A Compelling Case for a Confessional Church

Providence Baptist Church

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November 5, 2023

Ephesians 6:14a

00:10: Imagine, if you will, an insurance policy.
00:21: Frankly, I cannot think of a more boring way to start a sermon. After all,
00:26: I'm from the generation, you know, that when it says, have you read all the terms and conditions and you agree with them, we just click yes, and we just keep going, right?
00:34: But just play along. Imagine an insurance policy, if you will. You've got a new home and you want that home to be covered, right?
00:44: So, like, what kind of policy do you want? Do you want just like a one -page policy that's kind of nuanced and it's not very clear, it can kind of just be interpreted however by whoever?
00:59: Or do you want that extensive policy that is clear upfront about what is covered and for how much, and it actually deals with the substance of your home?
01:14: Of course, in this analogy, you want the policy that will really protect your home.
01:25: You don't want something that can be interpreted in any which way and ultimately fails to be there for us when we need it.
01:36: Turn in your Bibles, please, to Ephesians chapter 6. What we're going to do this morning, really, it's an extended application from last week's exposition.
01:52: And I think that it's relevant to where we are in two things. Where we are as a church and in our current historical context.
02:01: We're going to examine this morning a compelling case for a confessional church.
02:08: A compelling case for a confessional church. The church is called, in our text, to gird ourselves with truth.
02:17: To gird ourselves in truth. And I think there is relevant application from the text this morning for a church to have an extensive and thorough confession of faith rather than one that is vague and nuanced and ambiguous and short and can just be interpreted however, just so everybody can be on the same page.
02:47: I learned last week about a church. It's near here. It's not in this county.
02:52: It's several counties away. But a church where a Mormon, a
02:57: Seventh -day Adventist, a Church of Christ, they can all go, they can all worship there, they can all get along.
03:05: That's an extreme example, but can I submit to you, a church where all those kinds of people can get along is not a church.
03:14: And so, we need to think about that when the fires of adversity come, a confession of faith will protect, promote, and perpetuate the truth.
03:32: And those churches that do not give serious attention to sound doctrine will be a place where truth will only be diminished, disregarded, and ultimately deserted.
03:43: So with all this in mind, let us take up Ephesians 6 .14 again this morning and consider today a compelling case for a confessional church.
03:52: Ephesians 6 and verse 14. Would you stand and honor the reading of God's Word? The text commands it, right?
04:01: Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
04:09: Father, we thank you for this piece of armor. We thank you for truth.
04:17: We thank you that truth is not something that we have to guess about. We thank you that truth is not something that we ultimately have to wonder about this or that opinion.
04:25: But we thank you that the truth is simply the truth. And that you have revealed the truth to us.
04:32: Help us to be a church that stands on, and for, and with, and from the truth.
04:42: Lord, I plead with you today for your grace to deliver this message. Lord, I need you.
04:47: I need your gospel. We need it here. I pray that you give us ears to hear.
04:54: Help us to understand the point of this message and the seriousness of this call in the day in which we live.
05:03: We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. You be seated. Now, today's sermon admittedly certainly is more topical.
05:13: But I need you to keep in mind where we're at and that this really is one application from the text before us.
05:21: And really, and I'm looking around, I'm not sure if there is any who would qualify for this, but if you weren't here last week, if you missed last week's sermon, well, it would be good for you to go back and listen to that and then see how this morning's sermon really flows out of last week's sermon.
05:38: We're really just adding an application here from the text. We saw last week how the
05:44: Lord Jesus has fought our battle for us. He's won the victory and now
05:49: He bestows upon the church His very armor. And the church, having received the truth from Christ, now has the privilege and the obligation of being the pillar, it's 1
06:03: Timothy 3 .15, it says, the pillar and buttress of the truth. The truth is precious to the church.
06:12: Christ is our all. So it's the church's job then, now that we've been given the truth, now that we gird ourselves with truth, and by the way, the word belt, it's not in our text.
06:22: It literally just says, girding yourself with truth. So that's where we get the idea, though, of a belt. Paul pictures a
06:28: Roman soldier and has that belt to guard and to equip.
06:36: The idea is the church must protect the truth. The truth has enemies, chief of which is
06:45: Satan and his lies. We are to promote the truth. That is, the church is not just on the defensive.
06:52: We are storming the gates of hell and we are proclaiming the truth of God and Christ.
06:58: We're to protect the truth, promote the truth, and then thirdly, the church is to perpetuate the truth.
07:03: The church in each generation is responsible to pass the truth on to the next generation.
07:12: We're not like Hezekiah. You remember what happened to Hezekiah? Hezekiah, when the envoys from Babylon came, and then
07:19: Isaiah said, hey, they're going to take everything, and your sons are going to be eunuchs. Hezekiah was like, well, well and good, as long as there's peace and safety in my day.
07:28: No, no, no. When we think about the truth and protecting and promoting the truth, we're also thinking about perpetuating the truth.
07:35: We're thinking we want to pass on the truth from this generation to the next.
07:44: And all of this entails what it looks like to obey verse 14. Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
07:54: Listen to Martin Lloyd -Jones. You must gird your loins with truth. If you do not, you are defeated.
08:03: And I am asserting and maintaining that truth can be known, that there is an authority.
08:11: It is not reason. It is not feelings. It is not the church, any church. It is the book called the
08:18: Bible. Paul exhorts the church to gird ourselves with truth.
08:24: Truth is foundational to every other piece of armor. You don't get this right, everything else is not going to fit right.
08:29: It's going to be clunky. It's going to fall off. It's not going to do what it's intended to do. So this is our foundation.
08:35: This is what we stand on. And the standard of truth of what is truth and what is not truth is the
08:41: Bible. The Bible is our standard of truth at Providence Baptist Church.
08:47: The church has a book, a book from God, a book that we affirm is inerrant, infallible, sufficient, necessary, clear, and authoritative.
08:59: It is the word of the living God. This book is truth.
09:07: Christians are responsible to search the Scriptures and to know the truth.
09:15: Friends, this book has been attacked. This book has been burned. This book has been confiscated.
09:24: This book has been torn to pieces. And yet, here it is.
09:30: It remains. This is the truth of God. And at Providence Baptist Church, we unapologetically and unashamedly stand upon the word of God.
09:44: Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
09:52: Now, that being said, let me test you this morning. I'm going to read a little quote here.
09:59: And I want to see if you agree with it. Our appeal, here's the quote, our appeal is to the
10:10: Bible for truth. Our appeal is to the
10:16: Bible for truth. We're going to speak in code. The code is, yep,
10:21: I agree. Or no, I don't agree, right? What to it, is you agree with that? Our appeal is to the
10:26: Bible for truth. You agree with the quote? I agree with that quote. Problem, though.
10:33: The quote comes from a book written in 1946 that was written to defend the false religion of the
10:43: Jehovah Witnesses. Listen to this song from a Jehovah's Witness hymn book.
10:49: Listen, just listen to it. Though men God's word have ridiculed and falsehoods have preferred, we, like our
10:56: Lord, let God be true. We stand firm upon His word. For us who preach that truthful word, it has the final say.
11:06: It's truth we seek since we are meek and God's word we obey.
11:13: Jehovah's Witnesses. Now, we come to our text and the text says, stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
11:19: I'm preaching this and we're saying that Providence Baptist Church is a church that loves, believes and stands firm upon the
11:27: Bible and yet we have a false religion literally less than a mile down the road that is saying the same thing.
11:34: They're saying that they too stand upon the Bible. So which one of us then is actually obeying verse 14?
11:42: Which one of us is actually standing and girding ourselves with the truth?
11:50: This is where I'm going to make a case this morning for a confession of faith. What is a confession of faith?
11:57: By confession of faith, I wish I had one up here with me. I do not. A confession of faith is a written document or it's been called a discipleship tool explaining simply what a church believes.
12:15: A confession of faith is meant to be a servant of the
12:20: Bible. It is subservient to the Bible and it seeks to point us to the
12:27: Bible and it simply just says, hey, we're not only saying the Bible is the highest authority but we're also not ashamed to actually put down in writing what it is that we believe about the
12:43: Bible. So a good confession of faith says we believe the Bible alone is our highest authority and we don't stop there.
12:52: We actually articulate these are the things we believe the Bible teaches. Now the
12:57: Bible ultimately needs no defender. It is, as they say, the anvil that has broken many hammers.
13:08: I believe it was Spurgeon that said, and he may have said that one too, but I believe it was Spurgeon that said, how do you defend the Bible? I defend the
13:13: Bible like I defend a lion in a cage. I open the door and let it out. True.
13:21: But a confession of faith is saying to the world, when we gird ourselves with truth, this is what we mean by truth.
13:30: This is what we believe the Bible says. Spurgeon also preached whatever we find in this book, that is the
13:37: Bible, that we are to stay. And so that's what we do. We openly lay out our doctrine.
13:44: We confess these truths. And we don't just give the world today these vague and nuanced positions, but rather we stand for what it is we believe the
13:52: Bible teaches. This is what it means to do what verse 14 says. Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
14:01: It means that we stand for the truth. Now, a confession of faith, hear it this way, is not so much a necessity as it is a reality.
14:16: Say that again. A confession of faith is not so much a necessity as it is a reality.
14:24: What do I mean by that? I mean everyone believes something about the
14:31: Bible. It's just a reality. You can write down what you believe or you cannot write down what you believe, but it doesn't change the fact that you confess something about the
14:44: Bible. You have a belief about the Bible. That is your confession. So a confession is not so much a necessity as it is a reality.
14:52: So we look at our text, stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and we say, look, not only are we girding ourselves with truth, but we're going to say out loud what that means.
15:07: At some point in the sermon today, we'll get to the outline on your sheet, but not yet. I'm going to give you four quick problems with rejecting a confession of faith.
15:16: So sometimes in our Baptist tradition, we have people who's like, no, no, we don't need that kind of stuff.
15:22: Well, let me give you four problems with rejecting a confession of faith. Number one, it denies reality.
15:29: Okay, as I said, everyone believes something about the Bible. So for you to say something like, no creed but the
15:37: Bible, that in and of itself is a creedal statement. That's a confession. To say that you don't like a confession of faith is to pretend that you don't have a confession of faith, but you do.
15:51: You have a belief system. Whether you write it down or not, you have it. Everyone has a set of beliefs.
15:57: So to reject a confession of faith is to deny reality. Now, suppose maybe there's a way out of this.
16:03: One way out of it would be every song that we sing, every prayer that we pray, every sermon that we preach is to only read
16:11: Bible verses and never venture away from that. Because as soon as you begin speaking about the
16:19: Bible, you are speaking beliefs that you have about the Bible. Right? You understand?
16:24: So you are confessing beliefs. So a confession of faith simply acknowledges this reality and it says, look, we're going to actually own this.
16:32: We're going to say, yes, we do have beliefs about the Bible and we're not going to hide them from you. Here they are.
16:38: And we're going to articulate what we believe instead of pretending we don't have beliefs about the
16:44: Bible. So to reject a confession of faith denies reality. Second, these next will be quick.
16:50: It is historical snobbery. Number one, it denies reality. Number two, it's historical snobbery.
16:56: That is, it says in 2023, we're smarter than everyone else in history and we just don't need them.
17:04: Well, that's not true. Thirdly, it is embracing hyper -individuality.
17:12: So it denies reality. It is historical snobbery. Thirdly, it embraces hyper -individuality.
17:20: In essence, it says, well, all that matters is what I personally believe and I don't need to confess truth along with the church.
17:29: That's the spirit of the age, by the way. That's what's going on in our world today. You can't tell me what to believe.
17:35: You can't tell me what to believe. I can just believe whatever I want to believe and that's all that matters. And then fourthly, to deny a confession of faith, it ignores our present condition.
17:47: It denies reality. It's historical snobbery. It embraces hyper -individuality.
17:53: And then finally, it ignores our present condition. So listen to this, church. Wake up, please.
18:00: We live in a world today, or at least in American culture, I should say, that is apostatizing before our eyes.
18:11: The Southern Baptist Convention, we are watching one of the largest, once staunchly conservative evangelical domination.
18:22: We are watching them embrace women preachers before our eyes.
18:28: We are watching them embrace godless idolatry in their worship practices before our eyes.
18:36: We are watching the phenomenon of broader evangelicalism, something that is called, if you're not paying attention, you need to wake up and pay attention.
18:44: I'm talking about not in this sermon, although I would hope that you're paying attention, but I'm talking about the broader landscape here. Pay attention to what's being thrown down the pipeline, as it were, this idea of what's called deconstructing from the faith.
18:56: So you have these music artists come out and I believe a recent one was by a man, you can Google this later, caution about Googling, but his name is
19:04: Derek Webb and he was once, I believe, a singer in Cademan's Call. And I remember there's some good songs,
19:09: I think, and I've listened to Derek Webb before, but now in the latest Dove Awards, which, by the way, is connected with K -Love and all that, but he goes and he goes as a cross -dresser.
19:18: The whole idea is deconstructing from the faith. All these things that we once believed and all these things that we grew up in, and you hear church flyers, this ain't your grandma's religion or whatever.
19:28: The world is apostatizing before our eyes. People who profess to be
19:34: Christians are leaving the faith. We're watching all of this before our eyes.
19:40: And who could look at the current state of things and say, you know what we need today?
19:45: We need less truth. We need less clarity. We need less vigilance. We need less precision.
19:52: Who in their right mind could look at the deconstructing happening around our world today and say, you know what we need?
19:59: We need less truth. Friends, a confessional church is a church who publicly confesses what it believes in writing and is not ashamed of it.
20:13: It is foolish to look at our present condition and to say, we just need to keep making the tent bigger and bigger and bigger.
20:22: Did you ever play at a game? Let me just, quick illustration. You ever played a game with a four -year -old? And the four -year -old likes to change the rules, don't they?
20:31: And they change the rules so that they win, right? So this is what you have going on in evangelicalism today.
20:40: You have so much apostasy, so what do we need to do? Oh, we'll just, let's just make the tent bigger.
20:47: And then these people who are apostates, who are leaving the faith, now we can still include them because all we've done is we've changed the rules.
20:55: Friends, that is compromising the truth. It's not standing firm.
21:01: Remember verse 12. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil and the heavenly places.
21:13: Do not for an instant think that there is not a battle for truth today. And behind this battle for truth, you can hear the hiss of the serpent.
21:25: Before our eyes. Let me read to you 2 Corinthians 4, or 2
21:31: Timothy 4. You can turn there if you want. Just a few books over to your right.
21:37: 2 Timothy chapter 4, verse 3 says this. Paul says to Timothy, For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, or healthy teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.
21:57: That day has come long ago and it's here today. A confessional church is a biblical response to 2
22:04: Timothy 4, 3. We are declaring before the watching world that we love sound doctrine.
22:11: We will endure sound doctrine. We're not ashamed of sound doctrine. Here we stand. We can do no other.
22:18: So help us God. We do so with grace. Let me be clear because I could charge us up and we'd just get arrogant and rude about this.
22:28: No, no. We do it with grace. We do it with compassion. But we say without reservation,
22:37: Christianity is still the narrow way. Satan sought to broaden
22:43: God's Word in the garden, and he continues this tactic today. To minimize truth and make our commitment to truth minimal at best.
22:54: Thus, it is every local church's responsibility before God to gird ourselves with truth.
23:01: Stand therefore, having put on the belt of truth.
23:07: We're to protect the truth, promote the truth, and perpetuate the truth until Jesus returns for His bride.
23:15: Can I say it this way? Christ is worthy of a church that loves the truth.
23:23: So what a good confession of faith does then is serves the truth. A good confession of faith is merely a servant of the
23:32: Scriptures. A biblical confession of faith does not shape the Bible. It serves the
23:38: Bible. Now, don't press these analogies too far, but I thought I'd give you a couple. They break down,
23:46: I'm sure, in many places, but here's a couple of things to get your brain thinking about this. If the
23:52: Bible is a delicious steak... Now I'm hungry. If the
23:58: Bible is a delicious steak, a confession of faith is like the fork, knife, and plate.
24:09: It does not add value to the steak, right? So for example, if you serve me a steak on your finest china or on a paper plate,
24:18: I'm eating it, right? But a good confession of faith helps serve the steak.
24:25: It helps us digest the steak. It doesn't add value to the steak. It serves it.
24:32: Here's another analogy. If the Bible is gold, and by the way, it is gold.
24:37: That's what Psalm 19 says. If the Bible is gold, a good confession of faith is a chest to carry the gold.
24:47: It helps pass the gold on from one generation to the next. It helps to keep nefarious characters from trying to scuff up the gold or steal the gold or harm the gold in some way.
25:01: The chest serves the gold. It doesn't add value to the gold.
25:07: So this is what it means to stand firm and to gird ourselves with the belt of truth.
25:12: Since truth is foundational to our armor, it is the responsibility of every church to know what it is we believe and why we believe it.
25:24: There are two overarching satanic strategies when it comes to this belt of truth.
25:35: Okay, here's how he attempts to un -gird us. First is, he seeks to have us unbuckle with doubt.
25:45: That is, to doubt the truth and to take off this belt. And if he can't do that, he seeks to forcibly remove this belt from us by his fierce attacks.
26:00: And what a good confession of faith does is to help us stand against the evil one's lies and against his unholy war on truth because it helps summarize our core beliefs from the
26:15: Bible. In one sense, you might consider it like a buckle to the belt of truth.
26:23: All right, that was a good introduction. Now, here is our outline.
26:30: We'll go through this quickly. I'm going to give you five reasons this morning for a church to have a healthy confession of faith.
26:42: Number one, because we have a conviction. This will be our longest one.
26:48: Number one, stand therefore having fastened on the belt of truth. A church should have a healthy confession of faith because we have a conviction.
26:57: Robert Paul Martin says this, An unwillingness to define with precision the faith that it professes to believe is a symptom that something is desperately wrong with the church and its leadership.
27:14: Why would we not articulate to a lost and dying world what it is we believe?
27:20: Why would we not differentiate ourselves from the Jehovah's Witnesses who say, Oh, we stand upon the word of God.
27:26: Why would we not say it even louder? We stand upon the word of God and here's what we believe it teaches and give it to a lost and dying world.
27:35: We have a confession of faith because we have a conviction. Today is the day of not evangelicals.
27:42: I didn't come up with this word I'm about to say. It's not the day of evangelicals. It's the day of evangelifish.
27:50: There's an unwillingness to stand firm. But at Providence Baptist Church, we're not playing games.
27:59: We have a conviction regarding the truth of God. Here we stand. We're looking down on the ground saying,
28:06: Oh, well, shucks, you know, I guess we sort of believe that here.
28:12: I guess. Yeah. No, we're saying this is the word of God and we stand upon this truth.
28:21: And we're not ashamed of it. This is what the Bible says. So in March of this year, you know this. In March of this year, our church adopted as our confession of faith, the 1689
28:32: Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. This is not the only good confession of faith the church can have, but I think it's the best.
28:40: I'm not trying to be arrogant, but like if there's a better one out there, why wouldn't we do that one? Like I think it's the best and so that's why we've adopted.
28:48: Now, this historic confession flows from our roots as Baptists in America. Now, just listen, there's arguments about this, but it's frustrating.
28:59: But you cannot draw a line to Baptists in America from church history without crossing somewhere over or through the 17th century
29:10: Baptist of England. You just can't. So this is a historically Baptist confession.
29:16: We move from the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 to the 1689, not because I think the
29:23: Baptist Faith and Message is like a heretical whatever, but we've been shown today it's too vague and it's too imprecise.
29:31: How can you say that? Because we're watching before our eyes people taking the Baptist Faith and Message and twisting it and distorting it to whatever it is they want it to say.
29:42: The 1689, for example, is some 15 ,000 words. The Baptist Faith and Message is less than 5 ,000.
29:51: So we went from something shorter to something more precise to something more in -depth.
30:01: Essentially, we said while everyone else is progressing and minimalizing and moving, as it were, to the shallow end of the pool, we are going to, listen to this, regress, right?
30:14: We're going to go backwards. Where are we going? We're going back to our roots. We're going to maximize.
30:19: We're going to go deeper and fuller and more thorough because Christ is worthy of a church with real conviction.
30:28: In a world that is trying to customize and personalize truth, we are putting on God's truth unapologetically.
30:37: Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth. Now, no doubt some people say this, well, isn't the 1689, isn't it a long document?
30:47: Absolutely, it's long and it's thorough. But I think it's a product of our age. All we can do is teach our children today to read tweets.
30:55: And sometimes they can't even read that. We can go back and we can be a confessional church that understands what the confession teaches.
31:02: Listen to what Baptist B .H. Carroll wrote. A church with a little creed is a church with a little life.
31:08: The more divine doctrines a church can agree on, the greater its power and the wider its usefulness.
31:14: The fewer its articles of faith, the fewer its bonds of union and compactness. The modern cry, less creed and more liberty, is a degeneration from the vertebrate to the jellyfish and means less unity and less morality.
31:31: And it means more heresy. Definitive truth does not create heresy.
31:37: It only exposes and corrects. Shut off the creed and the Christian work will fill up with heresy, unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless deadly.
31:52: So friends, if we don't got a little pocket flashlight, right? We'll open up the spotlight.
32:03: We have a thorough, biblical, robust, Baptist confession of faith because we love the truth, because we have a conviction.
32:17: And I love the first line of our confession because it sets the tone for everything else. Here's the very first line.
32:23: The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain and infallible standard of all saving faith and obedience.
32:32: Our confession of faith then serves the Bible. It's not equal to the Bible. It's not above the
32:38: Bible. It's a big, giant arrow that points us to what the Bible teaches because the
32:44: Bible is supreme here. We have a confession because we have a conviction.
32:50: Secondly, we have a confession because we have a commission. Now let me just reference this and you can look it up later.
32:58: But Matthew 28, 18 through 20 is what is known as the Great Commission. And Jesus teaches the church that we are to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
33:12: Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all the things that Christ has taught.
33:21: So we have a confession of faith because we have a conviction and because we have a commission. Now here is the gospel.
33:28: The Son of God took on human flesh. He was conceived by the
33:35: Holy Spirit. He was born of the Virgin Mary. I don't care what Andy Stanley says, that matters.
33:41: It's important. It's part of the gospel. He grew up in obedience to His earthly parents and to His Heavenly Father.
33:50: He began His ministry, the Bible teaches us, around the age of 30. And all that He did,
33:56: He fulfilled all righteousness. He proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God.
34:01: He called sinners to repentance. Then He died.
34:11: He showed Himself, by the way, I don't care what CNN says, right? He's the only way.
34:17: He showed us His exclusivity. And then He died for the lawless, for the sinners, for the covenant breakers.
34:23: He bore God's wrath on the cross justly due our sins. He was buried and He rose again the third day in victory.
34:31: His work secured forgiveness of sins and a righteousness for sinners that can be had for all who embrace this truth by faith, turning from their sins, repenting from their sins, looking to Christ.
34:45: Those are the only ones who will be saved. What grace! What a precious truth we have here in the gospel.
34:53: Some of you who are listening to this, children, maybe you're listening to it online or it's not even today anymore, you're listening to this later in the future, or you're here and you're listening and you hear this, you need to respond to this message by trusting
35:06: Christ, repenting of your sins and receiving this glorious gospel. And I stand before you today and I say to you,
35:13: Christ is offered to you. Come. Come to Christ. Turn, let go of your works, let go of your sins, let go of your self -righteousness and run to Jesus.
35:24: Will He accept me? Are you a sinner? Are you coming to Him in faith? The answer then is yes.
35:32: Go to Christ. Believe. Now, before His ascension,
35:38: Christ gave His church a commission to make disciples. And we cannot make disciples apart from teaching.
35:46: So what I'm arguing is a confession of faith helps the church fulfill the commission. It sets forth what we believe
35:54: Jesus taught. What we believe that He taught us to teach the nations. Because the whole
35:59: Bible is what Jesus taught. So here the confession outlines what we believe about the
36:05: Bible, about God, about sin, about redemption, about the church and so on and so on.
36:11: Because we take the commission seriously, we put it down, we put the teaching down in writing so that we can teach.
36:19: The 1689 helps us do this rightly, to rightly teach the Bible. It helps us form good ways to talk about doctrine.
36:28: It articulates good ways to talk about the Trinity or predestination, providence.
36:33: Time and time again I've ran to the confession to say, help me articulate the Trinity or help me articulate the mystery of the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.
36:42: The confession helps us to teach the nations what Christ has told us to teach them so that we would fulfill the commission.
36:52: Thirdly, a confession of faith is useful because we have a conviction, a commission.
36:57: Thirdly, a contention. We'll turn to this one, Jude. Jude. As I joked with my kids the other night in family worship, turn to Jude chapter 4.
37:09: But they are too smart for that. Dad, Jude only has one chapter. Okay, Jude chapter 1 verse 3.
37:16: Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.
37:30: The church today, we've been talking about spiritual warfare, is the church militant. We are at war and we are contending for the faith.
37:38: Friends, we are contending for the truth. There is a saying out there today, I don't know how long it's been out there,
37:44: I think it's relatively new, but it's on t -shirts and it's in memes and stuff like that. And the saying is, love over verses.
37:54: Love over verses. Now, you kind of understand what that's trying to communicate, right?
38:01: So a person caught in sin, you try to confront them with sin. Oh, no, no, no, we don't need verses.
38:07: We just need love. That's trying to chip away at our foundation.
38:13: It's looking past what Jesus says and it's inventing its own idea of loving people.
38:19: It's ignoring the Bible's definitions and it's embracing a 21st century standard. It's saying, serve self and not
38:26: God. In essence, make the narrow way the broad way. But this is where a good confession of faith like the 1689 comes in and helps us protect the truth.
38:38: Here we say, no. Love over verses. We ain't doing that, right?
38:46: Here is the faith once delivered that we are contending for. Here is the truth of holiness.
38:51: Here is the truth of the church. Here is the truth of the Trinity. This is the road we are to travel. Here is a summary of what we hold dear.
38:59: This is the ancient path that we're walking on. So a confession of faith essentially says, here's what the
39:05: Bible teaches. Here is the faith once delivered and passed down from generation to generation.
39:11: Here is the truth that we are contending for. Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.
39:21: Are you girded with truth? A good confession helps us contend for the faith. Fourthly, a conviction, a commission, a contention.
39:30: Fourthly, we should have a confession of faith because it is a commemoration.
39:38: 1 Samuel 7, 12 says this, a commemoration. 1 Samuel 7, 12. Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mitzpah and Shen and called its name
39:49: Ebenezer. For he said, till now the Lord has helped us. Let's just be honest.
39:55: How many times have you sang, Come Thou Fount, and you had no idea what that was saying? You thought it had something to do with the
40:00: Charles Dickens novel, didn't you? Right? Here I raise my Ebenezer. You're like, and it doesn't help that some
40:07: Christmas albums put Come Thou Fount on their album. And so you're like, what does
40:14: Ebenezer Scrooge have to do with and why am I raising him? What in the world?
40:21: No, no, no. It's biblical. We should know our Bible. It comes from 1 Samuel 7, 12.
40:26: And Ebenezer is a stone of remembrance, if you will, a stone of commemoration, a rock of remembrance.
40:34: It is a reminder, then, a confession of faith is like this. It is a reminder that we have only arrived where we are today by God's help and that he hasn't only helped us, but he has helped generations past.
40:51: And it's by his helping generations past that we are where we are today. And by his sovereign grace, he will help us to help generations future.
41:00: So we look at the 1689 and we say, we stand in a long line of godly men and women who have been anchored in the same truth.
41:11: Some people argue today, well, you should just come up with your own confession of faith. Now, listen, you can do that. You have a freedom, a church has freedom to come up with their own confession of faith.
41:18: But you are being quite foolish if you desire no influence from those who've gone before us.
41:25: Because in a real sense, we stand on their shoulders. This is the way that God has brought us to where we are.
41:33: We are not here today completely separated from those of the past. And by God's grace, our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren will continue to hold the line and continue to gird themselves up in truth.
41:47: All right, fifthly and finally, we have a confession of faith because we have a conviction, a commission, a contention, a commemoration, and finally, a congregation.
42:01: Verse 14, stand therefore having fastened on the belt of truth. I remind you in this text that this is not given merely to an individual
42:12: Christian, but also to the whole church. The whole church, in verse 14, is to put on, as it were, one united belt of truth.
42:24: Yes, there is an application. You put on the belt of truth, you put on the belt of truth, you put on the belt of truth.
42:30: But when Paul says it this way, stand therefore having put on the belt of truth, there's also an application that the whole church is putting on the belt of truth.
42:40: The whole church is a pillar and bunches of the truth, not just a bunch of individuals. We are a body and we're called to a corporate faith, if you will.
42:48: Now, this is not dismissing the necessity of an individual and personal faith.
42:54: You cannot be saved by the church's faith in that sense. You can only be saved by individual and personal faith in Christ.
43:04: You must personally and individually put your faith in the finished work of Christ, in His life, in His death, for sinners bearing the wrath of God, in His resurrection.
43:16: You must put your faith in Christ. You do not receive the righteousness of Christ based on your parents' faith, based on your pastor's faith.
43:28: It's your faith. It's by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. But this personal faith is not a privatized faith.
43:37: You confess what the church confesses because the church confesses the truth. Now, let me press on this for a moment.
43:46: When it comes to a congregation and a confession of faith, there's two ditches here that Pastor Jacob and I want us to avoid.
43:53: Ditch number one that you need to avoid is what I will call hyper -confessionalism. Hyper -confessionalism is taking,
44:00: I should have brought it up here as an analogy, Hyper -confessionalism is taking a confession of faith and equating it with the
44:07: Bible, and saying, this confession of faith is equal to the Bible. The very words and language and verbs and nouns of this confession of faith are equal in authority to the
44:19: Scriptures. Friends, we must avoid that. A confession of faith is not equal to the
44:24: Bible. A confession of faith serves the Bible. In fact, I'll go so far as to say, we reserve the right as a church to amend or correct the 1689 if we ever find a portion of it that we say, this does not agree with the
44:39: Bible. We also reserve the right to add to it if necessary. So, I cannot stress enough here.
44:45: The Bible is our highest authority, not the confession. The Bible is our ultimate standard, not the confession.
44:52: We are people of the book. So, we avoid hyper -confessionalism.
44:57: But secondly, we must avoid, in the other ditch, nominal confessionalism.
45:04: This is when a church has a confession of faith, be it the 1689, be it the Baptist Faith and Message, whatever, but no one knows what it says.
45:11: Maybe you've been in churches like that, right? And so, it's a confession of faith in name, but not in practice.
45:16: It's on a website somewhere, or if you go around, and in the third room from the left, down the hall, in the third cabinet, down there in the third drawer, down from the bottom, if you go all the way to the back in that dusty, you pull it out, and you dust it off, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, here's our confession.
45:32: No, that's not really doing anything. That's just being confessional in name.
45:38: So, we want to avoid both of these ditches. This is why we are committed to reading, and studying, and teaching the 1689.
45:47: Because we believe in this age of religious pluralism, of the wild, godless
45:52: West, where everyone, they can just believe whatever they want to believe, for whatever reason they want to believe it.
45:57: In this wicked age, we believe that every faithful church should have a healthy confession of faith, and then every member of the church should be striving to know what that confession teaches, and why.
46:09: Because truth matters. Now, this doesn't mean that there won't, at times, be disagreements with members over portions of the confession, and that's okay.
46:20: What is required to be a member of this church is, well, 26 .2
46:27: of the Confession says it this way, All people throughout the world who profess the faith of the gospel and obedience to God through Christ, in keeping with the gospel, are and may be called visible saints, as long as they do not destroy their own profession by any foundational errors or unholy living.
46:43: All local congregations ought to be made up of these. In other words, the members of Providence Baptist Church must have a credible profession of faith, a life that matches it, and a baptism that has been administered by immersion when they were a believer.
47:05: No one in this church is required to be a 1689 scholar. No one in this church is required to be in strict agreement with every single sentence and every single word in order to be a member of this church of the 1689.
47:22: Within the life of the church, there certainly is liberty of conscience on certain issues.
47:28: Some people are just going to look at things differently. Some people are just going to need to be taught better, and all of us, your pastors included, are seeking to mature in the faith.
47:40: However, the 1689, it helps us up front because it says, This is what we believe. This is who we are.
47:46: This is how our elders are going to teach. And if you desire to be divisive over issues, or if you just simply cannot accept the teaching, then this probably is not going to be the best place for you.
47:57: It's one thing to disagree and be willing to learn. It's one thing to disagree and say,
48:03: Hey, I don't want to be divisive over it. But it's a completely different thing to just seek to sow division among the body.
48:11: So in essence, our confession of faith says, Look, this is who we are. This is who we are as a church. This is what we believe.
48:18: This is how our elders teach. And guess what? We're not ashamed about it. This is what it looks like for us to gird up ourselves with truth.
48:25: And we understand that we're growing in our knowledge, in our theology, and we're always growing every day, every week.
48:31: We're hungry for growing. We haven't arrived yet. A confession of faith helps us remember that. We haven't arrived yet. We're learning.
48:36: But this is who we are, and this is where we stand. And in this day, if anything goes, we've actually rejected that.
48:43: We've rejected anything goes. We have said that truth matters here, and we're planting our flag here.
48:50: The strategy of too many churches over the last few decades has been to be as big tent as possible so as to include the largest number of people as possible in the church.
49:01: And we're applauding them, and we're patting them on the back, and we're smiling at them to their face, and we're sending them along happily into eternal hell.
49:11: What the world needs today, though, is churches willing to be dogmatic, or as Steve Lawson says, bulldogmatic, over the truth, to walk the ancient path.
49:22: Do you believe that hell is real? There's a real eternal place called hell, and people who believe lies will spend an eternity there.
49:33: We need to obey 614, Ephesians 614. Stand. Stand. Have a backbone and fasten on the belt of truth.
49:42: Gird yourselves in truth. These are not the days for minimizing truth. These are not the days for nuance and ambiguity.
49:48: It's like so many who profess to be in Christ's army are trying to hide which side they're on, as though they're secret agents.
49:55: They're covering up their uniforms so as not to stick out. But what I'm pleading with the church to do today is wear the armor of Christ boldly.
50:04: Let's find the biggest, most flamboyant, most visible flag for Christ that we can, and let's plant that thing firmly and unapologetically in the ground.
50:16: And this is not because we want division or brashness. It is because we know that Christ is worthy of a church that loves the truth.
50:25: And it's because we know that the only hope, the only antidote for lies in the world today, the only hope for sinners, the only thing that will turn our communities and our home and our nation around, the only hope that America has and that the souls of your friends and family and neighbor has, the only hope that we have is truth.
50:48: And so we promote the truth, we protect the truth, and we perpetuate the truth.
50:57: God's truth. Three quick applications and the plane is landed.
51:04: First, are you opposed to the truth? Oh, friend, truth wins.
51:13: You're fighting a losing battle. Bow the knee to Christ.
51:19: He receives sinners. Trust Him. Number two, are you neutral when it comes to the truth?
51:27: Answer, no, you're not. You may think you are, but there is no neutrality. To be neutral is to be opposed.
51:34: So I say to you in the spirit of Elijah the prophet, quit halting between two opinions. Christ is
51:41: God. Serve Him. Thirdly, are you on board with the truth?
51:48: Hey, brother, sister, don't quit.
51:55: Don't give up. Encourage one another. Speak it to one another in love.
52:02: Christ is worthy. Let's do this together. Know what you believe and why.
52:08: And in that, let us obey what the text says. Stand firm, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, solely the old glory.
52:21: Father, thank you for your word. Help us to be a church that confesses the truth, girds ourselves in it, stands upon it for the glory of Christ.