Pastor Tom Hicks Interview 

No Compromise Radio

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:11

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. This is

00:16

AKA Duplex Gratia Radio. Still haven't made the change yet, but we're slowly working on it.

00:22

I'm glad you tuned in today. I guess that's kind of old language, isn't it? Tuned in, tuned in on your radio dial.

00:28

We still are on three radio stations, one in Belize, one in Wyoming, and one in Alaska.

00:35

Today we have a special guest online. I feel like I know him. I feel like we could be good friends, or maybe if we knew each other well enough, we wouldn't be good friends.

00:44

Pastor Tom Hicks, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Thank you so much,

00:50

Mike. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Tom, how do we know each other? Is it just through Twitter? Is it through,

00:55

I don't know, Barcelos or somebody? How do we know each other? Well, we do have a common friend in Barcelos, and I think we have a lot of common interests on Twitter, particularly as it relates to the law and the gospel.

01:09

And, yeah, I think that's mostly the way. We've never met face -to -face, as far as I'm aware.

01:15

I don't think so. But I look forward to doing that one day, if the Lord wills it. But I look at your picture. You're out in California. Well, you're in Louisiana.

01:23

That's right. I see you at the beach there. Is that the Gulf of Mexico? I see you and your wife in your about page, pastortomhicks .com.

01:34

Yes, actually, that is the Indian Ocean. So, we took that picture on the west coast of Australia.

01:44

And so, we're looking west toward the Indian Ocean. That was a trip to go see a missionary that our church supports out there,

01:53

Alan Beardmore. How wonderful. Do you ever surf in the Gulf of Mexico when the wind waves are proper?

01:59

We don't surf out here, bro. No surf is not allowed. We do things like hunt for gators and turtles and that kind of stuff.

02:09

Fish, catfish. When was the last time you shot a gator? I don't do that.

02:14

That's not my thing. All right. I ate a lot of catfish growing up in Nebraska. And we love catfish out here.

02:21

It's a staple. They have a little place down the street here in Massachusetts that's a

02:27

Cajun kind of Louisiana thing. And they have a great basket of fried catfish that I regularly get, assuming

02:34

I'm not on keto. Right. It's so good.

02:41

Shrimp and gumbo and crawfish and all that, that's our staple down here. Yum. Are you from Louisiana originally?

02:50

Actually, no. I grew up all over the world. My dad was Air Force. So I grew up in Texas and I grew up in Germany and Alabama.

03:00

And so now I'm in Louisiana. I accepted a call from First Baptist Church here about eight years ago.

03:08

And so that's how I ended up in Louisiana. But my wife is a native of Louisiana. And I met her at this church when

03:14

I did internships through seminary and married her. And then this church kept touch with me pretty closely.

03:20

And I did conferences for them, youth camps. And we'd come back and preach. And then they called me to be their senior pastor when that opened up.

03:28

Amen. Well, Alabama, Texas, and Germany, I guess you wear boots. You're always on time and you root for the

03:34

Crimson Tide. Roll Tide, bro. Absolutely. My dad was born and raised in Alabama.

03:42

And so we were always, no matter where we were, we were Alabama fans. All right. Well, today, Tom, basically,

03:48

I want to know a little bit about you. I want our listeners to know about you and the ministry the Lord has given you. And then the second part of the show, we can talk shop regarding law, gospel, and those that are against it, or federal vision, or some of the things that kind of unite us in the

04:04

Twitter space. How's that sound? Yeah, that sounds great. Well, tell me, you were born a

04:09

Christian, right? Well, I will say there was never a time that I can remember not believing the gospel.

04:21

So I didn't go through a crisis or a big conversion. I was born and raised in a Christian home. I was taught the gospel from as early as I can remember and believe that God is holy.

04:31

I'm a sinner. Christ died for sinners. And if I trust him, I can be redeemed and live forever.

04:38

And so that just deepened, really, through my life. I was baptized at age eight, based on a credible profession.

04:46

But then I wrestled. I was not reformed or Calvinistic in my theology until college, my college years, when

04:54

I really began to wrestle with the word of God. And that was another level of seeing the depth of my sin and depravity in need of the

05:02

Lord's mercy. And so the Lord has graciously, faithfully, patiently continued to grow me through experiences or really just a greater knowledge of him through his word, through my life.

05:16

But I don't really have a point at which I can say I know that I was converted for sure. I was baptized at age eight on a credible profession.

05:24

So that's kind of my testimony. Tom, that's wonderful. Let's talk about that for a minute, because there are certain people that would listen to Bible teachers, and those

05:32

Bible teachers might say, if you don't know the point in time in your life, you ought to question your salvation.

05:40

Obviously, there was a point in time where you go from darkness to light, and you go from death to life.

05:46

So there is a time. Regeneration is punctiliar. But what would you say to someone in your congregation or to the audience who they think they're a

05:55

Christian, they're believing in Jesus, but they are influenced by teachers who say, unless you know the exact time, how can you call yourself a

06:02

Christian? Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is, I don't find that anywhere in the scriptures.

06:07

The Bible doesn't say you have to know the time that the Lord saved you to be a believer. Instead, it says, believe on the

06:13

Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved. And so what I know is that today, I'm trusting the promise that Christ will redeem me and keep me based on his objective work in history, his life, his death, and his resurrection.

06:31

And so my assurance is based on what Christ has done historically for me. And then as I see that reflected in me, that I do trust him, you know, and even in spite of myself today.

06:44

And so I would really want to root assurance, not in a past experience, because those can be deceptive, but in a present reality and a hope based on what

06:54

Christ has done. And so I just try to refute that biblically, because there's nowhere in scripture that it says, you have to know the date and the time at all.

07:03

So wonderful. I regularly, Tom, think of going to the hospital, somebody's on their deathbed and kind of deathbed theology, deathbed practicum stuff, where you go in and the believer there from the church that you're pastoring is, you know, they've been trusting

07:22

Christ for 40 years and you go in there on their deathbed. And I usually ask them, are you afraid? And then how dumb it would be for me.

07:29

How foolish. Do you remember the time when you got saved? Because if you didn't, I'm not sure.

07:34

Instead, I say, are you trusting in the living savior? You know, he loves you. He sought you and he bought you.

07:41

And if I would do that in somebody's deathbed, why wouldn't I do that when they were alive? Amen, brother.

07:47

That is so true. How about, how about you? I've heard it said that nobody, nobody on their deathbed, the

07:54

Puritans used to say things like this. Uh, trust in their own righteousness. You know, you don't get to your deathbed and think, wow,

08:01

I lived a great, wonderful Christian life. And that's how I know I'm going to heaven. Or I had these experiences in the past.

08:08

Your only hope on, on your deathbed is Christ's imputed righteousness. That's all you got.

08:14

It's like, I, I, I, I am hoping only in Jesus and what he has done. That's my, my assurance and my comfort that I'm going to go across the dark waters of the

08:25

Jordan here, here in a little bit. It's Jesus alone who's going to get me through it. Amen. Well, on my show, when

08:31

I interview people, I like to hear from them, but I will give you one quick story because we've never talked before, uh, until now on the phone slash radio.

08:40

I was in the hospital, uh, 2021 dying of COVID 16 days there, thought I was probably going to die, sending my wife passwords and life insurance policies and all that other stuff.

08:51

And so I turned on the TV and they had a Roman Catholic lady doing the rosary.

08:56

And I said to myself, I don't believe in that. And the backdrop is I'm by myself.

09:02

There's nowhere allowed in no family, no clergy, no anyone. I'm just sitting there alone by myself in COVID isolation.

09:08

I turned on the next channel. It was a Pentecostal preacher. And I said, I don't believe in that prosperity gospel. And then

09:14

Tom, I thought, I do know I'm sinful. I do know God's holy. I do know eternities a long time.

09:21

And I began to say to myself, is it my, is it faith in the Lord Jesus or is it my faithfulness?

09:28

And so I just had to preach to myself again, the objective work of Christ. And I said to myself, essentially not trying to use poker language when it comes to the gospel, but I'm all in when it comes to Christ for me, the hope of glory.

09:43

And if he's not risen and he's not sinless, then I'm willing to go to hell for that.

09:49

But I'm just trusting that he's the rescuer he says he is. Amen, brother.

09:56

So, Tom, you get saved at a young age and you would go to this church once in a while in Clinton, Louisiana.

10:03

And when you got there, what was the climate? Did you change a lot of stuff? Do you preach verse by verse?

10:08

If I attended First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, what would

10:15

I expect? Yeah, we are a confessionally reformed

10:20

Baptist church. So we confess the Second London Confession and we have regulative worship, which means we practice and worship just the elements that God has instituted in the new covenant.

10:33

And so it is preaching and it's often verse by verse.

10:39

I go through whole books of the Bible. Sometimes we'll break away and do a series. I just got through with a series on the Christian home.

10:45

But normally we're working through books of the Bible right now. I've just started working through the very short book of Jude.

10:54

And then maybe I haven't decided what we're going to do next. Maybe either Leviticus or Exodus or something like that.

11:01

But, you know, we sing songs, hymns and spiritual songs. We pray together.

11:07

We observe the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. We offer offerings.

11:14

And, you know, we have simple worship. Our worship does not try to stimulate the senses as much as it holds forth the means of grace that God has given us to stimulate our faith.

11:26

And the means of grace are the word divided as law and gospel and the sacraments, which are the word in visible form.

11:35

And there are the law and the gospel in visible form. And so we're seeking to point people to Christ and not to use a lot of contrivances or human innovations or ingenuity to strategically get people to believe in or to be sanctified based on our own wisdom, but to do what

11:53

God has said full stop. So if you come to our church, we are unique.

12:01

We shouldn't be unique, but we are unique in our context. There aren't many churches like us. Some time ago, most churches would have been like us.

12:10

But we have really nothing to offer but Jesus, His word. And we do love each other.

12:15

Our church is a very loving church. It's a community of faithful believers where we love and serve and encourage each other.

12:25

And that just flows organically and naturally out of faithful preaching of the word. Before I was the pastor at First Baptist, we had

12:32

Fred Malone. Some of the listeners may be familiar with Dr.

12:39

Malone, Fred Malone, who was a faithful pastor at this church for about 25 years before I got here.

12:46

And he was very Christ -centered, understood law and gospel, and exhorted the people at a practical level to live upon Christ.

12:55

And that has borne fruit over the years. And I've been here now eight years. And it's just continued.

13:01

It's a sweet church. I'm not saying that there's no problem. So don't hear me sanitizing.

13:06

I mean, Satan is always on the prowl. There are sins that rise up that we have to deal with and work through in our midst.

13:14

And so it's not a perfect church by any means. It can't be prior to glory.

13:19

But it's a real church of Christ and a sweet and a blessed place to be.

13:27

And it's my honor to be a pastor of this people. That's great, Tom. Today on No Compromise Radio, we have

13:34

Pastor Tom Hicks. You can go to his website, pastortomhicks .com.

13:40

It used to be Dr. Tom Hicks, but he changed that. Just kidding. Yeah, I know.

13:47

It sounds like... Just Brother Tom. It sounds like the worship is ordinary. Ordinary worship.

13:54

There you go. Tom, while I was thinking about means of grace, many, many

14:00

Baptists, I think, have come around to seeing the Lord's Supper, not as a funeral, but as a celebration, as seeing the

14:10

Lord's goodness and kindness. Yes, in fact, you've sinned this week, dear congregation, but you're still welcome at the

14:17

Lord's table. Yes, repent and confess and forsake. But lots of Baptists would kind of frame the

14:23

Lord's Supper as, how can you take the Lord's Supper this week since you've sinned so much? And they almost make it a kind of law light, trying to put people back underneath the covenant of works if it were possible.

14:34

And we understand that that's not how we celebrate the Lord's Supper. But tell me, Tom, about baptism.

14:41

I would say Presbyterians get after Baptists more often with their baptismal theology based on, you know, you

14:50

Baptists say, this whole thing is based on, I want to be obedient, and this is my response to God's work.

14:58

Could you tell our listeners a little bit about how to think through a sacrament, a means of grace that baptism would be versus it's just something we do?

15:14

Sure. I would say that Baptists would see the way

15:20

God's action works with our response in baptism as parallel to the way

15:27

God's action and our response works at the Lord's Supper. I would say Presbyterians would tend to,

15:34

Orthodox Presbyterians would distinguish, would seem to make some kind of separation between those two.

15:40

But I would just say they're the same. And it's that both baptism and the Lord's Supper are visible words.

15:48

They are the proclamation of the gospel of the crucifixion in visible form.

15:56

But both signs also entail the idea of union with Christ.

16:03

And so in baptism, you have the death, burial, and the resurrection of Christ depicted in the immersion of a believer.

16:11

But you also have the death, burial, and the resurrection of the believer. But it's still

16:16

God's act. In union with Christ, he's giving both. He's giving himself. Christ is giving himself and his death, burial, and resurrection.

16:24

And he gives our death, burial, and resurrection as well as signed to the believer.

16:31

So it's still all coming down from the Lord and the word of the promise and the symbol of union with Christ as we see in Romans 6.

16:40

I would say the same exact picture is going on in the continuation of union and communion with Christ in the

16:49

Lord's Supper where you have the death of Christ signified by the elements, the body, and the blood, the bread, and the cup that are then ingested by the believer signifying union with him and feeding upon him and an actual spiritual feeding upon him.

17:06

I would say both baptism and the Lord's Supper nourish the faith of the believer.

17:13

So it's all coming from the Lord. We're only responding. So we're not initiating or working for something or trying to achieve something to get a blessing.

17:21

We're responding to blessings that he's already given to us. And even the response itself is a blessing.

17:29

That's something God himself provides. So that's how I would just see them as unified, that both baptism and the

17:37

Lord's Supper are both symbols of union with Christ. Baptism is more a sign of coming into union with Christ, whereas the

17:47

Lord's Supper is continuing in union and communion with Christ. Amen. Like the answer, makes me think about PhD at Southern Seminary.

17:57

What was your dissertation on? Um, my dissertation was on the doctrine of justification in the theologies of Richard Baxter and Benjamin Keech.

18:13

So, yes. So this leads us into this. Go ahead. And I was going to say it's a compare, it was to compare and contrast their theologies.

18:24

And so what I did was I took for both Baxter and Keech. I looked at their philosophical background.

18:33

Some of this was teasing it out because they didn't always explicitly state it, but I was trying to align them with either nominalism or realism.

18:42

So that's the first thing I did. And they are different on that question, Baxter being more of a nominalist and Keech being more of a realist like John Owen.

18:52

And then the second thing I compared and contrasted were their covenant theologies. And so the differences between the way they viewed the covenants.

19:00

And then the third thing was the resulting doctrines of justification, which were very different between Baxter and Keech.

19:09

I laugh, Tom, because in the Twitter world, and it kind of comes in cycles, but there's always this pro -Baxter, anti -Baxter stuff that, you know, foments up to the top.

19:21

And I think some of it is because people think they have benefited from Baxter, or they've read

19:28

Reformed Pastor by Baxter, and it's been assigned in seminary, or some Baxterian elements appear in maybe some of their favorite authors like John Piper or others, but it just keeps kind of coming around.

19:42

And I think it's funny because, or this part's funny, when you make a comment and you disagree with Baxter, I think some of the

19:52

Twitter folks don't think you know anything about Baxter when you got your PhD.

19:58

It seems that way, yeah. So, yeah, I guess you're kind of humble and you're just kind of there, you know, just quietly waiting for the right cross, if I was going to use boxing language.

20:08

But I think that's kind of funny that that'll happen. I was in Omaha for the Pactum Conference, and I was just talking about legalism and antinomianism, and I kind of said, well, here's what

20:20

Rome did, and they were afraid of lawlessness and antinomianism. Here's what Baxter did with, you know,

20:25

Cromwell and the New Model Army and chaplaincy, and I think he was trying to protect the same thing.

20:31

Do you think, Tom, that's kind of what happens even today when people are trying to defend

20:38

Baxter? Are they trying to protect their celebrity pastors? Or do you think that they believe that grace doesn't motivate, and if you preach grace, it's going to lead to licentiousness?

20:51

What do you think is going on? Yeah, I think it's probably all of those things.

20:58

I mean, we have the Reformed people have been promoting Baxter largely because of his work, the

21:06

Reformed pastor, and maybe the Saints' everlasting rest, but particularly the Reformed pastor because it has the word

21:13

Reformed in it, you know, and so this was early on in the Reformed movement as it grew in the last century.

21:21

The Reformed pastor was republished. It was even republished by Banner of Truth.

21:26

It's the only thing that I think that they've republished by him because they're aware of his other errors, but it has a word

21:33

Reformed in it, so if you're really Reformed, you're going to like Baxter because it's got that word in there, but that word

21:39

Reformed in the book, the Reformed pastor, is not a theological marker. It's not to identify him or the book with the

21:48

Reformed faith. It just means in Baxter's way of talking the sanctified pastor or the pastor who himself is inwardly renewed or is personally

21:59

Reformed unto the Lord, and it promotes really a method of kind of pastoral examination and meticulous sort of looking into the lives of your members and making sure they're really repentant and they know the catechism and on and on and kind of a rigorous system of pastoral visitation that flows from Baxter's idea of that a kind of terror, a kind of fear that is a fear of condemnation is a major propellant for justification, for your continuance in and growth in and final justification, and so I know

22:40

I've kind of deviated from your main question here, but I think it's probably from that book and books like it that people have heard of Baxter, and they think he's a good guy.

22:50

He's on the right team, and so they have him in a category that's wrong, frankly, and so when you hear

22:56

Baxter criticized at the levels that he needs to be criticized at, which is on his doctrine of justification, their hackles go up, and they want to defend him.

23:08

There's another element here, which is that I have noticed on Twitter an effort by some scholarly types to want to retrieve

23:20

Baxter's political theology, and in doing that, they want to keep his name somewhat clear, and so that seems to be part of what's going on here, is they want to retrieve his political theology and reutilize it today, because he wrote an unbelievable amount of stuff.

23:36

I mean, I don't know if anyone could ever say they read and know everything Baxter said, because he was prolific.

23:44

I mean, he may have written more than almost anybody. He's just got right, wrote on everything. It's unbelievable how much he wrote, but political theology was one of his subjects, and that's one of the things that people are trying to recover now, and then yes,

23:59

I do think that your point about legalism and antinomianism and that if you reject

24:06

Baxter, you don't believe in good works and keeping the law, and you're probably just an antinomian, that's out there in some who would claim to be classically reformed and hold to at least one part of the

24:27

Puritan tradition, and so yes, I mean, there are some who are fearful of antinomianism, that if you're rejecting

24:35

Baxter, you're probably just against exerting any effort to live faithfully before the

24:41

Lord and do good works and keep his commandments, and you're eliminating some important motives to the Christian life if you don't like Baxter.

24:49

So I think all those are what's going on. Tom, when I was younger, I read the

24:55

Reformed Pastor. It was assigned at seminary, at the Master's Seminary, and then I became a pastor in 1997, small town of about 7 ,000 people here in central

25:03

Massachusetts, and if I would have—I mean, lots of times I'll read, well, even the scriptures, and I don't do them like I should, and I'll read other people in ministry, and I don't do what they do, even though I thought it might be a good idea.

25:17

How long did Luther pray a day or whatever? And so I read Baxter, and I didn't do what Baxter said in terms of home visits, and the reason

25:26

I didn't do that is because I just knew something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it, but I had four young children, and I thought, what am

25:34

I going to do, go visit everybody else and then lose my children? I'll visit people when

25:40

I need to. I'll have other people help me with visitation, and then when my children move out of the house, that's when we'll have our home open more or go visit people, and I'm thankful.

25:52

Obviously, I didn't save my kids, but all four are believers. All four love the church, involved in the church, and I thought,

25:58

I cannot neglect my own children for the sake of everyone else, and I think if I would have tried to do Baxter stuff, then who knows what would happen to the children.

26:08

I mean, God is still gracious and things like that, but reading volume five of the

26:14

John Owen series in the Banner of Truth, the Green series, I don't know how anyone can defend

26:20

Baxter when it comes to justification when Owen obliterates him in that volume. Oh, yeah.

26:27

Mm -hmm, he does. I know. That's exactly right. I was a Baxter guy long ago, and so my wife and I, and I think three kids at the time, were in London.

26:37

We rent a car. Kids are crying in the car. I'm on the wrong side of the street. It was very stressful, and I wanted to go to Kidderminster because I wanted to see all the

26:47

Baxter stuff, and so I can't find the church that he's pastoring, which is, I think, a Sassanian church now, interestingly enough.

26:53

But anyway, there's an info booth in the center of Kidderminster, tourist booth, and my wife said, you know, typical lady says to the guy, let's stop and ask for directions.

27:02

It's before GPS, and I'm like, no, no, no. Finally, I cave in because I said to my wife, they're never going to know

27:08

Baxter. I mean, Richard Baxter, they're not going to know. So I go to the tourist booth. I said, hi, you know, maybe you could help me.

27:15

Probably not, but I'm looking for a man. He was like a Puritan, you know, pastor, a preacher here in Kidderminster, and she said,

27:23

Richard Baxter's church is right down the street. Take a left. So, I repent from all my

27:30

Richard Baxter dealings. Yeah, and J .I.

27:36

Packer, who wrote his dissertation on Baxter, is well known for being extremely latitudinarian, accepting of all positions.

27:46

He's so kind. He's kind about Baxter's theology in many, many respects, but he says that as a theologian, he was a disaster.

27:56

And in a real sense, his political idea of God loses God. And, you know, that coming from Packer, Packer doesn't hand out those kinds of statements.

28:08

I mean, you can probably find books by authors of all different theological persuasions, ones in which he disagrees, endorsed by J .I.

28:20

Packer. You know, I mean, I think I've got a number of books that I'm surprised J .I. Packer endorsed, you know, but he doesn't usually condemn a theology.

28:31

But he said Baxter's theology was a disaster. And he says that in A Quest for Godliness, in his book by that title.

28:41

So, yeah, Baxter's a mess, brother. I thought of Packer's endorsement or forward or puff or blurb for Peter Kreff's book.

28:51

I can't remember what his book was about, but some... What was the name of that Kreff book that said we can all get to God through Mary?

28:58

And Kreff had a surfing accident and the surfboard hit his head and he had that dream.

29:05

Oh, it's going to come to me later. But I forget. I don't know the name of that. But that's the kind of thing. It shows you that Baxter is really careful.

29:12

He doesn't, or not careful. He's even, I don't know how you'd put it, but he never condemns things.

29:17

But he condemned Baxter for this. And he's got a dissertation on Baxter. Baxter, and you can actually still buy it.

29:24

It's published where you can see what, how J .I. Packer analyzed Richard Baxter.

29:29

If you want to see it from someone who is by no means got an axe to grind against Richard Baxter, but gives a faithful analysis.

29:39

He broke with the reformed tradition. Ecumenical jihad. Yeah. Oh, OK.

29:46

There you go. Just popped in my mind. So, Tom, it's a Friday here in real time, and you're going to probably be working on your message, tidying that up a little bit.

29:54

We could talk for hours, but we need to wrap it up. And so, here's how I'd like to end the show, if you wouldn't mind.

30:01

Sure. We've done some critique of Baxter. Would you just give our listeners an overview of how grace motivates kind of a law, gospel distinction, law directs and guides, but doesn't give us any animation, as it were, to obey and how they, those listeners out there, would like to honor the

30:25

Lord this week, and they'd like to say no to sin and yes to righteousness. They'd like to kill sin and live for God's glory.

30:34

But maybe they think there's a way or a method or something. Can you just describe kind of how

30:39

God works, spirit of God? We don't have to run to new laws. We don't have to blend law, gospel.

30:46

How would you encourage people to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus this week? Yeah, well,

30:54

I mean, it begins with seeing the absolute glory and the beauty and the excellence of Jesus.

31:01

And when I say seeing, that's faith, that you see him, you look at him revealed in the scriptures, who he is and what he has done, that he is true

31:11

God, that he is true man, that he perfectly kept the law in his life. He died on the cross as a substitute for sinners.

31:19

He rose from the dead. And in seeing Jesus, we see two things or two words coming forth from him.

31:27

And one is the law as a condemning letter, because we see that he is so holy.

31:34

We would say with Peter, who after he looked upon Jesus and all of his holiness and brought in the net of fish and he fell on his face before the

31:45

Lord and said, get away from me. Lord, I'm a sinful man. And so the law as a condemning word reveals to us not that my sins deserve hell.

31:57

And so now I'm terrified of hell. So I'm going to go to Jesus. No, it's my sins deserve hell. And so look at how horrid my sins must be, my sins themselves in light of who

32:07

Jesus is and his greatness and goodness and glory. I see the ugliness of my sin.

32:13

There's nothing I can do to overcome my sin and I can't fix myself. So that's number one.

32:19

Number two is we look to Jesus as the only one who can rescue us, who can redeem us and justify us.

32:29

And this is the gospel properly speaking. This is what Christ has done in our place as a substitute to reconcile us to himself.

32:38

He kept the law in my place. He died for my sins. He bought me with a price and he did it all in grace and in love.

32:47

And I do nothing. I bring nothing in my hands whatsoever. I don't even bring repentance in my hands.

32:54

I don't bring some thought of renewing myself in my hands. I just look to him and cast myself at his feet and trust him to rescue me.

33:05

And then he freely gives the gift of justification by faith alone.

33:11

And then the third, so that the first word is the law. The second word is the gospel.

33:17

But then the outflow of the gospel is that having been bought with a price, we love the one who bought us.

33:25

How could we not? We love him. We see his loveliness and we want to grow in the grace and the knowledge of Jesus and to become like him because of all of his graces toward us because of his promise of redemption and because of his own personal inherent beauty and goodness.

33:47

We want to put on Christ likeness to become like the one we love, like the one we admire, like the one who is so good.

33:56

And there's a kind of, there's a joy here that is mixed with sorrow.

34:02

We see our sin and what it was doing to us and how it dishonors the name of Jesus.

34:08

And we can't merit anything by renewal, not at all. But what we can do is grow in communion with Christ and then reflect him and his grace more and more in our lives.

34:19

And so we put on a new life and new obedience by faith, recognizing that even the faith itself is a gift from him and that everything, every way in which we change is itself a gift of free grace purchased by what

34:33

Christ has done historically for us. And so we don't try to keep God's commandments.

34:39

We don't try to keep the law of Christ. We don't try to keep the 10 commandments in order to be righteous before God or to attain a legal status or a verdict or to get rid of our guilt.

34:50

That would be actually sinful to try to do because Jesus has already accomplished all that. Rather, we grow in the grace and the knowledge of Jesus and we keep his commandments as a rule of life in order to express love for the one who bought us, love for others around us and to reflect his glory to those around us and to grow in communion with Christ.

35:13

And so our whole purpose and motive in keeping the commandments change. So a simple way to maybe put it that I love is it's not original to me.

35:23

I think I may have even first heard this from Michael Horton, but it's like, you know, the gospel is like the sails on a sailboat and the law is like the rudder.

35:34

So the law does not propel us. The 10 commandments do not produce or cannot motivate godly obedience in Christ, but rather the gospel motivates, propels and is the reason with every kind of gospel motive.

35:49

So I'm not just saying gratitude. There is gospel repentance. There's gospel fear.

35:54

There's gospel joy. Every kind of motive must be inflected by the gospel and that's the sails on the boat, gospel hope versus legal hope.

36:06

And then it's the law that shows us the way of walking to honor

36:11

Christ, to grow in communion with him and to reflect his glory to others. So, amen.

36:17

Would you be my pastor? Oh, brother, would you be mine? Tom Hicks today on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

36:27

You can go to the website, pastortomhicks .com, and then you can get links there to his Twitter account. I suggest you follow also the church that he pastors there in Clinton, Louisiana, First Baptist Church.

36:39

And what else was I going to say? I was going to say something else, but I'm not,

36:44

I've already forgotten, but you can reach Tom there on the website. Oh, if you'd like to have articles about what about Doug Wilson and what about federal vision, what about Richard Baxter?

36:54

It's all there found. Tom, thanks for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thank you,