Episode 12: Sola Scriptura and the Local Church

The Rural Church Podcast, 2 .0. Just a couple of pastors discussing life, ministry, theology, and the gospel from a local church perspective.

Eddie, what's it time for? The Rural Church Podcast. The Rural Church Podcast.

I don't even know what episode we're on, honestly, Eddie, because we've got some scheduled kind of out.

This is October the 12th, and we're scheduling this one out for the last

Wednesday of October for Reformation Day. So say hello, Eddie.

Hello, everybody. Yeah, it seems like whenever we have guests on, we go long and those end up getting split into two.

And today we have, again, you know, he's almost like a second co -host because we have

Gunnar Madewell. Say hello, Gunnar. Good morning. Nice to be here again.

He's like Joe Biden. He's just always watching. You know, he's really a lot like Joe Biden.

We probably don't have time to get into that. What we want to talk about today is, because this is coming out the last

Wednesday of October, so we want to talk about Reformation Day or just the

Reformation or how much was your pastor appreciation bonus? Hey, I do want to say, in case any of my church members are listening, my church this year for pastor appreciation, they got me some shocks, bone conduction headphones.

They are the coolest thing. They are. I want to say big thank you to the church for getting me because they're really pretty cool.

Amen. That's encouraging. Well, our podcast is not long enough to walk through all the ins and outs of the

Reformation, but this is a podcast about the local church. And, you know, the

Reformation impacts the church. The Reformation really began with the gospel.

But the implications of that, once you began, and in fact,

I know some people aren't going to like this. I would say I would agree with the statement that said before that like Baptists are

Reformers. They are those who have taken the Reformation to where it should have gone.

That's right. And so the Reformation is impactful to local churches.

And we'll just talk about it. We walk through the five solos when we talk about the Reformation. We'll walk through those real quick,

Ed. Yeah. Yeah. And it really all begins, I think, with, you know,

Sola Scriptura or the Scripture alone. You know, when we think about not just the Reformers, but even the individuals that we would call the pre -Reformers, those 100 or 200 years before the

Reformation, the single unifying factor is that they were people who were studying the

Bible. There were people who were being transformed by the Scriptures alone when they stripped everything else away.

And whether they were reading it in Latin or they were translating it from Greek and Hebrew or even translating it into the common language of German or French or even

English, what we see is that as they studied the Bible, they were transformed.

And so really the discovery of all the other solas and the doctrines that we hold so dear all come from studying

Sola Scriptura, the Bible alone. Amen. Yeah. And so we'll go back to that.

There's some things I want to say, but when we talk about the five solas, Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Grace alone, we're saved by grace alone,

Sola Fide, through faith alone, Solus Christus, in Christ alone, and then number five, all for the glory of God alone,

Solae Deo Gloria. So nobody wrote these down during the Reformation and was like, these are our five rallying points.

But as you study, you know, the Reformation, this is what you get.

So I think Gunnar, when you were opening the Bible, was there something you were wanting to say? Okay.

So they can't see you shake your head, so you have to audibly say. I just said, what

Eddie said, John 17, 17, sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. I believe

Luther said something along the lines of, I didn't do anything. The word of God did it all.

And as we talk about Reformation, and we talk about Reformation in our churches, Reformation, there is still, you know, the

Reformation is something that never ends. Like, okay, we're done with that. The church should always be reforming.

But I want to go back to that first, that first sola. We should be reforming according to the word of God.

And so it doesn't matter so much, which I do think it's important. It doesn't matter if you set aside time.

I think it's cool in October to set aside time to talk about the Reformation or maybe preach a sermon or something like that.

I think that's neat. But whether or not you do that in your church is not so much important. What is the most important is that you take the principles of the

Reformation and you seek to apply those to your church, starting with the

Scriptures. That's right. That's right. You know, we think about the importance of the

Scripture. And even this last, you know, this last Sunday, I've done something kind of strange. It was

Pastor Appreciation Sunday, which I'm sure that I'm not the only one that feels uncomfortable sometimes with that, you know, with the kind of the attention that comes with that.

But I preached actually from Hebrews 13, verse 7 and verse 17.

And, you know, in Hebrews 17, it says, obey your leaders. But the word that's translated there, obey, it carries the idea of persuasion.

And, you know, really, the way that we ought to be persuaded, it's not that we ought to just say whatever the pastor says, we got to do it.

But we ought to be persuaded by our leaders, our pastors, our shepherds who are leading us with the

Scripture. And we ought to be persuadable as members of the local church by arguments from the

Bible. Listen, if my pastor can show me in the

Scriptures, this is what the Bible teaches. I not have this idea that, well,

I'm convinced of this. And even though you're showing me in the Bible, it teaches something different. No, we ought to be willing to say,

I will, I want to submit not just to what the pastor thinks, but what the

Bible is teaching. And I think that's what really brought about Reformation. It wasn't so much that even the great intellect of Luther or Calvin or Zwingli, or even the courage that we see in men like Wycliffe and Huss and those pre -Reformers, but it really is the

Word of God transforming the lives of people as they're persuaded from the Scriptures to believe in these other doctrinal truths like justification by faith alone.

Amen, or grace, or saved entirely by grace. So let me say this based on some of the things that you're saying.

I want to encourage our listeners with this. I want to bring us back to reality, I guess I should say.

Reformation is hard. It is all God's work. We saw that in the

Reformation. I preached not long ago at a church, and I opened up talking about William Tyndale because he was strangled to death on October 6, 1536.

His crime, of course, was translating the Bible into English. He was strangled, and then he was burned at the stake,

I guess you would say, mercifully after dying from being strangled.

But the idea that we what we understand from the Reformation period is that Reformation is hard, and then if you're in a rural church and you're, or it doesn't matter, you know, this is a rural church podcast, it doesn't matter, any size church,

Reformation is difficult work, and you do need to be men of conviction. I would say you must be men of conviction, but you must understand that doesn't mean,

I mean, you can walk in and just say, look, I'm just going to preach the Bible and teach people what the Bible says and show them that this is where the

Bible teaches on this or that subject. I'm just telling you, it is still going to be difficult, even from those that you thought were perhaps quote -unquote on your side.

But it's a worthy, this is what I want to say, Eddie, and it requires pastoral prudence, patience, love, but it's a worthy endeavor to take the

Word of God to your churches and to say, thus saith the

Lord. You want to be careful, you want to be careful certainly in the way you go about certain things, and you want to be patient, you want to love, and you know, but there comes a time that in all of our churches, some aspect of Reformation is always needed because we've not arrived yet in glory.

Right, that's right. And I think what, maybe a lesson we learned from the Reformation, if we take seriously the timeline of history, which we know some things were affected by the state of technology at the time and the speed at which ideas could move, and we live in a time when communication is so much quicker, but we also know that the

Reformation, we think about those big hinge points like 1517 or 1521, but with those we have to realize that Reformation takes time.

You know, you mentioned patience, and in the local church, look, there have to be points when we say this, something has to happen now, and there will be those big points you'll be able to look back on and say, this is where we made a change, or this is where we made a difference in the local church.

But generally, we have to realize that it's going to take time. You're not going to see a church completely transformed in a month, or even in a year, or maybe even in a few years, but over the lifetime of a ministry as pastors are working in their local churches, you know,

I think I've heard people say we overestimate what we can do in a year, we underestimate what you can do in five years or in 10 years, because we just don't realize the importance of how it takes time for these kinds of Reformational ideas, not just to take hold in people's hearts, but to bear fruit in people's lives.

Amen, that's right, and I would say this too, I absolutely affirm and believe rather strongly, you can listen to my sermons, that the

Word of God being preached is central to all of this. But let me just say this,

I think there's too many guys who think they're going to reform the church just from preaching in the pulpit, you know, but there's more than just that.

This is an amazing thing I'm watching right now, Eddie is combing his mustache like in the middle of this podcast, but anyway,

I'm not even that big. What I am saying,

Eddie, is preaching the Word is central and priority, and it is a must, you cannot bring

Reformation to church without that, but there's so much more that goes into Reformation than just preaching the

Word. I mean, for example, during the Reformation, the Reformers were writing, right?

They were writing, they were writing tracts, they were writing, yes, they were preaching, absolutely, indispensable, but they were writing, they were making sure people understood where they stood on issues, and I'm not saying go out and you need to write your own copy of the

Institutes, but I am saying that there's an aspect of Reformation in your church that has to take place through interactions, through meetings, through discussions, through changes.

Yeah, you want to be careful. Maybe we'll have a whole podcast talking about changes in the church, and both of us have had good and bad experiences from that, but the point

I'm just saying is if you're at your church and you say, well, Reformation will happen here if I'm only preaching the

Word and I'm not doing anything else, I would say, brother, you need to think through that a little bit more. Yes, preaching the

Word must be priority, and it's indispensable, but there are other things that are important to be happening to see

Reformation. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've got to be counseling, we've got to be, you know, even this morning before we recorded this podcast, on Wednesday mornings, we have a men's prayer meeting where we pray through some

Scripture. We're working through 1 Timothy right now, just praying through a few verses each week, and then a brother stayed after, and he and I had just talked for probably 45 minutes or an hour, and, you know,

I would even say that kind of informal counsel, informal discipleship is integral to seeing real

Reformation happen, and it takes time because it's not like that needs to happen with one person.

That needs to happen at different times with different people in the local church, and so that kind of counsel, that kind of discipleship is really necessary even outside of the main teaching and preaching times that we have in the church, and look, you can disagree with this,

Cuatro, so I want to give you an out on this, so feel free, but I think sometimes we can even look at famous ministries, and we can hear them say things like, well, all they did was preach the

Bible, you know. We can hear John MacArthur, you know, talk about the transformation in Grace Community Church, and he just preached the

Bible, but we have to realize in the rural church that there are going to be certain differences and constraints just because of the size of the population around us that are going to be different than, say, a church that's in a community of a hundred thousand or a million or several million people.

Just because of the fact that we're in smaller communities, the need for us to be even more intentional about directly connecting with individuals in counsel and in care for their soul is even more important maybe than, say, the pastor, and I don't want to sound like I'm belittling that ministry because it's important too, but the pastor that's in a large place where there is a larger population so that a segment of that population that would come just for their preaching is going to be bigger, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and I would even say, though, that like, and I am in agreement, but I'd even say like ministries with John MacArthur, so like the only thing you see is the pulpit, you know?

That's right, yeah. But there's a lot of things happening that you don't see. And there are, and even if maybe

MacArthur himself isn't able because of just the sheer size, there are other brothers counseling, doing some of those other shepherding tasks, you know, in a church like that.

It's not like that's not happening in those churches. It's that works.

Somebody's got to be doing that kind of soul care for the sheep, or for the church to be healthy.

Gunnar. Oh, I thought you were raising your hand. All right.

So, Sola Scriptura, to be practically applied, it begins first with you believing the

Scriptures yourself, having time in the Bible yourself, not just for preparation for what you're going to give to others, but what you need for your own soul.

You know, if the Bible is God's Word, and it is, and it's clear, necessary, and sufficient, and authoritative, infallible, inherent, then you need to start with yourself.

You need to read and study and know the Scriptures yourself. I've said it for a long time, but as a general rule, and I apply this to pastors too, we're not spending enough time in the

Bible, in the Bible belt particularly. But we don't know the

Bible. Because of men like Wycliffe and Tyndall, we have the

Bible in our language unrestricted. We have more access to the Bible in our language than any generation in the history of the world, and yet we're also one of the most biblically probably—well, in comparison to what we have access to, we are the most biblically illiterate and ignorant generation when it comes to God's Word.

So be—you want to see reformation in your church? Start with reformation in your own soul.

Be a Bible man. You know, we have a friend, Steve Burchett, we said we're going to mention this, but he wrote a little book.

Where do you find that at? Christian? Ccwtoday .org.

Ccwtoday .org. He wrote a book on Wycliffe, a real short book, and I've read through about half of it,

I guess, so far, and it's a good little book on Wycliffe, and it's an encouragement that we ought to be

Bible men, Bible women. We ought to love the Scriptures. Don't go touting the Reformation on social media if you're not reading the

Bible regularly, daily, because the

Bible is at the core of the Reformation, and it's because of the Reformation that we have the

Bible in the common language. So we must be Bible men and Bible women.

And you know, nothing's going to make you— this sounds so simplistic, but no amount of reading great theological books, although that's a great thing, and people should do that.

Studying the languages, reading good commentaries, those things are all helpful, and people should do all those things.

Nothing's going to make you as literate and as just soaked in the

Scripture as reading the Scripture. You know, I realize now,

I mean, I'm not as organized as you are, Cuatro, so I know that you know exactly how many times you've read through the entire

Scripture. Probably 17? You know, what, 16, 17 times? Something like that?

Uh, 15. Yeah. So, and I don't know how many times I've read through, because I'm not good at keeping up.

Sure, yeah, but— But here's the thing. I realize today, at 43 years old, and the number of years

I've been in the ministry, just how much, and I don't have the command of Scripture like I wish

I had, but how much more I had than I had 10 years ago, how much more I had than I had 20 years ago, and it's not because I found the perfect memorization system.

It's just from reading the Bible, and really, that's the thing. I mean, you'll find yourself seeing even connections in Scripture that you've never seen before, and you won't find that because you've read the

Bible once or twice. You'll find that because you've read it a dozen times.

Now Gunnar does want to say something. I will say something. So, talking about the

Reformation, talking about reforming our churches, a couple things. One, I think so many reasons why people are so rejecting of God's Word is because, like John 17, 17, instead of being sanctified in the truth, they're being sanctified, or seemingly sanctified, in the culture, and tradition, and what we've always done, and different things like that, and so in order for us, partly, yes,

I think in order to have real reformation, we ought to be sanctified in the truth, and sometimes, and you'll come across this, if people rail against that, we don't want the truth, maybe it's not just because, oh, it's taking time.

It might be because they actually don't love the Bible. They might not be regenerate, and so you guys were talking about earlier, well, it doesn't take overnight unless God does it, right, and I think all those reformers, when we were going through this big

Reformation, I think all those reformers are saying, I hope God does it overnight.

I know God can do it overnight. Realistically, I know that the

Lord's timing is His timing, but I think as we're trying to reform our church, or other pastors are trying to reform their churches,

I think in the back of their minds, they're hoping just God do it overnight. We want to see people love

Christ. We don't want to see our church not follow biblical principles for five years.

We pray that we do it tonight, and we start now, and I think God can do that, and I think

God would be glorified and pleased to do that. I think we ought to pray to that end. Yeah, and I think that's true, and that's what we want.

At the same time, I would say also, Ed, that we just have to be resolved. We have to be resolved, and we have to, even if it takes some close friends, and it takes some, even you writing out some things, just be like,

I'm resolved no matter what. The only thing that matters is pleasing the

Lord. I have a, in fact, y 'all can't read it because of my handwriting. Can you read that? I think that's, did you write in Hebrew?

It says, I have a little note sticker right here. I know you can't read that, but it's there.

I cannot read that. It's not electrical. What it says is, pleasing God is all that matters, right?

Pleasing God. Are you sure that Haddon didn't write that? No, I'm positive I wrote that, because I was dealing with some stuff yesterday.

Isn't really all that matters? Pleasing God is all that matters. All that matters. Because all these other things are going to flow out of pleasing

God, right? You say, yeah, but pleasing God, but also taking care of my family, that matters.

Well, if you're not taking care of your family, you're not pleasing God. That's right. So I'm just putting that at the highest thing, don't care what men say.

I don't care what the Southern Baptist Convention says. I don't care what another church says.

At the end of the day, it is my responsibility as pastor of this church to make sure that what

I am doing and what our church is doing is pleasing to God. And if you're giving them the scriptures, right, you don't even have to wonder, am

I doing this right? Does the Lord actually is pleased with the vision? Maybe, as some have said, or whatever.

I think that if we are teaching the scripture, if the scripture is our foundation for how we want to reform our churches, then we don't even have to wonder if the

Lord is pleased with this. We can have full assurance. This is what the Bible says. This is what we're going to do. You can get so burnt out on trying to turn the church in your own way.

Maybe not even what the Bible says. You can get so burnt out like, I want to do this, and maybe we'll entertain these people with this, or maybe we'll get people with this.

And people get so tired of that. We don't even have to worry about reforming our church if we're going on what the

Word says. We can have assurance that the Lord is pleased. I've been reading

Ian Murray. He has a book called Pentecost Today, and he has another book called Revival and Revivalism.

But in Pentecost Today, I've been reading, and he's recounting kind of the way that true revival has happened in the past.

And one of the things that I'm really gleaning from Ian Murray's work there is the church needs to be faithful in the regular scripturally prescribed means of grace, the things that God has given us that we ought to be doing, those ordinary means.

Then God, in His sovereignty and providential working, He can bring the extraordinary.

But we can't produce the extraordinary. We need to be faithful in the ordinary, and then

God at His time can bring the extraordinary. And so whether we want to use the word revival or if we want to stick with the word reformation in our churches, the idea is we go about the ordinary means using the things that God has given us in the

Word by the work of the Holy Spirit. And then God brings about sometimes extraordinary, meaning a lot of people being converted or a lot of hearts being changed, even of Christians being transformed and reformed in their thinking, or God works slowly through the ordinary means.

But either way, we honor and glorify the Lord using the methods and the means that He has given us for that work.

Yeah, amen. The sola scriptura doesn't mean that we don't like confessions of faith.

So for example, I've made the argument before that because we love the Bible, we love confessions of faith, because what we're saying in a confession of faith is we love the

Bible enough to articulate what we believe about it. You go to the Jehovah's Witness building down the road, which there literally is one here, they will say we believe the

Bible. So I would encourage people to read the confessions of faith that came out of the

Reformation, particularly the first and second, obviously I'm going to say the first and second London Baptist confession of faith, but those aren't the only ones that you can read and benefit from.

And I think that if you love the Bible, you're willing to articulate this is what we believe the

Bible teaches. And so we're not just saying, hey, Bob and his Bible need to go over there alone on the island and they can, and him and God will be all right.

No, we're saying the scripture is the launching point for all these other things. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.

Justification is by faith alone, not faith plus works, faith alone in Christ alone, who is the object of our faith.

And all this is to the glory of God alone. But if you just read those real quick, you might think, well, then the

Reformation is just about individual salvation. Well, no, it's way more than that.

And it bleeds into what we think about the church. And so that's why we're saying we're not diminishing these other solas at the expense of sola scriptura, we're just saying we have to start here.

We have to start with the Bible. The Bible is our foundation. The Bible is what is going to reform your church.

It's going to reform your own heart, your family, your community. And so the scriptures are what we need to be shackled to.

Yeah, I always get them mixed up. Which is the formal principle and which is the material principle of the

Reformation? Sola fide or sola scriptura? Yes, sir. Well, I always get them mixed up too.

Oh, I figured you would just rattle it right off, and I was going to admit my ignorance. No, I'm with you too.

The formal material principle of the Reformation is justification by grace through faith.

The formal is sola scriptura. Right. And so the idea there is, how do you get to justification by faith alone?

Well, you get there from the scripture, right? You won't land on that without the special revelation of God in the scripture.

And I know just this week, didn't you teach on the doctrine of special revelation? Yes, yeah, in Spurgeon Academy.

So I think that even though we're talking about the five solas, it really does depend upon your commitment to the scripture so that all five solas get walked out.

It's not saying that one is more important than the other. It's just saying that it's necessary to have the foundation of sola scriptura so that we can define even what these other scriptural points are.

And it's even the reason why, you know, speaking of confessions of faith, the majority of confessions of faith, maybe all the historic confessions of faith, they begin with a statement about the

Bible. And that is because a person might think, well, shouldn't a confession of faith begin with a statement about who

God is? Or shouldn't a confession of faith begin with a statement about what the gospel is?

But most historic, if not all historic confessions, begin with a statement about the

Bible, because what's going to define the gospel? What's going to tell us who God is? The Bible.

Yeah. Amen. We must be Bible people. And the Bible shapes everything that we think about when it comes to the church.

You know, the Bible, the Bible, I preached this a few, well, last week at a special conference.

But the Bible defines the meaning of the church. That is, the

Bible defines what a church is. The Bible defines the membership of the church. That is, who can be a member, what a member is, believer's baptism.

It defines the management of the church. There I talked about the leadership of the church.

You know, it defines the method of the church. There I talked about worship and also our methods in evangelism.

And the Bible defines the majesty of the church. What I mean is, you can't look at a church and say, oh,

I think that's a healthy, beautiful church, if it's not biblical, right? And so the

Bible, well, the point is in all this, the scripture shapes our understanding, not of just salvation, but also of the church.

I mean, the Bible is God's communication to us. It is the word of God, as it were, in written form.

And so we must be slaves, if you will, of the scriptures in our personal reading and then in our ministries, in our counseling.

That's a whole other episode. We counsel through the scriptures. We evangelize with the scriptures.

We street preach from the scriptures. We preach from the pulpit from the scriptures. We teach Sunday school with those scriptures.

Our people need to know the Bible. We need to know the Bible. This is God communicating to us. And so everything that we do must be shaped by the word of God.

Why don't we close by each giving just a practical tip for reading and Bible study?

Starting with Gunnar or what? Starting with Gunnar, that's right. Are you ready, Gunnar? A practical tip for how to read the

Bible or just doing it? Well, I'll share mine and give you guys a minute to think about it.

Man, one of the things that has been the most helpful to me the last few years has been chronological

Bible reading. And so not that I'm saying it's bad to read the Bible in the order the books are in.

That's fine. Or that it's bad to read, you know, you pick this book over here and read it through several times and then you go and pick a different book to read through several times.

That's fine. I'm not saying you have to do this, but I have for several years now read the

Bible chronologically, and it has been one of the most beneficial things that has helped me gain a greater understanding of especially what

God is doing between the Old and New Covenant, the way he's structuring the entire redemptive historical narrative in the

Reading it in chronological order has been vastly beneficial.

And so I would tell anybody, if you've never read the Bible chronologically, you would do yourself a great service if you took the year of 2023 and read the

Bible in chronological order. Amen. I think I would just say this. There's no wrong way to read the

Bible except not reading the Bible. Now, I'm sure that we could use extreme examples and, you know, you're just randomly picking a text here or there.

Well, that's tough, and that's not a great way to read the Bible, but it's better than not reading the

Bible. However, for me personally, it has been reading through the Bible every year, and I've done multiple kind of plans on that.

You just have to find the plan that works for you. And then the other thing I would add is this. Reading books of the

Bible over and over and over again. So I said I read through the Bible 15 times. Yes, but then

I don't know, maybe it's more than that, because there's lots of different books of the Bible that I've read over and over and over and over again, even while reading through the

Bible. And I just think that that is helpful. Gunnar, you got anything? Because you don't got long fixing to shut us down here.

Yeah, I would agree with Quatro in that it's not a matter of one particular plan used to read the

Bible. However, reading the Bible daily, one of the biggest chapters of the whole

Bible is a love letter to the Bible, meditating on it day and night. And so read the