Episode 12: Sola Scriptura and the Local Church

The Rural Church Podcast.

Two point up.

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 Maidwell.

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, we

want to talk about Reformation Day, or just the Reformation,

or how much was your.

Pastor appreciation bonus?

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, I mean, because they're really pretty cool.

They're really pretty.

Cool.

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 solas when we talk about the Reformation.

You want to 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.

They 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, Soli Deo Gloria.

So, nobody wrote these down during the Reformation.

It was like, these are our five rallying points, but as you study the Reformation, this

is what you get.

So, I think, Gunnar, when you were opening 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, 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 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

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 the attention that comes with that, but I preached

actually from Hebrews 13 verse 7 and verse 17.

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 ought 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 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, you know.

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 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 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 be, 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 ten 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 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 open,

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 that big.

What I am saying, Eddie, is preaching the Word is central 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, 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 100

,000 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.

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 and 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, 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, right?

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, Quatro, 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?

15.

Yeah.

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

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, you know, 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, what you guys were talking about earlier, well, it doesn't take overnight unless God does it,

right?

And I think all those Reformers, when they were trying, when we were going through this big Reformation, I

think all those Reformers were 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.

I cannot read that.

It's not legible.

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.

Yes, or yeah.

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, like, 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 soli deo gloria.

And if you're giving them the scriptures, right, you don't even have to, 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 I want to do, 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 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,

you know, 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 timing, 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.

If 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, 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.

The Bible, I preached this 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.

Believers' baptism.

It defines the management of the church.

There I talked about the leadership of the church.

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.

And so the Bible, 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 the 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

Bible 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 Bible.

Reading it in chronological order has been vastly beneficial.

And so I would tell anybody, if you've never read the Bible chronologically, that

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've 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 Bible.

If you're not reading the Bible, you need to read the Bible.