TPW 102 Immovable on the Gospel Against Abortion and LGBTism

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Welcome to the Protestant Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines here at Gridwell Heights Presbyterian Church in Kingsport, Tennessee.
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And today I'd like to post the first talk that I did at the conference on marriage, family, and sexuality.
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And this particular talk really was the one that I was hoping would get the most downloads and that people would listen to it.
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And basically it's an appeal from my heart as a pastor, as a
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Christian, to be fixed and immovable upon the word of God in the midst of the terrible and horrible culture change that we're seeing with the
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LGBT revolution. I have been appalled, disgusted, broken, and deeply hurt at the indifference that I'm seeing to this in the
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PCA. I was shocked and horrified when Greg Johnson stood up and made some of the most inane arguments
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I have ever heard in favor of being gay, likening it to women who are infertile or people who are paraplegics.
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I think that infertile women and paraplegics would be highly offended by such things, but that's what was said.
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I was naive enough, even then, to think that he would be shut down and silenced. He wasn't.
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Instead, he received rousing applause. We have to be immovable, immovable upon the truth.
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We are to be anchored to the word of God. It is the rock. No matter how hard the winds are blowing, no matter how high the waters rise and the rains come, we are to be immovable upon our convictions of what the word of God says.
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And we are to do that no matter what the cost up to and including our own lives, our ministries, our livelihoods, friends, family, reputations, whatever it costs to be firmly planted upon the truth.
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And there's a lot of things, there's a lot of other things that are on my mind and heart lately that are really bothering me.
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Right now, I'm watching the world premiere done by Apologia Studios of this pro -life documentary about abolish, or abolish abortion, or end abortion now, that whole thing, and watching all this and seeing the partnership that's going on now with Apologia and Doug Wilson and CrossPolitic, the federal vision stuff.
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And George Grant is interviewed a lot in this video. And I'm reminded of the years
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I spent involved in the pro -life movement when I was in Ohio. And we have to be just as immovable in our convictions about the gospel.
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And it seems that the whole premise of this documentary is that the pro -life movement has failed because of all of its ecumenical activities.
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They haven't made this a gospel issue. I agree completely. That has been the problem. That's why they can't stop abortion. It hasn't worked.
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Because they're not focused on Jesus Christ and the biblical gospel.
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And yet, in this documentary, I don't understand how they can be partnering with Doug Wilson and his whole federal vision gang.
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Doug Wilson has not changed anything he believes about the federal vision and its false gospel.
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Nothing. Nothing. R. Scott Clark did a good blog entry and pointed out, yeah,
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Doug Wilson has said he doesn't like the label federal vision, but nothing he believes has changed. Absolutely nothing that he believes has changed.
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And then George Grant. George Grant has always been running around with those groups. With the federal vision guys.
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George Grant wrote a glowing review of M .T. Wright's book, What St.
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Paul Really Said, back in 1997 for World Magazine. Granted, that was 20 years ago. But why would you endorse a book and speak so highly of it when it denies the gospel so ferociously and clearly?
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The winds of apostasy and doctrinal shift and change and worldview are all around us.
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And I have a dear brother, one of the seminary students here, has started a wonderful website and ministry.
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I'm going to promote it here, called Full Armor Ministries. And it's amazing because that passage in Ephesians chapter 6 about putting on the full armor of God, that was hugely important to me in my,
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I'll just call it what it was, hellhole of a nightmare that I spent trying to do pro -life work when
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I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. And it was a hellhole of a nightmare, not primarily because of the proponents of abortion, but primarily because of the people who were supposedly pro -life who didn't understand the gospel and heaped their utter contempt and utter hatred on me because I wanted to take a principled stand for the one true gospel that were justified by faith alone, apart from works, etc.
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It was hell, primarily because of the pro -life people, not the pro -abortion people, ironically.
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I could not do pro -life work with Roman Catholics because they wanted to make it into saving souls and bring in their rosary beads and obviously we're not going to do that.
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Unfortunately, in that area of Cincinnati, there was also a very large federal vision contingent as well.
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And as I came to understand more and more of that, I didn't want anything to do with them either.
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And then the Protestants, so -called, from the vineyard and other places in Cincinnati, nobody understood the gospel.
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I was literally, completely, and utterly by myself.
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And eventually, I had to write a letter and copy like 50 people on it, including people that were, you know, called themselves reformed and would have said that they were
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Calvinist and they were federal vision types, Roman Catholics, um, that were involved with doing some of the stuff that we were working on there because Martin Haskell, the inventor of partial birth abortion, set up an abortion clinic less than two miles from the church there where I was an assistant pastor.
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So I immediately got involved in doing pro -life work. And eventually, I had to tell everybody, everybody, every buddy, every single person that I was involved with that I didn't want anything to do with any of them.
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Because not a one of them understood, not a one understood that you cannot do this without the true and biblical gospel.
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That means you cannot partner with people that deny it. Like federal vision people, like Rome, like liberal
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Protestants, like people from the vineyard who, at least the ones there in Cincinnati, didn't know anything about the
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Bible and knew absolutely nothing, nothing about the gospel, nothing.
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And you know, when I sent that email out, this has been, my goodness, this is in like 2000, 2005 or 6, so this has been a long time ago.
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I got so much hate mail from that, I had to block so many email addresses. That letter that I wrote explaining what the gospel is and why
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I can't work with anyone that denies it, it was actually photocopied and distributed to Catholic churches all over the area.
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The church where I pastored got hate mail attacking me, accusing me of being a racist.
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I was like, a racist? And then I was like, why are they saying I'm a racist? Oh yeah, because the guy that was helping us, he opened up a room in his pediatric practice which was right adjacent to the abortion clinic.
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He was Jewish. So my not wanting to work with people that deny the gospel became,
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I'm a racist, I'm anti -Semitic. I was like, wow. Yeah, people will just lie their faces off about you.
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But I'll tell you, as much as my heart is stirred by some of these individuals that are talking, that they're interviewing in this documentary, they're criticizing the pro -life movement, and rightly so, for being ecumenical.
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It's always been ecumenical, and that's always been its biggest problem. It's ecumenical. It doesn't have the gospel. And it doesn't think the gospel is the key to all this.
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It is. It always has been. But they're partnering with people that deny it, that deny the gospel, and tolerate the presence of others that deny it as well.
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The federal vision, I'm sorry, nothing's changed with that. That's the same old heresy, it's just neo -legalism, it's just a different form of the
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Judaizing heresy, repackaged under new terms. But nothing's changed in that regard.
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And so, by attacking everyone around for getting the gospel wrong,
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I've noticed, I am an hour and twenty minutes into this one hour and forty -two minute long documentary, and I've heard the word gospel a lot, and I've been listening very carefully to this, not a single time, not once, have they defined what the gospel is.
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They criticized the pro -life movement for being ecumenical, for being incremental. I agree with those criticisms.
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We should not want to regulate murder. We want to see it abolished altogether.
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They're right to criticize that. And they're right to say the gospel is the key to all this, but why are you interviewing
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George Grant, and why are you partnering with Doug Wilson and his whole gang in Moscow, when nothing about the federal vision has changed?
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They haven't repudiated any of their heresies or errors about justification, the gospel, their denial of the covenant of works, their belief that faith means faithfulness, and all the rest of it.
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So once again, every time I think maybe there's something going to come up that's going to really be principled, it just breaks my heart.
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It just always does. And I'm thankful for my friend John O 'Rourke.
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He has a very principled stand on this. He is not going to be partnering with federal vision people, praise the blessed holy name of Jesus Christ, thank you,
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God. He made a presentation at our church promoting his ministry, the Full Armor Ministries.
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He has a great YouTube channel. He goes out and does street evangelism and is going to the abortion clinic up in Bristol. It's about a 25 minute drive from the church here up in Bristol.
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There's an abortion clinic up there. And when John was done making his presentation, since he's a member of our church and he's also a seminary student under my pastoral care here, along with two other guys, when he was done with his presentation,
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I was almost teary eyed. Because he specifically said that he's not going to partner with people that deny the gospel, including the federal vision and all the rest of them.
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And I stood up and told the church, because I'm the pastor, I closed that meeting.
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We did a special Sunday night supper so he could make his presentation to try to raise support for his ministry work. And I made the comment,
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I want everyone here to know that as of today, I am aware of one and only one pro -life ministry that has this kind of principled stand.
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One. Only one. And just for the record, and I didn't say this, but just telling my listeners here, when
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I was in Cincinnati, when I was doing pro -life work there, I was very involved in it. And I made a lot of contact with a lot of people.
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And I always thought, well, they're pro -life, but I'm a Christian and I'm going at this with the gospel.
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But, you know, I guess we can have sort of a general benevolence and sort of work alongside each other. Uh, no you can't.
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Because they all think that we're doing ministry and saving souls and I'm like, no, we're not. Because you guys don't have the gospel right.
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And then that made me an absolute pariah. I mean, people just detested me, just hated me with a passion.
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And so I was completely, totally, in every way, alone in that work.
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But God blessed us. And we had about 40 people at the church there. And I tried to help them learn how to do sidewalk counseling.
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And we saved a lot of babies. I got the whole one of them in my own arms. Her name was Soleana. And that's a wonderful story.
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We got that woman an ultrasound. She was 20 weeks pregnant. She was there for her abortion. Got her an ultrasound.
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She saw that baby in that room, the pediatric office, right across the way from the abortion clinic.
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She started to cry. Can't do it. She needed to have a C -section. I stood up in front of the church and we raised $3 ,100 like that.
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And we paid for it. I was there when the baby came and we loaded up a van with absolutely everything they would ever need to take care of that child.
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It was beautiful. It was wonderful. It was one of the most wonderful things I've ever been involved with. And you know why I think that worked?
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You know why I think we saw that? Because the gospel was not compromised by myself.
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I absolutely refused to work with federal vision people, with liberal
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Protestants, and with Rome. Would not do it. Because I knew you can't bring an empty squirt gun to a gunfight.
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And the gospel is the only thing that can stop abortion. And oh how I have prayed.
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Oh how I have prayed that God would raise up people who will not be muddy on the gospel and not get in bed with federal vision people from Moscow and not get involved with the federal vision and other forms of heretical so -called
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Calvinistic Christianity, but actually love the one true biblical gospel, justification by faith alone in Christ alone, apart from works, no such thing as final salvation by works, and all the rest of it.
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And God raised up one here. And I'm excited for his ministry work. And he's already been contacted by a local federal vision guy from one of those
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CREC churches. I've been encouraging him, you gotta stand your ground my friend.
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Stand your ground. This is a gospel issue, don't ever compromise on it. So anyway, the winds of culture change and apostasy and lack of doctrinal discernment and lack of faithfulness to the gospel, they are swirling all around us.
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And yet, where are the few who will take their stand for the biblical gospel? And it only takes a few who are willing to do it for God to do great things.
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So anyway, I hope that this sermon from the word of God will encourage you to stand your ground against the winds of culture change and against the winds of groups that claim we're going to take a principled stand for the gospel by denying the gospel.
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We're going to take a principled stand against the ecumenism of the pro -life movement and its incremental approach.
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And instead, we're going to partner with others that deny the gospel in different and subtle ways.
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Instead. That's not the answer. We need people to take a principled stand on the one true gospel and not compromise it at all, ever, for anyone, for any reason.
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So I hope you'll find this to be edifying, encouraging, and helpful. We have to be, as the word of God uses a very interesting word, ametakinetos, which means immovable.
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We have to be immovable in the gospel. We have to be immovable on what is right and what is wrong on the LGBT issues.
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Please take your Bibles and turn to John 17. John 17, verses 14 through 17 will be our scripture reading.
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John 17, verses 14 through 17, John 17, 14 to 17, this is
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God's word. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
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I do not pray that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
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Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth. And God bless the reading of his word.
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Let's pray, please. Our Father in heaven, our hearts are burdened by the revolution that we see in our culture around us.
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Not so much that it's surprising that it's happening, but because it is trying to destroy what's left of Bible -believing, gospel -loving
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Christianity in this country, and it's doing it with incredible success. We pray, Lord, that you would help us to see what your will is for your church in terms of being leaders, not followers.
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Those that set trends instead of following them. We pray, Lord, that you would help us to be exactly what our
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Lord prayed we would be, and that is set apart by the truth, sanctified by the truth.
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We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. When the internet first became available to the masses,
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I had just gotten married in 1997. Thankfully, there were a lot of good
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Christian theologians, apologists, and thinkers who leveraged that technology to disseminate sound doctrine and sound theology.
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Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, I had been exposed to Roman Catholicism almost constantly. Some of the first internet searches that I did, and this is long before there was
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Google. Back then it was Savvy Search and Alta Vista Digital. Anyone remember those?
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Used to dig around the internet for stuff with those search engines. And I was interested in understanding the
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Protestant and Catholic debates. And one of the first people I came across online back then, and this was long before I was
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Reformed in my theology, was a Reformed Baptist guy from Phoenix, Arizona named James White.
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And he had written on this topic and regularly debated, not just Roman Catholics, but debated everybody else too on everything you could imagine.
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And I quickly found a website called straightgate .com. I don't know if it even exists anymore, but it was a repository of White's old dividing line programs, his debates, lectures that they had done and taped and uploaded to the internet.
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And there were lectures on justification, Reformed theology, the atonement, textual criticism, and all kinds of stuff.
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And back then I had this little device called a Nomad 2C, which had 64 megabytes of space on it.
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And I bought a chip, an expansion chip that was this big with 64 more megabytes.
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And I thought I was styling pretty cool with that thing. And I would load it up with stuff and I would just listen and I would hear the book recommendations and get more books.
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I'd buy books, go to the library, get books. Around the year 2000, so that would be 19 years ago,
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James White started talking frequently on his program about homosexuality and the Bible. And of course he would point out the obvious, that the
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Bible condemns homosexuality. And eventually he wrote a book on the subject called The Same Sex Controversy, which is an excellent scholarly defense of what, frankly, back then
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I thought would never need to be defended. Back then I thought, what a waste of time. This guy is so brilliant.
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Why doesn't he write on things that actually need defense? This is not even an issue. Well, he was way ahead of his time.
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He saw this coming. The arguments that White brought up that were being used by the proponents of the gay agenda were very shallow, very facile, and could, so I thought, only work upon the profoundly gullible or exceptionally ignorant.
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In fact, I recall getting frustrated every time White did another dividing line program and the topic was homosexuality.
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I got to the point where I'm not listening to that anymore. I'm so sick of this topic. I thought, how could anyone be taken in by the kinds of foolish arguments that are being used to justify what cannot be justified?
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Nature itself tells us that the greatest, nature itself is the greatest reputation that such could ever be normal or right, right?
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No one could ever actually believe that homosexuality is a genetic trait, right? I mean, what genetic trait could possibly be more disadvantageous to the survival of a species than this one?
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Surely, no one will ever believe the lie that some people are just born this way, right? Surely, no one in the church would ever buy the argument that some people are biologically, intrinsically, inherently homosexual, right?
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Wrong. We live in odd times, to be sure. There has been a cultural mega shift that's been stewing in this nation really since the 1960s.
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And that's not surprising, that ideas and worldviews shift is not surprising, that perverted and wicked people have tried in every possible way to normalize what is, in fact, disgusting and vile in every sense of both of those words.
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That's not surprising, that people are trying to normalize this is not surprising. What is surprising is that even professed conservative
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Christians are right now being taken in by the arguments, that the revolution is happening does not surprise me.
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What does surprise me is the speed with which that revolution is swallowing everything left of conservative
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Christianity in America. Very fast changes in cultural ideas and worldviews, however, is not new.
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The Church of Jesus Christ has thrived during times of peace and during times of revolution that also involve persecution.
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In fact, the church tends to do better during times of revolution and persecution for one simple reason, please hear me.
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Unpopular Christianity, unpopular Christianity reveals the traitors, turncoats, cowards and goats clearly for all to see.
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The incompatibility of the LGBT revolution with God's word is going to continue to clear out more and more driftwood from the church.
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Joshua Harris and Marty Samson are just a couple of high profile examples of such driftwood.
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And frankly, I appreciate that they have the honesty to simply renounce and abandon their faith and to do it publicly.
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Samson, however, I've been praying for that guy. He is supposedly doing more research and looking for answers to some of his questions.
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But his initial statements about leaving the faith were that I'm losing my faith and it doesn't bother me.
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Joshua Harris left the faith, the guy that wrote the book, I Kiss Dating Goodbye, long ago. He's renounced the gospel and of course,
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I was looking for it in his post, of course issued an apology to the LGBT community.
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Now, my second talk today, we're going to talk directly about the fact that Harris has apologized to a group of people which in point of fact does not exist.
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There is no LGBTQ community in the same way that there is no murderers community, covetous community, thief community or adulterers community.
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People are not biologically covetous, inherently thieves, intrinsically adulterers.
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People can be covetous thieves or adulterers but all of those are labels which describe the sinfulness of actions, desires and behaviors.
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They do not and cannot describe a person's ontology or their being, more on that later.
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In this talk, I want to emphasize the way in which the word of God instructs the people of God to be distinctly
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God's people in the face of cultural megashifts. And how a full understanding of the biblical concept of antithesis is absolutely foundational to God's people remaining distinctly
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God's people as the winds, hurricanes, cyclones and tornadoes of culture change blow all around us, destroying everything in sight.
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The exhortations in God's word on this topic are many. Before we look at some of them in detail,
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I'd like to give you first a couple of sentences from an excellent book I read years ago by R .B. Kuyper called
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The Glorious Body of Christ. In his introduction to that little book, he has three things that are facing the church in all ages of time, and one of those things is worldliness.
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And he wrote this, quote, how true is the oft -repeated indictment of church members that they can hardly be distinguished from the men and women of the world?
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The most outstanding sin of ancient Israel was that instead of upholding its distinctiveness as Jehovah's chosen people, it was ever and anon imitating its pagan neighbors.
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That sin is rampant in the church today, end quote, said Kuyper. Those words were published in 1967, 52 years ago.
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The great J .C. Ryle, in his wonderful book on holiness, wrote this about the duty of Christians to resist worldliness, to resist cultural megashifts, to resist the winds of change that take us away from the word of God.
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He said this, he must fight the world. The subtle influence of that mighty enemy must be daily resisted, and without a daily battle can never be overcome.
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The love of the world's good things, the fear of the world's laughter or blame, the secret desire to keep in, to be in with the world, the secret wish to do as others in the world do, and not to run into extremes, all these are spiritual foes which beset the
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Christian continually on his way to heaven, and they must be conquered. The word of God teaches us, friendship with the world is enmity with God.
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Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is an enemy of God. If any man loves the world, the love of the father is not in him.
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The world is crucified to me, said Paul, and I unto the world, and whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world.
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And the scripture also says, do not be conformed to this world. The LGBT revolution is probably one of the most extreme forms that worldliness has taken in our time.
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One of the grand revelations that God has made to his people for all time is Malachi 3 .6.
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I am Yahweh, I do not change. I am Yahweh, I do not change.
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Therefore, you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob. And as apostasy in the church is coming from every direction, as shown in the acceptance of the mythological category of personhood known as sexual orientation, that is a myth, it doesn't exist.
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You and I do not have sexual orientation. You and I do not have sexual orientation.
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If you're a man, you were designed by God for a woman. If you're a woman, you're designed by God for a man. You do not have sexual orientation.
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What every single God -fearing, gospel -loving, word -of -God -obeying Christian must remember is simply this.
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I hope you're listening carefully. God's attitude on the issue of homosexuality and gender is still exactly the same as it was before he created the universe.
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And God's attitude on the issue of homosexuality and gender will be exactly the same on the day
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Christ returns as it was before the foundation of the world, and the same as it is right now.
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Moral megashifts like the one America is experiencing today on the LGBT issues have absolutely positively no effect on truth or morality whatsoever.
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What is true and moral remains true and moral even if every single teaching and ruling elder in the
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PCA believes something to the contrary. God is unchanging in his essence and moral character.
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As a necessary corollary to this, God's breathed -forth revelation in Scripture is also unchanging.
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Genesis to Revelation still says exactly what it's always said on these matters. Now, the biblical exhortations are numerous, forceful, and clear.
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In our Lord's high priestly prayer in John 17 is contained, that whole prayer is a goldmine of precious truth for God's people to walk phrase by phrase through and just soak it all in, the wonderful things that he prayed for.
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But for our purposes, I want to focus here on the passage that I read. I want to walk through it together. Look at John 17 verse 14 there in your
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Bible, just verse 14. Remember, this is Jesus praying for all future generations in his high priestly prayer right before he's crucified.
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Verse 14, I have given them your word and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
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He stopped there. Jesus gave his disciples his father's word, his father's message.
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What Jesus spoke was the words of the father. He says, I say nothing of myself, but only what the father teaches me.
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That is what I say. That message of the gospel, which would be fully inscripturated in the New Testament, also includes the
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Old Testament. At the completion of the New Testament, the people of God would then have in their possession the entirety of everything they need to know from God.
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The people of God are the possessors of God's word, God's message. And the world hated
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Christ's disciples just as they will hate us because we are not of the world, just as Christ is not of the world.
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That phrase there, of the world, means seeing the world of sin as described by the apostle
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John in 1 John 2 .16. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the father, but is of the world.
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This is the world that we are not of. Jesus prayed that we would not be of the world.
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The lust of the flesh, what is that? Those wicked, evil desires of our sinful nature that are contrary to the unchanging character of God, contrary to his revealed law, contrary to his word, that's at war with us in the depths of our souls, those evil things we often want, but know that we have to fight against and resist.
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The lust of the eyes, what is that? Those wicked and evil desires that people see and want, which are contrary to the law of God.
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What is the pride of life? The pride of life is the arrogant and boastful pride of men in their pursuit of prestige and a name for themselves and fame and glory for themselves.
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Because the Christian has the word of God given to them by Christ, the world hates them because they are not of the world.
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We are not governed by the desires of the eyes, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. That's not what we are of any longer if we really belong to Christ.
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Look at verses 15 and 16. I do not pray that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one.
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They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Hey, stop there.
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It is not the will of God that Christian people withdraw from the world and live in monasteries or deserts by themselves, but rather that they would bring their sanctified salt and light and the word of God and their biblical worldview into the rot and the darkness in which they live.
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Jesus prayed to his father that he would keep the precious sheep he was about to lay his life down for from the evil one.
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I don't want you to withdraw from the world. I want you to be in the world, but be kept from the evil one.
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Jesus prayed that his father would protect and keep us from Satan. Jesus also asserts a plain fact about his true people, which will always be true about them.
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You see verse 16, they are not of the world. This is a truism.
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Christians are not of the world. Christians are never of the world. They are against the world in that sense, against the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, because those things are not of the father, but of the world.
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The children of the living God see God as their loving father in heaven. They hallow his holy name.
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They live for him. And all that is opposed to God, they oppose too. We who prior to our effectual calling and new birth were the willing slaves of sin, we cease that allegiance and give ourselves to another, namely to Christ.
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We once served and loved sin and hated God. Now we love and serve
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Christ and righteousness and we detest our remaining sin and we detest the sin of the world.
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We hate the sin in ourselves and in the world because that is precisely what our dear Lord Jesus came to die and rise again to deliver us from.
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Paul asked the rhetorical questions at the end of Romans 6, Romans 6 20. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
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What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed?
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You hear what he's asking there? What fruit did you have? When you lived in debauchery and sexual immorality and drinking parties and everything you used to do, the pride of life, the lust of the flesh, what profit did you have then in those things of which you are now ashamed?
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You see, when a person comes to Christ, they become ashamed of what they once were. He says, for the end of those things is death, but now having been set free from sin and having become slaves to God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life.
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Those terrible vices and sins, which used to rule over our lives and command us, we are now ashamed of them.
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What fruit did you have back then? If you remember your pre -Christian life, what fruit was there? What good came from living in sin?
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Nothing. We were only accumulating more wrath to be unleashed upon us on the day of judgment. But blessed be
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God that now, having been set free from sin and having become slaves to God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life.
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We who were once of the world, we who were once the slaves of the world, the willing servants of the world, the defenders of the world have been set free from that allegiance to become the children of God.
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And now by definition and by divine indicative statement of fact, we are not of the world just as Christ is not of the world.
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Our Lord continues with the key statement I wanna emphasize. Look at verse 17 in John 17. In this prayer, sanctify them by your truth.
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Your word is truth. This is the key to everything else I'm gonna say to you this morning. The word of God written, the
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Bible, is that by which every single redeemed person is set apart by God. To be set apart means to be no longer common, just like the holy day we learned about.
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Those set apart by the word of God have the word in their hearts and in their minds. When God grants salvation life to a person, he grants them repentance unto life and faith in Jesus.
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The principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification and eternal life.
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But another essential component of saving faith in Christ is also this from our confession.
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By this faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word for the authority of God himself speaking therein.
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And he acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth, yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come.
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This is what it is to be as Jesus prayed we would be, sanctified by the truth.
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It is God's word that is truth. And that word is what sets us apart.
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And here's one of the keys I wanna hammer home as hard as I can. That truth by which God's people are sanctified is fixed and is as unchanging as the very character of God himself.
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The scripture says what it says and it never changes. God's attitude on the issues related to the gender revolution and the sexual revolution, his attitude about these things is exactly the same as it's always been.
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It has never changed, it will never change. No matter how many churches, ministers, ruling elders, people, professing
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Christians are swept away by the winds of change, God's wrath still abides upon those who do such things.
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God's wrath still abides on those who want to protect this homosexuality as an identity for themselves.
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There is a biblical theme that is lost in our day that has to be recovered. It is the theme of standing fast and immovable in the truth.
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Truth is not a fluid concept. Francis Schaeffer talked about true truth.
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Why would he use that phrase? It's kind of an odd sounding thing, true truth. At the time and also today, people were talking about what's true for them.
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When I was in the corporate world as a programmer for 11 years and people would share the gospel with them, well, I'm glad that works for you, that's true for you, but not for me.
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Truth doesn't work that way. Truth is not a fluid concept. Christianity, we're often told it's true for you, but not for me, glad it works for you.
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The fact is what is true is true for everyone whether they realize it or not. Jesus prayed that all of his redeemed people would be sanctified by God's truth.
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God's word is truth. God's truth is a rock, heavy, fixed, immovable, unchanging.
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All that is contrary to God's truth is likened to sand in our Lord's teaching in Matthew 7, 24.
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Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.
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And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it did not fall for it was founded on the rock.
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But everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.
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And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house and it fell and great was its fall.
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Those whose lives are built upon and sanctified by the truth of God's word will withstand the rain that falls, the floods that come, and the winds that blow.
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Those who really are the sheep of Christ will not be taken in by the
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LGBT revolution. They will not be taken in by it because they're built upon a rock, something that's fixed and unchanging, immovable.
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Men without divine revelation in scripture, men without a fixed and unchanging foundation upon which they build not just their lives but their eternal destinies, and also the buildup of human knowledge, they will constantly be destroyed, ruined, collapsed, and blown about with every wind of culture change.
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Here at the church on Wednesdays for the past several weeks, we've been working our way through R .C. Sproul's 35 -part series called
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The Consequences of Ideas, an Overview of Philosophy, and it's fascinating and it's heartbreaking at the same time.
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Every generation of philosophers and theoretical thinkers who tried to make sense of the world around them in terms of what exists and the possibility of knowledge and ethical obligations, when they did it without the help of divine revelation, they were the poster children for what
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Jesus is talking about. They were blown about constantly. They were never able to settle any questions related to the most important subjects facing humanity.
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Each generation of new thinkers recapitulates and then they refute their forefathers, and then their children grow up, and they eat their parents and explain to the world why they were wrong, and on and on and on and on you could go.
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The entire history of philosophy is one giant concerted lesson in the inadequacy of the human mind apart from divine revelation to make sense of anything in the universe.
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Man is simply not up to the task before him, and his fatal assumption all along has been our minds are up to the task.
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We are up to the task. We can understand the world. The best and the brightest disagree on nearly everything.
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Man needs a place to stand given to him by the divine mind of God. Without this, we are adrift.
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We will be moved by everything around us, and this is exactly the opposite of God's will for us.
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The teaching ministry of the Christian church is to have its grand goal in this, please hear me, that the people of God, the
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Christian people, would not be tossed to and fro by the winds of culture change.
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That is one of the grandest goals every ruling elder and every teaching elder should have.
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When the changes start coming, the people under their shepherding care are not affected by it.
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They see it for what it is. That's contrary to the word of God. We're not gonna go that direction. That's contrary to the word of God.
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That's a subtle twisting of what scripture says. We're planted, we're rooted, we're not moving. Teaching and ruling elders must have as their goal to root and ground the people of God in the truth so that they are as immovable in their convictions as God himself is, unchanging in his own divine nature.
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If we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, and the word of God says we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ, we are to be as grounded upon the unchanging, fixed, and rock bed of divine truth as Christ himself was.
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It is the duty, especially of ministers and elders in Christ's church, to equip people to stand their ground against the unending assault upon God's truth that will always be coming at them from the culture around them.
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And now we must address one of the saddest facts before us that we could ever consider. What are we to do when the guardians and teachers of the flock are themselves the ones blown about so easily by the winds of culture change?
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What are we to do when it's the pastors and the elders who don't stand their ground? When the winds come, they're blown of the culture change.
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The winds are blowing this direction with the LGBT revolution. There go the pastors and the elders right with it. They don't stand their ground.
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They're not on a rock. They're not immovable. What are God's people to do when so many pastors and elders are more influenced by the pathetically weak and emotive arguments of individuals who profess to be pastors and elders, but clearly have no backbone or love for the truth to stand upon the word of God against the
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LGBT revolution which is upon us? That a lay person, a person who's a new
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Christian, a not very well catechized person, a person who hasn't read the Bible much, might be taken in by emotional stories, anecdotes, and horrendously bad argumentations such as the following quote.
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We don't tell infertile women to conceive of themselves as fertile because that's God's ideal. Therefore, we should not tell homosexuals to conceive of themselves as straight.
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We can expect some people who are naive, not well catechized, don't know the Bible very well to be taken in by such things.
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Such things may happen from time to time. But what do we do when it's the teaching elders themselves who are making such fallacious and anti -Christian arguments?
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When Paul defended his apostleship against the so -called super apostles, these false teachers that were always challenging his apostolic authority, one of the things that he said in 2
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Corinthians in defense of his apostolic authority is he talked about everything he had suffered for the church.
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From the Jews, five times I received 40 stripes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned and all of this stuff and weariness and toil, sleeplessness and everything else.
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And then he says at the very end of that, who is made to stumble and I do not burn with indignation?
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Who is made to stumble and I don't burn with indignation? When Paul saw Christian people bought and redeemed by Christ being led astray and being led to stumble by false teachers, he burned with anger.
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Yeah, he had some angst. The last phrase of that verse says, literally the
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Greek is, who is scandalized and I am not set on fire. Ordained pastors and elders ought to have a burning indignation in their hearts when they catch wind of the sheep of Christ being led astray and devoured by wolves.
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But what are we to do when wolves stand up at the general assembly and openly blaspheme God's law and God's gospel and are met with rousing applause and cheers from the other gathered pastors and elders?
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Who is made to stumble? Who is made to scandalize by filth and perversion and we do not burn with indignation and I'm not set on fire in our hearts?
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I'd like you to turn with me to another passage, please. Look at Ephesians 4 .11. Another critically important passage for this time.
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Ephesians 4 .11. Ephesians 4 .11. Here you have
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Paul speaking about the gifts of elders, pastors and teachers that God gives to his church, that the ascended
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Christ gives to his church. Look at verse 11. And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists and some pastors and teachers.
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It is a humbling and soul -stirring thing to consider that pastors and teachers are the custom -made gifts of the ascended
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Christ from on high to his church. Christ gave some, he gave them to be pastors and teachers.
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If you have a pastor that loves you, loves the truth, that's a blessing and a gift from Christ to you.
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The rest of the passage tells you exactly what they're supposed to do as well. Look at verse 12. Four, the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.
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Pastors and teachers equip the saints for the work of service, that term diakonos, service and ministry.
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Pastors and teachers are to open the word of God and exposit and teach and apply what it says so that people can understand it and be equipped for service through it.
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And what is the purpose of that service? The edifying of the body of Christ, it says. Pastors and teachers are to get across to their hearers the truth of God, the fixed and unchanging rock bed of truth so that people are equipped to serve and live their lives in obedience to that fixed and unchanging truth so that the body of Christ is built up more and more upon that fixed and unchanging rock bed of truth.
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The truth that pastors and teachers have been teaching for nearly 2 ,000 years now has never changed.
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It will never change. It is still exactly the same now as it was when God the Holy Spirit breathed it forth in those new 27 books that were added to the
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Old Testament. Look at verse 13. Till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the
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Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Stop there. Nothing breaks the heart of a pastor more than theological division in his church.
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You sweat bullets over your biblical texts that you preach. You read systematic theology. You study the original languages.
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You search the scriptures. You pray over them. You pour over them. You implore God's help and his
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Holy Spirit to help you, and yet division persists. It's very, very painful to see. Yet what does verse 13 tell us?
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What is the goal of all that instruction? Unity, unity in the faith and of the knowledge of the
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Son of God. It would be wonderful if a church were completely united in its confession of faith.
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That is the goal of all pastors and teachers. Everyone's united. Everyone believes the same things. We all agree together.
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We stand fast together in one spirit, one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of all.
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Hopefully in the core essentials of the faith, this is the case, or at least close to it in all of our local fellowships.
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But verse 14, the next verse, really is the key to this entire talk on how Christian people are to react to cultural mega shifts and revolutions like what we're seeing with the
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LGBT revolution today. See verse 14? That we should no longer be children tossed to and fro, carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.
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Those who are easily taken in by smooth arguments, nuanced definitions, flattery, stories that are intended to cloud judgment with emotion and distract from the issues of truth, they are children.
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They are children. When I was a child, my father was a very hairy man.
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He has big hairy forearms and a big hairy chest and growing up around the house, he always had a button down shirt that was just hanging open in the summertime.
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We'd sit there and eat breakfast and eat cereal together and I asked him at breakfast one time, dad, why are you so hairy? And without batting an eye, he looked over at me and said, because I ate a bear.
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And then went back and kept eating. And I was just like, wow.
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So that's how he became so hairy. I told all my friends, my dad ate a bear. You know why
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I believe that? Because I was a child. I was gullible. He used to mess with me all the time.
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I could tell you stories forever. It is God's goal in our sanctification that we grow up.
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Don't be children. Remember what I said about white? I thought, why is this guy talking about this issue all the time?
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How could anyone seriously take this, actually be persuaded by the kinds of arguments that are being used?
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He saw this coming. That's why he wrote that book. It was one of the few, every time the guy published a book, I was one of the first people to get it.
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In fact, I have a hand -signed copy of The God Who Justifies by James White. I was one of the first hundred people in line to get a copy of that book.
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The same sense of controversy, I put off buying it for a long time because I thought it's pointless. How could anyone seriously think that this would need to be defended?
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He was smarter than I was. He saw this coming. That we learn to deny ourselves and our wicked desires as part of the
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Christian life. We need to grow up. We need to not be taken in by these kinds of things. We need to be sanctified by the truth, stand our ground.
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We're not moved by the winds of culture change. That we are rooted and grounded in the truth, immovable from that truth.
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People can try and try and try to turn us from the truth and they can cry in front of us all day long and tell us about their personal struggles and some of those things are very painful to hear, yes, but we are no longer children in our understanding.
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Who are the people being turned away from the truth to lies, to fables, to emotional tear -jerking stories which present nothing even approaching a biblical argument?
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They're children. But those who love and know the truth are rooted and anchored to that truth and are not moved away from it by the winds of doctrine and the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.
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First Corinthians 1558, another text of scripture. If you want to turn there, please do.
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First Corinthians 1558, you should mark this one. In conclusion about addressing the resurrection of the dead and addressing people that were denying the resurrection,
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Paul says, therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable.
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Be steadfast and immovable. Always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain.
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You see those two phrases, steadfast and immovable. God, the Holy Spirit, tells all
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Christians in every era of history and in every place in the midst of every revolution of ideas and all paradigm shifts, be steadfast.
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And then a word that occurs only one time in the entire New Testament right here, a meta -kinetos.
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Did you hear the word kinetic in that? What does kinetic mean, moving? If someone has telekinesis, they can move things with their mind.
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We are to be the opposite of kinetic. We are the opposite of kinetic. We stand still.
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The term means immovable, pertaining to not being readily shaken in one's opinions or beliefs.
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This word from God is in many ways the opposite of what so many professing Christians are today.
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People today in the conservative churches, forget the liberals, they don't care about truth. They haven't cared about it for over a century.
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But in conservative churches are showing themselves to be the very opposite of what God, the
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Holy Spirit says. You are to be a meta -kinetos. Immovable. Don't move.
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No matter how hard the wind is blowing, no matter how many tears are coming your way, no matter how many emotional tear jerking stories you hear, you are a meta -kinetos, immovable.
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Today, people are easily shaken in their beliefs. Someone stands up and tells a story about their homosexual orientation and how mean people have been to them.
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And instead of evaluating what is said biblically and seeing it for the facile and simple error that it is, they start shifting their opinions.
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They start moving. They're kinetic in their convictions. The ease with which very, very, very bad arguments are working on today's conservative
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Christians is a testimony, I will say, to the collapse of seminary education, the collapse of expository and doctrinal preaching from pulpits all over this nation.
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By and large, the seminaries have failed to provide well -educated, well -grounded men to the pulpits of the churches here in this country.
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Those pulpits then produce professing believers who are just as easily led astray as the men preaching in the pulpits are.
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One such teaching elder, Greg Johnson, of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, said on the floor of the
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General Assembly, quote, when I read Article VII of the Nashville Statement, it hurts because Article VII says it is a sin to adopt a homosexual self -conception.
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And we don't do that for any other people. We don't tell paraplegics that they should conceive of themselves as able -bodied, because that's
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God's ideal. Okay, stop for a moment. It is positively amazing to me, it is remarkable to me that we have to pause here to point out that there is no parallel of any kind between physical handicaps and homosexual sin.
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I would never have dreamed, I was ordained as a ruling elder when I was 27 years old. I am 44 now. It would never have occurred to me that that kind of an argument would have to be refuted by anyone, ever.
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We don't tell people to repent of being blind. We don't tell them to repent of being deaf or crippled because those aren't sins.
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We do, and we must tell people to repent of homosexuality or lust, inordinate lust, or coveting, or drunkenness, because those are sins.
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Those are violations of God's word. And if we don't, we're committing perjury against God and are not being faithful to scripture.
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Johnson goes on, he says, quote, we don't tell an infertile woman that she needs to conceive of herself as fertile and she's unbelieving to conceive of herself as infertile because that's not
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God's design, end quote. Physical maladies, conditions, and handicaps aren't sins.
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What could be more obvious than that? For the record, these are without question to me, the most foolish and easily dismissed arguments
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I have ever heard made by anyone in favor of anything in my life. What an incredible confusion of categories, confusing the effects of the fall in the form of physical health conditions and perverted sexual sin.
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I'd like to assume that no thinking biblically minded Christian would ever be taken in by such embarrassingly fallacious and nonsensical arguments.
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But for those who watched the video of that speech, you know that those arguments were met with rousing applause and the moderator had to call the meeting back to order.
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What are teaching and ruling elders supposed to be? What are you aiming at in your ministry of the word? He himself gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.
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How are God's people to respond to cultural megashifts? It's real simple, by being leaders, not followers.
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We are to be leaders, not followers. The only hope that people have of going to heaven is if the church will stand up and be a faithful witness to the truth.
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God's attitude on these matters hasn't changed in the least. Not in the least. God is every bit as wrathful against adultery, against coveting, against stealing, against homosexuality as he always has been.
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God has not shifted at all. God is ametakinetos in his convictions, even if the church isn't.
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We are to embrace the God -ordained antithesis between truth and error, and determined to fight and defend the truth against all its detractors.
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By standing our ground, by being immovable and steadfast in the faith, by standing upon the unchanging word of God and the unchanging moral character of our
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God, whose divine mind on the subject has not shifted in the slightest since the beginning of time, by refusing to allow such facile argumentation to go unchallenged and unanswered, by laboring to grow up in the faith and by ceasing to be gullible children who believe that their dad really ate a bear.
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The question before us as the resistance that's left in the church today, and I pray that we're all part of that, will we be leaders or followers?
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Leaders or followers? Are you willing to be booed, to be attacked? Just in the one final passage, 1
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Corinthians 16, 13. I actually have this printed out and taped up like on the door as I go out of my room.
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I don't slap it or anything when I leave, but. Watch, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong.
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Stand fast in the faith, you see that? Stand fast in the once for all delivered faith that has not shifted, that has no shadow of turning, just as God himself doesn't.
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Let us be leaders. Let us be distinctively God's people. Let us be set apart for God by his truth, his word is truth.
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Let us take our stand upon the word of God and let the rains fall, the rivers rise and the winds blow, and let us, especially teaching and ruling elders, set a good example for others, not being taken in by such argumentation.
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Let us be immovable leaders who will lift the banner high even still. There is still liberation from the slavery to sexual perversion.
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God has lost none of his life -changing power, none. And woe upon anyone who thinks he has.
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Let's pray. Our father in heaven, we do pray that your church would be what your word teaches us.
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And that special word that occurs at just that one place, ametakenetas, immovable, immovable, not able to be moved away, not even a little bit, not even in small degrees, but immovable upon the rock bed of truth that is your word.
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Our Lord prayed for us that you would sanctify us by your truth and your word is truth.
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May we remember that word and stand for it always. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. This is
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Pastor Patrick Hines of Brittle Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Brittle Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee.
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And you've been listening to the Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m.
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sharp, where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen Lord. You can find us on the web at www .brittleheightspca
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.org. And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.