Episode 107: Doctrinal Churches

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. I am your host,

Alan Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in the

Grand Metropolis of Perryville, Arkansas, just on the outskirts of Toadstuck.

ProvidenceBaptistAR .com is our church website. You want to know more about us? While I'm mentioning websites, let me mention to our listeners

FreeGracePress .com. If you go to FreeGracePress .com, they've been running this special for a while, but if you go to FreeGracePress .com,

FreeGracePress .com, and you sign up for their email list, they will send you a free audio version and e -book of Henry Schugle's The Life of God in the

Soul of Man. So FreeGracePress .com, The Life of God in the Soul of Man. You subscribe to their email list and you get those free, plus you get updates on great sales and upcoming books.

By the time this podcast comes out, I believe Sam Waldron's The Doctrine of Last Sayings will have already started shipping, so that's great.

And there's some other things coming down the pipeline as well. Well, thanks for tuning in to the

Rural Church Podcast. I appreciate our listeners. This week, I want to talk about doctrinal churches.

Really, this is my kind of first solo podcast. Typically, I'm either reading a sermon or I'm interviewing somebody or I'm playing someone else's sermon or I'm playing one of our sermons here from Providence.

So I've got to feel all the time today, and I feel a little bit small when

I think about that. There's no one else to carry my fallibility.

So anyway, but what I want to do today, I do want to talk about doctrinal churches.

Doctrinal churches, and what I mean by that is churches that are committed to sound doctrine and that are not afraid to preach doctrinally, are not afraid of both biblical and systematic theology.

We don't pit these two against each other. By biblical theology, we're just talking about understanding how the

Bible fits together, Baptist covenant theology, and then systematic theology is the system, if you will, that the

Bible teaches. We're not afraid of these things, and really, I want to get back to understanding the importance of robust confessionalism in our churches.

I know we have a wide variety of listeners. I know that there are Reformed Baptists that listen to this.

I know that there are Independent Baptists, Southern Baptists, all of us from a wide variety of perhaps

Baptist backgrounds, maybe even non -Baptist listening to this. But I would make an argument that from our inception as Baptists, now

I know some people, they want to try to trace modern Baptist roots today in America to the

Anabaptist movement. I don't really think that we can make a case for that. I think that our grandparents, no matter what stream of Baptist you're in today in America, primarily, the primary stream is from our 17th century

Baptist forefathers out of England. They eventually came over here to the

United States, and we know that they were strong confessional churches.

So I want to make a plea today for doctrinal churches, churches that don't just care about sound doctrine.

Don't just say they care about sound doctrine, but actually, it's tangible. It's in their church's documentation.

It is spoken of in small groups, fellowship, around tables.

It's preached from the pulpit. In 1 Timothy 3 .15, Paul says that the church is the pillar and buttress of the truth.

Think about that imagery for just a moment. The church is the pillar and buttress of the truth.

It is the church's job to defend and to preach and to further the truth of God.

Recently in our Wednesday nights at Providence Baptist, we've been talking about eschatology.

One of the things about eschatology, people bring up the Antichrist, and certainly that's true, but John says in 1

John 2 .18, there are many Antichrists even today. An Antichrist, if we could just boil it down, is the opposite of Christ.

Of course, how we press back against the lies of this world, the many Antichrists in this world, is proclaiming the truth.

It is preaching the truth. Of course, I know, I understand. We're going to get to the practical aspect of this episode, but I understand that everyone would say amen.

Yes, we need to preach the truth. We need to proclaim the truth. But I'm going to argue that doctrinal churches do more than just say they're going to proclaim the truth, and they even do more than just preach the truth from the pulpit, but they are bound, they are committed to, if you will, robust confessions of faith.

Now, in Baptist world, I understand that we say things like, our appeal is to the

Bible for truth. In fact, that's a quote. That's a quote, our appeal is to the

Bible for truth. And for the most part, Baptists would agree with that quote. But the problem is, that quote, our appeal is to the

Bible for truth, it comes from a book written in 1946, seeking to defend

Jehovah's Witnesses, Jehovah Witnesses. So Jehovah Witnesses would say, our appeal is to the

Bible for truth. And the Baptists would say, our appeal is to the Bible for truth.

Now, this is not a problem with the scriptures. Men's misuse of the

Bible is not a problem of the Bible. It's a problem with man. And so this is where I would argue that doctrinal churches do more than just say,

I appeal to the Bible for truth. Yes, we say that, okay?

We don't say less than that. We just say more than that. Because if you go into a Jehovah's Witness church, and you say, what do you believe here?

We'll say, the Bible. You go to maybe an

Assembly of God church, what do we believe here? The Bible. Maybe a Methodist church, what do we believe? Well, no, Methodist church anymore.

They wouldn't say they believe the Bible. But you get the point. The point is, you walk into a Baptist church, and you say, what do you believe here?

And you say, well, we believe here, the Bible. Okay, but what we're saying when we have a confession of faith is, we're not only saying the

Bible is the highest authority, but it teaches us we're not ashamed to actually articulate publicly and openly and consistently, this is what we believe the book teaches.

So that's what a confession of faith is. That's what a doctrinal church is. A doctrinal church has a statement that says, this is what we confess the

Bible teaches. Now, the Bible doesn't need a defender. I think it was

Spurgeon that said that the Bible is the anvil that has broken many hammers.

But a confession of faith is saying to the world that this is what we mean.

When we say we believe the truth, this is what we mean. This is what we believe the

Bible says. Now, you're listening to this, and you're saying, well, I agree with you that we need to be a doctrinal church.

I agree with you that we need to hold to sound doctrine, be committed to that. You think about Titus and Titus 2 and teaching sound doctrine.

I agree with all that, but I still don't believe that we need a confession of faith.

Well, I would make the argument that a confession of faith is actually a reality for every church.

You say, well, no, we don't have a confession of faith. Well, yeah, you do. Because I could walk into your church, and I could say something that is contrary to what everyone believes.

I could say, well, I don't believe in a literal thousand -year reign. I believe that's figurative.

I'm an all -millennial, and I might be ran out of your church, even though you don't have any of that written down, because your church believes something.

So what I'm saying is you can write down what you believe as a church, or you can not write it down, but it doesn't change the fact that every church confesses something about the

Bible. So if you say, well, we're not going to be a—or maybe you're listening to this.

Maybe I've caught someone listening to this, and you say, well, I don't even think—we don't even need doctrine.

I've had many interactions before with people that say, we don't need doctrine today. We need love.

Well, come on now. How do you even define love without doctrine? You can't even define who

Jesus is without doctrine. You can't even define what a church is without doctrine. Doctrine is just right teaching, and we're commanded to do this, right?

We're commanded to do this in the Great Commission, for example. What does the

Great Commission say in Matthew 28, 19 and 20? You know, verse 18, all authority is given to me.

But in 19 and 20, Jesus says, And then verse 20,

So it is the job of the church to teach, and you can't teach without doctrine.

So, back to our reality about confessions of faith.

To be a doctrinal church, you should hold to a confession of faith.

A good confession of faith is a servant of the Scriptures. We don't believe that confessions of faith are equal with the

Scriptures, and they certainly don't stand above the Scriptures. They certainly should not shape what we believe about the

Bible. Rather, they serve the Bible, okay? So, a couple of analogies

I've used before. But if the Bible is a stake, a confession of faith is a plate and knife and fork.

What is it doing with the stake? It's not the stake. It helps serve the stake. It helps us digest the stake.

It doesn't add to the stake. It doesn't stand in authority over the stake. If the

Bible is gold, a good confession of faith is just a chest to carry it.

It helps pass the gold on from one generation to the next. It helps keep nefarious characters from trying to scuff up the gold or steal or harm the gold in some way.

The chest serves the gold, but it doesn't add value to it. And so what a good confession of faith does is it helps us use the truth rightly in order to stand against the evil one's lies.

So, if we want to be doctrinal churches, and by the way, again, if you're listening to this and you say,

Well, I don't want to be a doctrinal church. Well, you already are a doctrinal church. You don't have the option of being a doctrinal or non -doctrinal church.

You only have the option of being a church with sound doctrine or a church with damning doctrine.

A church with weak doctrine or a church with strong doctrine. So, you want to be a doctrinal church.

So, one of the things that that looks like practically is having a confession of faith.

Now, I would make the argument that the best confession of faith that we have is the

Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, or maybe, you know, sometimes we just refer to it here as the 1689, but I'm not necessarily making an argument.

I mean, yes, I think churches should hold to that. Baptist churches should hold to that. But I'm not really going to make the argument today that you have to do that so much as you need a solid confession of faith.

Listen to what Baptist B .H. Carroll wrote. A church with a little creed is a church with a little life.

The more divine doctrines a church can agree on, the greater its power and the wider its usefulness.

The fewer its articles of faith, the fewer its bonds of union and compactness. The modern cry, less creed and more liberty, is a degeneration from the vertebrate to the jellyfish and means less unity and less morality, and it means more heresy.

Definitive truth does not create heresy. It only exposes and corrects. Shut off the creed and the

Christian work would fill up with heresy, unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless deadly.

That's B .H. Carroll. So I'm arguing that doctrinal churches must have robust confessions of faith.

I said I really wasn't going to make a case for the 1689, but let me press it for a second. Most other confessions of faith out there today are derivative of the 1689.

So if you, for example, if your church uses the New Hampshire Confession, if your church uses the

Baptist Faith and Message, these flow downstream from the 1689.

Well, some people would say, well, we don't use the Second London Baptist Confession. We use the First London Baptist Confession.

But if you understand the history of Baptists, the First London Baptist Confession is really superfluous for a couple reasons.

It's important. It's important historically. But it's superfluous for a couple reasons.

Number one, the doctrine of the First London Baptist Confession of Faith is the doctrine of the

Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. It's the same. So you can read James Renahan about that in his first book.

You can find it on Founders on the First London Baptist Confession of Faith. Anyway, it makes a great case. The doctrine is the same.

But what happens is the 17th century Baptist, based on corrections, based on some heresy from,

I think, Thomas Collier was his name, they're able, and based on unity with other believers, they're able to take the

First London Baptist Confession, modify it in the sense of making their doctrine that they already believed in the

First London, making it clearer, clarifying things, and producing for us the 1689.

So I would argue, so that's the First London Baptist. And then when

I said that the Baptist Faith and Message and the New Hampshire, what those confessions wind up doing, the

New Hampshire just a little, and then the Baptist Faith and Message a lot, those distill some of the important truths from the 1689.

But they leave so much out that I would argue they wind up being a little bit weaker confessions.

Now, particularly when it comes to New Hampshire, if your church holds to the New Hampshire Confession, that's great.

I'm glad. That's a lot better than the Baptist Faith and Message. But I would even argue that you should just go back to your grandparents, like go back to your roots, go back to the

Second London. I would also make the argument, if you're using the Baptist Faith and Message, that it has its problems.

We wound up switching from the Baptist Faith and Message because the Baptist Faith and Message is good insofar as you're reading it through a conservative

Baptist lens. So if you're reading the Baptist Faith and Message through the lens of the

New Hampshire or through the lens of the 1689, then it can be helpful.

But the problem is the most Baptists in the pews aren't reading it through those lens.

And as you've seen in arguments in the Southern Baptist Convention, a lot of people can twist it to make it say whatever it is they want to say.

Now, I wound up going a little bit in a direction there I hadn't planned on.

But let's say that your church's confession is the New Hampshire, or it is the

Second London, or it is the First London, or it is the Baptist Faith and Message. Here is one thing

I would say. Doctrinal churches should know their confessions of faith.

So while I make an argument, while I think, I mean, guys, brothers, sisters, we all do this, right?

Like whatever confession you hold, you think it's the best, don't you? I mean, like, if you don't think that your confession of faith that you hold to is the best, then why do you hold to it?

So give me the leeway there to make the argument. But if you do hold to another confession, and no matter what confession of faith that you hold to,

I would argue that your church, to be a doctrinal church, your church needs to know what the confession of faith is.

I've used this example a lot. But even with the Baptist Faith and Message, even the

Baptist Faith and Message actually has a high view of the

Lord's Day compared to the average Southern Baptist. Why is that?

Well, I think, in part, no one's teaching or preaching or connecting the preaching to the statement of faith.

No one's, or I shouldn't say no one, but most Southern Baptist churches aren't doing that. For most Southern Baptist churches, the

Baptist Faith and Message is just something that's on your website, or maybe it's in a file drawer somewhere.

But at the end of the day, no one knows what it says. And what I'm arguing in this podcast episode is that we not only should and must have a confession of faith, but that we ought to be articulating what it is the confession of faith teaches.

Why? Because when we arrive at a confession of faith, I know people would say, well, we don't use the confession to interpret the

Bible. I get that, and I said that earlier even, and that's true. However, when we arrive at a confession of faith, what we're saying is we believe, as a church body, that this is what the

Bible teaches. And so now, when we come to the scriptures, we are using the confession of faith because we've already established, we've already agreed together, we've already covenanted together, this is what we believe the

Bible teaches. And so now when we read the Bible, we are saying, hey, these are the guardrails, if you will.

These are the lines in the sand, if you will, of what we believe and what we don't believe, what's in, what's out.

This is how we defend sound doctrine. This is what we believe the Bible teaches and why.

That's why in our confession of faith, we have all these footnotes throughout the scripture. We believe this, and then we have the footnotes, and it's there.

And the Baptist Faith and Message does that, the New Hampshire, all these confessions of faith do that.

Okay, but what I'm arguing here is to be a doctrinal church, you can't just hold to a confession of faith, but your people need to know what it says.

Now, that's actually an argument for some against something like the 1689 because it's so big, 32 chapters.

But even at our church, so I'll just give you an example. What we do at our church is we read from the confession of faith every

Sunday morning. Every Lord's Day morning, we read a portion. Now, I think, well, no, I don't think, I know. We're now on the third reading of that, and we've also taught on it in Sunday school.

Something else that we do is when we preach, and I don't do this every sermon. You're not required to do this every sermon.

But every so often when you preach, you actually should be connecting your point to your confession of faith.

So recently, I preached something about election, and I read from our confession of faith.

This is what we believe about election, that God predestinated some men and angels to everlasting life, and others he left to their sins.

And so that helps us to understand what we believe about the doctrine of election is what the scriptures teach.

And that is there's not an equal ultimacy in predestination and reprobation. Predestination is active choosing of God, of his elect, of the flock before the foundation of the world.

And reprobation is God passing over, leaving others. He doesn't have to actively predestine them into sin or whatever.

He leaves them to themselves and to the just consequences for their actions.

Well, that's just an example how we connect our doctrinal preaching to our confession of faith.

So again, let me make this clear. What we're trying to say is we need doctrinal churches, and doctrinal churches must have confessions of faith, even if it's as simple as the abstract of principles.

Some people have short confessions. I get it. But you got to have something, right?

Again, I don't want to go back into the argument that I would make the argument for the robust doctrine of the

Second London Baptist Confession. But at least your church has something, right? If your church doesn't have something, then you need to move to that something.

But even a basic application is this. If your church holds to something like the

Baptist faith and message, whether it's 2000, 1963, or whatever the other one is, 1925,

I think. If you want a doctrinal church, then you need to begin connecting your church's statement of faith to the life of the church.

The statement of faith, the confession of faith, is not something that should just sit in a drawer somewhere in your church's documents.

It's not something that someone should just click on your church's website and they say, oh, you believe this.

Yes, that's important. Put it in the church's paperwork, of course. Put it on the church website, of course. I'll say this, too.

Don't be afraid of who you are. Don't hide. Don't be squishy. Immediately, when someone pulls up your church's webpage, let them see this is who we are.

This is what we believe. Amen. But I'm arguing it needs to be more than that, right? It needs to be more than that.

You need to connect the life of the church to your church's confession of faith.

So you need to, again, teach on it. That would be a very basic way that you could start.

So let's say you're a pastor. Your church's statement of faith is the Baptist faith and message.

And you can at least start by saying, hey, guys, did you know that this is what we believe?

And you could walk through that. You could do that on a Wednesday night. You could do that during Sunday school. I guess there would even be ways that you could preach through that.

I know it's not expository preaching there, but you could take, for a while, a break from that and do topical and talk about, hey, this is our church's statement of faith.

Because your people need to know what they believe and they need to understand why they believe it.

We are, as I said earlier in the podcast, we are, the church is, the pillar and buttress of the truth.

Now, let me also mention this. When it comes to a church using a confession of faith, there are two ditches to avoid.

I think I've already kind of talked about one, nominal confessionalism. That is, your church has a statement of faith, has a confession of faith.

No one ever reads it. No one even really knows what it says. It's just on a website somewhere.

You never reference it in your sermons. It's just out there. I would say that's nominal confessionalism, which would mean that's confession in name, but not practice.

So, confessional churches, doctrinal churches, should be committed to reading and studying and teaching confessions, however that looks in your church.

I told you how we do it here. So, again, we read it from it on Sunday morning. We've taught it in Sunday school.

At some point, maybe next fall, we'll start teaching again, maybe on Wednesday nights or something. And then we reference it.

We like to reference it. By the way, we don't only reference it in church, like in sermons.

We also, Pastor Jacob and myself, we also reference it in counseling situations.

We also reference it in discussions. And so, it's part.

We can do better and we can grow in this, but hopefully it's part of our DNA as a church.

So, that's one ditch, nominal confessionalism. I will address the other ditch, and that is hyper -confessionalism, when a church treats a confession of faith as on par with the

Bible. So, remember, a confession of faith is under the Bible's authority. It's to serve the Bible. So, we need to be willing, as difficult as this may sound to some people who really love sound doctrine, listen, if your confession of faith somewhere is contrary to the

Bible, well, a church reserves the right, not only the right, but the necessity to amend or to reword or to even add to a confession of faith as necessary.

Of course, this should be done with the utmost care. But we'd never do that with the

Bible. We can't amend or reword or add to the Bible. When it comes to our church, again, when you have such a document like the 1689, we just ask our folks to have a general agreement.

And then there can be areas of disagreement. Even with a confession of faith, there can be areas of disagreement, but we promote love and unity even in that.

So, no one is required, for example, at Providence Baptist, no one is required to be a 1689 scholar or in strict agreement with every single sentence, because that would be kind of weird, right?

Like, for example, let's say a 15 -year -old gets converted and before they're baptized, they have to become a confessional scholar.

Well, of course, we would not say that. That would be silly. Before you can be a member of the church and experience the benefits and blessings of church membership, you have to know and be a scholar.

Of course not. But they do have to have a general agreement. So, again, the idea of robust confessionalism is to keep us doctrinally pure.

Now, you can see this in the

SBC. You can see it in the PCA. You can see it in various places. Don't think that just having a confession of faith and even coming from a tradition of robust confessionalism necessarily keeps you from drifting into error.

So, you've seen the SBC. Our doctrinal roots, the Southern Baptist Convention's doctrinal roots are in the 1689.

I believe historians have shown this, but when they met for the 1845 in Georgia, May 1845, when the

Southern Baptist Convention met and was founded, the first meeting, all the churches came from churches that subscribed to the

Philadelphia Confession. The Philadelphia Confession is the 1689.

It just has two, I think, unnecessary addendums. One is about hymn singing, and the other is kind of strange and I would actually probably disagree with, but the laying on of hands.

But other than that, it's the exact same confession as the 1689. But the point is all the churches came from a church or association that held to the

Philadelphia Confession in some shape or form. But you see now the state of the Southern Baptist Convention, they've drifted.

The PCA, you see the things that they're dealing with today. The Presbyterian Church of America, they've drifted.

Of course, you have the apostasy of the PCUSA, also Presbyterian.

So the point I'm trying to make is just having or subscribing to a confession of faith, even a good, solid, robust confession of faith, is not enough over time to keep your church from drifting into unsound or weak or even damning doctrine.

What we have to do is not only have a confession of faith, but hold to it practically. I've repeated that time and time again in this episode.

We must have doctrinal churches. So you understand that the strategy of churches all over the place,

I have one in my mind right now. The strategy of churches over the last decades has been to be as minimalistic as possible, to be as big tent as possible when it comes to sound doctrine.

So we want to believe the least amount of doctrine that we can so that we can be the biggest church that we can be.

So we can have the largest number of people possible in this church.

What that has done, that has weakened churches. That is, you can't weaken the truth, of course.

I mean, the truth is the truth. And in some senses, God's truth needs no defense.

God's truth will stand. This world will pass away. But the words of Christ, the doctrine of the

Bible, the truth of the scriptures will not pass away. Yet, it is the church's responsibility, as I mentioned from 1

Timothy 3 .15, to be that pillar and buttress of the church. So what the world needs is not big tent churches, but churches that are actually willing to be dogmatic over the truth.

And I'm not saying be rude or promote schism. We can have unity even with people who don't fully agree with us.

So as a Baptist, I'm willing to and joyfully have unity with conservative,

God -fearing Presbyterians, as just an example, or other denominations that we might could mention.

But the point is, insofar as our local church goes, we're not afraid to say, hey, Providence Baptist Church is a

Reformed Baptist church. We hold to the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.

This is what we believe and why. We need to stand firm.

Ephesians 6 .14, Paul says, Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth.

So we're to stand, to gird ourselves in truth. We've had some important political victories of late.

I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the turning tide in America politically. That's helpful.

That's good. We should praise God for that. But notice that or remember that these are still days, still dark days, that are not the days for minimizing truth.

These are not the days for nuance or ambiguity. These are the days that Christ's army must show forth, like show the side.

This is whose side is that we are on. We are like Martin Luther. Here we stand.

We can do no other. So it's been my argument in this episode that churches must be doctrinal churches.

We must uphold sound doctrine. We must teach sound doctrine. We must know sound doctrine.

And one of the most practical ways that we can do that as churches is to hold to a sound confession of faith.

And I'll say again that, of course, I would argue that the 1689 is what churches should hold to to an extent, but not so much that I'm going to divide from my fellow

Baptists for holding to a different confession. If you hold to a different confession, a conservative, solid confession of faith, praise

God. My exhortation to you is to actually use that confession of faith to teach your people that they would understand and know this is what we believe and why.

And remind them as we read our confession of faith. We remind them like it's not the confession of faith for the confession's sake.

We believe this is articulating what the Bible says. So we actually give out a sheet from our reading that has the reading of the confession, but also has the verses.

We want you to not just read this, but to go and look at the verses. We want the Bible to convince you of its truth.

So let us have men today. Let us have pastors. Let us have church members. Maybe you're listening to this and you're just a church member.

What can you do? Well, one thing you can do is if you say, I don't even know what our church's confession of faith is.

Well, one thing you could do is you could go to your pastor and you could ask, hey, what's our confession of faith?

And then you could take that home and you could seek personally to know it in your family time, in your family worship.

You could seek to read it together and know it. And you could do your part as church members to understand what your church believes and why.

And then you could encourage gently, lovingly, humbly, submissively, encourage your pastor or pastors to teach and train the church in your church's statement of faith or your church's confession of faith.

Why? Because we love sound doctrine. It is our responsibility to be robust, doctrinally sound churches.

So that's what you could do. If you're a pastor, I think you've probably already heard some practical things.

But again, you could make sure that you believe your church's confession of faith.

You make sure everyone there believes your church's confession of faith. Or maybe you don't have a confession.

So you can begin to lead your church in studying. I think one thing is to look at the

Scriptures and understand why it's important. To go back to the analogy, you can go to any place around here, true churches, non -churches, and you can ask them, what do you believe?

And they're probably going to say, we believe the Bible. So again, a confession of faith is not to take away from that, but to add to it in the sense that we believe the

Bible. And here's what we believe the Bible teaches. And we're not afraid in these days of people backing away from the truth.

We're not afraid to put our flag in the ground and to say, this is what we believe. And we're not afraid to articulate it.

And then, of course, if you're already a confessional church, you could teach on that more.

You could make sure that in your sermons, periodically, you cite your confession of faith.

Maybe you could add a part to your own service about reading. Some people would argue that that's not in line with the regular principle of worship.

But I would argue that part of the regular regulative principle of worship is that we're to teach.

And so we put the reading of the confession of faith under the banner of teaching.

It's the part of the worship to teach sound doctrine. And so that's what we do.

And we also, by the way, read the Baptist Catechism. But that's maybe for another episode.

But I'll just mention that before I close. And that is catechisms and confessions of faith go really well together.

So for us right now, and we've done different catechisms, but right now we're going back to the

Baptist Catechism, which goes along with the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.

Again, don't miss the big picture. I'm afraid that sometimes, man,

I can just, I think people misunderstand me. And so I'm afraid that me talking about the 1689 so much is going to turn some people off and think that I just want to just make everybody a 1689 church.

Well, maybe there's some truth in that. I would love that, you know, big picture. But that's not really the goal of this episode.

I want to have friendly camaraderie and fellowship with other churches that are in line, you know, even if they don't subscribe necessarily to the 1689.

But my point is that we have to know what we believe and why.

We have to be doctrinal churches. Again, remember what I said earlier at the episode.

There's no such thing as non -doctrinal churches. Your church is either a church that is promoting sound doctrine or maybe unintentionally you're promoting unsound doctrine because you're just preaching in which we would never undermine preaching.

We would never minimize or take away from the necessity of sound preaching. But you're not connecting that to the life of the church in something like a solid statement of faith, a solid confession of faith.

So you've probably listened to me long enough in this episode.

We'd love your feedback. If you want, you can reach out to me at quatranelson at gmail .com.

That's c -u -a -t -r -o -n -e -l -s -o -n at gmail .com. Our website, provenancebaptistar .com.

I hope that your church, after listening to this episode or already, is pushing toward being a church of sound doctrine, a doctrinal church, a robust confessional

Baptist church. That's what we need in these days. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.