Extended R Scott Clark Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

My name is Mike Abendroth. The show�s title was originally coined by my wife, No Compromise Radio, and early on in the ministry I thought, you know, I�m going to be the kind of guy that never compromises.

But as time goes on and you see your own frailty, the shift of the show now is, the Lord Jesus Christ never compromised, and we want to focus on Him and His work on Calvary. The law of God and the grace of God were not compromised, they met perfectly there, along with the other attributes of God, and so we love to talk about the Lord Jesus and His life and His death and, of course, resurrection.

Wednesdays we like to have guests on the show, and today, back for the second time, is Dr. R. Scott Clark. Dr. Clark, welcome back to No Compromise Radio. Hi, good to be with you. Dr. Clark, I have to say early on, we talked about this last time, we are both from Nebraska.

What�s your favorite food in Nebraska? When you go back to Omaha or Lincoln or any of those other cities, what are you hankering for? A Runza hamburger. And anything, tell our listeners what a Runza is, and then why would you get lobster at a steak shop?

Well, you know, it's a doughy thing, and then inside the dough is hamburger and onion and cabbage, I think. And it's all sort of cooked up together, and then they put it in the dough, and then it's baked in the oven.

And I've heard people say it's Czechoslovakian, so I don't know. I think different cultures from that part of the world probably have similar kinds of things. So it's something you and I, on which you and I were raised, and it's good.

But my wife makes really good Runzas, and I don't need to go to Runza for Runzas. But they make, I think, the best hamburgers. I love a Runza hamburger, so it's a beautiful thing. Although, there's a place down, you'll know this, down in Lincoln on Cornhusker, it's a pretty good barbecue place that I like, too.

So we hit that. That's basically what I do when I go home, is I just go from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant, and then we come back, and then we fast and diet and exercise.

Remember when Val's was the hot pizza place in Lincoln?

Oh, yeah, we still, we usually, every trip, we try to hit Val's at least once. Oh. And, you know, if you really love pizza, if you're a pizza connoisseur, you probably won't like it. But, you know, if you've been to Chicago, New York, you've had those famous pizzas.

But if you grew up in Nebraska, it's part of the fabric of life, and yeah, we always hit Val's at least once.

I think my favorite pizza in all of Nebraska is La Casa pizza in Omaha. There's one on 44th Street in Leavenworth. I tweeted out yesterday, I was going to interview you, and I said, any questions for Dr. Clark?

And one question was, who is the better quarterback, Tommy Frazier or Eric Crouch? And I thought, that's not even fair to ask.

Yeah, exactly. I saw that question, and I thought, I have no idea how to answer that question. I don't think there's an answer. I mean, how do you compare those two guys? I mean, better, that's, come on, Tommy Frazier, you know, should have won the Heisman, and I think most people recognize that now that he, you know, made one of the great runs of all time, led his team to national championships, and Eric Crouch led a team that probably wasn't quite as talented to a national championship, or at least to, yeah, and won the Heisman, and you know, you see the speed with which he ran that, they both ran that option so well, and the punishment that Crouch took for so long.

People don't realize, you know, how hard he got hit and how hard he hit people. So I don't know. I don't think there's any way to answer that question. Okay.

Law and Gospel as the Reformation’s Foundational Distinction

Well, Dr. Clark, I know with your work and expertise as a theologian and historian, you can help our listeners with this. Walk us through the law-gospel distinctions. What is the law? What is the gospel?

What happens when you blend them together, and why it's important for people to think in those categories today?

Would you help us with that? Sure. This is a topic that's really close to my heart. This is one of the foundational distinctions that we made in the Reformation. It's something that, when we lost it as a church, particularly in the late patristic period, or maybe in the middle patristic period, through the Middle Ages, it really damaged the church.

And one of the great recoveries of the Reformation was recovering this distinction, because it is clearly made in Scripture. And it's so important, you know, this is 1517, this is a Reformation year, we're celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when Luther published his 95 theses, or when they were published, and he said in his 1532 commentary on Galatians, the difference between the law and the gospel is the height of knowledge in Christendom.

Every person and all persons who assume or glory in the name of Christians should know and be able to state this difference. If this ability is lacking, one cannot tell a Christian from a heathen or a Jew.

Of such supreme importance is this differentiation. This is why St. Paul so strongly insists on a clean cut and proper differentiating of these two doctrines. And what he was saying there, and what the church, I think, understood early on, and what it came to recover in the 16th century, is that there are these two different kinds of words in Scripture.

And so you find them all throughout Scripture. The first thing we should say is that although traditionally law and gospel were sometimes used to distinguish between the Old Testament and the New Testament, most fundamentally they don't really refer to the Old and New Testaments.

So it's not like the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is gospel, in the sense in which we're using it, right? So that's important. This is a theological distinction, and it's a distinction, by the way, that everybody understands.

So let me put it this way. Last week I had an opportunity to go for a ride-along with a San Diego police officer. So there we were for 10 hours in a patrol car. And the first call on which we went was a noise complaint.

And the guy came out, and he was a very nice guy, he handled it very well. Some neighbor had complained. And he said, you know, it's so frustrating because we're obeying the law, and yet we're in trouble.

And my first thought was, that's the nature of the law, and no, you're not obeying the law. He didn't understand that the law, as such, is a covenant of works. And that's why Scripture says, Deuteronomy says, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law.

Everything. And the truth is, what he really had done was to obey most of the law, but he hadn't obeyed all of it. And that's why he was in jeopardy, because he was making too much noise. And the law demands perfection.

So when we talk about law and gospel, in the first instance we're talking about, then, that principle of Scripture that says, you must obey, you must do everything that God has commanded. And you see that, as I say, at the very beginning of the story.

God came to Adam, and he said, you may eat from any of the trees in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. Genesis 2. That's the law.

And what he was really saying, in that cryptic way, as so much is in the opening chapters of Genesis, is, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

You must love God completely. And the day you fail to do that, you shall surely die. So that's the law. And that principle continues to be expressed and restated, re-expressed, re-published throughout all of Scripture.

So in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Old Testament, and in the Greek Scriptures, that is the New Testament, that law continues. When the rich young ruler, the young man, you know, came to Jesus and said, you know, I have done all of this, Jesus said, if you think you've done all of this, sell all you have and give it to the poor, and the man went away sad.

Jesus was trying to teach him, no, you haven't done all of this. You've done some of it, but you haven't done all of it. You have not utterly loved the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Because there was God the Son standing before him saying, go sell all you have and give to the poor. And he couldn't do it. He didn't want to do it, because he didn't actually love the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, or his neighbor as himself.

So, that's the law, and so that's why traditionally, in my tradition, we've distinguished between two kinds of covenants, a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. And the law is a covenant of works.

So traffic, you know, when you're in traffic, that's a covenant of works, you know, the day you run that red light, you know, you shall surely be ticketed. And the Gospel is a different principle. The Gospel says something else.

The Gospel comes to Adam and Eve after the fall, and the Lord says, I'm going to send a Redeemer. I'm going to send my Son, and the seed of the woman will crush the serpent. And you see that in Genesis 3.

That's a Gospel promise. It's not about anything that we must do, it's about something that's going to be done for us, and something that we're going to receive, as we see throughout Scripture, by God's free favor alone, His grace alone, through faith, that is, resting, receiving, trusting in the promise of Messiah.

And all through Scripture, then, that promise gets repeated. So you have these two principles, you know, working at the same time. Law teaching us the greatness of our sin and misery, and Gospel, the promise looking forward to Christ, or the Gospel as it is expressed in the New Testament, in the advent of Christ.

Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

The Gospel keeps getting repeated again and again.

Dr. Clark, when I was told that every real theologian's book, Bible rather, should be opened naturally to Romans chapter 5, I quick put a crease on Romans 5, so that would happen. Now I think about Luther, who said, whoever knows well how to distinguish the Gospel from the law should give thanks to God and know that he is a real theologian.

So now I think, okay, could I call myself a real theologian because I know the difference between law and Gospel?

Well, it is really essential, and the Protestants were, the confessional Protestants, were absolutely united on this. The Reformed or the Lutheran, sometimes people will say, well, you know, this distinction is a Lutheran distinction, and that's just completely false.

That the very earliest Reformed theologians made this distinction. You can find this distinction implicitly, in fact, in some of the early Fathers where you get a pretty clear distinction. And all through the 16th and 17th century Reformed, again and again, you see them also making this distinction.

So it really is essential to be able to distinguish these things. If you don't see it, you're really going to have a very difficult time making sense of Scripture. I will say, as a matter of personal testimony, that I had been a minister, and I had been a preacher for 10 years.

Actually, I started preaching in 87 as an assistant pastor, ordained in 88. And it wasn't until 1998, I was at a conference here on campus at the seminary, and Mike Horton gave a little talk about distinguishing law and gospel in preaching.

And I had struggled for years with my preaching. And I knew there was something wrong with it, but I didn't have the category by which to understand it, to analyze what was wrong with my preaching. I'm sure there are many things wrong with my preaching.

I was working in the original languages, I was trying to clearly structure the sermon so that people could follow, with points and titles. I was trying to preach expository sermons, expositional sermons, all of those things.

But there was something wrong with my sermons. I remember preaching through the exodus, which is a great place to preach the gospel. I was preaching the gospel about how God graciously saved His people, the church out of Egypt and led us through the Red Sea on dry ground, even though we were grumbling and rebellious.

And it's just a glorious picture of the gospel, and how God comes to meet with us at the mountain and in the tabernacle and so forth. But at the end of some of those sermons—too many of them, I'm ashamed to say—I would turn around, and rather than simply leaving people with the gospel or encouraging them to live their lives in light of the gospel according to God's holy moral law, not in order to be saved, but because they had been saved, I would turn around and say, you know, well, have you really done enough?

And implicitly, I would put them back under the law from which, as it were, God had just delivered them. And I did that again and again, because that's what I thought application was. And I thought if I didn't—and it wasn't like I was thinking to myself, well, I need to put them back under the law or else they won't be good, because if you had asked me, I would have said, well, no, that's crazy.

But in practice, that's what I was doing. And the reason I did it was because I really hadn't been exposed thoroughly or consistently or clearly to this distinction between law and gospel. And it was when Mike gave this little 20-minute talk that, you know, again, if you will, the scale sort of fell off my eyes, and I realized, holy mackerel, I've been confusing these two things, and this is what is wrong with my preaching.

This is the fundamental problem that I've been trying to solve for 10 years. You know, it's like when you hear, you know, you've probably driven old, bad cars, you're driving a car, it makes a noise, and you cannot figure out what the noise is.

That was my preaching. And it was when I realized that there are these two principles in Scripture. There's a law principle and there's a gospel principle. And I learned to ask the passage that I was working on, how do these two things relate?

And just that very simple question and the recognition that there are these two principles really made a huge difference in my preaching. It made me a better preacher, because it made me more faithful to Scripture, but it also made it so much better for God's people to hear the sermon, because I was doing what Scripture does.

And I was able to preach the gospel freely, and then encourage them to live in light of the gospel, in the power of the gospel, according to God's law, without confusing the two. So that they were not being burdened unduly, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. We're talking to R. Scott Clark today. He is professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary, California, suffering for the Lord there in Escondido. Do you ever surf at—what's this?

It's called Old Man's? What's that called?

I don't surf. I am from Nebraska, so the ocean makes me nervous.

Well, I'm from Nebraska and I surf, so how does that work?

Well, you know, the ocean is a beautiful thing, and I don't mind looking at it. I don't mind going on the beach, but getting in it, you know, there are some really large creatures out there, and surfboards, yeah, the idea of—look, I think about surfboards the way I think about skiing, right?

Why would I get on two pieces of whatever it is, wood or fiberglass, whatever, and slide down the side of a mountain? That just makes no sense to me. And why would I get on a piece of whatever it is, fiberglass, and go out in the middle of the ocean, and paddle back in and hope some of the waves did not kill me?

Well, Dr. Clark, the answer is, you need to start doing this more because you have to contextualize things in Escondido, and to make the gospel relevant there, you have to wear hurly shirts and quicksilver pants and stuff like that.

Dr. Clark, regarding the law and gospel differences and distinctives, how does that lead into maybe some of the problems in evangelicalism, where they're preaching so much law, the focus is on the faithfulness of the believer—and of course, I'm not against faithfulness of the believer, there are all kinds of imperatives in Scripture, even in the New Testament—but what about telling people about the object of their faith?

I'm preaching through Hebrews now, and that's just such an important thing for these people to understand. This is the person that you're to believe in. So tell us a bit about how, if at all, law-gospel paradigm helps us understand faith and faithfulness as we hear it coming from the pulpit.

Faith, Faithfulness, and the Object of Saving Faith

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's really important. Because I think every Christian knows instinctively that we need to live in a way that glorifies God and that honors God, and yet, how do we do that?

And so, if we don't distinguish law and gospel, we really are not going to be able to live joyfully in the way that we know we ought to live. And I think when we make this distinction, it really helps us in our Christian life.

And so, and it frees us to obey God according to His holy law in the power of the gospel. And so that's the distinction that I want to make. So we need to understand that we have been saved, that we have been justified, that we are being sanctified graciously.

That is, by God's free favor alone. So this is Reformation year, so here's a good Reformation term, sola gratia, by grace alone. That's what that means. So by His favor, His free favor, God has redeemed us.

He has saved us. He is saving us. He has justified us. And He is in the process of sanctifying us, that is, putting to death on us the old man, making alive on us the new, and conforming us to the image of Christ.

He is at work doing all those things. So that's wonderful good news, the core of which is that Christ obeyed in our place. That's the core of the gospel, that God the Son became incarnate, that God the Son obeyed for us, and that all that He did for us is credited, it's imputed, it's reckoned to us.

And we receive Him and all that He did for us through faith alone, that is, by resting, receiving, trusting in Christ. So that's where the Christian life begins. If you don't get that, if you think that you're going to present yourself to God in any way on the basis of your performance, on the basis of your obedience, on the basis of your progress in the Christian life, then you're still under the law.

You haven't really grasped the gospel fully. Because the good news is not that God has made it possible for you to be saved if you do your part. That was the medieval message, that was the message that the entire Reformation rejected.

Salvation is not a possibility for those who cooperate or do their part. Salvation is a gift. Right? The Israelites weren't doing anything to cooperate. The Israelites were stiff-necked, they were rebellious, they were grumbling, here they were with their backs against the Red Sea, here come the Egyptians and they're shaking their fists at God, at Moses.

I mean, there was nothing sanctified about them at all. And yet God delivered them and He led them through the Red Sea on dry ground. He saved them, not as He says, you know, Deuteronomy 7, not because there was anything in them, but that He might display His glory and His power in them.

So, that's the good news, that Christ died for sinners, as Paul said. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And salvation is freely given. And Paul is very clear about this, as you say, in Romans 5, he's very clear about this in Romans 8, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Right? There's no possibility of condemnation for those who are trusting in Christ, believing in Christ. So, now what? Well, now you live your life according to God's revealed moral will. And that is summarized for us in the Ten Commandments, but it's found all throughout Scripture.

It's found in the New Testament. You can see an exposition of God's law and a distinction between the law and the teaching of the rabbis in our Lord's Sermon on the Mount. You see it in the epistles, right?

And typically in the second half of Paul's epistles, you'll find some sort of reflection and instruction from the moral law. So, that's the baseline of the Christian life. That's how we know, you know, how we are, is according to God's will.

I was thinking about Dr. Machen's comment, and he was discussing. If they had only learned the lesson of the law, they would understand how great the gospel would be. And he said a new and more powerful proclamation of that law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour.

Do you think he's right. About 70 years later, 80 years later?

Oh yeah, he's absolutely right. There's no question about that. The thing that Machen was facing in the 1920s and 30s and before that was liberalism. And one of the things that the liberals did was to, again, to confuse the law and the gospel.

The liberals were going to try to fix the world. They were going to improve the world. They believed that everything was getting better every way and every day, that people were getting better every way and every day.

And they used to say that sort of thing in those words. God is everyone's father in precisely the same way. They basically reduced Jesus to a teacher, a moral teacher. And so in response to the liberals, Machen said, no, what God's people need to hear is the pure preaching of the law, the law in all its terror, where we really come face to face with God's righteousness and his holiness.

And from that, we learn the greatness of our sin and misery. And once we learn or having learned the greatness of our sin and misery, we are driven to Christ. We seek Christ for who he is, a savior of sinners, a savior of people who not only cannot save themselves, but left to themselves would not save themselves and don't want to be saved.

That's how wretched we are by nature. And so traditionally in Reformed theology, we've distinguished three uses of the law. There's the pedagogical use, which is what I was just going through. That's the use that Paul refers to in Galatians, that the law was a pedagogue.

It was a teacher, a schoolmaster. It was teaching the nation of Israel the greatness of his sin and misery and his need for a savior. So, you know, the rabbis counted 613 commandments and that every one of those, what was meant to teach the Israelites at every turn in their existence, you are not good enough.

You are not righteous enough. You need a savior. So that's the pedagogical use. And then sometimes we talk about the civil use. That is the application of the God's moral law to civil society, particularly in the second table, right?

Loving your neighbor, not stealing, not lying, not coveting, and those things. And then the third use is the normative use of the moral law. Now that we're in Christ, now that we're declared righteous, now that we're being sanctified by God's grace, by his Spirit, we seek more and more to see God's law for what it is, to learn to love God's law, and to obey it, the moral law, the law that God gave to Adam in the garden, in creation, the law that he re-expressed in an elaborate way to the Israelites, but still summarized in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, in the ten words, in the Decalogue, the ten commandments, and that our Lord summarized in Matthew 22, right?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. So we have these three uses. So not only do we distinguish between law and gospel, but between the various uses of the law.

And if you get these distinctions, and you begin to think about them and incorporate them, they are wonderfully liberating, because now I know that I'm not seeking to obey God's law in order that he might accept me, right?

You must get this. I'm not seeking to obey him in order to be accepted. I am seeking to obey him because I am accepted. And the difference between the law-gospel distinction, for example, and antinomianism is the antinomian says, well, I'm accepted, and I don't have to seek to obey.

And that's the definition of antinomianism, the rejection of the necessity of obeying God's law. The neonomian says, well, God initiated the process, but you have to do your part, and your part is to keep the law, and if you do your part, you know, successfully, then God may accept you, you know, at some point.

And we want to say a pox on both your houses. The law is not the way to salvation for sinners, and anyone who says the law no longer applies to us does a grave disservice to the whole scope of Scripture, but to the explicit teaching of the New Testament, right?

The Apostle Paul repeatedly appeals to the moral law, the very same moral law that God gave to Israel at Sinai.

Well, Dr. Clark, this is such a fascinating topic that I want you to know this is the first extended, this is the extended, you know, LP, extended version of No Compromise Radio ever, so I want to ask you a little bit more about this topic.

If I go to a church and they say, our vision statement is, our mission statement is, what we're all about is loving God and loving our neighbor. When I hear that, I just think, I want to avoid that place.

It's a law church. It's law, law, law.

Is that the right way to think about that? Well, I guess I'd want to hear a little bit more from them, what they mean by that, but You're right, because that's the kind of thing that any neo-Nomian could say, or any mainline liberal could say.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff that I used to hear in the mainline liberal churches. This is the kind of stuff that I used to hear when I was a teenager or preteen in the Unitarian Church, right? Wherever that is in Omaha, is that down on Farnham?

I don't remember, but across the street from the tennis courts. From the Unitarians, all I ever had was law. We're good people, go be good people, love God, love your neighbor. And the law, in that sense, if it's not accompanied with the gospel, it only condemns.

There's no salvation, there's no deliverance. Because the truth is, you and I can't keep the law. If we could keep the law, sufficiently, perfectly, the way God demands, and again, you mustn't miss this, because Paul quotes Deuteronomy 26, 27 in Galatians 3, 10, Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law.

That's the nature of the law. Not most of it, not some of it, not your best efforts, all of it, and perfectly. Because that is the nature of God's holiness, that's the nature of God's righteousness. So when people say, you know, our goal is to love God and love our neighbors, well, okay, great, but how are you going to get there?

And the only way you'll ever get there or begin to get there is by the grace of God in Jesus Christ for sinners. So you have to start with the gospel. I would rather see the church say, our goal is to preach the gospel and live in union with Christ out of gratitude, you know, and seek conformity to Christ, and thereby to love God and love our neighbors.

Something like that.

Absolutely. I'm thinking about William Perkins, that English Reformed theologian. And when he was talking about law, he said, quote, the law exposes the disease of sin and as a side effect, stimulates and stirs it up, but it provides no remedy for it.

By contrast, a statement of the gospel speaks of Christ and His benefits. And the older I get, and the more I study the Bible, I think the church that I'd like to go to, if they have a proclamation, is, we're going to tell you about Christ and His benefits that you, the sinner, a sinner can hear.

So when I just see churches, I was thinking about one in Omaha, matter of fact, and my brother and I were driving down the street, and you know, we're all about loving God and loving our neighbor. And I'm thinking, how are you doing?

How are you measuring up? How's that working out for you? I know that, you know, because we're Christians, we are to love God and love our neighbors. I understand that. But just as my main point of telling people, this is what the church is about, I tell people here at Bethlehem Bible Church, if you like to hear sermons about Jesus and His life and His work, you'll love this church.

But if you don't want to hear about that, if you want to hear five ways for financial integrity and six ways to have a better marriage, don't we see that in evangelicalism everywhere? It's this pragmatic how-to stuff.

I think we get that, but we don't get, it's just all law. Do we ever consider this is just all law?

Well, that's right. Theodore Beza, who was Calvin's successor in Geneva, said, we divide this word, Scripture, into two principal parts or kinds. The one is called the law, the other, the gospel, for all the rest can be gathered under one or other of these two headings.

Ignorance of this distinction between law and gospel is one of the principal sources of the abuses which corrupted, and there he's talking about the medieval church, and still corrupt Christianity. And you know, that was as true, it's as true today in 2017 as it was in 1558 when he said that.

And as you say, William Perkins taught the same thing. The father of English Reformed theology, people like to say Puritans. There's nobody more committed to piety and godliness in English Reformed theology than William Perkins.

And he said, the basic principle in application of Scripture, talking about preaching, is to know whether the passage is a statement of the law or of the gospel. For when the law is preached, for when the word is preached, the law and the gospel operate differently.

The law exposes the disease of sin as a side effect, stimulates and stirs it up, but it provides, as you say, and this is what you were just quoting here, no remedy for sin. But the gospel, he says, not only teaches what is to be done, it also has the power of the Holy Spirit joined to us.

So if preachers really want their people to be obedient, they really want them to be godly, the secret, the gospel mystery of sanctification is not to preach the law without the gospel. It's to preach the gospel and then to preach the law in light of the gospel.

I think Dr .—go ahead, I'm sorry. It's the gospel that frees people. It's the gospel the Spirit uses to bring people to new life and to true faith and union with Christ. So that's essential. And I'm a preacher and I understand, you know, it's frustrating as a preacher.

You look at your congregation and you want them to do better. And I get that. And your people, if they're believing, they want to do better. The thing is, you know, you and I know, preaching is an act of faith.

And you have to, you know, rest and rely on the foolishness of the gospel and rest and rely and trust in God's sovereign grace to work through the foolishness of the gospel to bring his elect to new life and to sanctify them and give them a desire to obey the law.

I'm a proponent of just teaching the Bible verse by verse and Lectio Continua, where we'll just to pick up a book like Zwingli did with Matthew and just preach all the way through it. But I'm cognizant of the fact, Dr. Clark, that if I'm in Ephesians 4 with a lot of imperatives, every sermon—and hopefully in a way that's not creative theologically but just creative as I deliver the message so it's not the same thing every time—I need to remind myself, and then the congregation, that these people that receive that circular letter and now are hearing the preaching are in Christ and union with Christ.

And because of that, the hinge with Ephesians 4 .1, walk in a manner worthy of your calling, I can't forget to tell them about that calling and who they are in Christ before I tell them, don't steal and tell the truth and those other kind of commands, correct?

That's right. And remember, when that letter first went to that congregation and then copied down and sent to other congregations, it was read in one sitting, so that they heard the gospel and then they heard what we call the third use of the law.

And they were reminded about the greatness of their sin and misery and how they were dead in sin and trespasses, and that God had graciously saved them, not by works but by grace, Paul says. So they would have heard all of that, you know, at one time.

So one of the dangers of expositional preaching, verse-by-verse preaching, is that you can isolate the law from the gospel, so that when you're in the midst of Paul's discussion of the Christian life, you need to recontextualize it, remind people, look, Paul's talking to people who are professing Christian faith, right, and people who are truly believing have been given new life, and they were given new life through the gospel, and remember the gospel.

This is the good news. And we live our Christian life, we seek to love husbands and wives, you know, learn to love one another, children learn to obey their parents, we learn to put away the works of the flesh, and so forth, as Paul says.

We do all that in light of the gospel, in the power of the gospel, by the work of the Holy Spirit. So, preaching, you know, is its own thing, and so you have to sort of bring back the whole context. If you just isolate one verse and work on that, and you don't, you know, do your job and to preach the gospel as well as the law, then your message isn't really capturing the balance that is actually in Ephesians, or in Romans, or wherever you are.