Episode 61: A Case for Confessions

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. Fourteen months, Eddie, from today.

Today, exactly, fourteen months. Till Christmas 2024. That's right, baby.

October 25th. Happy day of countdown to Christmas or something.

Friday, we're putting our house lights up. Oh yeah, house lights.

That's good. This will come out later in November, so it won't sound so weird.

But yeah, it'll be October 27th. We're putting our house lights up.

You know, on Tuesdays, I teach at local recovery ministry here in Marshall, and we've already been listening to Christmas music at the end of my teaching session each week, ever since the beginning of October.

That reminds me. I'll play one or two Christmas songs a week. We listen to them. I'm going to text Gunner right now and ask if we are doing

Christmas songs tonight. What are we talking about today, Edward? We're going to talk about confessions of faith.

I mean, what are they? I thought I'd alliterate that title a little bit.

A case for confessions. How about that? You're a good Baptist. I try, brother.

You know, it's still Reformation month at the time of this recording. Are we talking about Rome confession?

Oh yeah, the Catholic catechism. Biblical confession. Is that what we mean?

That's what we mean. No, what do we mean, really? We mean having confessions of faith that accurately reflect the scriptures.

That's right. What is a confession of faith? I have a definition from the

Encyclopedia Britannica. A confession of faith is a formal statement of doctrinal belief ordinarily intended for public avowal by an individual, a group, a congregation, a synod, or a church.

Confessions are similar to creeds, although usually more extensive. They are especially associated with the churches of the

Protestant Reformation. You agree? Pretty generic.

I think that's a good definition. Pretty good definition. So, we want to talk about in this episode, well, we kind of already talked about what is a confession of faith, but we want to talk about why you should have a confession of faith, and then we'll talk about some options with that.

Eddie's church and my church, we both have a confession of faith. They're both really derived from the same source, but they're a little bit different.

Now, one of the things that I want to mention first,

Ed, is that Baptists have historically come down on a couple different sides of this, but I make the case that majority of Baptists have been—

I don't know if it's right to say majority or not, but as well as for today, for sure, the majority of Baptists are confessional, even on a loosely definitional basis.

Yeah, and as we talk about this, there is a little bit of an issue when it comes to the way people view subscription to a confession, and so we may get into talking about that a little bit today.

By subscription, I would just mean how do you utilize the confession?

Honestly, there are a lot of Baptist churches today, and probably not just Baptist churches, that they have a confession.

It's in a file cabinet somewhere, but nobody in the church knows what's in it.

And so really, I think practically, if a confession is going to be meaningful, there has to be an understanding that the members of the church know what is in the confession.

They know what, being a member of that church, what they're confessing that they believe.

And so that means there's going to have to be some teaching. There's going to have to be reading. There's going to have to be making sure that your people know what is in that confession, and that's going to take some repetition, even.

Yeah, I think that's good. So we'll start on one extreme. The Baptists who say, we need no confession. We have the

Bible. Right. My response to that is, if you go to the Jehovah's Witness building, if you go to, you know, whatever, the

Assembly of God, I mean, whatever. I'm not trying to equate, by the way, the Assembly of God and Jehovah's Witness. However, I use some extreme examples there.

If you go to another place, say, what do you believe here? The Bible, the Bible, the Bible. Right. So a confession of faith is not used rightly, is not detracting from the

Bible. It's magnifying the Bible. It's not just saying, we believe the

Bible. It's saying, here is specifically what we believe about the Bible. Right. Then you have the loosely confessional churches that I would say, and some would disagree with me probably on both sides, but the

Baptist faith, the message. So you talk about the Southern Baptist Convention. Really more of a loosely confessional people in the sense that the

Baptist faith, the message, I know we call it a statement of faith, but in essence, it is a confession.

It's just an argument over subscription to it, but it is like a baseline. The problem is most

Southern Baptist churches, like you say, they have that somewhere. It's on their website maybe, or it's in a drawer somewhere.

But you ask people, well, what does this teach? And they have no idea.

Or the way that you could really say it is if you ask a member of most local churches, what does your church believe about X doctrine?

Just pick it. Just pick a doctrine. Not some obscure doctrine, but a major thing.

What does your church believe about the fall? Well, I'm not saying they have to be able to recount verbatim your church's statement on that, but they ought to have an idea.

Well, our church believes. Our church believes that sometimes it's 80 degrees in the fall.

Sometimes it's 60. What does your church believe about election? We believe everyone gets to vote.

Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so I think some of the issues come down to do our people understand being a member of this church means you're saying on these issues you believe this.

Yeah, and I think that it's convictional to be confessional.

Hey, that sounds like a good, you know. That's a good Baptist thing there too. It's convictional to be confessional.

So I'm in Ephesians 6 right now. We're talking about the belt of truth. And Paul instructs us to gird about our loins with the belt of truth, as it were.

Really, the belt's not in there. It's the participle. So we gird ourselves with truth is the idea.

And I'm going to preach a sermon soon here on a compelling case for a confessional church with some application from that text.

Meaning if we're going to be a church that girds herself up with truth, it's a good idea to have a confession of faith to say this is what we believe here.

I'll give you an example. The other day, I won't give you all the story. I'll tell you later if you got a question.

But the other day I was wondering about this guy that was preaching at a place. So I looked up his church website.

And I was like, okay, what do they believe? And it's just very generic stuff.

We have bought into mere

Christianity, like minimalism. What is it that we can check off in that way?

And we do that because we don't want to create controversy. I think somewhere along the way, the church growth gurus got into our heads where we thought, well, we want to be as minimalistic as possible.

That way the door seems really wide. Kind of like the Andy Stanley mindset, which obviously he's gone off the rails now.

But there for a while, it was like he was really working to play both sides. So the conservative could claim

Andy Stanley. The liberal could claim Andy Stanley. That's what a lot of people want to do.

And I'm saying, if we're a convictional people, like we believe certain truths and we think that they are important, then we're going to be a confessional people.

We're not going to be afraid to say not only that we believe the Bible, because that's easy, right?

If you live in the Bible belt and you say, we believe the Bible, that's easy. You're going to get a lot of amens.

You're not just saying, we believe the Bible. You're saying, we believe the Bible and we believe this is what the

Bible teaches. Yeah, two things I would want to say. One, we kind of talked about this even when you guys were talking about your name change in your church.

You know, sometimes people will express, well, you don't want to say too much.

You don't want it to be too clear because there might be people that are like, Providence, I don't think we want to go there.

No, no, no. We want people that hear the word Providence and say, I think we want to go there.

Because our approach to reaching lost people isn't to draw them in.

It's to go out and preach the gospel out there. And then when they're converted, they want to come and meet with God's people.

And so I think sometimes with statements of faith or confessions, sometimes people are kind of like, well, we don't want to define too much because it may push people away.

When I think it actually works exactly the opposite. We want to define very well who we are and what we believe, because that is going to draw people who agree with those convictions.

They're going to want to be a part of that kind of church. As a matter of fact, I think in our church, we've seen that the more we've defined who we are, the more that God has drawn people that agree with us into our fellowship.

Yeah, essentially with a confession of faith, not only being convictional, but you're saying, hey, this is who we are.

It's not our desire. Let's make this clear. And I know that you agree with this. It's not our desire to be unduly confrontational.

Right. We're not being mean or arrogant or rude. We really, both of our churches, we really want to be a loving and Christ honoring church.

But what that looks like is to be people of truth, children of the light. And so we say to our community and to our guests and to those inquiring about us, hey, this is who we are.

This is what we believe. This is the type of church here. We have these biblical convictions.

And by the way, and we'll talk about this in just a second, we're willing to be patient and we're designed to be gracious, but we're not going to compromise.

So, for example, let's talk about this. Let's talk about subscription. And by subscription, we mean how serious about the confession do we need to be.

So I will give two extreme categories. We've already kind of given one.

One, I would say hyper confessionalism. And the other,

I would just say nominal confessionalism. That's good. So nominal confessionalism, we've already talked about, which would be what?

That's we have a confession. We don't even know what's in it. And it's not going to matter to us.

If somebody shows up and they say, hey, man, you can't teach that in the

Sunday school class. Our confession says the opposite. And they'll say, well, I don't care what the confession says.

Yeah. I don't even know how to find it. I don't know, and I'm not that concerned. Yeah, yeah.

So you have, okay, well, we have this statement of faith somewhere written down somewhere in some file in the cabinet.

Or we know what it is. It's New Hampshire, 1833. It's the Baptist faith and message. Even people do this.

It's the 1689. But we really have no idea what it teaches. But we know it's important.

So that's what we say we believe. So that's nominal confessionalism. What I would define as hyper confessionalism is, you know, trying to put the confession on the same level as the scriptures.

Right. And what I love about our confession of faith, 1689, I'll just start.

The very first words of our confession say this. The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.

That's something the Baptists put in there different than the Savoy and the Westminster confession of faith, just to be clear.

So our confession comes out swinging. Hey, this document here, it's just a document.

It points us to what's the only sufficient, certain, infallible rule.

So a hyper confessional church, I would say, is like you would even be willing to parse the words and, you know, force yourself like, well,

I'm not sure if this says this the right way. It'd be like, oh, well, I've got to conform my understanding of the

Bible now to this instead of the opposite, which is if I come across something, so this is our position here.

If we come across something in the Bible that seems to point in a different direction than the confession, then we need to hold to the

Bible, not the confession. Right, right. And so I'll give you our position, then you can give us yours, but our position is it's okay to disagree with portions of the confession, but you need to understand that the elders here in the teaching of the church, it's going to be in line with the confession.

So you could even have hypothetically a disagreement, maybe even a significant disagreement, so long as you understand two things.

One, you're not allowed to be divisive about it. Right. And two, you need to understand and accept that the teaching and preaching ministry of the church is going to be in line with the confession.

Yeah, and I think my position would be substantially the same. Yeah, would be pretty well the same.

Let me ask you a question. So as far as, and it may be a moot point for you because you and Jacob may so substantially agree with 1689 that you don't have any exceptions, but would you guys have a position on exceptions for elders in the church?

Can an elder take an exception to something in the confession?

Well, that goes back to what we believe about the confession, and that is it's not. The only sufficient, certain, and fallible rule is the scriptures.

So in one sense, that answers the question. I'm going to go into a little more detail, but in one sense, that answers the question.

The only, like, for example, it's not like asking, can you have substantial disagreements with Ephesians?

You're like, no, because it's the word of God. The confession is not the word of God.

It is an interpretation of what we believe, and there are portions in there at times that say, there's often times

I'm humbled and filled with awe, and I'm just like, that's worded so well, so good.

There's sometimes you're like, that could be worded better, and there are portions that you'd say,

I would like to add maybe a clarifying statement or something like that. But to answer your question, like, the only sufficient, certain, and fallible rule of all saving faith, knowledge, and obedience, that's the

Bible. And so there's going to be portions that we say, yeah, we could word that better.

Or maybe I'd add this, but to have significant, and I know that's kind of maybe just playing with words there, but to have significant disagreement, that would be an issue among the leaders, the elders of a church.

Did I answer or did I punt? No, I think that's good. Like you were saying earlier, a lot of times people who want to say that we don't need a confession, confessions aren't important, they'll say, well, don't we just need to believe the

Bible? We believe the Bible. Well, here's the reality. What do we believe about the

Bible? All these different churches are going to say that they believe the Bible. But what we're saying with the confession is, we're getting it down to something manageable to make a statement on.

And honestly, if our churches had a robust, if your church as a whole had a robust enough understanding of the

Scriptures, that you didn't need a confession, that would mean that your entire church was far more literate in the

Scriptures than even most elders and pastors are today.

Because just your ability to handle the

Scriptures as a whole congregation, I mean, like you said, it'll be heaven.

It'll be in eternity when we're able to not need a confession.

In the Bible, we have, I would argue in the Bible, we have little confessions here and there.

Off the top of my head, I think about the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, or I think about 1 Timothy 3, verse 16,

I think 16, 17. Anyway. I've actually got that pulled up right here. Okay. Philippians.

It says, great indeed we confess is the mystery of godliness. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the

Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

And Paul's saying, we confess this. That's right. We confess. Philippians 2, maybe another one, 5 through 11.

But the point is, the Bible itself points to the need for confessional type statements, little summary statements.

That's because the Bible is such a big book. The idea, so I want to say this very clearly. A confession of faith serves the scriptures.

If you're in a church that the confession of faith is competing with the Bible, that's a problem.

The confession of faith is meant to serve, highlight, shine a big light on the

Bible. It's not because the Bible's insufficient that we have a confession of faith.

No, no, no. We have a confession of faith to highlight the authority and sufficiency and clarity and necessity of the

Bible. Yeah, that's good. But I would say this. Go back. So we kind of talked about nominal confessionalism, hyperconfessionalism.

But I want to say this, and I think you brought this up earlier. If your church should have a confession of faith, and it should be one that you visit regularly, like people,

I'm not saying people have to memorize it or whatever, but they understand this is what your church believes.

And so for us, let me give you an example. Here's some things that we do. One, we read a portion of the confession every

Lord's Day. So we just go through it, and we just finished it for the first time, and now we're on Chapter 3 again.

So we read a little section of it. The other thing is right now, which I don't know what we're going to do after this, but right now we're teaching through it on Sunday mornings during Sunday school.

When we get done with that, maybe we'll lay it aside for six months or a year or two years or something and bring it up again.

But regular thing. And then thirdly, at times, this isn't like a – there's no rule on how much this has to be done, but at times it's quoted in our sermons or our teaching because we're like, hey, we're in this passage.

This is what this passage teaches. By the way, here's our confession. So we try to keep it in our people's minds.

This is what we believe. This is what we hold to. Yeah, so our church's confession of faith is the abstract of principles.

And so what we do is we read an article. We have an article printed in the bulletin each week, and that article gets read during the service.

And then usually – so most Sundays, after the service is over, we have a fellowship meal most

Sundays. And then after that fellowship meal, we have another prayer meeting.

And usually I will read whatever article of the confession of the abstract that was in the bulletin that week that was read in the service, and I'll make a few comments on it, and I'll read an accompanying scripture passage when we have that part of the prayer meeting.

So it's not a full exposition of it, but for the people that are there for the prayer meeting, we just go a little bit into it along with having read it during the service.

So that's what we're doing right now. Of course, we've taught through it in the past, and I'm sure we will in the future.

And the idea is you're training and teaching your people.

And let me make this comment because of people who might say, you know, we don't need that. Your people, whether you like it or not,

Christians are confessional. So your people have a confession of faith, whether it's written down or not, they believe certain things.

They believe certain things about worship. They believe certain things about the

Lord's day. They believe certain things about whatever the case may be. A confessional church is seeking to embrace this reality and say, yes, we hold, and here's, we're going to put it in writing.

We don't have to guess what Miss Susie or Brother Bob or whatever think because we're going to put it in writing.

And so, you know, for the churches to be like, hey, the Bible is enough.

Amen. The Bible is enough. But the difference between my church and your church, say you don't have it written down and I do have it written down, is just that.

We both believe things about the Bible. It's just a confessional church is willing to put those beliefs in writing to be transparent and to plant your flag there and be convictional and say, hey, this is what we believe.

This helps with doctrinal integrity. It helps with defending sound doctrine.

It helps with defending against error. And it helps with unity. You know, we talked about the flip side earlier.

Some people don't want to put the confession or they don't want to put too many beliefs.

They're just going to say, what do you believe here? Well, we believe you're saved by grace. Okay, amen.

We all believe that. But what do you mean by that? We believe in the Trinity. We believe the Bible. Okay, well, that's a lot of kind of those are good things to believe, by the way.

Right, right. But what do you mean by that? What do you mean by those things? Right. And you say, so the point is, let me finish this thought real quick.

The point is that, yes, if you put a confession out there, it can be like some people like, yeah, we don't, that's not us.

However, you already mentioned this. The flip side is also true. Not only does a confession divide, but it also brings true unity within a body.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. For us, we use the abstract principles is in our constitution as our statement of faith.

And then what we're able to do with that is we take other historic state confessions of faith and we use them as commentary to understand even broader the things that are in it.

So, for example, at times when I'll be teaching on something from the abstract principles,

I might go to the 1689 and say, well, this is what

Baptist said in the 1689. And it might go into fuller detail on something that we have in our statement from the abstract principles.

Which that's what the abstract is from. Right. Yeah, yeah. So something else that we might want to point out, thinking about the different documents that a church has, it's not like the confession is the only thing that we're saying.

We're also saying as a church, there's a certain covenant relationship. So you're,

I mean, I'm sure there are churches that don't, but, you know, you ought to have a confession of faith saying this is what we believe.

You ought to have a church covenant saying this is how we're going to behave. This is how we're going to treat one another.

You ought to have a constitution that states certain things about the governance and the life of your church.

And all of those are important because all of those are ways that we are. We are being upfront and clear about who we are as a covenant local body of believers.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the further so like for us. So I think the abstract principles is good.

Obviously, it comes from the same place that we're at. I like for a local body. I like for I like the further out you get, the smaller the confession.

Does that make sense? So like, here's what here's what I'm trying to say. I know you understand what I'm saying, but just so our listeners like. So you get you get a couple of churches partnering together.

Well, sometimes you might need more of a summary or you get a whole group of churches.

You know, you might need more of a summary. And that's why, for example, for the Southern Baptist Convention, the

Baptist faith and message is what it is, which is kind of wild that you can't even like it's such it is such a low bar.

Right. Like it's so easy to be in cooperation with or submission to with the

Baptist faith. Like that's like, how can you not do that? And yet the Southern Baptist Convention can't even do that.

But but when it comes to a local church, I think the more the better in a sense. I mean, obviously, there's a there's a space out there somewhere where you're like,

OK, that's too much. But you're talking about with the you know, with the church covenant, what you agree with and love, how you show your love to God and the scriptures and to one another.

And then, of course, with the confession of faith. So so my argument be like, I like for me and I'm not

I'm not like publicly disagreeing with you, but I'm just saying, like, I like for me an idea like an abstract for maybe a group of churches.

Whereas I like the 1689 more for a local church. That makes sense. Yeah. For example,

I'll give you an example of that. I mentioned earlier that I teach weekly at a local recovery ministry that our church is a part of.

And there are several other churches and it's beyond Baptists. I mean, there are other denominations involved.

Well, before that ministry was ever begun. We needed a statement of faith, so I put together a statement of faith that we could all agree to.

Now, it doesn't say near enough for me. Right. It does not say near enough for me.

Like the statement that I and I teach through it regularly at this ministry, it would not work for our church.

It does not say enough. It would not work as the statement of faith for Marshall First Baptist Church. But it does work for statement of faith for us to partner in that particular ministry.

So it defines enough that we're able to work together with these other Christians. But it doesn't define enough for our local church.

And so I think you're I think you're right. I think that there are times when you have to be able to see a difference between what kind of a confession do you need for your local church?

And maybe what kind of confession can you have for, say, a missions organization that's partnering together or for a fellowship of churches or for a association of churches or for a ministry like we're involved in?

But but and then and then the only thing I'll say and then we got to kind of wrap up. But when the 1689 came out, that was their cooperative statement, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So that's you know, but I do think that we're such an anti authority age.

We're kind of anti doctrine. You know, we're kind of loose when it comes to convictions.

And so what we're doing at our church and you're the same way, Eddie, is we're saying, hey, look, look, look.

We don't think that we need to go forward. To be better, we need to go backward. We want to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters through the centuries.

And we want to confess the things that our brothers and sisters as Baptists have consistently confessed over the centuries.

And we want to know what it is they believe. We want to know what the scripture teaches that we are to believe.

And when we want to hold it seriously and, you know, we can have disagreements about it, that's fine.

However. Putting it in writing helps the church to find unity in the truth.

I don't know if I'm kind of rambling. No, that's really good, because one of the advantages of using something that come that came before us is that we are tying back into that history.

You know, honestly, there is a great temptation. I mean, you look on a lot of church websites and they're going to have their belief statement or whatever.

And basically they wrote it. Right. They just wrote it. They said, this is what we believe.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that the temptation there is to say, hey, we can word this exactly the way we want to so that we don't really have to wrestle with what brothers and sisters have believed in the past.

We can just say it exactly the way we want to say it. Well, the issue with that is then you're not grounding yourself as much in what's been said before.

So, you know, when we when we changed our statement of our confession, you know, we we did have the

Baptist faith and message 1964. I don't think that our church had ever actually voted to bring in the 2000 version, but we had the the

Baptist faith and message. Was it 1964 or 63? 63. Yeah, that that was what we had as our statement of faith or our confession.

And so when we change it to the abstract principles, honestly, we did discuss and we thought about the idea of just why don't we just write our own confession?

Which which I want to say, I do want to say. The autonomy of the local church, you can do that.

We could have done that, you know, and you have the right to do that. Yeah. But but we kind of decided that, no, we want to take at least something that ties us back into some of these historic documents.

I think that's prudence. You know, do not do not move the ancient landmark.

You know, I think there's a bit of application there, at least for like, hey, if we're going to come up with something new, that should that should maybe be a last resort.

You know, like. Yeah. And at least tie in. And like, for example, we could think through today, like with critical race theory or transgenderism, like we could think of issues today that we could add chapters, you know, to to the confession.

And and, you know, that, hey, we it's probably pretty doubtful, but we might do that as a church and we have the right.

Like so I'm being clear, like you don't have to confess the 1689 or the

New Hampshire or the abstract of principles or the Philadelphia or the Charleston.

Like you can you can have your own. I mean, you have the right to have

Billy Bob's confession. Right. Yeah. And and and I don't want to, you know, be too pejorative about that.

However, I would say there's some there's some prudence when it comes, some biblical prudence.

Say, hey, you know what? Well, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and I want to stand in a long line. By the way, that's what

Baptists did in the 1689. They took the Westminster Confession, made it better.

Right. And they took the Savoy Declaration and the first line of Baptist confession. And they said, hey, this is who we are.

We're going to use some of this because we're going to show solidarity. But we're also going to make it better.

And obviously my response would be more biblical because I'm a Baptist. So I know we need to wind up close.

And so we may even this may even be something we just want to hold over to another podcast. But I'll throw this last thing at you before we before we sign off.

You mentioned giving additions because of things going on today. We can also another thing we can do is there are statements being made on all of these different issues.

And it's OK for your church to say to just put it put in your constitution that whether the

Danvers statement, you know, if you want to go with that or the Nashville statement or the

Dallas statement, you know, these different statements on these different topics that have come up over the years.

If you want to say, hey, this is a good this statement that other believers have put together.

We agree substantially with this on this topic, whether it's got to do with gender or sexuality or or even or or or male and female roles within the church and family.

Those are all things where it'd be OK for you to say we're not going to add it to our confession of faith.

But we're going to but we're going to just state that we agree with this statement. Yeah, that's another possibility.

Yeah. Yeah. So so essentially 80s church in our church here, essentially what we're saying is we believe the

Bible. We believe that the Bible is the word of God. It's authoritative, sufficient, necessary and clear.

And we need nothing besides the Bible. But because of fallen man and the loss of the teaching that's out there today and the falseness and even the divergent views of things, we have these confessions of faith that articulate, hey, this is actually when we say we believe the

Bible. Here's what we mean. So that's good. Well, I hope this is

I really enjoy this episode, brother. I really had a good time going back and forth talking. And maybe if you have a question or comment, you'd like to send it to us.

My email is Quatro Nelson at Gmail. So that's C -U -A -T -R -O -N -E -L -S -O -N at gmail .com.

Eddie, how could they reach out to you? Eddie Ragsdale, E -D -D -I -E -R -A -G -S -E -A -L -E 17 at Gmail.

Is that how old you are? 17, yeah. All right, brother, as always, I enjoy it.

I hope that you guys have enjoyed this episode as well. I think this is coming out right before Thanksgiving.

So enjoy it. Enjoy your turkey. Yep. 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 hoemas, the masterpiece of God.