May 1, 2017 Show with Mark G. Johnston on “You in Your Small Corner: The Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this first day of May 2017.

I'm very excited to have back on the program Pastor Mark G. Johnston of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Cardiff, Wales and this is going to be in order to promote an upcoming conference.

It's actually a pastor's conference in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania at the

Elizabethtown College, the United States Banner of Truth Ministers Conference and we'll be talking more about that.

Before I introduce my guest and our theme today I want to just let everybody know that I had a wonderful time at the

Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology this past weekend in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania at Proclamation Presbyterian Church and it was such a joy to once again see

Carl Truman and Rick Phillips and Dan Doriani, not only see them in person but hear them preach and share fellowship with old friends and new.

In fact some dear old friends of mine from Grace Reform Baptist Church on Long Island and even going way back before then when it was

Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, I had some dear old friends that were members of that church,

John and Joe Matone and they surprised me by showing up at the conference there in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and it was just a blessing to be there not only to hear the edifying messages but to have so many people approach the

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio exhibitors booth to ensure me that they would listen and also to meet some of my listeners that I had never met or heard from before who are already listening to Iron Sharpens Iron regularly and have informed me that they are richly blessed by the broadcast.

I thank Bob Brady at the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and everybody who enabled

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to participate in that event. But as I said today we have another event we are promoting the

Banner of Truth U .S. Ministers Conference and my guest to do that is Mark G. Johnson, Minister of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Cardiff, Wales and he is a trustee of the

Banner of Truth Trust and the author of three commentaries in Banner of Truth's Let's Study series on John, Colossians and Philemon and 2

Peter and Jude and today we are discussing a book that he has written for Christian Focus Publications, You in Your Small Corner, the

Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Mark G.

Johnson. Thank you Chris, it's a pleasure to be back with you. I'm glad to be able to talk to you about these themes this evening.

Praise God. Well before we go into the subject at hand for our listeners who have not yet heard you on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio or perhaps they are unfamiliar with you and the church where you pastor, tell us something about Bethel Presbyterian Church and the location where this church is serving

Christ. Bethel has been situated on the western edge of Cardiff in Wales in the

United Kingdom. Cardiff is the capital city of Wales and has been blessed with many good churches over the years but most of them have been towards the center of the city but about 25 years ago

Bethel was planted with a view to trying to reach a section of the city that had very little evangelical or reform witness.

So just last year we celebrated our 25th anniversary. I've been here for two and a half years and we've seen some encouraging progress with the work.

The area that we are located in is quite a difficult area socially. It's an area of probably 20 -25 ,000 homes on the western edge of the city that was a kind of dumping ground for people with social and other problems in the post -war years.

So traditionally it's been very hard to see churches thrive there but we've been making a lot of effort to try and reach out to the local community and beginning to see some people coming in which has been good.

Even though we're in Wales we're actually quite a multi -ethnic congregation. We have about six or seven nationalities represented from the

USA to Eastern Europe and to Africa as well and it has been great just to see how the gospel draws people together across cultural and ethnic boundaries.

We are blessed also to have as one of our members Dr. Bob Leatham who's Professor of Symptomatic Theology in Union Theological College not far from us here in Cardiff and he'll often assist in preaching and in other teaching activities within the church but just as a great influence to have in the church as well.

Great and the denomination that your congregation is in is the

Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales, correct? That's correct. If anybody knows anything about the history of church life in the

UK they'll probably know that the Presbyterianism has been strong traditionally in Scotland and Ireland and for some time it was quite strong in Wales but it was known as Calvinistic Methodism in Wales rather than as Presbyterianism but for many many years indeed in England for many centuries there was a steady decline in the

Presbyterian Church theologically. It drifted towards Unitarianism by the 19th century and by the middle part of the 20th century and it virtually died out so in the early 1980s there was a small grassroots movement to try and revive a

Presbyterian Witness, a genuinely evangelical and confessional

Presbyterian Church in England and Wales and it grew from very small beginnings with a conference addressed by Professor Ed Clowney, the late

Professor Ed Clowney of Westminster Seminary, Dr John Nicholls who was the Minister of Scottish Presbyterian Church beside St Paul's in London and Tim Keller who came across as well to address the conference and out of that conference there were about 70 or 80 people turned up to hear it.

There was a group formed that began to explore ways of planting Presbyterian Churches in England and Wales and that little denomination has grown to about 16 or 17 congregations now that are just gradually becoming stronger so that's the group that we're part of and we're just thrilled to be able to introduce a sane and confessional and biblical

Presbyterianism to the British Isles as part of the British Isles again. And for anybody interested in learning more about Bethel Presbyterian Church in Cardiff, Wales go to bethelpcr .org

.uk that's bethelpcr .org .uk

and you are going to be speaking as we said earlier at the Banner of Truth U .S.

Ministers Conference which is coming up very soon and there are at least two Welshman there speaking.

Jeff Thomas the former pastor of Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales. Did I pronounce

Aberystwyth correctly? That is absolutely right. And in addition to Jeff Thomas and Mark Johnston, Joel Beakey who's been on this program as well and Mark Vandewaard and Jonathan Master.

Jonathan Master is actually going to be our guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio this coming

Wednesday not the day after tomorrow but a week from this Wednesday I should say on May 10th and Carlton Wynn is speaking and Ian Hamilton is speaking and to register

I would register very soon because I think that they are running out of room. We're quickly approaching the date of the event.

Go to banneroftruth .org, then click on events and then click on U .S.

Ministers Conference. But you just completed a U .K. Ministers Conference for Banner of Truth did you not?

Yeah it was our 53rd Ministers Conference held in the U .K. The conference began in 1962 not long after the

Banner of Truth Trust was founded. We found that there were a growing number of ministers were showing an interest in the reform faith some because they already were aware of it and appreciated others because they were just discovering it and I think it was about maybe 40 or so ministers gathered at that time under the leadership of Ian Murray and with the late

Dr. Martyn Lloyd -Jones having acquired involvement from the wings of that organization and the conference met in Leicester University.

It was often nicknamed the Leicester Conference simply because that was the location where it was held but year after year it just proved to be a tremendous blessing to a growing number of men and it's now moved into its third generation of young men who hadn't been born when the conference began but now are on the platform speaking.

So this was the first year we had to relocate because the university facilities where we held it for 52 years had altered their arrangements for housing and for contracts so we had to find new premises.

The new premises were excellent, good room facilities and eating facilities and just excellent place for the talks but also for men to mingle informally for fellowship.

So again we drew men largely from the UK, from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland but also again drawing men from the continent, from France, from Switzerland.

We had 18 countries represented in total and it's just a tremendous place for solid ministry.

We see it very much as an opportunity for ministers to be on the receiving end of good expository preaching but also the kind of historical and biographical addresses and lectures on theology that will minister to them.

So often ministers find themselves giving out and giving out and not having the opportunity to be refreshed and this is a high quality opportunity to minister.

Again we've had a range of speakers. We had Sinclair Ferguson as our keynote speaker.

He did three addresses in the evening on Christ at the Centre. We had

Geoff Kingswood from Canada just in Woodstock outside Toronto. He's one of the

Banner Trustees as well. He opened the conference for us and then Gary Williams who

I'm not sure if many of our American listeners would be aware of him. Gary is the Director of the

John Owen Theological Study Centre in London and directs master's level and PhD level courses but does a lot of in -service training for pastors throughout the

UK. He delivered two excellent addresses under the general title of a

Functional Doctrine of Scripture. The first one being Scripture as the

Literary Word and then the second address on Scripture as the

Living Words and is very stimulating. Stephen Clark, Welsh pastor, again following the theme of Scripture, basically followed the same theme as it will be followed at the

Elizabethtown Conference but he spoke on Christ's witness to Scripture and spent some time going through the

Gospels showing how the Lord Jesus Christ had the highest regard for Scripture and the way he used

Old Testament Scripture as it was then. Then he moved on to speak of the

Scripture's witness to Christ and he gave a panoramic and breathtaking survey of biblical theology through the

Old Testament showing how at every point through Old Testament revelation

Jesus Christ is the one who's been witnessed to and pointed to and of course

Old Testament Scripture finds its fulfilment in him. We had several other men. We had

David Johnson who was a pastor of a large Presbyterian church in Ireland, again following the theme of the

Word at work so he looked at the entire book of Hebrews, took us through it as a paradigm for preaching, arguing that the book of Hebrews is not so much a letter that was written to the churches but a published sermon that was addressed to the churches at that time and very helpfully just showed how the key features of faithful expository ministry are displayed throughout that letter in the

New Testament. And then again his second address was on the

Word at work and the way that Holy Scripture has a unique way of working as it's not only read privately but especially as it's proclaimed publicly and people receive it.

So it was a great conference and we had about 250 men or so from the entire spectrum of ages there.

That was a real blessing to us. So that's where I've just come from and I'm just now getting ready to come across to the

USA in a those who are either already registered or interested in attending the

U .S. Ministers Conference, what should we be expecting at this conference? Well the theme is going to be the same theme as we had at the

British Conference. The overall title is the Living and Enduring Word and it's really taking the opportunity this 500th anniversary of the

Reformation that has been marked in many parts of the world this year just to remind ourselves that the

Reformation wasn't primarily either a social or a political shift that took place in Europe or simply a realignment of ecclesiastical allegiance that took place.

The one at the heart of the Reformation was the Word of God being rediscovered and unleashed again through fearless preaching and through men who passionately use scripture in debates within the church and debates also with those outside the church looking in.

Again historically it's not without significance that before Martin Luther famously nailed the 95

Theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg in Germany that there had been almost 100 years of pre -Reformation movements taking place in small pockets throughout

Europe and notably it was through men like the Lollards, John Wycliffe and the men who he trained as preachers nicknamed the

Lollards who began to express their confidence in scripture and seeing it as having priority over the tradition of the church.

The Roman Catholic Church had put the authority of church tradition on a par with the authority of scripture but these men recognized that church tradition is subordinate to the authority of scripture and they often itinerated traveling around towns and villages and preached and saw the word work in people's lives, people being brought to faith, people coming to the joy of salvation and really what happened then with the

Reformers as they began to exercise their ministry was to not only study the

Word afresh but proclaim the Word afresh so that same living and enduring

Word that left its mark on Europe 500 years ago is the same

Word that we continue to proclaim and continue to have our confidence in as we minister not only to the church but minister through the church to the world around us praying that that same

Word will awaken people and bring them to Christ. So that's the overall theme of the conference and the speakers have chosen different angles than the ones that we saw in Britain.

Geoff Thomas is going to be speaking first of all on the true state of ban that really in light of what

John Calvin teaches at the very beginning of the Institutes where he, the

Institutes of the Christian Religion, where he expounds the main teachings of the Bible he says that the two great things that the

Bible confronts us with is first of all a knowledge of God but also it brings us to a true knowledge of ourself and Geoff is going to begin by talking about the true state of our humanity but he's also going to be speaking about the super supremacy of Scripture that it's impossible to overstate the significance of this book that God has given it's impossible to underestimate its potential not just for changing individual lives but for reshaping the church and through the church to actually leaving its mark upon nations and then

I think poignantly for Geoff, many of you who know Geoff Thomas will know that he was quite recently bereaved of his wife and to go through that loss he's going to be speaking about about the mere believer having certainty in the face of eternity you know it's the most sobering thing that anyone will face to think about their death to think about what lies beyond and to be able to do so with assurance and confidence and Geoff is going to be speaking on on how we find out how

Scripture provides that so that'll be one thread running through the conference. Joel Beakey is going to be taking the angle of the

Puritans and their use of Scripture particularly in the way that they preached Scripture and he's going to hone in first of all on the

Puritans the priority that they gave to preaching in their ministry again that was something that would have been somewhat unusual in their day there was a tendency in the state church the

Episcopalian church at that time to rely on liturgy and the various sacraments of the church but the

Puritans placed a particular emphasis on the privacy of preaching and Joel will be looking at that but at the same time in his second address he's going to look at Puritan preaching in terms of whether or not it's a good paradigm for us to I anticipate that he'll mark the strengths of Puritan preaching and he'll mark the way in which it was particularly blessed in that era in which they ministered but I'm guessing also that he will argue against simply transposing the way that those men ministered in the 17th century and 18th century trying to transpose that into the 20th 21st century without recognizing the significant historical and cultural differences that we live in in our world today.

Carlton Wynne, this will be his first time speaking at the Banner Conference of the USA. I got to know

Carlton whenever I was the pastor of Proclamation Presbyterian Church a number of years ago and I was doing some work in Westminster and got to know

Carlton then while he was still completing his doctoral studies he's now teaching in Westminster, a great guy and he's going to be focusing on the preacher's mysterious ministry.

I think it was Dr. Martyn Lloyd -Jones who talked about the romance of preaching that there's a very real element of mystery involved in this task that we're involved in.

It's not simply lecturing from the pulpit but it's a calling that requires giftedness.

Maybe also Paul speaks to Timothy about the gift of God that was within him by the laying on of hands and was almost certainly speaking about the gift of preaching that young Timothy had and Carlton will be talking about the way in which the

Spirit works through our humanity and enables us to proclaim God's word faithfully. Jonathan Masters is giving two addresses taken from that well -known text in Hebrews chapter four where it speaks about the scriptures as being living and active and sharper than a two -edged sword so he'll be looking at those two aspects of scripture that's the fact that it is a living and active word and then also that it's a word that is sharper than a sword in a way that it's by its home.

And Bill Van Dudenvard, he's the professor of church history in Puritan Reform Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan and he's going to be addressing us on the subject of the vindicated word and then it falls to Ian Hamilton and myself to deliver two addresses at the conference.

I'll be providing the closing sermon as I sometimes describe it where if you've had a run of addresses at a conference it falls to the closing speaker to land the plane safely so I'll be trying to land the plane safely after three days together so that's pretty much an overview of what will be happening and what to expect if you come to Elizabethtown.

It's probably also important to say Chris that one of the great things about Banner conferences is that they're very much geared towards cultivating fellowship between the men who attend, the men who speak at our conferences don't have bodyguards, they're not whisked away after they finish.

They eat with the rest of the men, they dorm with the rest of the men so there's just the whole conference you have access to the speakers which has to get to them personally.

But it's been astonishing and delightful to see the way in which men who maybe started coming to the

Banner conferences years ago have kept coming, they've forged friendships that have been sustained not just at the conference but in the months in between the conferences and it's great to see young men coming.

One of the challenges of pastoral ministry is it's very lonely at times and often you find it hard to get the kind of fellowship where you can open up, where you can bear your soul and often it's only in the company of fellow ministers who walk the same roads, who face the same challenges that you're able to do that and both in the

US and the UK there's been tremendous blessing for ministers through the friendships that have been formed through the fellowship that they enjoy and year on year we just see men being blessed in that way.

Yeah plus we have an annual, interestingly we do this at the

US conference, we haven't got quite the same status in the UK conference but there's an annual ministers soccer match, not

American football but soccer match for which there's a major prize for the team that wins.

And I want to thank Pat Daly over at the

United States headquarters of Banner of Truth which is just a few blocks from where I'm sitting right now in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

I want to thank him for arranging my registration for my very first Banner of Truth ministers conference.

I've never been to one of the Banner of Truth conferences before although I keep hearing rave reviews every year which is why

I aggressively approached Pat this year and said I really would love to attend this conference even though I am not a minister,

I speak with ministers nearly every single day on Iron Trip and Zion Radio and Pat was graciously willing to allow me to attend this conference and I'm looking forward to meeting many of you who are listening,

God willing, Tuesday May 30th through Thursday June 1st in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania at the

Elizabethtown College and again the website to register is banneroftruth .org

and click on events and then click on 2017

U .S. ministers conference. I look forward to reaching out to Jeff Thomas as he is still facing the grief of losing his beloved bride.

I lost my beloved bride in 2011 and I'm still at times having difficulty with grief and depression but I know that my precious wife is with our

Savior for eternity and it will be a good time of fellowshipping,

I'm sure, with Jeff as a fellow mourner who has lost his better half and of course

I'll look look forward to fellowshipping with you too brother and all the other men as the

Lord gives opportunity while I'm there and once again go to banneroftruth .org, banneroftruth .org,

click on events and then click on 2017 U .S. ministers conference. We're going to a break right now if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest

Pastor Mark G. Johnston on the theme of his book, You in Your Small Corner, the

Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity, which is a book he has written for Christian focused publications.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question on that theme or of course you could ask a question on any general theme regarding the

Reformed faith and regarding the Banner of Truth ministers conference. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

USA. Don't go away, God willing we'll be right back with Pastor Mark G. Johnston after these messages.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnsen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is

Pastor Mark G. Johnston, Minister of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Cardiff, Wales, a trustee of the

Banner of Truth Trust, and he is the author of a number of books, including the one we are addressing today, published by Christian Focus Publications in the

UK, You in Your Small Corner, the Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

and we have somebody who's sending you their greetings from Aberystwyth, Wales, Mike Iliff, or Iliff, I don't know how to pronounce that,

I -L -I -F -F. Mike Iliff. Yes, he has been a listener to Iron Trip and Zion for quite a while, and he, as I was saying before the break about Jeff Thomas and I both having lost our precious brides who have gone home to be with the

Lord, and Mike Iliff also shares that same sorrow, as not long ago he lost his bride, and I'm delighted that he is listening today.

We have also quite a number of listeners waiting to have their questions asked and answered.

We have Patty in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and she asks,

Why do you think Christians, especially those in the Reformed camp, seem more worried about their fellow believers knowing the five points of Calvinism and all other doctrine than they are their neighbor's salvation?

Is doctrine that important? That's a very good question, and sadly

I think sometimes we in the, who hold the Reformed faith dear, are our own worst enemies because we fall into a number of traps.

I think in one instance we put great emphasis on what have come to be known as the five points of Calvinism, and I think the great irony of that is that if Calvin had lived to hear that expression he would have been appalled by it.

The whole sweep of the way that John Calvin opened Scripture up went far beyond those five points represented in the

TULIP acronym, and his great focus was rediscovering the glory, the majesty of God revealed in Scripture, and the glory and the majesty of God as it's worked out in salvation.

So yes, there is indeed a place for those different facets of what the

Bible teaches about redemption beginning in eternity past with God's decree leading through to eternity future and what

God has prepared for those who love him. But in response to the question, does doctrine matter?

I would say a passionate yes, it does matter because part of the problem of so many churches throughout the country and indeed throughout the world today is that they preach a message ostensibly from the

Bible, but it reflects very little understanding of what the Bible says, what it teaches on the one hand about the seriousness of our human condition, that we simply cannot save ourselves, we're beyond self -redemption.

But also in terms of just how much goes into the salvation presented to us in the gospel, it's far richer, far bigger, far deeper than most people imagine.

So the desire that not just we in the Reformed faith but in any serious -minded church has is to preach a gospel that isn't light and shallow but a gospel that is full of biblical substance.

I think it is true to say that too often we in Reformed churches have tended to be too inward -looking.

We've been so busy trying to sharpen our understanding and refine our understanding of the

Bible's main teachings that we have managed to neglect the great command that Jesus gave the very last word that he spoke to his disciples before his ascension where he told them to go into all the worlds and to make disciples of all nations.

Too often I think we in our churches have misread the great commission to say something to the effect of come and hear.

We're quite happy to welcome people who are searching for salvation into our churches that they might hear our preaching, but we haven't been so good at actually going out and telling, proclaiming.

I've just finished a series of addresses, sermons on Sunday mornings of my church on Paul's visit to Athens.

Paul, of course, was the great theologian of the New Testament, but he wasn't just a great theologian.

He was the great missionary theologian because his conviction about the truth of Scripture and the glorious truth of the gospel, which is the heartbeat of Scripture, caused him to leave behind the comforts of what could have been a very useful ministry either in Jerusalem or in Antioch and instead itinerate through Asia Minor and then across into Europe and quite probably to the very edge of Europe before he died.

He proclaimed the gospel. We spent seven weeks looking at Paul in Athens and just being struck by how he interacted with this totally pagan audience and yet so very effectively confronting them with the depth of human need, their own helplessness of themselves, the uselessness of the gods that they worship, the philosophies that they embraced, but then to bring them ultimately to Christ as the man that God sent and the man that God raised from the dead and sealing him as the savior that he had promised, who is indeed able to save.

So yes, short answer to the question, doctrine does matter. Calvinism is far bigger than the five points and absolutely reformed churches need to be getting out more and fulfilling their responsibility to bring the gospel to the unbelieving world around them.

Thank you, Patty, and you have won a free copy of the book that we are discussing, You in Your Small Corner, the

Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity, compliments of our friends at Christian -focused publications in the

United Kingdom and thanks to our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service here in Pennsylvania, cvbbs .com,

cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com for shipping out the books and Bibles and everything else that our listeners win when they submit questions.

By the way, to touch on Patty's question, I know this personally, having worked in Christian media since the mid -1980s,

I know that one of the reasons why I do a lot of talking about Calvinism and reformed theology amongst other

Christians is because these things are so greatly hated today. Although I must say that I'm sure you would agree there seems to be an upswing in recent years, a rise in popularity of the reformed faith and sometimes that manifests itself in some things that we would actually, who have more of a historic understanding of Calvinism, have problems with in some level or another.

But I have found myself, since I've been in the Christian media industry for so long, that I find myself having to explain what these things are, these doctrines of sovereign grace, the doctrines of reformed theology, because they are so often slandered, caricatured, and distorted.

And when I am speaking, especially with leaders who are talking to their own congregations and perhaps misleading them,

I am urgently trying to rectify the slander, albeit often unconscious slander, that is going on in the world.

And it is an important thing. These are important truths, are they not? Very important truths,

Chris. I wouldn't for a moment disagree with you on that. I think my concern is that we don't confine our energies and efforts in one direction, but we shoulder both sets of responsibilities.

We have one set of responsibilities towards the Church to challenge those who fail to appreciate how biblical

Calvinism and the reformed faith really are. They wrestle seriously with the whole of Scripture, they don't wriggle out of the hard parts of Scripture, those parts of Scripture that are offensive to some

Christians. The idea, for example, of God being the God who elects a people for himself or chooses a people for himself from before the beginning of time, many

Christians find that offensive. But if you actually look at the passages that speak about that in the

Bible, you can't soften that, you can't wriggle out of what the

Bible is saying, but you need to appreciate that aspect, but also the aspect of what's often described as the total depravity of our humanity, again, which is so offensive to people.

People want to, even Christians want to say, oh, but there's a basic virtue in human beings.

The Bible clearly speaks of the fact that no part of our humanity is left undamaged by our sin and by our failure.

So it's only when we realize the seriousness of our sin and our helplessness and inability to solve that problem ourselves that we appreciate that the

God of our salvation, the roots of it go right back to what he planned for eternity past and to his sovereign choice of a people for himself, but also the way he fulfilled that through Christ's redemptive work and the way he applies that through the

Spirit's work as he takes the gospel and opens blind eyes to see it and opens stony hearts that they might receive it and find out salvation for themselves.

Amen. And this book that you have written, I think, is a very valuable subject and much needed subject to be addressed because I think that there are two things simultaneously going on within Christendom.

You have two polar opposite things going on. You have, on the one hand, a remnant of people who

I think perhaps today are in the minority who are pharisaic, sectarian, perhaps even bordering on cultic or even crossing the border of being cultic that only believe that their group is saved, that they are the true followers of Christ.

Everybody else is either lost or stupid and therefore very often you have little interaction or fellowship or unity between those groups and those outside of their circles of influence and so on.

Then you have, I think, the much more broader, the much broader I should say, pardon the poor grammar, the much broader or more prevalent problem today, perhaps you would disagree with this, but the more prevalent problem today is those striving for unity at any price, unity at the cost of truth, more and more churches are caving into the pressures of the modern ecumenical movement and they're welcoming

Roman Catholics and those of aberrant cultic sects and so on within their embrace of fellowship.

Now I understand, to clarify what I mean, I believe that there are many

Roman Catholics who will be in heaven but I believe that they will be in heaven in spite of Rome's dogmas on justification and salvation and other things.

But would you agree that this seems to be the more prevalent problem of those who are striving for unity at any cost?

In many ways that was one of the key catalysts that encouraged me to write the book in the first place.

Back towards the early, late 80s, early 90s, the ecumenical movement in Britain was becoming very influential and quite a number of Reformed Evangelical churches wanted to resist that trend because of the damaging effect it was having upon what people believed and what was being preached in churches, but at the same time to make sure that there was a positive biblical alternative put in place.

A little booklet that appeared around that time was written by Dr. Harold Jones, formerly

Professor of Practical Theology in Westminster Escondido in California, but a

Welshman who had been the Principal of London Theological Seminary for many years, but he wrote a little booklet entitled

Holding Hands in the Dark, describing the way in which those churches and Christians that think you can have ecumenical relations by brushing doctrine aside, said it doesn't matter what we believe, if we claim to be

Christians we can be one regardless, and there was a welcome given to Roman Catholics into that kind of ecumenical embrace.

That was the climate in which many churches were finding themselves and the kind of struggles that we were facing.

Of course, if you weren't part of the ecumenical movement at that time, you were accused of being sectarian and isolationist and unwilling to step into the wider body of Christian churches or professing

Christian churches. So, on the one hand, when I wrote the book I wanted to argue very much in favour for meaningful relationships between churches and recognition that if our churches are true churches then they belong to the church universal that the

Lord Jesus Christ has promised to build. One of the chapters in the book speaks about the constraint of Scripture, that we are not left to decide for ourselves what the basis of unity should be.

The unity that Scripture speaks about is always unity in the truth, it's unity that's defined by the truth, it's controlled by the truth, and my desire was to bring people to portions of the

Bible that speak of the, if you like, the concentric circles of how our unity as Christians within the church is expressed with one another, and how it's worked out in practice.

Yes, in fact, unlike the common stereotype of Calvinists and Calvinism and Reformed theology,

I have seen such a wonderful uniting influence that these doctrines have amongst varying denominations who have strong disagreement on other issues, like for instance the

Banner of Truth Conference itself and the Banner of Truth Publishing Ministry have brought into print the works of Baptists, Presbyterians, Calvinist Methodists, Congregationalists, and others who embrace these precious truths.

They do have a very powerful unifying factor, do they not? Absolutely, again one of the points

I make in the book is that when you look at the various labels that denominations take to themselves, or church groupings take to themselves, very often it shows how they've latched on to one particular aspect of the

Bible's teaching, or one particular aspect of the life and work of the church, and made their interpretation of that their distinctive.

So for example, Presbyterian churches have latched on to a

Presbyterian understanding of church government to be what distinguishes them.

Now that's oversimplifying it slightly because historically it's always been bound up with a particular view of the

Covenant, and with the sweep of confessional teaching that you have in the

Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, but the form of government, again with the

Episcopalians, it's their particular view of church government that has become their defining feature in terms of their label.

Baptists, obviously, their view of the Sacrament, Pentecostals, their particular interpretation of what happened on the

Day of Pentecost, and so on and so forth. George Whitefield, who was an

Episcopalian himself, with some Presbyterian leanings, once announced there'll be no

Presbyterians in heaven, held his breath and said, well there'll be no Baptists in heaven, and no Pentecostals in heaven, there'll be no

Episcopalians in heaven. At the end of the day, the church is something bigger than what those various labels speak to, and the heart of the message of Scripture brings us to something much more profound than those aspects of church life that are latched onto.

And as you rightly say, one of the strengths of the Banner of Truth over the years in terms of its publishing, but also in terms of its conferences, is that it's been able to draw together those who are united in the great, historically recognized truths of the faith that have been articulated from earliest times in the creeds of the early church, and elaborated through later phases of church history and the great confessions and catechisms that have been embraced by the different church bodies.

And we have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please always remember to give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA, and I want to remind all of our listeners who are patiently waiting to have their questions asked and answered already,

I will get to each and every one of you as God permits during the course of the remaining hour of this program.

So we look forward to hearing from more of you if we have time to include you, and we'll be right back,

God willing, after these messages with more of Pastor Mark G. Johnston on Evangelical Unity.

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Go to ironsharpensironradio .com and click on support. All right, we're going to go to some of our listener questions for Mark G.

Johnston regarding evangelical unity, and let's see, we have

Jerry in Charlestown, New Hampshire, who has a question for you,

Pastor Mark, and I have to enlarge Jerry's typeface on his email because it's very small.

Let's see, it says here, would you say that one weakness in the way the evangelical church seeks unity is that they often minimize truth by being agnostic about different doctrines or seeing almost all doctrines as unimportant rather than holding fast to truth, but also being characterized by the fruit of the

Spirit? In other words, rather than viewing doctrines like predestination or believer's baptism as unimportant or unknowable and therefore are not discussed for the sake of unity, isn't it better to search the

Scriptures faithfully and teach all of what they say, but to have our conversations and disagreements marked by gentleness, kindness, and love?

Excellent. We already touched on it to a degree, but he is basically saying that we shouldn't stop disagreeing, but we should change the way, perhaps, the way that we disagree.

Jerry, thanks for that question. It's very helpful indeed. We have touched on it in part already, and agree entirely that we don't simply brush our differences under the carpet and pretend they don't matter, or pretend that there's some of the

Bible's teachings that are not as plain as others. I think it's interesting that when you come to 1

Corinthians 15, Paul begins that chapter talking about doctrines which are of first importance, and by implication he is suggesting that there are other doctrines in Scripture that are not of first importance or primary importance, but fall into a hierarchy of importance in relation to the ones that are at the very center.

Of course, the central doctrine that you find in Scripture is the truth about the

God who reveals himself in Scripture. So often we tend to latch on to how we understand salvation, or how we understand the

Church, and make them of primary importance, but actually we must minimize the fact that it's the doctrine of God that...

I think we may have lost our guest. Are you there, Brother Johnston? We're going to have to go to a break right now, because I believe we have lost our guest,

Pastor Mark G. Johnston, and I am going to go to a commercial break, and hopefully we will have

Pastor Johnston back on the line. For those of you who would like to join us on the air with questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back with Pastor Mark G. Johnston. Tired of box store

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Well, there's nothing like severing unity like being disconnected during a phone conversation with a brother from across the other side of the country—of the world,

I should say. But we have back with us Pastor Mark G. Johnston, and sorry about that.

I don't know what happened, Pastor, but we thank God that you're back on the program. So sorry, Joey, for only getting halfway through my answer to your question.

What I was trying to say was that as we wrestle with the doctrine of God as it's presented in Scripture to us, then that's the most glorious thing that we can focus on and in which we find our unity.

And out of that comes what it teaches about salvation, what it teaches about belonging to the Church, what it teaches about the responsibility that we have as the

Church in the world and to the world. I think what you also said about the attitudes with which we exercise discussion and debate with fellow

Christians is hugely important. Whenever we become aggressive and adversarial in the way that we interact over our disagreements, it becomes divisive and destructive to the fellowship of the

Church. I think if you look at even the Reformation, sometimes people look at the

Reformation times and kind of tune in to the debates that we have recorded in written form that took place then, and some of the language is pretty colorful, and it's clear that some of the debates were pursued with pretty intense feeling.

But that didn't mean to say that there was an underlying Catholicity between those who were true believers and contending for the same faith, that they were striving to find consensus rather than to divide the body.

And again, the same was true in the era of the Puritans. Some people tend to think of the

Puritan movement as being fairly monolithic. It wasn't. It was made up of people, men from different churchmanships, from different traditions.

So they had major differences in terms of some of the details of the faith, but there was a remarkable brotherhood between them and a very deep respect for one another and an overwhelming desire and determination to, as Paul says to the

Ephesians, to preserve the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. And I think that should be the paradigm that we follow in church life today, that we also have that Catholic Spirit with a small

C that recognizes that despite the variation in interpretation over a range of doctrines, that where we agree on the core doctrines about God and about salvation, there's a unity that lies at the very heart of the family of God itself.

Well, thank you, Jerry, from Charlestown, New Hampshire. And we ask for your full mailing address because you have also won a free copy of You in Your Small Corner, the

Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity by our guest today, Pastor Mark G. Johnston. And we thank

Christian Focus Publications for donating these books today that we are giving away, and we also thank our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service for shipping them out.

So look out for a package from CV for Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com.

CVbbs .com will be on the shipping label, the return address, so keep your eye open for that.

And thank you very much for contributing with your question to today's program,

Jerry. We also have RJ in White Plains, New York, who says, one of the things that disturbs me most about the modern ecumenical movement is that now even many who are professedly

Reformed are seemingly softening their views against the wickedness of homosexuality.

While I fully understand that we must evangelize those who are practicing this sin with more love and compassion, and with a view that their souls, their never -dying souls, need to be one for Christ, at the same time

I fear that many within evangelicalism who are addressing this issue today are stripping this sin of the fear of eternal damnation.

If you could comment on it, and I don't know if you agree with my passion about changing the way that people are viewing this issue, but I believe it is deadly serious.

Thank you, RJ, for your question, and again, fully appreciate the weight behind it.

You sadly live in a day and age whenever the media, especially, and through the media society at large, has become fixated with the issue of human sexuality.

It's almost as though they're wearing blinders, and that's the only thing that really matters, and what people think about not just the issue of homosexuality, but even more recently of the whole question of transgenderism, and other expressions of sexual relations.

It's as though, if you define yourself, take a stance one way or the other on that issue, that you're immediately regarded as beyond the veil.

If we, as evangelical Christians, are to have our views shaped by scripture, then scripture is unequivocal in what it has to say about deviations from God's pattern,

God's standard for how we understand our sexuality, and how we relate to members of the opposite sex, and if we are submitting to the words, then we accept the fact that not just those who engage in homosexual practices, but those who engage in other forms of sexual distortion, in light of scripture's teaching, are bringing themselves under God's displeasure and the consequences that will flow from that.

It's increasingly the case that those who find themselves having access to the media as Christians need to be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves in the way that they address the issue.

I think there's a strong case for being cautious in the way that we express ourselves in public places, not out of fear of standing up for the truth, but in order to not allow the world to set the agenda for us.

The fact that certainly in British churches, and I think to some degree in U .S.

churches as well, the church has allowed itself to be backed into a corner over these issues, so that in the eyes of the watching world the gospel ultimately hinges on what your view of homosexuality is.

That's what people are looking at as far as the world is concerned. So in the case of some of the broader denominations that would have a mixture of people of evangelical conviction, but also those who are more liberal in theology, many of those churches are being brought to the point of schism, and it's over this particular issue.

And the irony of that is that there were far bigger issues at stake further down the line in the history of these churches, the authority of scripture, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, cardinal doctrines on which our faith stands are false, and yet evangelicals were happy to turn a blind eye to those issues and not see those as watersheds that would cause them to leave the church, break fellowship with the church, but rather live with them in the church.

But now that it's come to the question of gay ordination or gay marriage, that's become the issue.

We say, well, if our church crosses that line, then we will break fellowship with our church, we will break away and form new churches.

That actually is a serious thing to allow that issue to be the one that breaks fellowship, because the issue of the deity of Christ, the issue of the authority of scripture, the issue of the bodily resurrection of Christ and other things like that are, in terms of the priority of doctrine that I was mentioning a few moments ago, are infinitely greater, and yet sadly too many evangelical men were prepared to turn a blind eye to those distortions.

There are a number of Christian authors who have written very helpfully on the issues of homosexuality.

They do so in a way that doesn't in any way compromise the teachings of Scripture. Someone like Sam Albrey in the

UK who has written a very helpful book as a primer for people who perhaps don't read very much of it, and it just introduces them to that subject in a helpful way.

So it clearly represents the teaching of Scripture, but at the same time it does so in a way that recognizes that just as Jesus was the friend of sinners and reached out to people who were shocked by the fact that Jesus was prepared to reach out to them, that it's our

Christian responsibility to reach out with the gospel to those in every community, including the gay community as well, to see them brought face -to -face with their needs as sinners, and the fact that they are sinners is bigger than the fact that they are gay in their orientation and practice, see their need, but also see that the answer to that need is the same for any sinner, is the

Lord Jesus Christ. And wouldn't you say that to soften the severity of that sin is not doing anybody any favors?

I mean we are not to make any kind of wickedness more palatable for someone to continue in their sin, and one of the things that disturbs me about this issue is that I have always been taught, as long as I've been a born -again believer, that if somebody is teaching you something that the church has never believed in 2 ,000 years of its history, it is with certainty a false teaching.

And one of the things that seems to be taught today is that homosexuality is a condition that is benign or neutral unless you actually physically participate in it, and that the desires and so on have no sinful import necessarily.

But doesn't the scriptures, or don't the scriptures teach that even the burning in their hearts for one another was a sign of the judgment against them?

I think if you look at a book like the one that Rosaria Butterfield wrote,

The Secret Thoughts of an Almighty Convert... Yes, I've interviewed her, yes. That gives you a very helpful insight into the struggles that go on in the mind of someone who finds themselves in that lifestyle, and the way in which the gospel reaches them in that situation.

I think the significant thing about what Rosaria says in her book is the fact that Ken Smith, the pastor who spent so much time with her leading up to her conversion, took time to understand her, to listen to her, to address her as a person in the same way as the

Lord Jesus Christ made a point of relating to people not in some generic sense, but understanding in their individual conditions, with their individual propensities for sin, to address them in that way.

The danger is that we simply treat sin as a generic thing that is a kind of a label, rather than actually seeing the human dimensions of it.

I think Rosaria Butterfield's books are very helpful in terms of helping

Christians understand the Bible's teaching, and she is unequivocal on the way that she represents the

Bible's teaching on that issue, but more significantly, I think, in terms of helping

Christians to reach out courageously and lovingly to people in that situation with the gospel that is able to give them the new life that every sinner needs.

Yes, and during my conversations both on -air and off with Rosaria, as strongly as she wants people to reach out with love and compassion and patience to those practicing homosexual activity, just as the

Presbyterians and her community reached out to her, she still was very opposed to placating the people involved in that activity by giving them a delusion that they are a part of a community that is very little different from an ethnic group or a nationality, and treating them as if this is something that they are certainly unable to escape from for the rest of their lives, that the transforming power of the

Holy Spirit cannot transform them, so they must just remain or be satisfied with remaining with this state of mind, albeit chaste, and she's opposed to that kind of thinking in her writing and what she has said on my program.

In other words, that people shouldn't just wave the white flag and say, well, I know that I'm never going to be anything other than a homosexual,

I'll just remain chaste though, in order to honor and obey Christ. That seems to be a diluting of the power of the

Holy Ghost. Would you agree with that? I sort of would, Chris, to be honest, simply because, for example, we have quite a number of recovering addicts in our congregation and dealing with recovering addicts in our area, and in my limited experience of working with people from that particular group, it's clear that there are some people with alcohol and drug addiction problems who are brought to faith and who in a very special way are delivered from their addictions and from the desire that underlies those addictions.

There are actually significant numbers of people who come to faith who spend the rest of their life fighting the same addiction, the same temptation that would draw them into alcohol abuse or drug abuse, so that there are many different expressions of sin that involve deep desire and deep inclination, of which we are all called to repent and to deal with them, but it doesn't mean to say that those desires are miraculously removed from us.

Oh, I understand that. I understand that, but what I'm saying is that people will cave in and wave the white flag and say, there is no hope for change for me, so the only thing that I can hope to do is remain chaste.

That's what I'm talking about. People who will categorize themselves as a homosexual

Christian, something that's permanent in their lives, and it seems to me doubting what the

Holy Spirit can do to them. Yeah, certainly it would be wrong to say that there's no possibility of deliverance because there's many, many examples of that for people who come to faith from that community, from that background, but at the same time,

I would echo what I said, that there are also many people who have been brought to faith from a homosexual background who do find themselves wrestling with those temptations and propensities.

Yes, I understand that we are sinners until we enter glory. And the Apostle Paul speaks of that, and the writer to the

Hebrews speaks of besetting sins that are sins that snap at our heels and have an influence in our hearts until the day that we are brought to glory.

I think what I want to guard against is the idea that there's some kind of miraculous deliverance that will come to every

Christian, whether it be who's been rescued from an addiction background of alcohol abuse or drug abuse or from a homosexual lifestyle or from addiction to pornography or addiction to serial adultery, that all those issues have to do with perversions within or distortions within the deep desires of the human heart, where the

Holy Spirit does work and calls us to faith and to fight those desires with the help that He gives through His Word.

Yes, I would agree with you very much on that. I guess my main complaint that I'm trying to set forth is the fact that there are many who are saying, it's okay, there's nothing wrong with having these desires and they should remain content in the fact that they will always have them as long as they're chaste.

That's really what my point is. I agree with that, Chris. And we're going to our final break right now.

It's going to be a briefer one than normal, but if you'd like to join us on the air, now is the time to do so before we run out of time.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com is our address. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, and we are now in our final 25 minutes or so of our interview with Mark Johnston, a pastor of the

Bethel Presbyterian Church in Cardiff, Wales. We are discussing his book, You in Your Small Corner, the

Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity. And our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. If you have a question, and please give us at least your first name, city and state and country of residence if you're outside the

USA, we have Daniel in Bakersfield, California, who says,

My question for Mark Johnston is, with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation coming up, many believe that the

Roman Catholic Church and Protestants should unify under the banner of ecumenism. I've heard liberal denominations claim that we have nothing to protest anymore.

How do we answer people who make such claims? And he has a second question that I'll go to after you address that.

Well, in fact, it's not even only sadly liberal churches that are saying the

Reformation is over. There are professedly conservative churches and denominations making the same claim because of the fact that Roman Catholics share our abhorrence to abortion and same -sex marriage and things like that.

But if you could comment. The crunch issue that brought division between Rome and the churches that emerged from the

Protestant churches was very much the issue of justification by faith alone.

And the most recent re -articulations of official Catholic dogma in the most recent

Roman Catholic Catechism that's been published shows that there's been no change in Rome's view of how a person is justified.

That although they would talk about being justified by grace, they don't see it as being grace alone by faith alone in Christ alone.

But they still see grace that's infused through the sacraments.

They still see a place for good works in terms of obtaining the merit that is needed, the righteousness that's needed for acceptance with God.

And the fact that even when one of their leaders, a

Pope, dies, that the Roman Catholic Church at large is told to pray for his soul in purgatory shows exactly where the

Roman Catholic view of salvation lies, that it has no basis for assurance.

You cannot die with certainty. And because the issue of how we are accepted by God's pardon for our sins, reckoned righteousness, is of critical importance to our understanding of salvation, until there's a demonstrable change in the

Roman Catholic view, there can be no reunion between the

Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches until that's resolved. And Daniel in Bakersfield, California, his second question is very much like a question that we have from our listener in Slovenia, Joe in Slovenia, who says, what if any kinds of unity should we seek with individuals and faith traditions with whom we disagree on primary doctrinal positions?

And then also Daniel in Bakersfield says, where do we draw the line with churches we do not unify with?

So I mean, they're both basically asking for, I guess, a list of things that you would think are primary things that should be on a litmus test for our true biblical ecumenism with another group, and also those things that would say, if you do not accept these elements,

I'm sorry, you cannot cross over this wall to join us because you are still in the category of lost or apostate or false religion.

It would be arrogant of me as an individual to try and offer a list that would be the litmus test that we should be looking at.

I think it's wiser to say, let's look at the historic declarations of the truth that have emerged from the church over the centuries.

So I would point back to the Catholic creeds that have underpinned

Christianity, Orthodox Christianity through the Apostles' Creed, the

Miocene Creed, and recognize the way in which they capture for us the primary doctrines, the central doctrines.

I would then point to the confessions and catechisms that were produced, especially at the time of the

Reformation, whenever the issues of the relationship between Protestant churches and the

Roman Catholic Church were being thrashed out. The theological backdrop to the debates of the 16th and 17th centuries were very much understanding salvation, understanding the nature of the church, understanding the nature of the sacraments, understanding the nature of worship.

So I would be pointing people to what is summarized in the

Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, which has been adopted and modified by those in Baptist churches with the

London Confession, the Philadelphia Confession, the 1689

Confession, and adopted by those in congregational churches by the Savoy Declaration, as well as the

Continental Equivalents, the Belgian Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort.

There's a range of historic theological documents that have been recognized not just by individuals but more significantly recognized by churches.

I think the challenge then comes over how individual churches and denominations uphold those confessional statements.

And you need to start asking the question, do they uphold what it teaches about justification?

Do they uphold what it teaches about the perseverance of God's people, those who are truly

God's people to the end? There's a range of truths that relate to how we understand salvation and the security that we have in that salvation, that many churches pay lip service to them but in practice have deviated from them.

I think there's a strong case for saying that even where we encounter churches that have drifted from their own confessional mirrorings, whereas we can draw the line at full -blown fellowship with them, nevertheless there's a place for discussion and dialogue with them because if there's no attempt to talk with them and bring them back to Scripture and bring them back often to the confessional statements of their own denominations, that they can be helped to see things more clearly because too often the reason that churches drift is because they first of all ignore

Scripture and then as a consequence of that they end up ignoring their own church's basis of faith.

Well thank you both of you, Joe in Slovenia and Daniel in Bakersfield, California for your questions, and you are both getting a free copy of this book we have been addressing,

You in Your Small Corner, the Elusive Dream of Evangelical Unity by our guest Pastor Mark G.

Johnston, compliments of Christian -focused publications in the United Kingdom and also compliments of cvbbs .com,

cv for Crumble and Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com, who will be shipping those books out to you at no cost to you and at no cost to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and we thank

Todd and Patty Jennings of cvbbs .com for being faithful supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says,

I hear from some Reformed scholars, pastors, and evangelists that Arminianism is a false gospel.

I hear from others who are also Reformed that say although Arminianism is deeply flawed that it has enough of the true gospel within its proclamation that they could be considered our brothers in Christ.

How do you address this issue? In terms of Arminianism's attempt to represent the teachings of Scripture, I would say they misrepresent the teaching of Scripture, that they actually ignore what the

Bible says about human nature and the extent to which it's been affected by sin.

They fail to recognize that our will is not free, that we don't have the ability in and of ourselves to choose for God, because the

Scriptures teach plainly that we are God's enemies by nature, and as Martin Luther famously described it in his commentary in the book of Galatians, our will is in bondage, that we left our own devices, we are lost.

But that said, you can't argue with the fact that people like John and Charles Wesley, who were card -carrying

Arminians, were certainly used in the 18th century in the forefront of a revival that affected not only the

British Isles but also the United States significantly. And of course there was the well -known clash between Whitefield and the

Wesleys over this particular issue, because the Wesleys challenged

Whitefield's Calvinistic theology, and Whitefield's response was to ask

John Wesley how he prayed, and as he listened to his response, when he admitted that he asked

God to open people's eyes and ask God to bring people to a response to the faith, he said,

I may not agree with the way you articulate your theology, but if your prayers represent what you actually believe in terms of your view of God and salvation, then

I cannot argue with that. And he wasn't endorsing his views, but he was saying that the

Wesley brothers were inconsistent Arminians in terms of how they worked out their theology, and it was reflected in their prayer life.

I think that sometimes the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism has become polarizing in the wrong sense, and we as Calvinists haven't always done our best to bring our

Arminian friends back to Scripture to enable them to see from the Bible that it wasn't

John Calvin that first taught these views. Actually, these views are deeply rooted in the teachings of Scripture itself.

Yes, and George Whitefield actually requested, before he died, that John Wesley preach at his funeral, and he did.

That's correct. And one thing that seems to be not very well known amongst

Reformed people is that there was a deep friendship and great ecumenism between John Gill, the predecessor of Charles Spurgeon at the

Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, with a

Seventh -day Baptist pastor, Samuel Stennett. Samuel Stennett was a hymn writer as well.

Although they were both Calvinists, even though they disagreed on the day of the

Sabbath, not only did they have a great friendship, they also exchanged pulpits, and their disagreements on the day of the

Sabbath actually aided in their ability to exchange pulpits. And Samuel Stennett was also one of those who preached at the funeral of John Gill.

I actually have a printed copy of the sermon that Samuel Stennett preached at John Gill's funeral.

So we should learn lessons from the past, from these men that many of us uphold as heroes, and we want to follow their teaching, but we sometimes overlook some of the compassion and love and patience and tolerance that they had.

Yeah. And I want to make sure that before we run out of time that you have several minutes uninterrupted to basically unburden your heart and give our listeners what you most want etched on their hearts and minds.

You know, just going back to the theme that we've been talking about this evening, the passion that I have had over the years for ecumenism in the biblical sense of the word, where those who are faithful Christians and churches that are faithful to Scripture should seek to cultivate that core unity that we have in Christ, it brings us right to the heart of the doctrine of the church as it's presented to us in the

Bible. The Apostle Paul writes the Ephesians, a letter that was addressed to a church that was sadly divided because of converts from a

Jewish background and converts from a Gentile background who had brought the baggage of their past into the church and were maintaining the divisions of their past within the confines of the congregations there in Ephesus.

Paul brings it face -to -face with what it means to be part of the church and what the church is by nature, and makes an amazing statement in Ephesians 3 verse 10 of the church being the stage, the theater upon which

God has chosen to display his multi -colored wisdom. And that seems a strange thing to us because we look at churches and they seem to be torn apart by strife, they seem to be filled with imperfections and failures, and yet God still uses the church as the theater for his multi -colored wisdom worked out in salvation, lives being transformed, communities being restored.

And I think it's for that reason that Paul in the letter to Ephesians especially has so much to say about the importance of the church and the importance of maintaining the unity of the church.

Chapter 4 verse 3 he says that we are to spare no effort to preserve the unity of the

Spirit in the bond of peace. He doesn't talk about manufacturing unity, he doesn't talk about our duty being to create that unity.

If we're in Christ, if we're joined to Christ, then by definition we're joined to all his blood -bought people in our own local church community, but also to all his blood -bought people through the world and throughout the ages.

I think the other thing that brought it home to me was just reflecting upon the high priestly prayer that Jesus prayed on the eve of his arrest and crucifixion, recorded there in John chapter 17, that when it comes, it is a prayer that falls into three parts.

He prays for himself as he faces the ordeal of the cross, that God would be glorified through that. He prays for the apostles as he prepares them to to go out into the world to fulfill the calling that he had given to them very testament to him.

But then he closes the prayer with a section where he prays for all those who will believe in him through the apostolic message and not once but twice he says,

Father I pray that they may be one even as we are one. Then he attaches this reason that the world may see that unity and believe that you would have sent me.

Really that's an indication that the credibility of the gospel is deeply bound up with the unity of the church and the efforts of God's people to maintain that unity and the bond of peace.

That when the watching world sees a church in turmoil because it's in conflict with itself, then it begins to question the gospel that we claim to believe.

But where we seek to labor in the unity of the faith and the unity that we have in the gospel and work out that fellowship that we have in Christ and that becomes a huge testimony.

We talked earlier on this evening about church distinctives. The bible only ever mentions one distinctive that the church must have and it's

Jesus tells the disciples in the upper room, by this shall all men know that you are my disciples by your love one for the other.

If we as the church could invest as much effort and energy into cultivating love between faithful churches and true believers instead of the amount of time and effort we invest into accentuating our differences, then

I think our testimony to the world would be enhanced. Now in about a minute's time if you could answer

Mike from Aberystwyth Wales who we mentioned earlier, if you could answer his question is, do you see a difference between the

U .S. and the U .K. over Reformation distinctives? I think the

U .S. has ironically has got a greater awareness of the

Reformation distinctives and you see that in a multitude of ways not just in particular denominations but in organizations like the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Ligonier, others as well.

I think in the U .K. those distinctives have somewhat been blurred and that's perhaps because Reformed churches are very much in the minority in the

U .K. But my desire,

Mike's desire as well and others like us is very much to try and recover and promote

Reformed Christianity in the U .K. as much as we see it happening elsewhere in the U .S. I want to remind our listeners that the website to register for the

U .S. Ministers Conference being held by the Banner of Truth is BannerofTruth .org.

Click on events and then click on U .S. Ministers Conference. The website for the

Bethel Presbyterian Church of Cardiff, Wales is BethelPCR .org

.UK. BethelPCR .org .UK.

Thank you so much, Pastor Johnston. I look forward to having you back on the program soon and I look forward to or sharing fellowship with you,

I should say, in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania for the Banner of Truth Ministers Conference. I look forward to that, too.

Thank you for having me on your show. Oh, my pleasure, brother. And I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in with questions.

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. Please keep Iron Radio in your prayers.