April 24, 2025 Show with Dr. William R. Downing on “Reflections on the Sovereign Grace Movement Among Baptists”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse 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 two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 24th day of April 2025.

And let me give my listeners today a fair warning that if you indeed hear me fall asleep and begin to snore during the interview, it has nothing to do with my guest being boring. It's because I had zero hours or even minutes of sleep last night.

I had a horrible case of insomnia, so I am running right now on a low battery mentally and physically, and I don't think that I will actually fall asleep during a live interview. This never happened, although it used to happen with my co-host Buzz almost every time we did a program together.

I would actually have to throw a book at him across the room to wake him up because he would be snoring on the air. But today I'm so excited to have a returning guest on the program. Amongst many sovereign grace-believing Baptists, my guest today is a hero and legend.

His name is Dr. William R. Downing, who received the call to gospel ministry in 1963, a year after I was born. He pastored six different churches and in 1994 became founding pastor of Sovereign Grace Baptist Church of Silicon Valley, California, which is home of the Pacific Institute of Religious Studies and Sovereign Grace Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dr. Downing served there as director and president until his retirement from pastoral ministry in 2021. Dr. Downing is the author of 14 books, and his academic degrees include an MA in education, a THM, a PhD in New Testament Studies, and an honorary DD.

And today we're going to be discussing reflections on the sovereign grace movement among Baptists over the decades from a retired pastor. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. William R. Downing.

Thank you, Brother Ardson. It's a privilege to be here.

Well, I would like you, because of the fact that it's been a while since you've been on the program—it's been over seven years since you've been on the program—so I would like you to give a summary again, even though you've done this before, of your salvation testimony and your discovery and coming to embrace and love the doctrines of sovereign grace.

All right. I'll be very candid and not dramatic, but candid in my answer. I made my decision for Christ when I was 10 years of age. I was urged to go forward in the church and repeat a prayer, and my family was very pushing me to do this.

And it took about a year, and I finally did on a Sunday night. And until the time of my conversion 10 years later, when I was almost 21, I never doubted my salvation. And the reason I never doubted my salvation is that we were also taught the doctrine of the carnal Christian.

So if you did fall into sin and sin got the best of you, you simply rededicated your life and went on, never dreaming or searching out that the Word of God says nothing about a doctrine of repeated dedications.

So I went on this way through my school years, high school, and I worked as a commercial deep-sea diver for two years, and then in construction work to buy more equipment and get ready. Diving was my life.

Now, exactly what were your duties as a deep-sea diver back then? What was the realm in which you were doing that? I was doing some salvage diving, and then I worked several seasons as a commercial abalone diver.

And what would be the first one that you mentioned? What does that even mean, salvage diver? Picking up objects that people had lost under the water. Oh, okay. Exciting, to say the very least. And I had some harrowing experiences in my teenage years just as a skin diver.

And I looked a great white in the eyes for about 15, 20 seconds. And all of that came back the night I was converted, that there were several times I should have died, should have been ill, perhaps. Well, one Sunday night in October of 1961, I went forward in church.

I'd been under a terrible state of depression for close to a year, and it was a general state of depression. And I was working full time. I was doing well. I was a single man. I didn't date or so. I had my own life.

I hunted and fished and dived. Those were my interests. And I became very, very depressed. And twice, I came to the point of taking my own life. And that's terrible for a man who's 20 years of age, that life has no real meaning to it.

So did you actually attempt suicide? I put a revolver 38 special to my head and pulled back the hammer. Wow. A pound and a half of pressure, and I would have been in eternity, and I would put it down.

Very frustrating. The last month and a half or so of that time, it narrowed down to a spiritual depression. And I find myself opposed to God and everything that God was. I was attending a fundamentalist church.

I was under strong preaching. It was having an effect in my life. So I went forward in church that night, and the pastor said, Bill, why are you coming? And I said, to move my membership to this church and to rededicate my life.

Everybody was weeping and happy. They'd been praying for me. They needed a song leader and a high school college-age teacher, and I ended up being that in about two or three months. At any rate, I rededicated my life, whatever that means.

They voted me into membership of the church, and I walked outside the building. We met in a rented building, church of about, oh, I'd said 100, 120, or 30 congregation. And I walked outside, and I looked up at the sky, and the fog was rolling in off the ocean.

And this is what happened. I said, okay, God, now you can get off my back. I've done everything I can. I just, I mean, that's the way it was. I could live as a carnal Christian, and that fulfilled the bottom line.

And I had lived like that for 10 years, really carnal. And so I got in my truck and drove home, and it was the Sunday night, and I stopped by the dispatch shack to see the schedule for my truck in the morning.

We were pouring missile sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and they had missile silos. There are a lot of concrete pouring. So I was saving money up to get a diving boat. At any rate, I went home. I couldn't sleep.

I got out of bed. I paced back and forth in the bedroom floor. I was living by myself, watching my parents' home. They had moved away for a few months. So I could not sleep. I was just miserable. And finally, I said to God, this must be settled tonight.

I can't go on. This, once and for all, we have to settle this. And I was in a state of confusion and just feeling absolutely miserable. Well, I ended up with my face on the floor, the cold linoleum floor, by the way.

And I preach once a month now at a mission in Salinas, California, and they have the same design on their floor, tile floor, as I had in my bedroom. And I'm reminded of that every time I go in there to preach.

I look at that and it causes me to remember that terrible night. Well, about two or three in the morning, I said, if you're going to kill me, just do it and get it over with. And all I can say is, this was the worst night of my life.

And I was brought utterly to the end of myself. And I didn't mean to say what I meant until I had said it. And I said, if you're not going to kill me, then from here on out, I will live for you. And there was a complete surrender and submission.

And I fell into bed and fell fast asleep, got a couple of hours sleep and went to work. And when I walked into the dispatch shack to sign in that morning and punch the time clock, the foreman looked up at me and slammed his chair into the wall and jumped up and said, what in the world's happened to you?

I had not said a word. Were you with a woman last night? Of course, he asked it in different terms, very vulgar terms. I looked at him and said, no. And God had saved me. And I was a different person.

And I was shocked. I never doubted my salvation in my days of being a carnal Christian, quote unquote. But there I was. And before the end of that day, everybody knew that Bill got religion. But at the end of the day, I was washing out my truck after my final load.

And I stood there at the back of the truck. And I remember saying to myself, God has done something to me. And that's my first real thought of what had taken place. Before I'd been taught, you do this, you do that, you do something else.

And God responds with, born again, you know, that type of thing. It was very shoddy theology. And by the end of the month, I started reading my New Testament through. And we had no television in the house.

That was good. And so at night, I would spend two or three hours reading. And I was reading the New Testament through. And this was the beginning of the new year. And I came to Ephesians chapter one. And I read Ephesians chapter one.

I saw the doctrine of election. And I said, if he loved me then, he loves me now. And it was through the doctrine of election that I had a real scriptural self, unmistakable assurance of my salvation.

And I saw everything in the hands of God. Well, I became the song leader of the church, became the high school college age teacher. One of my students was in the Air Force. And he is the missionary today, 50-some years later in Belgium.

He was my first real Christian friend. At any rate, two years studying and so forth, I would go out in the evening or afternoon. It was a 19-mile drive to the ocean south. And there was a place there called Halama Beach.

And I would go to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. And I would open my Bible and read. And I would become so emotional that I would just weep and just wrinkle the pages of my Bible just because I had a full heart and I could feed upon the Word of God.

And I called it mingling my tears with the dew of heaven. And those were my first spiritual experiences. Everything was new. Everything was different. And of course, my parents were gone. They moved back a few months later.

And that's the way it was for about two years. I began to read, study. I was teaching. The first book we were going through was Arthur Pink's Commentary on Exodus. So that was a fine start. Then something happened to me that was really troubling.

It was different. I couldn't pray. And I tried for a whole week to pray, and I couldn't pray. So I went to my pastor on a Sunday afternoon, and I told him I had a spiritual problem. I needed to come and talk to him.

He said, what's wrong, Bill? And I said, I can't pray. How long has this been going on? I said, well, for four days. He said, what do you think is wrong? And I said, I think God's calling me to go to Bible school.

And that meant giving up diving. It meant the whole life I had planned. It meant the money I had saved. This was the great shift in my life. He said, I think God's called you to preach. And that scared me to death.

Going to Bible school, being a student of the Word of God, I could only see one step ahead. But being called to preach? No. Well, he put me on the pulpit a couple of weeks later, and the report I got was I preached too long and I made everyone mad.

So I guess that was my call to the ministry. But he loved me. He was a dear man and later left the Fundamentalist and went to the Primitive Baptist. But here I was. So a few months later, he signed a paper for me so I could get to Bible college.

And in those days, you couldn't have any facial hair. But I had a mustache. And so they gave me a special dispensation. And I got to go to a Fundamentalist Bible college with a mustache.

Was that Bob Jones?

One of those things. And I got to college, and I had been there about two weeks before classes started. And I knew nothing about higher education or anything except what I had personally studied in the Scriptures for myself.

And I went to a meeting one night. There were 20-some churches in the area, and every church wanted to get as many students as it could because they did all the visitation work and all the other things.

And there was an elderly gentleman that came down and sat in the pew a few feet over from me and wearing thick glasses, white hair, and spoke with a heavy Irish baroque. And the pastor got up and said, Dr. Conley is with us tonight.

And he says, Dr. Conley, would you stand and lead us in prayer? Well, I was from a small church on the West Coast. I had really only heard 10 or 12 men pray in my whole life that were, you know, halfway mature Christians.

Dr. Conley was a professor of theology at the college. He lifted us up into the face of God. I had never in my life heard a prayer like that. He became my mentor for seven years. And later when they fired him for believing and teaching the doctrines of grace, we followed him to Texas at his invitation.

And I went to the school that he had started in Houston, Texas College of Theology. It used to be the Bible Institute of Texas, Texas College of Theology. And I finished my work there and then became a professor for several years.

But certain things happened that changed my life drastically. It was an awesome thing. But I became, in a sense, a Calvinist, a believer in the grace of God from my very, very conversion. My father, of course, he went to Biola for a year in the 1950s, and he was still quite an Arminian and a devotee of Schofield.

And I came back after he was voted out of the church under discipline. He had come to the doctrines of grace through the books that I gave him. And he was an excellent Bible teacher and always my mentor at home, you know.

And they disciplined him out of the church, and the charge was teaching and embracing a humanistic 16th century philosophy called Calvinism. So he gathered two or three families together. They called me his pastor.

So when I graduated from Bible school, my first pastorate was in my hometown and with my family in a rented building. And we had a tremendous relationship, my father and I. And I have to say this, I think you'll appreciate it.

One night, I was having an intense discussion with my dad, and I still have a couple of his Bibles here. And everything in that Bible from Genesis 1 -1 to Revelation 22 -21, I think, is underlined in about three different colors.

But he was an astute student of the Word of God, and I was giving my arguments on a certain issue, and he laughed at me. And I went into a state of shock. I said, Dad, I said, you're about the most serious Christian I've ever met.

I said, you've never laughed at the Word of God. He looked at me and smiled, and he said, Bill, if you look back at what you just quoted to me, you see you're quoting Schofield's footnotes, not the Word of God.

That was the beginning of my leaving Schofield and getting another Bible. But things like this, very, very strange. But I went back to school after I got married. I needed the languages. My first year in the ministry, knowing I needed the languages, I taught myself Greek and Hebrew enough to read them.

And I would spend seven or eight hours on a single text, just looking up everything I could with what tools I had. But I got married, went back to school to go to graduate school that they were just starting, a two-year graduate school to take Greek and Hebrew.

I lasted six months. They put my church off limits. I had a church of students, and they fired Dr. Conley. So, we went to Texas, and I spent several years there as a professor, came back to California, had a call to the Sacramento area to be the head of a faculty, and I taught there for quite a few years and pastored a church, and then came to the Bay Area in 1974 and have been here in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since with pastoring two churches.

Now, there's sort of a strange situation.

Now, was that Bible College that you were attending that wouldn't allow facial hair, and they gave you a pass on the mustache for some reason, and also fired Brother Conley? Was that Bob Jones?

No, that was Baptist Bible College, Springfield, Missouri.

Oh, okay.

And they did have some Calvinists on the faculty, but they were not that outspoken. But Dr. Conley took me under his wing, as it were, and his son—his son just passed away a few years ago. He had Parkinson's disease and died at the age of 72, 73, and he pastored quite a church in Southern California, and he was a good friend likewise.

He taught at Pacific Coast West Baptist Bible College, and so the family's had a tremendous influence in my life.

Well, when we return from our first commercial break, we are going to really dive into Brother Downing's reflections on the Sovereign Grace Movement amongst Baptists over the decades. He has been a Christian, and even since he has been called into the gospel ministry in 1963, we're going to hear as much of that as we have time to discuss.

And if you have a question for him, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with Dr. William R. Downing, and he has been a preacher of sovereign grace for many, many years, dating back to his call to the gospel ministry in 1963, and he just recently retired from pastoral ministry.

But I wanted to inform our listeners of what you're doing for shut-ins and people who are incapable of physically going to church right.

Now. Yes, we joined another church pastored by a friend of mine. He is a disabled Vietnam veteran and been a good friend of mine for over 50 years, and he began a church of older people. The church they were members of was a rather large church here in the Bay Area, and the church property and building were sold, and they were sort of orphaned.

Many of them were shut-ins. So several years later now, most of them are shut-ins, and so my wife and I joined with them, and I preach one Sunday a month or more for them over the computer. We use the Zoom program.

It works out well, and when we have the Lord's Supper, we get together when we're able to and meet at a Chinese restaurant and have a meal and fellowship and observe the Lord's Supper, and they're very kind to us.

But it's a good ministry, and it enables us to minister to people Bible studies and preaching that otherwise would be limited perhaps to general radio ministries where they would be one of many, and here we're able to have discussions in Bible studies and take personal issues and questions and deal with people on a personal basis, and it's been very good.

I've been very pleased with that and thankful for it, and we have people scattered over the United States, families here and there, and that are sustained with no doctrinally sound church near them. They're able to listen in and sometimes to partake of the Bible studies and so forth, and it's been a very good ministry.

We've been members there for close to three years now. Praise God, and tell us about some of the.

Published works that have been brought into print, that were written by you, that have been brought into print by our dear friends at First Love Publications, First Love Ministries, which is a ministry founded by our mutual friend, Pastor Joe Jakowicz, who's a Jewish believer and a Reformed Baptist, and he is pastoring Christ's Bible Church, and I know that the mailing address is in Dublin, California, but I can't remember right now the name of the city where the church is.

Pleasanton. That's right, Pleasanton. By the way, I just want to throw out his website here, ChristBibleChurch .org, but they have First Love Publishing, and they have brought into print some of your works.

Why don't you tell our listeners about some of them?

All right. First Love Ministries is First Love missions, publications, and radio. They took over many things from family radio. In fact, Pastor Jakowicz used to work at family radio, and two or three of the men that worked at family radio are now with his work, and I'm preaching on there every evening about six o 'clock, I think, and they put us on.

It has a tremendous ministry all over. And this program, Iron Shirt, Iron Radio, is live-streamed daily on First Love Radio. Really? Yes. Okay. Fine. Getting a hearing, and Pastor Joe and I have been friends for about 40 years.

Wow. It's been a long time. We were both very young men. I'm 84 now, and I had a stroke when I was 81. That led to my resignation and retirement that I spent several days in the hospital, and then I had a second stroke and wrecked my truck, and I blacked out on the way home from an appointment.

And then the third stroke, I lost the sight in my right eye. Wow. So, I guess I'm winding down. But at this point, I've written 26 books.

Wow. So, I was definitely short by 12 when I was reading your bio.

Yes. Well, yes, I've had two since I had the stroke where I lost my sight and one eye. Both of them are systematic theology books that I wrote for First Love Ministries, and they were written for pastors in third-world countries.

So, one is an introduction to theology. The other is a work of about, well, it's well over 300 pages long on systematic theology. It's still not what I would like. I would like something of about five or six hundred pages long.

We have a theological propitutic, a Greek word meaning a basic introduction, where it deals with the five branches of theology. That's 650 pages. If all of my books have been published by lulu .com, L-U-L-U dot com, and they're an instant printing company, and they print everything.

So, if you call that up, no telling what might be advertised. But I have 26 books on there, various books on various subjects. And we have 14 textbooks that are on there that we used in our in-house seminary when I was pastoring.

I have a first-year Greek book, a first-year Hebrew book. I have a book entitled An Exegetical Handbook for Biblical Studies, giving the various constructions, emphatic and so forth, of both Greek and Hebrew.

And it's meant to take its place on your desk. So, when you come up with something that is interesting or unusual, word order, or other things, you can look it up and study it. Very necessary to have a work like that.

And that's from my own experience. I have a five-volume set. Each volume is over 400 pages long on a survey of the Bible. And we have books on church history, books on the history of revival, several theology books, and other works that we've been able to write.

The way my eyesight is, right now, I'm on five types of medication, and three of them make me depressed and sleepy. So, I have a difficult time. I'm sort of in a slight fog, but I'm still able to preach once in a while with pauses that are a little long, but I'm able to preach and able to study fairly well.

And I'm thankful for that. I hope to remain active until the Lord takes me. But it's been interesting. But we have 26 books. Some of our books you can find on Amazon and just put down books by W .R. Downing, and they usually have seven or eight of the books on that in their book list with a short description.

But if people want and are concerned about it, they want to contact me, I can give them some help in that way. I don't know if you're going to put my address, just my email address. Thank you. My email address.

The old email address was pastordowningatsgbc .org. That's Sovereign Grace Baptist Church, our old church, and some people haven't changed that. It still comes up.

Including me.

Some confusion. Yes. But right now it's d-r-w-r-d-o-w-n-i-n-g at gmail .com. And we get out quite a few books, and I'm able to recommend them, discuss them, and so forth. And it's been a ministry that I've always loved because many of these works are not available by usual publishing companies and whatnot.

But I've tried to make things available for the pastor and for the Bible.

Student. So, for what it's worth. Yes. And of course, as we said earlier, some of Dr. Downing's books are available for free, as are all the books that are published by First Love Publications. And if you want to find out more about those books and many other books that they publish that are free, they never charge a penny, you can go to firstloveministries .org forward slash shop,.

S-H-O-P. That's firstloveministries .org forward slash shop. And you should be pleased to know, Dr. Downing, that ever since I began having my pastor's luncheons, which I have twice a year here in Pennsylvania, I started doing them in New York, and then after relocating to Pennsylvania, been having them here twice a year.

Every time I host these pastor's luncheons, Tom Smith, who is the Virginia representative of First Love Ministries, makes the long drive to Pennsylvania and sets up a book table and gives away free books.

And that's in addition to many other Christian publishers who donate books to give away for free.

Oh, that's wonderful.

Yeah, praise God. And once in a while, once in a blue moon, Joe Jacobs himself will show up at these luncheons. He'll come all the way from California on occasion. But I want to hear something about the circles of sovereign grace, Calvinistic-believing Baptists that you began to share fellowship with and learn from and so on in the early days of your ministry, and perhaps that branched out into other groups also declaring the doctrines of sovereign grace.

So, tell us about that.

All right. I found out when I left the Midwest and went down to Houston that sovereign grace Baptist preachers have always existed in the South, stronger than the North. And the Reformed Baptist movement in the North started out in the 60s and very much blessed some great men and great preachers came out of that.

I met an entirely different group when I went to the South, and we would have Bible conferences. I met and became good friends with Rolf Barnard. And with L .R. Shelton, Jr. And he's the one that started the work in Florida.

Yes, he started Mountain Zion Bible Church, but also started Chapel Library, which blesses thousands of Christians globally with the very inexpensive but very well done pamphlets and occasionally even full-length books.

But most of the time, they're tracts or pamphlets or booklets. And chapellibrary .org is their website for those of you listening. And I had the honor after Pastor Shelton went home to be with the Lord, I had the honor of staying in his home for a couple of days with my former pastor when we were attending a Bible conference in Pensacola.

So, it was very kind of the folks at Mountain Zion Bible Church to let my pastor and I stay in the late Pastor Shelton's house.