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

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April 25, 2025

April 24, 2025 Dr. WILLIAM R. DOWNING,who received the call to Gospel ministryin 1963, pastored 6 different churches,& in 1994 became founding pastor ofSovereign Grace Baptist Church of SiliconValley, CA, home of the Pacific Institute ofReligious Studies & Sovereign GraceBaptist Theological Seminary, where heserved as Director & President until hisretirement from pastoral ministry in 2021.He […]

00:03: Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer
00:10: George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend
00:16: Jim Thorpe. It's iron sharpens iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,
00:23: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:31: Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:38: 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.
00:50: 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.
00:58: And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
01:10: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet
01:15: Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
01:21: This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 24th day of April 2025.
01:32: 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.
01:47: It's because I had zero hours or even minutes of sleep last night.
01:53: 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.
02:09: This never happened, although it used to happen with my co -host Buzz almost every time we did a program together.
02:16: 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.
02:21: But today, I'm so excited to have a returning guest on the program. Amongst many sovereign, grace -believing
02:31: Baptists, my guest today is a hero and legend.
02:37: His name is Dr. William R. Downing, who received the call to gospel ministry in 1963, a year after I was born.
02:47: 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
02:58: Pacific Institute of Religious Studies and Sovereign Grace Baptist Theological Seminary.
03:04: Dr. Downing served there as director and president until his retirement from pastoral ministry in 2021.
03:12: Dr. Downing is the author of 14 books, and his academic degrees include an
03:18: MA in education, a THM, a PhD in New Testament studies, and an honorary
03:25: DD. And today we're going to be discussing reflections on the
03:30: Sovereign Grace movement among Baptists over the decades from a retired pastor.
03:37: It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. William R.
03:43: Downing. Thank you, Brother Ardson. It's a privilege to be here.
03:50: 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.
04:19: All right. I'll be very candid and not dramatic, but candid in my answer.
04:30: 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
04:48: Sunday night. And until the time of my conversion, 10 years later, when
04:55: I was almost 21, I never doubted my salvation. And the reason
05:01: I never doubted my salvation is that we were also taught the doctrine of the carnal
05:07: 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
05:23: Word of God says nothing about a doctrine of repeated dedications.
05:29: 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.
05:47: Diving was my life. Now, exactly what were your duties as a deep -sea diver back then?
05:53: What was the realm in which you were doing that? I was doing some salvage diving, and then
06:00: I worked several seasons as a commercial abalone diver. What would be the the first one that you mentioned?
06:10: What does that even mean, a salvage diver? Picking up objects that people had lost under the water.
06:22: Exciting, to say the very least. And I had some harrowing experiences in my teenage years, just as a skin diver.
06:33: And I looked a great white in the eyes for about 15 -20 seconds, and all that came back the night
06:43: I was converted, that there were several times I should have died, should have been ill, perhaps.
06:50: Well, one Sunday night in October of 1961, I went forward in church.
06:56: I'd been under a terrible state of depression for close to a year, and it was a general state of depression.
07:06: And I was working full -time. I was doing well. I was a single man. I didn't date or so.
07:13: I had my own life. I hunted and fished and dived. Those were my interests.
07:20: And I became very, very depressed. And twice, I came to the point of taking my own life.
07:28: Wow. And that's terrible for a man who's 20 years of age. That life had no real meaning to it.
07:36: So did you actually attempt it? Did you actually attempt suicide? I put a revolver, 38 special, to my head and pulled back the hammer.
07:47: Wow. A pound and a half of pressure, and I would have been in eternity. And I would put it down.
07:53: Very frustrating. The last month and a half or so of that time, it narrowed down to a spiritual depression.
08:06: And I find myself opposed to God and everything that God was.
08:11: I was attending a fundamentalist church. I was under strong preaching. It was having an effect in my life.
08:19: So I went forward in church that night, and the pastor said,
08:25: Bill, why are you coming? And I said, to move my membership to this church and to rededicate my life.
08:34: 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.
08:47: At any rate, I rededicated my life, whatever that means.
08:53: They voted me into membership of the church, and I walked outside the building. We met in a rented building, church of about, oh,
09:01: I'd said 100, 120, or 130 congregation. And I walked outside, and I looked up at the sky, and the fog was rolling in off the ocean.
09:12: And this is what happened. I said, okay,
09:18: God, now you can get off my back. I've done everything I can. I mean, that's the way it was.
09:27: I could live as a carnal Christian, and that fulfilled the bottom line. And I had lived like that for 10 years, really carnal.
09:36: And so I got in my truck and drove home, and it was the
09:43: Sunday night, and I stopped by the dispatch shack to see the schedule for my truck in the morning.
09:49: We were pouring missile sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and they had missile silos.
09:57: There are a lot of concrete pouring. So I was saving money up to get a diving boat.
10:03: At any rate, I went home. I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed. I paced back and forth in the bedroom floor.
10:12: I was living by myself watching my parents' home. They had moved away for a few months.
10:19: So I could not sleep. I was just miserable. And finally,
10:25: I said to God, this must be settled tonight. I can't go on. This—once and for all, we have to settle this.
10:33: And I was in a state of confusion and just feeling absolutely miserable.
10:43: I ended up with my face on the floor, the cold linoleum floor, by the way.
10:49: 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.
11:03: 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.
11:11: 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.
11:18: And all I can say is this was the worst night of my life, and I was brought utterly to the end of myself.
11:29: 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,
11:40: 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.
11:54: 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?
12:08: I had not said a word. Were you with a woman last night? Of course, he asked it in different terms, very vulgar terms.
12:16: I looked at him and said, no. And God had saved me, and I was a different person, and I was shocked.
12:27: I never doubted my salvation in my days of being a carnal Christian, quote unquote.
12:32: But there I was, and before the end of that day, everybody knew that Bill got religion. But at the end of the day,
12:39: 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,
12:49: God has done something to me. And that's my first real thought of what had taken place.
12:59: Before I'd been taught, you do this, you do that, you do something else, and God responds with borning again you, you know, that type of thing.
13:09: It was very shoddy theology. And by the end of the month,
13:15: I started reading my New Testament through, and we had no television in the house.
13:21: That was good. And so at night, I would spend two or three hours reading, and I was reading the
13:26: New Testament through, and this was the beginning of the new year, and I came to Ephesians chapter 1, and I read
13:38: Ephesians chapter 1. I saw the doctrine of election, and I said, if he loved me then, he loves me now.
13:49: 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.
14:03: Well, I became the song leader of the church, became the high school college age teacher.
14:09: One of my students was in the Air Force, and he is a missionary today, 50 -some years later in Belgium.
14:19: He was my first real Christian friend. At any rate, two years studying and so forth,
14:28: 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
14:39: Halema Beach, and I would go to the cliffs overlooking the ocean, and I would open my
14:45: Bible and read, and I would become so emotional that I would just weep and just wrinkle the pages of my
14:53: 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.
15:07: Everything was new. Everything was different, and of course, my parents were gone.
15:14: They moved back a few months later, and that's the way it was for about two years.
15:21: I began to read, study. I was teaching. The first book we were going through was
15:29: Arthur Pink's Commentary on Exodus, so that was a fine start. Then something happened to me that was really troubling.
15:38: 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
15:47: Sunday afternoon, and I told him I had a spiritual problem. I needed to come and talk to him.
15:54: He said, what's wrong, Bill? And I said, I can't pray.
16:01: How long has this been going on? I said, well, for four days. He said, what do you think is wrong?
16:09: 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
16:15: I had planned. It meant the money I had saved. This was the great shift in my life.
16:22: 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
16:30: Word of God, I could only see one step ahead, but being called to preach?
16:36: No. Well, he put me on the pulpit a couple of weeks later, and the report I got was
16:42: I preached too long, and I made everyone mad. So I guess that was my call to the ministry.
16:49: But he loved me. He was a dear man, and later left the fundamentalist and went to the primitive
16:55: 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
17:18: 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
17:34: I had personally studied in the Scriptures for myself. And I went to a meeting one night.
17:42: There were twenty -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.
17:52: 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
18:07: Irish baroque. And the pastor got up and said, Dr. Conley is with us tonight.
18:14: And he says, Dr. Conley, would you stand and lead us in prayer? Well, I was from a small church on the
18:21: West Coast. I had really only heard 10 or 12 men pray in my whole life that were, you know, halfway mature
18:28: Christians. Dr. Conley was a professor of theology at the college.
18:34: He lifted us up into the face of God. I had never in my life heard a prayer like that.
18:45: 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.
19:05: 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.
19:16: But certain things happened that changed my life drastically.
19:24: It was an awesome thing. But I became, in a sense, a
19:29: Calvinist, a believer in the grace of God from my very conversion.
19:36: My father, of course, he went to Biola for a year in the 1950s, and he was still quite an
19:44: Arminian and a devotee of Schofield. And I came back after he was voted out of the church under discipline.
19:53: He had come to the doctrines of grace through the books that I gave him. And he was an excellent
20:01: 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
20:17: Calvinism. So, he gathered two or three families together. They called me his pastor.
20:23: So, when I graduated from Bible school, my first pastorate was in my hometown.
20:28: It was my family in a rented building. And we had a tremendous relationship, my father and I.
20:38: 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
20:49: Bibles here. And everything in that Bible from Genesis 1 -1 to Revelation 22 -21,
20:56: I think, is underlined in about three different colors. But he was an astute student of the
21:01: Word of God, and I was giving my arguments on a certain issue, and he laughed at me.
21:08: And I went into a state of shock. I said, Dad, I said, you're about the most serious
21:14: 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,
21:21: Bill, if you look back at what you just quoted to me, you see you're quoting
21:26: Schofield's footnotes, not the Word of God. That was the beginning of my leaving
21:33: Schofield and getting another Bible. But things like this, very, very strange.
21:39: But I went back to school after I got married. I needed the languages. My first year in the ministry, knowing
21:48: 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
22:00: 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
22:11: Greek and Hebrew. I lasted six months. They put my church off limits.
22:16: 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
22:28: 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
22:39: Bay Area in 1974 and have been here in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since with pastoring two churches.
22:50: 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
23:04: Brother Conley? Was that Bob Jones? No, that was
23:09: Baptist Bible College, Springfield, Missouri. Oh, okay. And they did have some
23:15: Calvinists on the faculty, but they were not that outspoken. But Dr.
23:22: Conley took me under his wing, as it were, and his son—his son just passed away a few years ago.
23:29: He had Parkinson's disease and died at the age of 72, 73, and he pastored quite a church in Southern California.
23:40: And he was a good friend, likewise. He taught at Pacific Coast West Baptist Bible College.
23:50: 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
24:07: Sovereign Grace Movement amongst Baptists over the decades. He has been a
24:14: 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.
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26:18: I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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33:06: 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.
33:31: 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.
33:45: Yes, we joined another church pastored by a friend of mine.
33:52: 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.
34:04: 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.
34:16: 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
34:33: Sunday a month or more for them over the computer. We use the
34:39: Zoom program. It works out well, and when we have the
34:44: Lord's Supper, we get together when we're able to and meet at a
34:51: Chinese restaurant and have a meal and fellowship and observe the Lord's Supper, and they're very kind to us.
34:59: But it's a good ministry, and it enables us to minister to people
35:07: 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.
35:34: I've been very pleased with that and thankful for it, and we have people scattered over the
35:41: United States, families here and there, and that are sustained with no doctrinally sound church near them.
35:51: They're able to listen in and sometimes to partake of the
35:57: Bible studies and so forth, and it's been a very good ministry. We've been members there for close to three years now.
36:08: 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,
36:33: Pastor Joe Jakowitz, who's a Jewish believer and a Reformed Baptist, and he is pastoring
36:41: 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.
37:01: Pleasanton. That's right, Pleasanton. By the way,
37:07: I just want to throw out his website here, christbiblechurch .org, but they have
37:15: First Love Publishing, and they have brought into print some of your works.
37:21: Why don't you tell our listeners about some of them? All right. First Love Ministries is
37:31: First Love missions, publications, and radio. They took over many things from family radio.
37:41: In fact, Pastor Jakowitz 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,
37:58: I think, and they put us on. It has a tremendous ministry all over.
38:04: And this program, Iron Shirt and Iron Radio, is live -streamed daily on First Love Radio.
38:11: Really? Yeah. Okay. Fine. Getting a hearing.
38:17: And Pastor Joe and I have been friends for about 40 years.
38:23: Wow. It's been a long time. We were both very young men. I'm 84 now, and I had a stroke when
38:35: I was 81. That led to my resignation and retirement that I spent several days in the hospital, and then
38:43: I had a second stroke and wrecked my truck, and I blacked out on the way home from an appointment.
38:54: And then the third stroke, I lost the sight in my right eye. Wow. So, I guess
39:01: I'm winding down. But at this point, I've written 26 books.
39:07: Wow. So, I was definitely short by 12 when I was reading your bio.
39:12: Yes. Well, yes, I've had two since I had the stroke where I lost my sight and one eye.
39:20: Both of them are systematic theology books that I wrote for First Love Ministries, and they were written for pastors in third -world countries.
39:30: 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.
39:42: It's still not what I would like. I would like something of about five or six hundred pages long.
39:50: We have a theological propitutic, a Greek word meaning a basic introduction, where it deals with the five branches of theology.
39:59: That's 650 pages. If all of my books have been published by Lulu .com,
40:11: L -U -L -U .com, and they're an instant printing company, and they print everything.
40:19: So, if you call that up, no telling, you know, what might be advertised.
40:26: But I have 26 books on there, various books on various subjects.
40:33: And we have 14 textbooks that are on there that we used in our in -house seminary when
40:42: I was pastoring. I have a first -year Greek book, a first -year Hebrew book.
40:48: I have a book entitled An Exegetical Handbook for Biblical Studies, giving the various constructions, emphatic and so forth, of both
40:59: 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, other things, you can look it up and study it.
41:16: Very necessary to have a work like that. And that's from my own experience.
41:22: I have a five -volume set. Each volume is over 400 pages long on a survey of the
41:29: 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.
41:47: The way my eyesight is, right now, I'm on five types of medication, and three of them make me depressed and sleepy.
41:58: 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.
42:16: And I'm thankful for that. I hope to remain active until the Lord takes me.
42:23: 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.
42:35: Downing, and they usually have seven or eight of the books on that in their book list with a short description.
42:47: But if people want and are concerned about it, they want to contact me,
42:53: 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.
43:07: Thank you, my email address. The old email address was pastordowningatsgbc .org.
43:17: That's Sovereign Grace Baptist Church, our old church, and some people haven't changed that.
43:23: It still comes up and creates some confusion. Yes, but right now it's d -r -w -r -d -o -w -n -i -n -g at gmail .com.
43:37: And we get out quite a few books, and I'm able to recommend them, discuss them, and so forth.
43:45: 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.
43:56: But I try to make things available for the pastor and for the Bible student, so for what it's worth.
44:05: 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.
44:21: 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
44:35: forward slash shop, S -H -O -P. That's firstloveministries .org
44:41: forward slash shop. And you should be pleased to know, Dr. Downing, that ever since I began having my pastor's luncheons, which
44:51: I have twice a year here in Pennsylvania, I started doing them in New York, and then after relocating to Pennsylvania, I've been having them here twice a year.
45:01: Every time I host these pastor's luncheons, Tom Smith, who is the
45:10: Virginia representative of First Love Ministries, makes the long drive to Pennsylvania and sets up a book table and gives away free books.
45:22: And that's in addition to many of the Christian publishers who donate books to give away for free.
45:30: So... Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, praise God. And once in a while, once in a blue moon,
45:36: Joe Jackowitz himself will show up at these luncheons. He'll come all the way from California on occasion.
45:44: But I want to hear something about the circles of sovereign grace,
45:54: 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.
46:21: So tell us about that. All right. I found out when
46:28: I left the Midwest and went down to Houston that sovereign grace
46:35: Baptist preachers have always existed in the South, stronger than the
46:41: North. And the Reformed Baptist movement in the North started out in the 60s, and very much blessed.
46:51: Some great men and great preachers came out of that. I met an entirely different group when
46:57: I went to the South, and we would have Bible conferences. I met and became good friends with Rolf Barnard.
47:06: Oh, yeah. And yes, and with L .R.
47:11: Shelton, Jr. Yeah. And he's the one that started the work in Florida.
47:18: Yes, he started Mountain Zion Bible Church, but also started
47:25: Chapel Library, which blesses thousands of Christians globally with the very inexpensive but very well done pamphlets, and occasionally even full -length books.
47:41: But most of the time, they're tracts or pamphlets or booklets. And chapellibrary .org
47:48: is their website for those of you listening. And I had the honor after Pastor Shelton went home to be with the
47:59: Lord, I had the honor of staying in his home for a couple of days with my former pastor when we were attending a
48:11: 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
48:24: Pastor Shelton's house. Yes, he was a dear man and had a love for the
48:34: Lord and had a vision. I met him at a Bible conference in Iowa, and then after the conference one year,
48:44: I drove up to Minnesota. I borrowed a car and drove up to Minnesota when he lived there before he moved to Pensacola, and I spent a week up there.
48:55: He had a bookstore, and we loved our books.
49:01: It was always my desire to have a library that I could walk into my library and pick up a book on any given subject, a good book, and I had it in my possession.
49:17: And I finally achieved that. I had a library of over 5 ,000 volumes, and part of it is now in Nepal, and the rest of them are boxed up to be shipped out to the mission field.
49:30: Now that I've retired, I simply don't have the room for these. I have a few special ones that I've kept, but I advise that for every pastor.
49:44: It's really rough, but I invested a lot of money in books, especially secondhand books and so, and I finally got to the place where I could walk in and pick up a book on any given subject that had to do with the
50:00: Bible, and I had some good material on it. And I sadly know some men that are limited to their
50:10: English Bible to a version of a translation, and I use the key, James.
50:15: I have no problem with that at all. But I usually, in preaching, open up the text, and if there's anything there from the original languages, make some comment upon it, and that's really an eye opener, and people learn from that.
50:33: But I spent hours and hours doing this. This was one of my life's goals, was to know the
50:42: Word of God in the original, and then writing some textbooks, teaching the languages and whatnot.
50:50: It was extremely profitable, but a person should work at that.
50:56: If God has called a man to preach, he should know the Bible more than anybody else that he preaches to, and be able to work in those languages and bring out the meaning, especially sometimes extremely rich.
51:16: Even John 3 .16, For so loved God the world, so as his
51:21: Son, I mean his only begotten One, he gave, that every single one, without exception, constantly exercising faith in him should not perish but have eternal or everlasting life.
51:35: Just the word order there shows the emphasis, and I don't want to get into controversy, but I'm afraid since Nicodemus heard that that night, that Christians have
51:48: Christianized John 3 .16 and given meaning to some of the words that Nicodemus never had and our
51:57: Lord never corrected. But I'll let that go. That's for another time of conversation.
52:05: And at times people said, people talk to me. I'm doing a series now on the
52:11: Ten Commandments, the moral law of God, and people talk to me. So we're not under the law, we're under grace.
52:18: And they, excuse me. While our brother's taking care of something technically,
52:27: I'll give you our email address again for listeners. If you have a question, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
52:34: Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Are you back?
52:41: I'm back. I just had to, I had two phones here, so I'm manipulating phones.
52:47: A family member is out today and I'm keeping me in contact with that person.
52:54: Well, we have to go to our midway break and you can pick up where you left off. And I don't want to interrupt you mid -sentence here.
53:03: So once again, if you have a question for Dr. William R. Downing, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
53:12: As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence.
53:18: If you live outside the USA, don't go away. We'll be right back. Such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world.
53:39: Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show.
53:45: He really loves hearing interviewed Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai, in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005.
53:57: One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio,
54:05: Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank, since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.
54:14: Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.
54:20: Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards, and Dr.
54:25: Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight volume commentary on the larger catechism. Heritage is a member of the
54:31: Hanover Presbytery, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great
54:40: Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Heritage maintains and follows the biblical truth and principles proclaimed by the reformers, scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone,
54:51: Christ alone, and God's glory alone. Their primary goal is the worship of the triune God that continues in eternity.
54:58: For more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,
55:04: that's heritagepresbyterianchurch .com, or call 678 -954 -7831, that's 678 -954 -7831.
55:15: If you visit, tell them Joe O 'Reilly, an Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener, from Matti, in County Kildare, Ireland, sends you.
55:35: Iron Sharpens Iron radio first launched in 2005. The publishers of the
55:40: New American Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors. It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the
55:48: Iron Sharpens Iron radio audience have been sticking with, or switching to, the
55:53: NASB. I'm Dr. Joseph Piper, president and professor of systematic and homiletical theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, South Carolina, and the
56:05: NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Chuck White of the
56:10: First Trinity Lutheran Church in Tonawanda, New York, and the NASB is my Bible of choice.
56:16: I'm Pastor Anthony Mathenia of Christ Church in Radford, Virginia, and the NASB is my
56:22: Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Jesse Miller of Damascus Road Christian Church in Gardenville, Nevada, and the
56:29: NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Bruce Bennett of Word of Truth Church in Farmerville, Long Island, New York, and the
56:38: NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Rodney Brown of Metro Bible Church in South Lake, Texas, and the
56:46: NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Jim Harrison of Red Mills Baptist Church in Mayapac Falls, New York, and the
56:54: NASB is my Bible of choice. Here's a great way for your church to help keep
56:59: Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air. Pastors, are your pew Bibles tattered and falling apart?
57:06: Consider restocking your pews with the NASB, and tell the publishers you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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57:35: This is Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.
57:41: Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support
57:46: Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially. Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in scripture through the person and work of our
58:02: Lord Jesus Christ. And of course the end of which we strive is the glory of God.
58:09: If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some
58:22: Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.
58:32: Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org.
58:40: This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign
58:46: Lord, God, Savior, and King Jesus Christ today and always.
58:59: Hi, this is John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnson and the
59:07: Iron Sharpens Iron podcast. I consider Chris a true friend and a man of high integrity. He's a skilled interviewer who's not afraid to ask the big penetrating questions while always defending the key doctrines of the
59:19: Christian faith. I've always been happy to point people to this podcast knowing it's one of the very few safe places on the internet where folk won't be led astray.
59:28: I believe this podcast needs to be heard far and wide. This is a day of great spiritual compromise and yet God has raised
59:35: Chris up for just such a time. Knowing this, it's up to us as members of the body of Christ to stand with such a ministry in prayer and in finances.
59:44: I'm pleased to do so and would like to ask you to prayerfully consider joining me in supporting
59:50: Iron Sharpens Iron financially. Would you consider sending either a one -time gift or even becoming a regular monthly partner with this ministry?
59:58: I know it would be a huge encouragement to Chris if you would. All the details can be found at ironsharpensironradio .com
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01:01:24: Puritan Reformed is a Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church. We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in scripture alone.
01:01:35: Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and kings.
01:01:42: We teach families to worship together as families. Puritan is committed to teaching the whole counsel of God so that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.
01:01:55: We sing the Psalms, teach the law, proclaim the gospel, make disciples, maintain discipline, and exalt
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01:02:40: I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program hosted by my long -time friend and brother
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01:04:14: Hello, my name is Anthony Uvino, and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corum, New York, and also the host of the reformrookie .com
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01:04:47: Please be sure to also give it a good review and pass it along to anyone who would benefit from the teaching and the many solidly reformed guests that Chris Arnzen has on the show.
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01:05:22: Doctrines of Grace to the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Leviticus, the Reform Rookie podcast and YouTube channel is sure to have something to offer everyone seeking biblical truth.
01:05:32: And finally, if you're looking to worship in a Reformed Church that holds to the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, please join us at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, New York.
01:05:42: Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Avino, and thanks for listening. Welcome back. Before I return to my guest today,
01:05:48: Dr. William R. Downing, and our discussion on the Sovereign Grace Movement amongst
01:05:55: Baptists over the decades of from the 1960s until today, before I return to that conversation,
01:06:05: I just want to remind you folks, if you really love this show and you do not want it to disappear from the airwaves, please go to ironsharpensironradio .com,
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01:07:07: So send me an email, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put advertising in the subject line. Remember, folks,
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01:07:54: God has blessed us, which is still God's money. We're primarily to use that money to provide for our church and our family, and providing for my radio show is not a command of God, obviously.
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01:08:23: That's ironsharpenersironradio .com. Click support, then click to donate now. Last but not least, if you are not a member of a biblically faithful, doctrinally solid, theologically sound,
01:08:38: Christ -honoring church, no matter where on the planet earth you live, I may be able to help you find a church that's biblically faithful, as I have done with many people in our audience spanning the globe, sometimes even finding biblically faithful churches for them within minutes from where they live.
01:08:56: That may be you, too. So, please, if you are in that predicament of not having a biblically faithful church home, send me an email to chrisorensen at gmail .com,
01:09:07: chrisorensen at gmail .com, and put, I need a church, and that's a big line. That's also the email address to send in your questions to Dr.
01:09:14: William R. Downing, and that's chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.
01:09:22: Before I go to any of the questions that have come in from our listeners already,
01:09:28: I'd like you to finish your thought that you started before the break, Dr. Downing, and that I'd also like to hear more about Rolf Barnard.
01:09:43: All right. Rolf Barnard was unique, and he was a strong preacher.
01:09:55: Would it be fair to categorize him as a sovereign, grace -believing fundamentalist? Well, his background was,
01:10:05: I think, Southern Baptist. I may be wrong about that, but he was a strong preacher.
01:10:13: He was unique. I'll put it this way. My pastor down in Texas said, would you like to go hear
01:10:22: Rolf Barnard tonight? And I just started teaching there at the school.
01:10:27: I had never heard of Rolf Barnard. These were preachers in the South. There was a whole group of preachers in the
01:10:34: South well -known that I had never heard of. And so I told him yes, and we went to the meeting.
01:10:43: It was across town, and he got up very winsome, very quiet, and he said, the night in which our
01:10:56: Lord was betrayed, he said, one of you is going to betray me.
01:11:04: And he went through all 12 disciples. Lord is it I? Lord is it I? Lord is it
01:11:09: I? And I thought, you know, who is this fellow? He was very almost quiet.
01:11:15: Then he came to Judas, and then he opened up. It ain't me,
01:11:20: God wants me to always stay. And then he began to preach, and I almost jumped out of my chair.
01:11:28: But I tell you, I went home that night, and I was afraid. He put some fear into me.
01:11:34: There was power in his preaching. There was power in his preaching, and at times, he came and lectured at our school for several weeks on the law of God.
01:11:46: They were excellent, excellent. But he was an evangelist, and in his preaching, he could really rise to the heights at times, and the
01:11:58: Word of God would penetrate. But it was quite an experience.
01:12:05: While I was there, I met Pharaoh Griswold, and he became one of my best friends.
01:12:11: My dad and Pharaoh Griswold were very good friends. They developed a friendship over the years.
01:12:18: And I met several of the other men that were well -known in the
01:12:24: South at that time. Sometimes their names might escape me.
01:12:31: And I went outside the Baptist framework quite a bit. R .J.
01:12:36: Rush Dooney was a good friend of the Reconstruction movement. My dad used to make him beef salami.
01:12:47: And I went to a meeting one night after my dad had passed away a few years, and Dr.
01:12:56: Rush Dooney was there to teach a Bible study. We had been invited, so we went. I hadn't seen him for several years, and he looked at me, and he said, we know each other.
01:13:08: And I said, yes. And his wife said, his dad used to make that beef salami for us.
01:13:15: Oh, yes, he said. And I would take the men of our church, and we would go up about once a month to Vallecito, to the
01:13:25: Chalcedon headquarters up there, and he would give a lecture. There'd be two or three lectures given.
01:13:31: We would go up and have some fellowship and then listen to the lectures and whatnot.
01:13:38: And we profited from them in that way. I wanted you to think, didn't want you to think that as a
01:13:46: Calvinistic Baptist, a Sovereign Grace Baptist that I was too tight in my fellowship.
01:13:53: And we've had some good times with men from all over the world that would come through here, through the
01:14:02: Bay Area, and preach. And we've profited very much from that.
01:14:08: May not agree on everything, but we've profited much and always learned. By the way, in your travels over the decades, did you ever come to meet my friend, who is actually one of the largest sponsors of this program,
01:14:25: Dr. Joe Moorcraft? I have not.
01:14:31: Okay. Well, I hope that one day you do. I've heard of him, but I've not personally met him.
01:14:38: By the way, folks, I want to let you know that if you are interested in hearing some of the sermons by Rolf Barnard, you could get them on sermonaudio .com.
01:14:50: And if you type his name into the search engine, which is spelled R -O -L -F -E -B -A -R -N -A -R -D, his sermons will come up.
01:15:01: I just thought I'd let you know. One of the most famous is, does the
01:15:09: God of the Bible kill people, suddenly cut off, or does the God of the Bible kill people?
01:15:16: And that's penetrating. It really is. Okay. We have
01:15:23: Anthony in Hoshton, Georgia. And Anthony says,
01:15:31: I am still thankful to God for your years of faithful ministry. I have come across a
01:15:38: Reformed Baptist pastor who believes that the death spoken of in Romans 8 .6
01:15:45: is not about an unsaved person remaining in the realm of the flesh, but he teaches that Romans 5 .8
01:15:56: is dealing with the saved and justified elect who can drift into walking in the flesh and hence being dead to God, alienated from the life of God until they repent and walk in the
01:16:11: Spirit. I remarked that it sounded like the carnal Christian heresy, but he said, no, he does not believe in a carnal
01:16:21: Christian. He describes a believer living unto themselves rather than living upon Christ.
01:16:32: Does the text of the original language give any indication as to if Romans 8 is contrasting believer and unbeliever, or is it only speaking of a sinful failing of a believer walking in a fleshly way?
01:16:50: I would say that Romans chapter 8, and we, that there is really no division, chapter divisions in in that section.
01:17:02: We began in chapter 6, that we died to law, not the law, but we died to law, and we died to the reigning power of sin.
01:17:18: And this goes over through chapter 8, through chapter 7, into Romans chapter 8, up to about verse 15 or 16.
01:17:30: And there are statements in there that if we're living according to the flesh, we're not converted.
01:17:40: And I used to believe in the carnal Christian heresy very strongly in my school field days, but a study of the book of Romans brought me forth from that.
01:17:53: And there are those who believe that Romans chapter 7 deal with Paul's self -righteous state before his conversion.
01:18:02: And we say, no, this deals with indwelling sin and remaining corruption.
01:18:08: It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
01:18:14: I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I find another law in my members, so on and so forth.
01:18:21: But he deals with indwelling sin and remaining corruption. No Christian is without sin.
01:18:29: But the major message is that we died to the reigning power of sin, and we are no longer under its reigning power as the unsaved people are.
01:18:41: We commit acts of sin, but we no longer live in sin or under its reigning power.
01:18:49: Well, thank you, Anthony. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and keep sending in those excellent questions.
01:18:59: Before I go to another listener question, I wanted you to basically give a description that would differentiate you from what have been called
01:19:21: Reformed Baptists. I happen to be a Reformed Baptist, and the interesting thing to me is that you do not call yourself a
01:19:28: Reformed Baptist, and yet, while you were pastoring the Sovereign Grace Baptist Church of Silicon Valley, California, that church adhered to both the
01:19:40: First and Second London Baptist Confessions. So, how would you be different from a
01:19:46: Reformed Baptist? Well, I think it's a matter of name, and I know that some
01:19:54: Sovereign Grace Baptists, and there's a movement of Sovereign Grace Baptists, and some of them hold to New Covenant theology, and they're rather antinomian.
01:20:05: The tendency is that way. We were and are as strong as we could possibly be on the law of God and the present existence of God's moral law, as summarized in the
01:20:22: Ten Commandments, to point out sin. Paul says in 1
01:20:28: Timothy chapter 1, about verse 8, the law is good if a man uses it lawfully, and we are not under the law or have to do with the law for our justification.
01:20:42: That was the problem of the Galatians, that they were justified by keeping the law.
01:20:49: They were part of the Judaizing party. You have to be a Jew to become a Christian, and of course, that's not true.
01:20:57: But we can look at the law in the realm of justification, and that's wrong.
01:21:03: But looking at the law in the realm of sanctification is somewhat near the truth that the law remains.
01:21:11: The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
01:21:18: And the perfect tense there we could translate, the law was and continues to be our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.
01:21:28: But it still points out sin, and I hope I don't sound too confused, and it continues that way to the
01:21:37: Christian. It points out sin for what it is, and it's the best summary that we have of pointing out what is sin and what
01:21:47: God considers as sin. And the Ten Commandments are taken literally or taken in their full import.
01:22:00: Our Lord said, if a man looks upon a woman, he's committed adultery with her in his heart.
01:22:06: The Jews believe that only the overt act was sin.
01:22:11: Our Lord traces everything back to the heart. We can be a heartbreaker of the law and be guilty before God, and that points out sin in our lives and not simply the overt act in that way.
01:22:29: Under the old covenant, the Jewish covenant, I would say that maybe even the majority of those people had an outward religion, but the inwardly, they were perhaps even unregenerate in that way.
01:22:48: The law did not govern, and the truth of God did not govern their inner being, their inner life.
01:22:57: What it does with the child of God under the new covenant, where God states in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 37, 36, that I will put my law in their hearts, and so on and so forth, the internalization of God's law as a motivating factor in our lives and pointing out sin, we as Christians have a sensitivity towards sin and the commission of sin that the
01:23:29: Jews under the old covenant did not have. I know that's very subjective, but I would say that is the culmination of the argument there.
01:23:40: Now, as I said just moments ago, when you were pastoring at Sovereign Grace Baptist Church in Silicon Valley, California, the church's official statements of faith were not only the 1689
01:24:04: London Baptist Confession of Faith, which is the more predominant confession adopted by Reformed Baptists and other
01:24:16: Calvinistic Baptists, but your church officially had both the 1646 and the 1689 confessions as your statements of faith.
01:24:29: What was in the first London Baptist Confession that you believed should remain as a statement of faith that perhaps wasn't re -articulated, if that's the correct way of saying it, in the second
01:24:49: London Baptist Confession? My mind is not functioning as it ought to be.
01:24:59: My first, just off the top of my head, we deal in the 1644 -46 more with the local church, and it's more of a local church, and it's not as, quote, reformed, unquote, in that way.
01:25:25: And there are some who would be more comfortable with the 1644 -46 than they would the 1689, and we've incorporated both in a general sense as covering what we might call
01:25:42: Calvinistic Baptists in that way. There are some who are narrowed,
01:25:49: I believe, and all this goes back to controversies and agreements and disagreements that were current perhaps only 20, 30 years ago that probably aren't as current today.
01:26:06: Okay, let's see here. We have Carl, who lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Carl wants to know, in your travels over the decades, did you ever come across a
01:26:28: Sovereign Grace -believing pastor and author who seems to be virtually unknown in our day, although he was alive not long ago?
01:26:39: His name is W. E. Best. Do you know anything about him? Yes. Yes, I knew
01:26:48: Brother Best, and he was like Rolf Barnard.
01:26:54: He was rather unique. Yeah, I used to actually get his free books, because all of his books were free,
01:27:03: I believe. And I remember being blessed by some of them, maybe all of them at least in part, but there were definitely novel things in there, and at least they were to me.
01:27:21: And I remember some brethren accused him of hyper -Calvinism.
01:27:27: Do you agree with that assessment of him? That might be an impression.
01:27:35: There are several authors, and Best, I think, is just an example of this, whose writings reflected the controversies they had been in and maybe colored their thinking a little bit.
01:27:49: But I had several of his works and read them, and I could see where he was coming from.
01:27:58: And my own background and so forth, while I grew up in an
01:28:05: American Baptist church, it was modernistic, but then I went with the Fundamentalists, and I'd been accused of being very narrowed and bringing my
01:28:16: Fundamentalist narrowness with me throughout my whole ministry, and I perhaps have, but I haven't reached out to others as much as I should.
01:28:26: It just became part of me. It was not done on purpose, but it was there, and perhaps some of his controversies colored his writings a little bit and brought out emphases or things that would not affect others or as they had him.
01:28:45: Well, one thing that sticks in my head about W .E. Best, that I had never heard anybody else say, which to this day,
01:28:55: I can't write him off as wrong, and I just found his reasons for teaching this, which
01:29:05: I'm about to reveal, seemed logical. He said, and I don't remember the name of the book where he wrote this, but he said that we should never call reprobate people who die in unrepentance lost.
01:29:29: He said, lost is a term that we should only use for an elect person prior to his coming to the state of being born again and regenerate, because if you're lost, that means you are not somewhere that you belong, and a reprobate person doesn't belong with Christ.
01:29:54: He doesn't belong in the kingdom of God. He doesn't belong in the church. And of course, he likely articulated it much better than I just did, because it's been a long, long time since I remember reading that and thinking about it.
01:30:11: But what do you think about that? I mean, have you ever heard anybody else say that? No, that seems to be a rather strange doctrine.
01:30:21: I suppose then, according to that, a person could only be lost once he dies and his state is settled.
01:30:28: I'm not sure. As I said, and for what it's worth, that some men—and he may be included in this—reflect in their writings the controversies they have been in and maybe the conclusion that they've reached.
01:30:48: Arthur Pink, you find that at times in Arthur Pink, just some strange things.
01:30:55: And you figure, well, he went through some of these problems and so forth, and it probably colored his thinking or gave him an emphasis in his thinking that other people may not have.
01:31:09: Now, did you ever meet another Pink? I'll let it go at that. Did you ever meet one? I did not. Only on the printed page.
01:31:18: Now, how would you say A .W. Pink fit in the spectrum of sovereign grace -believing
01:31:29: Calvinist Baptists? I know that in his later life, he was somewhat of a recluse.
01:31:39: Yes, I did hear that, too. He thought the church was so corrupt, you couldn't find a true one anywhere, basically.
01:31:46: Yes. He was—oh, I'm thinking of the
01:31:53: Isle of Man. That's not right. He was in the area—he died in 1952—he was in the area where a great revival took place in one of the islands off the coast of Scotland, and books have been written about that revival.
01:32:12: He lived in that immediate area and was never touched by that revival. It was just—it's just a strain.
01:32:21: The reason for it, I don't know. But it was—he was somewhat,
01:32:28: I take it, as a recluse, stayed with his writings and so forth. And really,
01:32:34: I don't know of anyone who visited him in the last few years of his life and gave any impression of what he was like.
01:32:44: I've known some men toward the end of their lives, and they were much different as they were in the days of their productivity.
01:32:55: Yeah, that's a shame. What a great wealth of wisdom he has left in his legacy to the body of Christ even today in his writings, and yet that sad, dark blemish on his life having cut himself off from the church.
01:33:17: But the best of men are men at best, and we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and every one of us is going to be guilty of more sins than we know of when we leave this earth, even the most seasoned saint among us.
01:33:38: So we can't write him off for that. I'm sure you agree with that.
01:33:45: Yes, yes. Well, some people suffer from dementia, other people slow down, and once they leave the public life where they've been very useful, they retire and just into something private, and they may spend their whole time writing and being productive, but they don't have that outreach that they once had, and people sort of lose contact with them.
01:34:15: Okay. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say,
01:34:22: I used to travel and preach hither and yon and spoke at some international conferences and other things, and right now
01:34:32: I get on a computer a couple of times a week and preach system shut -ins, and I guess some people thought
01:34:40: I just died or something, they still know my name. And no, this is where I am, but I've had three strokes, and that slowed me down quite a bit, and my mind is fairly clear, slipping a little, especially people's names, but that's life, and we don't know what's happened to a lot of these great men.
01:35:07: Spurgeon died early. He had just turned about 58 when he died in January of 1892, and so he was—but still, he was in Mentone, France for parts of the year, and no doubt his disease and so forth affected him, but he was still just putting out material, editing his messages and so forth, and was mightily used of God.
01:35:36: Had he lived another 10 years, he might have become just a very private person.
01:35:43: We don't know. But some people who live longer, and Pete didn't live that long, but the last few years of his life, he didn't travel, and he had almost no outward influence, where some men would be traveling to Bible conferences and whatnot, and then we would know of them and their functions and their influence.
01:36:11: Amen. Oh, we have an anonymous listener who is bringing up W .E.
01:36:18: Best again, and he's saying, I heard Mr. Arnzen describing
01:36:23: W .E. Best's view of the word lost. He wasn't a universalist, was he?
01:36:31: No, no, no, that's not what I was trying to convey about Best's view on the word.
01:36:39: He was just in this book, one of his books, and possibly in some of his sermons, but I don't recall hearing it in a sermon.
01:36:48: But one of his books, he said we shouldn't use the word lost for reprobates.
01:36:56: Like, for instance, Adolf Hitler died a lost man. He would object to the wording of that.
01:37:04: He would believe Hitler is in hell, suffering for eternity, but he would say that lost should be only used for an elect person in their state prior to their regeneration.
01:37:20: Because as the song Amazing Grace beautifully puts it,
01:37:27: I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see. John Newton's wonderful words there, but that's what he meant by that.
01:37:37: But anyway. Yes, well, we won't know if a person's lost or not until they're saved.
01:37:43: Right. Of course, we have a lost sheep, but not a lost goat. Right, right.
01:37:51: Let's see, we have a Jackie, and Jackie is in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
01:38:04: And Jackie says, can you tell us some of the highlights from the
01:38:12: Sovereign Grace Movement over the decades that churches today should emulate? And then if you have time, talk about the errors that you think that we should avoid.
01:38:28: Well, maybe I can reverse this and talk about some of the errors first.
01:38:36: Sadly, some of our Calvinistic brethren have espoused
01:38:42: New Covenant theology, just sort of of an antinomian stand.
01:38:49: And in fact, some of my good friends have gone astray in that way, and it hurt our fellowship.
01:38:58: But yeah, the Sovereign Grace Movement, the Reformed Baptist Movement, some people will call themselves
01:39:05: Sovereign Gracers, some will call themselves Reformed Baptists. I understand because I don't get out much anymore, but I understand from people who are looking for churches in certain areas, and certain areas tell me that there is a tendency among our brethren to become rather contemporary with their music.
01:39:31: And I don't know. I haven't heard that. I know that with many people, they become rather contemporary with their music.
01:39:40: They've lost that sense of reverence. And there is a point at which worship becomes entertainment, and it's a fine line perhaps.
01:39:53: But I see it when I watch religious programs, even good preachers, sound preachers on the television, their choirs, and their musical worship before they preach is very questionable.
01:40:15: Maybe the people are overenthusiastic. I don't know. But I'm pretty critical of things like that.
01:40:24: Yeah, I think that from what I have witnessed over the decades that I've been saved,
01:40:30: I was saved in the mid -1980s, and on the one side of the coin, you have the wonderful and glorious and beautiful reality that people spanning the denominational spectrums are coming to the doctrines of grace, and in larger numbers than I have ever seen compared to the 1980s.
01:41:00: But the other side of that coin is they very often bring the negative baggage with them from whatever denomination or group that they're in, if you follow what
01:41:10: I'm saying. Yes, yes, I see that tendency. Well, we have to go to our final break, and if you have a question, submit it now or forever hold you apiece because we're rapidly running out of time.
01:41:24: Chris Arnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.
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01:53:07: Now, I don't know if you're going to like me less, Dr. Downing, but I do have friends, very close friends, who are
01:53:16: New Covenant theology advocates and pastors, and I have always been kind of in the middle of the divide with the brethren on both sides.
01:53:31: My late wife, when I first met her, was a member of a
01:53:37: New Reformed Baptist church, and I always had friends on both sides. Do you think that we have to be careful about not being overly broad -brushing in our approach to people who disagree with us?
01:53:55: Because as you may have discovered, New Covenant theology and their churches are not monolithic.
01:54:02: They do have divisions amongst themselves. Well, I would like to clarify this.
01:54:12: It's one thing to have a friend who's New Covenant. It's another thing for a pastor to invite him into his pulpit to preach such doctrine, you know, to create differences, and that's the way it is.
01:54:32: We don't want to emphasize the differences, because then it affects the entire congregation.
01:54:39: What would you say are some of the men of God that you've met over the years that have made the biggest impact on your life—those that you actually knew and met, rather than just whom you've read?
01:55:00: Well, I have to mention Dr. Peter Conley.
01:55:09: When I went to Bible school, he had the greatest impact on my life, and he was professor of theology there and had a great impact on my wife's life.
01:55:21: She was a student there, and we got married after we graduated. Then my father, who was a very, very serious man—and by the way, he was my father in the flesh, my brother in the
01:55:40: Lord, and my son in the ministry. That's unique.
01:55:47: We ordained him at age 57, and he even saw a time of revival among some college students at the
01:55:57: Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo in the 1960s.
01:56:03: Some of those men are still here to this day that we know.
01:56:09: But he was a very serious Bible student, and after my conversion, he had a great formative influence on my life.
01:56:19: Pharoah Griswold, Rolf Barnard—some of these men, for one reason or another.
01:56:28: And some of them were good friends. Some of them were a little more distant, just because of the circumstances of life.
01:56:37: My professors—several of them were very significant in the influence they had on my life.
01:56:49: Some just with their attitude and their presentation of doctrine and so.
01:56:55: Some of them with their personalities. Others with their studies and whatnot, for one reason or another.
01:57:06: And all of them had significant influence, and I rejoiced in that.
01:57:12: And then pastors that I'd known, and some even younger than myself, that I've known over the years, causing me to rethink issues.
01:57:24: Perhaps their preaching gifts and so forth, or their friendships, or praying with them.
01:57:32: There was one I used to pray with, and then I would pray, he would pray, then
01:57:37: I would go someplace and pray again. Well, I want to give our listeners, once again, your email address.
01:57:46: It's drwrdowning, d -o -w -n -i -n -g, at gmail .com,
01:57:54: if you'd like to get in touch with William R. Downing. And you could perhaps remember it better if you think of it like this, drwrdowning, at gmail .com,
01:58:08: because the D -R is obviously an abbreviation of Dr. Dr. W. R. Downing, at gmail .com.
01:58:15: I want to thank you so much for being a wonderful guest today, as you always have been.
01:58:21: I look forward to you returning to the program. I look forward to meeting you face -to -face someday on this side of heaven, if we ever have that opportunity.
01:58:31: And please send my warmest regards to Joe Jackiewicz and everyone else out there in California from First Love Ministries, and I look forward to seeing
01:58:44: Tom Smith, the Virginia representative from that fine ministry, next
01:58:49: Thursday, manning a book table of free books for First Love Publications at my
01:58:56: Iron Trifle Design Radio Free Pastors Luncheon. I want to thank everybody who listened.
01:59:03: I want to thank especially those who took the time to write and email questions into the program today.
01:59:10: And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater
01:59:19: Savior than you are a sinner. Thank you, as always, for listening to Iron Trifle Design Radio.