September 8, 2015 Show with A. Craig Troxel on “With All Your Heart: Thinking (again) about What You Know, Love & Choose”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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

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

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

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

Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Welcome back, this is

Chris Arnton. Thankfully the Lord enabled us to return to the live streaming and we thank you for your patience on Iron Sharpens Iron.

Many of you know that we've been occasionally experiencing technical difficulties for reasons we can't determine yet, but God willing those will be completely ironed out in the very near future, keep praying for us.

But as I was saying at the very outset of the program today, I'm very excited that I have today with me on Iron Sharpens Iron as guests for the very first time, two pastors within the same denomination.

We have Pastor Craig Troxell of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois on the phone with us today.

Pastor Troxell is also Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and Adjunct Professor of Ministerial Studies at Mid -America

Reform Seminary in Dyer, Indiana, and it's my honor and privilege first of all to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time,

Pastor Craig Troxell. Thank you Chris, it's good to be with you. And also we have co -hosting with me in studio here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Pastor Jody Morris, who is the

Pastor of Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, and it's my honor and privilege to have you for the very first time in studio or as a co -host or guest on Iron Sharpens Iron.

It's great to have you on the program today. Thank you Chris, it's great to be here. And today we are going to be discussing with all the heart, thinking again about what you know, love, and choose.

And before we even go into this theme, I would like each of you men to introduce our listeners to your congregations with an abbreviated description of what you do and what makes you unique over at your respective churches.

First of all, our guest, Pastor Craig Troxell, tell our listeners something about Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton.

Bethel Church has been in Wheaton for over 50 years, 55 to be exact I believe, and it is a church that's planted for other churches, and so it's experienced significant, probably steady would be the better word, steady growth over the years.

And I would say that the distinctive ministry given to Bethel Church would actually be simply the preaching of the word and the means of grace.

There's nothing fancy about what we do, and most people that attend our church would probably describe it as traditional.

Our building enjoys a kind of a simple form. It's architectural minimalism with tan brick, and so it's kind of a unique church even among our denominational churches.

Other than that, I would say that we've had I think seven ministers over the time and steady ministries.

Most of those ministers being here for more than 10 years or so. I've been here eight years, and that's about it.

And Pastor Jody Morris, tell us something about the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church here in Carlisle.

Yes, Redeemer is located right here in Carlisle, and we've been here for 12 years now.

We started as a church plant those years ago, and I came a couple of years into the church's existence and am its first pastor and continue to serve here and love the congregation and enjoy this community.

And some of the distinctives of our congregation are probably something similar to what you heard

Craig say. We focus on the ministry of the word and sacrament. Our motto on the church sign says, worshiping

God through word and sacrament. We're right there on the corner of York and Petersburg. If you've seen our sign, then you know where we are, and we welcome you.

Great. Well, it's great to have you on the program. And some of our listeners, just to be a little bit more clear about the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church, they may be totally unfamiliar with the more conservative or evangelical or Bible -based

Presbyterian churches. They may be only familiar with the very liberal mainline

Protestant church down the road who may describe itself as Presbyterian.

Perhaps, Pastor Craig, if you could give us just an abbreviated history lesson about what happened that brought about the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church as a denomination during the fundamentalist modernist controversy.

No, you just captured it well. It comes right out of that controversy, a time when mainline church members were becoming frustrated with their churches and pastors and missionaries who were no longer interested in the gospel and were distancing themselves away from those very core tenets and beliefs that Bible -believing

Christians had always clung to, like the virgin birth of Christ or his bodily resurrection, things like this.

And so, in the 1930s, that's exactly what explains the birth of our denomination.

The flashpoint was missions and a concern that we had missionaries that were no longer interested in the exclusive claims of Christ and felt that we should be doing things that addressed more social justice concerns and things like this.

And that's basically how our denomination began. You could say that the precursor to that was the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, which for over a hundred years had basically taught the same doctrine, had been very faithful in teaching

Scripture and Scriptural doctrine. But that changed, and so our denomination was born.

And out of that, the Westminster Theological Seminary, too, correct? Sure. Yeah, that also was given birth to the same people that started our denomination.

J. Gresham Machen would be probably foremost among those forefathers, but he died very, very early on in the start of our denomination,

January 1st, 1937, which was a heartbreak for our denomination. But it very quickly decided the case whether or not we'd be ruled by a person and heavily influenced by just one person, or if we were a true

Presbyterian church that believes in the plurality of leadership. Great. And I know that you're also adjunct professor of ministerial studies at Mid -America

Reform Seminary, which has become affectionately known as MARS. I know that he's retired now, but if you ever bump into Dr.

Nelson Klosterman, say hello to him for me. He's a good friend of mine. Yes, I know him very well.

He's a good man, a good friend. Yeah, and hoping to have him back on my program again in the near future.

Pastor Morris, did you want to say something there? Well, I just wanted to add while we're talking about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a fellow pastor in our denomination shared a great thought for many people,

I imagine, who wonder what we mean by orthodox. He said, orthodoxy is to biblical teaching what orthodontistry is to teeth.

We make things straight. Right. That's right. In fact, that's what the word means, right?

Straight. Right, exactly. And yes, this is no connection to the Eastern Orthodox branches of Christendom, as many people may mistakenly think from that name as well.

During our discussion on the heart today, we are going to be promoting two conferences.

One is actually a Reformation Day celebration on Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m.

at the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where our guest,

Pastor Craig Troxell, will be speaking on lost treasures for our postmodern times, the

Puritan theology of the heart. And for more information, you can go to that website,

RedeemerOPC, which stands for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, dot org, RedeemerOPC .org.

And then on November 13th, through Saturday, November 14th, that's

Friday, November 13th, through Saturday, November 14th, the Dallas -Fort

Worth Reformation Conference will be held at Mid -Cities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas.

And that theme is also going to be on with all your heart, thinking again about what you know, love, and choose, and that is featuring our guest today in Iron, Sharp, and Zion, A.

Craig Troxell. And the website to get more information on that conference is

MC, which stands for Mid -Cities, OPC, for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, dot org,

MCOPC .org. And hopefully I will remember to repeat that a couple of times before the end of the broadcast.

But first of all, obviously, I think it would be very appropriate, since we're talking about the heart today, a word that's very used, overused, and misused, if you could give us a definition of the heart.

Well, I guess one way to approach it would be this way. I think the simplest way to put it is that the heart is the governing center of a person.

This is the Bible's most loved word, most often used word, to describe who we are within, in the inner person.

But you can look at it two ways, in that as the governing center of a person, the word heart in Scripture is a term that has simplicity to it.

So it reflects that inner unity of who we are within. But the way the word heart works in Scripture, it's also a comprehensive term.

It has different nuances, and it's able then, as one word, to bring in the complexity of that same inner being.

So it's both simple, and yet it's a complex term. And we can get into different ways of what that means, or how to explain it.

And that complexity, I think, can be described in three branches, and that's probably what we'll get into later.

So that's how I would call it. I would call it the heart is the governing center of a person.

It's like what's in the driver's seat. It's your heart. And it has both a simple side to it, and a complex side to it.

And do you think that the words heart and mind are very often used interchangeably, and perhaps sometimes in an incorrect way?

Or how would you separate the two? Well, the way I would describe it, is that I think the heart has three different meanings in Scripture.

I mean, most often we have to think of it as a unity. So when you see the word heart in Scripture, your first instinct is to see it as a word that refers to the unity of who you are within, much in the same way the word soul, or spirit, or inner man, or conscience are used in Scripture.

But the heart, in many contexts, has a particular nuance to it. And that nuance is tilted either towards the mind, the word you just used, or the desires, or the will.

That many times one of those three aspects of what the heart is, is being reflected there.

It's stressing that aspect of the complexity of who we are. So if you take the word mind, for instance, many times it's clearly what's in view in Scripture is the mind.

But they're not exactly the same thing. In fact, the way I think we ought to think about it biblically, is that the mind is a portion of your heart.

It's that knowing part of your heart. And so, like in Psalm 139, it ends saying, search me,

O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. Well, clearly what's in view there is the mind, the cognitive part of who we are, our understanding.

But David, the psalmist there, is using them almost interchangeably. So there's it is interchangeable.

And there's many times you have translations that will have the word mind, or sense, or something like that, and the word underneath it is heart.

That's what's literally there in the text. And do you think that people often speak in a wrong way,

Christians, modern evangelicals, speak in a wrong way in their reflections upon making the mind perhaps less a desirable element of the

Christian faith and presenting the gospel than the heart? Today, you have people who perhaps overemphasize a sentimental understanding of the heart and view the mind as something only involved in dry, dull, lifeless intellectualism, if you follow what

I'm saying. Yeah, no, you're right on it, and that's a very important thing you're presenting. And the way that we have to see that in Scripture is that the heart and the minds are always friends.

And they're never put into a relationship of tension, or they're not seen as having competing interests.

In fact, there are some that would say that, in fact, one of them, Hans Walter Wolff, who wrote

Anthropology of the Old Testament, he wrote that in by far the greatest number of cases, the word heart is intellectual in the

Old Testament. It has the rational functions in view. So if we're going to say that the heart does one thing in Scripture, it thinks.

And so this is the word that's used to bring in what are we thinking, our considerations, discerning, understanding, reflection, meditating, insights, all those sorts of things are all captured by the word heart.

So clearly in the Bible, you do not want to pit the mind against the heart when in fact the heart comprehends the mind.

But there are those times when you find both of them in the same sentence, like, say, the Great Commandment, where Christ is asked, you know, what's the

Great Commandment? In Matthew 22, 37 and following, he says, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

But in cases like that, what you're seeing is simply redundancy, which Scripture loves to do. Areas that overlap, one with the other.

But that should not put us off. So it's very clear to me in my research, and this is not really that controversial of a statement, among biblical scholars and especially among the

Puritans, that the heart sinks. And what's interesting is that heart spikes in its use, especially in wisdom literature.

So this word heart appears over 200 times in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, for instance.

That's where you see its most common use. What are these books about? I mean, Proverbs is clearly about wisdom.

And so, in fact, it's interesting that on occasion you'll have, you know, in Scripture, a man of wisdom, like the way

Solomon is described. Like it says he has an understanding heart or a listening heart, but sometimes it's not translated that way.

It's like he's a man of wisdom. Well, literally, it's a man of heart. And so it's very helpful to help us to appreciate that the whole idea of heart is, without apology in the

Bible, that area of your heart, the mind, rather, is a part of your heart where you meditate, reflect, etc.,

etc. I'm very intrigued by the topic, theme, or title of your

Reformation Day celebration on Friday, October 30th, scheduled to be held at the

Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle. Lost Treasures for Our Postmodern Time, the

Puritan Theology of the Heart. If you could, before we even go into some other definitions that I want to ask you to describe, if you could give us a breakdown of that very intriguing title.

Well, one of the things that I maintain, and I should maybe say that this is a book I'm writing that's under contract, and I won't mention the publisher's name until the book's actually done.

They'd probably appreciate that. But it's basically Puritan theology, which also happens to be what modern biblical scholarship is saying about the heart, that the heart is these three areas, the mind, the desires, and the will.

And the Puritans understood this. They worked with this particular grid that I have discerned.

You see it in places like John Owen, especially when he's dealing with temptation, or in his book,

The Mortification of Sin. It's a tremendously insightful work. But you see it in other works as well.

And you don't see them like teasing out this grid. You just see them using it and assuming it.

But where they were, I think, especially good was what we would call the desires of the heart, and what they called the affection.

So they were very, very concerned to go after that particular part of the heart. What is it that we love?

What do we want? And the desires of the heart. But as you probably know, the Reformed tradition, which the

Puritans are part of, have been very strong on the will, and that you cannot separate the will from the heart itself.

And then if the Puritans emphasize anything, it was surely theology.

Very, very dense many times, and appealing to the highest abilities of things.

And so all three of these things are assumed in their writing, and they weave in and out of these categories quite comfortably, but always talking about the heart.

So that's where that comes from, that Puritan theology of the heart. So I'm not saying anything new.

I don't feel like in this book, or in these conferences, just simply going back and realizing that our

Puritan forefathers, especially at their best, were articulating in very precise, very descriptive, helpful ways, really drilling down into who are we within.

And that's why when you read them, so oftentimes you feel like you're underneath an x -ray machine, or under a microscope, and you're being taken apart, as it were, and then put back together.

That's because they understood this so well, in my mind. So Greg, what you're saying so far, if I understand you, is that while the heart and mind are not contrasted, but coordinated in Scripture, they're not at war with one another, but one is the expression of the other, perhaps, at least a portion of the expression of the heart, the mind is.

Additionally, there's this will that is an expression of the heart, and desires that are an expression of the heart.

You mentioned something about a grid. Is this what you're at, as a portion of this grid you described, the heart as mind, desires, and will?

Yes. So I think when you come across the word mind in Scripture, you're thinking this is a portion of the heart.

And this is often the case in our modern translation, that the word understanding, sometimes the word consider, or especially the word sense.

And how about faith, believe? That those, well, these particular words are oftentimes the translation of the actual word heart.

So let me give you an example, like Proverbs 632 in the ESV, he who commits adultery lacks sense, he who does it destroys himself.

Well, the word sense is not there, it's actually the word heart. And this often appears in the

Proverbs. And the reason it's translated that way is because for a lot of modern day readers, we wouldn't know how to understand this.

Lack sense, it's very obvious that this is a person who's not thinking carefully. But if they put lacks heart, our modern idea would be to say he lacks emotion or something like that.

But that's a too superficial of an understanding of the word heart. So the words understanding, consider, sense, mind, these are oftentimes in our modern translations, actually a translation of the word heart, where either the

Hebrew word lev, levav, or the Greek word kardia is underneath there. And you don't see it.

So we might think that kind of a person lacks conviction or commitment or a will to do what he should, and what we should actually be seeing there is the way it's translated.

Right. And this is the problem, is that because of the way we use heart, or the way that Chris was talking about earlier, is we think of it as emotional or something like that.

It's interesting that there's this little sequence, this conversation, and in all places, the

Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum, I don't know if this is in the movie or not, but with a Tin Woodman and Scarecrow, Scarecrow were having this conversation.

And Tin Woodman says, but after all, brains are not the best things in the world. And Scarecrow says, have you any?

And Woodman says, no, my head is quite empty. But once I had brains and a heart also, so having tried them both,

I should much rather have a heart. And see, that's the way I think a lot of evangelicals today think of the mind.

They think of the mind as simply the brain, as opposed to the heart. They say, well, I'd almost always rather have a heart. And well, in the

Bible, they're the same thing, or at least what I'd rather say is that the heart comprehends the mind.

It takes in the mind. Yeah, and in times there has been at different periods of church history, as you know, and even today, an anti -intellectualism that somehow this bad villain of the mind is going to somehow interfere with the wonderful loving heart and its relationship with God and with others.

That's absolutely right. There's been times when there's been too much confidence put in the mind, and other times when it's absolutely distrusted or to feel like, you know, we should have nothing to do with it whatsoever.

C .S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man says something like, a hard heart is no infallible protection against the soft head.

And it's true that you can't do an end around the mind and think you're going to come out with a better heart.

In the Bible, that just doesn't make sense. Now, it's also interesting,

I don't want to go on too far of a sidetrack here to talk just briefly about the Puritans themselves, but it is interesting that you are titling your conference at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Lost Treasures for our

Postmodern Time, The Puritan Theology of the Heart. Many people view the Puritans as heartless, and that they would be the furthest place to, or the last place to look for any kind of information on the heart.

If you could give us some caricature -busting information, perhaps, on the Puritans.

Well, the best thing to do would just simply read some of their devotional literature, and to read what they say about marriage and love between a husband and wife, to see what they say about prayer, and to read, for instance, to pick up Valley of Vision, printed by the

Banner of Truth Trust, which introduces you to Puritan prayers and some poetry, and to see...

And the letters they wrote to their wives. Oh yes, I mean, there's so much there. You know, when somebody says something like that,

I think probably our strategy should be, somebody who wants to put down the Puritans and say, well, what have you read? Right.

You know, just simply ask them, what have you read by, let's take John Owen, or, you know, we could pick anybody, but I think that it'd be helpful if we just would start introducing our people to primary sources, and read, you know,

The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, or to read on the Holy Spirit. These men talk so much about the

Holy Spirit. It's on every page, and as is the heart, when you start opening up what they have to say, or John Newton's letters, and a whole section of them called

The Cardiographer, it's all about the heart. So, this is a great concern of theirs, and yes, they were concerned about theology, but when they wrote polemical theology, it was to protect what was more precious to them, and that was the areas that, like for instance,

John Owen, communion with God, or the mortification of sin, or on temptation, and it's very clear when you read those works, that you're sitting underneath the tutelage of a pastor, that you have somebody who's concerned about your soul, or your heart, and not somebody who's interested in just whittling away with their knives.

Yeah, well, the Puritans, when I began to be taught what they actually taught, and believed, and lived for, really destroyed mythology for me in a good way, and they have become a very valuable part of my

Christian growth, and it's amazing that the Puritans, no matter how many hundreds of years ago they may have written their works, how timely and timeless some of the, many of the things that they address, could be describing the present -day church, and the dilemma that the church is in today, perhaps with some antiquated wording here and there, but the actual messages themselves really hit home in an amazing way.

And we have a couple of other definitions that I'd like you to go through. First of all, we hear a lot about the word sin, especially those of us who are in more conservative,

Calvinistic, or even fundamental churches, sin is brought up quite frequently, and in the most pulpits of modern evangelicalism, especially those within televangelism and so on, you hardly ever hear it at all.

But if you could go through a definition of sin for us. Well, this is an interesting thing, because when

I started preaching Psalm 51, I started to see how it's not just that we have these three areas of the heart, but there's a corollary between these three aspects of the heart and in the vocabulary

God's given to us for sin. There are so many different words for sin, and as we're talking about the mind, what's interesting to me is the most popular word for sin in the

Bible, it's usually translated sin, no surprise there, but it means literally to fall short or to miss the mark, and what that means is you fail to measure up to the standard, you know what the standard is.

Now, there's times you don't, and Scripture does talk about mistakes and errors, but most times that's not what we're talking about.

And what it means is that you know what the standard is, but you fall short of that standard, you miss it, and that can be done both actively and passively.

But sin, the most popular word the Bible means is exactly that, to miss the mark, to fall short.

We knew we were supposed to do our devotions, we didn't do them. We know we're supposed to tell the truth, but we fell short of telling the truth.

And so lying, lust, and anger, all these things, or all the things that we quote forget, unquote to do, bespeak our sin.

But then the second nuance to that, this is very important, is it tells us that as we think of the mind in particular, it means that I know what

I ought to be thinking as well. And one of the things that Christ does in the Sermon on the

Mount is he totally exposes that person who thinks that they're sinless because they simply haven't done certain things.

I'm not a murderer because I've never killed anybody. I'm not adulterer because I did not sleep with somebody

I wasn't supposed to sleep with. He goes right through the moral law and exposes all that, and basically says, you have an anger problem with your brother?

Guess what? You've committed a sin against his commandment. You struggle with lust? You struggle with hypocrisy or avarice, worldliness or anxiety or self -righteousness or judging?

All these things begin by incubating in the mind. And so what it tells us is that falling short of sin is not just in my actions or in my speech, but it's also my mind.

And they're having wrong thoughts. Or if I am, you know, simmering in my anger.

If I am completely lost in anxiety because I continue to nurture that.

And then we're not even talking yet about false doctrine or unhealthy doctrine. Those can be sins as well.

And so this is really helpful to understand that the sin of my mind is one peculiar expression of my sin against God.

Yeah, we think of that as very often as an unimportant thing.

We think of it as really not sin at all. Some people will even categorize, the

Roman Catholic Church, for instance, will categorize homosexuality as not being sin unless it's acted upon.

But that's completely off the mark, isn't it? Isn't that a very dangerous way of thinking about sin? Yes, and I remember, not to quote

C .S. Lewis too often, but somebody was telling him about, you know, reading the Sermon on the Mount and being very comfortable with it, and he said, how any person could possibly read the

Sermon on the Mount and be comfortable afterwards, I do not know. It's very unsettling when you read the

Sermon on the Mount and you see the ways in which you are completely exposed by the law of God, and the way in which

Christ as a prophet comes and exposes us in ways that we never realized. But no, that internal thing that's happening within, that's all open to him, and he's showing us again and again that maybe you didn't act upon this, you wanted to, that's because I stopped you, but it begins right here.

Here's the seed of it, in this anger, or in this worldliness, or in this lust, whatever it might be.

And the biblical view of reality in all the world we live in says that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.

It's very easy for us to be deeply concerned about our appearance and not pay so much attention to our heart, and there in the

Sermon on the Mount, it seems to me that one of Jesus's points of emphasis is that this is about what

God sees, this is about what he's paying attention to, and it seems like what you might be getting at here is that if the mind is about what you know, and then to sin is to fall short of what you know, and that's what

God is paying attention to. Right. Yep.

We have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Craig Troxell, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, the city and state where you reside, and the country where you reside if you live outside of the

United States, and please feel free to remain anonymous only if this is a personal or private matter that you are asking about.

And again, the email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Don't go away, we'll be right back with Pastor Craig Troxell and Pastor Jody Morris and our discussion on the heart.

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That's the Thriving story. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arms. And if you just joined us, our guest today is Pastor Craig Troxell. And he is going to be speaking at two different conferences that we are promoting today.

One is going to be held Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m. at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the theme,

Lost Treasures for our Postmodern Time, the Puritan's Theology of the Heart. For more details on that, you can go to the

Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church website, which is redeemeropc .org.

Redeemeropc .org. And then after that, not long after that, Friday, November 13th through Saturday, November 14th, the

Dallas -Fort Worth Reformation Conference at MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas, also features

Pastor Craig Troxell on a similar theme, With All Your Heart, Thinking Again About What You Know, Love, and Choose.

And for more information about that conference, go to the MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church website, which is mc, for MidCities, opc, for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, dot org.

mcopc .org. And we encourage you if you live in those areas, or if you have time to get to those areas, to get there for those events.

And obviously, let your family, friends, and loved ones who you know who do live in those areas to be there, if at all possible.

And before we went to the break, we were discussing sin, Pastor Troxell. If you could get into a little bit more depth, iniquity and transgression.

Right. There's a corollary that I see here in the vocabulary that Scripture uses.

And a good example would be, again, in Psalm 51, where David immediately is confessing his iniquity and his transgression and his sin.

So the word sin is that which correlates well with the sins of the mind. The second word he uses is the word for iniquity.

And the word iniquity correlates well with desire. The word iniquity means to pervert or to twist.

So it means to take something that originally was straight and then twisted like wrought iron, something that you work.

Or it means to make it crooked. But it can also take on the nuance of when we corrupt something, something that was clean and now we make it corrupt and impure.

And we can talk about that when we talk about desires. The third word is the word transgression, which is the

Bible's word for rebellion. And so it takes on that idea that any time that I owe submission to someone but I resist them, this is the

Bible's word for political revolution, to completely throw off authority. But it's the idea that I'm kind of brazenly defying the one who's in charge of me or over me.

And so you can see how that really works well with the will and the person's will resistant to God.

But we'll see a little bit if we talk about this that there's also a flip side to this. There's a time when our will is supposed to be strong when it could be weak or enslaved and cave or afraid.

Those categories come into play there as well. But those are those three words that are used there.

There are other words very similar to them. But I see them falling out in these three groups that really help to bring out what sin is.

And it shows that sin is very complex. And there are times when you might sit under somebody's instruction, like I was in college with a liberal professor, and all he would say about sin is, it's falling short.

I thought, well, that's not so bad. You know, nobody's perfect. We had a government leader who said that, you know,

I'm not perfect. Well, that's not much of a concession. But when you start telling somebody that in your heart, you're perverted, and that you lodge impurities, or that you're rebellious, well, now you're really starting to get into the hard stuff.

Right. It's just like the commonly used phrase, I'm only human, which is a way to excuse yourself of anything that you do that may be hurtful, especially to others.

And, well, I'm only human. Right. Transgression to rebel, that's where it's definitely connected with the will of knowing exactly what you're doing, and then defying

God and what you know he teaches and commands, correct? Correct. And it shows that we're committed.

We're not just passive. Nobody can argue I'm just passive and everything. Well, it turns out that's a problem, too.

But, right, it's more than just what we think, or that I have a stray thought every now and then. I actually commit myself.

And whether I do that in my mind, whether I do it in my language or in my actions, that our heart is committed to a certain agenda, and we pursue those things.

Now, how do the three offices of the Lord come into play here? Yeah, very good.

Yeah, we just don't want to leave people in sin. The Reformed faith does not exclusively do this, but it has especially done this, in trying to understand the work of Christ as a prophet, priest, and king.

And to see that those aspects of his ministry continue. And as a prophet, the way we think of the ministry of Christ is that Christ ministers to his people through his

Word and Spirit. So we would say the Word of God is not just active, it's being actively applied to us through the preaching of the

Word, but in a particular way by the Spirit of God. And this was the ministry that Christ told his disciples that though they would be disappointed and saddened that he would go away, that something marvelous was about to happen in the outpouring of the

Holy Spirit, who takes the teachings of Christ, takes the Word of God, and applies it to our hearts.

And the fact of the matter is that we not only need to have recreated minds, where God by his

Spirit grants to us a saving knowledge of Christ, but we need our minds renewed. And in fact,

Romans 12 opens up this very way, in that not to be conformed to this world, but to be renewed in the mind of the heart, and to be transformed by God's Word in our mind.

And so we need God to retool us in the same way that a car, or a musical instrument, or machinery has to be retooled, or retuned, or reminded.

And this is a glorious thing that God is doing to us, teaching us more and more about himself, about our world, and about ourselves.

And so that our thinking about our life and our world is completely different from what it used to be, because he's literally at work in our minds, in our thinking, how we understand things, our attitudes are changing, because he's stamping us into his mold, and not allowing us to be completely shaped by this world.

And this is very helpful as a Christian, as you constantly undergo this process of being sharpened, and honed, and reoriented by God's Spirit and his truth, and your perspectives, and your thoughts, and your goals, and all these ways.

It's a way that God is training us and helping us. And then, if I could just throw this in there as well, there's actually something even beyond this that's taking place.

And this is particularly helpful in an age that's telling us we really can't know anything, living in a post -modern time, is that he's also reassuring us that we have not misplaced our confidence that the things that we believe are true.

And it's striking to me, where you have these promises in Scripture, where, like in 1

John 5, verse 13, it says, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know.

I think it's amazing, the Scripture says this, that you may know. Or where Paul will say,

I am certain, or I am confident. Or that wonderful promise in Romans 8, verse 32, that we know, we may certain that God works all things for our good.

So again and again, what you have is this kind of bolstering of the mind, telling us that, look, you believe in a

God that you cannot see, and you are not wrong in doing so. That by the

Scriptures, by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, God is continuing to assure us that what we know is true.

Or as Francis Schaeffer would say, that we know that we know. And to have this assurance in what is real.

We can't touch it, but it's real. It's the things that we touch and see. These are the things that are not going to last.

It's that which is invisible that will last. And it's the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, who again and again is reminding us not just that we're saved, or that we're

God's children, or that we have life, but that the things that we are clinging to are things that we absolutely must not forget, and they're the things that will help us in times of trouble.

We have a listener in Lindenhurst, New York, CJ, who asks,

I know it's a very popular teaching that someone can be born again and sin freely and not lose their salvation, and then at a different point later on in life when they are more mature, they make

Jesus the Lord of their life and put him on the throne rather than themselves.

Is this a biblical teaching? This one's for Jody.

Well, I think what our Puritan forefathers would, they would scratch their heads and say, why would anybody want to separate

Christ as Savior from Christ as Lord? And it seems to me that the Reformed faith has answered this quite well, and to say that, no, we would say that we accept

Christ as Savior and Lord, and so when we accept him as a prophet or as our priest, we also accept him as our king, and that he is, in fact, the

Lord of our lives. And there's some times when people say things that are silly in their immaturity, and they may say something like that, when in fact what is happening in them is that Christ is subduing them, and he is teaching them.

You know, I was not raised as a Reformed Christian, and somewhere along the lines the doctrines of grace began to make sense, but I have a hard time understanding where that line is chronologically as I look back.

And what was happening is, of course, Christ was already practicing his lordship, his priestly ministry, his prophetic ministry in my life all along, and so happily that takes place in our lives.

But we ought to think about these things correctly, and we all of us need to bow our knee before his kingship and to say that I have a benevolent ruler, and I need to make sure

I submit everything to him in life, and no Christian, no Christian, no matter what theological persuasion they embrace, no

Christian would say it's permissible for me to sin without concern or wantonly.

No person who loves Christ talks like that. We all of us sin, and we sin boldly, but we don't say it's not a big deal.

This is the most important relationship of our life, and so no Christian would genuinely want to talk like that.

And yes, concerning the topic of the heart, the apostle Paul says that with the heart one believes, and if your definition here as you're describing the heart to us is true, then it's the whole man that believes, not just the mind and not just the will later, but the whole man who believes, and so these points can't be broken up.

We can't divide between Christ as Savior and Christ as Lord. And maybe, Chris, to tag on to what

Jody's saying there, it's to understand this overall unity of the heart, that you cannot antiseptically separate these categories.

They're not meant to be parsed. All of my thinking has an agenda. It's all wrapped up with my desires, and it's all wrapped up with my will.

You can't take them apart, and in the heart of a heart of any Christian, what do

I want? Well, I want what Christ wants, and I want to love what Christ loves, and I want to hate what he hates.

Yeah, do you think that is a part of the four spiritual laws or something of that nature that the listener was talking about?

Do you think that that could be a wrong response to the truth that we are not to think that we need to clean ourselves up before we come to Christ?

Perhaps that's an overreaction to that wrong notion that would be more in a

Pelagian or semi -Pelagian understanding of salvation that, you know, because we're sinners, we have to first somehow clean ourselves up and make ourselves presentable to God before we come to him.

Some might even think before they even enter the doors of a church. Yes, boy,

I think that's true. I've never thought of it that way, but I do think that it's very prevalent that when people say, well,

I'll get myself together, then I'll come to church, and it shows that they do not understand the gospel in the least, and unfortunately sometimes even our own people think these things, and we have to correct them time to time.

You're right, there's probably a deviation from that understanding, even though it is a right understanding to say that you need to come to Christ.

Just come to Christ and let him do the hard work. Let him, by his

Spirit, in the context of a community of faith and sitting under the ministry of the Word and prayer, let him go about that work.

And yes, may I add that that community of faith where a person comes should work very hard to read the signs.

They might be very difficult to see the signs of the Spirit of God at work in this person's life because they're there, and as faint as they may be because so many other troubling things could be going on, where there is a sign of the

Spirit's work, there is the Spirit at work. And where the Spirit is at work, he will do his will, and he will have his man, and we shouldn't get in the way of that because we're concerned about all the troubling aspects that we might see in that person as they come.

We want them to come, and our communities of faith should be open and ready to receive them.

Could you talk a little bit about the work of the Spirit in the heart to bring a sinner to faith, what our confession calls the effectual calling?

Yeah, the effectual calling is that powerful summons of God, and it's clear in the way in which our subordinate standards,

Westminster Confession of Faith and catechisms, exposit this that the heart is what's central here.

And effectual calling is basically saying that the Spirit of God speaks to us in such a way that it convinces us of our sin and basically shows us

Christ. I think the way that the catechism puts it is so interesting because it talks about enlightening our minds, it talks about renewing our wills, and yet if you look at the scripture text for that particular question, it goes to Ezekiel 36 and the promise of a new heart, that God will come and take away our stony heart and give us a heart of flesh, which is a very important concept of regeneration and being born again.

And so Presbyterians talk about effectual calling, others might talk about being born again, but effectual calling takes that in along with this language of calling, like in Romans 8 28, it speaks of that those who are called were justified.

But yeah, it's a comprehensive thing where God comes, and without doing injustice to our hearts, without running roughshod over the nature of our heart,

He's opening our heart up to the truth, opening our eyes, and it means a softening of the will.

It means that we see what we really want in our hearts, and we realize that everything else has left us thirsty and hungry and parched, nothing else satisfies, and we truly desire

His truth. And it's when people are really hungry, like the prodigal son who realizes all these pigs are eating better than he is, that's when he starts to look home.

And I think there it's a metaphor in terms of his hunger, and that's what Christ says in John 6 35,

I think it is, where he says, you know, whoever is thirsty, let him come to me, whoever's hungry, let him come to me, because he's the bread of life, and this is what he provides.

And we see that, we see it in our minds, we embrace with our desires, and our will finally bends the knee to Him.

And that's that beautiful thing that takes place in every Christian, whether you understand it perfectly or not, this is something

God has to do, and we cannot do it for ourselves, none of us can. But He does it,

He does it beautifully, He does it graciously. For some people it takes a long time, for some people it takes cancer, it takes some tragedy, but to the pure, all things are pure, even the most difficult seasons, we look back upon them and we bless

God for them, because this is what saved our soul. I think you get a similar testimony from Johnny Tida Erickson, that God took her legs.

She's the only person that could say this, I would never say this to her, but she said it so that He could give her a new heart.

And that's what it takes, but praise God He does those things. Amen. Yes, and it's interesting, our charismatic and Pentecostal brethren will often chide us who are

Reformed, and not only us who are Reformed, but perhaps especially us who are

Reformed, for not having the Spirit. And yet we believe the

Spirit is far more involved in the life of a Christian than they do, really, if there are many in that is, because we believe in the necessity of the

Spirit to even open up our eyes and ears that we may come to Christ in saving faith.

I mean, we rely on the Spirit far more than the non -Reformed

Christian does. Yes, I think that's true. And I used to work cattle in western

Nebraska, and the cowboys I worked with used to say that there's no such thing as a fat cowboy. And they would also say, you never trust a skinny cook.

So the way I put it is, there's no such thing as a non -praying Calvinist. And I think what

I mean by that, of course we all struggle with prayer, many of us to our shame struggle with prayer. But what we're saying is this, everything

I have is a gift, and I know who I am and my weakness, and so I need

His Spirit. So that's why I go to Him every day and ask for the strength that I cannot muster myself, and for that wisdom that I do not have, for that grace that I so desperately need to embrace and pursue my responsibilities as a husband, as a father, as a

Christian disciple, as a soldier of Christ, as a minister of the gospel, whatever the case may be, that I need the

Spirit. And it's so interesting that John Calvin is the theologian of the Spirit. It's just written all over the pages of what he writes.

And before we go to the break, I want us to begin a discussion on keeping of your heart, which

I think that we'll probably spend the most of our final hour in. That is really where the rubber meets the road and the practical elements of theology where we as Christians have to really take heed to the warnings in Scripture to protect ourselves from those temptations that will lead us into sin.

And we just, all of us have heard about someone who is fairly prominent in our

Reform circles who was revealed to be involved in a very wicked internet service, or at least visiting the website, and of course this should be quickly said that he was caught.

You know, there were probably many more than we care to count that are who believe that they are, you know, secretly in the privacy of their own homes getting away with these sins and constantly forgetting that the

Lord is fully aware of everything that they're doing. But one of the things that you have described as the gatekeepers of your heart are the eyes and ears.

If you could start off that part of the discussion with that. Sure. Well, Scripture is very clear about, as you're saying, keeping the heart, and expressly so in places like Proverbs 4 .23,

keep your heart with all vigilance. And the way that Scripture teaches us this is that, well, if I could start for a second by just talking about keeping, because the word keep that's used in Proverbs 4 .23

actually has two sides to it. And the one suggests, you know, preserving, and the other one suggests protecting.

So like if my wife tells me to watch the kids, on the one hand she's saying, you know, watch them.

So tie their shoes, wipe their nose, make sure they're being good, something like that. But also to watch out for them, so watch for danger, like a loose dog, foul weather, fast cars, suspicious looking characters, something like that.

And so it's both this inward and outward thing. So keeping the heart is both, you know, paying attention to the heart itself, but also protecting it.

And it's a word that it means to watch over something, that you just, you're studying it in such a way that you know it, but also it means that you're watching out for it.

And so that's what the Bible means by keeping the heart. It means that on the one hand

I'm looking for danger outside of myself, those things that will appeal to my heart, but I'm also looking at the heart itself.

And what I call the gatekeepers of the heart is what Scripture teaches us with regard to the ways in which we both preserve and protect.

But here the emphasis is on protecting. And it's the eyes and the ears. So like for instance,

Proverbs 4 .25, it says, let your eyes look directly forward and your gaze be straight before you.

What it's, the idea there is you're on a path and don't look to the left, don't look to the right, keep your eyes straight ahead of you.

And it's the eyes that get us into trouble so many times. We think of King David looking around the city and seeing this woman

Bathsheba, and it says that she was pleasing to his eyes. And it's interesting, it's the very same language that's used when

Eve saw the fruit of the tree, saw it was pleasing to her eyes. In fact, there's three verbs in common in both of those passages.

It's very striking. And so what does David do? He sees, he takes what was forbidden him, and all this...

He desires, and then he takes. Yep. He sees it's beautiful, it's good to the eyes, and he desires and he takes.

The mind, the heart, and the will. Oh, it's interesting. Yeah, you could argue that. And so the eyes are very important in Scripture, that the eyes, like Christ says, are the light of the heart.

So in Matthew 6 .22, he says, the eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness?

That's Matthew 6 .22 and 23. And what he's leaning on is the person who created everything.

He knows how this works, that light shines into your eyes, and through them your whole body is able to act and work dependent upon that illumination and the direction you can take.

If the eye is healthy, your whole body is going to function properly. But if it's not, then you're in trouble. And he's saying that's also true for your heart.

And this becomes a very, very important idea when we think of, for instance, the call of Isaiah.

And in his commission, God tells him in Isaiah 6, make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts.

And so what he's saying is that for these people to see and or to hear is what's going to gauge whether their hearts are open.

Now what is so significant about that is that is the very passage that Jesus cites when he's asked, why do you speak in parables?

And he goes to that passage. And he says, well, some see, but they don't see. They hear, they don't hear.

And their hearts are not open. And that's the very passage that's gone to with the seven churches of Asia.

This is the passage that closes the book of Acts. This is what Paul quotes in Romans. And so it's a very, very important idea that to see spiritually will determine whether you are blind spiritually or whether your heart is open.

And so in Scripture it says, protect your eyes, and in so doing you protect your heart. And that's why you have that covenant that Job makes in Job 31.

He says, I've made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I gaze at a virgin? But what's interesting, the verse that's not noted six verses later where he says something like this, if my step is turned aside from the way and my heart has gone after my eyes.

And what's interesting there is he's saying in verse one, I'm doing what I can with my eyes to protect my heart.

So I'm making sure I'm not looking at these younger ladies who are still attractive to me, but I'm being careful there.

But what about those times when your eyes let you down, your eyes are looking at something before you realize it, you're looking at something that's forbidden or wrong, what's going to happen then?

Well, that's going to come down to your heart. So your eyes are supposed to be the gatekeepers of your heart. But then there's those times when you can't help what you see, like a commercial comes across the television, or you're looking at all the billboards going by on the highway and realize that there's one that probably you don't need to read or remember.

Well, what it's going to get down to is your heart. And so what Scripture is saying then is to protect your heart by watching where your eyes go.

And I think what's so significant about this is think of the age in which we live. When you go to an airport, you're sitting there waiting for your plane, look around what's happening to you.

Everybody is plugged in. It's almost like being in the ER, you know, in a trauma unit, everybody's got wires coming out of their body.

And they're all, they are glued to what they're watching, and their ears are completely tapped into it.

There's no teaching in Scripture that could be more relevant to an audiovisual age than protecting your eyes, and then secondly, your ears.

And everything I said about the ears is also true. The person who refuses to listen is the person whose heart is closed.

And I could cite many passages on this, like Jeremiah 13 .10, or Malachi 2 .2.

These are passages that say that these people refuse to hear my words, and the reason why is because they're stubbornly following their own hearts.

And Isaiah 6 .10 is another example of that. You think of Pharaoh's heart, which was hearted.

He would not listen, Scripture says, in Exodus 7. And the godly listen. They're given a new heart, and it's because their ears have been opened.

Whereas Christ says in Matthew 13, blessed are your ears for they see, and your ears for they hear. And so what

I'm saying is that Scripture tells us is that if you want to protect your heart, 99 .9

% of what enters in your heart is either because you saw it or you heard it. We're going to another break right now.

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

And please, if you're writing, include at least your first name, city and state of residence, and country of residence, if you live outside the

USA. And if this is a question regarding a personal and private matter, you may remain anonymous.

chrizarnsen at gmail .com. We'll be right back with Pastor Craig Troxell and Pastor Jody Morris on our discussion on the heart right after these messages.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arns. And if you've just tuned us in, we apologize once again that we have been having some difficulties with some of our technical aspects of the show, like our commercials and so on.

Sorry for those pauses of dead air that are unintentional. And hopefully all these things will be rectified in the near future.

And if you just tuned us in, our guests today are Pastor Craig Troxell, and he is going to be speaking at two different churches for conferences.

Pastor Craig Troxell himself is pastor of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and he's an adjunct professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and adjunct professor of ministerial studies at Mid -America

Reform Seminary in Dyer, Indiana. He is going to be speaking on the heart.

First of all, he's going to be speaking at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

And the theme of that conference, or that celebration of Reformation Day, is

Lost Treasures for Our Postmodern Time. The Puritan's Theology of the

Heart. That's Lost Treasures for Our Postmodern Time. The Puritan's Theology of the

Heart. That's on Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m. For more details, go to their website,

RedeemerOPC .org. RedeemerOPC, which stands for Orthodox Presbyterian Church .org.

RedeemerOPC .org. And then also, just a couple of weeks after that, Friday, November 13th, and Saturday, November 14th,

Pastor Craig Troxell will be speaking at the Dallas -Fort Worth Reformation Conference at Mid -Cities

Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas. And that's going to be on the theme,

With All Your Heart, thinking again about what you know, love, and choose. For more details, go to their website at the

Mid -Cities Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is MC, which stands for Mid -Cities,

OPC, for Orthodox Presbyterian Church .org. MCOPC .org.

My co -host in studio today is Pastor Jody Morris of the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, one of the churches hosting one of those events featuring

Pastor Craig Troxell. If you have any questions that you'd like to join us on the air with regarding the heart, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

And if you could, Pastor Troxell, continue on with where we left off here about protecting, or the protection of one's heart from sin, from the world of flesh and the devil, the

Keeper Himself, the Lord, our Protector, if you could go into a bit on that. Sure, and part of this, where I go with this, is because of what the

Scripture tells us about our own heart, that there's a lot of heart work, to use the phrase of the

Puritan John Flavel, that we need to do, and paying attention to our weaknesses, those areas where we know that we are prone to temptation, and all that, but there's a real limit in what we can do.

And the reason for that is because the heart is deceitful of all things, and it's beyond cure who can understand it.

And Scripture is telling us that we really do need to take a position of humility when it comes to understanding our own hearts, that we're just not able adequately to, you know, get to the bottom of what we struggle with.

And it means that ultimately our confidence can't be in ourselves. Now, God has given to us many aids, like the

Scriptures, which smoke out things that you thought were hidden, or unlock doors that have dark closets to them, and things that we generally don't want to see or confront.

And God, you know, is very faithful in exposing those things in us. But I think one of the things that attracted me to the doctrines of grace, being raised in the holiness movement, and being raised in a tradition which said that you could live above sin, was that I just thought, you know,

I'm done lying to myself. I just, I can't believe this, because it's not true.

And it was from somebody of youth that had, you know, substantially dedicated himself to trying to live a holy life, and realizing that, you know, the last thing

I should do is put confidence in myself, because I can't do this. And when you read a psalm like Psalm 121, that's a psalm that was given, it's an ascension psalm, so it's given to the

Jewish pilgrim going up to Jerusalem on the annual pilgrimage, and he's asking myself, where does my help come from?

And the answer is, it comes from the Lord. It's not from those hills or the high places they represent, but from the

Lord who made those hills. And it's the Lord who will keep you. And six times in that psalm, you get this word, keep, shema, and this shema, rather, where the

Lord is my keeper. He's the one who keeps you. He keeps Israel. He'll keep you from evil. He'll keep your life.

He keeps your going out, your coming in. The Lord is your keeper, again and again and again. And what that psalm reminds us of is that, at the end of the day, my confidence is not in myself, because I can't keep my feet from slipping or stumbling.

I've not done a very good job at keeping myself from wandering away or turning back or backsliding.

I can't protect myself from evil and from forces that are greater than myself. And sometimes

I wake up, I don't really have the will or the desire or the mind or the wisdom to keep myself.

I don't always see that love there. Or as one of my professors used to say, not every day feels like a resurrection day.

And so, what do I do then? Well, I'm leaning upon the Lord and to know that He is the one who protects me.

I'm under the shadow of His wing, that He's the God who never sleeps or slumbers. There's many times when it feels like I'm asleep, but that's not so with Him.

He never ceases in His protecting me. And you get that language throughout the

Bible. It's a great promise that's given to Jacob, I'm with you, I'll keep you wherever you go. It comes up in Psalm 91.

Psalm 145, the Lord preserves all those who love Him. It's in the blessing and the benediction, number six, the

Lord bless you and keep you. And the gospels pick up the very same idea. Our Lord prays in the high priestly prayer in John 17,

Father keep them in Your name. Well, anyway, all this goes to show what the gospel is, that Christ as my prophet has come and revealed the way of salvation.

Christ as my priest has come and He's opened the way of salvation. But He's also come as my

King and He keeps us along the way of salvation. And He's guarding me to the very end, that when

He began, He will finish. And His promise to me is that He'll keep my heart, that He's going to preserve it from being overcome by hardships or suffering or despair.

And He'll protect me from being overcome by temptations that are too great for me or the world which is greater than I am or the devil who's stronger than I am or being led away by my own sin.

But He's one who will keep me in His name by His Spirit until His work is done.

And that doctrine of assurance is simply the flip side of saying that Christ will do what

He said He'll do. He will raise me up in the last day. He will lose not one of those given to Him by the

Father, as He says in John chapter 6. And so I find this to be a very rich and important ministry of Christ as our

King and who addresses, not just in a sanctifying way, my will, but in the end,

He's my Lord Protector. And that's one of the reasons I want to, I would title this section of the

Lord, Christ our Lord, the Lord of our heart. But in the end, we belong to Him.

He's the one who's preserving our heart and protecting it. Earlier, you said that something like 99 % of the trouble we have with our heart comes through our eyes and ears.

The other 99 % comes from within our own heart. James warns about our own temptations that lead us astray, right?

In the light of the onslaught of trial and temptation that we face and everything you described already, it's a very encouraging point you're making here that Christ Himself is the one who truly preserves and protects our hearts.

We're told to keep our heart with all diligence, with all vigilance. But in the final analysis,

He is the one who will keep us. That's a very encouraging word. We have a listener,

Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says, please explain to me how your

Reformed understanding of perseverance and preservation of the saints is not an invitation to sin freely without fear of losing your salvation, if in fact,

God is certainly going to keep you eternally secure.

Mm -hmm. Well, somebody once asked

Spurge in this a similar question and said, how do you reconcile God's sovereignty and man's responsibility?

And he says, you don't need to reconcile friends. And I think that the way

Scripture addresses both of these things, without trying to necessarily explain how they intersect, and I don't think we should put that burden upon Scripture in a similar way, the historic creeds have been very cautious about saying, where does the divine nature and the human nature of Christ intersect?

Give us that precise point. Well, that's a profound mystery. But I think that if you start to absorb the tone of Scripture when it comes to obedience, like in Philippians 2, 12 and 13, working out your salvation with fear and trembling, especially the passages in Hebrews 6 and 10 that put the sharpest edge on perseverance that one could ever possibly want to hear, what

Scripture is telling us is that the mode of the Christian is one that is active, and that no

Christian, no matter what theological persuasion they're under, should be timid about the fact that Scripture tells us to obey.

And in fact, when I was an Alaska, and I went to this Bible study where all these

Calvinists were, and I was very put off by what they were saying, one of the things we were talking about afterwards is somebody said, well, we just really believe

God's promises. And I kind of smiled because I knew what he was saying. I said, well, I guess the point we can agree on is obedience. And he said, that's true.

We really can. And it wasn't until I met my wife, when

I finally met such a winsome and beautiful, I should say, presenter of the doctrines of grace, that God really was whittling me down.

But this was one of those doctrines that became very precious to me, because my father began to see the errors of being raised in a view of Christianity that said that every morning, basically, you're not really sure if you're saved or not.

And he just felt that just didn't make any sense whatsoever. And the reason why is because it doesn't. And he did not become fully persuaded of the doctrines of grace before he died, but he had certainly come a long ways.

And he was one of the first ones that oriented me towards the fact that these promises in God's Word mean something.

And what they mean is this, that ultimately, like I was just saying in Psalm 121, if my salvation is in my hands, if it is absolutely up to the purity of my desires, if it is going to come down to the strength of my will and volition, if it's going to come down to the consistency of my obedience, then

I'm in really big trouble. Because the fact of the matter is, as I wake up,

I become more and more convinced of my need of God's grace, and my waywardness of heart, and my weakness, and my foolishness, and my stubbornness, and the fact that I have to rehearse these things again and again and again.

And I've become so relieved that the grace of God is all sufficient to save someone even like me.

It's amazing to me he would have anything to do with me whatsoever. Whatsoever. It does not make any sense to me.

The only way you can make sense of it is that his gift of salvation is free. Yeah, I think that's why, that it is a very dangerous combination.

As much as we love the fact that it is true that those who are truly the children of God, those who are truly the elect, are eternally secure, we who are

Reformed tend not to use that phrase because, although it's true, it's an insufficient definition or description because we are preserved by God, and that's why we persevere.

Don't you think that it is a very dangerous combination to borrow from Reformed theology the notion of eternal security while rejecting the rest of Reformed theology?

Because then you do indeed have a scenario that is very dominant in modern evangelicalism, where people are being taught that the way that you live is no litmus test of whether or not you're born again.

That you are eternally secure as long as you have prayed that prayer or went forward an invitation or altar call, so -called, and that type of theology which rejects

Calvinism or rejects the dominance of Reformed theology and yet embraces that one element of eternal security, that's a really deadly combination, isn't it?

No, that's absolutely right, and it takes the edge off where it ought to be. If you think of just the watchfulness language that you have in Scripture and our

Savior in the garden telling us to watch lest we fall into temptation, or so that we will not fall into temptation, and I think that you need to keep that edge as a

Christian, ever persevering, ever vigilant. That idea, I'm a soldier, I'm constantly on watch, and I'm not on edge wondering whether he loves me or not, that's not the case, but I'm constantly watching out, and for a host of reasons.

My responsibility is to set an example before others, and to help others, but no, it's a great concern

I have. It's like one of my professors in seminary would talk about that bumper sticker that used to say,

Christians aren't perfect, they're just forgiven, and well, okay, that's true, that's true, but what is it really connoting?

What is that bumper sticker suggesting? You can have Jesus as Savior but not Lord. Exactly, it's excusing laziness, it's excusing sin, and it's basically suggesting an attitude that is really reprehensible to a

Christian and to Scripture. And can I add that there simply isn't any environment or thought given to the idea that you can be justified and not be sanctified anywhere in the

New Testament? No, that's true. In fact, there's a passage in Romans where Paul describes the journey or the path that a

Christian takes that leads to eternal life, and in that path is included sanctification.

Right. You just can't have one without the other. You can't separate them. Jesus is very clear too.

He says, you will know them by their fruits. And so in the

Reformed community, we really know nothing of receiving

Jesus as Savior but not having Him as Lord. The two are inseparable, they go together.

The way that Jesus as our Savior and Lord works Himself out and that by His Holy Spirit in individuals, it's different for everyone.

And that journey can't be formulated precisely, but that journey always includes both justification and sanctification.

We have a listener, Harrison in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, do you believe it is biblically accurate to tell people to invite

Jesus into their heart? That is an interesting question because I've heard brothers criticize that language.

In fact, I think biblically, I think we can say that. I mean, it's clear that Christ by His Spirit lives in our heart.

And I understand the concern that some people have, but I'm not troubled by it because He does.

Sinclair Ferguson has said something like this, I'm paraphrasing, that every single benefit we have as a

Christian is either because we are in Christ or because Christ is in us. And what he means by the latter is that Christ Jesus by His Holy Spirit, or the

Spirit of Christ as Paul puts it in Romans 8, lives in us. And so technically,

I'm not troubled by that by that language. Can I add that even using the language of inviting

Him in so that it emphasizes the act of our will is important, and behind the act of inviting

Him in as an action of our will is that we would like Him to come, that we desire to have

Him. And you know, in John, Jesus talks about the way the

Father draws us, convinces us, and makes or reveals something about Himself to us that is more desirable than what we experience in this world, so that we want

Him to come. And all of these things are aspects or expressions of the heart, that we desire

Him, that we welcome Him with our wills, that we desire

Him with our hearts. It's a reasonable expression, especially when

Jesus says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Now, do you think that the objection by Reformed people is primarily because of the fact that, yeah, you can invite

Jesus in your heart, but you should be inviting Him in there to rip it out of you and replace it with a new one?

Yeah, I have no problem with that. I'm just, I think that there's one other place, though, where,

I mean, Paul talks about Christ in you in Colossians 1, but I'm thinking there's another phrase.

But I understand the concerns, but I don't want to be a person who overreacts to the way certain things get abused in wider evangelicalism.

I don't want to be nervous about, if Scripture puts something a certain way, then I'm good with it. I'm just,

I'm totally content with how the Holy Spirit puts things. That's not the most popular way to put it,

I understand that. But no, you're certainly right. What are you inviting

Him to do? Demolish and then build, like you said. We're going to be going through our final break of the day for this two -hour broadcast.

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That's linbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is

Chris Arnzen, and if you just tuned us in, we have been interviewing for the last 90 minutes or so Pastor Craig Troxell, who is going to be speaking at two churches, for different events involving the heart, which is our theme today, has been our theme for the last 90 minutes and will be for the next 30 or so.

He will be speaking Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m., God willing, on the lost treasures for our postmodern time, the

Puritan's Theology of the Heart. That's Friday, October 30th, 7 p .m., at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Their website is redeemeropc .org, redeemeropc .org.

And then, just less than two weeks after that, he will be speaking at the

Dallas -Fort Worth Reformation Conference at Mid -Cities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas.

And that is going to be on a similar theme on the heart. And the website for the

Mid -Cities Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Bedford, Texas is mcopc .org,

mcopc .org. I really want you to get back into the mind, that aspect of the heart.

And there are a lot of people who say that we don't really need to be reading books written by men, we should just stick to the

Bible and we don't need any guidance other than the Bible. Well, that's a bit arrogant, isn't it, to think that we don't need teachers when the

Scriptures themselves teach that we need teachers and that not everybody should be one? And isn't that a good way of protecting our minds by saturating them with the, not only the

Scriptures, of course, that's the first and foremost thing, but also to glean the wisdom of godly men, many of whom have lived before us, like you've been talking about the

Puritans and so on, and, you know, great men of God who have stood the test of time to saturate our minds with the truths that they have brought forth from the

Word of God? Yeah, I totally agree. Well, it's interesting, like, the book of Hebrews closes with some admonitions about imitating your leaders, listen to them, don't make it hard for them.

But it is interesting as well to me where it says somewhere in there, not to be led astray by strange teachings.

I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of verse 9. And then it follows it up with something like this, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace.

And I think one of the ways that we need to think of how we can strengthen our heart is to understand that we equip it through the mind.

And it's very significant that the book of Romans opens its practical section in chapter 12 after running through some of the deepest expositions that we have of doctrine in all the scripture.

It says, therefore, so here's the conclusion in light of these great mercies of God for you, these things that we love to reflect upon.

What does it say? It says renew your mind. And so I think that's one way to state biblically what you're arguing.

And that is that we need to strengthen our hearts by grace. And that grace comes to us through God's truth as he ministers to our minds.

And many times it comes to the mentoring ministry of those that have gone before us.

The great folly, if we could put it that way, of one of the great follies of American evangelicalism is constantly reinventing the will and not going back and understanding that so many things that we face, we've faced before.

Open to God, open theology is something we've seen that before. And that's why the Reformers went after the

Socinians. There's all sorts of foolishness that we have all around us that we've seen it before, if we'll just study it.

And there's oftentimes better arguments made historically than they are today. And again, and to get back to the heart, this is one of the reasons

I want to get people familiar again with the Puritans. And they're not always at their best, but in their good expressions, which is

I think most of the time, you have these wonderful pieces of literature, these devotional works that do a really good job of inoculating a

Christian against foolishness. And some of the stuff that we face is not very sophisticated, and some of it is absolutely foolish, and it's silly that people fall for such stuff.

And so that's one of the reasons we read our forefathers. And there's the admonition in the

Proverbs given again and again, my son, listen to my words. Yeah.

Amen. And going to the iniquity of your desires, if you could contrast that between perverted love and pure love.

Sure. This is actually one of my favorite topics in all the work I've been doing, is to think about desires and the way in which desires can become perverted and twisted and impure.

And I think you have to begin with the idea that the vocabulary of Scripture and the word for desire is that the word for desire, as far as I can tell, is always a neutral term.

That it's, in other words, it's a word that is not bad in itself or good in itself. And the way that Scripture treats desire is that it's bad depending upon its object, almost always based upon its object.

On occasion it's amount. But usually desire in itself is not necessarily bad, it's not necessarily good.

Now the world will tell you any unfulfilled desire is a tragedy. That's probably the point of the movie Titanic.

But Scripture is saying that's not necessarily true. There's some desires that are healthy, some that are unhealthy, some are shameful, some are honorable, some are mature, some are childish.

And that means we have to either subdue our desires or encourage them, smother some, fan the flame of others.

And so when it comes to understanding the purity of desire and the impurity of desire, we have to ask ourselves, is this a desire that is good?

Is it, in other words, is the object good? Is the amount of it good? Some desires can get out of control.

We love things too much. The Bible calls those things idolatry. Those are idols. What do you hunger for?

What makes you sad if you can't have it? And so we have to understand those things about our desires and that those desires can get way, way out of control.

Well, so what does God do with those desires? What's secure? And our first instinct,

I think, many times is simply to squash desire. And that is not true.

The Christian faith is not Buddhism. What's the goal of Buddhism? It's nirvana or enlightenment.

We have no desire. And we are not Buddhists, and neither are we Stoics, where we look down upon emotions.

And for people that are Star Trek fans, we'd say we're not Vulcans. But I'm no

Star Trek fan. So the goal is not to squash desire. Or many times we downplay it.

We say, if you don't feel like doing the right thing, just do it anyway. Just buck up. And there are many times that's true.

I don't always wake up in the morning and feel like I need to, I want to have my devotions, but I should have them anyway.

But it's not the heart of the Christian faith to say that we should not have desires.

So, for instance, if loving my wife is nothing but bare duty, in other words, if she said, well, thank you for the birthday card.

I said, well, that's my responsibility as a husband. Well, that's my duty as a husband. And my heart's never in it.

You know, something is wrong. The way that God made the heart is that we are filled with desires.

And here again, I'll lean on C .S. Lewis. Our problem is not our desires are too strong.

Our desires are too weak. Hmm. That we are half -hearted creatures, C .S. Lewis says, and we're content with things that are ridiculous.

What God wants us to do is, our desires are to be inflamed, but for the right thing. So, like, as a husband,

Proverbs tells me to rejoice in the wife of my youth. Let, and then it becomes very explicit, let her breasts fill you at all times with delight.

Be intoxicated in her love. So that's not squashing or extinguishing desire, that means fanning in the flame.

And so, here I think it's helpful to think of an example from Greek literature, if I may.

From Greek mythology, let me put it that way. And that's when the sirens would sing and lure men to their death.

Lure them to Charybdis and Scylla. And there are only two figures in Greek literature that made it through.

First, there's Odysseus. And what he did is he stocked up the ears of his men with wax. They bound him to the mass.

So they went by, they got to hear the sirens singing, but the men didn't hear it. And so, but he got to hear it.

So he made it through. He lost six men, but that's just a technicality. He made it through. But there's another guy who made it through.

And that's Orpheus. And Orpheus was the greatest of all Greek lyricists and singers.

And what he did was better. So that when Jason and the Argonauts, he's in their boat.

When they're coming to the sirens, they began to hear the sirens. But Orpheus began to sing to the men.

And his song was sweeter. And his song so enchanted the men that it was a more alluring song.

They didn't even hear the sirens. And I think it says actually, Jason Argonauts, as they passed by, they disdained the song of the sirens.

I think biblically, what scripture is telling us is that that is what's to happen with a

Christian. That our desires for Christ, or for my bride, or my spouse, for what is more noble, what's beautiful, become sweeter to me than the songs of the world.

So that, in other words, I'm not extinguishing desire in my heart. I'm fanning in the flame the right things so that the more noble desires, the better desires, the good desires, those are the things that eventually squash or put to the side these other desires, because I'm understanding more and more this world and its desires, they do not satisfy.

These are the things that will fade away, as 1 John 2, 16 says, that the desires of the eyes, all those things, the desires of the flesh, these are the things that are passing away.

And that when I'm seeing more and more as a Christian, and the desires of my heart, that Christ alone offers that water that quenches my thirst.

That here's the one who gives me food that satisfies. Here is truth that not only answers my questions, but this truth has set me free.

And I don't care about those other things any longer. It's like when I first met my wife, at the time

I was living in Alaska, or just before that I was living in Alaska and I was training as a mountain climber, and I told one of my friends about Carol, and they said, what about your dream to climb

Mount McKinley? And I said, I found something more interesting. And that was an easy answer, and it was a genuine answer.

Why? Because that was a genuine desire of my heart. And that's exactly what's happening with what

Christ says about the pure in heart, we'll see, God. He's not saying a pure isn't clean. He's talking about a heart where what's happening is that it's not mixed with doubt, it's not distracted by lesser things, it's a heart that's being increasingly purified.

And so I think the most beautiful illustration of this in Scripture is in Luke 10, where Martha says,

Lord, I'm doing all the work, tell Mary to help me. And what does he say? He says, Martha, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but Mary has chosen the one thing that is necessary, and it will not be taken from her.

And what he's saying is, Martha, your heart is divided. Mary has a pure heart. And so when

Scripture says, whom have I in heaven but you, there's nothing on earth that I desire besides you, it's talking about this having a pure heart.

And so a pure heart means having undivided desires. In the same way, if I'm wearing a jacket, it might be 100 % pure wool.

Or if I'm drinking water on the bottle, it'll say 100 % pure spring water.

Or a hamburger, you know, in the United States, at least, not in England, has 100 % pure grade

A beef. In England, it might have some horse in it or something. But anyway, so what is a pure faith?

It means it's a faith where it's not distracted by lesser things. And what it is, it's built upon that metaphor.

Like in 1 Peter 1 .6, let me just grab that passage real quick. It says that the genuineness of your faith, which is more precious than gold, though it is tested by fire.

And what he's talking about is the same thing Isaiah talks about when God says, I'll smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy.

Well, that's what it means by purifying. And so that is that pure heart with regard to desires, where that's what

God is doing in my heart by his spirit, that he's increasingly purifying my heart. It doesn't mean washing it clean, that does happen.

But it means that it's a heart that's less and less without mixed motives. It's less and less divided.

Not all that extraneous, unnecessary stuff. It's not purged by contaminants.

God is making it more and more pure. And to me, that is one of the most precious things in Scripture that God is doing in this heart of mine, is he's making it more and more like Christ.

And so, sorry that's a little long, but I think that's such an important insight in Scripture. Our instinct sometimes is altogether wrong.

Why shouldn't this feel so good? It must be a sin. Well, maybe not. Maybe this is a godly desire and it's okay.

Yeah, for some reason I was reminded of the song, I think it may have been a song from the 70s or 80s, if loving you is wrong,

I don't want to be right. And that should be the national anthem, I think, for this world right now.

I don't mean that it should be in the sense that that'd be a right thing for them to sing. Right, right. But people think that if they attach the concept or the word love to something, that it all of a sudden magically makes the object of that love appropriate.

And nothing could be more reflective of that than the homosexual revolution that we are experiencing with same -sex marriage being legal and so on.

And people are saying, how dare you, who are you to stop me from marrying someone

I love? Now, that's a very important part of what you were just saying, that the

Holy Spirit is going to guide our hearts to love correctly.

Right, right. And it doesn't mean it's going to get all perfect before it's all said and done.

That's not what it means. But it means that I will increasingly want to do what's right. That's the promise of Philippians 2, 12, and 13.

Work out your salvation of fear and trembling. Well, how can this take place? Well, because for God is at work in you to want and to will according to his, or to work and to will according to his good purpose.

And the promise there is, he's not just helping you to do the right things, but to want to do them. And I can't will anything perfectly.

There's all kinds of things that I desire. But I have my weak moments, or I have those more truthful moments where I see,

I didn't want this as much as I thought I did. But it's the unbelieving heart that will defend absolutely anything.

If you think of back in the day when Woody Allen tried to defend his scandalous affair with Sun Yi, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, his longtime girlfriend.

And even the mainline press was asking about this. They were scandalized. And his answer was something like, well, the heart wants what it wants.

There's no logic to these things. You meet somebody, and you fall in love, and that's that. I think that's almost a direct quote.

But it went something like that. That's what my heart wants. Well, that's not good enough.

That's not defensible. But that is exactly the mindset of this world. If I want it,

I should have it. But they can't help themselves. It's like that sequence in the Lord of the

Rings, where Mary and Pippin are talking after Pippin has looked into the seeing stone. And Mary says, why do you look?

Why do you always have to look? And Pippin says, I don't know. I can't help it. Mary says, you never can. And that is that helplessness of the unbeliever, absolutely enslaved, addicted, entranced.

And that by temptations and various desires, or uber -desires, we could call them, by their idolatries.

And that's where Christ comes in to the believer's heart and says, no, I'm going to reign. And there's many of these things that he pushes aside right away.

And there's many of them. He makes them struggle with them for a long time. But they never gain the control. It's that sin's double cure, as the hymn says.

Not just removing that condemning power of sin, but the reigning power of sin. This will not rule me.

And that's the significance of Romans 6. Sin will not master you. You will struggle with it, and you'll feel like you're in its death hold many times.

But it will not reign, because Christ is Lord. If you could, in about four minutes, leave our listeners with what you most want etched on their hearts and their minds when they leave this program today.

Well, that's not asking very much. I guess my concern would be to think of these three areas of the heart, and to know that at any given season of their life, they may, without intention, understate the importance of that part of their heart.

Or for many of us, we are raised in such a way as to de -emphasize or not encourage that part of our heart.

Like you were talking about earlier, about theology and the mind. It's possible to overstate the mind.

Many Christians want to intellectualize the faith, and they compartmentalize their theology from their life, which is a horrible, horrible thing.

But then there are other Christians who understate the mind and fall into anti -intellectualism. And so that's an area where I'd have them concerned.

I think with desires, my concern would be that there are Christians that do not understand that God wants a fan in the flame.

Here they are. Christians should be a passionate people. Everybody talks about what they're passionate about.

They'll talk about they're passionate about using canola oil. But we ought to be passionate about Christ, and our love for Him should be infectious.

And that should be obvious, that we love each other, we love our families, and we love Christ. And so I'd like to hear an amen every now and then.

And the Presbyterian Churches are kind of hard to come by. But every now and then, they can't deny themselves. But I want to be all in that way, as a

Christian, very, very passionate about things. And in terms of the will, this is something we didn't touch upon, would be it's possible to be too stubborn and resistant of God in our will, but it's also possible to be too passive.

And I think parents feel like, oh, I have this strong -willed child. Woe is me.

Well, I would say, what do you think God needs in this next generation? Do you think He wants weak -willed disciples?

You know, we need some Lutherans. So when somebody says, you know, nobody else agrees with you on this, we want a child to say,

I don't care, I'm following Christ. And so we need Christians who are not so weak -willed and so passive and powerless, but to know that my duty is to say yes to God and no to this world, and to forsake the world, and that means that as the captain of my heart,

Christ is strengthening me. He's making me a courageous person.

But on the other hand, He's making me tender towards Him. That's why my will, it needs to be very, very strong against this world to say no to the world.

On the other hand, when it comes to Christ, that I increasingly become like putty in the hands of the

Spirit, very sensitive to His movings in my heart by the Word of God, that my heart is always repentant and broken to Him.

And the Scripture says, that is that one sacrifice God will never, ever despise. And He looks upon that and says, now, finally,

I have something to work with. And that's where the Christian's will should be.

Thick -skinned to this world, but tender -hearted to God. And I think those are the things I'd be concerned about to communicate.

And last of all, to say, but think of them always as a unity. They always go together. That's the brilliance what

Scripture tells us, that Christ is your prophet, priest, and king. He is doing these things in your mind, in your desires, in your will.

Thank you so much for being our guest today, Pastor Troxell. It's been an honor and privilege and a joy, and I really enjoyed our conversation.

And I know that your personal website for Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois is

BethelOPC .org, BethelOPC .org. I hope that you return as a guest on Iron, Sharpens Iron soon.

I would enjoy it. Thank you very much, Chris, for having me. And Pastor Jody Morris, it's been an honor and privilege also to have you as my co -host for the very first time right here in studio on Iron, Sharpens Iron.

Thank you for having me. And I know that your website is RedeemerOPC .org,

RedeemerOPC .org, which is also the website you can go to for more information on the

Reformation Day celebration on October 30th, that's a Friday at 7 p .m.,

at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the theme Lost Treasures for our

Postmodern Time, the Puritan's Theology of the Heart. And then on Friday, November 13th through Saturday, November 14th, our guest,

Pastor Craig Troxell, will be at the Dallas -Fort Worth Reformation Conference at MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas, and that website is

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

Savior than you are a sinner. God bless, and we hope you join us tomorrow on Iron, Sharpens Iron.