1689 Class Session #2

Almighty God, we thank you for this day, and we thank you for the blessing that is the church, Lord. We thank you that you have gathered us together in congregations that we could worship you and that we could encourage and approve each other,

Lord. Lord, I pray that you would open our hearts and that you would help us as we go through this, that you would teach us, and you would teach us things that we don't even realize that we need to learn,

Lord. Pray these things in Christ's most holy name, amen. So you know, y 'all are lucky, because my original rough draft of this clocked in at two hours and 40 minutes.

However, I sat down with my editing staff, and we were able to get this down to two hours flat.

So, no, I am, hold on, I need to start this timer, or I will mess up.

We're going 40 minutes flat, all right? Let's see if we can do this. The Pope of Rome is that man of sin, the son of perdition, the

Antichrist. I made a promise that that's how I'd start that off. But that's just something good for someone listening, when they open this up, that's the first thing they hear.

It's good for them to hear that. But you know, in all seriousness, chapter 26 is the longest chapter in the

Confession, and it has a lot of wisdom in it, that line being part of it. But ultimately, it is what makes us

Baptist. It is one of our true distinctives. So we've got a lot of ground to cover.

There's 15 paragraphs in chapter 26, two chapters in chapter 27. So we've got a lot of ground to cover, and we'll try to do this pretty fast, pretty high altitude looking at this.

But before I do that, and before I get started, I want to say something about what Josh said last week about the papacy, even if he didn't really know he was talking about the papacy, when he said it.

You know, he reminded us that people died for the truths in this Confession. And that's been rolling around in my head, and most of y 'all know

I'm a little bit of a history nerd. So I went digging, and the truth is, when we look at 130 years of European history, from about 1520 to 1651,

I found that between two and four million Protestants were killed during that time.

There were various wars that were waged by the papists against the Protestants, various inquisitions, and then through these wars, different people died of plagues and starvations that were because of the war.

Think about that, that's 84 people every single day for over a century, three every hour.

They weren't dying over simple things or the finer points of eschatology. They were dying for salvation by grace alone, justification by faith alone, salvation through Christ alone, and Scripture as the ultimate authority.

See, they died for the solas that we so easily rattle off without a second thought that we get the blessing to just be able to affirm and believe.

Our faith, these very truths that we confess in our confession and we confess with our lips were bought and preserved and handed to us by the blood of our forefathers, and we need to remember that and not let our comfort and our familiarity with these ideas breed contempt for them.

So remember that as we go through this, that people died for this. They didn't just believe it, they died for it.

So diving into chapter 26 and chapter 27 on the doctrine of the church and the communion of saints.

So we have to start out by asking a basic question, what is the church? Paragraphs one through three of chapter 26 give us a very clear definition, and one that stands in direct contrast to say, the

Roman and Greek views of the church and also the Presbyterian view of the church. The Romans and the Greeks view the church as a centralized institution outside of which there is no salvation.

It's a top -down, if you're not with the Pope, you're gonna go to hell. That's how they view it. The 1689 confession though teaches us that the church is not some monolithic church.

It's not a monolithic institution that is planted down by the Pope in Rome, but instead is the whole body of the elect united by Christ, by the

Spirit and by faith. It's invisible, not in the sense that it isn't real or that we can't reach out and touch it, but that it is by the work of the

Spirit in our own hearts and the working of the Spirit and the elect. See, the

Roman church and the Eastern Orthodox church for that matter, both argue that unless you are under their institutional umbrella, you are outside of the arc of salvation.

However, what's funny about that is that a Roman Catholic, according to their doctrine, is far quicker to say that a

Muslim or a Jew can be saved than a Protestant. However, we have to understand that we see here in the confession, the first word is the

Catholic church. And that can throw us for a little bit of a loop as Baptists because especially here in America, we don't like to use that word

Catholic at all. We kind of get scared by it. But the truth of the matter is, Rome has abandoned the name

Catholic. What makes the church Catholic is that it's universal in scope, it's invisible. It is the body of the elect united across the world because while we are all united here in a congregation, we are just as united in a way through Christ with a church in Ethiopia because we are all

Christians and we belong to the same body. So for that matter, I'm not gonna refer to the

Roman Catholic church as Catholic. They are Romans, they are Papists. They are not a true church as described under the 1689

Confession. Now, our Presbyterian brothers, they still get it wrong on this.

They hold to a distinction between visible and invisible church. Whereas the Baptists, we're gonna say that,

I wanna quote this, hold on. All right, paragraph two, all persons throughout the world professing the faith of the gospel and obedience unto

God by Christ, according unto it, not destroying their own profession by any errors, averting the foundation or unholiness of conversation or it may be called visible saints and of such on all particular congregations be constituted.

So that's saying that of the saints is the church to be constituted up, the congregations to be constituted up.

The Presbyterians would say no, that it is a covenant membership and that you can be part of the visible church and not be part of the invisible church.

That if you're an infant and we baptize you, you're part of the church. You're a part of the visible member of the church, even if you're not elect and even if you eventually apostatize of the faith and you go out and become a

Buddhist or any other pagan, that you are a part of the visible church for a while. And here's why we can't hold to that as Baptists and why this is important that we understand that we should not divide the church between visible and invisible.

The fact is we're a congregational polity. Whenever it's time to raise up elders, when it's time to raise up deacons, vote on money, we're voting as a congregation.

Do you want pagans voting with the church? We've seen what happens when pagans infiltrate the church, what happens to those churches they apostatize.

You have gay flags waving on churches because for too long they said, well, that's not what really matters.

It does matter. The fact is is that the church is invisible.

It's the body of the saints. However, we do have visible gatherings. We have our local churches that are true expressions of the greater invisible body, but they're not a separate institution that can be separated from it.

It's all one. Paragraph two goes into talking about saints.

Now, this is another spot that we differ from our Roman enemies. The fact is is that they sit there and they will say that saints are to be canonized.

They're to be these great lines of the faith, pastors or martyrs or men that do miracles. But we see in scripture in 1

Corinthians, Paul tells us that we are all called to be saints together who call on the name of the Lord.

The fact is that by the very nature of being a Christian, we are being sanctified by God and throughout the

New Testament, we see Paul refer to the entire body of the church as saints. That's why

I always love it whenever you see those little old ladies that call people saints, they say, oh, you're just a saint.

There's more truth to that than we realize because if you're a Christian, you are a saint. Second part of that is we reject

Rome's practice of praying to the saints, venerating the relics of the saints or assigning patron saints to various causes.

That's not Christian. It's paganism with robes on it. The fact of the matter is scripture expressly forbids praying to the dead,

Deuteronomy 1811. And it tells us plainly in 1 Timothy that there is only one mediator between man and God and that's

Christ. So we have to realize that when we're talking about saints, we have to draw a hard line and we don't get roped into this

Roman fascination with praying to saints, venerating their relics. I think in the

Eastern Orthodox Church, they kiss dead body parts to try to get blessings out of it. It's not good.

But with this and seeing that the church is the body of the elect, that we are all saints and of that our congregations are constituted, we also have to see in paragraph three that even the purest of churches are still subject to error.

The fact is faithful Christians are gonna disagree. We disagree on the spiritual gifts. We disagree on how often we should take communion.

We disagree on the mode of baptism and of various other things, whether it be dispensational or covenantal.

We all disagree on these things. And these are serious disagreements. And there does need to be a level of doctrine dividing.

The fact is that a Presbyterian shouldn't be able to serve as an officer in a Baptist church and a Baptist shouldn't be able to serve as an officer in a

Presbyterian church. These matters do divide us. However, just because we have these disagreements and someone is an error, it doesn't make that church a false church.

We can have unity without uniformity. That is one of the blessings of the local expression of the church that we can gather here and affirm the 1689 and down the road, there can be a faithful Presbyterian church or a faithful Assembly of God church.

That's the beauty of is that we are still all one church, yet we have our local expression. However, we also have to realize that paragraph three gives us a very hard warning that the fact is that some churches are no longer churches, that they are in the words of the confession, synagogues of Satan.

We see that all too often that churches apostatize and they go away. We look at our own country with our mainline denominations, the

PCUSA, the Methodist church, the Anglican church, we call it the Episcopal church here, all of which have denied the very basis.

They deny the inerrancy of the Bible. They deny the word of God as being truthful, which is inerrancy.

They deny Christ as the only mediator. They deny him as the only way to heaven. These churches aren't churches at all.

We also have churches out there that preach that if you just have enough faith, you'll get all the desires you want.

And then we have Rome, which has polluted the gospel with idolatry, extra mediators, and the office of the papacy.

So what do we do when we see all this going on? Well, first we have to understand that as Christians, we are part of a church that spans all time in all nations.

Second, we need to be gracious towards others who disagree with us on secondary matters. It is not good for us to kick people out of the kingdom because they believe that you can speak in tongues.

It's not good for us to kick people out of the kingdom because they want to baptize their baby. That's not our prerogative.

We can disagree on these things. However, we do need to stand firm whenever the essentials of the faith are in question, whenever we're talking about things like justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone.

We have to be firm on those things and we have to call that out and we have to realize that not everyone that calls themselves a church or puts a cross out in front of their building is a church.

And we have to watch that. And with that, we come to possibly one of the strongest and probably the most uncomfortable parts of the confession.

And you know what? It's really uncomfortable for us, our modern ears. Paragraph four says, "'Neither can the

Pope of Rome in any sense "'be the head thereof, but is that Antichrist, "'the man of sin, the son of perdition, "'that exalts himself in the church against Christ "'and all that is called

God, "'whom the Lord shall destroy "'with the brightness of his coming.'" That phrasing's not really politically correct, especially today when we are in this age of broad ecumenicalism.

We have conferences where Romans and Protestants are getting together for the gospel. I don't know how that happens when we don't have the same gospel.

But the truth is, it probably makes us squirm here. Even though we all say that we affirm this, we sit there and think about our friends or our family members that are

Roman Catholic that are in this institution and think, well, could they be part of some false institution?

The truth is, this isn't some minor issue of disagreement. Just as a woman who is married, a wife only has one head, her husband, we don't hold out room for her father at that point because they are joined together, they leave their father and mother.

The church doesn't have another head out there. We have one head, that is Christ. That's what the scripture tells us.

And to say that because the Pope tries to usurp this and claim this title of himself that he's an antichrist isn't a fringe view held by only a few

Baptists in 17th century England. This is the unanimous testimony of the Reformation. Lutherans, the

Reformed churches, Anglicans and Baptists all agree that the Pope and the papal system is a, and in some cases, the antichrist.

Here's how this works. So the small clad articles, penned in 1537 by Martin Luther, declares this, the

Pope is the very antichrist who has exalted himself above and opposed himself against Christ because he will not permit

Christians to be saved without his power. The Westminster Confession, in an almost identical version of this, says there is no other head of the church but our

Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be the head thereof but is that antichrist.

The Scots Confession of 1560, penned by John Knox, we utterly detest the vanity and blasphemy of that Roman antichrist.

The Savoy Declaration, our Congregationalist counterpart, repeats almost word for word our version.

Francis Turretin, the great Reformed scholastic, wrote this, the Roman pontiff is that head of an apostate church and a true antichrist, foretold by Paul.

John Calvin, a man who most of us probably all respect, in his institute wrote, we call the Roman pontiff antichrist because he is the head of an apostate church and opposes the kingdom of Christ.

Now why did they say this? Were these just a bunch of angry ex -Catholics with an ax to grind against the papacy?

No, they were reading their Bibles and faithfully exegeting 2 Thessalonians, which describes a man of sin who exalts himself in the temple of God, claims divine prerogatives, sets himself above the people of God, and says that salvation only comes through him.

The Pope claims to be the vicar of Christ on earth, claims that he is the head. He claims that when he sits ex -cathedra, that he has infallible authority to pronounce matters of doctrine.

He demands that we address him as the Holy Father, and he claims that he has the power over life, death, and salvation, that if he says you're cut off, you're just cut off and there's nothing you can do about it.

Is that not sitting in the temple of God and claiming to be God? Is that not claiming the prerogatives of Christ for himself?

John Gill, the great Baptist expositor, wrote this in Revelation 17, talking about the harlot of Babylon in the

Roman church. This antichrist is not to be understood of a single person, but of a succession of the persons in the papal chair.

He sits in the temple of God, not a Jewish temple, but the Christian church. Gill points out that the

Pope takes to himself all the titles of Christ, claims Christ's authority, and demands that we obey him the same way we obey

Christ, all while persecuting the saints. These are all traits of the beast in the book of Revelation.

And this isn't just theological speculation about this. It's grounded in real history. The Popes have excommunicated kings.

He has launched crusades against other faithful Christians such as the Waldensians and the Hussites and various others whenever that time could have been spent battling back the

Mohammedans in the East. He oversaw dozens of inquisitions across Europe that burned thousands for reading the

Bible. He encouraged kings to wage war against Protestant states to enforce the papacy in those lands.

Pope Alexander VI of Borgia had wild and debauched parties in the Vatican and fathered illegitimate children with his mistresses.

This is a common thing amongst popes, cardinals, and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, these sexually debauched trists that they have with various mistresses and, in often case, homosexual activity.

Pope Leo X, who also excommunicated Luther, sold indulgences claiming that they offered the forgiveness of sin and that you could get loved ones out of purgatory if you bought them.

Then he used that blood money to build St. Peter's Basilica. The Roman system enslaved millions of consciences across Europe, sold salvation to the people as if it was a common item to be sold in the temple, just like the

Pharisees that Jesus traced out with a whip. He shed the blood of the saints and ordered the

Council of Trent, which instead of repenting of all this when they were called out on it by the reformers, doubled down on their sin, made their dogmas canon, and anathematized any of those who believed in justification by faith alone.

The fact is, to this day, Rome still teaches that we must cooperate with grace. They still teach the ideal of a treasury of merit, that it's stored up there and we've gotta make sure that we have enough in there to get into heaven.

They teach that Mary is the Ark of the Covenant and that Mary is a co -mediatrix and a co -redemptrix with Christ.

They still teach that even the faithful must suffer through purgatory as if Christ's blood isn't enough to cleanse us.

And they still say that the Pope is infallible while speaking at the cathedral. This is not the gospel that we know.

This is not the gospel that the Bible teaches, that Christ teach, that Paul preached, or our confession claims. This is paganism wrapped up in tradition and gold and incense.

We have to be aware of that. But also, we have to know that there are Christians in the Roman church.

There are many confused believers caught up in that system who trust in Christ even though their institution teaches them otherwise.

We have to know that, that they don't believe in these indulgences, the Mariology, or the papal infallibility.

They read their Bible and they trust Jesus. And we have to be kind to them. We have to call them out of Rome. We have to preach the gospel to them.

But we can't assume that every Roman Catholic is a Christian. We can't assume that just because they go to a

Roman parish that they're saved. We have to treat them until we have that positive confession as someone that needs to hear the gospel because the truth of the matter is, just as we institutionally confess the 1689, they institutionally confess all of the heresies of the

Roman church. So, that's all well and good.

We can point fingers at Rome all day long. I love doing it. There's more I would love to say on that. However, here's where this actually hits home for us.

We've got to be careful that we don't build our own popes. We are very prone to do that, especially in the reform culture today in America.

We love our celebrity pastors. We build them up. We build these great ministries around them that really are just built on that one man.

And if that man gets pulled down, the whole ministry collapse around him. We have to be careful of that because when we do that, when we let one man's word become almost infallible, even if we say it's not, if we let one man basically lead the church, we're flirting with that very spirit of the

Antichrist that the Pope is so heavily drank. The fact is that Christ only is the head of the church and we have to hold to that.

No matter how gifted a man is, no matter how good he is at expositing the word or giving out the ordinances or just being a charismatic person, we have to understand that he can't be the head.

We can't make him our own head. We do this all the time. We joke about people being the

Pope of the Protestants. This is dangerous. We have to beware this. We have to know that there are men out there who claim to be

Christians who sit there and they try to amass these followings of people so that they can be the

Pope. And that's very dangerous. We have to hold fast to our confession. The fact is we don't call the

Pope the Antichrist to be edgy about it, to be like real cool, or to be angry at the

Catholics. We say it because it's true. It's biblical, it's confessional, and it matters.

Second, we need to realize that we have to reject ecumenical compromise sometimes. It's one thing that we stand beside Romans outside of abortion clinics, pride parades, or drag queen story hours to protest them, but we cannot call them allies in the gospel.

We cannot say that they are a church just on equal standing, just with different doctrine. We have to call them out.

Finally, we need to echo the words of our Anglican forerunners. The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm.

Christ is the only head of the church. He needs no vicar to dispense his grace on earth. Now, after laying down that hard truth about the

Pope and the fact that we are all too often willing to sell out Christ's headship for another man's headship that is more charismatic, we have to move on to see what does this true church actually look like?

What does life in this church look like? That's what paragraphs five through eight do. This is where the rubber really meets the road for the

Christian life. See, Christ hasn't just called us out of our sin to be lone wolves and to sit in our own homes.

He's called us out to join together in faithful Christian life, to be covenant together into a congregation.

See, he doesn't gather his sheep to be isolated. He gathers them into local churches for the preaching of the word, the administrations of the ordinances, and the discipline of the church.

He doesn't call us just to be passive observers in this. He calls us to walk together, to worship together, to covenant together, and to live as one body.

There is no such thing as just me and Jesus. This is all too often repeated in the

American church. We sit back and we say, oh, well, it's just as good for me to be in my deer stand as to be in church.

Well, I can sit here in my house and watch church on TV. That's not church.

It's not, that's just not what church is. It does not matter how many podcasts or live streams you follow and listen to, those men on there aren't your elders.

John MacArthur in his life was very influential on me, but he's not my elder. He is not responsible for my soul.

The fact is, I love to watch him. And when I watched him, I'm watching him with millions of people. Those other millions of people aren't the members of my church.

I'm not covenanted with them the same way I am with y 'all. They aren't accountable, I'm not accountable to them, and they aren't accountable to me.

The fact is, we are called by Christ to be his people, to come together under the word, to submit to the ordinances and our elders, to sing, pray, and commune with real people in a covenantal fellowship.

And a covenant has duties and it has penalties. And in this, we have blessings.

There are blessings to be in the church. It's a blessing just to be here today, isn't it? That's a blessing.

And there are also penalties. When you don't come to church, you can be placed under church discipline.

The fact is that we are saints, we are called out. It's not a casual thing to be a member of a church, it's a spiritual act.

And we are called to join a church. All too often, we treat it like a gym membership that we'll go to church when we wanna go to church, and we won't go to church when we don't wanna go to church, and if we need to, we'll just go over to this church, we'll go to that church.

That's not what it looks like. That's not the picture we have in scripture, and that's not what the 1689 teaches. It teaches that church is a covenantal community, and if we're not joined into one church, if we're not a member of a church, we're walking in disobedience, no matter how spiritual we may feel.

Now, I'm not saying that if you're not a member of the church right now, you're a sinner. It's not what I'm saying, but that's what it can sound like, and some people do twist that to say that.

That's not what's being said. What I am saying, though, is that we shouldn't be church hopping on purpose.

You shouldn't just be holding out on getting membership because you don't want to actually submit to elders.

Now, then paragraph seven continues this and tells us why we should be like this. It tells us who holds the keys to the kingdom.

Christ didn't give the keys to the kingdom to Peter. He didn't give the keys to Peter to Peter's successor on the throne of the papacy.

He didn't give them to a bishop or to a presbytery. He gave it to the local congregation.

This is probably, when we really get down to it, this is one of the most important parts of this chapter. When we talk about Baptist polity, it's a

Baptist distinctive. The authority of the church doesn't flow from someone up top down.

It flows from Christ to his people. The church is ruled by Christ through the work of the congregation.

This doesn't mean that there's no leadership in the church. Christ has given us two offices. He's given us elders to teach and lead and deacons to serve.

But the authority of the church rests with the whole body. When we have a church discipline case, pray that we never have to deal with that, but we could.

It's not Josh that gets to make the decision. It's the body. We have to have a church court. We have to hear testimony, hear witnesses, and then we make a decision.

When an elder comes up as an elder candidate, Josh doesn't get to just pick one. The congregation picks.

When we spend money, it's not just Josh and the deacons that get to make that decision. The church makes that decision.

If not, we're not a congregational church. We're an elder -ruled church where one man gets to make all the decisions.

And that has just as much danger of sliding into the papacy as the

Pope does in Rome. That's why we see Jesus in Matthew 18 as he's going through church discipline, tell us, tell it to the church, take it to the church.

We see Paul in 1 Corinthians tell the whole assembly to remove the unrepentant man, not just the elder of the church.

See, it's not a synod or a council that has these decisions and has this authority. It's the church.

And we see in our real world what happens when we forget that. Not too long ago, Pastor Joel Webben was approached by another pastor about a former member of his congregation and told, hey, you need to discipline this person, because they've shared a meme

I don't like. Pastor Webben was like, hey, I've talked to him. We've had a lot of conversations.

This man is not in sin. He's repentant of his sin. Good to go. That should be the end of it, right?

No. Instead, a whole group of the reformed big heads of the big wigs of our popes get together and try to force

Joel Webben to excommunicate this man, to place him under church discipline whenever his local elders have said there's no case against him.

And instead of backing off whenever they were approached, hey, we're Baptist. You can't tell us what to do.

They then said, oh no, let's have a agreement that we'll all get together for a church council and a church court, and that decision's binding, and it'll be by a third party.

That's not Baptist. I don't know about y 'all, but I can't find that in the confession right there.

I don't see it. But we have to be worried about that. But at the same time, we have to know that we aren't autonomous in the sense that we're isolationist.

We are fully autonomous as a church body, but we're not in isolation. We work together with other churches. We seek counsel from other churches, but we are not bound by their authority, but only by Christ and his word.

Paragraph eight flows from this and tells what does this church look like. And it's not a cathedral.

It's not based on having a pretty building. It's not based on any of those things, but it is based on a gathering of the saints organized under Christ with appointed officers that administer the word and the ordinances.

That's a church. That's what the church looks like. And that, I'm actually gonna pause right here to kind of talk about this.

Boy, I'm gotta move faster. But when we talk about this, what is a church? We have to understand.

So you've got the body, the congregation. If you don't have a congregation, you don't have a church. If you don't have elders, you don't have a church.

Because if you don't have elders, you can't administer the ordinances. The elders are the ones who dispense that.

Josh talked about that just last week. So if you don't have elders, you don't have a church. If you don't have deacons, the elders can't do their job.

Because they've got to deal with all the other problems. We see that in Acts. That's why we have the office of deacon. And if you don't have the preaching of the word, why are we even doing this?

If the sheep aren't being fed, what's even the point? So that's the church.

And with that, that body has the autonomous ability to raise up elders, to raise up deacons, to handle church discipline and dispense the ordinances.

They don't have to go through a presbytery. They don't have to go through some bishop somewhere. The fact is we don't need

Rome. We don't need Geneva. We don't need Little Rock. We don't need any of that.

We have everything that Christ has given us. We have the institution that Christ gave the keys to and praise

God for that. Now, moving into paragraphs nine, 10 and 11, we see how leadership is supposed to work in the church, how preaching functions, what the roles of elders are.

Paragraph nine shows us what our two offices are and how they should be appointed. We have elders and deacons. We see right away that this process is congregational in nature.

They're not handed down to us from some outside source. The local church does the choosing. They raise up men who are fitted and qualified.

And they do this through common suffrage. Suffrage is a fancy word. Suffrage is an old English word, means the vote.

Hopefully everyone knew that beforehand, but suffrage is the vote and we vote for these things.

And it's not democracy for democracy's sake. We're not democratic because, oh, democracy's the best. We're democratic because it's spirit -led discernment.

It's the work of the spirit in each believer to discern and to hear out and to test and approve these men.

The church recognizes that a man is fitted for the Holy Spirit, that he's gifted, he's charismatic in nature, gifted in his speech or his oratory.

We also test him. His doctrine must be sound. His life must be above reproach and his family must be in order.

With this testing and an observation, we see that it's not just men that we admire or men that we watch on YouTube.

It's actually getting to know them. It's being in their house. It's being around their family because here's the thing. A man can kind of cover stuff up for a while.

And we see this. We've seen this in the reformed world not too long ago, that a man can cover up quite a bit for a while.

Now, eventually I do believe that it does boil out because I believe what is done in the dark will be brought into the light.

But we have to understand that it is our duty as the congregation to make sure it gets brought into the light before the man brings shame and reproach on Christ and the office of elder.

That's why we do this. That's why it's so important for us. Right now we are engaged in the process of selecting elder candidates and deacon.

Well, we've got elder candidates and deacon candidates. We're engaged in this process now. Our duty as church members is to be involved in their lives.

Go over to their house, have them over to your house, hang out after church and talk to them, watch them.

And don't just give a rubber stamp because that's the easy thing to do. We are so prone to do that in this country.

We just want to give the rubber stamp and be done with it. That's not what we're called to do. I assure you that these men that wrote the confession didn't give a rubber stamp to anything.

They debated these things ad nauseum. We need to too. It's a good thing.

A members meeting when we decide these things should be a little controversy. Should be a little bit of controversy.

Someone, it's okay to have different views. It's okay to speak up. Chapter 10 though, going from that, we see how we should deal with pastors and what the pastor's job is.

The fact is that an elder's job is not just to be motivational speakers for the church. That's not their role.

Sometimes they do motivate us, but the fact is their role is to feed us the word of God. They are to shepherd our souls.

Hebrews 13, 17 reminds us that they will have to give account to the Lord one of these days for how they shepherd us.

And because of that weight, the weightiness of that command that they have to be our shepherds, the church is called to care for their elders.

So the fact is we have Galatians 6, 6 and 1 Timothy 5 that both tell us that whenever we are taught good things and when we have elders who are worthy of double honor, that we should provide for their sustenance.

A church eats from the words that are given from the elder during the sermons.

We, as the church, feed the elder to ensure that they don't go hungry, that they don't have physical issues that they need, such as a house or things like that, that they're taken care of emotionally and spiritually.

Like when was the last time anyone checked on their pastor? I haven't done this either, Josh, I'm sorry. When's the last time you've asked him how he's doing?

We should be doing these things, church, that's our job. The fact is that if a pastor is left out in the cold, if he has to scramble to make ends meet, if he has to divide his heart going out and doing other jobs, he abandons his sheep.

He can't do everything at once, he's one man. He can't do everything. So if he's doing these other things, the sheep suffer.

And we are called to care for our pastors, to free them up, to do the work that God has called them to do.

The word, the ordinances, prayer, discipleship, giving hospitality to members of the church and shepherding us.

Finally, paragraph 11 teaches us that while the officer of pastor or elder, however you want to call it, it's used both ways in the 689, is distinct and sacred, calling for these men.

Preaching of the word is not strictly limited to ordained elders. I think that should be obvious because I'm standing here. The fact is that throughout scripture and history, we see that God has raised up faithful men, some of them ordained, some of them not, to preach his word and to teach.

If a man has been gifted by the spirit and tested by the church and approved by the body, he can preach, whether that's on Sunday or that's any other day of the week, that's the prerogative of the elders and the congregation say these men are approved, these men can preach.

We do this all the time. Our elder candidates, they're not ordained yet, but yet they preach before us. That's part of it.

The pulpit doesn't belong to one man. It doesn't belong to one office. It belongs to Christ and who he's given us.

And right there, we see who he's given. Not only has he given us elders, but he's raised up men through the spirit to teach.

We should encourage those men. We should put them in the pulpit and we should let them teach. And then we should hear what they have to say and follow it, even when it kind of hurts to do it.

Finally, we get into paragraph 13, which has possibly one of the biggest issues with the modern evangelical church.

So fact is when we get butthurt, we like to run away. We don't like to deal with it when someone offends us.

We're real bad about that in this country. Snowflakes, even conservatives, when we say we're not snowflakes, we are.

The fact of the matter is you're gonna get offended. Someone's gonna sin against you. It's gonna happen.

Whether it's an actual sin or just a perceived slight, it's gonna happen. What we cannot do is disrupt the order of the church, blow things wide open, cause church splits over.

Instead, we wait on the timing of the Lord and his discipline that he's given us for the church to do.

There's a process. We go through that process. You don't get to believe halfway through because you don't like it. You definitely don't get to leave to avoid it.

So, but we are so prone to do that in the modern American church. The fact is

Matthew 18 tells us what to do. We have to go to our brother. We're to seek reconciliation. If that doesn't work, we can go back, bring another witness, preferably an elder in the church.

It's always a good idea to do that, to bring an elder or a deacon, but it doesn't end there.

Instead, if that doesn't work, then we advance to the church stage where it's brought before the congregation.

That is nowhere in that do you get to say, oh, I'm going to leave because I got my feelings hurt.

You're covenantally bound to this church. Now, that doesn't mean you can't leave. That doesn't mean that if you're going someplace that you, you know, that's wrong, that's okay.

What I'm saying is you can't leave because you just feel like it cause you got upset. But we've got to remember that church membership is a covenant and covenants aren't like contracts.

In contract law, one of the first days I was told, contracts are made to be broken. Covenants are not made to be broken.

They're made to be kept and enforced. A contract, if you break it, a lot of times nothing actually happens.

They might try to sue you, but if there's no enforcement mechanism in the contract, you get off scot -free.

In a covenant, there is an enforcement arm and there is that mechanism. And it might not be in this world that you get that enforcement against you, but it will come against you at some point.

Paragraphs 14 and 15 are important because they remind us that while we are Baptist and while we do believe in the autonomy of the local church, that we are not the only church.

Local congregations are distinct and self -governed, but we ought to be in communion with one another. The fact is we have a really bad temptation to treat church like a zero -sum game, that there's only so much of the pie out there and we've got to get all the pie.

All the reformed people need to be at this church. All the Christians need to be at this denomination.

That's silly. It's just silly. It's vanity is all it really is when we get down to it. The fact is, is that Christ's kingdom is bigger than just these four walls.

There are gospel preaching churches just down the road. Now they might differ with us on secondary issues.

We might even not really like how they disagree with us. We might think that it's just a horrible error, but we should rejoice that Christ has given us the local expression of the church.

The fact is that Paul tells us that when Christ is proclaimed, that he rejoices. So we should rejoice, whether that looks like an assembly of God church where people running around waving flags or the

Presbyterian church where everyone's sitting there with their hands in their pockets and look real serious or a Southern Baptist church that isn't reformed and dispensational.

We should be glad that God has given us these churches and that there are people preaching the words of Christ and people worshiping the living

Savior. We are not rivals. There is no rivalry between us and Presbyterians or us in the assembly of God or us and other

Baptist or free will Baptist. We might not plant churches together. That would actually probably be a really bad idea.

Yeah. And we might not join denominations with them. We might not hold synods together, but we should pray for them.

We should support their health. We should cheer them on when they're preaching the gospel and we should go out knowing that they are our brothers.

We don't throw people out of the kingdom over stuff like this. The confession here is just a blanket rebuke of this concept of lone wolf

Christianity that it's only us and no one else. Finally, we go into paragraph 15, which speaks of councils or synods.

Boy, that's my timer. So that, so I'm doing good. I got, well, no, I've still got chapter 27. Hold on.

I'm gonna wrap this up real quick. The fact is, is that we hear synod and we think binding authority, but that's what we see in like the

Westminster, the 39 articles, we see a king calls a synod, they meet, the decision of that synod is binding on the churches.

That's not how Baptist polity works. The fact is though, that we are an associational people.

Since the very beginning, Baptists have been associational. Early on, the 689 is a product of an association of churches.

Is it seven churches in the London area? It says it in the beginning. I can't remember. Someone that's got it, test me on that.

See if I'm right at six or seven, something like that. I think. And they bound together, they associated, and they had a council and they hammered this out.

It's good to have these associations and these councils. We do this through sending messengers. These messengers have no church powers.

They don't have the authority of the church, but they do seek godly counsel and can give rulings.

They aren't binding on the churches unless the churches adopt them as binding. But this brotherly advice is good for us.

So we are different than say the Presbyterians, but it is key that we have these advisory synods to carry on the mission of the church.

And that's the beauty of the Baptist polity. It guards us from being enslaved to a higher authority, but it keeps us accountable and it keeps our autonomy intact.

Because here's the thing, if our church were to go off the rails, heaven forbid, I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon, but if we did, other churches in our association could just say, hey, we're not gonna associate with you.

That's just the truth of it. If tomorrow we, this isn't gonna happen, but if tomorrow we ordain a woman,

Bart is just gonna walk away from us and say, nope, we're done. You're not a church.

That's okay, that's good. That's how we discipline. We don't have to discipline by saying, oh, we're going to punish everyone in the church through some extra church body, because that's not where the keys are given.

Now on to chapter 27 and the communion of saints. This is a chapter we kind of tend to gloss over.

It doesn't really seem controversial to anyone. It's kind of short, it's just two paragraphs. It's right after a really long chapter.

So if you're reading the 1689, that might be one that you just kind of try to read real quick after reading and not really think about it.

But there's something really important that you miss there if you just skip over it. You miss kind of the heartbeat of what it is to be a

Christian. The actual joy of belonging to Christ.

The fact is that when we belong to Christ, when we are saved by Christ through his grace and his blood, we enter a union with Christ.

And that's not figurative, but it is a very real and spiritual union. We're not absorbed into one gigantic being, but we are joined with our risen

Lord. We see Paul in Romans six talk about if we are united with him in death, we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.

There's something awesome about that. And here's the other great thing. When we are united to Christ, we are united to all those who are in Christ.

This isn't just some vague thing that we say, but it's a real true aspect of our shared life that we get to participate in each other's lives.

We get to share our gifts. We get to share grace with one another. And even though some of us have passed on and gone to sleep, we still share a mystic communion with them.

What's the name of the song? Oh my gosh. The church is one foundation. It says that, that this mystic communion that we have with those whose fight is won.

Isn't that awesome? God didn't save us for us to just sit back in the back row and sneak out after service.

He saved us to be a part of the church, to encourage others, to build us up.

Iron sharpens iron, just as one man sharpens another, to rebuke each other, to serve each other, and to be served.

Paragraph two kind of goes into this, that this communion that we share isn't just about worshiping

God in the church. It's about mutual care. And this is a really hot topic today, actually.

The fact is that we are called to care for our Christian brothers. We do share a mystic communion.

I can't explain it. I don't know why it works, but it does. But I am united with Ethiopian Christians just as I am united with you.

And I have duties to those Ethiopian Christians just as I have duties to you. However, those duties aren't the same.

We get into this concept called the order of Morris. It was pinned up by Augustine, technically, but really we see

Paul preaching it, in all honesty. But that you have concentric circles of love, that you have concentric circles of duty.

That as a man, if you're married, your first duty is to your wife and to your family. The fact is you should not be giving money to overseas missions if your family can't eat.

That is misplaced love. That doesn't get you there. However, if your family's eating and everything's good, that you didn't go and run and take your money overseas?

No. What about your brother down the street? Is his family eating?

What about your mom and dad? Are they eating? Paul tells us if a man is willing to forsake his family, he's an infidel.

So we do have this duty, first to care for our families, then to care for our broader church community.

My duty that I have to you all is higher than a duty that I have to a church down the road.

Then we have a duty to care for those in our community. My duty to people in Springdale area is greater than my duty to someone in Little Rock.

Then it goes out from that, I have a greater duty to Arkansas than I do to Illinois. I have a greater duty to Illinois than I do to Kenya.

And I have a greater duty to Christians in Kenya than I do a non -Christian in Kenya. It's these concentric circles of love and we can't misplace that love and get it screwed around.

Because when it does, what happens is very quickly, you'll see people saying, well, don't take in your brother down the road who's not a

Christian. Instead, take in an Ethiopian Christian into your home. How is that showing

Christ's love? By leaving your own brother out in the street. Now, another thing is we see in this chapter, hold on,

I wanna read it because this is actually interesting, that in this, we are to share and give our belongings with one another.

However, oh yes, nevertheless, their communion one with another as saints does not take away or infringe the title or property which each man hath his goods and possessions.

We aren't socialist. I wanted to add this in. We aren't socialist.

We aren't called to live in communes. We aren't called to advocate that the government owns everything, gives to the people.

No, we give out of the love that Christ has given us for our fellow brothers. It doesn't take away your property rights.

You still own your home, you still own your car, you still own the gifts that you're giving these people, but we do it out of love and out of compassion and out of service to Christ and service to our brethren.