The Whole Christ (part 5)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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We are continuing our study on The Whole Christ, this awesome book. There's still a couple more copies on the book table.

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If it is something that you'd be interested in picking up, I highly recommend it. It is an excellent treatment of the merit controversy by Sinclair Ferguson.

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And he really does an excellent job of capturing the nuance that we have to approach this issue with.

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Because I think that as I read this book more and as I study this, I'm really kind of convicted that this is a struggle that I think every

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Christian will deal with over the course of their life and will waver back and forth on this legalism, antinomianism thing.

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And I don't think anybody really will get it quite right until we're in glory. So I highly commend the book to you.

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Facebook just told me it was somebody's birthday. But so today we're gonna talk a little bit about chapter five.

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Corey went into chapter five a little bit last week. We're gonna do some review because I think that there's a lot of facts that we kind of have to marshal for this whole thing to really understand because there's so much nuance to really kind of get it.

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And so we'll do a little bit of review and then we'll finish up chapter five and then we'll lead into next week, which is sort of the pivotal chapter

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I think in the book. We've been really focusing a lot on legalism over the first couple of weeks of this study.

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And I think, I suspect that Ferguson structured the book in this way because legalism is something that's a lot easier for us to sort of categorize and understand.

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And as the hooks of the writing get into you, you can say, okay, I get this legalism thing.

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It's something that makes a lot of sense to us. Antinomianism I think is something that we have this sort of more ethereal understanding of, but it's less concrete, it's less academic.

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And so I think that's why he tackles legalism first. So next week, Corey, we'll be presenting on the beginning of this transition from legalism to antinomianism.

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He's like, sure, whatever, yeah, absolutely. So I have,

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I took a look last night as I was wrapping up, putting a bow on the study for this week.

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And I realized that most likely all of my notes from yesterday, I won't get to today. So I'm gonna jet tour through some of the review in hopes that we can actually get to the end.

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So we talked about some definitions. Legalism, legalism is the idea of bringing some element of the law or obedience to the law into our justification.

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It's the idea that it necessarily has something to do with our salvation. And that's really important because as we will see today, there is this idea of working out your salvation in fear and trembling.

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And there is this idea of building up crowns in glory and these kinds of things. But specifically, this deals with the salvation issue.

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Antinomianism, rejecting any role of the law in the life of the believer entirely, right? And so those are the two things that we're dealing with.

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This tight grasp on the law and then the rejection of the law completely. And as we've talked about, we've got the bowling lane, we wanna stay out of the gutter, okay?

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That's a good life motto, stay out of the gutter in general. We talked about the Marrow Controversy, which is named after this book,

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The Marrow of Modern Divinity. And there were these two groups of people. There were the Marrow men who believed that you should offer

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Christ to all with the promise of justification to the ungodly who believes, which sounds remarkably biblical, right? There's a reason for that.

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The Scottish Presbytery was of the opinion that when presenting the gospel, you should tell the hearers that you need to forsake sin in order to be saved, to the point where you shouldn't even bother to preach the gospel to people who don't seem to have already forsaken sin, right?

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It's kind of this sort of exclusive look at the gospel. I like having

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Maria in the front. She gives me the faces. She's like, oh, that's terrible. And then we started talking about separation.

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And I'm really gonna harp on separation because I think that ultimately, as we seek to understand this, and I know

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Corey talked a lot last week about how legalism and antinomianism are a lot more similar than we think at first blush.

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I think the reason why this is, and I'm sure Ferguson would make the same case because I read his book, is that it's really all about separation of the law of God and the character of God.

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And we're gonna see this over and over again as we look at these different examples, how this separation of these two things comes into play and really, really helps us understand this issue.

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And not two weeks ago, it was a month ago now, when I last taught on this, we looked at the separation of the work of Christ from the person of Christ, right?

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And it becomes this idea of not how do I preach Christ, but how do I offer the benefits of Christ, right?

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And it becomes this perspective where we're trying to, oh, well, we have this

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Christological paradigm, we swear we want these benefits, we want salvation. We all say, well, non -lordship is terrible, right?

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And it has to be lordship salvation. But at the same time, we're still focusing on the things that are accomplished through Christ and not on him and his character.

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And Christ ceases to be central to this perspective and it becomes a means to an end. If you guys remember,

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I shared some photocopies of this insanely complex diagram that was impossible to read.

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One of them was from Paul Bunyan and the other one was from, I don't think it was from Fisher, I don't even remember who it was from at this point.

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It wasn't from Boston either. But I had Pastor Steve email them out over BBC Announce, so you should have them.

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If you don't, let me know, I will make sure that you get them. And we saw this very subtle shift to and kind of this formalized order of salutis that did not consistently refer back to the person of Christ as the one affecting the change in the life of the believer.

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And it was subtle, but remember, it's not like these diagrams are something that somebody whipped up on the back of a napkin at Denny's, right?

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This is something that these are carefully planned. I mean, at that time, you're paying someone a lot of money to put a bunch of circles on a page and make it available for press.

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So, I mean, it was very carefully put together and constructed the way it was, considered probably with a small group of people because they were published under certain people's names.

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And it was very deliberate, the decisions that were made to put them together. And so when we look at this, it's not really the removal of Christ from the center of the diagram, but when we look at it and we see, oh, all of these things that are now on this diagram are about what the believer gets, right?

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And yes, it's all in the context of, because of the grace of God, sola gratia, sola fide, all this stuff.

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And so, biblically and theologically, all of that is accurate, but we kind of see this very subtle change where all of a sudden we're not like, oh, well, this is because of Christ.

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This is because of Christ. This is because of Christ. And so we started to see at that point, and that was hundreds of years ago, a little bit of a separation of the character of Jesus and the benefits of him.

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And then we looked at John 3 .16, right? Does anybody remember this part of the study where we looked at this and Corey went through this as well, this idea where, okay, so does

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God love us because Christ died for us, yes or no? Who says yes? Who says no?

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Okay, good. The only hands I saw were on the no, that's good, right? God loves us, so he sent

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Christ to die for us, right? And so when we have this other perspective where God loves us because of what

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Christ has done, it becomes a separation of the character of God and the accomplishment of Jesus Christ and the benefit of what

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Christ did. Ferguson says, the scriptures affirm that the love of God for us is the reason for the death of Christ.

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And then we saw two examples last week. I say we, I listened to the message online so I can be part of the club, right?

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We saw last week two examples that Corey brought in scripture where this separation sort of brought forth some very fundamental misunderstandings.

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Who remembers what those were? Who was here last week? Let's not all raise the same hands.

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Eden, right? We had Eve in the garden, was one of them. Anybody remember what the other one was? Well, that's what review is for, right?

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You got repetition, right? It's the key to learning. The prodigal son. There was the parable of the prodigal son and how we saw the changing perspective in the prodigal son that gave us a good perspective of the separation of the work of God and the character of God.

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So given our active response, I'll slow down a little bit and we'll really, we'll circulate on talking about Eve in the garden.

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Okay. Hold on. Don't tell anyone

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I did that. Let's open to Genesis two and we'll take a very quick look at, oh, there's a large print, at this passage.

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Would anybody like to read Genesis two, starting in verse eight? So many volunteers today. Brian, start in verse eight, go to verse 17, please.

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So here we have this picture of the context in which God has placed

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Adam, right? And it describes all of this stuff. It's whatever, nine verses talking about the paradise that God created for Adam, right?

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And then he takes Adam and he puts him in the garden and he says, you can have whatever you want, whatever you want, just don't eat from this one tree, right?

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That's it. P .S., you know, we look at this and we say, verse 15, like, okay, he's

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God, he can create anything. Can he make stuff that's like self grooming? Like, why does Adam have to work the garden? Like, come on.

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I mean, if you're gonna make it paradise, go all the way, right? But remember, before the fall, work is not toil, right?

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I don't know about you. I kinda like to get outside sometimes and work on some stuff as long as I don't basically kill myself.

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You know, you get a little sweaty, feels good, right? But before the fall, before chapter three, verse 17, where he says, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which

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I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground before you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

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Thorn and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.

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So work wasn't hard. Even though he was commanded to work, this is paradise. All this context in which he says, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

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Right, that's what happened. I like putting things in terms that are really easy for us to understand, so I have an example for you here.

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Imagine me saying to you, now if you're a Patriots fan and not a Red Sox fan, just imagine the word

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Patriots is in here, you'll be fine. I will pay for your Red Sox season tickets, including chauffeur drives to Fenway Park.

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That's a big part. I will pay your boss, so it's okay that you took time off from work. I will pay for all of the food and all of the drink that you would like.

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The only restriction is that hotdog guy right there, don't eat from him. Would you do it?

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Right, I mean, is this even a question? But that's exactly what

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God did. He put him in paradise. Now, a lot of people say Fenway Park is the dump of Major League Ballparks, I digress.

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He put him in paradise, he said you have everything. I have custom made a partner for you and put her right next to you.

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You have everything you want, you can eat whatever you want, you can drink whatever you want, one thing. No hotdogs from the

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Aramark guy. That's what he said. And then what do we see in Genesis three, starting in verse one?

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Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did

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God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? By the way, did

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God say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? No, the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

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But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be open and you'll be like God knowing good and evil.

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So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desired to be made known wise, she took of its fruit and ate it, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

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Now, I don't know how many of you have gone to a debate class before in your life or learned how to debate or paid attention to Facebook where people think that they can debate or whatever it is, but it is a bad debate tactic to remind people of context when you're trying to make a point to persuade them away from something.

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And so we see here that that's not what the serpent does.

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No, he has a laser focus, not on what she could do, but on what she couldn't do, right?

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Back to Fenway Park. Imagine your friend is sitting next to you in the free seat that you got that went along with your seat because he wants to go to a game alone, and they point to that hot dog vendor, that guy in that yellow shirt.

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I don't know how they balance that thing on their heads, by the way, that's amazing to me. And they say, what?

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He's right there. You can't order a hot dog from him? I mean, it's a hot dog.

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Who cares? That doesn't seem very fair. Like, how ridiculous is it that just because, whatever, you can't get a hot dog from this guy?

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I mean, you have the ability to do it. You can wave your hand, and the hot dog guy will throw a hot dog at you and hit you in the face with the ketchup.

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It's not that hard. You can get a hot dog. This is completely unreasonable that you actually have to get up and walk all the way over there.

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Like, that's nuts. Why would you do that? Why is this acceptable? What's wrong with this guy? These rules are ridiculous.

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Right? It's a nothing -nothing game in the seventh inning.

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Those rules sound kind of ridiculous. Who wants to go somewhere else when they want to stay there, when their desires are stewing around inside?

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Who wants to follow that rule? And that's what Eve is thinking.

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She's like, whew, that's a plump Fenway Frank. I am gonna go, and I'm gonna eat.

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She rejects the law. My sister and I have this joke when we are making recommendations to each other.

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Oh, Brian, lest you lose the free tickets. That's a consequence.

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I'll talk about it today, actually. I don't think I'll go into super deep detail on it because I didn't think

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I had time, but who knows, we'll see how we do. So, my sister and I have this joke back and forth whenever we make recommendations, like, hey, maybe you should check out

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XYZ, like, I don't know, go to the doctor or something, whatever it is. We'll always say to each other, don't tell me how to live my life, right?

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Don't tell me how to live my life. And that's exactly what Eve does here. Don't tell me how to live my life. She disobeys the law. She rejects the law, right?

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Anti -Nomian. But how did that happen? It happened because of separation.

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It happened because when you take the context away, when you ignore the forest and you look at the one tree, whatever it is, it looks negative.

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That perspective is a negative perspective. It's like, it becomes a restriction, right?

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The facts have not changed, but the context has. So, just like before, where we were talking about the separation of Christ from his works, here we see

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Satan separating the character of God from the law of God, and it changes a reasonable command in context to God looking like an ogre who wants to keep something away from her.

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It's like Corey said last week, legalism is the lie that there is something, anything that we can do to change

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God's disposition towards us with regards to salvation. God becomes he whose favor must be earned.

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And then we got into this thing that's, this is one of those things where I have to sit in a room that's quiet because there's all these different things that I have to piece together to make this make sense in my brain, but it does, and it is the fact that the separating of the law of God from the person of God, from the character of God, is the fundamental underpinning of legalism, right?

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Do we agree? Does that sound reasonable? We're all on the same page? Okay. It is also the foundation of antinomianism.

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The separation of the character of God from the person of God is the foundation of both legalism and antinomianism.

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How can that be? Well, they're clearly not the same thing, but they share a common ancestor, and it is a dangerous ancestor, by the way.

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By separating the law of God from the character of God, we see legalism, it's clear, we can see it in the Pharisees, we can see it in all the other people, all the examples that we've talked about over the last month, we can see it in lots of places.

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But we just looked at it by separating the law of God, do not eat from this tree, from the character of God, look at all of these things that I have given to you, we saw

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Eve's antinomian heart. We saw her reject the law, right?

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And so we saw last week the Westminster Catechism, Shorter Westminster, Shorter Catechism, right?

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It's the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. What's the chief end of man answer? To glorify

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God and enjoy him forever, right? But if we're not thinking about him rightly, and we're not enjoying the character of God, and we're only thinking about the law of God, the rules of God, then it removes our joy, right?

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We're obeying him because there's a bunch of rules that we have to follow, not because, look at what

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God has done for us. I sit in my house,

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I shared a picture on Facebook from like Thursday or Friday. You know, it was seven o 'clock in the morning, I was reading this,

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I had a cup of coffee, I was sitting on the porch, it was not a million degrees outside. I was like, this is how to start the day.

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Like, it was just nice, just nice, right? Thankful to God for all of these things that he has provided to us, even though I was exhausted because I was still preparing a message for today.

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It's all about context, right? God's glory and our joy are not supposed to be separated things.

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Now, to some degree, we all have legalist tendencies. I think that's undeniable, right?

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We looked at some of the manifestations of these tendencies last week. Does anybody remember any of those? Not winning on crowd participation this morning, so I'm trying here.

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I will seed the pot. Slavery, I just talked about it. We obey out of duty, right?

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Not out of desire or anything else, but we feel like, well, we have to obey this stuff.

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There is no joy. We've separated these two things. We're not focusing on the character of God. We're slaves to this law.

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We're obeying out of duty or necessity. Does anybody remember anything else? I'll go straight to the wellspring if I have to.

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Do you remember anything else from last week? The ways in which our legalist tendencies manifest in the lives of the

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Christian. That's where we're at. So slavery, right? Presumption, if God's favor is earned and we believe that we're in God's favor, then, well, we've earned it, which puffs us up, right?

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Remember, thank God that I'm not like that tax collector. How about idolatry?

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Just like the Roman Catholics, we wrongly see grace as an infused substance, something that gives us the ability to be loved by God.

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By grace, you've been saved, and now God will love you. That kind of twisted thing.

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But the biggest one, and this is where the prodigal son parable comes to play.

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The biggest struggle that we have with legalist tendencies is self -reliance, self -righteousness.

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We get convicted of our sin, good, but our reaction is, I will try harder and I will do better, right?

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That's curious. Right, is that necessarily a problem? Right, it's true.

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But here's the thing, this is a super worldly response. This is something that we, on its face, we're like, oh, well, that sounds reasonable.

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I mean, if you're being dumb, stop being dumb. That's not hard to comprehend, right? But here's the thing.

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You fall off the diet wagon, you're like, you know, that wasn't a keto meal. Like, gotta try harder, or whatever it is.

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We mess up at work, we make a mistake, the boss comes down and yells and screams at us, right? And our response to that is, okay, we need to try harder, we need to do better, right?

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So we have this pattern of response to trials or admonition or whatever it is in our lives, and it makes sense in a secular context where our works are the thing that everything is measured by.

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But it doesn't make sense in a sacred context. Why? Salvation by works, right?

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Remember, this is all in the context of salvation. And so we looked at the story, the parable of the prodigal son.

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I don't think we're gonna read through the whole thing again. I don't think we have the time. But we know the story. The younger son took his father's inheritance, he asked his father for his inheritance, and said, pfft, right?

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Very Eve -like, don't tell me how to live my life. Went off and did his own thing.

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Left the family, and he squandered it. He turned his back on his father, he squandered his inheritance, and what was the result?

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Well, he squandered it, right? He had nothing left. He was destitute, he was in ruin, there was a drought.

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Clearly, God is punishing this man for what he has done. The Pharisees are like, yeah, eat it, right?

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So that antinomian son, I will reject the law of my father. I don't wanna live by these rules.

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And by the way, we know that there's rules because after he comes back and the older son starts complaining, what does the older son say?

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He's like, pfft, I followed the rules. I did what the other son didn't, which just reinforces the whole reason why the other son left wasn't because he had a great business idea, it's because he didn't wanna follow the rules, right?

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I mean, look, if you have a really good business idea, P .S., board game store in Worcester, anyway, and you put your heart and soul into it and it doesn't work out, that's not the same thing as going out and squandering your inheritance.

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Those are very different things right here. And the reason why I say that is because the whole point is that this guy was adult.

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He went out and just blew his money. There's some insane statistic that like 50 % of people who hit the lottery end up bankrupt in 10 years or something like that, right?

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Because they don't learn how to manage their money. It's something like that. He gets all this money, he's like, party up.

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So he doesn't wanna follow the rules. Antinomian heart, right? Don't tell me how to live my life. And then what happens?

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He's like, well, I'm an idiot. I shouldn't have done this. Then the son, because remember, he's got that same foundation.

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He has separated what his father has from who his father is. That's the whole point.

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He turns around and he says, okay, well, if I need to get back what my father, like the benefits of being my father's son,

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I'm gonna have to work for it, right? That's his response. He comes back and he says,

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I'll work harder. I'll do better. He's gonna, what is he gonna say to his father, which he never gets a chance to say?

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Treat me as your hired servant, right? Verse 19, Luke 15. The foundation hasn't changed.

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The expectations, the law and the character of the father are separated. And those are the two responses that we have.

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He switches from being an antinomian into being a legalist. If you flatten your wrist in your delivery, this is a bowling analogy again, ball's going in the right gutter.

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If you pull up on that ball too much, it's going in the left gutter. Both of them are bad. That's a real thing.

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I need these because I lose my place because I look up and talk. So first, because of separation, he rejected the expectations.

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He couldn't see the blessings of his father. He couldn't see the context in which those expectations existed. So he took what he wanted and he left.

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But over time, that same separation ended with him landing on self -sufficiency.

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He's like, well, if I try hard enough, I can follow the rules enough to become self -sufficient.

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He focused on the rules and not the character and that is legalism, right? Now, with God and the true character of God in the gospel, none of that really happens.

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There is no earning back the father's favor because the father already loves us. John 3, 16, we've seen this already.

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And that's exactly what we see in this passage. The father doesn't say, do penance or do whatever.

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He says, you are my son, I love you. When we purpose to do better, we become like the

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Galatians who would fall from grace and fail to believe that the righteousness of Christ alone is sufficient to entitle us to justification.

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This is what Ferguson said. He said, the proclamation of the gospel is a repudiation of doctrinal legalism.

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But what the heart hears, I have failed somehow, I know I must try harder, often draws forth a response of experimental legalism.

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This goes very deep. It is commonplace to say that one can have a legalistic head and a legalistic heart, but it is also all too possible to have an evangelical head and a legalistic heart.

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It was this that the Marrowmen found themselves confronting. Several of them first in themselves for one of the diseases the

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Marrow exposed was a subtle thought that my growth in holiness strengthens my justification.

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My growth in holiness strengthens our justification. Now, does our sanctification confirm our justification?

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Yes. Does our sanctification strengthen our justification? There are a lot of long words in that sentence.

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No. Exactly, it does not put us in better standing.

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And we'll talk about that a little bit too. Ferguson kind of writes in a spiral. He revisits things that he's talked about before, but he goes a little bit deeper into them or attacks them from a little bit of a different perspective sometimes.

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And so I think we're gonna see some of that here. But what I did in that review, and we're just now done with review, it's important, is

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I've stressed different words, perspective, I've stressed some different things because I'm gonna draw them out as we keep talking.

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Okay. Now, ordo salutis. I talked about ordo salutis two sessions ago, right?

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And then Corey talked a lot about the separation of the law of God and the person of God. And guess what? These two things are related to each other.

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Imagine that, right? So we talked at length about how repentance is not a qualification for coming to Christ.

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Right? And when we say it in certain ways, it sounds really obvious that that's the case.

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But we remembered last week, and I just reinforced it, sanctification does not contribute to our justification. It cannot contribute to our justification because that would be salvation by works.

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We also talked about the ordo salutis that we looked at a couple weeks ago or whatever, and how the focus transitioned from one that was very

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Christocentric to one that was really only highlighting the benefits of faith in Jesus Christ, which doesn't make it theologically inaccurate.

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Like those things are still right things, but that perspective changes a little bit. But Corey mentioned something else last week when he talked about the prodigal son, and I dropped a word about five minutes ago.

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He talked about repentance becoming something else. Does anybody happen to remember what that was other than Corey?

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That's okay. He talked about in the context of the prodigal son, repentance was replaced with penance, with penance.

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Now, the words sound similar. Imagine that. They are very similar.

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But what's the difference between penance and repentance? Penance, the prescription of particular good deeds to make up for doing wrong.

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The idea that there are specific concrete acts that a priest could prescribe for sin as part of the sacramental system.

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So that's what the prodigal son did. He said, I will perform these specific acts.

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Those specific acts are those things that you expect a worker to do. P .S., if you are a manager and you don't tell your employee what you want them to do, at least in some way, you're probably not a great manager.

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And that's, when the prodigal son comes back and says, treat me as your hired servant, what he is saying is,

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I understand the, because I was their boss, I understand exactly what this person is supposed to do. And I have this perspective that if I do exactly what this person is supposed to do, then

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I will be made right. That is penance. That is looking at a concrete thing to restore a relationship, to forgive sin or whatever that thing is.

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So that's the prodigal son's response to his situation.

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When we look at the prodigal son's response and his transition from antinomianism to legalism, he confused penance with repentance.

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By contrast, repentance, which is what we are called to, is, quote,

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I think when I use these words, you'll know that it's a quote anyway, not the punctiliar decision of a movement.

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Sometimes I wish I was Scottish. But a radical heart transformation that reverses the whole direction of life.

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That's repentance, right? It's not a concrete act to restore some element of what was lost, but it is a complete and total transformation of the heart, repentance.

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So it all turns out that the Latin Vulgate, which is where a lot of this stuff came from in the

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Catholic Church, translates the term that means repentance into a term that means penance, basically.

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And so when Erasmus did his Greek New Testament, he used a different translation, and the world was made better. So when we have a right view of repentance and a right understanding, then it cannot precede faith, which originates from God.

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Then we can turn back to the Ordo Salutis for a moment, and we can look at it in the context of this thing that we've been focusing on, the character of God and the law of God.

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Listen again to what Ferguson said. He said, at the end of the day, we cannot divide faith and repentance chronologically.

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So yes, the Ordo Salutis is an order, but a huge percentage of it is sort of stuff that happens basically instantaneously.

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It just helps us kind of understand the theology of what's happening. The true Christian believes penitently, and he repents believingly.

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For this reason, in the New Testament, either term may be used when both dimensions are implied, and the order in which they are used may vary.

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But in the order of nature, in terms of the inner logic of the gospel and the way its grammar functions, repentance can never be said to precede faith.

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It cannot take place, listen, outside the context of faith. So if we talk about penance, inside the context of faith, it's repentance.

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So the Christian looks at themselves through the lens of the law and recognizes that they fall short.

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But repentance comes as a reaction to our perceptions of ourselves compared to the law. Got that?

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And our faith in Christ and our knowledge that we are united with him. So repentance, which is a radical heart transformation, happens in the context of our faith, but through the eyes of the law.

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So remember, faith is tied necessarily to the character of God. When we look at how we fall short, the thing that we measure ourselves by is the law.

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But it is important to remember that we measure ourselves by the law in the context of our faith and the character of God.

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Because if we lose the character of God, then all we do is measure ourselves by the law and there's no grace and we're not thankful and we don't have a heart that desires to please him.

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We just feel like he's an ogre who has put this law forth that we don't measure up to and we're hopeless.

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And it removes joy from obedience when we don't look at it in the context of our faith, in the context of all these things that we've been blessed with.

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There's some faces I have a feeling I'm gonna have some conversations after. The only way this works is if we stay, and we stay on the lane, is if we understand the interaction with the law in the context of our faith in a loving and gracious God.

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Oh yeah, I'm not finishing this. So, we've talked a lot about justification by grace alone.

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And there are some ramifications of legalism in this context. And I wanna have some thought experiments, because thought experiments is a thing

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I like to do, that can help us recognize things in ourselves and maybe potentially, hopefully we can try to avoid them.

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The legalistic spirit that subverts in some way this idea of justification by grace is very insidious.

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Sure, the legalistic spirit that subverts in some way this idea of justification by grace, so not of works, that this legalistic spirit, this idea that there's works that can contribute in any way to our position in Christ is insidious.

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It's like water. Water gets into everything, right? This justification idea gets into everything.

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You just can't get rid of it. Ferguson highlights two of them in the book that I think are particularly convicting for us.

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And when I say that, that's code by the way for these things convicted me as I read them. So please don't judge me too much.

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But I wanna present them because I think they'll help frame our thinking of the grace of God.

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And the first one is thinking about the gospel offer itself, right? And that's sort of how this whole marrow controversy began, right?

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We remember the thought process, the presbytery, you show some fruit, you show me that you're interested, we'll give you the grace of God, right?

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That's their position, right? But that's wrong, right? Like we agree that that's wrong, right?

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It's so clearly anti -biblical when we say it that plainly.

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But if that's wrong, then what's the opposite? The opposite of that is freely preach the grace of Christ, right?

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Okay, I'm there, I'm tracking with you, right? We're walking down the same road. What's the consequence of that?

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If the call is to freely preach the grace of Christ to all, in the words of Samuel Rutherford, that means reprobates have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ as the elect.

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I mean, it means what we already know, Brian. Well, yes, and I'm using grace in shorthand to say preach the gospel.

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So in all fairness, like that's on me, right? So if we would agree that you withhold the gospel offer to people until they show fruit, if you would agree that that's incorrect, then the flip of that is you give the gospel offer to all.

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It is hard to remember what we were like before, why? Because repentance is a complete and total radical transformation of our heart, right?

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It is totally different. And unless you had a life that was really strongly defined by extreme anti -biblical activity, it is difficult to remember what that nuanced perspective was.

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Because, I mean, I've said this to a lot of people, I don't know if I've said it on microphone.

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If your Christian life is not one where you regularly, regularly,

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I'm talking multiple times a day, are openly thankful to God for what he has done in your life, then you need to seriously think about your perspective.

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Because it is ridiculous, the blessings that we have in God.

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Even as saved people, even with the way that we respond to things, as Christians, to think that we have the blessings of God, even though I've been a

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Christian for, I don't know, 15 years, whatever it is, and I still act like an idiot a lot of the time, and God has still saved me, and God has still blessed me, and I sit on that porch, and I read my

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Bible, and I read this book, and I have a cup of good coffee, and I can hear my kids shambling around inside, right?

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I have all this, I have all of this stuff because God has given it to me, not because of anything that I have done.

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And if your life is not marked by habitually going to God in thankfulness, then where do you think you are?

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What do you think you've been given, right? So it is hard to remember what our lives were like before we were saved.

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And it is hard to really focus on grace, and really focus on what

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God has provided to us, and to be so thoroughly mindful of that that it affects the way that we react to other things, right?

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It's hard, it is, and it is also hard to get through my notes, so. No, but I mean, it's an excellent point.

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So I'll give this stuff to Corey, he left anyway. So I think we have to close, it's late enough.

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So why don't we close in prayer, and if anybody has any questions, feel free to come afterwards. I apologize for not having time to take them now.

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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this chance to come together as a congregation, and to talk about you, to talk about your grace in our lives, and how we are to respond to that.

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I pray, Father, that you would help each and every one of us as we wrestle with the nuance of this doctrine, that you would help us to gain clarity on it, help us to return our eyes, not to the speakings or teachings of me, or anyone else in the pulpit, but to your word, to find what you have said to us through the scriptures.

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I pray that you'd be with us as we worship you this morning, in singing and in hearing the word preached through Pastor Steve, Father, and that you would just bless our time of fellowship together in your name we pray, amen.