WWUTT 584 Celebrating the Ministry of RC Sproul

2 Timothy 4 and Remembering a Faithful Teacher

The Apostle Paul told Timothy to preach the Word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. And today we remember the life of a man who did exactly that when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's Word that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will. For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. I would like to begin today by playing a clip from Dr. R .C. Sproul. This is actually a recent recording, as this past September he celebrated 60 years as a born-again Christian.

Here's Dr. Sproul. I'm coming up on the 60th anniversary of my conversion to the Christian faith. It was in September of 1957. And I will never forget, I think I'm the only person in the history of the church to be converted by a particular verse that God used to open up my heart and my eyes to the truth of Christ.

It came from the book of Ecclesiastes, where the author of Ecclesiastes describes in metaphorical terms a tree that falls in the forest, and where it falls, there it stays. And God awakened my soul by considering that passage as I saw myself as a tree fallen and rotting and decaying.

And that was a description of my life. That's where I was. Nobody had to tell me that I was a sinner. I knew that. That was abundantly clear to me. But as I went to my bedroom that night and got on my knees, my experience was one of transcendent forgiveness.

And I was overwhelmed by the tender mercy of God, the sweetness of His grace, and the awakening that He gave me for my life. And I pray that any of you who have not yet experienced an awakening to the reality of Christ would have that experience in your life, that you would look carefully at the Scriptures, at the Word of God, and that that Word may be used in power to quicken your soul and your spirit, that you too may be awakened to the fullness of glory and peace and joy that is ours in Christ.

Robert Charles Sproul was born in 1939. He was born again at the age of 18 in 1957. This year, he celebrated 78 years as a soul here on earth and 60 years as a soul that is hidden with Christ in God. And I imagine that it is also this year that Dr. Sproul will pass from this world into the next and will be with his Lord forever in glory.

At the time of this recording, which was late on a Wednesday evening, Dr. Albert Muller said, so many of you have been praying for Dr. R .C. Sproul. Please pray, especially tonight. God is sovereign and gracious.

Thank you for praying for Dr. Sproul, Vesta, his wife, and the Sproul family. And Dr. Stephen Lawson put this out, please be in prayer for R .C. Sproul. Our champion of the faith, the great warrior of truth, and my mentor is soon to be home with the Lord.

Dr. Sproul has been under hospital care for the last several days, couple of weeks, and I imagine that this is an announcement that he is going to be taken off of his ventilator and his body will soon pass and his soul will go to be with the Lord forever in heaven.

Dr. Sproul has been such a champion of the faith, has been a tremendous teacher of the word and has made a huge impact on my life. One of the things that Dr. Sproul helped me appreciate was church history.

He brought it to life for me, that it wasn't just about reading dusty old books and learning about dead old men, but how Jesus Christ moved and worked through the church over the last 2000 years. Not to mention that Dr. Sproul has been such a great expositor and teacher of the word.

He's also had an influence on my family. My oldest daughter, Annie, who's nine years old, fancies him as her favorite preacher. There's one time I was joking with her about it and I said, you mean he's your second favorite preacher after your dad, right?

She kind of was like, well, so as a treat to her earlier this year, we went on vacation down to Florida and wanted to make it a point that on the Sunday that we were there, we would go to Orlando or Sanford, which is just outside of Orlando, and hear Dr. Sproul preach there at St. Andrew's Chapel.

And so we got to do that. Rob and Faith Stiles, who were so kind to take us there, and we enjoyed a church service there on that Sunday morning, Dr. Sproul sat as he taught from Galatians. He was also on oxygen, so he had the hose coming out of his nose and then back over his ears, and every once in a while, the thing would kind of hiss as it was feeding him oxygen.

And my son, Zachary, who was five years old at that time, was asking me what that sound was. And I explained to him that he was a very old man and he needed oxygen to help him breathe. And after he got done preaching, somebody helped him down off the stage and he passed in front of us.

And we looked for him later and wanted to just express our thanks to him and his ministry, but we were told that he doesn't really shake hands anymore because of his age and his fragility. And so it was a great privilege to me to be able to see Dr. Sproul live there at St. Andrew's Chapel this year.

Just a couple of months after I got the chance to see Dr. John MacArthur live for the very first time. We kind of went from coast to coast. I got to see Dr. MacArthur in California, and then we went to Florida and I had the chance to see Dr. Sproul.

So anyway, all of that to say that he has ministered to me greatly. And I'm even appreciative of his teaching that it's had an impact on one of my children. I remember about six years ago, a member of my church handing me Table Talk magazine.

And I was familiar with the magazine. I knew of it, but had never received it with appreciation before or a diligence to read it and have been a faithful reader of Table Talk ever since. Then when in 2012, when RefNet came out, the app that you could have on your phone and listen to 24 -7 reform teaching from Ligonier Ministries, I didn't subscribe to it right away, but came into it a little bit later.

And then about three years ago, became a regular listener of RefNet. And when I mean regular, I mean like every day. So to some degree, over the last three years, I have either listened to or read from Dr. Sproul every single day.

He has helped me tremendously in understanding scripture and church history. And I am indebted to his ministry and will continue to follow his ministry even after he has left this world to go on and be with the Lord.

Pray for that ministry. Pray for Ligonier, because they are no doubt mourning the loss of this great teacher. And also St. Andrew's Chapel. Be in prayer for Burke Parsons, who will be taking over all of the pastoral responsibilities there at St. Andrew's.

The Sovereignty of God and the Westminster Confession

I wanted to play another clip here from Dr. Sproul. And this goes with what we were teaching on yesterday about the sovereignty of God, how he has decided the end from the beginning. And Dr. Sproul gets pretty direct here in understanding the sovereignty of God.

It's not just a matter of adopting a certain theological position or believing in a particular doctrine, but it is necessary as a Christian to believe in the sovereignty of God. Here's Dr. Sproul.

The third chapter of the Westminster Confession begins with these words, God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will freely and immutably, that is, without possibility of changing it, God did freely and immutably ordain whatsoever comes to pass, semi-colon.

Let me take a breath there at the point of the semi-colon. God from all eternity, according to His own holy and wise counsel, did freely and immutably ordain or foreordain whatsoever comes to pass. I paused at that point in the seminary classroom, and I said to my students, how many of you believe that statement?

I have to understand this was a Presbyterian seminary, so these fellows were pretty well steeped in the Augustinian tradition, and I got like a 70 vote there that that large number believed it. I said, okay, how many of you don't believe that statement?

And 30 or so hands went in the air, and I said, fine. Now, let me ask another question. I said, without fear of recriminations, nobody's going to jump all over you. We just would like to know, feel free to state your position, how many of you would call yourselves atheists?

And nobody put their hand up. And I went into my Lieutenant Columbo routine, there's just one thing here I can't understand. I said, and I looked at those 30 who had raised their hand, and I said, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

I said, I can't figure out why those of you who raised your hand saying you did not believe this statement didn't raise your hand when I asked if you were atheists. And they looked at me with a mixture of puzzlement, but with the same kind of looks I'm seeing in your eyes here today, and I was saying, because if you don't believe this statement, you understand that fundamentally, bottom line, you're an atheist.

And that was about the most outrageous thing they ever heard in their lives. I said, well, let's understand that this statement that I've just read, that God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, is not a statement that is unique to Calvinism or to Presbyterianism.

It doesn't distinguish the Reformed tradition from other traditions. It doesn't even distinguish Christians from Jews or from Muslims. This statement here distinguishes theists from atheists, and they were still puzzled as I continued this harangue.

And I said, don't you see that if there's anything that happens in this world outside the foreordination of God, that if there's no sense in which God is ordaining whatsoever comes to pass, then at whatever point something happens outside the foreordination of God, it is therefore happening outside of the sovereignty of God.

That's something else that Dr. Sproul has helped to illuminate for me, are some of those basic concepts of doctrine and theology, because I'm somebody who has grown up in the church. From the first Sunday that I was alive in this world, I've been attending church.

The first book of the Bible I learned to read was Exodus. My dad gave me a choice. I was six years old, being homeschooled, and he said to me, okay, you're going to read through the Bible, pick a book.

And I liked the story of Moses and the burning bush and the parting of the Red Sea, so I picked Exodus. I should have picked something like Jude or Revelation. But Exodus was the book that I picked, and so that's where we started.

That was the first book of the Bible I read through, and then went through the whole Bible. And my dad taught me to use scripture to interpret scripture. And so these are the kinds of things that I've grown up hearing, and having all of this information crammed into my brain, and hearing the same messages repeated over and over again.

So sometimes the basics and the fundamentals get a little bit lost. And so listening to Sproul and Clipse, even as old as that one, helped me to realize the essentialness of those doctrines. As much as I believed them and held on to them, did I understand the basic building blocks level of those doctrines?

And Sproul would help me break those things down and understand it from the most fundamental level. And you can picture him there at his chalkboard. You know, if you've watched some of those old clips of Sproul, he's there at his chalkboard as he's drawing these illustrations and writing these things out.

And that's what you're going to hear in this next clip, because he's at his chalkboard drawing circles and showing how Christ's righteousness was imputed to us, and our sin was imputed to Christ when he was on the cross.

That's what he's going to talk about here in this next clip regarding imputation, and the essentialness of understanding imputation as the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Imputation, Justification, and the Righteousness of Christ

Now, the question is, on what possible grounds could God ever say to you, you are just, when in fact you are not just? Again, how can an unjust person be justified? Well, when we look at imputation, the concept of imputation is found frequently in the New Testament with the imagery like the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

How does he take away the sin of the world? How does the Lamb do it in the Old Testament? What's the symbolism? The priest puts his hands on the Lamb. Why? He's transferring symbolically the sins of the people to the animal that is to be sacrificed, or to the scapegoat who's to go out into the wilderness, and we'll look at that again later on.

Jesus is said to bear our sins. He takes upon Himself the sins of the world. The language there is a language of a quantitative act of transfer, where the weight of guilt that belongs here is taken from this man and given to somebody else.

So that what happens is that God in Christ, Christ willingly takes upon Himself all of this, so that before God, once the sin has been imputed to Him, and again we'll talk more about what this means when we examine the curse motif in the New Testament, but now in the sight of God, God looks at Christ and what does He see?

Justice? He sees a mass of sinfulness, because the sin of now has been transferred to Jesus. This is elementary. I don't want to be insulting your intelligence, but this is, we've got to get this into our bloodstream.

The sin is transferred or imputed to Jesus. Now, if that happened, and that's all that happened, the single transfer, the one-dimensional transaction, you would never be justified. If Jesus took all of my sins that I've ever committed on His back and took the punishment for me, that would not get me into the kingdom of God.

All that would do would be keep me out of hell. I would still not be just. I would be innocent, if you will, but still not just in a positive sense. I have no righteousness of which to speak. And remember, it's not simply the innocence that gets me into the kingdom of God.

It's righteousness. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you'll never get in to the kingdom of God. And so we could talk about, maybe I'm not guilty of anything, but I haven't done anything.

I haven't merited anything that whereby justice would give a reward. So the point is that there is a double transfer. Not only is the sin of man imputed to Christ, but what happens to the righteousness of Christ?

The sin is transferred to Jesus. The righteousness of Christ is transferred to us, to our account. So that in God's sight, this circle is now clean. So that God, when He declares me just, is not lying.

Incidentally, Rome has trouble with this. Rome calls this concept, the Protestant concept, a legal fiction. And they recoil from it because they sense that in the Protestant view of imputation, that somehow this concept casts a shadow on the integrity of God because God is now declaring people just who are not just.

The response of the Reformers was, if the imputation were fictional, then when God declared us just, it would be a legal fiction. It would be a lie, and that would be a blemish on the character of God.

But the point of the gospel is that the imputation is real, that God really laid my sins on Christ. And not only that, God really transferred the righteousness of Christ to me. And that there is a real union for those who are in Christ.

In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, beginning in verse 17, we read,. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

We implore you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Dr. R .C. Sproul, thank you for teaching us the Bible.

Our Lord God, we pray that you would receive your servant, Robert Charles Sproul, into your kingdom. May his passing be gentle. May the remembrance of his life result in giving glory to God our Savior for the gospel of Jesus Christ that was so faithfully preached by this man over the course of his ministry while he was here on this earth.

We pray for St. Andrew's Chapel and we pray that this congregation will be mourning the loss of this great teacher, that they will be comforted in the hope of the message that Dr. Sproul reminded them of so frequently whenever he preached the gospel.

I pray that you would be with Ligonier and those other great teachers who were such close friends to Dr. Sproul, and may there be many other men as a result of this man's ministry who will stand up firm on the gospel of Christ and holding fast to the inerrant word of God.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus, and in Christ receive us into your kingdom as well by the power of the gospel that transforms a sinner from death into life with Christ. We pray these things in his name, amen.