Creeds and Confessions #3 - An Intro to the New Hampshire Confession of Faith

The Historical Background of the New Hampshire Confession

So we've been in this series, about once a month, looking at what it means to be a creedal and a confessional church. And this morning, there's some handouts here. Eddie, if you don't mind coming to get these passed out.

There are a couple of handouts here that we're going to need. Because this morning what we're going to do, if I can review where we've been really quickly. So by way of review, in the first week of this series, and it's only a three week series.

So in the first week, we asked the question, well what do we mean by this whole idea of creeds and confessions? What do we mean when we say that we have creeds and confessions as a church? So we took some time just to answer that question.

And then in our second week, we asked the question, well how do these creeds and confessions, how do they work in the life of a local church? And so that was probably the most technical of all the lessons we're going to do in this series.

Because there's so many concepts we have to kind of get our arms around in thinking about, essentially, how to be a confessional and creedal church. And so having done all of that, what I want to do in this final session really, is to kind of do an introduction to our confession of faith.

And so you should have a handout which is just an outline, a fill-in outline for where we're going to go. As well as a copy of our confession of faith. Yeah, there should be a second, there was a second stapled handout with that.

With a copy of our confession of faith, you'll want that in front of you. Because what we're essentially going to do this morning is, we're going to walk our way very carefully through our confession of faith.

And we're going to do a full detailed study of it, obviously. Instead, what we're going to do is, we're going to slowly, well not slowly, we're going to kind of overview what it teaches. And we're going to see just the sort of broad categories that our confession of faith covers.

So, okay. First off, I think it's important for us to recognize that our confession of faith has a history to it. It didn't drop out of the sky, so to speak. It came from a time and it came from a place.

So our confession of faith came from a particular time and a particular place. And so I want to begin by surveying the history behind our confession of faith. As you can see on the handout, our confession of faith comes to us from the 1800s, 1833.

And when you consider the historical context into which the confession was written, two big things were happening at the time, essentially. So, firstly, as we think about the history of our confession, it was a period of really big doctrinal decline.

So our confession, the New Hampshire Confession of Faith, comes to us from the Baptist churches, particularly the Baptist churches of the northern U .S. And at the time, there were a number of things that were coming into the churches that led to the need for the writing of this confession.

Again, I won't spend too long here, but I think it's important just to understand some of the background to what it is that we're thinking about. First of all, there had been a what you could call anti-missionary movement within the churches.

So a number of churches had started to adopt this belief that because God is sovereign in salvation and because God saves his people without any aid from men, then churches don't need to be sending anybody with the task of preaching the gospel.

If people are elected, if people are chosen, well, they'll come to faith with or without the help of anyone, really. And so this movement essentially taught that the gospel was not to be proclaimed freely.

So there was no offer of salvation being made in preaching. And preaching had become very moralistic, essentially, on the one hand, or it just became very legalistic because you're essentially saying, well, this is how you know you're truly elect.

You need to do these things. And so there was a growing anti-missionary movement within the churches that was becoming a problem. So that's one end of the spectrum where there are problems. Another end is that there was this movement called the Second Great Awakening.

Now, this is not to be confused with the first or what's just known as the Great Awakening in general. Coming from the UK, we call it the Evangelical Revival, but it's the same thing. The revival that, you know, if I mention names like George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, if I mentioned those names in church history that period of time.

Well, after that period of time, there was a second Great Awakening, so-called, in the 1800s. And I say so-called because actually, if you know the roots of this revival, it wasn't much of a revival at all.

Probably the biggest name attached to it was a man named Charles Finney, Charles Grandison Finney. Finney was a lawyer who became a minister. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church, but very quickly came to reject a number of, I would argue, core biblical doctrines, including justification by faith.

He denied that the believer receives the righteousness of Christ when they're saved. He believed in a form of sinless perfectionism. It's actually very hard to figure out what he means when he talks about perfection.

But it's more or less a form of perfectionism, and he actually rejected the idea that, as Christians, we talk about the cross and we say that Christ died for people's sins. He had a very warped view of what that meant.

For him, the cross of Christ was not God paying, well, careful how I word it. It was not Christ taking on our penalty in our place. He viewed the cross of Christ more as Christ is showing us what happens when God's law is broken.

So keep God's law. And that's how you'll say it's a very distorted view of salvation. But then he had a massive impact because he believed that, unlike the first great awakening, which viewed revival as a sovereign work of God in refreshing his people, he viewed revival primarily as something that could be influenced upon the sinner.

That with the right use of means, he called them the new measures. That with the new right use of proper means, you could induce salvation on someone. You can make somebody choose of their own free will to become a Christian rather than what the church historically taught, which was that, yes, we are called to believe, but even the act of believing is a gift that God gives.

And so, again, this is all feeding into some of the background because a lot of churches were taken up with this. A lot of churches in our day are still taken up with this. So you have the second great awakening.

So you've got those two problems, which are bad enough. But then you have another problem, which is that another movement was rising up in the U .S. at the time. It goes by varying names. Probably the most well-known in history is the Restoration Movement.

The Restoration Movement had a lot of tentacles, actually. It's kind of a broad umbrella term. But there was a particular expression of it that started in the South, led by two men, Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.

And Alexander Campbell especially was kind of the force that drove a lot of this. If you've heard of the Churches of Christ, those who don't practice instrumental music, that baptism is required for salvation, those sorts of things, that movement.

And one of the main features of the Restoration Movement was a rejection of any sort of creed or confession entirely. And you still hear this today among the Churches of Christ. The more conservative, traditional Churches of Christ will say things like, we have no creed but the Bible.

Or we speak where the Bible speaks and we're silent where the Bible is silent, which actually that phrase isn't so bad. But what that ends up meaning is we reject any and all written statements of faith.

Now, if you think back to week one, those of you who were here and if you were, you can catch up on our website. If you think back to week one, the rejection of creeds and confessions creates more problems than it actually attempts to solve.

So all of this was happening in the background as this confession comes to be. And it was having an effect on churches across the spectrum. And Baptist churches in the northern U .S. were especially concerned that these movements and these ideas were having very harmful effects on the churches.

Churches left and right were being swayed in terms of some of these issues. And so out of this period of doctrinal decline, there's a desire to have some clarity and consensus. The church has begun to realize we need to be clear on what we believe.

And also in responding graciously to some of the errors that are out there. And in a sense, this is how most confessions in the history of the church have come to be. They're, in a sense, the product of conflict.

They're the product of a lack of clarity leading to clarity. Same with our historic creeds. They don't come out of a vacuum. Something is happening which necessitates writing them. And so seeking to find some clarity on these matters, the churches began to essentially answer some of these questions.

And so the New Hampshire Baptist Convention, so the grouping of Baptist churches in the state of New Hampshire, came together in the year 1833 to write the confession that we have today. There were some differences between what was written then and what you have in your hands now.

Because in 1853, this man, J. Newton Brown, who was a Baptist pastor in Philadelphia, made some rather helpful revisions to the confession. The big ones being he added two chapters. So the chapters on repentance and faith were his additions.

He felt that the confession was lacking in that area. There's also a section on sanctification. So he added that too. And pretty much his changes were accepted by the churches. And so we have the confession as we have it today.

So even on the printed copy you have, it says the New Hampshire Confession of Faith with revisions. Those revisions weren't done by me. It's referring to his revisions in 1853. So that's kind of a thumbnail sketch of the history of our confession, the context out of which it came.

There were doctrinal issues that needed to be addressed. There were movements that were attacking the Christian faith, essentially. And so out of that came our confession, hoping to give some clarity and some consensus among God's people as to what we believe.

Before we move on, any questions about that? Any questions on the historical side of things? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the benefit of those listening to the recording. Eddie's point was that we can appreciate the way in which our confessions come about because they're meant to clarify.

Dealing with real world issues. It's not just someone somewhere decided to write some stuff. But there's a real world context to that, which absolutely that's why that's one of the great benefits, I should say, of having a confession of faith.

Any other questions or thoughts before we move on? There aren't any. Let's quickly move on then to another important facet of our confession, which is that our confession deals with, I use the word tears, but tears maybe isn't the word I'm looking for.

Because, you know, it's not that there is an order to them. So maybe I should keep it. But when you read the confession, you can really categorize the doctrines that it teaches in into four sorts of categories.

Maybe that's a better way. Categories of doctrine. There are four categories of belief that are found in our confession. And I think it's important to note these. So, first of all, you have. What we can call historically Christian doctrine, that which all branches of Christendom agree on.

Another term you could use is orthodox. Things that orthodox just means right belief. These are the things that the churches agree upon. Across the board. So it's historically Christian or historically orthodox.

It's also evangelical. So it kind of if you think of each of these four categories is getting more and more narrow. It's evangelical. And again, I'll explain all of these in much more detail in just a moment.

But again, it holds to an evangelical view of the faith. So things like the authority of scripture, the virgin birth, the deity of the Lord Jesus, the Trinity, those things that Christians in general hold to be true.

Our confession holds to be true. Step down from that. It's reformed in its theology. Reformed referring to that which comes out of the Reformation. That's a very strong reformed emphasis in this confession.

And we will see some of that in just a moment when we march our way through it very quickly. And finally, it's baptistic. So if you think of this as starting off super broad and getting more and more narrow.

When we say it's baptistic, it simply means that it holds a particular view of how the church functions. So this confession, as we'll see in just a moment, holds to the idea of believers baptism versus infant baptism.

It holds to the view that churches are independent. They may come together to partner in ministry and to take care of various matters. But the final authority is the individual local church. It's not an organization outside that dictates to the local church how it's supposed to function and what it's supposed to do.

And so these are the sorts of tiers of doctrine that you find in the confession. And this, I think, creates a healthy balance in the views that it holds. It's not needlessly divisive in areas. And at the same time, it's not unhelpfully loose in areas.

So where it needs to be incredibly tight, it is where there can be some freedom and some disagreement. It has that, too. And I think that's, again, a benefit of how this confession is put together. That it's put together in the kind of way that it emphasizes the right things and it keeps the right balance between these varying viewpoints, all of which are important.

It's not that some things are important, others we can kind of ignore and let go. No, all of these things are important. But there is a very healthy balance to how the confession is put together, which I think we can appreciate.

So these are, again, just four basic tiers or categories of doctrine as you find them in our confession. Again, any questions on that? If not, for the rest of our time, and I'll try not to be too long about this, I want to give us something of a crash course in the confession.

That's why you've got a copy in front of you. I'm not going to read every single article, but what I am going to do is to highlight those four areas that we talked about. I want to show you where they've come out, essentially section by section in this confession of faith.

Historically Christian and Evangelical Doctrines in the Confession

So a bit of a crash course in our confession very quickly. First of all, like I said, there are those doctrines that are historically Christian, those things that Christians of all stripes have always agreed on.

And so if you look at a confession, you can see just a sheer number of chapters that are just basic Christian orthodoxy. Like I said, orthodoxy, right belief. So chapter two on the true God, chapter three on humanity and the fall, chapter four on the way of salvation, chapter six on the need for grace and regeneration, chapter 12 on the harmony between the law and the gospel.

All of these things are tenets of basic Christian orthodoxy. So, again, it's not saying anything unique. They're not coming up with a whole new religion here by any stretch. These doctrines are rooted and grounded in historic Christianity.

So you've got this first category of doctrines, which again spans most of this confession. Which deal with this basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy that all Christians. All professing Christians, as it would agree on.

So you've got historically Christian doctrines. And then you've got, like I said, more evangelical doctrines. And when we say evangelical again, we have to be careful. That's not referring to a denomination, but it's referring to a particular view of particular Christian distinctives.

So in the confession, if you look at, for example, section one. So if you look at section one, section one is on the scripture. Which, again, it kind of reflects a basic evangelical emphasis. We start with scripture because scripture is how we know who God is.

So section one begins with the scripture. And as it begins with the scripture, it espouses a very historic view of how scripture operates. Makes sense. Because now we are, as you can see on screen, I've said these are doctrines that mark out evangelicalism from.

Those are some big terms up on screen, so let me explain them a little bit simpler. So when we say liberalism, theological or doctrinal liberalism was a movement that was actually very much alive and well when this confession was being written.

It denied, it began to anyway, deny the inspiration of the Bible, that the Bible is given to us as the product of God speaking to us. It denied the virgin birth because the virgin birth didn't make sense.

From a quote unquote logical and scientific standpoint, it rejected that the biblical authors actually wrote the works that bear their name. There were a number of things that the theological liberal movement denied and continues to deny into the present day.

There are churches in our valley that would call themselves theologically liberal. That's not an insult we're throwing at them. They would say that of themselves. You look at article number five on justification.

That marks you out from Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church. Rome teaches that justification is not a declaration from God that we have been declared righteous. It says that righteousness is infused into us through the sacraments.

Well, if you read chapter five or section five of our confession, it rejects that entirely. Or look at six, the freeness of salvation. We believe that the blessings of salvation are made free to all by the gospel.

That's that evangelical emphasis that the gospel is for everybody, that all men can be saved and that all men are called to believe. And so you see that emphasis in our confession, like I said, in chapters one, five, six, eight and 17.

17, I think, is an interesting one because it talks about the difference between the righteous and the wicked. Theological liberalism, at least by the time that this confession was being written, had started to lean towards a sort of universalist understanding of salvation.

Universalism essentially says everybody gets to heaven regardless of their faith in Jesus. And our confession very clearly says, no, there's actually a difference between righteous and the wicked. Again, these are doctrines that when you understand them rightly, they mark out evangelical Christianity from whether it's theological liberalism.

The Roman Catholic Church or the so-called Orthodox churches and Orthodox is used in a different way there, like the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, those sorts of churches. And so you see that emphasis in our confession that not only are we historically Christian, those things that all Christians agree on, we also very specifically evangelical.

We hold to a right view of the gospel and it's working out in the life of God's people. And again, the confession doesn't assume this. I think that's one of the great benefits of having a confession of faith, that these things are not assumed, but they're explicitly spelled out.

We're told quite plainly, this is what we believe on these matters. There's no room for confusion. And that's a good thing, because if there's no room for confusion, then we can all be agreed in large measure on what these doctrines are.

So there are historically Christian doctrines, there are evangelical doctrines taught in the confession. But again, as we kind of get more narrow, there are some reformed distinctives to this confession.

Reformed Distinctives: Regeneration, Repentance, Faith, and Election

So the churches that came together to write this confession held to a reformed understanding of salvation. Again, if that means absolutely nothing to you, let me explain real quickly. 16th century, so the 1500s, there was a movement called the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation was a rediscovery of the biblical gospel. The reformers were very clear that they were not creating something new as much as they were going back to something historic. And so as the gospel is being recovered in the Reformation, what you start to see is that there is a, again, just like with our confession, same thing happened in the day of the Reformation.

There was an increasing amount of clarity on particular doctrines relating to salvation, especially. Eventually, that understanding came to be known as reformed theology. Some people like to use the phrase Calvinism.

I'm not crazy about that label personally, but if you talk to some people, that's the phrase they use. These are all just ways of talking about the theology that came out of the Reformation. And when you read our confession, our confession takes those views.

So articles 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 present doctrines that are very distinct to reform theology and its view of salvation. So look, look real quickly what in front of you look at number seven on grace in regeneration.

So number seven says we believe that sinners must be regenerated or born again in order to be saved. Regeneration consists of God's gift. Again, not that language. That regeneration consists of God's gift of a holy inclination to the mind.

It is accomplished in a way that is beyond our comprehension. It is carried out by the power of the Holy Spirit using divine truth to obtain our voluntary obedience to the gospel. The proper evidence of regeneration appears in the holy fruits of repentance, faith and newness of life.

So again, note that they say that. Regeneration is a gift that God gives. That again, we talked about in our historical context little section about Phinney and his views. Phinney believed that regeneration wasn't a gift that God gives, that it's a decision that it's the result of a decision that you make.

But here's our confession. No, that's a gift that God gives. It's not a work that we produce. Look at Section 8. Same thing. So this is one of the chapters that Newton Brown added. We believe that repentance and faith are sacred duties as well as inseparable graces.

So again, we are not being told that repentance and faith are something that originate that start with us. Rather, repentance and faith are graces that God gives, which is what the Bible teaches. So Philippians 1 .29, we're told that we are granted not only to suffer for Christ, but also to believe in him.

Ephesians Chapter 2 says that our salvation and all the parts of our salvation are a gift of God. Repentance and faith are not things that are worked up by us. They are gifts that God gives to his people to bring them to him.

And again, that's a very distinctively reformed understanding of things. Chapter 9, if there's any confusion, makes it very clear. So God's purpose of grace. We believe election is the eternal purpose of God, according to which he graciously regenerates, sanctifies, and saves sinners.

He goes on, election is perfectly consistent with human free agency, which is true. God chooses, doesn't deny that yes, people must make a decision to believe in Jesus. So it's perfectly consistent with human free agency.

No, they don't say free will. They say free agency. And includes all the means necessary to achieve God's purpose. It is a most glorious display of God's sovereign goodness, which is infinitely free, wise, holy, and unchangeable.

So again, a very distinctively reformed view of how salvation works. And so you see that in our confession that there are reformed distinctives that are put forward in our statement of faith. So we've seen historically Christian doctrines, we've seen evangelical doctrines, we've seen reformed distinctives.

Baptistic Distinctives and the Church's Ordinances

Letter D, there should be baptistic distinctives. I made a mistake in the slides. Baptistic distinctives. And so if you look at especially our articles, articles 13 and 14, they present a baptistic view of the church and its ordinances.

So again, baptistic when, so I think this is important to clarify real quick. There's a difference between being a baptist and being baptistic. Baptists, with a capital B, refers to a particular tradition and the denominations that come out of it.

And I say denominations plural because there are multiple of them. So even in our valley, there are churches that are part of the Southern Baptist Convention. There are churches that are part of the American Baptist Convention.

There are independent Baptist churches. There are all different types, but they are all part of that same theological tradition. That's different from being baptistic, which means that, again, I think I have it on, yeah I do have it on screen.

So we only baptize believers upon a clear profession of faith, and we restrict the Lord's Supper to believers alone. Those things are baptistic. Why? We tie them to believers being baptized. And as you read the confession, the confession, which again was written by Baptist churches, takes a baptistic view of these things.

I think this might be a good way to clarify this. That all Baptist churches are baptistic, but all baptistic churches are baptist. Say that fast three times. All of the churches that believe in the baptism of believers alone and that the Lord's Supper is for believers alone.

Yeah, they are baptistic. And so Article 13 and 14 present to us a baptistic view of the church and its ordinances. And again, we should expect this because this is a confession that is written for churches.

And so that's why there is clarity on what a church is and what a church does. It's not as though the confessors thought, you know, let's just deal with the stuff that individual Christians believe in.

No, they understood that the church was critical. It was important that there was a centrality to the church. That meant that if we're going to write a confession of faith, our confession of faith is going to have to deal with the church.

And so you see some baptistic distinctives embedded in our confession. And when you put all of those four categories together, historically Christian teaching, evangelical teaching, reformed distinctives, baptistic distinctives, you put all of those together, you get the body of doctrine that we hold to as a church here at Redeemer Bible Fellowship.

What the Confession Leaves Unsettled

Now, I want for a moment as we wrap up, I'm going to be done in two, three minutes. But as we wrap up, I want to think for a moment about what our confession doesn't address. Because there are some things it doesn't address.

So, for instance, if you look, for example, right at the end, final article 18, the world to come. We believe the end of the world is approaching. At the last day, Christ will descend from heaven and raise the dead from the grave to final retribution.

A public separation will then take place in which the wicked are justly assigned to endless punishment and the righteous to endless joy. This judgment will determine forever on principles of righteousness the final state of people in heaven or hell.

Did you notice what was missing from that statement? Yeah, so Brad said any sort of specific eschatological viewpoint. And that's right, you read our confession, it does not take a side in the nearly 2 ,000 year old debate about what do we believe or not believe.

So, it deals essentially with the essentials. That the end is coming. That on the last day there will be a judgment. Believers will go to one place, unbelievers will go to another place. And that this judgment happens on the basis of God's righteousness.

Now, is it wrong for a church to take a more specific stance on those issues? No, I would argue actually there's some practical benefit to that. But do you see how somebody could maybe say, let's put it this way.

Could somebody become a member of our church, and I think I talked about this in week one. Could somebody become a member of our church and say, I don't know the first thing about any of that stuff. Yeah, I agree Jesus is coming back and we should be ready for it, but I don't know anything else about all the rest of that.

Could they become a member of our church? Yes. Because we're not trying to bind a particular view on everyone. Again, I think I talked about this in week two. That there may be, and I would argue I think there's a lot of wisdom in maybe having more specific views for those who teach.

So that there is doctrinal uniformity. But that's very different from binding the conscience of just your average everyday Christian. And the confession avoids that. Really healthy way to approach this.

That there are issues of individual conscience. Well, another confession, the 1689, a really good one, says that there are matters of Christian prudence and the light of nature that you don't want to take too hard a stance on.

So do you notice that the confession doesn't tell you which translation of the Bible to use? There are churches, which tend to be of one kind, that are very strict on which Bible you can use. The confession doesn't take that view.

It opens with an article on the scriptures. And yet, in its treatment of the scriptures, it doesn't take a stance on which translation you should use. And there were other translations when this thing was being written.

It doesn't take that view. Should you use wine or grape juice in communion? Our confession doesn't address it. I also don't think it's that important, but that's neither here nor there. Um, should there be a, this one, I'm coming from the UK, there are churches that used to debate this.

Should communion be a shared loaf or individual pieces of bread? The Bible doesn't address that. I mean, if you want to be really technical about it, do what they did at the Passover and have four cups, because that's what happened in a Passover meal.

Have four cups, have a roasted lamb, because that's what they did at the Passover. And have multiple pieces of bread. And bitter herbs. And a boiled egg. I'm going to eat a lot of boiled eggs. Um, but no, we don't do, we require, can you recognize, okay, what the scripture does say is the fruit of the vine and bread.

Can Christians have particular views on some of that? Of course they can. But do the particular views that Christians have rise to confessional status? No. Again, this is one of the things, I think I said this in week one.

One of the arguments made against confessions of faith is that they bind the conscience. But in our confession of faith and other confessions of faith are the same. They don't bind the conscience in non-essential areas, which actually protects Christian unity.

It doesn't fight it. So I can't come up here and say, all of you, if you want to know my view on eschatology, I am pre-millennial. All of you must be pre-millennial. I think I'm right. If I didn't think I was right, I wouldn't hold the view I hold.

Yeah, I think I'm right. I might even argue for it depending on the context. But am I going to make that a test of fellowship? No. Am I going to make that a test of membership? No. Did you serve in our church in any number of ways and not share my view on eschatology?

Yes. However, if you came in and said, I don't believe in the Trinity. Now we might need to have a conversation. Because those things are part of the... Again, I wish my iPad were working and I could draw on screen.

The confession forms both a center and a boundary. You know what I mean when I say that? It forms a center in terms of these are the things that we come around as. We come around, excuse me, as a body.

But it also creates a boundary. That means there are certain things that we keep out. And so the confession forms both a center and a boundary. Which I think is healthy in the life of a church. I'm pretty much done.

Why Creeds and Confessions Glorify God and Protect the Church

Why did we take three weeks, one a month, to address this issue of being a creedal and confessional church? Why did we think that this was so important?

Well, simply this.

God is not just glorified in what we do. God is glorified when, as churches, we are clear on what we believe. We can't just sit there and say, well, it doesn't matter. First of all, the idea that says it doesn't matter usually boils down to, well, I can't see what the practical value is.

Well, not everything has practical value. That's a whole other conversation for another time. But what's important is this. We want to glorify God not just in what we do, not just in how we behave, but also in what we believe.

And for us here at Redeemed Bible Fellowship, we have, as a body, agreed that the best way to do that is by having a very clear, very defined confession of faith. You all got a copy this morning. You need another one?

Let me know. I'll print off another one for you. And if you notice, I don't quote our confession a whole lot. Not because I don't think it's important. I quote this a whole lot. But the reason I quote this is because even as our confession says, this is the final authority.

All that the confession does is help to bring clarity as to what we believe when we say this book is the final authority. It's essentially saying the Bible is the final authority on hope. Here's what we believe that this final authority teaches.

And so, beloved, I want to encourage us as a church, and I will be saying more about this in months to come. I want us as a church not to view our confession as a, how do I put this, a side dish. Think of it this way.

Yes, it's not the main, so be careful about that, I suppose. But it's not a garnish. Let me put it that way. A garnish is not necessary to a meal. No, it actually has an important function in the life of our church.

And so my hope is that in this series, as we've given some thoughts to what our confession of faith is, why we hold to a confession of faith, why don't we just have a very generic statement of faith and keep it like that?

Why have we opted for a more detailed confession? Ultimately, it's not just because, you know, we are theological nerds and we take this stuff seriously. It's because we want to glorify God by faithfully holding to his truth.

Really, this is a matter of us being as faithful a church as we can be. And I don't say that churches that aren't confessional aren't necessarily faithful. Far from it. I'm not making that point. What I am saying is, for us to be as faithful as we can be, we want to be a church that is creedal and is confessional.

And we want to be clear on that. Not because we want to be better than anyone, but because we want to be more and more faithful to the Lord who has called us. Amen. Let me pray. We will wrap it up for this morning.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this time. Father, we thank you for the confession of faith that we have as a church. The clarity that it affords to us, the blessing that it affords to us. Father, help us that we would not be those who hold our doctrine with a lack of joy and a lack of grace, a lack of patience with others.

Father, help us that we would be both robust in our belief and vibrant in our faith. Father, help us to always remember that your word is indeed the final authority. Grant us humble and teachable hearts that if we need to correct something, that we be willing to do so.