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This is Pastor Patrick Hines, special program today.
I was listening to Semper Ephraim on the radio, I'm about an hour into their 95th program where they respond to emails, shoutouts, and apparently are going to discuss some stuff about covenant theology.
The fatal flaw in Presbyterian covenant theology, that will be interesting for me when I get to that part of it. But I wanted to go through just a few things here. I really like that Tim and Carlos did this kind of year-end inventory and responding to emails and certainly appreciate their encouragement.
There have been times here tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains in Northeast Tennessee that I've wondered if there are any humans left that still love the true gospel and are willing to defend it in public, and who love it, and who will die for it and fight for it, because we want Christ to be glorified for the perfection of His work and the triune God worshipped appropriately.
We don't want to allow the admixture of works of any kind. I love that phrase from our confession in the chapter on justification. Not for anything wrought in them or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone.
Every time I read that in our confession, I just want to jump up and shout amen. Just so thankful for the gospel, so thankful for the gospel, and so heartbroken at its modern detractors and at the silence of men who should know better and should be shouting and defending and doing everything they possibly can to assure that no glory is taken away from Christ for the greatness of His work.
I just needed a little sip of coffee there. Still waking up. It is hard when you get into your 40s and you have a house full of children. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that here in a moment.
So I wanted to first thank Tim and Carlos. They've been a real great encouragement to me. I'm so thankful for their stance for the gospel. I've really enjoyed Carlos' writing and Tim Coffman's programs.
I wish I could listen to all the SRR programs that are out there. There's a lot of really good stuff. The Roman Catholic stuff that Tim Coffman has put out there is just outstanding. I really appreciate his knowledge of patristics and church history and some of the issues related to Roman Catholicism.
Just very thankful for that. The Protestant Witness podcast. Really thankful for this. Really thankful to have the opportunity to do a podcast and I think it's a good thing and I'm thankful for these partners and ministry here.
It's really become kind of my greatest hits. I can't think of any other way to say it. I go out to Sermon Audio and Tim mentioned there's more than 600 sermons. There's actually over 700 under my name because I preached a lot of sermons at the church in Ohio that are not under Bridwell Heights' sermon audio page, but they're under my name if you just look for the sermons under my name.
If you really want to overdose on me, those are out there too. A lot of sermons preached at the church I came from before I got to Bridwell Heights about six and a half years ago. So, the Protestant Witness has enabled me to put out some of the videos I had done on my YouTube channel.
I had like 150 videos out there over a number of years and I also uploaded a lot of those videos to Sermon Audio. So, I might try to transfer, especially some of the Eastern Orthodox stuff that I did because folks have said, hey, we used to look at that and some of those videos had several thousand.
Views.
One of the videos I did on Hank Hanegraaff had 11 ,000 something views. Man, I got a lot of email from folks that watched that one. The whole Hank Hanegraaff going to Eastern Orthodoxy. I documented in one of those videos that Hank said his views have not changed and I demonstrated that that is not a true statement.
He used to recommend R .C. Sproul's book, Faith Alone, and now he's acting like, hey, we don't know what Faith.
Alone is about.
We don't even make a dichotomy between faith and works at all in the East and we never had these debates and yada, yada, yada. But he did used to point out that justification is by faith alone and in fact he used to understand James Chapter 2 correctly and I document that in Hank Hanegraaff's Bible Answer book that I have on Kindle and contrasted it with what he's saying now and also contrasted what he said with his predecessor, Walter Martin.
And Walter Martin wrote an excellent little book called Essential Christianity and addresses James 2 and the misuse of it by Rome, etc. So I may bring some of that Eastern Orthodox stuff back and put the audio on the Protestant Witness because I think folks found that Eastern Orthodox stuff to be helpful.
I got into dialogues with a lot of Eastern Orthodox folks. But I'll tell you, talk about a fluid group of people. I mean, Eastern Orthodoxy is anything but a united front. I mean, I had this young convert guy sending me videos and sending me links to sermons and I responded, I mean, this young guy is a flaming liberal and the sermons that he sent me by a guy named Thomas Hopko who died in 2015, the guy was a liberal.
I mean, it seriously was like listening to something by Henry Van Dyke or Harry Amberson and Fosdick, one of Machen's opponents way back during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and I thought, this is what you have embraced?
This liberal nonsense? So just really disappointing. Thomas Hopko thinks the idea that Jesus is satisfying divine justice is absolute madness and it's insanity, it's crazy, it's not what the church has ever believed and I'm just like, what Bible are you reading and what historical sources are you reading?
Because that's always been the Christian proclamation. Jesus died for our sins. Okay, so the Protestant Witness has really become kind of my greatest hits because you can sort your sermons on Sermon Audio by popularity.
So the sermons that are the more popular ones are the ones that I've been posting because I think they hit a chord with folks and I think that people find them helpful. What's interesting is if you do sort your sermons on Sermon Audio, you can see what your least popular messages are too and my least listened to sermons are the sermons I preached on deacons.
The need for deacons, the ministry of deacons and selecting deacons and that's disappointing to me because that's an office in Christ's church and you know, our church here, I went through a year of officer training, I actually came up with a plan, a reading list and everything for the session because we needed some deacons, we needed more deacons, we only had four, we needed some more.
And we wanted to open up three slots to get nominations and so three guys were nominated and I originally proposed a training plan that was going to take 18 months and they said no, Patrick, that's too long and I said okay, so I had to get rid of some of the books.
It's kind of like asking which one of your kids you want to kill or something, you know. Because every book I had on that list was so important but they said this needs to not take more than a year. So we trimmed it down to a year, did the officer training, we got three new deacons, so now we have seven deacons and I love those guys, they're great, they do so much work in this.
Church.
But yeah, if you want to know what are my least favorite sermons that I've ever preached, the sermons on deacons and I did a lot of work on those sermons. I read the New Testament deacon minister of mercy, read the sections of R .B. Kuyper's book, The Glorious Body of Christ, which is an awesome book on ecclesiology, I mean R .B. Kuyper, that's not spelled like Abraham Kuyper, it's R .B. Kuyper, K-U-I-P-E-R, The Glorious Body of Christ, is outstanding book, just an outstanding.
Book.
The stuff that he wrote on deacons and then the New Testament deacon minister of mercy. And put together a couple sermons to prepare the congregation, they were going to be nominating deacons and I wanted to go over with them, here's how you do it, here's what you need to look for to nominate deacons.
But what we really need are more elders. Things at the church here at Brittle Heights Presbyterian Church are going real well. As of our statistical report at the end of this year, I mean we're a smaller church and we have a decent sized facility, but we're getting to where we're outgrowing this facility.
We have 129 communicant members and we have, get this, 47 covenant children. I tell people from the pulpit occasionally, if you're standing around talking, don't take a step backwards because you're probably going to trip over somebody's kids.
Now granted, over a fifth of those are mine, because my wife's about to have our 10th child, just more on that here in just a moment, but we're blessed with lots of kids and there's newlyweds in the church that just had one, another newlywed couple's about to have one, and so we're going to break the 50 covenant children threshold here very shortly, which is just incredible for a church, a smaller church like our church is, but we also have plans in the works.
We did a $100 ,000 expansion a couple years ago. We had to expand our parking lot a little bit and we also knocked down some walls in the basement and expanded our fellowship hall because we do these monthly communion fellowship meals and we'd have 160 people would stay for lunch and we would stay and chit chat and talk and fellowship and hang out until 2 and 3 in the afternoon, that's why we don't do an evening service on the first Sunday of the month because people stay here and hang out for so long.
But we are now, we've got plans to try to double the size of our sanctuary because we're bringing in a lot more tithe money than we need and we made the decision, the session made the decision a couple years ago, we're not going to take on any new ministries or new missionaries, instead we're going to engage in what we call a big home missions project and that is everything that's above and beyond our budget we siphon off into a growth fund is what we're calling it and we're getting, I think, fairly close.
It'll be interesting at our annual budget meeting which is coming up in January with all the elders and the deacons to propose, to put together the budget and propose it to the congregation. It'll be interesting to me to see what the levels are at right now because I think we're getting close to being able to pull the trigger to do a $1 million expansion and that would maximize what we can do with the land that we have here at the church, we've got like five acres, we've got the space that we need to add more parking and we had an architect put together a plan, we had a committee that did a lot of work, they really did great work to figure out what we could do, do we want to move and try to build a new building or do we want to try to buy an existing structure and remodel it or is there anything we can.
Do here?
Getting a new building and buying land and building would be like $5 million, there's no way we could do that, I wouldn't want to do that, I think that none of us are comfortable.
With that.
Buying an existing building of some kind like a warehouse and then trying to remodel it or something, that would have been around $3, $3 .5 million and we didn't like that either, that was too much money and the proposal that we were given by the architects and from the committee was around $900 ,000 to $1 million we can knock down the sides of the sanctuary and make it twice the size that it is now and all we need to do is add some parking up by the, there's a parsonage, there's a manse, a building where actually my family and I lived there until we sold our house in Ohio, there's places up there we can put more pavement for parking and then we would maximize this area, we would maximize the land that we've got here and I told them I have no interest and never have had any interest in a mega ministry, I'm not going to do that, there's not a chance that I'm going to preach to a congregation of more than 500, that's just not, if I don't know the people I'm preaching to, I don't know how I could really apply the word of God effectively to them, so that's not going to happen, but if we have a sanctuary that's twice the size of the one now, we could probably, Lord willing, if the church continues to grow, once we hit around 250 members, I'm thinking, Lord willing, the three seminary students we're training here will be close to being ready to take their own churches and I want to get them pulpit opportunities and get them licensed and give them about seven Sunday nights a year each, so that would be 21 Sunday nights a year that they'd get to preach so that they've got experience and the congregation's used to hearing them and then plant churches with them, that's what I've always wanted to do, since I was a young man, I've wanted to be a church planter and do missions in that way here in America.
I think America's one of the darkest nations on this planet. I mean, it's getting to where you can't find the gospel anywhere in this country, you have to look really hard. It's kind of like what Amos talked about, it's a famine of the word and people running to and fro and folks come to us here and it's because of the stuff that they hear it on sermon audio, people listen to the Protestant Witness now, I've tried to promote that, encourage people to listen to that, and so people are showing up because they want biblical worship and I love telling people all the time, because we have no gimmicks.
I mean, this church, we don't have a youth group, we encourage families to stay together, we're family integrated, we encourage everyone to stay in the sanctuary, we have a nursery for kids up to two, once they're past the age of two they have to be in the sanctuary with everyone else, and we have no gimmicks, we don't have a praise band, we have a piano and a clavinova with an organ voice in it, that's it.
That's what we do, it's a very boring traditional Reformed service, but people love it. People come because they want to worship God, because after all, God is the audience of worship, not the congregation.
And that's something that people need to learn, people need to know. God is the audience of worship, not us. People go, I just don't like the music, I don't like this, I don't like that, and people have said that to me over the years, at times, and I just say, in all this time you thought it was about you.
We're not here for you. We're here to worship God. We're here to declare His glory, and to give Him praise, and to love and worship His Son, our Savior, our Redeemer. And so, yes, we want to do that with beautiful music, with well-played music, and we're blessed with some phenomenal musicians at this church, who use their musical gifts and their talents.
And if our sanctuary gets bigger, I'd like to get more instruments involved, I'd love to see some strings and everything else. But we do rich theological hymnody. We don't do the praise choruses and things like that.
And I tell people at the church, if you hear good Reformed hymns, we'll use them. And people email me stuff, and you know, we sing In Christ Alone, How Deep the Father's Love for Us, there's a whole bunch of them.
We have them in laminated sheets with a little keyring thing on them, behind the hymnals and the pews. Because we're not just, Red Trinity hymnal, that's it. No, there's still good Reformed hymns out there.
In fact, I just sent an email with three new, really great Reformed hymns to the music folks here at church, and the session loves the hymns, and so they're looking for the music, and we're gonna try to teach them to the congregation.
We're all for that. But one of the rules of thumb I've told folks about hymnody and about music, because people will complain, I really like the repetitious praise choruses, and I really like this and that.
And over the years, I've come up with this as kind of a response to that. If someone can sing a hymn in a synagogue, a mosque, a Mormon chapel, and a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall without giving offense, then there's not enough theological content to the hymn.
Does that make sense? And people are like, yeah, I get it. I said, think of hymns as you're singing the faith into your soul, and you're praising God for the doctrines that he has revealed, and for the great things he has accomplished.
And you can't sing about things like that without theology. You can't. And so, that's the heart and soul of how we worship here at our church, and it's encouraging. We use the, there's a Maroon Book of Psalms for singing, so we sing a lot of psalms here too.
We're not, psalms only, but we do sing a lot of the psalms, and we sing the great, you know, reformed hymns of the past. And so, things at the church are going well. I've been really blessed. The church I came from had a lot of problems and issues.
It was a very, very difficult experience for me. It was one of the, I'll just go ahead and say it. Those four years at my first church were the worst four years of my life. They really were. Those were the worst four years I have lived on this planet between the age of 32 and 36.
Those were unhappy times for me. Very, very, very stressful and sad. But things here the last six and a half years have been wonderful. I am blessed with such a great congregation here. They love the Word of God.
They love the gospel, and the people in this church take care of each other. I'm consistently blown away at how much love there is in the congregation here, and how sweet and how warm people are to one another.
And they have been such an encouragement to me. I'll tell you, it was hard. The first four years I was a pastor, it was like non-stop, you know, I was just being slashed and burned constantly. You know, people didn't like the reformed faith.
They didn't like what I had to say about education. They didn't like, you know, the emphasis on recognizing education as a comprehensively religious undertaking. And you need to recognize that. I realize people have limitations based on their life situations as far as what options are available to them.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, fathers in particular, and fathers and mothers in general, but fathers in particular, are held responsible by God for the education of their children. And there's a lot of people that don't like to hear things like that.
And people let me know about that and complained and fussed at me. But, you know, when you go into pastoral ministry, you kind of accept that there's going to be folks that don't like you. Hey, the apostles had rocks thrown at them and were stoned and had riots and things like that.
So it shouldn't surprise us that there's a little bit of that antithesis going on still. Excuse me while I sip some more coffee here. Now, family update. My eldest is 19. Abigail Grace is 19. Seth is 17.
Paul is 15. And Maria is 14. And Lily is 9. Hannah is 7. Malachi is 6. Elizabeth is 4. Ruth is 2. And then we have a baby that's going to be coming probably in the next two weeks. My dear Amy is pregnant with our 10th child.
I have seven girls, including our unborn baby girl and three boys. So yeah, I've got to figure out a way to pay for seven weddings. I'm going to have to sell a kidney on the black market or something.
I don't know how. We'll figure out something. But family's doing great. My four eldest children, all 10 of my children were baptized as covenant children and were seen as members of the church as part of how we understand the continuity of the church prior to and after the coming of Christ.
That our children are not suddenly to be discarded or left at home, but they're supposed to be brought to church with us. And we need to teach them how to worship God, teach them how to pray and evangelize them.
But they are members of our church, non-communicant members. My four eldest children have now made their professions of faith and are communicant members. And I tell you, it's been a blessing, such a blessing to me that my four eldest kids are not just friends.
They're not just my children. They are my brothers and my sisters in Christ. And they're great, great Christian young people. I'm not just bragging on my kids. We've been through some difficult things.
We've been through some hard stuff with a couple of them. But all four of them never really had rebellion in their hearts. All four of them were very soft hearted towards the gospel and love the gospel.
And it moved me to hear their testimonies when they shared them with the elders. But Paul and Maria recently became members, that was just a couple months ago. And that really warmed my heart to hear their testimonies.
And we've been talking, obviously, we do family worship every single day. And I wake them up and we do devotions in the morning, we do devotions in the evening. And I actually do devotions separately with all my younger children.
Because in a sense, I have two batches of children. We had four very quickly. And then there's a five and a half year gap between my fourth and fifth, because we just were kind of done having kids. And then we had a change of heart.
And I wonder if God would give us more more kids? Yeah, six more. And, you know, we've been very blessed. My wife, the doctor told me your wife is a baby making machine. I said, Yeah, I know. It's pretty incredible.
Um, we do home births, no complications. And Amy's like, like fully recovered, like she didn't even have a baby like a week later. It's pretty, pretty unbelievable. She, my wife is kind of, she's, she would have been like one of those pioneer women, like real tough and grisly and very strong physical constitution.
She just has always been like that. And I just have nothing but love and respect for her. She is a blessing to me. And the thing is, she's three years older than me. You know, I don't think she would care.
But if I said this, but she's 46 years old. And people get all upset, you know, you're having children is she's too old to have kids. We've had three kids past the age of 40 for her and she's 46 with this child.
Now I do think this, this will probably be the last, but I've said that three times now. So I tell people I am, I'm just not going to be saying that anymore, but probably this will be the last. So family's doing, doing really well.
My younger kids are, um, are doing great. Uh, they're, they're, we've been really blessed by the grace of God. We homeschool the kids, you know, we've homeschooled them all. And they're very, very sharp, very bright.
And, uh, we've been, been really blessed in that way with healthy kids that, that really seem to have a heart for the Lord and love the gospel and have not really shown any, any hints of, uh, rebellion or anything like that.
So that that's always been one of my fears is that my kids would rebel or walk away from the Lord. And they just haven't done that. And you know, that's, that's because of God's faithfulness to his promises.
That's because of my wife's steadfastness and evangelizing them and teaching them, instructing them and doing so much, carrying so much of the homeschooling burden. But, um, myself as well, I've taught all four of my older kids know the entire Westminster Shorter Catechism, all 107 questions and answers from memory, uh, taught that to them.
And they recited it out loud, um, at our church to get a Bible, a leather Bible with their name engraved on it. Um, there's one other family that's done it too. And I always push and encourage that you need to teach the kids.
In fact, if you look at the history of the PCA, uh, Frank Smith wrote a really good history of the PCA. What happened to the PCA? Why did it lose it? So, or not the PCA, but the PC us, the Southern church, why did it start turning liberal?
People stopped catechizing their kids. And so they grew up and they didn't know the faith. They didn't know the doctrines. They didn't, they didn't know the truth. And it's difficult to believe the truth if you don't know what it is.
And so you need to catechize your children. And I've preached on that. I have railed from the pulpit on that issue. I have hammered that as hard as I can with tears in my eyes to the congregation. So promoting family worship and what the Puritans called domestic piety, uh, has been a huge part of, of my ministry.
Uh, I need to, I need to post some of those sermons. Um, in fact, I did, I did post, uh, uh, up to the process and witness on Matthew Henry and family worship. And I've preached a lot more. I did a 13 part series on discipling your family.
And, uh, people said that that was extremely helpful to them. Our church also provides, um, we, we help subsidize Christian education. If you homeschool or send your kids to a Christian school, we pay $200 per child, uh, every year, uh, to families that do that, to try to help them and to promote and encourage that.
Uh, so that's that with the family's doing great, uh, pastorally ministry wise, I've been preaching expository through the gospel of Luke, um, which is great. It's like I've said to people, I can't believe they pay me to do this.
Um, it's such a, an encouraging thing to be able to just immerse myself in commentaries and to look at the original language and to look at the text and to pray through it and read it and reread it, reread it, read through the context, the surrounding context, and then to, to put together, um, meals for the people of God and to, to do that spade work and to get into the pulpit every Sunday about ready to just burst, um, and ready to, to share my findings with the people of God.
And, and, uh, I serve a congregation that is hungry for it. So it's been great. You know, at the end of the four years I was in Ohio, I, I, it was really terrible. Like I said, those were the hardest days of my life.
I used to take long walks, um, by myself in the woods and I would just cry like a little kid. I would just cry and I'd get, I'd get on my knees in the and, and ask God, did I miss your will? I thought you wanted me to do this.
Why, why has everything been so hard and why, why has my life been so miserable trying to do this? I have only ever wanted to serve you and to preach the gospel, to evangelize people, to help people, help people's marriages and to be a loving presence in the lives of your sheep.
Um, but God needed to take me through that, um, humbling time. He needed to strike me down and hit me. I think of that proverb, blows that hurt cleanse away evil as do stripes the inner depths of the heart.
Very often it's hard for God to use people greatly until he's hurt them deeply, until he's cut them deeply. And God does that. God strikes us. He got, God hits us and hurts us because he loves us. It's the same reason we, we discipline our own children because we, we love them.
The thing is, I wouldn't have been as useful to God here if he had not taken me through those very, very difficult experiences. We had, we had three miscarriages. Um, and that, that was during that time too.
That was a real, real, real difficult things. I love being a dad. I love being a dad. And that was a very hard on us. So it was a, those were hard times, but at the end of all that, and then coming here and having, having the love of a congregation and having elders that believe in me and that really are for me, I've really been able to just thrive here.
And so these have been, um, very happy days for me and happy times for my family and for me. So very thankful for that. We, we have challenges too. It's not like everything's perfect, but, um, but for the most part, you know, the ministry here at the church and things are going really well.
I've been preaching through Luke's gospel. I've been doing a series through the Westminster confession. I think I'm on the 55th sermon, um, in chapter 16 of good works. And that's a very important chapter of our confession.
So, uh, I was going to preach out that sermon this past Sunday night, but, um, church got canceled cause there was a foot of snow on the ground. So there's that the ministry of the word is going well here at the church.
And then there's lamp seminary, um, is a, a new program that I think is really going to be the future of, of seminary education, using all the resources with all the online stuff and all the courses that you can get in the MP3s.
And there's all sorts of stuff like that. The books are cheap, you know, there's electronic books, Kindle and, uh, you know, readers and everything else. I think that seminary education really does need to be retaken by pastors and local churches.
And that's what I'm trying to do here. And there's three guys here. I have prayed and prayed and prayed anyone that that's a member of brittle Heights church, the, my pastoral prayer, the long prayer.
I ask God to raise up men for gospel ministry every Sunday and do almost every day. Um, between Sundays to ask God, please give us godly men. We are in such desperate need that the need is so great. And the, the, and the resources are so scarce.
Please give us godly man. We desperately, desperately need godly men. And God has given us three here. So there's three guys here, John, Eric, and Ryan. I pray for those three guys. All three are quite a bit younger than I am.
And they have young families and little kids. And so those Saturday mornings we meet at the church here every Saturday morning for at least an hour or required by the program to meet for an hour, to go through the lectures that they went through, to look at their notes, to go through these dialogue worksheets about the theology they're studying and the Bible and everything else.
So it's really great. I mean, that in and of itself could be a podcast because we have a great time sitting around the table. And these are, these are not three ordinary guys. These are three exceptionally bright, uh, young, uh, reformed Presbyterian brothers that I am so excited about.
And I love these three men and I'm just really excited for their future. And I really do think that, uh, Lord willing, if, if the trajectory continues at the church here and we keep growing, uh, that they're going to be the guys we plant churches with eventually.
So Lamp Seminary is a great program. Um, lampseminary .org is, I appreciate that. Yeah, that is the website. There's that. And those three guys are doing great work. They're doing excellent work. Um, I'm excited to help them to improve their preaching skills.
We're giving them opportunities. Uh, I've told them once they've got about a year's worth of seminary work under their belt, I wanted them to get licensed in our Presbyterian so they can not just preach here, but also go out on the circuit.
There's churches that are in need of pulpit supply regularly. So, and I've told them you always want to embrace and take whatever opportunities you get to stand in a pulpit and preach because, you know, preaching, preaching really, it is an art form and you need to get, you have to practice at it.
And I, I told them we're also going to video record you and as painful as it is, you need to see yourself preaching and you need to listen to recordings of yourself preaching so you can get rid of bad habits and you can learn how to present yourself better.
See where you trailed off, where you may have lost folks, where your presentation is not as cogent as it needs to be. You, you've got to practice at this and get better at it because public speaking and preaching, um, is, is something that's very important to the ministry of the word.
And I also told them, uh, you know, I'm not, I'm not a charismatic, um, but I have a very, very, very, very, very high view of the Holy Spirit. Um, and I think that the reformed churches have the highest view possible of the Holy Spirit.
And when, when I had hands laid on me, when I was set apart for gospel ministry, there was a change. There was a change in the unction and the pathos that accompanied me into the pulpit. It was a, there was a difference.
Um, and I don't know how to describe it, but there's a sense of, of urgency, a sense of passion. Um, you, you want to prepare and to preach, you know, you just, it's, it just burns in your, in your bones.
Like Jeremiah says, um, you know, it was like a fire in my bones and I, I, I tried to, to hold back, but I could not. And so there, there's that too, when it happens, when you're ordained to the ministry, there is an unction that accompanies, uh, that and in my heart and in my mind, um, I'm always thinking, um, as the congregation sitting down before I pray over the, over the sermon text, um, I'm thinking in my mind, I believe in the Holy Spirit, just like the apostles create, I believe in the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit of God will help me and guide me.
And occasionally I break from my sermon manuscript. I don't do it very often, but I've been doing it more lately. And I was actually encouraged to do that more because I, I really do think when you preach, you need to, to deliver to the people of God, the fruits and the results of the labor of over the word that week, that you worked hard over your sermon.
You're not just going to stand up there and wing it. You're going to actually give them the spade work that you did in the sweat from your brow over the passage. So I don't like breaking from my manuscript and kind of going off into other and not, not into rabbit trails, but to elaborating with more pathos, but people have encouraged me to do that more because, um, they like that.
And that that's great. I think that's good, but you need, you still need to stick to, to the work that you've done and the labor that you put over your sermon manuscript. So anyway, so ministry of the word is going well here at the church.
We need elders, man. I'm telling you, um, what we had, uh, two deacons, two really good deacons moved away. So we were, we were in need of deacons because the congregation has been slowly, but surely growing.
And we had, uh, when I got here, there were four elders, um, and then me. So there's five total. And one of, one of our elders, uh, died a few years ago and he was, uh, one of the founding members of the church, a man named Bob Lane.
Bob Lane was actually there in Southern England and listened to Dwight Eisenhower's speech before D-Day happened. He was a World War II veteran. Uh, Bob Lane was one of my favorite people. Uh, he was 95 years old when he died.
And, uh, I did his funeral. I was with him. Me and my son, Paul went to see Bob, um, 20 hours before he died. Uh, he was, he had cancer and it was all in his abdomen. And I went to see him and, uh, held his hand and he looked at me and said, um, I know it's inevitable.
Uh, I'm not bitter in any way and I'm ready. And he asked us if we would sing, um, his favorite hymns with him. And so myself, my son, Paul, and, uh, several other folks from church were there. We sang The Church's One Foundation.
We sang Amazing Grace with him. And then I went home and when I was going to go back over there the next day, uh, I got the call that Bob had, Bob had gone on to glory. And I told the congregation, um, it was on a Sunday and I started crying and everyone, everyone at church was crying and Bob was such a great guy.
And I wanted to share a funny story about Bob. Bob was from that generation. He was from the generation that fought, that, you know, survived the depression and, um, and defeated the Axis powers and, you know, those bad guys, the Nazis and the Japanese, the Italians in World War II.
And Bob had a way about him. He had a dry sense of humor, um, but he would tell you exactly what he thought. And he was very intelligent, very spiritual, very godly, very knowledgeable man. And when I first got to the church here, I gave the elders at every monthly session meeting, every elders meeting every month, I would give them five blank cards with five envelopes and five postage stamps.
And I told them, guys, people today in the world of electronic communications, they really, really respond well if you write them letters, if you write cards. And I always keep a stack of cards in my office and I write letters and I write cards, I handwrite stuff with, with stamps and envelopes and send them to the people because people really like that.
People respond well to that. People have prayer requests. They have things that are going on in their life to get a card that someone took the time to write and address an envelope with a stamp. People really like that.
That really, that really means something to them. So I encouraged all the elders to do that. And three out of the four did it. Bob Lane didn't, didn't want to do that. And I didn't know, I didn't know he wasn't doing it.
And it was kind of a funny thing. After we had done that, I would, every session meeting, I would have the, a paper clipped thing of five blank cards, five envelopes and five stamps sitting in their chair.
So when they got in the room, they would pick those up. And I told them just write one note a week and all three of the other elders did it. And they said, yeah, the people in the congregation really liked that.
And it encourages them to know we are thinking of them, that we're praying for them. And it was good. That was their response because I asked them, so is that going well guys? I mean, I do that every month and we've been doing this for about five months.
So I give you five stamps, five blank cards, five envelopes. And all three of the other elders are sitting there going, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been great. It's been great. But Bob Lane was just sitting there kind of looking at the table and he wasn't responding at all.
And so I got the courage to say, um, I said, Bob, has it, has it been helpful to you to have those blank cards and those, those envelopes? And he looked up at me right in the eyes and he said, no, Patrick, it hasn't.
But those stamps have come in real handy. And we, we laughed so hard at that. Bob was just not the kind of guy that writes letters. Okay. That's just not his thing. And to have him say that the way he did, we just cracked up.
And I don't know if we actually even accomplished anything at that meeting, but he, he had us in stitches from that. No, Patrick, it hasn't. But those stamps have come in real handy. I shared that story at Bob's funeral and the people thought that was really funny.
That was so typical of, of Bob. But Bob was one of the most faithful men I've ever met in my life. His wife, Lena, went on to glory shortly after she had a real severe dementia and used to go see her.
It was painful because Lena knew me when I first got to the church here. And she was a huge encouragement to me. And she would thank me for my sermons and for my preaching and everything. But the last couple of years of Lena's life, she did not recognize me.
And I would, at that nursing home, I would, I would kneel down and get right up, like, right, so she could look right into my face and I'd say, Lena, it's me. Remember the new, remember I took over for Pastor Ball when he retired?
And she would just smile and look at me and I could tell she does not recognize me. But she was a very pleasant dementia. Sometimes people get dementia and they get belligerent and kind of mean, but she was just as happy and smiling all the way up to the, to the end.
But yeah, so we lost Bob. Bob has gone on to heaven. But as the church has grown significantly since I got here, we really need some elders. We need at least two more. We really could use three more. And there's a couple of guys here at the church that I would like to see nominated.
But we really, really, really need elders. You know, always think of Ephesians chapter four, where do godly leaders in the church come from? They come as gifts from the ascended Christ in glory. He's the only one that can give godly men to the church.
And if he doesn't do that, the church isn't going to have godly men. And you know, one of these things I've been transcribing lately, I don't, I haven't had time to do this, but that guy who's an expert on Presbyterian history and he found this, the works of Samuel Blair and in the opening salvo of his book on predestination, Blair makes the comment about a pastor who was a very godly man, very godly minister, and God killed him because the church that he pastored wasn't worthy of him being there.
And I thought, you know, people used to have a much higher view of God. You know, they saw everything. There was no chance happening. Everything had meaning. Every event had meaning. And Blair was saying, yes, this friend of mine who recently died, he wasn't treated well by the church that he pastored.
And so, God, because he was such a great minister, God killed him because that church, and took him on to glory because that church didn't deserve him. I thought, wow. Okay. Yeah. God, God can do that too.
He can, he can remove godly men from us. I mean, let's face it, at no point in the church's history does it deserve to have godly leadership. But we really, really, really need godly men. And there is a, there is a massive shortage of godly men.
And, you know, there's a psalm I would like to preach through this at some point. The opening verse of Psalm 12. Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases. For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.
They speak idly, everyone with his neighbor, with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. Yes, we need to cry out to God. Help us, for the godly man ceases. The faithful disappear from among the sons of men.
I mean, isn't that what we're seeing today? There's very little faithfulness to the truth, very little faithfulness to the gospel, very little faithfulness to marriage vows, to discipleship of families and children.
There's very little of that. Help us, God, there's no godly men anywhere. And the very last verse of Psalm 12 is just a, it's just a hammer blow of a Bible verse. Listen, the wicked prowl on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.
Hmm, why is there wickedness on every side in this country? Because vileness is being exalted among the sons of men. Perversion is being exalted among the sons of men. And that's why the wicked are everywhere in our culture now.
And they're closing in on the church and they're trying to bring that perversion and vileness into the church itself. And that's where we have to say thanks but no thanks. And we have to resist up to and including our freedoms, our lives, and whatever else it may cost us.
So we could use some godly men in our church. We could use some elders. There's a number of guys here I think are qualified and we're hoping to open up nominations in 2019. If you can remember, if you're a regular listener, please pray for us.
The church, the local church, that's where the battle for the future is going to be won and lost, my friends. That's where the rubber hits the road is right there in the local church. Okay, just a couple other things.
I want to just share my love for my Baptist brethren. Tim and Carlos, great guys. I love you guys. You guys are a real encouragement to me and very thankful. I assumed wrongly that because you guys were, you know, it's part of the opening music and the opening quotations in the Semper Ephraim Radio, we are unashamedly, unabashedly Clarkian and we're going to step on all your Vantillian toes out there.
I love that. But I thought that that meant you guys were like full-on Clarkians, like Presbyterians, you know what I'm saying? Because Gordon Clark was no Baptist. He was a Presbyterian. He was part of the true church of Christ.
I'm just kidding. But I love my Baptist brethren. The way I was introduced to Reformed theology was through a radio program called the White Horse Inn. This was way back in 1998 and 99. So this is probably when Tim and Carlos were real young back then.
You guys were probably in elementary school or something when that happened. I'm not exactly sure how old you guys are, but listening to the White Horse Inn. You know how I used to listen to the White Horse Inn?
I had a tape player and I had a little tape recorder that I bought at a store, like a department store. I got a little tape recorder, one of those little tape recorders you just push record. And I would stream the White Horse Inn from my computer into the speakers and I would set my tape recorder and push record so I could listen to the tapes in my car.
And that's literally how I was introduced to Reformed theology, listening to the White Horse Inn. And they would recommend these other guys, R .C. Sproul, Lorraine Bettner, Louis Berkoff, James Pettigrew Boyce, and all these other Reformed scholars.
And I started actually going to the public library. This was before I had children. When I had more time to do things like this, I'd go to the public library and would do interlibrary loans to get some of these books.
That's actually how I got Chosen by God by R .C. Sproul. It was an interlibrary loan from a local Bible college. And read that and then returned it to the library and read all sorts of books. Read everything Michael Horton had put out at the time I read and learned a ton from Horton.
And Horton really helped me understand the Bible better and understood church history a little bit better and started getting books on everything. I just was so curious about all these things. But that's how I started listening to Reformed stuff was the White Horse Inn.
And then also, I was always interested in doing evangelism with Roman Catholic people because I knew so many. And even in Akron, Ohio, where we lived at the time, most of my co-workers were Catholic there too.
So I started doing internet searches. This was before Google. There was no Google back then. It was Alta Vista Digital and Savvy Search. And there are these weird search engines that no one today has even heard of.
And I would do searches on stuff. And lo and behold, this crazy guy from Phoenix, Arizona, James White, started coming up and started reading transcripts of debates he had done, started getting tapes of his stuff.
And Alpha and Omega Ministries had this program called The Dividing Line. And you could go out there and download the MP3s of his debates and of the dividing line from a place called straightgate .com.
I don't know if that even exists anymore. But I'd go out to straightgate .com and every time he put anything else out, I'd get it. And I didn't even know he was a Baptist. Of course, I was not even a member of a Reformed church yet.
I was looking. I visited a Lutheran church, Missouri Synod. There were no Calvinistic or Reformed Baptist churches where we lived there. And I went to Reformed churches, a Christian Reformed church. I didn't know they were becoming liberal.
And that was kind of a weird experience to go to one of those churches and wonder what in the heck they actually believed. Also started visiting Presbyterian churches. I thought that there was just, you know, Presbyterian churches.
I didn't realize that there were liberal versions of these things, but every Presbyterian church I went to was a liberal church. And I kept scratching my head going, I thought these people held this really great thing called the Westminster Confession, and yet it seems to be locked in a safe in the back room somewhere.
And then finally discovered, well, Presbyterians are the split Ps. And there's all these OPC, PCA, and RPCES, and RPCGA, and yada, yada, yada, and EPC, and everything else. So found some PCA churches, and then, you know, was introduced to some really great folks.
Zachary Eswine, who's an author and was a professor at Covenant Seminary for a little while. He was a pastor way back then, and he was the first Reformed pastor I ever talked to. And he really helped me.
He introduced me to Martin Lloyd-Jones and let me borrow books and things like that. So I was very thankful for Zach Eswine. But anyway, James White was someone I read everything the guy had written that was available.
You know, The Roman Catholic Controversy, The God Who Justifies, The King James Only Controversy, great book. Really learned a lot from Dr. White. I have benefited from his work tremendously. I still do.
I still listen to The Dividing Line occasionally. I haven't listened to it as much since he's gone into the Islamic issue, because where I live, that's just not an issue. No one in my congregation's asking about Islam, so I haven't followed The Dividing Line as much since he did that.
But he's someone I really see as a very special person who has a big heart for the lost and loves the truth and has defended Biblical, Orthodox Christianity, and especially the Gospel in almost every context imaginable.
I mean, the guy's debated everybody on everything, and has really conducted himself as a Christian gentleman, and I've always been very thankful for White. And I pray for him. I pray for his safety, because he goes into mosques in Muslim-populated areas of the world and does these debates, and I've wondered if he's in danger doing things like that.
But I admire his courage and his guts and his stand for the true Gospel, and very, very thankful for him. And I love my brethren. I'm thankful for Tim and Carlos and their partnership, and I think we'll be together, whether we ever convert each other to each other's views on baptism.
We agree on the things that matter most, and for that I'm very, very, very thankful. So I just wanted to do this, kind of an update on me, what's going on in my life. We've got a baby coming. It's a little girl.
Everything looks healthy and good, and I think probably within the next couple of weeks we'll get to meet her, and very excited about that. And things are going great here at the church, and I'm really blessed and thankful.
Things are going well with my family. I've been discipling a young man that's been courting my eldest daughter. He and I meet. We're reading The Complete Husband by Lou Priolo. The Complete Husband by Lou Priolo is the equivalent of a Mike Tyson uppercut to the jaw for married men.
So if you want something that will convict you and make you get on your knees in front of your wife in repentance and tears, asking her forgiveness for being married to someone like you, Lou Priolo's book is great for that.
But I've been discipling with my probably future son-in-law, and I love him. He's a great young man. I baptized him. He has been a professing Christian for quite some time, but had never been baptized, and so he made a profession of faith, and I baptized him and have embraced him.
He's already like a son to me, so I'm very, very, very thankful for Nathan. I've been praying for my children's future spouses from the time they were conceived in my wife's womb, and I would encourage everybody who has children, pray, pray, pray for wisdom for those kids and for their future spouses and for their future families.
And if you're married and have kids, you've got to set an example of what godly leadership is like. You've got to lead devotions, and you've got to disciple your family. So that means you can't watch Netflix's silly shows episode after episode after episode.
You need to focus on your family and disciple your family and love your family. Wear yourself out for them, because the future of this country depends on it. And you know, our culture is a death culture.
Okay, the last verse of Proverbs chapter 8, wisdom personified, says what? All those who hate me love death. What do death cultures do? They die. They die because they hate kids. That's why they've murdered 70 million of them.
They don't want kids. And so they have no future. There's no future. When you exalt homosexuality and transgenderism and all this LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ and whatever else is coming, what does that tend not to promote?
Human flourishing. You know, I've wondered, what about folks that are promoting all this sexual perversion and the destruction and annihilation of marriage and everything else? What do they tend not to do?
Reproduce. And so what's their future? Their future's nothing. They have no future. The future is they all die. The future is crickets chirping over gravestones. And I thought, you know, if each of my kids has ten kids of their own, and that continues for eight generations, I will have 100 million descendants.
How many descendants do death cultures tend to have? None. What do people in scripture cry out to God for constantly? Children. Children are a blessing. They're a blessing. You know, and it's an amazing thing.
I remember learning, I can't remember where I read this. It might have been in Kevin Swanson's book, The Second Mayflower. Yeah, it was. It was in that book. The Second Mayflower by Kevin Swanson. Great book.
He points out that in the year 1900, okay, let's actually back up a little bit further. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, I think that was in 1726 that he wrote that, the average size, the average number of children born per household in the United States, of course, we didn't really fully exist.
It was in the colonies then. The American War for Independence hadn't happened yet. But the average number of children born per household over here in the colonies was seven. And Adam Smith was lamenting how few that was.
You think, people have seven kids today, they think you've lost your mind. But you see, that number has steadily declined. It's steadily declined. In the year 1900, it had dropped to just over four. And Swanson points out that studies have been done that confirm this.
The average number of children born per household in 1900 was four. But the average square footage of houses that they lived in was less than half of what it is today. Today, the average number of children born per household is less than two.
And we have now fallen below replacement. America as a nation is dying. We're not replacing ourselves anymore. So think about what that means. What that means is, in 1900, people had twice the number of kids they have today, and raised them in houses that were less than half the size of our houses are today.
So what do we all need to do now? I guess we all need to go home and do what? Kiss our drywall? Hug our houses? Because we love our stuff. We love our things. And we don't want kids getting in the way of our things.
I think that that's really an indictment against us. You know, the scriptures teach that debt, debt is something, it's not a sin, but it's certainly something that we want to avoid. In the Proverbs, it says that the debtor is a servant or a slave to the lender.
And yet, so debt, in a sense, is a bit of a curse, isn't it? And children are a blessing. And yet we apply for curses, and we reject blessings. What does that mean? I think it means that our nations under the wrath of God, under the judgment of God, you see, nations that are under the wrath of God and under the judgment of God, tend not to know that they are.
They're like the church. The church is described in Revelation 2 and 3. We are wealthy and rich and have no need of anything, but don't know that you are naked and blind and dead. So think about that.
Children are a blessing. And people say, well, that's easy for you to say, you've got 10 of them. Yeah, you know, but I haven't always felt that way. I haven't always thought that way. God showed mercy to us in convicting us, in helping us.
And I realize, there's health issues, there's other concerns. You don't want to have more children than you can responsibly take care of. But usually, usually, you can handle more than you think. And God will help you with it.
So anyway, that's that. I just wanted to share an update and ask for some prayer on some of those things with regard to needing elders of the church and the future of the church. And very thankful again for Tim and Carlos.
Carlos Montijo is just an excellent writer. His stuff on Piper and the paper that he wrote, Part 1, I've got Part 2 queued up here. I really want to read through it because he was curious on getting some feedback from me.
He is just an excellent writer. Really labors to be clear, lots of citations, and really shows how seriously he takes this issue. And I am very thankful for how careful these guys are with their statements and with the things that they say, and just their love for and commitment to the gospel.
So very thankful for them, very thankful to be a part of the network, and I'm excited for the future of it. And I'm going to try to do some more podcasts dedicated, not just posting my greatest hits sermons, but really doing podcasts.
Myself and the three seminary students I've asked them about helping me do some podcasts on the state of theology, that Ligonier study that was done about what people believe today, and maybe going through some of the key texts and just talking about some of the basics of Christian doctrine that not only does the church need to know, but we need to be equipping the generation that's alive today to teach their children about the essentials of the faith and the doctrines of the faith.
So that's that. This has been Pastor Patrick Hines here from Birtle Heights Presbyterian Church in Kingsport, Tennessee. Thank you for listening. This is Pastor Patrick Hines of Birtle Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Birtle Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee, and you've been listening to the Protestant Witness Podcast.
Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp, where we open the Word of God together, sing His praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen Lord. You can find us on the web at www .BirtleHeightsPCA .org.
And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.