Pitfalls for the Reformed | Theocast

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Hi, this is John and today on Theocast, Justin and I will kind of take shots at ourselves and our world, the conservative reformed world, and how it's all over the place at times, all over the road, falling on one side of the ditch to the other, from dead orthodoxy all the way over to revivalism and pietism.

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And we're not here to just point the gun at everybody else and say, see how they're wrong. We're going to shoot them down. We're actually trying to create a conversation to where we can ask ourselves, how did we get here?

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What is it that God's expecting? And can we identify that maybe one of these pitfalls are in my own life and how do we correct it?

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So we have this conversation, we continue it into the Simple Reformanda, where we talk about the purpose of the Christian life and the kingdom.

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So we hope you enjoy. We are excited to announce we have a brand new podcast available called the

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Kingsmen Podcast. It's where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom.

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You can find it anywhere you download a podcast. You can also watch it on YouTube. We have new episodes that come out every

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Monday. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to find their soul sufficiency in Jesus Christ alone.

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Conversations about your Christian life and ours from a Reformed, confessional, and pastoral perspective.

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If you're wondering what's going to be going on today and that didn't make any sense, let me boil it down. We're going to clarify the gospel and then we're going to reclaim the purpose of the kingdom and how you fit into it.

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Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. And I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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Justin, it's been a wild morning. We've had technical difficulties, but guess what, brother? We are here.

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Justin Perdue We're thankful to the Lord that we're able to upgrade some equipment here at Theocast. At the same time, as a person that is completely utilitarian when it comes to technology,

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I can find it frustrating when things don't work. The whole setup process can be a little rocky.

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I don't think any of us enjoy it, let's be real. Even if you're a techie guy, which I'm not, I think still, you're just like, why is this not working?

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Or man, we had it set up right and then the settings got lost or whatever it is. And now we got to start over and yeah, why do something once when you can do it twice?

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Amen. Amen. Anyways, that's not why we decided to gather this morning, but it is what our experience has been.

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So, Justin, why don't you, we're going to go and just jump right into it. I mean, a couple of announcements coming your way. We do have some new podcasts that are going to be coming your way, so stay tuned for that.

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I think we're working on a t -shirt contest, so stay tuned for that. So there's some stuff. We might even have some education classes coming for Simpleware from Monda.

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Stay tuned for that. So anyways, a lot of good stuff coming. So we're excited to bring out some new stuff for 2023.

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But Justin, pitfalls for the reform, a little eye pokey, a little eye pokey.

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A little bit. I mean, and in some senses, we're trying to turn the finger in on ourselves. I mean, this is maybe a terrible turn of phrase, but we're trying to point the gun at ourselves a little bit.

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I hope that didn't offend anyone. But anyway, yeah, we talk a lot on our show about things that pertain to evangelicalism, about things that pertain to conservative

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Christianity, so -called, in a broad way. Today, I mean, our thoughts are, hey, there are errors that reform people are prone to make, and these errors might very well also apply to conservative

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Christians in general, and I trust that might become clear. But the reform tradition, while you and I, clearly,

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John, would find ourselves in that tradition happily, we're thankful to be where we are.

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We're thankful that the Lord has taught us these wonderful truths that primarily center on the sufficiency of Christ and what

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He's accomplished in God's plan of redemption. That is our salvation, right?

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It's our hope, it's our life, and it's our sanctification. It's all that. We're thankful. And at the same time, the reform tradition is not immune to error because we're all sinners and we all are prone to make mistakes theologically and in our lives.

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And so today, we thought, hey, we've done a lot of conversations, had a lot of conversations, done a lot of episodes lately on things that are concerning out there.

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Let's talk about things that we're prone to do and ways that we're prone to error. So let's discuss some things that are at least potentially problematic in here.

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I hope that's clear enough, and where we're going to go is this. This is not an exhaustive list, but even as we've thought back through the last several hundred years, and if you read some church history and you're aware of these categories,

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I think this becomes pretty plain pretty quickly. Three errors that reformed people that do exist in the reformed tradition are the following.

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One, dead orthodoxy. We're going to explain what that means. That's always an error, a temptation. Second, pietism.

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I know we talk a lot about pietism on the show, but there is pietism within the reformed tradition for sure. And then thirdly, revivalism.

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And again, we talk about that a good bit on our show. We'll be talking about it more in the weeks to come, but that too is something that exists within the reformed stream.

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Even though we would say that the reformed tradition and an ordinary means of grace understanding of the faith and of the

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Christian life is antithetical to pietism and revivalism, it doesn't mean that those things don't rear their heads sometimes, even amongst the reformed.

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The error of dead orthodoxy, which is where we'll start, I think is perhaps the error that is most obvious to people that would look at the reformed tradition.

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There's a reason that the frozen chosen is a turn of phrase. Justin Perdue It is.

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Yeah, we were trying to really narrow down what it is that we wanted to bring to the table, and I'm hoping some of this resonates.

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I'm hoping two things happen. It's going to resonate with some of you saying, yeah, I thought I've seen this as well, and we might be hitting some of you on the nose, which is kind of the point of the podcast as well.

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Kind of saying, hey, this is probably you. You might need to think about this. Justin Perdue Yeah, as Vodie Bauckham is made famous, if you can't say amen, say ouch, right?

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So there you go. Justin Perdue There you go. Not to promote everything he says, but I agree with that one.

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Justin Perdue No, I mean, many people have heard that. Justin Perdue I know. These days, you've got to protect yourself because who knows who's going to shoot at you.

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Justin Perdue Apparently, if you mention a person's name or go on a person's podcast, you're endorsing wholesale everything they've ever said.

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Justin Perdue Yeah. Justin Perdue Apparently. Thoughtful people know better, John, and we trust our listeners do too. Justin Perdue So one of the things that has frustrated me as I've grown over the years and aware of Reformed theology is that some of the accusations aren't necessarily unfounded.

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You do find the Reformed, especially those who have been coined in the cage stage, they go on the internet and they're so passionate about making sure that everyone is accurate in their understanding of Scripture, which

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I think we are called to be accurate with our handling of the Bible. So, I'm passionate about that, but in our accuracy for truth, we actually end up ignoring the truth, which

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I find ironic. I've always found it interesting when people have come to me.

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I'll give you a good example of this. When people come to me about saying that it's a sin if a Christian doesn't read their Bible, and they're adamant about that.

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If you're not daily reading your Bible, it's not that it's beneficial, but it's a sin. You're violating God's law.

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And yet when I present to them God's Word as, hey, this is also a sin if you don't do that, they can't see it.

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Like, for instance, abandoning your church or not caring for the burdens of people in your congregation or submitting to an elder.

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They're so adamant about one side of a doctrine that they fall off on the other or ignoring it. I also sometimes throughout the years with theocasts,

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I've run across people who have their thing, whether it's the charismatic movement or they're going to turn everybody into a

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Calvinist. So, they get narrow -minded and narrowly focused in on a particular situation. Jon Moffitt Or, brother, may

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I say burning down lordship salvation? Jon Moffitt Yeah, lordship salvation, covenant theology. Jon Moffitt You have your thing.

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Jon Moffitt That's right. Whether you're a Pado or a Credo Baptist, you're going to take down the other side, and you become so narrowly focused.

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I understand how this can happen because there are times that I too have to study and Justin has to study. We have to narrow down our thoughts, things that I've done in the past.

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Even the stuff I'm doing right now, I'm studying some stuff on theonomy and Christian nationalism, the use of the Old Testament and the

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New Testament. What happens is you can get so narrowly focused in on that that you forget the broader perspective of the

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Christian faith, and you forget really what the point of sound doctrine is for. And when we say dead orthodoxy, it's because typically what happens is we noodle down into one area and forget the whole.

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And because we forget the whole, which is supposed to guide and direct us and keep us clear on the purpose of the

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Christian life, at least we got this area locked down and it's good to go. You proved lordship salvation was wrong, but you killed everybody's faith in the process.

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Justin Perdue It's effectively dead orthodoxy. I'm going to try to explain what

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I mean. On the one hand, can we care too much about sound doctrine? No. But can we be off in our perspective in the way we approach it?

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Yes. I think that's what we're trying to point out here. It is a hyper -focus on sound doctrine as though sound doctrine is an end in and of itself.

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This has been an error that Reformed people have been prone to make, and we're going to talk about this probably in a minute. Pietism, in part, is a response to dead orthodoxy historically.

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We're all reactionary creatures as human beings, and that's something that we want to try to get across today.

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Don't be naive into thinking that you are the unicorn out there that is not reactionary in how you do theology, because we all are.

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Typically, we're swinging one way or the other on the pendulum. We're rarely just resting in the middle, holding everything in appropriate tension.

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We're just not good at doing that. And so, having said that, I agree with your observation that you do see a lot of people, especially those who are newer to Reformed theology, or I would say, too, people who have been in it for a long time, who have been shot at for years, and who have observed a lot of carnage and wreckage out there for years.

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I think people of those two stripes and, of course, others are prone to fall into this orthodoxy police trap, where we're just watchdogs for sound doctrine.

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We're going to stand on the wall, and we're just going to be examining everybody's doctrine. We're going to be on Christian social media, just waiting to pounce on the next error that we find, and we're going to mow it down.

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That's not helpful. Justin Perdue Can I interject here? Justin and I are super sensitive to this.

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I was walking in a store yesterday, and we had a lot of suggestions thrown our way of things that people want to hear our opinion on.

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Justin and I are like, I don't know if Theocast has to give their opinion on everything that's out there. It's not necessarily our role to do that.

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Justin Perdue I think we can acknowledge it. As the platform has grown, people reach out to us more about stuff.

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People want to know what we think, what our take is on ABCD that's happening in Christendom, if Christendom is even a thing.

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I'm using that now. I feel like I need to explain myself. But in the Christian world, I'm not interested in doing that, nor is

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John. Because there's a lot of stuff that we haven't had time to investigate. There are things that we can say that might be generally true, but we're not trying to create a platform here where we react to and respond to everything that goes on.

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We are now the arbiters of what's sound and right and orthodox. Go ahead. Justin Perdue You have to think about it. You can only produce so much information.

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Here's your time of your life. Here's the time allocated to Theocast. If I do that, is that the best use of my time?

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That's what I'm getting at a little bit. A lot of things that we spend our time on are important, but how much time is that the best use of our time on the global scale?

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Sometimes people come up and ask me questions, and then they're kind of dumbfounded. I don't know the answer to it. I just say, hey, look, to be frank with you, on the scale of what

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I need to know and what I need to communicate, that's not one of them. I'm just going to be frank. It's just not that important.

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Justin Perdue Exactly. Let's talk for a minute, though, unless people get the wrong idea. People listen to our show. They know we care about sound doctrine.

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They know we care about sound doctrine from the Scripture, sound doctrine as we survey historical theology as well.

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We're all for all of that. Having said that, the point of sound doctrine is what?

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At the most primary basic level, we want to guard the gospel, the news of what

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Jesus Christ alone has accomplished. We never want to allow things to come in and obscure Christ.

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There are a million things clamoring to do just that. We, because of our natural bent—we'll get into this more later, too,

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I trust—are prone to throw all kinds of clutter on top of the gospel. That's happened historically.

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I think that's beyond debate. The purpose of sound doctrine is to defend the clarity of the good news.

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Think Paul in Galatians. It's the oldest writing of the New Testament. That's illustrative in and of itself.

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The very first letter, the oldest one, written even before the evangelists write their account of the life and ministry of Christ.

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You have the letter to the Galatian churches, and Paul is doing what? The man is going in the paint and throwing some bows on the clarity of the good news and how we can't add anything to Christ.

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We're taking our cue from that because the point of sound doctrine at its most basic level is to preserve and clarify the gospel of Jesus Christ so that sinners might be accepted before God.

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They might be found righteous in His sight. They might be forgiven of their sins and absolved of their guilt because that is all of our most fundamental and basic need.

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That is the purpose of the church at the most basic level is to herald this news so that people might be brought from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's beloved

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Son. Sound doctrine matters to that end most pointedly. It does.

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Sometimes when we think of dead orthodoxy, we think of services that are dead and are emotionless. Not necessarily.

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I think that sometimes dead orthodoxy could also mean that we are dead to the fruits of the

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Spirit, aka that which Christ even amplified for us. When Jesus talks about speaking the truth and defending what's there,

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He says, Speak the truth in what? A reflection of the nature of who I am. The truth, which is love.

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Speaking the truth in love. There are times when I'm watching YouTube videos that are sent to us, or we get tweets that are sent our way.

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I'm watching this stuff, and they're accurate in what they're saying, but they're inaccurate in how they're saying it.

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How can you defend Christ and not defend the actual persona of Christ, the person of Christ?

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You're defending this theological nuance that is really important as it relates to the Trinity, or it relates to the masculinity, or whatever it is you want to put out there, but you aren't actually reflecting the living fruit that comes from that.

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I've even got guys, I'll point the gun at some guys in our own church in context here, where they are theologically one of the most astute people that I know as far as being able to recite doctrine and scripture, but there's this disconnect where it's like they have the right doctrine, but when you look at their life, their life is full of all kinds of bad habits.

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The way that they treat their spouse is completely inappropriate. I look at it and say, you're orthodox in your understanding of scripture, but you're a complete pagan in your practice of it.

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There's a complete disconnect. Justin Perdue Sure, and a couple of thoughts. One of the things that immediately comes to my mind when you say that is, what a task we have as preachers of God's Word, because the thing that we're really seeking to do above all other things is to apply the gospel to the hearts and minds of our hearers.

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If we're applying the gospel and we're rightly preaching the law, then the hope is that the

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Lord is going to use these means to keep us from this error. If you and I and others out there, if our church services, if our gatherings on the

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Lord's Day are permeated with a right understanding of the law and the gospel, we're doing the best we can to safeguard ourselves from this kind of dead orthodoxy.

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If we preach and make plain the thunder of the law and what the

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Lord requires of us and how the law is good and holy and upright and just because it's a reflection of God who gave it, if we understand those things and then we start when it comes to the conversation about the gospel and justification, if we start at the judgment seat, understanding who

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God is and what he would require of us, and then we go from there to heralding the news of what

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God the Son came into the world to do and how it is that we're justified, that's affecting.

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It really will. Now we're fallen and so we're not always stirred by things we should be stirred by, but we have a chance if we're clear on these things and the

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Lord is faithful to use this stuff. But then as we talk about what God has done for us and who he is and how he operates and think of the sufficiency of Christ for you, think of everything that Christ has accomplished for you and how you're now safe in him and how you struggle left and right, but Christ has you as we say these things.

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Then as we look to the law because we're no longer threatened by it, we're no longer condemned by it, and we say, man, look at how good the law is.

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Oh, brothers and sisters, saints, let's live like this for the good of our neighbor and for the honor of our great

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King. If we talk in those terms, that's going to help protect us from dead orthodoxy rather than the concern being we want to be precise in our exegesis and we want to get it right.

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If that's all that's in our minds, we're in grave danger, I fear. I mean, how else do you interpret?

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I mean, this is why Paul says things like this. Those who are spiritual have an obligation to deal with the failings of the weak.

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In other words, your strong theology should create within you long -suffering impatience. It should, right?

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It should cause you to understand that what has been faithfully passed down to you is going to take a lot of grace and patience to pass it on to someone else.

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But what we do is become what I call Facebook keyboard warriors. We go out there and we're going to make sure that everybody knows where they're wrong, and we throw the word heretic around everywhere.

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I mean, it's just like, boom. It's just not helpful when I sit back there and think about what's going on.

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Justin and I are immune to this. We too have to be very careful that sometimes we can get worked up and it's like, that is so bad and that is so wrong and that's so out in left field that we just want to come upside with a sledgehammer and knock it over and realize, okay, that's still a human being and that's still somebody we have to realize.

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Listen, I have engaged, most of you who listen to this may know, I have engaged with calling people out on the internet, but I try to do it with as much humility and grace and patience as I possibly can because I wanted people to hear what

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I was saying, not how I was saying it. He was a jerk. He was arrogant. He was so livid.

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That is just not helpful. And we have to be careful in how we use our anger. Obviously, Christ used anger to get his point across, and I think we just have to be careful in how we do that, that we can show a disturbed anger, but it's done in a loving way.

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If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest.

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And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. Justin Perdue Last thought on sound doctrine here in terms of how it really does bear good fruit.

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We should be concerned for these matters, and the gospel rightly defended and clarified bears fruit.

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I'm thinking the first few chapters of Romans. I'm thinking about Ephesians chapter 2. Paul is very clear in the early chapters of Romans that the only righteousness a sinner could ever have before God is a righteousness that God gives them.

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That's huge. Then he goes to prove that point and makes it plain that all human beings, Jew and Gentile alike, are under sin.

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The only hope you've got, the only shot you've got, is if you're given the righteousness of Christ by faith.

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Having said that, he asks then, what becomes of our boasting? It's excluded.

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By what law? A law of works or a law of faith? Of course, it's a law of faith. Then he goes on to make plain that the law is not overthrown because Christ fulfilled its requirements and endured its penalty.

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But then too, when we understand that we're not people that work to earn a wage, but we are people who trust the one who justifies the ungodly, and literally righteousness is given to us, this produces good things in a person.

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It humbles us, and it also puts rock under our feet. We don't get it twisted into thinking that we're doing this.

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We're forced to look outside of ourselves to Christ, and to your point, it produces humility, patience, and long -suffering with others because we understand what we have received graciously from the hand of God.

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This is Ephesians 2, 8 -10, that all of our salvation is a gift from the Lord. It is not of works so that no one may boast.

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That does good things in the heart of a human being that is naturally wired to think that we can work our way to God.

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People have been doing this forever. From Babel on, from Cain on, because Cain and Abel, I don't need to get off on a tangent there, but Abel brought his sacrifice in faith.

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Cain did not. This is as old as time. We need to be reminded of these matters.

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Lest anybody think that this kind of doctrine does not produce good works, that's absurd because, like Ephesians 2, 10, we are

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God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has ordained beforehand for us to walk in.

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There we have it. Let's move now to the other areas that we mentioned.

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They're related. We're going to try to pull them apart a little bit for the purpose of this conversation. As we've even been talking about how sound doctrine produces good works when we get this right, there is a concern that often surfaces in the church because we do think we need to live better.

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I agree. So do you, John. I'm thinking about my own life. I'm thinking about the congregants that make up Covenant Baptist Church.

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They would all say the same thing. We want to live better. We need to live better. God help us to live better.

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Amen. That said, a lot of times through history we've seen these patterns where there is an emphasis on the clarity of doctrine.

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The Protestant Reformation, let's just talk the last 500 years, nothing happens in a vacuum. The Protestant Reformation occurs.

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We chalk that up to the goodness and the providence of God, and we're thankful for it. There are a number of confessions of faith produced out of the era of the

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Reformation. Why? Because you're clarifying doctrine. There was a lot of error in the medieval church that needed to be clarified.

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That's great. But then, as we're all prone to do, we can fall off the side of the horse to major on doctrine, maybe to the neglect of how we're living.

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And there's concern that begins to sprout up everywhere in the church, and you have responses to this.

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I'll go ahead and say it. I'm going to maybe open us up to some more bullets here. Not only do you have pietism proper beginning in German Lutheranism, that's something we could talk about, but I think if you read the

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Puritans, all the Puritans are not created equal. Some of them are very, very good on the law and the gospel and covenant theology and sanctification and all these things, and then there are others of them that are not so great.

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I think some of the ones that are hyper introspective are an example of what we're about to talk about.

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There's a concern for right living and ordering our lives according to the scripture. Now what happens is an opposite error from dead orthodoxy is made.

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One of those errors is pietism, where we are going to major on the interior of the Christian's life, affections, discipline, all of that kind of stuff.

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How well are you doing? How are you performing? We're going to get into revivalism later that perhaps emphasizes transformation even more and personal fervor even more, but you can see this in the writings even right after the

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Reformation, where we need to be hyper introspective people and scrupulously examine every aspect of our lives.

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It's to the point sometimes, John, that it's paralyzing, and the focus becomes us, not Christ.

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Jon Moffitt That's right. Revivalism has affected the

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United States and really the world in ways which people don't understand. We're going to be bringing

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Ken Jones on to have an entire episode on this together, so stay tuned for that.

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Here's the influence of it. Think about dead orthodoxy. Revivalism looked at it and said, no one's being saved.

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No one's really concerned about living for Christ. No one's worried about the poor. No one's worried about our cities.

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People are drunk. You're over here getting your theology right, and the city's going to hell. For revival, it comes in and it's got a big pop.

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The slogan starts to hear it. Theology divides, Christ unites.

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We don't want dead orthodoxy because that's what killed Christianity in America. Revivalism is like there's something exciting about it.

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We don't want to put anything in its place. We don't want to put anything in the Bible in its place that would slow down this excitement for Jesus.

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So it becomes vague, and it becomes generalities, and it's very emotionally driven.

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It's hard to argue when you are on an emotional high. I was a college pastor for ten years, and I had kids come into my office and tell me they were convinced they were in love with whatever.

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I'm like, dude, you guys are just on what's called an emotional, sexual high right now that has nothing to do with love.

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You're experiencing endorphins, and you think that's what love is, is these endorphins. We do this with Christianity where you can feel this presence, and the endorphins start going, and the emotions start going, and you can feel that.

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All of a sudden, that becomes what's most important. Revivalism ends up falling off on the other side, and the

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Reformed are drawn to this because they can feel like there's a lack of sincerity, or they just don't feel saved.

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I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation with people where I'm like, you don't believe God's truth and promises, and you're calling

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God a liar because you're saying, this is what God requires of me to have assurance of my salvation.

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There needs to be this radical affection that's just pumping through my veins versus God saying, no, this is how you know that you're saved.

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What happens is the emotional side of religion becomes the confirmation that truth is real.

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So if pietism is an emphasis on discipline and performance and analyzing every aspect of how

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I'm doing, revivalism perhaps is an overemphasis on feeling, personal fervor, level of devotion, and then transformation of life that is inherently moral.

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We're prone to make these errors because there is pietism and there is revivalism that has crept into the

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Reformed tradition through history. That's not debatable. Justin Perdue We're starting with some of the Puritans.

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We need to talk about these things lest we make similar errors. We've made this observation before.

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Many American evangelicals don't know how to think about the Christian life and the Christian faith apart from some of these categories because it's so normal to us that we don't know how to think about it without this emphasis on a radical conversion moment.

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You need to know when you were saved and your personal experience of the divine. We definitely value our own personal experience of God and our own feelings of God more than we do.

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Like you said, John, do you believe his promises? Do you trust what he said in his word regardless of how you might feel right now or how you might feel in an hour or tomorrow or ten years from now?

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Do you believe the Lord's word? I'm comforted by the fact that whenever my heart condemns me, whenever our hearts condemn us, the

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Lord is greater. God is greater than our hearts. We can't trust how we feel in any given moment.

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Of course, it's not the best strategy to point us to our own feelings and our own fervor, something that I need to work up within me in order to legitimize my faith.

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That's how people talk. There's a lot going on in our land even at the moment where people are debating the legitimacy of revival and all those things.

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I'm going to save comments on revivalism in general for subsequent podcasts. I can't wait to have

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Ken Jones on to talk about Christ -centered preaching and to talk about revivalism. Those will be two separate pods.

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Before we go to pietism, I have one more thought on revivalism. Well, we're kind of doing both because I started with pietism.

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You're right. That's true because pietism gets a lot of traction in revivalism because pietism is hyper introspection.

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I mean, when you have guys who have the title Reformed or even

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Calvinistic, and they get up and preach, and they're preaching hyper introspection, meaning that you need to be doing this self -examination all of the time.

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I've heard people say things like, I think most Christians and churches in America today aren't even

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Christians. That's how they preach. They're preaching to churches as if the church isn't actual believers, and the believer that's sitting in the pew is only getting first use of the law.

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They're just getting pounded all of the time, and they're never getting the gospel after the first use of the law. The third use of the law and the first are completely smashed.

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If you don't really understand what I mean by that, it's this. Revivalism and pietism was effective in saying basically that your obligations to the

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Father as a Christian is required obedience or else you're probably not a believer.

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That's first and third use put together. First use is this. God requires perfect, perpetual, personal obedience to the law if you want

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Him to look at you and say righteous. Third use of the law says Christ is my righteousness by faith alone.

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I'm in union with Him, which means all of the benefits and all of the person and all of the inheritance of Christ is mine.

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He and I are one in that way. Therefore, my obedience to the law now is the law guides me to help me reflect who

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I am now. It's not an obligation for righteousness. It's what Paul says in Ephesians 4, walk in a way that reflects worthy, reflects who you are now.

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When you collapse those two in, that's a perfect example of revivalism. It was the hellfire preaching damnation that they would come after and say, yeah, you said the sinner's prayer and you believe, but this is how you absolutely must act or else you're probably not a

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Christian. You talk about creating a sense where you must get saved over and over again or a lack of assurance.

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Justin, I don't know how many times I got saved when I was in high school or even elementary school because I was afraid

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I wasn't doing enough. I would say the sinner's prayer over and over and over again, and that is definitely the result of revivalism.

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Justin Perdue For sure. Last comment here before we maybe speak in a more positive way to how we might press back against these errors.

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In revivalism, and I agree with you, pietism came first historically, and then revivalism comes after, but they are very much related.

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One kind of begets the other. Revivalism is always concerned with transformation at a moral level of the individual, but then often revivalism is concerned with the transformation of society through the transformation of individuals.

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If you don't see that that is going on in our day, I don't know that I can say much to persuade you.

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Among serious -minded conservative Christians, this is a mantra that if the church is the church as it should be and people are being changed, then our land would look different.

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Our country would look different. We wouldn't be in this moral dilemma that we find ourselves in.

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We've recorded some content on that in recent weeks, and we've taken some bullets for it, and we stand by what we said.

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This is not that conversation, but it's clear that even amongst Reformed people, this temptation to think about transformation as this great end and this great aim of Christianity and that we're going to transform the world is alive and well.

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We want to avoid that kind of transformational kind of perspective because oftentimes what it ends up forcing us to do is to jettison the pure purpose and mission of the church, which is the proclamation of Christ, the administration of the sacraments for the salvation of God's people.

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I think I want to make very plain that we are absolutely concerned for the transformation of life. The transformation of life via union with Christ is real and it's certain.

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And the objections that have been raised as long as the gospel has been preached are still raised today.

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If you tell people these things that Christ has done it all, then people won't be concerned to go and do good works.

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If you tell them that salvation is over, then people will not care at all about holiness and obedience. They'll just be lazy and apathetic, and you need to be really careful in terms of how you talk about these things, lest people get it confused, to which we would say those objections would make sense if Christianity was natural.

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But it's not. It's supernatural. That objection might make sense if this was a human endeavor, but as it stands, it's

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God's work. That might make sense if the new birth wasn't real. It might make sense if union with Christ wasn't a thing.

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But those things are real, and so we trust that the saints will be sanctified. That said, how does it occur?

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This is the thing that sounds counterintuitive. We preach the law, as we've talked about many times.

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In its first use, to crush us in our sin and drive us to Christ, we preach the law to guide us in our living. But then we always understand that the power unto sanctification is only found in the heralding of Jesus.

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Just like in our justification, we need to look outside of ourselves to be justified in Christ.

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We would be aided in our sanctification if we looked more often at God and at his goodness, his character, and the way he works, because we would be encouraged to continue to press on in the fight.

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He is purposeful and sovereign as he's demonstrated through history. I could give the example of Pharaoh and Rahab.

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God says in Exodus 9 .16, through Moses to Pharaoh, I've raised you up for this purpose that my power might be displayed and that my name would be proclaimed in all the earth.

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Then later, when two spies are sent to scout out Jericho and Joshua 1 and 2, and they meet a prostitute named

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Rahab, what does she say? She's like, we heard about what the Lord did in Egypt. We heard about it, and we know the

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Lord has given you this land. Just remember me. This woman, of course, we know is in the genealogy of Christ.

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In one sense, the Lord and everything that he did in Egypt in setting his people free, he did it in part with Rahab in mind. This is the kind of God he is.

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I mean, that's encouraging, John, because I'm like, my gosh, if he's that purposeful for her, he is for me, and he is for you.

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Then thinking about his kindness, he doesn't deal with us according to our sins. He's merciful and gracious, and he's taken our sin away, and he knows our frame.

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He's compassionate. You know, and somebody's going to jump in and say, well, he's compassionate toward those who fear him, and I would say, dear saint, if you are concerned that you want to please the

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Lord, and you are grieved at the thought of offending him, my goodness, you fear him. That's you. Take heart.

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Finally, Hebrews 12, we've done an entire podcast on it. That passage is a passage of encouragement to tell us the reason you're being disciplined is because you're

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God's kid, not because you're his enemy. Discipline is hard. You need to bear up under it.

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It's going to be painful sometimes, but we know it's good for us because God is teaching us to share in his holiness. All that stuff is encouraging to me as a sinner saint who battles my corruption every day.

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Sometimes, like anyone else, I'm like, man, you think about giving up because the fight's tough, and it's like, how are you going to endure?

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It's not by looking to yourself. It's going to be by looking to the Lord and how he works and how he's faithful to sanctify.

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Jon Moffitt That's right. I think the last thing I'll say, and I'm going to take this over to SR because we'll just have more time over there for me to bring it out.

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One of the taglines we're adding in here is clarifying the gospel and reclaiming the purpose of the kingdom. We added that this year because I think it does help draw some centeredness to theology, especially in the

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Reformed world. What I'm about to say, and it's hard because the Reformed world is getting broader and broader, unfortunately, and we're trying to create a little bit of a narrowness to it just so that we can use that word rightly again.

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Sometimes we forget that theology has a particular purpose in mind.

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When we're talking about sanctification, I think our sanctification and you think our sanctification is highly important.

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It's like there's a massive reason why God has emphasized it in Scripture, but the way in which, unfortunately, right now it's being used as a means to, primarily,

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I think it can be used, but the primary means of it is to gain assurance. That's not how Scripture presents it.

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It's to prove yourself theology. Sanctification is used as a means for God to care for others and the advancement of the kingdom.

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That's what it's used for. I keep going back to Ephesians 4 and 2 Peter 1 where he says,

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Ephesians 4, walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called with gentleness, meekness, and patience. And then 2

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Peter 1, when he says, if these things aren't true about you, when he's talking about the fruits of the

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Spirit, that you have forgotten you've been cleansed from your former sins. He's meaning that you're ineffective and you're unfruitful in what?

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The advancement of my love and my affection to one another in the body and also the world around you.

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Part of what I think is important and needs to happen and part of what Theocast is about right now is helping people put the theology back where it belongs in the practicality of it.

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We don't need to be falling off on the emotional side. We also don't need to be falling off on the introspective side. If we understand the purpose of life,

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Christ saved us, everything we need, all our inheritance, all of our future, our death is all wrapped up in Christ.

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And then he goes, okay, this is what I need you to do. I need you to look at me and what I am and who

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I am and reflect that to one another and the world so they can be liberated from the pains and slavery of Satan and their sin.

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That's the purpose of your life now. That's hopefully what Theocast is creating for you in that you're reminding yourself, we don't want you to obey so that God can confirm your salvation.

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We want you to obey so that those around you might also be liberated from their sin. Your sanctification most certainly is not for you.

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Jon Moffitt No. We have a whole episode on that. You can go look at it. Justin Perdue Take us home, man. Jon Moffitt All right, man.

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All right. There was a lot there. We went way over than we wanted to. Ten minutes over, so you're welcome for the extra ten minutes.

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Justin and I, we're part of a second ministry called Temporary Firmanda, which means always reforming.

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And this is for those people who have decided to partner with us on a monthly basis and donate to our ministry. And there's three different ways you can do that.

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Advocate, and then there's a second one called Builder, and then Reformer. And what that allows you to do is interact with Justin and I in an app on an extra podcast.

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And then coming soon, we are going to have actual classes that are available for you to interact with as well. They might even be out by now that this is here called

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TheocastU. So a little extra hit there. But if you want to learn more about this, you can go to Theocast .org.

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Look for Temporary Firmanda, and you guys can engage with us. Again, that's for those who want to support our ministry and help us get the rest of Christ out to the world through all kinds of online means.