Pre-Debate/Conference Dividing Line

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I just, I mean, literally 23 seconds ago, Weather Underground puts up a graphic that says January thaw, highs 10 to 20 degrees above average for all of the deep South, Georgia, Tennessee, every place I'm going, 10 to 20 degrees above average.

And I've got all this warm stuff that I've packed.

I was looking yesterday and Atlanta was warmer than here. Huh?

Yeah. But how much, but how far, I'm gonna have to look when I get home.

All I know is next week's, or the rest of this week is gonna be awesome. Just beautiful weather down there. Just like here.

Might change, might change, might make it a little bit easier because I'll tell you, packing winter stuff takes up a lot of space. So, but I have to, I have to bring at least a couple of Coogees. Just, you know, just because people demand it.

So.

Yeah, that, that line is long, isn't it? Oh, it is.

It is. That, that. And make sure I have plenty of bow ties. Bow ties. If I, if I don't wear, if I, may I not tell you the tears, the disappointment that I get when I wear a regular tie, when I travel, it's terrible.

Especially people show up wearing a bow tie. I can also understand tears when you wear Coogees.

I tell ya, the, the, the Coogee hatred and the jealousy is, it's, it's hard.

It's not a hatred thing. It's a, it's a blind thing. So, as you all can tell,.

We are getting ready to head out tomorrow. And unfortunately, I'm stuck flying with the disembodied voice that you hear in the background.

Who will also be in the background? There'll be two, two rows behind you.

If you all, if you all want to meet the disembodied voice and, and discover more about his fascinating life, he will be standing in front of our, now we have, you know, you've been to, you've, you've probably been to conferences and stuff before where they have the really big booth and, and all the rest of this stuff, but they always have this big thing in the background.

Well, we've had a big thing since 2009?

2010, May of 2010. May of, May of 2010. That's right. That's right. We ordered it for the CRI conference. For the CRI conference.

We debated Robert Price. Unfortunately, it, it didn't get there in time.

So we haven't. It's never been seen in public before.

It's been sitting in a room here at the office, set up. For almost six years. And in fact, the one we had made was so old. Yeah, had to make new ones. We, we, we had to have the fabric thing reprinted and.

I thought ahead and there will be one display for the debate and a different display for the conference. Ooh.

Got it, got it, cool. So we're going to have a, we're going to have a booth at G3. So come on by, that's where you'll be able to find me and Rich. And if you've got, you know, you'd like to say nice things, want to say nasty things, we're going to be in St. Louis.

So, so there, there you go. But we're looking forward to seeing everybody. I've already told Kofi that if he will come, that I will tie his bow tie for him. And, oh, he's listening. So I was, Kofi, you need to tell me, tell me on Twitter, Kofi, what your, what your neck size is in inches.

If, if you can figure that out. You know. Yeah, not, not centimeters. Not, not metric. No, please, no metric. I don't, I do a lot of metric. Most of my riding distances, running distances, I get it. I need, I see the necessity.

It is a much better system. It's, it's obvious. It's actually logical. It makes sense, but there's still, there's still issues. So let, let me know what your, what your neck size is there. Pre-debate dividing line.

What is a pre-debate dividing line? Well, I happen to know there's a bunch of you weird people in, in the audience, which is pretty much everybody in the audience. You, you, oh man, dude. I was, 19 inches.

That's, you're, you're a big boy. You're a big boy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you. I, I had packed, I had packed a tie for you, but I don't have any ties that big. I don't have any ties that big. It won't, it won't work.

Yeah, yeah. It won't work. I'm gonna have to unpack that thing. Nope, can't do it. Can't do it. Sorry. So I hope you, I hope you got one. I just don't have one that's adjustable to 19 inches. I'm, I'm sorry.

But anyway, I will tie whatever you bring and we'll, we'll get you, we'll get you set up. And anyway, now, now, now my, now my phone is, this is this first day that I have those new things installed and it's making me go, what's going on at my, what's, what's going on at both my front and back door at the same time?

You know, that's a little bit weird. You know? Yeah, I've been getting the same thing. I'm sorry? I, I, I've got the same thing and got it two weeks ago and it's great, but you know.

Yeah, but how does, how does, I think what happens is you get like a big, big truck that goes by and it, and it shakes everything. And.

Or it could be the, of course it's daylight now, but if it happens at night, it's just the helicopter flying overhead, putting the, the lights down on your, you know. Thankfully it hasn't happened recently.

But anyways, what is a pre-debate? What I want to do is I want to talk to you a little bit about my preparation. People always say, well, how do you do debates? And, and how do you prepare? And, and, and all the rest of that stuff.

I'll talk about a few of the practical things. For example, here is my debate notebook. My debate pen is charging over there. I suppose I can probably reach it. See, it's still plugged in here. These, this is the Livescribe pen.

And if I wanted to, and I may, I'm not sure if I will, but I can connect this to my iPad. And as I'm taking notes, it'll put the notes directly into my iPad and then can OCR it just almost instantaneously.

And it does amazingly, since I print, the OCR is pretty good. But I'm hearing something. Oh, you know, remember when, back when we demanded the no-call list? It's dead. Anyway, if you know anyone who's going to school, going to high school, college, seminary, anything, man, I wish I had had this.

This was invented long after I graduated, but the Livescribe pen, just an incredible invention. I mean, you write this as you're writing notes. I can go back and tap on a previous part of my notes and it'll play back what was being said because it's recording audio while you're, and it's indexing it to your writing.

So this is my emergency backup recording device for all my debates. Now, would that be a quality high enough to make available? Probably not. But what if I'm in a context where somehow conveniently the audio gets destroyed, gets deleted?

I've got a backup. I can prove what was said, what wasn't said, so on and so forth. Great thing to have the Livescribe pen. And of course the Livescribe pen requires a Livescribe journal, which I've put in a nice leather thing here.

But like, let's see, here's, yeah, here's notes from my debate with Yusuf Ismail in South Africa a while back when things really went south with that. And let's see, here's a, I normally write up at the top which debate it was, what the debate, when the debate was, what date it was, stuff like that.

Forgot to begin the recording. Missed my opening statement. Stuff like that. But the Graham-Codrington debate, Johannesburg 10 -9, 2015. So I keep them all in one thing. I can go back, I have the recordings of them, stuff like that.

Obviously didn't have that for the earlier debates. And first debate, August of 1990, we're coming up on 27 years of debating, almost three decades now. Things have, do things differently now. Anyway, the debate on Wednesday evening, I'll be perfectly honest with you, I would much, much, much rather be in the minority than the majority, especially on this subject dealing with Roman Catholicism.

Why? 95 of the people in that room are probably gonna be on my side or at least lean my direction. And I bet you could sell that notebook for a pretty penny. Actually, I still have the notebook. I was looking at it just this past week that I had when I didn't debate.

We never did debate. But when I did the radio program with Dave Hunt and the notebook that specifically says where Dave Hunt said, I don't really know the reformers. And I remember it's written out there in that notebook.

That's about the only thing in that particular notebook. But yeah, I've thought about putting that up on eBay and bidding it out or something like that for the ministry. It'd be sort of fun. Anyway, I am not comfortable being in the majority this Wednesday evening.

Why? Even though 95 of the people in the room are gonna be on my side, 95 of them do not know Roman Catholicism very well and have probably never engaged in a conversation with a knowledgeable Roman Catholic apologist.

And this is one of the problems that, I haven't faced this for a long time, but it was a problem that we encountered a great deal back in the 1990s especially and the early 2000s when we were engaging in regular debates with Roman Catholic apologists.

The majority of non-Roman Catholics that are interested in apologetics have not read Catholicism and Fundamentalism. They've never listened to a Scott Hahn video on the Eucharist. Most of their interactions have been with Roman Catholics online and maybe with family members who just, well, look, the average mindset that people have is, well, Roman Catholics believe what they believe because the priest tells them to believe it.

And you've had a lot of interaction with nominal Roman Catholics who don't really know what they believe or why they believe it. Just like a lot of the calls that I hear on Catholic Answers Live talk about objections to Roman Catholicism that were obviously made by non-Roman Catholics who aren't serious about their faith, don't really know much about what they believe, know less about what the Roman Catholic believes.

And so responding to their objections is pretty easy. That goes both directions. The majority of the people coming into the debate on Wednesday are going to be expecting a rather one-sided conversation and it's not going to be.

Trent Horn is an intelligent man. He's not afraid of these things. He does Catholic Answers Live. He's a public speaker. And what that means is you're going to get two Lord-willing, clear presentations that are gonna be forcefully made.

You're gonna have, hopefully, meaningful interaction. I hope that, because I've been reading a little bit about what happened over the weekend with the debate between Dr. Tony Acosta and Bob St. Genes, and as I had predicted, and as I think is necessary, given the topic, Dr. St. Genes had primarily moved the topic into Sola Scriptura.

You can almost always tell when a Roman Catholic is feeling a little uncomfortable when they move the topic into Sola Scriptura. Though, when you think about it, it is a natural progression. Almost any topic that you're gonna debate with a Roman Catholic will eventually devolve back to source of authority.

And since Rome denies Sola Scriptura, the ultimate authority within Roman Catholicism is, of course, the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as it currently exists. Because of that, it's rather obvious that it will eventually get back to Sola Scriptura, but especially when doing the Marian dogmas, when I debated Dr. St. Genes on the bodily assumption, that's what he did then, is he went to Acts chapter 15.

The church has the right to define these things, therefore the church did. I'm not gonna try to prove this in the scriptures because the scriptures don't really teach these things, but the church has the right to do it, et cetera, et cetera.

Catholic Answers has a long history of defaulting back, and basically what they did back in the 90s is you would have opening statements, and then they would wait until the next section of the debate, and they'd start throwing out issues like canonicity, knowing that as the timeframe that you have gets smaller and smaller, it's next to impossible to debate the issue or even define a meaningful position on the canon in literally a matter of seconds.

Because you eventually get to a point where you really have like 90-second snippets. You can't say anything meaningful on a topic as complex from either direction, at least meaningfully, at least in a historically honest sense, as the canon in 90 seconds.

It just can't be done. So I hope that it doesn't go that direction. I hope that there remains a meaningful focus upon the subject, which I guess I should remind everybody is can a true Christian lose their salvation?

Now, we wanted to debate sola scriptura or sola fide, one of the specific Reformation doctrines, but Mr. Horton insisted that this was the only topic that he would be willing to debate. And so it is a soteriological topic.

It's very relevant. So that's what we're doing. But as long as Mr. Horne, let's just put it this way. As long as Mr. Horne doesn't drool on himself, there could be people you'd be very impressed because they have so little knowledge of the depth or the character of Roman Catholic apologetic argumentation that they're just gonna be blown away that anyone would even show up and show a knowledge of the scriptures.

One of the first debates I did with a Roman Catholic was on this subject. It was the Northwest Community Church, December of 1990. And it was with Jerry Matitix, which I don't think Catholic Answers would like to remember was at that time the newly hired staff apologist at Catholic Answers, along with Patrick Madrid and Carl Keating.

Oh, it's on Sermon. Yeah, I know, I was listening to it over the weekend. I downloaded it from Sermon Audio. And that's what, Jerry was throwing every kind of cheap debating trick there was into that debate.

Listening to it all these years later was pretty amazing. And of course, given where he is now, it's somewhat humorous to look back and hear some of the things that he's saying. But they did, Jerry did go for the Sola Scriptura stuff.

And I once believed what like you believe and so on and so forth. I don't think that Trent Horne's a convert. I could be wrong. I don't know a lot about him, but I think he might be a cradle Catholic.

So maybe that won't come up. I'm really not certain. I would like to find out before we get to the debate. Anyway, here's what's gonna happen. As far as, so let me finish this thought though. For a lot of people, this is one of the reasons that some churches don't like to do debates, is I know that there are going to be false believers who are gonna be coming to the G3 Conference.

And they may well be convinced by Mr. Horne's arguments. And so when, you know, something that you get used to over the years is one of the arguments that, you know, you always get this from Mormon missionaries because I think they're told to do this.

When you have a good conversation with a Mormon missionary and really challenge them, they're told at the end to tell you that their conversation with you strengthened their testimony in the Book of Mormon.

Even though there isn't a single logical or rational reason in the world why that would be the case, that's what they're told. Well, there's a good possibility that someone might become a Roman Catholic because of this debate.

When you expose unregenerate men to false teaching, they can find that to be something that is attractive to them. And that's why some people don't even want to engage in debates. And again, it goes back to the issue of that sermon I gave a number of years ago, the blessings of apostasy.

Look at 1 John 2. Consider the nature of false faith. That's gonna come up in the debate, by the way. There are people who make false professions of faith and none of us are saying, and I'm going to distance myself by a long shot from the anti-lordship, no-repentance, false gospel that is so common out there.

But that kind of an individual who has a false belief, false faith, might be influenced. And fully understand that that's a possibility. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The reality is they should be being repelled by the force of the proclamation of the true gospel in the first place, if they're actually a hypocrite.

So I recognize that there is a disadvantage in being in the majority. I would much rather be in the minority, no matter what the topic is. But I certainly find that to be more useful to have more of the folks I'm trying to reach in the audience.

Of course, we're recording all of this. It's gonna be professionally recorded. It's gonna be made available. So it's still gonna be available to that audience eventually. But I just wanted to mention that.

What's gonna happen in the debate? Well, how do you defend the concept that a true believer in Jesus Christ cannot lose their salvation? If you are a synergist, I'm not gonna be debating on your side in this situation, because I don't believe that any synergist has any meaningful ground whatsoever for believing in the perpetuity of salvation.

If you believe that your autonomous will cooperates even by some mythical thing called prevenient grace in bringing about salvation, if you're a Southern Baptist traditionalist, and by the way, I mentioned Southern Baptist traditionalists in the Sunday morning sermon at PRBC yesterday in preaching on John 10, 16.

And if you're a Southern Baptist traditionalist, if you're an Arminian of any kind, if you are a synergist of any kind, I am not going to be approaching this subject in a way that's gonna be amenable to any position that you could take.

Because as I said, I don't think you have any consistent way. If you believe you have free autonomous will to enter into relationship with God, then is somehow your free will removed from you once you're in?

Because if your free will can get you in, your free will can get you out. And unless you're going to say that you become less free once you become a Christian, that your autonomous will is no longer autonomous, which all the arguments I've ever heard for autonomous will would be refuted by that kind of a perspective, then I don't see any basis whatsoever for you to believe in one saved, all is saved or anything like that at all.

Obviously, I don't like that phrase, one saved, all is saved. There is a way that that could be interpreted in an appropriate fashion. For the elect, once regeneration takes place, then you are amongst the saved, you are being saved, you will continue to be saved all the way until the consummation of your salvation in glory itself.

No question about it, but that's not normally how one saved, all was saved is understood. So what's gonna happen is, and I'm, you know, I actually hope that maybe Trent will listen and make it a better debate if he hears what I'm gonna do, because it was interesting, I didn't remember after 26 years exactly how I approached the subject in 1990 with Gerry Matitix, and remember who else was there that evening?

Scott Hahn, yep. Because then the next night we had the debate on the papacy at the City of the Lord in Tempe. That went way south for the other side,.

It really, really did. I'll just never forget the couple who slammed those metal doors when they left.

In the middle of it. Yeah, all the Catholics were storming out the second night. Yeah, they were very, very unhappy. And it wasn't because of my behavior either at all, it was because they had lost the debate.

I think that was the first time that the Catholic apologists and the moderator was Scott Hahn the second night, and it was the first time that Catholic apologists had really had to deal with a historical refutation from patristic sources of the Petrian claims.

Not first time, I mean, in Catholic answers experience in the past couple of decades. Anyway, so what I'm gonna do, I listened to that debate and I sort of chuckled because, yeah, that's not my outline from 26 years ago.

But the primary thrust is the same. And that is the only reason that I believe that a truly regenerate person will persevere in the faith is because I believe in the complete power and ability of the Son of God to fulfill the will of the Father for Him.

And that is, as John 6 .39 says, this is the will of the Father that of all that He's given me I lose nothing but raise it up on the last day. The only reason to believe, as I believe, is that you believe that Jesus can actually save.

Not that His death merits grace that is then channeled through sacraments and so on and so forth. Not that He tries to save, but the only reason to believe in this is that you believe that Jesus is actually a powerful Savior who is able to save ice panteles.

I think it's ice top panteles. I'll look, I have it in my notes. The quotation from the book of Hebrews, save either forever or to the uttermost. Two different translations, the same phrase. So my argument is going to be the argument for monergism.

Why is salvation permanent? Because it's perfect. It's perfect because God performs it. He performs it to His own glory. He performs it for a specific people, that there are a specific elect people, and they are the only ones who are truly born again.

They are not the only ones who profess faith. That's why there are warning passages. That's why there are false professors. That's why in the New Testament, there are apostates. They're all there. No one's arguing that.

There is apostasy in the New Testament, but not one of the sheep of Christ will be lost. That is His promise. And it is as certain as the doctrine of the Trinity itself, because if that is untrue, then you could have disruption in the very Godhead itself.

If the son could fail to do the will of the father, then all bets are off. All bets are off. And so the presentation that I have made, I think we're both gonna be using keynote presentations, is focused upon those texts where Jesus specifically promises the perfection of His work as Savior, resulting in the salvation of His elect people.

Now, there's a lot of texts there, and I only have 20 minutes. So you can only cover the key texts. But here's my thinking. I do not believe that Rome has a meaningful response to those texts. I just don't believe that there is a mechanism whereby a synergistic sacramentalist can engage in a meaningful fashion with Jesus's statements in John 6, in John 10, and then the apostolic application of that truth in Romans 8, the great text speaking of who will bring a charge against God's elect.

And it's rhetorical, the very form of the text. There's no one that can bring a charge because God is the one justifying. Jesus, the one who died, rather has been raised again, and He is interceding for them.

There's no place for the accuser. And you would need an accuser for one of those elect to be lost, but there's no place for one. I don't think Rome has an answer to these things, not one that can stand up to cross-examination.

And so I'm gonna focus upon that, and then flowing from that, okay, Jesus is a perfect Savior, but how does this end up working out in our lives? It works out in the imputation of Christ's righteousness, and hence Romans chapter four.

And I'm going to ask the question that I have been asking Roman Catholics, and I'm gonna ask it of Trent Horne as well. You say, you're telling what you're gonna do. Yeah, I assume that Trent Horne is a smart man.

Now, I could be wrong. He could do exactly what Peter Stravinskas did, but I think maybe they've learned their lesson from Peter Stravinskas. He may do what Father Stravinskas did. And if you don't know what I'm referring to, look up James White, Peter Stravinskas on Google.

It's almost the first thing that comes up, which makes him so upset. There are little clips available from the cross-examination. One of them is the clip of the cross-examination on purgatory in 1 Corinthians chapter three, which it's just one of those memorable moments.

It really was. What happened very clearly in that debate was when Chris Arnzen, who arranged all those great debates, they were called the great debates. That's why I call it the great debate. I wasn't saying all those great debates I did, and I can just see somebody doing that.

They were called the great debates. When he contacted Stravinskas, Stravinskas said, well, who would I be debating? And he said, James White. And his response was, ha, he's harmless. And so since he did not take me seriously, he did no preparation.

He did no research. He didn't read a word I'd ever said, read a word I'd ever published on the subject of purgatory. I, on the other hand, since he had edited a magazine called The Catholic Answer, I had read everything he had published that I'd get my hands on anyways, that I even knew existed on the subject of purgatory, had it all on my handspring visor, your gadget, as he referred to it later on, your thingamabob, gizmo, gizmo, gizmo of yours, yeah.

And when one side has read everything the other side has said on a subject, and the other side has not bothered to even do research one, it's not difficult to win that debate, not difficult at all. And it was a very lopsided debate.

There's no twice about it. Now, I don't think that Trenthorne's gonna do that. I think Catholic Answers takes this seriously. And so I would expect that Trenthorne's well aware of the fact that I debated gerrymantics on that subject and has listened to it.

And I have a number of books out. Potter's Freedom specifically addresses this subject. So I'm going to assume and hope not to be disappointed because I'll tell you, I've been disappointed many times.

I have been disappointed many, many, many times by debate opponents who I expected to be prepared. But look, okay, that's disappointment, part of life. My perspective is be prepared for the best. If you don't get the best, well, you're not gonna be quite as challenged as you would have been otherwise, but still it's the best way to honor the truth is to be prepared for the best argument that the other side has to offer.

So I don't figure that I am giving anything away to tell you this is what I'm gonna focus upon because anybody who's read my books or listened to debates in the past, things like that, already knows that, already well aware of it.

Now, I don't know how much experience Trent Horn has dealing with reformed individuals, but I hope he's prepared because that's the direction I'm gonna be going. So I'm going to focus in and I'm going to ask the question of Trent Horn.

I'm gonna tell him right now, be ready because, well, it's the same question I asked Peter Stravinskis. Remember what I asked Peter? Well, I asked Peter Stravinskis many questions that left him pulling on his clerical collar and wanting to be anywhere else but where he was.

But, oh yeah, oh man, that was... It got so bad that after the debate, I was going over and telling people, calm down, back off, trying to help him out because the sharks were in the water. The blood was everywhere and the sharks were like, and yeah, it was bad.

Anyway, I asked him the question, who is the blessed man of Romans 4, 7 -8? Specifically verse 8. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute his sin. Who is that? Because in classical Roman Catholic theology, there is no blessed man.

If you commit a venial sin, it is imputed to you. You bear the temporal punishment of that sin. If you commit a mortal sin, it is imputed to you. You lose the grace of justification. Now, I say in classical Roman Catholic theology because like I said, I think a lot of Roman Catholics today are inclusivists and universalists and all sorts of other things.

But in classical Orthodox Roman Catholic theology as defined by the Roman Catholic Church, and no, I'm not having to drag this big thing along because I already have it on my phone. Actually, I need to double check that because that may have been on my Google phone.

I may need to do a little Apple store shopping. But anyway, there is no blessed man. All sin is imputed, which is why Roman Catholics believe that you can lose your salvation because if you commit a mortal sin, it destroys the grace of justification and you will be lost because that sin is imputed to you.

Blessed is a man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Why? Because the great exchange, the imputation of my sin to my sin bearer, Jesus, the imputation of his righteousness to me, which Rome rejects.

They believe in an infusion of righteousness, not an imputation of righteousness. So there is no blessed man. And so that's the result, not of a man-sided view of salvation, but just the recognition of this is the outworking of the perfection of the work of Christ.

His righteousness is what makes me right in the sight of God and which is what allows God to save his elect people in perfection without violating his justice. So there's my focus. And I say that's the only meaningful ground for a belief in eternal security, for a belief in the perseverance of the saints, preservation of the saints.

Whatever terminology you want to use, the reason that salvation does not fail is because the Savior does not fail. And that means the Savior has to be able to save by himself, monergistically. If you're a synergist, this debate, I'm not representing you because we do not believe the same things.

And this is where theology matters. And in fact, I don't think you can win a debate with the Roman Catholic on this because you already agree with the Roman Catholic on the fundamental issue. You're on the wrong side of the Tiber River on this topic, if you're a synergist.

That's a dividing line. That's a very important dividing line. Well, what do I expect from Trent Horne? I expect a clear presentation. I expect one that is professionally done I expect a speaker who will not stumble over himself.

I expect a speaker who will have ready answers in cross-examination, even if they're not necessarily fully responsive to the question. There will not be large gaps of silence or anything like that. Both Trent and I have spent many hours behind one of these microphones.

And though in the context of the dividing line, I don't have a clock in front of me. I've done network radio. I grew up doing radio. He does network radio. That means he's going to, I fully expect him to be perfectly on time just as I will be perfectly on time, always have been.

Every debate opponent I've ever had will have to testify by, if they're honest at all, that I've never gone over. I've never abused the rules of debate when it comes to time at all. And I don't expect that he will either because he knows what it means to have to take breaks on the Immaculate Heart Network.

I'm sure they have a hard time clock right in front of him. He knows how to handle callers and get that break in and the whole nine yards. So I expect on that level that there will be a perfect equality because we're both trained professionals when it comes to doing things on time, watching clocks, not being afraid of audiences or any type situation like that.

I think there's going to be perfect equality on that level. As far as presentation is concerned, I expect, my guess is that the presentation will be focused, well, it has to go this direction, it has to go this direction, will be focused upon the descriptive prescriptive texts.

What does that mean? I've said many, many, many times that when you dialogue really with any synergist but especially with Roman Catholics, what you have to keep in mind is the difference between prescriptive reading and descriptive reading of the text of Scripture.

Because of the overall soteriology and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church regarding how a person is saved, when a Roman Catholic looks at a text such as, let me give an example, he who endures to the end shall be saved.

He who endures to the end shall be saved. Now, there's no question that Jesus said these words. We believe everything that Jesus said. We accept everything that Jesus said. But everything that Jesus said is a part of the full revelation of Scripture.

We are not hyper red letterists. And while we recognize that Jesus was God incarnate, we likewise recognize that what's found in the Book of Romans is inspired by the very same Holy Spirit who is just as much God as the Son is, has eternally been just as much God.

And therefore, the words of Romans chapter four are just as theanoustos, as the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John when quoting Jesus. And so in light of that, when we look at that text, if you take them prescriptively, then you understand what is being given to you here is a prescription.

It is a commandment to perform something so as to gain something. So by your enduring to the end, you bring about your salvation. Or let's look at a parable. The parables, I imagine, there'll be a number of parables brought up, but the parable of the unforgiving steward who is forgiven a great debt and then goes out and shows unforgiveness to people who owe him much less than he had owed the master.

You remember the story. And the application being, if you do not forgive, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you. So when you look at that prescriptively, then what you hear is, by my forgiving others, by fulfilling that prescriptive command, I bring about my own forgiveness.

There are numerous parables, numerous statements. You can look at Matthew chapter 25, the judgment. Why do the sheep enter in when the goats do not? Well, it's because they did these particular things.

So prescriptive reading of all of these texts. Now, what is a descriptive reading? A descriptive reading of these texts is seeing these things as descriptive of what the redeemed or the saved do. Not as a prescription as to how to attain to that position, but a description of what they are.

So he who endures the end shall be saved. That is descriptive of what true saving faith is. A non-saving faith will not endure. A non-saving faith will eventually collapse. A non-saving faith will have the wrong object.

Whatever it might be, the reason that any faith does endure is because it's divine in its origin. Faith is described, saving faith is described as the very gift of God. It's the work of the Holy Spirit within the heart of God's elect people.