1689 London Baptist Confession (part 37)

The Gospel Is Not a Coalition for Social Reform

Father, thank you for this morning. Father, we just thank you for all things that you're in control of everything, including the weather, including our building, everything, everything that we have, everything that we are, everything that we do and see.

You have arranged and ordained everything that we might have what we have, and we are to rejoice and be grateful. Father, we are thankful for the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness, full and free for the gospel.

For the scriptures that we might know you. And Lord, as we look to things like assurance, and even as we walk through the London Baptist Confession of Faith, I pray that you would open our eyes to how it matches what the scripture says, that these aren't merely the meanderings or imaginings of men, but men who have studied and been informed by your spirit and your word.

Father, bless each one here in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I wanted to, I don't wanna take too long on this, but I have this huge printout, but I don't wanna read it. Here's what I wanna ask you, and to just mull over.

When somebody says that something is a gospel issue, something is a gospel issue, let me give you an example. This week, how many of you know that the, how many of you are familiar with the Gospel Coalition?

A few of you. You know, I have a thing about, I think I actually learned it from Pastor Mike years ago. The more yous in a church's name, the more problematic it is. So, you know, the worst thing probably on the face of the planet would be something like the United Unitarians for Unity Church, or if there's a fourth one, a fourth you that you can get in there.

You know, like there's the Four Cs Church. If there was a four yous church, that would be entirely problematic. But a similar word is like coalition. So when I see the Gospel Coalition, well, why do they have to have a coalition?

And what they're saying is it's people from disparate backgrounds getting together around one thing, which would be the gospel, presumably, right? So this week they had a Gospel Coalition sponsored event with the group from Southern Baptist, ECLC, or whatever it is, headed by Russell Moore.

And the topic was, it was called, the conference was called MLK50. Because it's been 50 years since Martin Luther King was, I'll use the word, he was assassinated, he was murdered. Some people say he died.

Well, that's too sanitized, I would say. So this conference was about, in fact, from their website, it said this, racial unity is a gospel issue. Racial unity is a gospel issue. Now, what does that mean?

It could mean that we're all one in Christ. Let me ask you this, let's put it another way. When you go and preach the gospel to somebody, do you mention racial unity? Why not? Okay, is our faith based on racial unity?

Now, most of us are white, Caucasian, and so we've got this idea, in our country especially, that race means what color you are. Well, the truth is, what? There's how many races? One. We're all descendants of Adam, right?

Now, color is something that's often been used in our country to divide people, but I don't think that obscuring the gospel by calling racial unity a gospel issue is wise. For the same reason, here's another one.

People, I didn't see him so much this year, but last year, there were people actually at the Shepherds Conference protesting. And do you know what they were protesting? Of course you don't, because you weren't there.

They were there representing a group called Abolish Human Abortion, okay? So, and their point was that we don't spend enough time stressing the fact that abortion is what? A gospel issue. It's a matter of first importance.

Now, is it horrendous? Yes. Is the murder of unborn babies horrendous? Yes. Is it a sin issue? Yes. Is racial discrimination a sin issue? Yes. Has the United States engaged in it? Yes. But I think, you know, when you're gonna hold a whole conference basically about racial unity, you have to ask yourself, are we really the gospel coalition or are we the coalition for social reform?

Because there are many people in this country that will join together with us to stop abortion. They would be Muslims. They would be Catholics. They would be Mormons. They would be other faiths. There will be many people that would join with Bethlehem Bible Church if we were to start marching for racial unity.

How many people would join together with us if we said we just want to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified? There'd be a lot fewer people interested in that. And that is the gospel issue. The gospel issue is the gospel and nothing else.

It's about Jesus Christ, not about all these other issues as important as they might be. So I just had to get that off my chest. Questions or comments? Well, okay, good question. How do we help other people?

How do we think through this? How do we apply the gospel into these kind of areas? Let me just back up a second. Let's look at Galatians 3 .28. I've actually seen people, I saw one person, this was a seminary graduate, say that the theme of the book of Acts was racial reconciliation.

And I thought, where did you learn that? Was that a Fuller seminary that you learned that? I don't even know. You guys wouldn't really get that joke. Fuller is a very liberal seminary. But the book of Acts is about a lot of things.

And I just wouldn't say it was about racial reconciliation. Okay, Galatians 3 .28. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Now, when I read that, I don't think to myself, the Bible's against gender. I don't think the Bible is necessarily saying that it's approving of slavery. It's acknowledging slavery here. What it's saying, well, I mean, I could go on about Ephesians 2.

What is the, when it talks about Jew and Greek, why is that the dividing line in the New Testament? Why do you think Paul's stressing, there's neither Jew nor Greek? You could say there's neither Jew nor Gentile because that's the idea.

Why is he stressing that? Yeah, they had to shop in a different aisle of the grocery store. They had the kosher aisle and, no. Yes, rise, kill, and eat. And so here's the point. In Ephesians 2, it talks about, Paul writes about Jesus put an end to the enmity, that is to say the strife, that is to say the separation that existed between Jew and Gentile.

And that separation was the law of God. The law of God, we look at it, and rightly so, we look at it as the standard, the unattainable perfection of God. But it's another thing, too. It was designed to keep the Jewish people holy.

That is to say, to keep them separate from all the other nations around them. They had a jealous God, right? God is a jealous God. He didn't want them to be like the other people. He didn't want them to be absorbed by the other people.

So he gave them these rules that no other nation followed. And he had kept them separate from these other nations and caused enmity. And in Christ, that enmity is put aside. There is no longer Jew nor Gentile.

We're all one, and we all stand condemned by the law before God. So how do we then encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ who may feel discriminated against those kinds of things? Well, here's some things to think about.

Could women, in fact today, feel there are times when they are discriminated against? Yes. Could any number of people feel like they're discriminated against? Yes. Now, we could certainly look at the history, especially in the United States and some other countries, and we could say that what has transpired over the several centuries of this country has been, in many ways, repugnant in terms of how African-Americans, blacks, have been treated over the years.

I mean, even since Brown versus Board of Education, which I think was, was it 54 or 56, doesn't matter, separate but equal, all these kind of things, the Jim Crow laws, all these things designed, and that doesn't even go back to slavery, all these things designed to systematically discriminate against black people.

This is gonna lead to the topic that I wanted, that we're gonna talk about this morning, and it does so in this way, because there are a myriad of things that could concern us, distract us, depress us, but here's the good news.

The good news is that no matter how difficult this life is, and no matter how difficult life was for those slaves, and it was difficult for most all of them, and they lived often in conditions that we would not put our pets in, if they loved the Lord Jesus Christ, their life here was absolutely the worst life they're ever, the worst thing they're ever going to experience.

The good news is, for us, no matter what our situation is, the good news is, upon death, there are no more tears, there's no more suffering, there's no more disease, there's none of those things. And when we, how do we comfort somebody?

It's hard. We can acknowledge the truth that there are bad things that happen in this world. I was just talking with a woman last night who had a relative who stole a tremendous amount of money from her.

That's a bad thing. I mean, that's difficult to understand. And you can empathize and you can sympathize with them. I can't change that, but here's what I can say. Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose on the third day.

And if you believe in him, you'll spend eternity with him. My encouragement to my brothers of color, my brothers of non-color, my semi-transparent brothers, you know, who have no color whatsoever, is this.

If there is sin in this world, and there certainly is, our response is to not try to change the morality of the nation, but it's to preach Christ and trust the spirit of God to transform lives one at a time.

We can't change the country. We can't Christianize the country. I mean, this is, to me, just watching this whole thing unfold, it's like a leftward swing of the moral majority. It's like, let's change the society instead of imposing the Jerry Falwell kind of morality on it, let's impose a different kind of morality on it.

Now, you can find out, you know, I'll get a little personal here for a minute, you can find out exactly where you are in terms of your thinking on ethnicity. I don't even like to call it race, but ethnicity, when somebody comes calling on your daughter and they're not of the same ethnicity, that kind of can, you know, give you a real check on where you are, because maybe you think you're not, you don't have issues, and then somebody shows up from a different color, and you're like, maybe I'm not as free of that as I thought.

And your first thought in that situation should always be, does this young man, or, you know, in the other case, does this young woman love the Lord Jesus Christ? That's the issue always. And, you know, why don't we spend a lot of time talking about racial reconciliation?

I could tell you why. Anybody wanna take a guess why we don't spend a lot of time talking about racial reconciliation? It's divisive. No, I'm sorry, Galatians 3 .28. I mean, here's the thing. The Bible does talk about reconciliation, right?

What kind of reconciliation does it talk about over and over and over again? Between God and men, right? When Paul says we are ambassadors for Christ, he doesn't say we are ambassadors of racial reconciliation.

We're ambassadors of the gospel. We urge people to be reconciled to God, right? Reconciliation is vertical. And guess what? The outgrowth of that, the fruit of the spirit of that, is horizontal reconciliation.

I have grave concern for the people of, I mean, I don't know, but our previous generations who actively oppressed and discriminated against people because of the color of their skin, because it makes me wonder what they really understood about the Bible, what they really understood about the gospel.

But we can't change that. What we can do now is preach the truth, and that's what we try to do to the best of our capacity. And we don't talk about racial unity and racial reconciliation a lot because the Bible doesn't talk about it a lot.

Again, Jesus Christ broke down the barriers. He reconciled us to the Father, and then as an outgrowth of that, we are reconciled or we ought to be reconciled to one another. Color ought not to be an issue.

Other thoughts or questions, and then we'll move on. Okay. Seeing none. All right, so talking about assurance of salvation, we mentioned epistemology. How do we know what we know? That's what it means.

How do we know what we know? When it comes to the world around us, we know what we know because we see, we sense, we smell, we touch. And then we read Romans 1, 19 and 20, and I'll just read that and then we'll get going here.

For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. We would know just by looking around the world that we would understand that God is creative, that he is a creator, that he has quite an imagination because, I mean, you look at animals like the platypus or whatever, just different creatures, and you think, well, who would ever think of such a thing?

We were talking about, there was some creature we were talking about the other day. It's just interesting that people could ever believe in evolution because all these different things that should never exist logically, but yet they do.

We talked a little bit about, I mentioned in the past how Carl Sagan once said that he was confident that out of 100 planets, there'd probably be one that was like earth and had life on it, sentient beings and everything, because there were only, I think he said, there were like seven factors necessary for life.

And then a few years later, he revised it. He said, well, there are actually 12. And so maybe like life on one out of a thousand. And then a few years later, it was up to 20 something. And he said, well, it's probably one out of 10 ,000.

And then it got to the point where basically life was impossible. He's like, well, it's still out there. Sure. Because they suppress the truth and unrighteousness. But general revelation shows us something about God, but it can never save us.

The atheist says, I don't believe in God. I've never seen, tasted, touched, smelled, heard Him, whatever, I'd only believe what I could sense. But we believe in a God that we have never seen or heard.

How do we do that? How do we worship God? How's it possible that we can worship Jesus Christ when we have never seen Him? We've never heard Him. We've never met Him. We've never shaken His hand. We never sat down with Him and broken bread.

How can we do this? We believe the testimony of eyewitnesses. Men were there. They recorded later what they experienced by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we believe what they say. If we only could rely upon, if we only had our senses to rely upon, we'd be in big trouble.

But we have a revealed religion. Scripture records the testimony of the apostles, prophets, and other inspired writers. 2 Peter 1 .16, I'll read this and then I'll let you guys read. But we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we came or when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.

Peter says we didn't make these things up. We saw it. Let's look at 1 Corinthians 15, verses three to eight. Appropriate for the week after Resurrection Sunday to read 1 Corinthians 15. If somebody would read verses three to eight, please.

Thank you. So how many really appeals to expertise here, eyewitness testimony is Paul making here? He says what? That he saw Jesus, the risen Jesus. He says that James saw Him, all the apostles saw Him, 500 brothers at one time, but notice also even in the beginning, I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received.

In other words, he got this from somewhere, this truth from somewhere. And ultimately, if we dug far enough, we'd understand that he got it from Jesus Christ Himself. So he's claiming eyewitness testimony and numbering in the hundreds.

Luke 1, one to four, when Luke is introducing his gospel and the kind of the methodology of how he wrote really both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, Luke 1, verses one to four. And if somebody would read that, please.

So he's saying with exacting detail, making sure that he's precise, Luke is going to pass on what he has learned from eyewitnesses. This is the nature of scripture. R .C. Sproul writes this. He says, the testimony of the writers of scripture is not that they have revealed to us some inner light, that they've been enlightened or inspired in some secular sense, but rather that they have revealed what they have seen with their eyes and heard with their ears.

Christ came in the flesh partly for this reason, that we might have the account of eyewitnesses of interacting with the Lord Jesus Christ. God gives us revelation through his spokesman that is through his spokesmen that is not available from any other source.

There is no other way to know what God wants us to know about himself other than through scripture. Now, I mentioned this for those who were up at O Dark 30 last week. How did God affirm his message? How did he affirm scripture?

What did he do? How do we know? I mean, you know, unlike say, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Quran or something like that. How can we know? Yes, Mark. Okay, so we have fulfilled prophecy, right? That would definitely be true.

That would be a way we can know the scriptures are reliable. Yeah, Larry. Okay, exactly. He empowered his messengers, these really new kind of messengers of truth to do powerful works that the words that they were saying might be verified by what they did.

Let's look at Exodus 4 verses one to nine. It's quite something to say, you know, for Moses to show up and to say, you know, I am God's prophet. You guys need to listen to me. And then the people will say, well, why should we listen to you?

And that's exactly what we see here in Exodus 4 verses one to nine. Would somebody read that please? Exodus 4 verses one to nine. Now, just first of all, I have to say, whenever I'm reading, I'm very visual.

And the first thing I do when I hear the name Moses and I start hearing about him doing these things, what do you suppose I have in my mind? Charlton Heston. It's like uncanny. I could just see him, you know, throwing down his staff and the snakes on the ground and all that stuff.

And I don't know what to say. But now I want you to think like you're Moses for just a minute. God says, put your hand inside your jacket. Okay, now take it out. You know, it's glowing or it's leprous or whatever.

What do you think? It was just normal a minute ago. I'd be a little scared, right? And then God says, put it back in there. It's gone. Let's do that again. You know, like a little kid, I'd be like, hey, this is kind of cool.

Look what I can do. This is, you know, again, this happens to affirm who Moses is and what he says is actually coming from God. Now, John 3, you don't have to turn there, but in John 3, when Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, what does he say to him?

He says, we know that you are sent by God. You're a man from God. You're under the authority of God. How do we know this? You're a teacher, he says, come from God. For no one can do these signs you do unless God is with him.

They knew, the Jews knew that these accompanying signs meant this was a man of God. And guess what? When Jesus comes along, there's been no man of God for 400 years. The vast majority of the miracles in the Bible are done within a 100 year period.

And they comprise the ministries of Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, and Jesus and the apostles. Outside of that, there are very few miracles. And again, the reason is because the objective of the miracles is not to show what God can do, but to affirm what they are saying, what they're doing is actually from God.

Now, going back to the confession, the doctrine of scripture is discussed in chapter one of the confession because reform theology is derived from scripture. God's truth doesn't need human approval. We've said this many times, the old bumper sticker that said, God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

What's wrong with that bumper sticker? It doesn't matter if I believe it, right? In fact, I'd like to reprint those bumper stickers and just have it say, God said it with I believe it like X out and then that settles it, right?

Because it doesn't matter if I believe it or not. It's true. R .C. says that when he was in his early twenties, he went to his pastor because he was burdened with the sense of sin and he wanted to confess it.

So he went to, and please, unless you really feel obligated, don't come to me with your confessions. He comes to his pastor with his sin. And the pastor says, please read 1 John 1, 9, which says, if we confess our sins, he's faithful to forgive us, right?

And R .C. reads it aloud. He says to the pastor, I still feel guilty. Didn't help me. Pastor says, what? Read it again. Process gets repeated five times. On the seventh time, oh, wait, that's not, has nothing to do with numerology, sorry.

Thank you for laughing. I appreciate that. After five times, he says he got the message and the message was, what? If we confess our sins, if we agree with God about our sins, he is faithful to forgive us.

It had nothing to do with how R .C. felt. You know, in other words, he's like, I still feel guilty. Well, read it again. I still feel guilty. Read it again. Let it sink through your skull. God has forgiven you.

God said it, that settles it. There's no higher authority. We need to trust his word. R .C. says that's the advantage of having information and knowledge that comes from God. In other words, having this revealed scripture, knowing what God wants, knowing what he expects, knowing who he is, what he does and will do.

We read it and we can be sure of our forgiveness of sins. So we spend time talking about revelation and epistemology, how we can know what we're supposed to know when we're talking about assurance of salvation, because the confession teaches that the assurance Christians have of their assurance is infallible.

Our assurance does not rest on our own reasoning, our own thinking, our own feelings or our own desires. Let's read the confession here again. It says, this certainty, that is to say the certainty of salvation is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ revealed in the gospel.

And again, just five seconds. I can't resist saying this. The gospel is about Christ. It's always about that. That's the good news. Our confidence, our assurance of our salvation is founded upon the promises of God who is infallible.

He knows with absolute certainty who is saved, who is not, who is in a state of grace and who is not. It is not opinion. It's not something we've been talked into, right? It says there in the confession, probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope, like, hmm, maybe if you just kind of give me some more arguments, I might believe that I'm actually saved.

You know, it's kind of like the approach to the gospel that says, you know, I'm gonna keep giving you new arguments about why you should believe and eventually maybe you'll yield to me. I can sell you on the gospel.

We stress over and over again. You know, well, let me put it in a different way. When we talk about the Bible, we assume it is true. Why? Because it says it's true. We believe what God says about it. Why is it so important that scripture is true, that it is reliable, that it is in fact infallible?

Why is that so important? Okay, because it corresponds to reality, right? It's very important. One man wrote this. He said, all that the Bible affirms to be true directly or indirectly is true. It corresponds to reality.

And all that the Bible affirms to be false is false. So any attack on propositional revelation that diminishes or negates propositional truth has denied the inerrancy of the Bible. So we stress propositional revelation that it is true.

Everything that it speaks about is the truth. We cannot use our senses to know God, but he has given us his perfect word that we might know him and trust him. And so our confidence is based upon his infallible word.

Back to the confession. And also upon the inward evidence of those graces of the spirit, unto which promises are made and on the testimony of the spirit of adoption, witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God and as a fruit thereof, keeping the heart both humble and holy.

And as you turn to 2 Peter 1, that's an invitation to turn to 2 Peter 1. I wanna just say a few things about, because he doesn't mention them later on, this idea of the gospel belief in Christ, producing humbleness, humility, and holiness in us.

I marvel when I see things, memes like this on Facebook, anybody seen this one? I'm proud to be a Christian. I read that and I just go, well, let me first say, I'm not ashamed to be a Christian, right?

I'm not ashamed of the gospel, but am I proud to be a Christian? What does that mean? I'll tell you what it means to me. What it means to me is I think it's just wrong. I think it's like viewing things wrongly.

I'm humbled by the fact that I'm a Christian. I can't believe I'm a Christian. I can't believe God would save me. That's how I view it. And I'm like, what people say, I'm proud to be a Christian. I mean, I guess I just say this, I know that my redeemer lives, right?

He is risen, he is risen indeed. I mean, those are the truths that I have no reason to be proud of the fact that I'm a Christian because I didn't do anything to deserve that. Okay, would somebody read 2 Peter 1, verses two to four, two to four.

Yes, go ahead, Haley. Okay, now I'm gonna skip to verses 10 and 11, and then I'm gonna tell you why we're doing that. He's given us these things. And then verse 10 says, "'Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities, you will never fall.

For in this way, there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.". Now, R .C. did this in his book and he skipped these verses, and then he goes back to them.

And here's the reason he does this, because this is, if you look at the first bit of it, really is just talking about the sovereignty of God and his power and the things that he's done for us. And then it goes on to just talk about making our calling and election, sure.

But then listen to 2 Peter chapter one, verses five to nine. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love.

For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.

Peter lists these qualities that we are to produce to make our calling and election more sure. And what do they sound similar to? Sound very similar to Galatians five and the fruit of the spirit, right?

R .C. says this, he says, Peter wants us to be fruitful in the Christian life, confident in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit dwells within us. If we are sure that we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that goes a long way toward helping us become productive in manifesting the fruit of the spirit.

When we can look at our lives and see fruit, then the fruit of the spirit, then we have more assurance of our salvation. If we look at our lives and we see a lack of fruit and we see a life simply marked by sin, then we have less assurance, less confidence.

And in fact, we'll talk about this next week, but if you just look back at, or if you listen to what the confession says, it says that if we don't have these things that we are, or maybe it was actually in the verses, whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind.

Can a person who is blind serve in the same way as somebody who has his eyes open? In other words, and I don't even maybe like the idea of blind, let's put it this way. If you are saved, but you're not producing this fruit, you're not pursuing your sanctification, it's as if you are trying to live your Christian life with your eyes closed, right?

And then you wonder why you keep stumbling into things. Well, it's because you're not pursuing what God has commanded you to pursue. You're not pursuing your sanctification. You're not living in light of the fact that you belong to God, that you've been purchased with a price.

So of course, your life is more difficult. Of course, you're not being as productive as you ought to be. And we're gonna leave it there and we'll pick it up next week. Father, thank you for your word.

Thank you for the fact that we can know that we belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, that we are his, that we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, that he has taken up residence in us, that he is producing fruit in keeping with our status as Christians.

Father, we thank you that Father, Son, and Spirit work together in us to produce a transformation, to sanctify us, to conform us into the image of your Son. And it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.