June 19, 2025 Show with Jeremiah Nortier on “Revival in a Confessional Church”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

The Program Mission and the Opening Scripture

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 19th day of June 2025.

I'm thrilled to have back on the program a very gifted brother in Christ named Jeremiah Nortier, and he is a Christian apologist, he's a debater, he's the host of the Apologetic Dog podcast, and he is also pastor of Twelve Five Church, a confessional reformed Baptist congregation in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Today, we're going to be addressing revival in a confessional church, and we're also going to be announcing the upcoming Road to Revival Conference in Tullahoma, Tennessee this fall, where Pastor Jeremiah will be preaching on that very theme of revival in a confessional church.

But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Jeremiah Nortier.

Chris, thank you so much for having me back on.

It's great to have you back on, and also I want my listeners immediately, right now, to mark your calendars for four dates that involve two debates, two days each, that Pastor Nortier is going to be participating in on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

On July 10th and 11th, Pastor Jeremiah will be debating Nazarene pastor Jared K. Henry, and the theme is going to be the ordination of women to positions of authority over men in the church, and my guest today opposes that, and Jared K. Henry, the Nazarene pastor, affirms that practice.

Just to let you know a little bit about him and the Nazarene, or at least the dominant makeup of the Nazarene church. They are not liberal, most of them. They are conservative evangelicals, but they do ordain women into leadership over men in the church, so that should be a fascinating debate.

I've been wanting to orchestrate a debate on that issue for decades, and I'm glad that this is finally happening. So, that's July 10th and 11th, which is a Thursday and Friday, and then two weeks from then, on the 24th and the 25th of July, also a Thursday and Friday, once again, Pastor Jeremiah Nortier is debating Jared K. Henry, and that time, the two-day debate will be on the question, can a Christian attain total freedom from known sin in this life on earth?

And the common way that people refer to that teaching is sinless perfectionism, but Pastor Jared K. Henry, the Nazarene who is defending the possibility that Christians can attain total freedom from sin in this life, he does not like the phrase sinless perfectionism, because he believes that it's only known sin that men can be free from, totally free from, and whereas there are always going to be sins that we commit even without our knowledge, that it would be a requirement of omniscience for somebody to claim that they can be free from all sin.

So, that's just a nuance in that, but make sure you mark down the 24th and 25th of July for that two-day debate, and I'm really excited about both of those, because I had never had a debate, either a live public debate or a radio debate, on either of those issues, and I'm sure you're pumped up about them too.

I am. I'm really excited for both. I do a lot of debating Church of Christ. I do a lot of debating Reformed theology, things like that, and so I feel like this may be a little bit more practical, and so hopefully after doing that, I can share some of that content on my channel, just to let people know.

I want to be able to be a voice defending very practical things that broadly evangelicals—biblical, sound, healthy evangelicals—share in common, so I want to let people know that. I want to throw my hat in the arena on many different.

Topics.

Great. Well, I'm sure the days are going to fly by, and we'll be sitting here preparing for the debate before you know it, and I do like Pastor Jared K. Henry. He's a very ironic man, a very humble and gracious man.

I've interviewed him before, when I was actually in agreement with him on something. He was publicly opposing the Nazarene seminary because they had somebody sympathetic towards homosexual activity being acceptable in the Christian church, and that person was eventually, thankfully, terminated from the seminary.

I don't know if Pastor Henry's personal activity opposing that had anything to do with it, but he's a nice guy, but just very, very wrong on both of those issues. Sure. And just out of curiosity, just to whet the appetite of our listeners, why are those issues so extremely important?

Why is it so wrong? Why is it so dangerous to ordain women into positions of leadership and authority over men?

Why the Ordination of Women and Sinless Perfectionism Matter

Yeah. So, not only is Scripture painfully clear on the matter, what a person has to do to misinterpret 1 Timothy chapter 2, that kind of hermeneutic and gymnastics really will bleed over into everything else, including the gospel.

So, I think that is the gateway. You unhinge the door wide open. When you ordain women, everything goes. Now, people don't have me saying that, but I just tell them to justify that interpretation or lack thereof.

It doesn't stop. Does that make sense? I try to research the arguments on the other side. They're so far reaching to say women preached. When Mary and all them saw that Jesus was arisen and on the tomb, they wouldn't preach.

It's like, yeah, but not to a congregation. You see so clear qualifications of what a man of God, Paul's words, not mine, of what someone who labors to teach and preach looks like. It's just the definition is so pointed.

I think the secular culture says, well, women are smart. Women can lead. Women can do these things. I'm the first to say, my wife is way smarter than me. But it is a part of God's design that humility and submission be a part of the family and church dynamic.

I'm going to press into how it's not just in roles, but by design. We see this in every domain of life. I'm going to say a P word, but there is a patriarchy that is going on that's inescapable that goes all the way back to God.

And as far as achieving total freedom from known sin in this life, why is that such a dangerous idea?

Yeah, so I'm going to research some of the nuance, but to me, it's really not going to matter a whole lot because there's a thing called sanctification that we wore against the flesh. It's Paul's words, not mine, that, oh, wretched man that I am, who is going to deliver me from this body of death.

I think there's going to be a deeper anthropology that me and the gentleman are going to have to talk about is the power of sin reigning in our members. So to me, in this life, you can't attain a perfection at any level.

Only Christ was the perfect human. He was able to be a better and second Adam. And so the whole point is we are against the flesh, we're warring against the pattern of the world and the enemy of darkness.

And so my whole thrust in that debate is going to say, look, it's great that someone says, yes, we should war against sin, but we're never going to attain the status that only is going to.

Be accomplished in glory and this side of that. Well, these should be utterly fascinating events, and I'm looking forward to them. And please pray for these events. Pray for both men involved, because we don't want Pastor Henry to come down with some kind of an illness or have some kind of providential hindrance for him to participate in these events.

So please pray for them, and please spread the word about them, and please listen when we are conducting these events live. And now let's go on to have you explain a little bit about the apologetic dog, for those listeners of ours who have not yet heard you do your apologetic mastery on that podcast.

The Apologetic Dog, Gospel Defense, and Doctrinal Controversies

Well, thanks so much. So the apologetic dog, the heartbeat behind the ministry is 1 Timothy 620, where Paul tells Timothy, oh, Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. And so the guard dog mentality is all Christians, we should be laboring to defend and guard the gospel of grace that's been entrusted to us.

And Paul goes on to say to Timothy, avoid irreverent babble, avoid contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge. And so how do we do that? We stand on the gospel of grace that exists in the broader context of our sovereign triune God, who has revealed himself in his life-breathed, life-giving word.

And so that is the framework, the Christian worldview, where we get truth, knowledge, how we ought to relate to one another and relate to God. And so my heart is just to defend the Christian worldview with the gospel of grace at the center.

Something that I try to focus in on is evangelize the church of Christ. I believe they've compromised the gospel by confusing the representation of baptism, the wonderful ceremony, sacrament given to the church.

But that is not the means of how we receive forgiveness of sins, even though, not in our justification, even though it has been prescribed to the church, is prescribed for Christians in our sanctification.

So I try to really bring clarity. My community here in Jonesboro, Arkansas, northeast Arkansas, there's a lot of church of Christ. So I just believe there's different gospels afoot, and I've been given tons of opportunities to be able to kind of shed light on that.

And I have a Facebook group called the Church of Christ Exiles, where many people have come out of the church of Christ and just need a sense of direction and have lost their community, if you will. And so that's a lot of content that you'll see me kind of contending with, along with hyper-preterism, which is just an awful teaching that just says all biblical prophecy was fulfilled at 70 AD with the destruction of the temple.

Once again, that's kind of prominent in my local area, just not too far from me, was a Baptist church, Southern Baptist church, that essentially got the golden boot because the pastor took a nosedive into that.

And so people have been knocking on my door asking me, what is hyper full-preterism and why is it dangerous? And I just say it redefines all of Christianity. And so those are some things you'll find me.

I really, Chris, I talk about a number of different things, but, and that's what I've learned with apologetics, is you want to prayerfully be sensitive to the needs of kind of the spirit of the age, right, of what needs to be talked about with God's people, with what is creeping up and trying to creep into the church.

And by the way, folks, you might want to.

Hear a testimony of a former hyper-preterist that is archived on ironsharpensironradio .com. Many of you are no doubt familiar with the name Jeff Durbin, who pastors alongside Dr. James R. White of Alpha Dominican Ministries at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona.

Well, Jeff was at one time a hyper-preterist, and he tells his story about how God delivered him out of that heresy. And I also conducted a debate on my program between Don Preston, who is probably the most well-known hyper-preterist alive today, the most actively involved in debate and so on.

He debated a man who was formerly Don's protégé and worked alongside him in the hyper-preterist circles at conferences and so on, but was also delivered out of that heresy, Sam Frost, and they debated each other on ironsharpensiron, and you could hear that debate.

If you look up, just type in Frost, F-R-O-S-T, and that will be just one of the number of interviews I've had with Sam Frost. I actually disagree somewhat with Sam though, because I don't know about you, Jeremiah, but I am a partial preterist.

Sam is no longer any kind of a preterist, but do you have any position on that?

I do, which by the way, I have Dr. Sam Frost on my channel all the time, me and him with the collaborations kind of going, so we respond a lot to Don K. Preston and some other hyper-preterists that exist out there, so I'm glad that you know him well.

We'll be doing some content in the near future. When it comes to partial preterism, I tell people, look, there are things in the past that we see in the Olivet Discourse, there are things that are just historic facts in the book of Revelation, but what I like about the idealist perspective is really applies the principle of the ongoing battle between good and evil, and I think even if somebody is partial preterist, a lot of those applications, we would yes and amen, so there's a lot of overlap I see with kind of the partial preterist paradigm with idealist principles of reading and understanding the book of Revelation, so I'm super charitable because we all need to rally together to have that dividing line of saying, look, full preterism is outside the bounds of orthodoxy.

Yes, and I think that some people use the wrong argument against partial preterism because they will make the claim that it's a doorway to hyper-preterism. Now, is it true that likely the majority of hyper-preterists started as partial preterists?

That's very likely true, but the majority of hyper-Calvinists, I'm sure, started as traditional historic Calvinists, and that doesn't mean Calvinism is any less true just because there is a distortion and a very twisted and warped version of that known as hyper-Calvinism, and by the way, for those of you who are listening who are not from theologically Reformed churches, hyper-Calvinists are not those that believe in the five points of Calvinism.

Hyper-Calvinists have a number of traits. Maybe you could chime in too, Jeremiah, but they typically do not believe it is the duty of Christians to evangelize. They don't believe that the gospel is an instrument, the preaching of the gospel.

They don't believe it's an instrument in the regeneration of lost sinners, and there are a number of other things that would make them stand out as being heretical, and there are different kinds of hyper-Calvinists.

You have some that have an enormous open gate of heaven where even non-Christians can enter into the kingdom of heaven if they live their entire lives without Christ. They may still be one of the elect or among the elect.

Many in the primitive Baptist movement would have that view, and then you have the opposite, very prevalent in the Netherlands Reformed churches where the gates of heaven are much more tightly shut, if it were, or the way is even more narrow than the Bible would teach, and you have congregations sometimes with over a thousand people in a Netherlands Reformed church, and only a handful of those people receive the Lord's Supper because they're the only ones who believe that they're of the elect.

But do you have anything.

To add about that? I do. I think one of the biggest—well, there's so many cautions when it comes to hyper-Calvinism, namely that it's just unbiblical. But yeah, the distortions come out with—I think the one a lot of people are most familiar with that you brought out is it's not up to us to evangelize, only to share the gospel to those people that give evidence in air quotes of them being regenerate, and that just flies in the face of all Scripture that talks about us sowing seeds, and we trust God to give the increase.

But yeah, that's one thing that rises to the top. The other, and I guess maybe there's just a lot of different shades of hyper-Calvinism, but I really think, from what I've researched there, is kind of a move from how could we say, you know, how God is sovereign, yes, but we would never infuse fatalism, which is a secular mentality that God arbitrarily selects people, and then we can conclude that then, therefore, it doesn't matter how we live our life or what we do.

No, those things will give evidence to what Christ is doing in and through his church. And so what I'm getting at is in these hyper-Calvinist movements is a form of fatalism, and I've heard their exegesis of how God hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he shows mercy to whomever he will have mercy, and he hardens whomever he is.

So, they will look into the verb tense that God is actively hardening there, which it is true, but we still have to ask in what way, which the book of Romans—and I would point people to Martyn Lloyd-Jones' excellent commentary on how God actively restrains his goodness in Romans 1 talks about he hands them over to their reprobate and debased mind.

So, God is active by restraining his goodness, and that is not the hyper-Calvinist move. It's God—it commits the heresy of equal ultimacy, that God works in the same way that he works in goodness to the elect, is he works in the hardness of heart and evil and wickedness into vessels fitted to destruction.

So, yeah, those are a few things that rise to the top. It's just out of step, and it doesn't represent who God.

Is. And it just popped into my head that our listeners who might want to find out more about hyper-Calvinism, I have returning to the program on Tuesday, July 1st, Dr. Thomas Nettles, who is one of the world's most prolific and renowned Baptist historians and authors.

He is returning to the program to defend John Gill as not being a hyper-Calvinist, which is the charge against Dr. Gill, probably by the majority of Reformed Christians. Identify Gill—.

Chris, I'll be sure and listen to that part. I'd be real curious to hear what all he has to say.

Yes, he is one of the very few voices amongst Sovereign Grace-believing Christians who defends Gill as not being hyper-Calvinist. So that's Tuesday, July 1st, on Iron Trumpet and Zion Radio. We're going to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we're going to be more focused on our theme, which is also the theme of the message that my guest today, Jeremiah Nortier, is going to be delivering at the Roadmap to Revival conference in Tullahoma, Tennessee.

And that theme is going to be Revival in Confessional Churches. And if you would like to ask Pastor Jeremiah a question, submit it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

Don't go away. We're going to be right.

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September I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen has lined up for me. On Thursday, September 18th at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastor's Luncheon at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville.

Then on Sunday, September 21st at 1 30 p .m., I'm speaking at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle on the theme, Can We Trust the Bible is the Authentic and Inerrant Word of God? I hope you can join Chris and me for both events.

For more details on the Free Pastor's Luncheon, visit ironsharpensironradio .com. That's ironsharpensironradio .com. For more details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, visit trbccarlisle .org.

That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, I'll see you in September in Pennsylvania for these exciting.

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's Word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune God.

We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ. In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every Sunday.

We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org. That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.

I'm Pastor Bill Shishko of The Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac, Long Island. I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program hosted by my long-time friend and brother, Chris Arnson, in the highest esteem, and I'm thrilled that you're listening today.

I'm also delighted that Iron Sharpens Iron is partnering with one of my favorite resources for Reformed Christian literature for decades now, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. Well, with the economic nightmare that we're all currently enduring, cvbbs .com, I'm going to enable you to build a wonderful personal library of the best literature that the Reformers, the Puritans, and the great Christian minds of today have to offer, and at affordable prices.

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And don't forget, cvbbs .com is now shipping worldwide. Now we're back with Pastor Jeremiah Nortier of Twelve Five Church in Jonestown, Arkansas. And can you tell us something specifically about that church?

You explained it last time, but the unusual name that you have.

Yeah, so our name is Twelve Five Church in Jonestown, Arkansas.

I'm sorry, did I say Jonestown?

Yeah, I was like….

Drink the Kool-Aid, folks.

Oh, that's good. So, Twelve Five comes from Romans 12, verse 5, which essentially is a verse about the church body. Even though we are individually one of another, we are one together in Christ, by faith alone, Christ alone, all by God's grace alone, to his glory.

So, we are a church plant that, I believe, we just completed around four and a half years. And so, I love Jonesboro. I've grown up here. But me and Pastor Nathan, in the early days when we planted, we just wanted something distinct.

We believe that there's a lot of evangelical churches, but we see a lot of lack of discipleship with theological training and sound theology, sound doctrine. And so, that's what we have aimed to do, is to be a part of a healthy church that aims to honor biblical fellowship, but also contends for sound doctrine, saying, hey, those things can coexist and have a holistic discipleship.

And so, we wanted to be unique in our name with a church and the city of churches. There's literally churches on every block, along with any restaurant and bank. So, Twelve Five just kind of stands out in that way, and we are a confessionally Reformed Baptist, but we wanted something to kind of pop in the name and not confuse people.

And some people, when they see the term Baptist, they have a lot of negative baggage with what that means. And so, this just kind of gives me flexibility of how to relate to people that either don't know about Baptist theology at all or maybe have a negative experience to say, hey, we're probably not like that.

You know what I mean? So, yeah, we're coming up on five years in September. Hey, Chris, we planted back during the COVID in September of 2020. Praise God. Well, I want to.

Give you folks the website if you're interested in visiting and even joining this church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, TwelveFiveChurch .com, and it's the word 12 and the number five, church .com. The word 12, the numeral five, church .com.

And as we said at the outset of the program, from September 12th through the 13th in Tullahoma, Tennessee, our dear friend Jeffrey Rice of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church in Tullahoma is hosting a Bible conference called the Roadmap to Revival.

And my guest today, Jeremiah Nortier, is one of the speakers. The other speakers include the aforementioned Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Jeffrey Rice himself, Jonathan Burris, who's been on the program recently, Keith Foskey, who's been on the program in the past, Claude Ramsey, who's also been on the program recently, Michael Schultz, who we're still trying to get another interview out of Michael.

We had technical difficulties the last time and I have not yet heard back from Michael. And Andrew Rappaport, my dear friend, who was just on last week, I believe, on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. This is a good lineup.

And before you get into your specific theme, which is our main focus today, tell us about the overall theme of Roadmap to Revival. Yeah, so Jeffrey Rice, really good friend,.

And, you know, something that we feel passionately about is Reformed Baptists, we have the right covenant theology, and we think that, you know, God has spoken to us by virtue of covenant and his word is broken up into two covenants, old and new.

And so we know that there's so many other good, healthy churches that maybe do not have the same covenant theology or systematic biblical theology framework as we have. But where there is truth, truth is honored.

God honors that. And so we really want to bring clarity on what it kind of means to be confessional, just at large, and what that means in application. And so I think that's kind of Jeff's overall mindset, because this was kind of put together on short notice.

You know, unfortunately, the G3 conference, you know, was canceled. And so I believe it was Dr. White that reached out to Jeffrey and was like, hey, you want to do a conference? He was like, yeah, sounds like a good idea.

So he reached out to me and was like, hey, what do you think about doing a revival in the midst of a confessional church? I told him I would love to do that.

What It Means to Be a Confessional Reformed Baptist Church

Great. Well, why don't you explain for our listeners, especially those who are not from confessional churches, what does it exactly mean to be a confessional Reformed Baptist church? And might conjure up thoughts in the minds of especially former Roman Catholics who are wrongly thinking, wait a minute, these guys have a little booth in their church where they sit down with the pastor and confess their sins, and he absolves them after they are directed to, as punishment, say a number of prayers and so on?

It's funny.

You're like, wait, he didn't say no to that. In fact, when you look at Roman Catholicism, it's Reformed Baptists that we are probably the most juxtaposed and combative to Rome, in my opinion. We Reformed the most.

We kept Reforming. That's what I tell my Lutheran friends and Presbyterian friends. So it's funny because I want to do another shameless plug. If people go to 12 Five YouTube channel, we are actually teaching through the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.

Last night, I taught the first four sections of chapter three of God's decree, and I've been reading James Renahan's book on his exposition of the 1689. One of the big takeaways of what makes a church confessional is, number one, we realize that we're building on the shoulders of giants.

We have a historic faith. I know contrary to Rome, the East and the West, they claim to be the ancient apostolic church, and they've preserved the faith. To me, they look at church history exactly backwards.

They look at the church fathers as the most mature, and I always push back and just say that's the church in its infancy stage. Now, surely, Christ has been building his church for 2 ,000 years, and the gates of hell will not prevail, and he has given us the Holy Spirit that guides us into all truth.

But Christ is sanctifying his bride not only on the individual level, but he is sanctifying the bride universal, and so we would expect there to be growth, clarity. You look at the clarity of the Trinity, and so forth, and so anyway, I believe Reformed Baptists, we have creeds, confessions, but in their proper context, not as ultimate, not as absolute or infallible, but just to say, hey, there have been giants in the faith that have come before us, and by God's grace, we are trying to continue to reform, right?

The church is always reforming, and so when we point to the 1689, we just say, hey, this is a great kind of standard to say that we believe God's Word is sufficient, and we can demonstrate over time how God's truth, his clarity has shown through the darkness, if you will, and this is just a document that we think really captures a lot of amazing truths, so I do want to recommend our audience of saying go check out the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.

There's a lot of really good confessions out there, but to me, this captures kind of the construct of the covenants really well.

Revival, Joy, and the Regulative Principle in Worship

Amen, and how does revival fit into a confessional Reformed Baptist church? People also have a very non-historic and unbiblical understanding of revival. Many in our charismatic and Pentecostal neighbors' churches would consider us the frozen chosen, and that if they were to ever visit our churches, they would say very often, well, there ain't revival in here, that's for sure.

These people are singing those stale, worn-out hymns, and they're not moving around when they worship. They don't seem very happy. They have an idea that revival is taking place when people are excited about singing and dancing around during a worship service, and some of them will even think that they can bring about revival and even schedule it on a specific day and time, come to our revival meeting this Sunday night or whatever.

So tell us about what is revival. We've been covering this actually a lot lately on the show, but it always helps to have more voices of truth explain these important things.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this topic because, number one, there's so many things that I want to say, and so I've not figured out how to structure it properly yet. But I think there's a lot of confusion, and first I want to say revival in the true sense that is good is just kind of spiritual awakening, meaning true conversion, right, where the Spirit truly regenerates hearts and is indwelling the saints and compelling us to live to the glory of God.

And so there's a bar to what that looks like. One of my favorite verses to kind of point people to is we are to worship in spirit from a heart of zeal and a heart of praise celebratory, and I want to talk about that a little bit later, but also in truth.

And so both of those must coexist, and Chris, I cannot wait. I think I'm going to push a little bit against the grain in the Reformed world to say, look, I think there's maybe a little bit of a false dichotomy that goes on because there is emotionalism versus true conversion, but since we are saints, since we have experienced the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit, we are in the better covenant.

And I want to wake up our Reformed Baptist brothers to say we can do things well in the new covenant that causes us to celebrate, and it's okay to be loud in some ways. We can be emotional in some ways, and I think some of our Reformed brethren look at that as, well, that's only been done poorly.

That's only been emotionalism. Therefore, anything that's loud and saying well to the glory of God kind of makes the hair on our necks stand up to think, oh no, it sounds like that's a swing of the pendulum.

And I want to say, no, no, no. We're Reformed Baptists. The new covenant is celebratory, and I think we become all things to all people. We realize there's certain context in the world where it's okay if a church convictionally wants to sing a cappella—you know, my exclusive psalmody brothers out there—but I want to say that's not exclusive.