1689 London Baptist Confession Of Faith (part 1)

to have a confession of faith. Why do you suppose that is? Because there is a lot of confusion.

And that's definitely one of the issues we want to address by having a confession of faith.

Yeah, a lot of different ideas, Charlie. Charlie's puzzled, he's confused. Okay, so good point.

So to condense what Charlie was saying, before we had so many resources available to us online and in print, a confession of faith was a condensed version, something that was printable, readable, something that you could refer to and understand essentially what the contents of the

Christian faith is. What about this concept?

Somebody says, and this is an example given in Carl Truman's book, The Credal Imperative, a man holds up his

Bible and says, this is our only confession, this is our only creed.

Is there anything wrong with that? But there's a difference between being based on that and saying this is it.

And we're going to expand on that a little bit. Obviously, he's talking about the

Bible when he says that kind of thing. But here's what Carl Truman says. He says, this is that statement, this is our only creed and our only confession.

He says, is somewhat ironic and sad given the no doubt sincere desire of the pastor and the people of this church to have an approach to church life that guaranteed the unique status of the

Bible. In other words, he says, that's true. This is a good thing. Then he says, there are two types of churches.

And this is important to think through a little bit. There are those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, things that are subject to public scrutiny, public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique.

And those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation, and crucially and ironically, therefore, not subject to testing by scripture to see whether they are true.

So if a church doesn't have a statement of faith, and most do, by the way, I go, first thing

I do when I go to a website is I look at another, you know, people typically are drawn by different things on the website, but I always go to, you know, what we believe, statement of beliefs, our statement of faith, whatever they call it, you know, and I start looking at that.

And, you know, you can have anything from a super short statement, you know, usually it might be like, you know, maybe as many words as are on these two pages, just like that, you know, we believe in the scriptures, we believe there and there, and then they just kind of give just the sketchy outline.

And then something more like ours is where we have the whole 1689 online there, something more in -depth like that.

And what Truman is saying is it's good to have something that people can read as opposed to something that they can't read.

If you have just a page or two, and then most of the doctrines are only known to the pastors, the elders, or something like that, then people can't say, well, is that really right?

Is that correct? Because there's no way of looking at it and comparing it to scripture and seeing if it falls short or not.

Truman says this, in other words, there is a sense in which the claim to have no creed but the Bible is incoherent given the fact that the

Bible itself seems to teach the need for creeds. I have a need, the need for creed.

Okay, let's have a look at 1

Corinthians 11, verse 2. Now I commend you, Paul writes, because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I deliver them to you.

Now that word traditions, I want to focus on that for a minute, because it also means teachings.

And notice what he says there. He says, maintain the traditions even as I deliver them to you.

Well, how did he deliver them to the Corinthians? What's that?

Well, he's writing this letter to them, right? But he's commending them for maintaining the traditions that they were taught, right?

Listen to what Leon Morris says. He says the teachings were the traditions, the oral teaching that formed an important part of early church or early

Christian instruction. They were not Paul's own, but teachings handed down to him, which he passed on.

The term stresses the derivative nature of the teachings in question, and particularly the gospel.

It did not originate in the fertile mind of the teacher. In the fertile mind or the fertile mind of the teacher.

Why is that important? I've been, I was exchanging pleasantries with my cousin and my uncle recently on Facebook.

In fact, I told him to stop posting because I didn't want to argue anymore. Because here's the thing.

If we believe that the once for all delivered faith, right?

In Jude, that Jude talks about. If that's what we are to guard, if that's what we are to reclaim, if that's what we are to preserve and hand down really as teachings, as traditions, then anything that is new, anything that springs out of a fertile mind, anything that is novel, anything that supposedly is given to you by an angel or something else, what are we to do with that kind of thing?

We're to reject it. Why? Because we compare it to what we have, and we say this is not correct.

This is not orthodox. This is not biblical.

So then I, this is my own writing, and please, I don't want to take too much credit, but I said new is not good.

Thank you very much. New is not good.

New is something that a lot of people value, right?

We don't want something, you know, what didn't you like about that church? Oh, I went in and it was just kind of musty, stale.

You know, the teaching was just so old school. See, I like to go into a church, you know, as a visitor and think it was so musty.

It was so stale. The teaching was so old school. This is good, you know, stale, maybe not, but I mean, you want something that is tried and true, and more importantly, as Carol said, biblical.

Why do you suppose biblically, how could you argue that new is not good? Okay, what's the biblical reference for what you're teaching me, right?

You say that this is a new thing, and this is really going to change the church, and it's going to help people and everything.

Well, what's the biblical reference for it? Good. Any other thoughts? Yes. Stand up and take a bow,

Mr. Goddard. Now, what's the biblical reference for that? Okay, you could say Galatians, but I'm going to go to Ephesians chapter four.

Let's turn there. Ephesians chapter four, Mr. Goddard, if you would read verses 10 to 14 for us, and then please wax eloquent.

No, I'm kidding about the waxing eloquent, but Ephesians four verses 10 to four. I'm sorry, did I say

Galatians? Ephesians four verses 10 to 14. Charlie poisoned my mind.

He put something in my fertile mind. Okay, thank you. This doesn't strike you as just, well, more than a little bit arrogant.

If somebody says, yes, Jesus gave to the church these men through the centuries, and yes, they were to equip the saints for the work of ministry, but I've discovered something that no one's ever seen before.

I remember, and I've given this example before years ago, obviously it was years ago because Mike and I were together in California and I was not here yet, so it had to be 15, 16, 18, 20 years ago,

I don't know, long time ago. And Mike says, go over to the church bookstore. He says, pick up this particular

New Testament translation. And it had a bent in it.

And he goes, don't even read the translation or anything else. He goes, just pick up the intro and read the first couple paragraphs.

And in it, the author said, who's pretty well known in our circles. And he says that he had discovered many nuances of the

Greek that no one had ever seen before. I close the book.

Put it back up on the shelf and I go, I'm done. I don't want something new.

If you say to me, I've got insights that no one has ever seen before, then I have news for you.

You're not on terra firma. You're out in the ether. And your next step might be a very problematic one, like a cartoonish kind of plunge.

It's not a good thing. The idea that Jesus somehow left the church without the knowledge of a particular doctrine for millennia, that is problematic.

And that's why when you hear the Mormons come to your door, we have the restored church, we have the restored faith, we have, or the

Jehovah witnesses telling you things that have never been heard before. There's a problem with that.

And there's a problem with it also when Christians say, well, this is something nobody's ever heard before, but I'm going to spring it on to you today.

No, this is the once for all delivered faith.

It's done. There's no new revelation. Please turn to second

Thessalonians 2 .15. Second Thessalonians 2 .15. We're out of even thinking about Galatians, so don't even bring it up.

Second Thessalonians 2 .15. Again, a similar charge from the apostle

Paul. And he says, so then brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

Again, Leon Morris says the prominent idea of paradosis, that's the

Greek word for traditions here, is that of an authority external to the teacher himself.

In other words, not something he created, but something that's been handed down to him, something outside of him. Another commentator points out that the word is used in the inscriptions of treasure lists and inventories, the articles enumerated being handed over to somebody else.

In other words, I bequeath this to so -and -so or whatever. Well, that is the kind of language that would be used to give items over.

And it's the same way Paul's saying, give these traditions, these teachings over to the subsequent generations.

This is a way of putting the truth that the gospel is not of, or it's a way of framing this, that the gospel is not of human origin.

The preacher is never at liberty to substitute his own thoughts for what he has received. The traditions that came both by word of mouth and by letter, and then he goes on to say,

Morris does, that it does not matter in which form God's word was delivered. Either way, it was authoritative.

So the idea is we are not as pastors and elders, any teacher. We're not to be innovators.

We're not to be inventors. We are to just be faithful passers -on.

Basically, the picture in Timothy is what? We take the baton and we pass the baton on.

And that's the idea. Dr. Waldron writes in his book, some argue against the legitimacy of confessions on the premise that confessions of faith undermine the sole authority of the

Bible in matters of faith and practice. And he went on in his book to say that, you know, that the framers of the 1689 and other confessions, the

Westminster Confession of Faith and others, they go out of their way to say, listen, this is no substitute for scripture.

And they would readily agree that if any point somebody found an error in there that disagreed with scripture or something like that, that it should be changed.

These confessions of faith are not something, you know, Steve didn't sit home and write it on Saturday night and then bring it in on Sunday morning.

There were scores of men who would, they hammered these things out, they debated them, they expanded upon them, they cut them down, they edited them, and they really very carefully crafted these statements of faith.

And now we have them and they've really stood the test of time. About the no creed but the

Bible comment, Waldron says this, he says, one writer proclaims to arrive at the truth, listen to this closely, and I want to get your feedback on this quote, to arrive at the truth, we must dismiss religious prejudices.

We must let God speak for himself. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth.

Now on the face of it, we'd go, that sounds good, right? Doesn't it? To arrive at the truth, we must dismiss religious prejudices.

We must let God speak for himself. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth.

And there was a problem. It was written by the

Jehovah Witnesses. And so,

I mean, this whole idea of the Bible alone, well, the Bible can be, as I was discussing with my cousin, my uncle, because being familiar with Mormonism, what they do with the

Bible, and you might wonder, well, how can any Mormon believe the Bible? How can they believe that they are going to, for example, be a

God? Or, you know, any of the other things that they believe? You know, why would they do baptisms for the dead?

Well, it's First Corinthians, what is it, 1529, something like that. Why would they believe that they can become a

God? Well, they take something like, have I not said ye are gods? And they yank it out of context.

And without context, and without really proper hermeneutics and study, you can come up with all kinds of things.

So did the Jehovah Witnesses. So can anyone. The foundation of a cult isn't necessarily, isn't that they necessarily dismiss the

Bible altogether, is that they use novel ways to interpret the Bible. And then they, over time, they will subjugate the

Bible to other so -called authorities. But, you know,

Scripture alone or Bible alone is good and right up to a point.

You have to also interpret it correctly. Waldron says, a confession of our loyalty to the

Bible is not enough. The most radical denials of biblical truth frequently coexist with a professed regard for the authority and the testimony of the

Bible. When men use the very words of the Bible to promote heresy, when the word of truth is perverted to serve error, nothing less than a confession of faith will serve publicly to draw the lines between truth and error.

So what he's saying there is essentially, look, if people have and do wander off into heresy by misuse and abuse of Scripture, well, what is the most sure way of kind of pulling them back or of even anchoring people from going too far?

Well, a confession of faith is a way, certainly a very good way to do that, because it kind of sets up the boundaries for which we will not go any further than the statement of faith.

Questions or thoughts about that? Okay. Our second question here, this one, that was one question.

That's pretty good. Question number two, is a confession of faith like Roman Catholic tradition, like the magisterium, like the church teaching?

Is there any difference between a confession of faith and Roman Catholic tradition or the

Roman Catholic magisterium? Yeah, because what Barry said, and let me just kind of alter it a little bit, but basically, if a

Roman Catholic disagrees with something that the church teaches and appeals to Scripture, the

Roman Catholic authority, the priest, the cardinal, whomever, will say, okay, well, let's go to the magisterium and see what the magisterium has to say, because we're going to straighten you out with the magisterium, with the church teaching.

Why? Because essentially, church teaching is, as Barry said, above. The tradition is above Scripture.

And with a confession of faith, with our confession of faith, what we're going to say is, if there is a conflict between Scripture and the confession of faith, then the confession of faith loses, right?

If there is some conflict, then Scripture would win out. Calvin, and this is, again,

I think related to us from Carl Truman's book, The Credal Imperative, Calvin debated tradition with a

Catholic cardinal on one occasion. The cardinal accused Protestants of abandoning the truth by abandoning

Catholic tradition. Calvin responded that the tradition that transmitted the correct understanding of Scripture from generation to generation belonged to the

Protestants. In other words, there's nothing wrong with tradition in and of itself, as long as, like what

Barry was saying, it's founded on Scripture. A confession of faith is meant to transmit the right understanding of the

Bible. Someone like Charles Spurgeon, therefore, I wrote this, that's why I'm struggling with it.

Charles Spurgeon could theoretically come to BBC and feel right at home, assuming he was alive.

Well, why would that be? Why could

Spurgeon kind of fit in here, outside of his infernal pipe smoking?

Because we both love Scripture, right? And we both frame the Bible, or we understand the

Bible within the rubric of the 1689 confession of faith. So he would see that we belong to the 16, or that we subscribe to the 1689

London Baptist confession of faith, and he would therefore have no problem here. Now, we would have a problem with him, because right away he'd want to preach, and that would be a bigger problem.

So he'd be taking all the pulpit time. That's okay. Carl Truman, again, he says the

Reformation was not Scripture versus tradition, but a scriptural tradition versus unscriptural tradition.

In other words, how do we understand Scripture? Is Scripture supreme or not? The Reformers would say, absolutely.

The Catholic Church said, absolutely, asterisk, because they would change it.

They had to. So we're not against traditions. We have traditions.

We are against unbiblical traditions, traditions which contradict Scripture. Question number three, what is a confession of faith?

Well, it's pretty easy. Here's Carl Truman. He says, a public statement of what a particular church or denomination believes that Scripture teaches in a synthetic form, a presentation that is not simply a collection of Bible verses, but rather a thematic summary of what the

Bible teaches. Okay. So when he says synthetic, a lot of us think, what?

What do you think of when you think of synthetic? Yeah, plastic, fake, right?

Like, you know, if I say, my ring is made of synthetic, you know, whatever, you don't think, oh, that must be really valuable.

You think it's trash. But what else, what does the word synthetic really mean at its root,

Charlie? To synthesize means to, yeah, bring things, different elements together, right?

Weave them together. And so that's basically what he's saying is what the, what a confession of faith does is it synthesizes, it brings together all these different ideas into a simple format and a simple way of looking at it.

So it's, it's more of a systematic approach without being a systematic theology.

And question number four. Oh, I should, I, it is not a systematic theology, and then it's not seeking to be comprehensive.

So it's not comprehensive. I mean, you can read it one night, I did. But it does not, it does set out the major doctrines of a church or denomination.

Okay, number four, question number four. Why do many churches reject lengthy confessions of faith?

Why do many churches reject lengthy confessions of faith? Why do you suppose that is? Yes, Taylor.

Marketing. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you know that people have, having been a

Saddleback, and what do they do at Saddleback Community Church, or Saddleback, what is it? I think it, maybe it is a community church.

Whatever they call it. I remember being there and just being kind of surprised when

Rick Warren or whoever was teaching would teach for like 10 minutes and then sit down and then they do a song.

And I thought, is that it? Is that the sermon? No, because after the song, they get up and do another 10 minutes of teaching, so to speak.

And then another song, and then another 10 minutes. Well, why was that? Why do you suppose they have these 10 minute segments?

To keep their attention. Because they know that people when they're at home and they're watching

TV, you know, it's like 10 minutes and then commercial break, 10 minutes, commercial break.

So it's 10 minutes, commercial break, 10 minutes, commercial break. I'm surprised that I didn't, you know, probably if I sat there and was really observant,

I'd see people when the speaker went to sit down, you know, a bunch of people break for the bathrooms, you know, or go grab some popcorn or whatever they do.

I don't know, you know. But part of it definitely is, you know, attention spans.

Why else do you suppose shorter is better, Charlie?

Keep the goats in the pews. Yeah, well, I mean, sure.

The more you say about what you're about, then the less likely you are to equate or to gather people together.

Here's what, here's a few thoughts. One is there's a tendency to equate new with what?

If I say something's new, then what's the first thought you think? If I say we have a new parking lot, we don't yet.

Better, right? New and improved, you know, better. It's bigger, better.

Newer is good. And so then the question would be, you know, a church comes out, you know, they've got 3 ,000 people and they come out and they say, hey, good news.

You know, that 17 word statement of faith we had on our website, we got rid of that. We installed the 16 and 9 confession of faith.

People are like, their first thought would be, why would we want a 320, 30 year old document, you know, as our statement of faith, what would be the point?

Carl Truman says, it would be a tragic irony if the rejection of creeds and confessions by so many of those who sincerely wish to be biblically faithful turned out to be not an act of faithfulness, but rather an unwitting capitulation to the spirit of the age, the spirit of the age being new and improved.

Newer is better. Waldron says, sadly, we live in a non -credal, even an anti -credal age marked by existential relativism, anti -authoritarianism, big words, and historical isolationism.

Many professing Christians regard creeds and confessions of faith as man -made traditions, the precepts of men, mere religious opinions.

When he says anti -credal and then existential relativism,

I'm like, what is he even talking about? I'll just summarize it this way.

We live, correct me if you think I'm wrong, we live in a rebellious time. Do people like authority or despise authority?

I think they hate it. Way back when

Horatius Bonar said this, he said, to any book or doctrine or creed that leaves men at liberty to worship what

God they please, there is no objection. But to anything that would fix their relationship to God, that would infer their responsibility for their faith, that would imply that God has made an authoritative announcement as to what they are to believe, they object with protestation in the name of injured liberty.

In other words, don't tell me what to believe, don't impose your beliefs on me. They don't like statements of faith.

You ever ask anybody what the source of their belief system is? I had a young woman

I was talking to years ago when I was a deputy sheriff, and she explained to me that her belief system was, and based on my background,

I found it intriguing. She goes, well, you know, I have a, like her mother was

Mormon or something like that. She goes, so I take some Mormonism, then my dad was Jewish, and you know, and so she goes,

I take a scoop of this and a scoop of that, and you know, this works for me. So I said, well, you know, kind of what's the authority for that?

And her authority, of course, was herself. And I'm finding it fascinating even watching, because I do pay attention,

I have a lot of Mormon friends on Facebook and whatnot, and I pay attention to what's going on in the

Mormon church. There's a real call for, I would say, revolution in the

Mormon church, where they want more acceptance of homosexuality and all the current modern trends.

Well, why is that? And I think it comes to the idea, here's the basic idea of the

Mormon church, if I could boil it all down, it's this, that God still gives revelation, just like he did before, in the exact same way.

He talks through prophets, and he gives them revelation today, and what happens when you have that mindset?

Anything goes. Joseph Smith marries several women, needs to cover that up somehow, so he gets a word from God, allegedly, the polygamy was okay.

Now, this is after he's done it, right? And the interesting thing, I really should bring it in sometime and read the revelation, because it's from God to Joseph.

But basically, it's bashing his first wife, and telling her that she needs to stop complaining about the servant, my servant

Joseph. I mean, Joseph Smith was probably like, well,

I know what I want to say to her, but how do I write that? Yeah, God told me, works every time.

Waldron, again, he says, citing A. A. Hodge, A. A. Hodge from Old School Presbyterian says this, he says, the real question is not, as often pretended, between the word of God and the creed of man, but between the tried and proved faith of the collective body of God's people, and the private judgment and the unassisted wisdom of the repudiator of creeds.

So again, it's this idea of, it's a deposit, a treasure box of truth that gets handed down from one generation to the next.

Question number five, why are creeds and confessions good? Why are they good?

Carl Truman says, my conviction, the creeds and confessions are a good and necessary part of a healthy biblical church life, rests on a host of different arguments and convictions, but at root, there are two basic presuppositions.

He had three, but I kind of threw the third one out as being entirely Presbyterian. Sorry. He says, this must be true for confessions to be the idea for the case for confessions to be a sound one.

He says, both go against the culture of today. Number one, number one reason, the past is important and has things of positive relevance to teach us.

I mean, it's amazing, you know, as I get older, now this is going to really sound arrogant, but I think

I'm getting wiser. And I never would have thought of this, really, when I was younger,

I never would have thought this, but, and why do you suppose that is? And it's not just me, I think people generally, when they get older, they get wiser.

Why is that? And I'll tell you why for you, for you young people, because every, pardon me, every stupid thing that you're thinking about doing, we've either done them or thought about doing them and then figured out why they were bad ideas, right?

That's what wisdom is. Wisdom is you look back on your life and you go, that was stupid. And then you hear somebody come up and say, you know what

I want to do what you did 30 years ago. And you go, that's stupid. Well, how can I say that?

Well, I can say that because been there, done that, you know, and I've got the scars to prove it.

You do get wiser. So the people, old things have something, not just old people, not just me and older people, you know, but things that have been tried over a long period of time have relevance today.

They've been proven again. New isn't necessarily good, but he goes on to argue.

He says, modern science militates against that. On page 25 of his book, he says that, uh, that there is a built in narrative of progress whereby everything, or at least almost everything just keeps getting better.

And when you think about it, in some cases it's true, right? We just got a new coffee maker. It's way better than the old one.

I mean, it is deluxe. I even liked the coffee pot better than the old one, you know, because it actually pours like I would expect a cup to pour.

So new can be better, but it's not necessarily better. He goes on to say, he says, throw concepts like evolution into the mix.

And you have a gravitational pull within the culture towards the future build on the assumed inferiority of the past.

Now there was a politician not too long ago who said the arc of just, or the arc of, uh, how do you put it?

The arc of history bends towards justice. What did he mean?

He meant that over time injustice would be corrected, right? In the future, things will be better than they are now.

The things are just going to get better and better and better. Well, is that true? Are things going to get better and better and better?

What does the Bible say? Things are going to get worse and worse and worse.

You know, when Paul writes Timothy about the last days, he doesn't paint a very glowing picture.

When Paul writes the book of Romans and he talks about the evolution of mankind, you know, of society, it's not getting better.

It's getting worse and worse. And that's what we see when we think about things like, uh, uh,

I, I know that, uh, what, what's his name? Bruce Jenner is in the news. Again, he was doing a series of interviews and I couldn't help.

I saw just a clip, just a 20, 30 seconds of him talking.

And of course he wants to be now called she, and I thought, you know, 30 years ago, that man would have been hospitalized and he would have been medicated.

In fact, they probably would have put them something into something akin to a stupor, right? But now he's a celebrity.

He's bold. He's brave. Of course, everybody wants to refer to him as a woman.

I'm just like, how do you think the guys that he whipped in that, you know, Olympics feel about that?

We were beaten by a woman. Nope. Or his kids, you know, he has kids. Our dad is a woman.

No, but anyway, are things getting better and better?

No, we're just as a society, our minds are getting really warped. I would say.

So again, the idea that having a past and anchor in the past, something secure, something that we can pass on.

I mean, if the Lord tarries for another 300 years and we can keep the 1689 intact and in print,

I think it will be just as valid and just as relevant 300 years from now as it is today. His second point was that language helps both in the transmission and the preservation of truth.

And really, if we understand anything about our society today, it's one that there isn't a lot of clear thinking.

But the second thing is that words have lost a lot of meaning, right? It's oftentimes difficult to understand what somebody's trying to say because they use words in a ways that were never meant to be used.

I said here, words have become so malleable. Truman says, page 32, he says that Christianity is a way of life and not a set of propositions has become something of a mantra among younger

Christians in the last 10 years. Now, what does he mean by that? I mean, I remember or you even hear this.

Christianity is not a religion, right? It's a, you guys can finish this, right?

It's a relationship with Jesus. Now, is there truth to that? Yes. In other words, it's not just a series of rules.

It's about knowing Jesus Christ, but you can't know

Jesus Christ, right? Apart from doctrine.

You can't know Jesus Christ apart from knowing truths about him. So this whole idea of, is this about a relationship?

Well, it's not just about a relationship. In other words, a relationship, Janet and I have a relationship, right?

I don't have a relationship with Jesus. I love

Jesus. I worship Jesus. And here is why, you know, in other words, there has to be some content in that.

There has to be some truth within that that goes beyond, you know, just, well,

Janet and I have been married a long time and I find her very attractive and she does these things and I really like that about her and all that.

We don't have that kind of relationship with Jesus. So I, every time I hear the, it's not a religion, it's a relationship,

I start getting wobbly. Why? Because that's the wrong set of ideas. Christianity apart from content, apart from doctrinal content is what?

It's nothing. I mean, it's anything you want it to be. And that's what Christianity has become, right? Who are you to say who's a

Christian and who's not? Who are you to say who's a Christian and who's not? Well, in one sense, that's very true, right?

God is ultimately judge of the heart. But if the Bible says X and somebody refuses to obey that, or somebody refuses to see it or whatever, well, then there's a real question about whether or not they're a

Christian. Because it's not just about the relationship, it's about the creed.

It's not just about deeds, it's about creed. There has to be some belief, there has to be some content. And creeds ultimately are bulwarks, they're fortresses against cultural pressure to alter or even jettison truth.

As I was saying, we really need, we need to close. But if you look at the Mormon church, and I think it is a good example, because they don't have this sort of thing, and they are being pressured to change, well, why?

And they already have softened on the issue of homosexuality. Because God can change things.

In fact, I was in church in 1978 or 79, when they changed the rules about blacks being able to have the priesthood.

Before that time, blacks could not have the Melchizedek priesthood. And all of a sudden, you know, the

IRS was going to look at their tax status, the prophet got a word. And boom, it changed just like that.

In fact, I mean, if you go down, it's really remarkable how the prophets would get these words from the

Lord. Because like, for example, Utah wanted to join the United States. Well, they had polygamy.

And the United States wasn't going to let them join the union. Now, today, it would be no problem. But they weren't going to let them join the union until they got rid of it.

Well, Utah couldn't get rid of it because it was the LDS doctrine. Word from the

Lord, boom, the doctrine went away. And Utah got into the United States just like that. Consistently, they would do things like that.

Anyway, we need to close. We'll pick this up next week. And we'll start talking about 1689 and what it says about scripture.

Father, thank you for this time. Thank you for your word. Thank you for the men over the centuries that you have given the church to help us to understand you and your word better.

Lord, let us love the Lord Jesus Christ with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And let us not be those who would say this is just a relationship, but we need to understand more of this

God that we say that we love. Father, bless each one here. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.