I Come to the Garden Alone? | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to have a conversation about what does it mean to mature in Christ?

How do we grow to be in the fullness and likeness of Jesus Christ? And we may have a little bit of fun with an old hymn that's used out there, but the hymn is definitely a result of a theology that individualizes our faith, and it has us emphasizing a seclusion of our faith instead of the corporate body.

So we're going to look at it through the Bible and ask the question, how is it that God grows us in our faith?

We hope you enjoy. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

Christian life from a confessionally reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are

Pastor Justin Perdue of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, Pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

As always, Justin, we find it good to just get to the point, and it's what we're going to do.

But before we do, as I've already said, I want to take a moment for those of you that might be anxious and just need subtle reminders around the house, whether it's a coffee mug or a sticker or a magnet, whatever.

We would encourage you to trust Christ and calm down. You can do that by going to our store, and it's an easy way to support our ministry, but it's also just a great way to remind yourself that Christ is in control.

He has finalized all of our hope. His promises are ever true. One of those ways,

Justin, that we've been told in the past to be reminded of that is by an interesting hymn that was written in 1912.

Justin, tell us probably about maybe one of the most confusing and theologically off hymns we love to sing in history.

One of the worst hymns written in the last hundred years. I'm always hesitant to say the worst, but it's not good.

What's the answer? It would be, I Come to the Garden Alone for 500. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Yes, that's right. I Come to the Garden Alone. I don't know all the words, admittedly.

John and I were talking about this hymn before we hit record based on the content for today. This is the episode title with good reason because many people are familiar with that hymn.

I Come to the Garden Alone is a song about spending time with Christ alone.

One of the most baffling lines in that hymn is that he walks with me, talks to me, and tells me

I am his own. The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

To which you and I both are like, really? Nobody else?

No other child of God? No other adopted son or daughter of God? No other person who's been united to Christ has ever experienced the joy that you alone experience with him when you alone have that time with him?

Could we just stop for a moment and think about the gravity of such a statement? Do you want to talk about that at all?

Verse one, I Come to the Garden Alone while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the

Son of God discloses. Then the refrain is that he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me that I am his own.

I appreciate the affectionate part of it, that I am his own, but the part of it is this concept that first of all

God is speaking to us outside of his word, which is interesting, but at the same time, no other person on the planet has ever known the joy than this particular individual does right now while the dew is on the garden.

I know this is probably a beloved hymn by many. To this day,

I have family members who enjoy that song. It's a catchy tune.

It is a series of podcasts that are to come. One of them,

Justin and I had already talked about today, is on revivalism, which today is not the day we're talking about.

This hymn is definitely the result of revivalism. Justin, I think it'd be helpful for us to expose why it is that we might sound a little punchy and pushy, but our goal and aim is to help you see how confusing this type of understanding of a relationship with the

Father is. It's actually going to sap joy and rest from you instead of giving it to you like you think it is.

Justin Perdue I think really quickly, I come to the garden alone as a far cry from the words of Christ.

There's a better way to talk about the fact that we're his. John 10 comes to mind where he says that I know my own and my own know me, or then he says again, my sheep hear my voice,

I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

Those are some words to build a life on right there. What we're trying to highlight today humorously and maybe just with some sarcasm, trampolining or whatever off of this old hymn that's well known to people, we're trying to highlight the fact that in the evangelical church, in the

American church, we think in not so great ways about our relationship to God wholesale, but then we certainly don't think in good ways about how we would mature in Christ.

We think that the real stuff of the Christian life happens when we are alone.

How often do you hear Psalm 46 .10 ripped out of context? The be still and know that I am

God. You've got to get alone, and you've got to be still. You've got to listen for that still, small voice, and all those kinds of things.

That's what we say often. It's just baked into the vernacular that we use all the time in the church.

People have absorbed that we're all individualistic. In the modern

West, we're all individualistic in our mindset anyway. That's even celebrated to some extent in America.

Be all you can be and make of yourself what you can make of yourself, etc. We've all got that.

We're all coming with that anyway. Then we hear the teaching and the revivalistic stuff and the pietistic stuff, meaning

I don't know that we need to define those words, but we're just maybe going to trust that we've talked about those enough over time.

We hear all this kind of teaching that then doubles down on that what really matters is me and God.

It's me and Jesus. It's me and my Bible. It's me and my quiet time. That's the real marrow and the lifeblood of the

Christian life. That occurs when I'm by myself. This podcast today is us saying, hold up.

Perhaps we've gotten it wrong. Let's look to the New Testament. Let's look to the confessions produced through the history of the church and just have an honest, frank conversation about this.

If you were to tell Christians from any other era of human history over the last 2 ,000 years, obviously, that the most significant things for them spiritually happen when they're by themselves, they would look at you sideways.

How is that even possible? For the first 1 ,600 years of the church's existence, people didn't even have their own

Bibles. The only access they had to the Word of God was through the reading and the preaching of the

Word in the corporate assembly. That's a huge thing. The emphasis of the

New Testament unashamedly is just plural exhortation, plural nouns all over the place.

This is a group thing. The Christian life is inherently corporate.

Christian devotion is inherently church -shaped, and maturation in Christ is a community project.

Well, my mind is racing with verses right now. I just finished

James. I can think of Peter. I'm just going to start quoting some of these passages that warn us against the very opposite of what you're saying.

There's this individualism where it's me and my relationship with God, and it's on me to develop that relationship, whether it's through prayer,

Bible reading. If I'm struggling with sin or if I'm struggling in my maturity, it's because I have not developed to go back to the song.

I haven't spent time in the garden, and I need to get out there when that due's there. When is there due in the mornings?

There's this concept that we must be spending time with God in this development, and we're going to have this existential experience and joy that's there.

One who does not experience that enlightenment in many ways, there might be something wrong with you.

What's interesting is that the Bible does not take such a wonderful position about the human heart.

It takes a very different position of the human heart that one who is isolated and by themselves will often wander from the truth.

This is why Hebrews says, consider daily how to build one another up, that you aren't hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

This is why when one does start to wander from the truth, James 5 says, go to them and restore them so that they don't end up dying through discipline.

How many times do we hear about the strength and the growth of the body? All of Ephesians 4, just go and read it.

Verses 12 through 17 is all about the body of Christ developing and growing.

I love this. I want to read one from Hebrews 10. He says, you want to talk about strength, where strength is found.

Paul is speaking about the function of the church here. He says, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the

Son, to mature manhood to the measures and the statures of the fullness of Christ. Paul is giving you a guarantee of what that looks like.

Here's the negative warning, so that we are no longer children tossed to and fro by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.

You can see that the Bible in multiple passages is concerned about what happens when we isolate ourselves away from the body of Christ.

The body of Christ is functioning around the words of Christ. Even when it says, consider how to speak psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another.

Why? So that we are uplifting ourselves. Justin Perdue Correct. A brief thought as you're talking, because we were talking about this earlier.

How do we know God? We know him through his word. How do we experience

Christ tangibly in this world? We experience him through his body called the church.

How are we going to grow most effectively in our knowledge and our understanding of the word through which we know

God? Is it going to be in our private Bible study, or is it going to be in the assembled church when the word is opened and read, and when there is a man gifted and equipped by God set apart to minister the word, who will then open the scriptures and preach?

We're going to talk about this more in a minute. I think the answer is obvious. One is a private exercise where I could go astray in my understanding.

The other is a corporate exercise where the Holy Spirit of God is gathering with his people and ministering in the midst of his people.

We'll talk about that more in a minute. I want to read Hebrews 10 for a second, because we want to continue to give you some Bible. We don't have time to read all the passages, but some of these passages are just pointed.

This is Hebrews 10, beginning in verse 19. I'm just going to read a half dozen verses or so. Listen for the corporate aspect of this.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more, as you see the day drawing near.

That's a beautiful passage of the Christian life and the value of the church and how we live together and how we together are assured and how we together confess, how we together stir one another up through our meeting together, which we're told not to neglect.

Justin Perdue Well, you're relying on the strength of many. Justin, how many times have we showed up on a

Sunday ready to preach, and yet our hearts are dry? We've been distracted by sin.

We've been crippled by sin. We need to confess our sins. We need to hear the saints sing the gospel.

We need the fellowship of the believers. Those are the things.

When we individualize our faith, it's all about the development. Here is the personal development plan for the individual to grow into knowledge and to grow into maturity.

I look at Scripture, and yes, there are individual responsibilities. We must repent.

We must believe. We must confess. We must obey. But how is it that we grow?

That's really what this conversation is about. Going back to the reason why we picked this song,

I Come to the Garden Alone, the point of it is this developing of a relationship with Jesus happens in this isolation.

I'm sorry, but that just isn't it. Justin Perdue Well, your relationship with Jesus is personal, but it's never private.

Justin Perdue That's good. Justin Perdue That's not unique to me. Others have said that. If I can just jump in really quick on something you said, how many

Sundays do we even, as the primary preaching pastors of our respective congregations, come?

We've labored. We've studied. We're prepared to preach. The Lord always is faithful to do this.

He always prepares our hearts and our minds to preach God's Word, but we're human beings. Some Sundays you go to church.

You're driving to church. You feel frail. You're distracted. You're burdened by your own sin, whatever it may be. You show up there, and you're encouraged.

I am. I'm encouraged by talking to saints before the service and all those kinds of things that we do leading to the worship time.

But then when the service begins, as I participate in the service before the sermon, by the time we have confessed sin and been absolved of our guilt, by the time we have had

Scripture read over us, by the time we have confessed our faith using an ancient creed or an article from our confession, by the time we've had multiple corporate prayers of petition or praise or thanksgiving or whatever it may be, and we've sung, we've encouraged one another in Psalms, Hymns, and spiritual songs,

I am affected. Then I get into the pulpit affected by what we have done.

Even the preaching time is a corporate experience for me as the preacher.

I'm under the Word, just like the congregation is under the Word, and we together are experiencing this.

I use that Word on purpose. The Word experience has been hijacked in our contemporary setting because of all the nonsense, wacko, and attractional approaches to ministry.

We've got to make it a rock concert, and we've got to make it fun and engaging for the non -believer. That's really bad methodology, and that's a product of revivalism, which is another conversation for another day.

That has made confessional reform types at points shy away and be nervous about using the word experience regarding corporate worship.

We don't want to overly subjectivize religion. That's something we push back against, but it's appropriate to say from a confessional reformed ordinary means of grace perspective that what we do on the

Lord's Day is a corporate experience. There's a reason why you can't go to church online. There's a reason why you can't replicate the thing that happens once when the saints gather, and the

Word is preached, and we sing and pray and come to the table, because the Lord is uniquely present with us in those moments to minister to us through the means that he has ordained.

The preaching time is the most hands -down transformative time that we ever spend with the

Word of God when we sit under it together and it's preached. The law is expounded. The gospel is expounded.

The mercy, the grace, the power of Christ are extolled, and we are changed.

You can get your free copy at theocast .org. Well, the question that we love to ask is entrepreneurial country.

We live in a country that's expanding. We have rapid expanding. I was just watching some stuff on Elon Musk this morning.

It's just fascinating how his brain is and what he's been able to expand. What an incredibly gifted human being.

He's eccentric. Right. He's always asking basically what works. What works? What works better?

We love that question. That's the question of pragmatism. In many ways,

I absolutely am a Christian pragmatist. Under the authority of the

Bible, we are. I want to know what works best, and we learned that from his

Word. I want to know how to become mature in Christ so that I'm not tossed about by every wind of doctrine.

If I'm not being tossed about, it means I have rest and I have assurity. I have joy. I have the capacity to suffer long.

I have this capacity to be patient and give to others. Sacrificially, I can lay my life down.

I want to know the pragmatist way of doing that. This is why God's Word becomes so powerful for us because it's not silent in this.

As a matter of fact, I'm just going to go ahead and read it because it's a beautiful way of summarizing what you and I were saying.

This is Paul writing to the young pastor encouraging him. In 2

Timothy 3 .16, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching and reproof and for correction, for training and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is the judge of the living and the dead, and by his appearing in the kingdom, preach the

Word. He's emphasizing the Word that you have. You need to go proclaim it because there are going to be people in the midst of you preaching, reprove, rebrook, exhort, and patience in teaching.

There's coming a time where people are going to be looking for other ways because they're trying to fulfill their own passions.

I would say, Justin, a lot of what we see today as acceptable living as a

Christian is people trying to fulfill their own passions while pursuing maturity in Christ.

Let me explain to you what I mean by that. We can put this in the notes here.

I think Justin and I will probably do a podcast on this soon. I recently preached a sermon on reclaiming what is biblical love.

Here's the short story. God says that his love is unconditional and full of sacrifice.

Just read Romans 8. When you look at human love, human love is looking for an experience in two ways.

It's transactional. You make me feel good. The second part of it is that I love things that are beneficial to me.

This is the complete opposite of biblical love. According to God, the way in which we're supposed to love is there are no conditions that you need to meet in order for me to give you love.

Secondly, it's going to require everything. This is John. No greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.

What's hard about this is that the entire Christian faith has nothing to do with individualism.

It is 100 percent. I seek God's love for me. It's unconditional, and it's full of sacrifice.

Then he says, I want you to live that way, which means I'm immediately drawn into the family of God.

I do not put conditions on my brothers and sisters, and I lay my life down for them. Then Jesus says, I will give you joy.

He goes, when everybody does this, when the body functions properly, everybody is built up into love, which means we all have joy.

That is a complete opposite view. Basically, the world says, no, human beings are frustrating.

The church is messed up. The church is full of hypocrites. I'm just going to do this on my own.

That is not a biblical view of Christianity. We would never really word it that way.

I love this because every lie is about 99 percent true. Satan has convinced us that you don't need the church to grow in Christ.

You just need the Bible. That's all that really is needed. You need the Bible and the Holy Spirit, and you can do this.

Obviously, you're not sufficient.

No Christian is going to claim that they're sufficient. They know they need grace. They know they need God's Spirit. That's true, but you also need the church.

That is not a slap in the face to the Holy Spirit because he's the one who tells you that you need the church in his word.

You read Ephesians 4 earlier. We need the gifts of pastors and teachers. We need the gifts of our brothers and sisters, the ways that they're able to minister to us.

We need one another. Like you said, we're adopted into the family of God, and then immediately we're told how to live alone.

No, we're told how to live together. It's clear that the New Testament is a corporate emphasis.

I want to make this very clear. We are not saying that the private

Christian life is insignificant. We're not saying that your private life is irrelevant. We're not saying it doesn't matter, but what we are saying is that your corporate life as a

Christian drives your private life. I think in the American church, we have that inverted.

We think that the private stuff, my personal time, etc., is what makes me useful as a

Christian so that then in a corporate setting, I might do something meaningful. Whereas in reality, corporate worship is given to you for your nourishment and your sustenance and your protection because you're a pilgrim and a sojourner in this world.

Then, having been fed by God and being met by God and ministered to by God on the

Lord's Day as you gather with God's people, you then are nourished and sustained in such a way that you can go about and love your neighbor throughout the rest of your week and love your family so that you might be useful there.

Justin Perdue goes back to pragmatism. We ultimately want the results the

Bible promises to be completely full of joy and built up in love. You can't have that unless you're mature in Christ.

Paul prays this to every congregation. I pray that you are mature in Christ. I pray that you are in Christ, that you're full of Christ.

That's all we're trying to help expose everybody to. The Bible isn't optionable.

Sometimes people wonder why they have such deep struggles in their faith and why they are constantly feeling like they're under attack.

That's because when you are alone, you are going to be weaker than you are if you are alone.

Hebrews says that the design of the elders is to watch over your soul.

They're supposed to give care for your soul. There's so much that says to bury one another's burdens and fulfill the law of Christ.

We just flippantly say that, but think about what Paul says. When you care for each other, that requires you to be with somebody.

You can't carry a burden. Love your neighbor as yourself and do all these things for one another is the fulfillment of the law.

That's Galatians 3 and Romans 13. I want something that works.

When I think about investing in money or if I'm thinking about building a house, whatever it is, you want something that actually is going to work.

It's not going to just be in theory. I know this works. What's great about the Word of God is that if you want that joy of being mature in Christ where you are resting in the absolute promises of God, that doesn't mean sinlessness.

That's impossible. What it does mean is that we can find that true status of rest and that capacity of enjoying the love of God.

You can actually have joy sacrificing yourself for the sake of others.

You can have that, but we have been duped and misled. Satan has convinced us.

He isn't convincing us to go away from the Word of God. He's not convincing us to abandon

God in general. He knows where the source is. He has access to the Bible. He knows where the source is.

The source is in the gathered church. Justin, you had made a comment, and I want to just add one thought to that. We don't really understand when

Paul says, when the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love. When it says, grieve not the Holy Spirit, he's talking about the gathered church in Ephesians 5.

That's at the end of 4. We tend to think about grieving the

Holy Spirit as an individual thing, whereas in reality it's all about how we speak to one another when we're together.

Justin Perdue Right, because at the beginning of the chapter he says, be eager to maintain the bond of peace. The unity of the

Spirit and the bond of peace. Justin Perdue Tearing apart the unity of the church through how we speak and divide is what he means. Justin Perdue This is the whole book of James, which we had mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

James is writing to a congregation that is dividing itself. He's encouraging them to set down these divisions.

He says, why do you fight? Is it not because your passions are at war with one another? Individualizing Christianity is the greatest way to deconstruct it and make it ineffective.

What I mean by ineffective is that it's not literally giving people hope and joy and rest. You have

Christians wandering around doubting their salvations, being hateful and mean to each other, and not actually being effective in building each other up.

We're tossed about. People get angry with bad theology.

I don't get angry with bad theology. That's the result of us not taking God's word seriously.

This is what ends up happening. Poor people who are God's precious children are being tossed about by all kinds of bad stuff.

It's our job to rescue them with patience and joy. This is James 5. They've wandered from the truth.

We need to bring them back. Justin Perdue I have several thoughts all around corporate worship that I think are relevant to this discussion.

The first thing is backing the truck up a little further. I fear that if you were to ask many evangelicals, why do you need the church?

I don't know that they would quite know what to say other than some sense of moral obligation. If you were to ask the average evangelical, why do you need corporate worship?

I think they would struggle to answer that question too. In some contexts, it seems like the corporate service is really just a stationary

Billy Graham crusade and it's aimed at the non -Christian. Maybe it's a piece of my evangelism and I'm getting people to come to church with me.

Maybe for some people it's a supplement or a vitamin or I go because it's exciting and I enjoy the speaker.

It's going to help me have a better week or something. Maybe that's a reason. Again, I think a sense of moral obligation.

I'm supposed to go to church. That's a reason why some people say we should go. I could give a number of other stock answers that you would hear.

Why do you need corporate worship? Some people, in a more serious -minded way, would say we glorify God in our worship.

I think what's conveyed in all of that is we have missed the point, in part at least, of what corporate worship is for.

Why do we come? We come because we are in need. The Lord has ordained corporate worship for our benefit, for our sustenance, and our protection.

It's just like Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. I think the same is true of corporate worship.

Corporate worship was made for man, not man for corporate worship. We were made to worship and glorify

God, but God doesn't tell us to do something that's arbitrary. He tells us to come and sit under the

Word and sing and pray and partake of the table and administer baptism. Why? Because that's how faith is imparted.

It's how faith is sustained and confirmed, and it's how we're grown. I'm just going to be very clear.

Coming that way with a collective sense of our need of Christ, partaking of the means that God has given, singing praises to Him, confessing

His truth, sitting under His Word, all of those things, having the law and the gospel preached, all of that glorifies the

Lord very much. We don't need to pit the two against each other, but so often I think we view corporate worship as like we need to come and we need to contribute something.

We need to be doing something that God needs or God desires, or that we're going to be useful somehow, or that me showing up is somehow this big deal that I'm bringing something to the table, when in reality we're coming to receive from God on the

Lord's day. We are coming together to encourage one another and build one another in the faith, amen, as we all cling to Christ and as we receive

Christ in corporate worship. It's just a very different perspective, and none of that in any way is confusing the glory of God or anything like that.

God is very much glorified as His people gather knowing they need Him, desperate for Him to do for them what they could never do for themselves.

We come together loving one another inherently because of the fact that we understand why we're here.

Jon Moffitt Yeah. How many times does Paul mention the power of the preaching of God's Word?

We already read 2 Timothy. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, Romans 3.

He talks about sanctification. Sanctification is by hearing and believing the

Word of God with faith. What's interesting is that I know people can hear us really emphasizing,

I would say we're emphasizing what Scripture is emphasizing, to the detriment of some kind of a personal quiet time or whatever you want to call it.

My encouragement to you is this. The way in which the Bible is concerned, like God's Word written to His children is concerned, is that we know and believe and do

His Word. Right, James? Be doers of the Word and not hearers only. The major concern is that we are in the knowledge and obeying the knowledge that we hear.

Obeying literally can be resting on the promises of God, right? Know these things and believe them. It's more important that we are living every day in the truth of God's Word and that that is what shapes and governs our life.

If someone finds hope and encouragement and desires to spend time in His Word, engaging it more in that way, they have every right and joy and freedom to do so.

We would say, praise God for your time to be able to do that. But what I do not want to do, and we're going to spend some more time in SR speaking about this, is that we have to emphasize what

God's Word emphasizes. I've had people say, Justin, if someone is not wanting or at least willing to read their

Bible on a daily basis, they should question their faith. My struggle with that is we long for the

Word of God, and I think that is we want to see it, we want to know it, we want to believe it. But the act of reading

God's Word is never a litmus test, and it should never be a barometer of one's maturity.

When Paul describes a mature Christian in Christ, he describes the fruit of the Spirit. Patience, meekness, long -suffering, gentleness,

I would say sacrificial love. That's a mature Christian, but many times it's the amount of time and longevity one has spent in reading a particular book, and that's not the evidences of maturity.

Justin Perdue. Let me give an anecdotal illustration to tie some of these things together, and then

I'll hand it back to you and we can move over into the SR podcast. Here's something that I think is a dead giveaway that we've gotten this twisted.

If you were to ask a person, what's the Lord teaching you these days? How would people answer based upon how they've been conditioned to answer?

They think that what you're asking is a super hyper -subjective individual question.

I need to come up with some kind of insight that I've gained through my own personal time, rather than saying my pastor preached

James 5 on Sunday, or rather than saying my pastor preached the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday, and I'm learning more of what it means that the

Lord is faithful and how there's healing in the confessing of sin. I'm learning more of the distinction between the law and the gospel, and I'm seeing how

God's law works in more ways. I'm seeing how the gospel is this and the declaration of God that I am just because of Christ.

You can't answer like that. You're talking about what you learned in church on Sunday. No, I mean,

I need some personal insight that you've gained when you were in personal quiet time. It shouldn't be that way,

John. Last thought here related. We're told in the Scriptures that it's a good thing to meditate on God's law.

It's a good thing to understand and to believe God's word and to meditate on it. What does that mean?

Meditation in our context either means some kind of Eastern religion thing or it means quiet time, whereas in reality what that means is to live a life where all of your life is lived in light of the truth of God's law.

It's ever before you and it guides you. So how does that occur?

I would suggest that if we are thoughtfully and intentionally engaged in the corporate life of the church and we're there on Sunday and we're sitting under the word and we're participating in the service and all those things, we're living life in the fellowship of the saints, then we're going to be meditating on God's word.

If the word of God preached and read in the assembly reverberates around the congregation all week where we talk about what we're learning together, we can live in light of God's word all the time in a corporate way.

I would suggest that's huge and massively important. Then let that drive your own personal study of the

Scriptures because you're going to learn how to study the Bible through the corporate preaching of the word. That's so good.

I'm going to make this observation. If you got this far, some of you, if not a lot of you, are very discouraged at this moment because you believe everything that you hear.

You're convinced that this is biblical, you can see it in Scripture, and yet you're thinking to yourself, that's not my experience in my church.

I think this is why it's so important that church become as biblical as possible.

If you find yourself in an unbiblical context, do your soul a favor and find a church that is going to not be perfect, may not even be reformed, but they're going to administer the word of God faithfully week in and week out and provide a place for burden bearing and to care for one another.

This is another great reason to why we would ask that you continue to pray and support a new endeavor

Justin, Purdue, and I are in, which is called Grace Reform Network. You can go to gracereformnetwork .org.

There are no churches there to be found yet, so we are still in the building phases, but we need your help.

One, through prayer of strength and wisdom, and two, financially, so that we can get this. It's a church network that we're going to God willing see started.

The applications for churches may have gone live by the time you hear this podcast.

We need your financial support. We need your prayer that we can plant more churches. We have several we're working on right now in the works, but all that takes time and money.

Hey, we hope you're encouraged. For those of you that are listening, we keep mentioning this SR podcast. It stands for Semper Reformanda, which means always reforming.

We have a community of people who have partnered with the OCAS saying we want to support you financially because we know this requires a lot of money to get all of this information out.

You guys have done so. We have a membership program that you can do that. You can support us various ways. Part of that community, we have an app where Justin and I are pretty active in there.

I was in there this morning, just replying to different questions and interactions.

It's a really sweet community. There's also an additional podcast that we do just for you every week called

SR. Justin and I are going to head over there right now. If you'd like to learn more about that, you can go to theocast .org.

Hey, thank you for listening. We've got some fun stuff for this summer. Stay tuned. We're going to do some different and new things that are definitely in line with what we do, but I think you'll find some joy in that.