What is Reformed Theology? | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin.

Today on Theocast, John and I are going to answer the question, what is Reformed theology?

As pastors, we get this question a lot. And here at Theocast, we get this question quite often. So we thought we would go back and grab historical categories of doctrine that Reformed Christians have agreed on and held dearly through the centuries and have the conversation oriented around those.

We hope that this is clarifying. We hope it's helpful and encouraging to you. Stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, we know that many people who start listening to us struggle with their assurance.

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That's right. Here at Theocast, we have conversations about the Christian life from a confessional, Reformed, and pastoral perspective.

And we are seeking to clarify the gospel and reclaim the purpose of the kingdom of Christ.

Around the microphones today as normal is John Moffat, who is the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And then I am with John and I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

So yes, this does mean we're recording from remote locations in our respective studios, but we get to see one another's faces via video interface.

We thank God for technology, even though I'm not necessarily the biggest techie, John. We're having an important conversation today.

So I don't wanna waste a lot of time here, but I want to make a couple of announcements, or we do.

I'll give the first one and then you'll give the second one. The first announcement, just to continue to put this on people's radar screens, is a

Grace Reformed Network event. So you and I, John, are on the board of directors for something called the Grace Reformed Network, which is a network of confessional

Baptist churches that we hope to see formally started next month. And so October 3rd through the 5th in Nashville, Tennessee, we have an event.

The first two days, October 3rd and the 4th, are open to anyone to come. The last day is reserved for representatives of churches who plan to be a part of the network.

But there are still a few registration slots available. So if you go to gracereformednetwork .org,

it's all pretty straightforward and self -explanatory. If you would love to come and hear teaching on confessionalism and law and gospel distinction and covenant theology and Saint -centered reality, along with a sermon from John and me, the respective evenings, we'd love to meet you.

We'd love to have you there. Should be a really good time. So register for that event and maybe we'll see you in a month in Tennessee.

Yeah, it's fun. It's starting to fill up. A second announcement, if you haven't heard about it yet, we have a brand new app that has everything that we've ever produced and it's a social app.

So it's a community. It's what it's called, Theocast Community. At this point, there's well over 500 of you in there.

There's a free access in there if you want to come in and just interact and see what the material is. And then if you want to support what we're doing and be a part of the education material and classes that myself and Justin are teaching, you can support us and be a part of that as well.

Just go to theocastcommunity .org and learn more about that. All right, Justin, that was pretty quick, but let's get into the meat and bones because really this is the backbone of our podcast and our ministry and our pastorate, everything.

Yeah, in many ways. Yeah, well, as you can see, we're going to be talking about what is Reformed Theology. And thankfully, in the last 50 years, it feels like it's on the rise.

The awareness has gone up, which is good. Justin and I have benefited from, you know, the new neo -Calvinism movement that sparked our interest.

Not in this episode. It's been a good gateway drug for many people. That's right, for sure, for sure for me.

But not in this episode, but next week, we're going to talk a little bit more biographically about our experience in Reformed Theology versus Calvinism.

Why are those two things distinct? And with those movements, the neo -Calvinistic movement is different from the

Reformed Theology. So today we're going to set up what is Reformed Theology so that next week will make more sense.

But the one thing that Justin and I are a little concerned about is that there are, if you ever met somebody who gets excited about something new they've learned, and they just kind of come and dispute everything that they have, but they haven't had it all figured out yet, or they hadn't learned all the information.

And so it sounds half right, and the rest of it sounds crazy and disconnected. And that's kind of how

Reformed Theology, unfortunately, has unfolded through the years, where anything that's old and conservative and somewhat

Calvinistic becomes Reformed. And so what we want to do is explain why the pillars of Reformed Theology are in place.

They're there historically, they're there over theological debates, and they have been examined for hundreds of years now.

And Justin and I embrace all five of these pillars because it really helps govern our church and our hearts and keeps us safe as we engage in God's word.

So, sola fide, I mean, sola scriptura for sure, but we're gonna talk about how these are really argumentations from scripture that we think guide and direct the church.

Go ahead. Two quick public service announcements. One, I use the term gateway drug, which has a negative connotation.

And in reality, I should have just said that New Calvinism, the Young Restless and Reformed Movement, so -called, has been a really good gateway and kind of launching off point for many people.

Over the last 20 to 30 years, people have continued to encounter old things and have bumped up against the historic confessions of faith and the like, which is a lot of what we're gonna be talking about today.

That's PSA number one. PSA number two is that John and I are articulating what we would call five pillars or five tenets of Reformed Theology.

We do not claim that this is all that can be said about Reformed Theology wholesale, but these are five sort of headers that we find really useful for ourselves and for our congregations.

And we see these things historically attested to. And so we feel good about these five things, giving a good presentation of what it means to be

Reformed in one's theological orientation. Yeah, this is an episode we did in the past, but we thought we'd refresh it.

It's been a while. Add some new ideas, ways of thinking about it. So Justin, I'll throw it over to you.

So to get us started with what we call the three Cs. Yeah, so we've got the three

Cs and then two additional points. But C number one, a major tenet of Reformed Theology is covenant theology.

It is not wrong to say that Reformed Theology is covenant theology. For sure.

So to, we'll get into this more next week, but to claim to be Reformed in one's theological posture and not be covenantal in historical tri -covenantal sense, which

I'm gonna outline in just a minute, is kind of a contradiction in terms. Really is, yeah. Yeah, and so we could get into the nuances that exist.

There's some nuanced disagreement amongst those of us who hold to covenant theology, and we'll talk more about that probably in the months to come on some other episodes.

But the major thing that we wanna highlight first here is that Reformed theologians through history have all held to what we would call the tri -covenantal framework of Scripture, the three major covenants, the first of which being the covenant of redemption that is made in eternity past amongst the

Godhead, most pointedly between the Father and the Son, concerning the redemption of a people. And the

Son would come and accomplish the work of salvation, and then what He did would be given to His people.

His reward for the work done would be to inherit this people, resurrected and glorified in the new heavens and the new earth with Him forever.

So there that is, the covenant of redemption oftentimes referred to as the pactum salutis. The next covenant is the covenant of works, which

God made with Adam in the garden, and we understand there that Adam represented the entire human race, and he had the potential to earn eternal life and blessedness through his obedience and keeping of the covenant, or he could earn and receive death, spiritual, temporal, and eternal death for breaking the covenant.

And so that covenant is referred to as the covenant of works because it was contingent upon the rewards of that covenant, and the words covenant or no were contingent upon Adam's obedience.

They were contingent upon his works. So that's the second of the three major covenants. The third is the covenant of grace.

Now, the way John and I would articulate this is this covenant is promised in Genesis 3 .15, and it is revealed increasingly by father's steps throughout the

Old Testament in other covenants that are subservient to it, and then is established and accomplished through Jesus in the new covenant.

And so we see from Genesis 3 .15 onward the unfolding of the accomplishment of that promise that there would come one who would crush the head of the serpent and redeem his people.

So those three major covenants are critical for our understanding of how the Bible hangs together and of how there has been one plan of God from before all time to save a people that would live, as I said earlier, resurrected and glorified with God the

Son in the new heavens and the new earth forever. That's good. Yeah, and the reason that we would put such a firm kind of stamp on this is that it influences how you interpret

Scripture. Looking at the Bible from a Christocentric standpoint where Christ is the point, and really it's a story of redemption.

The arc of the whole Bible is the redemptive story of how God saves sinners.

Now, there's more in the Bible than that. Sometimes people think that's what we're saying is that's the only thing the Bible is about. It's about God's kingdom and His glory.

There's so much that's wrapped up in there, but it is the redemptive story of the beginning to the end.

And so the reason why covenant theology has been so powerful in the Reform movement is because of the emphasis that it places on Christ in all of Scripture.

And when you compare this to other hermeneutics of the Bible that are popular, it's not that Christ is absent.

It's just the emphasis seems to change. And we would argue that the emphasis comes from the text.

We're not putting it into the text. So this is not an apologetic for covenant theology.

Justin and I have done multiple series. We'll put these in the notes below. We did a five -part series as an introduction to covenant theology, and then we did a three -part series on the implications of covenant theology, as you basically go through and give the arguments of why these three covenants should be seen in Scripture.

So that's below. We'd encourage you to go interact with that. But Justin, I think that you and I would say if we only talked about covenant theology on this podcast every week,

I don't know if I would ever run out of things to say because the covenant that Christ made with us is never -ending, which means the benefits are immeasurable in my estimation, which is we preach from that covenantal perspective every time that we get up in the pulpit or get behind these mics.

Right, and the covenant of grace in particular, as opposed to the covenant of works, is made between God and His elect people.

And what happens in the covenant of grace is the merits of Jesus, the Redeemer, are given to sinners and received completely by faith.

And so we don't do anything. And so in that sense, too, this covenantal understanding, in particular of works and grace, helps us to see the sufficiency of Jesus Christ and how

He has done everything necessary to save His people. And it does, as you said so beautifully, helps us keep the main point in view, that the

Bible is the story of God's plan of redemption, and it's accomplished through Christ.

And so it keeps us between the ditches and it keeps us on the rails when it comes to how we understand any one particular passage.

And so it's very important for us. All right, so that's number one, covenant theology. And now we're gonna move on to number two, which is,

John? Yeah, the popular one, Calvinism, right? I'm gonna give you a really quick explanation of what it is just theologically, and then we'll talk about kind of the historical points.

And again, we've done multiple series on this, we'll put the notes below, or you can just go to our new app and type in Calvinism and you'll see it all there.

So Calvinism really is a discussion of how you understand the nature of man and the nature of God.

So anthropology and theology, right? So this debate is a very significant one and it's been happening for hundreds of years now.

I mean, all the way back to Augustine and Pelagius were debating this, which is, does man have the capacity to save himself by means of his own will, or is man dead in his trespasses and sins, right?

His eyes are blind, his ears are deaf, must the Holy Spirit, John three, must the

Holy Spirit come and bring new birth, a new birth that Nicodemus didn't even understand. That's the debate.

And unfortunately, it got connected to a man's name. We're not gonna get into that, we do in our series, but the man's name really was, there was an argumentation between, should we be amending the confession or not?

And the answer to that was, no, we think it's sufficient to say that unless God through the preaching of the gospel and through the means of the spirit comes and regenerates a man's heart or a woman's heart, they will not have faith in Christ.

That's what Calvinism is. Now this debate broke down into five areas of how that would work, right?

And it's known as TULIP, if you wanna look that up. And - The five points of Calvinism.

The five points of Calvinism. And we can quickly go through them, but you can look them up and I'm not gonna really spend time explaining those five points.

I would encourage you to do so. But the reason why we connected into reformed theology is that the way in which we understand scripture is that we trust and believe in a sovereign

God who creates and sustains the world. And that without his moving and acting, sinners do not go from death to life.

This is why Paul specifically writes passages like you were dead in your trespasses and sins, he made you alive.

He mean Christ through the means of the Holy Spirit. So each one of the points, when you go through it, it points us out like point number one is total depravity or total inability, the capacity of the human in its will, you were born dead.

So you had physical capacities with a dead spirit is how we kind of describe that to be. And this is where the rest of the points kind of fall into place, explaining what we'd call really how salvation happens.

So Calvinism really is the argument of, were you saved because you chose to be saved or were you saved because God saved you because you were dead?

That's the debate. And I'll just not let you speak into that, but I think that's the general idea. If you're new to Calvinism, it's really your will versus God's will.

And what we're here to say is reformed theology, I think argues pretty clearly from a Calvinistic standpoint that is without God and his movement, we would remain dead in our sins.

Yeah, I mean, not in a reductionistic sense, I think this is appropriate. Calvinism can be summarized as God accomplishes all of his purposes, one.

Two, salvation is of the Lord, he saves. That is Calvinism reduced down to a very digestible level.

So Jonah 2 .9, salvation is of the Lord. God is the savior of sinners. Jesus actually, when he came to accomplish the work of redemption, he did it all.

And he didn't just make salvation possible for people and then we need to actualize it through something that we do or an act of our will.

But Jesus actually saved all of his people and the work is really done. That's a piece of this as well.

And also how God saves, like you alluded to this too, John, we believe that God works in redemption.

We believe that God works directly upon the human heart to impart faith, to give life, to regenerate and to unite his people to Jesus, who is the forgiveness of their sins, their righteousness and their eternal life.

And so that is what we mean when we talk about God saving sinners, that he is the actor and he acts directly on the human heart in a way that saves us.

Just a couple of really brief historical comments for those out there that might be thinking, well, where does this all come from?

As you've already kind of mentioned some of this stuff, in the 17th century, there were followers of a theologian named

Jacob Arminius who wrote a document called the Remonstrance, where they raised issue with five major areas of doctrine as it had been understood historically in the tradition of orthodoxy.

So then there was a Senate, the Senate of Dort in 1618, 1619 that convened. It was an ecumenical group of reformed pastors, as we would call them looking back, reformed churchmen, who debated the

Remonstrance of the Arminians. And then they came up with responses, doctrines, canons of the Senate of Dort arranged under those five headers, those five objections.

And so those five heads of doctrine are where we get the five points of Calvinism. So this didn't just come out of nowhere and it wasn't an offensive thing where people historically said, we're gonna come up with these five major points and then really enforce these and teach these and preach these.

But in fact, they came to be in the first place as a defense of orthodox doctrine.

So just a brief comment there. No, that's good. And I will say that this affects your ministry and how you interact with people.

If you believe, it really comes down to your apologetic and how you approach people.

If you believe you're presupposing, you're presuppositionalism, you're realizing that this person cannot be logicked into heaven, that the gospel has to be proclaimed, the

Holy Spirit has to come, then that changes how you do church and evangelism. And it changes how you counsel and shepherd people.

It changes how you see the world. People don't need to be convinced to change their mind. They need a supernatural gift to do so.

And so this is why in reformed theology, it's been so important that this is one of the main pillars because it influences how you do ministry and how you see life.

Yeah, and as you said, Calvinism finds itself firmly entrenched within the Augustinian tradition. That's right.

So it's not new in the history of the church. Hey guys, real quick, some of you are listening to this and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions.

So where do you go? How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources? We have started something called the

Theocast Community. We're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there, and you can share it and ask questions.

You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. Just to recap, point one, covenant theology. Second major tenet of reformed theology is

Calvinism. We're now moving on to the third, the third of the Cs, which is confessionalism.

So reformed theology is confessional in its orientation and its posture. And I'll get us started here with just a few thoughts.

To be confessional means that we have a theology, a piety, and a practice. And let me just define the theology, an understanding of God, piety, godliness, a way of godliness, practice, the way we do church.

All right, so we have a theology, piety, and practice that is articulated in a confession of faith that was produced in the era of the

Protestant Reformation. So that is the kind of low -hanging fruit, first thing we would say. I think whenever you talk about confessionalism, that's about the only category that people have in their minds, is that you appeal to a confession.

And we're gonna talk about that more in just a minute. But in addition to that, we would say that to be confessional is to also have a theology, piety, and practice that is grounded in the objective work of Christ for sinners.

So objective meaning it exists outside of us and it stands unaffected by us in terms of how we're feeling or how we're doing.

Our subjective response or subjective feelings about what Christ accomplished does not change what he has done for us.

And so that's an emphasis of confessionalism. You could also say that it's a declarative reality too.

It's done. An emphasis on the fact that everything is finished and these truths about Jesus are to be believed.

We don't do anything, we believe in him. We trust in Christ and thereby receive everything that he's done for us.

Next, we would say that to be confessional is to have a theology, piety, and practice that is grounded in the local church.

It is inherently church -shaped, this confessional Christian life. And devotion is church -shaped as a

Christian from a confessional perspective. And we're gonna talk more in a minute about the ordinary means of grace and that's how we understand that faith is imparted and sustained and strengthened.

And John, last comment before I throw it over to you. Confessional Protestants, confessional reformed

Christians historically have also shied away from what we would call a theology of glory and have emphasized what would be called a theology of the cross where the

Christian life is ordinary. It can even be difficult, mundane, filled with suffering.

We live it in the context of the local church. All that's true, but the Christian life is not about just making one's way from this great spiritual experience to this next great spiritual experience to this next spiritual high.

But in reality, it's about learning to trust Christ in the midst of weakness and in the midst of the battle against the corruption of the flesh.

So that's a confessional theological posture. And I trust that some of those things might be new to the listener, but they're helpful for us to have in our minds.

Yeah, this one's probably the, could be the hardest to stomach at times. And I think maybe,

I mean, covenant theology is probably the most debated for sure. But I don't think people understand.

Well, I'm just saying, if you go online and look at what people debate, it's dispensationalism versus covenant theology seems to be a pretty hot one.

But everyone believes in confessions because I don't know of a church website that's worth its weight in gold that doesn't have a doctrinal standard on it.

Of some kind. I don't, I don't know. Yeah, you should go to it if it doesn't. That means the doctrinal standards, whatever the pastor or elders decide it to be, and it can change and shift at any moment.

And there's no way to examine it. Like Justin, if I were to walk up to you and you and I are going to have a meaningful relationship and you say, well, what do you believe about Jesus?

Because we're supposed to test the spirits to make sure they're of the Lord. And I'm just not supposed to just accept everything you say because you say you're a

Christian. You say, well, John, what about Jesus do you believe in? I just say, well, I believe the Bible.

Well, there's, you say, but you're not offering me anything to examine. Like I can't actually validate what you're saying.

And doctrinal statements often on websites, I grew up this way. I think you may have grown up in churches like this where, excuse me, you know, it's like instructional manuals at a hotel to get ice, you know, put the cup here, hit the button, and ice comes out, that's it.

You know, that's about all that's there. You know, we believe the Bible. We believe Jesus rose from the grave and don't sin. It's like, that's not enough to really tell you robustly what this church stands for.

So theologically, what I love about confessions and specifically the ones that we hold to the 1689, but I would even,

I mean, a lot of the reformed confessions, I would not have a hard time. Westminster, Belgian confession, et cetera, et cetera.

Exactly. In that they are examined documents that have been stood the test of time for hundreds of years now.

That's not to say you're ungodly, unbiblical, or in danger if you're using a more modern confession.

Okay, I'm not gonna say that at all. That's cultish. But you and I find a lot of confidence in using the 1689

Latter -day Baptist confession just because it has stood the test of time for so many years, and it's been a confession that has,

I would say, accurately represents the entirety of Scripture in places that matter.

Now, when I say like in places that matter, there are certain parts of Scripture, Justin, that you and I would agree that can be confusing, but they're not changing the nature of God, the nature of man, or the nature of salvation, or the nature of in time, meaning that for all of eternity where we will be.

So from a confessional standpoint, this is why, Justin, I've seen churches who have almost made fun of confessions.

They say, Sola Scriptura, but yet then their pastor or the elders get up and write up their confession on the website.

I mean, I'll give you an example of this. John MacArthur and John Piper are the ones who wrote the doctrinal statements. This is not like hidden knowledge.

This is public. But they've written it, and so they're saying the church are gonna be held to my specific understanding of it.

And effectively what happens there is the man becomes the confession. His doctrine becomes the confession of the church.

That's right, and at times those things have been examined and had to be altered because let's just say they weren't orthodoxy.

Yeah, a couple other comments here before we move on. You've picked up on some wonderful things.

Functionally, everybody appeals to some kind of confession. Even people that say no creed but the

Bible, no confession but Christ, they typically do that while they are showing you their notes in their study

Bible or something like this. Which is a confession, by the way. Exactly, where do you think those notes came from? You're appealing to something that is outside of Scripture.

And this is another podcast for another day, but Sola Scriptura does not mean solo Scripture where we only appeal to Scripture, but Scripture is the highest authority, but then we appeal in a good sense to the tradition and the history of orthodox belief that has existed in the church of the

Lord Jesus Christ for 2 ,000 years. And so we appeal to that, and in doing so, instead of doing theology individually where what really matters is what

I think about a text or what I feel about a text, we are asking the question, no, with all due respect,

I don't so much care what you think. What we care about is what the saints have collectively understood through history about the

Scriptures and about what they teach. And so confessionalism unapologetically appeals to that one witness, that historical orthodox witness of the saints through history.

And there is some safety and some security in that, John, that protects us from a multitude of errors, man.

That's right. And so even in being good Bereans like Acts 17, understand that that is a corporate exercise.

That is not some individualistic thing where I go to my Bible alone with no presuppositions and am able to discern truth from error.

Right, and they were, you have to understand too, they were dealing with the Messiah has come, and he was like, look, you don't need to trust me.

You can compare what I'm saying to the prophecies that have been fulfilled. I love this quote. I'm gonna not quote it verbatim because I can't remember where it's at, but Spurgeon has this question about confessionals, and he held to the 1689.

And he says, because the debate is this, I have the Holy Spirit and I have my Bible, which is inspired, therefore

I should get it right. And he says that I find it ironic that you believing you have the

Holy Spirit and that you're gonna get it right, that the believers before you didn't have the

Holy Spirit, therefore they couldn't have got it right. That's right. Yeah, realizing you're not the first to study the

Bible. You're also not the first to get it wrong. And therefore, maybe we should allow the wisdom of those before us to help guide us in making sure we don't fall into the same traps.

Exactly, and maybe because you're fallen, you might not get everything right. And it would be useful to appeal to other people who have also had the

Spirit of God. Amen. All right, so that's the third point, confessionalism. Let's move on to number four, John. Give it to me. Yeah, so the next two would be ones that, well, this one for sure is a part of Reformed theology because it is driven out of the first three, in our opinion.

Once you have these perspectives of the Bible from a covenantal perspective and then a

Calvinistic perspective as means of the sovereignty of God, and then we look through history of how the church has interpreted the

Bible and interpreted the relationship between the sinner becoming a saint and then connected to the body of Christ, how are they then sustained?

And so there's an old phrase, and we love it, we still use it to this day. It's how does

God interact with His family? How does He sustain them? How does

He grow them? How does He protect them? And we would say that the phrase is the ordinary means of grace.

If you were to counteract the opposite of that, it would be extraordinary efforts or supernatural means, right?

You could either be effort or it could be supernatural. God has at times - Meaning God acting directly in a miraculous sense.

In a miraculous sense, like Moses in the burning bush would be a great example or speaking in tongues, things like this.

So you have ordinary, and the reason why we use the phrase, I know for a long time, I didn't quite understand this phrase when

I was younger, I don't know what you meant by this, when it says means of grace, that we believe that the

Bible teaches that how we have begun in the faith, which is by grace through faith in Christ alone, is how then we continue in this, which is by grace through faith alone, right?

So how is it then, we heard the gospel and that's how our hearts were brought to life, then we are told that the same means, which hearing the word of God proclaimed to us, is how

God continues to sustain us. And so there's three means, there's kind of been debates here and there in general, and we're not gonna really get into that, but by and large, the

Reformed have all agreed that the means of grace is the public church gathered around his word through the preaching and the teaching and the fellowship of the word where they are speaking the truth to one another, like it says, consider how to build one another up daily, right?

So, but primarily the preaching and teaching of the word is God's means to develop, strengthen and care for his congregation.

The next would be the sacraments. Some, if you're new, that's a new word for you, it might sound

Roman Catholic, it just means sacred. Really, it's a sacred command from our

Lord that, and he only gave us two. Ordinance is another word. Ordinance. That is sometimes used, yeah.

But I like sacrament because it creates a levity to it, like it kind of really raises it to a level of significance.

Like this is sacred, this is from the Lord. That's right, and those are the Lord's table and so the body and blood of Christ presented to us.

We'll talk about that here in a minute. And then baptism. And we believe that those must be, or those must be practiced by the church, a legitimate church, under the authority of the church.

And when they do, when we hold the body and blood and the gospels presented to us, God uses those means to increase our faith, to comfort our hearts and to strengthen us.

And the same thing. To nourish us, yes. That's right, and our baptism. I love this. I'm gonna be preaching on this in a couple of weeks.

We need to do an episode on this soon. But it is of no mistake that Christ sends his disciples out and says, baptize these new disciples in the name of, and anytime it's in the name of, it's under the acceptance and with the authority of, in the name of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So when we say remember your baptism, we're saying remember you have been accepted by the triune

God to be a part of who he is. Remember that is a work of them, not of you.

Yeah, and that ultimately your baptism is about your union with Christ. That's right. And you've been grafted into him and your sins have been washed away.

And then we would say prayer is also a means, corporately and individually, that prayer is a means of God's grace.

I mean, when you think about it, you have three absolute guarantees for the rest of your life that God will always answer without fail, without obligation.

He says, in a time of need, boldly run into my throne room and I will give you mercy and grace. Excuse me.

And then James 1 says, if you lack wisdom, ask of the Lord and he will give it to you liberally. So we can go to him to receive these means, but we're often commanded to pray for each other.

Why? Because God moves in our hearts and in the hearts of people as we pray for them. So I'll wrap it up into this,

Justin, that the Reformed have believed that the faith that we practice day in and day out is a corporate reality and that God cares for us as a unified body of believers.

Just go read Ephesians 4. When the body functions properly, through teaching and preaching and praying and administering all of these means,

God builds us up into love. So this is so contrary to modern

Christianity, which is individualism and spiritual disciplines practiced by ourselves, where church becomes a gym, where we come in and do our part, but we don't see the connection to the body.

And so Reformed theology really draws us in to God's mission, His method, and His means.

And that's where we'd say the ordinary means of grace is God's mission and method for the sustainability of the believer.

And in particular, the means of grace are partaken of in corporate worship.

That's right. And so when we come to worship the Lord, we come to receive from the ministry of Christ. And God is very much glorified and honored in that worship because we are casting ourselves wholly upon His Son, who is our salvation, right?

But so, yeah, we come to corporate worship not to bring something to God on the basis of which He would show us His favor, but we come to receive from the ministry of Christ so that we might be nourished and strengthened, sustained and built up.

And so, as you said, I just wanna hammer this, the corporate realities of the gathered church drives our private

Christian lives. And that is the complete opposite of how many modern

Christians think intuitively and in some senses, how they've been taught to think in the church.

Because we think that my personal devotional life will make me useful in the corporate setting, when in reality, it's the opposite.

The corporate drives the private. And corporate worship is a lifeline. And that's because we come and receive from the means of grace in corporate worship as the gathered church, as we sit under the word, as we receive and participate in the sacraments, as we pray, and then also as we teach and exhort and admonish even one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

That's right. And so this, I would, again, just in the interest of clarity, and then John, yeah, absolutely, one more comment. This is not, the means of grace proper is not the same thing as our personal spiritual disciplines.

To read the Bible and to pray and to do these kinds of things on our own are good things to do. And yet they are not the means of grace.

And God has not attached his promises to those individual pursuits, the ways that he has attached his promises to the gathered church reality.

And so we believe that faith is imparted ordinarily through the preaching of the word, and faith is nourished, sustained, and strengthened through the various means that God has given.

Yeah, I think that phrase, God has not attached his promises, that's a scary thing to say, but it's the truth.

Like if you go in and say, I promise this, because Ephesians 4 is so plain.

When this happens, my guaranteed of this. Justin, I'll just, you know,

I'm emphasizing Bible reading. Look, you need to hear this out. From a historical standpoint, people have not had access to own personal

Bibles, nor the time to study them, nor the education to study them until recently.

So God in his providence literally tells the early church, free up these men, get deacons around them, so that what?

They can dedicate themselves to the study of the word, which would take them to the synagogues and where these manuscripts would be, so they could come back to the gathered church, and you have men.

And listen, the requirements for the elders, Justin, is massively important here, because they have to be able to defend, understand, and communicate

God's word accurately. Sound doctrine. Because it's how the church was cared for. Exactly.

If I may, in the interest of time, we'll move on. I agree, we are not trying to belittle or diminish personal

Bible reading. Praise God, we have copies of the scriptures. I mean, avail yourselves of them. What we are saying, though, is that throughout the history of the church, whenever you read about things in the

New Testament regarding the word of God and its effectiveness, we should understand that to be speaking to corporate realities of the word preached and read in the church.

And for people to have meditated on the law of God through history would have meant, to your point, they would have gathered with the saints, they would have heard the word taught, preached, so that they could rightly understand it, and then they would have lived life, here's another ordinary means of grace term, in the fellowship of the saints, and they would have talked about it.

They would have been sharpening one another and teaching one another based upon what they were corporately learning together.

So that's how the word of God reverberated around congregations for over a millennium, was through this kind of thing, where we gather and we're taught, we receive, and then we live life together and we talk about it and we continue to teach each other.

Man, if we lived like that in our churches today, how great would that be, right? Amen. All right, so now, number five,

I guess I'm leading off on this one. So the last of the five that we're gonna bring up today is the distinction between the law and the gospel.

Many people think that the law and gospel distinction is a Lutheran category only, and that is false.

The distinction between the law and the gospel is also a reformed doctrine and a reformed category.

You can read any number of people, William Perkins, John Calhoun, I could name many others, right, who articulated these things,

Theodore Beza, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that articulated what we are about to say. The distinction between the law and the gospel, spoken relatively simply as this, that in the

Old and New Testaments, you have law and gospel in both. So there's law and gospel in the

Old Testament, there's law and gospel in the New. Whenever we read of what God requires of mankind for righteousness, that is law.

Do this. Any kind of imperative, you need to do this for righteousness, that's law. Anytime we read of what

Christ has done that is then given to us that we receive by faith, that's gospel.

So simple ways to remember this in your mind. Do is law, done is gospel.

Do this and live, Leviticus 18 .5, Jesus in Luke 10, a number of other places, Paul picks this up in Galatians 3, we could go on there.

Do this and live, that's law. Christ has done it, now live in him, that's gospel.

Remember this too, that everything God requires in his law, he gives in his gospel.

That's right. Last one, and then I'll throw it over to you. The law demands everything and gives nothing.

The gospel demands nothing and gives everything. That's right. The law's standard is one of perfect, perpetual, personal obedience at a spiritual level.

Nothing else will meet its righteous requirements. And so it is all or nothing.

Whereas in the gospel, the covenant of grace, so when we say law, we mean covenant of works, do this and live.

When we say gospel, we mean covenant of grace, receive. When it comes to the gospel piece, we don't do anything.

We simply receive with an open hand what Jesus has done and are thereby saved.

That's right. Now, some of what Justin is saying may seem elementary and it's elementary, my dear Watson, and basic.

But my goodness, how these categories get collapsed, John, which I will tell you, the previous four that we have mentioned will be obliterated if this category is not safely protected.

And we can't get into it today. This is more of an introduction. We have done so many episodes, but below,

Justin and I did an introduction to covenant theology, sorry, introduction to law gospel distinction, and then the three uses of the law recently, as I think as early as last year.

And so you wanna go - A year and a half ago or so, last year and a half, yeah. You wanna go and listen to that. But I will say this, the foundation of all the previous four really is held by a law gospel distinction.

Because if you don't get the law and the gospel correct, then you're going to misinterpret a lot of scripture.

And it happens, Justin. We try and point this out quite often in our podcast that, for instance, when someone comes up to Jesus and says, what must

I do to enter the kingdom? Jesus tells them what they must do.

He does not give them the good news of what he's about to do. He's like, if you wanna know what you need to do, that's fine.

If you come and ask me what I'll do for you, that's a whole nother answer. Now, all of the prostitutes and all the tax collectors came and asked

Jesus that. What are you gonna do for me, Jesus? He's like, I'll save you. Well, came knowing that they didn't have righteousness.

That's right. And couldn't achieve it, right? But the righteous came judging him, saying, who are you to say what we can and cannot do in the kingdom?

Because he's like, because I am the king is why. So the law and the gospel, Jesus was the greatest preacher of the law.

And it's really hard, like for instance, I'm not gonna answer this to you now, but we answered in the law gospel podcast, when

Jesus says, pick up your cross and follow me, that's not the gospel. And we'll explain to you why.

But these definitions are important. And it really does, it's a debate going back hundreds and hundreds of years.

And really it goes back to Rome. This is where Rome collapsed the law and the gospel. And this is what

Martin Luther and the reformers saw and have been fighting to rip it apart and put it on either sides. Both are holy, both are necessary, both honor and glorify

God, but one condemns you and one saves you. And that's important to understand the distinction between the two.

Exactly right. Yeah, it's sometimes jarring for people when you say that Jesus was the greatest preacher of the law ever.

And that in actuality, if you read the gospel accounts, which are effectively just the accounts of Jesus's life and ministry, he speaks more words of law than he does gospel.

That's right. And now he has intentions in preaching and teaching the law the way that he did.

The first of which is to crush sinners in their self -righteousness and force them to trust him alone.

Like you come to the end of yourself because there's no way that I can meet the standard. Exactly right.

Only one has ever met it. And you trust him to save you completely. And he is your whole and only righteousness received by faith, not by works that you would do.

Critical importance. If I can like Trojan horse, like a 5 .5, I think it's acknowledged in our confession.

It's kind of wrapped up in things that we've said. We also vehemently and doggedly affirm the saint -sinner reality.

That's right. And the reason I bring this up is because, and this may end up becoming a sixth thing that John and I talk about over the course of years.

Like if we redo this podcast in four or five years from now, we might have a number six because this,

I don't like to use alarmist language, but this is under some kind of assault. It is. Amongst like serious minded people.

Yeah. Particularly around the text of Romans 7. People are saying that there's, it's becoming very popular and in vogue right now, even in seminaries to see

Romans 7 is written by Paul in a unregenerate, like hypothetically unregenerate state.

And we would just say, no, historically in the reformed tradition, the Lutheran tradition as well, we have understood that Romans 7 is written by Paul as a

Christian. It's normative to the Christian experience. And we've absolutely doggedly defend the saint -sinner reality.

You are at the same time justified in a sinner. We could talk more about that in future episodes, but I just,

I felt like it would be remiss to not throw that in there pointedly, John. Yeah. And I would say, if you go to our website,

Grace Reformed, the network, jrn .gracereformednetwork .org, you will see that this is what the network is built on, are these pillars.

And so any church that is a part of this network will also be a part of all of this theology.

So pray that it continues to grow and that God will encourage the pastors who are a part of it. Yeah. Amen. Well, this has been good, man.

We've jam -packed about as much as we can into 40 whatever minutes. We trust this to the

Lord and we hope this is useful to the saints. Again, this is just us trying to recap some of the major things that we've talked about over the years, but to give this to you in an all -in -one, hey, when you guys answer the question, what does it mean to be reformed?

What do you mean? How would you talk to people who come into your offices or who show up at your church and wanna know what it means to be reformed?

This would be effectively how we would start to answer that question. Of course, more can be said, and we trust if Christ carries, we'll record more podcasts,

John. But until then, we're grateful that you've decided to listen. We hope you've been encouraged and helped by the content.

Grace and peace to you. Hey, everyone, before you go, Justin and I first wanted to say thank you. And if this has been encouraging to you in any way, please feel free to share it.

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