Sound vs Strange Doctrine

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to Hebrews chapter 13.
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The title of today's message is Sound vs.
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Strange Doctrine.
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And we are beginning a new series on the subject of the five solas.
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If you're unfamiliar with that term or what that means, you will learn through today's message.
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And I want to say that today's message is going to be somewhat historical in nature.
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There's different ways to present God's truth and one of the ways that we seek to present the truth is to remind ourselves that we are not the first ones to be exposed to it.
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We are not the first ones to discover it.
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We're not the first ones to believe it.
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But we stand in line of a faithful cloud of witnesses that goes all the way back to the time of Christ and even before.
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The church did not begin in the 50s or in the 60s.
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And so we need to be reminded at times of the importance of history.
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And history is difficult sometimes.
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People seem determined to edit, to retract, to conflate, and to exaggerate history.
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Just think about the last three years.
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Consider 20 years from now how the last three years are going to be written into textbooks and the things that are going to be adjusted for making certain people look like heroes and others look like villains.
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It's easy to see that history in many ways is hard to determine.
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It's hard to at times know exactly who is the one who was in the writer, who was truly the one who was the hero.
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And as we think about church history, there's little more that divides greater than the Protestant Reformation.
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The Protestant Reformation is similar to the American Revolution.
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If you were to go to Britain and ask someone how they think of the American Revolution, they would say it's the American Rebellion.
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We say it's the American Revolution looking at it from two different perspectives.
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Ask a Roman Catholic what they think of the Protestant Reformation and they will talk about heretic Martin Luther and how he was a wild boar in the king's garden come simply to root up and destroy.
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But no matter what perspective a person has, no one can deny the massive impact of the Protestant Reformation.
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Not only in an ecclesiastical or church sense, but in the sense of how it changed the world I saw a post someone made this week and it said the founder of America and it was John Calvin's picture.
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Now some may take offense to that, but you really have to consider how much of what has affected how we live and believe and work and do our lives goes back to the time of the reformers and the changes that came as a result.
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So today we are going to look at that event from a historical perspective.
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We're going to see what changes the Protestant Reformation was concerned about.
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What were the battle cries and by the way that's the name of this series of sermons and this series will go throughout October.
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The battle cries of the Reformation.
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What were they and why did they matter? And why was it that the reformers were so concerned that strange doctrines had entered the church and the necessity of going back to the word of God and stand upon sound doctrine.
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So let's stand together and let us read just one verse from the book of Hebrews.
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I did a series through Hebrews many years ago.
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I have preached through it verse by verse, but I'm going to take this verse and simply look at basically one sentence and even more specifically one word from this passage.
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The writer of Hebrews we do not know, but we know that this book has been universally accepted as part of the body of writing which came to us from God and therefore it is God's word and it says this.
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Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings.
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If you have a King James it says doctrine.
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Do not be led away by diverse and strange doctrines for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods which have not benefited those devoted to them.
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Let us pray.
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Father, as we come together today to consider the remarkable history of the Protestant Reformation and what you have done in bringing renewal and revival and reformation to your church, we pray oh God for your mercy as we go through this sermon together.
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I pray Lord that you would keep me from error.
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I pray it every time I preach Lord because I'm afraid to preach something that would be false.
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Your word says let not everyone be teachers for teachers will be held to a higher standard.
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They will be judged with more strictness and so Lord I pray that you protect me from error, that you protect your people, that you guide us into truth by the power of your spirit and that your spirit be the one who teaches us.
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May I decrease, may Christ increase, may the people of God be edified, may those who have not yet bowed the knee to Christ be as my brother prayed earlier, either terrified in his wrath or moved by his love and Lord may you bring souls to you today.
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We pray this in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.
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As we begin today's sermon, I want to consider the distinction between how the Bible uses the term sound doctrine versus the term strange doctrine and I put the words on the screen for you if it makes it easier.
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The word sound comes up in several passages.
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My original thought for today was I would try to have us stand and read through all these passages but I felt like having you turn your Bible that many times may have been a little confusing.
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But just consider how many times the phrase sound teaching, sound words or sound doctrine come from the pen of the apostle Paul and he is the one who is most apt to use this particular word.
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First Timothy 1.10 as he is describing several sins, things that would drag us away, he talks about sexual immorality, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.
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So he's talking about those things that are opposed to that which is sound.
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In First Timothy 6.3 he says, if anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness.
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So he's speaking there about what it is to speak true sound doctrine.
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It is to speak the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, the true words.
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In Second Timothy 1.13 he says, follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
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Second Timothy 4.3, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound doctrine but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.
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Many of us are familiar with that one.
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Oftentimes we think we're living in that day, aren't we? That men will not listen to sound teaching but instead run after those who would teach things that are false.
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Titus 1.9 says he must hold, speaking of the elders, it says he must speak, he must hold firmly to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and to rebuke those who contradict it.
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By the way, that's our job.
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The job of the elders from a scriptural mandate is that one, we be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and two, we be able to rebuke those who contradict it.
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This is why the eldership is no place for a coward.
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Titus 1.13, this testimony is true, therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith.
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We hear the word over and over, sound, sound teaching, sound doctrine, sound words.
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In Titus 2.1, but as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine.
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Over and over and over the Apostle Paul is concerned with this idea of sound doctrine and as I put on the board for you, the word sound comes from the Greek word hygaino and it's where we get our word, interestingly enough, it's where we get our word hygiene.
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The word hygiene goes back to that word and it means something that is healthy.
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We talk about someone with good hygiene as a person who keeps their body healthy.
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Think about how many of you went to the dentist as a kid and they always had a picture of the person with the teeth that didn't brush their teeth, they had bad hygiene and you didn't want to be that guy? Yeah, you didn't want to be the guy with bad hygiene.
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Well, the idea, we've taken it to mean wellness physically, but Paul is talking about that which is right and well and whole biblically, spiritually.
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That's the way this word is being used.
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We talk about people being of sound mind.
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We talk about people being of sound body.
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Paul says we need to be sound in our doctrine as opposed to the opposite of being sound and the opposite of being sound or healthy in our doctrine is to be strange in our doctrine.
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The word strange, as I have it up here, is the word xenos.
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Now we are probably familiar with the word xenos from the word xenophobia.
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Xenophobia means fear of someone who is outside of us, someone who is foreign to us.
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Oftentimes when the subject of borders comes up, people talk about xenophobia, closed borders, open borders.
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That's a topic that rises because it says you're afraid of those who are different.
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You're afraid of those who are outside.
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That's not a subject I want to preach about today, but that's trying to simply drive in the idea that we know what xenos is.
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It means something that is outside.
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Well, what is it that's outside? What's foreign? What's strange? In Hebrews chapter 13 verse 9, the writer of Hebrews is warning us and he's warning us do not be led away by, and the ESV says diverse and strange teachings.
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It could also simply be translated diverse strange teachings because the reality is strange teachings are very diverse.
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There's all kinds of strange teachings, and I'm not just talking about people who go back to Ezekiel and see the wheels and say those were aliens.
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That's not what I'm talking about.
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That's a little strange, but the strange teachings are things that people bring in that pervert the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Paul talks about these strange teachings in the book of Galatians.
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In fact, if you have your Bible, I just want you to quickly turn over to Galatians, and I just want to show you how Paul addresses these strange teachings in chapter 1 of Galatians.
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Go to chapter 1 in verse 6.
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He says, I am astonished.
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By the way, just a quick little note on the book of Galatians.
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Galatians is one of the only letters Paul gives where there's no real positive comment at the beginning.
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He normally gives a positive greeting to the church, not much with Galatians.
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He gives a call of grace and peace, and then immediately goes right into the problem, and the problem with Galatia is they had allowed false teaching to come in and pervert the gospel.
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This is what Paul says.
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He says, I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a heteronewangelion.
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Heteron means a different gospel.
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Then he says this in verse 7, not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and they want to distort the gospel of Christ.
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But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be anathema, let him be accursed, cut off.
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As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be anathema.
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Paul is not playing, is he? He's serious about sound doctrine, and he's giving us the danger of strange doctrine.
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It's what's so interesting about this.
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He says if an angel from heaven, you understand how many cults have been started by people who believe they saw or met angels, such as Joseph Smith who believes that he was given the golden plates by the angel Moroni, and therefore the entire Mormon religion is based on a false gospel given by a man who loved to tell stories, probably a false story, but even if he did have some sort of a supernatural encounter, it wouldn't matter because Paul says even if you have a supernatural encounter, even if you do meet an angel from heaven, if he gives you a different gospel than the gospel I have given you, let him be anathema.
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You see, Paul does not play with false teaching.
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He does not consider strange doctrines something to be played with or toyed with.
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He considers them something to be cut off, and so when we consider the subject of doctrine, this is why it is so important.
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This is why we focus so much.
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This is why in this church our unofficial motto, and I guess all it takes to make it official is a vote of the elders, so maybe an official motto by next week is theology matters.
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Theology matters.
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Doctrine matters.
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Sound doctrine matters.
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We want to be a place that promotes sound doctrine and rebukes strange doctrine.
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We do not want to be a house of strange doctrine.
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So the question comes up then, where are the lines? What do we stand upon? What do we believe? Has anybody ever asked you that question as a member of this church? Has anyone ever come to you and said, oh, you go to Sovereign Grace Family Church.
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What do you believe at Sovereign Grace Family Church? And if they were to ask you that, if you were to go today and you were to meet someone on the street and someone says, where have you come from? I've just come from our church.
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Oh, your church.
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What do you believe? How would you answer them? Some might say, well, we believe in Jesus, or we believe the gospel.
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But someone might ask for more specifics.
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You might even go as far as to say, well, we hold to a Baptist confession, the 1646 Baptist confession, therefore we are Baptists.
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Or you might say we are evangelical.
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Or you might say we are reformed.
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Or you might say we are Calvinistic.
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But I would challenge how many of you actually can define what those things mean.
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That's not in any way intending to be insulting.
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I'm just saying these are not terms that everybody uses on a daily basis.
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If someone were to say, well, if you're reformed, what does that mean? You're Calvinist, what does that mean? You're Baptist.
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Do you even know what it means to be a Baptist? Well, we baptize people.
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Well, everybody baptizes people.
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Why do we hold that title? Presbyterians baptize people, Anglicans baptize people, Lutherans baptize people.
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Somebody say, do it wrong? Yeah, I don't know.
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We'll talk about that later.
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But you understand that what I'm driving at is I'm asking the question, do we know what we believe? In fact, if I were to say to you, we are evangelical.
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We are.
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With this church, we are associated with the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals, FIRE for short.
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But what does that mean? What does it mean to be an evangelical? Where does the word even come from? Well, you're probably familiar with the word evangelism.
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The word evangelism comes from the root word evangel, which is a derivative or a transliteration of the word euangelion, the Greek word for good news.
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Putting the prefix epsilon, oopsalon at the beginning of a Greek word makes the word a positive good thing.
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Like today, I'm going to be preaching a funeral at 2 p.m.
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and I'm going to give a eulogy.
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You put eu in front of logos and it becomes a good word.
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A eulogy is a good word.
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Well a euangelion is a good message.
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Angelos means message, where we get the word angel, which means messenger.
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So, evangelical means people of the gospel.
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That's the simple definition of what an evangelical is.
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An evangelical is a gospel believer, a person of the evangel.
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It ties us to two historic truths, well I'm sorry, two historic traditions.
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The first tradition that it ties us to is what is known as the ancient creeds and confessions of the early church.
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You understand that in the first 400 years of the church, there were what were known as the great ecumenical councils, where bishops and leaders from all of the churches would come together and they would counsel and deliberate over issues and questions of the day.
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And they would discuss and they would debate and they would write.
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And we still have the writings of those men.
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Do you understand that we have not only 66 books of our bible, but we also have the writings of what are known as the early church fathers.
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And we have hundreds of years of writing of these men who came along and argued and deliberated and fought against heresy.
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In fact, some of the writings are actually called against heresy.
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That's the title of the writings.
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Men like Arius, who came and said Jesus Christ is created by God, he is not himself equal with God.
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And that became known as Arianism.
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Arianism flourished in the early part of the fourth century.
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And so, the council of Nicaea gathered together to debate and deliberate and argue against the false teachings of Arius.
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And from that was birthed the Nicene Creed.
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And even to this day, we would say the Nicene Creed accurately describes what we believe about the person and nature of God and the Trinity.
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And so, as an evangelical, we would say we affirm the Nicene Creed.
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We affirm the Athanasian Creed.
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Not because those men were infallible, but because we believe that they are expressing the truths that are laid down in Scripture.
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And they accurately describe those truths in these statements and therefore we can stand upon these statements and say, we as evangelicals affirm this.
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This is why we would say that certain churches qualify as evangelicals and certain churches do not.
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Because if you deny the deity of Jesus Christ, you deny the ancient historical teaching of the church and what the Bible says.
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Because the Bible clearly teaches the divinity of Jesus Christ.
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And if we deny it, we're no longer gospel believing because that's part of the gospel that Jesus Christ is the God-man.
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And therefore, when we say we are evangelical, we are saying we hold to those historic teachings.
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But also, as evangelicals, we hold to another historic tradition.
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And by the way, tradition is not necessarily bad as long as tradition is scriptural.
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There are a lot of unscriptural traditions, right? But it's not bad to say, here's why we hold to these things because this is what the Bible teaches.
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And the second, as I said, the first great tradition that we would hold to is the ecumenical councils of the early church.
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But the second tradition that we would hold to, and we would hold to this very firmly, is we would hold to the teachings which arose during the Protestant Reformation.
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And you say, well, why in the world would we hold to doctrines that are only 500 years old? In fact, we celebrated back in 2017.
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We celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation because in 1517, on October 31st, Martin Luther published the 95 Theses, which effectively became the spark that lit the fire that would become the Protestant Reformation.
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In fact, I want to read to you.
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This is from the opening of the Cambridge Declaration.
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I'm going to be reading from it again later because you have it on the back of your bulletin, the five solas that we're going to look at.
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What you have printed in the back of your bulletin is from the Cambridge Declaration.
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And this is what it says in the opening.
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Evangelical churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age rather than the spirit of Christ.
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Amen.
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As evangelicals, we call ourselves to repent of this sin and to recover the historic Christian faith.
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In the course of history, words change.
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In our day, this has happened to the word evangelical.
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In the past, it served as a bond of unity between Christians from a wide diversity of church traditions.
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Historic evangelicalism was confessional.
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It embraced the essential truths of Christianity as those were defined by the great ecumenical councils of the church, what I just explained.
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In addition, evangelicals also share a common heritage in the solas of the 16th century Protestant Reformation.
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You see, what came out of the Protestant Reformation was a body of teaching that can be distilled into five simple statements.
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That we are saved according to Scripture alone, that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone.
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And that's the essence of what came out of the Protestant Reformation.
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What's interesting though is Luther wasn't the first one to come up with that.
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It isn't as if Luther just was sitting in his monastery one day and come up with some strange nouveau doctrine.
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No, Luther himself was standing on the shoulders of men who came before him.
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A hundred years before Luther, there was a man named Jan Hus.
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He was the preacher in Prague.
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And Jan Hus had preached almost the same doctrines as Luther.
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And Jan Hus was taken into a council, the Council of Constance, where he was treated shamefully.
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They put a hat on his head that said heretic, almost like if you think of when they used to put the dunce cap on.
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They put this hat on him that said heretic.
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They let him out and they burned him with fire.
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In fact, if you've ever heard the phrase, your goose is cooked, Jan Hus was called the goose.
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He was from a town that the name was Goose.
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And therefore, when we think of the goose being cooked, it was a reference to Jan Hus.
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But before Hus was another man.
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His name was John Wycliffe.
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John Wycliffe was probably one of the greatest minds that the earth has ever produced, that God has ever given to a man.
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One of the most brilliant men of his day.
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And John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible into English.
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Because he believed that part of the problem with the theology that Rome was putting out to the people, part of the problem with the theology was that the people didn't have the word of God to compare it to.
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They couldn't listen to what they were being taught and compare it to God's word and see the errors for themselves.
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So he took to the task, and by the way, this was before the printing press.
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He took to the task of translating the Bible into English so that the common man would be able to read the word of God.
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But what's interesting is that was actually after he was put out of his teaching position at Oxford.
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He was put out of his position because he was questioning the teachings of Rome.
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One of his writings, which caused one of the greatest controversies, was about the table.
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Because Rome was teaching a doctrine called transubstantiation, which means that the bread, when it is blessed by the priest, becomes the physical body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And the cup, when it is blessed by the priest, becomes the physical blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And in the 1200s, the doctrine of transubstantiation came to include the idea, because Christians had long believed in real presence, and that's another topic for another day.
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But in the 1200s, the doctrine of transubstantiation began to include the idea that Christ himself was being represented in his sacrifice on the table.
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And therefore, for you to receive forgiveness, you had to come again and receive his sacrifice again for your sins, over and over and over again, thereby absolutely eliminating the idea that Hebrews tells us that Christ's sacrifice was once for all.
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Wycliffe taught against the table.
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He was put out of his teaching position.
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So, he went and gathered a group of disciples around him that were called the Lawlords.
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And he gathered that group around him.
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They wrote what he translated.
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They hand-wrote Bibles.
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Can you imagine the dedication, the absolute love for God and his—what if the only way for you to have a Bible, beloved, was I get to—you get to hold mine and copy it? And that's the only way you could—would you have a Bible? Would you have a book of Romans? Would you have Jude? It's one of the shortest ones.
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These men took the task of scribes and with their hands wrote the Word of God.
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John Wycliffe had a stroke in the pulpit, was carried out the side door of his parish and passed away, having not been martyred.
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But later, at the same council that condemned Jan Hus and burned him, that same council ordered that John Wycliffe's bones be exhumed and burned.
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How foolish.
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And yet, a testimony to how powerful was his work.
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That even well after his death, his memory remained.
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So when we talk about these truths, this is not something that was invented by Martin Luther.
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Do not let the false historians lead you astray when they say, oh, these five solas are just the concoctions of a crazy German monk.
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Oh no.
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In fact, if you were to visit Prague, there is a library.
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And in that library, there are three medallions on the wall.
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And the medallions are pictures.
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The first picture is entitled, Hus, I'm sorry, Wycliffe struck the spark and it's Wycliffe holding a flint.
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And the next picture is Hus with a candle.
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It says, Hus lit the candle.
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And the next, it's Luther holding a torch, saying, Luther wielded the torch.
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You see, and we could go further back, even into the medieval period.
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There were those who heard the teachings of Rome and knew there were errors as new and strange doctrines began to develop.
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And I have in my history class, I teach these things.
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I teach the years that these doctrines began to develop.
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Doctrines like papal infallibility.
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Doctrines like praying to Mary.
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Doctrines like the rosary.
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Doctrines like transubstantiation all arose in the medieval period.
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And therefore, there were those groups that arose in opposition to these false teachings.
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I mentioned the Lollards.
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Before them, you had the Paulisians and the Waldensians.
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Certainly not perfect in their theology, and I'm not claiming that they were.
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But they were attempting to say, no, that's not what the Bible teaches.
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Those are strange doctrines and we are told to flee from strange doctrines.
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And so, we are to stand on sound doctrine.
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We're going to examine, just for a few moments, these solas.
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And the purpose of this is to set the stage for the next few sermons because I'm going to dig deeper into these in the weeks ahead.
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But I want you to understand how the solas operate.
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And by solas, just in case, I don't want to confuse anyone, the terms are Latin.
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Sola means alone.
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And if you think of like a person singing a solo, right, they're singing by themselves.
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So think of sola as alone.
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And what we have in these battle cries, what we have in these doctrines, is we have salvation grounded.
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Salvation is grounded in sola scriptura, which means scripture alone.
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The Bible is our sole infallible rule for faith and practice.
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We're going to read in a moment more about it, but this is our salvation grounded.
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This will be our message next week, sola scriptura.
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And then salvation explained.
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How are we saved, beloved? We are saved sola gratia, by grace alone.
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We are saved sola fide, through faith alone.
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And we are saved solus Christus, in Christ alone.
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And then finally, on the Sunday before Reformation Day this year, we are going to look at salvation applied.
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Your salvation, beloved, is not just so that you get a ticket to heaven, but your salvation is for the purpose of glorifying your Savior.
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Your salvation is to bring glory to God.
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And God will glorify himself in one of two ways.
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He will glorify himself either in saving you and giving you eternal life, or in punishing you in eternal death.
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And God will receive glory in both.
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Because in one, he justifies himself by glorifying his justice.
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And in one, he glorifies himself in the glory of his beneficence.
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But God will get glory, and to him be all the glory.
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So on the back of your bulletin, I've given you the five solas.
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And this is directly taken from the Cambridge Declaration.
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This was not penned by me, so I want to be clear.
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I did not write these, but I affirm what they say.
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And I encourage you to take them and use these in your family worship for the weeks ahead.
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I encourage you to take these in your personal devotions and examine them to see if they are true.
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This is not Scripture, so I would encourage you to look at it with the same level of scrutiny that you would look with anything that isn't Scripture and compare it to Scripture.
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But let us look at what they say.
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Sola Scriptura.
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We affirm, rather we reaffirm.
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We reaffirm what has already been stated in history.
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We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation which alone can bind the conscience.
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The Scripture alone teaches all that is necessary for salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.
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We deny that any creed, council, or individual may bind a Christian's conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.
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Notice that it comes with an affirmation and a denial.
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This is important because what you believe is just as important as what you don't believe.
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And what you affirm is just as important as what you deny.
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For instance, if you ask a Jehovah Witness, well do you affirm that Jesus was divine? They will say sure.
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But if you ask them, but do you deny that He is the one true God? They will say yes as well.
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What you affirm is just as important as what you deny.
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Therefore in this statement we have our affirmation and our denial.
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As I said in the weeks to come I'm going to dig down deeper into these.
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I want to preach it now, but y'all don't want me to because then I'd preach all five.
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This is next week and we're going to dive deeper.
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Let's look at the next one.
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In your list it's Solus Christus.
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Now I'll take these in a slightly different order, but this is fine for now.
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Solus Christus, Christ alone.
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We reaffirm that our salvation is accomplished by the mediatorial work of the historic Christ alone.
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Those are important words.
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The mediatorial work of the historical Christ.
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Christ was a true man.
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He truly stood in our place and He truly died for sinners.
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We believe that.
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We affirm that.
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His sinless life and substitutionary atonement, boy I can't wait to preach that.
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His substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our justification and reconciliation to the Father.
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And we deny, listen to this.
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We deny that the gospel is preached if Christ's substitutionary work is not declared.
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That was an amen moment because a lot of people don't, a lot of people won't preach the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
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And we say the gospel has not been preached if you don't preach that.
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And faith in Christ and His work is not solicited.
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If you don't call men to faith in Christ, you've not preached the gospel.
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In fact, I do want to, I want to speak for a moment.
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I said I had a funeral to do today.
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As you know, I serve a lot of families that don't have pastors.
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I open myself up to that because it gives me the opportunity to preach at funerals I would never get to preach at.
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And I try to preach the gospel.
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And I was thankful that this family reached out to me, reached out to the funeral home and said, they said, we want someone who will preach the gospel.
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And they said, we know just the guy.
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I gave them my number.
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I was thankful that that's what they wanted.
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And they knew who to call.
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Number three, sola gratia.
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We reaffirm that in salvation, we are rescued from God's wrath by His grace alone.
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It is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ by releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from spiritual death to spiritual life.
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How beautiful is that? That's Ephesians 2.
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You were dead in your trespasses and sins, but God, being rich in mercy, has made us alive with Christ.
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By grace, we are saved.
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But we deny that salvation is in any sense a human work.
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Human methods, techniques, or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation.
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Faith is not produced by our unregenerate human nature.
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We don't believe in decisional regeneration, where we make a decision and God gives us new life.
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No, we believe that God gives us new life, therefore we believe.
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Number four, sola fide.
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This article, Luther said, is the article upon which the church stands or falls.
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The very fulcrum that turned the Protestant Reformation is sola fide.
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We reaffirm that justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone.
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That's salvation.
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By the way, if somebody says, what do you believe? That's what you should believe, and that's what you should say.
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We believe we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
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If that's all you can utter, that's enough.
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That's enough.
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That's beautiful.
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In justification, Christ's righteousness is imputed to us, and I'm going to explain this when we get to the sermon, but that means that it's charged to your account.
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It's imputed to us as the only possible satisfaction of God's perfect justice.
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We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ's righteousness.
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That's a direct shot at Rome, by the way, because Rome does not teach justification by imputed righteousness.
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It believes in justification by infused righteousness, which is an entirely different doctrine of salvation.
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Or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.
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By the way, Rome does do that.
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If you've ever read the Council of Trent, which was the post-Reformation, anti-Reformation council, they said if you affirm that you are justified by faith alone, you are anathema.
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Trent anathematizes the gospel.
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Finally, number five, soli Deo gloria.
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We reaffirm that because salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God, it is for God's glory and that we must glorify Him always.
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We must live our entire lives before the face of God.
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There's a phrase R.C.
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Sproul used, Coram Deo, before God, before the face of God.
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Under the authority of God and for His glory alone, we deny that we can properly glorify God if our worship is confused with entertainment, if we neglect either law or gospel in our preaching, or if self-improvement, self-esteem, or self-fulfillment are allowed to become alternatives to the gospel.
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Woo, I can't wait to preach that because what have we seen in the churches? Entertainment taking the place of evangelism.
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We have seen self-improvement taking the place of repentance.
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We have perverted, we have contorted, and we have made the gospel unrecognizable.
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And so, I didn't go, I didn't put that on the screen, I'm sorry, I quit like three back.
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If you didn't have it on the paper, I apologize, I lost my, there's a lot to do up here.
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But hey, here's the thing.
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When we consider, when we consider all of these things, we do have to think about the fact that it had a historic context.
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As I said, going back to Wycliffe and then Hus and then Luther, we have to understand that these things are not just reasons for churches to divide or churches to split or churches to argue.
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But this was men saying, we have lost our way and we must repent and we must go back.
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That's what reformation means.
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Reformation means to go back to the beginning.
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In fact, there was a phrase that came out of the reformation really well, it was out of the renaissance, and it was ad fontes, ad fontes is Latin, from the fountains or from the sources.
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What it meant was, when we want to know the truth, we have to go back to the source.
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We have to go back to the fountain out of which that truth came.
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Where's the fountain out of which this truth comes, beloved? It's the word of God.
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This is why next week I'm going to preach sola scriptura, because if we don't have sola scriptura, we don't have a reformation.
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If we don't have sola scriptura, we don't have a church, because we have put something else above this word.
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We have put some other doctrine or some other tradition or some other teaching above this word, and Jesus condemned the Pharisees for what reason? He says, you teach as doctrines the commandments of men.
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So why do we focus so much on theology and doctrine? Because it matters.
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Because theology matters.
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There's been a significant downgrade in the last generation, replacing doctrine with experience, exegesis with emotion, and entertainment for the gospel.
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And many churches have become VBS for adults.
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I had a video I showed just a few weeks ago of a church, Toy Story, you remember the movie Toy Story? Did the gospel story with their people dressed up as toys from the Toy Story movie, and Buzz Lightyear was Jesus, and they took his batteries out, and he said, it is finished, and fell over.
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It's repugnant.
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It's blasphemous.
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It's absolutely blasphemous.
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If you want something strange, you're not going to find it here.
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We are not about the strange.
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We are about the sound.
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And we need desperately, as a church, to have a firm grasp on the foundations of our faith.
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Thereby, we teach you the battle cries of the Reformation, that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to scripture alone.
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For God's glory alone.
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Let us pray.
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Father, we thank you for your word.
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We thank you that these truths that are derived directly from your word become the very battle cries of our faith.
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And we pray now, Lord, as we look forward to the next few weeks, as we dive deeper into these doctrines, we pray that you would walk with us, teach us, instruct us from your word, instruct us from history, instruct us in the ways that you would have us go.
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And Lord, I thank you for giving us this opportunity to hear the gospel.
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And I pray the gospel's been proclaimed today.
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And I pray that men and women and children in this room would hear the call of the gospel, which is to repent of their sin and trust in Christ, for there is no other way but through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and his substitutionary sacrifice.
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Lord, may it be that you save people today.
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And now as we turn our attention to the table, Lord, may we see in this table a reminder of the salvation that comes through Christ and him alone.
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And it's in his name.
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Amen.