Prayer Requires Righteousness | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are recording the second of at least two episodes from the latter portion of James 5.

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Today we're gonna tackle, in particular, what James says in verse 16 of chapter 5, that the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

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The prayer of a righteous person is effective. And then he gives the example of Elijah. So how are we to understand that example?

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How are we to understand the prayer of a righteous person? Is righteousness required for prayer? And if so, what kind of righteousness are we talking about?

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There's a lot of confusion around this passage. John and I hope to shed some light and bring some clarity into the conversation.

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And then over in Semper Reformanda today, we're gonna talk about positional versus personal righteousness and how pietism and revivalism have really collapsed those categories and have damaged and harmed our ability to be able to rest in our positional righteousness when it comes to prayer or pretty much anything else in the

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Christian life. So again, we hope it's helpful. Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a confessional, reformed, and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today, as is normal, are

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John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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John, we have met to record for the second time today on this Wednesday morning. We're recording the second of at least two, maybe three episodes from the latter portion of James chapter 5, the very end of the letter.

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Why are we recording from this section of Scripture, you might ask? Well, because James writes some things that are debated by many

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Christians. And there are some things contained in these verses that people get tripped up over, man, and don't know what to do with.

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So last week, we talked about praying for healing and how the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick.

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And so if you, that's particularly from like James 5, 13 to 15. If you haven't listened to that episode, we would encourage you to go back and check that one out.

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Because what we said there will be relevant for what we say today, because in the flow of James's thought, these things build upon one another and they're related.

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And there is the word therefore in verse 16. And so clearly James is building upon what had come before.

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So go listen to that episode and then come back and listen to this one. Today, we're going to look at James 5, 16 to 18. Effectively, in particular, we're going to be considering the fact that James says that the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

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And so how much righteousness, John, is required? What does it mean that the prayer of a righteous person?

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Again, how righteous? What kind of righteousness are we talking about? And how can I know that my prayers are going to be heard, that God will even answer?

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There's a lot there, bro. Yeah, there's a lot of promises, right? Confess your sins and then pray for one another and you will be healed.

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And then he says, what, by the way, so this whole section is about prayer and healing, which we have argued last week is talking about spiritual weakness and restoration within the body of Christ.

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So you go back and listen last week, but he says the righteous has power. There's a lot of great, not only power, there's great power and it's working.

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So yeah, that is Justin, how I've heard that preached is often we stop right there and we go at it, right?

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We say, listen, if you want God to hear your prayers and your prayers are to be effective, and if you feel like your prayer life isn't effective and God isn't hearing you and people aren't being healed, then again, where do they immediately go?

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They immediately go to what's called personal righteousness, your actions. Your actions are going to directly affect your prayer.

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Well, I don't disagree with that. Paul talks about how there's strife within the marriage.

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It can stifle one's prayer. Yeah, like if you as a husband aren't living with your wife in an understanding way, Paul insinuates that, or no,

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Peter, it's first Peter, three. Yeah, I took my cue from you. Yeah, Peter, one of those Ps, that your prayers would be hindered as a husband treating your wife harshly and not seeking to understand her.

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That's serious. Yeah. So I mean, from that particular passage and that context, we could make that argument.

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For sure. And I mean, I think in terms of our experience of things, when we are sinning, we're affected in all kinds of ways, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and it affects how we approach the

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Lord in prayer. We get wrecked by all kinds of things. That's true. We agree with that. Yeah. But in here,

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James is dealing with creating confidence within the believer. He does it the whole letter.

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So I'm going to do another review. I'm going to do it a little bit from a different perspective. So in the midst of trials, Justin, trials can often knock us in the teeth and then have us question our faith and question

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God's goodness and then look to other means to then supply what it is that we think we need.

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And James is saying, no, you should be thankful for the trials because the trials are going to prove to you that God is faithful and sufficient in the midst of your trial.

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Right. So he's doing this at the very end of the letter and he's calling them towards an ordinary means.

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He's like, listen, the prayer. And he is dealing with corporate prayer. He's not dealing with individual prayer at the time because you can talk about prayer of the elders and then you have confessing your sins to one another and praying for one another.

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So we see here, James very much is teaching that prayer is a means by which God strengthens his church and heals his church and grows his church.

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So we, you know, those of us who are Reformed and believed in the ordinary means of grace, James is a very powerful passage for us.

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And I think it's a really important that you can't this. We talked about this in SR last week. So if you want to go to Semper Firmata, we talked about exegesis and translating the passage.

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We're going to do a little bit of that now, not as much as details we did in that episode. But if we just keep reading,

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Justin, he explains himself. And I love this. James gives us, again, a beautiful example of what does he mean by righteous?

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We don't have to guess. We don't even have to go into the Greek to figure this one out. We can just use the context because what does he say as an illustration of how one should position themselves or see themselves or where power comes from?

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And so he says this, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Now, why would

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James have to use that particular phrase? It's so fascinating.

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It is fascinating. If I can, I want to offer my own thoughts on how this is often interpreted and how it's often presented.

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Because you said this, I mean, latter portion, portion, latter part, portion, portion. Anyway, sorry about that.

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It reads this way, the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. And I think you're entirely right.

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And I agree with you that typically where people go is our own personal righteousness, or I might phrase it as our godliness.

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The more godly we are, the more effective our prayers are. And then people will take the example of Elijah, even though the apostle uses the language that he has a nature like ours.

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And we're going to talk about how we should understand that. What they will then do is take Elijah in the way that we often do, particularly with Old Testament saints.

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You know, we moralize things and we say, okay, well, how can we be like Elijah or like Abraham or like David?

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As we think about some of the good things that they did, some of the good things they said, some of the good things they were used by God to do, et cetera.

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And so then we think, oh man, you know, Elijah was a prophet and he was godly and he had great faith.

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He did miracles and raised a kid from the dead. Yeah. He performed miracles and all these kinds of things. And this was clearly because of his godliness that he was able to do all these things.

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I mean, it's the same, bro. Man, I don't want to get off on tangents, but I mean, this is the things that people will say about revivals in the history of the

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United States. That the power of revivals is connected to the godliness of its leaders.

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And it's like, oh my goodness, if that's really what we think, I mean, character of course matters and people need to be fit for like particularly the office of pastor.

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I mean, there are qualifications for that. I mean, amen. The gospel frees us from sin, praise the Lord. Amen. But if we think that the effectiveness of ministry or the effectiveness of the building of the church or anything like that is tethered to how godly we are, my goodness, that's a whole other podcast for another day.

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Like Truman says so beautifully, you know, we should pray that God would build his kingdom and his church in spite of us, that he would keep us from knocking over the furniture and that he would keep us to the end in spite of our best efforts to the contrary.

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You know, I mean, that's a much better way to put it. All right, anyway, I digress. I guess partly people love us, they give us grace for that.

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But yeah, it's sad that what often happens, we talk about personal righteousness, we talk about how godly we are, and then we even take the example of Elijah as a man with a nature like ours to say, look how godly he was and how powerful, you know, he was in his day and he had a nature like ours.

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So if we're disciplined enough, we can be that godly and that powerful. That's how I've heard it presented. So we're gonna offer something that's different than that and we're gonna give our reasons for it.

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Listen, James, again, I'm gonna say this now because it's gonna help us in our interpretation. James is writing to people who know the

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Old Testament. He just mentions things assuming they know. He's done this with oil, he's done this with Job, he's done this with the law, he's done this with the

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Passover. So he would know that these people are gonna know this story, so it's not lost.

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So he references Elijah and he begins his illustration with Elijah saying he has a nature like ours.

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Well, in the context, what is he dealing with? Not Elijah, but I mean James. James is dealing with people who are weak in faith, who are sick, and he's saying this man also had the same nature as we do, has the same issues that we do.

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And then he uses the whole story of what power came out of this weak man, and he doesn't point to the man's righteousness.

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So this is where we're going to make the argument going forward that James is speaking of a positional righteousness.

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He's talking about those who are in Christ by faith alone. This is why he's saying, I mean, you could literally interpret the prayer of those who are of a righteous person or those who are righteous by Christ.

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I mean, however you want to interpret that. The prayer of a person in Christ. Right. Because you cannot have righteousness unless you are in Christ.

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I know James has this perspective because he goes back and says, let the lowly boast in his exaltation.

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Our exaltation doesn't come from our own performance. Go back even further to James 1, 16 and 17.

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He says that our righteousness literally was gifted to us by the will of God so that we might be the first fruit.

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So James has a positional righteousness throughout the whole book. The position that we should always be holding is a positional righteousness.

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Now, let's just go ahead and keep using the illustration. So James is dealing, James just decides to use

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Elijah as an example. Well, in context, Israel is in a dry spell because they have abandoned their faith, their weakened faith.

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They have wandered from God. And so James says that Elijah prays and it doesn't rain for three and a half years.

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Well, during that period, they repent and are restored. And so don't lose that.

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Not only is he using Elijah as an example of a man like ours, but he's also using an

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Old Testament example of those Israelites who have wandered. And when he repaid and restored and rain was restored, it was as an example of a restoration of Israel's faith back to God.

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Read about this in 1 Kings 17 -18, where you can read about the drought and Elijah praying and it not raining for three and a half years and all those sorts of things.

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If I may, I'm going to take us over into 1 Kings 19, where just to think about Elijah for a minute, and then

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I know we're going to give another example that I think is also illustrative and helpful here, kind of taking our cue from James, we can give another one.

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So Elijah, his righteousness, obviously everybody at the highest level is going to acknowledge, yes, he is righteous before the

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Lord on account of Christ. He's trusting the promises of God realized in the Messiah. I think we can all say that and agree to that.

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But just to demonstrate that he was a man with a nature just like ours, read 1 Kings 19, because what happens in the aftermath of some of the greatest, most powerful stuff, not only the drought and the rain, but then there's this whole confrontation with the prophets of Baal and Elijah literally calling down fire from heaven to consume the altars.

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It's wild, right? I mean, it's a crazy scene. So that all occurs, but then

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Elijah is threatened. King Ahab is married to Jezebel, and there's a lot of animosity and hatred and vitriol.

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Jezebel threatens Elijah's life, and Elijah is warped out of his frame.

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He flees into the wilderness. He's anxious, he's afraid, and he is so perplexed by the whole thing, he just asked

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God to kill him. He's wrecked, and then he even uses a lot of language about how...

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You've got to just stop and think about that for a moment, right? He's so scared. He's like, God, it's better if you just kill me.

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And yet James uses this guy as an example, which totally makes sense now.

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Sorry. I mean, 1 Kings 19, we're not slamming

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Elijah here. This is encouraging to me, brother, and I hope you're listening. It's like, okay, he's like us.

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1 Kings 19, 4. Well, I'll start in 3. Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.

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But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree, and he asked that he might die, saying, it is enough.

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Now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my father's. He's there.

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The Lord tells him to arise and eat and all these kinds of things. Then he's going to go on later, if my memory serves me correctly.

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He's going to just lament that he's like the only faithful guy. His perspective is warped, and the

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Lord meets him in 1 Kings 19, 9 and following. It's just, what are you doing here, Elijah?

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It's really a sweet scene. Just really encouraging to think about how these

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Old Testament saints were just like us, which is what James is trying to say, that he's a man like you who is righteous on account of Christ alone.

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He is counted righteous through faith. Look at how the Lord used his prayers. He will use yours, too.

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That's right. One other example, then I want to go back and argue even more why there's suppositional righteousness.

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There's a lot of Old Testament play in here that we can use, and I think it's some New Testament. A great example of someone in the midst of his stupidity,

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God hears his prayer. Abraham lied about his wife. It caused a curse on the king, and so Abraham has to pray and ask

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God. Literally, Genesis 20, 17, then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech and all of his household, for the

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God had closed off the womb of his house of Abimelech because of Abraham's wife. If we're going to talk about the prayer of a righteous man, the man in the midst of his sin, it's like,

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Lord, will you kind of fix what I completely just guessed out there? Exactly. I was going to say, Abraham's deception is what brought the ruin upon Abimelech's household in the first place.

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It's like Abraham prays and he's healed, and to your point, it's like, okay,

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Abraham is righteous how? He is righteous because he is trusting in the promises of God, realized in Christ, and that faith is counted to him as righteousness.

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It's the righteousness of Christ imputed to him, and so Abraham is righteous in the eyes of God because of Christ.

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He receives that by faith. That's true for Elijah, it's true for Abraham, it's true for us. As we think about the prayer of a righteous person, we need to have these categories of view.

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If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest.

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If you struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. I want to read a couple of passages that really help us understand this is a position of righteousness because I know that you may not still be convinced from its context.

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I think from the context, from what James is giving us, that we should be trusting in the prayer that we have for one another.

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We're going to end there, and how do we pray for one another and believing in this power? But just so you understand that it is righteousness that's been imputed to you.

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This is your union with Christ. Even in Proverbs 15 29, Solomon writes, the

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Lord is far from the wicked, but here's the prayer of the righteous. Well, how do we identify in the

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Old Testament between the difference between the wicked and the righteous? I mean, why was Abraham considered righteous according to Hebrews, right?

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It was granted to him by his faith. So I think it's important that even that Paul in Philippians 3 talks about where his righteousness comes from, right?

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Philippians 3 9, and I found not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

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So James is talking about this kind of righteousness, and I would even say

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Hebrews 4 is one. So I'm going to give a couple more passages Justin, and then I'll let you comment on all this because I've got a passage too from the

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Old Testament that's helpful. Go ahead. Great. So Hebrews 4, it says that Christ sympathizes with us because of our weakness and that we can run with confidence into his presence.

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Why would we do that? Because Christ is our great high peace and representative, meaning that he is our righteousness.

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So our confidence does not come from our personal righteousness. Our confidence comes from our positional, which is

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Hebrews 4, another passage on prayer. John 9, after the healing, the man born blind, he knows the

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Old Testament, and they're asking him questions, and he's like, to the validity of Jesus.

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And the man born blind says this, we know that God does not listen to the sinners, but of anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will,

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God listens to him. And so you have this contrast that's happening between the two. And so I think going back and forth, you can see that when

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James uses this idea, by the way, Jesus being the representative of the righteous, when

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James says he has a nature like ours and yet God heard him, I cannot help but think as we confess our sins, that doesn't cause us to not want to pray.

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James is saying you're confessing your sins and then trusting in your positional righteousness and the power of that to pray.

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So dovetailing beautifully, we didn't plan this. This is just the Lord's word and how good it is. Psalm 32, how does that go?

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It begins this way, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Not who doesn't have any transgression or who doesn't have sin, but that you're forgiven and it's covered.

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Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. What does that mean?

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Immediately following, for when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, says

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David. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

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So when I kept my sin hidden and I didn't confess it, I literally was dying inside. Then verse 5,

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Psalm 32, I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity. I said,

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I will confess my transgressions to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Blessed is the man against whom the

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Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. To have deceit in your spirit means you hide your sin. To have no deceit in your spirit means you acknowledge your sin to the

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Lord and you confess it and he heals you and he forgives you. But then toward the end of that Psalm, there's a contrast between the wicked and the righteous.

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Well, how should we understand that? Psalm 32, 10 and 11, many are the sorrows of the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the

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Lord. So there's a contrast between the wicked and those who trust in the Lord. Verse 11, be glad in the

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Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart. Well, it's very clear in the context that the wicked are contrasted with the righteous, but the righteous are the same people.

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They are synonymous with those who trust in the Lord. It's very helpful to draw all these connections.

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Jon Moffitt is not on James's mind. James knows Psalm 32. It's a well -known Psalm. It's a beautiful Psalm.

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So James would have known that when he said, the prayer of the righteous has great power in this working, because he is referencing the power of Christ's righteousness on our behalf.

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Why does God hear our prayers? He hears our prayers. No, because we pray in Jesus' name.

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What in the world does that mean? And we approach the throne in Christ because of him we have boldness.

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That's right. So now we know what it doesn't mean, and now we know what it means.

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Why did he write it? That's what I want to spend the rest of our time with James, because one of the things

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I'm getting prepared to do is we'll probably do some podcasts down in a few months when I'm done preaching through some of this, but I'm going to do a series on prayer.

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I'm heartbroken. Prayer is very much like pietism and much like the cluttering of the gospel.

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We have so confused it and added things to it that it's just never intended to be that way. A lot of people don't get excited about the gospel because of pietism, and I think a lot of people don't get excited about prayer because of pietism.

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So this is a great passage to open up the doorway a little bit to what we can experience in prayer.

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But what I love about this is that where's the confidence? Where does James place your confidence of why you should pray?

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Your confidence is not in you. He's like, look, you're in sin. You need to confess that sin and trust that Christ's righteousness on your behalf is the power by which

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God will work. Your confidence is Christ for you.

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That's right. It's so good. Not only that, you need to understand that he's saying this is like Hebrews 4.

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He's saying this is why you should have confidence in the prayer. This is why you can run with boldness to the

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Father and know that your prayer will be packed with power, not because of what you have done.

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He goes, the only thing you've done in this whole section is sin. I love this. He's like, confess your sins and then trust your positional righteousness.

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That's what he's saying. And there's great power. And then I love it. He uses Elijah as an example of a man who has a nature like ours.

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But what did God do? And so we don't necessarily need God to stop raining. That was just an example of the kind of power that can happen.

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But Justin, how much more powerful is it to have a church unified in the gospel and unified in love where they are loving and caring for each other with the power of God?

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And James is like, that's what you need. You guys need to be healed in your relationships because you're devouring each other. And then he uses something like Elijah.

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I mean, it's super cool, right? He stopped it from raining. But James is like, that's cool. That's a really powerful thing.

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But what you guys need is power in your relationships. And he's saying you can have it because of who you are in Christ.

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Amen. Daniel 9. I'm going to read this. These are some really encouraging thoughts, too, related to what we're saying.

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On what basis are our prayers effective? On what basis are our prayers heard? These are really good words.

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So Daniel in Daniel 9, 18 and 19, he says, Oh my God, incline your ear and hear.

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Open your eyes and see our desolations in the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy.

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Oh Lord, hear. Oh Lord, forgive. Oh Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not for your own sake, oh my

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God, because your city and your people are called by your name. That's so good.

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There it is. I say something very similar to that before every pastoral prayer I do at CBC when

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I'm bringing our petitions to God. So I'm interceding for us. And it's like, Lord, we don't bring these before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy.

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Because we are now your people. We're covered in the blood and righteousness of your Son and we're now called by your name. It's like, okay, if that's how we're coming to the

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Lord, we can trust, along with James' words here, that the Lord hears and the

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Lord will act and that our prayers are effective because of the righteousness of Christ for us.

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I need that word this morning, man, because I don't feel this way a lot of times. Even when our faith is weak, this is an amazing illustration from Acts 14.

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Peter's in prison. He just killed James. He just skewered James with a sword.

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I don't mean to be grotesque, but he saw how the people responded to that.

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So now he's excited about doing something with Peter. So Peter's in prison. And so the church gathers to pray for Peter.

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And Peter, an angel comes and he can't decide if he's dreaming or if he's awake. And so finally he realizes he's awake and he runs to the door and knocks on the door.

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And there's a little girl there at watch. And she's so blown away that Peter's standing there.

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She forgets to open the door and goes and tells him, you know, like, Peter's here. And they're like, no, it's a ghost or it's an image of him.

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It's not really him. But the point of the illustration, what I love about the story is that, Justin, their faith was not very strong, but where did the power come from?

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And I think it's a beautiful illustration that the power didn't come from their strength of faith. The power came from God hears the prayer of his children, no matter how weak in faith it may be.

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And so I just find it so encouraging that he's trying to put the confidence in the power of God.

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So if you feel weak, you feel distant, man, just go back up to chapter four. He's like, draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

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Confess your sins and cleanse your hands, you sinners, right? And repent. The point of it is, is that we're always trusting in the power and the forgiveness of God because of our relationship to God, not because of our obedience.

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I mean, all throughout James, it's this way. And so you just have the illustration of Elijah. You have the illustration of Abraham.

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You have the illustration of Psalm 32. You have the illustration of Acts 14. I mean, how many more examples do we need? It's Acts 12,

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I believe. Sorry, Acts 12. Thank you. Acts 12. How many more examples do we need where prayer is not about how good you are?

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Prayer is about how gracious God is. Amen. And that's why it's effective.

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And that's why we can pray with boldness and confidence. And yeah, it's a beautiful thought. Maybe in these last few minutes,

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I know that you mentioned this before, but just James's aim in encouraging people, confess your sins to one another.

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That's obviously, like you said, it's a corporate dynamic where we, as the body of Christ corporate, are confessing our sins to one another and then pray for one another that you may be healed.

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Again, that healing language is clearly a spiritual principle.

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We pray this for ourselves a lot, John. I know I pray this personally, and then I pray it a lot publicly in our congregation.

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I know you do too. We ask for mercy from the Lord, and we ask that he would take away the shame and the guilt and the fear that we carry around with us all the time.

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Because our consciences accuse us. The enemy accuses us. There's a lot of darts flying at us.

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We're mindful of our sin, and we can be wrecked and affected by that. The healing we're talking about is that freedom and that restoration that the

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Lord gives to us as we apprehend Christ for us and what that means in terms of our forgiveness and our liberation.

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The fact that we don't need to worry anymore about the sins of yesterday or the sins of this morning, but we are free in Christ to pursue righteousness now.

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I trust others to feel the same. We need to keep saying these things and putting these words in our mouths so that we would believe them, that we would trust them, and that we would feel them.

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Justin, when you and I either are weak or we have epically face -planted sin and we just feel disgusted and ashamed, when you're in that moment, do you want to go talk to somebody who you know is going to be a hardened judge and it's just going to make you feel worse?

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Or do you want to talk to somebody who maybe understands and is sympathetic towards your position? Justin and I do this when we fail and falter.

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We struggle even in our own marriages. There are times we call each other because we know Justin is going to be sympathetic to my position here because he struggles with this too.

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But Justin always points me back to the grace of God. Well, this is what's amazing about Hebrews 4.

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It says we have a high priest, the one who we are supposed to talk to, who is sympathetic.

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What that means is that not only he understands, but he wants to hear you talk about it.

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You can go in and say, all right, Lord, this is how I've completely face -planted. I completely just botched this.

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Or I am weak and in need and I know that you actually care and you are compassionate to hear what

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I have to say. That is so powerful. I do believe that is what

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James is going after. He's like, listen, you who are sinning, you can trust in the power of the righteous position you are in.

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This is why he goes, hey, just so you guys know, Elijah had a nature like ours. Weak, sinful, and he prayed and God heard him.

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Justin Perdue has fallen in. If he was fallen like you and he was able to pray and it didn't rain for three and a half years, you certainly can pray for each other.

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You can confess your sins and you can pray and you will be healed and you will be restored and God will give mercy and grace in your time of need.

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That's right. There's this idea that we should be thankful and in many ways quick to run to the one who is sympathetic.

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It's hard for us to hear that. Justin, pietism and revivalism created a fear tactic amongst the believers where God isn't a sympathetic father who says, come to me in time of need.

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He's drawn near to me and I will draw near to you. Why don't they preach

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James 4 when it says he gives more grace? Why can't we say that? James wrote that.

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Why don't we say that? Hey, in the midst of your sin, there's more grace. Now come repent. Come here. Come draw near to the

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Father and receive grace and receive mercy. No, it's exacting. I'm just going to say this.

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This is the end of a podcast. You can go listen to our whole podcast on it, but this is the tone that Piper gave. It's debilitating to people, calling them to question their salvation.

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Sorry, I just dropped that bomb. Go listen to the episode. Justin Perdue You did drop a bomb. I'm metaphorically ducking.

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We'll take it to SR. It is a sadness.

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There's so much wrapped up in this. We lose sight of the fact that we have a sympathetic High Priest. We lose sight of the fact that God does give more grace.

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We lose sight of the fact that He's a loving Father. When we are in agreement with Him about His law and we agree with Him that we're in error, it's like I'm coming to confess that I've sinned again.

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I'm sorry. I hate my sin. My flesh loves it. I hate it in my inner man.

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I'm in need. Wretched man that I am, who's going to deliver me? Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

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I'm so thankful, Father, that I'm not condemned. I'm coming because I need grace and mercy.

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Man, such is the Christian life. I trust we're not alone, John. I trust this resonates with many people out there.

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We're now going to go and record an additional podcast. It's called Semper Reformanda, SR for short.

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This is our membership. It's another ministry related to Theocast. It's for people who have partnered with us.

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By this time, my sermon series on prayer should be out. We'll put that in the show notes as well.

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Excellent. Great. John and I are going to record an additional podcast today. We're going to keep talking about some of this stuff and maybe even deal with that bomb that John dropped.

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Try to clean up the shrapnel and the wreckage from that and see how we do. This time is family time because these are people that have partnered with us that we know are in agreement.

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We talk in those ways. We also will go in more depth sometimes and pull back the curtain a little bit more to try to deepen all of our understandings and sharpen us all.

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That's what we're headed to do. If you want to listen to this additional content as well as become a part of the SR community and get on the

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SR app and be able to interact with other people who are processing and wrestling with the same things you are, then you can find information about our membership and how you can donate to Theocast over at theocast .org.

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We'll leave that to you. You are intelligent people who know how to use a website. John and I are out of here.

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We'll talk with a number of you again on the regular episode next week. For many of you, we're going to talk with you over on SR.