Drowning in Evangelicalism?

Hi, this is John, and today we're going to have a conversation that many of you are going to agree with. There's something wrong with the modern

Christian movement, or we would say the evangelical movement. Something feels off, and if you feel this way,

I think this conversation is going to be helpful for you. We talk about, really, a lot of the dangerous movements that happen within the broader evangelical church, where it came from, and is there a solution?

Do we dump the whole thing, or is there another option, what we would point you to, which is a

Reformed confessional option? In the members' podcast, we really explain where there's rest and hope can be found, looking back to the historic teachings of Christianity that have been handed down to us.

We hope you enjoy the conversation. Hey, guys, as a quick reminder, if you'd like to join Theocast in helping other people find rest in Christ, a simple way of doing that is simply by leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

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To learn more about how to support Theocast, simply visit theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective, and yet very lively.

Our hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Last week, we started a new segment, so I'm ready to jump right into it. We call it The Pro -Cons, and we're going to hear from Jimmy this morning.

Jimmy, what are you for and what are you against? What gets under your blood and makes it boil?

All right, I'm going to stir the pot here a little bit this morning. I am pro -salty snacks, con -sweet treats, don't like them, yeah, don't eat them.

All right, you got to give an example of like a sweet treat, what do you mean? Okay, so let's just say, let's say for supper,

I had a steak, maybe a little vegetable, maybe a little potato, you know, you finish your supper, you put it away, you clean up.

I want to sit down with like a beer and pretzels more than I want a brownie and ice cream.

So you just don't like dessert. No, I don't. I mean, I just, if you were to tell me today, hey, we are, we are no longer going to have dessert in any shape or fashion.

I'd be like, okay, that's fine. All right. I don't need it. There you go.

I don't need it. I like cake. Don't like cake. I think cake is gross in all, in all forms.

I can agree with you. Cake is like, this is what I think cake is like. Cake is like taking a sponge and trying to sugar it up with icing on top of it and it just doesn't work.

You're still eating a sponge. It's gross. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the only, like,

I mean, even doughnuts, I'm like, yeah, whatever. It's fine. Oh, come on, man. Good old -fashioned.

Like, I just, I don't. Nope. I don't care. You can keep them. All right. All right. Two thoughts.

One, I mean, I can't resonate with you on some of this, Jimmy. I like savory snacks too, but I can't get away from the fact that I dearly love the sweet and salty combination.

Oh, yeah. Like that, that's a thing for me. Like chocolate covered pretzels. Come on, man. Man. Like if you were to take away the sweet piece of the sweet and salty, that would be heartbreaking to me.

And then secondly, I mean, I'm all for nutrition and fitness, but I've never met a baked good I don't like.

And so the fact that I don't eat a lot of them has nothing to do with not wanting to eat them.

And so I wish I didn't like cake and I wish I didn't think that doughnuts were one of the most incredible things to eat in the whole world.

Yeah. Made my life easier on the one hand. So I'm pro. I'm pro salty snacks, but I'm also pro sweet treats.

Yeah. I can eat a brownie and ice cream every night, man. Every night. Okay. Let me give you a real life example.

The joy of Jesus right there. Let me give you a real life example. So our school right now, y 'all need to pray for my self -control.

It's like the last week of school and the concession stand is open bar right now.

It's just completely wide open. Wow. Our director of development just said, we normally sell all this stuff with baseball, but because we didn't have sports because of the pandemic or whatever, it's open bar and this stuff is going to expire.

So I walk in there and I mean, it's honestly any candy bar, any sort of candy that you could want.

And what do I go for? I go for the cheap, nasty, fake cheese nachos.

That's what I want. I want the salty. You can keep the Twix and the

Snickers and the Milky Ways and all the nougat. I don't want it. You keep that. Get that out of my life.

I resonate with a little bit of what you're saying. If I'm going to the concession stand, I'm not buying a Snickers. Yeah, who's going to buy a

Snickers? And I think partly to, I'd rather,

I don't know. There's part of me that's like, I'd rather drink my calories too. And so I just have to be careful. I'm built like a marshmallow with toothpicks sticking out.

You're just a product of your culture, man. You're just a product of your Wisconsin culture. Oh, he did it. He did it.

Jimmy, you've been influenced by so many factors you don't even know. They're, yeah. That's right. Because real people, real people love

Snickers. And everybody in this podcast probably just stopped listening when you said that. Right. That's exactly right.

So are you, JP? I gave you the transition. I know. It was beautifully done,

Jon. We today are going to discuss the fact that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that we are all products of the culture in which we live.

We're all influenced by things that we're not aware of, frankly. And so the point of the conversation today is to hopefully be of help to the broad evangelical out there, or even to the

Calvinistic evangelical perhaps as well, in identifying some of the things that have produced the evangelical culture in which we live, and the evangelical culture in which many of us have been raised and have cut our teeth, like spiritually and theologically speaking.

And the illustration we like to use a lot of times is the one of fish and water. The fish lives in the water, swims in the water, and honestly is not really aware of the water itself.

And what we want to do is help the fish see the water and understand the water in which it's swimming.

And so our hope is to maybe give a little bit of backfill in terms of how we even got here, what is it that has produced evangelicalism with respect to history, because that does matter.

But then we want to identify some of the big things that are a part of evangelical culture that may or may not be so much biblical as they are just cultural.

And a lot of times we assume these things are in the Bible because we've just never known anything other than them. But we want to take a serious look at some of those things and come alongside the evangelical in a kind way to say to them, as we so often do, if you're seeing these things and you're feeling these things and you're experiencing this tension and you're disenchanted, you're struggling, you're frustrated, brother or sister, you're not crazy and you're not alone.

And I know for me, the Lord primed the pump for years and years to bring me to the place where I've been now for some time.

And I know that's true with you brothers, and we may talk a little bit about our experience, but I'm even mindful, guys, of a number of the podcasts and the media that's out there, the writing that's out there, that is basically just in out -and -out rebellion against the evangelical culture because they've been so burned by it.

And that's not what we want to do. We want to come along and be a little bit more helpful, maybe more charitable, and not burn the whole thing down, but identify the things that aren't as biblical and that are more culturally situated.

So that's the best way I know to frame the conversation. Let's try to help some people out there.

John, take it away, bro. Yeah, man. Well, there has obviously been quite a few people who have identified this problem.

A person who's been brilliant at this and really, I think, did a fine job.

Unfortunately, what he did is he kind of just threw the whole thing out. And when you do that, then you're left...

So Rob Bell, brilliant mind, brilliant communicator, and very meticulously was able to pull out all the strings.

And before you know it, all of evangelicalism was unraveled. And he pulled a large following with him.

And now, I'm not sure what it is. I don't know if Rob's a deist or what he is. But we, too, want to pull out all these strings and help you dismantle and help you identify where you can say, this isn't right.

Like, it can't feel right. And there's two types of people. There are, unfortunately, people who are over it and they walk away.

And I have friends who are in these circumstances where they have just walked away from evangelicalism.

They've walked away from Christianity. I have a lot of college students I used to help think through as I was ministering to them.

And they've done the same. And then you have those who remain, but they stay frustrated.

And they're constantly trying to figure out, why do I feel this way?

So they know they can't walk away from Christ because they love Christ. But at the same time, how do we identify what's going on?

And they don't have, as Justin said, they don't have a category to place it because no one's pulled them out to show them the context.

One of the big keys, I think, in this and really becoming self -aware and identifying what's going on in your current context, and this was big for me when

I first started to evaluate my own Christian life, is that evangelicalism, the history behind it, has turned the entire

Christian world in on itself to where everything is about the self -made

Christian. Here is how you make yourself, and then they will give you a thousand different things to be a better dad, to be a better mom, to be a better whatever.

Everything is the self -improvement, self -focused. Everything is, how do

I become better? From books to church services to music.

I mean, the me song movement back in the 80s and 90s is just exhausting to think about how many songs are just about what

I'm going to do or what it's all about me and my worship for God. And so I would say, we had this conversation before, guys, and I know you want to jump on this, but the foundation of most evangelical, the movement, has been this me -centered, me -focused movement.

Yeah. I mean, this is where you really have to ask the question, when you come to this place and you've felt these things for a while, you've begun to feel, in a sense, lost in the crowd, you're asking the question, is there another way?

But you're also fearful to ask that question because it's kind of like you are bucking against the status quo.

And when people hear you ask the questions, is there another way that the

Christian life is, dare I say, experienced? People begin to look at you funny.

So I'll just share an example from my own life. I remember in my own journey, kind of coming out of evangelicalism and looking at the

Christian life from a more historically Reformed mindset. The things that I was saying and the ways that I began to think about piety and holiness and church and preaching and the sacraments and the like, people would look at me like I was nuts.

And one of the questions I always got is, are you Catholic? Are you going to become Catholic or something like that?

But JP, you've said this before, that the way that I was talking and frankly, the way that us three talk, it's not that it's new, which is the route that Rob Bell has gone, right?

I'm just going to make up something new. It's not that it's new, but in fact, the way that we are talking now is actually very old.

It's very historic. And so it's very simple, and it's very easy to feel that way, to feel like, man, something's wrong with me.

So Justin, I know you want to jump in here as well. Justin Perdue Sure. Like I say, it's a pop -tart reality.

We talk in such a way, it's so old, it sounds new. I'm referring to that old school commercial, so hot, they're cool, so cool, they're hot.

Yeah, that was free. So I think it matters to have the conversation about history and about what produced evangelicalism.

I'm going to say this, I'm going to state it frankly, I mean it to be humbly put forth. I'm not trying to act like I've got it all figured out or the three of us have it all figured out.

But I would wager that the vast majority of evangelicals have no real idea of how we got here in terms of what is it that produced the evangelical church in America, historically speaking, and even more specifically thinking about the history of interpretation, the rule of faith, and just the theological ebbs and flows and movements that have led us to this place.

And without going way down the road with some of this, we can't talk about evangelicalism, which is a uniquely

American thing. We can't talk about it without using two words, and I'll try to briefly define them. One is pietism.

We talk about it all the time here, which is a hyper -focus on the Christian and the interior of the

Christian life. It's very subjective. It's all about you, your affections for God, your disciplines, your performance, your obedience, etc.

So there's that hyper -focus on the individual and on the believer. But then the other thing that has really contributed to where we are is something we would call revivalism, which we have to just state that the evangelical church in America is pietistic at heart, and it is revivalistic at heart, meaning that in terms of revivalism, it's about several things.

It's about moral transformation. It's about personal improvement and change, and it is also about this conversion moment.

We need people to make decisions for Christ. As the American church is becoming a thing, those two theological movements, pietism and revivalism, form and shape the

American church, broadly speaking. This has all kinds of fallout for where we find ourselves today.

I will start with this because I do think it matters, and I'm speaking to the broad evangelical out there right now.

I think that most Christians in America assume that the Sunday morning gathering is really for the purpose of bringing non -Christians in.

The purpose is essentially to have a stationary Billy Graham crusade.

Let's make it as attractive as we can to the non -Christian and see as many people make decisions for Christ every

Sunday as possible. The thought that we would herald the gospel primarily to the saints, with the understanding that the non -Christian would be present, is absolutely foreign to most people.

Most people would be like, that's bananas, bro. Why would we do it that way? I think that demonstrates a number of things.

We've misunderstood what the focus of the church is and what the focus of the Sunday morning gathering is.

It's not so much for the equipping of the saints and the sustaining work of God through word and sacrament, and through which he imparts faith as well.

It's aimed at the novel. Let's bring people in, and then let's think about how we can live better lives now in Christ.

We've got to move on to that reality. I know you guys are chomping at the bit here.

I'll wrap it up. Go, John. I would say when you look at even the early church in Acts, then you read the

New Testament epistles, and then even look at church history, the church service is primarily for the saints.

It's a family gathering. It's for the sake of building one another up. You then get influenced by revivalism and the tent meeting movement, and the church service became the evangelistic program.

Revivalism and tent meetings became so famous and popular because there was no entertainment in the culture.

You didn't have TV. Radio was on the movement, but revivalism threw up this tent, and it was, go hear a very dynamic, passionate person preach.

That influenced preachers where they wanted to have that in their own church services, so church services became revivalistic.

All of a sudden, instead of teaching and training and shepherding people, it became how many conversions can we get.

This is all about conversionism. It's all about transforming, getting people to make a decision. It's still true today.

You look at these large evangelical churches, not all of them, but by and large, a lot of them are giving away

TVs. It's all about the music and the feel and making sure there's proper children's ministry because we want to draw in the unbeliever.

The believer who's in that context is so anemic and is so weak that their whole lives learn to adjust to think that this is normal to live in a very shallow, and even when

I mean shallow, I mean the sermons are shallow and the fellowship becomes shallow. If you start talking about deep struggles, that's going to scare people away.

Jimmy, really quick, we're all about having a heck of a time in Jesus' name on Sunday morning.

It's all about the energy, and it needs to be epic every week.

Every Sunday has got to be better than the Sunday before. It's a treadmill. I could say a lot.

Jimmy, jump in, man. Jimmy Buehler Yeah. Even to stay within this, but also to maybe shift lanes a little bit, if you were to ask a modern evangelical, what are the ways that a

Christian grows in their faith? Most likely, the different barometers and the different things that they would say would be, well, a

Christian grows through their personal devotion time, a .k .a. their prayer closet, and a

Christian grows by going to the

Ra -Ra -Shish -Boom -Ba church service. I mean, those are the primary ways that it goes. That's what happens.

It's got to be this high energy, and the way you really know that you are growing as a

Christian is you ask yourself this question, how do I feel about Jesus? What is my overall disposition and feelings about Christ?

That's not to say that there's no room for feelings, so don't hear us say that. What we're pushing is

Christian stoicism. That's not at all what we're saying. But at the same time, what we have been trying to say for the past 20 minutes or so is that there has been this massively individualization of the

Christian life, that everything within the Christian life needs to be about the individual, how they are pursuing their own holiness apart from the local body.

Maybe now we begin to shift a little bit and say, what is the better way?

The sickness that people feel, what is the antidote? I don't know if you guys want to talk about that a little bit.

Justin Perdue I think you've identified something that's important, Jimmy. I made a wager earlier about the fact that most evangelicals don't know where we came from.

I would also wager that most evangelicals assume that the real stuff of the

Christian life happens when we're alone. That's right, in your closet. Versus the real stuff of the

Christian life happening when we're gathered in the context of the gathered church with the ministry of the

Word and the ministry of the sacraments, which is the historical and Reformed understanding of those things.

Jimmy, you have said this before. We've talked about this on Theocast before. The new sacraments of the evangelical movement are spiritual disciplines, quiet times, like you said, your prayer closet and your devotional time.

Then the worship experience that needs to be really hyped up. It's the hype train piece.

It's all about how we feel. We evaluate everything based upon how we feel. My quiet time was only useful to me if I felt really good about what

I read in the Scripture or if it moved me in a certain way. My worship experience was only good or meaningful if I felt a certain way.

It's almost like we're chasing these emotional highs in order to really assess our lives spiritually.

Like you said, Jimmy, we're not saying that emotions are bad. They're good, but we're acknowledging the fact that they vacillate and they ebb and flow like crazy.

I am not the first to make this illustration. I've heard better preachers than me say these kinds of things.

You go to an evangelical service so often, and it's almost like it's a concert or a show because the person comes up, everything looks perfect, the music is banging, and there's a lot of visual presentation, and the countdown happens.

Three, two, one, and then right on cue, somebody grabs the mic with some grandiose gesture and says,

Hey, good morning. How y 'all feeling? It's just like, okay, well, what am I supposed to do with that?

Because honestly, I got into a fight with my wife in the car on the way over. We spilled our coffee going through.

Our kids are an absolute disaster. How do I feel? Pretty lousy, actually. What do you have for me?

That's a common experience, I think, for so many people in the evangelical church. It kind of promotes a dishonesty.

I almost feel like I've got to put on the face and the facade and construct that thing because we're all supposed to be hyped up for Jesus.

Maybe we're not. Maybe we come in here struggling today, and I've got to fake it until I make it because if this is what the

Christian life is supposed to be, either one of two things, we conclude, I think, if the

Christian life is all about hype and experience and I'm just geeked up for Jesus and I'm doing swell, then one, either this is just all a farce and it's not legit, or two, it is legit, but it just didn't work for me and I'm done.

I think it is where a lot of people end up. The experience that I have with a lot of people who come into our church context, the first time they come to a women or men's

Bible study and they're from the broader evangelical context where it's all about the presentation.

I remember the first time I heard the old, I don't know how old the song is, Casting Crowns, the whole

Happy Plastic People. That's how people feel. You have to step out of your car, put on the fake plastic

Christianity where it's all squeaky and polyester. It's Instagram, buddy. You get back in the car and it all comes off.

Their first experience of a raw, where you come in and it's all about being honest.

This isn't air dirty laundry. You are safe here to admit that you do not have it all together, that you do not have the power to accomplish this

Christian life on your own. Then you see grown men who are strong and firm.

We have very strong personalities cling tightly to Jesus Christ and it's an experience that just transforms them.

This is where I would add to what Justin and Jimmy are saying. Within the evangelical world, there's this progression.

You get drawn in through the light show. Clearly, my life is not what it should be.

Christianity can make me happy. You come in and now you're given next steps. Here's the next steps that you are to follow.

That's how you're trained to interact with not only the church service, but your Bible. We would love and encourage everyone here to indulge in God's word as much as you're capable and as much as you want.

But the danger is, and I know I'm going to get myself in trouble in saying this, you actually cause more problems indulging your word or the word of God inappropriately than you would if you knew how to read it appropriately.

You read your Bible as if it's the next step movement. It's your handbook for life.

That is an evangelical fallacy to think that the Bible was designed for you to try and determine what it is that you are going to do next as a

Christian. I think maybe the awkward elephant in the room is evangelicalism is perfectly designed to run a business that needs to grow.

Often what happens within these contexts is that decisions are made for Christ.

We need to on -ramp them into greater life within the church.

Typically what that means is greater volunteerism within the life of the organization.

When we have a service that has six, seven, eight, nine hundred people coming through the doors, we need bodies of people to make sure that this machine moves.

I'm sure there's people that are thinking that I'm really jaded out there, but I would say one of the things that often lacks within evangelical culture is this mindset of three church planters right now.

This mindset of maybe being this large isn't sustainable and let's get these forty people healthy and let's send them out and maybe let's plant a church.

Often that mindset just does not go because we have to keep the machine moving here.

We have to keep the mothership afloat. Often what's used as a tactic is the fear -based and legal preaching that you have to live this way and think this way and feel this way and do life this way.

Otherwise, you're going to make a wreck of yourself and you're just going to walk away and abandon the faith.

That just exhausts people. It crushes and exhausts people. We're excited to announce that we have a new free e -book available at our website called

Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rust. We, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rust and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

You can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

I want to respond to a couple of things you guys have said. John, you were talking about the danger that comes from reading your

Bible by yourself and misunderstanding it and going places with it that you should not go.

This is why you need pastors. The Lord Jesus has given pastors and teachers to the church for a reason.

It doesn't mean that you can't profit from reading your Bible by yourself. It just means that you need to be doing that in the context of a healthy local church where you're getting good teaching so that you are being taught how to understand your

Bible. Secondly, this is why it matters that we would do theology corporately, not individually.

This is part of being a confessional Christian. We look back through history and understand that the same

Holy Spirit has been at work in the church for 2 ,000 years. We want to stand on the shoulders of saints who have come before us and have believed these central doctrinal truth claims about Scripture.

We're going to believe these things and do theology corporately, not just off by ourselves and take the

Bible to mean whatever we think it means. The piece that you mentioned, Jimmy, about how the evangelical church is a machine or a business that needs to grow.

It's almost viewed that way. I think evangelicalism, too, because of the revivalistic pieces and stuff, is inherently pragmatic.

It's results -driven. It's results -oriented. In the second Great Awakening, which happened in the middle of the 1800s, for example, something called the

New Measures developed where we are going to do whatever we need to do in order to see the results produced that we want to see.

We need to see people make decisions for Christ. We want to see lives transformed and changed. Now we're going to engineer the methods and the measures to produce those results.

Because the results are good, it justifies the means through which we would achieve them.

I think that's a backwards way of thinking, whereas what we would say is the Scripture is very clear that the church is grown and the

Christian life is lived. Christians are sustained by the preaching of the Word of Christ and by the right administration of the sacraments of the

Lord's Table and baptism in the context of the gathered church. That's how we want to move forward in not only seeing people come to Christ, but how we want to see them grow in the faith.

I think that what ends up happening is a lot of damage that results when we try to tweak the measures and the means in order to achieve the result.

We try to reverse engineer it, and I think a lot of the damage and the fallout of that is what we see in the evangelical world broadly.

I would even say this is how we evaluate a successful church, where successful churches are the ones that are big and growing.

The church planner who had 400 on his first service, and then by the next year he had a thousand. This guy's got it on, and people are attracted to success.

Why do you think we re -reviews? We re -reviews on Amazon because we want something that's successful.

We don't want a lemon, and so we are attracted to big, better, and we want something that has a movement to it.

We all have been a part of this. We all want to be on that ground floor where something's moving. It's pragmatism on steroids.

We're going to do what works. What is sad is that the

Bible tells you what works, and the Bible gives you the measures of success. They look nothing like what the modern evangelical church looks like.

Think about it this way. The apostle Paul says that some people plant and some water.

Paul planted the Apollos water. Who gives the increase?

It's God who gives the increase. The way you measure a successful church is, are they administering what

God has instituted them to administer? Are they loving and caring for one another? Are they functioning as a church should function?

That's the measure of success. What we always measure is budget, numbers, social media, book sales.

You look at it, and it's nauseating because you see people who are drowning.

The whole reason, and this is where we're going to try to make a shift here, is that some of you are probably feeling in deep despair and, wow, these guys are jerks and they just love to punch people in the nose.

We are speaking as ones who came from this movement. Every single one of us were drowning in this movement.

We all got to a point where we put our hands up and said, enough is enough. We're not doing this anymore.

There has to be a way that... I think every single one of us ended up going back in history.

Where did things go wrong? Where did stuff go off the rails? Really, the

Reformation is a rediscovery because during the Reformation, the Reformers were saying the same thing.

We have gone off the rails. We are so entrapped in legalism and in a culture of...

The Catholic Church became a part of the culture. If you wanted to be a part of...

identified by your city or by your county or by your state, you had to be baptized in the

Catholic Church. That's how they took census. The whole system got turned on its head.

Let's talk a little bit about how it is that we can help people transition. We're not just going to pull the threads and pull this thing apart.

We're not over here saying we have the better system. We don't have the better system. We're hailing a system that is, I believe, biblical and based on years of history of men reshaping and reforming this from a biblical perspective.

I think it's also helpful to remember. We've mentioned the word pietism. It's helpful to remember where that also came from.

The pietist movement... Keep in mind, there's a difference between pietism and piety.

Piety is good. We are for a personal holiness. We are for repenting of our sin, placing our hope and faith and trust in Christ and allowing

His means to sanctify us in this life. We are for that. Pietism, though, this hyper -focus, it comes from this movement where what you had going on in the

Reformation was a lot of this high -level scholastic debate and conversation happening.

A lot of it wasn't trickling down and reaching the laity. What you had was a lot of...

Particularly in Lutheran circles, the German Lutheran pietist movement, they began forming these groups.

There were groups. Jacob Spanier was really the head of that, where they would have these small groups.

Really, the question became less about, are you sound theologically?

Are you even saved? That became the question. Are you even saved? Which isn't necessarily horrible in and of itself, but as with anything, when you take it to the nth degree, it begins to shift and morph into a monster that nobody ever intended it to be.

What happened within pietism is, are you saved? It just became the air in which evangelicalism came to breathe, that it was born into.

Evangelicalism is a pietist movement. We have to keep that in mind. Once I began to realize that, and once I began to see that the evangelical system is built to suppress me, and I know that sounds so drastic, but the evangelical system is really built to constantly drive me to myself and constantly batter my assurance.

Once I began to see that, then there has to be another way. There has to be a different way because this cannot be a sustainable course of the

Christian life. That's really when I began to study deeper, more historical Reformed theology and say, whoa, these creeds and these confessions, whether it was the

Westminster Confession, or the Belgic Confession, or the 1689 London Baptist Confession, or even the 39

Articles of Christian Religion. Once I began to look into these things and see, wait a minute, there is a whole different approach to piety and the

Christian life and church that I feel like has just been robbed from me. I think one of the first things that I would encourage somebody is, have you read any of these historical documents?

The Reformation, dare I say, is more than the five points of Calvinism. It's way more.

It's way more than the five solas. It's way more than the five solas. Jimmy, you dropped a really hard pill for some people to swallow.

When I heard of confessionalism, or the Westminster to me, when I was growing up as a

Baptist, was a step to the side of Roman Catholicism. All they did was clean it up a little bit.

They took out some of the crazies, but it's still Roman Catholicism. They are adhering to a document and system rather than the

Bible being the sole authority for all that they do. That was just my own ignorance.

Evangelicalism is ignorant of Christian history, really, at large. They have broad categories, but they don't really understand the distinction of what's going on.

Confessionalism, I think it's very important for you to understand, if you're new to this podcast, we are not asking you to admit yourself to an authority that is above Scripture.

The word confess literally means to explain. I am explaining what

I believe the Bible says. Every single person has a confession. For instance, if I ask you, if I ask any person on the street, who is

Jesus Christ, what you tell me is your confession. You're about to confess to me who you think

Jesus is. Here's the danger. If you don't use history and you don't understand

Scripture, if you think you're the only one who's going to rightly divide the Word of God and has the only capacity to do that, you're going to teach heresy.

What confessions are is the history of what the evangelical church, the history of what

Christians have believed throughout the ages. Thankfully, during the Reformation, men decided to say, listen, for the sake of education, for the sake of clarity, for the unbelieving church, and to help distinct ourselves from false religions and the

Roman Catholic Church, we are going to document what we believe the Bible says. If you look at a confession, it's very thin.

It's not a very thick document. What they're trying to do is, here's the Bible, and here's the main points that we think you should know that historically this is what

Christians have believed. The authority is God's Word. The explanation of what

God's Word is the confession. Just to help explain that. To confess, to explain, or even to say together what we believe.

That's what we're pointing people to. I think a big issue in evangelicalism, guys, and I'm going to try to maybe paint this picture a little bit, and then transition us to the confessional place where we are.

One of the issues is that evangelicalism is built on what could be called theologically a theology of glory, meaning it is about the fact that we, in Christ Jesus, are now onward and upward.

We're constantly improving. Ours is now a position of strength. This manifests itself in all kinds of ways.

Some of it is just the very practical how to have a better marriage, how to have a better handle on your finances, how to be a better whatever.

There's all of that stuff, but then there's also this you're a conqueror in the Lord Jesus. There's this kind of abuse of Philippians 4.

You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. There's all of that kind of stuff that's sometimes sentimental and sometimes just flat out ridiculous on the face of it.

I think what ends up happening in that culture where we're always improving, it's always onward and upward, the people who are pretty self -aware and are looking at themselves are thinking,

I am not there. I am struggling like crazy. My life is hard.

My sin is kicking my backside like on the regular. I'm not doing well spiritually.

I don't feel like my affections are where they need to be. I want to love God with all my heart, but I can't seem to pull that off.

I want to love my neighbor, but I can't seem to pull that off either. I am just struggling. Then again, we look around and we're like, okay, if I'm struggling this way,

I have to assume that other people are too, but everybody is acting like they're doing great. What is going on?

I think you end up with so many people who are discouraged and jaded because they assess the church landscape and they think, okay,

Jesus is legit. I can't walk away from Christ even if I wanted to, but the church has nothing for me.

The Christian life, it just seems impossible. It seems absurd.

I just don't even know what to do with any of this stuff. I think the way that we would frame it here at Theocast, and I know we do this in our local churches, is

Christ, He is our righteousness. He is our surety. He is our assurance. He's our peace.

He's our hope. He's all of these things. Now, let's be honest about our struggle and about our sin and point one another to Christ in the

Word and in the sacrament and in our corporate witness to each other. Let's lock arms together as we trust

Christ and rely upon the Spirit to sanctify us. I know the way that we aim to do this at my church, at CBC, is we set the tone from the jump.

We welcome people to service after we have a song to just herd everybody into the room. We welcome people to church by acknowledging, here's the reality, guys.

You've come here today. We're not sure how you're feeling. We're not sure how you're doing. If you're like the rest of us, you've probably had some good things happen this week, and you've had some really hard stuff happen this week.

If you're honest, your heart is an absolute mess. You're distracted, and you're struggling as you come in this morning. We have no hope.

In and of ourselves, we're weak. We're inadequate. We're insufficient. We have come because Christ is our sufficiency, and He has saved sinners even such as us.

Welcome to church. Now, we can actually look to Christ and have something to sing about and rejoice about and confess together and comfort one another with.

That's the confessional perspective. It's just a much more honest approach, I think, to the

Christian life and to church. It's more self -aware, and that's not to sound arrogant. It's just true.

We're looking to the truths that are tested by centuries and centuries and centuries of time.

We cling to those together, and ultimately, those truths center on Christ. That's right.

Amen. As we get ready to transition over to our members' podcast,

I just want to conclude with this and really set up the next conversation. The hard part, and just to add what

Justin was saying, the hard part about all of this is that it's the now what moment.

It's, okay, well, all right, we've identified this, but now what? Hebrews 12 for me has been very helpful, and I think it helps clarify.

The writer of Hebrews says, listen, you need to set aside anything that's weighing you down and the sin that weighs you down, and where does

He point you? He says, you need to look to the founder, the author, and the finisher of your faith, the beginning and the end of the one who is leading you, who has saved you.

Amen. The Christian life is about pointing you towards Christ, and unfortunately, evangelicalism is about pointing you towards you to improve yourself before Christ.

What we're going to do is that we aren't telling you there's a new way. That is a massive movement within the evangelical world.

I've got this new discovery. I've got this new prayer. I mean, I remember when the prayer of Jeroboam just blew up.

It was like this new way of praying, and where is that today? It's like everything that was once big has now moved away, and all of these movements.

There has been this underlying consistent Christian living that has been around for thousands of years, and so that's kind of where this conversation is going to go next, is how do you understand, and really, how does confessional theology lead us to rest in Christ and bring clarity where there is a lot of confusion?

In other words, we aren't the first to battle with this, and it's been a conversation that's been going on since the time of Christ, and it'd be wise of us to look at history and see the conclusions that believers have made, and we aren't the first to struggle with those.

So, gentlemen, we'll be heading over to the members' podcast. I know this is where we're going to get pretty lively, because we're very passionate about this.

If you don't know what this is, it's just a simple way for us to, one, have an additional podcast. We love this.

It's a little bit more intimate. It's how we fund our podcast. It costs us a lot of money to produce these, to transcribe these.

It also costs money for us to produce books that we're producing, and we have one on Assurance that you can get. Go to our website.

There's a free book there as well. But if you want to learn more about this podcast, you can go to the members' podcast and help support us.