July 19, 2023 Show with Matt Kenitzer on “The Gospel at War with Moralism”

The Gospel Versus Moralism

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 19th day of July 2023.

I'm thrilled to have back as a returning guest someone to discuss a very important topic, a topic that has affected much of modern evangelicalism. And his name is Matt Kennitzer, Senior Pastor at St. John's Reformed Church of Freidensburg, Pennsylvania, and a board member of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society.

We're addressing the theme, The Gospel at War with Moralism, and we're also going to be announcing the upcoming 2023 Future of Christendom Conference and Debate featuring Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Matt Kennitzer.

Hey, Chris, it's good to be back with you.

It's a thrill to have you back, and tell our listeners about St. John's Reformed Church of Freidensburg, Pennsylvania.

Yeah, St. John's Reformed Church, it's an independent Reformed Church. In the leadership, we would land on the 1689 London Baptist Confession, and it has been rescued out of the United Church of Christ.

And that happened about 2006. I came here about five years ago, and that kind of brings us into the topic of The Gospel at War with Moralism, because that's really what I walked into. So, over the last five years, God has done an amazing work, very gracious and merciful to us, bringing the gospel to bear upon people who have largely been in the dark and lost in a moralistic religion that is not Christian at all.

By the way, have you met my friends, Pastor Micah Klaus and Pastor Ed Boyle, who have congregations where they pastor? Micah Klaus is actually technically still in the United Church of Christ, but is moving forward to lead that congregation out from that denomination.

And Pastor Ed Boyle pastors a congregation that already left the United Church of Christ before he received a call to pastor there. Have you met these two brothers?

Yeah, no, I have not. I think you might have had both of them on, and I caught that because that was about the same topic, and that's what really sparked me to connect with you.

Yeah, and by the way, for anybody listening who wants to listen at some point to that interview that I just mentioned featuring Pastor Micah Klaus and Pastor Ed Boyle on the theme, Is There Hope for the United Church of Christ?

Just go to ironsharpenzionradio .com and type in Klaus, C-L-O-U-S-E, into the search engine. Pastor Micah Klaus is the only person I've ever interviewed on the program, so that will be the only link that comes up.

So I hope that you take advantage of that later on. If anybody wants to find out more about St. John's Reformed Church in Freidensburg, Pennsylvania, whether you live near there or in that town, or if you're traveling through on vacation, or if you know folks, you have family, friends, and loved ones who live in or near Freidensburg, the website is sjrcpa .org.

S-J-R-C-P-A .org, which stands for St. John's Reformed Church, Pennsylvania. S-J-R-C-P-A .org. And I'm also very excited, as you know, to be a part of the orchestration of an upcoming conference and debate being conducted by the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society, the board of which you are on the membership of.

I don't even know if that was grammatically correct, what I just said. But I'm so excited. I was so thrilled that Pastor Joel Saint reached out to me and said, we want to get James White out for our next conference in September, September 15th, 16th, and a worship service on the 17th in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, more specifically Mannheim, Pennsylvania.

And he said, please, could you do whatever you can do to get James White to agree to speak at this conference and possibly even conduct a debate? Well, the conference is a done deal. We have 100 confirmation from Dr. James R. White that he will be the keynote speaker at this conference on the theme, The Gospel at War.

And we are still working to finalize a debate that Dr. White will be having. We thought that we had a debate finalized, but it turned out that due to health issues of the debater that agreed to participate to be Dr. White's opponent in a debate, he had to reluctantly bow out.

So we're back to the drawing board. And we do believe that we are right at the precipice of getting 100 finalized confirmation from another debater, and we will keep you updated on that. But tell us about the Future of Christendom conference, Pastor Kennetzer.

The Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society and the Future of Christendom Conference

Yeah, so we really are developing conferences that really speak to the cultural issues that are going on, swirling all around us and bringing the biblical worldview to bear upon them. And what's really great about the organization that Joel has been spearheading for years is that they are tackling topics like corporate welfare, taxation, all of these things that we are dealing with on a day-to-day basis, and yet many Christians are really struggling of how to even think through those issues, let alone walk through them.

And so the Mars Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society is really passionate about bringing that worldview to bear upon the culture and what we're dealing with. So this is a unique conference in that that's a focus, and so there's going to be many, many speakers on many different topics, all swirling around the gospel at war with, and then a certain topic.

And we are doing expositions, is what we're calling them, and coining kind of that phrase, and it's about an 18 to 20-minute exposition on an issue in the culture and how the Bible speaks into that issue, how God has revealed His Word to inform us of how to live wisely and not foolishly for the glory of Christ and all of culture for all of life.

And so it's going to be a very, very unique conference, very practical, very theological, and the connection in those two are going to be great. And it's going to be awesome to just highlight the exclamation mark with James White being here.

He was here the past fall with your event, and he came up to our church here. And so it's going to be good to just build that relationship even more this fall.

Amen. Well, if anybody wants more details on the 2023 Future of Christendom Conference and Debate featuring Dr. James R. White, which will be held September 15th and 16th with a worship service on September 17th at Spooky Nook Sports and Events, which in spite of its name is a very breathtakingly beautiful facility where Doug Mastriano, when he was a candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, held one of his major campaign events.

And if you want more details on that, go to futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom .org. You can also go to midatlanticreformation .org, midatlanticreformation .org, and register as early as you can because the earlier you register, the less expensive the registration fee will be.

And we are now entering into our very provocative theme, The Gospel at War with Moralism. Can you please define moralism?

Defining Moralism and the Moralistic Religion of the Unregenerate

Moralism is basically you are confronted with the question, How do I get into heaven? How am I accepted by the triune God? How am I gaining salvation? How do I retain that? And the answer with moralism is be a good person and do good things.

Simple as that.

Which is probably what the vast majority of humans who are not regenerate, not born again, think. Those that actually believe in heaven.

Right. And I would say a large amount of, unfortunately, the quote unquote Christian community. And that's really what I walked into, and not knowing what I was going to walk into, was a very moralistic tradition that was just entrenched in the answer, Be a good person, do good things.

That's how I'm accepted by God.

Now I'm assuming what you mean by the Christian community is the professing Christian community.

Yep. Exactly. Yep.

So tell us how you came to stumble upon this unfortunate discovery.

Yeah, so my wife and at the time two girls and I were living out in Oregon. I had grown up there for a good majority of my life. I was going through my MDiv program and I was about getting done the Christmas before June 2018.

And so I started, during that Christmas time, I started looking around at open churches all across the country. Just kind of putting feelers out of what the possibilities could be. And really keeping it wide open to where God may be leading us.

And this kind of came in with the St. John's Reformed Church. I got a Skype interview. So I did the interview. They voted unanimously to bring us out here. So we came out for a visit in March 2018. Spent some time here, preached.

And preached a very Calvinistic, Reformed, clear presentation of the gospel, the sovereignty of God. And so they voted 82 to 1 to extend the call to us, to me as their pastor. We went home, went on a camping trip, prayed about it, talked about it.

And ended up coming out here June 2018. And during that visit, I had some conversations with some people, especially some of the leadership. And hearing about how they had come out of the UCC, the United Church of Christ, in 2006.

And it was over the homosexuality issue. Which was, I'm glad that they did that. And during conversations, I asked them, what is Reformed? What is Reformed theology? And no one could really give me an answer.

So I knew I had some things that I had to address. There was also women in leadership at the time. And during the Skype interview, I told them that we would need to address that. And so I knew some things that needed to be done.

I knew the church was kind of languishing, kind of falling into more of just a lot of what the churches are going through here. A majority of just decline in a big way. And so I really didn't fully know what I was walking into.

Until I started getting into ministry, getting into doing Bible studies and preaching the gospel. And I got opposition over and over and over again. And so that was a lot of tension pretty much right away.

With this moralistic religion being confronted with the gospel of God's free grace. That it's Christ alone. So that kind of propelled me into what happened next.

Yes, a very similar story from Pastor Ed Boyle of the church, which is now Trinity Christian Church of New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania. He had on his hands, when he accepted the call to be a pastor of this church, which had already left the UCC.

You have an older group of people who are extremely uncomfortable and even repulsed by the leftist extremes that have taken over most of the mainline denominations. And although they recoiled with disgust over the homosexual issues and the transgender issues.

And perhaps the abortion issues or should I say infanticide. You had people that were just as you described and defined earlier, moralists who were unregenerate. I'm not saying all of them were in that category in the congregation.

But he was facing that dilemma of now pastoring a flock that included unregenerate people who just had a more traditional and moral understanding of social issues.

The UCC, Social Conservatism, and a Gospelless Christianity

Yeah, and it was interesting that kind of dynamic where it was a great thing that they broke away from the UCC over that issue. But they still had nothing underneath it. And I went, what was interesting is during some of the time of being here, I actually preached a sermon against the UCC.

And against and my preparation, because I was learning more and more just about the history of it, where these people were coming from, the heavy tradition and the moralism that they were entrenched in.

And I went through all of the confirmation that the UCC used. And I even traced it back years and I got different editions of the confirmation material. And I went through it and they had no gospel at all.

They denied that it was like this kind of modalistic view of Christ and the Trinity. The definitions of baptism really were like a generational baptism. The salvation was basically follow Jesus as the example, do the best that you can.

He kind of just showed the way we're all on this type of journey. And so we're going to do the best that we can. You know, he's just trying to he's kind of just cheering you on, hoping that you'll tip your scales in your favor.

So going through that confirmation material, I was astounded how there was no gospel at all. And so that was, you know, the gospel wasn't underneath the conviction to break away from the UCC on the homosexuality issue.

There's nothing there. And that makes completely sense when you understand the history of these mainline liberal denominations who have been just damaged and devastated by this moralistic religion.

Yes, this is a reminder to evangelicals, because even many conservative evangelicals feel so frightened about the left's increase in their influence and domination in our culture, not only here in the United States, but globally.

They are so terrified of what awaits us in our future. We could be just as Christians of old. We could be one day being imprisoned for our views. Who knows the way the insanity is really rapidly increasing and rapidly charging toward us like a snowball that began rolling down a mountain and has become this giant boulder of ice heading towards us because of this fear and because of the isolation and feeling like a minority.

There is such a strong temptation for conservative evangelicals to become ecumenists with those outside of the Christian faith to embrace conservative Roman Catholics, for instance, as our brothers and sisters.

Now, I am one who believes in certain levels of co-belligerence. I believe in working in the public square with those outside of the Christian faith to bring about more biblically faithful laws into our community, elect more biblically faithful politicians into office and on and on.

And that sometimes involves in the work of social approaches to bringing enlightenment to the community and so forth. I believe in certain circumstances working side by side with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox Jews, even Muslims and conservative atheists and agnostics.

But there's a difference between that and becoming an ecumenist with these folks. And you have an alarming number, percentage of Christians who are more than happy to embrace Mormons as their brothers and sisters who are conservative, that is, because the Mormon cult is becoming more and more enslaved to leftism themselves.

In fact, in my search for a debater in Lancaster, one of the individuals I approached is actually an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University who is a leftist, who's a pro-homosexual. He declined my invitation to debate James White.

But don't you agree that we have to really be careful about resisting the temptation to fall into the trap of ecumenism to gospel deniers?

Yes, especially in our culture when we are feeling that pressure more and more that we then want to give an inch here and give an inch there. So it's either not going to be, you know, confrontive to us or uncomfortable.

So we kind of give in to that. And that is a great temptation for Christians that, and it's not helped at all, that there has been a lack of clarity on the gospel, on what Christianity is, the salvation that's in Christ alone and not by any good thing that you do.

And so that has been shallow for many years and growing so. I mean, Machen, he fought this very thing way back in his day in different contexts and things that were going on in his time. But we've seen just that snowball effect where it's grown more and more and more.

And the culture is more and more anti-Christian and the church, the professing church, those who are unregenerate, especially those these big denominations that are, you know, have no gospel and going the opposite direction.

They are going along with the culture, looking like the culture, embracing it. And there's no clarity, there's ambiguity all over the place of what they believe. And it's devastating because then you have a lot of people who have no idea what Christianity is at the bottom level and how to even engage in life from that worldview.

So they back away, they give in, they compromise. And little by little, it creeps into the church and ransacks it. And that's what we're dealing with a lot with these churches that are in these denominations that are really struggling.

There are many churches around here that have 10, 20 people and they're just trying to barely hang on. There's a lot of other churches that are beautiful churches that are just empty.

The Gospel, the Law, and the Third Use of the Law

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Pastor Matt Koenigser on the theme, The Gospel at War with Moralism, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. We'll be right back after these messages, so do not go away.

The Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War. September 15th through the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Featuring Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

Come join us for our 6th Future of Christendom Conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania and will run from Friday evening through all day Saturday. With an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church.

Registration is required and lunch will be provided on Saturday. This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching with the theme of the Gospel at War in many areas of our culture. Including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be the keynote speaker. You will not want to miss this engaging event. Go to futureofchristendom .org.

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We are discussing the Gospel at War with Moralism and our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. So please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

So, how do pastors and even Christians as graciously as possible with love as a motivation approach this situation, which is actually a life and death situation that has eternity in the balance? How we approach this issue is not a trivial matter.

People may think, oh, somebody is fine and dandy as long as they are opposed to homosexuality and transgenderism and same-sex marriage and abortion. If they're opposed to all of these things, that's just fine with me.

Well, that's really not sufficient as we've been saying. You could be in the mafia and be against all those things and yet you love to murder people. So, tell us how you and what your counsel to others in our approach to this.

Well, for one, we need to be resolved and know that the gospel is offensive and foolish to those who are perishing and it's in our very nature to feel like we are good, that we have a good nature, a good heart, and can do good things that God would be approved of and appreciate.

So, we need to know that God's gospel confronts that very thing. And so, when we recognize that we are in a society that goes along with the Disney motto, follow your heart, and all the other stuff that we hear, and all the, you know, you're good by nature, we need to recognize that, recognize it for what it is and the depth of our spiritual condition and be ready to give that gospel.

We're called to serve it up and trust that God will work through it, whether for justice or mercy. And so, we need to be resolved to fulfill our calling and serve that gospel to all people. And then from there, we open up the scriptures.

If they are professing Christians, then where we need to go to is the standard of God. We need to go to His word. What does He say about this? And to do so, not in a self-righteous way, where I'm thinking I'm better than them, but in a humble way, recognizing that I'm a sinner saved by grace and that we need to go to what God says, we need to submit to His word, even bringing up the issues that we have and many moralists would reject a lot of the doctrines of scripture itself.

So, going to the word of God and what the word of God says and to try our best to show that we care about these people, to show that we want them to know the Christ that died for them, that we want to help them see what is true.

And it's interesting to think about, and I've heard people say this before, when you're thinking of it from a human perspective, the moralist is one of the hardest persons to see salvation come to because of that self-righteous nature of their belief system.

Now, again, obviously, God can crash down any wall, He can save any sinner when He wants to in His sovereign grace, but this is a very, very hard context to deal with. And so, trying the best that you can to show that you love these people and that was a massive struggle and where I came into because I prayed before even looking into this church or any others that God would bring me to a church that He would use to bring the church to life.

I really looked up to men like John MacArthur and Stephen Lawson and they had similar stories of churches that they walked into that were in a declining and spiritually dead situation in the majority.

So, walking into that situation, I was praying that God would bring me into a place like that. And so, really trying to navigate and show these people that I cared for them, that I cared for their eternal state and that I was willing to tell them the truth no matter what would happen.

And it was a big, it was a struggle, big time. We, you know, my wife and kids, we could have just up and left and went back to Oregon and just tried to pretend like nothing ever happened. But we knew that God had sent us here, that God was sovereign over us bringing us here and putting us into this position.

So, we were resolved to be faithful no matter what. And there was a lot of pushback, a lot. A lot of people left the church. A good number of the membership left the church angry. I was called a lot of different names.

I don't know if you're familiar with Archie Bunker, but it's the...

Yes, I am. I am old enough to know who Archie Bunker is.

America's beloved bigot. Well, I was called that. And a lot of other things were slandered against me. And so, it was hard walking through that suffering, but God was so merciful in changing just the complete dynamic of this church.

Like as people were leaving and angry, God was replacing and then more so through going through COVID and all that stuff. So, it was an amazing time, but it was really hard. But yet, the gospel needed to be brought to bear upon these people, and that was the catalyst that God used.

We have an anonymous listener who has a question for you. Wouldn't it be wise to point out to these moralists that their religion is the religion of the Pharisees, even if they claim Christ, because they are claiming Christ without a gospel.

Therefore, the religious aspect of their theological understanding of Christ is rendered null and void, and they are really just modern-day Pharisees.

Yeah, that's actually what happened a number of different times. One of the texts that I constantly went back to, because I would get in conversations with people who had been in this church for years.

They grew up in it. They were 80 years old, and they were a pillar of the church, and all the range of people. And I would ask them the very simple question, how do you get into heaven? And again, they would say, be a good person, do good things.

And so I brought them to Matthew 5 .20 constantly, and Jesus says that if your righteousness does not exceed the Pharisees and the scribes, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And so I showed them that human standard, and I highlighted one of the greatest Pharisees during that time, one of the most righteous men, Nicodemus.

And I said, are you better than him? Because none of us are going to be better than him, better than any of these Pharisees and scribes with this external righteousness that we think that we have in this moralistic religion.

And so you're never going to measure up. You're never going to do good enough and be good enough. And so bringing that exact issue that they are modern-day Pharisees to bear upon and confront them was one of the many ways that God either opens them up and is merciful and saves them or hardens them in his justice.

And that was one issue. He's exactly right. That's one issue that's what can show the hardness of heart and the deception of this moralistic religion that's not Christian at all.

We have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who asks, How can we be firm about the necessity of good deeds and good works in the lives of truly born-again people while at the same time making it extremely clear that these good works and good deeds are merely a fruit and evidence of someone who is truly justified and born-again and not in any way an agent of their regeneration or justification?

Law and Gospel in Evangelism and Sanctification

Yeah, that's a really, really important question and very relevant to, I think, a lot of what we're dealing with today in many different ways. I think what it comes down to is that we need to have a very good, clear handle on the law and the gospel and the uses of the law and the gospel, the relationship between them two.

And so when we understand that the two uses of the gospel before salvation are, for one, to restrain sin in a civil sense, in a societal way, and then, two, that the law of God is to be a mirror that the sinner is to look into and see their sin for what it truly is.

When we understand those two and those are driving us in an evangelistic nature like Jesus did often, many times, he said, Here's what the law says, so go and do this. And that is so contrary to our modern-day evangelism.

But Jesus had a great grasp on the law and how it's supposed to empty the sinner and show them the utter impossibility it is to save themselves in any capacity. It's supposed to empty them out, show them their sin, and show them their need for Christ.

And so when they're gutted with that law and they have no hope in themselves, then what comes flooding into that void is that beautiful, glorious gospel about Christ and Christ alone, his imputed righteousness that we need.

So in that light, when we have despaired in who we are by nature, being brought down to the ground in utter mourning over our sin, then God brings us up. When he saves a sinner, he brings us up to see that advocate that stood in our place and did everything for us that we could never do.

And so when that void is created by the law, the gospel comes rushing into that. And then from that new life, from the very beginning of that new life, then we have a whole new life that is living and walking according to God's law, and that's the third use of the law, the path, the paths of righteousness for his namesake.

It's that obedience to Christ that is not burdened by the law anymore. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. All of that, being conformed to the image of Christ, that life of sanctification. Now you are wanting to obey.