February 10, 2020 Show with Conference Interviews featuring Andrew Smith and Doug Wilson

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century Gospel Minister, George Norcross, in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 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 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 a 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, Champaign County, Illinois, and the rest of humanity living on planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming to ironsharpensironradio .com.

My name is Eric Nielsen. I am sitting in, once again, for Chris Arnzen today. And over the past few days, we have been listening to interviews from recent conferences. Today we are continuing with two interviews from the recent G3 2020 conference this past January.

Chris first sat down with Pastor Andrew Smith. You might recognize Andrew Smith from the recent shows with Chris on This Day in Church History. And following that, we will have Chris's interview with Pastor Doug Wilson.

Let's begin by listening to this discussion between Chris Arnzen and Andrew Smith.

Christ Reformed Community Church and the Meaning of Being Reformed

Here I am again on site at the G3 Conference 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Georgia International Convention Center. And I'm thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest, my friend Andrew Smith, pastor of Christ Reform Community Church in St. John's, Florida.

And it's great to have you back.

Thank you, Chris. It's good to actually see your face while we do these interviews.

Yes. And I am suspecting very strongly that you're lying about that. I'll accept the compliments.

I enjoy the face-to-face fellowship.

Yes.

It's better than a telephone.

I do as well. Well, for those of our listeners hearing you for the first time on Iron Trip and Zion Radio or for the first time anywhere else, why don't you tell our listeners about Christ Reform Community Church in St. John's, Florida.

Yeah, I'd be glad to. So we're an independent, reformed congregation. We're still considered a church plant. I started the church four years ago, and by God's grace, we're growing and just purchased a new facility, and we'll be moving out of the school that we've been meeting in and become more like a real established church, which is really exciting.

We're a confessional church. We believe in the value of the confessions and teaching through the confessions and having a robust doctrine as the foundation of the church, and I'm an expository preacher, so I just preach through books of the Bible.

One of the things that I'm looking forward to when we get in the new facility is being able to have multiple services a week. So yeah, we're there in Jacksonville, St. Augustine, that area just south of Jacksonville.

A lot of the people that end up coming to our church are people that actually are moving to the area because it's a high-growth area, so they're looking for a reformed church when they get there, and so the Lord's just been so gracious to give us some very solid church members who love the Lord and love the Word of God, and I've had enough conversations with church planters to know that there can be some challenges at the beginning, especially with people who see a new church plant, and then they want to come in and kind of do church their way instead of according to the Scripture, but God has really preserved us in bringing in the group that we have people who are on the same page as we are because they move there in many respects for that particular church, and we're looking for it.

So it's a great ministry. I pastor great people, and it's a privilege just to be able to preach God's Word every.

Lord's Day. You know, once in a while I will have a conversation with a friend who is a Christian from outside of the Reformed faith where they will say, you know, what's with you Reformed people, where you always have to bring up the fact that you're Reformed, you always have to throw around that word Reformed, why are you so preoccupied with that?

Well, typically my answer to that is, well, what we really mean is the very important, vital aspects of the Scriptures that are being ignored or even disbelieved or opposed by many other people in Christendom are things that we are in love with, are excited about and believe that every Christian should be in love with and excited about, and therefore we are bringing up something that needs to be highlighted which is tragically very often absent from Christian speech, from pulpits, from Christian conversations, from Christian media.

That's the way I answer that. How do you answer that?

No, I completely agree. I mean, I'm Reformed because I believe the Bible teaches those doctrines of grace that is fit within the Reformed tradition. When we started the church we had this discussion about, in the elders meeting, what to name the church, you know, and inevitably we discussed, should we include the word Reformed in it?

And that conversation honestly didn't last long because my argument was, this is an opportunity, full disclosure, to be honest with people about a term we shouldn't be afraid of. The term Reformed highlights historically and biblically what the purest branches of Christianity have taught regarding the gospel, you know, regarding God's sovereign grace.

Very critical doctrines like election and predestination and perseverance of the saints. So instead of that term being threatening, we wanted to use it in our church title so that as soon as people came they would ask that question, what does Reformed mean?

So that it would give us an opportunity to be able to teach scripture to them. And so I think it's hard to be a church and not be identified with a particular theology because there are so many aberrant forms of theology and I believe that the doctrines of grace teach the purest form of the gospel, which is at the heart of divine revelation and God revealing himself to us.

So to us it was sort of like a no-brainer and provided an opportunity as an issue of integrity to say this is who we are, we want you to be part of this church, but this is what we believe, this is what we're going to preach, and that way you sort of protect the identity of the church, which I think is part of being a steward and a shepherd.

You're being a steward of the doctrines of the Word of God and you're not afraid to unashamedly declare those truths because the Bible teaches them, not because they simply fit within the Reformed tradition, but because the Bible itself teaches those doctrines.

Yes, I believe that there is no other system of theology outside of the Reformed faith that elevates God to his proper place, his holiness, his sovereignty, his righteousness, his authority, and lowers man to his proper place, his helplessness, his hopelessness, his impotence without the power of the Holy Spirit to regenerate him and without Christ giving us new hearts, removing our hearts of stone and replacing them with hearts of flesh.

There is no other system that consistently and logically gives 100 of the praise, honor, and glory to God for our salvation and all good things that we receive. Because even though most other theological schemes and most other denominations and fellowships, those outside of the Reformed faith would claim they give 100 of the praise, honor, and glory to Christ, when you dissect their system, their ideology, their theology, you can see that what they believe requires that much more credit is given to man than the Bible will allow.

Yeah, and think how many church planters, I mean, I was just talking to a brother earlier here at the conference who is manning a booth for a seminary, and we were talking about how so much literature on church planting is just purely pragmatism, and it's all just what works, what's convenient, what do people want, and you can't operate that way if you're a true, pure Biblicist.

You have to operate as a church planter according to what the Bible says, and so as a church plant, to identify yourself at the beginning as being Reformed, you are, you know, you're drawing a line in the sand and you're saying this is where we stand, and we're standing on Scripture, that's the foundation we want this church to be built on, and we can't equivocate on these things, and we won't equivocate on these things.

At the same time, if someone is not fully embracing everything that's in the Reformed tradition, but they're teachable, then we'll embrace them and work with them and pray that the Lord would change their hearts and make them a strong member of the church, and we've had opportunities to do that since the church started, so all the glory goes to the Lord, it doesn't go to the church planter.

People become followers not of a man like myself, but they become followers of the Lord, and there's also that built-in accountability that says we're not just making up doctrine, we're believing and teaching things that the church has believed and taught and died for for hundreds of years, and that's tremendously compelling because it makes a church plant not about a personality or any one person, but about the Word of God and the truth of God, and as you said, Chris, the glory of God, which is the most important thing.

The Practical Comfort of the Doctrines of Grace

What can you say about how the Reformed faith has impacted your life, your faith, perhaps even in ways that might not be automatically assumed by someone when they hear about an individual becoming and even being a Calvinist believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace?

What are some of the ways that even might not be ordinarily thought of in the way that it has broadened your faith and deepened it and made it more rich?

Yeah, well, I mean, that's a great question, and I think that people assume that the doctrines of grace are just theological ideas, abstract ideas, and there's no practical application to them, and a lot of people will have that argument.

They'll say, well, it's fine that you believe that, and those doctrines may be true, but what impact does it have on my own life, especially if God is sovereign and He has elected and predetermined who's going to be saved, and so what's the point of doing anything?

And there can almost be this complacent, apathetic, really a hyper-Calvinism, which I don't think dominates Reformed circles, but I have ran into hyper-Calvinists occasionally. But I go back to my own testimony.

I grew up in a Christian home, and I struggled with the assurance of my salvation for a number of years, really up until my early teenage years. And one day I was reading, and it was really a series of different evenings where I couldn't sleep, and I was reading the scriptures, and I was reading in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, all that the Father gives to me will come to me, and those who come to me I will not cast away.

And it dawned on me in that moment that instead of sitting there trying to figure out am I elect or not elect, trust in the promise of Jesus that all that come to him he won't reject, he won't cast away.

So the evidence of being elect is your love and your desire to follow Christ. Well, that's immensely practical because now it removes this mystery of trying to plumb the depths of the providence of God and trying to determine am I elect, is this person elect.

You know, it's practical and it's assuring to know that if I have a desire to follow Christ, all the glory goes to him, it's because the Spirit of God has drawn me to Christ, so that even my faith itself is evidence, and my repentance is evidence that I am elect.

And so it's not just abstract. That was immensely assuring to me, to know that at the end of the day it's not my level of faith, it's the object of who my faith is in, and the fact that this Savior, it has been predetermined that he would save his elect people, die for them, redeem them, and that they would be preserved until the end.

So it really touches at the heart of even my own testimony, the doctrines of grace.

Amen.

One of the things that I know is a great blessing that comes through the Reformed faith is knowing that all things, even the saddest, most painful moments of my life, have been decreed by God, and that this is not something that is taking God by surprise, even if it takes me by surprise, by no means, and certainly does not take God by surprise.

But not only that, it is something that he has purposefully intended and designed and decreed to occur in my life. And since I am a Christian, it is certainly promised to me that it will work together for the good, because as that precious promise is laid out in Romans 8, 28, that all things work together for the good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

It's amazing to me how many people, even some of the most dedicated Christians, find that a horrifying concept that we would say when something horrific and tragic and catastrophic happens in someone's life, to attribute that to the divine decree in the very hand of God himself.

They find that very often monstrous and are baffled. Why on earth would you find comfort in that? Why would you find comfort in God, the one that is supposed to be all-merciful, all-loving, all-kind, all-compassionate?

Why on earth would you get comfort from knowing that he is the source of this? And my answer to that is because it gives it purpose. If I thought that what I am going through, what I am experiencing in a negative way, in a very frightening or sorrowful way, is purposeless, that would only magnify the pain in my understanding.

How do you respond to people that react in that way? They are mystified why we would actually attribute God for being the ultimate source of everything that occurs and everything we go through.

I go back to that very passage, Romans 8. And in the context of Romans 8, the sovereignty of God, the working out of all things together for our good, is in the context and the framework of comfort. The whole point of him saying that is to say, if you are elect, if you have been foreknown, if you have been predestined before the foundation of the world, you can have the assurance that God is working all things out for your good.

And so in Scripture there is a pattern when God's sovereignty and God's grace is being spoken about. It is never used as a terrifying thing. It is always used as a comforting tool. And that is the way I think we need to view it and teach the doctrines of grace, that this is the most comforting thing imaginable.

Even in that Romans 8 passage, in verse 26 if you back up, Paul says,. Likewise, you know, you don't even know how to pray as you ought to pray, but the Spirit with his groans prays for you. So you have the Spirit, the earnestness of the Spirit praying for us when we don't know how to pray.

You have Christ who is our mediator and intercessor who is praying for us. So that even prayer, which is often viewed as something, well that is something I can do if I just pray more. Even that, God is in control of our prayers because it is Christ whose prayers he is hearing as our intercessor.

It is the Spirit's groans. We are even incompetent when it comes to prayer. And we are dependent upon the grace and the mercy of God even for our prayers to rise and to ascend to heaven. That is comforting to me because that takes all the pressure off of me.

And I can rest in that fact even in my own prayer life, which is often viewed as a work of the flesh. And even it is not a work of the flesh. It is something God is doing for us as we pray in the Spirit and pray along with the Spirit.

Praying at all times with all prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your request be made known to God, the scriptures say. So I think again it is very practical because prayer could be something someone could say, there is evidence right there God is not sovereign.

Why does he ask us to pray if he already knows what is going to happen? Well, in that Romans 8 passage prayer is talked about but it is in the context of God being sovereign over all things. And who would not be comforted by that if you really sit and think about it?

Yes, the fact that God has decreed to use means to bring about his purposes in no way diminishes his sovereignty or control or authority over these things. He is the one that designed that means would be used in his hand and means being among them, us and what we do in obedience to him to serve him.

And that is something that is interestingly enough misunderstood by both Arminians and Hyper-Calvinists who have a caricatured understanding of Calvinism or the reformed faith where God has operated to decree things to occur without the instrumentality of the means of human activity and so on.

And both ends of the spectrum and opposite ends in opposition to each other, Arminianism and Hyper-Calvinism seem to agree that that is what the reformed faith teaches and yet that is clearly not what it has historically ever taught.

Amen. He has ordained the end and he has ordained the means to the end. And either God is sovereign or he is not. He is either meticulously sovereign or he is not sovereign at all. You can't relinquish from God the total control that he has over the universe because at the point you do that, the point at which what hope is there?

What comfort is there? What surety is there? He is either totally sovereign or he is not sovereign at all. I mean for God to be God he has to be completely sovereign. I think that is what the Bible teaches from beginning to end.

And again that goes back to the question at the beginning, why use the word reformed? Because I think it provides an opportunity to talk about God in these traditionally theologically rich reformed terms that help people understand that these aren't just terms but this is what the Bible itself actually teaches.

And it's a handy summarized way to say this is what I believe in five points. I believe more than this but this is the basis of what I believe and it's critical because it touches every single point of the Christian's life and the church's life as well for that matter.

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Welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I'm Eric Nielsen, and we are listening to an interview with Pastor Andrew Smith from the recent G3 conference in January 2020. Let's continue to listen.

Reformed Baptists, Paedo-Baptists, and the Scope of Reformed Theology

That's one thing that we have been accused, especially we who are Reformed Baptists, we have been accused, perhaps especially by our Pato Baptist brethren who share our Reformed faith, that we have really isolated our faith and understanding of the doctrines of God's sovereignty to the five points alone, that we are really not experiencing, enjoying, proclaiming, and practicing the fully-orbed understanding of what it means to be Reformed.

How do you respond to that criticism that I've heard, in fact very recently even through the blessing of the Internet, that we Reformed Baptists were just all about the five points and have become just too overly enamored with those points alone and never growing beyond that, if you will?

Yeah.

Well, I would say a truly Reformed Baptist would follow what historically Reformed Baptists have followed, which means they're not just Reformed in their soteriology or in the five points, but they're also Reformed in their ecclesiology, which means, and we're at a conference on worship, which means they're Reformed in their worship.

And John MacArthur, I think, said it best when he, you know, talking about the Young Restless Reform Movement. I don't think he talked about it at this conference, but he's talked about it in the past, that the thing that's missing from that movement is that you have people that maybe hold to the five points, so-called five points of Calvinism, but they're not Reformed in any other sense, you know, whether it's in their ecclesiology, their preaching is not always expositional.

Well, if you study historically Reformed Baptists, you will find that they were expositional in their preaching, they were Reformed in their ecclesiology, they were Reformed in their worship, and heavy in Bible reading and prayer in the corporate worship.

The songs were, often they sang the Psalms, although not all Reformed Baptists were opposed to singing hymns, but it was, their singing was filled with theologically rich lyrics. So I think that in that Young Restless Reform Movement, they have given true Reformed Baptists a bad name, if I can put it that way, where people that are Presbyterian, and are part of that more confessional Presbyterian ilk, they look at Reformed Baptists and kind of laugh, and think that there's no true Reformed Baptists, but there are true Reformed Baptists that are essentially only different from Presbyterians on the issue of baptism.

And, of course, church government.

Yeah, church polity.

Reformed Baptists have historically believed in the autonomy of local congregations, where there is no ecclesiastical authority higher than the local elder.

Yeah.

And that Christ alone and His inerrant God-breathed Word are the only things that are above the local leadership of the church, and, of course, everybody in the congregation.

Right. Yep. Absolutely.

And that's where some of the conflict comes with our Reformed brethren who are Pato-Baptist, Presbyterian, and other denominations. Ironically, they will say that we are less Reformed because we, in their minds, resemble less the Reformers, because they were predominantly, if not exclusively, and, of course, initially in the Reformation, they were all Pato-Baptists, and they did not have an independent, autonomous understanding of church government.

However, I believe that Reformed Baptists are more consistent in pursuing and living out the intention of the Reformers, especially when it comes to Sola Scriptura, and, dare I say, even Solus Christus, because we are following not what the traditions and counsels of men have insisted upon.

We test everything by the Scripture, and we have come to the conclusion from the Scripture that baptism is for repentant believers alone, that it is by immersion in water, and that the church government taught in Scripture is the local autonomy of every congregation, because we see no examples in the Scripture of presbyteries or denominational hierarchies.

So I think we are actually living out in a more faithful way the intention of the Reformers, even though the Reformers did not yet arrive there.

MacArthur said the Reformation just didn't go far enough. It's interesting, we're talking about this, the reason I was smiling is because on this date, January 17th, 1525, Zwingli in Zurich had a debate, and this debate in Zurich is really where the idea of infant baptism being a sign of the covenant was sort of made official.

And following that event in Zurich, it was a debate.

Was it Anabaptist?

Yeah, well, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz were the opposing side, they were Anabaptists. And at this debate, that's when the Anabaptists began to be persecuted, when it became official that infant baptism was a sign of the covenant.

And so that was 1525, before that was really formalized as what today Presbyterians would say is part and parcel of their theological system, understanding the nature of the covenant itself. So again, this is where I think church history is helpful in thinking through these issues.

The thing that I'm encouraged about is that Paedo-Baptists and Credo-Baptists are unified in far more than they differ. And when I come to conferences like this, you see Presbyterians and Baptists getting along on the most important things, the essentials, the things that matter.

And my interactions with both Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians, just in God's grace, I guess I know the kind ones, the ones that aren't always looking to throw a rock. We should have convictions, and we should...

If you're a confessional church, that doesn't mean that the confessions go over the Bible. If you're truly confessional, the confessions just supplement Scripture. Scripture is the foundation. Otherwise, you're compromising sola Scriptura, which is in many ways the first principle of the Protestant Reformation and of the Reformed tradition.

So these things can get really complex when you're dealing with relationships with other believers that agree with you on, like, 95 of everything else. So it's good to have these conversations, and it's good to know that there's one body in Christ, there's one head of the church, and we can all learn from one another on these issues.

Yes, it's... One of the difficult things in life is when you have Christians who rightfully are concerned with preserving the purity of biblical teaching, preserving biblical truth, being very concerned over biblical accuracy, while at the same time being sinners.

So, therefore, those things combined, unfortunately, on occasion, and with some people more frequently than others, comes out with unnecessary harshness, arrogance, pride, and the way they respond to brothers who differ with us is a very key thing.

We should never let the fear of men keep us silent when we see differences that we disagree with, but at the same time, we always have to respond to this in humility. And the last thing that the doctrines of grace should ever do, the opposite of what they should do, is make men proud.

And they should always humble us to the dust, knowing that we owe all to God. Nothing comes from any innate goodness in us. And yet, over and over and over again, being sinners, we even allow the thing that should make us most humble to make us most proud.

Amen.

I always tell people that if we know the doctrines of grace, then we of all people need to know the grace of the doctrines. We need to be able to demonstrate grace and charity and love. Being firm on our convictions.

We can still be firm on our convictions and preach the truth and agree to disagree, but we need to be very careful what we disfellowship with others about. It better be over a truly pivotal cardinal doctrine in Scripture, or we're really on the edge of violating, I think, a lot of Scripture's commands.

And even in 1 John, if you say you love God but you hate your brother, you're not in the kingdom. You're not truly of God. That's serious stuff that I think we, and especially as things get more and more secular in the United States, we need to find areas without compromising anything, but we need to find areas where we agree on things and focus on the gospel and focus on those things, while at the same time being firm in our convictions and not capitulating.

Now, one thing that Reformed people have been accused of, and there's obviously a reason we've been accused of this, but we have been accused, perhaps more than anyone, we've been accused of this by our fundamentalist friends and brothers and sisters of perhaps putting the writings and the thinking and the genius of men in their writings, perhaps even predominantly from eras past, years past, but even including contemporary writings, placing these things above the Scripture.

Now, obviously a rightfully thinking Reformed Christian is never doing that, but we definitely have a well-deserved reputation for having an insatiable appetite for great Christian literature, extra-biblical Christian literature, and I think that that comes from a very right understanding of our own inability to know everything that is taught in Scripture to the fullest degree that we can understand it, not that we will ever achieve that fullness of accuracy and understanding, but we know that we need teachers, and the Bible teaches us that we need teachers, and for someone to think, I don't need any other book than the Bible ever is demonstrating that they don't think they need a teacher, and these great works of literature and the creeds and confessions that are biblically accurate are merely God's gracious provision to us of teachers, and it just so happens that many of them are in heaven and have left the legacy of their writings behind.

And so, as it has been said, sola scriptura does not mean solo scriptura.

Yeah, that's right. That's great, yeah.

So, having said that and knowing that you agree with me that a faithful Christian should be a well-read Christian, and obviously reading the best and most biblically accurate of Christian writings, and that it does not violate sola scriptura, obviously only the Scripture is our sole and final infallible and inerrant authority, but at the same time we benefit greatly by learning from great minds that God has placed in the church.

So, having said that, what are five of the greatest books that you can think of that every listener in our audience should possess?

Oh, wow. Five? I only get five?

Yes.

Okay.

For time restraint.

Yeah, other than the Bible, obviously. Yes, because you made that pretty clear. So, yeah, my top five, first of all, I would say anything in the Puritan paperback series by Banner of Truth. I mean, there's more than five books in that.