June 28, 2016 Show with Joe Thorn on “The Practical Implications of Reformed Theology”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on 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, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with 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 hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. Wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 28th day of June of 2016 and a guest that we had originally scheduled to have on the air,

Dayton Hartman, he had to reschedule because his wife is expecting their baby any moment now and it's going to be another little boy that they are inviting into the world.

So I am so very happy that once again with very little notice our friend

Joe Thorne was able to charge in on a white horse and save the day by being our guest with very little notice at all.

And Joe Thorne is the founding and lead pastor of Redeemer Fellowship in St. Charles, Illinois.

He has written two books, Note to Self, The Disciple of Preaching to Yourself, and Experiencing the

Trinity, The Grace of God for the People of God. And he has contributed articles to the

ESV's Men's Devotional Bible, the ESV's Story Bible, and the

Mission of God Study Bible. He is currently writing a series of three books on the church for Moody Publishers, and today we are discussing the practical implications of Reformed theology.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Joe Thorne. Thanks for having me on again, guys.

It's always a good time. And you know, just to let you know, my wife's in labor right now. I'm in the hospital, but I've always got time for you.

I'm not one of those guests. I thought he had a pretty lame excuse, you know?

Yeah, that's pretty weak, man. So no, just breathe, baby, just breathe. Oh, that's hilarious.

Before we go, oh yeah, let me introduce you to my favorite sound effects machine,

Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co -host at Iron Sharpens Iron. Hello, good afternoon.

Good to talk to you again. And before we go into this very important topic, this most misunderstood topic of Reformed theology, because there are many people who say there are no practical implications to Reformed theology, but if you could,

Joe, let our listeners know about Redeemer Fellowship. I ask you to describe it every time you come on, but there are people who discover the show every day.

In fact, especially since we have a full -page ad in World Magazine this month, and we have been getting new listeners as a result.

It's a full -page ad that happens to be directly next to the story on the death of world heavyweight champion

Muhammad Ali. So it's quite a great place to be in. But tell our listeners something about Redeemer Fellowship of St.

Charles, Illinois. Well, a team of us planted Redeemer Fellowship nine years ago, and we are a

Southern Baptist church. We are also a part of the Church Planting Network, Acts 29. We are known as a

Reformed and Baptist church that plants churches. So it's been an honor to pastor here alongside these other pastors and to serve a great congregation.

It is a peaceful, happy place, and I feel kind of bad about it, because it is genuinely such a great group of people to work with and to serve alongside that we haven't had any weird churchy drama.

I haven't had a bad email in nine years, like complaining about preaching or music or anything.

We have trauma, right, where people fall into sin and need to come under care and discipline and things like that.

But there's always been great restoration, and it's really been a blessing of God to serve here at the best church

I've ever been a part of. Now, once again, because some of our listeners may be scratching their head about Acts 29, if you can explain the text that doesn't exist.

Right. Well, a lot of your readers will know that the book of Acts ends with chapter 28.

Acts 29 is a church planting network. It is a network, a global network, really.

It's worldwide, and it's a network made up of churches that plant churches. And it is called

Acts 29 because it wants to communicate the idea that this is the continuing story of the work of God through the church.

And it is characterized by churches that are very broad.

We have Presbyterians and Baptists and E .V. Free and non -denominational guys, but all of them subscribe to a

Calvinistic soteriology. So we have a lot in common, but we also allow for a lot of diversity.

Now, as you know, Joe, the critics of Reform theology, in fact, dare

I say, some of the enemies of Reform theology, will say that this is a comical discussion or topic that we're having today because they will say there is no practical value to Reform theology.

They will say this is the stuff of egghead conversations in libraries and studies that are filled with cigar smoke, as people just sit around with sifters of brandy and discuss things that have really no practical value at all on the planet

Earth. They may titillate the theological excitement of those who are nerds or Bible nerds and so on, but this has no real practical value at all.

Explain why you wanted to discuss this very topic today. Well, for two reasons.

One is a misconception that you've just articulated, that this is in the realm of the arcane and irrelevant, and this is usually said by people who have not read true

Reform literature that is richly devotional, so they just don't have any exposure to it.

But on the other hand, there are people that would say, no, there are implications of Calvinism, and it turns you into a big -mouthed jerk, and that's been their experience.

And so, I want to talk about the implications of Reform theology, not so much for the critics, though they will definitely benefit from this conversation, but especially for those that identify as Calvinists, who, in my estimation, are sort of false converts.

You know, they've embraced some of the doctrines of grace, or they've embraced a shell of Reform theology, but they are not yet Reformed in heart.

And, you know, my desire is for the Word of God and the truth of God to penetrate our hearts deeply, to grow deep roots, and to bear the fruit of joy, of godliness, of sincerity, and really an outward orientation towards the lost.

That's what Reform theology really does, and I want our people, people in our camp, to really embrace that and to experience that.

And we can't or shouldn't take it for granted that everybody listening actually knows what we are talking about when we say

Reformed theology, because that even has some problems behind it.

You have a lot of churches that are a part of a denomination called the

Reformed Church of America that has, although there are some faithful men in that denomination who are conservative,

Bible -believing, historically Calvinist men, but there are also those who would be liberal or bordering on liberalism.

There are those who are caught up in the self -esteem and self -help movements of Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller who are both in that denomination.

I have had conversations with some RCA men, and when

I bring up the doctrines of grace and Reformed theology and Calvinism, I get one of those looks like a dog has on its face when it tilts its head, and they don't even know what

I'm talking about. So you'll have churches in many neighborhoods that will say

First Reformed Church of this town or what have you, and then you also have the misunderstandings of people who wrongly import the same meaning from Reform Judaism, which is one of the most liberal wings of Judaism.

I think there is a Reconstructionist wing of Judaism that has nothing to do with theonomy and Christian Reconstruction, and it's an even more liberal form than the

Reformed Judaism, but they think, well, I guess if the Reformed Jews are liberal, the

Reformed Christians must be liberal. So if you could let our listeners know basically in summary, of course, because this could take a week of programs or more.

Disregard the title Reformed in churches in terms of trying to diagnose what Reformed means, because like you said,

Chris, it's used by a lot of people in a lot of different ways, just like the word Gospel. So you need to think about it historically and theologically.

Reformed theology is an understanding of Scripture. Everybody has a cohesive understanding of Scripture that makes sense of the whole.

It's an understanding of Revelation of God that was seen in historical figures like Saint Augustine and John Calvin, as well as the

Puritan movement to preachers like George Whitefield during the

Great Awakening. You have Charles Spurgeon who was Reformed, and that theology is reflected there, and modern figures like R .C.

Sproul is a classic Reformed theologian. And so it's reflected in all of that.

Inherent to the idea of Reformed theology is confessionalism, right, a clear articulation of theology that highlights the sovereignty of God, the covenant working of God through his people, and our union with Christ.

So when people say Calvinism or Reformed theology, sometimes they're referring to what's called the five points of Calvinism, which hits on some of these things, and that is a part of Reformed theology.

The acrostic tulip is often used, and we can talk about that if we need to, but really, just those five points is not the whole.

It really comes down to our understanding of God, his purposes, his working, man's chief end.

It involves our view of the covenant and the law. So it's a pretty big picture.

When I'm trying to explain it to newcomers at our church, I explain that in Reformed theology, we have a very high view of God, where he is absolutely sovereign over all things, and we have a very realistic view of man, a biblical view of man, that shows us to be desperately wicked in our hearts and in need of God's sovereign grace to change us, to save us, and the rest of us.

Great, and I'd like to give our email address out now in the event that there are any listeners who'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And you may remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter which necessitates that you not reveal your identity.

That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. And one thing that is also true of Reformed theology is that it is a theology, unlike what some might think, wrongly, that has unified brothers and sisters in Christ from a number of varying denominations.

I mean, you have Reformed Baptists, you have Presbyterians, obviously, most of whom are

Reformed, but not all. I've discovered a bizarre Arminian -Presbyterian denomination called,

I think, the Cumberland Presbyterians or something like that, who are actually vehemently anti -Calvinist.

But you have Reformed Anglicans, you even have

Calvinist Methodists, which are not that well known today, but in Wales, especially, most of the

Calvinists, I think, at one time were Methodists, and you had Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones coming out of that group, and so on.

So you have all different kinds of Congregationalists who are

Reformed or Calvinistic, and so on. So the basic, wouldn't the basic summary, and I know

I've repeated this before, the basic summary, and you can fill in the blanks here, Joe, but isn't the basic summary of Reformed theology is that God alone saves sinners, because sinners cannot even help save themselves?

Yeah, I think that's a very good summary. I mean, a summary has to communicate a central idea, right, that is critical to the whole, and I think that's a great way to introduce people to the basic concept.

And we have living proof right here on this program today, we have two Reformed Baptists and one

Presbyterian who all have very similar theology. It's not identical, but it's all soteriologically very much the same, if not identical.

And Buzz is a member of a PCA congregation here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and this is one of the few times, it seems, that the

Reformed Baptists outnumber the Presbyterians on the show, because I think most of my guests are

Presbyterians. And of course, if you wanted to briefly, again,

I know this may seem ridiculous to go through the TULIP acronym briefly, but as briefly as you can, just so our listeners get more of an idea of what exactly we're talking about.

Right, well, very briefly, the Calvinists did not come up with five points that were important to them.

There was this opposing theological movement that disagreed with this theology, and so they articulated five points, sent it to the churches, and alluded to the leadership and said, hey, these are our beef with what the

Church is teaching today. And so the Church convened, and they issued a response to those five points with five points that they say clearly articulate the truth of Scripture, these are known as the canons of Dort, and these have been formulated into the five points of Calvinism with the acrostic

TULIP. And so they are, number one, total depravity. And this does not mean that every human being is as practically sinful as he or she could be, but that every part of our being, body, mind, soul, like every part of our being, every action, every thought, is corrupted by sin, and that our will in our heart, specifically, is so corrupted by sin that we will not and cannot exercise good deeds or even faith because we are spiritually dead.

So total depravity means that we are in the worst situation possible as we stand before God. We are, we have sinned ourselves to death, essentially, and we are in need of rest.

Let's total depravity. The U in TULIP stands for unconditional election, and this means that although we have destroyed ourselves in sin,

God has, out of his kindness and mercy, sovereignly chosen to save some. His election of these people is unconditional, meaning that there is no condition in the man or the woman that moves

God to choose them. Well, this person's really smart, so I'm going to choose them. This person's really good -looking, like, buzz,

I'm going to choose them. It's not based on anything in us, it is according to his mysterious will.

So the L in TULIP stands for limited atonement, and the emphasis here is that when

Jesus died on the cross, he died to actually save, to actually redeem those that the

Father has chosen. So when Jesus says things like, I laid down my life for the sheep, or when

Paul says Christ died for the Church, the scope of the atonement is, in Scripture, is always limited to those that the

Father has given the Son, or to the elect, or to the Church. So limited atonement simply means that Jesus effectively died for the elect.

He did not die for those who do not believe, because his death actually satisfies God's wrath.

And if his death satisfied God's wrath for everyone, then there would be no hell, and all would be saved.

It would be universalism. So that's the L. The I in TULIP is irresistible grace, and this is the idea that those that God has chosen, those for whom

Christ has died, experience God's saving grace at a particular moment in their life.

It may be when they're very young, it may be when they're very old, but when his grace comes upon them effectually, they are born again.

It is irresistible. And this isn't that he is saving us and we're kicking and screaming and saying, don't save me, he saves us anyway.

It means that his work of regeneration and his work in our heart is so powerful and compelling that we are changed in an instant, and the moment that he changes us, we're born again and we wind up believing.

So God's grace is irresistible and sovereign and powerful. And the P stands for perseverance of the saints.

And this sounds a lot like, or somewhat like, once saved, always saved, which is true insofar as that statement can communicate something.

But it's not just that, well, once God chooses a person and Christ dies for that person and God causes that person to be born again, they can backslide and become an atheist, homicidal maniac and still go to heaven.

That's not the idea. Perseverance of the saints means that those that God has saved will persevere in faith to the end.

They may backslide, their faith may be very weak, sometimes they may not look like a Christian, but in the end, their faithful will persevere as God preserves them in the gospel.

Now, going back to one thing that you said, I just want to clarify it for our listeners about limited atonement, also called definite atonement, particular redemption, substitutionary atonement, even though Armenians use that very often, they are wrongly using that because only a reformed

Christian can consistently and logically use the term substitutionary atonement, unless you're a full -blown universalist.

But you said that Christ did not die for the unbelieving, and I'm assuming, in fact,

I know what you meant by that was those that remain in unbelief until death, obviously, everyone for whom he died was unbelieving at some point, in fact, may have been unbelieving for the majority of their lives.

Right. Yes, it's fair to say that Christ only died for the unbelieving. We could always nuance this, but yeah,

Christ did not die for those who never believed. He died for the elect who will experience

God's sovereign grace at a particular time. Christ secured their salvation on the cross, this land that was slain before the foundations of the earth, like Revelation tells us.

This one secured the salvation of some, not all, and those whose salvation is secure do believe in this life at some point according to God's sovereign will.

Great, and we do have a listener from Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York, Tyler, who says, what would be the main reason that Armenians can't let go of their golden idol of the heart and free will?

I'm assuming Tyler's a Calvinist, I guess. Sounds like it. But yeah,

I think that that is not an exaggeration when many people who profess to be

Christian cling on to this concept of free will like an idol, even though their definition of what free will is is nowhere to be found in the

Bible. And perhaps you might even want to not only address

Tyler's question of why they can't let that go, and of course you'd have to be a mind reader to know that, but there is a sense, which even

John Calvin believed, that men have free will, but isn't it that we act freely according to our nature?

In other words, neither God nor Satan forces us against our will to do anything.

Right, right. The Reformed theology has consistently over the centuries articulated that all men and women are free agents.

That's the word we like to use, or the phrase we like to use. We're free agents. Edwards and others would talk about free will, but it's explained in the context of our nature.

We are free to do what we want to do, and we will only do what we want to do. And we're responsible for the things that we do.

The reality is, you know, you have the, like Edwards, Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest theologians,

I think, considered by many, or at least one of the greatest thinkers in American history. He would say that all people have this natural ability in them to choose, right?

Good and evil, God or the devil, like we have all the constituent elements that are necessary to make a choice.

The problem is the heart. We have the natural ability to function and make choices, but we do not have the moral ability anymore as sinners to choose and do good from a pure heart, and to trust in the

Lord, to love Him with all of our being. We have essentially, you know, shot ourselves in the head with the thin shotgun, and we are dead spiritually.

So, yes, we are free. I mean, as a man, I'm free to do whatever I want in accordance with my nature.

I'm not free to fly. I'm not free to grow another two inches and become five foot even. I am bound by my nature to be who

I am, unless God changes my nature. And in terms of, you know, why people hold on to this idea of the heart being free or of free will,

I understand the desire and the tension here. Nobody wants to think of themselves as robots, and, you know, we read about this hard determinism of Islam and things like that, where it's a scary, cold idea.

We don't want to just live in a great big machine where we are a cog, and we don't want to live like that because that's not who we are, who we're made to be.

But a lot of these people go beyond that, and I just ran into one at the Southern Baptist Convention.

I was there a few weeks ago with Pastor Pat here at Redeemer, and I sat down with a guy, and because he had a beard and was bald,

I assumed he was a Calvinist. Turns out he wasn't, and he was really concerned about protecting the notion of freedom.

And even just recently after church, one of our newcomers was saying to me, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you said that God chooses some and not others, and we have six billion people on the planet, and if any one of them believes, they're going to heaven.

And I said, of course, if any one of them believes, they're going to heaven. And he was perplexed because he hadn't really thought very deeply about the nature of human freedom and of the will and how this all works.

I think to start with an axiom like, we are free and we must protect that, is a very dangerous idea, because the only place where we get to understand such complicated metaphysical concepts is by Scripture.

And so if you start with an axiom, and most of us start with some central fundamental belief, we have to allow the

Scripture to speak into that or against that and to constantly reform our thinking as we read

Scripture. So I think people have, you know, generally they're not just trying to beat up on good theology, they're trying to make sense of their world, but they have to be willing to give up ideas that they hold to be precious in order to find a treasure far more valuable, the truth of God.

Yeah, and the fact of the matter is that all these Armenians and those who are in opposition to unconditional election, and they recoil in horror about there only being a certain segment of all of humanity that are chosen to be saved, they have to grapple with the fact that many, if not most, of these millions and millions and billions of people are going to hell.

And if their system of theology is true, I don't know how they, if they were consistent, logically consistent with what they believe, how they could ever have one night's rest knowing that anybody that they know died and went to hell.

Because they, if the Arminian system is actually true, they are very much to blame for that person's damnation.

Because they could have more frequently evangelized that person, they could have more accurately evangelized that person, they could have more lovingly evangelized that person, they could have more lovingly represented

Jesus Christ to that person and the way they lived. You could go on and on and on, and if Arminianism was true, sorry pal, everybody that you ever know, that you've ever known who has died without Christ, you are partially to blame for their damnation.

Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to bring up. The issue there underlying all of that is, why do some people believe and others don't?

Are they smarter? Are they more spiritually in tune? Are they better educated? Like, why does one person, both people hear the same message, one person believes, one person doesn't.

Why is that? Now, as a Calvinist, I believe that the only reason that one will believe and another won't, the only reason that my parents came to believe the gospel, is not because I was such a winsome evangelist.

I wasn't. I was a ham -fisted big mouth when it came to communicating the truth. But what the difference was, is

God changed their heart. He, like with Lydia and Acts, he opened their heart to respond to the message that I had given.

So, like, you know, I was the first Christian in my family. No Christian. And I shared the gospel as often as I could,

I tried to be winsome, tried to be biblical and clear, but eventually I needed to leave and go to seminary,

I had to leave the state. If I thought that I had the ability to persuade my parents to believe, if I thought it wasn't going to be according to God's sovereign working,

I never would have left. I would have duct -taped them to chairs, and I would have convinced them. We would have had a long session of waterboarding.

I'm not about to risk that for their eternal souls. But the truth is, and really when

I talk to even non -Calvinists, I say, like, if I asked them this question, would you ever have believed in Jesus if God didn't touch your heart?

I use that kind of language to see what they say, and they say, no, I wouldn't have. Like, well, there you go.

You understand on some level that God had to do something to wake you up.

Now let's talk about what that something really is. Yeah, well, you know, talk about that guilt trip. I heard,

I will not mention his name because of his popularity, and I don't want anybody stoning me when

I leave here, but... That makes one of us. A very big name in evangelicalism years ago had a radio program, and he was very dedicated to evangelism with a very popular track, and that's all

I'm going to say. But he said on his radio show, anybody will believe if the gospel is presented correctly, and I got to thinking about that.

People that have been praying for lost loved ones and witnessing to them and pouring their heart out to them, and then they die without Christ.

It's like, if only I had learned his steps of evangelism, they would have been saved today.

So did this guy claim to have a 100 % track record for everybody who ever watched or listened to his messages and got saved?

Well, he probably got a lot of people to sign on the dotted line. Well, a lot isn't all. When you boil it down to God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, yeah, things kind of go.

I didn't mention his name. I didn't. No, you didn't. No, you didn't say Bill Bryant or anything. I was just saying.

Yeah, right. You know, I was using that as an example. No, listen, all I do is give screwed up presentations of the gospel.

I'm never going to do a perfect job. I'm a mess. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's... I used to preach the gospel when

I was a brand new Christian, and I would drop the F -bomb all the time, because that's how I talk.

What did I know? Oh, my goodness. I've had people tell me that people couldn't get saved if I used the American Standard of Witness to them.

Well, that might be true. I don't know. It's pretty bad out there. Whenever Buzz preaches, his elders use the

F -bomb. I'm only kidding. Oh, boy. I don't want to...

I am just kidding, folks at Carlisle Reform Presbyterian. That was a joke. I know that you would never use that language.

Now... You know, that's the nice thing about it, though, Chris, is that, you know, this is the way

I put it to my parents when I was explaining to them. You can't say the wrong thing to the right person. You can't say the right thing to the wrong person.

It's just, you know, if they're... You're going to see fruit if they're elect. Maybe not right away, but,

I mean, it's going to work. Well, you're going to see some kind of fruit right away. And this is why you can have

John Wesley, you know, preaching a very different theology, but still hitting the gospel.

You got John Wesley on one side and George Whitefield on the other, and they're both preaching the gospel. They're both giving some different nuances and presentation, and yet God used both of those men magnificently to reach the law.

Okay, we have to go to a break right now. And unless you are not finished with more of the inner workings of what exactly

Reform theology is, the nuts and bolts, we can go into the practical implications.

But I think that there was a point you were in the middle of making before Buzz was giving his personal anecdote of a television preacher.

I may be wrong about that, but... I have ADD, man, so that wasn't too long ago. That was at the beginning of the sentence.

All right, well, we'll be going into the main reason why we gathered here today on the air to discuss the practical implications of Reform theology.

The first one off the bat I know is that if you have problems walking, if you have bursitis or something, that you no longer need to walk an altar call down the aisle to be saved.

So that's one practical thing. That's practical, yeah. But we're going to a break right now. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Transcribed by https://otter .ai

That's the Thriving Story. Chris Arnsen, if you just tuned us in, our guest today is

Pastor Joe Thorne of Redeemer Fellowship in St. Charles, Illinois.

He's also an author and he has become one of our favorite guests here on Iron Sharpens Iron, and we are discussing the practical implications of Reform Theology, otherwise known as Calvinism and otherwise known as the

Doctrines of Sovereign Grace. If you have a question of your own on the subject, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And before I have you begin the specific area of practical implications,

Joe, we do have a listener from Clinton Township, Michigan.

Jeff, how would you guys speak to the believer who has never been sure if they are elect or just hopeful?

I gained comfort from, I gained comfort from 18, oh, chapter 18 .4

of the 1689 London Baptist Confession. But what would you add to that when discipling the weak

Christian? Well, when we get this kind of a question in the

Christian life and certainly in ministry, how do I know I'm elect or how do I know if I'm a believer?

And I always start with something very simple. I ask them, why would

God smile upon you and accept you instead of damn you to hell? And they would say, hopefully they would say, because Christ died for my sins and through him

I'm reconciled to the Father. And I would say, do you believe that? And if they say yes, I say, well then, brother, if you believe that, that this is the answer, how may we be saved?

You believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then if people are wrestling with how do

I know if my faith is real or not real or if it's just intellectual, part of that takes time, growth, it comes with maturity, because all of us have imperfect faith.

Even our faith in our repentance is corrupted. It's not this beautiful, shining example for everybody else to follow.

So I tell them, like, your faith is going to be small. At times it'll be very small. At times it'll be very big and robust.

So what you want to do is look to the cross, look to Jesus, and do you find your hope and your comfort in him or in something else?

And then I ask them, what are you despairing over? And usually it's like, well,

I'm still struggling with the same sins I've struggled with for years. You know, I'm still looking at pornography on the internet or I'm still ignoring the needs of my wife and I'm not putting her first.

And so what we say is, well, listen, none of those sins can damn you if Christ has died for them.

And if your faith is in him, you should have assurance. Now, what you need to do is to repent.

You should turn from those sins and face the God who accepts you with open arms in Jesus. But that's my starting point, is let's talk about the gospel itself,

Christ's death for sinners, and the only thing that God requires of you to experience that, which is faith.

There is no passage that says, here are the five steps to figuring out your election.

But we are called in Scripture to make sure of our election, make sure of our calling. And the only means by which we can really do that is by going back to the gospel and answering this question, is my hope there or is it somewhere else?

Yeah, the Bible never tells us that we know the secret counsels of God, but the

Bible also tells us that those who are elect will be justified and sanctified.

Good tree will bear good fruit. There will be evidence of someone if they are the elect.

I remember in the radio station that I worked for for 15 years, when

I started to get opportunities to fill in for the regular talk show host, there was always a person every time

I was on, a very polite man, I believe from the West Indies, might have even been from Africa.

He was always very troubled as to whether or not he was one of the elect.

He lived in fear and he actually believed, even though we corrected him many times, because he would call in a lot under the alias

E, just the letter E, that's the only thing that he would use to identify himself. He would always ask,

I'm afraid that even though I repented years ago and continue to repent daily and have placed my trust in Jesus Christ and I am a member of a

Bible -believing church and I truly live my life for him even though I sin and when

I sin, I cry out to him for forgiveness, but I'm so afraid that when I get to the

Lord's throne of judgment, he's going to say, you are not one of my elect, be gone, you worker of wickedness.

I'm just so terrified. He was obviously talking about Matthew 7 in some degree, what the

Lord will tell the false converts, but he was giving the description of somebody that doesn't exist, somebody who has truly repented and believed and loves the

Lord and has followed him for their entire life and then they wind up dying and they're not holding the lotto ticket or the lottery ticket that God has for all of his elect.

They have this bizarre concept of what that means. You know, the Reformed tradition has a really healthy biblical balance of understanding this concept of the perseverance of the saint and therefore the perseverance of faith as well as the reality and trouble that sin causes us.

In the 1689 Second Lenten Confession, Chapter 17, it talks about the perseverance of the saint, and if I can,

I'd like to read two paragraphs, because these two, Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 3, speak to this particular issue.

In Paragraph 1, it says, Those whom God has accepted in the Beloved, that's Jesus, effectually called and sanctified by his

Spirit and given the precious faith of his elect unto, these believers can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere thereunto the end and be eternally saved, seeing the gifts and callings of God are without repentance, from which source he still begets and nourishes in them repentance, love, joy, hope, and all the graces of the

Spirit unto immortality. And though many storms and floods arise and beat against them, yet they shall never be able to take them off of that foundation and rock by which faith they are fastened upon.

Notwithstanding, through unbelief and the temptations of Satan, the sensible light of the love of God may for a time be clouded and obscured from them.

Yet he, God, is still the same, and they shall be sure to be kept by the power of God unto salvation, where they shall enjoy their purchased possessions, they being engraved upon the palm of his hand, and their names having been written in the

Book of Life from all eternity. Number one, our confidence in our salvation is not on the robustness of our faith, but on the secured salvation that Jesus has obtained for us.

And then it says this in paragraph three, it's shorter. And though they may, these Christians, these believers, though they may, through the temptation of Satan and the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, though these may fall into grievous sins and for a time continue therein, whereby they incur

God's displeasure and grieve his Spirit, they come to have their graces and comforts impaired, have their hearts hardened and their consciences wounded, hurt and scandalize others, and bring temporal judgment upon themselves.

So all of these things can happen to a believer, yet they shall renew their repentance and be preserved through faith in Christ to the end.

I think that's a beautiful summary that we stole from the Presbyterians of how

God preserves us. Listen, I can tell you right now, if it wasn't for the grace of God, I never would have believed in Jesus.

And if it wasn't for the grace of God, I never would have continued to follow Jesus. I need them both. Yes. Well, let's, we do have listeners still waiting for questions, but I still want to get first into some more practical issues.

I think one to start with, I actually touched on already, of a practical ramification or implication of Reformed theology is that when someone passes away, when someone dies, and we don't see any evidence in their life that they have come to Christ, we need not be tormented day and night for the rest of our own lives over that.

Obviously, we should be ashamed of ourselves if we never evangelize that person. We should use that as a reminder that we should be diligent to spread the word and proclaim it to every living and breathing soul.

But at the same time, we need not live in torment, wondering if, actually, it wouldn't be any wonder at all, we need not be in torment with the guilt that we helped to send that person to hell.

Isn't that a practical implication, a really powerful one? Yeah, yeah. The confidence that we have is that God saves sinners.

We don't. And so if we preach the gospel, and we trust God to do his thing, and if I didn't preach the gospel, like you said,

I should be convicted of that, and this person died without me ever taking the opportunity to share the gospel with him when

I had it. But I also know that the sovereign God does not only appoint the end, he appoints the means to the end.

So if he did not use me through my own neglect, I know that he would have used someone else.

Amen. And, Welt, tell us some of the other practical implications or ramifications on your mind in regard to the

Reformed faith. Well, two of the biggest implications that should be the natural fruit of Reformed theology are humility and joy.

We should be the happiest, humblest fools on the planet. We know that there was no hope for us outside of God's sovereign working.

We know that there was no way in which we would have ever have chosen him, but he chose us. So his condescending love and grace rescued us, so we should be humble, knowing our own weakness, knowing our own depravity, knowing the depths from which we've been rescued.

And we should be happy. We should be joyful in the midst of all things, knowing that God not only has saved us, but that he is working all of the things in our lives for his glory and our good.

I mean, we should be... I mean, listen, we have to be serious about theology, and sometimes we have to fight.

That's biblical. But too often, with Calvinism, or at least with a superficial gleaning of some aspects of Calvinism, we are tempted to become proud and pugnacious.

We want to fight everybody and correct everyone. And sometimes, you know, we get distracted from the

Savior that is highlighted in Reformed theology by the system itself. It's easy for us to have the golden calf of the system and miss the glory of the

Savior. So humility and joy are two massive implications that should be true.

I mean, Calvinists should be known as, man, those humble people suffer so well, they love Jesus, they preach the gospel all the time, and man, are they happy.

They know how to rejoice in God and in his good gifts in ways that others just can't.

That should be the mark of us. Amen. And one of the things that I think is a practical implication of the

Reformed faith that we are actually most often accused to be guilty of the very opposite of this thing.

I know what you're going to say. Really? Okay. Well, I was going to say that Reformed theology gives boldness and evangelism and zeal to press on and persevere in evangelizing, even when we don't see fruit at all, or at least not for a long time, because we know that God has an elect from out of every tribe and people and nation and tongue.

I mean, this is what continued to fuel William Carey, the father of the modern missions movement.

You know, he goes to India, where most of the people, many Calvinists of his day, were saying, you know,

God doesn't need to use you, he can just save anybody. They had a hyper -Calvinism, a perverted form of Reformed theology, really strangling the missional impulse of the church that God has given us.

But Carey understood better. He knew that God appoints the means as well as the end, and that no one believes unless there is a preacher preaching the gospels.

And, you know, he didn't see fruit for years, no conversion for years, but he labored faithfully, confidently, and boldly, because God used his word to rescue the perishing.

So yes, we should be bold, confident evangelists, knowing that God can use my messed up presentation of the gospel or your messed up presentation of the gospel.

He can overcome our weaknesses, because I know that he can overcome their heart. By the way, did you, was that what you were thinking?

Yep, exactly. I mean, okay, I'm going to overstate it a little, just a little, but it's not crazy hyperbole here.

The greatest evangelists in the history of the church were Calvinists. Of course. I mean, like, look, they just start picking a name.

Most of them were five -point Calvinists. Most of them were thoroughgoing Reformed theologians. You know, you can pick up Bunyan or Spurgeon, for that matter, it doesn't matter.

Edwards and Whitfield, certainly. Now, with Wesley, you have an exception to that rule, of course. There are great evangelists from other traditions who are gospel -centered, but really the vast majority of the well -known missionaries and evangelists have been not just influenced by, but have embraced these doctrines of grace.

Now, it is true, we can't hide from reality that there are,

I mean, just as there were Baptists and Methodists and other kinds of professing

Christians in the Ku Klux Klan, and still are, there are always going to be people that contradict the faith they claim to possess.

We do have Calvinists. We do have Reformed pastors and professors and teachers who are as dry as dust.

Right. You have preaching that is no more than a lecture at times.

There seems to be no difference between a sermon preached and a

Bible study taught. You know, you have people gathered in church that might as well be in the classroom of a college professor's lecture on some theological topic.

There seems to be no apparent passion for the loss to come to Christ, etc.

Well, why do you think that we have this reputation, and it's not without some evidence that it's there?

Sure. And if I'm honest, I mean, look, I'm not a very good Christian. I think a lot of the times people could watch me very closely and go like, man, that wasn't very

Christian. And I know I'm not a very good Calvinist. People can look at me and go like, dang, man, you complain a lot for a guy that believes that God is in sovereign control over everything.

Why are you complaining about his providence? It's because I'm a weak, you know, sinful man. But I think a big part of what's happened among a lot of Calvinists is we have mistaken the knowledge of the

Bible for the knowledge of God. You know, we have become so thrilled with understanding some of the points of doctrine that we become these collectors of facts, and we want to know the answers, and we want to be right, and we don't want to be ignorant.

And so it's easy for us to shift into a way of living and thinking in the

Christian life where it's just about knowing rather than knowing God. And I think, you know, that is a big difference between the two.

The knowledge of God is not having facts, but it's having a relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

And that relationship is built upon doctrinal truths revealed in Scripture. If I know

God as Father, that broadens and deepens my faith. If I know

God as the provider of every good thing in my life, that broadens and deepens my faith.

If I know Jesus as King and as Friend, that broadens and deepens my understanding of God. And those things should have a corresponding impact on my piety.

If our doctrine is not increasing or improving our piety, then there is a disconnect there that we need to find and repent of.

But, you know, the opposite is also true. I mean, I recall years ago when

I was in the Pentecostal churches, paying attention one time to just the normal language.

My pastor was a good friend of mine, so, you know, I don't want to be saying too much disparaging about him. But I paid attention to the stuff he was sharing with me one time, and I realized how there was no biblical base to all these things he was saying about how the

Spirit moves. I mean, this is a guy that's telling me how to live my life to please God, and it was totally void of scriptural foundation.

It was all, you know, well, the Spirit does this in these cases and, you know, so forth. And, you know, how can people don't realize that they're totally without foundations if they don't learn theology?

Did I make that clear enough? I used to. Why the silence?

I don't get it. You were awe -stricken. Oh, my. Zeal without knowledge is dead, but knowledge without zeal is useless.

Yes, that's the point. It was useless because it wasn't true. Right. I mean, these things should make us alive.

It's not because I've got answers. It's because I know God better, and I can make him known more fully.

We disciple a lot of people here. We raise up a lot of young people to become leaders and preachers. And, you know, we have a guy here, a young man named

Travell. He's a very gifted communicator and preacher. He grew up in a black

Pentecostal church. He's been preaching since he was nine. So he's got these oratory skills that are just captivating.

But he's embraced Reformed theology. He's a member of our church now. And so he has not just the cadence and the mannerisms and the ability to communicate well, which is good, but he brings that enthusiasm and that earnestness with the truth.

Now, of course, God can use the truth without the earnestness. God can use his word communicated imperfectly, of course.

He always does it. But those doctrines should be reflected in the way we carry ourselves and in the way that we communicate.

By the way, I heard one of my most favorite lines against baptismal regeneration from a young black preacher

I saw on TV. He was on a talk show or something. And I don't know if he was nine. He could have been nine.

I remember him being very young. But he said, you know, baptism by water is not going to save you.

If you go into that water a devil, you're going to come back out a wet devil.

And I love that line. I remembered it. I saw that probably 25 years ago.

We have to go to another break right now. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, and we do have several people patiently waiting, at least

I hope they're waiting patiently. But they're waiting anyway to have their questions asked and answered.

We'll get to you as soon as possible after the break. But our email address, if you'd like to join them with a question on the air for Joe Thorne, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Joe Thorne and our discussion of the practical implications of reform theology.

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And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own. You mean that one? Yes, that one. We're going to have to wait now.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, for our guest Joe Thorne, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. As we discuss the practical implications of Reform Theology, we have

David in either Ada or Adda, Ohio. I vote for Ada.

What do you think, Joe? A -D -A in Ohio. Is that Adda or Ada? It's Ada in Michigan, I know.

Oh, really? It's gotta be Ada, right? Well, no, it's Ohio. They probably pronounce it wrong, so it's probably Ada. Well, I'm from Buffalo originally, and one of the suburbs is

Lancaster. You never say that down near Lancaster here. Right, right. So you never know.

All righty. Well, anyway, David asks, I heard Charles Stanley say, God has done all he can do.

Now it's up to you. Can you speak to the problems that have come along since Finney, et cetera, when it comes to presenting the

Thai gospel and evangelizing? I'm not sure what the

Thai gospel means. That may be a typo. Is there an altar call in the

Reformed churches? I think, yeah, this has kind of got a few typos in it. He said later call, but I think he meant altar call.

Well, you know, I do know a couple of Calvinist pastors and churches who do have altar calls, but I know that's not at all the typical thing that you would find.

And why don't you explain that, Joe? Why is that a very rare thing amongst

Reformed and Calvinistic Christians? And then you could also go on to the whole God has done all he can do, now it's up to you.

Well, let me do it in reverse order, if that's okay. Yeah, that's the way he asked it, in reverse order. So yeah, I mean, there's a famous Moody tract where, you know,

God has done his, Satan has done his, cast your vote, who will you? You know, Billy Graham used to say,

God's done 99%, the 1 % is up to you, now believe. And I understand what they're saying here.

What they're trying to communicate is, it is your responsibility to believe on the

Lord, and that's true. It is our responsibility to believe on the Lord Jesus. And so we call all men and women indiscriminately to believe on Christ.

The problem with, theologically, with what they're actually saying, or what they, maybe unintentionally, are trying to, are communicating, is that it makes it sound like God has done his best, but couldn't really pull it off.

It sounds like, you know, God did what he could, and now his hands are tied, and he's waiting for you to finish the project.

And that is never how Scripture presents the work of Christ on the cross, or God's electing grace.

It is always accomplished, finished. So theologically, there are a lot of problems there.

The altar call, you know, especially with the anxious bench, invented or made popular by Charles Finney, is problematic in the way it's typically presented.

Typically, it's a sinner's prayer, is really what we're talking about. If you want to believe in Jesus, then, you know, come forward.

Or, if you want to believe in Jesus today, right now, pray this prayer. And so I've seen a big evangelist, I've seen

Luis Palau do this. He'll say, all right, who here knows they're a sinner? People raise their hand. All right, pray this prayer with me.

And if they all pray the prayer together, and he says, if you prayed that prayer, and you meant it, your sins are forgiven.

Well, that is, to me, a very crazy way of presenting the gospel, and leading someone to Jesus, because people repeat prayers all the time.

And they can be very sincere in the way I'm saying my prayer, but they may not have faith. So the reason that there aren't a lot of altar calls, we don't do altar calls at Redeemer, and yet we see conversions.

The reason you don't see a lot of altar calls is because what they do is, instead of adding an altar call to the end of the message,

Reformed preachers, typically, if they're any good anyway, they are preaching the gospel throughout, making strong, earnest appeals for people to forsake their sin and to look to Jesus, to cast themselves upon the mercies of God and Jesus, to believe today that they would be saved.

I frequently say it here, listen, you have come in here as a non -believer, a person alienated from God, but you can leave here reconciled to God, made a child of God, your sins forgiven and eternity secured.

That can happen today. So we make earnest appeals to people to believe on Jesus, just like we see in Scripture.

But we don't have them pray a formulaic prayer or walk an aisle as a means of obtaining that salvation, because Scripture doesn't call us to do that.

Instead, Scripture says, believe. And so really, the call that we do is, believe on the

Lord Jesus. So all of the conversions that I've seen throughout my years in ministry have always been people who come up to me and they say,

I believe, I have believed the gospel. We talk about it and we celebrate, we baptize them, but it's never in the context of them performing some kind of a ritual.

And my fear is, is that, you know, the sinner's prayer is essentially a sacrament.

You know, if I just do this, then I'm going to be okay. I just go through these motions, and they're not thinking of it that way, but if I do this, if I jump through this hoop, if I do this, if I offer this gesture sincerely, then

I've secured it. So we don't, well, we don't do that here. There is a way to do an altar call.

And in fact, a contemporary of Finney was A. L. Nettleton, and he would tell people, if you want to talk more, hang out after.

Go over to this room, we're going to talk some more. And in that room, or on that bench, he would then further exhort them in the gospel.

And so you can say, hey, if you guys want prayer, if you want to come up, if you're confused about where you're at, if you want to talk more about Jesus, then come on forward after the service here, and we're going to talk.

I think that's great. I think that's wise. Yeah, and it's amazing that the churches that do this don't say that there are three ordinances of the church, because it really has become a third ordinance, so much so that there are people who are horrified if they visit your church and you don't have an altar call.

Right. Well, actually, in my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, that the gospel churches were, that was the way that the gospel was accepted.

Exactly. People have said, I will not go to a church that doesn't have one. And we do have a listener, oh, it's actually our friend from Ada, Ohio, again,

David, who says, does the Reformed faith teach the salvation of all who have not lived long enough or are not mentally capable to know the difference between good and evil?

He's talking about infant salvation here, and also salvation of those who are mentally handicapped.

And there is disagreement even amongst the Reformed on this.

Charles Spurgeon strongly believed that every single infant that perished in infancy would not have died unless he or she was of the elect.

And you have a tiny handful of people who profess to be

Calvinists who say that those infants will definitely not be in heaven, but the majority seem to have an agnostic position on this, where they say that we cannot really know with certainty what the state of the death of the infants are.

What is your response? Yeah, well, because it's such an emotionally charged issue,

I think you have to remove all of that from, you have to remove the pastoral implications of it from the conversation on the front end and deal with it biblically, theologically.

Let's get our answer and then figure out how to do this pastorally. Because a lot of people go straight there, what are you going to tell the person?

Let's not worry about what we're going to tell the person. Let's first figure out, what does the Bible actually teach? And your summary,

I think, is very accurate. I would agree that, in my reading of church history, in terms of perspectives in the Reformed faith.

Now, as a pastor of a church where we have had several people lose infants, and not just miscarriages, those are bad enough, but I mean babies that have been born, they die after two weeks, four weeks, stillbirth, things like that.

What I tell them is what I honestly believe. And I tell them the story of David.

And it's 2 Samuel 12, I think. And I say, listen, David, when his child was sick and just dying, not dead, but dying, he was mourning, he was praying, he was in misery.

And when his child died, he stood up, he brushed himself off, he anointed his head with oil, he was rejoicing, and his friends were confused.

They're like, what's your... your son just died, why aren't you a record? It doesn't make any sense. And his response was, well, he will not come to me, but I will go to him.

David knew that his son was saved in his infancy. He knew it.

He was absolutely... Now, there's no record of him getting some kind of divine revelation that his child was one of the rare elect infants, so all infants being damned is off the table, just because of this one account.

There are other passages as well. So there's no way that we can say all who die in infancy are damned.

At the very least, some are elect. So now the question is, well, who are some elect or all elect? My belief is, and it's a mystery, let's just admit it's a mystery, we do not know, but my conviction is,

David had a theology of infant salvation. He understood God and the gospel well enough to know those who die in infancy are those that have been chosen by God, for God, and in some mysterious way, all the benefits of the cross are applied to them, and he is able to rejoice.

So David had hope and rejoiced that he would see his child again. I believe that those Christians who lose their children very young can have this confidence that they're going to see their child again.

Yeah, I agree with you, and a lot of Reformed people that I have discussed this with have dismissed that text, and they will say that David was merely speaking of the grave, and I always say, how on earth did that give him comfort?

That's a dumb argument. Put that guy on the line. My child is now a rotting corpse.

I can't wait to be a rotting corpse next to my child. Well, I do hear it, though.

It's consistent. Oh, no, I've heard it, too. Well, you know, Sheol, and yeah, listen, we all took Hebrew, and none of us really know what we're talking about.

Let's talk about the theology here. There is no hope in that. There is absolutely no hope in going to the dirt.

I mean, if anything, he'd move into, you know, Solomon's mode of Ecclesiastes. It's all vanity.

It's all vanity. It's all, we're just going to return to the grave. That's where you wind up without the fear of the Lord. But with the fear of the

Lord, you don't fear the grave. Mm -hmm. And I do know that Al Mohler, a fellow

Southern Baptist along with you, who is a thoroughgoing Calvinist, he believes that infants will certainly be in glory with Christ if they die in infancy.

And by the way, I want our listeners to be clear that no Calvinist or sovereign grace -believing

Christian or Reformed Christian ever would say, if they know what their theology is, that an infant is going to heaven because it is pure and perfect and does not require a

Savior. Right. And this is where, now, I don't know what Dr. Mohler's position is today, but back in the 90s, he and Dr.

Aiken wrote an article on infant salvation. And in that, they argued for something closer to an age of accountability, definitely than I would argue.

Really? Because I had read an article by Dr. Mohler that I'm almost certain was a one within the last decade that would have taught the certainty of infant salvation.

Well, that's good. And he argued for that in the article. But I believe that, if I'm recalling correctly, this article written in the 90s said that we essentially don't become actual transgressors until we...

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I understand what you mean. Okay. So they're not yet condemned until they make a choice.

So all are going to heaven, but it's not articulated in the same way that I would.

In fact, I don't know personally, I'm not friends with any Calvinists, and I haven't come across any, honestly, who would say those who died in infancy are going to hell.

And I've only met a handful of some elect, some non -elect, but they seem to even be pretty ambivalent about the whole idea.

Yeah, I knew one. I met one. Yeah, and this is a different one than Buzz knows.

So there's at least two of them out there. Yeah, and I'm not going to mention him because he may have changed his mind.

I haven't spoken to him in quite a while. But he was no average, quote, quote, layman either.

He was quite a brilliant apologist who has mysteriously disappeared from the apologetic scene, and I don't know where he is right now.

And we had a very lengthy argument about that issue at one point. He was mocking my using

John the Baptist in the womb of his mother leaping for joy in the presence of Christ, and I said, why would it be impossible?

Because he was insisting that you cannot enter heaven without faith.

And I said, why could not God, who can do anything, give faith even to an infant that was one of his own that he knew he was calling home to himself?

Why couldn't he give that infant faith like he did to John the Baptist? And he just dismissed it as nonsense.

Maybe, I mean, it's not a totally fair comparison, but how possible is it for him to believe the

Gospel? Right. He's a full -grown man. How possible? Right, right, there you go.

It's impossible without God's sovereign grace. So I just, I think like, well, okay, so now you're talking about intellectual abilities and all that, but there is mystery and miracle in what

God does. And where the Scripture is silent, I shut my mouth. But where I think

Scripture is clear, I want to be clear, and where I think Scripture points in a particular direction, and I think it's pointing in a direction here,

I'm happy to affirm what I think it says, or at least implies. And, you know, one of the things that I also turn to is that whenever hell and eternal damnation and torment are mentioned in the

Scriptures, you never have an instance of an infant going there. You never have someone being described as only being there because they possess the inherited sin of Adam.

Right. You have rebels who are consciously Yes. Rebellious and who have, who are liars and have false teaching and on and on.

But anyway. And our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. We have another question from Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island. How can

Arminians believe that man's will contributes to salvation with verses like John 1 .13

and Romans 9 .16, which clearly obliterate synergism?

Well, they obviously, when it comes to proof texting, they'll just come up with texts that they, obviously, we would believe they're twisting, even if unconsciously they're twisting.

But if you have a response to that. Yeah, look, I know sometimes

I'll run into a person and their gotcha verse for me is, choose this day. Or, you know, believe in these appeals for people to believe and to exercise their will.

And of course, you know, Calvinists are Bible nerds. They love these verses.

They love all of Scripture. And that's how they preach the gospel. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Like, leave your sin behind.

We make those appeals because that's the imperative, right? Like, every man is responsible to do that.

We can't do it. So what God does is, He changes our heart.

Like, Lydia, I think it's Acts 16, right? Lydia is, or is it 17? But anyways,

Lydia is with the ladies. They're praying, but they're not believers. And Paul shows up and he preaches the gospel.

And we're told that the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. So she would not have responded positively to the gospel.

She would not have believed savingly on Jesus unless God opened her heart. So the appeal is there.

Choose today. Believe. Repent. The appeal is there. The imperative is there. And until God changes the heart, they won't actually make that choice.

And one of the things that I think is a practical, a powerful practical implication of the doctrines of grace or Calvinism or Reformed theology is kind of, well not kind of, is very much related to what

I mentioned earlier about the peace we can have even when those we love die with no evidence of faith in Christ.

We can have peace with God no matter what is going on in our lives. No matter what kind of trial or tribulation or whatever we are experiencing, we know that Romans 8 28 is true, that God will work all things together for the good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

And the Arminian claims the same verse, obviously, but it really is not entirely logically consistent with the rest of what they believe, is it?

You know, these doctrines are not an exercise in intellectual rigor.

They're not merely an academic pursuit. These are truths that God gives us to transform us, and they should be giving birth to a whole host of affections so that when a person dies,

I have all of this information, I have all of these doctrines, and they all apply and bear fruit if I believe them.

So, I mean, listen, I don't want to give anybody false hope. You know, I've had friends die, and as far as I can tell, they're unbelievers.

I mean, like, you know, I've shared the gospel with them. But the truth is, I've shared the gospel with them a lot. I don't know what happened at the end.

You know, I just don't know. God could have broken through the dark clouds and regenerated them shortly before their death.

He certainly has done it before. He did it with a thief on the cross. So, just because I don't have an evidence doesn't mean that He didn't do it.

So, I don't spend much time, you know, wringing my hands about what happened.

I say, God is good, God is sovereign, we all get what we deserve, or we get better. And I'm going to trust

God in this, and I hope that person trusted in the Lord before they died. I mean, I didn't see

Him do it, but who knows? So, I wouldn't want to give anybody false hope at a funeral. I've preached the funeral of an abusive man who was hated by his entire family, who was an unrepentant sinner.

I don't give any of those people false hope. I preach the gospel. But in terms of my own self, where I'm at,

I can't sweat those details because I know God has worked out every single one of them for His own glory.

Amen. And obviously, we have that even more sure peace in the midst of trial because it's not like things are happening by accident, that God is somehow moving around like chess pieces to make them work.

We believe that God ordained them. He intended them. They have purpose.

That's one of the main things that has come out whenever my dear friend,

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries has debated those who are opposed to Reformed theology.

The Arminian and those outside of Sovereign Grace, there is so much purposelessness in the things that occur on this earth.

And nothing would be more of a hindrance to joy and peace that I can think of is that there are random acts of purposelessness occurring all around me that are bringing horror and grief and sadness and despair into my life.

Right. And the idea that God could do something, but He won't on the principle of not violating my human autonomy.

There goes that idol again that our listener was talking about, that golden idol. Listen, when my wife and I were dating in Bible college, she was the right size.

I'm sure she was fine. We were great friends. But once we started dating, one of the very first things we had to talk about was the sovereignty of God.

Because I can't pursue a relationship with a woman that I want to marry if we're not on the same page.

If our children are suffering, if our children die, if our world falls apart around us,

I can't have my wife saying, curse God and die. I can't have my wife saying, God doesn't do anything. God's not involved.

I have to lock my arms with a woman who says, the

Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. That was the kind of woman that I needed. And of course, my wife is a rockstar theologian.

She was right there. But it's really, really important that this idea that God isn't involved or would be nowhere near that car crash when these bad things are happening, flies in the face of everything that we see in Scripture.

I mean, listen, the Chaldeans coming in to take over the southern kingdom of Israel was at the hand of God.

God says, I'm going to raise up the Babylonians to do a wicked thing in your life. And then

I'm going to punish them for doing it. And I'm going to restore you after it. God is in control over all these things.

We're responsible for what we do. And that mystery intention has to be embraced, not just argued over and not refused.

You know, I don't want to minimize the problem in Christianity today that is rampant.

When taken to its extreme is a heresy of individualism, where people don't believe in the necessity of a corporate gathered body of the believers known as the church, they don't believe in the necessity of submitting to elders and all that.

But I can tell you that there is something that magnified my own appreciation and joy of my one -on -one personal, intimate, private relationship with God when

I discovered the meaning and joy of definite atonement and even unconditional election, because it was no longer

Jesus hanging on that cross. And even though an

Arminian may never say this, but in reality, if they're logically consistent,

Jesus is yelling out, I hope that I save all of you!

No, he's saying, Chris Arnzen, I'm taking your sin upon me, and you will come to me.

You will not only come to me in faith on this earth, but you will come to me for eternity in glory.

I'm doing this for you, Chris Arnzen. And that made it revolutionize my understanding of the cross.

I can't believe you just said that, because that honestly is my exact experience. Well, I was converted, no background in the church, no background in the

Bible. I was a former Satanist. I didn't know any truths. Wow, I don't think we ever brought that up before.

Yeah, that was my background. Never stepped foot into a church until I was 17, never heard the gospel until I was 17.

So I was converted while reading the gospel of Matthew. There's no altar call. I mean, God changed my mind and my heart.

I went from not believing to believing, from confusion to conviction in a minute, in an instant. And so I never struggled with election.

I never struggled with the priority of regeneration to faith. I did, though, really struggle with definite atonement.

And because of just two passages in Scripture, 1 John and 1 Peter, I struggled with those two passages.

And so in 1994, around Christmas time, I broke out my concordance and all my books before the internet.

So I had my concordance out. I looked at every verse that had to do with cross, death, propitiation, everything.

I looked at every verse throughout the whole Bible that dealt with the atonement in one way or another. And at the end of that,

I was crying, because Jesus died for me. I mean,

He actually... He didn't die for me to make it possible. He didn't buy me a nice home, and it's sitting in there somewhere, like He bought everybody an ice cream cone, for me by name, like you just said, and it changed everything.

It's the same exact story. Yeah, and it's not a faceless, nameless sea of humanity that He died for.

Right. Yeah, He didn't buy a bucket of chicken for everybody, and if they figure out where the bucket of chicken is, they can have some.

Well, they're going to go home and church dinners anyway. Right, He says, hey hungry fool, here's some chicken.

I got this for you. Not to make light of salvation, but I mean, it's more of a proper understanding that He brings salvation to us.

He brings us to Himself. My very dear friend, Pastor Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, Long Island.

I know I've repeated this story, so bear with me, those of you listening who are beginning to roll your eyes at me repeating another story, but I loved the way he put this years ago.

It still burned into my memory. He said, imagine you're a little boy, and you climb up on your daddy's knee, and you say to your daddy, daddy, do you love me?

And your daddy says, of course I do. I love everyone in the world. And you say, no daddy, but do you love me?

Didn't you hear me, son? Of course I do. I love all the little children in the world.

That's not really what you want to hear, is it? The love of a father for his son, that is a special kind of love.

And listen, the Reformed tradition argues that God has a benevolent love for everyone, that God is good to all, but he has a special love, a saving love, a peculiar love for his children, those that he has given to his son, those for whom

Jesus praised in John 17, those for whom Jesus died. Stan Mallow Are there FBI agents looking for you via helicopter?

right here yeah oh you know what yeah that's it

I'm in my office and I have to have a I have to have my window open that's all you want me to say.

I have to have my window open right now. I'm sorry but I stepped on you right in the middle of a vital moment there.

Well that's just I mean listen that's I think the real picture. Yes and in fact it also obviously with Paul's command to husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church the spousal love that Christ has for his church is elect is not the love we have for everybody it's not

Christ it's not husbands love your wives and every other woman in the world as Christ loves his church.

It's even like this in the Old Testament I mean like when when the sacrifices were being made by the high priest those were not made for the whole world those are made for the people of God.

Yeah. This is not a weird idea it's only a weird idea to people that have really grown up under a different system of thought but if you just get back to what the

Bible actually affirms the scope is always limited to us the church it is never broadly applied to the the masses of unbelievers when you're just placing people into two categories unbelievers of the chosen and the unchosen.

Thank you Buzz for reminding me about our last station break and we'll be right back after these messages so don't go away.

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Well, another evidence of the sovereignty of God and things not working the way that you planned them to or hoped them to with the last commercial there wouldn't air, but we will have to double up the next time that we are airing commercials on our next program.

But anyway, if you've just tuned us in, we have had for the last 90 minutes

Joe Thorne on our program to discuss the practical implications of the sovereignty of God.

And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And this question,

Joe, as far as a practical implication, is not as easily explained or we can't be flippant about it as we might have a tendency to think or do, but one of the things that is a powerful practical implication of the sovereignty of God is that when we climb out of the pit of sin that we fall into in repentance, we can praise

God that as a child of His, elect before the foundation of the world, who cannot be snatched from the tight clutch, the tight grasp of Christ, we will not, as other denominations and theologies teach, we will not ever lose that salvation.

Obviously we can never use that as a license to live licentiously, at the risk of being redundant there, but Paul obviously said that grace is not to give us some kind of a notion that we are to become libertines and live in any way we choose without any concern for the afterlife, but at the same time when we know that we have climbed out of that pit of sin and repentance, we know that we have a

Father who has always been there waiting with His arms stretched open to us. It's not like He's got

His back turned to us until we return to Him. We are always

His because He has elected us before time even began, right? Yeah, nothing can separate us from the love of God, neither height nor depth, nothing created, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, nothing can take us out of Jesus' hand.

This was when I was converted, I was by a, really through the influence of a godly young Baptist girl that I had the hots for when

I was a teenager, and she would tell me about Jesus and it went on for a year and I just,

I didn't get it, and after a while eventually I was converted, and I kept finding all of these doctrines in the

Bible, and just reading the Bible, and I would ask the pastor about it, well the Bible says that God chose us in Christ before, and he would go, no, no, no, and I was like,

I'm just telling you what it said, I'm trying to make sense of it, and they kept pushing back, they started calling me a Calvinist, I didn't know what that was, but it sounded bad, and the last conversation

I had there before I moved on to another church was, I said, no one can take us out of Jesus' hand, so my salvation is secure, and he said, no, that's right, no one can take you, but you can jump out of it, and you can willingly just get out of it, you know, and I just,

I so struggled as a young, ignorant Christian, how this made sense of what seems to be pretty plain in Scripture, at least it seemed plain to me, and I think that, again, it's this very

American idea, it's certainly made popular here, that we are our own captain, we are ultimately in control, we are the hero of the movie of our life, and all of that, and so I just,

I struggled with that, with the way that people were pushing back into these doctrines, but once I finally said,

I just, I'm going to give up on what they're saying, and I'm just going to go with what I see Scripture saying. Now, in this election season,

I think one of the practical implications of this belief that we have is that although we are not to be irresponsible and lazy when it comes to voting, we are not to sit back like hyper -Calvinists, or even viewing

God like a deist, you know, whatever happens, that kind of a thing, but at the same time, we know that no matter who wins this presidential election,

God is in control, God is the one that sat that person in a seat of power, and it may very well to bring a judgment upon the country where we live, so that true repentance among our fellow citizens can finally come, but it disturbs me when

I hear, even from some Calvinist Christians, that for you not to be supporting with great fervency and vigor and enthusiasm

Donald Trump, that, are you kidding me? If you don't support

Trump and vote for him, Hillary's going to win, and then the world's going to end. What's wrong with you?

You want Hillary Clinton in the White House for the next four to eight years? Are you kidding me? Do you know what's going to happen to us?

And, I mean, what? She could potentially get Jesus off that throne. I mean, she's a powerful woman. I just got done.

I just, I was preaching through, um, what was I preaching through? Daniel. Oh, yes.

I just got done preaching through Daniel. No charts. I didn't use any charts, but because the theme of the whole book is the sovereignty over God, the sovereignty of God over all kings and all kingdoms.

That's the theme of the whole book, and so, and Daniel kept getting these visions, and what was the vision? This king's going to rise up, and then this king's going to rise up, and that king's going to take out this king, and it's going to get bad for you guys, but guess what?

I've got the plan. I've got the control. I'm the one who's really on the throne, and in the end, my people will be vindicated.

Don't sweat it. Trust me, and I agree with you. We should be active, knowledgeable, involved, and understanding why both of those candidates are complete lunatics, and they're not a good option either way.

However, I don't sweat that stuff because I know I'm preparing for four years of embarrassment.

I really am. I'm going to be, and our country will be humbled and humiliated, and we deserve that. We absolutely deserve that, and so I'm going to predict it right now.

Trump's going to be the president, and we're all going to be humiliated, and that's what we get as Americans. Yeah, the

Christians fail to recognize that if you are, there's one thing if you're going into the privacy of your voting booth and saying, well,

I really don't want Hillary Clinton who is openly in favor of abortion up until the ninth month and is just openly wicked, so I would prefer that Trump win this election and then they throw the switch, but there's a difference between that and somebody who is on some kind of joyful bandwagon when their public testimony is a

Christian, and the reliability of the Bible and the authenticity of the gospel may be all called into question when this person may turn out to be the hugest embarrassment to the

American presidency that we've ever had, and it's amazing when I listen to or watch

Fox News how many of these commentators, not all of them, but many of them, will look upon these conservatives who have reluctantly said, well,

I would rather Trump win than Hillary, so I'm supporting them, and they look at those people with wrinkled noses and say, what kind of an endorsement is that?

They should be really supporting him. Well, these same people already had declared that they thought he was a liar.

What are they supposed to do? They themselves reveal that they're liars, too? Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, here at Redeemer, we're a very diverse group of people.

We've got sweet little old ladies, and we've got young guys with tattoos. We've got empty nesters and families.

We've got all these different kinds of people, rich people and poor people. Any old ladies with tattoos? Depends on how you define old.

Hey, Chris is shopping. Oh, shut your mouth. There are some. I'll tell you what.

If you look at my Instagram feed, I took a picture of a couple. She is my age, so she's in her 40s, and he's probably got 10 years on her, and she has a tattoo on the back of her neck, and they're a very well -to -do couple.

I know one thing about old ladies with tattoos, those tattoos don't look anything like what they originally began to look like.

But I'll tell you what. Tattooed wrinkles always look better than plain wrinkles. So in our church, we're very diverse.

We have people here who vote Democrat. We have people here who vote Republican. We have people here that are against, you know, the

NRA, and we have NRA members. We have people here who pack heat on Sunday mornings. We're okay with that here.

So how are the church discipline hearings going with the non -NRA members? They have to sit in the crying room.

So I mean, the point is that nobody gets riled up because, number one, we're all brothers and sisters in Christ, and number two, we all believe

God is sovereign, and He has a plan, and number three, we're all trying to make strategic choices that we think are going to help the country.

And some of us are wrong, or all of us are wrong, but some of us are wrong, some of us may be right, and we're trying to do our best.

So we cut people some, a lot of leniency here, but do what you think is best. Use your brain, use the

Bible, but ultimately, we don't need to worry about this. The sky is not falling. Jesus will come back at His appointed time, and that will be the end.

Trump is not the end. Hillary is not the end. The end comes when the dead in Christ are raised. That's the end.

Well, I want to make sure that we don't miss anything that you actually intended to say about a practical implication or plural implications about the sovereignty of God, so if you could, before we run out of time here.

One last thing. I read a book back in 94, 95, called

The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Lorraine Bettner. Yes. Wonderful woman.

I don't know if she was hot, but I've got to say it. Mr. Bettner, he was good -looking, too.

Mr. Bettner wrote this book, and this is a great book for people who want to go a little deep into this doctrine.

It even covers the five points in the back, but listen to what he says about the practical importance of this doctrine of God's sovereignty, okay?

He says that this doctrine is not a cold, barren, speculative theory, not an unnatural system of strange doctrines, such as many people are inclined to believe, but a most warm and living, a most vital and important account of God's relations with men.

It is a system of great practical truths, which are designed and adapted under the influence of the Holy Spirit to mold the affections of the heart and to give right direction to conduct.

Then he says this. This great subject is not, as many imagine, a mere thorny and noisy disputation, nor a speculation which wearies the minds of men without any profit, but a solid discussion eminently adapted to the service of the godly, because it builds us up soundly in the faith, trains us to humility, and lifts us up into an admiration of the unbounded goodness of God towards us, while it elevates us to praise this goodness in our highest strain.

That's how real Calvinists write about this doctrine. They are felt, they're experienced, and they change us because it's

God's truth, and the truth, Jesus says, is what God uses to sanctify us. Amen. Amen.

And, you know, it's funny how wedded we Reformed Christians are, or tend to be, to our confessions of faith and catechisms.

Why is it that we seem to very frequently forget the very first question in the shorter catechism, what is the chief end of man?

The chief end of man, man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy

Him forever. Obviously, the

Reformed people never forget about the first part, but the second part just seems to be, very often, vanishes from our

Christian life experience. I mean, I'm a Reformed Baptist, as you are,

Joe, and I've met many a Reformed Baptist, and I know this is a Presbyterian catechism, maybe that's the reason, but I've met many a

Reformed Baptist who, they must have imitated, as a role model for their

Christian walk, lurch from the Adams family. I mean, they just kind of, you know, speak like this, and everything is very serious, and you know.

I get that, we all have different temperaments, you know, and my steady state is to frown.

I just, I look, I do, I like, gently, I'm like, why don't you smile? I'm like, I'm happy, this is my happy face.

I naturally, not that I'm laughing, but that's the thing, these doctrines, the knowledge of God, that makes me smile, that changes my heart, that's what warms me.

And so yeah, the idea that we are lifeless, unfun Christians is a blemish on the knowledge of God, it's a blemish on our doctrine.

We should be having fun. One of the great, we have a lot of pastors that come up to Redeemer, especially younger guys that are planting churches, and they want to know, like, how do you raise up leaders?

How do you guys function? And one thing that they say again and again is, all you elders, you really like each other, you hang out a lot, you laugh all the time, you guys are always busting each other's chops and having a good time, but then you're super serious about ministry and all these things.

They said, is that normal? And we just say, like, I don't know if it's normal, but that's how we do it. You know, like, that we enjoy

God and his good gift, because everything, right, from a great cup of coffee to any worldly pleasure that's lawful, right, biblically lawful.

Well, there's something else to consider, too, in this whole discussion, and that is, some of these guys may be, they seem very starchy when they're behind the pulpit, because they have a view of worship that is very high, but if you were to go to just a

Bible study with them, they'd be a totally different person. I know one, I heard him speak at other churches, and I thought he was one of the funniest guys, and then when

I heard him speak in his own pulpit, I'm like, wow, it's like, it's somber.

Yeah, I'm not advocating clowns from behind the pulpit. Right, so, I mean, there's that that gets in there, too, is the fact that sometimes it's just because they don't believe that it's proper to have levity or anything like that.

Yeah, I was speaking about in general areas of life when you're at a picnic or sitting around a coffee table.

You've got to look at the whole man. You've got to look at the whole woman, the life, right, because they have different circumstances. You know, like right now, we're trying to close on this house that we want to buy so we can be even closer to the church, and just, like, it's put me in a pretty somber mode, because I want this house, and I think it'd be great for our family and great for hosting people at the church, all this stuff, and it may not happen because we have to agree on certain things, and so it's put me in a more of a sober mood.

So, people see me today, I'm a little more sober or somber, I mean. Hopefully, I'm always sober, but biblically sober, but somber because, you know,

I'm thinking very deeply about this, and I'm just kind of going over my head, and I'm praying a lot, but when you look at the whole life of a person, what do you see?

Do you see the joy of the Lord? I don't see it enough in my life, and if I want more of it, I know where to find it.

I've got to go to these doctrines. I've got to go to all the doctrines in the Bible and embrace them, and some of the most profound and incredibly mystical or mysterious doctrines that we can just sort of really grasp, those give great joy.

To know that God is absolutely sovereign in my life makes this life very well worth living, because I know that He is not just God.

He's my God, and I know He's my God, because Christ died for me, because the Father chose me.

That's how I... Amen, and even though we've touched on this already in various ways, but wouldn't you say a really powerful implication of Reformed theology and ramification is that when consistently held, the doctrines of grace or Reformed theology or Calvinism prevents us from boasting, prevents us from arrogance, and prevents us from also striving with anxiety that this is all up to us as if we're on some kind of a

Pelagian treadmill where we work and work and work and we have to keep pressing forward or else we're going to lose it all, and it's all because it's all up to us.

And the doctrines of sovereign grace just totally annihilates that, doesn't it?

On both ends, both the arrogance and the pride and the boasting and also the despair of the

Pelagian treadmill. I agree a hundred percent that in our church, in any given church, you have those who are proud and those who are anxious as it relates to their relationship with God, and what is it that changes both?

The same doctrine of God's gracious, sovereign love, because now the proud are humbled because they're not lovely, they're ugly, and God loves them anyway.

And for those who are anxious for their souls and fearful, well, they now have boldness and confidence, not arrogance, because yes, they're ugly, but they've been made beautiful in Jesus Christ, and just as God says, this is my son with whom

I am well -pleased, but we are in him, so God is now well -pleased with us. The same doctrine has different effects in different people.

Before we run out of time, can we have the titles of your books again? Yeah. The first book that I wrote is called

Note to Self, the discipline of preaching to yourself, and it's a devotional.

It's got an introduction that explains what it means to preach to yourself. The second book is another devotional read, just daily readings, called

Experiencing the Trinity, three sections, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where we interact with different aspects of the personhood of God and as it's applied to life.

The next three books that are coming out through Moody are, it's all ecclesiology, and it'll focus on the heart of the church, which is the gospel, the character of the church, or what makes the church a church, and then the life of the church, what is the church supposed to be doing, and this is going to be aimed at church leaders and laypeople.

It's not an academic book, but these are definitely bigger books than I've written before, and I believe that it'll be really encouraging to people who want to not just know

God, but want to really have a proper understanding and a proper relationship with his local church. Well, I definitely want to have you back to discuss this book.

Sure. When is that book going to be out? Well, those are three different books. Oh, okay. They're all supposed to drop early next year, like March or something.

Okay, so it's a series. Yeah. Okay, and our friend in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, wants to know, and I love this quote by Stephen Lawson, who

I've had on this program. He's one of my favorite guests as well, Stephen Lawson.

He has said that man has permission to believe, but not the ability to believe.

If you want to comment on that, I really think that's an excellent way of describing the total depravity of man, and if anybody is wondering about the total depravity of man, just go to Romans chapter 3, verses 10 through 18.

That will summarize it in a nutshell, and I don't know why anybody could leave those series of verses who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and not believe in the total depravity of man.

But anyway, if you could. Well, let's put a real fine point on it, right? Jesus, for all you red -letter Christians out there,

Jesus said this. Jesus said, no one can come to me. No one can come to me.

It's an issue of ability here, spiritual ability. No one can come to me unless it has been given to him by the

Father. So we do not have this moral spiritual ability to believe.

We have essentially sawed off our own legs. God's like saying, come here, and you're like, but I just sawed off my legs.

Yeah, that's on you. And we're out of time, Joe. We're out of time. I'm sorry, but I know your website is joethorn .net,

and I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.