Exciting Update: Gospel Advancement | Theocast

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Hi this is Justin and John and you are listening to Theocast.

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We are here together today in the same place in Maryville, Tennessee. For those of you who are familiar with East Tennessee you might know where that is.

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If you don't don't worry about it. We're together and we're doing a lot of work today for Theocast and for something called the

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Grace Reformed Network. You may have heard some rumblings about it and some of the stuff we've recorded already but we're going to talk a little bit more about GRN today and why we think it's needed and we're going to talk in particular about the theology and the doctrine that Grace Reformed Network churches would affirm.

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And we hope that this is encouraging for you as a listener regardless of whether you would ever be involved in GRN. So we hope you enjoy the conversation.

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Stay tuned. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

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Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

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To learn how to sign up just go to Theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed and pastoral perspective.

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Also a confessional. Also a confessional. Your hosts today are John Moffitt who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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He's sitting right here immediately to my left, your right, as you're watching on YouTube or wherever you might be seeing this. And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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It is good to be physically together, John, in the same location. Always fun when we can record this way.

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We are together today doing work for Theocast but also for another entity which, as the

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Lord would have it, is going to be at least some of what we talked about on this episode today. Yeah.

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And so why don't you tee that up for us and we'll go ahead with it. Right. Well, it's a big day for Justin and I.

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We have been praying about this. The conversations probably started about two years ago. I wanted to seek some advice from other pastors, church planters, other networks.

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And one of the desires we have is to see more like -minded churches not only together for the sake of harmony and encouragement but also to pool our resources so that we can plant more churches.

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So we're going to be talking about Grace Reform Network. It is officially, by the time this episode has come out, it's officially up and available to look at online.

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We are gathering churches right now. We're gathering applications and we're also gathering the donations to help fund this.

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But today is really a conversation about the heart behind why this was a need, why we decided to, on top of a podcast, on top of our children and our marriages and on top of our churches, take on one more thing that's going to be oppressing of our time.

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But why it's necessary and how we're going to balance all of that together. But specifically, there is a desire behind this network, which is the name

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Grace Reform Network. And that's really what this podcast is going to be about today. We're kind of announcing this to Theocast.

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And the reason why we're announcing it to Theocast is because it is because of Theocast, this exists and the need for it.

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I'll give just a 30 second history. Theocast started about eight years ago.

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It was a bunch of pastors just trying to walk through this change of theology for someone that's transitioning from a pietistic, legalistic background to a confessionally reformed background.

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That's why the podcast started. We wanted to shepherd people through that transition, specifically in our own church, but also those who wanted to listen.

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For those from the old school podcast, for our church and anyone else who wants to listen is what we used to tag it.

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And that is still true today. Almost every episode that Justin and I record, we're churchmen.

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We always have those to whom God has given us to shepherd in the back of our hearts and minds to who and how we talk to things.

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But then that led us down the road to shifting and changing and the hosts. And when we relaunched a couple of years ago,

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Justin and Jimmy came on board. I met Jimmy through Theocast. He now pastors a church plant that our church,

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Grace Reformed Church, helped plant. That is Christ Community Church. I met another man named

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Patrick Crandall, who's a Westminster grad. He planted a church in June of 2021 in Columbia, Tennessee.

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Justin is also a church planter. Somehow we got connected through Twitter.

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I am thankful for Twitter for one reason. It brought me my good friend and co -laborer in Christ, Justin Perdue.

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We got connected over Twitter, I believe via Jimmy. As Theocast has brought all of these different men together and different churches together, one of the ongoing requests we hear is, is there a good church in our area?

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Will you help me plant a church in my area? Justin and I have a number of requests that we get throughout the years.

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We're in our third year now, is that right? Yeah. Third year doing Theocast. It'll be three years this summer that we've been doing this.

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Three years. In our first year, we started talks about the need of this. I had already just planted

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Jimmy, my own church. Not long after that, I had started conversations with Patrick.

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We just started thinking about all of the other churches that would reach out to us. Sure. Like you said, we get a lot of questions because of Theocast.

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People ask, is there a church that preaches and teaches this doctrine, that has this understanding of the

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Christian life, anywhere near me? The Facebook group and some of these other communities associated with this podcast have grown over time.

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That's the venue and the platform where we get some of these requests. Some of it is just direct correspondence, emails, voicemails.

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We get people asking this question. In addition, if I'll go ahead and interject, we've had a number of pastor type guys that listen to the podcast, that have contacted us.

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We'll get into this more in a minute, who have asked us, you guys are confessional Baptists. You're confessional reformed, covenantal

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Baptists. Who do you guys associate with? In terms of your churches, what association, what network, what denomination, fill in the blank, are your churches a part of?

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We've not really had a good answer to those questions ourselves. I think we've been burdened by that for our own churches, trying to figure out where we fit, with whom can we associate.

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All of that is a factor in terms of how GRN has now come to be a thing.

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To be super clear, the network has not been chartered yet. It's not been constituted yet in terms of any official way, but we do have many of the legal boxes checked and all that kind of stuff.

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We're moving towards what we hope is a launch in the next 12 to whatever number of months.

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We're an official non -profit, which means tax deductible for donations. A little bit about the theology and idea behind it.

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I know that we have a number of, and we're thankful for this, we have a number of confessional

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Presbyterian listeners, a number of confessional reformed listeners, we have a number of confessional Lutheran listeners.

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You guys, in those various streams, will be charitable towards us in this,

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I trust. We, as confessional Baptists, have not had a great heritage here in the

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United States, by and large. We feel as though the theology and the doctrine that we're talking about on a regular basis on this show is a throwback to old world religion, a different continent.

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Part of the reason that we have seen that GRN is necessary is because the confessional heritage amongst credo

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Baptists in our country has not been great, and the vast majority of even

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Calvinistic Baptists would not be covenantal, they would not be confessional in the sense that we are, in the sense that Theocast is.

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There is a need for this, and we trust that our Presbyterian Reformed and Lutheran brothers and sisters agree with that, and would be sympathetic to us in that, and could, alongside us, pray for this and be hopeful for it.

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That's right. Much of what drives Theocast is specifically the emphasis of confessions, of covenant theology, law gospel distinction, ordinary means of grace.

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All of that is really what has driven the desire and the design of this network.

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We're not just trying to replace another network that's out there. We're not here to poke in the eye any other network that's out there.

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Justin and I have a desire to see like -minded churches proceed with this type of a network.

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So what I want to do now is talk a little bit about specifically, so this could be a little bit different for Theocast.

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This is not a normal episode. We normally tackle things that are broad, but really this has grown to be our family at large.

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We hear from a lot of you throughout the year, throughout the weeks. We've interacted with you through email and social media and through our

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Semper Firmanda app. We're excited to share with you that because of the support for those of you that have supported us financially, for those of you that share our content on social media with your friends and family, your support is what has gave birth to this.

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This really couldn't have happened without you. We're excited to not only get to meet more pastors, more men.

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You and I are both in conversations with guys that are in seminary that are excited about getting out, finding an associate role, starting church planning.

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So we're excited to see those who emphasize Christ find a place for them.

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I can't tell you, we have a Facebook group that we're a part of that is just for pastors. There's a lot of guys in there that are looking for jobs, that are frustrated because they're trying to preach

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Christ, but they're losing their careers because of that. Pietism is what has gotten them laid off.

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Not their pietism, but unfortunately the context that they find themselves in. So let's just walk through,

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Justin. On our website, we have a document. We'll put the website in the link to our show notes, but we have an overview of what it is that GRN churches are going to be about.

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So why don't you just walk through from a high level and then we can talk about the theological stuff. So the confession of faith of the network is going to be the 1689

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London Baptist Confession. That would not be a surprise to anybody who's listened to us for long. But beyond that, we have some other things by way of affirmations and denials that we have worked to write together.

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None of this stuff is new. We're just trying to articulate it in clear and succinct ways, all in one space, so that people can see it.

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So the first bullet, we're just going to go really briefly through these, just so you guys can get an understanding and a feel for the kind of network we hope that GRN is.

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So in addition to the 1689 London Baptist Confession, our first affirmation and denial piece is that we are creedal churches, meaning that we affirm the three ancient creeds, the

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Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Nicene Creed, and also a Chalcedonian definition of Christology.

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So we're not going to go into all the details of all of that, but that's all there. The next affirmation and denial piece is we affirm the law and gospel distinction.

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So this is an historically Reformed doctrine, as well as an historically Lutheran doctrine, where we believe that there are law and gospel, both revealed in the

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Old and New Testaments. Simply defined, the law is the revelation of God's standard for holiness and righteousness.

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God teaches us in His law what He requires for human beings to be just in His sight.

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But then, because of our sin, we understand, of course, the law crushes us, and so we need the gospel, which is the promise of God to us in Christ Jesus, where Christ has accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, and then it is given to us.

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We receive that simply by faith. So the law and the gospel distinction, we don't want to collapse those. Jon Moffitt No. This is a really important part, not only of our emphasis at Theocast.

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We wanted to make sure this was a clear spotlight for the network. There are a lot of Reformed denominations out there.

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There are a lot of church planning organizations out there that might be confessional, but it seems that there still can be, at times, a law -gospel confusion, where there's preaching and teaching that sound more law when they're being presented as gospel.

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So for those who are going to be a part of the network, we want to be very clear that when you preach and when you counsel and when you present the

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Word of God, that you do so historically with this distinction in mind. Thankfully, we are producing more material that has this distinction.

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We're getting more and more requests from people how to understand this, because it seems like we put a lot of the emphasis on it and why it's so important, but yet there is a ton of information out there that I would say is modern.

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There is some information out there that is available, but this distinction is huge because it affects,

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I think, three areas. It affects your preaching. I also think it affects your polity, how you practice as a church, and the overall emphasis of your church.

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If you're always emphasizing a gospel or a legalistic, pietistic view of it, it's going to change the tone of the ministry.

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Justin Perdue Right. If you collapse law and gospel, there's a number of things that end up occurring. Inevitably, you're going to relativize the law, because you're going to dumb it down to a place where it comes across as though we can at least quasi do it.

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We're not talking about the law being our guide for our living, which we would uphold as the third use of the law. We're talking about the confusion that exists where the law is presented in such a way where we do this well enough and God will be pleased with that.

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In some senses, we gut the law of its holiness and its glory and its goodness, frankly, when we do that. I kind of like the phrase of, we end up smuggling the law into the gospel, where we turn the gospel into a kind of conditional covenant where we need to do our part.

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Somehow, mysteriously, our works factor in. Of course, we're saved by Christ, but the gospel ends up sounding hard, because there's stuff that we need to be doing well enough to be legitimate.

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That's what we're talking about. That law and gospel confusion is detrimental on a whole host of levels. It robs us of assurance. It affects the tone and the tenor and the posture of a pastor and of a church writ large.

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It's a huge important thing to affirm the distinction between the law and the gospel. GRN churches would affirm that.

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Let's move on to the next piece. The next one is covenant theology. In particular, what we have emphasized for the network is the historical tri -covenantal framework of the

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Scriptures. We're going to explain what that means. It's like, good grief, brother. That's some big, academic, theological sounding words.

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What we mean is tri -meaning three covenants that are the primary thing that would give us the framework of the

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Scriptures and how the Scriptures hang together. The first of those being the covenant of redemption. That is made in eternity past between God the

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Father and God the Son, most pointedly, in which they agree that the Son would save a people for himself through his obedience.

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It's a covenant of works for the Son, and then the benefits are mediated to his people through what we call the covenant of grace.

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We'll get to that more in just a minute. The covenant of works, secondarily, the next covenant, is the covenant that God makes with Adam in the garden through which he could have attained eternal life and blessedness through his obedience.

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He could have attained that for himself and for all of his children, though if he broke it, God told him that he would die and bring that upon himself.

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Thirdly, we have the covenant of grace, which is the covenant God makes after the fall with humanity.

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He says that I'm going to send a Redeemer who is going to rescue you.

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It is a gracious covenant. It is unconditional to us, and the merits of Christ are given to sinners by faith.

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Those three covenants—redemption, works, and grace—we affirm all three. That's a big piece of our theological framework for GRM.

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Sometimes when we say covenant theology, someone might think, you believe in the biblical covenants, which of course we do, but that is not necessarily what we mean.

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We mean that the Bible has a form and a function to it that flows using these structures to help explain the overarching view of Scripture.

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We would affirm the 1689's view of this. It's important that we're not just confessional, but we are clear in our distinction, which we are covenantal in nature.

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Those three covenants you just presented, I think is important because it's going to come out in our preaching.

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It's going to come out in our teaching. I also believe this is where a clear law gospel distinction is made as well, because the covenant of works is not the covenant of grace.

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We need to make sure that we keep those two separate. The covenant of works would be synonymous with law. That's right. The covenant of grace would be synonymous with gospel.

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That's right. Yeah, absolutely. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called

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Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. If you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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

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slash primer. So the next one that we're going to be covering is confessionalism.

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And as Justin already said it earlier, that this network is going to be those who affirm the 1689, and it's important that there is a document that helps govern us theologically.

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We have seen in recent days where when we aren't clear on our theology, that you can start wavering in the most important areas of our faith, which is things like justification and sanctification.

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And what a confession does is that it shows you, through examination and through criticism, how the doctrine has lasted through the test of time.

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You know, when someone says, I just believe in the Bible, there's no way for me to examine your claim.

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There's no way for me to take it and say, actually, I know you're saying you believe in the Bible, but that's actually

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Arian, or you're denying the sonship of Christ, or you're actually adding to justification. So when we present a confession, what we're presenting is a way for you to examine our theology that will be accountable to in the pulpit and in our teaching.

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So what we're presenting, when we're presenting the 1689, is a well -examined and well -thought -through document that has been around for hundreds of years, and there's some safety in that.

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So we affirm a confessional understanding of the Christian faith and of the church. And part of what that entails is what you just described.

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We would affirm and submit to, doctrinally, a confession of faith produced in the era of the

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Protestant Reformation. That's right. So that's clear. But alongside that, to be confessional, in one sense, is an orientation.

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It's a posture. To be confessional means that we have a theology, a piety, and a practice that are driven by certain things.

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And we're unashamed of this, and this is so central to what GRN means to be. We are built upon, as confessional

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Protestants, doctrine that centers on Jesus Christ and his objective work in the place of the center.

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So we talk about this all the time on Theocast. I mean, that's kind of the heart of what Theocast is, really, is extra notes outside of us.

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We're pointing ourselves always outside of ourselves to Christ for our righteousness and for the forgiveness of our sins, and therefore our peace with God now and forever.

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So that's huge. So we're built on that. And then in addition to that, it's a theology, a piety, and a practice.

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It's also built on the ordinary means of grace, which we're going to get to in just a minute, in terms of being the primary and ordinary way that God works to impart, sustain, nourish, and strengthen faith in his people.

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We understand that the Christian life is inherently corporate as confessional Christians, and that means that our devotion as Christians is inherently church -shaped, and we're viewed as pilgrims in this world.

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And what that means is we've been promised a homeland. We know that the Lord is faithful, but we're not there yet.

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And between here and there, we're going to face literally thousands of spiritual dangers, and we need protection.

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We need nourishment. We need sustenance. And that's what the ministry of the church is for. I think we can go ahead and say this.

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Not only do we affirm under this confessional banner, not only do we affirm this confessional understanding, we also would affirm that pietism and revivalism have greatly impacted the

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Protestant church in the United States for centuries, and this may be in a particular way is true for us as Credo Baptists.

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Yes, this is true. And I would even say this is why probably most people have a bad taste in their mouth from the experiences they've had, right?

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Spiritualism, heavy law preaching, legalistic preaching, a very individualistic view.

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In other words, the church is here to give you some helpful tips so that you can go home and make it on your own.

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Confessional theology doesn't see that that way. We will make it together. That's right.

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We emphasize, when you say the ordinary means of grace, people are like, yeah, I believe in ordinary means of grace, like read your

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Bible, pray, practice spiritual disciplines. And I was going to say, with all due respect, what you just articulated is spiritual disciplines, not the means of grace.

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That's right. The means of grace are gathered. In other words, when the church gathers to hear it preached, when it gathers to hear it taught, when it gathers to encourage each other in song and in fellowship around the table, prayer and baptism.

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So you always have this communal nature because literally, when Paul says in Ephesians 6, when the body functions as it should, that's when we are protected in love.

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And we're built up to maturity in the Lord Jesus. He even says in chapter four that it prevents bad doctrine, so that we're not cared about by every wind of doctrine.

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Well, Justin, what do we see now where people have a loose connection to the church and they are heavily influenced by the internet, and so their theology is tossed about everywhere, where they don't have a good shepherd there to lead them along and say, hey, listen, you need to watch out for wolves that are going to come in and try and sway you theologically.

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We believe confessional churches are going to see the need to gather for the sake of protection.

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No, absolutely. So you've already been talking about the ordinary means of grace. Let's just kind of stay along this line because this is all under the banner of being confessional.

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So alongside that, I think it's important that we would acknowledge that this corporate life we live together in the church is one in which we are not just moving from subjective experience to subjective experience, from triumph to triumph, but this is a corporate experience that we have where we are learning more and more to depend upon God's grace and we're learning more and more together to trust

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Christ in the midst of suffering and pain and weakness. That's a theology of the cross, as Calvin and Luther would have articulated it, and we affirm that too as a piece of what it means to be confessional, whereas it's obvious,

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I think, in the church in the States, particularly the evangelical church broadly, that a theology of glory reigns today.

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It's onward and upward. It's improvement. It's this kind of clean, linear progression of the

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Christian life that is often emphasized. It unsettles people because I think most people, if they're honest, know that that's not true of them, but we're going to kind of fake it until we make it.

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It's just not helpful stuff. So to be a confessional church would mean that we're committed to all of these things and the ordinary means of grace being the primary way in which we together grow, acknowledging our weakness.

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One of the things I know we love to say in our church, I know you do too, is we come in need to be met by the

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Lord and His faithfulness. He's going to meet us in our need and give us what we lack. Where everyone is in equal need of God's grace.

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Amen to that. There's a couple other things that I think we need to point out that are unique. Obviously, we're going to believe in church membership, plurality of elders, but I think something that's unique and we need to point out is that we do hold to a doctrine of two kingdoms, which has become more and more necessary to bring this distinction in light of some growth and some views that are not helpful.

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Justin, real quick, give us a quick definition of what does it mean that we hold to two kingdoms?

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In the doctrine of two kingdoms, from a reformed perspective, we would affirm the two kingdoms being the common kingdom and the redemptive kingdom.

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The common kingdom is established by the covenant God made with Noah. Genesis chapter 9, where God is going to sustain the creation.

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He's not going to destroy it again with a flood. The seasons, the years, they're going to keep trucking along. He's going to do that.

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Its concerns are ordinary cultural activity, marriage, procreation, provision, judicial action of proportionate justice, etc.

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The redemptive kingdom, however, is established by the promises and the accomplishment of the covenant of grace. So its concerns are different.

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Its concerns are sacred activities of faith and worship. So keeping those two kingdoms distinct is helpful because what we're not called to as Christians is to be little

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Adams who run around and redeem everything. But in reality, there's really one thing that we do that's redemptive, and that's when we gather as a church and then, yes, we love our neighbor in the common kingdom, and we seek to show people that the

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Lord is, in fact, good and gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

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But we're going to invite them into those sacred things that we do as the church. So then alongside that, we're going to deny,

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GRN churches would deny, that theonomy and reconstructionist views are biblical.

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We would understand that two kingdoms doctrine, as well as covenant theology, are at odds with such understandings.

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And I think that's important. We're seeing a growth in that. I think it distracts from the purpose and the nature of the pulpit, the purpose and the nature of the church.

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We seem to start focusing more on culture and politics and what's going on.

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And we lose sight that the church has two missions to care for each other and growth in Christ and to reach the loss with the gospel, that the transformation of culture is going to happen when

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Christ returns and all things are made new. But understanding that we aren't then to just sit back and not care about the culture.

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That's right. We're not hiding in a bunker and just waiting. Yeah, like the Benedict option. Yeah, it's totally not.

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It's not an option because we are told to be light and salt. That's right. We're to be there.

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And so I don't think we need to be extreme in that way. But I think it's just a good distinction to understand that we are going to take that view as a network.

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Yeah. And we're not going to seek to spiritualize everything. Which is actually really helpful to people in thinking about their vocation and their love of neighbor.

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I think some other areas that are going to be helpful, Justin, that we're going to talk about here just real quick when we hit this high level.

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But it will affect the way in which we preach, the way in which we counsel, the ways we shepherd our congregations.

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But we do hold a very old and reformed biblical view of something as clear as the nature of the human as both saint and sinner.

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The nature of the Christian. Sorry, thank you. The nature of a Christian. And this specifically comes from our confession.

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It talks about it. You can look at the chapter 5 .5, right? In sanctification. Yeah, chapter 17.

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But we're going to talk a little bit about Romans 7 and how this is a very important understanding. So take a couple of like 30 seconds here and explain to people why we would want to put this on our documentation and what it is that we're trying to prevent from happening.

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So in our document, Affirmations and Denials, we have Romans 7 as a bullet point. GRN Church has affirmed that Romans 7 is written by Paul as a

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Christian and that it therefore applies to Christians. In other words, is Romans 7 the normative experience of the believer?

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Our answer to that is yes, as a network. Paul is writing this as a saint who is justified in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and who battles against the corruption of his flesh. And I think anyone who has read Romans 7 as a

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Christian reads words written there and says to himself or herself, truer words have never been written.

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It is our experience, man. We have been born again. We've been brought from death to life. We have been justified.

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We've been forgiven. We've been absolved of our guilt, and we now delight in God's law and our inner man. We've been delivered from the tyranny of sin.

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We've now become obedient from the heart. Romans 6 .17. We've been united to Christ. Romans 6 .1 and following.

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All that's true for us. And so we are, on the one hand, we are saints in that regard.

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But then at the same time, we have not been fully sanctified yet. And so we fight against the corruption of our flesh.

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Galatians 5 .17. The spirit and the flesh are opposed to each other and keeps us from doing that reality, keeps us from doing what we want to do.

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So when we want to do good, we often fail. Evil lies close at hand and the evil things we want to refrain from, we often find ourselves doing, which is what leads

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Paul to say, wretched man that I am. Who's going to deliver me? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. And there is therefore now no condemnation for all those who are in Christ Jesus.

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We affirm all of that. And yeah. Amen. Amen. That's good. That's good.

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A couple other things that are going to, you're going to start kind of seeing, they all connect together. So Romans 7, covenant theology, understanding,

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I mean, we're Calvinists. We didn't have any put that in there, but we affirm the five points of Calvinism as historically understood from the canons of the door.

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But there is a confusion that has happened. We would say a resurfacing of a theology where one must do something in order to come to Christ.

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And so we put this in our document, coming to Christ. Jireh and churches affirm that the answer to the question, must one forsake sin in order to come to Christ?

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And the answer to that might shock some people because the question can be confusing is no, one must not forsake sin because here's the reason.

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One cannot forsake sin. One cannot do anything. The way that Paul describes it in Ephesians is that we are dead in our trespasses and sins, he makes us alive.

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And we've recently did a podcast on this. You can go back and listen to it called. You need to repent of your repentance, meaning that one repents because they have been brought to life.

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It's a fruit of our regeneration. And this is really referencing a whole,

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I believe this is later in the document, but dealing with the whole Christ from Sinclair Ferguson.

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Yeah. I mean, so effectively this, this piece for us, must one forsake sin in order to come to Christ? Answer is no.

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This question is effectively what sparked the marrow controversy in the church of Scotland in the 18th century. It's, it's a question that I think even

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Thomas Boston acknowledged is not worded super well, but we have to answer it in the negative.

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Because if we need to do anything in order to come to Christ, we will not come to Christ. And so what this also means is that we preach the gospel indiscriminately to all people and we hold

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Christ out to all people. And our word to people, sinners crushed by the law is trust

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Christ. That's right. I don't think that's controversial, but it's, it's sad that I think we've reasoned ourselves into a corner and there's reasons for this culturally and theologically where that is, that is a controversial statement.

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Yes. And it does erode, erodes a lot of things. We're affirming the free offer of the gospel. That's right. It erodes assurance, a rest in Christ.

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It, I think it really, it confuses the order of salvation as well.

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So just some, we would say there's other issues that we affirm are going to deny. You can find those on the website.

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Things like our view on eschatology, views of creation, Christian liberty, Bible translations, political views.

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What you're talking about right now are things that we're not going to have as issues of fellowship. That's right. Issues of fellowship.

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So there are certain things that we are clear about, even in our documentation, that will not be things that we're going to divide over.

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And that's kind of important too. Like you want to chalk the field in terms of what we need to affirm and deny together. But then there's other stuff, doctrinally, theologically, practically that people are going to believe and adhere to that is not going to be an issue for GRN churches.

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Yeah. Eschatology, like you don't have to have a particular position on the millennium. Now you and I have a position that we agree on, and I think most of the churches will, but we're not going to write that in.

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You must believe that Christ is coming back. Bodily, personally, visibly, gloriously.

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Amen. But then, yeah, I mean, even the age of the earth, issues of Christian liberty and issues of conscience, the

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Bible translation, and even political views, John, I mean, this one is a big deal. We've got it written down here.

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GRN does not understand voting patterns to be a test of orthodoxy or of fidelity to Jesus. And that sounds really controversial.

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It does. But we're not going to divide over things like that. That's right. Well, Justin, for the rest of our time,

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I'd like to just spend, for those who, churches, and for those who are thinking about supporting us financially and those who want to plant a church with us, what are the benefits of being a part of GRN?

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I mean, we just stated our theological position, which I think is important. That alone is a benefit. People understand clarity is going to prevent us from getting into theological debates and fights.

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We know where we want to be. We know what we're trying to accomplish. And there's accountability and safety, we would say, that comes from that doctrinal clarity and that confessional heritage.

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And this is going to be something that GRN churches would affirm annually. That's right. The General Assembly and the like.

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But we can talk about some other benefits. That's right. So the first is perhaps the historical reason why

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Baptistic churches have associated together, even going back to the 17th century in England, is for the pooling of resources for church planting and church revitalization or church reform.

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And so that's certainly true for GRN. That's one of the reasons, one of the main motivators for doing this is so that we can together do more than we can do apart.

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We can pool our resources to see more churches like this planted, because this is how we understand we fulfill the

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Great Commission. I'll go ahead and say that, right? When Jesus says that we're to make disciples of all people, we would understand that to mean,

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I mean, read the book of Acts. How does that occur? Churches get started, right? So here we go doing this. We're not going to individually go save the world in 80 days, but we're going to do this together as we see churches planted and churches reformed.

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That's right. Yeah, there's a lot of guys who want to plant churches. Sometimes guys just go out and just do it on their own, which is not safe.

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And I don't think biblical churches plant churches. So GRN itself will not be planting churches.

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GRN will be partnering and helping support churches who are planting churches. And we're going to use our pooled resources to do that.

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And we're going to also care for one another. For those of you who have ever been in ministry, you know that being in ministry can be very lonely and there's not a lot of great reformed resources that are being produced at this moment.

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So we want to produce more resources. We want to provide better ways of fellowship that we can gather together and make sure that we're caring for one another as we're continuing to minister in our local area.

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So there'll be ongoing counsel and development. There'll be ministerial support, also accountability and safety.

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You know, Justin, if there's a pastor who passes away or needs to sit down in ministry and that church needs to then find another minister,

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GRN, if they're part of the network, is going to be able to step in and help support that church in doing that.

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So they don't have to figure it out on their own. We might be able to provide, or if you see there's a conflict within leadership and they can't seem to resolve that, we can use the network to then come in and provide counsel in that way.

36:32

Justin Perdue All in accord with the autonomy of local congregations versus, you know, congregationalists. But yeah, I think those are clear.

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I mean, in terms of the benefits of the network, there are reasons why pastors' congregations would benefit from being a part of this.

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And please join us in praying for this, that the Lord would provide for us, give us the resources that we need, and we hope to see this become a reality in the next 12 plus months.

36:56

Well, Justin, as we bring this down to a close, we wanted to let all of you know, if you are interested in learning more about this, you can go to our website, most of this information is there.

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A couple of other videos, just kind of doing some quick overviews. We're going to be producing more videos that help us explain from the network, why we hold our positions on like baptism and our confession and law gospel distinction.

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All of that will be available over time. And if you're interested and want to know more information, there's a form you can fill out there and you can get contact with us and we'll set up a time to meet with you.

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First of all, praise be to God for the ministry of the gospel that has gone out to faithful churches, to you faithful people who have been able to be encouraged by the gospel.

37:36

Thank you for your support and we will see you next week. We do have a special podcast for our Semper Reformanda family and so Justin, tell us a little bit about Semper Reformanda and take us over there.

37:45

We'll do ma 'am. Semper Reformanda is from the Reformation, right? So the church reformed, always reforming.

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So Semper Reformanda, always reforming. It is our community of people, I guess I could call it, who have partnered with Theocast to support us in a number of ways,

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I mean, through just general encouragement and prayer and the like, but also financially to see this ministry grow and flourish and to see this message of the sufficiency of Christ spread as far and wide as possible.

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And part of being a Semper Reformanda member means you get access to an additional podcast every week that we record. So we're about to go record that now.

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And if you want more information on what it might look like to be a part of SR, as we affectionately call it, you can find that information over on our website, theocast .org.

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That's different than the website for the Grace Reform Network. So a lot of websites today, but you're going to find information there about SR, which includes a community, an app, all kinds of things.

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People like you who are transitioning from maybe a more pietistic way of thinking to a more confessional way of thinking, all kinds of good conversations and interaction occurs on that app.

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It's like Facebook, but better. That's what I tell people. So if you're interested in that and that sounds good to you, check out