The Danger of Denying Works (w/ Pat Abendroth) | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast is part two of two with special guest Pat Abendroth.

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We are discussing the covenant of works. Last week we talked about the legitimacy of the covenant of works and the fact that it is in the

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Bible, contrary to many objections that are often raised against it. Today we're going to be talking about the implications of the covenant of works, implications of denying the covenant of works and how that affects our understanding of the law and the gospel, and how that might end up eroding the assurance of the believer.

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Why does it matter that you would affirm a covenant of works? That's what we seek to answer today. We hope you enjoy the conversation and stay tuned.

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If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

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Christian life from a confessional reformed and we hope pastoral perspective. We are seeking to clarify the gospel and reclaim the purpose of the kingdom.

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Today, your hosts are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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And for a second straight episode, we have a special guest with us, not to be confused with his brother, Mike Avendroth, it is none other than Pat Avendroth, who is the pastor of Omaha Bible Church in Omaha, Nebraska.

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Not going to go through the entirety of Pat's bio. If you have not yet listened to last week's episode on the legitimacy of the covenant of works, like is the covenant of works in the

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Bible? We would encourage you to go check that episode out. Today's conversation is going to be related. I'm going to leave that to John to tee that up in just a moment.

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But Pat, brother, thank you for being so generous with your time and being willing to record a second episode with us.

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It's great to have you on. It's a delight. I'm so thankful for Theocast, and I'm thankful for the way the Lord uses you,

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Justin and John, a great blessing and by the grace of God, changing the world. And I mean that sincerely and literally.

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Amen. Yeah. Thank you, brother, for those kind words. John, let the good people out there know what we're going to talk about this time.

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Yeah, for sure. If you're tuning in on this episode and you missed the first one, you'll learn a lot here and we'll thank

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God that you're here. But if you have not had a chance, you should go back and listen to episode one, where we set up the covenant of works.

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And today we're going to be talking about the implications of it. And the way I would describe it, just as a point of illustration, the word of God is vast, it's massive, it's huge, it's a wilderness of beauty.

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But if you do not have a map to where you are going, you can get lost and it can get dangerous very quickly and you could find yourself falling off the cliffs of heresy.

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To which, that's what we're going to talk about today, the benefits of it, how it just gives us a greater insight into the glory of Christ and how we trust and love

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Him more. Or you can lead yourself, finding yourself believing in things like federal vision, final justification, and all kinds of other crazy stuff that's out there.

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So today we're going to be talking about the implications of why this is so important. It's not, there's a lot of theology out there that we're frankly, the three of us, not interested in.

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Did Adam and Eve have a belly button? Don't really care. But when it comes down to my standing before the creator of the universe,

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I really want to know, does he consider me to be clean? And is he considering me to be righteous? I need to know that.

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And that is what this conversation is about today. So Pat, I'm going to let you go ahead and jump into this first, as far as about the importance of the implications.

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And I know you have been wrestling with this a lot. I see you on Twitter. I listen to your podcast. You and I have had conversations about this.

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So share us with some of your concerns about the implications of maybe the negative side of when you reject the covenant of works.

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What does that produce? Yeah, I'm still thinking about the fact that you said belly button. I'm feeling kind of traumatized.

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I'm devastated and traumatized at the thought of such things.

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A belly button, yes. Okay. You heard it here on TheoCast.

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Belly buttons would never be discussed on the pactum. You guys are far too mature. You're far too sophisticated now. You guys don't talk about journeys.

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You don't talk about any of that. We don't. Yeah. Maybe this is a good place to start,

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John. And that would be with the fact that it seems that everyone has a category for merit.

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Everyone puts works somewhere. Works are important. And if we don't look to Christ to do all of the works, if we don't see

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Christ meriting eternal life for us, 100 % that is, by fulfilling all righteousness, by meeting the obligations, by gaining eternal life for us.

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If we don't do that, if we don't see it that way, somehow we're in on it. So now it's 10%, maybe it's a third of a percent, but somehow

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I have to do something to gain eternal life. And now I've denied the gospel. Now I've undercut the sufficiency of Christ, the final work of Christ.

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So I think we need to say, let's talk about merit. Let's talk about works.

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Because no matter what, we have a place for it. And we need to make sure it's all of Christ and not us.

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Otherwise, we get some of the glory. I call it glory grubbing. Ugly, it's not good.

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But oftentimes people say, oh, there's no place for merit talk in theology. And there's no place for talking about works.

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Well, and then you listen to their preaching or you listen to their talking about the Bible, and somehow it's faith plus works equals final justification or some other crazy non -biblical perspective.

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So let's talk about works. Let's talk about law. Let's talk about the strictness of God's law, that it needs to be met.

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Because if we don't, we're going to be legalists. That's another side of it. So hopefully that gets us started and gets us off the topic.

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A lot there. Well, I'm curious to see, and this is not an episode on this, but I think it applies and Justin referenced it earlier.

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I'm curious to see the implications of covenant works and a law gospel distinction. If you don't get the law gospel distinction correct, it's going to influence also your view of covenant of works, because what do you end up doing?

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You're talking about merit. You end up collapsing the law and the gospel and you get glossible, as you say.

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And so this is where, when I'm thinking about implications,

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I'm going to throw some hot stuff out there for you. But there can be a collapsing, right? People that I know of that typically would reject a covenant of works historically, from what

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I read, men like John Piper or even John MacArthur in the dispensational world, because of that, there tends to be a confusion of merits and a law gospel collapsing.

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For instance, thinking about a guy like John Piper, who every man around here would respect him and we're thankful for a lot of the work that he's done, but being that he was trained

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Daniel Fuller, very adamantly against covenant of works, how has that played out in some of his theology in present day that you've seen as far as this rejecting of the merits of Christ on our behalf until the end?

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And for your listeners, it is not just a rumor. It's absolutely true. John Piper does write the forward,

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I think it's the forward, the endorsement to the book, The Unity of the Bible by Dan Fuller, where he, John Piper basically makes fun of the covenant of works.

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It's a so -called covenant of works. So again, when you try to, and Fuller's basic argument is, you know, it's all law and it's all gospel together.

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It's all blurred together. It's faith and works. And he denied, by the end, he denied justification sola fide.

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And I think that's what you do. That's the logical outcome when you don't see strict merit and it's required and law keeping is required.

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Christ has to do it. And if it's not that, of course, you're going to say it has to be something you do. And then you're going to say, and then you're going to get caught in it.

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And you're going to say, well, not for justification, but for salvation. Well, that doesn't jive with what

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Jesus says regarding eternal life. It's to do this and live. That's eternal life.

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So he's not strictly saying justification there. He's talking about eternal life. So and then what you have to do is you have to say, well, then you have to, you know, your faith has to be somehow faithful faith.

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And now it has to be passionate faith. And how much do I have to desire

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God? And obedient faith and all the rest. Yeah. And it's surely not reformed classic reform theology.

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It's not classic covenant theology. And it sounds a lot like Roman Catholicism. It sounds a lot like new perspectives on Paul, which is rather odd that it does.

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But it certainly does. And I think it robs people of their assurance. It robs people of their joy.

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Because we should be able to rest in Christ when we trust in Christ. And then we want to obey.

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We want to have obedience as a result of that. But it's because we're first resting in Christ.

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If I may, I want to pick back up on a couple of things that have been said. You talked about merit, Pat. You know, we're allergic on the one hand to talking about merit in our theological conversation.

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But then we slip it back in the back door somehow, you know, inevitably. We do. I agree with you.

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And I'm mindful of a passage like Romans chapter 2. We said this on the

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SR episode last time. And I just want to make this connection for people explicitly now on the regular show. That when we talk about the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, that is in many ways synonymous with law and gospel when we talk about that distinction.

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Because when we talk about the law as opposed to the gospel, do this and live, Leviticus 18 .5.

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That is the law viewed as a covenant of works to be kept for righteousness before the Lord.

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Whereas the gospel is the message of what Christ has accomplished in fulfilling the law and its penalty given to us by faith.

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And so thereby, we're righteous before the Lord in Christ. But the language of Romans 2 is significant on a number of levels pertaining to the covenant of works and the law and the gospel distinction.

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Because Romans 2 .5, the second portion of that verse, we're told that the day of wrath will come when

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God's righteous judgment will be revealed. So God's going to judge the world on what?

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Principles of righteousness. And you've already defined what that means. It's adherence to the law.

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And then the next verse, He will render to each one according to his works. Whoa.

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So we've got works talked about there. Now, I mean, we could talk all afternoon, I mean, all day long about this passage like the words of Haldane and others.

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You either leave Romans 2 .6 -13, a Protestant or a Romanist, and there's no middle ground. I mean, amen.

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I'm here for it. I mean, we could talk about that. Okay. And in God's providence,

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I'm preaching Romans 2 .1 -16 this coming Sunday. So I'm just a little hyped up on it. Well, I haven't even begun prep yet, but I'm already excited.

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You know what, Justin, just to interrupt you for a second. Please do. I love to be interrupted for good things. Almost like a litmus test.

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So if I want to figure out where someone is theologically. In fact, I did it one time. I was going to have a man come and preach for me when

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I was out of town. And he was preaching through Romans. And so I listened to the Romans 2 sermon, and it was basically

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Roman Catholicism. I just thought, this is terrible. Romans 2 is strict law, right?

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It is. God justifies the doers of the law. And basically people say, so you better get busy.

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Yep, or they'll say, you know, it's mysterious. We don't need to name any names right now.

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But I mean, modern commentators who are respected, one of whom was a professor of mine, will say something like this, that it's really mysterious because on the one hand, we know that we're justified by grace through faith in Christ alone.

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But then here in Romans 2, 6 and following, somehow our works are going to factor into our final salvation.

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You know, and it's wild because like you said, what Paul is doing there in the flow of his argumentation, it's straight law.

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Because it is true that God will judge the world on principles of righteousness, and he will render to each one according to his works.

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He will reward those who do good and punish those who do evil. The problem is no one's good, right?

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And this is why a righteousness has to be revealed apart from the law, though the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

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Yeah, so it's a really short line. There's only one person standing in that line. Exactly. His name is

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Jesus, so you'd better be trusting in him. Amen, dude. And so this is related to our conversation about the covenant of works and thereby then the covenant of grace.

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Because if we understand that Adam had this covenant that God made with him where he could have earned justification through his obedience, or he could damn us all through his disobedience, which we know occurred, then

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Christ, as the second Adam, comes to fulfill and succeed in every way the first Adam failed.

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And so now in him as our representative, we are counted with his perfect obedience and his perfect merits.

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His perfect works are counted as ours. Yeah, that's why ours can be justified by faith, faith in him.

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He's the doer of the law. That's right, and we are, you know, Sproul is famous for saying this. I'm sure many others have said it, that we are saved by works, just not ours.

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We're saved by the works of Christ counted to us. And this is why justification, we touched on this last time, justification is more than just being forgiven.

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You know, some people will say to be justified is to be as though you never sinned. To which we would say, okay, that's true, but that's only half the story.

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Just as if I never sinned, right? Yeah, exactly. Just as if I always personally, perfectly, and perpetually kept the law.

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That's right. So don't cut the work of Christ in half. Don't cut the work of Christ in half. Yes, he atoned for our sin.

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He was, he's the propitiation for our sins. He made satisfaction for those. All that's true. And he is our righteousness in that he fulfilled all of the righteous requirements of God.

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He fulfilled the law perfectly. And that is what it is to be justified, to be declared just in the presence and in the sight of a holy

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God. Yeah, so it's the covenant of works is a big deal. I like to say

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God doesn't require nothing. So if you're only forgiven, you're at zero. God doesn't require that.

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He requires that you love him with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. So we need positive adherence to law.

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So God requires that. Pat, talk to us about your experience in pastoral ministry and even probably through the pactum about when these are blurred, it really does rob people of assurance.

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Why does it rob them of assurance? Because in part, because they read the

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Bible and they see God requires a lot. Yeah, there's as you did in the intro,

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John, there's the Bible is a big book and there's a lot of things in there and a lot of things to grasp.

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And there's so many commands and there's strict requirements. And Romans chapter two, you ought not have any assurance unless you understand what

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God requires and that Jesus Christ is our righteousness. It reminds me of first John chapter two, you know, where it says, you know, basically don't sin.

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But if you do, right, we have comfort. We have an advocate, Jesus Christ, the righteous

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Jesus Christ, the perfect obeyer, we have him.

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So don't sin, but just know that if you're in Christ, you have perfect righteousness.

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And so that's assurance. It's wonderful. It's fantastic. So let me put it this way, your expectation before you're a believer is to, according to the law, is to perfectly obey the law, which when we don't do that, right?

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So now those of us who are in Christ, we've been regenerated, we're adopted. What is God's expectation of us now as it relates to this covenant of works we're talking about?

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What's the expectation so that we can help people find rest? How do you give someone assurance based upon God's expectation now?

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Justin Perdue Maybe what I want to do is go back to, and I'm going to get there, but go back to what does

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God require? I really want to sharpen the pencil of the strictness of God's law.

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I want people to understand it's way worse than you ever thought. Let me remind you of what

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God's law requires so that you're reminded that there's only one solution, and the one solution is

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Jesus Christ the righteous, because God still requires perfection, so you need Christ.

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But if you have Christ, you have rest. And so now you're resting.

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Now there's no condemnation for you if you're in Christ Jesus. Well, now that there's no condemnation,

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I'm not terrorized. I'm not completely paralyzed by fear, so I can live boldly, and I can live courageously, and I can do the right thing.

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And I'm not afraid of getting, you know, I haven't earned my way into the family. I'm in the family.

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There might be discipline involved, but I want to operate out of it.

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I already know the end. Judgment day, it could be condemnation or justification. And in light of Romans 5 and Romans 8, we're already told the end.

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There is therefore now no condemnation. There's now no future judgment of condemnation because we're justified.

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Well, now I'm bold. Now, when I fall down, I get back up by God's grace.

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I'm encouraged. I'm in. I'm in the family. Justin Perdue Well, it makes sense, too, because we're described as being in a war.

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We're in a battle, right? And we're trying to take the kingdom of light into the kingdom of darkness.

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And the greatest tactic I think Satan has is to remove the sure -footedness and even the grasp that I have the light.

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And you're not going to be boldly running into the darkness, spreading the light. If you're not confident, you hold the light.

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You have the light, right? And so this is why I hate this whole concept of denying the covenant of works and really the imputed righteousness of Christ, because it removes the confidence of the believer.

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When Paul says, there is no condemnation, do not worry, right? Well, that gives me like, I'm going to fail and fumble and fall over the place, but at least

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I know I'm not going to be condemned. Let's go. Let's proclaim Christ, right?

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Justin Perdue Absolutely. So on one of our local mountain bike trails, there's this little tiny brick path.

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And think of like riding, it's not as narrow as a tightrope, like a cable, but it's really narrow, this little tiny brick path.

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And oh, it's maybe a city block long. And I never fall off of it.

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I can ride it perfectly, I think maybe once in my life. Maybe a hundred times, I've never fallen off of it.

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I can ride it perfectly. It's kind of, you know, makes you nervous, but I can make it every time.

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And the reality is if that were raised up off the ground, excuse me, it's ground level.

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If it were raised up off the ground, you know, five feet or 50 feet, let's say, but even one foot,

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I would fall off every time. Because I just would, it would get in my head and I would fall off every time.

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But because, you know, it's ground level, I can ride it perfectly because I know that the consequences are no big deal.

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I'm safe. Not a perfect illustration. No, but it's a good one. It's a good one.

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Well, because, you know, we talk about the law, even the third use of the law guiding our lives in Christ, and we don't need to go too far down this road.

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But the reason that that can be true and that we can seek conformity unto the law, even as sinner saints, is because the teeth of the law has been removed.

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Yeah. It no longer condemns us. I like that image. That's good. And I think of Romans chapter six, we're not under law, we're under grace.

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What's interesting about that is, you know, he says you're not under law, you're under grace. And then he goes on and on and on to use law words.

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Sure. Because he's basically saying you're not under law for justification.

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Exactly. But you're under law still, a third use kind of thing. That's right, because it's obey, it's obey, all this kind of stuff.

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You've been united to Christ. You've been set free from the condemnation of the law. But you've now become obedient from the heart, too.

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Yeah, that's good. You're not under law for justification, but you are under law because the law is good and righteous and holy, and it's a light unto your path.

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And now it all of a sudden makes a lot of sense. 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. For me, a couple of things that I'd love to accomplish before this episode's over, the latter one being,

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I think a great landing place for this episode would be Romans 5, 1 -11. We alluded to this in the first episode, but we could connect that and help people see

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Romans 5, 1 -11 and how it relates to Adam and Jesus and representation and all of this.

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So that maybe is the ending place. But let's briefly talk about this. The term monocovinentalism.

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I thought Theocast was just pop level, like whatever. So monocovinentalism is a term for, just putting it in layman's terms, denying a covenant of works, like this framework of covenant of works and grace.

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There are a number of different presentations of monocovinentalism, but Pat, I would love for you to talk for a minute about what that means.

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Then maybe we can talk about a couple of the popular ways this shows up and why it's so damaging. I had a class one time actually with R .C.

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Sproul, so I just want to name drop. It was really interesting.

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It was the justification class. Who spoke at your graduation? That's right. He did. I sat there and just cried my eyes out.

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He preached on the act of obedience of Christ. Come on, son. Let's do this. No hope without it.

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That's right. Anyways, keep going. Anyway, we're sitting in a classroom with maybe 12 people.

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The question was posed to us, how many covenants do you believe in? One question was, what is the gospel?

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He went around the room and we all had to explain. But this question was, how many covenants do you affirm?

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It was interesting because my friends who are not associated with covenant theology, they're trying to count on their hands.

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Sure. And then all the

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Presbyterians, they understood the question. They understood the assignment. Yeah, exactly.

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So basically, and my friend, let's just say his name is Kirby because that's his name. So when people, my friend

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Kirby, when people were saying two, he was like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Well, basically, two or three because classic traditional covenant theology is bi -covenantal.

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So covenant of works, covenant of grace. Right. And then sometimes we would say, in addition, covenant of redemption.

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Right. Tri -covenantalism. Tri -covenantal framework. Yeah. But basically, the vernacular, the verbiage is, are you bi -covenantal or are you mono -covenantal?

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And really, that's what R .C. was wanting to know where people were. Because if you're bi -covenantal, you're a traditionalist.

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You affirm the distinction between the law and the gospel, and you have covenant of works, covenant of grace, and you're going to get justification right, therefore.

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Now, that's a huge statement that you just made to say, I'm serious. And I agree wholeheartedly with what

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R .C. said. Like, if you get the covenant of works and grace right, you're going to tend to get justification right.

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If you don't get these covenants right and you mash them together, you may get justification right, but it'll be an accident.

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I mean, it'll be an inconsistent conclusion that you've drawn. New perspective on Paul. Federal vision.

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Final justification. Should we keep going? Pat, keep going, man. So, you're exactly right.

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Mono -covenantalism is a bad idea. It's a bad thing. Let's use

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Karl Barth as an example. Karl Barth, 1886 -1968, hated the distinction between law and gospel, covenant of works, covenant of grace.

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He's a classic mono -covenantalist, and he gets everything wrong because of it.

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And so, it's interesting then to watch other people who studied under him, Dan Fuller.

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His theology reflects Barth, maybe not in its entirety, but it's no wonder.

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And so, you're going to get everything wrong as a mono -covenantalist, and yet today, also in the federal vision, we have people who essentially are mono -covenantal.

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And so, it's no wonder that they don't like the law -gospel distinction. It's no wonder that they tend to get justification sola fide wrong.

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It's hugely problematic. Well, they openly say they reject the title covenant of works, and they try to retitle it, but all they're doing is, as you're saying, they're creating one covenant at this moment.

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And what often happens with this, at least in my observation, where this becomes so obviously damaging, is that people who deny the distinction between the covenant of works and covenant of grace and become mono -covenantalists, they're just one covenant, and they loop

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Adam in with that, and they'll say that Adam would have been saved through obedience and obviously faith.

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So, it's faith and obedience for Adam, and then it thereby becomes obedience and faith for us.

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And it's always been the plan that it's faith and obedience. It's faith and our faithfulness.

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I mean, that's what the federal vision guys say, objectively speaking. And then there are many other people, the final justification camp and others, even lordship guys, that try to weave obedience and repentance and all that kind of stuff into the definition of faith because of this collapsing of categories.

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Yes, yes. So, we want to keep them distinct. Otherwise, we ruin both. So, keep the law distinct from the gospel.

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Covenant of works, covenant of grace, keep them distinct. They're both important. They're both vital. But if you blur them, you ruin both of them.

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So, then you weaken faith and make it something else, and you weaken the law. And I don't want to get graphic in this, and I've never used this illustration before.

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But when we think about just human reproductive, there is what keeps a human alive, and there's the evidence of their life.

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And then there is how a human comes into an existence. And those two things are separate. They're not the same thing.

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And I think understanding that there is what brings someone to life in Christ, the proclaiming of the gospel, and that is purely done by God's power, by His proclamation of His good news.

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And then there is the evidence of what has happened. And what we're trying to say is we're collapsing the two, that the evidence now is part of how one is justified or how one comes to life.

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And all three of us here are going to say our ministries, our pulpits, our podcasts are all designed.

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We have to keep those separate. The evidences of salvation, the fruit of our life, is never influencing, affecting, infiltrating, infusing our justification.

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Sanctification and justification, law, gospel, they have to be distinct at all times. And it can be confusing at times when you're reading

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Scripture. For instance, Pat, I'll throw this over to you. Sometimes people will use James too, and they'll say, well, it says faith without works, your justification is dead.

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And I think I would agree with James. James is right. But as a great example, why do you feel like there is this resurgence?

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It feels like, I think it's always been around here, but why do you think there's this resurgence of, you know, like you and I, all three of us here, we'll tweet something out, we'll put it on a podcast, we will give the gospel, and what's the first thing they say?

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But, right? And then there has to be a mentioning of works. Why are people feeling that necessity to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you have to have works.

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Because we're all Pelagians at heart, right? I mean, it's the knee -jerk reaction. We love to rob glory from God.

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We love to get in on the action. We want to, you know, heaven be a mutual adoration society or something.

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I mean, it's part of the fall. We love to play God. We love to get in on the action.

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And that's why we, you know, had a reformation. That's why we'll always keep fighting this battle.

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It's why Galatians had to be written. So the battle will never end until glory, but it's the thing worth fighting for.

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It's of first importance. And so I don't want to fight about everything, but we need to fight over this because the glory of God at stake, the good of his people, their assurance, you know,

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Rome stole people's assurance. That's one of the main things that they, you know, damned is

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Protestant assurance. That's right. So we, as Protestants, I don't think we should forget that.

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It would, it would, if we could just remember, pretend like you're talking to a Roman Catholic when you're explaining the

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Bible, and you're probably going to be, get it right. But then don't forget your

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Protestantism, you know, when you're doing verse by verse exposition.

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So, but I think there's a positive resurgence too. So we're going to keep fighting this battle, but the positive resurgence is good.

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I just spoke to a man yesterday, a pastor, and he's like, okay, help me out. Help me think through, you know, the fact that Jesus said, follow me.

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Is that law or gospel? That's a great question. Yeah. I was so happy. And the answer is.

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It's law. That's right. Absolutely. Pick up your cross and follow me is not gospel. It's not good news. I said, you know, it's good, but the problem is we're not very good at following Jesus.

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That's right. If we were good at it, he didn't need to be crucified to make atonement for our bad following.

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It's true. So, but I know he'll never think about it the same way again. I know he sees it.

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And so it's wonderful. It's great. Yeah. We need to go to Jesus for rest, you know, come to me, all who are heavy laden,

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I will give you rest. Yeah. There you go. That's gospel. Right. But following Jesus is law.

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Now, now, once we rest in Christ, right, then we want to, then we want to follow him. That's right. Because we belong to him.

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So it's wonderful. I think Jesus is better than we even thought. Right. Yeah.

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And like you said, we don't want to fight about everything. We don't always want to define ourselves by what we're against. We say that stuff all the time here.

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And this is worth fighting for. I mean, this is the most important thing. This language is used by a lot of our biblicist law gospel collapsing friends, where they'll talk about obedience and say, you know, heaven and hell hang in the balance.

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And in reality, heaven and hell do hang in the balance on this conversation because it is a conversation over justification and how a person could ever be seen as just in God's sight.

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So let's land this conversation, guys, briefly with Romans 5, 1 to 11, and then we'll shut it down.

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We talked about it earlier because we talked about Romans 5, 12 to 21, and we'd said we would come back to this. Now, I have one thought on it that I'll save maybe if it's not already taken by you guys as we discuss this.

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Pat, you had mentioned Romans 5, 1 to 11 earlier. What was in your mind as you were thinking of that? So I was thinking in terms of the practicality of the doctrine of justification.

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So that comes, I think, in the second part of chapter five. So sometimes, yeah,

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I think that's the second part, which we discussed earlier. The first part deals with suffering and difficulty and how we can make it through life in this broken, fallen world filled with calamity and difficulty and pain and turmoil.

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And I think the answer comes in the latter part. Your biggest problem, your ultimate problem, your eternal problem has been solved.

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And therefore, you can face tomorrow. Therefore, you can persevere. Therefore, you can face no matter what happens to you in suffering.

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So that's my summary of chapter five. And it shows the importance of doctrine.

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It's why theology matters. It's why this important doctrine is so precious and wonderful.

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Because again, to repeat myself, your biggest problem has been solved.

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And so it helps me to face the other problems that might be big. But God is not against me anymore.

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He's for me in Christ. It's my only comfort in life and in death, as the catechism says.

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Amen to that. Let's have an altar call now. Yeah. Romans 5, one and following, in my mind, is one of the first texts that I will offer to people that are advocating a final justification kind of position, where it's this, you know, we acquire the right to eternal life by faith and we'll actually acquire eternal life itself through faith and obedience.

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You know, this idea. And I just say, you know, I mean, read Romans 5, one and following.

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It's very clear when Paul says, therefore, since we've been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

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Lord Jesus Christ. I don't think he means you have peace with God now, but you might not have peace with God forever, you know, on account of what

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Christ has done, right? That doesn't work. Because like you just said, he goes on to talk about how we rejoice in all the, even the difficult things that we go through because we know what

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God is doing in and through us. Because we've had the love of God poured into our hearts by the

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Holy Spirit, you know? And then we go on to, how do we know that we have peace with God and all this?

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How do we know this is a certainty? Well, because when we were weak and when we were sinners and we were God's enemies, Christ died.

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And if we've been saved by the wrath of God, how much more will we be justified by his life? I mean, we're going to be saved by his life and all these things.

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It's a wonderful text. And it blows up a lot of this final justification and the weaving in of works and the uncertainty and the unsettling that occurs as a result of that.

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We say, I don't think justification means you're okay with God today and you might not be tomorrow.

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It's very clear that because it's grounded upon Christ, it's now and forever, you know? Justin Perdue It helps us to avoid theological pastoral malpractice.

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Justin Perdue It's true. It's very true. Jon, any final thoughts from you, bro? Jon Moffitt No, I think this has been very helpful.

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I just wish we could have more conversations, which I think we're going to be able to do that in the coming months.

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We'll have longer opportunities where we aren't so pressed by time. But no, my encouragement to you is if you struggle with assurance, if you're struggling with trying to wrestle with this, listening to things like the

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Pactum, even going back to their series on what is biblicism, their episode on theonomy, their series on the five solos was fantastic.

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The point of it is you've got to reorient your brain. I want to go back to Pat's illustration.

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The point of the gospel is to remove the fear of consequence.

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Like when he was talking about riding across that brick path that's not 50 feet in the air, we shouldn't be walking every day fear of falling out of favor with the

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Father. He says, I lose none. He's given us all the assurances of the covenant of work, saying

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Christ fulfilled what you could not, and He paid for your sins. My encouragement is to listen to reaffirmations of the gospel, ground yourself in the truth of that.

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As Paul says, he wants to make nothing known except for Christ and Him crucified. Pay attention to the parts of the gospel that ground us in the foundation of Christ.

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We do not hold Christ. He holds us, and because He holds us, we have the opportunity to proclaim that light loudly.

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That's my final thought. Justin Perdue I would recommend. John mentioned a few Pactam episodes already. Pat, you guys did at least a couple of episodes on the active obedience of Christ somewhere in the 20s.

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I remember listening to those summer before last, and I remember shooting you a message. I was greatly encouraged.

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I was on vacation with my family and running in the morning listening to those, and I would commend those to the listener as well, in addition to the ones that John mentioned.

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Justin Perdue I appreciate it. There are two episodes on the active obedience of Christ. Justin Perdue Excellent. Brother, thank you again for being on with us today.

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We are now going to head over and briefly, just for the sake of time, record a Semper Reformanda episode. If Pat is able to stay on with us, that will be even better.

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If not, John and I will handle it. We thank everybody for listening and for tuning in. The other podcast we're about to record called

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Semper Reformanda is for people who have partnered with our ministry. We're grateful for that partnership and that support.

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If you're interested in finding more about what it would be to support Theocast in this way and get access to additional content, all that fun stuff, and to get access to the app where we're on there and encouraging one another, all those good things, you can find that information over at theocast .org.

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If you're not yet listening to the Everyday Grace podcast, we would commend that to you as well. Just excerpts from sermons of mine and John's and podcast clips to encourage you in Christ Jesus each day.

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With all that, by way of housekeeping, I think we're done here. Grace and peace to everyone until next week.