March 21, 2024 Show with Dr. Matthew P. W. Roberts on “Pride: Identity & the Worship of Self”

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

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

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

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 21st day of March 2024.

I'm thrilled to have both a first-time guest and a friend who has been on the program before who is going to be serving as our co-host today. The first-time guest of whom I speak is Matthew P .W. Roberts, who is the minister of Trinity Church York, England, a congregation of the International Presbyterian Church denomination.

He has a Ph .D. in systematic theology from Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has served as moderator of synod and chair of church planning for the International Presbyterian Church denomination, also known as the IPC.

He is married to Kate, and they now have three teenage children. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Matthew P .W. Roberts.

Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be with you, Chris. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Oh, the pleasure is all mine, brother. And we are going to be discussing today the book Pride, Identity and the Worship of Self, written by Pastor Matthew P .W. Roberts, published by Christian Focus Publications.

And the reason I even know about this book is because my very dear friend, Pastor David Monreal of the Carlisle Alliance Church, which is just about five minutes from where I'm sitting in the studio, we met, Pastor David and I, at a Banner of Truth conference a number of years ago and instantly became fast friends, as they say.

And I've been so blessed by his friendship. And I am so thrilled that he has highly recommended the book we are discussing today. And welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Monreal.

Well, thank you very much. It is my honor and my pleasure to be here and could not be here to talk about a better book and discuss a very important topic.

Trinity Church York and the Growth of Presbyterianism in England

Well, the first thing I want Pastor Roberts to do is please explain in further detail than I already did something about Trinity Church of York, England.

With pleasure. There aren't very many Presbyterian churches in England. It's plenty in Scotland and Ireland, but England is a little bit different. And so most Presbyterian churches that you'll find in England have been planted in the last 20 years and ours, that is true of ours as well.

I was sent to York by our Presbytery in 2009 and I came with my young family and that was it. And so we started a church. Initially, we held services in our living room, in our house until we had too many people.

And then we moved out. But we're a fairly normal Presbyterian church, I think. We're now a little bit bigger. We're not just five of us. We're normally about 140 or so on a Sunday morning. In England, that's a medium sized church.

There aren't too many churches that are much bigger than that. And we're very privileged to meet together week by week and worship the Lord.

Well, here in the United States, that would be considered a medium to large size reformed church, especially a confessionally reformed church. You don't typically have, other than PCA congregations, perhaps, you typically don't have reformed congregations from the OPC, let's say, or the confessional reformed Baptist groups.

You typically don't have congregations much larger than that. I think the church where I am a member, Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, perhaps has a little less than 300 on a Sunday morning.

But obviously, those are not all members. So it's not an unusual circumstance, the size of your congregation. And is there anything unique about the IPC that would set itself apart from the denominations like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, like the Presbyterian Church in America and other more perhaps well-known Presbyterian denominations?

Yes, theologically, not a lot, really. We were founded by Francis Schaeffer originally back in the 1950s. It was sort of the fruit of his evangelistic ministry in Europe, as he founded his Labrie centres.

A lot of people were being converted and sort of needed churches to go to. And as a result, the International Presbyterian Churches sprung up. But we remained fairly small, really, for about 50 years as really only a handful of congregations.

But there's been a very, very substantial growth in percentage terms since the turn of the millennium. And so now our presbytery, which covers all of Britain, so England and Scotland and what we would cover Wales, I don't think we have any congregations at the moment, but we have.

We've grown in the time I've been in it from being five congregations when I started. We're now 17. That's happened over the last 14 years. And we seem to be regularly starting new churches now at a rate of several every year.

So we're seeing a lot of growth. We're really blessed and encouraged by that. You asked what's distinct about us. Probably it's unusual is that we we're not limited to one country. We have churches all across Europe as well as across the UK.

And we even have a few churches in South Korea, although that's sort of historical how that came about. But we're sort of a reformed denomination which is spread across Europe. But the majority of our churches are in the United Kingdom.

Great. Well, if anybody has more interest to explore and discover more about Trinity Church York, England, you can go to their website, TrinityChurchYork .org .uk. TrinityChurchYork .org .uk. And I'm assuming the reason for the scarcity over the centuries of Presbyterian churches in England is because of the dominance of the Anglican church there.

Yes. I mean, there's a sort of slightly amusing backstory to it, which is that King Charles II, who became king after our civil war in the 17th century, he had a schoolmaster who was a Presbyterian who he hated.

So when he became king, he decided to be as nasty to Presbyterians as he could be. And so basically half of them gave up or became Unitarians or something like that. And the other half went to America.

So that's you guys over there. Well, you guys who are Presbyterians. We came over to you. And there weren't that many of us left. But the slightly sadder aspect to it is that there were quite a lot of, there were still a reasonable number of English Presbyterian churches, but they were in the 19th century.

They were just overwhelmed by liberalism, really. And by the middle of the 20th century, there was really no gospel. Very, very hard to find any gospel in any of them, which is why none of them really existed.

And a number of them merged into what's now called the United Reformed Church. But the word reformed in there does not mean anything that those of us who really are reformed would recognize these days, which is sad.

But the good thing is, is that there's been just a lot of growth recently. And it is true that the Church of England has been very broad, but has historically contained a lot of very faithful and fairly reformed people.

Yes. But that has become harder and harder in recent years. And sadly, there's been a lot of theological decay in the Church of England. That's probably part of the reason why we and other Orthodox churches are seeing a lot of growth, because the gospel people want to be in churches where the gospel is being preached.

And obviously, people are converted only in churches where the gospel is being preached. So we're pleased to be used by the Lord, but we certainly pray for the church to grow much more in this country.

Amen. And well, we have a custom here, a tradition on Iron Troupe and Zion Radio, whenever we have a first-time guest such as yourself, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they may have been raised and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And I would love to hear your story.

Very happily, that would be a privilege. I have to start with my parents. My parents are both believers, but that itself is a story. My maternal grandfather was a very godly minister, a country minister in the Church of England, but a very good man who faithfully preached the gospel, although he died many, many years before I was born.

But that meant that my mother grew up in a very strongly Christian, faithful home. My father, on the other hand, was converted to Christ while he was an undergraduate student in the 1950s in Manchester, England.

But the result of that was that my parents were very committed to teaching us the gospel as children. So I grew up with a very, very good knowledge of who the Lord is, who God is, why Christ had to die for us, the fact that he rose again, the authority of the scriptures.

So I think I was very, very privileged as a child to learn those things. So for many years, I would have said and believed that I was converted aged 11. I remember clearly hearing someone explain the cross at a children's summer camp that I'd been sent on, and I was blown away by the magnitude of Christ's love for me.

I think the thing that really struck me was that I was responsible, I am responsible for Christ's death, as much as the soldiers who drove the nails into his hands and feet, because it was my sins that he died for.

And I had never appreciated that in all my upbringing. The sort of personal conviction of sin hadn't struck me. So that was a very important moment for me and very definitely was a sort of defining moment in terms of my own commitment to the Lord Jesus.

I knew from that point onwards that my life had to be devoted to him, whatever else I did. So I'm very grateful for that. But I would look back on it now and say, I don't actually think it is true that I didn't love the Lord before that day.

I think I didn't really know why I loved him. And I didn't fully understand how much I needed his love for me. But I think I did, even as quite a young child, I think I had a genuine love for the Lord as far as I can tell.

But the Lord knows our hearts, doesn't he, better than we do. Amen.

Sovereign Grace, J.I. Packer, and the Call to Ministry

Well, when did you realize, or should I say, when did you first discover the doctrines of sovereign grace, also known as the doctrines of reformed theology or nicknamed Calvinism? When did you first discover these teachings and fall in love with them?

Well, again, I think I need to thank my father for that. He, because he taught us to love God's Word, and because he made sure that we clearly knew that, you know, we had to repent of our sins and that all of our salvation came from Christ.

I think I sort of instinctively knew that was true. And I can't remember the first time that I explicitly encountered the fact that God has in his mercy chosen for salvation those whom he chooses. I don't remember that.

But what I do know is that I never, not only did I never find it a problem, I could never see how it would be anything else, because I knew that I was only a believer because of Christ's mercy towards me.

And so, therefore, to be told you're only a believer because of Christ's mercy towards you wasn't a new thing. And also, it's just plainly in the scriptures. So there was never a point at which I kind of discovered it and either rebelled against it or was shocked by it.

But it was more a process of just sort of seeing things more and more clearly. So I can remember even while I was still at high school, talking to other Christian friends about it, and there weren't very many because there's not that many Christians in England compared to other places.

But, and I was always the one who was saying, you know, but the scriptures are clear that God has mercy on whom he will and all salvation is due to him. And it quite clearly says that he has chosen those whom he'll save.

So that always, I never doubted that was true. What certainly is true, though, is that when I went to university, I studied at Cambridge University in the 1990s and spent a lot more time studying God's word there than I had done before, even though I wasn't, I was doing a degree in physics, but I definitely came to grasp that much more deeply and to a much sort of deeper appreciation of the magnitude of grace.

I was really helped by the writings of J .I. Packer at the time, who is a reformed Anglican. I mean, he wouldn't be reformed in every way, but in terms of his understanding of the doctrines of grace, he was very clear.

I found his writings very helpful.

Well, now he's very, very reformed because he's with the Lord.

He's an enormously influential man. Conservative evangelical Christians in England have a huge debt to him because there was definitely a stage in the history of the church in this country where he was one of very, very few people who were doing rigorous theology, but doing it from a starting point of the lordship of Christ and the authority of scripture.

So we're very grateful to God for him. Under God, he's been a great blessing to us.

And last but not least, according to your testimony, when did you realize that you were convinced that our sovereign Lord had placed a call into the pastoral ministry upon your heart?

Yes, that's much more sort of definite, really. It never occurred to me. I was an enthusiastic Christian as a teenager. When I first left home and went to university, I very much wanted to be a faithful Christian and to spread the gospel as much as I could.

But it never occurred to me that pastoral ministry would be within my gifting or my calling. And it was at the end of my second year as a student, one of the pastors at my church took me aside and challenged me and said, Matthew, I think you should think about this.

And I said, don't be ridiculous. It's not what I'm going to do at all. I wouldn't be any good at that. And I was quite resistant to it. And he extracted from me a promise that I would at least think and pray about it while I was at home over the long summer vacation.

And all I can say is that the Lord changed my heart and mind. And by the time I returned for my final year at university, there was really nothing else I wanted to do. And the Lord somehow just convinced me or gave me a passion for preaching the gospel and for teaching the scriptures and spreading the word of God, which just meant I found it almost impossible to think of doing anything else.

And that's kind of how it's been ever since, really. I don't know whether I would have been any good at anything else. I don't know whether I'm very good at this, but I am. So that would have been around age—I must have been around age 20, 21, about then.

Great.

Even though it was quite a long time before I actually got engaged, before I got ordained. It was quite a long time after that until I got ordained, but I think that was when I became convinced.

Why Write Pride, Identity, and the Worship of Self?

Okay.

Well, before I have my co-host, Pastor David Monreale of Carlisle Alliance Church, ask you a question, I just wanted to start the ball rolling with why is it that you believed that you should write this book, Pride, Identity, and the Worship of Self?

There have been other books written, some very excellent ones, on the themes of our wicked culture and the worship of self and the perversions that have arisen as a result of that, specifically homosexuality.

It's interesting. It's a very perfect book cover illustration that you have on the cover of Pride. Narcissus, is it, that fell in love with his own reflection? Is that the—?

That's right.

That's who it is.

It's Narcissus looking into the pool at his own reflection. That's right.

Right. But what made you—what brought to your mind, you know, Got to add a volume, even though there's other great things, excellent things out there already in print. I've got to write my own volume to add to the mix, because there are some things that may have not been focused upon enough—no pun intended—with Christian-focused publications.

So tell us about that. What was the original catalyst for you even exploring the idea of writing this book and, in fact, writing it and getting it published?

Yes, you're absolutely right that there are a lot of excellent books written on the subject of Christian attitudes to sex and marriage and immorality and, of course, on the specific issue, which has been with us for a number of decades of homosexual practice.

And there are plenty of excellent books that carefully examine the scriptures and very clearly demonstrate that God has made us male and female with the intention that one man and one woman should marry and that sexual activity outside of the marriage of one man and one woman is always sin.

So those things, I think, are very well covered and very grateful to many of the people who the Lord has used to write on those things. But what I wanted to deal with in this book was something which I had observed, which is that the arguments about the sinfulness of any form of sexual practice simply don't carry any weight with people who are convinced or just operating with the assumption that what our culture calls identity is a real thing.

So once people believe that some people are transgender or are gay or lesbian or are any of the other identities that people claim, once people are convinced that is what people are, then the moral argument is over because nothing will persuade someone who is convinced of that.

And that was an intriguing thing to me. And I realised that that actually carries a huge amount of similarity with the way that the people in the Bible who are idolaters, the way that they think about immorality, in that one of the effects of idolatry is that it turns our understanding of morality on its head.

Worshipping idols makes you think that good things are evil and evil things are good. And more than that, that that actually is the purpose of idolatry, that the reason that we invent idols, that we invent false gods, is in order to justify to ourselves the sins that we want to commit.

And therefore, I just wanted to dig into the reality that the culture we're in is not a culture where people are still basically Christian, but they've started doing a lot of bad things. Actually, we've always been in that kind of culture, well, as long as Christianity has been around, because people have always done bad things, however much they've learned the gospel.

And we're living in a culture where people follow a completely different religion and worship completely different gods. And secularism is not an absence of religion, it is a religion, it's a worship of the self.

And so I wanted to dig into where does the whole LGBTQ plus thing come from? Well, it comes from a religious devotion to worshipping the self.

Yes.

And so that's the purpose of the book.

Yeah.

In fact, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, a very dear longtime friend of mine, he was the first person I ever heard years ago referring to homosexuality, both in its attraction and in its consummation of physical activity, that it is at its core the worship of self because you are attracted to and pursuing physical sexual relationships with a mirror image when it comes to the biological gender issue.

And of course, that is referred to as an abomination in the scriptures. But when we come back from our first commercial break, which we are entering into now, we're going to hear from Dr. James R. White, who is the founder of Carlyle Alliance Church, ask you some questions.

He is, to repeat myself, the reason why we're even having this discussion today, because he contacted me and said that this book, Pride, Identity, and the Worship of Self, by Matthew Roberts, is a superb book.

And in fact, he said it was the very best thing he had ever read on this subject. And so I wanted to make sure that he was included in the discussion and he will be asking you questions. And that's coming up right after this commercial break.

And if anybody has questions of your own, those of you who are listening, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence.

If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And whenever the subject of things related to sexuality are being focused upon on this show, that's very often an area that gives rise to questions that are intensely personal and private.

So we will honor your request to be anonymous when you submit such questions. But if you're asking general questions, general questions about the Bible, general questions about this specific book, Worship, please give us your first name, at least city and state of residence and country of residence.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with my guest today, Pastor Matthew Roberts, who is the pastor of Trinity Church in York, England. We are discussing his book, Pride, Identity, and the Worship of Self.

And also we have with us as a co-host today, Pastor Dave Monreale of the Carlisle Alliance Church. And please, first of all, tell us, Dave, before you ask your own question, why don't you tell us what was it that struck you?

What was at the heart of what made you such an enthusiastic promoter, if you will, of this book, Pride, that even led you to eagerly recommend it to me?

Yeah, definitely. I just recently graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary with my doctorate of ministry and pastoral counseling, and this was the area of my focus on ministering to people who struggled with same-sex attraction.

And I was back there just a few months after I graduated for a pastor's conference, and one of the sessions, I'd never, wasn't aware of the book or Matthew Roberts, but went to the seminar and was just fascinated by his talk.

And he mentioned that he had had a book on this topic. And so when I when I read it, I mean, it's the first book I've read that I thought, man, I wish I had this when I was writing my paper, because it was so pastoral in its approach and so biblical in its presentation that it would have been something that I would have just loved to had an opportunity to interact with as I was working on the paper and just addressing some of the things that he brought up in there.

And so, you know, like you said, I've read many, many books, and this would be the first one that I would recommend on this topic.

Great. Well, what's your own question to Pastor Roberts?

Well, yeah, it's such a big topic, and you're coming at it from an angle that I think a lot of evangelical Christians don't think of the idea of idolatry and, you know, questions of identity. It seems like even within the church, there's a lot of disagreement on that.

And so I was thinking just to begin with, to help the listeners understand where you're coming from as far as explaining identity and how that ties into idolatry.

Yes, one of the things that I think started me off thinking about this is wherever you go in the world, people identify themselves by their gods. It's a pretty standard thing. If you ask a Muslim, a serious, real Muslim, to describe themselves, then the fact that he or she is a Muslim, that is a worshipper of Allah, is right at the top of the list.

If you ask a Hindu to say, well, who are you really, then the gods whom that person worships are vital in describing who he or she is. And you see that in the scriptures as well, actually, that one of the powerful effects of idolatry is that people describe themselves by their idols.

So I discuss at one point in the book in Acts 19 when Paul is in Ephesus and there is a riot caused by a perceived insult to the goddess Artemis that the preaching of the gospel has caused. But the people of the city shout without stopping for two hours, great is Artemis of the Ephesians.

And there's this kind of deep connection between the Ephesians' understanding of themselves and their devotion to their goddess. And those two things are kind of connected. They're the same thing. And that, I think, is something you can observe in the world.

But exactly the same thing is going on in our Western culture. But we have tended to miss it because far too much of the time we are still stuck in this way of thinking that assumes that people in the West have no religion.

So if they're not Christian and if they're not someone who's a Muslim or Hindu or whatever, then they just have no religion. But actually, that isn't true. In the Bible, there is no one who has no religion.

You all worship something. And so it occurred to me many years ago now, really, that this whole thing about having this passionate belief in identity, which is driving really everything in the way that modern secular people think, must be connected to an idolatry.

And of course, there's a good reason why it works that way, because we are supposed to identify ourselves by the one we worship, because we are to worship the one true God and we are his images. And so actually what you see happening for people who worship idols, it is something that is a corruption of and a sort of turning upside down and inside out of what is supposed to happen, which is that we worship the true God.

And then we really know who we really are because we're made to be his worshippers. And so that's sort of the background to the whole purpose of the book is to say that you don't understand what is going on in our culture if you don't realize that we're living in a culture that worships this thing called the self.