LBCF Chap 13 thru 15

We've been to the first 12 chapters so far of our confession of faith. And last week we looked at chapter 11, which was justification. And then we've looked at the chapter 13, which was, no, 12, which was adoption.

Sanctification as the Fruit of Union with Christ

So today we come to chapter 13, which is of sanctification. And let's read what it says. Those who are united to Christ, affectionately called and regenerated, have a new heart and a new spirit created in them through the virtue of Christ's death and resurrection, are also further sanctified, really and personally, through the same virtue by his word and spirit dwelling in them.

The dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened than mortified, and they more and more quicken and strengthened in all saving graces to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

Okay, I'll just put up to you this scripture proofs. This is an important chapter. And actually it ties in with what I'm gonna be preaching on this morning. In the middle of the 20th century, you know, right around 1950, maybe even a little bit earlier than that, a teaching came into the church and they called the movement free grace.

Unfortunately, that's a misnomer because we believe in free grace, all right? That's what the Bible teaches. But what they meant by it was you didn't have to repent. And there didn't have to be any change, outward change in the individual.

In other words, if you pray a sinner's prayer, you're saved and nothing can change that. And you can go and live your life the way you have, you shouldn't, they would say, all right, but you could, and you're still saved.

This chapter, talking about sanctification, links sanctification and salvation with justification and adoption so that you can't have one without the other. The mistake that they made in this movement was linking it in such a way that making repentance, making change sanctification prior to salvation, all right?

That's the mistake they made. There's a difference between it being, some people call it roots and fruits, you know? Repentance is absolutely essential. If you don't repent, you can't be saved, you know?

I mean, we see that throughout the scripture, you know, what must we do to be saved? Boy, my tongue is, I'm a little tongue-tied here this morning. What must we do to be saved? Repent and be baptized, Peter says, you know?

So repentance is absolute. Sanctification is essential, but it's only essential in that it proves that the work of grace has been brought in your heart, all right? So what he's saying, what the confession is saying is, all those who are truly effectually recalled, they have been regenerated, they have the new heart, the new spirit.

All the merits of Christ's death and resurrection are accrued to you. That person will be sanctified really and personally by the virtue of the spirit dwelling in you and the ministry of the word, okay?

Does that make sense? And that's one of the reasons why we have Bible studies, why do we have Sunday school classes, why do we preach the word, you know, in the worship service. In fact, let me clarify that just a little bit.

The preaching of the word in the worship service is not primarily evangelistic, okay? It's primarily for the sanctification of the body because the worship service is where the body of believers meet.

Yes, we invite non-believers in so that they can hear the word, but the primary purpose is worship, not evangelism. Now, and I'm sure you've noticed, it's seldom that I don't make an evangelistic application at the end of the sermon, all right?

Because every sermon that we preach, I believe there should be a gospel message because we presume that every time we meet on Sunday morning, there's non-believers there. Whether they be some of our children or whether they be guests or family relatives or people who have just walked in.

But you're hard-pressed on a Sunday to look around that room and not realize there's some people who are sitting here who are not safe. So as a matter of practice, we always give an application that's evangelistic.

But the primary function of the message is for the membership or the Christians who are sitting there to aid them in their sanctification and to bring them to a place where their worship is in spirit and in truth, all right?

Does that make sense, all right? Yes.

Recently, a man was saying how he loved to listen to sermons and he wanted to know if that was a form of worship. Yeah.

Oh, it definitely is. Sanctification is not just for Sunday morning, all right? And in fact, you've heard me preach many times. If that's the only instruction you're getting, that's not enough, all right?

But even there, the, and I just wanna make this point really clear. The main purpose of the Sunday morning message is not for what we get out of it. It's that we please God because he is worthy of worship.

Now, as we do that, we should be getting something out of it. It's just a question of what is the primary and what is the secondary, all right? I mean, if you go to a worship, and unfortunately, this is what happens in a lot of the seeker-sensitive churches.

What do they do? They have an hour and a half of music, singing, you know, scripture reading, et cetera, and then they have like a sermonette. Five, 10 minutes pass, it gets up and gives some little tidbit, all right?

That's out of balance, okay? The songs that we sing, the scripture we read, all of those things, everything that we do should lead up to the preaching of the word, which is designed to turn your hearts towards worship to God.

Now, at the same time, you get a sanctifying benefit from all of the service, even the songs that we sing, which is another reason why we strive in our worship service to make sure that the songs we sing are theologically correct.

One of the reasons we don't sing too many contemporary, quote, worship songs, unquote, is that many of them are just not theologically correct. It's not a question that, you know, the older hymns are necessarily better than the newer hymns because they're older.

You know, it's not like wine. It doesn't get better with age, all right? It's the theological correctness of it, and so, and in fact, even some of the hymns in the Trinity Hymnal that we use have been changed, the ones that are in public domain.

They've been changed, some of the words have been changed to make them more theologically correct, all right, which is one of the reasons I love the Trinity Hymnal is I don't have to think about another thing for the worship service.

Those hymns are pretty, or they've been already, you know, scoured over by other Reformed Baptist pastors, okay, but again, I just wanna make you aware, the main purpose of the worship service is to worship God so that he's pleased.

The other is man-centered. You know, we're here for our pleasure. Seeker-sensitive, no, and that's why the doctrines of grace are so important. And in fact, the message this morning talking about, you know, talking about the fact that we are the possession of God.

You know, he chose us before the foundation of the world. All right, so we don't have to do all kinds of fancy things to bring the people of God in, just do what the Bible tells us to do, and the Holy Spirit will draw that, okay?

Anything else is man-made, and unfortunately, what happens is you have a lot of emotion come in, and people make emotionally charged decisions, and it's not true repentance of the heart, okay? And this is one of the proofs.

That's why this chapter is so important. If there is no work of sanctification in the heart, there's a presumption that there is no true conversion, all right, and remember, you know, the parable of Jesus of the sower.

You have, there are people, you know, some of the seed is going to fall on the rocky soil, on the parched soil, and it's going to start, it's going to look genuine, but it's not gonna last, and the key is, how do you know if somebody said, do they persevere to the end, okay?

And that's kind of what this chapter is alluding to. Notice that the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified. The Puritans used to call it the mortification of the flesh.

That's our job. Sanctification is putting to death the deeds, the deeds of the flesh, day by day. It's not gonna happen all at once. I mean, wouldn't it be great at the moment you were saved, that's it, the sin was gone, but that's not in the design and plan of God.

For his purposes and his reasons, that's something that takes place over a period of time, okay, and that's our job. We have to work at it. Paul says in Philippians, work out your sanctification with fear and trembling.

There is effort on our part, okay? And notice the confession is very strong on it. It says, to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. Puritans had an expression, no holiness, no heaven, okay?

All right, moving to paragraph two. This sanctification is throughout the whole man, yet imperfect in this life. There abide still some remnants of the corruption in every part, whence arises a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh.

And again, one of the major proof texts for that is the Romans 7, right, where Paul talks about the fact that sometimes the very thing that he wants to do, he doesn't do, and the things that he doesn't wanna do, he finds himself doing.

That's the battle of the flesh, and it's gonna continue throughout your life here on earth. It doesn't end until you die and you're with the Lord, okay? Any questions on paragraph two? Paragraph three, and there's a scripture for it, says, in which war, although the remaining corruption for a time may much prevail, yet through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying spirit of Christ, the regenerate part does overcome, and so saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

Pressing after in heavenly life and evangelical obedience to the commands which Christ as head and king, in his word, has prescribed them. Okay, some fancy words, simply means this. You should see, our doctrine is progressive sanctification.

You should see a change in your life and a movement towards godliness. Let me give you a perfect example of this. My wife and I are avid movie goers. That's one of, we have a date night each week, and we go out for dinner, and then to a movie.

That's the thing that we enjoy to do together. It's becoming increasingly difficult to go to the movies, because we have standards. We don't just go see any movie. Before we see a movie, we research it to see what the content is gonna be, and whether it's something that we can actually see.

Well, here's what has happened. This has happened on a couple of occasions, and so we don't even really do it anymore. Somebody will be talking about a movie, and we'll mention a movie that we saw 20 years ago, and say, oh yeah, this was a great movie, et cetera, et cetera.

And they'll say, well, you know, we haven't seen it in a while, and we start watching it, and we're shocked by the content. They'll say, we liked this movie? We actually enjoyed this, and we shut it off.

And we say, how could we possibly have sat through this? It's sanctification. If you're truly moving closer and closer to Christ, things that you never even considered before, that you didn't wanna see it, now you realize.

So we basically, we don't recommend movies anymore, especially old ones. Or if we do, there's a disclaimer in that, you know, we saw it a long time ago, we don't remember what was in it. But that's a good thing if that happens, because you'll find that things that didn't bother your conscience early in your Christian life, all of a sudden they do start to bother your conscience.

And this is another reason, too, why we need to be careful in the body of Christ, that we don't set up our standards of what we consider to be Christian behavior on other families. Because everybody is moving at a different rate, people who come in, they're newer Christians, their conscience isn't offended.

I mean, if it comes up and you wanna give them a little help, that's fine, but finger pointing it all, because we were all there, and sanctification is progressive. So, I mean, and you see this, I mean, it's not just movies, but, you know, what you watch on television.

I mean, there's some people who have recommended, you know, movies to me, and I was, but I don't go back, I don't say anything, because, again, you leave room, you know, God is working on it, you know.

Does that make sense? Okay, I see some smiles that we're talking, you've experienced things like that. You know, and one of the things that we need to do in the body of Christ, you can be on either side of that.

Some people can look at you and say, how could you watch that? Just accept it graciously, you know, they have a different standard, and that's fine, there's room for that in the body, just like there's room for, you know, differences on certain other issues, you know, like eschatology, all right.

There's all three major views of eschatology fit within our confession of faith. The only one that doesn't is dispensational premillennialism, all right, because the whole system of that mitigates against covenant theology.

But historic premill, amill, postmill, all three of those views fit within the framework of the 1689. We have people who represent all three of those views in this congregation, and we have some nice little spars back and forth once in a while talking about eschatology, but it's not a requirement for membership that you hold a certain view, and so we need to exercise our liberty on those certain things.

The essentials of the confession, oh, by the way, we do have an eschatological statement, all right, in the confession, just not a millennial statement. So it doesn't matter what your particular view of the millennial.

And again, that makes for some fun discussion sometimes, but it's not a question of fellowship. Any questions on this paragraph? Okay, I'm going to pause. Okay, now we're gonna look at the next chapter, which is chapter 14 of Saving Faith, okay.

Saving Faith and the Means of Grace

All right, something just happened here. Okay, chapter 14 of Saving Faith, paragraph one, the grace of faith whereby the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts and is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the word, by which also and by the administration of baptism in the Lord's Supper, prayer, and other means appointed of God, it is increased and strengthened, okay.

Very, very simple, obviously, being a Reformed church, we believe that salvation is by the grace of faith alone, and that it is typically, it is always the work of the Spirit in the heart. There is no salvation apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.

And the means that is used is by the ministry of the word, but that faith is increased by the administration of baptism in the Lord's Supper, prayer, and any other of those means. Those are the things we call the means of grace, okay.

That's why we emphasize making diligent use of the means of grace, because your faith needs to be increased, it needs to increase. It's a simple childlike faith that is necessary for salvation. Somebody can be saved and not understand anything about all the theology, they don't know all of this about the confession, they need to learn, and those things also increase the faith.

Does that make sense? All right, so again, it's not, and even the purpose of this class, we don't expect at the end of, there's not gonna be a written test at the end of this class, we're gonna have to be able to explain all 32 chapters of the confession and the subheadings, et cetera.

No, the purpose of this class is to make you familiar with what this church believes to be the doctrine that comes from scripture, and that you would grow in grace as you sit under the teaching of this class, and that it would make you more aware of what your obligations are to the body of Christ as members of the church, et cetera.

Does that make sense? Okay, so, and hopefully, that even sitting through a class like this, that your faith is continually increased, all right, which is part of your sanctification, okay? All right, second section by this faith that Christian believes to be true whatever is revealed in the word for the authority of God himself, and also apprehends an excellency therein above all other writings and other things in the world.

This harkens back to our first chapter on the scripture, remember the first chapter in the confession is the scripture, that alone is our authority. It surpasses anything else and is the only supreme and written norm, okay?

It bears forth the glory of God in his attributes, the excellency of Christ in his nature and offices, the power and fullness of the Holy Spirit in his workings and operations, and is so enabled to cast his soul upon the truth, thus believed, and also acts differently upon which each particular passage thereof contains, yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, embracing the promise of God for this life and that which is to come, but the principal acts of saving faith have immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon him alone for justification, sanctification, eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace.

All right, a lot of words. Here's what it simply means. Your faith, when you're saving faith, is simple. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. You believe that, it's simple. Then you come to the scripture and when you start and understand that the scripture is the authority and you simply believe it, as you read it and sit under the ministry of the word, you're gonna grow in grace.

Your faith is gonna be increased and so we'll use sanctification and that's the whole purpose for this, that our faith is a growing faith. Does that make sense? Okay, and then the last one is, this faith, although it's different in degrees and may be weak or strong, yet in the least degree of it, different in the kind or nature of it, as is all other saving grace from the faith and common grace of temporary believers and therefore, though it may be many times a sale than we can, yet it gets the victory growing up in many to the attainment of a full assurance through Christ who is both the author and finisher of our faith.

All right, a couple of things on that. When it says temporary believers, it's not saying that there are people who truly believe and are saved and then lose their salvation. That's not what it's saying.

What they mean by temporary believers are, in fact, I'll use, I had an uncle, my uncle Connie, he was a police officer but he was also a preacher, kind of like me I guess and he used to say, there's three kinds of people that come to church.

You got believers, you got non-believers and you got make-believers, all right and that's really what they're talking about. There are people who profess faith but they're not really and it's going to be proven because they're not going to last.

They're going to fall away from the faith, okay and that's what it's talking about. The other thing that this section is talking about is the grace that God gives us that enables us to have faith to believe is different from the grace that he gives to the whole world.

God does give grace to the whole world. If he didn't, everybody would be annihilated. But this is what we call common grace and I think I've mentioned that a little bit in the past. It's a very under-taught, misunderstood doctrine but God does give grace to the entire human race just by virtue of the fact that he is their creator God and he allows them to live and as the scripture says, the rain comes on the wicked as well as the believers.

If you're a wicked farmer, you know and a non-believing farmer next to each other, God's not going to cause rain on one field and not have it rain on the next field. He's going to give that common grace but that is to be differentiated from the saving faith which is efficacious for salvation and too many people presume upon common grace and they presume that that is enough to get them into heaven and it's not, okay.

Repentance Unto Life and Ongoing Confession of Sin

Let me see here, we have, yeah, we probably have time. Let me just pause this. Okay, we're up to chapter 15 of repentance unto life and salvation. Such of the elect as are converted at riper years having sometime, that's a polite way of saying they're old.

Okay. I prefer that nowadays, you know. Such of the elect as are converted at riper years having sometime lived in the state of nature and their divers lust and pleasures, God in their effectual calling gives them repentance unto life.

In other words, it is possible for somebody who's lived a reprobate life to come to faith late in his years, okay. And there's some of the scripture that addresses that as well, all right. In paragraph two, whereas there is none that do good and sin not and the best of men may through the power of deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them with the prevalency of temptation fall into great sins and provocations, God has in the covenant of grace mercifully provided that believers so sinning and falling be renewed to repentance unto salvation.

Okay. In other words, basically what it's saying is it doesn't matter how bad you are. This is good news, you know. We have a tendency of looking at certain people and saying, ah, they could never get saved, you know.

And I look at it and say, hey, if God saved me, he can save anybody. And that's really should be our view. And so it doesn't matter. God in the covenant of grace mercifully provides that believers so sinning and falling may be renewed through repentance unto salvation.

Now again, now here he's, actually the last part of that, he's talking about believers who fall into great sin. Okay. And this is where you come into 1 John 1 .9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

We need to always keep that in mind. Repentance is an ongoing process that we still need to, are you raising your hand or just, no, okay. All right. Everybody follow that? So repentance is for both believers and non-believers.

Okay, repentance is ongoing. All right. Paragraph three, this saving repentance is an evangelical grace whereby a person being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, does by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it and self-abhorrence, praying for pardon and strengthening of grace with a purpose and endeavor by supplies of the Spirit to walk before God unto a well-pleasing in all things.

All right, again, it doesn't matter where you are, where you've been, if you truly call out and repent of your sins through the grace of the Holy Spirit, you can be restored. Again, repentance is an ongoing grace and it is an absolutely essential one.

Questions? Okay, paragraph four, as repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives, upon the account of the body of death and the motions thereof, so it is every man's duty to repent of his particular known sins particularly.

That's not a redundancy, there's a reason why they put particular known sins particularly. In other words, it's good in your prayer closet when you're confessing your sin, it is helpful and beneficial to list the ones you know particularly and not just do it, forgive me of all my sins.

All right, it's very helpful to list those and to ask specifically for their sin. You don't have to do what Martin Luther used to do. He would spend hours and hours in the confession but that's, we're not talking about that but those special sins, especially if there's a specific sin that you know that you're struggling and we all have at least one.

That's what Hebrews 12 talks about, that sin that so easily entangles you. There's certain, yes, go ahead. Sure, sure, because some sins can be of such a nature that it is a struggle and well, in fact, the Apostle Paul said that he had a certain thorn in the flesh, all right, that he struggled with and it says he prayed three times and actually, when he said that he prayed three times, that's kind of like a figure of speech.

He prayed continually that the Lord would remove it and do you remember what the answer was? My grace is sufficient for you. So in other words, God was not going to remove that thorn in the flesh. We don't know what it is, all right, and I think it's intentional that we don't know what it is because this way you can apply it generally.

Look, some people, when their temptation, when tough times come, what do they do? They go right to the bar, they want to get drunk, all right. Some people want to be alone, some people get depressed. There's all kinds of ways in which we respond when we hit certain temptation.

There's a biblical way, all right. And we don't always handle things the biblical way but that's where ongoing repentance comes in. If you fall, you know, if you get drunk, you got to confess that and ask for forgiveness and the same thing and it can be any one of a number of things and one of the things that we need to be careful of is that we don't look down our nose at people who struggle with something that we don't struggle with.

All right, some of our struggles are private and internal and nobody knows them. Somebody who's a drunk, for example, theirs is a public one and everybody knows it and it's easy to look down our nose at somebody who struggles with alcohol and say, ah, that's not a problem for me.

Yeah, but you got your own set of problems, just that they may not be manifest. I'll give you an example. The last thing that I would ever do as a temptation is any kind of drug. I worked undercover narcotics and I developed a hatred for drugs because I saw the effects on, especially on young people but even on older people, I saw the effects of it and I developed a hatred for it.

Somebody offered me a drug, I go off, you know, because I recognize it but that doesn't mean that I don't have my own set of struggles, okay? And so I have to be careful, especially in my counseling, that somebody comes in and they're struggling with drug addiction and I don't look down my nose at them just because I don't have that problem, all right?

Everybody has a specific problem and yes, it may be an ongoing one because we carry around, that's what the confession said, we carry around a body of death with us, you know, until we're glorified, okay?

Okay, all right, as number four, did I read this one already? Yes, I did, let's look at paragraph five. Such is the provision which God has made through Christ in the covenant of grace for the preservation of believers unto salvation, that although there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation, yet there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that repent, which makes the constant preaching of repentance necessary.

There's that kind of picks up on what we were just talking about. Any sin, the smallest of sins is enough to cast us into hell, but there is no sin, no matter how large or how keen is, that will prevent us from going to heaven if we repent.

Simple, not too much more to say than that, okay? Any questions? We've done three chapters, 13, 14, 15. We did saving faith, sanctification, and now repentance unto life.

How did you go to where he's being convicted by the Holy Spirit?

There's a couple of things. One, by developing a regular, organized, and systematic prayer time, all right? Too often, even Reformed people approach prayer like they were charismatic, all right, and just let the Spirit lead, okay?

There are times to pray that way. Do you notice how my pastoral prayer is when I pray from the pulpit? It's systematic. There are certain things that I pray for every week, all right? That's not because I'm lazy or I can forget.

It's because that's the way prayer should be. We're praying, the pastoral prayer is praying for the things specifically that Scripture says we as a church should be praying for. That's why we pray for those things, okay?

In our personal prayer life, it should be the same way. There should be certain things that you pray for on a regular basis, and there's nothing wrong with having either our prayer list or another prayer list or whatnot, and praying very specifically.

When I counsel people, which would be the second thing that I would say if somebody is struggling with a persistent sin, all right, is to seek advice from the eldership, you know, from a counselor, all right?

Because what I do is I have some sheets that actually I give to people to help them in their prayer life, all right? I use an acronym, it's not unique to me. First part, we should be praying and just acknowledging God, okay?

Praising Him, thanking Him, et cetera, just praising Him. Then confession, confession of sin. Notice, we always have a time for confession of sin, all right, and then thanksgiving, and then the last one we should do would be the petitions and supplications.

So if you structure your prayers, you're sure to be praying for those things, all right? And also, accompanying prayer time should be scripture reading, and if you have a particular sin that you're trying to mortify, there's specific scriptures that you should be reading that would give you help in doing so.

But pleading with the Holy Spirit, of course, is one of the primary things. Asking God to help you, to deliver you from that particular sin, okay? But again, I think a structured, systematic prayer time is very, very important.

And again, it's a shame that we have gotten away from structured praying. You notice that Jerry prays, reads sometimes prayers from the Valley of Vision. There's nothing wrong with a structured and written prayer, all right, as long as it doesn't become rote.

You know, if that's all you do all the time, then you can, you know, it's just like anything else. You can fall off the horse on either side. There's always that balance point in the middle. This is what's biblical.

And that's why we use in the pastoral prayer, you know, notice the first thing we do is we acknowledge God, praise him, glorify him, all right? Thank him for what he's done. Then we get into the petitions.

And what are the petitions? Things he's told us to pray for, the nation. Pray for the church. Then we pray for the individual, our individual church. Then we pray for individual members. There's a structure to what we do, okay?

Yes. Years ago I heard, it helps me that when you're, especially how you said, you know, we confess our sins, doing prayer, go through the 10 commandments. Sure. And it actually helps. You know, you go through one and then you start thinking of the things you've done to break that commandment.

It brings about that repentance.

Yeah, anything like that is fine, whatever really works, you know, to keep you focused on your confession. Okay, that will do it for today. We'll meet again.