00:01:14.260Unfortunately, as many of you know, the vast majority of Christians in the West know very little about what they say they believe.
00:01:26.040They say things like, Jesus is my theology, or I don't need doctrine, I just need the Bible, or my only creed is Christ.
00:01:35.060I've heard these things said before. We have a big issue with me, my Bible, and I theology.
00:01:40.800In addition to this, we also have several other groups out there who call themselves Christian, but their definition of the Bible, God, Christ, and the church are out of step with historic, biblical, evangelical Christianity.
00:01:58.300So the truth is, if someone calls themselves a Christian today, that needs to be qualified.
00:03:44.500that are contributing $25 a month or $50 a month.
00:03:47.800We have several people that do $100 a month.
00:03:49.920That really gives us stability where we go, okay, we can count on, we can actually hire this person because we have several, you know, several hundred donors that are on a monthly donation that give us a consistent, reliable income.
00:04:04.480That's really helpful to a ministry like ours.
00:04:34.240Okay, today's question is from Jake from Columbia in South Carolina, or I should say Columbia, South Carolina.
00:04:40.340And he asked the question, Pastor Dale, I'm a youth pastor, and in recent years, we've had more people join our church from Bethel, Hillsong, or one of these other megachurches who promote a health and wealth-like gospel.
00:04:57.200Additionally, we have also had people join from several fundamentalist Baptist churches here in the South.
00:05:04.680Essentially, I'm realizing that many of these new people at our church are unaware that they hold a variety of heretical ideas about the gospel, the church, and the Bible.
00:05:15.140How can I bring our church or help bring our church as a whole to an orthodox view of Christian doctrine?
00:05:23.340Okay, this is a really good question, and it's actually something that I'm going to try to talk to you as a pastor, Jake, but also I think is very helpful for the average Christian.
00:05:32.620And so let's just all dive in together on this.
00:05:36.340And I can assure you, Jake, that this is a problem for all pastors, basically for all time.
00:05:44.200Always having people come in from different walks of life and different experiences and different historical church standards and statements of faith.
00:05:57.020We live in a generation where many people, I mean, many, many people in the church are the walking dead.
00:06:05.520And by that, I mean that they're physically alive, but they're spiritually dead.
00:06:10.320And this is because we've, again, peddled Christianity from the pulpit.0.91
00:06:15.140And we've told people if they pray the sinner's prayer and they get baptized, that they're saved.
00:06:20.840This is very different from the historical biblical Christianity that we see down the annals of church history.
00:06:29.380Biblical Christianity preaches the gospel, and they do it repetitively and boldly.
00:06:35.200There was no altar calls or sinner's prayers to initiate conversion.
00:06:41.320These, again, are extra biblical practices that I believe have no place in the church.
00:06:45.940People don't need to come forward at church to come to Christ.
00:06:49.960Okay, this idea of calling people forward, if you look at it through when it started, you know, coming into church practice, I really believe that it's man's way of measuring the success of his own evangelism.
00:07:04.060You know, I've had people come to Christ through this podcast.
00:07:07.880They never came forward or said the sinner's prayer.
00:07:11.200The sinner's prayer doesn't save people.
00:07:14.260God saves people by opening their ears and their eyes to the gospel, granting them repentance and faith, and bringing them through regeneration and into the fold of God's people.
00:07:26.360People need to hear the raw biblical gospel, and then we need to wait for the Lord to birth these people into his kingdom.
00:07:35.500You know, I want to preach and to proclaim.
00:07:39.720I'm not trying to intellectually persuade people when I preach.
00:08:23.380And for that reason, we have thousands of cultural Christians, these Bible belt kind of Americana Christians, conservative Republican Christians, religious moralist Christians who are deceived.
00:08:38.140They're misinformed, and many of them are actually on their way to hell and they have no idea.0.70
00:08:44.100And so I'm just going to be very bold there.
00:08:46.920And Jake, I'm going to break down my response in two pieces.
00:08:50.380First, we just need to first commit to a constant re-preaching of gospel basics.
00:08:58.280I'm talking over and over and over and over and over and over again.
00:09:04.640Every Sunday, gospel basics over and over.
00:09:08.960Because you don't know when the Lord might break through the heart of somebody.
00:09:17.240Wait, what? That's what the gospel means?
00:09:18.980Like the breakthroughs are just amazing when they come, but it's just faithful preaching of the biblical gospel integrated into your sermons, integrated into your discussions, integrated into your announcements, whatever you possibly can get that gospel basic doctrine out there.
00:09:39.460And in American churchianity, you really need to pry people's dead hands from their church camp testimony where someone asked them at 12 years old if they don't want to go to hell.
00:09:52.660And if that was the case, they should come forward and accept Jesus.
00:09:56.240I mean, these people are white-knuckled onto that testimony.
00:10:00.740And I'm not saying that every church camp convert is false.
00:10:05.580You know, many people are saved through these ministries, but many are also deceived through these moments.
00:10:11.460They believe that they're actually saved, when in reality, they're actually not.
00:10:23.600I'm going to have you guys memorize this quote.
00:10:26.140He says, the only thing worse than not having the assurance of salvation is having the false assurance of salvation.
00:10:35.620Now, I don't want anybody here to just start doubting their salvation because I'm saying this.
00:10:41.060But I do want all of us to self-examine and to look at our comprehension of the gospel against biblical, Christian, historic, evangelical Christianity.
00:10:53.720I look at it and go, do we believe what the Bible says we're supposed to believe?
00:11:06.700John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Wesley, you know, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther, John Calvin.
00:11:16.860I mean, guys, these are people who were in the church for years, in ministry for years.
00:11:24.060Some of them had doctorates and master's degrees in theology before they actually were born again.
00:11:30.300Now, God has unique stories for these men, and I don't want to project those stories upon you.0.52
00:11:34.080But what I'm saying is they were deceived by the Catholic church.
00:11:39.500And today we have all types of deceiving things that are out there.
00:11:43.060and we need to get very clear on what biblical Christianity is
00:11:48.280and make sure that we are in step or in alignment with that.
00:11:54.400So that's my little preach section right there.
00:11:59.980And so secondly, that was the first thing.
00:12:03.000We've got to preach the gospel basics over and over again,
00:12:05.500not assume that people are actually, that everybody in your church is saved.
00:12:10.000Actually, I'm going to go on a tangent just for a second.
00:12:11.940We have to remember that revival, historically, when we think of the word revival, okay, this is not historically defined as a group of people who were a bunch of atheists that came to Christ.
00:12:23.340Like the Great Awakening in the 1700s and the Second Great Awakening, these are great awakenings of people who call themselves Christians.
00:12:33.640These are people in the churches who didn't know they were dead coming alive because someone started preaching the biblical gospel.
00:12:44.100I mean, if you read the accounts of people who are listening to Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,
00:12:53.440this is a sermon that he delivered, and there's accounts of people that are like wallowing.
00:12:59.960I mean, I'm like, like just wailing, screaming out, asking for forgiveness, crying at the foot of the cross, like wild stories of repentance because Jonathan Edwards preached the biblical raw gospel.
00:13:17.160Paul Washer talks about this same thing as well, that he was preaching once, and all of a sudden he started seeing, without an invitation to come forward, people are coming, and they're like wailing and crying and laying themselves on the front of the steps before him, and they're just quiet, and he just continues preaching and preaching, and more people start coming forward.
00:13:40.840This is, this is what we're, I'm trying to say here is that when we preach the biblical gospel, you just are the midwife of God's work.
00:13:51.240He is, he is birthing out these people.
00:13:55.380Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
00:13:58.000Preach the word of God, preach that gospel and let people just come to faith and on their own.
00:14:04.820You don't need to invite them forward.
00:14:06.260You don't need to have them say a printer's prayer.
00:14:07.640Just preach that gospel and let the Lord do the rest.
00:14:11.920Secondly, and to get to the more direct issue at this episode, catechize your church members.
00:14:20.980Okay, present to them biblical, historic, evangelical Christianity and let them again examine that very clear definition written down against what they believe.
00:14:35.140And as you stated, Jake, in your question, you have people from all types of Jesus-related religious backgrounds.
00:14:44.820But when someone says, I'm a Christian today, what does that even mean?
00:14:50.460We have to determine what that means because the Jehovah's Witnesses call themselves Christians.
00:15:24.020Like our ministry at Reformation Seminary,
00:15:27.680we're planting biblical house churches.
00:15:29.580um our ministry is a confessional church movement this doesn't mean that we elevated above scripture
00:15:38.220that's not what i'm saying is that we have clear confessions about what we believe um our little
00:15:44.880house church confession book is a hundred pages long and it talks about what we believe and we're
00:15:50.580always clarifying that and clarifying that to get more clear and so we need confessions in the church
00:15:57.940This is a very helpful tool for a church.
00:16:00.040And I'm not talking about, again, shallow, easily misinterpreted, three-paragraph statement of faith on your church website that makes the entire world feel accepted either.
00:16:11.400I'm talking about churches who either adhere to or adopt their own historic statements of faith.
00:16:20.040I'm thinking about like the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith or the Westminster Statement of Faith.
00:16:25.680John MacArthur spent, I think, several months, maybe even several years, writing the Grace Community Church Constitution.
00:16:38.920But these need to be, again, ultra-clear, thorough, well-documented, explained, biblically-backed, robust statements of faith on Christ, the Trinity, Scripture, the Church, the Gospel, right?
00:16:53.980Some confessional churches have even gone as far to confess openly their beliefs on marriage and children and sexuality and gender and divorce.
00:17:02.120And bottom line, we live in an information age that's riddled with relativism and self-determining truth.
00:17:12.260Okay, we have a low intellect and a low, I mean, meaning that our desire for intellectual assent is low.
00:17:20.120We have very low understanding of logic, very low understanding of philosophy or religion.
00:17:26.760We have a low value for mental theological discipline, low respect and trust for experts like pastors who have been trained.
00:17:36.960We have high emotions. We have high desires for pleasure.
00:17:41.240We're self-centric. We're autonomous and independent by nature.
00:17:45.460I mean, guys, we are a generation that has every ingredient for creating and adopting bad theology, okay?
00:17:53.440This is why the church is a mess right now.
00:17:58.340The founding president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he wrote a really cool little two-paragraph piece, short paragraphs.
00:18:06.840I'm going to read them to you just to kind of explain.
00:18:42.840jellyfish and means less unity and less morality. And it means more heresy. Definitive truth does
00:18:51.380not create heresy. It only exposes it and corrects it. Shut off the creed and the Christian church
00:18:58.900or the Christian work would fill up with heresy, unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless0.85
00:19:05.800deadly. This is just, it's exactly what I'm talking about here. We need to get clear. And so0.77
00:19:12.540So I'll talk more about that in a second, but I would say, Jake, take your church, or if you're a listener, take your family through a robust confession of faith.
00:19:24.720For example, I'm holding right now in my hands the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English.
00:19:32.420It's produced by Founders Ministry, a friend of mine, Tom Askell, I've actually just had him, I did an interview with him that'll be coming out on the podcast in the future.
00:19:42.540founders.org you can actually pick up a copy of that and read it it's about 60 pages long
00:19:48.480now these confessions are they're not to again supersede the scriptures they're simply to
00:19:55.720organize and succinctly identify the grand teaching or the grand narrative of the scriptures
00:20:02.100and i like these older confessions because they've stood the test of time and scrutiny
00:20:08.260And additionally, I like them because they're developed by hundreds of pastors and theologians
00:20:58.260Or how does Christ's resurrection benefit us?
00:21:01.900Or how many sacraments did Christ institute in the New Testament?
00:21:06.660You need to have the answers for this.
00:21:08.160And those questions that I just listed off,
00:21:10.160those come from the catechism for children between the ages of 8 and 10.
00:21:15.320Okay, this is basic stuff that we need to really take hold of
00:21:21.140in our churches, in our families, so that we understand what we believe.
00:21:27.200Ultimately, a confessional church is a place of informed and unified members who are more equipped to guard against heresies and false teachings.
00:21:39.520We need to be informed, and then we can be unified around these ideas, and we're more equipped when we know the truth to notice a lie.
00:21:48.880Okay, Christians need to be clear about what Christianity is, and when you have a church that's filled with people who hold varying views on critical issues, one, this is just grounds for a church to explode and divide and turn into a mess.
00:22:16.860But the only way to deal with that, in my opinion, if this is what's going on in your church,
00:22:21.560a bunch of people who are unclear, a bunch of people who don't like,
00:22:25.700they don't even know they have a statement of faith on their church's website.
00:22:28.780This is not good because this is a breeding ground for deception.
00:22:34.420And the only way to get past this, as I said, is preaching the biblical doctrine and gospel truth
00:22:42.120And then again, offering systematic training and reading of historic statements of faith that are robust, deep, and then grasping those fundamentals through catechism, through question and answer catechism.
00:22:58.680Guys, these are wonderful tools that have proven to be very fruitful throughout church history.
00:23:05.720So I'll give you guys a few resources on this episode, and hopefully it'll be helpful for you guys as we close out.
00:23:12.120But a few things that I'm going to say just kind of you can just Google around and find is the Apostles' Creed is a good one.
00:23:19.700Just it's essential, basic Christian fundamentals.
00:23:23.780It's something that a lot of churches would recite on a regular basis or many Christians have memorized.
00:23:28.580But I would look at the Apostles' Creed.
00:23:30.920I would look at the Athanasian Creed.0.78
00:23:33.220And this is a Trinitarian defense against Arianism early, I believe, I think it's the 4th century is when that happened.
00:23:43.360But the Athanasian Creed is a great creed to understand the complexity of explaining and representing the Trinity faithfully when people ask about it.
00:23:53.760And guys, so many issues come, I mean, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, I mean, the way they view Trinity, I mean, it's very, very different than how we view Trinity.
00:24:02.300The Nicene Creed, same thing, kind of a reaction to the Arian view from the, I guess it would be mid to late 4th century.
00:24:14.580And this is, again, another Trinitarian view, but it also talks about the hypostatic union, Jesus being fully man and fully God.
00:24:23.500These are, again, just basic creeds, which are different than statements of faith.
00:24:28.600The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith is great.
00:24:31.260It's a Reformed theology on a Reformed view of the Christian faith.
00:24:38.460And it's robust, not overwhelming, but robust.
00:24:42.500The Westminster Confession of Faith can be a little overwhelming,
00:24:44.860but it's a fantastic read getting through it,
00:24:47.860especially if you could find a version and it's in modern English.
00:24:50.640Banner of Truth produced a version of that, I believe.
00:24:55.040I don't know if it's in modern English or not,
00:24:56.920but it's worth having on your bookshelf for sure.
00:24:58.940Another great resource is the Heidelberg Catechism. I like that catechism actually the most because instead of talking in a third-person perspective, it's talking in a first-person perspective. It's very pointed at you and at your heart, and it's just a really great catechism.
00:25:17.720It comes from a Presbyterian background, but there's actually a Baptist version of the Heidelberg Catechism.