in perseverance. It's by looking at leaders, those who spoke the word of God, and not just thinking about what they taught, but he says, consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. And so these leaders that probably were people that this church knew, they were probably people who maybe were persecuted, maybe were martyred, but they made it to the end. So you are to look at how they made it to the end. and think, how can I do that? What was it about their life that I can imitate that will help me to persevere? And so we are to remember our leaders, those who spoke the word of God and consider the outcome of their way of life. And that, I think, includes not just the ones that we know personally, but in church history. And so today, we're gonna remember Richard Sibbes, Consider the outcome of his way of life and imitate his faith. So what can we imitate about Richard Sibbes? I think this is the main thing I hope that you will walk away with. Someone said this about him. Of this blessed man, let this just praise be given. Heaven was in him before he was in heaven. Heaven was in him before he was in heaven. So if you don't learn anything else today from this lesson, I hope that you will walk out of this room thinking, I wanna be like Richard Sibbes and have heaven in me before I am in heaven. So as Philippians 3 verse 20 says, our citizenship is in heaven. we should see ourselves as primarily citizens of heaven, not this earth and not a country on this earth. Or as Hebrews 11 verse 16 says about Abraham, he desired a better country that is a heavenly one. And so as you go through life, you should be desiring your heavenly country. And because you're looking forward and thinking about heaven, having your mind on heaven, heaven will be in you. It will reveal itself in how you live, how you talk to others, how you handle difficulties in life. And so Sibbes was also called the heavenly doctor, the heavenly doctor. So you notice a theme here. It's as if he was sent from heaven, the way that he spoke and preached. He was also called the sweet dropper. So in his sermons, it's like drops of medicine, but they're sweet drops. One person was converted under his preaching and he said this, Sibbes' sweet, soul-melting gospel sermons won my heart and refreshed me much, for by him I saw and had much of God and was confident in Christ." So his sermons and the books, if you will read his books, they're full of encouraging things and hope-giving things. Sweet, soul-melting gospel because he had his mind on heaven. Also, because his mind was on heaven, he focused on Christ in his sermons. So I wanted to give you some titles of books that he wrote, and basically all his books were sermons that turned into books. But notice how all of these are about Christ. So there's the bruised reed, speaking of Christ. But then he also wrote one called Bowels Opened. Now that doesn't sound good to us. But bowels opened is talking about the heart of Christ. So the bowels of Christ is his heart. And how the bowels or the heart of Christ go out to his people constantly. So Christ's heart is open to us. He wrote the spouse's earnest desire after Christ. So our love for Christ. He wrote precious promises. a glance of heaven, the excellency of the gospel above the law, and then the glorious feast of the gospel. So doesn't that make you want to imitate him? Don't you want to be the kind of person that just thinks about Christ and thinks about the gospel and how glorious of a feast the gospel is? Someone wrote in the preface to the glorious feast, they said this, alas, Christians have lost much of their communion with Christ and his saints, the heaven upon earth, while they have woefully disputed away the life of religion. And so to recover spiritual relish of these truths, these sermons are published. So you see they're saying that people just always want to focus on arguing about all these things about religion, but they've lost communion with Christ, which they say is heaven on earth. So Sibbes in his books and his sermons always is pointing people to Christ and his grace and his love. So that's what we want to imitate. So let's learn more about his life. I'll tell you first a little of the details of his life, then we're gonna talk about the Puritan movement and how he fits into that. So first of all, he was born in 1577. He's from England, of course. So 1577, and he dies in 1635. So he's in the early days of what we call the Puritan movement. So late 1500s, early 1600s. So when he's 18, 1595, he goes to Cambridge University, and after he gets his degrees, he continues working there as a teacher, teaching the Bible at Cambridge. And then when he's 40, in the year 1617, he becomes a preacher at a place called Grey's Inn in London. Grey's Inn. Okay, so Gray's Inn doesn't sound like a church, does it? That's not a church name. So he wasn't, at this point, a pastor of a church, but he was preaching at Gray's Inn. I don't know if you've read or seen something related to the book Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. And that whole story is based on these men who make a bet. Can this guy go around the world in 80 days? And these men are at a man's club, a social club, at this, I don't know exactly what time, maybe 1800s, in England. And that's what they had in England. Today we have country clubs. with golf courses and tennis courts. Back then they just had these men's clubs and they were just men sitting around smoking and talking and reading the newspapers. And so Grey's Inn was a club for lawyers, the social club for the men who were lawyers in London. And so Sibbes' job was to preach twice every Sunday. And so notice, again, that's not church. So that's on top of church. Everybody would go to church and then listen to Sibbes preach later two more times on Sundays. So you guys can't complain, okay? Sibbes said about London at the time, I think there is no place in the world where there is so much preaching. No place in the world where there's so much preaching, because they had all these clubs where they would hire preachers. So most of his adult life was spent preaching at Gray's Inn, and then later on he went back to teach at Cambridge for a while, and then it wasn't until the last two years of his life that he became a pastor. The church was called Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge. So most Puritans were pastors, but Sibbes was not a pastor for most of the time. He was ordained in the Church of England, but it wasn't the last two years until he was pastoring a church. Another interesting thing about Sibbes is that he never married. He was a lifelong single, and part of that was that that position at Gray's Inn, those kinds of positions, they required the preacher to be single for all of his life, or, well, as long as he wanted the job, I guess. So I was just thinking about that. I was wondering if that's because of the influence of Roman Catholicism, not allowing priests to be married, and that was still being kind of influenced the times in England. So that's basically his life. Now, Sibbes was a Puritan. So let me ask you, what is a Puritan? And you don't have to give me some deep scholarly answer, but what do you think we mean? We use this word all the time. What is a Puritan? Tony. Yeah, good. He pretty much got it all, but does anybody else want to add anything? Yeah, so they were a group of mostly pastors, but, you know, including the members of the churches. They were a group of people who wanted to continue the Reformation in the Church of England. So they technically existed from about 1558 to the end of the 1600s. So many of you probably know that King Henry VIII broke off from the Roman Catholic Church because he wanted a divorce from his wife, and the Church of Rome did not allow that. So he broke off. He said, fine, I'll start my own church so that I can get a divorce. And so he started the Church of England. So the Church of England, started by King Henry, was the official state church, but many people saw the Church of England, or also called the Anglican Church, they saw that it was too heavily influenced by Roman Catholicism. And so the Puritans wanted to remove Catholic influence, Roman Catholic influence from the Church of England. So I'm skipping a bunch of things, but King Henry VIII died in 1547. And then in the 1550s, we had Queen Mary. She was known as Bloody Mary because she was Catholic. And so in this time period, you have the Church of England just going back and forth from Protestant to Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, based on who was king or queen. So Bloody Mary persecutes the Protestants because she's Catholic, but then she dies, and then her sister, half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I becomes the queen, and she is a Protestant. And so in 1558, she passes something called the Act of Uniformity. And this is why the Puritans start at this time. Because this means that all pastors and all churches have to be uniform in their worship according to what the Church of England says, according to what the Queen says. And so there's this book, the Book of Common Prayer, that has to be used. Everybody has to be uniform in using it. And the Puritans had issues over a lot of things, like kneeling before the Eucharist, before the communion table. They did not think that was right. They had issues with pastors wearing robes, making the sign of the cross when you baptize someone. They were even against wedding rings. Did you know that? They were against wedding rings. is they thought that wedding rings were, well, they had to become a Roman Catholic superstition at the time. It's like the ring itself was blessed by the priest and so it had some special blessing from God. So they were against even wedding rings. So you have two kinds of Protestants in England. You have nonconformists and conformists. So the non-conformists, the separatists, they said, no, we're not gonna be part of the Church of England. We're gonna separate. And then you have the conformists. So Richard Sibbes was a conformist. He stayed in the Church of England. And it wasn't because he agreed with anything that they were doing. Well, he agreed with some things, but he didn't agree with all these other things that the Puritans were upset about. So Sibbes was a Puritan. And he stayed in the Church of England. He stayed because he wanted to change it. He thought the best way to change was from the inside. And you have this happening today. Some people, they think, I don't like the way churches do things or a denomination does things, so I'm just gonna go start my own church, do it the right way. And then there's another philosophy that says, if there's something wrong, then we need to go in and change from the inside. So Richard Sibbes disagreed with a lot of things, but he stayed in the Church of England, and we'll talk about that in a minute. It's also important to know that this is at the beginning of the Puritan movement, and so at the end of his life, things get a lot harder for him. He doesn't get thrown in jail or anything, but there are positions at Cambridge that he wasn't allowed to get because of his beliefs, so there's a lot more controversy. A lot of the Puritans that we know are at the latter time period of the 1600s, and they face a lot of persecution. And so probably Sibbes, if he had lived longer, he probably would have had to leave eventually, but we don't know that, obviously. So Queen Elizabeth dies, and then comes King James in 1603. What is King James known for? The Bible. In what year? 1611. Good job. So he's Protestant. This is why he wants an English Bible, because he's a Protestant. But the Puritans don't like King James. He really is the one who starts the battle with the Puritans. He outlawed preaching on predestination. That's kind of the first main thing that really got them going against each other. So it's that time period where Sibbes is now living. So we're gonna talk about why Sibbes stayed. His biographer calls him a cautious reformer and a moderate Puritan. So one person put it this way, that Sibbes, quote, preserved the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, spirits might not evaporate themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, conscience-perplexing questions. So, similar to what I said at the beginning, basically, Sibbes thought his ministry was to focus on the essentials. and to not have people have their souls evaporate, souls die over these little minute questions in his mind. He wanted to focus people on the glory and beauty of Christ. Sibbes thought that division was a worse problem than the problems that were already in the church. So he said, must we make a rent, a tear in the church for circumstantial evils? That is a remedy worse than the disease. So division from the church would have been a remedy worse than the disease. Also, the issue of separation was about what he considered to be a true church. So I know at least some of you know the answer to this. So what is a true church? What are the marks, what are the things that make a true church? Christ, yes, Christ-centered. And the gospel, what else? What makes a church different from inter-varsity or youth group or Bible study at your house? Leadership, okay. Biblical leadership. The sacraments, yes. One more, related. Okay, teaching, yeah, and that would be under the Christ and the Gospels. Walt. Interesting, but I wouldn't add that as a requirement for the church. Okay, yeah, you're getting close. Yeah. Right, yeah, those would relate to each other, so you have to be a church of true people of God. The answer I was looking for is church discipline. Church discipline. which is related to the sacraments, because you should only baptize believers, and you should only give the Lord's Supper to believers, and people are repenting of their sins. So, marks of a church, gospel, sacraments, discipline, which is related to the sacraments. That's what Sibbes believed. And so he said, Church of England has all of those things. They're a true church. The issues that people were fighting about were like what we call the Episcopal government, so having bishops, and then especially that the King of England was the head of the church. Even today, technically, King Charles is the head of the Church of England. And so he swore to defend the faith, and people were not sure, is he actually gonna say those words? But he said those words. So, the King of England is the head of the Church of England, and a lot of Puritans obviously disagreed with that. But Sibbes said, that's not an issue worth dividing over, fighting about, because we can administer the sacraments, practice discipline, and preach the gospel. He also pointed out there are problems in the churches that separate it. So he said, preaching is the most important. You've got these churches, yeah, they've got the right kind of leadership structure. They don't have bishops and all these things, but they have corrupt preachers. They have people who aren't preaching the gospel. And so, at least over here, if I stay in my church, I can preach the gospel. He also felt responsibility for the believers in the Church of England, and so he said to these other people, he said, quote, You see? You Puritans, you're separating, but how did you get converted? John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, they were converted by listening to the Church of England preachers preach. And so he was making the same point. People are becoming Christians in this church, so I, as a preacher, I need to help them grow in Christ. I can't abandon all of these Christians to just go to another church. So, here's his conclusion. He said, there will be miscellaneous, sorry, there will be a miscellany, I'm not really sure why he says that, but there will be a miscellany and a mixture in the visible church as long as the world endures. So it is no better than soul murder for a man to cast himself out of the church, either for real or imaginary corruptions. So let me admonish you to return yourself from these extravagant courses and submissively to render yourself to the sacred communion of this truly evangelical Church of England. So that was from a letter that he wrote, probably the letter where he makes his strongest case, where he's calling upon people to submit themselves to the Church of England. So I'll give you a little hint that I don't agree with Sibbes. And so I'm not saying that we're saying all this to say that he was right. If I was in the 1600s, I think I would be more along the lines of the other Puritans, not Richard Sibbes. And it's interesting actually that Sibbes at Cambridge, he was teaching a lot of these men. They were kind of his disciples. So like Thomas Goodwin is a name you might know. Thomas Goodwin was one of his disciples. And yet Thomas Goodwin learns everything from Sibbes, but then goes off and does the opposite. And so, Just because Sibbes is saying and doing all this doesn't mean we have to come to that same conclusion. We're Baptists, and so Baptists by definition are separatists. That's how we came about in this time period, is we separated over the issue of baptism. So, I personally don't agree with Sibbes on this specific point when he's talking about staying in the Church of England. So, why are we talking about it? And how can we imitate his faith? So here's what I think we can pick out of his life and the way he handled this issue. So two things I think we can appreciate about what he's saying here. So first of all, I think we can appreciate his commitment to the church. He was not committed to the church only in fair weather, in good times. He was committed through good and bad. He stuck with his church in very rough times. There are a lot of things that he disagreed with and yet he still stuck with the church. And so for us, this should challenge us and our commitment to the church. And Pastor Hill talked about this last week, but this is so foreign. Remember what I was saying about our biases? This is so foreign to how people think about the church today. Today, when people want a church, they have a shopping list, and we call it church shopping. because they're looking for certain music, certain programs, or a certain size church, and they have this list of things that they want. And Sibbes is in a totally different universe in thinking about that kind of thing. Sibbes looks at his own church, he's like, yeah, I disagree with that, I don't like that, I don't like that, I don't like that, I don't like that, there are 30 things about the church of England that I don't like. But there are three things that I like. So because it's got the three things that are most important to me, I'm sticking with this church. He looked for the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. And isn't that ironic for our day? Does any visitor come and ask, does your church practice church discipline? Do you rightly administer the sacraments? Tell me how you administer the sacraments. I wanna know that right off the bat. Maybe even before I visit. This is what I wanna know because these are what's most important to being a church. That's not how most people think, right? They ask, what do you have for children? What's the music like? And then, you know, don't even think about whether you're gonna bring church discipline when sin happens in my life. So we can ask Sibbes' question, I'll read it again, we can ask it, but that doesn't mean we have to agree with him on the way he lived it out in this case. But I think his question is a good one. Must we make a rent, make a tear in the church for circumstantial evils? This is a remedy worse than the disease. Or in other words, Should I divide the church because I see faults in it? That's a remedy worse than the disease. So we can appreciate his commitment to the church. Second, what I love most about Sibbes is his focus on Christ and how he preaches the gospel. So again, another quote from his biography, Godly preaching as the means of the Spirit's activity rather than historical organizational continuity was the heart of Sibbes' vision of the church. So the heart of the church when he looked at it was not you know, succession from the apostles and the bishops and the king of England. That's not what he said defined the church. What defines the church is godly preaching. So, as long as he could stand up on the Lord's day and preach Jesus Christ, he was gonna stay there. And he just wanted to preach Christ. Because he really thought Doesn't matter what the king says or what the king does. If I can preach Christ, it's preaching that's gonna help people grow. It's preaching that is going to save sinners. And then on the other hand, you can have the great structures and the great organization, but you have bad preaching, people aren't gonna grow. So we can focus on Christ and we can focus on the gospel. Now again, we're Baptists, I'm a Baptist, I love the Second London Confession, I love everything about it, I love being Reformed Baptist, but the reason I love all those things is because it helps me focus on Christ. It draws me to Christ and we want to love Christ more. So I believe all of these things about being a Reformed Baptist, they all serve the purpose of focusing on Christ. It's not an end in itself. It's to draw us to Christ. So we want to hear Christ. We want to hear about Christ. So Spurgeon said this about himself, but he was quoting Sibbes. He said, the special work of our ministry is to lay open Christ, to hold up the tapestry and unfold the mysteries of Christ. That's what Sibbes said about himself. That's what Spurgeon wanted to be like. That's what a preacher like me wants to be like. And that's what I hope draws you to this church and helps you to be committed to this church, is that we would open up Christ. So, as we began, may heaven be in us before we are in heaven, as it was for Richard Sibbes. Let's pray. Our God, we do thank you for the glories of the gospel. We thank you for all of your grace revealed in the Son of God, the Son of God who became flesh, who lived on this earth, sympathized with all of our weakness, lived a righteous life, died on the cross and bore your wrath, endured the curse, drank the cup of the wrath of God, fully down to the dregs, all out of love, love for people like us, love for sinners, love for people who are rebellious. We thank you for the glories of this good news of your love in Jesus Christ. We thank you for Richard Sibbes proclaiming the excellencies of Christ. We pray that you would help us to preach Christ. We pray that we who are part of this church would desire and want to hear more and more of all of the treasures that are hidden in Christ Jesus. And we ask that even in the rest of this day, and as we come to worship you in a few minutes, that our eyes would be drawn to the greatness of the Lord Jesus. And that as we hear your word again, we would hear good news of the gospel. And so we bring these things before you, coming through our mediator, through our savior. Praying in Jesus' name, amen. Okay.