This is September the 9th. This is the chapter 21 or article 21 of the Christian liberty and liberty of the conscience. Yeah, we went through section 2 and we're going to just kind of recap real quick. Section 2 says, God alone is Lord of the conscience and has left it free from all doctrines and commandments of men which are in any respect contrary to his word and not contained in it. This is the idea that We have a liberty of conscience not free from the commandments of the Word of God or the Word of God in totality. We are free living out the Word of God as Christ lives in us and Holy Spirit lives in us. We are free to do those things that we couldn't do beforehand. but we are free also in a different way. We are free in liberty from the commandments of men. We don't have to worry about the Pharisees commanding us on how we're supposed to live. We don't have to worry about, today, and we're gonna talk about it later on, is this social justice, social gospel idea. We don't have to try to live up to the expectations and demands of every single subgroup or Christian group that identifies everything as a gospel issue. And that's very important. I'll tell you what, guys. The Southern Baptist Convention and so many of the denominations are falling into this social gospel. And what they're doing is, in order to please men, they are turning their back on the true gospel. You have to ask yourself the question, what is the gospel? When you're talking about the social gospel and you try to add social justice to the gospel and say that everything is a gospel issue, what you do is you bind men's consciences. I saw a perfect example in the Abolish Human Abortion guys, AHA. Charles Russell or whatever his name was, I can't remember his name. He's the leader of this group, and him and all the AHA people say, if you are not actively supporting their cause, their group, you're not a Christian. They're the ones that go outside of churches and protest churches. Sundays rather than going into the church and being salt and light and rather going in the church and working with the church They go and protest churches that do not support them or aren't out actually don't support them and Are not standing out in front of abortion clinics all the time. It's their idea is if yeah well no no that's that is their church they say this is church and see that's the social gospel that's the that's a good good understanding of what a social gospel looks like when you add anything to the gospel oh are you feeding the homeless oh are you involved in race relations oh are you involved in you know sectarian politics are you involved it's uh... It's Socinianism, which comes from a guy named Socinius. He did a lot to twist and pervert the meaning of the gospel. It's seen, first of all, in Galatians. The Pharisees are the ones that really started the whole idea of adding stuff to the gospel. The Galatian heresy was that they would say, you can be a Christian, but you have to do this stuff too. According to Article 2, God alone is the Lord of the conscience. And that is very important when you consider all that's going on today with the call. I mean, you guys got to realize there are some humongous named people that are starting to get into the social gospel. And Albert Muller is one of them. And I'm telling you, as much as I love Albert Muller, He and John MacArthur are butting heads pretty good. Phil Johnson, they're butting heads pretty good over this issue. They're saying, look, all this extra stuff is adding to the gospel. We're going to talk about it in the sermon discussion today. This idea of the social gospel, and we're going to look at it John MacArthur had the social justice and the gospel statement of affirmations and denials, and it talks about what we as Christians believe and what we reject because this freight train of socialism, this freight train of intersectionality, is all coming in. I mean, this is only probably the second or third week you've heard me talk about intersectionality because this is such a new thing. Yeah, it came out some years back, but intersectionality, the lady that started this was a black lesbian protester who was a college professor and said that every single thing in society makes her a victim and everything intersects into her victimhood And basically, it's every way that you can possibly identify your background or history or your society or anything, that makes you a victim in that way. So she's a lesbian, so she's a victim of society because she's a lesbian. They haven't appropriated her right to be a lesbian. She's black, so she's a victim. I mean, she's got a dozen other things, but everybody grabs a hold of this intersectionality idea, and that what they do is, in order to please men and make people happy, I mean, you have to think, all of this is born out of the seeker-sensitive, Rick Warren-type mentality. Because what do I have to do to cause the community to want to be at this church? Not what do I have to do to proclaim the gospel to this community, but what do I have to do to get this community to want to be at this church and fund this church and support this church? Well, I go out and I do polls for seekers, and I get their ideas of what they think is most important, and I speak to those issues. racism politics you know all this stuff becomes the central focus and in order to bring all these people in, you know, LGBTQ, all this P, AX, XYZ, all those numbers and letters. For all these people to come into the church, I've got to open the doors up, slow down on the gospel, you know, not speak so much about sin, righteousness, and judgment to come, but then start addressing the people about the work of the gospel. Well, if you're a Christian, you're going to be out here. It's, you know, Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself. And so since you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, that's a gospel issue. And you're supposed to be out here doing all this service work. Phil Johnson pointed out, we're going to talk about it. Phil Johnson pointed out that a lady actually told him that came out and told him that, you know, Jesus says you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. And he goes, absolutely. There is no, no, uh, Qualm with Christians out in the community serving people in the community no problem with that at all for the gospel sake But this is not the gospel and she starts arguing with him. He says ma'am Jesus says you're supposed to love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind strength and that is the what First commandment and you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself and that's the other great commandment. He says this is law the gospel frees us from law and according to the Word of God. He says, what you're not understanding is you're trying to bind people back under the law. And that's what's going on here. We have a free conscience. That's what we believe. You know, James 4.12. There is one lawgiver who is able to save and destroy. Who art thou that judgest another? We have to look at it. If there's one lawgiver, if there's one that's given us the truth, and he's given us his standards, we can't be bound under the consciences of men who want to cause you to have to live a certain way to please them. You know, the Pharisees, they did it. Think about how they did it. Tea, mint, steps, you know, words that you speak in a given day, the Sabbath and all the things you did on those days, couldn't do on those days, you know, how you washed your hands, the ceremonial washings. I mean, think about this. The ceremonial washing, I think, was the most disgusting thing that they could possibly do. Because what they did is they made that a religious thing. You had to hold your fist like this, and somebody dropped water on you, sprinkled the water on you. You'd sit there and shake it off, and you'd hold your hands like this, they'd sprinkle water on you, sprinkle water on you, you'd dry it off so many times with this hand, so many times with this hand, this way, this way, and then you were clean. But they had absolutely nothing to do with righteousness, with godliness. Nothing to do. It was just outward show. And what he's talking about here, and what we find out in Galatians and other passages, is all of this stuff is to bind men's consciences. That's all it is. It's to bind men's consciences. And if it sounds good to the world, most of the majority of the Christianity is going to pick it up. Because they're not interested in what the gospel says anyway, they're not interested in the word of God anyway, they're interested in what sounds good to the world, because it sounds good, it's the most acceptable, so we can make this our religion. Yep. When the Antichrist comes, at the last moments of world history, before Christ returns and establishes his kingdom, what do you think about this? When Antichrist comes in and establishes his one world religion and all these different things, you've got to understand that this guy is not going to be some monster that comes in with a dragon head and with crowns on his head and looks scaly and red and looks all monstrous. He's going to look like an angel of light. He's going to come in and he's going to be so Christian that it sounds so Christian to the deceived world. I mean, you think the social gospel is another inroad for the Antichrist to come in because everybody's picking up on everything of the world, bringing it into the church and saying, this is Christianity. When the Bible itself tells us the gospel is one entity, that it's one factual entity that's singularly all by itself, and the work that comes out of the gospel is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. But we don't do that before the gospel, we do that after the gospel. It's a byproduct. James says, you show me your faith without works, and I'll show you my faith by my works. He's not saying that he is a Christian because he's working. He's saying because he's a Christian, he's working. He's doing these things. Now, you want to jump in and say all these things that we need to be doing as Christians, that's fine. But you've got to prove it from the scripture. Our conscience needs to be bound to God and free from man's law, from the man that's trying to bind us. It goes on here, it says, we've been left free from all doctrines and commandments of men, Acts 4.19 and 4.29, 1 Corinthians 7.23, Matthew 5.9. In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. I mean, Jesus himself condemns those things. We see these truths that come up, and it's amazing. Nothing has ever changed when it comes to the religious world. Yeah, we might have new technology, but we're still dealing with the same things. We might have better technology, you know, nice lighting system at the house or whatever, but nothing's really changed. We still are dealing with people who want to destroy the gospel and replace it. We're dealing with people that want to replace the gospel and the message of the cross. So we started at point two and as we finished up last week we get to this section. This week says thus to believe such doctrines or obey such commands out of conscience is to betray true liberty of the conscience. Let me back that up. And he left it free from all doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any respect contrary to his word, and not contained in it. Thus, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience." Colossians 2.20, Diane. You know, Colossians 2, we're talking about these different ordinances of men. Don't touch, don't eat, don't drink, don't taste, all these things, right? And 22 to 23, Gary, you want to grab that? All those things, those outward things, do they make you more holy? Do they make you more righteous? Are they sanctifying? No. No. You do them or you don't do them, but if you do them to be bound under a man's commandments, you're living up to his standards, not God's. And humility, let's see, it says, which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will worship. You're doing this as an act of the will. And it looks like you're doing it out of a worshipful attitude, maybe. And it could be anything. I mean, anything from, I'm fasting. I used to love slash hate watching people talk about, oh, we're going to have a 20-day fast. We're going to have a 10-day fast. I'm going on fasting. I'm going to go tell everybody, I'm going fasting for the next week or two. They put it on Facebook. They put it on social media. They go to church. They tell everybody they're going fasting. They're going to do all this fasting. And I'm going, OK. Jesus says when you fast, you don't tell anybody. That's between you and God. You don't brag about it. You don't tell people about it. When I do it, I don't brag about it. I don't do it for very long because I don't want to get grumpy and angry and all that stuff. But there's times when it's very, very necessary. But when you do it just to make a show of it, God's not the one being worshiped. There you are. You're looking for somebody to see what you're doing. Now think about what it says here. It's a show of will worship, right? If you're dead in Christ, if you're dead from the rudiments or the fundamental things of the world, why are you living in the world and are subject to the ordinance of the world? You think about how much that plays into what we're doing with society today. Are you a Christian because you're a Republican? But before you go there, I do know Christians that are Democrats. And I go, I mean, I listen to the, I mean, look, there's old time Democrats that are, you know, they've been Democrats all their lives and they're not gonna change, you're not gonna get them to change because that's just what they're, they've been, you know, kind of programmed into believing. Now, they are blinded, because I'm going to tell you something. As much as I'm not a Democrat, just because you're a Democrat doesn't mean you're going to hell. OK? And I got news for you. As disgusting as it is, to be pro-choice doesn't mean that you're going to hell either. I think it's disgusting and wicked. But if you've repented of your sin and trusted Christ alone as your Savior, I do believe you're going to have a major problem with your conscience when it comes to the issue of murdering a baby. But they've so indoctrinated themselves by the rudiments of the world, Well, yeah, but by the rudiments of the world, they've so indoctrinated themselves into what the world's teaching that they've actually justified it by saying, well, it's not a baby. Now, they're going to stand before God. They're going to stand before God, and they're going to be judged by God. Are they truly saved? I don't know. I don't have a clue on that. But what I do know is this. All of those are side issues and not the gospel. The gospel is a totally separate entity, and if you are bound to the gospel through Jesus Christ, by faith alone, by grace alone, and Christ alone, and it's all to the glory of God alone, yes, I believe there's gonna be changes in life, but guess what? There are people that start from very wicked spots, and they slowly are sanctified. And they don't come along in the same progression of sanctification as you have. So they could be in pretty messed up situations. We can't say that that person's not a Christian because of this or that. Yes, I think it's wrong. Yes, I think it's disgusting. The vast majority of people that are pro-abortion know I don't think they're Christians. However, I can't wrap that around and say that's a gospel. I can't say that's a gospel. There's one simple gospel, and we have to stand on that. Now, if we've been given true liberty, we shouldn't be bound under the consciences of any person. Now think, Colossians 2, 23. Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship and humility and neglecting of the body, not to an honor to satisfy the flesh. What's he talking about satisfying the flesh? In this case. Look at the context. What satisfies the flesh of a believer more than anything? A believer. We're talking about people that proclaim Christianity. What satisfies the flesh of the believer more than anything? The word starts with R or you can say S. Righteousness or sanctification. The true believer wants to be right inside of God. Wants to be clean. Sometimes you have to sit out on your porch and scream and yell and just go crazy praying to God. about your sin. Sometimes you have to go out in the wilderness or drive down the road and have this big, long, tear-filled battle with God as you're screaming and yelling about the sin that so tears you up. I've had many of those times in my life when I've driven down the road and I'm angry at everything because the wickedness in my life. If you haven't, you may not be a Christian. Because that battle of the flesh, you want to conquer it. And you don't want to submit to the things of the world. You've been free from the law, you're free from the world, you're set at liberty, and your body wants to be, your spirit, let's say, wants to be in alignment with Jesus Christ. The requiring of an implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also. It always struck me that in the scripture, the Bible talks about those that forbid marriage and forbid certain rights of Christianity. Because the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, since it actually started around 450, has taken those doctrines and forbid marriage. They know you can't get married to the priest and all these guys. Well, what's been the outcropping of that? Not just homosexual men, yes. Homosexual men, pedophiles, all this stuff going on, but you also have cases where you have even popes in history that have had children, and their children have become popes. Yeah. I mean, you have all these children, you're not supposed to. You know, when you say Bishop so-and-so has a kid, you're going, wait a minute, what? You know, it's not a sin to have a kid, but it is a sin how it came about, because you didn't get married, you know. I mean, there's, you know, fact of history that you have nunneries that were brothels. You had, you know, these Roman Catholic brothels. And I'm not just targeting Roman Catholics here, but think about what it says here. The requiring of an implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience I think that's what the Roman Catholic Church demanded. There's only one faith and anybody else that doesn't believe exactly what the Pope and the Cardinals and the bishops and the priests, exactly what they say. You could be put on the rack, you could be boiled, you could be hung, all these things can happen to you. You better believe what we say or you're gonna die. You know, that was the standard, that you better believe what we say or we're going to die. But then you also have the idea of the blind obedience. Guys, in most of the churches today, They demand a blind obedience to the convention or the group think idea of what the collective, SBC for example, what the collective thought is. But as we're noticing that collective thought is changing. So where do you stand? Where do you stand? Well, this passage of 1689 here, this article tells us we stand with Christ. We stand on the word. If you can show me where the Bible says this is wrong or we're wrong, then fine, we'll stop. But this right here has the sectarian idea right in the middle of it. Sex or groups, different groups. I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos. Listen to this, 1 Corinthians 3, 5-7. Who then is Paul? Who is Apollos? 1 Corinthians 1 tells us that there's a group that says, I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos, I am of Cephas, Peter, and I am of Christ. Got all these different groups in this one church saying, I agree with the author and teacher, Paul. I agree with Apollos because he's the man, he's the notable man. I agree with Peter because he's the notable apostle. Another one says, yeah, but I agree with Jesus Christ. They don't agree with Christ, they're looking at sectarianism. The man that says, I agree with Christ, should have looked and said, wait a minute, what are you all doing? That's what Paul did. He says, who then is Paul and what is what and who is a Paulist? We're just ministers by whom you believe. Look, we just proclaim the gospel. We didn't do anything special. The Lord gave to every person. He says, I have planted a Paulist water, but God is one that gave the increase. And you have to think about what's the context. They're not saying anything about you can't go out into the world and serve the homeless and serve those that are needy and seek justice and demand righteousness. But when you try to incorporate justice and righteousness and all the outward things of what it means to be a Christian into the gospel, that sectarian thing comes along. What group are you part of today? Well, you're righteous because you're part of the Democrat Party. You're righteous because you're part of the Republican Party. You're righteous because you're Antifa. You're righteous because you're black. You're righteous because you're white. You're righteous because you're, well, this is racism, sectarianism, socinianism, all those isms and schisms coming into the gospel, into the church. That's what's going on. Go ahead. Because they try to make it a gospel. They try to say, well... Oh, the scriptural? Well, I mean, you think... Well, actually, what it's talking about is the outcome of true salvation. The outcome of true salvation is not a social gospel. It's you go... But listen to the context of the passage. Whatsoever you've done to these my brothers, my beloved, You're not going out. This is not just going out into all the world. This is going out and helping those Christians that are in need. You know, Jesus talks about going to the jails. Now we need to have jail ministries because man, they need to hear the gospel. But this is talking about going to a jail, a prison where Paul was at and saying, brother, Paul, come over here. Let me feed you because they're not feeding Paul. They're not giving him clothing. He asked for a camel skin coat because he's freezing to death when he was in prison. Because they didn't give him a blanket. They didn't give him three square meals a day. He had to trust in the people that were believers. And guess what? They go over there and they start giving him food and the Roman soldiers are going, what are you doing over there? Hey, let me ask you a question. Do you worship Caesar just as much as you do Jesus Christ? No. No, no, no, no, no, no. Christ alone, solus Christos. Oh, get in prison too. Jesus is talking about, are you willing to lay down your life for your brothers and sisters in Christ? And they're saying, are you willing to follow Christ and go out and do social justice movements? Because Jesus was demanding that whatever you did to the least of these, you've done it to me. They take the scripture and they twist it to make it a socialist issue, a social gospel issue, a social justice issue. The idea of the passage is, as Christians, What is the thing that the Bible kind of makes clear when you look at Jesus? I actually had a person post this on Facebook talking about the greatest love of Jesus, and if we were that way, we'd do the same thing, is that he went and he fed thousands of people, and we should love people the same way. And I said, wait a minute. The context of this passage is Jesus Christ fed all these thousands of people, at least 5,000. Well, no, they actually wanted him to, the next day they wanted him to feed him again, and the next day he wanted to feed him again, and they wanted to make him the king, to force him to be king, because he was able to feed them and they didn't have to do anything for themselves. They wanted to force him to be king, and what did Jesus do? Denied him. Walked away from him. Turned away from him. He gave them the gospel, and then when they rejected that gospel and wanted the stuff, he turned away and walked away from it. He said, you know, I have no part with you. I'm done with this. Jesus Christ says he's Lord of the rich and the poor. Bible tells us the rich and the poor alike are both made in the image of God and they both meet at the house of the Lord. He's aware that there are rich people and there are poor people. He's aware that there are people that have cancer. He's aware that there are people that have bad lives or bad things going on in their lives. But the gospel doesn't say it's going to pull you out of that or make all of that better. The gospel says he's going to save you from the wrath of God. All these people hearing him preach wanted the stuff. They wanted the freebies. They wanted all the extra stuff. When Jesus is talking to those that did not serve his brothers and sisters, we talked about service in Galatians, we talked about service in Luke, we talked about service in 1 Corinthians, and it's all directed towards believers in Christ. When we go out in the community, out into the world, and we're doing the soup runs and everything else, we go out, and you go up to Mr. John Q. Atheist, and he's, you know, hey, give me a bowl of soup, and you give him a bowl of soup, and you start talking about the gospel, and he throws a bowl at you in the face and says, I don't want to hear about your stupid God. And you go, okay, you come back the next day, and you give him a bowl of soup, and he gets a little bit of it and throws it back in your face and says, I don't want to hear about your stupid God. The Bible says not to cast your pearls before. You've tried to give him the gospel and he doesn't want it, but he wants your soup. You stop giving him the soup, too. You want to go out in the world and live like the world, act like the world? Fine, there you go. I'm going to give the soup to the person that needs it and wants it. And I know they need it and they want it because they need it and they are willing to listen to the gospel. Maybe they get saved or maybe they don't, but at least they're not antagonistic and angry. Look, this whole social gospel, social justice issue, death trap for Christianity. Because what it's going to do is, it's going to be judging Christians by their activity. If you want to do that, Rand Paul talks about the social issue, he's talking about Bernie Sanders, talking about why healthcare should be a right. Rand Paul says, if you say that this should be a riot, you're talking about slavery, you're talking about conscription, you're saying that as a doctor, all of my staff, all the janitors, everybody else, we can be forced by gunpoint to go over and take care of people. If you say that Christianity demands that we do everything that everybody else thinks it should for it to be a true Christianity, a true gospel issue, then what you've done is you've brought back in the Roman Catholic Church into the center of it and bound men's conscience under implicit faith and blind obedience. Because they've set the standard and then you have to follow it. And if you don't toe the line, you're either out or, well, however far they want to take it. And that's the danger in this. Yeah, you're now bound by by whose law. That's where we go back to the Roman Catholic Church. You know, when Jesus has freed us from that, when God has freed us from that, we have to be very careful because people want to bring us back under it quickly. You know, and we've seen it under the fundamentalist idea. I mean, look, I don't have any problem being called a fundamentalist, but we've seen it under the history of the fundamentalism, as you see these people that are, you know, if you don't wear a certain type of dress and certain type of shoes and certain type of, you know, garments, they have to be, you know, I mean, the tape measure, this thing, just get it down here, it's gotta go down to the ankle. If it goes down a little bit further, that's too far. You know, you gotta have a certain type of socks and shoes. Your hair's gotta be a certain way. You can't use this makeup, you can use that. You have to eat gruel because we don't want to, I wanted to look at... I want to show you something. Give me a second. So Sinianism is a system of Christian doctrine named under Fausto Sozini, which was developed among the Polish brethren in a minor reformed church of Poland during the 16th and 17th century and embraced by the Unitarian Church of Transylvania during that same period. S-O-C-I-N-I-A-N-I-S-M. Socinianism theology, as summarized in the, it rejects the views of Orthodox Christian theology of God's knowledge on the doctrine of the Trinity, on the divinity of Christ, and on any soteriology. They're talking about, it doesn't care, they don't care about God and the Trinity. The Socinians held that humans were created mortal in the beginning and would have died naturally without Adam and Eve if they had not eaten of the tree or not, it wouldn't matter. They also reject the doctrine of sin. The atonement is rejected for a view of a popular atonement. It's basically everybody's gonna be saved and the more work you do, the better you do, the more saved you're gonna be, I guess. God's omniscience is limited to what is necessarily true in the future. In other words, all those things that are going to actually happen at the very future, okay, his omnipotence is limited to that, what's actually going to happen. Okay, well that's just ignorant. They added in this idea of skepticism, they can be skeptical about everything. I'm absolutely certain about everything, but I'm not even certain about that. I mean, you know, there you go, that's a good one. So, I just want to throw that in there real quick, we'll talk about it later on, probably next week or something. But I want to just point out as we're talking, we finish up here. 2 Corinthians 1.24 says, not for that we have a dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy, and by faith you stand. I want to stop right there, but I do want to point this out. Paul the apostle says we are your leaders. You're supposed to listen and submit and you're supposed to understand. You're supposed to hear what we're saying and submit to that. Not like we have dominion over you. We're not your bosses. And the problem is there's so many people that try to make themselves your lord, your boss, bind you under their man-centered doctrine. And he says, we don't have dominion over you. We're not your commanders, okay? We're your helpers. And the whole point is, socinianism and social justice, social gospel, it binds men underneath and it destroys joy. Because you're not working hard enough, you're not mad enough, you're not vicious enough, you're not violent enough, you're not even Christian enough. Because if you were, you would be just as outraged as everybody else is. And there has to be, by the way, outrage is part of this whole idea. You have to be outraged at every single thing. And you have to be oppressed, because that's the issue. We're oppressed, you're oppressed, we're all oppressed. And so in order for us to be Christians and to give people the gospel, we have to give them the food, the things that they feel they need, the justice they feel they need. Even if I have to go wear an outfit that says I'm a guilty as a white, I have white privilege. and put myself in handcuffs and go sit out in the middle of the street and be in handcuffs and in mourning and in shame over my white privilege. Because if I'm a Christian, I'm giving somebody what they need in their reparations. Because that's what I did. I loved my brother and my neighbor as myself. I loved somebody. I went to jail for them. I identified with them. Okay, but but but that's part of it. I mean look wait. Yeah, think about it Don't laugh Gary cuz I'm gonna tell you what you owe it to him because that's that's part. I mean you say you're a Christian That's part of it See here's the problem That's not gospel at all and it's binding legalism All of that destroys the entirety of Scripture All right, we're going to be done for now and then we're going to pray real quick. Dear Lord, I just want to thank you for our time together. I want to thank you for this day. Lord, I ask you, God, to look over us and protect us. Lord, I do want to ask you, Lord, all those that are deceived under this new gospel, this new ideology of what is called Christianity today, there's so much of it that is falling into the world's worship and the world's idea of Christianity and the gospel. And Lord, I would just pray now, Lord, that you would just open blind eyes and cause deaf people to hear and cause those that are yours to come to you and to not be deceived by this wickedness. In Jesus' name I pray, Lord. Amen.