Hello and welcome to this week's service at Westminster Reformed Presbyterian Church. We are located out of Prairie View, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago. We are so glad you decided to join us today. This is our next sermon in the series on the Lord's Prayer by Pastor Brett Malin. Our scripture reading will be 1 Chronicles 29 10-13 and 1 Timothy 1 12-17. Our sermon text will be Matthew 6 9-13. As you read the Word of God, you begin to see certain patterns. Obviously, the Bible comes from multiple authors, humanly speaking, but divinely speaking, there is just one author. That is the Holy Spirit. Or we could say, in a Trinitarian sense, the Word of God comes to us from the Father, through the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Spirit. And since that is the case, we can see patterns as we move through the Word of God. Oftentimes, you will see patterns like what I'm about to explain to you. You will have patterns like this. You'll often find that some books begin and end in a similar way, or begin and end with similar themes. This is not the case with every single one of them, but it is often the case. Think of Matthew. How does Matthew begin? It begins with a genealogy and then it talks about Mary and Joseph and the birth of the Lord Jesus. And then, in the midst of that, it tells us that the one that is going to be born of the virgin, this one is going to be Emmanuel. This one is going to be God with us. Well, then you read through the rest of the book of Matthew. It's truly marvelous and it's wonderful, is it not? And you finally reach the climax, the death and the burial and the resurrection of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And then what happens? Near the end, or right at the end, he says, Lo, I am with you always, always, even into the end of the age. Glory to take her from this. He hasn't used the word Emmanuel, but from beginning to end, the book of Matthew has bookend, wants you to see that Jesus Christ is God with us, he is with the church. Isn't it interesting when we look at the Bible itself even, What happens in some of the early chapters also takes place in the latter chapters of the whole Bible. You see, Adam and Eve, they are placed in a garden sanctuary. And they have many, many trees, but there are two trees of particular interest. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now they are told that they may not partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They should have submitted to what God said there. Reformed theology has understood rightly that had they obeyed, if they had followed God's orders there, then eventually they would have been granted access to partake of that tree, the knowledge of good and evil, and eventually they would have partaken of the other tree, the tree of life. And through that, Adam would have brought about a turn of life for himself and his posterity. This is the theology that governs our shorter catechism and our larger catechism. A lot of people don't fully understand this, not creeped enough, I seek to make a point regularly that Adam sacrificed more than just his own life. He cast away eternal life for himself and his posterity. Had he done that, we would have bypassed all of this wars and rumors of war and plague broken wrists and bad backs and all of these things that have ensued death, all of these things. What do we see in the end of the Bible? Close to the end, there is that tree of life placed in a sanctuary once again at the end of the book of Revelation. In other words, here's the thing, the first Adam has failed. The first Adam has granted to, he has failed, and so the second Adam, rather, has come and he has succeeded, and he has caused us to be able to be partakers of that tree, the tree of life. First Adam fails and the second Adam succeeds. Here we go again, I could just go on, there's so many examples of this. But it's interesting that the Lord's Prayer also follows this pattern, this pattern of bookends. What are the bookends to the Lord's Prayer? It is God's glory. God's glory begins and ends the prayer. Therefore, it is advisable for you that you would begin your prayers and end your prayer. Whatever happens in between, whatever requests you make, whatever sins you repent of, whatever things that you ask for, may they begin and end with the glory of God. For God the Lord Jesus says, hallowed be thy name. In other words, may your name, Father, be sanctified, may it be glorified, may it be honored, and then at the end, the other end of the bookend or the bookshelf, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. And isn't it interesting? The shorter Catechism, not inspired by God, But isn't it interesting that it follows this biblical pattern? Book ends. Where it begins is very close to where it ends. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. How does it end? Focusing upon the glory of God in doxology. And it says, the conclusion of the Lord's prayer teaches us that we should take our encouragement and prayer from God only in our prayers to praise him ascribing kingdom, power, and glory to him. And in testimony of our desire and assurance to be heard, we say, amen. What I want to take, what I want you to take away from this sermon is the content of the doxology. Second of all, that is the content of the doxology. But before we get into that, we must spend a little bit of time, maybe possibly the bulk of our time, talking about the preservation of God's Holy Word. I know that's kind of strange to do. but we must do so. I think you'll see why very soon. So here's what you should take away. God has preserved his word and therefore you must take encouragement from God in your prayers and from him only. God has preserved his word. God has preserved his word because he promised to preserve his word. Matthew 24, 35 says this, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. That's significant. Let the whole world burn. It doesn't matter. The words of the Lord Jesus, they will last forever. They will not pass away, and they have not passed away. Psalm 12, verse six, which we would have sung, that's okay, I'll read that to you. The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, Thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. The words of the Lord are pure words. And then lastly, 1 Peter 1.23, talking about us, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. What would you say of a God who inspires his words and intends for them to continue, but then his words are lost? That's not a God who is worthy of worship, that would be a God who is worthy of pity. We are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, We trust that God has inspired the words. God has breathed out into the Bible his words. And God has preserved his words. God has not just preserved the thoughts or the ideas. God has preserved the books God has preserved the sentences. God has preserved the very words. God has preserved the very makeup of his words. Each and every syllable of God's word has been preserved. You see this, you must understand this. because this is often under fire in our day. The Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 1 verse 8 says this in part. The Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence, this is key, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical. So as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal unto them. And then the Westminster Confession 1A goes on to talk about the fact that, yes, while we do have some people who are able who read and translate the languages, that's not the norm for the Christian believer. Therefore, they ought to be translated into the language of the people of God in the worshiping church. So that each and every member who has right unto them might have access to these words. You might ask, why is it that you're talking about this? Why is it that you're saying this? Because that's not what the doxology is about. Well, no, not directly. It's not what it's about. However, depending on which Bible you are reading, You might have had the doxology of the Lord's Prayer in the body of the prayer itself. But you might have had that prayer in a footnote. Well, I'm here to declare to you that if you found it in a footnote, then you had the Word of God in a footnote. You might have used a version, though, that did not even mention it and just excluded it. Well, that's very concerning, is it not? Because the doxology of the Lord's Prayer historically has been understood to be original. The framers of the Westminster Confession, they understood it. to be original. The Church, for much of 2,000 years, has understood this to be original. Let me just get even more pointed and say, the standards of the RPC&A assume that it is true and right. Rightly. Now I could talk about this for hours, and that's actually my greatest difficulty right now, I want to talk for hours on this, but I know that this is not for everybody. I mean, I tell you what, I nerd out, I geek out to this kind of stuff, but I know not everybody does, so I have to leave a lot out. But I want to declare to you that Jesus intended for this doxology to be in this prayer, even though the modern And we would say modernists, academy, indeed most seminaries, will tell you otherwise. Many of them subtly, not really realizing it, they undermine the idea that God's Word has been kept pure in all ages. But this is original. There is a forthcoming article in the Puritan Reformed Theological Journal for those who might want more detail on this. My fear is not that we would simply lose the Word of God, although that would be awful. I fear we will lose confidence in the framers of our shorter and larger catechism, because our catechisms end with the assumption that the doxology is the Word of God. larger catechism and the shorter catechism assume it both. Now here's what I want to put forth. Most modern Bibles that you will read, if you will read them very closely, they will point to the woman caught in adultery, which is 12 verses, the last verse of John 7 and then John 8, 1 through 11. You know that glorious story in which the Lord Jesus really sticks it to the bad guys because they're trying to bring this woman in and trying to catch him and Jesus wins the day. They would cause you to have doubts about that, and they'll say things like, well, you know, the earliest and best manuscripts don't have this. You might be a layperson, never been to seminary, tries to read your Bible, tries to pray, trying to get through life, trying to get through school or work or whatever the case may be. I guess the earliest and best don't have it. Okay. So I guess that that's not something that belongs in there. I'm getting a little feedback there. I don't know if that's, okay. So that's what they're gonna tell you, is that the earliest and best don't have. Then they're gonna point to the Book of Mark, and they're gonna say basically that the Book of Mark ends at verse eight. Basically, the women were afraid. That's what it ends like. And they were afraid for. In fact, it ends with the word for. I don't know about you, but what do you think when someone ends a sentence with the word for? What'd you do that for? Right? There's a politician, I won't tell you her name, but it rhymes with Splinton. Now she went and was trying to talk to a certain segment of the people, and she gets on a voice and she says, she starts using the word for, at the end. Wow, this is where I started from, and this is what I do this for. You know, trying to, as if these people were going to fall for this, that's how it's described there. In English grammar, you don't often end a sentence with or properly. You don't do it in Greek. Anyway. They're going to cause you to doubt the end of Mark. Now here's the other thing. There are 16 other verses that are, we would say, taken out of the Bible. They're put in the footnotes at best. And you say, oh, look, the earliest and the best don't have that. Well, how are we to make sense of these sorts of things. Well, first of all, I want you to start with the promises, and there are many, far more than the ones that I have read to you, that promise that God is going to keep his word pure. And I point you to the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is not just some people who got together and came up with some stuff. They put into a book. They put into words the theology of the church for 1600 years, using the best of the sources. And they understood rightly that God has kept his word pure, and therefore the Greek New Testament which I hold in my hands is the Word of God and we can apply ourselves to it. And I forgot to bring my Hebrew Old Testament. Hold it up for you and say, you understand that we can apply ourselves and look into these treasures. We can do that. There are some for the last 150, 160 years who would say, no, no, we have found some new books. We have found some new manuscripts. And these show us that in fact, many things have been added to the Bible. Therefore, we must take them out. I think very great things of that. These things were not added. The doxology was not added. The woman caught in adultery was not added. The ending of Mark was not added. These other 16 verses were not added, we argue, on the basis of Christian history and on the basis of the confession that they were taken away. But it seems like quite an indictment, does it not? The earliest and best. The earliest and best don't have, it seems so convincing. Let me tell you what earliest and best they're talking about, okay? Let me tell you what they're talking about. On the one hand, during the Protestant Reformation, you have Protestants, and also even Romanists as well, taking the Bible, which had been preserved primarily in the Byzantine Empire, putting it together, this is the worshipping text of the community of faith, and then they put it into a print. That's what they did. It's very simple. Now in the 1900s, they find a manuscript and they say, this one's the earliest and the best. and found it at Mount Sinai in a monastery. And then they find another one in the Vatican library and they say, look, you put these two together and you have the earliest and the best. Neither one of these, we have any proof that they were part of the worshiping community of the people of faith. Neither one of them. Set on a shelf. Set aside. And it just so happens that When you put these two together, they don't have the long ending of Mark, and they don't have the woman caught in adultery, and they don't have these 16 verses. They say, earliest and best. There you go. Now here's just the problem with that. When you look at the Byzantine manuscripts that were put into the printer, during the time of the Reformation, there was not a lot of variation in them. Very similar. And what What things in them were different, were so minor, it actually doesn't even come through in a translation. But, here's what happens. We put these two manuscripts together that are alleged to be earliest and best, and they disagree 3,000 times in the Gospels alone. 3,000 times they differ. 3,000 plus, 5,000 times they differ in the whole New Testament. But when they agree, they say, oh, that's where we get to the earliest stage. This is goofiness, really. And really, when we truly understand what's going on, we start to say, what in the world? People thinking they're displacing the Word of God. So of course, they both lack the doxology. We are just, they're disparate. 3,000 times in the Gospels, 5,000 times in the whole New Testament. Now, then they come up with papyri. They have papyri, which is a type of early, before we had paper used in the ancient world. And they have these papyri they've found. One is called the Bodmer papyri. They found these in 1950. It's named after a man who bought them. papyri bought from antiquities dealers. We don't know where this stuff comes from. And then there's the Chester Beatty papyri, which were, which were bought from illegal, illegal antiquities sellers, okay? They're in museums and you can see these things. And then there is the, Oxyrhynchus papyri. All three of these come from Egypt, which is not the center of purity, Christianity-wise, you understand? The Oxyrhynchus papyri are taken out of the trash. You must understand this, that the two greatest Bibles that they'll tell you, they're called Aleph and Ve or Sinaitics and Vaticanus, They disagree constantly. And then you have these others that you find with a whole bunch of other Greek writings and stuff, many of them pagan, many of them anti-Christian, and then they have Christian books along with them. And they're saying, you put these two manuscripts and all these, we've got about 130, almost 140 papyri, that's the earliest and the best. I don't think so. I don't think so at all. We ought to seek the old ways and the old faith. Now here's the problem in this day and age. If you say what I just said, someone will ask you, as I've been asked many times, are you a King James onlyist? Maybe you've thought that in the last 20 minutes. Maybe you've wondered. I don't wear this on my sleeve. I don't talk about this very often. I really don't. Let me just say that that's just really a nonsensical question at King James only. It's kind of a nonsensical word. Second of all, I'm not. It's almost like asking, are you a racist? No, I'm not a racist. It's a way of saying, oh, if I can say you're a racist, then I can just dismiss you. Are you a racist? Oh, I don't need to listen to you. Are you a King James onlyist? Oh, you're one of those morons, so I don't need to listen to you. Indeed, I am not a King James onlyist. The thing is, our society, even our Christian society, has been trained to think that it's either the modern Bibles or King James only-ism. What is King James only-ism? If we even have a definition for it, it basically comes down to this. It is the idea, in its worst senses, if we can even talk about this, that God inspired the word in the Greek and the Hebrew, in the Hebrew 2,000 plus years ago, 2,000 and a half or so, the end of it at least. And then the New Testament is given to us 2,000 years ago. And then in some sense the King James Bible in 1611 is re-inspired so that the English version is re-inspired. I don't believe that at all. Neither should you. And the other problem is this. Most who would be so-called King James onlyists don't understand that the men, the 54 men who put the King James together, brilliant men, head and shoulders above anybody, trust me, there's nobody that could even stand in their presence today. We have some brilliant men and women in our day. There's not one who would make that translation committee. even the greatest of our time. But it was not a re-inspiration. It was not that. Not at all. It was a faithful translation by very competent people. So what is the option? Are you a critical text person or a modern Bible person which takes all these verses out contrary to the church for 2,000 years? Or are you a King James only? And here's the other thing. Most of the so-called King James onlyists are Baptists, independent, and they're opposed to infant baptism, and they're opposed to Calvinism, which is very ironic because the men who translated the King James, they are All of them, Calvinists or Calvinists leading, and every single one of them would have baptized babies, rightly. See, what we have in many Baptist circles, and we love our Baptist brethren, is we have a total divorce, like a divorce of the King James Bible itself, which they think is re-inspired, a divorce of it from its actual history. And that's very problematic. So what should we do? Should we believe in a re-inspiration? No, we shall not. Should we believe that God has not preserved his word and then allowed a bunch of stuff to creep in for 1800 plus years and then we discover some stuff in the trash and we find a bunch of contradictory material and we buy things from illegal bunch of shenanigan antique dealers and put this together and say this is the word of God. That is not how we do things. That's not what Jesus meant. What should we do then? We should recommend the confessional text position. the confessional text position, which is the position that God has preserved his word, and he has given it to us in faithful translation. During the time of the Reformation, there were multiple translations that were helpful. The Geneva Bible, the Bishop's Bible, not as helpful, but still containing many good things. The King James came along and replaced all of those, put them out of print, really. Can we make use of things like the Geneva Bible? Yeah, better believe it. Are there helpful things to find in the New King James? Absolutely, sometimes it's clarifying. Do you benefit from some translations? Like, there are particular verses in the NIV I appreciate very much, clarify things where the King James is not so clear. There's one that I'm thinking of particular, another one in the ESV I think of as, that clarifies things. See, understand, a King James only wouldn't say this. Someone who seeks to be faithful, so far as God allows, would So here's what I want to say, and I know that this is the most of what we've talked about. God has preserved his word. And it is preserved in the King James. It's preserved in the Geneva Bible. It's preserved in the New King James. And there's a new one, the modern English version. I haven't read that. I trust that that is faithful as well, more or less. God has preserved his word, and you ought to find it in the body of the text, not in a footnote. Indeed, we should be calling ourselves and our churches back to the old path, back to the preserved text of the word of God, because this glorifies God. So therefore, coming to the text itself, and trust me, I'll try to be brief, what should we do with this? We should begin our prayers and we should end our prayers seeking to glorify God and praising Him for His glory. With everything that comes in between, we should praise Him for the preservation of His word. Among those things, we should praise Him because he gave up his own dear son to translate us out of this age of darkness, to translate us into that realm of light where we find our citizenship. We should take our encouragement from God only. From God only. It's nice when people say things that are encouraging. Do not live for other people's encouragement. We must live because of the Lord's encouragement to us, not from other people. We do not find encouragement from the things we own. or how we look or things we are able to do and that sort of thing. Let me just give testimony for just a moment. When I went to seminary, I had to buy all my first year books. first semester books. I was so excited. I'm buying this, buying that, got the whole list. Then I get this book and it says, when people are big and God is small. And I said, that's going to be lame. That's going to be really silly. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Many of the things, a lot of the things that I read, God really humbled me with that book. There are some books that you read and there are some books that read you, and that was a book that read me. Basically, that corny title, When People Are Big and God Is Small, that professor, he unpacked for me so many things, showed me ways I had no idea that the things that I thought that I was doing for God or for myself, I really was doing it blinded to, I was doing it for other people, for their praise, or because of the fear of them. Basically, it's a book about the fear of man. And oftentimes we fear man more than God. If you have not read that, I don't include book endorsements in a sermon, but that one is amazing, because I think we all struggle with and suffer from the fear of man. We should take our encouragement from God only, not from other people, not from the things that we own, not from how we look, anything like that. Jesus says, Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven saying, I have both glorified it and will glorify it again, that's John 12, 28. Jesus is, in a sense, praying the bookends of the Lord's Prayer in John 12, 28. Glorify thy name. We must pray that prayer as well. And as we pray, as we listen to the word read and preached, As we read the Word of God, I hope that you get a glimpse of the glory of Jesus Christ. The glory of Jesus Christ is not something that the world cares about. It's not something that the world looks for or seeks after, but it is the warp and warp the Christian that Jesus Christ is glorious, is wonderful, and he reveals who he is to us, and he reveals his desire that we might behold the Father. Well, how would we behold the Father? We would behold the Father by beholding the Lord Jesus Christ And we behold him now by faith. We behold the Lord Jesus in his word. We behold him in prayer. We behold him in the preaching of the gospel. And we behold the Lord Jesus in baptism and in the Lord's supper. And we behold him crucified for us, suffering for us, dying for us, that He might secure salvation for us, that the love that the Father has set upon you might be manifested through the grace that the Lord Jesus shows to you in giving you forgiveness and washing you with His blood. and that the love of the Father might be manifested through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, which the Father and the Son have sent to you. People of God, behold Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God, Behold the one who is the brightness of the Father's glory and the expressed image of the Father. Quote from Colossians 1.15 and Hebrews 1.30. Jesus says in John 14, he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. People of God, Christians, Behold the Son of God, the Lord Jesus, who suffered and died for you, and manifested the Father's love for you, and brought about the forgiveness of your sins. And by beholding the Son of God, behold the Eternal Father, and do so in prayer, praying for the glory of the Father. May that be the A and B, the Alpha and the Omega of both your prayers and your life. Let us pray. Thank you for tuning in. Please review our Facebook and YouTube pages for further teachings. We pray you will join us next week. If you are interested in or have questions about visiting us in person, please contact us at secretary at wrpc at gmail.com. Thank you.