All right, so second session, we're just going to imagine the church with and without the gospel. Think of those two scenes, at least, in the book of Numbers. There's the grumbling children of Israel who had been bitten by serpents, unlike Christians today, right? And then God commanded Moses to lift up what amounted to a sign of the cross. And we know that because of Jesus in John 3. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. So something about that was representing something about the cross. And it says in Numbers 21.9, so Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live. You think of that, speaking of Spurgeon, that famous story of how he was converted by that simple Methodist preacher preaching from Isaiah 45, Christ saying in the prophet, look to me, all the ends of the earth, look unto me, look unto me. And he kept saying that over and over again. And that's what's happening here. They were commanded simply to look at the serpent. They were bitten by serpents, but they were told to look at this thing that had taken the form of a serpent. And of course, what is a serpent? A serpent is the most cursed thing in all creation, the first cursed thing in Genesis 3. And Jesus becomes a curse for us in Galatians 3.13. Well, before that, in Numbers 16, they had grumbled again. Big surprise. And God had Moses make haste to the altar to offer atoning incense for their sin. And it says in chapter 16, verse 48, that as he stood, he stood between the dead and the living and the plague was stopped. And so in the very same way, the gospel minister stands in between the living and the dead. And what he holds in his hands in between the living and the dead for all the people to behold is the cross of Christ. And so when we talk about the object of gospel and the subject of gospel and the gospel ministry, we are standing in between the living object and the dying subject. This is not just standing in between subject and object, but a dying subject and a living object. There's an understandable confusion sometimes about the essential nature of the doctrines of salvation. If we don't cause our own salvation, then why would right belief matter? If it doesn't matter what you do, which is already an equivocation, why does it matter that you believe rightly? Shouldn't those who believe in the doctrines of grace be those who are the most relaxed in their doctrines and who most relax their doctrines? Answer, yeah, it depends what you mean by most, if you mean most relaxed ourselves, in other words, most comfortable in our own skin, well then yes. But if by relax we mean to tamper with what we tell the snake-bitten sinner to look at, then never. Here again, a working knowledge of that subject-object distinction is going to help us. We are not saved by our intellectual performance, but The gospel is the power unto salvation for everyone who believes. Our belief in it, our performance does not add merit, but his performance must be seen in order to be believed in. We've already established last week how the spirit and the word go together. Now I think we've established that the gospel is the center of that. Or as Matthew Henry put it in his commentary of Matthew 13, 44 about the treasure hidden in the field, Henry said that the field represented the word, the gospel word. And the treasure was Christ himself. And so you have in the word the gospel. And so to quote another parable from Matthew 13, our job, if this is the field, And this is the treasure, the gospel. Our job, according to another parable in Matthew 13, is to be a scribe of the kingdom. Every scribe who is trained in the kingdom brings out of his house, he's a master of the house, and he brings out of his treasure what is old and what is new. Our job is to bring people through that field to the treasure, to the gospel itself. And so in that sense, The ministry has an indispensable role in the application of the gospel. When I say indispensable, I don't mean indispensable to God. He does not need us, but to the purpose of the church. God does not need the minister or the ministry. But he has, in fact, ordained the minister and the ministry to be instruments in the Spirit's hand. Remember last week, Romans 10. How will they believe unless they hear? How will they hear unless someone preaches? God has designed it to be so. And in that sense, in that secondary sense, this gospel magnifying glass is indispensable. So let's look in the second session at the church with and without the gospel. Jerry Bridges has written a couple of really good books that, and if you're ever introducing Reformed theology to somebody who's just coming to it and they don't necessarily have a background in theology or reading very heavy stuff, Jerry Bridges does a good job in his books making it practical for real life and showing you that it is practical. He has written most helpfully on this dimension of the gospel. And in one of his books, The Gospel for Real Life, he says that we have a truncated view of the gospel. tending to see it only as a door we walk through to become a Christian. In this view, the gospel is only for unbelievers. So who's the gospel for? You say, well, sinners. So for unbelievers, right? Wait a minute. Aren't we all sinners? And so Bridges is saying this is a truncated view of the gospel. It's the secret handshake. It's the card, the access into the front door. In addition, Bridges says, many people have a utilitarian view of the gospel. What can the gospel do for me? And he doesn't mean that like a Christian hedonist would, like an ultimate desire. He means temporal felt need, scratching of an itch in this life. What can the gospel do for me? So, whether it's a truncated gospel or a utilitarian gospel, the gospel is not seen as an inexhaustible treasure for the saints. The work of Christ which saves sinners is no longer for the church. And that leads to a lot of big problems. Let me erase that. Now, different ages tend to cause different problems to rise to the surface. Such problems are almost always as old as the fall. But some of those problems seem to be characteristic of a particular time and place. If you asked a Bible-believing pastor in the 19th century or the 20th century what problem would result from a man-centered gospel, I would say that at the top of that list would probably be false converts. And of course, that's still a problem. worse of a problem, you could say. The reason the emphasis would be on that is because of the Second Great Awakening, all these new measures, and so, speaking of Spurgeon and Warfield, they both wrote on that subject. False converts. Those two centuries were the age of revival and missions in the English-speaking church. Consequently, the question of the integrity of the gospel would more often than not always gravitate toward how the gospel works in reaching out to the lost. and how false Gospels mess all that up. That would have been the focus. It's only in the last few decades that more focus has been placed on the integrity of the Gospel for the Church. Why? Because now you have the pagans. If you want to find pagans today, you just look in the Church. And so the question has to be, if not changed, it doesn't need to be taken away from false converts, obviously still a problem, still needs our attention. What I'm saying now is now the field has expanded. of the problem that a man-centered gospel creates. Books written by guys like David Wells, and Oz Guinness, and John MacArthur, and Michael Horton especially, have done a fair job showing how modern man-centered theology guts the church of its basic means of grace. False Gospels do not simply poison the message on the mission field, they do damage to the individual soul of the Christian, and they make the whole body unhealthy. False Gospels in the church abuse members of the church. False Gospels in the church make church members into abusers of themselves and others. Now there's two basic opposite human attitudes. Let's put another, it could be a pendulum swing. But let's do this. Let's actually put pride on the top, rather than putting it left and right right now. Pride and despair. Because I don't want to suggest that the churches we're about to talk about, kinds of churches which emanate from this, that one therefore doesn't have pride. You know, a pity party is an exhibition of pride, right? It's just the downside of pride. If you're experiencing self-pity, you're prideful in this way, that what is coming to you isn't coming to you. My life isn't what it should be, according to who? So, I don't want to suggest that people in despair are not experiencing pride, and that people in pride don't despair of things. So, I'm going to put pride on the top here, and despair on the bottom, just to show pride is exalted, exalts itself, and despair is down in the dumps. So that's why we're going to put it right there. Two basic opposite human attitudes. Well, if pride and despair are the two poles of the soul without the gospel, well then, now I'm gonna put left and right. Don't read into this any political thing or anything. It's a square, you know? Whatever. Let's call this one kind of church corporate pride. And let's, yeah, let's spell it right first. And let's draw an arrow from despair and call this corporate despair. Now one way to look at that is a whole bunch of private people getting together or a whole bunch of despairing people. Or maybe where they go, this message lights them up and this message gets them down in the dumps. But however it happens, let's start to put a dotted line shaped into a church. We're not gonna yet make it solid. We're just gonna start to see an embryonic form of the kind of churches this will produce. But what we're saying here is that these are basic human attitudes. They're already in the works. Pride. What does pride look like with the gospel and without the gospel? In other words, what does the gospel do to pride, and what does pride do with the gospel? In his introductory essay to that book by John Owen, J.I. Packer continues that, quote, The New Gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, and a concern for the Church. Why? We would suggest that the reason lies in its own character and content. It fails to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. That's kind of a duh statement. The man-centered theology does not make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts, because it's not its goal. Its goal is a man-centered goal. The religion of the Second Great Awakening shifted the preaching of America from God and His glory to man and his willpower. The First Great Awakening The gospel was what God did for sinners. In the second Great Awakening, it was how God could help you do what you're already doing. That's a different gospel. I said to the history class last week, look in your phone book, and people started to look at each other, and one mother raised their hands and said, there are no more phone books. And I said, well, then go to your library and look in your card catalog. How old am I? I was like, go on the internet then. I can't use this story anymore. This is ridiculous. But go on your quest.net or whatever it is. And look in that e-section of whatever, however you figure it out. And look at how many churches are in your community. And 99% of everything, particularly in this area, came out of that Second Great Awakening atmosphere. Well, this was a response to the frontier man, Rousseau's noble, savage, taming nature. That ideal is what the religious marketers responded to and created a new form of Christianity. Not new, I mean, the serpent also in untamed nature back in the Garden of Eden. came up with that gospel a long time ago. So it's not new in that sense. But it represented a shift in what we meant by gospel preaching, what we mean by evangelical. And a church made up of people who don't know the gospel and who think they're strong is a prideful church. That's the two ingredients. A church made up of people who, A, don't know the gospel and who, B, think that they are strong is a prideful church. Not that it could become prideful one day, but that this combination of natural strength and no gospel is the very constitution of pride. If you are strong in your nature, as Paul chides the Corinthians for, you are wise, but I am a fool. You are strong, but I'm, you know, when he does that, that's what he's driving at. He's poking at their pride. Well, the gospel levels pride. It does so by eliminating all grounds for boasting in one's merit. Think of those verses. We mentioned a couple of them in the break. Romans 3.27, what then becomes of boasting? It is eliminated. How can the faith, which Paul is talking about, not by law of works, but by law of faith, how can faith eliminate boasting if it's something you can take credit for? Ephesians 2.8, it is by grace you have been saved. through faith, and that is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not by works so that no one should boast. God's design in the relationship between grace and faith is designed so that no one would boast. 1 Corinthians 1.30, after he says, he is the source of your life in Christ Jesus. His conclusion, his punchline to that whole section is so that, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. The gospel levels pride by annihilating class distinctions. Who sees anything different in you? 1 Corinthians 4.7. What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you go on boasting as though you didn't? In Galatians 2.16, Paul does what was already done in the book of Acts with the Jerusalem council, where they started to teach themselves as the Jews that were starting to get this, We have received salvation even as they, even as they, the Gentiles, they learned to put the Gentiles first, who in the order of redemptive history came second. And he does the same thing in justification in Galatians 2.16, even as they, even as they. And you see that switching of the language, it annihilates class distinctions. What about despair? with or without the gospel. Well, again, this is where Bridges is pretty helpful. He says this, if you move from this to this, if you start to get it, if you start to see the sinfulness of your sin and the holiness of God, Bridges says this in the Discipline of Grace, he says, when you set yourself to seriously pursue holiness, you will begin to realize what an awful sinner you are. And if you are not firmly rooted in the gospel and have not learned to preach it to yourself every day, you will soon become discouraged and will slack off in your pursuit of holiness." In other words, short of the gospel, holiness will start to lag. You know, all the stuff that legalists want to get moving by some other means. Bridges is saying that grace does that, but short of grace, that will actually stop. Now, what follows from that discouragement, from that despair? Well, the Bible says what ought to follow is more grace. Hebrews 13, 9, Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace. That's what the Bible says should follow. But what follows by nature, if left to ourselves? Condemnation, more effort, I'll try harder, more failure, and therefore more slavery. A church full of those who know that they're weak, but who do not know the gospel. So now the combination is those who know that they're weak, but don't know the gospel, is a church in chains. They will either become captives of a prideful leadership or else they will find charlatans who will sell them on license. And yet in either case, such a church will be in bondage. Now, this is why there is rarely ever a despairing church. That's why I put these in dotted lines. What we're gonna see is that pride fills in the walls of its church and becomes in fact a church. There's no despairing church. Despair will either slide to one side or the other. There's either a prideful church or a licentious church. There's never a despairing church because despair doesn't lead. Despair, in being afraid of its own shadow, will gravitate to one or two people stronger than itself. Despair can't lead. Despair can only be exploited by the stronger. And so it will slide in one or the other direction to be led by either pride or license. Those with a sensitive conscience will either turn to rule makers to restore order or to rule breakers to ease their conscience. They will gravitate either to a legalistic church, or here's where this other church becomes, a liberal licentious church. So let's just put liberal over here. And then we can fill in that church now. The despairing do not start church movements. they offer themselves up as slaves to either legalists or the licentious. And there's not only private despair, but there's also the despair of leading others. After all, God is having us talk to dead people, right? In that ministry, we are talking to death. As Ezekiel is told in Ezekiel 37 verse four, he's told to prophesy over these bones. So we are given the ministry of speaking life into death, not just to dead people, but to those who are playing dead and really alive. And that's not the mostly dead gospel of Arminianism talking, I'm talking about people that are genuinely saved and yet who are languishing in some way. This is not to be confused with any raising of the dead on our part, as the Lord goes on to say to his prophet in verse five of Ezekiel 37, behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. So where is the despair in this speaking life into death? Well, it is simply in our inability to raise the dead. If we forget that spiritual death is the problem, on the other hand, it's our inability to make the corpse move to desired configuration. This is true of pastors and parents, or just really, really annoyed friends. That is what our despair is, our inability to produce results. Mark Dever, in that book, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, that I quoted from last week, he remarks about evangelism, but then he brings the principle into the church. He says, quote, we cannot finally judge the correctness of what we do by the immediate response that we see. It is important to understand this truth. because a failure to understand it can distract well-meaning churches into pragmatic, results-oriented endeavors, and it can transform pastors into neurotic people manipulators." End quote. That's not just a principle for evangelism. That's a principle for sanctification and discipleship and parenting. despairing over our inability to control the results. Now, what all this creates is two different kinds of churches, neither of which are under the gospel. So short of the gospel, of course, I'd like to recommend a third kind of church here. But the two un-gospeled kinds of churches, the churches of liberalism or antinomianism, and the church of legalism or nomism. From this split between the soul in despair and the soul in pride comes the kind of churches that such souls naturally produce. A liberal church is antinomian, that is, they are against law. A legalistic church goes by the opposite creed, gnomism. But if Jesus teaches us anything about the heart of the Pharisees that he encountered, gnomism, or legalism, is really just a conservative form of antinomianism. It is against the law as it really is by neglecting the weightier matters of the law, Matthew 23, 23. Pay careful attention to those showdowns with the Pharisees. And there's one of them because when he says you neglect the weightier matters of the law, what does he go on to divide between? He says you You tithe all you have, and you mint, and cumin, and dill, and you neglect justice, and you list these attributes of God. Over here, spice rack. Over here, attributes of God. Which one's more morally serious? I'm just, simple question. Spice rack, slicing and dicing, or attributes of God? Pretty, pretty simple. Okay? And so Jesus is saying that the problem with the legalist is that he's a relativistic liberal. It's just that in society, things have fallen in his favor to where he can put on a better show than this guy over here. And so he's got more spices in his spice rack. That's the difference. That's the difference according to Jesus. But they're both antinomians. They're both moral slouches. They're both dead and want to do nothing, but the legalist has gotten himself into a position to be able to command others where the liberal settles for anything goes. Legalism and liberalism are cut from the same cloth, both being low views of the law. Liberalism reduces the law by its distaste for legal restraints. Legalism reduces the law by its delusion of performing, and so it abuses those legal restraints. Liberalism and legalism have something else in common too, a distaste for doctrinal depth and precision. Its depth, the liberals accuse of being an intellectual form of legalism. Its precision is called sniveling nuance by the legalist. Whatever problems that liberals and legalists seek to fix, it will not be with much real doctrine. But this comes at an immediate cost. If we don't see church problems as doctrinal problems, then we're not likely to see them as gospel problems either. Because remember, the gospel is just One, doctrine among many doctrines of the Christian worldview. It's that central doctrine that everything is driven toward. It's what gives the whole DNA its shape. But gospel doctrines are at least doctrines. Whatever else they are, gospel doctrines are doctrines. And so here's the logic of it. If the elements of the gospel can be formulated into doctrines, and if we don't think that those are practical, then it's difficult to see what people could mean by the gospel solving anyone's practical life problems. The gospel, oh yes, that part of the gospel so affects this practical, apply that to my life. Well, what do you mean? Well, I mean this thing about the gospel. Well, I disagree with you about that part of the gospel. Well, it's like this. Well, that's your doctrine of that part of the gospel. And I mentioned the example of Jesus paying for sins in particular, not sin in general. That has immediate implications for how we apologize to each other. That has immediate implications for church discipline. In Matthew 18, we establish, you know, whatever. It's not what Jesus says. He says we establish the truth or the facts Okay? So, when our kids come to us and we make them say that they're sorry, and we say, sorry for what? What are we doing? We're being more like God in the gospel, who has taken a real offense against a real thing. A moral thing has been violated. And that thing needs to be made right. Okay? So, very practical. This is one example. One of the doctrines of grace that's all the rage to doubt in legalistic circles today is the imputation of Christ's righteousness, or at least the active obedience of Christ so imputed. The active obedience of Christ. Sure, let me draw that up there. Let's put the active obedience of Christ. Now let me just briefly describe what that means, the difference. I should, right before I talk, obedience. The act of obedience of Christ refers to Christ obeying the law. Galatians 4.4, Philippians 2.8, now it says there that he did this even unto death, and Romans 5.19 says by the one act, and so there are theologians who try to deny the doctrine of his act of obedience and reduce the whole obedience of Christ merely to his passion. His passive obedience. That comes from the Latin word, passio, which means to suffer. So active obedience, I'm pointing outside of myself, I'm doing. I am doing the law. I'm doing what God requires. His passive obedience was that obedience unto death, even death on the cross, and there he is suffering, and that's an obedience to God, too. Some theologians have tried to remove the act of obedience of Christ. What does a Jewish carpenter obeying a peasant woman in Galilee for this amount of years have to do with me? I'm not a carpenter, and my mother's name isn't Mary. Wow. But whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all unto the glory of God, that is still the command all the way back from the Garden of Eden. And when he obeys God's law for you, it's not fundamentally about the circumstances of the carpentry or the geographical location. It's loving the Lord as God with all his soul, mind, strength. And that's what we were commanded to do. Jesus does that for us so that when through faith, God imputes the righteousness of Christ to us. His performance counts for my performance. Oh yeah, I believe that. Okay? His obedience counts for mine. Yeah, I believe that one day when we go to heaven. No, no, no, no, no, no. His obedience counts for my obedience right now. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. He is a new creation. Every sin of every Christian dead and buried, crucified in Christ immediately, instantaneously, no time out. You can't even see, well, maybe I can drive a wedge in there. Why would you want to? What is the matter with you? Why would you want to disqualify the Christian? Well, what if he's not a Christian? Then, if anyone is in Christ, then it doesn't apply to him because he's not a Christian. Do you have access to that information? I don't. Okay? People don't believe 2 Corinthians 5, 14 through 21. People don't believe it. Oh, I'm reformed. Well, then His obedience counts for my qualification. I am free to obey Christ. Oh, you're free to do whatever you want? I am free to obey Christ right now. because his obedience is my, yeah, it's your justification, but not your qualification. Aha. So it's interesting how we can smuggle in part of sanctification into justification. We have cleverer and cleverer ways to do that every day. Okay, now this is a real truth for life. Christ's act of obedience applied, imputed to the record of every single Christian. This is actually the insight that moved William Wilberforce in his calling to abolish the slave trade. He wrote a book, we call it now Real Christianity, but it has a much longer title back then, but Wilberforce was convinced that the reason there's a slave trade in the English-speaking world was because we don't believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Whoa, what? What? How do you make the leap from that to that? I don't make the leap, Luke 18. He told this parable to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and had contempt for others. The two go together. You cannot boast in your own performance and not have contempt for other people. You psychologically cannot do it. Wilberforce knew that. The connection between the gospel doctrines and righteous action in the world is simply that it takes freemen to make freemen. And that's not just true out there in civil society. It's true in the church. There is a great liberation campaign that is needed in the church. People in these two churches need to be freed Will they be freed by slaves who are in chains themselves? Or will they only be freed by people who have to fight for their righteous in Christ status as they're moving, as they're freeing these slaves and being accused by the devil back into their chains, okay? If you try to start a church that is preaching the doctrines of grace, the devil is very provoked that you are freeing or threatening to free his slaves. He will send people to you to argue you back in your chains, to threaten you back into your chains, to create circumstances to intimidate you back into your chains. from personal experience. A lot of personal experience. The implications for preserving the gospel, and I'll close this, or with this. This is another unpopular dimension of this. From the beginning of the Reformation until the Cambridge Declaration of 1996, the doctrines of grace in the Reformed tradition were always seen as the correct formulation of the gospel. We've already said that, but that had an implication for preserving that same gospel. In other words, without ever questioning the salvation of our Arminian brothers and sisters, what we call Calvinism or even reformed soteriology, the doctrines about the gospel, that was considered a bulwark for the preservation of the gospel. Something has happened in the first decade and a half of the new millennium. And this something that has happened seems to parallel the poison of postmodernism that we already addressed. No longer can we distinguish between the person and the proposition, up there on that board, the subject and the object, but the ministry of preserving the gospel has become something of a lost art. It's no longer seen as a duty, it's actually seen as evidence of a morbid, self-congratulatory spirit. If you try to claim that this matters in such a way that we're liberating from churches and we're preserving the church, we're preserving this for you, that's part of what we're doing here, then you are viewed as having a self-congratulatory or morbid spirit. In his book, Getting the Gospel Right, R.C. Sproul said that, quote, when an essential truth of the gospel is condemned, the gospel itself is condemned with it. And without the gospel, an institution is not a Christian church. And he was speaking about mostly Rome. This is simply another way of saying that the gospel is an essential, if not the essential, of biblical Christianity, and that it is the first mark of the church, end quote. Now there's obviously a spectrum here. Let me introduce two ideas that I just came up with yesterday. I'm going to kind of run with this because... I think this is a good way to say it. I said something like this in the Romans 14 class about our structures. Our structures speak. In other words, we don't have to have a false gospel just on a piece of paper or in the airwaves, but we can actually have signs that are our actions that tell false gospels. And how did I do this? Oh yeah, a stick figure. Yeah, this is how I did it. Let's have a stick figure over here on the left. I'm going to describe this for audio land, and above this stick figure I'm gonna put the word flagrant, a flagrant false gospel. And I'm gonna have sound waves coming from this head. And then over here out in his hand, and that's gonna represent he's doing something, and I'm gonna put a number two there, and there the sound waves are gonna come this way into the head. So out of the head, a flagrant false gospel, into the head from our practices, a functional false gospels. So a flagrant false gospel and a functional false gospel. Now just work with me here for a second. Flagrant false gospels are anti-gospel doctrines. Functional false gospels are anti-gospel practices. And both of these can be lethal because one is explicit and immediately deadly from the mind to the heart. That's number one. and the other is implicit and therefore much more dangerous in the sense that it is insidiously working through actions and expectations and structures, and it works to the heart through the will, not through the mind, by people unwillingly absorbing against the doctrine, absorbing practices, expectations, and other structures. Now, why do we have a functional false gospel in this age especially? Because in American culture, or in any other culture, you have pragmatism. Pragmatism sets a functional way of doing church, or a functional understanding of Christianity as king on the throne, because we're concerned about what works, we're concerned about doing. So pragmatism creates the functional false gospel age, but postmodernism questions our right to question it. So put those two together in a pot, pragmatism and postmodernism, and apply them to the modern ministry, and we have a problem. Pragmatism creates the functional false gospel age. Postmodernism questions our right to question it. but the spirit who sold us this is not the same spirit who inspired the scriptures. Paul commands Timothy in 2 Timothy 1, 13 and 14, follow the sound or follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love there in Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Guard the good deposit. I am giving you a pattern of sound words. Guard that. I am passing this on to you, Timothy. He's a spiritual son. Pass that on. Guard that as you pass that on. The Apostle Paul even more strongly says this in his opposition to Peter in Galatians, and he was prepared to oppose all of the Jerusalem leadership, if necessary, over the issue of the ceremonial law as an impediment to the gospel. Listen to these words in Galatians 2, 4, and 5. Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery." Who's he talking about? Guys like Peter. Now, Peter repented. He didn't know how that was gonna turn out, but there were people who came in secretly to bring us into slavery. If this idea wins, Paul is saying, we will be in slavery. And he says, to them, we did not yield in submission even for a moment. Here it is, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. It belongs to the gospel ministry to preserve the gospel. Three main points from that text. Number one, There are those who would bring us into slavery. Peter was among them, in spite of being a genuine believer, who was brought to repent. But if Peter had stayed in that state, he would have joined the ranks of those who would bring us into slavery. Number two, Paul and his school of thought did not yield in submission to them. What is your job when those would bring us into slavery? Not to submit to them. Your job is to hold the line and not submit to the tyranny of a functional false gospel. Number three, the reason Paul gives is so that the gospel would be preserved. Now what was this fight over? It was over circumcision. Among other things, table fellowship as some biblical scholars call it. But whatever it was, practices that are more petty, that exclude things, You say, well that wasn't petty, that was a ceremonial law. Exactly. I always remind people, when talking about Romans 14 things, notice that the things that Paul says, we're not going to divide over this, are things that God was very serious about. They were his idea. And here we are dividing over so many things that are not even in the Bible. This was circumcision, it was the sign of the covenant, and you will notice that Paul has Timothy circumcised so as to not offend the Jews up in Ephesus, but he specifically refuses to have Titus circumcised so that he can start this food fight with the Jerusalem leadership. He makes a point to say it. Same practice, I'm gonna do opposites, for the sake of the gospel. Paul, you're such a relativist, why won't you draw a line and take a position? I am gonna draw a line, I'm gonna do it with this knife. I'm gonna cut this guy's thing in, I'm not gonna do that, and I want you to think about it, because you don't understand Christianity. And I am not gonna back down until you get it, the world depends on it. So I'm going to have him circumcised to not offend this group of people, and I'm going to have him not circumcised so that I can offend that same group of people. Because there's different things at stake for the gospel in both, but the gospel is the universal over them both. And our job is to get that in our heads. What happens when the church resists the gospel? Last point. You don't have to have a secret paradigm to begin growing sour toward things like the depths of the law or the knowledge of our moral inability to obey God. Packer correctly diagnosed this blind spot decades ago in that same intro to Owen's work. He said, these reform doctrines, it would be said, are not helpful, air quotes. they would drive sinners to despair by suggesting to them that it is not in their power to be saved through Christ. The possibility that such despair might be salutary is not considered. It is taken for granted that it cannot be, because it is so shattering to our self-esteem. However this may be, the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel, and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth." End quote. Many a new Calvinist would pump their fist and holler at this rhetoric of Packer's. And yet we might fail to see that the principle does not restrict itself only to the arena of evangelism, only at the front door. In other words, the refusal to hear the bad news because of the sovereign self-esteem is not simply an Arminian church phenomenon. It is what it is because of sinful selves. And Calvinistic churches are just as full of those A few sermon series from a reformed perspective does not guarantee a crucified heart, especially if you're coming to hear those sermons merely to be entertained or to distinguish yourself from other Christians. And that being the case, Packer's half-truth masquerade is always playing at a church near you. Now that's just the law. But why would the church resist grace? Well, for that, you'll have to come back tomorrow afternoon. And I invite you all to do that. I've got a third session that I'm doing on Thursday afternoons now. So you're invited to do that. And that's what we're going to talk about. 5 o'clock. We did that last week. We did a third session on the Word. And session three. We're going to start doing it indefinitely. So unless my schedule changes, there'll be a third Shepherds College session Thursday, five o'clock, because I'm here for the other thing, so I might as well add a third session, I thought to myself. I did, I did, and I just came up with it, so I'm not trying to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We did, if it helps, we did have a large amount of Kool-Aid there. No, no.