John Bunyan: Puritan Baptist

It is wonderful to be in a room full of such plotters for the gospel. As Tom said, I've certainly known this dear brother for probably longer than I've known anybody else here in this room. And I have appreciated him in his ministry for over 20 years. Mike Law assists me in so many ways. Lloyd Sprinkles books I have in my hand probably every day of my life. I'm handling at least one book that Lloyd has printed and given us. He's been a blessing to the work of Baptists in Virginia and beyond. I can just keep going with Jeff and Rob with this work. There's just so many people that it's just wonderful to be able to conspire together for the kingdom. Trying to think, what can we do to help the work of God, to further the work of God, to serve God in His work? Well, I've been asked specifically to speak on John Bunyan, Puritan Baptist Churchman. So, again, thank you. I thank Rob for that. I'm happy to talk about John Bunyan. I'm glad to talk about a topic that I think is relevant today for a number of reasons. As we've just heard from Tom, obedience to scripture is always relevant. Furthermore, John Bunyan's writings have been among the most appreciated meditations on scripture in the history of the Christian church. John Bunyan, since he wrote them, has been almost uniquely used as God, I think. Still more, John Bunyan rejected into baptism at a time and place where that was very difficult to do. term with all due response your brother we are respect thank you for your work we're delighted about bunion's choice on that matter particularly he concluded that the bible teaches only believer baptism and while today many have a loyalty to this position i fear it is too often only a kind of conservative grand loyalty in the sense that my family's always driven buicks you know so that's why i'm a baptist and i want to make sure we keep being baptists and i i'm not interested in that kind of position i would encourage any of us to be uh... we don't want to hold positions other than for that's what the bible teaches uh... also the identity of baptist is being challenged today on a number of levels and one very acutely going to be a bit of today's with john piper's open advocacy of accepting the unbought unbaptized into membership which is why i think this one's particularly relevant all the way over just to the careless membership practices that mark most southern baptist churches and just the utterly careless practices. Amen, if you agree that's true, not that you like that, and let's let that keep going. Just want to clarify the so let it be that we just heard. Like anti-amen would be good on that one. Well, for all of these reasons and more, we want to look at John Bunyan, and I think he will prove to be an interesting and useful conversation partner for us this afternoon as Christians together, as we consider Christ and his desires for his church. in one of a number of his works first published four years after his death towards the conclusion of his application of Psalm 130, verse 7, Bunyan used an arresting image of a heart as an unreliable container of truth. Bunyan observed, quote, He that will keep water in a sieve must use more than ordinary diligence. Now, what Bunyan said of water in a sieve about truth in the heart is also true about the difficulty of keeping such biblically conscientious Christians as Bunyan and his fellow non-conformists together in churches. And it's going to be this strange tension between Bunyan's doggy devotion to Scripture, which we can see and feel and admire, and yet his denial of what were to become important denominational boundaries. uh... that we will consider in this time together was bunion a non-conformist was he a dissenter a separatist or was he, to use a more recent political phrase, a uniter, not a divider what was bunion? we'll heard something about his life. John Bunion's biography is perhaps the most well-known among all those we call puritans born in 1648 near Bedford, England he was baptized as an infant in the parish church of Elsta At age 16, he joined the Parliamentary Army in the English Civil Wars. He was introduced to life and death there in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which is one of the best autobiographies you will ever read. Talk about encouraging your soul with trusting in Christ alone and in the righteousness of Christ alone. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In that autobiography, he told of one friend who took his place in one time of service as a Sentinel. And Bunyan says, quote, was shot into the head with a musket bullet and died, end of quote. That made a profound impact on Bunyan. He served in the army for about two and a half years, and then he returned home to Bedford, where he got married at age 20. His wife was as poor as he was, and her only dowry was a copy of John Bailey's The Practice of Piety and Arthur Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven. Not a bad dowry. Two years later, Bunyan's first child, Mary, was born. Mary is well known. She was blind. Much loved by Bunyan. Three years later, in 1653, Bunyan joined St. John's Church in Bedford, where Pastor Gifford ministered. Within two years, Bunyan had been baptized as a believer. He had become a deacon there. But also, his wife had died, and he was left with four little children to rear. Bunyan published his first book at age 28, in 1656. and he continued to write and publish prolifically for the next 32 years of his life. The next year, he began his public preaching ministry, and soon he began to get into trouble for being an unauthorized preacher. Something that didn't just happen to Baptist preachers in Virginia, but others have known what it means to be unauthorized by the state in order to preach and have suffered for it. The religious climate, of course, changed with the restoration of the monarchy. So on November the 12th, 1660, John Bunyan was arrested. He could no longer have that freedom. He refused to relent of it. So he was placed in the bed for jail. He was charged with, quote, devilishly and perniciously abstaining from coming to church to hear divine service and for being a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventacles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign Lord and King, end of quote. Bunyan now faced very strong pressures for conformity. Non-conformity was now associated with treason against crown and country. Only 11 years earlier, the king's head had been cut off by people who maintained the kind of freedoms that Bunyan was agitating for. So the tide of intolerance for religious non-conformity was high, and Bunyan had no extensive network of friends in high places, as the university-trained conforming ministers in the Anglican Church had. when he was born to a truly poor family. He had no formal education of any kind. He trained as a tinker. You know what a tinker is? It's a pot repairman. He would go around and, you know, hammer out pots, heat them, hammer them, try to repair them. He married early and, as I said, had four children to provide for. When he was converted, he'd come to reject into baptism, so he couldn't obey. He couldn't go into the Church of England accepting its authority to impose her laws upon Christians, and particularly the right of the Church of England to suppress preachers of the word. So Bunyan himself chose the inside of a jail for the better part of 12 years, from 1660 to 1672, rather than leave off his preaching. Now in 1672, when he was released, he was given a royal license to preach, and he became the pastor of the congregation in Bedford, that he had been a member of for 19 years, 12 of which he'd been in prison. Those prisoners were fruitful ones for him in terms of publishing. His most famous work came out of a brief later imprisonment in 1675. It was then that he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, not publishing it until three years later. Meanwhile, Bunyan served as the pastor of the congregation in Bedford and published regularly, annually, or even more often throughout his 40s and 50s, that is, the 1670s and 1680s. In August of 1688, Bunyan had gone down from London to try to settle a family dispute, but he traveled through drenching rain. in order to do this and he fell ill. And after this brief but severe illness, John Bunyan died at the age of 60 on August 31st, 1688. Just then, a different world was beginning religiously in England. On June 6th, just earlier that summer, 1688, William of Orange was invited to come and take the throne of England. The Roman Catholic monarch, James II, had fled to France. By the time William arrived in London in December of 1688, it was clear that those harsh measures that Bunyan had suffered under would be changed. denominations were about to be born as the strange fruit of toleration. And speaking of denominations, I'm going to turn now from the biographical consideration of Bunyan as a Puritan to the more specific and controversial notion of Bunyan as a Baptist. John Bunyan had a rather uncommon notion of the relation of baptism and the Lord's Supper. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic positions were clearly echoed and everything from antiquity to architecture, from the writings of the church fathers to the placement of the labors of regeneration as they thought of them near the door of the church when you came in, it was clear that baptism was viewed as the initial vehicle of God's grace in a person's life without which they would not be saved. Martin Luther's understanding of justification fundamentally altered this teaching. at least among his followers, removing baptism from its central place and replacing it with faith alone in Christ alone, the biblical teaching. Baptism was still, however, understood to be the entering sacrament for those coming into the church. Zwingli and Calvin forged new understandings of the covenantal and promissory nature of baptism, but again left its position practically unchanged. Cranmer seems to have taken on board much of Calvin and Booster's position in his understanding of baptism. It was left to the continental Anabaptists and the English Baptists somewhat later to completely re-understand baptism as a parallel not of physical circumcision but of spiritual circumcision. That is, as something which was to accompany not physical birth but spiritual birth. It was this teaching that John Bunyan, faithful member of the Church of England, came to during the tumultuous 1650s. He came under the influence of John Gifford, the pastor of St. John's Church in Bedford. Gifford seemed to have been an early Baptist. But in coming to his re-understanding of baptism, he went further than most others who were coming to that position. Most of the Baptists, as was reflected in the First London Confession, particularly in the second edition of it in 1646, understood baptism to be the entering ordinance into the church, as people who called themselves Christians had done for centuries. Article 39 of the First London Confession read, baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament given by Christ to be dispensed upon persons professing faith, or that are made disciples, who upon professing faith ought to be baptized and after to partake of the Lord's Supper. End of quote. So Baptists, like all other professing Christians historically, understood baptism to be a prerequisite for the privileges of membership in the Church, notably communion. and yet the baptists, like the other protestants, did not understand baptism to be saving. As Tom said earlier, ectopora operata, the work itself working. The doctrinal change they advocated was a change in the direction of making the church more pure, more visible, more approximate to the invisible church. As such, it was often attacked as a kind of Donatism or Hyper-Puritanism. That's the way Puritan ministers of an earlier generation opposed the separatists of their day by suggesting that those tempted with it read Augustine's anti-Donatist writings. Suggesting that Baptists are really Donatists. They're going to over-purify the church. To which we should always gently and lovingly respond to our Paedo-Baptist friends if they practice believer communion. Or do they practice Paedo-Communion? If they practice Paedo-Communion, you have a very interesting discussion on your hands. if they practice believer community most of them do then you would say that you're trying to purify the church no more than they are out of their understanding of obedience to scripture such an understanding of baptism as being for believers only was certainly the death knell of an established church as the church was no longer understood to be co-extensive with society and much more could be said about that including referencing some of psalm's comments about E.Y. Mullen's statements a century ago But it was not the final subjectivizing of baptism that its opponents often made it out to be. At least no more so, as I said, than the Reformed position subjectivized receiving the Lord's Supper, limiting that only to believers. The ultimate in subjectivizing the Christian faith, making it all centered on the individual, were undoubtedly the Quakers. The Quakers renounced all outward formalities. They drove home a version of the Christian gospel which measured in ethics and integrity with what one knows oneself to be true. And Bunyan had entered into writhing controversies against the Quakers and other sectaries, attacking them bitterly, as was the custom of the day. And if you get the three-volume set of John Bunyan's works, you'll find several of them aimed at the Quakers. But what we want to think about, particularly in the time we have together, is something he did in 1673. He took up his pen against another group, much closer to his own views, the Baptists. And this may surprise some of you because Bunyan is often thought of as a Baptist. And he did reject it in baptism. But he also rejected the position that many of the emerging Baptists of his own day espouse. And that is this, that there can be no church communion with, and therefore no church membership for, those who have not been baptized as believers. That was the position of many of the emerging Baptist leaders. bunion rejected that he was therefore what richard graves called an open membership baptist we might see him as a kind of e-free minister before his time you know allowing sort of either way to be practiced in his church bunion himself now understand this bunion himself was convinced that baptism infant baptism was nothing and therefore he sought and was baptized as a believer himself but he was not prepared to limit church membership only to those who agreed with him on such as he called them externals Bunyan had a more spiritual vision of the church, trying to see a wider unity in the local church. Sometime in 1671 or 1672, toward the end of his first imprisonment, John Bunyan had written, A Confession of My Faith and a Reason of My Practice. And he concluded this introduction to this piece by writing, Touching my practice as the communion with visible saints, although not baptized with water. I say, does my present judgment so to do? And I'm willing to render a farther reason thereof, shall I see the leading hand of God thereto? Thine bonds for the gospel, John Bunyan." And most of these controversial works of Bunyan on this point are in Volume 2 of Offer 3, Volume 7 of his work here in Volume 2 of Bunyan's works. Bunyan had two parts of this work, A Confession of My Faith, both evident in his title. The first half, he gave a confession of his faith, and in this he focused on Christ and then on justification. and then he followed with his confession of his understanding of scripture on election, calling, faith, repentance, love, the scriptures, the government. The second half of the work was his reason of my practice in worship, and the second half, the reason of my practice in worship, contained three parts. In the first part, Bunyan briefly stated those with whom he would dare not hold communion, so what his boundaries are. In the second part, and the longest section, and really the point of this little book, He stated that those with whom he would dare to hold communion. And the third section was a brief application. Bunyan was clear in that first part that the profane were not to be accepted into the church's communion. That's one of the problems he had with the Anglican church, with the establishers. There was no church discipline. But nobody would disagree with him among the dissenters. All the non-conforming Protestants agreed with him on that point. It was in that longer second section, however, that Bunyan argued that he would dare to have church communion with those who are visible saints by calling. That's how he put it. Visible saints by calling. Now, this may sound uncontroversial. I don't know how much you're used to reading language like this or hearing it. Especially in a tolerant age like our own. But just hold on. Understand this. At this point, what Bunyan was inserting, well, he put in a question at this point in the text. I'll share that with you. Like, you know, this would be like an objector to what he's saying. But do you not count that by water baptism, and not otherwise, that being the initiating and entering ordinance, they ought to be received into fellowship? Answer, says Bunyan, no. But Terry, it takes sense with my word, for herein lies the mistake, to think that because in time past baptism was administered upon conversion, that therefore it is the initiating and entering ordinance into church communion, when by the word no such thing is testified of it." Bunyan then proceeds by question and answer to pick his way through the visible arguments of the more purely Baptist ministers of his day, William Kiffin, significantly among them. A bit later, Bunyan poses this question, quote, Notwithstanding all that you have said, water baptism ought to go before church membership. Show me one and all the New Testament that was received into fellowship without it. And Bunyan begins his answer to that question. That water baptism have formerly gone first is granted. But that it ought of necessity so to do, I never saw proof. This kind of simple reasoning typified Bunyan's approach to this topic. His opponent's arguments would be frankly and simply stated, not much nuance, and frankly and simply refuted. Again, not much nuance. In various ways, Bunyan kept asserting the inconsistency of accepting someone as a Christian, but not as a member of the church. He wrote, quote, I am therefore for holding communion thus because the edification of souls in the faith and holiness of the gospel is of greater concernment than an agreement in outward things. I say it is of greater concernment with us and of far more profit to our brother than our agreeing in or contesting for the business of water baptism. And then again a little later, I am for holding communion thus because love, which above all things we are commanded to put on, is of much more worth than to break about baptism. But to conclude this, when we attempt to force our brother beyond his life, or to break his heart with grief, to thrust him beyond his faith, or to bar him from his privilege, how can we say, I love? What shall I say? Strange. Take two Christians equal at all points for this. Nay, let one go beyond the other, far for grace and holiness. Yet, this circumstance of water shall drown and sweep away all his excellencies, not counting him worthy of that reception. that with hands and hearts shall be given to a novice in religion, because he consents to water." One of John Bunyan's first pieces to write and publish after he got out of jail was his Differences in Water Baptism, No Bar to Communion, 1673. This was a brief book of slightly more than 30,000 words. In it, he answered a book by Thomas Paul and William Kippen, which had asserted what we've come to know as the standard Baptist position. Bunyan wrote, to clarify his contention, quote, that the Church of Christ hath not warrant to keep out of their communion the Christian that is discovered to be a visible saint by the word, the Christian that walketh according to his light with God. He explains to the readers, especially to Paul and Gibbon, these two Baptist ministers, I will give you a touch of the reason of my publishing that part thereof which you so hotly oppose. It was because of those continual assaults that the rigid brethren of your way made, not only upon this congregation to rend it, but also upon many others about us. If, peradventure, they might break us in pieces and draw from us disciples after them. Assaults, I say, upon this congregation by times for no less than these sixteen or eighteen years. Yea, myself they have sent forth and endeavored to persuade me to break communion with my brethren. Also, with many others, they have often tampered, if haply their seed the division might take. Now, sir, to settle the brethren, the brethren of our community, and to prevent such disorders among others, was the cause of my publishing my papers." In this work, Bunyan repeated the same arguments that he had made before, that baptism pertains to the individual's obedience. It is not the role of the church itself as the church. Following along, answering Paul and Kiffin's arguments to Bunyan's earlier arguments. So by this time, the arguments were getting muddied by his concern to answer what he felt were the misrepresentations and false conclusions of those who were opposing him. This seems, I think, a clear example of more heat not producing more light, as you keep reading these things. The basic arguments come out very quickly, and then the rest of it, they just kind of yell at each other. Well, in the second half of the work, Bunyan addressed the arguments and questions put by Paul and Kiffin, and reading this, as a baptist is for me a bit like reading harry emerson's fosdick harry emerson's fosdick thoroughly wrong-headed and very stirring sermon shall the fundamentalists win it is a powerful bit of rhetoric and nevertheless it's finally unconvincing if you're here as a baptist minister and if you want to see if you're really convinced You might go find this volume two of George Offer's edition of Bunyan's works, volume two. Take up the second half of Bunyan's Differences About Water, Baptism, and No-Bardic Union. Israel, you can borrow my copy and try to apply it during the break and talk to us about it. These are, I think, some of the best answers you're going to find about our arguments, you're going to find, for why we, as Christians, should not divide over this in our churches. but if you didn't answer uh... objections that one in and alternatively for those of you who are bad this year like i think you like the sharpener converse after two o'clock into the great job thinking about that it's in the morning two thirty six thirty five to six forty there's a five key pages i think the look at Well, upon his death, John Bunyan still had twelve works largely prepared for the press, but that weren't published. At least part of the reason for this, for them not being published, must have been the hostility of the government to works from people like Bunyan, who were openly critical of the religious establishment. So in April of 1688, an indulgence was issued which greatly relaxed requirements for works printed, and in the four months between that relaxation in April and Bunyan's death in August, he got five of those twelve books published. He went right to the press as it opened up. One of those books which came out after he died in his posthumous collected works was a fairly small piece, less than half the size of his Confession of Faith. It was called Peaceable Principles and True, and it answered another Baptist minister, Danver, and Paul again, to their answers to his differences in judgment about water baptism, no bar to communion. And he again restates his position a little bit more briefly. Bunyan writes, I have denied that baptism was ever ordained of God to be a wall of division between the holy and the holy. The holy that are and the holy that are not, so baptized with water is we. And this book, as all of Bunyan's, are marked by plain speech. So you will not have trouble understanding Bunyan once you get into it and start reading him. He writes, your first five pages are spent to prove me either proud or a liar. You ask me next, how long is it since I was a Baptist? Since you would know by what name I would be distinguished from others, I tell you, I would be and hope I am a Christian and choose if God should count me worthy to be called a Christian, a believer or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost. As for those factious titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians or the like, I conclude that they came neither from Jerusalem nor Antioch, but rather from Hell and Babylon. For they naturally tend to divisions. You may know them by their fruits." I would say that's pretty typical of Bunyan's writing on this point. If you're feeling tired late at night and you want to get some more reading done, that will keep you awake as you read. Bunyan concludes with a prayer, God banish the bitterness out of the churches. and pardon them that are maintainers of schisms and divisions among the godly. Bunyan, of course, was no such divider. He was an heir to the English Protestant Reformation. He sought for that Reformation to continue. The Reformed Church was always being reformed according to the word of God. Bunyan attempted to do this in part by attempting to compose brethren who were alienated from each other over lesser matters, matters that were not essential to salvation. In the closing remarks of the 1673 treaties, uh... differences about what about it in the park union bunion comes up well what we might call it that is a project i strive not for mastery or to show myself singular unique unusual here out out of bounds but if it might be for union and communion among the godly that was his goal that was what he was driving so what does all of this mean for us well d martin lloyd-jones at his last address at the Westminster Conference, given in 1978, was on this very topic. And he ended with a passionate plea to follow Bunyan's position here. In reflecting on this, let me begin by saying that I am powerfully attracted to Bunyan's position. As a Baptist pastor, few things pain me more than turning away visible saints who are paedo-Baptists and who desire membership in our church. And let me just be clear on this point. I'm not even talking about those people who were baptized as infants and want membership in our church. No, they could have been baptized as believers, but if they do believe that infant baptism is baptism, we cannot admit them into our church. Because we're congregationalists. Because unlike our Presbyterian friends, we don't think it's just the elders who have to have this modicum of understanding of the gospel and theology. Because we don't think it's the elders, it's the final judicatory court under God. We think it's the congregation as a whole. There has to be a minimal amount of theological agreement among the congregation as a whole in order to exercise that final state of authority. Not that some Southern Baptist commission said we had to exercise, or some BGAV, but whom the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 18 suggests is the final court of authority. The ecclesia, the church as a whole. So we need to have some amount of agreement among the brethren over that. And certainly there are few things more fundamental to the visible church than baptism in the Lord's Supper. So I would love to follow Bunyan's lead. I would love to treat this as a weaker brother situation. I'm preaching through First Corinthians right now. I can understand in one sense how you could do that. But Richard Greaves has summarized Bunyan's position vis-a-vis the other Baptists by saying, quote, In the end, the whole argument could be reduced to a question of whether or not love would triumph over ecclesiasticism. And Bunyan harbored no doubt about his preference for the former alternative. Well, I for one am not satisfied by that summary of the argument. I don't think it's a matter of love triumphing over ecclesiasticism. I would say it's a matter of wonderful passion and desire triumphing over clear obedience to Scripture. There seems to be a few matters which are not theologically essential to being a Christian, yet which are essential to have agreement upon in order for a church to function. And as Baptists, we're the awkward ones who always go around saying, it has fallen to us. That is our lot. You know, our dear Lutheran and Presbyterian friends contend for deprecating my faith alone, and God bless them. We believe that, too. We know they're going to take care of those. Those conversations get very very complicated and most of us Baptist don't follow those too well. So we're just thankful our Presbyterian and Lutheran friends are there to lead us aright in these matters. But when it comes to the church, that's the place where we've made our contribution. And we think we see scripture clearly on this. Since the Reformation, for the overwhelming majority of Protestants, some questions of agenda, what we do, can practically become as important, as important, as some questions of credenda, what we believe. Questions of what are to be done are not only more quickly obvious to the layperson in questions of what's to be believed, but they're also often viewed as more important. So this preacher, for example, you're listening to on a Sunday sometime, may or may not believe there's some error tucked away in the Bible somewhere, but I can tell whether that preacher is a man or a woman. Now, is that issue as important as the authority of Scripture? Well, no, not formally. But are they connected? Yeah. And can I, as an undiscerning person theologically, tell what's going on there? In that second case, whether it's a man or a woman, yeah, I can see that. There's no debate there. So, this preacher may not believe in the existence of the exhaustive foreknowledge of God, of all future events. But I can tell if he baptized his infants or not. This preacher may or may not believe in the death of Christ as a penal substitute for my sinful self, but if I keep attending, I'll be able to tell if the bishop or the congregation or the denomination general assembly or convention or the preacher has the last say in the church. These practical matters become obvious. Now, any of these issues of polity and practice, we may declare to be matters in difference. We may allow freedom of opinion in our congregation on these matters. We may be united despite our differences. And on and on I could go presenting positively what Bunyan is trying to do here. I could talk charitably about uniting church like this, but at the end of the day, we must do something and we will do one thing and not the other. You can call yourself community church all you want, but you will end up baptizing infants or not. And you can have truth in advertising or not, in the way you're presenting yourself. We will recognize women as elders and bishops of national assemblies as our final authority, infants as subjects of baptism, or we will not. We will do one or the other. Now finally, I think you could say Bunyan took a nearly Quaker position on baptism, on the subject of baptism. It wasn't essential for communion, for church membership, so it would be left to be a matter of private judgment. Now, At Bunyan's Meeting House in Bedford, one pastor may teach infant baptism, the next may not. Neither one's teaching would fundamentally affect the church. Well, my question would be to my brother, John Bunyan, does that really create the unity that you're looking for? Does that create the unity that God is looking for in his word? Does it create an understanding that baptism is in the eye of the beholder? Does it make obedience altogether too subjective a matter? As long as you think you've been baptized, we'll treat that as baptism. Is disobedience to a command of Christ a mere lack of light to be born with, as rung and maintained, or is it a disciplinable sin and offense? Let me ask you a question, those of you who are parents. Do we teach our children to mean well or to act well? Do we teach them that they must not hit their brother? Or that there must be no malice in their hearts when they do. The Bible is clear in teaching that there are such things as unintentional sins. Unintentional sins. Leviticus 4 and 5, Numbers 15, Ezekiel 45, elsewhere, are about sins like this. But it's what's in the heart that counts, we say today. Is that what we want to teach people from God's Word? It's what's in the heart that counts? Don't misunderstand me. The intentions of the heart are hugely important. Who has taught that more powerfully than our Lord? So Moses taught that intentional sins should receive worse punishment. The Lord Jesus himself taught that intentions themselves were sins. And in some ways were the very heart of sin. But he never taught that that was all there was to sin. Because we know from the Bible that one of the effects of sin is to stupefy us, to dull us, to darken us. So those dwelling in sin are said to dwell in darkness. But that darkness in no way finally ameliorates our guilt. We're still guilty. So Jesus, in Matthew 25, he presents the judgment of God in the passage about the sheaf and the goat. And after inviting the sheaf into eternal blessedness, the Almighty then turns to the goats and he says to them, Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes, and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison, and you did not look after me. And do you remember what the goats pled? They pled their motives, their intentions, their ignorance. Lord, where did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or needing clothes, or sick, or in prison, and did not help you? And friends, did that exculpate them? Did that get them off the hook? He will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did not for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. Now, let me underscore, I'm not trying to say by that, using that as an illustration that baptism is essential for salvation, nor that agreement for baptism is essential for salvation. What I'm saying is centered on this point of intention. the best of motives notwithstanding, obedience to God is not in the eye of the beholder. And particularly in our subjectivist age, no evangelical leader should be teaching that it is. So in this sense, if I can just pick up on the President's hearing, Brethren, one more time in a positive fashion, much better theologically, I think, to actually think that baptism is legitimately baptism and to accept it, than to do as John Bunyan was doing and as other evangelical leaders are doing today, who do not think of baptism as baptism, and yet saying, if you think you've been obedient to this, we will accept you upon that basis. Friends, that's to subjectivize what we understand as obedience to God in a way Scripture does not allow us to do. And when we can read the signs of the times, we should know what a particularly dangerous thing that is to do today. When our whole culture is a kind of essentialist culture that has very little time for anything. in trying to make distinctions or carefully follow God's Word. Obedience to God is not in the eye of the beholder, unless the beholder is God Himself. He is the one who determines what is obedient to Him. We determine that by His Word. How do we know what He considers obedient? By His own self-revelation. We have no other sure and certain guides. Not even the Church. No, my Roman Catholic friend, in the New Testament, we see churches airing in Revelation 2 and 3. In most all, the churches of the epistles are addressed to. They are in error. We know from 2 Timothy 4 that teachers will err. We know from Acts and Galatians that even Peter erred. In the New Testament, we see Paul writing to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 4, my conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. The acquittal we need is not finding from some church accepting us into membership. It is not from our own opinions of ourselves. The acquittal we need, ultimately, is from God. The psalmist realized this when he prayed in Psalm 51, I can see you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. For sin is an objective reality based upon our thoughts and deeds or our lack of them over and against how God would have the creatures uniquely made in his image to live. And it is not finally determined by us or by our intentions, but by God as the judge of our thoughts and lives. And he is indescribably holy. It's not natural to us in our fallen states, even in our redeemed states as fallen human beings, to understand His holiness. He has revealed Himself to us in His Word, and therefore we had best cling to it tenaciously. Now, I want to be very careful in this matter. John Bunyan believed and taught all of the things I've just said. I don't want to slander the brother. His heart for the unity of the Church, I think, reflects our Lord's Prayer in John 17 well. When Jesus prayed, My prayer is not for them alone, I pray also for Those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one. Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. Amen. But if you ask the question, how the followers of Jesus are going to be so united? Well, how has Jesus just prayed in John 17? If you look up in verse 17, he says, he prays that God would sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. The most widely used Baptist confession of faith in the English-speaking world is the New Hampshire Confession of Faith. Remember the very first article of that of the Scriptures. We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is the perfect treasure of heavenly instruction, that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter, that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us and therefore is and shall remain to the end of the world the true center of Christian union. and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried. That phrase, the true center of Christian union, you see that significance. People with the best of intentions have long come up with unions ill-founded and ill-fated. We may not understand why God has commanded everything that he has, but we should not be slow in obeying him, nor in building our churches on such obedience. My conclusion on Bunyan's position on baptism is that he was editing Jesus. Not that he was intending to, but that effectively that's what he did. The Lord Jesus commanded it. And Bunyan even saw and acknowledged that the Lord Jesus had commanded this. And yet, he said he would not enforce that in terms of discipline in his own church and therefore in terms of church membership. Fred, I think there's a danger today of an essentialism where we think there are only two speeds, essential to salvation and unimportant. And Fred, you can't follow scripture very well if you do that. There's all kinds of judgments you're going to have to make in between things that are very important, but not essential to salvation, or things that are pretty important, but not essential to salvation. And things that, eh, they'll make some difference, but yeah, they're really not that important. And then things that are just completely indifferent. There's a whole bunch of speeds, if you will, of the importance of issues that we need to be able to recognize and think about carefully and biblically. Bunyan's teaching would encourage the individualism in our day that we're already sick with. the subjectivism that will lead to our destruction. So at the end of the day, there is much about John Bunyan I appreciate it and admire and love. But it seems to me that our congregationalist pedo-baptist friend Jonathan Edwards and the controversy that he faced about believers only communion is more suggested and more important model for us to consider today, particularly if we want to think about the future of Baptist churches. That's where we'll find our arguments for the importance of churches being composed of believers, not from our dear brother, from whom we learn so much, but not this John Budman. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for our brother who sat those years in prison. Who did not decry you, who, like Job, said no ill or wrong about you when you called home his young wife or when he had to keep his children from prison or while they were young, while one was blind, although we thank you for the faithfulness of this one who's gone before us. We thank you for how so many of your children have been suckered by his writings. Lord, we pray that you would give us wisdom as we consider this matter of baptism and of church membership. We pray that we would think well about the Lord's Supper and how you intend your church to appear in the world as a kingdom of priests. Give us wisdom and charity, we pray. Give us hearts of obedience. In Jesus' name, amen.