Survey of Doctrinal Preaching

Thank you, Rob. Thank you very much for being here this afternoon. And I kind of a great privilege to be able to be in the same program with Andrew Davis. He just spoke at Southern Seminary this yesterday in chapel and did just a wonderful job of giving an exposition of scripture. And it was an example of the kind of thing that I want to encourage you to do. The subject that we are dealing with during this particular meeting of the evangelical forum is the issue of the teaching of doctrine in the church advantages of teaching doctrine, how to teach it, the necessity of teaching it, practicality and so forth. And what I'm going to speak on this afternoon is something of a historical survey of the impact of doctrinal preaching. I had originally thought about speaking just specifically on Jonathan Edwards because Jonathan Edwards is such a marvelous example, a pristine example of what doctrinal preaching is all about, a combination of exposition, of application, of personal experience, of exhortation, all of these things combined in a marvelous display of strong, wholesome, biblical doctrine. But the more I thought about it and the more I looked at the manuscript I had on that, the more I believed that it would be good not to demonstrate it simply in One isolated individual who happens to be a genius beyond what any of us can accomplish. We might get something of a false idea about how to do this if we simply look at it in those who are the most exalted representatives of this in the history of the church. We might say, sure, that's wonderful for Jonathan Edwards. Look at who he was. Look at his sermons. Read his works. Who can think like Jonathan Edwards? I could never preach like that. But the fact is, Jonathan Edwards is the heir of an entire history of the church dealing with doctrine. He is one who incorporated within himself mature conclusions that had been being developed by gifts that God had given the church. And particularly you pastors should understand that you can do this and should do this because God has given you as a gift to the church. He requires this of you and he will not require of you in this particular calling He will not command you to do in this calling what he does not enable you to do by his word and by his spirit. So I want to lay before you today several issues of doctrine that have been worked out in the history of the church, mentioned individuals who are responsible for this, and then try to encourage all of us as to how these aspects of doctrine should be consistent factors in our own ministries. And this is primarily, of course, because if God has made you a pastor, he has made you responsible for the souls of individuals. One of the most familiar passages of scripture about that is in Hebrews 13, verse 17, where the writer there admonishes the people not to make life difficult for their ministers, for their leaders, because they will give an account for your soul. Now, isn't that an awesome responsibility to know that God has made you a person and you will give an account for the souls of those who are before you? This is the same thing the Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, when he is talking about how we will give an account and the particular things for which we will give an account, when he said, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new. Now, all these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ. And gave us the ministry of reconciliation. Namely, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. as though God were making an appeal through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Now, at least three times in those short verses, Paul emphasizes the tremendous grace, privilege, and responsibility, burden, that is on a minister of the gospel because all that is incorporated in this issue of reconciling the world to Christ All that is involved in God being in Christ, reconciling the world to himself comes to a point in the conscience of a hearer of the gospel when the minister of the gospel gives exposition of this truth. It's the word of reconciliation. It's the ministry of reconciliation. And when you're preaching, you are preaching counter to everything that that person has had before, to every desire that they have had, to the very condition of their heart. You're seeking to assault all of their affections and all of their dispositions with a worldview that is completely different, that will replace every single thing that they have, that will alter every relationship, that will change the direction of their lives. And you are responsible for building into their mind and their heart, from the human standpoint, a rationale for being willing to do that. And to set before them sufficient motivation to change the direction of their life and give themselves in repentance and faith to Christ. And then, if by God's grace they are brought to do that, you are responsible for replacing every value they have had before with a new value. You are responsible for being the person that brings to pass in their life this reality. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Behold, all things, all things have passed away. All things have become you. So you are to be a doctrinal preacher. Now, the reason I say a doctrinal preacher, I'm not using that in contradistinction to a biblical preacher, but I'm using the word a doctrinal preacher in a sense that when you preach scripture, you are preaching always in my always bearing in mind that every scripture comes out of the complete context of the fullness of God's revelation. It means what it means in light of its intent to lead us to a more complete and full understanding of the riches that are hidden in Christ Jesus. And so this means that you're consistently synthesizing, you're consistently bringing together all of these different aspects of divine revelation that impinge upon this idea to frame within the person of those who are hearing you a truth that is defensible from every aspect of Scripture and that makes sense within the whole Christian worldview. So when I'm saying a doctrinal preacher, I'm not talking about just abstractions that have philosophical coherence, but I'm talking about. Building up the truth of the whole Bible. By showing it consistently with its consistency with each individual truth. You will give an account for the souls of people, so it is important that you be a doctrinal preacher. Peter refers to this also in the book of 1 Peter chapter 5, when he is admonishing those that are elders as to the kind of conduct they should have. It tells them to shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion but voluntarily, according to the will of God not for sordid gain, but for but with eagerness, nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge. But proving to be examples to the flock. Allotted to your charge. When Jonathan Edwards was dismissed from the church at Northampton, his farewell sermon was built upon one particular passage, but out of this passage he discussed this doctrinal idea, that every church will give an account of itself corporately for how they have dealt with the ministers God gave them, and every minister will give an account before God for how he has dealt with the flops God has given him and they will appear together. With these distinct responsibilities set forth before all of them in the face of God. That was a particularly traumatic time for Edwards at that time, but he dealt with it in a very forthright way, recognizing that he himself would give an account and they would hear him give an account. And in their own perceptions, they would know in one sense that he was given an account that was true and they would give an account before God for him. But then God, of course, will clear all of it up to let us know the truth of this relationship. People are allotted to our charge. We will give an account for their souls. We have the word of reconciliation, the ministry of reconciliation. We're called upon to say to people, be reconciled to God. within your hands is this marvelous, wonderful, mysterious, sovereign transaction of God, if I can say it that way. From a human standpoint, you are called upon to handle all of the materials, all of the truths that go into that sovereign action of God, whereby a person who is dead in trespasses and sins becomes a new creature. And to show them what it means, that old things are passed away and all things become new. So that's the first point that I want to make is that it is a part of your stewardship to be a doctrinal preacher. A second thing that I want to say about this that I think that his church history and scripture presses upon us is that you cannot be an effective doctrinal preacher. Unless in your ministry there is an unbroken relationship between the operations of the spirit and the truth in one's own soul. Now, I'm not saying that God never does a transforming work in the person of someone who hears an unregenerate creature. He does. He can take his truth and do that. And he can take those who have no intention of honoring God, who simply are there for sordid gain, as Peter says, and can do works through them because sometimes the way to impress people is simply structure stuff in your knowledge of Scripture and God will take his truth and do wonderful works. But that which is the normal process is that which I think Paul sets forth in Second Corinthians three when he talks about he doesn't need letters of recommendation. Either from someone else or from them, but because he says you are our letter of recommendation written on our heart. There was such a love he had for them and for their progress, for their understanding of truth that he poured out his very life for them. You can see this in Philippians. You can see it in Galatians. You can see it in the Thessalonian correspondence. You can see it in the Corinthian correspondence. Paul was a person who had been captured by this truth. He was consistently growing in it. It is true that he received it by divine revelation. It is something we do not do. It is true that he had spiritual experiences that even he himself with his massive learning and vocabulary could not express and was not allowed to express, but that which is revealed through his ministry is for all of us. That which is revealed through his ministry and that passion he has for truth and for the personal embodiment of truth, as he seeks to impress it upon the minds of those to whom he is ministering, is our stewardship, it is our responsibility. Who cannot sense the outrage that Paul feels in his own soul as he is talking to the Galatians about how quickly they could depart from the gospel he preached to them, how quickly they could depart from the message of grace, how quickly they could depart from Christ and his completed work. This is not just a passive kind of, well, you're doctrinally wrong here because this and this and this is true. No, this is something in which Paul feels a personal sense of loss and distress that the honor and the glory of Christ is somehow being diminished because of these false teachers. And if his glory is diminished in any sense, you are separated from Christ. You're cut off from him. He will not share his glory with anyone. He knew that he had experienced that he saw it as truth. He worked it out in great detail in his exposition of the Old Testament. He came to see how the Old Testament absolutely had to lead us to see Jesus as the Christ. This is the way he preached in the Book of Acts. He goes through and he persuades them from the Old Testament that Jesus is the Christ. He knew all of this doctrinally and exegetically, but he also knew it experientially. The Word of God had been burned into his soul, it became his affection. We can see this in the history of the church, how in Augustine, among many doctrines that he dealt with, but one that in particular is so much a part of evangelical doctrine, is the devastating effects of the fall and bringing about corruption in our souls. You read Augustine's Confessions. And you see that the doctrinal discussion of corruption is so bound up with his own perception of the corruption of his own heart. It's not just a detached experimentalism that is without doctrinal foundation, but he is feeling the truth of scripture in his own soul. He is experiencing the depths of what the Bible is talking about when it says we're dead in trespasses and sins. And when it says, what do you have that you did not receive? And when it talks about. That we are sons of God, not by human will. Not of blood, but of God. These are things that he knew to be true because they were in Scripture, but he was passionate about them and he insisted upon them and he would not see it any other way because it was only that gospel that had saved him. It was that gospel that had revealed the corruption of his own heart. It was that gospel that had showed him the way out of such enslaving corruption. We see this also in the life of Calvin. Calvin talks about himself being captive to superstitions. being so hard-hearted in this and so that God, because he was so captive to these superstitions, had to arrest him by a sudden conversion, as it were, and to break forth into his mind the purity of the truth of the Bible. Now, there are many things that Calvin can be called the theologian of, certainly the theologian of divine sovereignty and how it meshes in with a fulsome understanding of A wonderful theologian of the person and work of Christ and the centrality of Christ's person. A theologian of the Holy Spirit and the operations of the Holy Spirit in bringing us to a knowledge of Scripture and a knowledge of Christ. I'm sort of nonplussed sometimes when I hear people talk about, well, it wasn't until we began to have the Pentecostal movement that we developed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I mean, where was John Owen? Where was John Calvin in all of this if we didn't have a doctrine of the Holy Spirit? There was a full doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Calvin could be called a theologian of the Holy Spirit, but he is a theologian of the clarity of the Word of God and of the sole authority of Scripture and how it pushes aside all superstitions and does not let us have any kind of crutch to stand on other than the fact that God has said something. And it was burned into his soul. Or Jonathan Edwards, how clearly Edwards delighted in divine sovereignty. This is the one thing that he said in his testimony that he said now. He loved nothing more than to contemplate and meditate upon and delight in this reality of the sovereignty of God, a holy sovereignty, a loving sovereignty, this ineffable sweetness of thinking about the sovereignty of God. And to be in the hands Of such a God is this is a pure delight to Edwards. So this was not just some sort of a mean spirited idea that I'm going to talk about a God who controls everything and will beat you over the head if you don't shape up. It was not just an abstract kind of. Sense of sadism on his part. This was a sweetness that had captured his life as to a God. Who has such awesome power who is unfettered in doing all that he wants in heaven and in earth, paying attention to worms living in dunghills and saving them and making them his children. What a powerful, wonderful thing that this sovereign God would pay attention to sinful creatures. It was in his conscience and in his heart, in his soul. Or Charles Spurgeon, the effect that the law had upon Spurgeon. The reason that it was such a quick conversion when the primitive Methodist preacher looked at Spurgeon and said, young man, look, look, look and live. Look to Christ, it ain't lifting your finger, it ain't lifting your foot, it's just looking. But the word look would not have been anything to him unless Spurgeon had been for years, as he says, under these ten black demons of the word of the law. The lost man sees them as something that is smothering him and killing him and dragging him down to hell. These plows, he said, that raked through his back and made ten furrows of blood every time they went over him. He was in distress over the condemnation of the law. Justly so, he recognized. And so when the Spirit broke through and through that simple Methodist preacher said, look to Christ, it was a moment of great, marvelous insight. And there's no wonder that Spurgeon is so clear in the balance between his understanding of the work of the law and the work of Christ. how focused he is upon Christ, how Christocentric he is in all of the most wonderful and enlightening and edifying meanings of that term because it was in his heart and in his soul. Well, we could go on with other illustrations, Bunyan, light interpretation of scripture, how confused he was as he thought about scriptures out of context. And then finally, when he began to see the contextual arrangement of scriptures what a release it was for him. Other things we could look at in Bunyan, but that's one particular thing that stands out in his grace abounding to the chief of sinners. And so history tells us that we are the heirs of a large number of people who have struggled experientially with the truth of God's word and have come into passionate and meaningful and God glorifying ministries because there was a careful union between the operations of the spirit and truth in one's own soul. Your experience will never do simply by itself. It cannot be the principle of exegesis or exposition. But when your experience is itself informed by Scripture and by truth, and it inflames your passion more and more for Christ, it can serve has a means of great communication and a sense of the rightness of what you preach. People will not be convinced that you're telling the truth if you don't believe that you're telling the truth. And this experience of these truths is one of those things that can give you that sense of genuineness. Well, a third thing that I want us to to see in this development of doctrine, what is our obligation as people who will give an account for the souls of people. What kind of preaching should we do? Another thing that is requisite, I think, is an understanding of the character of the canon, an understanding of the character of the canon of Scripture. Now, there are many passages, of course, that you are familiar with, and you could quote, but one that I think it's very familiar to all of us and it is so, because it is such one of those delightful high points of Scripture, where so much comes together in one text. It's in 2 Timothy chapter 3, where Paul is talking to Timothy and he says, You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you've learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work. All scripture is inspired of God. Its character, its origin, It's useful, it's profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, training, and righteousness. It's purpose, as it relates to us, that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. Now, we talked about the sacred writings here, which are able to make him wise into salvation, and being made wise into salvation includes all of these things that we just mentioned. A minister must understand not only that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. We must understand that. We must believe that. If we think that we can take exception to Scripture at any place and make ourselves wiser than God, then we have forfeited our position and our stewardship as ministers. But we go beyond the affirmation of inerrancy and infallibility, perhaps not beyond it, but we see other things that are consistent with that, and that is an understanding of the character of the entire canon, how all of it is moving toward one purpose. All of it is tending to focus upon this one thing that God is doing that will glorify him above all things, and that is the reconciliation of sinners to himself through his beloved son. This is why Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 3 that the veil still is over the face of the Jewish nation when they read the Old Covenant. They can't understand what it's like. They can't understand its meaning. They have all kinds of learning. They've made all kinds of laws. They have all kinds of books of exposition, but they don't understand it, Paul would say. Jesus experienced this in his lifetime when he was trying to unload for them what kind of Messiah he was, what the Bible, what the Old Testament actually said about him, what he actually must do to be a redeemer. They did not want to hear it. They attributed his ministry to everything else except a ministry that was faithful to God. And so Paul, as he is preaching, sees this same thing still operative. Among the Jewish leaders, those who should have known this better than anyone, those who should have been able to embrace this suffering servant as the Messiah. They could not, and so therefore they did not understand the Old Covenant, because Paul goes on to say then, because only in Christ is it taken away. Now we're led to Christ only through the Spirit, and so in that passage he says, he identifies the Lord with the Spirit. Because the Spirit's work is to lead us to an understanding of all of divine revelation is culminating in this wonderful, marvelous reality of the redemptive work of Christ. And so the minister, in his exposition of Scripture, should never rest satisfied simply giving a lecture on two or three principles of wisdom that emerge out of this passage of Scripture, how to make your family better, how to run your finances better, how to be a more kind and congenial neighbor to people, how to be a more attractive personality, how to not be depressed three days out of the week. All of these kinds of things that may be good in their place, but if this is all that a person is seeing in Scripture, he's missed the whole thing. If we do not find Christ, then we have not understood what the Spirit means. There are some places where he is more visible than others, but everything that is in Scripture in its context, in the place, in the way that it contributes to the whole has some way in which it is pointing us and leading us to see that the message of the whole is that we are reconciled to God only in the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is something that I think every one of us needs to work on. We need to see this because this is the exposition that the Bible gives of itself. Jesus said. You study the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and these are they that speak of me. He said to those who didn't believe him and then to those who did believe or were discouraged because he had been crucified. He takes them and he began with Moses and all the prophets telling them all of the things that related to him. Luke 24. This is the view the Bible has of itself and we as communicators of the Word of God must have as foundational to all our doctrinal preaching and understanding of the character of the canon in history. This has been very important. One of the first challenges that has brought to this whole canonical approach to understanding the Bible was the Gnostic challenge. The challenge of those Gnostics who said that the Old Testament is simply speaking about an evil God who has created matter. The New Testament And the teaching of Jesus is talking about the world of the spirit and so the divided between matter which is evil and spirit which is good Yahweh in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament and so completely fragmented divine revelation. Irenaeus, the great apology, the great pastor, the great preacher in France took the Gnostics on, wrote descriptions of their heresies and five books against heresies And in the middle of that came back with a positive construction of the entire Scripture. He developed a very profitable biblical theology showing how the God of creation is the God of redemption. The God of wrath in the Old Testament is the God of reconciliation in the New Testament. And you don't have reconciliation without a demonstration of the same kind of wrath you see under the Old Covenant. He showed a biblical theology, and we have been the heirs of this understanding of the character of the canon. The Reformation, it was not so much the unity of Scripture as it was the sole authority of Scripture. In the Middle Ages, other authorities began to creep in, and these authorities finally were culminated simply in the magisterium of the Church, represented most fully by the Pope. And tradition was all bound up in the interpretation given it by the Pope. And so you had two levels of authority and doctrine could be created simply out of whole cloth by the Pope's declaring something to be a doctrine, though it had no foundation in the written Word of Scripture. The Reformers, therefore, had to interact with this idea, show the insufficiency of it, both in the history of the Church, show how exegetically it could not stand up, show that it was self-contradictory, and again, recapture an understanding of the wholeness of the canon and the sole sufficiency of the canon of Scripture as an authority for our understanding of the truth and of divine revelation. Then in the confrontation with liberalism. where the tendency was to subject scripture to the philosophically informed reason of man. Basic assumptions began to invade theological schools that ruled out the possibility of such supernatural things as raising from the dead and walking on water and virgin birth. And people began to write lives of Christ, like Strauss, that assumed that all of these things could not possibly have occurred. Therefore, they simply are either purposely or perhaps sometimes naively constructed myths. And this deconstruction of Scripture and of its historicity and of the central core that it is affirming that God Himself who created the world is the one who has invaded our time and space in sovereignty and in power has redeemed us by Christ and has given us a revelation of this redemption in Scripture. So those who confronted liberalism had to study it and study its presuppositions and study the way in which it destroyed Christianity and again affirm that we do not have Christianity that is not built upon a consent to a truth because God has said it. This is functional on the mission field. Adnan Judson confronted a kind of skepticism about divine revelation even among the Burmans. There were sophisticated people among the Burmans that loved to discuss a philosophy with Judson. And there was one particular person that Inquiring and inquire that came quite frequently in the name moonshine walking on. That taught with Judson hour after hour after hour, and finally Judson was able to convince him. That. Christ actually had come. And had that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. And had come and had died for sinners. But Moonshwa Ganong could not affirm that he actually rose from the dead, even though he believed he died for sinners. And Judson asked him why. He says, because it does not match my understanding of what happens to our bodies. And Judson again talked to him and said, you are not yet even close to being a Christian because you still trust your reason above Scripture. And finally, when he did come to believe in the resurrection, Judson still talked to him, and he had only become convinced within a philosophical framework, and Judson said, you are not yet a Christian because you believe only because you are convinced philosophically you do not believe because God has said it. Eventually, Moonshine Ganong was converted, became a very powerful witness among his own people, but Judson insisted that the conversion must have within it a submission to the truth of the gospel, not because it agrees with our reason, but because we're convinced that God has said it. God has acted in this way. We must have, we must be convinced of the character of the canon. Another thing that is important for us doctrinally, if we're to be right doctrinal preachers, and it is essential for the effectiveness of our exposition for the passion of our exposition. It is this that gives us. Hope that our labor is not finally in vain, but it's meaningful and is God honoring and that is. That salvation comes by a belief of the truth. Salvation comes by belief of the truth. Now we know that the idea of belief of the truth is In some sense, shorthand is one of those things that has much contained in it, but it cannot mean less than an actual belief of the specific teachings that are in Scripture. It means more than that. It has to do with the operations of the Spirit of God to subdue our hearts and bring us to repentance and faith. It has to do with a sense and seeing of the glory of Christ. It has to do with an alteration of the affections, but all of these things are manifest. initially in a belief of the truth. The fact is, the apostle Paul is talking about the distinction between those that God leaves to themselves outside of salvation and those he brings to salvation makes this particular thing the point of difference. In 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, he says, Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of his mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of his coming. That is, the one who's coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and wonders, with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, for they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. They did not receive a love of the truth. Now, this implies, of course, that the affections had to be changed, but the thing that would demonstrate that the affections had been changed would be an embracing of the truth. when the affections have not been changed. They would not embrace the truth, so they did not receive a lot of the truth, so as to be saved for this reason. God will send upon them a diluting influence, so that they will believe what is false. They will believe what is false. This is the indication that they have not received a lot of the truth. In order that they may be judged who did not Believe the truth. But took pleasure in wickedness. So here he just says it very plainly. They did not receive a lot of the truth. They believe what is false. Therefore, they did not believe the truth and then he combines their erroneous position along with their affections and he says, but they took pleasure in wickedness. But we should always give thanks to you, brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. It was for this He called you through our gospel so that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. You see how much is bound up in this one activity, in this one thing, belief of the truth? What does it say about a person who will not believe the gospel message? What does it say about a person who will believe the gospel message? Paul packs all of these things into it. So when you are preaching. When you preach the truth. Two different worlds are being shaken by this. Two different realities are at stake. Those who are deceived by a liar and are in the kingdom of Satan. are not believing what you say. As he says in 2 Corinthians 4, if our gospel is veiled, it is a veil to those who are perishing, in whom the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, so they cannot see the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And on the other hand, those who hear what you say, and all of a sudden, it makes sense to them. It makes sense to their mind. It makes sense to their heart. It brings them into humble submission to Christ. This is saying that the reconciling God of the universe has taken his truth through your words, through your faithful exposition, and has converted a rebel into a subject, has changed a slave into a son, has made someone who is dead alive again. Has brought someone out of the kingdom of darkness and translated them into the kingdom of the son of his love because you preach the truth. And he brought them to believe that truth. Now, this is something that, again, has been assaulted so many times in the history of the church. And wherever this concept of believing the truth has been lost, the church has declined and has become something other than the church of our Lord Jesus Christ mainland denominations today and see this gradual but steady and regular decline if they reject one truth after another and the rejecting of these truths that it first just seem to be sort of well, these are the small things because they're so loud. Oh, so outlandish, they're so out of accord with our contemporary worldviews. It's not going to hurt us in our love for each other, in our morality, and in our talking about the central issues of Christ. But it chips away. I do believe the domino theory in history, that once you begin to lose one doctrine, then they are all so tied together that you will begin to lose others. You believe the inspiration of Scripture, then what reason do you have for believing some of the things that are very hard to believe, like God and man and one person coming into a virgin, a baby conceived without any human father? And that's the incarnation. That's the central theme, the central doctrine. How can you believe that unless you believe the Bible has inspired God? And if you don't believe that, how can you believe in atoning work? And if you don't believe in an atoning work that is just before God and that is capable of saving sinners, how can you believe in salvation? How can you believe in justification? How can you believe in forgiveness? And if you don't believe in that, then you don't believe in the necessity of forgiveness. You don't believe in the necessity of forgiveness. You believe everybody's OK. And then you do away with eternal punishment. And then it doesn't even matter if you are a Christian or not. And that's exactly what happened. in these denominations. They will talk and talk and talk and use all kind of language. It has symbolic meaning without any kind of real reference to what the Bible is talking about. And there is just no Christianity. It's church without Christianity. There can be. How can you have Christianity without a doctrine of hell? It's a very, very horrible doctrine, is it not? But it's a glorious doctrine because it talks about the reality of God's justice and God's consistency and God's holiness in the fact that he will not allow his glory to be trampled upon. Only that kind of God is worth worshiping. Only that kind of God can save. Only that kind of God would actually send his beloved son to work that which is impossible for humans to work in order to save sinners. If you have no hell, you have no substitutionary atonement. All of these doctrines are connected, and it is important as we see how these things have developed in history. We see the decline of the church, the destruction of the church, the immorality that begins to run rampant in the church, the definition of things within things that claim, within denominations that claim to be churches of the living God, flaunting the truth of God. And it's because this one simple principle that that great privilege that God places upon you as a minister of God is to be able to speak the truth. With the confidence that by God's Spirit, some will come to a love of the truth will cease delighting in wickedness. and will demonstrate by their humble submission to those words that you have spoken that they are beloved and chosen of God. What an absolutely amazing transaction that occurs when you preach the truth. Another thing that is clear in the doctrinal obligations and privileges that are before us, is we must proclaim how a person is made right before God. We must proclaim how a person is made right before God, the doctrine of justification. Through the history of the Church, we have seen this as a doctrine that was ill understood in the early days. Hence, bits and pieces of the true doctrine of justification gradually working their way into the church, smothered by many misperceptions, even in Augustine not developed as clearly as it should have been. But then even a decline from the time of Augustine through the Middle Ages, where works righteousness began actually to come up and take precedence over simple faith in the completed work of Christ, so that the whole system of merits known as congruent merit on the one hand, eventually emerging in the condom merit and all of these things being preached before people and giving them various sacramentals they could do and pilgrimages they could take and all sorts of of satisfaction they could perform to get rid of their sins in order to move themselves into a place where the justice of God would work itself in them, so they could become right become righteous before God. And the way they became righteous was not through doing real acts of righteousness according to the scripture, but just doing what the church told them. Paul faced this in his own day. Went to the church at Philippi and the church at Galatia. and other places, false teachers came in the church at Corinth, false apostles came in, some saying that in order to receive Christ, you must first begin to obey the ceremonial law, particularly the law of circumcision. And Paul says, I say, if you're circumcised, you separate yourself from Christ. You're cut off from Christ. That's what you're cutting off. You're cutting yourself off from Christ. The doctrine of justification, Paul says, is very important, because if we share the glory with God, if we share the righteousness, then we are doomed, because all of our righteousness is as filthy rags. And Paul came to the place. Again, the combination of exegesis and experience and the importance of the centrality of Christ and of this particular doctrine in Philippians, when he said, those things were gained in me, I counted loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. And I continue to count them but loss. that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own by the law, but the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith in Christ, that I might know him, the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his suffering, being made conformable unto his death, so that somehow I might attain to the resurrection of the dead. It was all in Christ. Or, as he said, in Titus. We are saved, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to His mercy He saves us, through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, so that, having been justified by His grace, we might have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Justification is at the center If we do not embrace and understand and grasp the doctrine of justification and see all of the various kinds of options that have come in that have smothered this, that have challenged this, if we preach anything other than we are saved by Christ, by his death and by which we have forgiveness, by his righteous life that is imputed to us so that the righteousness of the law becomes ours, we have no way of telling anyone they can stand before God with confidence in the day of judgment. We have no reason to tell them that they can flee to Christ to find refuge. What is it we need to be saved from? What does saved mean? Well, in reality, we need to be saved from the only one who has a right to condemn us, God himself. We are saved from the wrath to come. What is the wrath to come? The wrath to come is a righteous indignation of God against sinners. And he will not spare any sinner who does not have righteousness. He did not spare Sodom and Gomorrah. He did not spare the angels when they said he did not spare the world during the time of Noah. But also he did not spare his own son, but delivered him up. If we do not have righteousness in Christ, if we do not find forgiveness in Him, then we will not be spared. But if we come to Him, He has already taken the wrath of God. He spared Him not. And we can stand before God free from any blamability and having a righteousness not our own, but the perfect obedience of Christ so that all the demands of the law are met. It's punitive demands and it's just demands of requirement for absolute perfect external and interior affection obedient. All are met in Christ. What could be a more weighty responsibility? than to sort out all the subtle ways that human, sinful ingenuity seeks to manipulate and change the way in which a person is made right with God. And Paul didn't think this was just a minor area. When he wrote to the Galatians that he had been preaching to, he told them, I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, This means if you try to add something to even something that God commanded in the law, if you try to add something to the completed work of Christ and his complete fulfillment of all of these things. You are under obligation to keep the whole law, and therefore you are under a curse because you cannot keep it. You have been severed from Christ. You who are seeking to be justified by law, you have fallen from grace. He is not telling them that you were saved and now you're lost again. He is saying the message of grace that I have preached to you, you have rejected, you have not received. And so you are severed from Christ. You do not know him. You do not have him. You're under condemnation. You're under a curse because you really are in your mind thinking that there is something you can do to make yourself right with God. Oh, brethren, Your preaching of this truth of justification is for the glory and honor of Christ, the glory and honor of the law of God, and the safety of souls. It is a doctrine, but it is eternal life. It's the word of reconciliation that is committed to you. And the history of the church proves that every time this doctrine is lost, it carries within it a great tidal wave of infidelity and not only doctrinal decline, but a loss of the fear of God and a decline into ever increasing disobedience to the holiness of God. Well, I must, I must finish. Let me make one other point. Well, I'll make two or three other points much more quickly. We learn in the history of the church and in scripture that a part of our doctrinal obligation is that only truth purges away all false refuges and creates the right kind of certainty. But this is something that the Puritans were wonderful at. Every age of the church has had one or two heroes who were able to give exposition of scripture in a way that would make people release their hold upon false assurances. The Puritans were better at this perhaps than anyone because they were the heirs of what we might say a more mature, more complete, more holy, synthetic understanding of all of scripture. And they were they were they love people's souls. But if we look at this in scripture in Galatians, look at the warnings in Hebrews, look at First John. Scripture is filled with this reality that there is a way you can know that you are a child of God, but there are also certain very clear indications you're not a child of God. And many of these simply relate to. The kind of truth or the kind of doctrine that is taught, what people are told there to rely upon. Again, it is the truth that God uses. And a part of the vigorous doctrinal onslaught that Jonathan Edwards gave to his people in love for their souls was that he would not allow them to rest secure in anything that was not a true indication of saving grace. If you've not read his sermon, True Grace Distinguished from the Faith of Devils, read It will shake you to your boots in one of those healthy ways you can imagine. Because in that, Edwards lays bare every possible refuge that we might claim for ourselves that is not sufficient as an indication of genuine saving faith. Though only truth purges away all false refuges and creates the right kind of certainty. Only by doctrinal exposition can we systematically explore the glory of Christ. Oh my, what could be more glorious than speaking about all of these things related to salvation and then showing how all of them come together in the marvelous, wonderful obedience of the eternal Son of God to the will of His Father. In His incarnation to become humiliated, in His obedience to the law, In the joy with which he says, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and is set down at the right hand of the Father, the Majesty on high. In the person of Christ, seeing all of it culminate in the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, his person, his work, doctrinal preaching, exploring all the different areas of what it means that God became man, what it means that he was a full man, what it means that he was full God, what it means that he was one person, why this is necessary for the kind of redemption we have, what glory and might and power there is in this kind of investigation of the glory of Christ. A doctrinal preacher, in the sense that I'm talking about doctrine here, is the one who can unload that for the people so that they will know the glory of their calling all prayed that the Ephesians might know the exceeding glory of the calling that they had. They might know what was the exceeding power that had worked in their behalf. They might know what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, which He has invested them in Christ because of the glory of Christ. Only by doctrinal exposition can we establish true foundation for evangelical repentance and true doxology and gratitude. Any degree of reservation we have about attributing our salvation, our existence, our day-by-day existence to anything other than the mere mercy of God is a point that we will not relinquish to Him in gratitude. It is a point for which we will not glorify And it is the marvelous privilege of the preacher of the gospel who preaches true doctrine to show every person within his hearing how utterly and absolutely dependent he is upon the mere mercy of God from the time of his conception all the way through his life until the time that he enters into eternity. And if by God's grace he becomes an heir of eternal life, how that gratitude will then say nothing except gratefulness to God. And in this life, you have the special privilege and responsibility to lay before people this reality that their glorying in God and their gratitude to him, their joy before him is bound up in how they perceive just how much they are dependent upon him. May God grant us that we would be doctrinal preachers. Let's bow to prayer. Father, we thank you for your goodness to us. We thank you for the great riches that are ours in Christ. We pray, Lord, that these things that have been set forth in your word, that have worked themselves out to see the implications of them in the history of the Church, that have been displayed so clearly in the minds and ministries of some, and how the loss of them, the devastation wrought in the loss of them has been demonstrated in the lives of others. We pray that those things may bear upon our own conscience, upon our own sense of stewardship, that we might delight to hold forth your truth and all of its power. For it is in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.