So not not giving anyone guilt trips or anything like that, but It would help if you if you go ahead and when I send this to print it out and then write your answers On here if you spend a little bit of time and prep for Sunday school that would that would help tremendously Glad to continue to bring these but if you do that, that'll help the class all the all the more So let me encourage you along those lines Okay, so why don't we go ahead and begin our time with a word of prayer. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do thank you, O Lord, for the blessing of your grace, and we thank you for Jesus, who has given himself for us, his life as a ransom for many. Father, we thank you that you have given it to your church to spread this good news, this gospel, to all the nations. And we pray, Father, that by your Spirit you would fill us with love and with zeal for this gospel, this good news, that we might desire to not only remember it and to know it and to love it, but also to make it known. Give us such zeal, O God, we pray, that we might be a light to the nations. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. All right. So, we are in chapter 14. Total chapters are 19. So, we are rounding the corner, getting towards the end. What I'd like to do, by the way, just in terms of foreshadow, what I would like to do come the after the end of this book is start a new adult Sunday school class on a survey of the New Testament. So generally survey of the New Testament is a overview of the history of the New Testament as well as each book of the New Testament. And hopefully that will give us an overview of the history and theology of the New Testament. And just for those who are new, in the adult Sunday school class, we try to keep a flow of topics going, and we try to cover all the different aspects of Christian knowledge. So, Old Testament, New Testament, Practical Theology, this is our Practical Theology section, Apologetics, Church History, and I don't know if I said Systematic Theology or whatever, but there's about five of them. And we try to keep them rotating through. And we haven't covered a New Testament book in a while. And so what we're going to do is, rather than tackle a particular New Testament book, we're going to look at the New Testament as a whole and do a New Testament survey. And so I'm very much looking forward to that as I prepare. I never taught New Testament survey in my ministry, which is kind of interesting to think of, that as long as I've been doing this, I haven't taught the New Testament. I've taught books in the New Testament, but not the New Testament as a whole. So anyway, looking forward to that very much. Well, let's go ahead and dive into chapter 14. And this is on zeal for evangelism. God and zeal for evangelism. So you'll notice there in that first question is how does Paul teach us about zeal for evangelism? What would you say about that? What can we learn from the Apostle Paul about evangelism and particularly our zeal for it? Anything in Paul's writings or about Paul's ministry and acts that you might remember that is an example or teaching along these lines? Let me set the context a little bit for Kuyper's discussion here. He begins by talking about the Reformation and how the Reformation really was a revitalization of zeal for the gospel. And particularly over against Rome, which the reformers saw as having lost the gospel. particularly with Rome's understanding of the sacramental system, its understanding of justification, right? Justification is founded upon good works, our good works, mixed, of course, together with faith, right? And they had lost, Rome had lost Paul's, particularly, not just Paul's, but particularly Paul's teaching of justification by faith alone. right? And as you open up Romans or you open up Galatians, you really see this come to the fore, don't you? That Paul says that if an angel from heaven should come to you and he preaches another gospel, let him be accursed, right? So that you can't have zeal of the gospel, zeal for the gospel, and for evangelism without also having zeal for what the gospel is, right? Otherwise, what are we preaching, right? I mean, I hear people talk all the time who are outside of Bible-believing churches about the gospel and making the gospel known and I say, well, what gospel are you talking about, right? Tell me, what is the gospel? And almost always they get it wrong. They go, oh my goodness, that's not the gospel. That's not good news for sinners. And so anyway, what Paul showed us, I think, you know, was very significant along these lines. But anyway, What do you guys think? Think about what Paul says. How does Paul show or manifest zeal for evangelism in his letters or in the book of Acts? Any thoughts about that? Yeah, it's very good. Mars Hill, he really does, he subverts, he quotes from pagan, you know, authors, poets. And then he goes and he completely subverts them and says, that's false, but let me tell you about the true God. You know, you have the statute to an unknown God. This is what your own poets say. Well, it wasn't completely wrong, but It was wrong at the same time because it was a completely different notion of what it means to have our being, living and moving and having our being in God, right? Let me tell you about the true God in whom we have our lives, in whom we have our being, right? And then presents Christ to them. That's very good. What else? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's very good, yeah. And you think about what Kuyper here says, he's quoting from Acts 9.15, where Paul talks about, where it's talked about that Paul is God's chosen vessel to bear his name before the Gentiles. And I think about what Paul says. He says, it's in Romans, I believe, where he says, woe to me if I do not preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. I mean, that kind of manifests something of his zeal, doesn't it? For evangelism. Woe to me if I don't preach the gospel, right? Elsewhere, he talks about how he would He would that his own life would be taken from him and thrown into hell if it meant the salvation of his fellow kinsmen, right? That he's even willing that he would be condemned if it meant that his fellow kinsmen would know the gospel and be saved, right? So filled with zeal for making the gospel known, right? That he was willing, that he would be condemned and thrown into hell forever if it meant the salvation of others, right? So what's really important for us to kind of grasp with all that is that our zeal is not just that we would know the gospel or for the doctrine of the gospel, although that's essential, right? But that also that that would be made known, right? That the knowledge of that gospel would be made known to others, okay? You think about what Jesus says about, you know, kind of this, you know, if you keep this light under a basket, right? If you kind of just hide it up and you keep it to yourself, you think about the parable of the steward, right? If all of the talents are just buried, right? And not used to bear fruit, right? What good is it, right? What good are we? The gospel and the knowledge of the gospel has to have a practical effect, right? Which of course includes a number of things, but for our purposes here, it includes the making known the gospel to others who don't know it, right? Okay, very good. Yep, that's right. That's very good, that's very good. His zeal for the gospel is such that he doesn't, he's not ashamed of it, right? Why would he be, by the way, just kind of a question about that text, why why would he be ashamed, or why would people think that he might be ashamed, or why would we be tempted to be ashamed of the gospel? Yeah, well, yeah, certainly Christopher, yeah. No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not popular, that's right. Another way to describe it would be the language in 1 Corinthians, right, where he talks about how the gospel is folly, right? To the Jews, and it is weakness to the Gentiles, right? Why is it weakness? Why is the gospel weakness? In what way would the Gentiles regard the gospel as weak? To me be the glory, not God, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's weak. That's right. Yeah. Why else? There's another, you use the word offensive and the Greek word that Paul uses there is skandalon, right? It's an offense and it's a skandalon, it's a stumbling block. Right? And you can hear the Greek word and where we get the English word for scandal, right? Scandal is something that just like, you know, people are kind of like shocked and are like repelled by. And the gospel, if your heart is not transformed by the Holy Spirit and you're living in darkness, right? I mean, the gospel is a shock. and it's repulsive, really. I mean, there's nothing that commends the gospel to this world on this world's terms, right? There's nothing about it that makes the world go, oh, that's just wonderful, which is why the health and wealth gospel is so popular today. because what the health and wealth gospel is is a perversion of the gospel and it's twisted and made attractive to the world. I could be rich, I could be wealthy, I could be healthy, I could live a long life and have all these goodies. What a great God you have, right? And that's why it's so attractive and so popular. And it's particularly, this is the most wicked thing about the health and wealth gospel, it's most attractive in the poorest portions of the world. Because it gives people false hope that they can find something yet in this world to treasure other than Christ. But there's, let me go back to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians. What in the gospel is, in fact, the scandalon? I'm looking for just a one-word, one-object answer. What does Paul identify as being the most scandalous, offensive thing about the gospel? That's true, that's true, but I'm looking…that's absolutely true, but I'm thinking of another word. Bring it up. Where? On the cross, that's it, right? It's the cross. Yeah, it's a bloody cross with a dead man on it, right? Now, we know he didn't stay dead. Three days later he rose again from the dead. Right. And so he's resurrected. But we can't just talk about the resurrection without talking about the cross. Just like you can't talk about the cross without also talking about the resurrection. Both of those things need to hold together. Right. But if you have. But think about it. Think about the cross. You know you go to somebody and you say let me tell you about my God. He died on a cross. Well, that's not impressive. My God is Hercules. He happens to be really strong. Our God is weak by the world standards, right? We have a dying, dead, bloody Savior. who was crucified, nailed to a cross, which is itself a terrible scandal. Think about it. Why? The cross is such a scandal because the cross is where you put criminals. It's where you put sinners. You put bad people. Translated in today's vernacular, it would be like, you know, to say that Jesus, my Savior, was on death row. He was in prison. He was in jail. He was in the place where you put criminals, where you put people who have hurt other people, who have broken the law, who have committed crimes. Right? Scandalous people. That's what the cross meant to people living in that world in that time. That it was a place where you put bad people. And so... Now if we just stop at the cross, that's all we got, right? We got a man who looks like he was a criminal, dead, bloody, on a Roman torture device. That's all we got. But we know what was happening there, don't we? And we know it, and we know what was happening there is true because he was raised again on the third day. Right? And that's Paul's argument back to Acts chapter 13, right? Is that the resurrection is proof, right? that God is going to judge the world. Okay, so the cross becomes proof. I mean the resurrection, excuse me, becomes proof of the entirety of the gospel, right? So we continue there. We got to go on to the resurrection, but the cross itself is what is so absolutely scandalous and offensive to people in Paul's day and in ours as well. So, very good. Okay, what is the relation and difference between doctrine and evangelistic zeal? We kind of touched on this already, even last week, but we'll go through it again. Page 178. What is the relation difference between doctrine and evangelistic zeal? That's it? No, I think that's exactly correct. But what is the... That's correct. Now, that's how they relate. How do they differ? What is the difference between evangelistic zeal and doctrine? We kind of touched on it already. Sound doctrine by itself, right, doesn't accomplish the goal of sound doctrine, right? So the relationship is that the gospel, sound doctrine, should fuel our zeal to make it known to others. But if all it does is it fuels intellectual curiosity, or whatever other, you know, part of us, and it doesn't have its effect, right? It doesn't have its conclusion in or its outworking in the making known, as you said, orthopraxy, right? Then it just sits stagnant, right? And it's of no purpose. So those two go hand in hand, absolutely. Third question kind of goes very similar to the second one, but what happens if you have zeal without doctrine or as Kuyper says, a body without bones? That's a really, that's a cool illustration that he uses there because it really kind of, you know, hits this thing home. But what happens if you have zeal without doctrine? Yeah, there's no truth in it, that's right. There's no true gospel in it, right? It's kind of like a doctrine is the bones, right? And it holds together the flesh, okay? But if you don't have bones, you just got a pile of flesh, right? And you don't really have a living organism, right? So if you have a church, and that church has a whole lot of zeal, but it has no doctrine, then you just got a messy pile of flesh. Right? But if you have bones, but you don't have the flesh, then all you have is sort of a dead skeleton. Right? Which is a little freakish. You just got a pile of bones. That doesn't really do anyone any good either. Right? So you got to have both. Right? That's right. That's all it is. It's just dead men's bones, right? Or dead men's flesh without bones. And Kuiper particularly here has in view, because of his day and age, he has very much in view there, and we've talked about this before, but but liberalism and the liberal approach to doing evangelism. Remember when, I've said this before, but just to recap, maybe it's worth us touching on, when in the 1920s, it became very clear that the PCUSA, Presbyterian Church, United States of America at the time, Mainline Presbyterian, this is before the OPC ever existed. They were sending out missionaries that were liberal in their theology. And they had completely revamped how to do missions. No longer were we sending missionaries into foreign lands to preach the gospel, calling the people to whom they preached to repent and to believe upon Jesus Christ for salvation. But what we were doing instead, what they were doing, what the church was doing, what the mission board was doing, was sending missionaries who would go in and do humanitarian efforts. Right? So they would go in there and they would teach natives of lands that had never heard of Christianity before. They would say, okay, look, you have a religion that's very different than ours. That's okay. You know, doctrine's not really that important after all, so we don't want to make that an issue on the mission field. We don't want to get people upset with us. What we're going to teach them instead are the higher religious principles that Jesus taught us. Namely, love your neighbor. That's what Christianity got boiled down to. Being Christ-like, love your neighbor. That's it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna train the natives to love one another better. Stop fighting, stop tribal wars, teach them how to provide clean water for themselves, teach them how to pull themselves up from poverty, to become economically sustained. Basically, how to become more Western is what we're going to do. We're going to go into poor countries and Westernize them. Teach them how to be good Americans. And if we could just do that, then we've Christianized the nation, because we've Americanized them. We've Westernized them, right? Western civilization, Christianity, I mean, that's really, I mean, you know, one and the same. So what we do is we want to Westernize them. If we do that, we've Christianized them, okay? Doctrine's not that important. So Machen, J. Gresham Machen, Gresham Machen, and others said, you know, that's a scandal to me because That's not preaching the gospel. That's not missions. That's not evangelism. That's just, that's flesh without bones is what that is, which is a dead body. And so Machen protested by forming what he called the Independent Board for Foreign Missions, which is kind of an ironic thing in a Presbyterian church. But it was Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and it was a protest organization to send out reformed, confessional, Bible-believing, gospel-preaching missionaries to the foreign mission field. And that was it. I mean at that point Machen's fate was sealed because the money was re-channeled away from the church's official missionary board which was sending out liberal missionaries. and being channeled into now the independent board for Presbyterian formations. And if you want to get liberals upset, take their money away. I mean, they'll put up with you all day long, but once you start taking their money away. You're going to be very, very upset. And they got very, very upset. And they basically said this. They said not to financially support the church's foreign missions board is like refusing to come to the Lord's Supper. It's to contend the sacrament of the Lord. It's to contend the church. And so if you're not sending your money to the church's foreign mission board, rather than the independent board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, you're in sin and you're going to be disciplined. And they disciplined Machen and they defrocked him. He appealed to the General Assembly. The General Assembly upheld the decision of the Presbytery and Machen was defrocked. And it was at that point that Machen supporters walked up, stood up and walked out of the General Assembly in mass together. And later on that summer, I believe June 6, 1936, they gathered in Philadelphia and they constituted what they called at the time the Presbyterian Church in America. and later changed to the Orthodox Presbyterian. So the OPC was the original PCA by the way. And that of course changed. And we had to change our name because we ended up getting sued by the PCUSA because our name was too similar to their name. And so we had to change our name. And we changed it to the OPC about three years later. But that's what happened. And so this issue of missions was very much front and center in the early 20th century when it came to the church struggle. And so Kuyper is kind of really on top of this thing. And it's what happens when you take the gospel, when you take doctrine out of evangelistic zeal. You get a dead church is what you get. So, a little history lesson, sidebar there, but any questions? Thoughts? Comments at all? Okay, alright, so just moving on. Question four, how do we know which Christ to preach? How do we know which Christ to preach? Yeah, it's very good. For not having read it, I think you got a pretty spot on there. That's right, I like that. The whole Christ, right? The one who is not only Lord and Savior, but who is also fully God and fully man. And he goes on and he talks about the way in which heresy was dealt with in the early church. and particularly with regard to the doctrine of Christ, right? So you had the Chalcedonian Council and the Council at Chalcedon upheld the two natures of Christ and explained how the two natures of Christ and one person adhere together, how we're to understand that relationship and also how we're not to understand that relationship. So it made very clear as to who the person of Christ is. And of course, before that, Nicaea did as well in identifying Jesus as consubstantial with the Father. That means of the same substance with the Father, right? The Father and the Son are equally divine. The sun is not sort of semi-divine and the sun is not kind of semi-angelic. Not kind of like a part angel or something like that. He's not a creature. He's no less God than the Father is God. They are consubstantial, equally God. And that was very important for the early church to hash that thing out because you had heretics like Arius who arose and said, no, Christ is like the Father. His substance or his essence is like the Father's essence, but it's not the same essence or substance. And of course, Nicaea came along and said, no, no, no. It's not like essence. It is the same essence of the Father. so that Jesus is fully God. We understand that. And in order to get the person of Christ down, that's what early church had to go through, was to make sure that that got clarified. So, how do we know which Christ to preach? It is indeed the Christ of the Scriptures, right? It is the whole Christ, as Greg very adequately and accurately said, okay? It is fully God, the Christ who is fully God and fully divine, right? So, the whole Christ. Okay, question number five. Is it okay to engage in doctrinal controversy? Why or why not? What do you think? Is it okay, kind of a, I think, kind of know where I'm going to stand on this one, but anyway, what do you guys think? Is it okay to engage in doctrinal controversy? if it's done properly. Very good. Very good. What's that? Right. You do. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the history of the church, right? I mean, the history of the church is basically the history of theological controversy. I mean, there's more to it than that, of course. You know, they're just wonderful things when people aren't arguing. That happened in the history of the church. But, These controversies are really, really important, and it has biblical foundation, doesn't it? Where in the Bible might you see doctrinal controversy in a sanctified sense? That's right, Jude, right? We must contend for the faith once we're all delivered to the saints. That's right, yeah. Where else? Paul, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Paul and Peter in Galatians, right? They have a, they clash, right? And Paul, with others of the false teachers, the Judaizers in Galatia, right? I mean, he engages in this controversy in a sanctified way, you know, to speak to Catherine's point, right? It's gotta be done correctly. It's gotta be done, you know, with a, in a sanctified manner, right? Otherwise it's, You know, we got to speak the truth in love, right? So that we understand those two things going hand in hand. Let me take you to, I'm just kind of, I didn't prepare, I didn't prepare this. So I hope I can find the verse. I don't know yet. Yeah, New Testament. What's that verse? Oh, here it is. Here it is. Here it is. Okay. 1 Corinthians 16, verse 13. This is Paul's final exhortation to the Corinthians. He says this, be watchful. stand firm in the faith, be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. So right off the bat, that sounds very militant. And then he goes on, verse 14, let all that you do be done in love. Right? And I think in our day and age, it's often assumed to stand firm means that you're not loving or you're not kind. And it is true, there are ways of standing firm, of being militant for the faith that is unloving. You know, just spend a few minutes on Facebook, you know. You see these, even among Christians, these arguments and debates kind of explode, and it gets real ugly real fast. People just kind of, you know, being militant, but not, as Paul here says, doing all that you do in love. so that as we engage in theological controversy, we have to do it with love. Okay? We ought not to avoid it. Right? We're not necessarily seeking it out either, but there are times where we have to stand firm in the faith. And when we do so, we have to make sure we do what we do in love. Right? So that's that balance. Speak the truth in love kind of thing that we need to keep in mind. Loving militancy. Right? Being militantly loving, and as we are militant, fighting and contending for the faith, once we're all delivered to the saints, that we do it in love. Right? And that's the hard, that's, I mean, at least for us Reformed people, the easy part is being militant. The hard part, I'll speak for myself, is doing it in love. So, yeah. Any questions, comments, thoughts before we close? All right, well, why don't we go ahead and close our time of prayer. Let's pray. Father, thank you, O Lord, for the blessing of your grace to us in Christ, and we thank you for Jesus and for his salvation. Make us to be zealous and also loving in our work of evangelism. Help us, O Lord, that we might know the truth and that we might desire to contend for it, that we might desire to make your truth known. And so give us love to do that in an effective way and in a winsome way. We ask it all and we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.