We're going to read some verses in Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 1. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 1. We're going to read the opening verses of this chapter together. The first 14 verses. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are in Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved, have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace, wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in him. in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will, that we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ, in whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, in whom also, after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise. which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession unto the praise of his glory. Amen. The Lord will add his own blessing to the reading of his precious word for his name's sake. I want tonight to take as a text in the sense of a starting point, not something to be expounded part by part, Some verses from this chapter and also a famous statement of the Lord Jesus Christ in John 17 and verse 3. But first Ephesians 1 verses 4 through 7, according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Beloved, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace. In John 17, verse 3, the Lord Jesus, in his great high priestly prayer, said, This is life eternal, that they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. There can be nothing of greater importance to any man than the salvation of his own soul. And yet at the same time, when you really stop to ponder it, no creature can make himself or anything to do with himself of ultimate importance. The most important thing of all must be the glory of God. In the Word of God, the Holy Spirit brings these two immensely important things together and declares how God has most fully declared His glory in the salvation of sinners. In other words, the greatest exhibition of glory is grace. This is the burden of the New Testament. In Paul's epistles, for instance, in 2 Corinthians 8 verse 9, he says, ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, how that though he was rich, for our sakes he became poor, that we through his poverty might be rich. To the Ephesians he wrote not only the words that we have read tonight that are so replete with references to grace, But he wrote in the next chapter, by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. When he was writing in the pastoral epistles to Titus, He gives an outline of the gospel message, surely the message not only that he preached, but he expected the young preachers to preach. In Titus 3, verse 5, he speaks of God's salvation, God's kindness toward us, not by works of righteousness that we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us. by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Here then are the great elements of the gospel clearly defined. I want you to watch carefully as we read the texts and the Bible reading. In fact, as you just open your New Testament almost at random, here are the elements. God's free grace, whose only moving cause is in God himself and in his, what the theologians call, mere good pleasure. Here we find God's free choice of sinners to eternal life apart from any merit in themselves. Here we find God's free provision of Jesus Christ his Son as the all-sufficient sacrifice for sins. Also, God's free justification unto life eternal, that justification of his people through the merit of Jesus Christ, received by faith alone, a faith which he creates in them by the personal operation of the Holy Ghost. And then, of course, God's free intercourse or fellowship with man, whom he has redeemed, they know him." Some of the deepest words in the New Testament, that they may know thee, they know him, or as Paul puts it, or rather, are known of him. Our text that we have taken in John 17 and Ephesians chapter 1 put it well. Now this message not only was the apostolic message, but it also formed the burden of the Reformed message. You take Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Knox, Ecclempadius, Miconius, Bullinger, I'm naming just some of the most famous European Reformers, and you find that one and all, whatever their differences on minor matters, one and all, they were united in this burden to preach this gospel. When you open their writings, it recurs again and again. It's true of the Lutherans, as I pointed out last week, but it is preeminently true of those writers that we call Reformed. And tonight we're going to deal with the Reformed literature of the Reformation. Now, I say we're going to deal with it, that's rather an overstatement. We're going to be very selective, in fact, highly selective. We have to be. Consider this. that the Reformed literature constitutes thousands of works by authors innumerable. There are very numerous confessions of faith. You've got the Belgic Confession, you have the Heidelberg Confession, the Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, you have the French Confession, you have the Scotch Confession, you have the Irish Articles, you have the English articles, you have various confessions turned out by the Swiss, and then a few years later into the Westminster Confession, the Synod of Dort, and all those. So you're talking about very numerous confessions. Then you've whole libraries of new Bible commentaries. You've sermons by the thousand, literally by the thousand. John Knox wrote a vibrant history. It's good to read, it's not difficult to read for a book from the period, and it certainly throbs with the life of a man who's telling of a great movement of God in which he was personally involved. Zwingli was a philosopher and a schoolman, a logician before he was converted, and that lofty style comes through in his theological writing, though he always submits it all to scripture. John Calvin, one of the greatest humanist scholars of the age before God saved him. This is news to many people who only talk about Calvin never having cracked a book that the man wrote. John Calvin was a brilliant satirist. In fact, he gave birth to one particular form of French satire, the religious satire. And his wit was incisive. There's a tract, I suppose you would call it, that to this day makes very good reading. He called, tongue-in-cheek, for an inventory of all the relics of Christendom to be made. And he thought, what a wonderful thing it would be if that inventory could be made. There were so many pieces of the cross that he said they would form a good shipload of wood. There were 14 nails that were said to have been the actual nails that nailed the hands and feet of the Savior to the cross. You remember a Roman soldier stuck a spear through the side of Christ. Well, the Church of Rome, with the power to multiply, had four spears. And there were so many thorns that were said to be the authentic thorns of the very crown that was on the brow of Christ, that Calvin said a whole hedge was planted in making it. So, you have the satire, the wit, the history, all different kinds of literature. Reformed literature covers Switzerland, France, Belgium, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Holland, believe it or not, even Ireland, although sadly not to a great extent. So we're only going to give the slightest sampling. Now, over it all presides the towering genius of a man called Calvin. Now, to some of you that will almost be a swear word. If you have come out of The typical background, evangelical, fundamental background in North America, the name of Calvin will sound like a swear word. I have read it said in all sincerity, no doubt, that John Calvin has damned more millions of souls than any other man in Christendom. that kind of thing. Now, I want to tell you tonight, I'm not doing a biography on Calvin. If you want to hear that, you'll have to go back to our tape library. I preached one of Dr. Barrett's short messages of about an hour and 25 minutes on John Calvin a year or two back. But I want just simply to tell you to forget all the negative, usually totally ignorant comments, criticisms, etc., that you've heard of John Calvin. I was reading this week the verdict of an eminent theologian, supposedly. And he said, the usual picture of Calvin, you know, the brooding genius with cold logic, no heart, no love, no fire, the man who took the Word of God and subjected it to a sort of Aristotelian logic, though Calvin was the great opponent of Aristotle's logic, believe it or not. And this man was giving the idea that Calvin had one severe logical notion with which he started. His view of God. Now, he didn't mention the word predestination, but that's what he meant. He had it to think of it. He had this one great view of God, and he Logically and coldly worked his whole theology around his doctrine of the attributes of God. Now, any person reading that would say, well, now, isn't that a terrible thing for Calvin to do? Actually, you know, would you rather listen to somebody who spoke logically or somebody who spoke illogically? Would you rather have somebody who starts with God or somebody who, like so many people today, start with man, or even worse, with the devil? But here's the amazing thing. When you read Calvin's theology, even his greatest enemies of that time noted the spiritual, the religious aspect. It was not cult logic. And to this day, when you read it, there's more warmth, there's more fire in the institutes of the Christian religion by Calvin than almost any other book of systematic theology you'll ever read. And here's the amazing thing, in his Institutes, Calvin doesn't even have a section on the attributes of God. And yet, this criticism is made, and it's multiplied and passed on from generation to generation. I'm simply telling you, until you read it for yourself, don't listen. Half the lies you hear aren't true, and the other part are just plain lies. So, don't listen. until you've read. Over it all towers the genius of John Calvin. He wrote an immense amount of books. His works, when they were first published, filled 59 quarto volumes. His commentaries, I have them in their latest edition. They cover almost all the books of the Bible, not quite all the books, and they take up 22 large modern volumes. He has been called the father of genuine or the creator of genuine exegesis. You've got to remember that until the time of John Calvin, nobody, nobody in the whole wide world took the Bible as we are used to it being taken today and let the Bible speak for itself. Even Luther's first attempts to expound the Psalms were very Roman Catholic, not necessarily in their content, though there was some of that, but in their approach. Calvin was the man who established for the first time since the very early days, in fact, you would have to say in reality since the days of the apostles, the plain, simple scriptural method of understanding and expounding the Bible. One man who actually disagreed with Calvin in many areas was an Anglican bishop And he placed his value as an interpreter above, and I quote the words, 10,000 Augustines, Jeromes, Chrysostoms, and Cyprians. And he's just mentioning four of the greatest so-called fathers of the early church. Great American theologian B.B. Warfield said that Calvin opened the scriptures as the scriptures had never been opened before. Now, in those days, all Europe, in fact, that meant all the world hung upon his words. friends were strengthened, foes were overwhelmed—literally, absolutely overwhelmed—by the field of learning that this man had conquered. He was the master of the languages, the master of philosophy, the master of theology, and he had a profound and deep learning and reverence for the Word of God. History has largely been molded by his theology, and his ethics. The last people in the world to treat this lightly should be Americans, because I think it can be very easily shown that what this country became, at least in its heyday, it became largely through the application of the theology of the Bible as expounded by John Calvin. So it's clear that we've given a glance even at Calvin's works. You wouldn't have time to touch anything of the rest. So we're going to deal with the subject very briefly. Well, within limits, briefly. And to do that, we're going to deal with it topically. I'm going to take four topics on the subject, the Reformed literature of the Reformation period, and just let's see what the Reformation was all about. Now, this is going to start with the knowledge of God. That's why we read, or quoted John 17, verse 3, the knowledge of God. What we're going to be touching tonight is theology. Now, that's a dirty word again to a lot of people, but theology is only the knowledge of God. And if that's not something that ought to engage our attention, then I don't know what should engage your attention. The Reformation was profoundly and preeminently a theological movement. It was born out of a deep commitment to this Bible, to the self-revelation of God in Scripture. Now, I put it that way because the Reformers revered the Bible down to its smallest particles. But the Reformers did not merely learn the Bible to have so many texts at their fingertips. Though, mind you, if you got a few of them together, you could probably write the whole text of Scripture from their memory. That's how deeply they had learned it. But they studied the Bible because therein God gave them the revelation of himself. This theology, what is called in theology, theology proper, the study of God's person, this theology was their all-consuming interest. because what could be more important? Now, the greatest work on the subject was the Institutes of the Christian Religion, first turned out by Calvin when he was a young man of 26 years old. Now, you think, what a genius. First of all, they were very small then, compared to what they are now, but secondly, people seemed to do better in those days. Believe it or not, I have in my library, I was reading part of it this week, a production of Edward VI, the king of England, when he was twelve years old. And he wrote a treatise, a theological treatise, against the pretensions to supremacy of the Roman pope, pleading for the freedom of the people of God in the Church of England. I could hardly believe it. twelve years old. So I suppose Calvin was an old man by the time at twenty-six he started and turned out his institutes of the Christian religion. The most important single treatment of theology, certainly since the days of Augustine and probably even including his days. Calvin's work, for instance, on the Trinity, getting into the Bible to see what the Bible teaches on the Trinity, is without parallel, and orthodoxy today owes its insight into that doctrine to God's work through Calvin. So it was an epical event. The Western world would never be the same again once that little book was launched upon the world. It was that important. Now, here's the thing. At the beginning of the Institutes, Calvin enters into an exposition of the Scripture doctrine on the subject of true knowledge. Now, follow me very carefully here, because this has become the classic statement of Protestant apologetics. When it started out, it was a bombshell. It hit Europe, something like an atomic bomb. They'd never heard the like. And yet, it is simply drawn out mainly of Paul's view of his teaching in Romans chapter 1, linked up with many other passages of Scripture. Now, here's the germ of all Reformed theology. Just let me say something in passing here. These passing notes take sometimes too much time, but I want to make sure you get this. I am sort of sick hearing about the five points of Calvinism. The five points of Calvinism were only five answers that Reformed theologians gave at the Synod of Dort to contradict the five points of remonstrance. the five points that the Arminians raised. And while they are important truths, yet they don't get to the very basis, the very heart of the difference between the Reformed theology and other theologies. Here's where you start, with the doctrine of the knowledge of God. Now here's the reasoning, very clearly and scripturally wrought out, and I'm only giving you the briefest synopsis. The sum of all wisdom the knowledge of ourselves and of God, both as Creator and as Redeemer in Christ. Two kinds of knowledge, knowing ourselves and knowing God. Secondly, the connection between these two is so intimate that that it is not easy to say which comes first, which begets the other. Does the knowledge of God beget a true knowledge of ourselves, or does the knowledge of ourselves beget a true knowledge of God? No man can answer that. But this comes out very truly and carefully in Calvin's work, that no man can truly know himself. without perceiving that he is a creature of God. Thus, the knowledge of himself necessarily involves the knowledge of God as creator. And equally, any man who truly knows God is thereby given a true knowledge of himself. Now, that's all theology. I'm going to come back to Calvin in a moment, but let me just show you how this gets very practical. This is very eminently scriptural. You couldn't understand Romans 1 if you didn't agree with that. And yet see what it's saying. While men deny God, they can never make sense out of themselves. That's very clear. Here's a truth that needs to be recognized in all the so-called Christian counseling that is taking place today. While men deny God, they can't make sense out of themselves. And any attempt to make people feel good about themselves while they are denying God and rejecting the God of this Bible is futile and heretical. It reminds me of a person who has a car without an engine. Now how do you get the thing to go? doesn't have an engine, and until you put the engine and all the works in it, you'd have to say it won't go. But you see all these councillors saying, now if we can only get this car to the top of the hill, man, we find it'll go. And so they're careering down the hill. If it gathers enough speed, it can even make its way up part of the other side of the hill. Lo and behold, we have taught this person to deal with his problems. He's feeling good about himself. Instead of being stuck in a field somewhere, like the car, he's really moving. Not at all, my friend. You're fooling the man. You're fooling the man. That's what counseling, apart from a strong biblical reformed theology, is bound to do. Let us understand this. No man can know himself. He cannot make sense of himself until he knows God according to the Scriptures. And if our counselors would gather that much, spend a bit more time in the theology, their counseling would be a lot more effective. But from that you'll see, to get back to Calvin, that man is created with an inbred or innate knowledge of God. Romans 1 makes this clear again. God has stamped on every creature's heart, every man's heart, a knowledge of himself. And this is the seat of the religious feeling that's so natural to man, that even the heathens, degraded as they are, can't get away from religion, though they have so obscured the truth as to get into paganism. This innate knowledge of God is supported by the works of God. You look at the stars above you, you look at the earth around you, and everything has a voice. As the psalmist said, the heavens declare the glory of God. His works of creation and providence all bear testimony to the inbred knowledge of God that's in the heart of man by nature. But—and here's where Calvin followed Paul very carefully—but man's reaction to that revelation is conditioned by the state of his heart or the state of his soul. When Adam was created holy and spotless and righteous with the revelation of God within him and the revelation of God all around him, He could see it. He responded to it. Nothing made any sense apart from God. Adam couldn't think of himself. He couldn't think of a blade of grass. He couldn't think of a bird in the air. He couldn't think of anything apart from God because every part of it bore the stamp of its maker upon it. But when sin entered, Man became depraved and corrupted by the fall. And as Paul says, he holds down the truth of God in unrighteousness. He suppresses the light of nature and seeks to render it powerless. And for that reason, natural revelation is insufficient for fallen man. I haven't time tonight just to draw the distinction and the contrast between that seemingly simple statement and the whole theology of the Roman Catholic Church that had been formulated by Thomas Aquinas, another brilliant genius of a man, but a genius that was sadly perverted to the use of scholasticism and not, as in this case, to the presentation of the pure gospel of Christ. This natural revelation is insufficient for fallen man. First of all, go to any university. Well, I needn't say any, because I would hope and know that B.J. has to be different here, but go to any state university, and go to their astronomers, or go to their biologists, or whatever, and ask them, do you see God in nature? No, they don't. Why? Because God isn't in nature? No, sir. But because man, by the blindness of sin, can't read the book of nature anymore. And even if he could read it, it doesn't have anything to say about redemption. So he needs a special revelation of saving grace, and this is what God has given us in Christ, and this is what he has written in his inspired and inerrant Word. But now we're back to trouble. If man can read the book of nature, can he read the Scriptures? All right. The answer is no. He can't. He's blind. He's dead. He can't do it. Paul says, the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit. So even though God has stamped every page of this book with the proofs of its divine origin, yet man can't see it. So in order to save his people from their sins and bring them into a knowledge of him, God accompanies the preaching of his Word by what Calvin called the testimony of his Spirit. so that in Reformed theology you have this conjunction of terms, by His Word and Spirit. That's how God conveys salvation, by the preaching of the Word, that's the external witness, by the internal testimony of the Spirit, regenerating and quickening them unto saving faith. You see, you can give a dead man all the information he needs about the way to heaven, what can he do about it? If souls are dead in trespasses and sins, you can tell them as much truth. What can they do about it? If they're blind, you can shine all the light that the Bible has upon their eyes. What good will it do them? As another great Dutch-American theologian put it, sin put man's eyes out. And you can give a blind man with no eyes all the light of the brightest noonday sun. He still can't see. But when God saves a man, He not only gives him the light, but He gives him the sight to see the light. He not only gives him the external revelation, but the Holy Spirit does a work of regeneration within him, and quickens him by that miracle of grace to faith in Jesus Christ. This sets out the Reformed view of regeneration. It is the root of faith. It's not the fruit of faith. When people tell you that you're born again or you're regenerated as the result of believing, they've got it the wrong way around. You have regeneration first, and because God gives you life, He communicates faith. This is what we mentioned last week, the big word, monergism. It's by the energy of God alone that men are regenerated, not synergism in which men are supposed to help God. And yet notice This is something we would do well to follow today. Notice carefully the kindness, the fellowship of people of differing views in those days. We tend to think of those days as days of controversy, fighting, bickering, and sometimes they were. John Calvin was the strongest of the Reformed theologians, the leader of them in his day. Philip Melanchthon came to believe in synergism after a kind, and yet when you read the letters between those two men, There was a deep bond of affection, a deep bond of respect, and they didn't divide because of their differing views in this particular point of theology, for they realized that at heart we both want to preach grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Now, here's the knowledge of God. It's the basis of all Reformed evangelism. Look, if we don't get this back into our gospel preaching, if we go back into the way that people like Charles G. Finney established and a whole host of people ever since then, if we get back into that old nonsense that God has done all that he can and it's up to men now, if we don't return to our roots to the preaching of the knowledge of God as it stirred Europe in the days of the Reformers, I tell you there is little hope of revival and a powerful awakening that will have lasting effects in North America. You look at all the so-called revivals that have come out of man-centered preaching. Where is their lasting fruit? Finney's revivals blazed across New England. And for the last 150 years, there has been nothing else in those areas. There's never again been any moving of God. What's called in the history of religion in North America, it's called the scorched earth policy. He certainly did scorch the earth. We've got to get back to this knowledge of God. The basis of true Reformed evangelism, as I pointed out, the basis of true Christian counseling. And it's obviously the solid basis of true assurance. Because you see, if I have faith, so often the devil wants to get you, do you have enough faith? The Bible never asks you, do you have enough faith to be saved? Do I have faith? Where did it come from? It is the product of the immediate working of the Holy Spirit. I know by the special testimony of the Holy Ghost, if it weren't for Him, I'd be an enemy of God, a rejecter of Christ, a denier of all these things. I'd be an exalting man, proud in myself. I would not be brought into the dust to receive Christ freely offered in the Gospel. The very fact that I've been brought to that place is the proof of the agency of the Holy Spirit, and I can therefore rest secure in Christ and go on to labor to show myself approved unto God, to know God. I want to ask you tonight, do you know Him? Not just knowing about Him, not knowing a few texts. But can you say that I know God and myself in relation to Him? He is my Creator, He is my Redeemer in Christ. If you know God and know yourself in Christ, you have the sum of all wisdom and knowledge. But if you don't, you could have a string of degrees that would stretch from here to California and back, and you know nothing. Second great area is the way of salvation. Now here I'm just going to sum up. They taught that it was by Christ alone. We have no access to God, save alone through the only mediator and advocate, Jesus Christ the righteous. It was by grace alone, received by faith alone, the constant cry of the Protestant reformers, no human merit enters into salvation in any way or to any degree. Now Rome had a very intricate system of human merit. Thomas Aquinas taught that there were two kinds of merit. Sounded wonderful in their scholastic ears? He said there was the merit of congruity. Now, what does that mean? Well, it meant that if a man was unregenerate, without the Holy Spirit, he could do certain good works, which didn't actually deserve eternal life. But because he did these good works, God found it congruous, or fitting. to reward him by infusing grace into his soul. Then there was the merit of condignity. Once God had done that, once they were regenerated by the help of the Spirit, then these regenerate men would do good works, and God then owed them his reward. So when you put them both together, unregenerate and regenerate men were stockpiling merit before God. Some of them were so successful that according to the Church of Rome, they had more merit than they needed to get to heaven. They had done so well that God owed them so much that even bringing them to heaven didn't discharge the debt. So they had done works of supererogation. Again a big word which simply says the Pope then took these extra merits and he put them in a people bank. He had them all there and when you paid a few extra whatever it was, ducats or guilders or whatever, when you paid a little extra and did a little more penance and especially helped along the cause of his unholiness, then he would dip into that bank and he would give you a little of that merit, save you a year or two or maybe a million or two years out of a non-existent purgatory. That was the system of merit. Now, against all that, the Reformation came in like a tide, and everywhere the Reformers bore united testimony. Calvin wrote in his Institutes, wherever this good pleasure of God reigns, No good works are taken into account. Ulrich Zwingli cried and wrote, Christ is our righteousness. From this it follows that our works are good so far as they are Christ's, but they are not good so far as they are ours. And again, God forgives us alone through Jesus Christ our Lord. I like the way the English 39 articles put it. And these were strongly influenced by the great Strasbourg reformer Martin Busser. And they said, the condition of man after the fall of Adam is such, listen, that he cannot turn or prepare himself by his own natural strength or good works to faith and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good. To do good works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God by Christ preventing or going before us in order that we may have a good will. In other words, if God doesn't give us a good will to do his will, we don't have it. We can't even work to prepare ourselves Are we so far depraved then that we're wholly incapable of any good and prone to all evil? That was the question of the Heidelberg Catechism, and it said, yes, unless we're born again by the Spirit of God. We cannot do anything, even to prepare ourselves. There's no merit in anything that a man does except to take him to hell. So justification is not by works, it's by grace. And yet, you know, is there not today a return, even in Protestantism, even in fundamentalism? Is there not a return to pre-Reformation Romanism? That somehow or other there is some good left in man? I have heard preachers say, look, there's nothing to stop man coming to Christ except his will. Well, that's the whole point. They want us to believe that his mind is corrupt, his affections are corrupt, but somehow or other his will remains unscathed. And it doesn't. Man is depraved, even in his will. So the justification must be by grace, accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord Jesus Christ by faith. none of our own works are deserving. I like the way the French put it in their Confession of 1559. Here's where it all comes home to personal peace of heart. We therefore reject all other means of justification before God, and without claiming any virtue or merit, we rest simply upon the virtue of Jesus Christ. You know, that's a description of saving faith. We rest simply upon the virtue of Jesus Christ, which is impure to us, as much as to blot out all our sins and make us find grace and favor in the sight of God. Salvation by grace. Oh, how we think we have got used to the truth. But my friend, then it was light penetrating the darkness. salvation not by works, but by faith. And yet, you know, when a person's saved, here the Reformers have something to say to our day. Fundamentalism is riven, broken up today by a great debate. John MacArthur wrote a book, The Gospel According to Jesus, in which he said, essentially, that when people are saved by faith, that faith will be proved by the way they live. And a host of fundamental writers has risen up against him to say that no, no, no, there's nothing to do with it, there's nothing to do with it at all, and you're making salvation now to be by works. So that once you exercise faith and repentance, repentance does not involve any necessary change of life. So you have a bunch of people, millions of them indeed, going around saying, we're saved, we walked the aisle, we signed the card, we made the commitment, we made the decision, and they're still in their sin and they're living like the devil, and these preachers want them to believe that they're still on the way to heaven. In this particular issue, it's MacArthur who's right. And they would do well to get back to the old Reformed theology, that when a man is saved by grace through faith without works, yet he'll not be without good works. good works, the Helvetic confession said, are born out of a living faith. And all the Reformed confessions say the same. Once you have a living faith, it produces good works. Now, this way of salvation, it's interesting that it's just here that Calvin introduced his whole doctrine of election and predestination. Other people put it away at the beginning of their theology. And as he has been accused of doing, they have this notion of the sovereignty of God, and they work everything from it. Others have done that, but not Calvin. He worked through to the doctrine of salvation led out in Scripture, and then in that he saw the sovereignty of God. Now, he said, quite honestly, there are two ways in which you can go to extremes. You can be too curious. There are some people who try to pry into what is too holy. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, and they're not for us to try to be wiser than God allowed us. There are people who want to know why God did this, how God can do the other, and all the rest of it. What God says He did should be good enough for you and me. He said you shouldn't be too curious. But then there's the opposite extreme of being too cautious. There are people who say, well, sure, it's in the Bible, but let's not mention it. Can't do us any good, it only divides the people of God. Well, it may well be that it divides them. But God has put it into the Bible. And He, therefore, says it is profitable. 2 Timothy 3, verse 16. He says it's profitable. And if it's profitable, then we have got to accept what God says. Now here is the Reformed position. Follow it carefully. God has decreed everything that comes to pass. We read it today in Ephesians 1 11. He works all things after the counsel of his own will. Yet God is not the author of sin. God is not the author of sin. Adam could have obeyed God when God created him. You stop and read it sometime, you'll find that God put him in the most advantageous situation any man could ever be put in. And it was easy for Adam to obey, and it was difficult for Adam to disobey God. So often that's overlooked. He didn't just slip into sin. Paul says he was not even deceived into sinning. He sinned with his eyes open. Adam could have obeyed God, and is responsible for his own fall, and for ours in him. Now out of the mass of fallen men, as we read in Ephesians 1, 4 and 5, God chose a people to eternal salvation and he purposed to confer upon those people All the grace and favor necessary to bring them to heaven. And he did this without any reference to their merit or good work, foreseen or otherwise. It's not that he looked down through the ages of time and said, now, Tommy will believe and Jimmy will not believe, so therefore I'll choose Tommy. No, no, you've got to get beyond that. God did not choose them because of their good works. Their good works according to 1 Peter 1 verse 2 are the result of God's choice, not the cause of it. So God chose a people for his name. Now obviously, here's where we get to the tough part. In choosing some, he sovereignly passed over others. Now, nobody can say why, except that it was right in his sight, and what God does is beyond reproach. Paul says, Who art thou, O man, that replyest against God? Now, here Calvin, in some places, not always, but in some places, tends to make the damnation of sinners depend solely on the sovereign will of God. I think he was wrong insofar as he teaches that. strange that a grasshopper can look up at a giant and say, you're wrong, but I believe he was. Beza, his successor, and others, they hardened this position, and they taught that God purposed to save some and damn others for his own glory, and therefore he created them in order to save them and damn them. I don't believe the Bible warrants that, and it's interesting that all the Reformed confessions, even of that period, are careful to deny that, and they emphasize that men perish because of their sin. You see, when God chooses some to eternal life and passes over others, that passing over is actually called preterition. That didn't make anybody a sinner. Men don't go to hell because they're not elect. Men go to hell because they're We get to heaven despite all our deservings. Those who go to hell, go to hell because of their deservings. And any man who will have Christ, this is what the Reformers did, this is what they preached, this is what they called for, let him come. And when he has come, he will be able to say, thank God for sovereign grace. that give me a heart and faith to trust in Jesus. As the Belgian Confession put it, God is merciful and just. He's merciful in delivering and preserving his people from perdition, according to his eternal counsel, but he's just in leaving others to perish in the fallen perdition in which, I quote, they have involved themselves. C. H. Spurgeon used to put it very simply, salvation is all of grace, damnation is all of sin. There's not a man in hell that doesn't deserve to be there, and there's not a man in heaven that does deserve to be there, saved through the merits of Jesus Christ. It's Christ who is the difference, and as the word is preached and the Holy Spirit works in the heart, The Reformers and we after them call all men everywhere to repentance and faith in Christ on the understanding that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. My time has gone, and I am two-thirds home. Let me say a word about the worship of God, because all that we take for granted we owe to the Protestant Reformers. Rome was full of relics, imagery, and idolatry. When Pharaoh preached, actually, the people, when they saw the light, they went into their churches. Of course, they were their own churches, and they ripped out all the images. They were the iconoclasts. Calvin and the other Reformers, when they preached, they abolished the mass, they got rid of prayers to the saints, the worshiping of Mary, and the host that was held up as the body of Christ. And they adopted a very important principle. Sometime, actually, we'll look at this in detail. here's where the Reformers divided. The Lutherans and the Anglicans adopted what was called the normative principle. In other words, they said, we can accept for church worship whatever the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn. And that way they brought over many of the trappings of Rome. The Protestant Reformers from Geneva and the other Reformed areas, they adopted the principle that in our worship we must have the sanction of God's Word for what we do. It's a world of difference. There's a difference between saying, well, the Bible doesn't actually forbid this, and saying, well, the Bible actually calls for this. One was the Lutheran method, the other was the Reformed method. When the Reformers in Geneva introduced a biblical form of worship that was like sunlight after midnight, Let me quote to you from Philip Schaaf, the great American historian. He said, Calvin rejected the Mass, all the sacraments except two, the Saints' Days, nearly all church festivals except Sunday, images, relics, processions, and the whole pomp and circumstance of a gaudy worship which appeals to the senses and imagination rather than the intellect and conscience, and tends to distract the mind with the outward show instead of concentrating it upon the contemplation of the saving truth of the gospel. Now here's what we owe. He made the sermon the central part of worship. He magnified the pulpit as the throne of the preacher. He opened the inexhaustible fountain of free prayer in public worship, and he restored to the church like Luther the inestimable blessing of congregational singing. That was the worship of God as the Reformers set it up over against Rome. I would, to God, we could say they were all of one mind in themselves. They were not. They divided over especially the Lord's Supper. Remember, Rome taught that the little wafer became the actual body and blood, be it in humanity, of Jesus Christ. Everybody could see that that was unscriptural and nonsensical. Martin Luther, wanting to be as literal as possible when Jesus said, this is my body, this is my blood. He said that the bread, steadily, it was bread. The wine remained wine. But because of what they called the ubiquity of the body of Christ, that is, it could be everywhere at the same time, it was above, below, and all around. in an actual corporal way, so that when you ate the bread and drank the cup, you actually ate the very body of Christ, though the symbols were not themselves changed. Zwingli said, that's nonsense. These are just symbols. They represent nothing more. They are badges. Martin Busser sought to mediate. Luther would have none of it, but in 1536 Busser produced something of a compromised position, and again the agreement failed. Calvin, I think, and their whole Reformed tradition hit it well, and again our fundamental churches would do well to get back to this. How often have you been in a communion service where your heart is grieved, where it's a five-minute tag-on to the end of a morning service? where the words are run through, there is no sense of solemnity, there is no sense of deity, there is no sense of the holy, there is no overwhelming humiliation of heart before God, or adoration of the glory and grace of God and his incarnate Son. Calvin said, this bread is but bread. This cup is but the same. There's no change in it. And physically, the body of Christ is in heaven. The body of Christ has a specific height and weight. It is not omnipresent. When Jesus was in Cana, physically, he was not in Jerusalem. As God, he is omnipresent. But the body of Christ is not omnipresent. But he said, nonetheless, this is not just a badge. It is that. But it's not just a badge. And at the communion table, we have, as Augustine taught a thousand years before Calvin, we have the real presence of Christ. I said at our last communion service, we're fundamentalists. We say that that which is spiritual is most real. The presence of Christ is a spiritual presence. He is present to and through our faith. But because it's spiritual, it's nonetheless real. And we need to meet with Christ, and by faith, feast on Christ at the communion table. So that, and this is the symbolism, what bread does for the body when it is eaten, what wine does for the body when it's eaten, so when we remember Christ, We feast on him spiritually, and we assimilate and appropriate to ourselves all the virtue and all the value of the obedience of Christ in his incarnation and death. That's the symbolism of the Lord's Supper. That was the heart with the preaching of the Word of the worship of the Reformed Church. It's one final area where the Reformed literature stands out in great power, and that's the defense of the gospel. Calvin's letter to Cardinal Sadoulais to this day is still counted one of the most brilliant and beautiful things ever written. It's in many ways the most perfect defense of the Reformed faith. Also, his detailed refutation of the Council of Trent. John Knox's letter to a Jesuit priest by the name of Terry, the works of the English reformers, even when they were in the point of death, like Archbishop Cranmer in his last stand before his murderers, he looked them in the eye. And this was the most timid of all the English reformers. Yet he said, as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and antichrist. And all across Europe, the blood of the martyrs witnessed the same great confession. Now this is why they lived and died, and this is why we do these Reformation studies. That we may understand first our roots, that we may understand the gospel as it burst upon Europe, and we may get a little fire in our own hearts to stand for the things for which these men stood. They stood for the sufficiency and the authority of the Bible. They needed no popes, no councils, or any traditions of men. Now they didn't despise the councils of the early church. In so far as they accorded with scripture, they accepted them, but they believed in the sufficiency and authority of the Bible. Secondly, they preached the sovereignty of God. In an age when humanism was sweeping Europe, and over against it you had medieval Romanism, each of them majoring upon man. The Reformers held up the truth, let God be God. I want to tell you, my friend, when the church of Jesus Christ has high views about the sovereignty of God, you get men in the pulpit and not wimps. When you get a church that has high views and says that God is sovereign, That church is not going to be overcome by the fear of man. It's not going to be swept away by the tide of opinion. They will say, let God be God and let the devil rage. We will still trust our God, for He is sovereign. They contended for the sovereignty of God. They contended for the sacrifice of Christ, and the all-sufficient satisfaction to God. for our sin. Nothing but the blood can save us. They believed it. They taught it. Away with works of penance. Away with indulgences purchased from the Pope. Away with auricular confession. In the blood of the Lamb there is a perfect cleansing for the conscience that has been most defiled. And they lived and they died contending for that salvation by grace through faith, and sanctification by the Holy Ghost through faith in Christ as the evidence of that inward work of grace. That's what they contended for. To them the only thing that mattered was to know God, for this is life eternal. could have been. And the same could be said for Theodore Beezer, the same could be said for all the other great Reformers. They could have been men of immense popularity and immense wealth. They certainly could have had all their needs looked after. Calvin and the rest of them lived in great difficulty. In the midst of great bodily afflictions, a great personal sacrifice, because to them nothing else mattered than knowing God. We can very easily lose sight of that in the twentieth century. And we relegate our religion, if I may use a colloquialism here from America, to the back burner. It's like an appendix to our lives, maybe even as a crutch to our lives. but to the Reformers to know God was life. And if that meant they lost their family, as in many cases it did, then they lose their family. If that meant they lost their wealth, in many cases it did, then they lost their wealth. If that meant they lost their lives, then they would forfeit their lives, for this is life eternal, that they may know God. Now, these men were not perfect, but they were good men, because they were God's men. In this day of shallowness and compromise, compromise with the world and compromise with ecumenical apostasy and anti-Christianity, we would do well to recapture something of their We can only do that when we know God as they knew Him. May God teach us more of Himself, the glory of His grace, the majesty of His person, the perfection of His Son, and the power of His Spirit. Let's bow our heads in prayer. Let's all pray. In just a moment, the meeting will be over. To know God by free and sovereign grace. To know God. Do you know him? Or have you simply learned a little about him, and he's still a stranger? You have to say tonight, I'm far from God and far from great. That's the key. And I trust that you'll seek for life eternal and call on him. And if you are a Christian, remember Daniel's words, the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits. Do you have such a knowledge of him as emboldens you to be a good witness of Jesus Christ? Let's ask the Lord for that knowledge, fill our hearts and our minds with the transcendentally glorious knowledge of our God. If I can help you in the things of God, I'm here as your servant for Christ's sake. Don't go away without knowing the Lord. I'd be glad to open the scriptures and seek to let the light of God's word shine upon your heart with the prayer that the Holy Spirit will shine it into your heart. with quickening power. Father in heaven, bless thy word, write it upon our hearts, produce fruit for the preaching of it. We thank thee that life eternal is the knowledge of God and of Christ. O God, we thank thee that thou hast privileged us to be brought into this knowledge of thee, this fellowship with thee. We pray that thou wilt So speak to thy people that we may have such a knowledge of our God as never to fear the face of man again. And Lord, speak, we pray, to those who know not Christ, who only know God by hearsay, who are still suppressing the witness not only of nature but of Scripture. O God, we pray that thou wilt illuminate their minds and hearts and bring them to life in hear our prayer, and part us with thy very richest blessing. We pray in Jesus' name, and for Jesus' sake. Amen.