Father in heaven, we are thankful that, yes, the days are going by. And as we do so, we know that your faithfulness is, as Scripture says, new every morning. And that is to say that every day we can look forward to the grace that you have showered upon us, your people. We can look forward to even as we run into and face the difficulties of life, you walk with us through your son Jesus Christ and his spirit every single day so that we never have to worry about anything. Father, we thank you that you've given us your word, that you have spoken to us clearly about your love and your commitment to your people, and we pray that as we continue to read, we would be reminded of that great love and that commitment. The scripture calls that the devotion, that covenant love that you have for your people. And may it never be far from our thoughts. And we pray this, Father, in Jesus' name, amen. All right, we're going to continue our look at the Westminster Shorter Catechism. And again, I invite you to either turn in your own pocket copies, which I know many of you keep. For those few who have not, I know most of you have memorized it, but for those who don't, you know, it's pocket copies or you can also use the Trinity Hymnal. Maybe somebody will help me with what page. I keep saying about 870-ish something. Because we're looking today at questions 82 through 84. 82 through 84. And we completed looking at the Ten Commandments. The Catechism wanted to walk us through those commandments. And before we read this, let's remember the commandments were presented to us, because this is going to flow on and continue from there. The commandments are presented to us as God's moral law. They are a summary of that moral law. And they presented to us what our obligations are towards God, what our obligations are towards others. And in each of the commandments it was presented to us, not just saying, here's what it says, But here are the duties that are actually required by that commandment, the positive things that you're expected to do, and then here are the things, the prohibitions, that are forbidden in the commandment. These are the things that you are to not do, that you are to avoid. That's been the pattern in every one of these. And the one thing we've realized all throughout all of this is that it's impossible to keep the commandments, the depth of them, the depth of what's truly being asked. Like we said, Jesus himself brought these things out in the Sermon on the Mount when he said that it's not simply enough that you've never slept with someone outside of marriage, you even have the thought that's a violation. It's not enough that you've never physically taken up a knife or a gun or a club and killed someone, just the thought of anger and hatred is enough to condemn you and then so on. So what we've quickly realized is that we're unable to keep the commandments perfectly. But just in case there was any doubt whether we are able, we have these questions that are coming up today, 82 through 84, that make it clear that we're unable to keep the commandments and what we need from beginning to end is the grace of God. I'm going to do like I've done in the past, where I'm going to ask you guys to not only read that, but read scripture passages. But I'm not going to write them up. There's not that many, so I'm just going to ask you guys to look them up as we go along. So for now, can I have somebody read questions 82 through 84? All right, thank you, Tonya. Did anybody look at those in the Trinity Hymnal? 875, okay, so we are at 875 if you need to look it up there. All right, so when you look at these three questions, you see what they're doing. The very first one points out, that clearly none of us is able to perfectly keep the commandments of God. That is to say, able to handle them at a level where we are meeting every one of those prohibitions and those duties regularly, continually, faithfully, right? And then question 83, we're not going to spend all that much time with 83, but there's this idea that are all sins, you know, equally terrible, equally heinous. And it points out that, you know, actually scripture does recognize, for example, in John 19 11, where Jesus says, he that delivered me to you has committed the greater sin. So there's no doubt that there are levels, if you will, of what may be worse than, you know, like for example, we even said with the sixth commandment, While it's true that Jesus condemns the thought of hatred, it's better to have hated a person and not lifted, you know, a finger against them than to actually carry it out and either assault them or, you know, kill them. So there's no doubt that in that regard, you can distinguish, and yet, As we said even a moment ago, just the thought of hatred is enough to condemn the person to what level? That's what question 84 says, to nothing less than continual punishment. Now, before I jump into the very meat of this lesson, I do want to take up that. Now, you know what? We'll do this at the end if we have time. Forget that. Let's jump in. But let me ask you this question as we start the lesson proper. You can see where the thrust of it is. It's following up on the Ten Commandments and pointing out just how hard it is for us to keep the commandments. What would you say is the distinguishing feature between, I guess you can call it classical Christianity, scriptural, biblical Christianity, and every other religion, every other ideology or philosophical approach to life? You have to come up with one thing. Rob? That we're born as sinners? Okay. Islam says that you're born as a sinner, so. Sorry, I'm gonna, yeah, the problem with asking a question like this is if I have to tell you, yeah, sorry. But okay, there's no doubt that there are many positions that don't recognize a thing as sin, and hang on to that, because we'll talk about that a little later, our society's view of even the concept of sin. But, well, Islam will do that. Judaism will do that. And maybe even a few others. Zoroastrianism, if you're familiar with that. Jainism. The substitutory atonement of Jesus. So if we can reduce that, not reduce it, but if we can explain that in regard to what distinguishes it, it's simply this. You've given us the how. The what is in every other religious system, in every other philosophical approach to life, in every other ideology, that recognizes that something is broken with the world. Because in that regard, everybody gets it, right? Nobody sits there and says, oh, the world's perfect just the way. No, we think we're perfect just the way we are. It's everybody else that's messed up. But we all recognize that something is broken in the world. But to fix that, in every other system, you have to do something. You have to do something. Maybe you do it all. Maybe you cooperate with God and God comes alongside you and does things like he might do in Judaism, as he might do in Islam, as he might do in other situations, but only in biblical Christianity is Are you fully and wholly incapable of doing anything that gets you across the finish line, you know, right? That gets you to be able to fix and to say, you know, whatever. And I say save ourselves, but in other ideologies, other views, they don't even talk about salvation per se. So I'm just using that language and say any way of fixing what's wrong. Only in Christianity do you say that we're unable to do it. The how is what you talked about, Rod. It is Jesus, in fact, who does it for us through his both substitutionary life and substitutionary death. But this is the point is that even, and by the way, there are those who use the name Christianity, but they have in some way altered it to include some level. of what Paul would have called self-righteousness. So that's a very important point because when we look at these questions, it lets us know that we're unable to meet God's obligations on our own. And so what we begin to see is something very interesting, which is that the biblical life, the life that God has for us from beginning to end is one that is shaped by grace. And you're going to be hearing that throughout everything that we say this morning. that the grace that God extends is not just a helper. It's not just something that comes across to give you that extra boost. It's not just something that you get at the beginning of your Christian life to, you know, when you're saved and then you're on your own. And, you know, even most evangelical Christians who tend to see the gospel as something that brings us into the Christian life, into a relationship with Christ. And then after that, you're expected to be good on your own. You occasionally dip in and ask for the Lord to sustain you in those difficult moments. But when we begin to look at what scripture has to say, we realize that we never mature beyond the cross. We never outgrow the gospel. Grace starts us from the very beginning, takes us to the very end. Paul speaks in Romans about, right in the very beginning in Romans 1.16, he says that, what, you guys know how it goes? 1.16, does that ring any bells? That the gospel is the power of God for salvation. for anyone that believes, right, for the Jew first and also to the Gentile. But in verse 17, he talks that it is from faith to faith. And sometimes, you know, people don't know how to translate that from and to, basically meaning from the very beginning of your faith all the way to the end of the faith. It's the power of the gospel. It's the power of God, literally, is what it says. The gospel is the power of God. So it doesn't say from the beginning to the end, it is the power of God and your extra effort. or from the beginning, it's the power of God, but you bring it to the end. I mean, it's from beginning to end, it's everything that he does. Okay, so John 15, five, and I'll just read this one. Jesus says, for without me, you can do nothing. And that's one of those verses that, you know, we read quickly, okay, I am the vine, you are the branches, and all that. That line, without me you can do nothing, again, highlights man's total and utter inability, inability. So this is what we're seeing here. We're seeing that man is unable in this life to be completely sinless, even after he becomes a believer. Every day we continue to sin in thought and word and deed. And we know that, I think perhaps intellectually, you know, but here we're going to have to dig in a little bit to it, a little bit more into it. You're familiar with that famous passage in Romans 7 where Paul is describing his struggle as a believer. And he says, the good that I wish to do, I do not do. But the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I do. And every believer, I think, can resonate with that and can relate to that and say, that's us. Some people have tried to explain that and say that what Paul has done there is that he's reverted back to discussing what his life was before he became a believer. But there's absolutely nothing in the text that indicates that. In fact, everything in the text indicates that he's continuing to talk about the life of a believer and he's using himself. And again, any believer who's being honest with themselves sees him or herself in that text. However, like I said, not everyone buys into that. And so there have been two errors that have been persistent all throughout. the history of the church. They come up in different forms, different manifestations, but just like always, you know, if you can look at the early church and see all the things they did back then, and, you know, you come up with all the old names, docetism, agnosticism, and whatever, and you're like, oh, yeah, what does that matter? We end up reliving or redoing every single one of those, repeating them at some point, you know, and so it is with this. The one thing that we're going to see as we go through this is that the Christian life is really one of a constant sense of our unworthiness and our inability to do things on our own, our constant dependence on the Lord. And that has been, and I'll talk a little bit about this, that's been mistaken by some people to mean, when we recognize our unworthiness, that we're walking around all the time, you know, with a whip in our hand, you know, self-beating ourselves, and, oh, I'm terrible, oh, I'm whatever. Jonah, I think you're the one who posted a meme on our men's chat channel that was contrasting those two different things, and I can't remember what the first one was, the one that the dude, the wrong view of how he sees himself. Maybe you should look it up, or one of you guys can look it up more quickly. But the second one that you post not the second one you posted but the second picture was the guy who says I'm stupid and I'm whatever and And it's a recognition of who we really are it was funny. Maybe if I had a screen I'd put it up there but That is a starting point, but it's not your ending point. This catechism, of course, deals with one concept at a time. So even though as we sit there and say we are unworthy of any of the grace that we've received, it's not our stopping point. Because if you do stop there, then you might be prone to sit there and say, oh, I'm garbage, I'm slime, I'm human scum, and you know, whatever else. You want to say, we got to get to what's coming next, which is where we're going to look at that grace, what that grace is. We're going to be unpacking that in the questions to come. And that grace also includes an incredible love that restores ourself. Well, I say our self-worth. It restores our worth, not based on our own righteousness, but on the righteousness of Christ that looks at our adoption under Christ and so on. So we're going to look at all that in the questions to come. But for now, let's deal with these two persistent errors. And the very first one that we have that has come up again and again is the error of perfectionism. And this has had different manifestations, even in our own time. So, for example, perfectionism is this idea that, going against what we've just finished reading in the Catechism, that you are capable in your own ability in this life to achieve basically a sinless state, a place where you no longer sin. It's not saying that you have never sinned, it's not a Virgin Mary kind of thing, that she was conceived in perfection and so on, but that at some point you're able to slough off that sinful nature to the point where you no longer sin. And one of the places where you see that today is, and this is not all of them, but it's in the Pentecostal movement. If you're in the Wesleyan holiness movement, that movement does particularly hold to this view. So if you hold to that, everybody in that movement holds to that. But I've also seen it in a number of different places. and Pentecostalism, that's the idea that only when you have completely surrendered yourself to God and given yourself to him, you can then achieve complete victory. Now there's actually some truth to that. If you do, in fact, completely surrender your thought life, the things that you say and everything, in every way, your heart is completely given over to Christ, then you would be sinless, there's no doubt about it. The error is not in their saying that, but the fact that they can achieve it and that you can do it in this life. Again, if you're on the more Pentecostal side, this happens when you, or at least includes this idea of a second blessing where the Holy Spirit has to come and enable you to be able to do this. And again, many Pentecostals talk about a second blessing, there's problems with that already, but don't necessarily believe this part, but that's, that's all brought into the equation. If any of you have been in the Wesleyan holiness movement, which is probably the biggest one that now deals with this, then they don't have so much always the talk of a second blessing, but it's still the idea that the spirit will come through you and purify you. So any of you ever run into that, friends and so on? And usually, you know, you're usually looking at older, more mature folks, but I remember when I was younger running into a young man who was probably in his early 20s at the time. And his parents were all in it and so on. Yeah, and he didn't just look at them. He believed that his father did, but his mother had achieved perfection, you know. But he also thought that he had. So, and I've kept up with him from time to time. I haven't talked to him in a few years now, but it's probably been five years since I last talked to him. His life has been anything short of. I mean, anything but, you know, it's been rather short, but I don't know if he still holds to that. So anyhow, it could be, because even after he ended up in jail, of course, if you know anything about a lot of the folks that do that, it wasn't his fault. You know, it was the cops who were out to get him and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So maybe he does believe it. Who knows? But that's a very typical view, so that's the one that's in the, shall we call it the Protestant camp, although I'm not sure that it's fair to call a lot of this stuff Protestant. The other idea comes on the Roman Catholic side, and that might surprise you, because you might say, well, Roman Catholicism doesn't really push perfectionism like this. Well, no, not like that, but it does have an idea there. Remember, in Roman Catholicism, it's your righteousness that is going to be weighed and judged. Well, actually, that's kind of true. Your righteousness will be weighed and judged in the last day. The difference is that we see that we have the righteousness of Christ that has been laid over us. You know, we wear it like a garment, right? That is what it means that we are justified. The righteousness of Christ has been imputed to us. That means reckoned to us. It's not actually inherently ours, but it becomes what God sees when he looks at us. In the Roman system, it is you who, through your very righteousness, is measured. And Christ, as we've said when we looked at this earlier in this course, Christ comes along and gives you infusions, literally, that's the word they use, infusions of grace. that raise your levels of righteousness. You know, you lose it when you sin, and then you do the sacraments and the penance and all that, and so it goes up and down and just rises. And that's why if you're a Roman Catholic, you never really know, you know, where you're at. And if you die, you know, without last rites, last rites are supposed to zoom you up to the point where you can at least know that any mortal sin has been forgiven. But the idea is that if you don't have perfect righteousness, you know, you go to purgatory where you spend however long, you know, thousands of years sloughing off what remains of your imperfection. But there are people who are able in this life to reach 100%, and those people are called? Saints, exactly. Now, the word saint, that's from the Latin sanctus, and it's the exact same word from which we get from another derivation, the word holy. They both just mean those who are set apart. And when Paul talks about, you know, to all the saints who are in Philippi and so on, he's referring to all of God's people. We have all been taken and set apart. So we are the saints, but not in Roman Catholic dogma, in Roman Catholic thought. Only these folks who hit the 100% bar, there's not that many of them, but those are the ones who become saints. And there's different levels of saints, as you know. Maybe you just make it across the finish line. That means that you get to go straight into heaven when you die, rather than having to spend any amount of time in purgatory. But if you achieve sainthood, which means you're now at 100% righteousness, and again, you are no longer sinning, Then, and you continue to do that, every little good thing that you do after that is extra, and it goes into a treasury of merit, treasury of merit. These are called works of supererogation, if you're familiar with that term, if you come out of the Roman system. And the Pope has access to those works of supererogation, to that merit, and he can dispense it. Because remember, he is the vicar of Christ. Vicar means the substitute. You know, we're talking about vicarious substitution, the person who stands in his place. The Pope stands in the place of Christ and he doles out the extra merit. Rather than the righteousness that scripture says that we have, he gives you little pieces of it. Now, the problem in the Reformation time when Luther was pushing back against was not only that, but the fact that they were sold. That's a good way to make money. You know, you want to spend 10,000 years in purgatory or you want to give me 100 bucks now? That kind of thing. The thing is that while they have done away with the abuse of the sale of indulgences, because that's what those were called, it was an indulgence that was given to you by the Pope, they're still very much a thing. And I've actually held an official indulgence and it was an issue to me, mind you. But I have held one in my hand. It was laminated and kept as a keepsake. It was never cashed in. It's like one of those, like, you know, when you have a ticket to go see Madonna or something, I don't know, somebody that people consider worth seeing and they don't use it. They just frame it or whatever. So that's, you know, that poor person is probably burning in purgatory now because it was a 1950s indulgence. Because they didn't use it, didn't cash it in. Okay, you see I'm joking, right? Just in case. Okay, so that's the error of perfectionism and how do we deal with that? We've been looking at the book of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiastes 7.20 said, literally, there is no man on the earth who does not sin. So that's a pretty, pretty clear cut line. What does 1 John 1.10 say? If we say that we have no sin, we make God out to be a liar and his word is not in us. So the scripture's pretty clear that any claims towards sinlessness are basically bogus. So that's one error, the error of perfectionism. There is another error. Anybody know what that is? I'm able to keep God's law all the way to antinomianism. Anti means against, nomos, law, against the law. I'm able to keep God's law perfectly. Antinomianism says I don't need to keep God's law at all. And there's two reasons that are often given. Sometimes they only give one. Antinomianism starts with the fact that, well, Jesus paid for my sins. He's covered it. So since he's fulfilled the law, I don't need to fulfill the law. And then you can add an extra reason that some do. Not only do I not need to, but since I can't, in other words they acknowledge that we can't be sinless in life, why even bother trying? So that one is actually much, much more common in broad evangelical circles. You come up against it pretty much all the time. You hear people who talk about being New Testament Christians. I'm a New Testament Christian. So therefore, the law no longer applies. So I'm like, okay, can I come up and just deck you in the face? Because, you know, I can assault you, I can hurt you, I can beat you. Oh no, that's wrong. But wait a minute, you just said. So clearly, the law has some application, and we already saw this at the beginning when we started looking at the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments is God's summary of the moral law, which is what God expects us to do. And again, the thing is, it's not just simply what saves us, right? If you were able to keep the law perfectly, you wouldn't need to be saved. It's not what saves us. That's the common misunderstanding, that if you just keep the law, you'll be saved. It's what we're being saved to. Can you see that? In other words, what Christ does for us by fulfilling the law perfectly in his life, that's the positive aspect of his substitution. The negative aspect of his substitution is that he takes upon himself the curse, the penalty that we deserve for our failing to keep the law. But because Christ has done that, he saves us from the consequences of failing to keep the law. There's no doubt. But he doesn't keep us from the law. The whole reason why he saved us is to equip us so that we can keep the law. Did you see? The law was given to us as the way that human beings ought to live. And I know I said all this when we started looking at the law at the beginning of the Ten Commandments section. The law is given to us, not just simply as some tool by which we attain salvation, which you're already pointing out you can't do, but the law is given to us as the way to be human. What does it mean to be a human being? How do we interact in society? Well, You know, Robert Fulgham's book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Be kind. Don't hurt other people. Share scissors and paste. Don't eat the paste. You know, whatever else you learn when you're in kindergarten. But all those things that are in the Ten Commandments is what we're being saved to. So there is an ongoing role for the law. So just because Christ fulfills the law and therefore keeps us from the consequences of our disobedience does not mean that the law has just disappeared, right? And Jesus himself says in the Sermon on the Mount that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Let me throw in one aspect. Again, not everybody does this, but some people do. This idea that what we're dealing with also is when Paul talks about the old man and the new man, the old nature, the new nature, referring to the fact that we're still imperfect, we still have motivations to sin, you know, and even as believers. Some people have broken that up to this idea that there's like two people inside of me, right? And therefore, I'm not responsible when the bad person does bad things. Have any of you guys ever run into that? No, I've actually heard that taught in churches. And I don't want to pick on, just keep picking on the same people, but the last group that I have routinely heard this from is folks that were in the Pentecostal churches, Assembly of God and so on. This idea that, yeah, you know, I've got the old man and got the new man, and so when the old man does it, I'm not responsible. It's just, it's, you know, he's doing it, it's not me. I'm the new man in Christ. Well, they've got something correct, and you are a new person in Christ, and the scripture really makes that clear. Here we have Colossians 3, 9, that speaks about the new creation in Christ who has put off the old man with all its deeds and actions. You get the same thing in Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians 4 and Colossians, Ephesians and Colossians are sister letters that, say a lot of the same things, although in different ways. But Ephesians 4 says that same thing. He calls us to take off the old nature and to put on the new nature in Christ. But once you've done that, that new nature is there. So we don't have this idea that it's two different people, one running the show at certain times and the other one You know, you're not schizophrenic. Paul speaks in Romans chapter six that we are not to be ruled by sin any longer. So that really answers that aspect of antinomianism, which is, since I'm two different people, I'm not responsible when I disobey the law. The good part of me obeys, the bad part of me disobeys, and I'm not responsible. You're not two people, you're one, and so on. So those are the two errors that we keep seeing again and again. Any questions about those before we move on? So the answer to those, I mean, I've already been kind of addressing it, but what should be the answer to those? Yeah, the Christ in me, right. Sometimes we call that the gospel. And the other way to put that is grace. when we begin to see that it is because Christ is in us, because of the grace that he's shown to us, when we begin to understand that. So in the past, you've heard me talk about, you know, the Texas two-step faith and repentance, faith and repentance, and I want to expand on that a little bit today. This idea then is that, as I said earlier, you never mature beyond the cross. This has been a real challenge, I think, since, oh, I don't know, I want to say, since evangelicalism came out of denominations. Does that make sense? You know that the evangelical movement of today is something that's post-World War II. And, you know, you might think, World War II, that's 80 years ago. And it is, that's a long time ago. But up until then you had Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and Anglicans, Episcopalians, and they had their differences and so on, but generally you would find a pretty common core there. And then as the modernist movement of the very late 19th century, early beginnings of the 20th century, doubting the supernaturalism of the Bible, that there are no miracles, or that the Bible itself was inerrant, and so on. All those things, things like the OPC formed as they broke away from mainline Presbyterianism, because we rejected those new views, and others have broken away too. But of many who broke away, they just kind of formed this amorphous group that's become modern-day evangelicalism. And the problem with some of that is that there have been little in the way of moorings. Initially, you look at the late 40s, early 50s, into the 60s. Evangelicalism had very, very strong academic, intellectual, those are not the right words, I'm still quite not getting it right, but had strong doctrinal mooring. Guys like J.I. Packer, Carl Henry, and many others were men of academic renown who could, you know, go out with the big hitters and, you know, big sluggers and all that. And as we start entering the 70s and 80s, we begin to focus a lot more on experience and feelings and all that. And by the time we get to today, we're nobody, you know, you just, when Romans 12 tells us, Renew your mind, right, it talks about the renewal of your mind. That's now been changed in most evangelical translations to the removal of your mind. And that's pretty much how we behave. So I say that not to tear things down, but we have to be able to see things absolutely clearly. And one of the worst effects of this is the fact that we have lost our focus on the gospel. The very things that, you know, evangelicalism is from the word evangel, which is the word for what? It's the word gospel. The evangel is the good news coming from the Greek. Gospel comes from the Old English. But it's the same word. If you lose the gospel, you've lost Christianity. So the very people who talk about keeping the gospel alive after the modernism of the 20th century at the beginning of the 21st century are losing it from a completely different angle. In the beginning of the 20th century, the liberal churches, they didn't call themselves liberal at the time, modernist was the word, they looked and they basically said, we have lost confidence in the message. We have lost confidence in the message. It's no longer relevant because we believe in the scientific method and so on and so on. So since they believed that the message of a supernatural Christ and so on and all these things was just no longer relevant, they changed the message. And evangelicals come along and say, no, you can't do that. You can't change the message in the scripture. Good for them. But what they've now are doing, they're saying we've lost confidence in the methods that are in the scripture, the how we're supposed to be living as believers and so on. Those methods are no longer relevant. And so starting in the 60s and 70s, they began to change the methods. And even though each has gone in different directions, in the end, they both end up in the same place, abandoning the gospel. I tend to think of it like a cup. I didn't bring my cup today. But, you know, when you think of a line, a spectrum, right? And liberal theology went left, you might say, here's the gospel. Evangelical theology, so this one, message, right? Abandoned the message, this one abandoned the methods. The funny thing is it's more like a cup. So if we're looking at a cup from the top, and there's the gospel, you start going this way, or like a globe, and you start going this way, guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna meet over here at the anti-gospel. And they're gonna eventually meet, and that's pretty much happening right now. When you abandon the message, which is what they said, liberal theologians and pastors were saying, don't worry, church is gonna be the same. You get to come to church and we're gonna keep doing all the same things. We know that it's ridiculous to think that a man actually rose from the dead. What's important is that he rose in your heart. We know that nobody really walked on water, but what's important is that you try really hard to be good, right? Because you love, love for one another, and so on. Without the message controlling things, sooner or later the methods began to change as they went this way. And now our liberal churches are ordaining homosexuals, and all the methods have gone out the window. You see that? Well, guess what happens when you abandon the methods? Sooner or later, you're gonna start also ditching the message because you practice what you believe, but you also believe what you practice, and as we've turned towards entertainment and to all those other things, because that's become the major focus of the broad evangelical world, then this, you know, how did somebody put it, I forget. You keep them with what you hook them. So if you hook them with entertainment, with seeker-sensitive services, the one thing you can never talk about is what the question 84 deals with. Your sin deserves hell. Oh, you can't say that. That's not a self-esteem message. That's not something that, you know, is positive. That's not going to bring them in. And so as we hold back a little bit on that and hold back a little bit on the other and so on before you know it, the message has dissolved like Alka-Seltzer in water. You guys probably don't remember that. Some of you might, okay. All right, so you see where we're going. So the answer is to keep the gospel first and foremost, and to recognize that the gospel is not just simply what saves you at the beginning of your Christian life, which is the way that many evangelicals see it. They can still even today say, well, I can't save myself, I need grace, grace comes from Christ, and so on. And once they're saved, By grace, they take that gospel, that message of grace, and they put it up on a shelf in the back of their closet, and the rest of their Christian life is all about trying really hard to be good, which is why so many folks in the evangelical world are miserable. And they go to tons of churches, some of the, you know, the big-name churches right here in town and so on. And it's all about trying hard to be good. And guess what? You're going to fail. We just read it in the Catechism Questions. You're going to fail. And by the time you come and see me, and I've said this to, you know, folks who have come in, you can see them almost literally wearing a beam across their shoulders. Not literally, but you can just see the weight. And you know what that weight is? It's the weight of being good. Pastor, are you saying to take that weight off and stop being good? I'm saying stop trying to be good to the point where that's what drives you, where that's what you live for. That being good is a consequence of the gospel. You see what I'm saying? So every day then is a reapprehension of the gospel. Every day is a going back to faith and repentance. And we looked at this when we studied what conversion is, faith and repentance. The first time that happens, what do we call it? But just because it happens this first time and it has that name does not mean that it's something that stays back there. Every day you repent. of your failures because you recognize, as the catechism question says, that you do fail every day, that sin is not something that you just occasionally dip down into, but that is regularly a part of your broken human nature, your mind, your soul, you know, your will, your emotions, all that have been tainted. by sin, and so every day you repent of your failures, and every day you grab a hold once again of the promise of the gospel, and you trust in Christ's finished work every day, not just simply the beginning of your Christian life. And in the past, I've referred to that as Texas Two-Step, faith and repentance. But I want to either make it the Texas Three-Step, Or lump faith and repentance together and say that's the first step that you do, but then the other one is obedience. It has to be followed then by a renewed obedience, which is the result. It's not the cause. It's the result of your grabbing ahold of the gospel. Does that make sense? Your obedience, your keeping the law, is not what causes you to be in a right relationship with God. What causes you to be in a right relationship with God? Sunday school answer? Jesus and what he's done for us. But because he's done that for you, then you are equipped and enabled to obey, which is what he wants, because that's ultimately the best for you. Is all that making sense? It's by far, I think, the hardest thing for Christians today to do, which is to realize their ongoing dependence daily for the renewing grace of the gospel. They're renewing, you know, every day having to have that dependence. So it doesn't mean that you're being saved every day. You are saved, but this is the way that saved people live. It's the reason why we confess our sins on Sunday morning, because when we gather for corporate worship, we model what we are to do in our daily worship. So just as you daily express faith and repentance, so we do it corporately. Let me make sure I haven't missed anything here. The thing is, when you begin to do that, you begin to realize, like Psalm 119 says, verse 96, I have seen the goal of all perfection, your commandment is exceedingly broad. And there's this idea then, The commandment is exceedingly broad. Oh, we begin to realize just how far reaching it is. We begin to realize like the catechism did every commandment. This is what you're required to do. This is what you're forbidden. You begin to realize just how far short you fall regularly. The more and more and more that you practice this, the more sanctified that you become, the more aware you become of your own sinfulness. And the more you begin to confess and the more you cling to the finished work of Christ. You can always tell a person's maturity by where they are in that. If they downplay their sins, they're lower on the scale in terms of Christian maturity. If they're like Augustine in his book Confessions, where even the little tiniest sin, and he's been criticized, why are you making such a big deal of that? Because the closer you get to the light, the more even the smudges that you couldn't see before get exposed. When you're in twilight, you don't really notice certain things as much, but when you're in that super bright light, you can see it. So the closer you get to that light, the more even the tiniest things become obvious, and you're like, ah, horrified by them. This is why you see the truly mature saints, God's people who have had years of refining and so on through this process, are usually very humble. And yet they talk about those areas of their life that need improvement as truly horrific things and they recognize just how much they deserve that condemnation and how much they've received grace. That's where we all like to get, and it only happens as we work through this daily exercise of faith and repentance followed by obedience. So that's pretty much the answer to all those errors regarding our sin and regarding keeping the law. Any questions or comments about that? Oh yeah, yeah, it'd be great if one day somebody strikes all those headings that have been added to Bibles and change that to the parable of the older son. What, what? The prodigal son is only in there to get to the older son, because that's who Jesus was actually addressing. He was addressing the Pharisees, and he was saying everybody can see the prodigal, the one who's run off the rails, and see him come back. It's the older son who basically says, I've earned this. I've earned by my behavior. But a lot of folks, we just focus on the prodigal. And there's a part to that. Obviously, if you're off running off the rails and you're running away from God, then calling people back. But most people in the church, and that's who Jesus was talking to at that moment, he was talking to people in the church, he was saying, yeah, that's not your problem. And yeah, our problem is we're the older son. We like to sit there and say, look at what I've done. And you look down on the other person, oh, they're not quite as mature as I am. And so, good thing that I'm going to stand that day before the judge, and he's going to look at my great list of accomplishments. So, yeah, very good point, Ling. I'll finish with one last thing, and that is, as I was talking about question 84 that talks about everything that we earn is death, and I said I was going to work that in. We deserve nothing but condemnation and hell and so on. I probably should have said this a little earlier. Our culture has become completely anemic to that. Whether you're looking at psychology, they can't even name the word sin. It's no longer in the vocabulary. There are phobias and neuroses and all sorts of illnesses, mental or otherwise, that are the cause of that. And we can see that where men are dressing up as women and going into bathrooms and locker rooms and doing things they ought not to be doing. And we just sit there and say, oh, it's normal. So you've got that on that end, but even in, like I said, in broad evangelical Christianity, where we can't say sin because they won't come. And so, you know, we don't mention it, or we downplay it, and so on. We've got to get back to, you know, what the scripture says, and Jesus says in the last verse of Matthew, of chapter five in the Sermon on the Mount, you know, five through seven. It says, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. We have to call people to that and to the recognition that we're not and that the only answer is the gospel. It's the thing you've heard me say, you know, the Jack Miller line, cheer up, you're much worse than you think. And in too many churches, what we do is say, cheer up, you're much better than you ever imagined. And just think about it, that's the way most messages are today. You're coming in here with all sorts of negative feelings. You're much better than you really are. Your worth is, you know, unrecognized. You have to grab a hold of the inner you and run with it. We're hearing that not in, I mean, you are hearing that in mainline churches, but not only in mainline churches. You're hearing that more and more in evangelical churches. That is nothing less than an abandonment of the gospel, which is to say it's nothing less than an abandonment of Christ, which is to say that people who hold to that message are going to be just as lost as the liberal that it was so easy to throw stones at. Who I said, oh, he doesn't believe the Bible. Oh, he doesn't believe in the virgin birth. Oh, we hold to all those things. And somehow you've missed the gospel. Can't do that, folks. So, you know, maybe our numbers won't be as big as the, you know, the big church that, does bouncy music and tells you how wonderful you are down the street or whatever, but we need to constantly hear the reality that we're in danger, that danger is nothing less than eternal condemnation. Oh, and I'll simply, I'll end by this, oh yes, 1010. You know, we get asked, why is there eternal condemnation? Why doesn't God just sit there and say, okay, you've done something wrong, you know, go to the corner for 10 million years, but then, you know, when you're done, you come out. Anybody want to take a stab at that? I think that's correct. And what I want to do is maybe unpack a little bit of what it means that he's holy. He is infinite in his holiness. Every sin that you commit, as Question 84 was pointing out, is, yes, there are sins at different levels, but even the most minor sin takes on eternal demerit. Can we put it that way? Let me use an analogy, and it's all it is, is an analogy. If I go up to you and say, I'm gonna kill you, okay, you know, whatever. You can go to the cops, and you can say, you know, my neighbor sat there and said, I'm going to kill you. And he says, okay, well, you know, keep an eye on it. If he comes after you with a shotgun or something, call us. But just because he said that, they're not going to act on it, right? Now, yeah, you're saying, yeah. Look, I've had it done. I mean, years ago, we had a guy that was like long time ago stalking Mary Jo, and they couldn't do anything, even though he had said that he would do all that. He had to break the law. He had to break into her car before they would act. Right. But just just the fact that, you know, he wouldn't leave her alone. He would pass her at work, that kind of stuff. And you could see where it was going. But they're like, our hands are tied. Now, you try the I'm going to kill you to President Biden. And what happens? Right? The idea behind it is that the same offense committed against the enormity of the person, in this case it's the office, because we would all say people are all the same, but the office is more significant of president than of citizen. It shouldn't be that way, but you know, that's the way it's seen. So that same sin takes on a larger enormity. So it is that any sin against God because who is, infinite in his perfection, infinite in his holiness, infinite in his goodness. He does not deserve even one ounce of rebellion. Anything of that nature takes on infinite scope. Okay, just so you understand. And then we flip that and say, then how does Jesus pay for that? Maybe we should ask the question, how do we pay for it? Well, you pay for an infinite sin with infinite time. Because you're finite, so it'll take you an infinite amount of time to pay off your infinite sin. Make sense? So hell is forever. Jesus is able to absorb in his infinite nature the infinite wrath of God in the space of three hours on the cross. You see how that happens? So he's able to absorb it in that time. Okay, that's a little technical, a little more. I'm just gonna throw it. I probably didn't have time to do that, but I know that there are those out there who are gonna ask that question. So you can run with that, and if there's more questions, hold on to them. We'll talk about it some other time, but we do need to quit. So let's go ahead and stop here, and let's pray. Father, we thank you that you are gracious to a people who can do nothing on our own. We need your grace from beginning to end. This is why we're called in Hebrews chapter 12 to keep our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus, the author and the perfecter, the one who begins our faith and the one who completes it. Everything is from the beginning to the end with Christ. And so we thank you, Father, that you have extended grace to people such as us, and that you do so. And that because of your covenant love, your hesed, as the Old Testament calls it in Hebrew, that devotion to your people, we know you will never lift that grace. Help us to move forward with real confidence into our Christian lives. Yes, we recognize our sinfulness, we recognize our inherent unworthiness, but thank you that you have shown gracious love and you have made something of us because of Christ. It is in his name that we pray, amen.