While we're doing that, let me just take a moment to thank you for all coming out this evening. Appreciate you being here and your interest in hearing what this guy has to say tonight. Those of you who know me know that you're never really sure what I'm going to say, so you show up just to kind of see what is going to go, how it's going to go. But there is a theme. One of the themes and the point of the pencils is that I want you to think in terms of connecting the dots. Okay? So I'm going to try to pick up on that idea and remind you to use your pencils mentally or literally, if you have something to write on, because they do write, to draw some pictures perhaps and to connect the dots. It's a question of what is the time that we live in? How do we make sense of the time that we live in? This session, as I'm putting some notes together for the sessions, I thought it'd be helpful just to have a question to attach to each of the sessions for us to have in our minds as we start to unpack these. And the question for this session is what are the signs of the times for church and society? And I think you'd probably agree that things are a little crazy and probably getting crazier. So part of that theme is going to be connecting the dots. So get your pencils ready. The challenge is that there's data all around us. Now, if you've been in this part of the country for a while, you've probably lived through at least one hurricane. Try to imagine what that's like. How do you make sense of what's going on in the middle of a hurricane? You see, you know, parts of things flying by the window, and you're not necessarily sure whose they are or where they're going to land, but you have lots of information in front of you, but figuring out how it all fits together is the challenge, and we live in that kind of a time where there's plenty of data, We suspect that something in there is correct, but we also have a suspicion that a lot of what we're seeing and hearing may not be entirely accurate. And I'm being charitable by that. Okay, so we're surrounded by lies. Let me just go ahead and say that up front. I was going to hold that and try to keep you in suspense all weekend, but I don't think you're going to be surprised if I say that we have the sense that we are surrounded by lies. that there's a lot of information, some of it's true, but trying to make sense out of it and understand our times, and particularly the confusion of our times as we are struggling to understand everything that's coming at us so quickly, like in a hurricane, that becomes the difficulty, and we need some point of reference, and the obvious point of reference is gonna be what? The Bible. So, I think I just gave you the whole conference in the first five minutes. So, as we started tonight, Mark read from Genesis chapter 3, the first verse. This is the first appearance of this creature called the serpent. Up until that point in time, through those first two chapters of Genesis, things are not only good, but things are very good. that was the benediction that Yahweh pronounced on his creation at the end of chapter 2, that it is all very good, it is unblemished, it is untarnished. But then the serpent shows up and what is the serpent do? Or what is he set about to do? Deceive, right? Yeah, so Here's how I could ask this question. Who was the first skeptic? The skeptic is the one who's not sure what's true. Was that Satan? No, because he knew what was true. He was the first liar. And by his lies, he deceived the woman and Adam as well. So there's a difference between doubt and deception. although they often go together. This is the question, isn't it? Did God say? We kind of intuitively know that if God did speak that we have a duty to hear what He had to say and in so much as it pertains to establishing constraints or commands that we have a duty to obey as well. On the other hand, if He didn't say, then guess what? That's great news. Because now we can be as gods. We can determine right and wrong for ourselves. We don't need to know what God said. We don't need to care what God said. We can just do our own thing. And what's more American than that? So there's a cultural effect there as well. We tend to be very independently minded in our culture. And that affects our approach to the word of God and our Christianity as well. It seems kind of obvious but I'll be making a point of saying the obvious more than once this weekend that if God has spoken then his word has authority. That's kind of implied throughout, right? What would be the point of questioning God's word except to undermine the authority of his word? So God's word inherently has authority. Now when we look at society And when we look at the world and when we look at the church, what do we see? Lots of chaos, lots of confusion. It all goes back to that very first question, did God say? Because there was no confusion at the beginning until we started questioning what God had said and specifically what He commanded. Now when we started talking about how we wanted to put the conference together this year, it was initially going to be basically something along the lines of the doctrines of scripture, particularly as it's spelled out in the first chapter of the Westminster Confession. It's the first chapter in the Confession. It's the longest chapter in the Confession. There are ten paragraphs. And as you start to examine that first chapter, you find that there are lots and lots of doctrines of scripture that are packed into it that we could take time over the course of a weekend like this to unpack those. But as it's often the case in a creative kind of effort, at least it's been my experience, that it can take on a life of its own. And after we'd kind of agreed that was the topic we were going to do, I told Mark, it was like, going into the stable and picking out a horse and saying, okay, let's jump on that one. And instead of the horse going the direction we thought it was going to go, he took off in a different direction. And so here we are now several months later. So I would put it like this, that rather than thinking of Scripture, the doctrine of Scripture being the topic, think of it more as being the theme. It's going to be the thing that underlies what we're going to be talking about this weekend because it's the abandonment of Scripture that is characteristic of our time. I want to suggest a couple of proofs for that idea that the confusion of our times is an abandonment of scripture. One within the church is what I'll call the divergence of the church. What do you see when you look at the church? Even in a small town like this, in the Bible Belt, as we like to say in the South, you can't swing a dead cat in Lufkin without hitting a church. except you'll probably hit two or three. You'll hit some kind of charismatic church. You'll probably hit a mainline church. For sure you'll hit a Baptist church, maybe two. So you're going to hit lots of churches when you start swinging a dead cat and Lufkin. It's not a lack of churches, but the churches are all drastically different. Isn't that the case? Now you'd think that if we were all working from the same book, that instead of having churches all over the map, that you would see a lot more similarity, that there would be a convergence rather than a divergence. And so even for those churches that still will say, and some do on their websites, that they are committed to Scripture, the authority of Scripture, or the inerrancy of Scripture, and that's kind of the magic word, the inerrancy of Scripture. that they may nevertheless be all over the map in terms of what they believe, in terms of their theology, and especially in terms of what they practice. And we're going to be talking about the connections between what we believe and how that lines up with scripture, and also what we actually do, because we start to see disconnects when we look at those individually. So when we look at the church, we see a vast divergence. Instead of fewer denominations and fewer individual churches and fewer independent churches, we see more and more and more of different varieties of churches of every imaginable kind. And even if, for the sake of argument, we wanted to narrow our argument down to Reformed churches, we would still find a huge variety. The other part of the thesis is that if we were to look at culture, we no longer see really any evidence of what we would call a biblical ethic or a biblical moral framework in our culture. We can think back to a time, maybe our parents or grandparents' day, when things seemed to be a lot more in line with Christian ethics, but more and more we see an abandonment of any idea of Christian ethics in our society. So the church seems to be in a state of chaos. The culture seems to be in a state of chaos where we would expect to find at least some amount of agreement. We're finding very little. Now when we start thinking about what's going on in both church and culture, the question comes up, how do we judge what we're looking at? It's always been a little ironic to me. I've seen things like Gallup polls over the years. They'll do a Gallup poll every year or so and one of the questions they like to ask the general population, do you think things are getting better or worse? Now, the funny thing is that the response is overwhelmingly that people think things are getting worse. And being a little bit snarky, I'm asking the question, how do you know? Based on what standard? What are you using to judge to say that things are getting worse? Now, it's one thing to say they're different. That's not the question. Are things different? Sure, they're different. But the question is whether things are better or worse. That's a moral judgment, isn't it? And if you're going to make a moral judgment, you need to have some kind of a moral standard. We need to have a filter, especially at a time like this when you think about hurricanes, using that analogy, that's probably not a good time to open the windows. You keep the windows closed in a hurricane because you don't know what's going to come in the house if you open the windows. So it's like that for us individually. It's like that for us as a church. What is the screen that helps us figure out of all the stuff that's flying around, what is worth keeping and what do we need to keep out? It's kind of like mosquitoes in East Texas. You don't want those in your house. So the irony is that everybody knows there's a difference between truth and error or right and wrong, that's part of what it means to be made in the image of God. And we'll talk more about that tomorrow. But it always implies that there's some kind of a standard. Because without a standard, we really are lost. It's like saying, I'm going to go on a long trip to, I don't know, Montana, let's say. But I'm not going to use a map. And I'm not going to look at a compass. I'm not going to pay attention to the highway signs. I'm just going to get in the car and drive. Well, what are the odds that you're going to end up where you thought you wanted to go if you don't have a map that tells you how to get there? Now I'm going to make a little bit of fun from time to time. We have one of our national leaders who always gets giddy and giggly when she starts talking about Venn diagrams. Oh, she loves Venn diagrams. Well, I do too. Maybe for different reasons, but I'll find it helpful to at least have you draw in your mind a Venn diagram. Now my Venn diagram I'm actually going to start with three circles, and then I'm going to tell you why there's four. So you can either draw this in the air with me, or you can draw it on a piece of paper if you want to, because they really do write. I don't have a sharpener for these pencils, but I'm sure somebody has a pocket knife. This is Texas, after all. Maybe a Bowie knife. So here's the first circle. The first circle is the Bible, okay? And the second circle is going to be our confession. Especially in Presbyterian circles we like to talk about our confession. It's a summation of our doctrine, what we believe. And then the third circle is going to be our practice. So we have the Bible and then we have our beliefs, if you want to call it that, and then we have our behaviors. It's a nice little alliteration. So Bible, beliefs, and behaviors. Now The problem is that those don't line up very well. They should line up perfectly, right? If our doctrine agrees with the Bible and if our practice agrees with the Bible and with our doctrine then the circles line up and you can't tell them apart. Now here's where I'm going to complicate it by adding a fourth circle. Underneath the Bible because you're making the assumption, and it's a good one, that the Bible doesn't move. But the problem that we have when we start looking at what's going on in the church is that the Bible moves not by virtue of it being, meaning different things to different people, but by virtue of different interpretations of it. So that circle that's underneath, I'm going to call the truth. And then if you're an engineer, you'll understand what I mean. That when you want to show that something is fixed, that it doesn't move, you draw some hash marks on it, like little whiskers on the side of it. So that means the truth is fixed. It does not move. It cannot move. Now, our interpretation of the Bible can move depending on how we're looking at it. And certainly, our confessional beliefs and our practices can move. So in your mind's eye, if you want a quick idea of what, I would say, what's the chaos of the moment, it's that those circles are diverging. that the truth is fixed but our interpretation of the Bible could be just about anywhere on the map and then if you start allowing the Bible to wander away from fixed truth then your beliefs and your practices could be just about anywhere and then it's no surprise at the end of the day if you've got circles everywhere and none of them seem to even touch. So that's the idea that I want you to have in mind as we go forward because I think we can describe different kinds of churches in different ways. There can be churches, and I would say like in the Reformed Church, we may have really good alignment between the truth and our interpretation of scripture and our confessional standards. But what I'm seeing in the reformed churches is that our practices could be way off over here. Like they've just kind of, you know, like a balloon that's, the string is broken and it's starting to drift away. So that's the kind of thing that will help us visualize what's happening both in the church and in society. Now, we're going to refer to the Bible as inerrant. That's kind of the big word, and it's an important word, that the Bible itself is inerrant. In other words, this means what it means. And you say, well, what does it mean? And it means what God said, just as He spoke in the beginning to Adam. It means what He said. The problem is that Satan comes along and starts asking, well, did He really say that? and we start to doubt what it says, even where it's very clear. So that's where we start to wander off from that objectivity. What are some of the signs of social collapse? I'm just going to list a few here. This is frankly kind of depressing. But you've been hearing it and seeing it in the news. There's nothing new here. Things like drug abuse, drug overdose, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, suicide, marriage and divorce. And that's a big category because, well, that's like a whole different topic. But both marriage and divorce. And things like fertility rates, which are collapsing around the world. poverty which is increasing all over the place all of these things seem to be happening or getting worse at the same moment uh... besides that we have in the news almost on a daily basis more and more of stuff we don't want to hear about forms of sexual deviancy and all that goes along with that uh... it's We're pushing this kind of an idea into younger and younger and younger children, and the idea that you can be eight years old, an eight-year-old boy, and decide you want to be a girl, or vice versa. Craziness. Now, Martin Lloyd-Jones, who many of you probably know or have heard of, And one of his sermons was quoting from an historian called Edward Gibbon who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And Gibbon described five signs of social collapse. I think I heard an amen. Let me run through those just quickly. The first is undermining the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for society. So there's marriage and family, and that would include divorce on the back end. Second one is higher and higher taxes and the spending of public money on bread and circuses, on entertainment and frivolity. The third is the mad craze for pleasure and for sport, which every year becomes more and more brutal. And I was just thinking recently, visiting with my hosts and talking, we all graduated from the same school, and talking about how much money our university has spent just with some recent upgrades to the football stadium that you use like six times a year. hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a stadium. The fourth one is building gigantic armaments against external threats when the real threats are internal to society. And the last one is the decay of religious faith into a form that has lost contact with reality. And that's kind of a recurring theme. There's a medical term for losing contact with reality. I saw Kirk's eyebrows jump just now. It's called psychosis. Martin Lloyd-Jones says this, that all human systems fail because the trouble is within the people themselves, and external rules and laws and regulations cannot change them. It is not that we need better laws, but that we need better natures. but better spirits and better desires. And so all this human history comes to nothing and yet these earthly authorities prohibit the preaching of the gospel, the only thing that can save the situation. So there's the theme in a nutshell. that we need to get back to the Bible that the problems that we're facing in society are spiritual problems and they're not going to be solved particularly they're not going to be solved by technology and yet in our modernistic way of thinking we assume that technology of one form or another is going to solve our problems and it cannot because it does not go to the source. Now if you're a fan of Francis Schaeffer and I know there's some in the crowd here today He said much the same thing, and I find it interesting that by the late 60s, the book that he wrote, Death in the City, 1969, he could declare that America was a nation already under the judgment of God. What amazes me about Schaeffer is when you read him, he sounds contemporary. It sounds like he could have written what he'd written just yesterday. He was able to discern the times and to see, he was able to connect the dots. He could connect the dots to see where things were going, this humanistic worldview that was taking over society and where it would inevitably lead. It was also one of Schaeffer's great disappointments that during his lifetime, roughly the first, or let's say the middle of the 20th century, from the 20s to the 70s that the church had not done its job. That the church was, had seemed to have nothing to say to what was happening in society at that time. And we're only 50 years further down the road now. Now the first of the signs of decay, marriage and family, we could spend a lot of time on that one. we could spend a lot of time just talking about how over the last 100 years or so there has been nothing less than a coordinated attack against the institution of marriage in order to destroy it. And is it any surprise that that is the case? And the answer is actually no. The short reason is because which is the first institution that we find in the book of Genesis in chapter 2. After God makes the man, then He forms the woman from the man's rib, presents the woman to the man. We have the institution of marriage, and that is both the first and the most powerful institution in society. And in fact, without the institution of the family, there wouldn't be any other institution because Well, you know, there wouldn't be any kids. So it's not surprising then that if the serpent were going to attack just one of the institutions established by God that it would be the family that he wants to go at first. Let's think about some common threads that we see across religion and culture and politics. And I have, I think there's about 10 in my list here. The first one is no absolute truth. No absolute truth. That means there's no standard to judge right and wrong. And the other thing that that means that we're starting to see more and more is that there's no standard to restrain the exercise of power. Let that sink in for a second, because if humanism has indeed taken over the institutions, then the only exercise of power is whatever you can get away with. There are no ultimate limits to the exercise of power. Second in my list is a disdain for the past. And that means several things. One is a failure to learn from our past mistakes. It's also a failure to preserve what is good. And it implies that there's nothing for us to pass on to future generations. In other words, there's nothing that we could call received wisdom. There's nothing, let's say, that you could learn from your parents or your grandparents as if their age and experience has some value to you in your generation. So you think about what that means. It's a disdain for history. It's a disdain for learning. Everything boils down to whatever you can personally experience and essentially nothing else. Another common thread is what we'll call supreme self-confidence. And I might describe that as having certainty without having knowledge. Having certainty without having knowledge. Another that we keep seeing again and again, especially by the globalists, is confidence in the goodness and the perfectibility of man against all evidence. There's no evidence for us to have that kind of self-confidence, but we keep thinking that if we create just the right kind of society, man will be able to reach his whatever, his state of perfection. Next is that our society and our culture are characterized by experientialism and emotionalism. It's all about what I personally experience. It's all about what I personally feel. That means that we're all existential and mystical in our understanding of things. That also means that we're impulsive and we're hedonistic and, of course, we're selfish because what's more natural than everything being all about me? So it's what I want. It's what makes me feel good. And perhaps the easiest way to summarize the culture that we live in is that we are surrounded by those who are driven by nothing more than the impulse of what they want right now. I can't help thinking when I use or make that description of the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory back from the early seventies and a character in that in that story called Veruca Salt, who was the spoiled brat whose daddy was a rich industrialist. And her attitude was, I want it all, daddy, and I want it right now. That's kind of the spirit of our age. And if you don't give me what I want right now, what's going to happen? I'm going to make you miserable. So there is your choice. Give me what I want. or I'm going to make you miserable. There's also a sense of immediacy that we don't have the attitude or the belief that there's something that we can sacrifice today in order to have more tomorrow. And in fact, it's worse than that, I would say, because there's a willingness even to steal from future generations. What do I mean by that? What do you think happens when we rack up debt in our generation that our generation will never be able to pay? We're essentially shouldering that debt on some future generation without any concern about, number one, whether they want it or not. and number two, how they're going to repay it. Our age is also anti-rational and anti-intellectual. And I would say that that's happening to such a degree that much of what, air quotes, passes for education is becoming a liability. We may have already passed the point where more education is a benefit to you. The next is that our age is characterized by a divorce of personal responsibility. And if I'm not responsible for anything myself, then that means you're responsible. That means, like, my feelings. That means, for example, you can't say anything that hurts my feelings because I can't control my feelings. You're responsible for my feelings, so don't tell me something that's going to upset me. You see how that works out? and it becomes an absurdity. Next is excessive trust in government and a paradoxical suspicion of authority. And the pattern seems to be that our ignorance is making us less personally responsible and more dependent on somebody else. The last one on my list is self-righteousness. And here I'm describing it as trying to grasp virtue, man trying to grasp virtue in his fallenness, which is a folly. So we see things like this, redefining sin. We see excusing moral failure. We see demands for justice without any standard for righteousness. We see a conflation of emotional passion and fervor and activism And if you're really passionate about something and you're really doing something about it, then that passes for virtue, even if it's completely pointless. And much of what goes on in the name of activism today is either pointless or counterproductive. And then lastly, under self-righteousness, that we are insecure, moral, busy bodies attempting to impose our wickedness on everyone else while demanding tolerance. And if you're trying to make sense out of the things that I'm listing and you can't do that, good for you. That means you're still thinking. What's scary about that is that in the absence of persuasion, all you're left with is force and we're starting to see more and more of that. Now how about some signs of collapse within the church? The church doesn't get off easy here. It's not just about saying, here's what's wrong with society and thumping our Bibles because we haven't been thumping our Bibles enough or else society wouldn't be such a mess that it is today, unable to discern right from wrong. Now some signs of collapse in the church. I'll be quoting some statistics, and that's always a little dangerous, especially when those statistics are based on surveys, which surveys can prove basically whatever you want to prove. But I think this is pretty accurate, and if you have better numbers, please tell me. But it seems that up to 25 or 30% of those who were attending church in 2020 left and never came back. Now let that sink in for a second if that's even close. That in one year, a quarter of those who were attending church left and never came back. That's astounding by itself. It's not like, you know, two percent or five percent. No, we're talking about a large, a large percentage. So that's already a clue that something, something significant has changed. It's my belief that this is just the beginning of what's going to be a huge upheaval in the church. It's been three years since we endured the lockdowns. Things are still unsettled in many places. We can't pretend as if things have gone back to normal. I'm not sure there is a normal or will be for some time. Now some bad signs for the church itself. One is that the church doesn't seem to have much moral authority to resist either the trends in the culture or as the case may be to resist the state if the state oversteps its authority in its efforts to close down the church. So what we see as a result of that is the church is being pushed further and further and further to the margins of society where it has less and less influence and what's the slogan that we like to use to justify that? separation of church and state. And there's a wall of separation between church and state. So, therefore, the church doesn't get to have any say-so in the affairs of the state or of the culture. And, of course, that's not what was intended by our founders, and it's certainly not biblical. Another is demographic disparities. And here I'm thinking of two things. One is intergenerational. When you look at the breakdown of surveys, for example, that ask people, do you still believe there's such a thing as absolute truth? The ones who are most likely to respond in the affirmative are the oldest generation, and then it decreases with each generation down to the youngest. So that the youngest generation has the least belief in absolute truth. The oldest generation has the strongest belief in absolute truth. And if that carries through as the younger generations age, what does that mean for us? That as the oldest die off, then we are losing our confidence in the existence of truth. So there's that kind of a demographic disparity. The other is biological and that's birth rates because everywhere in society and even around the world, birth rates have been collapsing so rapidly. Now you know or you suspect you've got a problem when the secular demographers start sounding the alarm. This is not an alarm that's necessarily coming from the church, but when you have secular demographers who are saying, we're facing a population implosion. Now the narrative for generations has been we have too many people, too many people, too many people. And people have been saying, oh, we've got too many people so let's not have any kids. So they stopped having kids and now after about a hundred years, we're facing a huge population decline in the next few decades. And some places like Japan are already seeing their populations begin to decline. They've already passed peak population and are starting to go down. And that's a very hard trend to reverse because it takes generations for us to reach that point. So even if total population continues to grow, the problem is that we have our demographic pyramid is turning upside down so that the largest part of the population is in the oldest demographic. So that's affecting the church as well. I think we're seeing and we will be seeing a shuffling of the deck. That is a combination of winnowing in the church, many people leaving the church, and many others who are trying to figure out where to go in the storm. We have also seen, or it seems to be the case, we see more and more sin in the church and that includes a tolerance of sin within the congregation and also, which is a little alarming, is a rising tide of ecclesiastical authoritarianism. where those who are charged with the offices of the church are starting to act like kings and say, I'm an elder in this church and you will do what I tell you. And that's not how God constitutes authority either in the church or in the state. We see significantly shifting views of the purpose and the practice of the church. We'll be talking more about that in relation to our understanding of evangelism and discipleship. But that especially affects worship and discipleship. And it's also not surprising that we're seeing more and more seminaries that are being lost to liberalism. And there's kind of a catch-22 with that. The reason is because that academic institutions are places where you go to ask questions. And so there's kind of a natural skepticism that's built into academia, and that's a point of entry for liberalism. So you end up with skepticism that masquerades as scholarship in academic circles. The common thread in all of this the abandonment of Scripture. And the only possible result is chaos if we walk away from the standard of Scripture. Now I'd be remiss if I didn't pick a little bit on the Reformed Church. I'm an equal opportunity critic, or at least I like to think so. So let's talk about some failures of the Reformed Church as we begin to wrap up this session. It goes back to the Venn diagram that we drew a little while ago. So if we start with all of our circles lined up pretty nicely, we've got truth and we've got good hermeneutics so our understanding of the Bible lines up with the truth. And then we've got our confessional standards, and we love the Westminster Confession in our church. That lines up very nicely with truth and with scripture, so those circles are lining up nicely. But then this last one, practice, looks like it's starting to maybe break away a little bit. That's where we start to get a little concerned. Now, it's ironic that we have certain failures in the Reformed Church because of our Reformed tradition. And this is the time of the year when we like to talk about Reformation Day, October 31st, 1517. Martin Luther, 95 Theses, helps to launch the Protestant Reformation. And most of us, certainly in America, are downstream of the Protestant Reformation, even if we're not in the Presbyterian Church or in a Reformed Church. So we have a rich heritage, and that rich heritage is grounded in our commitment to the authority and the inerrancy of scripture, but we really seem to be losing that. And one of the ways that we do that is by what's called liberal skepticism, where we start to question what the Bible means. We can say, and I've heard it said this way, we know what the Bible says, we just don't know what it means. Okay, well then what do we do with it? And what's the point if we don't know what it means? And if we can't understand what it means, then probably it's going to mean whatever we want it to mean, and that's convenient. Then we're right back to the Garden of Eden. Ye shall be as gods. Another, and it's oftentimes a creeping kind of thing, is doctrinal compromise. It was one of Schaeffer's hobby horses to say that much of the failure in the church is from years and years and years and years of doctrinal compromise. Another that I would point to is dead orthodoxy and that's when that circle of practice starts to drift away from the other circles. We have a disconnect then between our confession and our practice. Other things that we see include traditionalism, and here's where we have to be careful because as much as we like our confessions and as much as we rely on those, we can't make those the center of the church. That becomes traditionalism. We always have to be careful as well that we don't start adding things to that, which is legalism. And then the other thing, which is not going to be fixed anytime soon, is a kind of sectarianism in Reformed circles. I don't even know how many different Reformed denominations we have, but I'm pretty sure there are dozens of them. Even in the churches that are committed to Scripture, we may often have a failure to preach the whole counsel of God. Now, that's kind of a catchphrase, and what that means is that over time, that we're preaching everything that's in scripture. We're not skipping over things we don't like or that maybe the congregation is not going to like. We also can be guilty of our failure to defend the authority of the church against the state when the state comes knocking and says, we're closing this place down. We should be willing to say, you don't have any authority to do that. The other side of that coin is authoritarianism. I've already mentioned that. There are examples even currently in the PCA where we're seeing illustrations of what authoritarianism can look like and it can be ugly. And we even end up with what I call a de facto kind of congregationalism. because the Presbyterian system is not maintaining the accountabilities that it's designed to maintain within the churches. The last one I'll mention here, so that you don't think I'm just going to go on, is that we need to remember what it means to be reformed. And the way to remember that is to change reformed to reforming. that the goal is to be reforming and not just reformed as if it's something that is over and done with. So there's a great deal for us to be thinking about as we kick off this weekend. Lots of failures within the church that carry over into society. And our goal in the end is to restore our commitment to the principle of Sola Scriptura. Scripture is the sole sufficient authority for faith and life both for the church and for society. So we'll conclude here, take a short break, and then we'll be back in about 10 minutes or so for session two. So the idea of this session is that we are living in a poverty of prosperity. I like paradoxical kinds of titles. We have all kinds of material prosperity in our age, we are starved of the Word of God and that's a fitting passage for us to consider as we start this session. Now I'd like to give you a couple of illustrations of why we have to have standards. I know there are a few Star Trek fans in here, whether of the older series or the newer ones, But after watching a few episodes of Star Trek, you're bound to be asking yourself this question. Why are they flying all around the unknown universe with their shields down? Because almost everybody they bump into is trying to kill them. Why wouldn't it be kind of a standard operating procedure in Starfleet that you always put your shields up? and that whoever it is that you're encountering these new life forms and new civilizations are going to have to prove themselves to be at least somewhat trustworthy before you lower your shields and let them start shooting at you. Well, why is that a fitting analogy for the church? What represents the shields for the church? The Bible is our shield and what's it shielding us from? Partly. What is it that we were talking about? What is coming at us all the time? Lies? Yes, that's certainly true. But all kinds of stuff, lies are in there. We have all kinds of ideas that are coming at us from all kinds of different places. And the question is, how are we going to shield ourselves against those ideas that may turn out to be hostile? As I look at the church, at the current state of the church, it's hard for me not to think of this analogy that the church is like the enterprise flying around the culture and allowing itself to be attacked by just about every idea that somebody comes up with. That we've left all the doors and windows open, we haven't locked anything up, that the ideas just come right through the door. So we don't have any defenses against that. I'll give you another illustration that begins to pick up on a theme from the book of Amos and it's the illustration of building a house. And I thought about bringing props for this but it would have been a little awkward to do that so I'm just going to use my pencil to draw some imaginary pictures and I trust that the picture that I draw in your mind will be accurate enough. One of those is the picture of a tape measure. Okay, you got that picture in your mind? And here's another one, a T-square. And here's the third one. It's a level. So if you want to build something, you're going to want to have some basic tools. What do those basic tools allow you to do? What does the tape measure allow you to do? Measure length. What does the square allow you to do? It allows you to measure angles. And what does the level do for you? It's what's going to make sure that your building is level with the earth so that it doesn't lean or tip over. We need those kinds of tools if we want to build straight and square. As somebody with an engineering background, I can't help seeing the Bible through a little bit of an engineering grid as I read it and it's fascinating to think of things for example going back to Genesis where God gives instructions to Noah to build an ark and this is an enormous project and it probably took at least 80 years That's my best guess on how long Noah and his sons took to build the ark, something like 80 years. And imagine how difficult it would have been over those 80 years building an ark if the standard for what we call a cubit weren't well-determined, well-known. What if it had changed? What if you build half the ark and then the length of a cubit suddenly changes? Now you've got a problem. You need to have a standard if you want to build something and you want it to be straight and square and level. That idea is throughout scripture, and scripture uses that analogy, that analogy of building, as an illustration of what is true, where God's Word is that standard that allows us to build straight and square. Now, the church is suffering from what I would describe medically. I'm not a doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express. Well, in fact, I'm staying with a doctor, so I'll use that as an excuse. The church is suffering from an acute case of spiritual anemia, spiritual anemia from chronic malnutrition. She is not getting any meat, which means she's not getting any iron, which means that she doesn't have any strength. and you cannot live your life on pudding. The funny thing is, and some of you may have had a similar experience, especially if you've come to the Reformed tradition from somewhere else, that you may not realize that where you were was starving you until you bumped into a good meal somewhere. For me, that meal happened to be a guy named John MacArthur, whose ministry I discovered back around 2001. And I'm thinking, I don't hear this in my church. This is something unusual. And the church I was in at the time is that one right down the road there at the corner, by the way. So we may have to have an experience of being fed the Word of God, being fed as it were the red meat of scripture before we even realize that we may have been undernourished for many years. Now part of the problem with an anemic church is that she's not prepared to fight a battle. In fact, she's so sick that she can't even be raised to a state of alarm if you yell at the top of your lungs. Now the Word of God is also described as the bread of life. It's described as that bread of life that we cannot live without. And it's incumbent upon both pastors and teachers to be feeding their people so that they are prepared for the spiritual battle that we face. If that's not happening in the church, it's an egregious form of negligence that in fact invites the judgment of God. And as you read through, especially the prophets of the Old Testament, part of what you see is that in the background, the prophets, those who are the, we'll call them the professional prophets and priests, are not preaching and teaching the Word of God. They are teaching out of their own imagination. Prophets do not have the license to speak their own words, and they especially do not have the license to speak words of false comfort in times of judgment. Now, Scripture is designed to give us a balanced diet. It contains everything, as we see in our confession, that we need for faith and life, that the whole will of God is revealed to us. in the Scripture. What does that mean on our part? We need to read it, we need to study it, in our churches we need to preach it, and in our lives we need to practice it. Now in the opening session we talked a little bit about experiential knowledge and I want to elaborate on that a little more in this session. The problem is that we have become like the pagans around us, that we can't tell our right hands from our left hands. That is to say we can't tell truth from error. We cannot tell right from wrong. In a word, we have lost our ability to discern. Now morality That idea of right and wrong, it's not an existential thing. It's not something that you discover by experience. I remember some years ago having an online debate with an intellectual. who was trying to argue that morality is something that we discover with science, that we try something and then we decide whether it's right or wrong and that makes absolutely no sense. Science doesn't tell us what's right or wrong. We have to bring our moral standard to our science in order to say, here's what science can do for us. Should we do it or should we not do it? Or how should we do it? Those kinds of questions, the moral aspect comes from someplace else. So morality is not existential in that sense. It doesn't come from the test of experience. And that means it doesn't come from individual experience, your particular experience, and what you decide is right or wrong. And it doesn't come from the experience of all of us put together, what we think collectively. And it leaves us with a lack of discernment. We have a spiritual and cultural lack of discernment. Now we do have a bit of a circular problem when it comes to Scripture because we need to assume something before we can understand what Scripture says. So I'm not going to get into the philosophical aspect of that, but what I will say, and maybe we'll have time to talk a little more about this, is that for us to understand Scripture, I'm convinced that what we need is a good systematic theology. We need to understand the basics of theology so that as we read Scripture, we can understand how all of the pieces fit together. To use the analogy of a puzzle, It's much harder to put a puzzle together if you don't have the picture on the box top. So we want to see the big picture, and that gives us a framework for understanding the individual parts of it. If we don't have an external standard, then we naturally are going to become experiential. In order to learn anything, we're going to have to try it for ourselves. And again, that sounds like a very American way of doing things. And then the question is, how do we evaluate the results that we get? So we try something, and then we say, well, was that good or bad? And the way that we evaluate is on the basis of what results it produces for us. In other words, it introduces what we call pragmatism. What gives us the results that we're looking for? What gives us some benefit? And so pragmatism is, again, another rabbit trail, you might say. But pragmatism has become woven into the fabric of how we think in our country. And what that leads us to is a way of thinking of morality in terms of what results is it going to produce rather than what is the standard for what we choose without considering what results may come from it. Completely different views of ethics. What that means is that we end up being relativistic even if we don't want to admit it. And the proof, part of the proof of that is our willingness to accommodate just about everything. If you see what's going on in the church today, it should alarm you that whatever seems to be drifting on the cultural breeze today is going to be in the church tomorrow. And the church is going to try to baptize it as some new, great new idea that we need to embrace in order to be relevant. And we want to reach the culture. and we're wrecking the church when we do that. We also have a tendency to wrongly think that small accommodations are tolerable. In other words, we don't realize when we're stepping off the mountaintop onto the slippery slope. We think it's just a small thing, it's not that big of a deal, it's just a small thing, but then pretty soon we're sliding down the hill and we can't seem to stop. We operate from a framework that attempts to be open-minded and charitable. I think we often attribute too much good faith to those who are getting us to try these new things so that we can make room for the culture. I might point out just as a sort of a footnote that the first small compromise that we find in scripture in Genesis chapter 3 had the effect of wrecking the entire universe. But otherwise compromise is not such a bad thing. Now, if there's no fixed boundary, then there's no boundary at all. In other words, if we're not willing to say, this is the line between what's right and wrong, and it's never to be violated even slightly, then it's not really, it's just an illusion. It's like a line in the sand that's going to move, and culture is going to help us move it. Now, Scripture is described in the book of Amos as a plumb line. It's a plumb line. Listen to what Amos 7 has to say in verses 7-9. Amos says, This is what he showed me. Behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, Amos, what do you see? And I said, A plumb line. Then the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel. I will never again pass by them." In other words, excuse their sin. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword. There are a couple of other references to plumb line that I want to pick up. One is found in 2 Kings 21. where it says, I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and a plumb line of the house of Ahab and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish. Wiping and turning it upside down in Isaiah 28. where he says, I will make justice the line and righteousness the plumb line. So we have that idea repeatedly in scripture of a plumb line. And what is it? It's a string with a weight on the end of it. And what purpose does it serve when it comes to building? To ensure that, well, that what you're building is in line with gravity. It's standing up straight. So we see that repeatedly. Scripture helps to give us what we need there. So we know God's Word has authority. The only question is what is His Word and how do we interpret it? That becomes a tricky question, of course. because we have many different translations of Scripture and many different ideas about how to interpret Scripture, but there are rules that allow us to interpret it in an objective way. And it's important for us in our day to understand the importance of the doctrine of the objectivity of Scripture. And what we simply mean by that is that scripture means what it means. That what God said, that's what the scripture means. And that it has one meaning and not many. Because in our day, what do we do? We say, well I read this verse and this is what it means to me and my friend read it and my friend says this is what it means to him and everybody reads the same verse and everybody comes up with a different meaning. That's not what it means for scripture to be objective and that would not give you a straight plumb line. Some more statistics for us to think about. I was curious to know what people's views are about scripture and how they use it and how they read it. Now, again, I'm going to say that any survey data that I'm quoting or referencing for you, just be sure you've got some salt handy because these can be somewhat uncertain numbers. So I'll paint with a broad brush stroke here. First of all, about half of Americans are in the category of what are called Bible users. Bible users. What's a Bible user? A Bible user is probably not what you think. A Bible user is people who read the Bible three or four times a year outside of church. That's not a lot of use, but that's how we're defining what is a Bible user. So about half are in the category of those who read the Bible outside of church maybe a few times a year. Now it seems that Americans have a fairly high regard for the Bible as the Word of God. About half About, well, 70% regard the Bible as the Word of God. You think that sounds like a pretty good number. About half regard the Bible as inerrant. And that's where things start to get a little tricky. Because what's the point of the Bible as the Word of God if it's not inerrant? That means it's not reliable. Again, in terms of reading statistics, about one-third of Americans read the Bible at least once a week. That sounds pretty good. About one-third never read the Bible at all and only about one-tenth read the Bible on a daily basis. Very few have actually read the Bible all the way through from start to finish. I don't think it's surprising that we have a low view of scripture and that correlates to a low engagement with the scripture. If we don't think the Bible is the Word of God, then why would we read it except out of just idle curiosity? Now some years ago, when I was working down the road, I had a co-worker that I had a conversation with one day at the office, and to set the stage This co-worker's wife was serving as an assistant pastor at one of the mainline churches here in Lufkin at that time. And this is what he said to me, his belief about the Bible. He says, I believe it was inspired by God, but that it was written by men who make mistakes. Hmm. And your first question might be, what does that even mean? Where do you get that kind of skepticism? And you might even suspect that this man had a certain conflict of interest because what does the Bible explicitly say about female pastors? No. So apparently that would be one of those things that's in the category of the mistake made by those who wrote the Bible. Now, would you be a little suspicious if this female pastor says that her experience at Union Seminary was a confirmation of her call to the ministry? And this is a direct quote. In the years I have served in ministry, I have always felt that this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. God has called me where I belong. you begin to suspect that somebody has a higher view of her own feelings than she does of the Word of God that she claims to be trained to teach. This is the kind of experiential knowledge that I'm talking about and what's the problem with experiential knowledge? It's irrefutable. You can't argue with someone's feelings. If she says, I have felt that this was what I was supposed to be doing, you can't argue with that because feelings are essentially irrefutable. And if feelings are irrefutable, then that means scripture is negotiable. Now I want to give you a quote from Christianity Today. It came out, not this year, but in the spring. of last year and it talks a little bit both about church attendance and about our views of scripture. So let me read this for you. It says, the pandemic took a visible toll on church attendance. We talked about that in the first session. Pew Research Center found that nearly a third of regular churchgoers have not returned to church buildings. Some choose to participate online, but others have dropped out completely. And at the same time, there was a sharp decline in Bible reading. Even people who do read the Bible often haven't read very much of it, according to research by Lifeway. Only one out of every five Americans has read the whole Bible, while one out of four has never read more than a few sentences. So according to that, no more than about 20%, and I think it's talking about those who are in the church, have actually read the whole Bible. Now, I'll admit that it's a daunting task, but it's also a necessary task. And we'll be talking this weekend about why it's necessary for everyone to read and study and search the scripture for himself. we have a biblical duty as Christians to do that. We're not off the hook. We can't farm it up to the professionals like Mark and say, Mark does that stuff. He does the heavy lifting. I just go to church. No, because who's checking up on Mark? Got to keep an eye on our pastors. And part of the way that we do that is by testing what they're teaching us. And if it's the case, if we have biblical warrant for testing teachers, even someone like, oh, for instance, the Apostle Paul, if even Paul gets to be tested and those who test him according to the scriptures are considered to be noble for having done so, then I think the rest of us have a similar responsibility as well. Now there are a couple of different views of scripture that I want to share with you that are biblical examples. They come near the end of the days of Judah, before Judah was carried into exile. The first is King Josiah. And what happened during the reign of King Josiah? At around 622 BC, as work was being done on restoring the temple, something was found in the temple. What was it? It was a scroll. And that scroll was brought to the attention of the king. and then it was read to the king and what was the king's response? we're in trouble only a generation later his son Jehoiakim when he is confronted by Jeremiah and literally given scrolls of the Word of God those scrolls are read to him and what does he do? He cuts them in pieces and throws them into the fireplace, demonstrating total contempt for the Word of God. What a contrast. Josiah hears the Word of God. He hears the law of God. He responds with repentance and faith. He recognizes his own sin when the law is read to him. On the other hand, Jehoiakim, when judgment is pronounced against him and the kingdom, responds with defiance. Now what's the rest of that story after those scrolls were burned in his fireplace? What does God tell Jeremiah? Kind of an interesting footnote to that story. It says, take another parchment, write down everything I said before, and I'm going to add many words to that. And then also we might notice that those words that Jehoiakim burned in the fire, you're holding in your hand today. They're still here. And even in your defiance, if you went home and threw your Bible in the fire and burned it up, what would that do to the Word of God? Nothing. Because where is the Word of God first of all written? In heaven. It is eternal in the heavens. So the Word of God endures forever. Men can do whatever they want to with it. They can ignore it. They can defy it. They can tear it up and throw it in the fireplace, and yet the Word of God abides forever. And it's interesting to remember that that same Word that Jehoiakim had such defiance for is the same word that we have in our Bibles today that has been preserved and handed down to us after all these years, about 2,600 years. Now which of those two scenarios, this is a pop quiz, which of those two scenarios sounds more like 21st century America to you? The first one where we hear the Word of God and respond with faith and repentance or the second one where we thumb our nose at the Word of God or much worse? And what does that say about the state? Yeah, number two, what does that say about the state of our country? I can't help echoing what Schaefer said so many years ago that America is under judgment. And if you want an explanation or to understand more clearly why things seem to be getting so much worse so quickly just within the last few years, I don't think there's any other explanation than it is God letting go His hand of restraint against sin and basically saying, you don't want me, then have at it. And what we are seeing is simply an outworking of more and more of the sinful nature of man. And that will be part of the discussion that we have tomorrow. That the paradox of man is that he has, at one and the same time, incomparable dignity, but also unimaginable depravity. And yet we seem to be always shocked at the kind of violence and inhumanity that comes from man and we shouldn't because this is what man looks like on the inside as a result of the fall. Now I've referenced several passages from the Westminster Confession of Faith in this session. and I want to touch on those to help us kind of complete the circle here. The first is found in paragraph 1.4 and by the way the hymnals, both hymnals have a copy of the Westminster Confession in the back if you would like to refer to that. Westminster 1.4 says that the authority of the Holy Scripture for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God who is the truth itself, the author thereof, and therefore it is to be received because it is the word of God." In other words, we hold the word of God in high esteem because it's the word of God. Paragraph 1.6 says that the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith in life, is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture. And then this next clause is very important for the time that we live in. Unto which nothing at any time is to be added whether by new revelations of the spirit or traditions of men." Now one of the things we will consider is the question of what is revelation? Because many in the church and not just in charismatic circles of the church believe that God is still giving us new revelation today, that the voice of God is still speaking. And if that's true, then Houston we have a problem. because it's going to be very difficult for us to know what to do with what we think are these new revelations. Paragraph 1.9 gives us a rule of interpretation. It says the infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself and therefore when there's a question about the true and full sense of any scripture which is not manifold, but one, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. And this tells us a couple of things. It reminds us that scripture has one meaning, even if we don't necessarily understand what it is, we may have to dig to understand it, that there's a duty to search the scripture and where it may not be as clear in one place, it may be more clear in another place. And one of the best examples I can think of, this principle, and in the Reformation tradition we like to put Latin expressions on everything. The Latin expression here is analogia scriptura, that we're comparing scripture to scripture. Well, where would we find an example in the Bible of someone comparing scripture to scripture in order to get the full and proper meaning of a scripture? I'll let the clock tick for about 10 seconds. Tick, tock, tick, tock. It's not fair. Mark already knows the answer because we've talked about this. Look at Luke chapter 4. Starting in verse 5, after Jesus answers the first temptation with scripture, man shall not live by bread alone. In verse 5 it says, and the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And he said to him, to you, I will give all this authority and their glory for it has been delivered to me and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will be all yours. And I'm in the wrong place. but I'll just keep reading. It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve. Again the temptation is being answered with Scripture properly interpreted. And He took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command His angels concerning you to guard you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone." Quoting from Psalm 91, Satan knows Scripture. And Jesus answered him, it is said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. In other words, you can't simply take Psalm 91 and make it mean what you want it to mean. We have to go by what it actually means, and it is not giving us a license to tempt the Lord. There's a good example of exactly that principle, and it shows us that we need to know not just part of Scripture, we need to know all of it, because all of it is necessary to have the proper objective interpretation. So that idea of objectivity is a very, very important principle. The last part of the confession that I'll share in this session is the 10th paragraph, where it says, the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined and all decrees of councils opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined and in whose sentence we are to rest can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture." And that's really the Reformation principle, sola scriptura. that Scripture alone is the source of ultimate authority, that it is what we use to judge all other matters of faith and life. And just like if we were going to build a house, we probably wouldn't build a very good house if we didn't have the right tools to get everything straight. If we do not have the tool of Scripture to help us evaluate everything around us, we are probably going to be influenced by things in culture that we don't even realize are influencing us. So, very important that we have that foundation. We mustn't allow ourselves to be guilty of that poverty of Scripture. I'll share with you a quote from Robert Godfrey. He's a church historian and says that the church must have a standard by which to judge all claims to truth. The church must have a standard of truth by which to reform and purify herself when divisions arise. The practice of the Bereans is praised in the Bible. they are called noble because they evaluated everything on the basis of the written word of God. And that has to be our guide as well. So we'll conclude this session. We have a closing song that we're going to sing in Reformation tradition. We sing Martin Luther's hymn to open our conference tonight and we'll conclude with Martin Luther's tune set to what was called his Psalm, Psalm 46. So please turn to that.