for a few months. Let me point your attention to John 16. You know, I realized sitting there just a moment ago, I never even referred to why I titled the first one Martin Luther, a wild boar loose in the vineyard. That's what the Pope said concerning Luther, was that we have this wild boar loose down in the vineyard. And, uh, and, and that's, if you're wondering, cause he didn't say anything about that. Well, that's, that's what that was all about, but I was trying so to be good with my time and not keep you all from supper. Um, but here, before we forget that Luth, that Calvin was a theologian of the spirit. And by the way, I take that from the fact that a. He speaks of the Holy Spirit a lot, but a number of historical theologians, historians, theologians have given him that title. That his institutes, in fact, if you read his institutes closely, you cannot come away and not realize that he is first and foremost a theologian of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is very important to John Calvin. If you want a place to go read in the institutes, and I hope you all own them, I know that I'm sure you have access to them down the hall. I saw a library. It said books to buy, books to loan, books to trade, and books to steal, something like that. And I'm sure the institutes are in there. If not, the pastors have them on their shelves. You should read Calvin's Institutes. They are accessible. That means you will be able to understand them. They're not filled with a lot of Latin. You'll be just fine. It doesn't matter which edition you read. You'll be fine reading Calvin. But if you want to go to just start in the section that is concerning of the letter and the spirit. There's where he talks about the fact that you can never, ever find God's word set forth apart from the Holy spirit. You go to the law, there's the spirit giving the law and instructing concerning the law. Go to the prophets. There's the spirit giving the, giving the prophecies and instructing, explaining the prophecies. Go to the new Testament. Likewise. that we don't have a new covenant of the spirit and an old covenant of the law. So he's hard against this idea of Old Testament was the letter of the law, the New Testament's the spirit. No, they're both of the spirit and of the letter. In other words, the word and the spirit go together. If you're familiar with your own Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter one speaks to that. There's a whole paragraph devoted to the fact that the spirit of the living God instructs us and what the word of God says and means. He's the perfect one to instruct us because he's the one who gave it. We know from Peter's writings that these old men of old, these godly men were moved by the Holy Spirit into all this truth that they set forth for us. Calvin believed that and preached that and wrote that way. And here's a primary passage. John 16, beginning in verse 5. But now, Jesus said, I'm going to him who sent me, and none of you ask me, where are you going? But because I've said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the helper, he's already told us who the helper is back in chapter 14, it's the Holy Spirit, another one just like me, he said. The helper, if I don't go away, The helper will not come to you but if I go I will send him to you and he when he comes will convict the world concerning sin righteousness and judgment concerning sin because they do not believe in me and concerning righteousness because I go to the father and you no longer see me and concerning judgment because the ruler of this world has been judged. I have many more things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak, and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine, therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you." That is a pivotal passage, A locus classicus as the theologians like to call them a classic passage on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit's work in the church. Both in giving the scriptures inspiring and in guiding us into truth illuminating. You always have to distinguish and Calvin does a wonderful job of that distinguishing the inspired word of God given in scripture rated in the script the Bible as we have it. And then the illuminating work of the spirit ongoing so that we can know what it says. That's the reason the reformers and the reformation, uh, restored to the church, that wonderful doctrine of the perspicuity or the clarity of scripture. It's clear because the Holy spirit illumines our minds. You know, I've heard people pray this, maybe, maybe you have steep, uh, Drew's not old enough to have heard this probably, but You've heard people pray this, uh, something like this, Lord, please make your word, uh, clear. Please Lord, take your word. We don't understand it and make it clear. The word is clear y'all. The prayer is supposed to be this dear Lord, may your Holy spirit illumine our mind so that we can understand your clear word. That's the proper theology. That's the proper prayer. The word's clear. God didn't mumble. God didn't stutter. God didn't, God didn't write in, in bad syntax. where we can't figure out what the predicative is from the nominative or the subject from the verb. It's there, it's clear. The doctrine is clear. I'm God, I'm holy, you're not. You're not, so you're going to go to hell. Unless I send a savior, I did, his name is Jesus, and if you believe in my son, you shall be saved. That's clear. Now there's some other things in the Bible that are kind of difficult. And what our confession says is that we go to the other scripture to help us understand those hard parts of scripture. If you'll keep that in mind, you'll find yourself very happy in Jesus and not sitting around thinking, I don't know what's going on here. If you would just let the scripture interpret scripture and Calvin was, uh, an interpreter of scripture with scripture par excellence, Calvin's commentaries. You will not find another set of old commentators or commentaries on the Bible of that sick of that number in the history of the church since our Lord. Number two, you will certainly not find another old dusty set of commentaries that are still in print and still utilized and still interacted with by scholars at every level. You know, historians deal with the dusty ones that nobody takes off the shelves. But the exegetes, those who do the commentaries, write the Bible commentaries today, interact with just a very few of the old commentators because they're dated. They're not relevant. Calvin is not in that list. That's an, a Mar that's a remarkable thought. That's a remarkable thing. Calvin remains relevant. And if you don't believe that read anyone and everyone, everyone has to interact with Calvin. It's just like Augustine in the patristic period. Everyone has to interact with Augustine. If you're, if you're going to be a scholar, likewise, you have to interact with Calvin. Calvin is significant. And I think it's because he took that passage, the role of the Holy spirit in giving truth, inspiring it, and in then teaching truth. illuminating it, he gave that his first priority. You say, so why do we generally not know about some of these men? And I'm gonna suggest to you that it's probably because of Henry Ford. If you drive a Ford, you shouldn't because first of all, it's a four-letter word. And my mom and daddy taught me not to say them. And so I drove one in my lifetime. I violated my vow. And I drove a car. I said I wouldn't say a four-letter word. And I wasn't driving it long until I realized, and if you're a Ford person, I'm sorry. And I soon repented. That's all supposed to be just funny. But you remember what Henry Ford said, I tell you it's so good I'm going to read you the whole quote because you've probably only heard a little bitty truncated version and it's not nearly as bad as what he really said. So he said, and he said this on numerous occasions, so what do I care about Napoleon? What do you care about what they did five or a thousand years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or didn't try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. Now you've all heard just the history is bunk, that little bitty truncation. History is more or less bunk, it's tradition. We don't want tradition, we want to live in the present and the only history that's worth a tinker's down is the history we make today. I'm gonna suggest to you that that's the way most people live. And that's the reason They don't know about and they don't care to know about anyone who went before them. That's pretty self-centered, isn't it? I mean, that's just sin. We're it. Nothing happened that we need to know beforehand. I'll be just as, this is as political as I get. This is not the pulpit and I'm not preaching. This won't be the pulpit until tomorrow, okay? The reason things are being torn down and bulldozed is because people don't know what they're doing. They're not stupid, they're ignorant. And we're ignorant because we don't really know history. And Calvin is as misunderstood as anyone. How many of you have had the conversation with somebody who think they know who Calvin was and what Calvin did and what Calvinism is, and the more you let them talk, the more you realize they're just, well, you wanna say stupid, but just be nice and say ignorant. And you're like, and some of us were there too, weren't we? Such were some of us, Paul would have said, but God. And he helped us understand these things. But we have it today. And we need to get over it and help others get over it. Calvin was born in Nouillon in France. His father's desire, guess what he wanted him to be? A lawyer, of course. Just like Luther's father Hans. He wanted to be a lawyer because you can make more money being a lawyer than you can being a Roman priest. After some time at the University of Orleans and the study of law, he made his way to the University of Borgia. There he studied under the humanist system. Now here's, we think from the 20th century, when we hear humanist, we hear things like humanist manifesto one and two, and we hear that man is king. Well, the humanist of this time, the 16th century, that's not what we're talking about. It was a school of thought and the school of thought was that we don't need to just learn from this generation, Henry Ford's idea, and frankly we don't need to just learn from the generation who came before us. So we don't need to learn from those around us now or from the late medieval fathers or from the middle medieval fathers or the early medieval fathers or the patristic fathers. Even we need to learn from all of them, but ultimately we have to go back to the original source. No matter what you're studying, go back to the original source and every good academic does that. So if you read a book that's really produced by an academic, a scholar, you will see them quoting original documents, not secondary and tertiary sources. They quote letters from this person to that person. They quote the original documents that person they're writing about wrote, not just what people say about what they wrote. That's a carryover from this period from the humanist school of thought that you're supposed to get back to the original documents. That's very important. Because you know, like I know how often people misrepresent other people. Right. And you go and you talk to that other person, you say, you know, so-and-so told me so-and-so I didn't say that. Well, what did you say? Well, here's what I said. Oh, and then you say, oh, I can see how they, I, okay. You know, you need to explain to them what you really said, because they think you said this. Who's been there. Everybody's been there. All God children been there. Original source is, is vital to knowing the truth. Calvin's working from that school. Interestingly, Luther was not a humanist. Luther was a scholastic. That's why he was a theologian. He was a nuts and bolts kind of guy. And that's what got him in trouble. He carried on the scholastic model. Now he ends up criticizing it at a point, but he's criticizing the Romanist scholastics and then using the model itself. Calvin on the other end, and this also explains why Calvin produced all those vast numbers of commentaries and Luther only produced a few handful of commentaries. Most of what Luther did was polemical. He wrote against the things that were going on in the, in the church. Calvin doesn't write much against. He wrote his letter against Sadaletto, and he wrote against the Libertines, and that's about it. Everything else is, we call it more a positive, proactive. We'll talk about one of those, particularly tonight, that it's considered, Calvin considered to be his greatest contribution. Now, if I had started this with what did John Calvin think was his greatest contribution, how many of you would have said the Institutes? Yeah, I think we'd all do that if we didn't know if we were like Henry Ford. You know, we'd say the Institutes. And while they are remarkable in their landmark, he didn't think that was his most important work, his most important contribution. We'll get to that soon. He began studying the Psalms as a young priest And he began with Psalm one, like we did tonight. And guess what? In his introduction to the commentary on the Psalms, he tells us about this. Um, you know what, what Romans one 16 and 17 was to Luther, Psalm one and two were to Calvin. And he tells of his conversion. And most scholars recognize in that introduction of the Psalms, this is Calvin telling us that here at this age, age 26, he's a priest in the church and he is now being converted. Something we talk about around the seminary. Drew can bear witness to this is how important it is for men, even men in the ministry to examine themselves, that they be found in the faith. When I do my lectures on Chalmers and on Abraham Kuyper, and we could go down the list. We can go outside the reform tradition to the Wesleyan tradition with John Wesley. All three of those men were in the gospel ministry for a number of years, unconverted. That's why it's important. And by the way. The importance of a godly woman, Abraham Kuyper is preaching. And he's, he's the minister in this church for a good while. And he goes to visit this little lady page Balthus and he's candid. And he says, I want to know why people aren't coming to hear the sermons. And here's this little lady. And she says, because you have nothing to say, you don't know the Christ of the gospel. Well, I'm a degreed man. I'm credentialed. I've been ordained. I'm sorry. You don't preach the gospel. She made him promise to read the institutes. If she'd give them to him, he, she, he did. She did. And he did. And God saved him. So if you ever find yourself in that predicament, don't get up and leave the church and go somewhere else. Take Jesus to the preacher. Now you've known your pastor long enough to know and your new associate long enough to know their hearts and their love for Christ and their preaching of Jesus. Thomas Chalmers, the same way, eight years unconverted in the pulpit of a church of Scotland, a Presbyterian church. Before God put him on his death bed and he began to read and he began to realize he was not a converted man and God saved him. Calvin was converted three short years after his conversion. We get the first edition of his institutes. Whoa. That was just one volume. You all know the two volume edition. That came in 1533 or 1536 rather, and then he produced his catechisms the following year, 1537, 38. And then in writing the catechisms, he realized, oops, I want to go back in and massage some of that Institute. And he comes out with a second edition of the Institutes in 1539. And then, of course, the two-volume, the final edition. Oh, there was a French edition that came in 1541. I forgot that one. And then he comes back out with a final edition of the Institute's two volumes, as we know it, in 1559. And we have it today. He was first and foremost a man However, and a lot of people think of him as a cow, as, as, as a theologian, right? Again, if you ask people, John Calvin, oh, he was a theologian. If they know the name, if they, if they have any knowledge of Calvin, he's theologian. Well, he wasn't, he was a pastor. He was the prototypical pastor scholar. You're saying he wrote all those commentaries and books? Yep, while he was preaching. He wrote those editions while he was a pastor? Yep, while he was a pastor. That makes me feel really bad because I can't even finish one biography that I've been trying to finish for a good while. I must have a harder church than he had. Like you, Steve, you've not written a book yet. This must be a tough bunch. Calvin was sickly. You ever seen pictures of him? They all got those caps pulled down over his ear. And those big old fur things. I didn't understand that until 2003. We had a power outage in the upstate of South Carolina. Ice storm swept through. The power went down. And we were living downstairs using the fireplace, cooking on the iron skillet over the fire. And one day, I couldn't get to the seminary, the roads riced over. One day I said, I need to go upstairs and just have some quiet time and study some. So I went upstairs, the goldfish had frozen. All of Carol's beautiful green plants were. And I go up there and I sit down and I start pulling stuff down over my ears. And I start pulling my coats up around, and I'm like, That's how Calvin lived. He lived in freezing stone buildings. You read about his life, he was sick all the time. He had pneumonia, he had bronchitis, he had the gout, he had, you name it, he had it. You say, wow, and he produced all those, yeah. He was a man on fire, he had a mission he wanted to do and do and do and do. And he did. Here's what one of the editors of his sermon said in another century. Few great Christian leaders have suffered quite as much misunderstanding as Calvin. He's often been dismissed as theologian without humanity. In fact, the very reverse is much nearer the truth as the pages which follow amply demonstrate. He was a man of deep and lasting affection, passionately concerned for the cause of Christ in the world, a man who burned himself out for the gospel. He trained ministers to go back to France from his homeland. Holland. Ministers from Holland. They sent ministers out of his academy as far away as Brazil. We think of Brazil, we think they speak Portuguese so it must have been the Portuguese. They came later, the Dutch came first. And they had Calvin students in that group establishing churches and preaching. His ministry was not an ivory tower ministry. He goes on this picture of Calvin the man the pastor is often unknown because of lack of knowledge. The true picture shines through in his commentary sermons and appears frequently in his famous institutes when carefully read if you've read his If you've read his commentaries, you know exactly what this man's talking about. They're warm, they're pastoral, they're engaging, they're full of application, and they even have a lot of stinging sarcasm sometimes. It's not really, it's more like stinging wit that he brings out. You can know a good deal about his pastoral life, we have a volume that's really a beautiful summation of his pastoral ministry, Calvin's Company of Pastors, Pastoral Care in the Emerging Reformed Church. He revitalized the office of deacon in Geneva and they had a considerable diaconal ministry in the church in Geneva. that had wonderful ramifications all through the community. If you want to know the whole Calvin, you have to read his institute, you have to read his commentaries, but you also have to read his letters and treatises. You say, well, I'll never get to all that. No, but your pastors have already read all those and they can tell you all about it. I don't have time tonight. But no, seriously. You probably would love to begin reading through his, his letters. You'll find with him pleading with the city council of Geneva, not to kill surveyed us. Now you've not ever read that in the popular history books. That's one of the things they use against him, right? Oh, he was for this government killing people who didn't agree with him. Well, there's a letter in there where you don't get that. And then he says but if you're going to at least be humane about it. Now being humane meant don't burn him. That'll take too long and that's painful. Just you know the French guillotine would be good. That's that. But the point was you don't do this. That's not the way to deal with with this this man as wicked as he was. Like Luther, he was committed to the ministry of the gospel to the people. That's something I didn't get to with Luther. He was a minister. You know, when he had this teaching position, that included pastoring the church where he lectured for the university. Again, these were not ivory tower removed men. One of the reasons why, when you read his institutes, you will find that book four, a major part of the institutes, is on the doctrine of the church. Because he'd come to realize, like all the reformers, Rome is sick in all of its parts. It's not just the gospel. The church is not right. And we'll comment on that a little bit more. His ecclesiology was one building on the scriptures that recognized the precious value of the human body and the human soul especially of the redeemed of the Lord. That's what drove his ecclesiology. He believed the church like Luther, like Tertullian, of the early church said at first she's our mother and as she is so shall we be. I have a favorite quote of Luther about Rome being our mother and but I can't say it in mixed company. Luther was like that. His German mouth sometimes got the better of his Germans. I don't think you've ever been accused of being Gentile and Luther certainly wasn't. Calvin built on Paul's instruction to the elders at Ephesus to take care of the sheep who are easily prey to the wolves, protect them, guard them. And the reason is, well, what does Paul say? And in Acts chapter 20, when he gives those instructions, he says, because they've been bought with the price and the price is the blood of Jesus Christ. And that meant a lot to Calvin. That that's what made the sheep, the flock, the saints precious to Calvin. Not because they were always right. Not because they were always easy to get along with. Not because they are always sinless, but because they were bought with the blood of Christ. And that's a lesson for elders and deacons to keep in their minds at all times, isn't it? Because sometimes, you know, pastors say things like this that they ought not to say sometimes. What's it like? At Fifth Street, Steve, how are things? He'll say, you know, if it weren't for the people, it'd be a beautiful church. And you probably thought if it weren't for the pastor, this would be the ideal church. And we forget, don't we? We lose sight of the fact that just what Calvin seemed to never, ever lose sight of. He was remarkable. He was a godly man. And I'll in a few minutes, I'll show you he was not any way perfect. Just like Luther had his main problem. Calvin had a main problem, but he seems to have never lost sight of the fact that these people to whom he ministers at St. Pierre's grand cathedral, that beautiful big pulpit that he got to ascend and preach from. He never seemed to lose sight that they've been bought with the blood of Christ and that makes them precious. I don't bite my tongue nearly enough and I'm sure you don't bite your tongue nearly enough about one another. If we would just think about that. Calvin did at the heart of his concern and his care was a reformation of worship and that is what led to him writing his main contribution. And that little book was called The Necessity of Reforming the Church. The Necessity of Reforming the Church. The folks down at Ligonier, Reformation Trust Publishing, they did a beautiful job just three or four or five years ago, they republished it in a wonderful little hardbound edition with a dust jacket, Dr. Bob Godfrey, Excuse me, Dr. Godfrey wrote a wonderful historical introduction to it, and they appended to it also that polemic of his against Satellito, Cardinal Satellito. And you will enjoy reading it. And this is basically the contents of it, is what I want to do here. First thing is, the most important need of the church in his day was worship. and reforming worship. Now, I'm going to back up here. That's one thing you didn't hear me mention about Luther and Luther didn't spend, he didn't focus on that. He had other battles he was fighting. And now here we are with a second generation reformer, Calvin. And so already Luther's been laying the groundwork with a lot of good foundational work on the scripture and Sola Fide. And Calvin says, yeah, but we've got something very central here that's not being touched, it's worship. If we're not worshiping right, we're not gonna preach the gospel right. So he backs up and he says, we gotta get this worship thing right. And Calvin gives us what we know today, well I shouldn't say he gives us, Got it back from the scriptures and it's what we call a worship that's regulated or the regulative principle of worship. Or to put it another way, here was Luther's thing. Whatever God doesn't forbid us to do, we're free to do. Well, if you just sit and think for a while, that'll allow you to do a lot of stuff that you won't find in the Bible. And so Luther was willing to let those things go. Calvin came back and said, well, wait a minute. When I read my Bible, when people did what God didn't explicitly command, it didn't go well. I mean, folks, you know, Nadab and Abihu, remember? I mean, they offered incense, but it was not the incense God told him to. We get tired of doing the same thing all the time, don't we? And so we think, well, we'll spice it up a little bit here. So they went down to, what's that, bed, body, and bath thing and got some more scented something. And old Uzzah, Uzzah was serious. Uzzah was genuine. He knew that ark's not to touch the ground. But see, they had got tired of carrying that ark around on their shoulders with those poles. They came up with a new invention, the cart with round wheels. You know, they'd come out of the caveman period by this time. And so that let's put it on the cart and we roll it and they're rolling it. The ox stumbles, the cart tips, the arc is going. And as it says, Oh, God said, not let it. I'm, I'm of course explaining. It doesn't say this in the Bible, but we know this is what happened. Purely motivated. How many times have you heard people say, well, as long as we, as long as we do it out of good intentions, don't you think it'll please God? Not unless God said, do it. It won't. I don't care what your intentions are, pure and impure. Doesn't matter if it's not what God said, he doesn't like it. Folks, Calvin locked in on this. This is God's worship, not ours. So he said, no, it's, it's not okay. Luther to do just whatever, as long as God hadn't said, don't do it. But we're only free to do what God commands us to do. Jesus said go make disciples baptize them in the name of the father and son the Holy Spirit and teach them what all that I've commanded you. And then lo I'll be with you to the end of the age. Calvin took that to heart here's a quote. The true and sincere worship which alone God approves and which alone he delights is both taught by the Holy Spirit throughout the scriptures. See again that emphasis on the spirit. He doesn't just say taught in the scriptures taught by the Holy Spirit throughout the scriptures. Also antecedent to discussion the obvious dictative piety nor from the beginning was there any other method of worshiping God. The only difference being that the spiritual truth which was with us in naked and simple is with us in naked and simple was under the former dispensation, the old covenant, wrapped up in figures. That while the Old Testament church had the spirit shadowed forth by many figures, the ceremonies, sacrifices, et cetera, we have it in simplicity. But it has always been an acknowledged point that God, who is a spirit, must be worshiped in spirit and truth. Let me tell you how Calvin understood spirit and truth. You've heard people say this. See, as long as we worship in spirit, it doesn't got the right spirit about us. It's not about your spirit or my spirit. It's about the Holy Spirit. Calvin understood in spirit to be in the power of the spirit. And here's the Calvin link again and the truth. You can't disconnect the spirit from the truth, whether it's your spirit and the truth that God's putting in it or the Holy Spirit who's teaching you that truth. You can't disconnect them. And that's what worship is all about. Taking what God has commanded and worshiping in the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. That would change our worship, wouldn't it, if we really caught on. We do this in the invocations. We invoke God to send his spirit to work among us, and then we just go through and we sing psalms and hymns and we don't even remember what we just said. Or we recite the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed or whatever, and we don't remember at the end what we said. We all do this. We're all sinners. Just like we drive the same stretch of street or road every day and you get home sometimes and you don't remember going through any lights, you wonder if they were green or red. Anybody ever had, if you're Baptist, you'd be saying amen right now. We do it in worship. We do it in his worship. Folks, it's a wonder he lets any of us walk out those doors on Sunday morning or Sunday night sometimes. Because we've not worshiped acknowledging the presence of the Holy spirit. And yes, we've done all the truth, all those elements that are set out in chapter 21 of the Westminster confession that John Calvin would have agreed with. He's the one that came up with it from the Bible, of course, but we can do all the right elements and still not worship God because not worshiping. Acknowledging his, the need for his power and that we're in his presence. You know, you ask preachers sometimes what's, what's the last thing you do before you go to the pulpit and you find, you get some interesting comments. Billy Graham's was, I checked my zipper to be sure my pants are zipped up. That's wise. My friend, Joel Beakey says, and I've heard him do it. I've been in his presence. The last thing he does is on the way up the steps, he says, give me your might and your power. And every one who's going to hear a sermon preached, who's going to offer a hymn or a Psalm in worship should do the same thing. Lord, give me your might and your power to do this. And then we offer those elements in spirit. In the power of the Holy, that was Calvin. He brought it. He said, that's the need we're not doing it. We're just full of formality. Second abiding need that he sets out is soteriology salvation. That's you to guess that one, wouldn't you? You might not have guessed that worship was the first most important need. But you would have guessed salvation. He said it was, Luther said justification through faith alone was the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls. Calvin said it was the hinge pin of all doctrine. You know what the hinge pin, it's what goes, you know, and everything swings on it. That makes it pretty important, doesn't it? Also concentration of the sacraments, Rome had it flipped sacraments. You could go and have the mass word wouldn't be present. Calvin said, nope, we go, we're going to worship the word is primary. So they had the sermon and out of the sermon came the, the Lord's supper because the word has to inform the sacrament. Otherwise the sacrament can become superstition. It can be a mystical experience, but not an act of worship. So you've got to have the word preached to inform the sacrament. That's the same with baptism. But the sacraments are important just because they come second. And by the way, we don't put them at the end of the service. They're not an add-on. They're not a tack-on. You say, well, ours comes after. That's not what I'm saying. You put them after the sermon because the sermon has to be preached to inform the word or to inform the sacrament. But then what you've got is this beautiful truth. It's reminder to us that we are saved by our savior in our whole being. The preaching of the word affects the hearing. Faith comes from hearing, right? Paul says that. But the sacraments touch what? They touch the rest of us. Our sense of touch, our sense of smell, our sense of sight, our sense of taste. In other words, all the senses of the man is affected when we hear the word preached and see the gospel set before us in the sacraments. And that reminds us that his salvation is total, it's in our whole being. That's the reason we have to stand firm on this. Don't stand and tell me that I'm saved and going to heaven, but I can live like the devil. Don't say that Jesus has saved me from the penalty of my sins, but not the power of my sins. The Bible knows nothing of that. It's time to quote a Baptist now. Charles Spurgeon, morning and evening, February 12th or 13th, right along in there over on the right side, that'd be the evening. In his morning and evening devotions, he says, the grace that doesn't save a man and make him better than others is a worthless counterfeit. Calvin believed that. And the preaching of the word and the sacrament to follow was evidence of that. Also, a reformation of church governance. And that's where he comes back and says, wait a minute, The Bible has nothing to say about cardinals. The Bible has nothing to say about arch anything. The Bible has nothing to say about sub anythings. The Bible knows nothing but ministers and elders and deacons. We need to get rid of all this extraneous stuff that the Roman church has added on because it's taken away from the beauty of Christ our head. The more intermediaries you built in there, the less Jesus is visible. We had to put Jesus back on the throne and not to mention the Pope's got to go. And so the elder, he says is necessary for the spiritual health of the church. The deacon is necessary for the physical health of the church. Christ came to save man in his wholeness. So worship, salvation, sacraments, church governance, and guess what? All that came from what? The scriptures. And that's why everything Calvin did looked so different. It was because it wasn't from the traditions and it wasn't from the magisterium. And it wasn't from the papal bulls, it was from the scriptures alone. Calvin was a man who loved his family as well. His beloved wife, Adelaide, there's a wonderful little biography of her life. written by Edna Gerstner, John Gerstner's wife, and you'd be blessed by reading it. He married her in 1540. We don't know a lot about his personal life. We do know that in 1542 she gave birth to a son who was born prematurely and he only survived just a brief time. Three years later, after surviving a plague, Adelaide fell ill and after an extended sickness she died in 1549 and he never married again. He wrote his friend Verre these words. I have been bereaved of the best friend of my life. Of one who if it has been so ordained would willingly have shared not only my poverty but also my death. During her life she was a faithful helper of my ministry. From her I never experienced the slightest hindrance. Now that's not a hard, cold, calculating, scholastic theologian there, is it? But I'm gonna tell you something. I'll just tell you right now. I could write the same thing about my sweet Carol. And not Flinch. Luther struggled with melancholy. We talked about that earlier. You know what Calvin's problem was? His sin, his besetting sin, as the Puritans would have called it. And I'll be done with this, I know we just budged over the eight o'clock hour. But remember, that's nine o'clock my time, so. I should be tired-er than you. Because I woke up at my time this morning, too. Calvin's was anger. he had a short fuse. Calvin's mind frequently turned disagreement into conspiracy against him. As he grew in his sense of a prophetic calling, he increasingly saw dissent as disloyalty and as something deeply personal. So out of this, this person, this temper, this short fuse, there was some paranoia there too. However, one of his greatest strengths in his later career was an acute awareness that despite remarkable confidence in his calling and intellect, he remained dangerously prone to moments of poor judgment on account of anger. Well, that's pretty good, isn't it? He was growing in grace. He realized this. A lot of people don't. That's what sanctification is all about. It's about us becoming more and more aware and dealing more and more with our sins, putting off and putting on, as Paul says. So. We've seen the two of the primary reformers, Luther and Calvin. And you can't sugarcoat them. I didn't. I just told you they both had their cleaved feet. But it'd be worse if we neglected them. So you really do well to get to know them. I've I've got reading list on both these men if you'd like to see that I'd be happy to send it to your pastor. I got a little brief you know popular kind of bibliographies that are I think are really good and helpful and historically well done. But read them in if you haven't ever read Luther's bondage of the will you missed a treat. I'm just teaching Reformation history, actually for the first time I've ever taught it at a seminary level. And it looks like it'll be the only time I ever teach it, but that's okay. I prepared these lectures and they'll be used somewhere. But one of the things I'm requiring the students do is read primary stuff, just like I did for you in ancient church. And one of the things they just had to read, and we just had a seminar where we sat and discussed it, was Luther's Bondage of the Will. When we come back from fall break, we're going to be discussing Calvin's necessity of reforming the church. And later in the semester, we'll be reading Zwingli's writings on providence and doctrine and the sacraments. And Bulliger's works as well in discussing those. The reason I bring those up is read them in. You can read them. God's blessed you with good minds, good intellect, good education. You can read them and benefit from them greatly. And all of a sudden you realize, wow, Calvin's really useful. Luther, Luther's not only fun to read, he's important to read. And I realize we're Calvinist, we're reformed. Luther's Lutheran? He's not. But he is in the Reformation tradition. And there's a sense in which, speaking humanly, and we know God was involved in all this, there might not have been a Calvin and a Reformation without Luther. Because there'd been reforming going on before Luther and nobody gave a hoot about it. But after Luther. It opened the door for the Calvins. And then the John Knox's. We owe a good deal to those two men. Father, thank you for this evening for these people being so kind and attentive. We ask now that you take us to our places of rest safely and bring us back tomorrow morning to worship you all the day long. We pray this in the matchless name of Jesus here in the presence of your spirit. Amen.