Sisters, I'm sorry that I can't be with you this morning, but currently enjoying a beach vacation, so I'm really so sorry. You know what I mean? No, certainly we're going to miss being with our church family this morning, but wanted to record this Sunday School as the final installment of the Church of Christ segment in our series, and the second-to-last denomination that we are going to cover. And so I'd really like to make sure I cover everything so that Brent can actually take over next time and present us with the last denomination. So let's pray, and then we will go ahead and get back into the material, picking up where we left off. Lord Jesus, we do ask for your guidance and wisdom as we consider these things, that we would not fall into some of the same pitfalls that we'll be even looking at today, that you would guard our hearts and that you would guard our minds toward the end of truth expressing itself in love. And so we pray that you would be with us as we study and consider these things in Christ's name, amen. Okay, so I have the eternal caveat about using the technology here. And so if you see me looking at screens and such, that's what's going on, notes versus advancing the PowerPoint and all the rest. So last time we discussed baptismal regeneration, we got to the concerns of the Church of Christ And we all agreed that baptism plays a very important role in the overall salvific sequence of things, from regeneration to resurrection of the body and life everlasting, and there are a variety of other factors that play a very important role in that salvific sequence, and sanctification, church membership, the Lord's Supper, those kinds of things. But But we are now asking, is this an absolutely necessary part of the sequence? Which, again, is a different question than asking, is it a part of the sequence that actually washes away sin? So again, within the baptismal regeneration camp, you kind of have the two views. One is that it is actually the thing that washes away sin, and one is that it is the time at which salvation is conferred upon somebody, but it's not as a sacrament itself washing away sin. So, is baptism, either way, an absolutely necessary part of the sequence? And they ended last time together saying, no it's not, but today I'd like to start by explaining why that is the case. The first general theological reason, which would only really squarely attack the kind of view of baptismal regeneration that considers it a work of obedience that washes away sin would be to understand it in that manner is simply undercutting justification by faith alone, and really I think is undercutting the gospel. So even a Lutheran perspective on baptismal regeneration is compatible with believing that salvation and justification is by faith alone. And, you know, of course he posited infant faith to kind of explain that. But nevertheless, the idea that baptism is a kind of work of obedience that itself washes away sin seems to undercut justification by faith alone. And you've probably heard that before, that particular criticism. That's the one that everyone's used to hearing. But those who believe that salvation is simply conferred at that time, like someone's degree is conferred upon them at a graduation ceremony, are going to duck that criticism. They're gonna say repenting is a doing, that's not a meritorious work. Believing is something you have to do, but it's not a meritorious work. And they're gonna say baptism is a doing, but it's not a meritorious work. And so in answering this particular version, we need to ask the question, are there any biblical examples of where the forgiveness of sins, justification, giving of the Holy Spirit, clearly precede baptism or suggest that it isn't absolutely necessary despite being normative? And the answer is, there are, well, there are multiple texts. We can only look at a few today. And so, turn with me in your copy of the Scripture. I want you to just look at a couple. The first one is in Luke, chapter 7. The first one is in Luke, chapter 7. And if you're in Luke chapter 7, you look at verses 37 through 50, or 36 through 50, you have this sinful woman who is forgiven. And Jesus tells the parable about the moneylender, starting in verse 41, and Simon answers in verse 43, the one, I suppose, for whom he canceled a larger debt. And he said, you've judged rightly, talking about which one will love him more, the one who canceled the larger debt. And then he turns towards this woman, he turns towards this woman and says to Simon, do you see this woman, verse 44, I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, verse 47, here it is, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven. For she loved much, but he who is forgiven little loves little. And he said to her, your sins are forgiven. Then those who are at the table with them began to say among themselves, who is this who even forgives sins? And he said to the woman, your faith has saved you, go in peace. No baptism in that picture. Okay, clearly right there we have a picture of someone who has been saved. who has been forgiven prior to baptism. I'm not saying that baptism wasn't a subsequent part of what happened to this woman, but it's just not this part. Skip forward in Luke, again, to chapter 18. Chapter 18, we'll look at verses 13 and 14. Verses 13 and 14 here. This is the well-known justification passage in Luke, and given that he was a traveling companion of Paul, It's not altogether surprising that he would include this particular parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector. And so he says, and it is parabolic, but the sequence of things in the parable is instructive for us. And so you've got two men going up to the temple to pray. One's a Pharisee, another is a tax collector. The Pharisee is, you know, being self-righteous. I'm thankful that I'm not like all these other people, and especially like this tax collector. Let me advance my slide here, sorry about that. And then the tax collector stands far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And then Jesus' commentary on that, okay? So it is a commentary on a parabolic situation, but he has a commentary on it within the imagery of the parable. He says, I tell you, this man went down to his house justified. rather than the other. There's something that happened in that man, and what is it? It is his calling out to God to be merciful to him, a sinner, and having faith that God could accomplish that. That man, Jesus said, he went up not justified, and he went back down to his house justified, and baptism does not enter the picture here, okay? Turn with me to Acts chapter 10. Turn with me to Acts chapter 10. This is the so-called Gentile Pentecost that we preached through here recently. And this one, man, this is just so powerful right here. Starting in verse 44, this is when the Holy Spirit falls on the Gentiles. And look at the order of things here. While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on these Gentiles, for they were hearing them speak in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared, can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have? And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Clearly then, their reception of the Holy Spirit precedes their baptism, and therefore their regeneration, their justification precedes their baptism in this particular passage. Finally, let's look at 1 Corinthians 1, 14-17. 14-17. This is simply a passage that suggests baptism is not necessary, a necessary part of becoming right before God. Why do I say that? Because Paul is talking about the divisions of the church in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 1, and then he says something that would be very, very bizarre if baptism was an essential role in bringing people in, played an essential role, excuse me, in bringing people into right relationship with God. He says in verse 14, I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius so that no one may say you were baptized in my name." He says, I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I don't know whether I baptized anyone else. Verse 17, for Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel. And not with words of eloquent wisdom was the cross of Christ be emptied of its power again. It is very challenging to see how if baptism is an absolutely essential part of bringing people into right relationship with God and the forgiveness of sins, that the baptism itself affects the forgiveness of sins, how Paul could say that? How Paul can say that? I wasn't even sent to do this. I was sent to do the thing that saves people, that is to say, to preach the gospel, okay? So I think that's all that I want to say about that at this particular point. Again, we've covered this a lot in some of the other denominations, and you can go back and look at how baptism is tied closely with the idea of salvation, and how to understand that combined with belief and faith and all the rest of it. Well, the second concern for Church of Christ is just the idea of rejection of faith alone for salvation. I'm not really going to say a lot here except to say that those Church of Christ churches who reject salvation by faith alone simply reject, I would say, the Bible and the Protestant Reformation, including Lutheranism. Again, Luther had a view, Lutherans currently, and Luther following him, have a view of baptismal regeneration. We covered this when we talked about Lutheranism, but he absolutely believed in justification by faith alone. And so rejecting salvation, justification by faith alone, It's a losing strategy if you want to be consistent with the Protestant Reformation, and more importantly, the Bible itself. Salvation is by faith alone. The forgiveness of sins, the indwelling of the Spirit comes through repentance and belief. The third concern is the inconsistent application of the regulative principle. Now recall This is a practical theological principle that states that we should order our corporate worship only by what we explicitly see in the New Testament, and it is an application of this principle that accounts for the Stoneites, the stone side of the Church of Christ, not the Campbell side. It accounts for why they don't use musical instruments in worship. Okay? Because they say we do not explicitly see it anywhere in the New Testament. Now, notice that there is nothing wrong with not using instruments. That's why I didn't list that as the concern. That's not the concern. I enjoy instrumental accompaniment, but certainly it isn't necessary to worship well. The concern here is the inconsistent application of the principle. We have to remember that when the regulative principle, as it was developed, particularly as it emerged from the Puritans and the Separatists, was largely born out of this concern to avoid injuring people's consciences who were repulsed by a lot of the Catholic elements left over in the Church of England, in Anglicanism. And so there was kind of a practical question then. What should we have in a worship service? What elements should be present? Most of you are familiar with C.S. Lewis's book, Mere Christianity. The regulative principle was an attempt to try to do something like mere worship. the core, things that everyone can agree on. Everyone can agree on and no one's conscience is going to be offended by. How do we come, how do we boil it down and figure out what those things are? What we do is we look at the New Testament and ask, what does it more or less straightforwardly lay out for worship? And what we see is reading, teaching, preaching, singing, praying, baptism, Lord's Supper. So the regulative principle says, we are going to let that be our regulator for worship. We aren't going to have anyone posturing towards pictures. We're not going to have anyone burning incense. You know, more contemporary applications would be, we're not going to have a skit with a moral to the story. We're not going to have a ballet team that performs. There was actually a ballet troupe that performed at the Presbyterian church I grew up in, PCA, which was kind of shocking looking back. But anyways, that was, that's what happened. But here's the thing, the New Testament was never meant to be a kind, it was never meant to give us this kind of Levitical prescription for what every corporate worship service was supposed to look like in granular detail with nothing omitted, okay? It just isn't. and insisting that we may only do in corporate worship explicitly, only what we see explicitly in the New Testament is just asking the New Testament for something it's not trying to give. So for example, there is never an explicit example in the New Testament, never an instance of a woman taking the Lord's Supper. There's not. You can go look. Does that mean women should not take the Lord's Supper? No! And even in Church of Christ churches, women take the Lord's Supper. Hence, it seems like there's an inconsistency. Never in Scripture is there a mention of hymnals or screens and baptistries, and yet those elements also characterize Church of Christ worship. Should someone object... I mean, for example, why don't Church of Christ churches go baptize someone in the river? Why are there baptistries? Okay? Should someone object and say that baptism kind of authorizes baptistries as a method for accomplishing baptism, it's difficult to turn around and not also suggest that encouragements to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, that that doesn't authorize instrumentation as part of the implementation of those things, particularly with the Old Testament background of instrumental worship. I mean, we see something, particularly see this in the psalms, and you might think it is odd that we are encouraged to sing psalms But psalms like Psalm 150 explicitly include instrumentation. Praise Him with the trumpet. Praise Him with the lute and harp. Praise Him with tambourine and dance. Praise Him with strings and pipe. Praise Him with sounding cymbals. So on this view, we can sing the psalm, but we can't do the psalm in one sense. The principle just is not applied consistently. There are other examples. And the mention of musical instruments in the very songs we are instructed to sing seems to authorize the use of musical instruments. Finally, we talked about some cultural concerns. All those came in at once. I apologize. Just don't look up there. I know there's no chance that you won't, but anyways, I said it. I'm not going to say a ton about this, because it would really require addressing a whole host of issues. Gender roles, dress, authority, theological triage, engaging culture, so on and so forth. And I try to address these things throughout my teaching in general. But I do want to comment on two phenomena, though, within what is oftentimes the fundamentalist culture that we see in Church of Christ churches, but not limited to Church of Christ. churches. You see this in independent fundamentalist Baptist churches as well. And those two things, now that I messed up my PowerPoint, are the legalistic understanding of sanctification and the mean-spirited criticism of those who disagree. So let's just talk about those two elements of the culture in turn. There's really, there are probably more than Yeah, there are definitely more than two problems with a legalistic church culture, a legalistic understanding of sanctification, but chief among those are, number one, a culture of performance and shame. A legalistic understanding of sanctification in a legalistic church culture creates a culture of performance and shame. Do, and if you don't, oh, you're one of those. Number two, That's number one, excuse me. And then number two, it feeds judgmentalism within and outside the church, because it turns into the looking to the left and looking to the right, who's doing this, and you end up playing the who's more faithful game, and who are the compromisers, and who is serious, and who's not. And then you're looking down on these people over here, and of course then they feel shame, because they haven't performed right, so the two are intertwined. So what is the alternative to just do more spiritual things and sin less, okay? Well first, let's talk about the theology of sanctification that's clear on the other side of the spectrum, which would be something like the free grace understanding of sanctification. This is very much a passive understanding of sanctification. To ask what should I do to grow in godliness almost is an incoherent question. On this understanding, sanctification is passive. You bask in grace, you know? you look to Christ. And that's basically it. There's very little, if any, role outside for effort and striving that's placed on the believer, because if it's suggested that believers should strive and should put forth effort, then they're afraid we're going to lapse into the problems that I just mentioned. And so it really is kind of a passive view, where you take your hands off the wheel, look to Jesus, and just try to worship your way into more holiness by just looking at grace, trying your best, repenting and doing again. And it is very much trusting that the Lord will bring you along because that's gracious too. So it's a very hands off, very passive. Let me start by saying, though, that striving for godliness and fleeing from sin are critical parts of the Christian life. They are critical parts of the Christian life. Effort in the Christian life is not to be confused with earning. Effort is not to be confused with earning. And the difference between grace-driven, gospel-fueled effort and legalistic effort in sanctification can be found in the motivation, foundational strategy, and expected consequences. And you see that there on the screen. Let's talk briefly about each. So the first, the motivation here. A better strategy. We might broadly separate motivations out into three fundamental categories. Positive consequences, negative consequences, and existential compulsion. So I take it that positive consequences and negative consequences are fairly clear. Positive consequences just meaning good things will happen. So Jesus himself says, you know, don't store Why don't you want to fix your heart on treasure? Because it's going to come to nothing. There's a positive consequence to doing this. Also, you have motivation, negative consequences. If you do this, your life will come to ruin. The one who stiffens his neck will be broken beyond healing. Hey, that's a great reason to not stiffen my neck. So I have positive consequences, negative consequences. The Bible uses both as motivation, but it also has a very important third category, this existential compulsion. And this is, I would say, the more fundamental, the more fundamental motivator in the New Testament that is lacking in both the legalistic understanding and in many cases, the free grace understanding as well. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. When I was in middle school, I remember I was not obeying my parents with regard to something in particular, and they told my grandma. I can't even remember what they were asking me to do, but I just wasn't having it. And so they called my grandma and had grandma call me to ask me to do this thing. And I just couldn't say no to her, you know? And why was that? You know, what was my motivation in that moment? It certainly was not positive consequences. It was not negative consequences in the sense of which we've just discussed. It was because I loved my grandma. I just couldn't bear the thought of telling her no, her kindness, her sweetness. I did it because I loved her and I wanted to honor her, not because there were going to be positive consequences or negative consequences, again, in terms of something happening to me or whatever. I was compelled by love. Okay? And this is much closer to the model for striving that we see in the Christian life. Our primary motivation for striving for holiness is because of what has already been accomplished for us by Christ. Our primary motivation is relationship with God instead of grandma. We strive for righteousness because we love righteousness, and we love righteousness because we love a righteous God, because we stand in awe over what He's done for us and what He's promised us. In other words, our primary motivation is love for God displayed in worship. That's our foundational motivation. Positive and negative consequences have their place, but the foundational driving motivation is going to be love for God displayed in worship. And now to get to that point, we can't just know the standard, we have to love the standard. So how do we get to that place where obedience is the overflow of worship? If you have your copy of the Scripture there, turn with me to 2 Corinthians 3, briefly. 2 Corinthians chapter 3, Paul is talking about being a minister of the New Covenant. He's talking about the veil of ignorance that lies on the heart of those for whom Christ has not taken the veil away when they read the Law of Moses. And he says that there is something different for the believer. He says in verse 16, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is spirit, is the spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And then 2 Corinthians 3.18 is the paradigm here. And we all with unveiled face, okay, unlike Moses who veiled his face, he had to veil his face. And we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Okay, so how do our hearts continually get transformed at a foundational level such that we don't just do the right things, but we love the right things? That our hearts are transformed toward worshiping the right things, we do in fact pursue, meditate on, and know the glory of God, and in so doing are transformed from one degree of glory to another. We become more glorious. We become like what we worship, okay? That's why the heart lies at the core of Christian ethics and worldview. You can see in Proverbs 4, 23, guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the strings of life. You were reading Luke 6, you know, good trees, a man, oh no, I'm mixing the two texts up. Yeah, out of the overflow of his heart, a man speaks. And so what is in my heart is what What comes out is just a product of what's already inside. So how do I transform what is inside so that what comes out is fruitful and is good? The answer is, I behold the glory of the Lord. I can behold that in a variety of ways. I can behold it in creation. I can behold it in prayer. I can behold it in community. I can behold it in God's Word. I'm seeking to know God. I'm seeking to know God. And I think that is largely the burden of someone like J.I. Packer's book, Knowing God, is this right here. knowing God, experiencing God, walking with God, in awe of God being transformed from one degree of glory to another, then we don't just know the standard and execute, we love the standard. Finally then, there is a difference in expectation for consequences. In legalism, There's the idea that if I give the right inputs, I should get the right outputs. If I live right, God will bless me in ways that I have in mind. I'm not going to end up in a bad marriage. I'm not going to have wayward children. I'm not going to experience being ostracized by a particular church community. And people who adopt those expectations that come out of the legalistic understanding of sanctification, sooner or later, and generally it's much sooner rather than later, find out that they are deeply mistaken. They're deeply mistaken, and they're left wondering where they went wrong. I did everything right, they'll say. I did everything right. Did all the good things, stay away from all the bad things, and look at my lot. Where is God? Why isn't he showing up for me? On a biblical model, there is an understanding that God blesses the righteous, just like we read over and over in Psalms and Proverbs, but the nature of the blessing is different. The nature of the blessing is different. Living righteously before God gives us peace with God. It provides us a deep fulfillment in terms of identity and value. It gives us unwavering hope, no matter the circumstances. And ultimately, it does guarantee blessing and prosperity, but just not yet. That is coming, but just not yet. It may very well turn out that you live a very righteous life characterized by a tremendous amount of relational strife, difficulty, physical suffering, and yet it is the blessing of God that sees you through it and promises hope and gives you strength for tomorrow. So living righteously holds out the prospect of knowing God deeply and cherishing Him robustly, such that whatever comes your way, you have a firm and steady anchor. And so on a standpoint of motivation, foundational strategy, and expected consequences, there is a better path forward than both a legalistic, do the good things, don't do the bad things, get to work, do better, try harder on one side, and the free grace just kind of stare at Jesus and the grace of the gospel passively on the other side. And I think as we understand these three things, we'll have a healthier understanding of what growth in the Christian life looks like as compared to what we see in some of these fundamentalist church cultures that tend towards legalism. Well, the final thing that I want to address here is just the idea of mean-spirited criticism of those who disagree. This bitter, angry criticism that often characterizes fundamentalist cultures, and it characterizes how they treat people who are outside of their camp, and how they talk about them, how they think about them. And what I want to suggest to you is that much of that bitterness is caused by the inability to distinguish first-tier, second-tier, third-tier doctrines and do theological triage. Because think about it. If every hill is a hill to die on, then in every theological conversation where someone disagrees, that person thinks the very core of faithfulness to Jesus is at stake. Every conversation, they're Paul against the Judaizers. You know, every single issue is an issue where everything could fall apart if you get it wrong. They take that kind of angst into every single issue, and so we have to step back and be able to do some theological triage. We have to step back and do some theological triage. So what's the antidote to this? I have three, a three-fold antidote. Humility, biblical competence, and understanding the spectrum. First, the idea is that if we do these things, we are going to be guarded from falling into this cultural error. Personal humility is absolutely required. The more I study and the more I learn, the more I realize how much there is to know that I don't actually know. Personal humility says, you know what, I may be wrong. I've inherited beliefs. I've come to some on my own. I am not some blank slate. I wasn't created in a vacuum. I could be wrong. And so because I could be wrong, I want to have a spirit of genuine curiosity. I want to have an open mind to hear truth because we all have blind spots. I have blind spots and holes in my theology. I just don't know where they are. You know, it would change my views. But personal humility is required. You could be wrong. And admitting that isn't supposed to shake someone's faith or make sure they don't have a stable foundation. And that's what sometimes is suggested. that to entertain even asking some of these questions and listening carefully to those outside your camp is to create this atmosphere where your soul is unstable and doesn't have kind of the spiritual furniture to rest on or the foundation to sit on well. And so there's almost this existential crisis. You have to be certain about everything and everything has to go in this one particular box and it helps you kind of, your internal self find a cognitive rest or something. And so, but that's not what this is suggesting. Humility is not suggesting that you should become a doubter or something like that, not have your convictions, but it's just to say, you have been wrong in the past. You could be wrong about whatever it issues that the issue is. And so why would we not want to listen and consider carefully? the truth? Are you open to learning? Are you open to changing your views? Step one. Step two is just biblical competence. You need to have a very firm grasp on what is central to the gospel in Christian living and what is not. Even in cases where it may be important, we think of something like baptism or disagreements with our Pado-Baptistic brothers and sisters. It's just not at the center of the gospel, okay? We can lock arms with good, faithful, Reformed folks who disagree on something like baptism, which is important. And we realize that it's not something to have bitter criticisms and bitter disagreements over. In order to have biblical confidence, you have to know how to read the Bible for yourself, but not by yourself. And a lot of people in fundamentalist cultures only know the Bible based off what their pastor told them, because these are high control environments where what the elder says is kind of like word of God. I mean, that's how it's treated. But they don't really know how to actually approach the text of the Bible. And when you do that, you end up accidentally, incidentally, putting your trust in a man and not the Word of God. And so we want to read the Bible in community, in community. The Bible is never meant to be a book read by yourself under a tree. It's a great way to come up with a bunch of heresy. But you need to be biblically competent to understand what is at the core of the gospel and Christian living so you can do that theological triage. Finally, you need to understand the spectrum. If I have accomplished anything in this Sunday School series, I hope it has been to broaden your understanding of what Jesus-loving faithfulness can look like, so we aren't just all staring around at one another and believing we're the shining apple of God's eye, and everyone else is just ignorant and compromising. It is understanding the spectrum of faithful brothers and sisters before us, around us, will cause our criticisms and the tone with which we level criticisms to change. Because we will realize, wait a second, this person really does love Jesus. This person really is in and we really are on the same team. But if you don't really have an understanding of the spectrum and you have, here is the faithful little tiny church denomination and everyone else is either going to hell or everyone else is so badly compromised they're not worth talking to, you're going to really struggle to be charitable talking with someone, because you're going to be in attack and defense mode in every conversation. We've got to have humility, we have to have biblical competence, and we need to know. It's so helpful to know the spectrum and just get to know some people who believe very differently. I am so thankful to be in pastoral fraternal with Lutheran, Arminians, Reformed folks, Methodists. It is to be able to talk to flesh and blood human beings who believe these things, and all of a sudden you can say, oh, okay, yeah. It's not some boogeyman that sometimes they're created to be. But if you don't have an understanding of the spectrum of views and who falls on them, and some of even the church history, you're gonna really struggle there. Well, my time's up. I may have even gone one or two minutes over. I hope this has been helpful. This is the end of The Church of Christ. Not next week, but the week after, Brent will begin the seventh-day Adventism, and we're certainly looking forward to that. Let me close us in prayer. God, we pray that we have carefully considered these things. We pray that you would help us be gracious, that you would help us be humble as we look out at those who disagree with us on certain things, that we would not fall into the same trap that we just finished discussing here, particularly as we pursue sanctification, that we would do so with the proper motivation, the right foundational strategy, with the proper expectations. Lord, work in us, transform our hearts, build us up into a strong house by the Holy Spirit of God, in Christ's name.