Peter, I'm glad to be with you on the Sabbath and to be able to enjoy all the blessings of the Sabbath with you this morning. Especially, I just learned this morning that you're a weekly communion congregation. So it's almost enough to make me a post-millennialist. You get worship according to the Word of God and preaching of the law and the gospel without any confusion. And you get weekly communion. Let me admonish you people. You have no idea how good you have it. You can't possibly know unless you've seen all the nonsense that passes for church and worship across this country. And if you only got the emails I get from people who are desperate to get what you have and who have no idea how to get from where they are to where you are. So if you're ever tempted to think that you don't have all that you could, Repent. You have all that you can have in this life. This is as good as it gets. Especially right today. I mean, it's gorgeous, beautiful sunshine, lovely colors. So this is it. After today, it's all downhill. I told you, I'm not quite ready to be a post-millennialist. So what I'd like to do this morning is to just finish the little do some of the last lecture. But I want to leave a little bit of time for Q&A. So probably write it to 10 o'clock. We'll we'll I'll just do Q&A. So the big night, whatever happened to the second service in the night? There's a couple of films actually with the title The Big Night. But I'm thinking of the 1996 film. There was a much earlier film was a film noir film called The Big Night. But that's not the one to which I'm referring in 1996. There was a lovely little film, but if you haven't seen it, you might see it, called The Big Night, featuring two brothers who own a family restaurant. It's an Italian restaurant. And they find themselves in competition with a large chain operation down the street. And they face a question. What shall we do? Shall we continue to be what we are? Shall we continue to offer food lovingly prepared to be enjoyed around a fellowship in a sense of community, or shall we try to become like the big, if you will, box store restaurant down the street by cutting costs and cutting quality and hurting people in, stuffing marginal food down their gullets and then hurting them out, which is what a lot of places do. As sideline churches, We face very much the same dilemma. Shall we continue to pay attention to quality? Shall we continue to prepare food lovingly, carefully? Shall we feed people well? Shall we fellowship around the table? Shall we offer something that people really want and need? Want in the old sense of lack, not desire. Or shall we give people what they desire? That's a huge question. And if you haven't faced it as a congregation, at some point you probably will. And you probably have. We all have faced, I think, faced that pressure to conform to the prevailing model of American commerce and American religion. And they aren't very different. Religion is in this country a commodity to be packaged and marketed to the masses. One of my favorite examples of that process is Rush Limbaugh, to whom I listen regularly and of whom I'm a big fan on a number of levels. But just as a radio person, as an entertainer, he is brilliant and for that reason very successful. But if you go back and listen to tapes, if you could, I don't know that you could, but if you did listen to tapes from the early years of the national show, you would hear a quite different show than exists today. And the reason is that the American culture pushes and presses. It's like geologic formation. And all the sharp edges get pushed and squeezed and rubbed down to conform. It's a much tamer, much gentler, much more polite show than it was all the way back in 1988. And he now has, and has had for a long time, something like 20 million listeners every week. Had he continued doing the edgier show, he probably wouldn't have reached the heights that he has reached. And so we all face that pressure. Even, I saw in the paper yesterday, Coles is going upscale. It's conform or die. One of the pressure points in our struggle in the sideline confessional reformed churches is to become and remain confessionally, in order to become and remain confessionally reformed is the evening service. And the broader question is, shall we become and be what we confess or shall we become and be something else? shall we become and be what we confess, which is what I understand the word semper reformanda to mean. Because the whole phrase is ecclesia reformata, the church reformed, comma, semper reformanda, always reforming. Philosophically, it's the one and the many, that which is fixed and universal and that which can change, that which is many. As a historian, As I go to explain the loss of the evening service, it seems to me that we're losing the evening service. And most of my evidence for that is anecdotal, but not all of it. I'm sometimes tempted to think of the past as superior to our time, because that's just the bias of the historian. And that temptation is called, at least I call that temptation, the golden age mentality. If only we could get back to, and then pick a time. And of course, as a historian, I know that every time I look into that time, which might possibly serve as a golden age, it turns out it wasn't really so glorious, which is another reason why I'm an amillennialist. There never have been golden ages on this earth, and as far as I know, there never shall be. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in some respects, as I say, the evening service has fallen on hard times. If only because it's getting harder to find an evening or an afternoon service, a second service. I don't care when it is. I know yours is a two, which is actually the historic practice of the Reformed churches. But judging by anecdotal evidence, a significant number of our Reformed congregations have eliminated the second service altogether. And I say that because when I travel, it's often very difficult to find anything like a a confessionally reformed second service, or any kind of a second service. A Lutheran second service, an Anglican or Episcopalian second service, or what have you. As a Calvinist, however, as I say, I take perverse comfort in knowing that some modern evils are not actually entirely peculiar to our age. Attendance to the second service has been a problem in our history before. It was a problem at the very beginning of the Reformed Reformation, according to Idzard Vandellen. I also take perverse pleasure in saying Idzard. I don't know why, but I wonder what were those parents thinking when they baptized that boy Idzard. What did they think was going to happen to him, even in a Christian school, at any rate? Idzard Vandellen and Martin Monsma, quoting here, at first, people did not take to catechism preaching. However, as appears from certain decisions taken by synods in regard to this matter, perhaps many refrained from attending the service at which the catechism was preached because they did not care to go to church twice a day. So it's been, and this goes back to the 16th century and into the 17th century. Convocation of and attendance to evening services continued to trouble the Reformed churches until the Great Synod of Dorton, 1618-1619, where complaints were brought that some ministers, including remonstrants, who by the way, the Armenians, opposed catechism preaching. Partly because they opposed the catechism, which they said they supported. And you can think of certain groups today who say, oh, we're in favor of the Reformed confessions. right up until the moment you find out that they're not in favor of the Reformed confessions. As we come to dealing, and I'm going to talk about this this morning in the sermon, not directly but indirectly, as we as Reformed churches come to deal with issues like or such as the federal vision and the new perspectives on Paul, we really need to take instruction from the Synod of Dor because the federal visionists and the moralists of their day were called Arminians. And they said, oh, we're reformed. And Arminius himself said, oh, they're being unfair. They're misrepresenting me. They're twisting my words. We're not any alternative movement. We're just regular reformed people. Until it turned out he was giving two sets of lectures, public lectures and private lectures. He was saying two different things, one in public and one in private. And he would give interviews to theologians and on the floor of classes when doubts were raised. And he would satisfy and then concerns would come up all over again. And they ducked and weaved and swerved and squealed about how bad they were being treated right up till, well, as soon as Arminius died, they published the articles, the five articles of the remonstrance. They were the ones that came up with the five points. And suddenly everything that the Orthodox had accused Arminius of teaching, It turns out he really had been teaching, and it appeared right after his death. And I'm so thankful for the great Synod of Dort, where they met and they didn't let the, as President Bush likes to say, the evildoers, they didn't let the evildoers off the hook. The Romance Prince actually tried to take over the Synod, and the Synod, the Orthodox in the Synod said, sit down. This is our Synod. You people are on trial. Shut up. This is how it's going to go. And they prosecuted, of course, the five points in response to the Armenian. I hope we will do that in our churches as well. We can take a lesson from the Senate of Dort. All right. At any rate, so all the way up to the Senate of Dort, there were complaints about ministers failing to hold afternoon services and congregants failing to show up. for afternoon services because they preferred to work or play. Does that sound familiar? Sure it does. Even in our congregations where we hold evening services, you're fortunate to get 50% of the people. So what did the Senate of Dort do in what's often called the post-acta, that is after the international delegates left, what did the Senate do? Well, they responded by insisting on the second service. They didn't back down. They said, you know what? We're going to have a second service. And we want you congregations. We call them consistories, the elders and the ministers who exercise discipline. And the council is the broader, you would say, court. We don't use that language in the Dutch reform tradition very often. And then there are classes, which you call presbyteries. They said that we want consistories to impose censure or classes to impose censure on ministers who refuse to hold the Second Service. And the Senate also said, now you ministers, you must preach sermons that are brief and understandable for the common people. You can't insist that they come to the Second Service and then do things that they don't understand. It's a violation, implicitly, of 1 Corinthians 14. Ministers were encouraged not to neglect the Second Service on account of small attendance. The number one reason that churches give for not having a second service is not enough people come. The Synod of Dort says, we don't care. I love those guys. I really do. Those were men, if you know what I mean. Listen, he said, even though only the minister's own family should be in attendance, you will still have a second service. you will set an example for the people about what is to be done, how and how we conduct our lives. Poor attendance to the Second Service is one thing, which we all face, but it's quite another to cancel the Second Service altogether. And that seems what's happening. For example, a lot of attention has been paid to the decision of the Synod of the CRC in 1995 to permit the ordination of females to the offices of minister and elder. Rather, less attention, however, has been paid to the decision of that same synod to allow congregations the option of not holding the second service. Both, it seems to me, were monumental decisions. One says something about the authority of scripture. The other says something about the relative importance of the means of grace in the life of the church. What did I tell you? What are the two things? Brief quiz here, pop quiz. What are the two things that are plaguing our churches? Who can tell me? You said choir. What's the other one? Quirk. These two decisions in the same synod are examples of quirk and quire. We know better than the Apostle Paul. People were making that argument in 1995. We know better than the Apostle Paul. That's quirk. We know better. We know what the truth is. And the truth is that the Apostle Paul was culturally conditioned. He was a Jew. And he didn't know any better. But we know better. That is an extreme form of quirk. But it is a form of quirk. And the option to cancel the evening service is a form of choir because people can achieve a more meaningful religious experience in small groups. If we can't get them to come to the public service, we'll have small groups. where people can gather together and have an intense, a more meaningful religious experience. How many times have you heard people say, we need to make the service more meaningful? That is perhaps the American slogan for worship and has been partly since the first Great Awakening. Maybe you can tell, I'm not very happy with the first Great Awakening. I don't regard those people as heroes necessarily or our people. I'm not entirely certain about this, but I have been told by reputable people and some of the reading I've done suggests that church attendance after the first great awakening didn't go up. It was flatter and in some cases went down. Seems to me that's not much of a revival if you ask me. If it's the case that attendance to the means of grace is a fair and objective way of measuring results. But it's interesting when you read the pro-revival people, such as Ian Murray, who you think is in favor of really only the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. Well, they weren't reformed. They were Arminian and Pelagian, Finney. And so really that's not our awakening. And there are a lot of people in the sideline churches who think that way. The First Great Awakening is our awakening. It's our revival because it's predestinary and Calvinist revival. And the Second Great Awakening, well, that's an Arminian revival, and it was a bad thing, and it left a burnt-over district and all of that. But if you probe beneath the surface, you'll find that Ian Murray defends not only the First Great Awakening, but if push comes to shove, he defends the Second Great Awakening, because it did produce an intensified religious experience. So as it turns out, it isn't theology that distinguishes the first and the second. its religious experience that unites the first and the second. Same thing happened, I think the same principle drove the CRC in Senate 95 to abandon, or at least to permit the abandoning of the second service. All right, so I said yesterday, and maybe Friday night as well, there are two kinds of conditions in establishing a truth or a practice. So the first is a necessary condition and the second is a sufficient condition. So what's the necessary condition to reestablishing the second service? Obviously, you have one, but it's well for you to think about this in case you're ever tempted to not have one or in case you're in a position to help people think through this issue. Well, it seems to me the necessary condition, if you remember the distinction, is the Sabbath, and the sufficient condition, which we'll get to in a minute, is the notion of a means of grace. Remember, the necessary condition is that without which something cannot be, but it isn't sufficient to bring a truth or a practice to full realization. For example, it's a necessary condition to being Reformed, to hold the doctrine of predestination, but holding the doctrine of predestination does not make you Reformed. folks have held. Thomas Aquinas was a very strong predestinarian. And I don't think any one of us would call him reformed, except John Gerstner, who suggested that if Thomas were alive today, he would be reformed, which is, I think, whacked. But at any rate, that's a historical judgment. That's my academic judgment. Yeah. At any rate, The sufficient condition is to recover the notion of a means of grace. If there's another sense in which the Sabbath is a necessary condition, it's necessary because it's a revealed doctrine. The Sabbath is arguably one of the principal doctrines of the creation narrative, it seems to me. Obviously, there's been a lot of discussion about the length of the days of creation. But I think if we pay attention to the narrative on its own terms, Charles Darwin wasn't alive when God inspired Moses to record the creation narrative. Now, you could say, well, the Holy Spirit knew that Darwin was coming, but that's a sort of a strange hermeneutic. God the Spirit inspired Moses to answer questions that wouldn't exist for 4,000 years or something. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but we don't ordinarily read the Bible that way. We don't say that God the Spirit inspired the Apostle Peter to answer questions that we have today. For example, did God the Spirit inspire Peter to answer, what's his name, who says we shouldn't go to church anymore? Who is that fellow with the used to be reformed radio program? He's a layman. Maybe you don't get it in Chicago. Family Radio. What's his name? Harold Camping. Well, obviously, we would say by good and necessary inference, scripture answers Harold Camping. But would we say that God the Spirit inspired Peter in a particular passage to answer Harold Camping? No, I don't think so. OK. So on its own terms, then, what is the narrative interested in? Well, the narrative is interested in a number of things to establish that Yahweh Elohim, the Yahweh Elohim who delivered Israel out of Egypt, The same Yahweh Elohim who spoke all things into being. And God said, and there was. That's the pattern that marks the narrative in Genesis 1. There are several patterns, but that's one of them. And God said, Elohim said, and there was. God sovereignly speaks. He powerfully speaks. And He speaks into nothing. We confess ex nihilo, creation, from nothing. That is, there was no pre-created matter. He wasn't working with anything. We work with stuff that already is. God made what wasn't. That's one of the great differences between God and us, is that He made what wasn't. And there's the pattern of realms and rulers. He makes a realm and then He establishes a ruler. He makes the heavens and He puts lights in the heavens. He makes the sea and He puts fish in the sea. And He makes the earth and He puts us on the earth. And at the culmination of all of that, God enters into His Sabbath rest. The culmination of all the creatures. We are the culmination of all the creatures. The high point, 126. God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And He gives human beings dominion over all of the other creatures on the earth. In verse 27. Then God rested in chapter 2. Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, Elohim finished His work that He had done. And He rested. He sabbathed on the seventh day. He rested on the Sabbath day from all the work that He had done. So, God blessed the seventh day. and made it holy, because on it God rested from all His work that He had done." Now, what work? Obviously, this is analogical language. Did God literally work? I mean, was He huffing and puffing? When you have to, you know, dig up the garden and turn it over, assuming you don't have a machine to do it. That's work, right? You put the spade in the earth, you turn the earth, And after a little while, especially at my age, you get sore and tired and you're sweaty and hot because it's work. Scripture uses that word because that's how we understand how things happen. But it's analogical language and it's the language of condescension. Obviously, God didn't put forth any effort. It's effortless. He simply says, let there be. So, Scripture wants to create for us and uses for us language that we can understand to help us get some grasp of what happened without really understanding what took place. I mean, you can't really imagine something from nothing, honestly. You've never seen it. It transcends our ability. We don't even know what nothing is. I guarantee you, you cannot think of absolutely nothing. If you close your eyes and you try to think of nothing, it turns into something. Which, by the way, since I've been hard on John Frame, I'll credit John. He's the one that taught me that and he's exactly right. We are so finite, we can't even think, really, of infinity. We can say the word infinity, but we don't know what it is. We don't even know what nothing is. Because we've always only known something. Because we're creatures. So why then, given all those truths, why then does the text say what it says? The text says what it says because we are to think of ourselves as analogs to God, image bearers to God. All of this talk of working and resting. I mean, resting. If God wasn't tired, then literally, which he wasn't, you surely don't want to say that he was tired. You're not a Mormon. Does He really have eyes? Jesus does, yes, but God, considered apart from the Incarnation? No. Does He really have feet? No. Does He really have hands? No. But the Bible says He does, because those are ways of thinking about Him, children. In fact, the Hebrew Bible says His nose gets red and hot, because that's the Hebrew way of saying that someone's angry. But God doesn't have a nose to get red and hot. So these are just pictures, ways of talking to help us understand truths. So, why then are these pictures given to us of God? Because this is the way He wants us to live. We're to conduct ourselves the way God conducted Himself. We're to work six days and rest on the seventh. That's all it is. I think that's one of the great points of this creation narrative. It's built into creation. I think that's a huge point. It's built into creation. Sometimes people say, oh, well, the Sabbath, that was Moses, and we're under Christ, and therefore the Sabbath is not for us. And I respond to them, but the creation narrative is before Moses. The creation narrative means that the Sabbath is built into nature. It's built into being a human being. built into how we relate to one another, and how we relate to God, and how we relate to creation. I think that's huge. That means the one in seven pattern doesn't go away when Jesus fulfills the civil, ceremonial, and moral law, because it's built into creation. Well, time's getting away from us. There's lots of other things we could appeal to. God is said not only to rest, but to bless and set apart. Now, think of this. What does it mean, before the fall? Before the fall, there's no sin. And God is said to make holy, kadosh. Kadosh is the verb. To make holy something that isn't defiled. The seventh day isn't defiled, and yet it's said to be made holy. And blessed? How do you bless something that's already perfect? Clearly, the message is, God wants us to... there was, let me rephrase that, there was from the beginning of creation, the sacred and the secular. That's what this means. That there's ordinary life and extraordinary life, and the Sabbath from the very beginning is extraordinary. Because it was a picture of what was to come, that should Adam meet the test that God put for him, the day you eat the rub, you shall surely die, that is implicitly do this and live, he would enter into a consummate state of blessed existence, full enjoyment of God. And the Sabbath from the very beginning was a picture of that. And it's still a picture of that. Well, time is getting away, so I'm going to have to press on, but that's the reason why at Sinai, in Exodus 20, God, as it were, appeals to creation to ground the Sabbath. In Exodus 20, He appeals to the creation narrative to ground the Sabbath. He doesn't appeal to redemption there. Now, 40 years later, just as they prepare to enter into the Promised Land, Moses does restate the Sabbath and this time he grounds it in redemption. You keep Sabbath and you let your servants keep Sabbath. Remember you were slaves in Egypt and God graciously redeemed you. Why? Because grace renews nature. It doesn't obliterate it. It doesn't perfect it because it's not broken. per se, but that is in creation, but because of sin, it must be renewed. Grace renews nature and that which was established in creation is re-established in redemption and transformed. That's why, to make a very long argument short, that's why we don't keep the Saturday Sabbath anymore. We don't keep the Saturday Sabbath because grace renews nature. And it's the apostolic pattern of meeting on the first day. Why do they meet on the first day? Children, do you know why they meet on the first day? What happened on the first day of the week after they... Remember, they crucified Jesus on Friday. He was in the tomb on Saturday. And what happened the next morning? Early the next morning. Can anyone say? What happened? He rose from the dead. The ladies ran faster than the men. And they went to the tomb. And they looked to see if anyone was there. And, of course, there was a man sitting on the rock, which was kind of the door of the tomb. And there wasn't anybody there. He says, what are you looking for? The fellow you're looking for is gone. And he was raised from the dead. And they looked inside the tomb. And he went all the way in there. And you know what they saw? The clothes in which he'd been buried were folded up very neatly, because he didn't need them anymore, because he was alive. Isn't that amazing? And it's true. So, when God the Son gets raised on the first day of the week, that is a way, that's His way of claiming the first day of the week. That's the new rest day. That's the new one in seven day. And of course, then if you read the New Testament, you read the book of Acts, they met, the Christians did, on the first day of the week, which was Sunday morning. This is the first day of the week. We think of it as the end of the week, but really it's the first day of the week. We begin the week just like we give the first 10% of all that God gives us. We give the first 10% back to God, to his church. Then we give the first day of the week back to God, because it's His, it belongs to Him. And He took possession of it in the resurrection. Okay, that's the necessary condition. The sufficient condition, about which we have just no time, but let me say by way of summary, is to recover the idea of the means of grace, which Lewis Berkhoff defines this way. He defines them as objective channels which Christ has instituted in the church and to which He ordinarily binds Himself in the communication of His grace. And that's the doctrine that you see in Heidelberg Catechism 65. From where does true faith come? It comes through the Holy Spirit, works faith in our hearts, through the preaching of the Holy Gospel, and confirms it by the use of the Holy Sacraments. Notice that order, by the way. The Spirit uses the preaching of the Gospel to create faith, and He confirms it by the Sacraments. The Federal Visionists are wrong. He doesn't create anything by the Sacraments. He confirms everything by the Sacraments. He seals everything. He signs everything. But He creates through the Word. Why? Because that's the pattern. In the beginning, God said. Nothing came into being except that which came into being through the Word. Just as it was in creation, so it is in re-creation. And that's how God has always worked. Who thundered His Sinai children? You know it was God. But do you know that it was Jesus? The same Jesus who fed the thousands and who healed? And he wept. That Jesus was at the top of Sinai in Exodus 20. And he thundered and all the people were terrified. So, they didn't want to come anywhere near that mountain. And they said to Moses, you go. We're not going near that place. We'll get killed. How do I know that? Because the book of Hebrews says so. In chapter 12, at the end of that long... In chapter 11 and then chapter 12, we come to a mountain that cannot be touched. A mountain that's more holy. And whom does he say is at the top of the mountain? Jesus. We've come to Jesus who is at the top of the mountain. And that's what we confess in Belgian Confession 33. Westminster Confession speaks of the due use of the ordinary means. And, of course, Westminster Shorter 88 teaches the same thing. And there's a whole pattern in Scripture of morning and evening. Creation is patterned morning and evening. This is my very brief case for the Second Service. All through the history of redemption, there are morning sacrifices and evening sacrifices. Psalm 141-2, Psalm 92-2, 1 Chronicles 16-40, Exodus 29-38-43. There are morning and evening sacrifices. Jesus himself followed, in a way, an evening and morning pattern. In a sense, he's crucified in the evening. He's the priest and the offering and the temple in the evening. And he's the resurrected Savior in the morning. Both morning and evening belong to Jesus. He fulfilled the old Sabbath. He instituted the new Sabbath in his redemption. The whole history of the church, Always morning and evening services. Early Church, 140 A.D. Justin Martyr testifies they met for morning and evening or two services, morning and afternoon, a.m. and p.m. Medieval Church, Matins and Vespers for more than a thousand years. Reformation Church, Matins and Vespers, morning and afternoon services. Post-Reformation. morning and afternoon. So it's the biblical pattern. It's the creational pattern. It's the redemptive pattern. It's the historical pattern. That's my case in a nutshell. All right. I promised time for Q&A and I left just a little bit. But now's your chance if you've been storing up questions. We took some questions yesterday and Friday, but maybe there are some that came up overnight. Yeah. The question is for the recording, what should the second service look like? And I don't see any reason to change the pattern of the reformed churches, which is in our church orders and which is in the Westminster Directorate for Public Worship. And that is that the morning service has one character and the second service has a slightly more instructional character. So you could say the morning service is more doxological, and the second service is more instructional. And the second service in the Dutch tradition has always been a catechism service. I understand Presbyterians haven't always had catechism services. And I'm not here arguing for that necessarily, although there are examples of the Westminster Shorter being exposited in a series of sermons. The Church Order of Dort is explicit for the Dutch churches and those that subscribe the canons of Dort, or that use the Dort church order, that in the Second Service, the Heidelberg Catechism is to be exposited every Lord's Day. Obviously, we're expositing the word of God using the Heidelberg Catechism as a guide. Although sometimes the catechism itself has been exposited, and that goes back to that form of subscription or mode of subscription to which I referred the other day, quia. we subscribe the catechism because it's biblical. Therefore, to exposit the catechism is to exposit scripture, although sometimes people simply exposit the text of scripture and then make reference to the catechism. So there are different ways of getting at it. I personally, I think there's a lot of wisdom in expositing the catechism, but I can't say as a matter of principle it has to be done, that everyone has to do it the way the Dutch churches have done it. But I can say you must have a second service. Because the preaching of the gospel is the means of grace. And the administration of the sacraments is a means of grace. Prayer, in the sense that the Westminster Confession is a means of grace. Yes? You can edit that, right? Sorry about that. Whenever I do anything, It always gets that way. Less formality. Well, I mean, it's a stated service. So whatever informality is appropriate to a stated service, it's a called service authorized by the elders, conducted according to the word of God. So I think I would rather say historically, there's been a different character. So more instructional. And if that means slightly less formality, sure. I think historically, there has been a certain degree of informality. When I say informal, I speak from a culture where we meet on the beach. And people are likely as not to walk into the service in their flip flops, which are sandals and shorts and t-shirts. Now, we conduct services in Geneva in robes. as a way of communicating to people, this is divine worship. This is serious business. Not that we aren't full of joy and aren't happy to see them, but this isn't playtime. And so it's informality where I come from is really informal. We talk about coastal time. There's inland time and coastal time. Getting things started on the coast is a challenge. Everything's very relaxed. Yes. Well, the question is, was Baxter not reformed because he didn't like the distinction between active and passive? No, Baxter wasn't reformed for a variety of reasons. He was a moralist, and I don't think any moralist is reformed. There were Orthodox men, however, at the assembly who denied the doctrine of active obedience. They were wrong. And I regret that the assembly was too gentle. The assembly chose to omit the word whole obedience, which in that context was understood to mean the imputation of the act of obedience. It, however, used the word perfect obedience, which seems to me has never been as strong as whole obedience. But in that context, that was seen as a concession, as a way of allowing the Gattaker, Twiss, and Vines. Twiss was deceased by that point, I believe. But Gattaker and Vines to remain in the assembly and live by their conscience and still subscribe the confession. So it seems pretty clear that the confession accommodated their scruples about active obedience while giving language to the rest of us who continued to believe active obedience So the short story is it's possible to, I think, deny active obedience and still be reformed, although I would say it's one thing to do it in the 1640s. It's quite another thing to do it all these hundreds of years later when we've had all this time to think about it and work out the distinctions. And the doctrine of active obedience is overwhelmingly the doctrine of the reformed theologians. and has been the doctrine of the reformed churches. So if I concede that someone can deny it and still be reformed, I do so with caveats and a lot of reluctance. But Baxter is not reformed for a variety of reasons. And I don't know that that would be one of them. But that certainly doesn't bode well for Mr. Baxter. Yeah. Sure. The Westminster directory is quite clear about the place and use of family devotions and family worship. And I should confess that I'm not very strong at that theologically. It's not something to which I've given a great deal of thought, partly because I've spent a lot of my career reacting to the pervasive pietism and privatization of religion. So because so many people assume the priority of the private, I've spent a lot of time emphasizing the priority of the public. But I don't mean to diminish the private. I think it's extraordinarily valuable. And to some degree, I regret not being a little bit better at that in my own family. And to be sure, we shouldn't neglect that. The reading of the Word of God, praying with our families. I think some people conduct, you know, practical worship services, and the directory is actually pretty clear about private, you know, the limits on private gatherings. The directory has no time for what we would call cell groups. You could get a lot of trouble, according to the directory, for holding a home Bible study or a cell group. I think they knew why, because you get people sitting around saying, I think this text means, or this text means X to me, which is not a very healthy thing. On the other hand, a man leading his family in worship is a godly thing, and it should be done. But a layman is not a minister. And so I think it's appropriate to read the scriptures and pray and meditate on them. And children should be instructed, and families instructed according to the catechism. I don't know how much farther I would go. That's why we have catechisms and confessions. Just because you're at home doesn't suddenly make you a priest or a minister in the official sense of the word. All right. It's right at 20. So this is the deadline. So why don't we stop and do you mind if I close with prayer? Let's pray. Our God and our Father, we are grateful for the Sabbath. We are grateful for the pattern that you established in creation. We're grateful that you have loved us from all eternity and cared for us so much that you were willing to give us such a wonderful example, that you reveal yourself as working and resting. We know, Sovereign Lord, that you are not a creature that needs rest. You're not a creature who must work to create. Evidently you reveal yourself and describe yourself this way so that we will understand ourselves how we ought to live and the pattern by which we ought to conduct our lives. And so we're grateful that you have established this rest day first of all in creation but secondarily in redemption. We're grateful for what it promises to us that in redemption we have a promise of eternal life that we already have now in principle through Jesus Christ and the imputation of his obedience to us, which we have received through faith, accepting, resting, and receiving. We're so grateful for those graces and gifts. But we're grateful for the way the Sabbath communicates to us your grace and mercy that one day we shall be with our Savior. We shall see him face to face. We shall sit at table. We shall fellowship. We shall be fed in ways that we cannot even really imagine. We shall enter into a consummate joy, and that all the sorrows and struggles and griefs of this life shall be no more, but that things shall be as they were intended to be from the very beginning. And we're grateful, then, for all of these gifts. We're grateful for the opportunity to gather together on the Sabbath and to worship according to the Word of God, to receive the means of grace and to be fed and nourished and strengthened. O Lord, be present with us this morning as we worship. May you enable us to pray and to preach and to offer praise in a way that is pleasing to you. May you be glorified in all that is done. May Jesus be glorified and may sinners be converted and the saints beatified. We ask these things for Jesus' sake. Amen.