Thank you, Joel. It's a joy to be here and to have all my sins exposed before the gathered multitudes. No, it seriously is a joy. Ever since, and I'm not even sure how long ago it was, Joel, that you called. I was driving somewhere in the car and we had a wonderful conversation about what my topic would be here in the full session. And you suggested a change in the original topic that I had been assigned to the subject of the resurgence of Calvinism in America. And that suggestion immediately resonated with me. It's something that I've been reading about. It's something, along with Joel and so many of the others of you in this room, I've been watching with my own eyes as I travel here and there. with my mouth wide open, look at what God is doing in the most surprising ways, in the most surprising places in terms of the display of His own glory and capturing people for the doctrines of grace and a big view of God and of His glory. And so when Joel suggested the theme of the resurgence of Calvinism in America, I jumped at it. I think you may have been a little surprised that I warmed up to a subject change like that. How long ago was that, Joel? Who knows? Six months ago. So I've been waiting to speak with you about that ever since. Let me ask you to turn in your Bibles to Romans 11 before we jump into this talk, and I think you'll see, I hope you'll see at the end of this address why we would start here at Romans 11. But I want to begin perhaps a verse earlier than you're expecting, Romans 11, 32. Hear God's word. For God hath concluded them all. in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counselor, or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again. For of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be the glory forever. Amen. Amen. Indeed thus ends this reading of God's holy Inspired and inerrant word may he write its eternal truth Upon all our hearts There is a reformed resurgence Going on. It's young. It's vast. It stresses at least across the English-speaking world. You can meet it in Australia and You can meet it in North America. You can meet it in Britain. You can meet it in parts unknown. Conferences sponsored not necessarily by what would have been considered 40 years ago the old line Calvinist denominations, but in Bible churches, Baptist churches, independent churches, charismatic churches. There is a Fever for the glory of God that has gotten into the blood system of a new generation even time magazine this last year has noticed this particular trend and Labeled the new Calvinism one of ten key ideas ranking it third among ten key ideas sweeping the Western world today what is going on. Where did this come from? That is the delightful subject that I have the privilege of speaking about with you for a few moments. Now, some of you know Ian Murray's famous introduction to William Cunningham's introduction to historical theology, or his great book on historical theology, a two-volume work. This introduction of Ian Murray's has also been appended to some other period books as well. but it was in the introduction to Cunningham's historical theology that I first read it. And it's been probably 25 years since I first read it, so this is a little bit ad-libbed. Here's how it goes. In the year 1800, weakness, slumber, and death reigned in the Church of Scotland. from the pulpits from which the covenanters had proclaimed the glories of God and the crown covenant rights of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, only coldness and moralism were proclaimed. But God did three things to change this situation. The first was the publication of a book by Thomas McCree, The Life of John Knox. Within a matter of years, that book was found in the homes of every godly layperson in Scotland. And the memory of what God had done through the life and ministry of John Knox stoked evangelical fires again. The second was the conversion of a minister. You heard me right, the conversion of a minister in the Kirk. He was a man who was more interested in mathematics than the gospel. And on what he thought was his deathbed, the Lord brought him to saving grace and to faith in Christ. His name was Thomas Chalmers. And under his tutelage, the third factor in the new evangelical revival in Scotland would blossom into full flourish. And that third factor was the birth of a series of little boys from about 1801 to about 1810. Names like McChain. Bonar, Buchan, Buchanan, and on and on and on. And all of these men coming under the evangelical influence of Chalmers, led to a revival of Reformed Christianity in Scotland that I think it is not too much to say impacted the entire English-speaking world and beyond, and is still impacting that entire English-speaking world to this very day. I love the way that Murray is able to sum up a title shift in Christianity in just a few words. And I've got to do something like that in this talk today, though I won't do it nearly as well as my older brother in the Lord, Ian Murray. But what I'd like to suggest to you is that there are at least nine factors in this current resurgence of Calvinism in America and I need to say something very quickly about this resurgence Let me say two things one of all the first of all is this this new Calvinism is not the full-orbed confessional Calvinism of the three forms of unity or the Westminster Confession It is a Calvinism that draws from the rich deposit of truth that has been bequeathed to this generation from those older, wiser theologians, especially an appreciation for the soteriology. of that older confessional Calvinism, but perhaps without an adequate appreciation for the ecclesiology of that older Calvinism. And so the new Calvinism is not identical to the old Calvinism. That's important for us to understand. Secondly, I would want to say this. As we look at this work, it is a mixed work, but let me encourage you with this. There is no work on this earth that is not a mixed work. If you are seeing slow but sure spiritual growth in your congregation due to the operations of the Holy Spirit and to the faithful administration of the means of grace, is that work in your congregation without admixture? No, it is not. There is impurity in every church in this world, and there is impurity in this movement. In every factor that I'm about to list, you and I could find something to criticize about it theologically. And so what I want to suggest to you, especially those of you who have drunk most deeply from the pristine wells of confessional Calvinism, is to appreciate what God is doing in a work that is characterized by admixture, and to glorify Him, and then to invest yourself in shepherding this awakening to a more full appreciation of the glorious doctrine of the church as it's revealed in the scripture. So there's my prefatory word. Now, what are the nine factors I think that we can identify in this resurgence of Calvinism in America? And I want to begin, my first factor is this, three preachers. Three preachers. One from the 19th century. One from the middle of the 20th century, one who's still preaching today. One from the 19th century, one from the 20th century, middle of the 20th century, one who's still preaching today. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, David Martin Lloyd-Jones, and John MacArthur. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, John MacArthur a Baptist a Presbyterian slash independent Congregationalists and a Dispensationalist does God have a sense of humor Three preachers, you know, it is fascinating that if you pick up a copy of Spurgeon's a massive 57 volume Metropolitan, you really have to pick something up if you picked up the 57 volume Met tab sermons. They are commended by ministers as diverse as W.A. Criswell and Billy Graham to Stephen Oldford and John Volward to R.G. Lee and Charles Feinberg to Jack Hiles and D. James Kennedy. Now, it's fair to say that you could not find those names endorsing anybody else's book but Charles Spurgeon. Some of them avid anti-Calvinists, commending the work of the great Calvinistic Baptist preacher, C.H. Spurgeon, to a generation of unsuspecting evangelicals. who bought him hook, line, and sinker, much to the horror of their anti-Calvinist recommenders of C.H. Spurgeon. And of course, Spurgeon himself says in his sermon on 1 Corinthians 1, 23 and 24, I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified unless you preach what is nowadays called Calvinism. Now, that's Spurgeon. And Spurgeon has consistently across this century past introduced generation after generation of Bible-believing preachers who want to preach the Word of God to Calvinism, a grand vision of the display of God's grace in his work of salvation. And then, of course, there's D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the man that J.I. Packer not only says is the greatest preacher he ever heard, but is the greatest man he's ever known. And I've heard Dr. Packer with my own eyes or with my own ears on more than one occasion instantaneously respond to the question, who is the greatest man you've ever known with the doctor? Dr. Lloyd-Jones. Lloyd-Jones' impact is staggering on 20th century evangelicalism. Not only on the British scene, in which he towered like a giant through his influence on Tyndale House, the InterVarsity Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, the Christian Medical Society, the Evangelical Library, and on and on and on. But as his expositions say of the Sermon on the Mount, came to the United States, just the transcripts of his sermons, it impacted pastors like my boyhood pastor who had never read anything like his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount and was completely caught up with it and gave us the fruit and the cream of his reading of those great sermons. And then of course his books, Preachers and preaching, or preaching and preachers, encouraged a generation of expositional evangelical ministers. In his great book, Spiritual Depression, encouraged numerous hurting saints, giving them the comfort of the gospel. And Lloyd-Jones had a massive impact on this generation. I well remember Don Carson sheepishly admitting that he had crept into a service at Westminster Chapel in London to hear the great Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. And after he'd heard the first sermon, Don said, I thought to myself, what's the fuss about this? He's just preaching the Bible. He said, eight weeks later, he said, I realized I was sitting under the most masterful expositor of scripture that I'd ever encountered. Man after man after man used greatly by God around the world can give that same testimony, the impact of Dr. Lloyd-Jones on them. And of course, Dr. Lloyd-Jones was a Calvinist. He didn't wear the labels on his sleeve. He didn't use the theological slang and jargon, but he was emphatically a Calvinist. from the Welsh Methodist Church, which is Presbyterian, don't ask me to explain. Lloyd-Jones brought sound, reformed theology in the language of Scripture into every sermon he preached. Tim Keller of Redeemer Church in New York City says, I learned to preach the gospel by listening to Dr. Lloyd-Jones. Dr. Lloyd-Jones would preach an evangelistic sermon every Sunday evening. Three hundred of them remained to us recorded. You can hear his own voice. Tim Keller has listened to every single one of them more than once. He credits him with teaching him how to preach the gospel. So one preacher from the 19th century, Spurgeon. One from the middle of the 20th century, Lloyd-Jones. One from the end of the 20th century, still preaching today, his name is John MacArthur, from a dispensational Bible church background. but a man so committed to the word of God that he was willing to go wherever that word took him. And it took him right in to the glories of the sovereign God and the doctrines of grace. So that his preaching, which is now heard in more languages than I can number, and by millions on radio daily, has been expounding the doctrines of grace and the sovereignty of God for decades. I will never forget four years ago being with John MacArthur at his Shepherd's Conference when he told a story of a young girl from a Muslim country who was attending his master's college. She had come to faith in Christ by listening with a huddled group of Seekers and believers in her country to a broadcast of his sermons that had been read by a man in their language She had come to faith in Christ now. She's from a Muslim family in a Muslim country. You understand what that means? Her father was even a mid-level official with the country's government But her father loved her And so he allowed her to follow her dream, that is to go to the master's college in California and study. And so she went there and she enrolled in computers and technologies as her major, because her country would not allow her to enroll in anything that would have involved studying Christianity or the Bible. But on the side of her studies in computers, she began to study Greek, Hebrew and the cognate languages because she wanted to translate the scriptures back into the language of her people He told us the story right after she had come back from the winter break when she flew home she was met at the airport and by the secret service of her country who interrogated her for two hours and then released her. When she got home, her father was not home, but her uncle was there and waiting for her. She walked in the door and he said, are you a Christian? She said, yes, I am. He said, you have shamed our family and you will pay the price. He picked up a chair, broke it over her back, took the stick of the leg and began beating her to death. At the final moment, her father walked in the door and rescued her from his brother. drove her to the airport, put her on a plane, and told her that she was not going to be able to come back to her country. She arrived back in California at the Master's Seminary, and just a few days later was able to have a personal audience with Dr. MacArthur. She recounted this story. Now this is a 17, 18-year-old girl, a freshman in college. who'd come to faith in Christ through hearing MacArthur's sermons on this glorious sovereign God and the glorious doctrines of grace, read by a preacher in her own language. And Dr. MacArthur said to her, what were you thinking as your uncle was beating you to death? And this young woman said, I was thinking, that this man has a religion that he would kill for, but I have a Savior that I would die for. And it humbled me to the dust that this little girl knew so much more of the glory of God's grace and of the power of the Savior and the sovereignty of God than I did. that she would be willing to lay down her life for her savior in that way as a martyr to the truth. And this kind of preaching going all over the world every day through the ministry of John MacArthur and what does he teach? The doctrines of grace and the sovereignty of God. So there's my first answer to the, what's the resurgence? Where is it coming from? Three preachers, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and MacArthur. My second answer is books. You knew that was coming. Books. Where did the reformed resurgence come from? Where does the resurgence of Calvinism in America come from? Books. And you have to mention the grandfather of them all when you mention books. The banner of truth, trust. Lloyd-Jones. Iain Murray, S. M. Houghton, and others gathered in the late 1950s and established a trust for the republication of Puritan literature. In those days, the only place you could have found Puritan literature would have been on the shelves of libraries where those books had been neglected for decades, if not centuries. or in dusty corners of antiquarian bookstores in Britain and New England. But the Banner of Truth Trust began to publish systematically and carefully sound, solid, Puritan literature, eventually began to publish a magazine and spread an appetite for deep books among the people of God. Students in the 1970s who were used to spiritual classics like, lighten up and live, suddenly were holding in their hands precious remedies against Satan's devices. Stephen Charnock's massive study of the attributes of God and more. And the spreading of this appetite led to a deepening of the grasp of biblical truth. And of course, all of these books were Calvinistic. They exalted the sovereignty of God in grace and in salvation. And of course, they spawned many, many other publishers of good books, one of whom sits on the front row in this room and whose books are behind you, I might add, available for your edification at the end of this session. Third, another source of this resurgence an evangelist. Now this is unlikely, I think, because the idea of a Calvinistic evangelist would not have struck anyone as surprising in the 16th, 17th, 18th, or 19th century. Indeed, the greatest evangelists of the days in those centuries were reckoned by all as the Calvinistic preachers of their time. But somehow in the 20th century, perhaps because of the deleterious effects of the Second Great Awakening and the kinds of pragmatic revivalism that had reigned from the times of Finney and Moody, Calvinism became disassociated with evangelism. So that though the Calvinists had spawned the missions movement and had fed the fires of a passionate evangelical preaching for decades. After all, who was it that Whitefield read four times on his knees in order to help him in the preaching of how many sermons, 28,000 sermons during the Great Awakening? Matthew Henry. the great English nonconformist Calvinist. Now, who would question Whitfield's commitment to preaching the gospel, but somehow that was lost in the 20th century. And one of the great charges against Calvinism was that it was gospel killing and evangelically diminishing and evangelistically deficient. And along came a man named D. James Kennedy. who was a passionate Calvinist pursuing personal evangelism. Now, we may fault some of his methods. as reflecting the salesmanship of his era and even some of the decisionism of the 20th century. But no one could question this man's commitment to the doctrines of grace and to passionate personal evangelism and public proclamation of the gospel. And so it became very difficult after Dr. Kennedy for people to say Calvinists can't evangelize because of their theology. Now in his wake, I think we can say many more helpful and biblical Calvinistic presentations of both the gospel and of how one shares the gospel have grown up, but he was a pioneer at the end of the 20th century for evangelism, and he dispelled the myth that Calvinism was anti-evangelistic, and he inspired a generation of men behind him. The fourth influence, I think, on the Reformed resurgence is the battle for the Bible. It is perhaps the greatest theological controversy of the late 20th century that stretched across denominations that represent what we call modern evangelicalism in North America and even in Britain. And though there were many prominent non-Calvinists that took a brave stand for the inerrancy of Scripture during the days of the battle for the Bible, the great names associated with the defense of Scripture and what names immediately pop into your mind when you think of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, James Montgomery Boyce, Roger Nicole and on and on and on it goes. In fact, do you know I was talking with Dr. Sproul not long ago. There was supposed to be in a committee to do a pre drafted document for the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy when they had their massive confab. to consider what statement of affirmations and denials would be debated at their gathering. And when they got there, the committee had not adequately done its work. And so do you know who sat down and wrote the bulk of the affirmations and denials of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy? Late into the night, J.I. Packer and R.C. Sproul sat up and drafted them by hand. And it is almost impossible to calculate the exponential effect of that labor infidelity. And because those men took a stand for the Bible, people outside of their own confessional traditions looked to them as men who could be relied upon to defend and expound Scripture. They trusted them because they knew they were Bible men. And because they trusted them because they knew they were Bible men, When they taught them the sovereignty of God and the salvation of sinners, they knew that they had gotten that truth, not from their own minds or from the opinions of the age, but they'd gotten it from the Bible. And so Calvinism was spread through the denial of the inerrancy of scripture by theological liberals. Don't tell me you don't serve a sovereign God. Sitting in heaven, how will I spread the glories of grace? I'll raise up a generation of men who deny the Bible. That's how I'll do it. And I'll raise up another who will stand fast by it. And I'll win people to the teaching of that word through the defenders of that word. Fifth, and you'll pardon my parochialism when I do this fifth point. After all, I was born in the South. As Dr. Beakey's already told you, I'm an eighth generation Southern Presbyterian. Actually, I'm a ninth generation Southern Presbyterian. And I wanna point as my fifth source of the Calvinistic resurgence, two church controversies. the controversy in the old Southern Presbyterian Church, and the controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention. In the 1940s, a missionary, a medical missionary to China, came back to the United States to his beloved Montreat after he had been run out because of the Maoist communist takeover, the same takeover that eventually took the life of Eric Little. And along with hundreds of other Presbyterian missionaries, he came back to his native South. But when he came back, he came back to a church that was not the church that he had left years before when he went to the mission field. It was a church rife with Barthianism and theological liberalism. And he was shocked. His name was L. Nelson Bell, the father of a woman named Ruth Bell Graham, the father-in-law of a man named Billy Graham. And L. Nelson Bell set about to establish a movement in Southern Presbyterianism that would recapture the Southern Presbyterian Church for the Bible, for the gospel, and for evangelism and missions, because he saw liberalism cutting the heart out of his church. His dream was never realized. The old church did not recover. But in 1973, 50,000 faithful people left their churches, some divided from their families, to establish the Presbyterian Church in America, whose motto was, true to the Bible, to the Reformed faith, and obedient to the Great Commission. And that small confabulation of 50,000 people has grown to about half a million. And today is the largest conservative Presbyterian body in the English-speaking world. It has established the largest campus ministry of a conservative reform group in the English-speaking world, the Reformed University Fellowship. It has the largest conservative Reformed missionary force, not just in the world today, but in the history of the world. And God has blessed that little backwater Southern gathering of faithful Bible people in spreading the Reformed faith here and around the world. And at the same time, beginning in the 1970s, there was a resurgence in another Southern denomination, a little denomination of only about 16 million people. the largest Protestant fellowship of churches in the world, in the English-speaking world, the Southern Baptist Convention. And through Bible men, none more eminent than R. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, there has been utterly, shockingly, revival of the Calvinism of the abstract of principles of the Southern Baptist Seminary drafted by the two founding professors in the 19th century who had studied under Charles Hodge and Samuel Miller at Princeton Theological Seminary and were thoroughgoing Calvinists. And when Dr. Moeller came into the faculty of Southern Baptist Seminary to take over from a Theological moderate and to turn that institution back to its roots into the inerrancy of scripture He did it on a confessional basis the abstract of principles, which is a Calvinistic document and he said no one is ever again going to teach at this institution that does not believe in the abstract of principles the first day he preached convocation and the entire student body of 1,400 students stood up and turned their backs to him. His sermon was, don't just do something, stand there. It was a message on standing on the authority of Scripture. He had pinned his flag to the mass. Now, you need to understand something. Not a decade before, He was a student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, deeply influenced by the theological liberalism of the moderates under the influence of the theology of Karl Barth, and a man named Karl Henry came to visit the campus, and Al Mohler was assigned to show him around. And Karl Henry said to Al Mohler, what is your view on inerrancy? Al Mohler had never heard of inerrancy. And he had no arguments for what Dr. Henry told him in the hours ahead. His life was dramatically transformed. And he came back to that institution, and after preaching that sermon, he walked across campus, and his seven deans followed him into his office. And he said, we will not stand for this. We are calling for a vote of no confidence on you at the faculty meeting tomorrow morning. And he said to them, fine, you're fired. I've been to that campus many times in the bad old days. When Al invited me to come back on that campus, four years after the turnaround had taken place, I wept uncontrollably at what God had given back to his people and to his churches. It is now the largest theological seminary in the world, and every professor there believes without exception and from the heart the abstract of principles drafted by Boyce and Broadus, who had studied under Charles Hodge and learned their Calvinism from old Princeton. You don't think your God is sovereign? You don't know how sovereign he is. Sixth, what's the sixth source of the resurgence? A book and an Anglican. A book and an Anglican, the book Knowing God the Anglican J.i. Packer now he was already respected in British evangelicalism. The book that put him on the landscape was his great book, Fundamentalism in the Word of God. And if you've never read Fundamentalism in the Word of God, it is more relevant today than it was when it was written. And there has never been a finer defense, brief defense of the authority, inspiration, and inerrancy of scripture ever penned in the English language. You can read it in a long sitting. Fundamentalism in the Word of God. He was already respected because of that book, but he began to write a series of magazine articles that InterVarsity said, hey, we'd like to put that into a book. And inspired by Calvin's Institutes, the title was given Knowing God, and it spawned a series of books in the 1970s and 80s and 90s that had a gerund and God, loving God, trusting God, desiring God, but it all started with knowing God. And that evangelical Anglican, because he was trusted by the larger evangelical world through their exposure to that volume, a volume that Billy Graham endorsed, a volume endorsed by the great and good of centrist evangelicalism, introduced a whole generation to a sovereign God and to the fullness of his grace. And Dr. Packer has introduced a generation to the doctrines of grace through his famous introduction to John Owen's death of death in the death of Christ. I guarantee you 10 times the people in our own time have read Packer's introduction to Owen's death of death in the death of Christ than have read Owen's death of death in the death of Christ. And they haven't been able to get out of the introduction without coming to the doctrines of grace. And whatever differences we may have with our dear brother about ECT, evangelicals and Catholics together, we are eternally and profoundly grateful to him for the influence that he has been for the doctrines of grace in our own time. Seventh, what's the seventh source of this resurgence? A theologian philosopher who can popularize. A theologian philosopher who can popularize. You cannot give your top 10 list of the reform resurgence without mentioning the name Robert Charles Sproul. R.C. Sproul has for now almost a half century been faithfully laboring, teaching church history, systematic theology, philosophy, and Bible to tens and hundreds of thousands of people on the radio and in conferences daily and year-round all over the Western world. I'm always astounded at the diversity of people that gather at these conferences. I stumbled upon a few years ago a mother, a father, and their seven children sitting on the front row of his conference, the children stretching from about three years old up to about 14 years old. And I thought, surely this is a homeschooling family from a Bible church somewhere. That's what it is. No, they were members of a United Methodist Church outside of Chicago. whose father listened to R.C. Sproul on the radio daily and wanted his children to hear the messages that he was hearing on the radio from Dr. Sproul. I was incredulous. I said, excuse me, you're a United Methodist. Do you understand that he is reformed? His answer, what's that? R.C. Sproul. Eighth, the eighth influence on the Reformed resurgence. Now, you knew this was coming sooner or later. The eighth influence on the Reformed resurgence is a force of nature named John Piper. John Piper, let me just quote my dear friend Mark Dever. It has been John who is the swelling wave hitting the coast. It is John who is the visible expression of many of these earlier men. His desiring God ministries is the conduit through whom so many of these others who have preceded him now find their word mediated to this rising generation, especially, of course, Jonathan Edwards. John Piper is transfixed by, intoxicated by Jonathan Edwards, and he channels him every sermon he preaches. Why John Piper? What explains the power of his ministry? All unction about God's truth comes from God. All fructifying of our labors comes from God. But in terms of human observation, what sets John's labors off from those so many others of us? Theological precision meeting up with spiritual, life-consuming passion, a profound hope imparting of a serious joy leading to satisfying sacrifice. The starkness of John's statements, the uncompromising nature of his sermons, calls, and claims have captivated the supposedly word-weary generation that we live and minister in. John may have turned 60 not too long ago, but his discipleship, his Bible reading, and his preaching and writing have more of the freshness of a young convert's anything, God, anything you ask of me than they do of professorial overstuffed leathered chairs with a retirement account to protect. The man has no fear. And he serves only one. And it comes out in everything that he says and does. I love the way that Colin Hansen tells the story of the young woman who sat under his preaching for the first time. And her reaction, I was terrified. And then I realized I'd never known the God of the Bible. And then I fell down and worshiped Now there's one last influence of the Reformed resurgence that I want to share with you before I close briefly with just a few final comments, and that is this. It's not a person, it's not a man, it's not a seminary, it's not a denomination, it's not a movement. It's the decline of a movement. It seems to me that one of the key things that has led to the Reformed resurgence is the decline and death of liberalism, and we've seen it before our own eyes. Liberalism is either dead or dying in our culture, sustained only by the life support of endowments. Quick, name all the growing liberal churches denominations and seminaries in the world. Right, you're done. There are none. They are dead and dying. It's evaporated. The liberal alternative to secularism is gone. What's left? What about the more one non-Calvinistic denominations of our day and age. Well, the nominalism of days past is now in a hostile secular environment. And again, my friend Mark Devers says this, the theological climate in which weaker more vapid versions of Christianity pale and fade and in which more uncut vigorous versions thrive is upon us. The rise of secularism and the decline of Christian nominalism has caused a generation of young people to grow up looking for something that they can pin their lives to the mast of. They're not looking for compromise with the world. They're looking for full bore, high octane, no holds bar, sold out commitment. And they cannot find that from nominal Christianity anywhere. So where do you find it? Well, irony of ironies, they've looked to the Calvinists. Now, I wish I could go on to explain that, but I think there is a deep, deep truth in that. You find it everywhere in the young reformed awakening. Why did you find yourself attracted to Piper or to Moeller, to Sproul? Because these men weren't sticking their fingers up into the wind to find out what this generation wanted. They were preaching what this generation needed, whether they wanted it or not. And these people weren't used to people telling them the truth no matter what. And they found themselves inexorably being drawn to it because these were men who neither feared nor flattered any flesh, but glorified God. They were consumed by a passion for God and a theocentric fixation. And suddenly there are thousands and thousands attracted to it. It was an amazing thing to see people with their bodies covered with tattoos and piercings in parts of the body that I didn't know you could pierce, surrounding Joel Beeky at the Gospel Coalition in Chicago not a few months ago, grabbing everything they could off your tables. What is going on here? Joel Beeky couldn't do that, friends. Only God can do that. Now, how do we respond to it? You say to me, but Ligon, there are all sorts of admixtures and deficiencies in this movement. Yes, yes, my friends, I grant you that. Especially in the area of the lack of the doctrine of the church. Oh, this generation so needs the doctrine of the church. It desperately wants community, but it doesn't want authority, and you can't have community without authority. There's where we can serve these brothers and sisters and say, you inspire us so much with your zeal. Your commitment and service is contagious. Could we serve you by showing you some things that we have learned from scripture about how we are to live and minister together in the church, which is the family of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and support of the truth. Could we serve you by showing you these things? This generation is confused about methodology. Even the best of them say, oh, we must be strong and biblical in our theology, but methodology is neutral. You can do it any way you want. You see, they've bought into the greatest error of evangelicalism over the last century or more, which says your methodology is absolutely unrelated to your theology, and the method does not affect the message. And we need to serve them by saying, no, no, no, God has not only given us a gospel message, he's given us gospel means, the means of grace, the faithful preaching of the word, the biblical administration of the sacraments, the exercise of church nurture and discipline. And he's told us how to preach and how to pastor in his pastoral epistle. And these principles, however differently applied they may be in different cultures and in different generations, these principles are universally applicable and in fact, universally required by the Apostle Paul. Ministry is not rocket science, nor can we make it up as we go along. We must follow the book. And while respecting these brothers, we can come along and say, let's learn not only to preach by the book, but to minister by the book. And this generation is fatherless. This generation is fatherless. If you've been among the young, reformed, restless crowd, there are young men aching for a godly man to pour his life into them. They come from homes that are broken. They come from homes where the father was too busy, too distracted to ever invest himself in them. They come from homes where the father was lost as a goat and couldn't have led them in family worship to save his life. And they have a gaping, aching void in their lives for a father to come alongside of them and to pour his life into them. Would you be that for them? You see why it's so important for you not just to give them the word of criticism because they're expecting their father to reject them. They've been rejected by their father all their lives. But to come alongside of them and love them and shepherd them and nurture them and then gently correct them. Show them a more excellent way. Praise what God is doing in them and tell them what an encouragement it is to you and then pour your life into them. What characterizes the first eight factors of this Reformed resurgence. What has led these things to flow into a Reformed resurgence? Very quickly, four things. Every single one from the three preachers to the force of nature, John Piper, from Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, and MacArthur to John Piper, all of these eight things that I've mentioned, not the ninth, but the eight things, All of these eight things, whether men or institutions or denominations, have been motivated by this philosophy. It is faithfulness, not success, that we seek. It is faithfulness, not success, that we seek. When we begin seeking numbers, prominence and the praise of the world, we may guarantee that our labors will be in vain." None of these men sought the success that God gave them. They aimed for faithfulness, and they left the fruit to Him. Second, all of these men, institutions, and denominations had a big view of God. With one interesting exception, which I can't go into right now, with one interesting exception, the only churches that are growing in the Western world are churches with a big view of God. That does not surprise me because you can't meet the skepticism of this generation with a little God and a little gospel. When men have peered into telescopes and seen a universe 14 billion light years across, a little God cannot capture their hearts. And so it is from the old faithful tried and true Bible teaching, the old confessional Calvinists that this new generation has drawn the vivifying air of a sovereign colossal God. Third, all of these men and institutions and movements have strong confessional convictions held simultaneously with broad sympathies. Strong confessional convictions broad sympathies. Let me briefly say for a hundred years evangelicalism has said the key to us staying united as an evangelical movement is To downplay theological differences and to play up sharing the gospel Wrong Because the Gospels theology And if you can't agree on what the gospel is, and if the Great Commission entails, as Jesus says it does, teaching everything that I commanded, then scaling down theology and scaling up mission is not the recipe for unity and for faithfulness. And movement after movement, of like-minded brethren are standing up today and say, we're not for doctrinal minimalism, we're for doctrinal maximalism. We're for confessional commitment, but alongside that confessional commitment, we are going to have broad sympathies with and for others who have a high view of scripture, a high view of God, a high view of the doctrines of grace, and understand the gospel as we understand the Bible to teach. And we will work with them, not minimizing or belittling our differences, but recognizing how important those differences are in the lives of our churches, and yet working together for the gospel. And fourth and finally, in all these men, in all these institutions, in all these movements, God, in his inscrutable wisdom, chose to favor them outside of their narrow ecclesiastical constituencies. Think of Spurgeon, representative of the British Fellowship of Baptist Churches, a minority man even in that fellowship because you remember the downgrade controversy dogged him at the end of his career as he saw even his own gospel fellowship of Baptists forsake their commitments to doctrine and to the gospel. He was a minority man in his own church. And yet today, you can hear Africans preaching Him. Right now, somewhere in Africa, there's an African preaching Spurgeon. And there's an Australian preaching Him. And there's an Indian preaching Him. And there's someone in China preaching Him. And someone in Russia preaching Him. all over the world. These men, God favored outside of their own narrow ecclesiastical constituencies and he gave them broad influence in the churches. You see this in each of these things. Well, my friends, there is so much more to say, but our time is done. Let us give praise to God and pray to him. O Lord, thine is the glory. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of Thee. How unsearchable Thy judgments and ways, they are past finding out. As we consider these things in our own time, let us give all the praise and glory to Thee. In the name of Thine own dear Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.