Let's begin by saying thank you for having me. I know I'm not easy to have. I appreciate that. It's been, I'm sure, a sanctifying experiment for you putting up with me. And I was going to I was thinking about how how beautiful it is here. I've been to Colorado many times. I haven't been to the Springs for a while, and it really is remarkably a remarkably lovely place. And it feels a lot more like home than than California. So it's nice to see the color and feel the crisp air. But I think the most beautiful thing has been the happy reception that the gospel has received here. And I'm I'm very encouraged by that. I'd like to begin this evening with Just a brief text from John, chapter one, which is appropriate for our topic this evening. It's John, chapter one, just just the first verse in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Well, we'll go on. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made in him was life and the life It was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And then verse 14, And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. I start with the reading from John 1. and particularly one one in the beginning was the word, because I want to speak and think with you tonight about two particular two questions. These questions are sometimes referred to as the formal question of the Reformation, and then the second one is sometimes referred to as the material question of the Reformation. But since we've spent enough time thinking about the material question, that is the question of justification, I want to think especially tonight in this time about the formal question, and that's the question of the Word of God and the authority of the Word of God and the authority of the Reformation. And the question is, who needs a Reformation? After all, when Luther, as we were saying earlier before dinner, that wild bore in the vineyard of the Lord came through and disturbed things. And as it were, overturned the tables of the money changers. People said, who are you? Who are you that you have called into question long established practices and doctrines in what was then regarded as the holy Catholic Church? Who are you? That's a very good question. Someone comes into the congregation tonight and begins announcing something from the Lord, we have a right to ask that person who are you, who set you, by what authority do you come and say these things? That's a crucial question. By what authority? And to make things more difficult, Luther's arch nemesis, Johann Eck, said of Luther and of the Protestants, something that's very true. Now, whether it was true of them, that's the thing we want to think about tonight, but it's very true. He said all heretics quote scripture. And it's absolutely true. Through the whole history of the church, heretics have always quoted scripture. And in fact, from the very beginning of the post apostolic church, one of the great enemies that we faced was the enemy of Gnosticism. And Gnosticism claimed to have a secret knowledge and a kind of salvation that comes through secret knowledge. And they had it apart from the Word of God. And they had a kind of knowledge that gave them leverage over the Word of God. And they said, we have the truth. You Catholics, which is the language they use, you Catholics, you are sort of ordinary, sort of second class Christians. But we Gnostics, who sometimes identify themselves as Christians, we are first class Christians. We are spiritual because we have knowledge about the spiritual world. You only know about this world, but we know about the spiritual world. We get sort of, if you will, a kind of special revelation because we are among, as my old friend and Professor Dirk Bergman used to say, We're among the select of the elect. We know. And we know, they said, that the world is divided into that which is ethereal and immaterial, which they called spiritual, and that which is material. And the material world is evil. It's evil by virtue of being material. And so they developed a whole theology. They said, we know that the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, he's not really God. There are gods behind the God of the Old Testament. In fact, they said the God of the Old Testament is just a kind of a demigod, they called him. A demi-urge is what they called him. And he's not really, you know, really much of a God. He's kind of given to temper tantrums and things. The real God is behind that God. And we know that God by our secret. knowledge. And by the way, we know that Jesus wasn't truly human. And we know that he didn't really die. It was actually Simon of Cyrene or perhaps Judas, but it wasn't Jesus. And we know all kinds of things that you mere Catholics, earthy Christians who don't have this secret knowledge. We know all kinds of things. And so in response to that, the early church said, listen, we have an apostolic succession. We know that the Apostle John led to this one, to this one, to this one, to this one. And there was there was rightly a turn to the continuity of the visible institutional church as the arbiter of the word of God. But it wasn't very long before the turn to the visible institutional church which Jesus did establish. Lots of folks want us to think that Jesus didn't establish a visible church. It's widely held among the 19th century German liberals. that you had this sort of charismatic message, this sort of exciting, existential message breaking into history in Jesus. And he preached this exciting, dynamic message. But then it sort of got codified and it was made into dead orthodoxy. And they described this process as kerygma to dogma. And the view that was taught among 19th century Germans and that's been embraced among many 20th century Christians is that the visible institutional church is really a product not of the charismatic message of Jesus, the exciting dynamic message of Jesus, the fresh new message of Jesus, but the stale dogmatic institutional message of the church. The problem is that that analysis, however interesting it is, has very little to do with what actually happens in the Bible. Jesus said that if someone sins, we should tell it to the church. Those are the words of our Lord. He instituted a visible institution. He instituted officers. He gave keys to that kingdom, that church. The kingdom of God is the church. The church is the kingdom of God. And it's a spiritual kingdom with spiritual power and the power is in the word of God. It's in the sacraments and it's in discipline. Those are the keys of the kingdom. But the old German liberals didn't believe that, and the American and the American evangelicals following them, by and large, have not believed it as well. And as a consequence, they justify their churchlessness on the on the premise that they're getting back to the original New Testament faith. Well, all of that is to say that in the Reformation, by the time of the Reformation, the church had turned the idea that the church is the place where authority had been given and that had ministerial authority. By the time of the Reformation, it had turned that ministerial authority into magisterial authority. In Latin, the noun magister means master. In Latin, the noun minister means servant. And so, where Jesus gave the church servant authority to recognize the truth, to announce the truth, to announce the word, to administer the sacraments, administer discipline, not by creating things, but by simply announcing and recognizing things. By the 16th century, the church had come to think of itself as having magisterial creative authority, so that the church creates things. The church speaks and makes things so. The church speaks and makes people righteous or unrighteous. The church speaks and through it, the word is created. And so that in the medieval church and in the Roman church, it came to be thought, in contrast to the Reformation, that the church forms the word. There were two kinds of revelation that the church was thought to have. One was written, and that's your Bible, and the other is unwritten. And that unwritten revelation was possessed by the church, mediated by the church, and sort of the product of the church. And in fact, the Bible, Rome says, is the product of the church. In other words, the church forms or creates the Word. Now, I want you to listen again as I read John chapter 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Who formed the Word? Careful how you answer that. It's a trick question. No one formed The word, the word was eternally begotten. There never was when the word was not. If anyone says there was when the word was not, that person is an Aryan. He's a Unitarian. He's a heretic. He's denied the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ and he's denied the Holy Trinity and he's denied the Christian faith. If there never was when the word was not, he was in the beginning with God, all things were made through him and without him. was not anything that was made in him was life. And this life was the light of men. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only begotten son is probably the best reading from the father full of grace and truth. If the word is eternally begotten and not created and if there never was when the word was not. And if the Word is God the Son, and if through the Word everything that came into being has come into being, and if the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word is God, how did the church form the Word? Well, of course, the church didn't form the Word. And the Reformation said the Word, this Word, the Word that you have in your hands, the Word that God the Spirit breathed out, and gave to prophets and gave to apostles that word, that inerrant, inspired word, that unchangeable word, that true word, that reliable word, that solid word. That's the creative word. The word is never created, the word is always creating. Let me say that again, the word is never created, the word is always Creating the word created the church, the church didn't create the word, you know, people like us to think and want us to think that there was a time and a place when we were all in a tizzy about which books were in the canon and which books were not in the canon. And there was a meeting. Nobody knows where this meeting was and when it happened. But everyone thinks there was a meeting and we all sat down and we said this one's in and that one's out and we formed a canon. There's no such thing. It never happened. There were meetings, but those meetings did not form the canon. They recognized the canon that formed itself. The church didn't form the word. The word formed the church. The church simply received the word of God and says this, and they said this is the word of God. It has the marks of the word of God. It comes from the apostolic company. It preaches Christ. It comports with the rest of the revelation of Scripture. And if you doubt what is the word versus what isn't the word, read the extra canonical literature from the first and second centuries. And you'll tell right away, take first Clement, a pious piece of writing, 32 chapters, tedious as all get out. Moralist, boring, dreary, dry exhortations to be good, one little bit of gospel light late in the chapter, late in the book. And then compare that to first Corinthians written to the same congregation about 50 years later. And ask yourself, does this have the marks of canonicity? No. It's useful. It's interesting. It's generally orthodox, but it's not canonical. It doesn't have the power. It doesn't have the breadth. It isn't. It is an apostolic. It doesn't breathe of the power of the living power of the Holy Spirit. And it wasn't, therefore, recognized as a canonical book, even though it was written very early, probably as early as 97 AD, probably only three or four years after the book of the Revelation. In a very similar circumstance, written to very similar circumstances in which the apostolic books were written. Read the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Read the Infancy Gospel. The promoters of Gnosticism don't like you to read the Infancy Gospel. It embarrasses them because it's just dumb. It's a little God brat, right? It's a little boy, tells the story of the boy Jesus, tries to fill in the details, and he's a little brat. He needs a spanking. And he gets angry with his tutor, and he makes his tutor disappear. Poof. Gets angry with his friends, he makes his friends disappear. And finally, the townsfolk come to his parents, and they say, you've got to get this kid to behave. He's making us all disappear. And they, mom and dad go, Joseph and Mary go, and they remonstrate with Jesus. And they say, listen, you can't make your friends disappear. And so, poof, he makes them all come back. It's just dumb. It's just it's just obviously false. It's obviously late. And it's and it's obviously a sort of a curiosity seeking to fill in the gaps, which is what all of those Gnostic books sought to do. It doesn't have the marks of apostolicity. It doesn't have the marks of canonicity. It doesn't belong. So, in other words, all I'm saying is there's no time and no place in history where we sat down and we made the Bible. That's a myth. It didn't happen. People did write the Word of God, but they wrote the Word of God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. They wrote in real times, real places, as real persons with personalities. You can see all of that. If you read the text, you can see Paul writes differently. And if you read Greek, you can see, for example, there's a different secretary who wrote down 1 Peter than the secretary who wrote down 2 Peter. They're both written by the Apostle Peter, but they were written down by different secretaries. There's different word choice, different style. It's the same theology, and it's inspired. It's the inspired Word of God, but there are real differences. John writes differently than Paul. Paul writes differently than Peter. Jude writes a little bit like second Peter. Matthew is different from John. Mark is different from Matthew and Luke, even though there are a lot of similarities, different styles, different interests, different perspectives. So the Bible is a really human book, but it's a divine book. It was given through humans in a time and in a place. But the humans didn't make it the Word of God. The Holy Spirit made it the Word of God. The Church didn't form the Scriptures. The Scripture formed the Church. And that was the formal question we faced in the Reformation. Who needs a Reformation? Well, the Roman Church needs a Reformation. Sometimes we forget that with all of the things that we talk about and with all of the concerns we have, we still have a concern for the Roman Church. The Roman Church still needs to repent of her notion that she forms the word. And our Pentecostal brothers need to repent and our charismatic brothers and sisters need to repent. They're no different than the Roman Catholics in that respect. And no, the Mormons are just as bad. Everybody who's getting ongoing revelation. They're all fiddling with the canon. And in one way or another, seeking to add to the word of God, Book of Deuteronomy takes a very dim view to adding the word of God, and so does the so does the apocalypse, the revelation of our Lord. It's because it's the word of God. It's not to be added to. It's not to be taken away from. It's not ours to play with. We don't get to change it. You want to know what God thinks it's in his word. You want to know what God wants you to do within his word. That's what we mean when we say soul and scripture. That's what we mean when we say the sufficiency of scripture. I'm going to come back to that because we're not really off the hook yet. But the Roman church needs reformation. Rome needs to repent of the idea that she formed the scripture. No, the scripture forms the church. Rome needs to repent of the idea that the Bible is so hard to read that unless the church magisterially declares what it says. that no one can understand it. The Westminster Confession says that scripture is plain enough in matters of faith and life. All scriptures, it is true, are not alike plain in themselves. That's certainly true, but it's not to say that all scripture is difficult. Sure, there are difficult scriptures. But God so loved the world that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. You don't need a Ph.D. You don't even need to be able to read Greek to understand that. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. You don't need a Ph.D. to understand that. You don't need a magisterial church, a word creating church to tell you what that means. You know what that means. We believe as Protestants that the word of God is, I'm going to use a ten dollar word, but it's an important word, perspicuous. It's perspicuous. Why? Because God constituted us to be able to hear and understand his word. Now, when I say us, I mean people who are united to Christ by the Spirit, by grace alone, through faith alone. And I mean, I think unregenerate people can understand, and I've seen it, they can understand what the Bible is saying. They don't believe it. But they can even they can understand what the Bible is saying. I've seen unregenerate people give perfectly good explanations of what the Bible is saying, sometimes better than explanations I read from Christians. They don't understand it spiritually, but they can understand it intellectually. And until the God, the Holy Spirit softens their heart and opens their ears and enlightens their mind, gives them new life, regenerates them, they'll never understand it in a true and saving way. But they can understand it intellectually, and that's because the word is plain enough. It's clear enough and it can be understood. And it and it and it is understood. It can be read on its own terms, who needs a reformation, the Roman Church needs a reformation and anyone, and particularly now in our modern age, it's common to embrace this sort of skeptical view of the Bible. Well, who really knows? And my response is read the Bible. I'm not saying that there aren't questions. I make my living explaining questions. There are lots of questions. If there weren't any questions, I wouldn't have very much to do. The whole history of the church is a series of questions. There are serious questions, hard questions, difficult questions, questions we probably won't ever really answer. A woman shall be saved through childbearing. That's a tough one. When in Exodus 4, Yahweh comes to the door and looks for Moses. and Zipporah runs back there. Right. Where's Moses? I'm going to kill it. Zipporah runs back there and circumcises the uncircumcised boy and Yahweh goes away. I think I know what that means, but I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't bet the mortgage on it. I do think I know what it means, but could I convince anyone? I don't know. And I don't have to. Because the Bible is clear enough where it needs to be clear. But in our age, our age is an age of skepticism. Our age is an age of doubt. Our age is an age that says, who really knows? You have your reading of the text. I have my reading of the text. What the author meant, who knows what the author meant? In our age, it's all about what the reader means. Well, I'm sorry. Readers are wrong. Readers are wrong frequently. I've sat in far too many Bible studies where people have said, well, I think this text means. Or as a as a female, this text speaks this way to me, or as an Asian, this text speaks this way to me, or as a Latino, this text speaks this way to me. So how many texts are there? How many different kinds of people are there? Does it speak differently to tall people than it does to short people? Or is there one word of God? Does your experience norm the text or does the text norm your experience? When Paul sat down to write. To the Church of Philippi, did he not have an intent as a human author? Sure, he had an intent. Can we know what his intent was? Yes, we can know his intent by paying attention to his words and by setting aside our own interest to set to say to to say to ourselves what what I want is of less importance than what the author intended. And more than that, we can know not only what the human author intended, we can know what God the Spirit intended. Because he made it clear. It's in there, it can be known from the text, God intends for his word to be understood. Who needs a reformation? The modern evangelical church needs a reformation relative to the formal question of the authority of Scripture and the reliability of Scripture and the truthfulness of Scripture. and the perspicuity of Scripture. Modern evangelical church has drunk deeply from the modern well of skepticism and subjectivism. Well, I think this means this to me. And my meaning is just as valid as your meaning. Oh, really? Try that at a red light sometime. Well, I'm experiencing this as a green light. So, I'm going to Treat it as a green light, because this is my reality. My reality is it's a green light. You explain that to the cop when he pulls you over. I don't want to pull over. Pull down your window driver's license and registration, please. Well, you see, officer, I was as I was interpreting that light, it just it just seemed it spoke to my soul and it seemed green to me. I had a word from the Lord that I should claim greenness. And I said, yes, it's green. And meanwhile, not only is he writing a ticket for running the light, he's calling the authorities to haul you away. Because the light was red and every sane person whose sense equipment is working in any normal way, experiences a red light in approximately the same way. Because there is really such thing as an objective reality created by the Creator, and we're constituted to be able to perceive that objective reality. Climb up onto a high place and throw something off, what happens? Whatever you threw off falls. Why? Because that's the way God made things. That's just the way it is. We can look at the word of God. We can see it. We can read it. We can understand it. We can find out what the author intended to say. And we can bring ourselves, by the grace of Jesus Christ, into submission to what the word intends to say. And the word norms us. It norms our experience. It norms our thinking. It norms our practice. It norms our theology, our piety and our practice. If you want to be reformed, if you want to be a Protestant, if you want to confess sola scriptura, then you have to say the Word is above everything. The Word formed the church. The church serves the Word. The Word determines the church. The Word controls the church. The Word created the church. The church doesn't create the Word. The Word gets to say what is and what isn't. The Word determines what we can say about God, what we can say about humans, what we can say about sin, about Christ, about salvation, about the church, about the sacraments, about the end of all things, about the beginning of all things. That's what we mean when we say the Word is the principal authority. It's the beginning of knowing, is what we say. Revelation is the beginning of knowing, is what we say in our theologies. We have a Latin phrase for it. But that's what it means when we say it. And that's what we mean when we say, So la Scriptura. The Word alone is the final and ultimate authority for faith and life. But the modern evangelical church is deeply indebted to modernity. And in the modern world, the world was turned upside down and where prior to modernity God was in charge, in the modern period, Man was put in charge, and man became the measure of all things, and the decider, to quote our president. Man became the decider. He became the ultimate authority. And now there are ultimate authorities in the evangelical world today who say, out of my autonomy, I'm a law unto myself, I choose to embrace Christianity, but I choose to do that as an autonomous person. That's a widely held belief, and it's held at the highest levels of evangelical academia. I know because I've been there. I've had those conversations. I've heard those papers in the academic conferences. And that's not the Protestant faith. It's not the Christian faith. It's not the biblical faith. The modern evangelical church is deeply indebted to modernity, deeply indebted to the idea that the mind of man is the measure of all things. It's also deeply indebted on the other end of the spectrum to a kind of subjectivism or romanticism. What I feel, what I experience is the most important thing. I don't know how many times I've had conversations with people who said, I just feel in my heart that the Lord wants me to do this. And I've said to them, yes, but the word of God says you may not. I'm aware of conversations and I've had conversations with people who said the Lord led us to do this and they go on to describe some violation of the law of God. And I tell them the Lord certainly did not need you to do that. Because the Lord doesn't lead you to violate his law. I don't care. At the end of the day, I don't care what you feel. When I first I'm going to make a confession. When I first became a Christian, all my friends in our little evangelical church, they all got messages from God. It was commonplace. There were a few things I learned right away as an evangelical. You had to have a Bible cover, right? A faux leather Bible cover, and it had a dove on it, which is a violation of the second commandment. Nevertheless, and we had a little booklet that said 9.59, nine minutes and 59 seconds with God. And then when you made sufficient spiritual progress, somebody would give you a 29.59 book, 29 minutes and 59 seconds for your quiet time with God. It's sort of standardized methodism. When you pass the standardized test, you go on to the next one. And the third thing that I learned as a young evangelical is that God gives secret messages to his people. If you just pray, if you just have enough faith and if you have a quiet time, God will whisper things in your ear and he will tell you what he wants you to do. He'll tell you what socks to wear. He'll tell you which car to buy. He'll tell you, he always tells you whom to marry and where to go to school. The really big, should I take this job? Should I take that job? If you really believe him, if you really have faith, God whispers little messages in your ear. Now, I wasn't raised in any of this. This was all new to me. I didn't have any idea that they weren't telling the truth. I thought it must be the truth. These are Christians. These people love Jesus. They're introducing me to the faith. Why would they lie? They've got covers on their Bibles. It's got to be true. Except that I never got any of those messages. And it's a pretty vicious syllogism. The syllogism is, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. You have a vicious syllogism. God gives secret messages to his Christians. Clark isn't getting any secret messages. That's really bad. And I used to pray, Lord, give me a message. I don't hear any messages. You know, I don't I don't never I never know if I'm is it my you know, do I have indigestion? Is it the Lord? I don't know. I can't tell. I was so grateful to become reformed to find out that, in fact, there aren't any messages. and that people are just making it up. All my Pentecostal friends, and I tell them this to their face, I've taught Pentecostals, I've prayed with them, I've heard them speak in tongues, I can do it myself, shundalala, shundalala, boom, done, it's done. Piece of cake. I can be slain in the Spirit, I can fall over, it's not hard. You hit somebody in the frontal lobe, bang, they're slain in the Spirit. All my Pentecostal friends, they simply re-describe ordinary experience in apostolic terms, and they're just making stuff up. God's not telling them anything. I prayed with them. I've laid hands on people. It didn't work. Why not? Well, maybe the Presbyterian ruined it. Well, possibly. But when the apostle Paul got bit with a snake on the island, didn't that fellow say he's a dead man? Was he a dead man? Did he die? No. Why? Because he's an apostle. Didn't matter whether people believed him or not. He had an objective deposit of apostolic power. that wasn't contingent on his faith. He's an apostle. God, the Holy Spirit transported people around in the book of Acts. That's the one I want. That's the one no one ever claims to have. We're holding healing services on Wednesday. And if they could really do it, they put the hospitals out of business, but it never happens. We still, when we get sick, we still go to the cancer ward, don't we? But why don't they ever transport? Why does Benny Hinn take a jet? Why does he own a jet? If you've got power, buddy, transport yourself. Let's go. Stephen did it. Philip did it. Let's go. Where's your faith? You don't have enough faith. Charlatan, thief, liar, heretic. And the truth is, none of those people are getting messages from God. It just doesn't happen. You want to know what God has to say to you? You listen to your minister when he preaches the word of God. I tell my students the only place that God ever speaks to me is on Sunday mornings out of the word of God. That's where I start my spiritual life. Is the preaching of the holy gospel and the preaching of the law and the administration of the holy sacraments from the table, from the baptismal font. That's the word of God. That's what I know what God says. And the Holy Spirit confirms in our hearts that it's true. When I was praying with my Pentecostal friends back in Kansas City, one of them offered to give me the Holy Spirit. I turned him down. Later, I thought to myself, I'm a Calvinist. We've been getting along without the Holy Spirit for four or five hundred years, so I think I'll just carry on. But it's not true, really. We do believe in the in the present and ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. He confirms to us that not only is the word generally true, it's true for you. You put a gun to my head right now and I won't. Change my mind because I know it's true, how do I know it's true, the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that it's really true and it's true for you and it's sealed to us by the by the sacraments as surely as we as we smell the wine, as we hold the bread, as we taste the wine, as we taste the bread. As surely as the water hits my forehead, so surely is the gospel true for those who believe and I believe, therefore, it's true for me. And I don't care what the Spirit allegedly says to anybody about anything. That's what we mean by Sola Scriptura. Not only does the Roman church, which gets ongoing revelation, need to be reformed, but the evangelical church needs to be reformed according to the word of God. They need to return to the material principle of the Reformation. They need to abandon their rationalism where they set themselves over the word of God and make themselves judges of the word of God. And they need to repent of their subjectivism and their romanticism, whereby their personal experience or their feelings norms the word. We have a slogan in Reformed theology. We say the Bible, the word God is the un-normed norm. There's no other norm that norms this norm. Norm. Nothing controls this. This is the sovereign word of God that works through whom the Holy Spirit works. And sovereignty makes people alive. I know I was dead. I remember being unregenerate. I remember thinking that Christianity was stupid and that you people were stupid. And that I would never believe anything so stupid as that. Right up till the minute I read the words of our Lord preaching the law as a 15 year old, he said, if anyone looks at a woman with the intention of lusting after her, he's already committed adultery. I was 15 years old. I did that about every three seconds. And I thought, oh my, that's true, I'm toast. And as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. How did I know it was true? God, the Holy Spirit, made it so that I would understand that it was true. I'm not saying exactly at that moment, but over a period of time, I came to understand that I wasn't so clever as I thought I was. And I came to see the greatness of my sin and misery. How did that happen? It happened through the word. The Holy Spirit used the word to accomplish a miracle to raise someone from the dead. Now, our evangelical friends made a temporary alliance with the Reformation. But our evangelical friends, as Cornelius Bintel used to say, need to make a decision because they've got one foot in modernity and one foot in the Reformation, and most of them have overthrown the Reformation in favor of modernity. And that's why they no longer sympathize with the Reformation. The evangelical church needs a reformation. The evangelical church is uneasy with real ecclesiastical authority. And therefore, most evangelicals do not have a doctrine of the church because they don't understand the authority of the word of God. The authority of the church is not magisterial, it's ministerial. The church serves the word. When your elder or when your minister stands up here, Lord, you know, permitting or forbidding that it should ever happen, but if it should ever happen and pronounces the most terrible sentence of excommunication, when your minister reads those words from that form, he's not making it so. He's simply recognizing what is. And that's what your minister does. He announces what is. The Word of God makes things so. And that's why Jesus says, whatever you bind in heaven is bound, whatever you loose is loosed. It's not our speaking that makes it so. It's the word that makes it so. And our evangelical friends and brothers and sisters don't understand that, and they don't get the distinction between ministerial authority and magisterial authority. But ministerial authority is real authority, and Jesus gave real authority to the church. We don't have to react to the Roman abuse of authority by abandoning authority. We don't have to react to the Roman abuse of authority by retreating into home churches or whatever, or making things up as we go along. Coffees, candles, and couches in the emerging or emergent movements. No, Jesus gave real ministerial authority to the church through the word. And part of that ministerial authority is to confess the faith. All heretics quote scripture. John Ecke was absolutely right. And that's why we have confessions. That's why our churches have gathered together and published a public authoritative ministerial confession of what we understand the word of God to teach. And that confession is binding Because we believe it's biblical. We say what we say. We confess what we confess because we believe it's biblical. And if somebody can show us that it's not biblical, we'll change our confession because scripture norms confession. We only confess what we confess because it's biblical. I am so sick up to here with this nonsense that we're putting the confession above the Bible. I just like to see someone read the confession for once. If we were all reading the confession and living according to the confession or worshiping according to the confession and teaching according to the confession and conducting our spiritual lives according to the confession, maybe I might start to believe that perhaps the confession is getting a little out of hand. And I don't know, maybe I'm just missing it, maybe that's happening everywhere. But when I see stories in newspapers about reformed ministers, ostensibly reformed ministers dressing up in uniforms of their local sports teams and standing in a pulpit on the Sabbath. I think we're not quite there yet. When I read stories of churches using puppets in divine worship services. When I when I know in my own denomination, there are churches with large pictures ostensibly of the second person of the Holy Trinity in violation of the word of God. Through whom, through which John Calvin would throw a brick. I don't think that we've become confession centered or obsessed with the confession when elders come to my house and the first thing they ask is, how is my prayer life? And not why aren't you attending to the means of grace by attending the second service? Or when you can't find a second service. Or when shine, Jesus shine replaces the word of God in worship. Or seven steps to a happy life replaces the gospel in worship. Or where pizza replaces the Lord's Supper or any of the crazy things or square dancing. Any of the other mind boggling things that passes for Christianity occurs in our churches. I don't think that the confession has been given too much authority. I think the evidence, the objective evidence is that we're not really reading it. We're not paying attention to it. So this is my way of picking on reformed folks. We need a reformation, according to the word of God, when we have ministers standing in pulpits saying that you're justified through faith and works and people a few years before I preached in a reformation service up in California or out in California. The year before, one of the leading founders of this movement, what became known as the Federal Vision Movement, was hailed by an elder at a Reformation service as a hero of the Reformation, even while he contradicted the Reformation. We have ministers saying that the regulative principle means that you can replace the preaching with a dramatic presentation. We have people saying that the Second Commandment permits and even encourages pictures of Jesus. And we could go on and on. When people think that piety is what happens in my closet and not through the due use of the ordinary means. When most of our people think that piety is what happens in the prayer closet and not in the due use of ordinary means. I'd say we still need a reformation when not only is it difficult to find a sound confessional morning service, it's becoming virtually impossible to find an evening service when people don't know what the Sabbath is, have no idea what the Sabbath is. When people have no idea what reform piety is, basically, I can't see how anyone comes to think that the confession has too much authority. The confession will only have authority when we understand that what we confess is the sole authority of the word of God. We do what we do. We say what we say, we approach God the way we approach him because of the word of God. If there's a problem in our confession, let us not just ignore our confession. Let us not act like Pentecostals or Roman Catholics or Methodists or Baptists or Eastern Orthodox and call ourselves reform. Let us change our confession. But before we go about changing our confession. Let us read our confession and let us read our confession in the light of the word of God and let us read the word of God in the light of the confession. Because what we confess is Sola Scriptura. That's the formal principle of the Reformation. That's the principle on the basis of which we answer the question, who needs a Reformation? And the answer to the question is, everyone needs a Reformation. Rome needed a Reformation. The modern evangelical church needs a Reformation. And we need a Reformation. We don't have it all wrapped up. We don't have it all figured out. We're not being faithful to our own confession. We have much for which to repent. But the beautiful thing about the Reformation is it's not finished. We can make a decision today. We can make a decision today to follow the word of God as we confess it. There's nothing stopping us. All we have to do is make a decision to do it. We're going to read our confession and we're going to have a reformation according to the word of God as we confess it. It can happen tomorrow if we decide that the word is the norm, the norms. It's the source. It's the creative, authoritative power of the church. It can happen tomorrow if we simply submit to the word. Thank you for your patience. It's been good to spend these days with you. And I look forward to seeing at least some of you tomorrow morning and tomorrow evening on the Sabbath as we enjoy the rest of the Lord.