in the 1689 Confession. It's to hold fast the form of sound words. It is to enable us to earnestly contend for the faith which was once for all time delivered to the saints. And I've been given the very delightful and important privilege of bringing to you a study on the 1689 Confession, which is really a study in systematic theology. But since it is the standard of our church, our confession of faith, it ought to be known well by all of us. Now, there's only two Sunday school classes left in the year. There's this one and the one next Lord's Day. And so rather than diving right in to chapter one of the confession, which by the way I've been given the approval to do from the elders, and that is to begin our study at the beginning and not to just pick up where you left off earlier, which is what my preference was as well. But instead of just diving right into chapter one, I thought that we would use the two lessons that we have in the year 2005 remaining to introduce the subject of creeds and confessions in the Church. There's a couple of ways we could introduce the 1689 Confession. We could introduce it in terms of its history. And perhaps some of you have been blessed to hear Dr. Renahan's history of the 1689 Confession, which is very good. There's another way we could introduce the Confession, and that is by showing its systematic order and the way that the doctrines are laid out and the rationale behind why the doctrines appear in the order that they do. But instead of doing either one of those things in the next two lessons, including this one, I'd like for us rather to consider the legitimacy and the proper use of creeds and confessions in the Church. And when I say creeds and confessions, or even the word catechism, I'm referring really to the same thing, a statement of faith, whether it be in the form of a creed, a confession, or catechism. And of course, this is a study in the 1689 London Baptist Confession. There has been over the past few hundred years, perhaps the last two centuries, an anti-confessional movement within the Church. creeds, confessions, catechisms, all which are attempting to do the same thing, that is, to carefully state what we believe the Bible to teach. These things have been opposed by some and have been considered irrelevant by others. Whether they contain errors or not, creeds and confessions are considered by many today to be unimportant if not positively bad for the church and for various reasons. Now these kinds of people I'm labeling anti-credalists and I'll explain what I mean more fully as we go along. I don't wish to throw everyone under that category who may not necessarily be anti-credalist But for the sake of simplicity, I'm just simply labeling all those who would have objections to creeds and confessions in the church, for the sake of simplicity, I am calling them anti-credalists. And what we want to do is ask three questions, and the first question is the one that we'll consider this morning. The second and third question we'll consider next Lord's Day, God willing. The first question that we want to ask today and try to answer is, what are the objections that anti-credalists raise against confessions of faith? What exactly do they have? in their minds that would be against or at least consider confessions of faith an indifferent or a bad matter. The second question is what is our biblical warrant for holding to a confession of faith? What do we have in scripture? The scriptures never say thou shalt have a confession of faith. They never say that. So what is our warrant for having one? We won't deal with that today. And, in fact, today we won't be really dealing much with Scripture itself. I trust you'll see that it's the nature of the study that we're doing today. But next Lord's Day we will. We'll make up for it then what we don't have of it today. And the third question is, why is a confession of faith so needful and helpful to a church? It's both helpful and needful. I believe it is necessary for the church to carry out its proper responsibilities to have a confession of faith. And so the first question, what are the objections that anti-credalists raise against confessions of faith is what we want to consider today. And before I even begin listing what they are, and perhaps some of you have the handout that is available today, you'll see them listed for you. I want to make clear that not all anticretalists are the same, and not all of them should be glumped together in that category. And the objections that we're going to consider this morning have nothing to do with the objections that a pagan, a relativistic postmodern pagan would have. Of course, those kinds of people will be opposed to confessions of faith, because if a confession of faith says, this is truth, this is absolute truth, this is what we believe to be true, then it draws a line in the sand. And postmodern relativistic people who do not believe in absolute truth will of course be offended and upset that you're telling them that they're wrong and that they're in error and that you do believe that truth exists and this is what it is. I'm not even going to deal with those people. These objections have to do more with the average Evangelical Christian, professing Christian today, who for various reasons may have this or that objection to holding to a confession of faith, either individually or as a church or as a denomination. And so perhaps you have friends in your lives, perhaps You're one yourself. Maybe you have some questions in your mind about confessions of faith in their proper place. This will be helpful for you. It will be helpful to not only defend the position of our church, but it will be helpful also for your own conviction to see the necessity of confessions of faith. So there are four major objections that I have listed. There are more. These, I think, are the four big ones, the ones that you'll find being raised most often. Objection number one, creeds and confessions undermine the authority and sufficiency of the Bible. This is the main objection that is raised, and this is the one that we will spend the majority of our time considering. You will find well-meaning, well-motivated, evangelical Christians today, oftentimes opposing confessions of faith and creeds, with the idea that we don't need a creed, we don't need a confession, because we have the Bible. The Bible is enough, they say. The Bible is authoritative and sufficient. Of course, we would say amen to that. That's true. It is authoritative, it is sufficient, it is the final authority, it is the sole authority for all matters relating to faith and practice. It is the infallible, inerrant Word of God, and it is sufficient. So, based on that argument, they go one step further and say, well then, why do we need a confession of faith when we have an infallible document that is sufficient and authoritative in the Church? Now, at first it may sound quite spiritual, it might sound quite plausible, this objection, but I believe it to be a mistake. Well-meaning, dogmatic, fundamental evangelicals, nonetheless, I believe this is a mistake. To say that creeds and confessions undermine the authority and sufficiency of Scripture is a mistake for at least three reasons. the first reason why it's a mistake to think that way. Assuming, of course, that the confession or creed that you're speaking of is indeed biblically sound. Of course, heretical documents are not to be held to. But assuming that the statement of faith or the confession or creed is biblically sound, this is a mistake to say it undermines scripture, number one, because it misunderstands what a creed or a confession is. The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, which just means, I believe. A creed or a confession is stating what you believe to be true. When you say things like, I believe in God, or I believe in the triune God, or you say things like, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, you have just formulated a creed. You have just made a statement of faith. You may not write it down, but you have just formed a confession of faith when you make such statements. When you say such statements to worldlings, you are giving to them a creed. Now the difference, the only difference really, between that kind of statement on your part and the 1689 confession that we hold to, The only difference between the two of them is that one is longer than the other and states its belief in more than just this one or two doctrines of the Bible, and it was put together not just by one person, but by many over the course of time. In other words, it's things most surely believed among us. So it's a statement of faith not just on the part of you, the individual, it's a statement of faith on the part of you and the entire church that you belong to and all the other churches that hold to that same confession and all of the religious, spiritual forefathers that we've had over the centuries and so on. But a creed or a confession is just simply saying, I believe this. I believe that the Bible says this and means this. It's a way of interpreting scripture and then reformulating that truth in your own words to someone else. Now brethren, if confessions of faith undermine the authority and sufficiency of scripture, then every single time you in your own words tell someone what you believe the Bible to teach, you are also undermining the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. But that's ridiculous. You're not doing that at all. You're affirming it. You're not undermining it. You are telling people not only what the Word of God says, but you are saying what you believe it to mean. This is what it means to me. And I believe that's what it means to God, because there's really only one meaning when you go to Scripture. It's God's meaning. And our goal is to find out what God's meaning is and then to state that, both in our witness to the world and as a doctrinal standard in our church. When a preacher gets up every Lord's Day to open and expound the Scriptures, he doesn't just quote Scripture. He seeks to explain and open up Scripture. This is what this word means. A whole sermon can be preached on one word. Is he undermining the sufficiency of Scripture, or the authority of it? Of course not. This argument, this objection that says that confessions of faith necessarily undermine Scripture, is really saying too much. It proves too much and therefore proves nothing at all, as a lawyer would say. Because if indeed it were consistently held to, then we could not even witness of the truth to pagans. We could not have preachers preach the word. They would just have to quote scripture alone. Because anything added, anything opened up, anything elucidated, anything interpreted would be undermining the sufficiency of scripture. So for that reason alone, this is a mistake. But this is also this idea that we don't need a creed because we have the Bible is a mistake for a second reason. It's a mistake because it doesn't take into consideration the necessity of carefully defining biblical terms and concepts. People who say we don't need a confession of faith, we have the Bible. are saying what they're saying we believe the Bible to be true that's a good statement but it's not sufficient to say that because every Tom Dick and Harry Colt says that let me quote you something to arrive at truth we must dismiss religious prejudices from heart and mind We must let God speak for himself. To let God be true means to let God have the say as to what is the truth that sets men free. It means to accept his word, the Bible, as the truth. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth. Do you all agree with that statement? Amen. Guess where it was found? In a book called Let God Be True, published by the Jehovah's Witnesses. What? How can we say amen to something Jehovah's Witnesses say? Well, that's the point. The point is, it's not enough if the church is to do its duty, or the individual Christian, to go up to someone and say, I don't need a creed. I've got the Bible. Here's the Bible. Just read that. Because people read the Bible and come up with all varying kinds of interpretations. They twist words. Even Peter was making comment of that in the early church. Men would twist the words of Paul unto their own destruction. We have all of these cults out there who base their whole religion on the Bible. Sometimes they'll add to the Bible what they consider extra inspired materials, but nevertheless, the Jehovah's Witnesses are a good case in point. We need not only the Bible, but we need a statement of faith that carefully defines biblical terms so that the heretics among the professing Christians of the world will be exposed and will not be allowed to continue to secretly and cunningly twist the very words of Scripture unto men's own destruction. How many of you know the story about the Nicene Creed? The Nicene Creed. 325 AD. A very important council took place there. It had to do with a heretic called Arius, who was teaching that Jesus Christ was not God. He was the Son of God, but not God the Son. Rumors had gone all abroad that Arius was indeed a heretic, but he was hard to pin down. It was hard to get him to actually come out and say it because he was trying to infiltrate the established orthodox orthodoxy of the day. And you know how he did it? He did it through redefining the terms that we find in scripture. Now I have a quote here from Samuel Miller I think is really helpful. It's published in his book called Doctrinal Integrity. Samuel Miller was a professor of Princeton in the 1800s. And this is very interesting. It's a lengthy quote, but it's interesting, and I'll try to read it in an interesting manner. But listen to what he says about the Nicene Creed and the council that took place on that occasion. When the council entered on the examination of the subject of Arius' view of the deity of Christ, It was found extremely difficult to obtain from Arius any satisfactory explanation of his views. He was not only as ready as the most orthodox divine present to profess that he believed the Bible, but he also declared himself willing to adopt as his own all the language of the Scriptures in detail concerning the person and character of the Blessed Redeemer. But when the members of the Council wished to ascertain in what sense he understood the language, Arius revealed a disposition to evade and equivocate, and actually for a considerable time baffled the attempts of the most ingenious of the Orthodox to specify his errors and to bring them to light. He declared that he was perfectly willing to employ the popular language on the subject in controversy, and wished to have it believed that he differed very little from the body of the Church. Accordingly, the Orthodox went over the various titles of Christ plainly expressive of his divinity, such as God, the true God, the express image of God, to every one of which Arius and his followers most readily subscribed, claiming a right, however, to put their own construction on the scriptural titles in question. After employing much time and ingenuity in vain in endeavoring to drag this artful thief from his lurking places and to obtain from him an explanation of his views, the Council found it would be impossible to accomplish their object as long as they permitted him to entrench himself behind a mere general profession of belief in the Bible. They therefore did what common sense as well as the word of God had taught the Church to do in all preceding times. and what alone can enable her to detect the artful advocate of error. They expressed in their own language what they supposed to be the doctrine of Scripture concerning the deity of the Savior. In other words, they drew up a confession of faith on this subject, which they called upon Arius and his disciples to subscribe. This the heretics refused, and were thus virtually brought to the acknowledgment that they did not understand the Scriptures as the rest of the Council understood them." In other words, brethren, cunning, sinful man can put any construction he wants on certain words of Scripture, and the Church has to, depending on what particular error is abounding in that particular day, must address those things and must carefully define what those biblical words mean according to the overall teaching of scripture. And that's a confession of faith. And it's needful. They were doing it already even in the time of the apostles. You'll find many creeds, M-I-N-I, many confessions of faith even in the New Testament itself. And it has continued to be needful throughout the history of the church because errors have continually cropped up. And Arius, the only way they were going to expose his heresy was to get down to the nitty gritty and split hairs over certain issues which were of vital importance to the doctrine of Christ. It's the only way they could do it. Now this no creed but the Bible objection is also a mistake for a third reason. It's a mistake because it doesn't give due weight to the statements of the Orthodox creeds and confessions themselves. The confession of faith that we hold to, for example, immediately begins in chapter one, stating that the Bible is the infallible, supreme, and unique authority in the Church And there is no higher authority, in fact, there is no authority in anything that man says unless it agrees with the infallible Word of God. And that chapter one of the Confession of Faith also encourages us to see for ourselves in Scripture whether these things be so. And it gives Scripture proofs. And so therefore, our confession and many other Orthodox confessions are self-consciously self-consciously looking to the Scriptures as their only authority. So to say that they're undermining the authority of Scripture is exactly the opposite of what they're actually doing. They're actually affirming the authority of Scripture. So I trust that even if there's no one here who had any of these thoughts in their mind, that at least it would be a way to deal with someone that you might come across that does have those objections. Or maybe it strengthens your own conviction on the matter. Objection number one, then, is creeds and confessions undermine the authority and sufficiency of scripture. As long as those creeds are according to scripture, the answer is no, they do not. That is a mistake. The second objection, and the second, third, and fourth, we won't spend as much time on. Second one is this. Creeds and confessions undermine liberty of conscience. In other words, there are those who would say, you mean to tell me that I can't be a member in this church or I can't be a pastor in this church if I don't subscribe to a man-made confession of faith? You mean to tell me that I have to bind my conscience to something other than the Bible? Other than the Word of God? No, that's not what we're telling you. But that's how the objection is brought forward. That doesn't seem right, they say, that we should be required to submit and to subscribe to a man-made document when our consciences, according to Scripture, it's a reformational truth, our consciences are to be bound only by God Himself, God and His Word. But once again, this does not take into account what our confession of faith actually says. In chapter 21 and paragraph 2, it says, God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his word, or not contained in it. This isn't in my notes, but I'll throw it in here. If you're a child, and you're under the authority of your parents, and your parents tell you to do something, do you throw right back at your parents and say, well, no, I'm not required to do that because my conscience is to be bound only to God? Well, no, because God himself has said, honor your father and your mother. As long as they're not commanding you to do something which is against God's law, then you're to do it. And that is not a violation of liberty of conscience. It's actually obeying what God says. The same is true with a confession of faith. No one's forcing you to subscribe blindly to any creed or confession in this church. No one has ever and no one will ever force you. You are given the confession of faith. You are asked to see if these things are so, if they're according to God's word. Now if blind obedience and blind subscription were required, well then that would be a violation of your liberty of conscience. Furthermore, if you do not in good conscience align yourself with what the standard, the doctrinal standard of the church is, then yes, membership and office in the church is not available to you, but that doesn't mean your conscience has been violated. No one's forcing you to be a member or an officer. If you do not believe that these things are according to scripture, well then I can almost guarantee you that there are many churches that would probably line up with where you stand, available today. In other words, brethren, if somebody in the church disagrees with something that's in the confession of faith, a confession which the great majority, if not all, certainly we would wish that all would say yea and amen to. If one person in the church or two people or a minority of people look at that confession of faith and say, you know what, we don't believe this is biblical. And we think that we ought to be able to remain here as members or as officers, even though we don't think this is biblical. That is an infringement on the liberty of conscience of everyone else in the church. Isn't that ironic? As Samuel Miller put it, are not the rights of conscience reciprocal? Or do they demand that while a church shall be prohibited from oppressing an individual, an individual shall be allowed to oppress a church? That's the tail wagging the dog. If that person doesn't see eye to eye with the confession of faith that the church holds to, for him to demand that the church compromise its doctrinal standard to accommodate his disagreement would, in a sense, be one man oppressing the whole church. and violating their conscience. In a court of law, this would never hold up. And in God's court, it is not a violation of anyone's conscience to ask them to subscribe to a confession of faith, if they're given a confession of faith and called upon to examine the scriptures to see whether these things be so. And if they have the option of saying, yes, I subscribe to it and therefore submit to it, and if at any time I do not, then I realize I cannot remain, that's not a violation of liberty of conscience at all. In fact, if they insist that the whole church change its doctrinal policy, or compromise on this or that doctrine in the Confession, that would be a tyranny of a far worse sort. Truth is truth, whether it comes from the mouth of babes, whether you read it in your Bible, whether it comes out of the mouth of a pagan. If it's according to God's word, truth is truth, and there's no violation of your conscience to submit to it. If the confession of faith merely states what is true according to God's word, to subscribe to that confession of faith is not to put your conscience in bondage to a man-made thing. It's to put your conscience in bondage to the truth of God, which is what we're required to do no matter what the source of that truth is that's telling us this is true, as long as it lines up with God's word. Now, I hope I've sufficiently dealt with that objection. Let's look at objection number three. Objection number three is creeds and confessions use unbiblical language. Some would say we ought not to have creeds and confessions because they're filled with all that technical, theological mumbo-jumbo jargon. All of these man-made words, homoousius and all of those other things that man has introduced into theology and just muddied the waters in complicated matters. Well, it is true. Confessions of faith do use technical words that are not found in the Bible per se. Chapter 1 of our Confession already, in fact the two opening chapters on God and on the Scriptures, have the words infallible, substance, subsistence, trinity, and so on. These words aren't found in the Bible. So why are they found in our Confession of Faith? for the simple reason, brethren, that a confession of faith is not a book of quotations. A confession of faith is a book of interpretation. It is confessing what we believe the Bible to mean. This is what it means. It's a hermeneutical device. It interprets. It doesn't just quote. Because once again, we go back to what we've already said. You can quote scripture to a cultic member, and go back and forth quoting scripture until you get down and define what those words of scripture mean, you won't get anywhere with them. That's why a confession of faith is necessary to defend the truth of God from being perverted. In other words, the purpose of using technical non-biblical language in a confession is to define biblical language more carefully. God's meaning is what we're after. If you were to sit down with a Roman Catholic priest, the typical Roman Catholic, of course, wouldn't probably be able to enter into this kind of discussion at a certain level of detail, but a priest probably would be able to. You'd sit down with him and you'd talk to him about justification. And you'd ask him, do you believe in justification? Oh, yes. Do you believe in justification by faith? Oh, yes. And I doubt not that even if you asked him, do you believe in justification by faith alone, he'd say yes. Now the naive evangelical Christian could go skipping down the sidewalk that day and thinking all is right with the world. But he hasn't accomplished anything and he hasn't learned anything. Because the Roman Catholic has redefined justification. The Roman Catholic has redefined faith, or at least what faith ought to be put in. And when you talk to a Roman Catholic priest, for example, you're going to have to use technical terms like, OK, you believe in justification. Do you believe in forensic justification? Do you believe in imputed righteousness or infused righteousness? Imputed or imparted, what kind of righteousness are you talking about? That's technical language, but it is only serving to define what scripture means. It is not undermining scripture. It is not trying to come up with some more technical and therefore be complicated for complications sake tactic. It is simply defending the faith in the way that it was meant to be defended. And I'll remind you, something we've already said, that creeds and confessions of faith are only one way, one means of several, in which we explain to people what the Bible says. Preaching is another way. Books, useful literature is another. Are all of these to be thrown away because they contain technical language? language that you can't find in the Bible? Is everything that we're to say in church and everything that we're to publish and everything that we're to print to be only mere quotations of scripture? Is that what we have to do to be consistent with this objection? Well, yes, and you can see then that it is not a legitimate objection at all. Objection number four, creeds and confessions, they say, are divisive. They're divisive. There are those who think that doctrine divides, and guess what? They're right. It does. Now there are many incidents of disunity in a church which don't arise from doctrine, which arise from things that should never be issues in the first place. Granted, that's true. There are unloving, professing Christians in the church today. There are people who make issues out of secondary, peripheral things that should never be made points of fellowship. All of that is true. There's sin within the church, of course. It's a hospital, not a museum. And we all have this measure of anger and strife within us that we fail to mortify at times, and it comes out over some of the most petty issues that you can imagine. All of that's true. But if there ever is a legitimate reason for a division in the Church, it's over the doctrines which are spelled out in our Confession of Faith. Because not only are these doctrines taught in the Word of God, they are also in our Confession of Faith precisely because they were considered and are still considered to be the fundamental primary doctrines. Therefore, to deviate from the Confession in those doctrines is to deviate from what is considered primary. If you compromise it at any single point, then you set a bad precedent. And you set the precedent for more compromise until finally what you find is a church that has a very little creed and a whole lot of error. And that is disunity of the worst sort. People who have this objection, who say doctrine divides and therefore creeds and confessions which spell out doctrine is not a good thing because it divides. Underlying that sentiment is usually this idea that the number one goal and purpose of Christians and of churches is to be united for unity's sake. But that is not a correct way of looking at the purpose of the church. The number one responsibility of the church is to earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered to the saints, and then to train others in that faith, to teach others what that faith is. If you lose the faith, then you can't even do evangelism, you can't do discipleship, you can't do all of the things that Christ lists in the Great Commission if you lose what the faith is. You have to define what you believe the faith to be. And then with that well-defined confession of faith, you then train and disciple and evangelize and carry out the mission of the Church. Therefore, if there is to be unity in the Church, it is to be unity which is based on the truth. It must be based in the truth. If it's based on anything else, then it's not the kind of unity that God endorses. In fact, it's a wicked unity, the kind of unity that we find at the Tower of Babel. Not the kind of unity that God would have his church experience. Truth divides, and Jesus himself said, I came not to bring peace. I came to bring a sword. What? Yes, it's a little-known passage in the scripture today. But he said, I came not to bring peace, I came to bring a sword, the sword of truth. Truth divides. Truth divides between daughter and mother sometimes, between son and father. It divides friendships. Truth, the sword of truth, as painful as it may feel in a church or in an individual's life, brings division. It does. But we are always to err on the side of truth. If we're going to err at all, it's going to be on the side of truth. And that's not to err. That is to be on the side of the Lord. And in good conscience, we must hold to the truth what we believe the truth to be. And we must speak the truth in love, but hold to the truth. We're not to love, considering truth to be irrelevant. We're to love in such a way as that we maintain what we believe to be true and earnestly contend for it. And that will divide. There will be people who will stop being our friends. And just make sure it's not over your lousy personality. Make sure it's over truth. There are some people who will leave the church. because they no longer find themselves in line with what the church confesses to be true. The sword of truth comes and it divides. Yes, it does. But I would rather be found, united around the truth, than telling God, God, I'm going to just compromise your truth. I'm going to lay it aside for a time because people are more important to me than you. That's really what you're saying. When we're talking about fundamental issues of truth, there are two great commandments. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that is the first and the greatest. The second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Don't ever reverse the two of them. If loving your neighbor in your mind means telling God, I'm no longer going to love you first and your truth first, then you've got it totally upside down. And if we're going to have unity in this church, it's got to be unity around the truth. And it's exactly that kind of unity, by the way, which doesn't weaken the church. It only strengthens the church. Strengthens the church. Yes, truth divides. A confession of faith will divide. But on the flip side, it also unites those who agree with it. who see eye to eye, who have the same mind. Think of all the times Paul said, have the same mind among you. It unites, it strengthens, unifies. And with that, I'll close with a quote which I find to be extremely helpful from one of our Baptist forefathers, B.H. Carroll, who said this, a church with a little creed is a church with a little life. The more divine doctrines a church can agree on, the greater its power and the wider its usefulness. The fewer its articles of faith, the fewer its bonds of union and compactness. The modern cry, less creed and more liberty, is a degeneration from the vertebrate to the jellyfish, and means less unity, less morality, and it means more heresy. Definitive truth does not create heresy, it only exposes and corrects. Shut off the creed and the Christian world would fill up with heresy, unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless deadly." To which quote I say, Amen. So we've considered then that first question of our outline, what are the objections that anti-credalists raise against confessions of faith? And I'm sure there are others, but I think those are the main issues. And then next Lord's Day, we'll look at question number two. What is our biblical warrant for holding a confession of faith? And then lastly, why is a confession of faith so needful and helpful to a church? I believe that we can save our questions and question time for next Lord's Day. So if you have some, write them down. We'll deal with them next Lord's Day after the second lesson. Let's pray. Our Father, we pray that you would help us to think clearly on these matters. Help us not to be fuzzy headed, but to understand how we not only have the scriptures, but we are called upon as individuals and as a church to defend the truth. to maintain, to earnestly contend for it. We pray that you would help us not to be on the one hand proud of our doctrinal confession, proud in the sense that we would feel spiritually elevated and better than other believers. But on the other hand, Lord, keep us from being jellyfish who have no interest and no zeal for maintaining strict definitions of what your word reveals. We pray, Lord, that you would help us to be loving and kind to those who differ and meek and yet at the same time not lose our boldness and our zeal and our stand for truth. This is a tight wire at times and we pray that you would help us to keep that balance Help us never to compromise your truth in the name of love and unity. Always be united around what you have revealed to us in your word. Strengthen this church, we pray, through all of the things that have happened to it and the divisions that have occurred. We pray that it would be, by your grace, a thing which only unites us further, strengthens us for the task, and causes our witness to be that much more clear in this world and in this community. We pray that you dismiss us now from this hour with your blessing, and may these words not fall fruitless to the ground. In Jesus' name, Amen.