Congratulations to all of you for not letting daylight savings defeat you. We are continuing this, during this season of Lent, we're going to continue looking at some issues in just Christian growth and formation and sanctification. And today what I'm going to do is use the Heidelberg Catechism, just four questions from the Heidelberg Catechism, which really do a wonderful and kind of a sweeping, comprehensive kind of movement through how Christians grow. It doesn't say, of course, everything, because you can see there, it's on your page, there's short answers. but it does touch on some very, very key teachings in scripture which have been emphasized by the Reformed, such that if you go and look in the literature, you will see that there is what we call the Reformed view of sanctification. We often think of the Reformed view of justification or the reformed view of predestination as being what is distinctly reformed. But one of the most important things that was recovered in the Reformation was the proper biblical teaching as to how Christians grow as Christians. And so we're going to look at that today. This is kind of an overview of that. But I want to begin by considering five sub-inferior paths of sanctification, inferior paths of sanctification, okay? And these are all things that I've encountered in my life and in my counseling, in Reformed churches. They're not things that are only particular to strange or Arminian kind of churches or things like that. They can be found in Reformed churches. Because, again, sometimes people, they come to the Reformed faith, even the pastors can be Reformed, but they believe that sanctification is something entirely different, and they adopt sanctification teaching from the world or from broader evangelicalism. Okay, so let me give you kind of a real quick run through as to what these things are. We're going to revisit them at the end if there's time, but one inferior idea of sanctification would be the Keswickian Christian view of sanctification. And this is the Christian, and all of these are Christians. All of these are baptized Christians. All of these are people who want to grow in their faith. So, we're not maligning their motives or something like that. These are people who have received bad teaching and there's a lot of that out there. Amy, maybe you could direct them to the handout. Thank you. So the Keswickian movement was a movement a couple hundred years ago, which was a series of conferences, just like we've been studying in revivalism. These were a series of conferences, and they said a couple hundred years, a little more than a hundred years ago in the 1800s. And they basically, the teaching of the movement was an emphasis on faith, and what they were trying to recover was an emphasis on faith, And when any doctrine gets overemphasized, you begin to kind of neglect other doctrines, and you begin to put a whole bunch of things upon one doctrine that it wasn't meant to bear. So one of the things of which people in this view would say is, look, your problem is your own human effort. You're trying to live a holy life. You think that by your discipline, you can discipline yourself unto godliness, and that's wrong. And I did that on purpose, because that's a direct quote from Paul, right? He says, discipline yourself unto godliness. But you think that by your discipline, you can live a holy life. No, what you need to do is understand that, and again, this is error, but it's not like 100% error. it takes a truth and it overemphasizes it. You need to understand that your holiness only comes to you when you let go of your life and you allow God to to come and fill your life. There's a common saying among these people. This is what I was taught in Sunday school growing up, is like, the Christian life is when you learn to let go and you let God do it. And of course, you know, we who are Christians and believe in faith and that God is at work in our lives, that sounds very much the truth, but this idea of passivity and stepping back, you know, let him take the wheel. That's Kezwickian. And it was soundly refuted by Reformed Christians. For instance, J.C. Ryle wrote his book, Holiness, partially in response to what he was seeing around England of this teaching that was taking off, okay? So that's one inferior form of sanctification that's common, still around very much today. In fact, podcasts, books, evangelical books and things, they will often just kind of speak that way. And there's certain verses they can pull out of context and so forth to use. It's just, it's everywhere. I don't know anybody that would say, I'm Kezwickian. Anybody would do that, but the leaven is in our culture. Another inferior way is the mortification by confession. And this has come about because of various kinds of sanctification groups that I don't know what the origin of this is, but I know that I've seen this in groups, accountability groups, and it was found in the Methodists. The Methodists would gather together. Remember, Methodism originally was not a new denomination. It was a club inside the church. It was a sanctification club inside the church. Because frankly, the church was not necessarily doing the work, the whole work of the church, so they decided to make a club pursuing holiness. And one of the rules in these meetings would be that you have to come and you have to tell every single thing you've done that's wrong. Every single thing. And it was this idea that if we just will just say what we've done that's wrong that week, then we will grow in holiness. Well, today there are still accountability groups like this. You can go in all over Portland in the Evangelical Church. If you're a person that struggles with drug addiction or pornography addiction or just any other kind of sin, you can meet with people. And the idea being that what you do is you go around and kind of like Alcoholics Anonymous, you just simply talk about your week, what happened, and you give an account. And that's it. Often there will not be any kind of like counseling or instruction. The idea being that if we can just simply tell people what we've done, somehow that will guide us internally into holiness or somehow atone for what's going on or move us. You'll see there's a major problem with that. It is not wrong or sinful to talk to people about your sin, of course, but it's also not, by itself, sanctifying in any way. In fact, what I've seen can happen in those kinds of things is that people talk about it, and they talk about it, and they talk about it so much that, actually, what ends up happening is they lose the proper shame that they might feel about that, because everybody in that group is just continually just, you know, this is, I had a really bad week, I had a really, And shame is actually a very important dynamic in our lives, that some things should not be normalized, some things should not be just made out to be, this is just an everyday thing. So that's one thing. The other, another inferior form would be the psychologizing Christian, and this is the person who basically, you know, again, orthodox Christian, but they adopt a view of Christian formation. You'll sometimes see language substituted in for the normal biblical terms of sanctification they'll start to describe as spiritual formation or, well, just other language. They use the psychological language there. And they will take the norms and the standards of modern psychology and they will plug them in and basically substitute them for holiness. So, whereas psychology, the goal of psychology is supposed to be to live a normal life. That is not the same as the goals of a holy life. We are called to glory. We are called to Christ-likeness. The idea of psychology is to take people that are sociopaths and psychopaths and to help them to live normal lives. That was supposed to be the purpose of it. So you can see from the beginning it starts with a kind of a wrong goal, but also one of the things that it will frequently do is it takes worldly standards of things and for instance the word shame becomes a buzzword there. I've even been, and I know a number of you were there too, we had a guy that came and spoke at a meeting, this was over at RCC, and he's a decent fellow, but he was a psychologist, and he basically, do you remember, he said, he said, the problem with young men and why they struggle with sin is that they have shame. And what we need to do is we need to get rid of that shame. We need to get rid of the shame. If they can get rid of the shame, then they will grow as Christians. The shame is what is holding them down. And that comes straight from modern secular psychology that doesn't come from scripture. And he got a lot of pushback. He actually kind of got filleted there in front of everybody. He was like, wait a second, hold on. It was a little awkward, but that's a pretty common thing because Again, going back a hundred years, the church abdicated because of revivalism and because of other things. It abdicated its role as counselor, the shepherd of the soul. Soul care was handed over to professionals and that's what they did with it. Another inferior view would be the carnal Christian, and this is just someone that I would say will abandon the work altogether as being impossible. You'll know that you're dealing with someone who has got into this kind of wrong teaching because they will often say, we're all just miserable sinners and we're all filthy. They throw mud over everything. And they genuinely cease to believe, they kind of give up on the idea that you can live a holy and upright and faithful life. And they level everybody down to exactly the same and just basically say it's all, we're all just living in the mud. People like that aren't gonna grow because one of the things that is absolutely necessary to grow in Christlikeness is to believe that it is possible to grow. and to believe and to have a goal that you are striving after and working towards, namely Christlikeness. And these people have just come to believe that, look, life here, we're just miserable, just miserable people, just miserable sinners. And that's how it's always gonna be. And Peter rebukes this person. Remember in 2 Peter 1, the person who has given up on Christian growth, he says, you've forgotten what you were. You've forgotten that at the beginning of your Christian life, you actually did grow. You actually did grow in virtue. You grew in knowledge. You grew in wisdom. And then you left off. You fell off. And that is a kind of Christian amnesia. You forgot that God was growing you, and it's caused a lot of problems because of that. Okay, and then the fifth one would be, I just call it the put-off Christianity. And this is the view that makes the entire work of sanctification negative. It's all discipline. It is all just stopping, stop that. It's just stop, just stop what you're doing. Just put it away. It's all mortification. It's all repentance. It's all these things, and it is not what we're gonna talk about what they neglect, it's not seeking after virtue. It's not seeking after Christ, seeking the face of Christ. So the Christian, again, that's just a truncated view of sanctification. All five of these people are going to be frustrated. They're going to be very frustrated because they genuinely, if they're real Christians or real believers, they're going to want to please God. They're going to want to serve Him. But because of this bad leaven that's gotten in the system, because of this bad teaching, They they look around for the resources and what they pick up. It just doesn't help them just doesn't help them It's it's tragic. So that's why this is important. Now the Heidelberg Catechism does much again. This is you know Long long time ago. This was written and it would be very good 1500s This would be very very good for us to learned these lessons from wise fathers that have gone before us How do I grow as a Christian? So here's four questions and we're going to I'm gonna read the question and you're gonna give the answer. Okay? So question 88, what is involved in genuine repentance or conversion? You say, two things, the dying away of the old self and the rising to life of the new. Nevermind those numbers at the end, I cut that out. What is the dying away of the old self? So hold on, so what you see he's doing here is you've got this paradigm, die, live. Now he's going to take this and pull it apart a little bit. And then he's going to take this and pull it apart a little bit. So question 89, what is the dying away of the old self? Answer? To be genuinely sorry for sin and more and more to hate and run away from it. Now he uses some language that is a little bit different maybe than what we've used before. It's it's all there. This is this is Paul. You know, this is Jesus teaching here. So what is the rising to life of the new self you say? wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a love and delight to live according to the will of God by doing every kind of good work. Okay, and then the question, what are good works? You say, only those which are done out of true faith conform to God's law are done for God's glory and not those based on our own opinion or human tradition. So what I plan to do today is mostly I'm going to focus on the first three questions. I'm going to do more during the season of Lent on the other question about good works. The Bible's teaching on good works is rich. We've talked about this a little bit in the parables we've been looking at. I want to put this back in the context of the catechism, though, is that this is the beginning of the introduction of his teaching, I say him. Ercinas contributed to this catechism, he was not the only author. Bolivianus, there's other authors, but it's actually a committee. But in the context of the catechism, they place this towards the end and they place the Ten Commandments towards the end. Some other catechisms place the Ten Commandments early. This reflects the fact that there are multiple uses of the law. One of the uses of the law, if it's early in the catechism, typically what they're doing with it is to bring us to conviction to seek a savior. Okay? Later, what it's doing here, so the Heidelberg Catechism, I don't know if you remember, has an early section That's very small, it talks about the law of God, our fallenness, our human nature, in preparation to talk about salvation, right there at the beginning. But it doesn't go through the Ten Commandments. But here, in the Heidelberg, they place it towards the end as a guide to show us how Christians ought to live. not to satisfy the righteousness, the righteous judgments of God, but to be a guide to us. So there's multiple uses of the law, right? And one of the uses of the law is to demonstrate for us what it looks like to love God and to please Him. So that's why it's talking here about repentance, conversion, good works, and it's going to lead into the Ten Commandments as a way of life. Okay. So, let's look at it, just pull, so in the next section I have A, B, C, D, and E, and I'm just going to pull out five reformed emphases. These are biblical. I keep using the word reform to distinguish between inferior things that are found in the world and evangelicalism, but these are just biblical, these are biblical concepts that are really, really important If we are to help our Keswickian mortification by confession, psychologizing our carnal Christians and our put-off only Christians, okay, if we are to help those people, and there are many many more besides that, those are the ones I thought off the top of my head, there are many more inferior ways of sanctification, But if we're to help them, and they're not just gonna be out there, they're gonna be in here. The leaven gets in here, guys. The leaven of the world, the leaven of evangelicalism, broadly, the leaven of psychology, it all works its way in here as well. So if we're to help them, we need to pull these things out, examine how they are biblical, and then think of how to put them into practice in our lives, okay? To review, you remember last week we talked about the four spiritual laws of Romans chapter 7, so that is prerequisite to this teaching. If you have that teaching, okay, if you understand the nature of sin and the utter inability of human beings to do anything, how the law of God is powerless to defeat it, how all of our good intentions, our covenant commitments are powerless to overcome it, it gets you a long way in terms of thinking about sanctification. Just by way of review, in Romans chapter seven we saw that this is called a law, but it's the principle of the flesh, the principle of the sin nature, is these things. It's an unyielding, which is why it's called a law. It doesn't let up, never lets up. I found in myself a law that when I sought to do what is good, evil's right there. Always there. It's like you think you get away from it a little bit, oh, he's right there. He's just always, always present, ready to say, no, let's do the opposite. Let's do the exact opposite, in fact, okay? So he's the unyielding, ever antagonistic, antagonistic towards what? Towards the law of God. towards the law of God. Always antagonistic towards the law of God. And therefore, it's really important, we need to remember that our sin nature is not an evil person living inside of us that is somehow just contrary to us, contrary to our welfare or anything like that. It is contrary to our welfare. but it's it's not an evil principle inside of us like the ego of uh is that the right the id of freud which is a principle that's that's carnal um you know freud freudianism um it's a reptilian it's like sub human it's not enlightened it's like it just desires and flesh like part of that would be our creatureliness We just get hungry. That's not what this is. This is someone, an evil principle within us that when the law of God presents itself, when obeying God presents itself, it says, no, the other. Our own way. Something else. Different. No. Okay, that's our fallenness. Our fallenness, okay? So, ever antagonistic, it is a mortal enemy. If you are a Christian, this is your mortal enemy. There's no peace with it. That is to cut yourself off, to be unrepentant. It doesn't mean it never wins the day. It will. We're fallen creatures. However, we will fight this to the death. and we will go down swinging, okay? Every day of our lives, that is our attitude towards it as baptized Christians, okay? It is our mortal enemy, we seek to put it to death. So you carry all of this and you carry it with you, your own worst enemy is always right there at hand, so it's something always to remember. As one, I love this line, someone was, It was a thing on online or something like that. It might have been Doug Wilson, actually, that said this. Now I'm thinking, oh, but I don't know who it was. But someone said when they were being accused falsely, they were saying like, you know, how sad it is because, you know, I'm not guilty of the things that I'm being accused of here. However, I sing hymns every week that say worse about me, that speak more, that accuse me more than this person ever, ever accuses me, right? In our Christian hymns, we know that guy that lurks within, we know what he is, and it comes out even in our singing. Our own worst enemy is within, okay? I'm not sure, I think I botched that quote. It was actually a really, really good quote, but sorry about that. Okay, so let's move on. So that's the basis of this, that's the foundation of this. The first principle that I want to stress from these questions is for those who have been truly converted, They are in perpetual conflict with the flesh. Okay, now this is in Romans chapter 8 and its language here is more common than what we use in the in the catechism. Romans chapter 8 says this. In the wrong place. So then brothers, okay, he's coming to a conclusion having considered the four spiritual laws, the law of the spirit of life, and what it's able to do now that we have a friend in our side who is able to overcome the flesh. That's the key thing. So he's drawing a conclusion. So then brothers, we are debtors. Not to the flesh. To live according to the flesh. If you live according to the flesh, you will die. I'm sorry, I'm in verse 12 and following. But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. And there's a world of teaching right there in that phrase, put to death. It's to mortify, to kill it. And what this reveals is a number of things, which I've already hinted at up there where it's that ever antagonistic. The process of mortification is the work of a Christian. Okay, the process of mortification, for those who have been truly born again in Christ, this is our regular work, it's what we do. It is, as I said before, it's a mortal conflict, okay? So he says, if you put to death the deeds of the body, this is not a if you slap around or if you push back, it is not only that. The language of the catechism is Look, the dying away of the old self and then later what is the dying away? To be genuinely sorry for sin and more and more to hate and run away from it. So it's not couched there in the language of put it to death, but before it is, it's to die to it. This is a mortal enemy and we mean to slay it. and we mean to slay it, we mean to be done with it, okay? The second important thing to note is that it's not particular. It is not just our particular sins that trouble us. Mortification is not a person who is so frustrated because they keep getting into trouble with their mouth or they keep getting into trouble at work or they get arrested and they're just like they're hitting rock bottom and they're like I have just got to get my life together and so they begin to fight against those things which have been troubling them and have been causing them so much distress, okay? That may be a part of mortification, but that's not the Christian work of mortification. The Christian work of mortification is universal in its scope. I am opposed to sin, period, in whatever form. And if you can convince me that any kind of behavior that I have been doing is sin, then that is my mortal enemy. And I will do everything I can to put that thing to death and fight against it. Does that make sense? It's universal in scope. You can't simply call something repentance if you're just troubled by this sin. In the world, worldlings feel convicted about all kinds of things. Some of those things overlap with the law of God. Our conviction is the law of God. What has God said we are to do or not to do? That is the basis of our fight. Okay? Questions about that? Doesn't mean, by the way, of course, that we're aware of everything. I'm aware of a lot more things in my heart than I was when I was 16. I'm, you know, blissfully ignorant, breaking the law of God all over the place. But the principle of mortification was there. Even though I was growing as a Christian, one of the things is I was falling under some of this bad teaching. I really at that time was more of a Keswickian than anything here and was really struggling with my Christian life because I thought the law of God didn't have anything to do with us. It's just nonsense, antinomianism, like horrible teaching that I learned in Sunday school. we don't have anything to do with the law of God we live by faith in Jesus and that's it and and and all the slogans and things around that so I'm really struggling with this but as as the teaching as I come to the word of God as a believer as I come to the word of God and I read it and I encounter it and I think about it I see what God's will is my desire to put things to death my desire to grow as a Christian group because I really was a believer I didn't know how to word these things, I didn't know how to articulate it, but it was universal. So we'll just finish with three and four here, and then we gotta get ready for worship. Number three, it is successful. It is successful conflict. So Romans chapter seven, remember these aren't chapters, this is how we divided this in the Middle Ages, ends with this. Who will deliver me from this body of death? And Paul's pulling his hair out. Doomed, left to myself. I'm doomed. But he doesn't end there, of course. Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, so then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for the law of the spirit of life. We have victory. We have victory over sin, okay? It is not an all-at-once, done-away-with-everything victory, okay? But it is successful. The history of any Christian's life is one of successes, some failures, successes, successes, but it is this upward trajectory if the Spirit of Christ dwells in you. It must be because it says here, if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the spirit, there's only two options here. If by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. You're putting them to death. Showing up it presents itself like no you should do this, you know, that's my sin nature voice. Yeah, okay gravelly, you know and in it and you'd like get back evil and you fight against it and you you put it away and You put it away. You're experiencing success day by day. Little incremental successes. And of course, it is not a straight line. And sometimes we go through seasons of our life. We've all had seasons of our life like... you know maybe this week it's just like like it it is like that but over the course of life led by the spirit of god we see success we see victory okay and perhaps it's not even the best way to say that is not even to draw this long line because truly some christians can like they can really deteriorate for seasons, but sin does not have the victory. If the Spirit of God is there and is at work in your life, it doesn't have the victory. So in any given conflict, the Spirit of God will give you victory at some point. And then the fourth thing is it's perpetual. Paul never says here in Romans chapter 8, he never says I'm going to read this in such a way that might communicate an inferior view of sanctification. This is Wesleyanism. This is found all over the place. This kind of thinking, I could have put it as one of the other things. So brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death Once for all, the deeds of the body, well, then you will live. That's not what it says. It's a present tense verb. So I would have preferred for emphasis for it to be stressing, if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. It is a perpetual fight. When do the deeds of the body present themselves? Only when you're 22? Only when you're 18? Only when you first become a Christian? No. When you're 85, the deeds of the body will still be there. The old man is still in there. This is going to be a battle all the days of your life. You don't get a vacation and you don't get a retirement from this. Your retirement is glory. So that's all the time we have. We'll pick up these other points next week. C, D, and E did not get very far. It's okay. Let's pray and then we will get ready for worship. Father, we thank you, Lord, for teaching us the way in which we are to live, that we might grow in Christlikeness. Thank you especially for giving to us your Son and pouring out your Spirit upon us that we might have the victory. We pray for all of us in here that we would experience great growth and victory in Christ in our battle with sin. In Christ's name, amen.