Okay, well, welcome this morning. Let me gather us together. Welcome to the question and answer period for our 2020 Theology Conference, and some of you have given us questions and we're going to talk about just a few of these before our Lord's Day morning worship. So let's open in prayer and. Ian, Dr. Hamilton, thank you for being here with us. Let's pray. Almighty God, we thank you for this Lord's Day that you've given to your people. A day of nourishment and rest in you brought about. By the new creation of your son and we thank you for this entire day, we pray that in this time as we discuss some related topics to the. Teaching that we have heard this weekend that you would encourage our hearts, enlarge our minds, and prepare us for worship. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Well, Ian, thank you for being here with us, brother. It's been a privilege to have you with us. And I'm just going to ask you some questions that have come about as a part of what having you here or what you've talked about over these last four sessions. The first question is this, how would you encourage a believer who is struggling with assurance? Well, I would encourage him to stop thinking about assurance and to focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. I think one of the great devices of the devil is to turn us into ourselves. Martin Luther used a very striking phrase. He said, sin is incurvatus in se, that which turns you in upon yourself. And so often when we're thinking about assurance, we are looking into ourselves for crumbs of comfort. Am I loving the Savior enough? Am I reading His word enough? Am I obeying His commandments enough? I think the great antidote to that is to look away from ourselves to Jesus Christ. Assurance is nourished when we see how great and glorious and good our Saviour is and how kind and generous He is to His faltering people. And it's when we sink our lives more and more into the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ that we discover that assurance flows out of a deeper appreciation of what he has done. That, for example, his love for us doesn't rise and fall with our love for him. And that the reason he will never stop loving us is because he never began. That's Geerhardus Vos, I have loved you with an everlasting love. And so I tell myself, Ian, stop looking into yourself. You won't find anything there to comfort you. Because there are days when my faith seems strong and even glorious. And there are other days when I say, Lord, help my unbelief. So when someone is struggling with assurance, I always uniformly begin there and stop looking to yourself. Look away to your Savior and find encouragement in who he is and in what he has done. So that's where I would begin. Thank you, brother. So, so encouraging. Related to your one of your messages, either Friday night or Saturday morning, will you expand more on Christ having to learn and study the word of God? I think the third servant song, Isaiah 50, you know, and Isaiah 42, Isaiah 49, Isaiah 50 and Isaiah 52 into 53 are called the four servant songs. They are an increasingly developed portrait of the serpent crusher, the one promised of God who will come and save the people of God and rescue them from the serpent. And in the third servant song, you find the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the suffering servant, as we know from the New Testament. We find him saying, morning by morning, you waken my ear to hear as one who is taught. And what is being accented there is the true humanity of Jesus Christ. There is a danger that when we think of the two natures of Christ, his divine nature and his human nature, there is a mystery what's called the hypostatic union. The union in Christ of two natures is a profound mystery. But we need to guard against thinking of Jesus as a divinized man, as if there was a conduit, a channel from his deity pouring into his humanity. enabling him to do certain things. For Jesus to be our Savior, he needed to be like us in all respects, as Hebrews puts it, apart from sin. He needed to be truly human. And part of humanity is maturative, developmental. And so his psychology, his humanity, he learned obedience. He grew in favor with God and with man. His knowledge as a human being was not exhaustive. He says, no one knows the day of the Son of Man's coming, not even himself, but the Father in heaven. His humanity is not omnipresent, it's not omniscient. He doesn't know everything in his humanity, otherwise he wouldn't be truly human. So I think one of the great truths of Holy Scripture is that we have a Savior who understands humanity from the inside, not merely by divine observation or by divine intuitive knowledge. At every stage in life, he had to progress. As a two-year-old, he was a perfect two-year-old. As a two-year-old, he wasn't a perfect ten-year-old, because he wasn't ten years yet. But as a ten-year-old, he was a perfect ten-year-old. Irenaeus, who was one of the early church fathers, end of the second century into the third century, Irenaeus of Lyon. He has a wonderful passage where he speaks of the Lord Jesus in his humanity sanctifying every stage of human existence. It's really quite beautiful. And that third servant song really impresses on us that his knowledge of Scripture was learned. It was imbibed as his mother. Remember Mary in the Magnificat? You think, here's a woman who is saturated in Scripture. So he learned Like Timothy, as Calvin puts it, he sucked in godliness from his mother's milk. He went to the synagogue. And the Bible is very strong to the point of astonishment when it highlights the true humanity of Jesus, because in the second servant song, the Messiah says, my life has been a waste of time. My whole life has been a waste. And you read that and you think, what? Is this the son of God speaking? It is. I've labored for nothing. Because in his holy humanity, as all the lights were going out. As his disciples abandoned him, denied him as Judas betrayed him, it looked as though His labor had been expended for nothing. And so the Bible is very bold in highlighting the sinless, holy, but true humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. But let me say one last thing. My children once said to me, you know, Dad, when you die, we know what to write on your headstone. I thought it was a strange thing for children to say. I said, well, what are you going to write? And I thought, you know, loving dad and wonderful husband, whatever. And he was not brief. Because when my children would ask me a question, I would say, Anna, that reminds me, oh dad, just give me the answer. I said, no, we're going to look at the root. So the one last thing I'd say is this, that at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the final great early church council, when they came to wrestle with the data of God's revelation concerning his son and the union in the one person of Jesus Christ of deity and humanity, they only used negative adverbs. They were more confident saying what that union wasn't. It was without confusion, without division, without separation, without mixture. they were more confident saying what it wasn't than actually what it was. So it is a mystery, but... I could just go on, but... But if that didn't make sense, you know, don't just sit there passively. And if you'd like to add anything, you're a scholar from the early church. So, well, brother, I think that was very, very clear and helpful. You mentioned in your in your sermons over these last few days that you had, at least at periods in your in your life, unbelieving parents. How did you honor unbelieving parents throughout your life? Particularly as you came to Christ, maybe how did you honor your parents? Well, if I'm honest, poorly. Cowardly. I was very, very close to my mother. My mom was a Roman Catholic. She was wonderful to me, encouraged me to. To learn, I was brought up in a working class, social housing. I didn't know anyone that owned a house until I went to university. Didn't know anyone that had graduated high school. I was the first person. My mum, I could speak to my mother about anything and would witness to her. My father, he was a good father, but never found it easy with him. I think at first I was so absorbed in my conversion that I neglected my parents. I remember my mother saying to me, maybe after a few months, have you joined a sect? And the reason was I would come in from school or university, go into my bedroom and read. Formerly, we would sit around the television. My mum would watch all these soap operas. Do you call them soap operas? Yeah. Mum would watch all of that. I'd sit with my mum. Then I stopped doing that. And I think I had this wrong idea, you know, love not the world, separate yourself. It was quite fundamentalist, I think. So I think I neglected my parents. But when my mum said that to me, have you joined a sect? It was a bit of a wake up call. I think the Lord was saying, Ian, you spend time with your parents. Don't hide away in your room. In the Lord's kindness, I never found it hard to be obedient as a little boy. For my mother, I just loved her so much. I would do nothing. I would do nothing if I thought it might upset her in any way. I must have been the only boy in the east end of Glasgow who didn't swear. And the only reason for that was I knew my mum wouldn't like it. I must have been the only boy, I lived in a very rough area, who didn't get up to this, this and this because my mum wouldn't like that. That was the Lord's kindness, I didn't know that. That was the Lord hedging me about. So with my mum, I found familial obedience always straightforward. With my dad, It was more fear that he would smack me hard if I didn't do what I was told. So temperament comes into it a lot. I don't have a very combative temperament. I don't like controversy. which has some good points and some bad points. So, I think at first I was neglectful, selfish, thoughtless. I think the Lord helped me to remedy that in measure. I tried to spend time with my parents. I tried to be wise in not always going on about the gospel. But if I'm honest, which is a strange thing for a Christian to say, but if I'm honest, I think I failed my parents by not faithfully and courageously speaking to them about the Lord Jesus Christ. But my parents at first, they'd never met really a born-again believer. They didn't know what that was. They didn't know anyone that read their Bible. They didn't know anyone who went to church. And I started going twice on a Sunday. They thought that was really weird. Then I started going Saturday night prayer meeting in the church. They thought I should be out on the town. I said, well, I'd done all that as a boy. My Saturdays and Sundays were spent clubbing. they thought that was really odd. So I found it a struggle all the years my parents were alive, a struggle to know how much should I speak, how little should I speak. And I look back and think often Lord forgive me that I didn't speak as well to my mum and dad as I should have done. When I got married and my mum died just after our second son was born, I would visit very regularly. Every week I'd visit my parents. They thought my wife was the greatest person they'd ever met. They just loved the thought that they had two grandsons. And so I, in a sense, I hoped my family unit would be a ministry to them. And I think in God's kindness it was. So that's very general. I'm more humble by my failures to my parents than probably almost anything else in my Christian life. Thank you, brother. Another question. Is there a line between being zealous for good works and rest? No. I think in our resting we're to be zealous for good works and in our zeal for good works we're to be resting. I don't think they are mutually exclusive. No one was more zealous for good works than our Lord Jesus Christ. And yet we read through the Gospels and find times when his life was punctuated by the necessity for seasons of rest. But even then, He was so filled with compassion for men and women that there were times when those seasons of rest were punctuated with people coming to him and he never turned anyone away. Sometimes there's a wrong kind of zeal. The New Testament talks about a zeal that's not according to knowledge. Zeal for good works is simply, I think, a longing to see God glorified in all that I am and in all that I do. God is often glorified when we're resting, sleeping, dare I say it, playing golf. I think as a young Christian, I thought zeal for good works meant an unceasing restlessness of activity. But I don't think that's what the Bible means. God puts us in different spheres, whether as a mother, a wife, a husband, a father, a child, a brother, an employer, an employee, and within those different spheres of life we are ever to be zealous for good works, but at the same time to exhibit a humanity that is at rest in the security of God's love. I don't think it's helpful for people to see Christians being endlessly busy. I think sometimes we confuse busyness with actual godly activity. That's very wishy-washy, but that's enough on that. Can you elaborate more on the difference between evangelical and legal obedience? Also related to that warning signs that a teaching is promoting legal obedience rather than evangelical obedience. Kind of a two fold question there. Legal obedience and antinomianism. You know what I mean by antinomianism? You do. They actually have the same parent. Neither of them understand the gospel. Evangelical obedience is obedience that is fueled by love to Christ. If you love me, keep my commandments. Legal obedience, which can be found, I think, in Christians as well as in unbelievers. Legal obedience is thinking that by my endeavors in any way, I can gain the good pleasure of God. Nothing you and I do can gain the good pleasure of God. If we do it out of love for His Son, God is pleased. So, legal obedience is is a mindset that thinks that we can merit something from God. And the reason why I mentioned the younger son in Luke 15 is because too often the focus is on the elder brother. All these days I have slaved for you. He had the mindset of a slave while he was a son in the house. And we think, yeah, that's really bad. But the younger son, we focus on his, you know, he came to himself, the Lord wonderfully granted him a new heart and he returns home repentant. But he says, make me like one of your hired servants. He still doesn't get it. He still doesn't get it. that he's not a hired servant. So, when Jesus says, no longer do I call you servants, I call you friends, he didn't mean they weren't his servants. He simply meant they weren't his servants. They were his servants, but actually they weren't his servants. They were his brothers who would serve him. Which is why, I think, in ministry, we need to guard against becoming far too imperatival in our preaching. You know, I mentioned the balance in Ephesians. One imperative verb in the first three chapters and 42 or something imperative verbs in the next three. That's quite striking. And in Romans, the first command, halfway through Romans chapter 6, And that's the balance because, to speak grammatically, the imperatives of the gospel flow out of the indicators of the gospel. What we are to do flows out of what God has done. And that's why in preaching, and I don't say this to flatter him or to flatter you in any sense, I'm always looking, when I visit congregations, to see what effect the ministry of the Word is having on people. The ministry of an indicative emphasis is very much manifest here. To me, the balance is right. When my children were small, someone would say to them, Are you coming to my birthday party on Sunday? No. Why not? Well, we go to church. Well, can you not miss it? Well, my dad wouldn't like that. And then you're looking forward to the day when someone will say to your children, do you want to come to the football match on Sunday? No. I'm going to church. Well, can you not miss it? Why would I miss meeting with the King of Glory to go to a football match? That's what you're looking forward to. So evangelical obedience is obedience that flows out of love to Christ and that seeks to bring pleasure to the Heavenly Father. Thank you, brother. You've mentioned travels. You've traveled all across the globe, but kind of a unique question. You've spent a lot of time in the United States, but you are not a native United Statesian. So a question here is, As you come to the US are there. You mentioned in your in your message. Certain positive characteristics about the church in the US I guess the question is twofold. Understanding the church in the United States but being able to see it from afar. Are there encouragements that you would offer, but also cautions or concerns? And I realize this could be for the West as well, but specifically maybe the United States. Yeah, I better watch what I say. It's often said that American Christianity is 3,000 miles wide and half an inch deep. And I'm sure there's a sense in which that's true. In my 30 or so years of coming to the States, I think I've been maybe 60, 70 times, I have, on the whole, only met just delightful Christians. There's an openness to speaking about the Lord. There's a generosity in the American Christianity that I've experienced that I don't experience anywhere else. An openness, a generosity, a certain naivety. Americans, this is generally speaking, 85% of Americans don't have a passport. I often think of America like a giant with a small head. Most Americans don't know much about the world outside America. Now, the reason for that is because to get your head around 50 states, I don't know how you do that. I mean, Alaska to, you know, Florida, to Hawaii, Mississippi, North, just to get your head around 50 states. But most Americans I meet, are delightful, warm, they have an open passion for Christ. They don't really understand, in general terms, you might be an exception, they don't really understand the world outside America and the Christian church outside America. I was in North Carolina a while ago speaking at a family conference and after it was all over on Sunday night, the minister had a lot of folk back to his house with pizza. Americans do pizza really well. I like coming here. And he said, Ian, tell us what you think about America. And I said, well, I just love coming here. My heart is almost uniformly glad to come. Oh, he says, yeah, but tell us what you really think. So I said, well, And you use this, I said, it's like a giant with a small head. What does that mean? I said, well, for example, what's the capital of Bulgaria? Now, I don't know why on earth I said this. Does anyone here know the capital of Bulgaria? One? Sofia, right. I don't know why I said that. Probably half the folk in my congregation in Cambridge at the time didn't know that. So I said, capital of Bulgaria. He said, Belfast. Yeah, yeah. Now, you might not know it's Sophia, but you'd know it wasn't Belfast. This is Northern Ireland. So he looked at me and he said, OK, what's the capital of Florida? I said, Tallahassee. He said, North Dakota. I said, Bismarck. He said, South Dakota. I said, Pierre. How do you know that? I said, everyone in Britain knows that. I said, no, no, they don't. My sons and I memorize all the state capitals. That's simply to say that your country is huge, but the world looks at America and doesn't see the great things you do and you do great things actually that the world doesn't see because it doesn't want to see. George Bush is a laughing stock in many places. You go to Africa, he's not a laughing stock because of the good he was able to do. The world looks at America and it hears your presidents, whether it's Mr. Obama or Mr. Trump or whoever, we're going to almost fix the world. And the world just shakes its head and says, when is this giant going to wake up and realize it isn't God's answer to the world? That's all very diffuse. I think you, by and large, Americans are open, generous, public in their convictions in a way that we are not in Britain. You're willing to speak up for the unborn in a way that rarely happens in Britain. Sometimes the individualism that drives America, you're so entrepreneurial, and that's great in many spheres, but it infects the life of the church. And you have an individualism, generally speaking, that can scar the community and the collegiality of the church. So that's just random thoughts. When my wife and I come here, Uniformly, we go back home thinking, if we had to live anywhere else in the world, we would live in America. There are some bits of America we wouldn't want to live in, but you know, I don't think there's anywhere else I've been where I would want to live. You have so much going for you. I just would wish that most Americans or even American Christians could have a little bit of a better sense of the cause of Christ outside of their own land and not view everything through the lens of the land of the free and the home of the brave. But you're a great country. Do you know that a Scotsman A Scottish Presbyterian from my home city was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Anyone know his name? Now, he must know his name. Witherspoon. Well done. John Witherspoon. So, one of the signers of the Declaration. You should know all this. 1776. I teach American Presbyterian history, amongst other things, which I really quite enjoy. Anyway. What would you say is the importance of the Lord's Day or the Sabbath in the life of the believer? It's absolutely pivotal. When the Sabbath goes, now listen to this, you might think this is overstated, when the Sabbath goes, religion goes eventually. You look at church history. When the Lord's Day is not kept and prized as the divine wisdom for creation and for the church, what happens ultimately is that vital religion dies. Because if our creator rested on the seventh day. You know that doesn't mean inactivity. And he imposed graciously that pattern on creation as a whole and upon his people particularly. When you abandon the wisdom of the Creator, you end up First of all, you end up with religion that begins increasingly to be shaped and styled by the thinking of men. And ultimately, the thinking of men is like the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy. It just tends to dissolution and destruction. So the Lord has given us one day in seven because we need structure to life and worship. We need a concentrated focal point for refreshing, renewing, recalibration. And when the Lord's Day goes then I think you see it in conservative churches. I know the PCA probably better than most other denominations. When evening worship goes relatively very soon on the scale of history, that church will die. or it will just become a parody of the world, a religious parody of the world. That's one of the benefits of reading church history. You know, what goes around comes around. There's nothing new under the sun. Honor the Sabbath day, keep it holy, keep it unto the Lord. Do good on the Sabbath, you know, Matthew 12. The Sabbath is not there for inactivity and whatever else, you know. It's right to do good to Jesus on the Lord's day. And we need to be generous in how we understand that. But I'm just so thankful that I have an anchor point in my life where in the midst of the busyness and the stresses, the trials, the joys, the sorrows of life, the Lord in his wisdom has given us a day, a whole day, when we can gather A few years ago I was at a conference with Alistair Begg. Alistair and Sinclair and I were brought up within about three miles of each other and we didn't know each other. Sinclair's two years older than me and Alistair's one year younger than I am. I was at a conference with Alistair and after it there was a Q&A for the young men there. They really wanted to talk to Alistair and that's fine but I was there so I kind of joined in. And someone said to Alistair, how many people come to your church on a Sunday? He says, 3,000 in the morning and 900 at night. The young man said, that is absolutely amazing. Alistair said, you think that's amazing? Where are the other 2,100 at night? They're out for dinner and watching TV. The man who has 60 people in the morning and 40 at night is doing better than I am. And I thought, I like you, Alistair. Enough. Brother, thank you for spending your time with us, sacrificing to be here. Is that it done? No. Yeah, we're right at the break. Is there any other thoughts or words that you'd share with us before we pray? Well, I've enjoyed very, very much being here. You've made me very, very welcome. And I just want to encourage you. It's so vital that when people come through a door, first impressions are huge. And not least in a culture where people increasingly have no idea what church is, what the Christian faith is. When I was your age, people had an idea about church and Jesus, God, whatever. But for people today to come into a fellowship of believers and to be confronted with genuine kindness is a huge thing because we don't live in a kind world. continue to do what you're doing. I know it's different. I'm a speaker, so people tend to go out of their way to welcome speakers. I know that, but I know enough to see beyond that and to And what's really encouraged me and impressed me is that no one... I go to some places and as soon as they know who I am, they come up and say, what do you think about Theonymy or paedocommunion or Aquinas? Well, that's fine. I don't mind talking about that. I love it when people just say, thank you so much for coming. Is your wife with you? I said, well, actually there's a trip she's not on. Do you have any children? I thought, these are normal people. This is good. So be encouraged. It's been a delight to be with you. Thank you. Thank you, brother. Let's pray together. Our Father, we thank you for this opportunity to think on a few things that we have thought about or have had questions about as a result of this weekend. Well, we praise you for you have made the heavens and the earth and the seas and dry land. Lord, you have created all things and uphold them by your very word. And we thank you in your guidance of your creation and your providence. You have crossed our paths together, this entire body, this Lord's Day for worship, the opportunity to hear your word in just a few moments. We pray your blessing in advance on our Lord's Day services and pray that you would encourage our souls And might we have hearts and minds that are ready to praise You. We thank You for our brother and for bringing him to us. These things we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.