Well, please, if you would, turn in your Bibles to 2 Timothy. We're taking a little break from Acts. We'll get back there. So if you would, would you stand and let us, as we confess, ask for the help of the Spirit to understand the scriptures this morning. Gracious Holy Spirit, thank you that you are the one who's the very breath of God Be pleased to bring your light, the light of the word, into us. Melt our hearts. Grant us attentiveness, we pray. And help the one who's speaking to speak only words that are pleasing in your sight. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Chapter three, beginning in verse 14. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. I charge you in the presence of God and Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears. They will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. You may take your seats. Well, while living in Philadelphia as a poor graduate student, the opportunity came up for work to be the manager of the apartment building that we lived in. My role was twofold. One, I was to be the rental agent. I was to show people around and have them sign their leases. collect their first check, and the second was to be a buffer between the renters and the owners who wanted absolutely no contact with their renters. In other words, I was the complaint department. Now, those apartment buildings happened to be located about a block from one of the commuter train stations that ran down to the center city of Philadelphia. And space was at a premium. And so people would drive by and see some of those empty spaces in our apartment building and want to park there. And I guess this problem had been around a long time. And so a towing service had been put into place who would tow your car if you didn't have a sticker on the back of your rearview mirror down to North Philadelphia, which if you're familiar, Philadelphia is one of the least desirable places in the entire city. And there were huge signs that announced this fact on four corners of various buildings. And one Saturday afternoon, a man nearly broke down my door. He was twice my size. He was livid because his custom van had been towed away. And he rocked back and forth on his feet and he raised his fist and just, well, he demanded that I get his van back. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I could tell there was nothing I was going to say that was going to make this a better situation, and I felt like I was about to make a visit to the hospital. Now, that feeling of being physically threatened, it rattled me for several days. It hasn't been a common occurrence in my life, but in my line of work, I have made more than a few people angry. Some have wanted to sue me, and judging by the looks on people's faces, some people wanted me dead. Now, I don't know if you've had an experience of being threatened. Maybe for some of you, the last time you were threatened was in a school play yard. I don't know. But let me ask you, what's the biggest threat to you personally right now? Maybe it's something bad happening to somebody you love. Or maybe it's an issue with your health. Or maybe it's rising inflation and the uncertainty in the economy. Let me ask you this. What's the biggest threat to CRPC? Well, you might think of what we've experienced during the pandemic and the tensions that raised, or perhaps being a part of an aging congregation, or perhaps having, well, the a mortgage as a church and the extra finances that requires, or perhaps it's the lack of a permanent pastor. And of course, all of those things are very important. But as someone who's looking in from the outside, I would identify some other things. The first is this, being inwardly focused as a church. That is the primary reason that churches plateau and decline. It's a failure to live out the Great Commission, to be making new disciples and not just maturing old ones. And the reason mission exists in the church is because worship doesn't. Our mission is to win people to Christ by witnessing to him and for the Spirit to work and for they in turn to become worshipers with us. And the second greatest threat is disunity as you make decisions in facing the future. You as a body have many, many decisions to make in the coming days. there is the decisions about your next pastor, those must-haves in addition to being ordainable in the PCA, their character, their experience and giftings and passions and what you need in a pastor in this season in the life of your church. And of course there's a decision about whom you're going to entrust the process of looking for such a pastor and bringing you one up. And then there's new officers. Each of the men who've been nominated has a decision to make about whether they will indeed follow through with the training and serve. And you have a decision to make as to whether in fact you will place them in office. And then there's the transition team's report and recommendations. Now, all of these decisions, in all of them, there will be opinions. In fact, my experience in the church is if you get five church members in a room, there's seven opinions. You can pretty much count on it. And some of those opinions will be, well, they'll be held strongly and some of them loosely. And there'll be varying convictions that this is the right course of action or that's the wrong course of action. There may be an issue of conscience. Someone says, to do that would be for me sin. But I can tell you one thing that isn't as obvious. There will be fear and pride as you walk through these decisions. There will probably mostly be under the surface fear and pride, but there will be fear that making this choice will have a bad result, and there will be pride thinking that my view of this is superior, it's better than everybody else's. Everybody else is missing something, and I alone have got this right. Being united as members of the body of Christ is not something nice if you can manage it, like taking a vacation to someplace you've always wanted to go. or remodeling your kitchen. No, being united, guarding and preserving our unity as a local church is commanded. Let me mention just a few passages that talk about this. I printed them out because, well, perhaps you don't have all of these fresh in your mind. Paul writes as the authoritative representative of Jesus Christ when he writes these words in the Corinthian church. In chapter one, he says, Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, I appeal to you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind, in the same judgment. For it's been reported to me that there's quarreling among you, my brothers." Don't let Paul's diplomatic way of speaking lead you to think that this is merely a suggestion. In Ephesians 4, he writes, I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling of which you've been called, in all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. And on the other hand, Paul speaks about divisions in the life of the church. In Galatians 5, he writes, now, the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." Those are sobering words. And of course, we find scandalous. the idea of Christians engaging in orgies or drunkenness or sexual immorality. But are we as equally repulsed by rivalries and dissensions and divisions? Now, of course, it's easier said than done to be united as a church, to navigate preferences and opinions and convictions and stay united. And I want to explore in the next four weeks with you what guidance God has given and how to work that out as a church, because God has not left us without instruction. These are first principles. These are absolutely foundational in order to walk together as a church. Now, perhaps the greatest threat to unity is not having different points of view, but having different sources of authority. What authority will govern our decision-making? Well, traditionally in the history of the church, in fact, the confession reflects this. There have been three sources of authority, scripture, tradition, and reason. In the Roman Catholic Church, both scripture and tradition are held to be of equal importance in making decisions and determining doctrine and practice in the life of the church. But the Reformed churches have always insisted on the primacy of Scripture. But there's one more source of authority that really wasn't, well, really not on the radar screen when our confession of faith was written. And so let me paint a picture just to help you see where we are. For much of human history, people held that the gods, or God, had the ultimate authority. Kings, well, they either were the descendants of gods or they were appointed by God. They ruled by divine right. And therefore, they had God-given authority to issue decrees, make laws, and judge disputes. This viewpoint held in Western Europe until the Renaissance. That's somewhere between the 1400s and the 1600s. And there was the rediscovery of Greek and Roman philosophy, and reason became an authority. It became a much higher authority over time than the scripture. It was used to debunk the existence of God and divine authority. And so kings and rulers no longer could claim, you know, I'm doing this by God's power and authority. Instead, they had authority only because of the consent of the people. Fast forward today, and I'm skipping a lot, but in the late 19th century, in the present, the individual became the final authority. We live in a time of the sovereign self, the autonomous self. And you hear all the time, it's all around us, I will decide for myself what is true, what is right and wrong, and what is real. It's what people are saying when they say, no one can tell me what to do, or what's right for you isn't necessarily right for me. What's moral for you isn't necessarily moral for me. And here's the thing. We've all been shaped by this thinking. It's far deeper in us than we might like to face. We're shaped by the thought that we're the final authority. And no Christian can escape entirely the influence of the spirit of the times and the age that they live in. And we see it all over the church. I, as a pastor, encountered this so much. People pick and choose. They like what Jesus said about this, but they're not so much about this. They choose to obey this, but this they ignore. If we're going to escape being people of our time, we're going to have to have our minds renewed. And Jesus Christ speaking about authority tells us just what's central to doing that. In Matthew 5, he says this, do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota or a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is saying the scriptures cannot be set aside. He affirms that he's not doing away with the Old Testament, his life and work are in fact the fulfillment of all the Old Testament, all of it. points to him. Jesus lived by the scriptures. He cited them. His life was based on them, and he used them in the midst of difficulty. And he says in verse 18 that the scriptures are more enduring than the heavens, that's the stars and the galaxies, and the earth, the mountains and the sea. And he goes on to say clearly that the scriptures are divine in their origin and character, and it extends to even the smallest part of them. Now the word translated here, iota, refers to the smallest letter in Hebrew, the yod. And it's like a, basically it's a little bit bigger than a comma that's in bold type font. And then there's the dot. And that's the distinguishing mark between two Hebrew letters, the Hebrew D and the R. And it's about the size of a half a dash. It's the smallest pinstroke in the Bible. Jesus is saying the smallest pinstrokes in the Bible are enduring. The very letters of scripture have come from God. Scripture is inspired, it's enduring, it's immutable. Not just in its broad strokes at the level of the ideas, but know the very words, the letters that make up those words. Now, we confess that. The first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith is intentionally prominent and makes this clear that this is foundational. This is the very foundational on which all the rest of the Confession And we could summarize it this way. We could just paraphrase that entire chapter by saying the scriptures in both the Old and New Testaments are the inspired word of God without error in the original writings. The complete revelation of God's will for the salvation of men and women and the divine and final authority of the Christian faith and life. And it's really truly a sweeping statement. And it's very much in line with what generations of Protestants have taught and held as true. Why do we hold this to be true? And what are the implications for us in making decisions as a local body? Well, we hold this true because the scriptures themselves make this claim. Over a thousand times in the Old Testament, it is written, thus says the Lord. We've just seen that Jesus makes this claim for the scriptures. In 2 Peter, I'm not going to read it, but Peter says that Paul's letters are in fact scripture. And the text I've read to you this morning from 2 Timothy is one of the clearest statements about scripture coming from the apostles. And I want to draw your attention briefly to some observations and then conclude with implications for navigating decisions. And this applies to decisions you make as an individual, to those of you who are married, to those of you who have families, as well as to the church. In verses 14 and 15 of the third chapter, Paul says, it is by scripture that we gain the knowledge of salvation. We only know about the life of Jesus, what he did and said, and the meaning of it through sacred scripture. Apart from the New Testament and the writings of the early church fathers, we would have virtually no knowledge. about Jesus Christ. We'd know that he existed, that he was real, but we'd almost know nothing about him. Salvation, our need for it, God's provision of it, how we obtain it, are all revealed truths. And apart from Scripture, we would have no real knowledge. of our desperate condition. Apart from Scripture, we would not know how it is that we might be saved. And then in 2 Timothy 3.16, Paul writes, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. All scripture is breathed out by God, or you may have it translated this way, God breathed. That is, every part, every sentence has its origin in the mind of God and expresses it the way he wants his thoughts expressed. It's not inspired in the sense that The authors had some amazing experience or thoughts about God and committed them to writing. The way we might say, well, Handel was inspired when he wrote the Messiah or Rembrandt or Van Gogh when they did this particular painting. The words God breathed in the Greek is a single word. And this is the first time that it occurs in human history. It's undoubtedly coined by Paul to convey the divine character of scripture. Scripture is unlike any other book. God moved men to write scripture in such a way as to honor their personalities and educations and skills as writers. And that's much more pronounced in the original languages than it is in our translations, which have smoothed out a lot of that. It's not easy for you to see how exalted the Greek is in the book of Hebrews, and how, well, simple and almost broken Peter's grammar is in his letters. You'll just have to take my word for it, but you can go find sources that'll tell you that's the case. Or you can ask the good doctor down here, he'll tell you. You know, that's so. It needs to be stated that God's words are not merely contained in the Bible as if there were some words from God and others only for men. No, all of scripture in their entirety are direct communication from God. And being from God, they're authoritative. That's where their authority comes from. It's not the view of the church of them. It's that God has spoken these words. And scripture's profitable or useful in its fourfold function. First, to instruct. We need to be taught by it and to be receptive to it. We have to admit our ignorance and surrender the pride that says, I am all-knowing or all-wise. We have a deep capacity for self-deception at this point. to be subjective, to want to set ourselves in judgment over the teaching of Scripture that we find distasteful, that we don't like. The second function is to reprove, that is to criticize us. To reprove means to express blame or disapproval. The New Living translation puts it well when it paraphrases this way, to make us realize what's wrong in our lives. In other words, to expose our hidden faults, our blind spots, and to benefit from it, it means that we have to lower our defenses. and let the scripture examine us. I don't know about you, but I don't really like to receive criticism, especially. I'm hoping that I'm getting a little better at it now in my old age here. But it's just something that doesn't come naturally to me. I don't immediately warm up to criticism. My first response is, oh, thank you for that. That's something I'm learning. Scripture's profitable to correct. That means to put right, to amend, to adjust, and approve. Several times I've had broken bones and I've had to submit to the doctor putting it right. Hasn't been pleasant always. I remember when I broke my elbow a few years ago having to lay it out flat. so that it could be x-rayed. And it was a miserable experience. You know, with digital x-rays, they take many more than they used to, I think. and to be trained in righteousness. It teaches us to do what's right. It provides guidance for responsible living that pleases God. This includes the idea of training or ongoing learning. And Paul's affirming something that's very important here and it's throughout all his letters, that truth and doctrine and godliness and right living are linked throughout the Bible. All four of these functions work together. And the result is, is that we become competent and equipped for every good work God intends for our lives. We're like a carpenter or mechanic who's furnished with the tools necessary to carry out our trade. Or like the artist who's enabled to draw a person in proper proportion and a landscape in proper perspective. And then Paul concludes in chapter four with these words, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing in kingdom to preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." Paul's pointing to the necessity of being taught, of sitting under preaching and teaching that honors the divine character of Scripture, as just Timothy himself sat under Paul's own teaching. He says that twice in the reading we had this morning. See, we all need to sit under such teaching. And this is one of the reasons why, in the Reformed tradition, it's held of great importance to have an educated clergy, someone who's received special training and who's examined and found competent to teach the Scriptures. And one of the reasons for that we read in the Confession. Not everything in the Bible is equally clear. Not everything is just right there on the surface and can be understood. And then Paul charges Timothy to preach at the church of Ephesus. And then he warns that people will turn away. they'll turn away from the truth. He's talking about people in church. He's not talking about the people out there in the world. He's saying people in church will turn away. They'll turn away from the truth. Their own passions and desires will cause them to seek out what they want to hear. They want people to tell them what they already think is true. They want to hear that. They want to hear from people who agree with them. And there's a fundamental problem with authority. Paul's saying to Timothy, you need to preach the word with authority. And it's that we resist it. We want actually only to submit to ourselves and not another. And that includes God. Now, scriptures are foundational for us, not just as individuals, but as a church. Otherwise, we'll be subject to the blowing winds that move through the church, to mere human philosophy, to myths and falsehoods, to opinions that ultimately, in their character, arise in one way or another from the world. The history of the church through 20 centuries is the story of churches that have been shaped by a commitment to be faithful to the scripture, however imperfectly that might be, and those who've been shaped by the prevailing ideas of their day. But here's the thing. Some churches think somehow that they can escape these winds. We can, in our appreciation and indebtedness to our spiritual fathers, we need to be careful not to think that they themselves didn't have errors and blind spots, that they weren't influenced by the culture of the day or the spirit of the age. It's very obvious in many places in the early church, and the reformers were very keen to recognize this, that Greek philosophy shaped the writings of many of the church's teachers and apologists. And some of those influences continue down to this day and the idea that there is a distinction between those things that are sacred and those things that are secular. That's a Greek idea. It's not a biblical one. No Hebrew would ever understand the world that way. Our Reformation fathers, as much as we have a debt to them, erred greatly in their persecution of their Anabaptist brothers that even put many of them to death. Our Southern Presbyterian forefathers, of which the PCA is most closely connected with in recent church history, endorsed slavery. as something that God approved, chattel slavery. We need to be wise about this. Now let me draw out the implications of this for protecting our unity. So the most obvious is this, the scriptures are our final authority, and that means we need to feed on the word, immerse ourselves in it. It needs to really govern our decision-making, and that means we need to turn to them first to discover what the scriptures, in fact, teach. We'll have to mind them and allow ourselves to be challenged by them. And for you personally, the question is, if you profess Christ, are you immersed in them? Do you have a plan, a way of being engaged with them? And do you come with a humility of mind and a readiness to submit to them? You see, we must allow the scriptures to function as God intends, to teach, to reprove, to correct, and train. We all have our ideas and opinions, some perhaps held loosely and others held very strongly. Sometimes our convictions are so strong and they're so sincere, like sometimes issues of conscience for us, that we think because we hold them so strongly and sincerely, we couldn't possibly be mistaken. But it is entirely possible to be sincere and mistaken. And it can be a real challenge for us to see that. And we need to be taught. what is one of the things that Paul's driving home here with Timothy. We need to read the scriptures in community, and we do this in a number of ways. The Lord Jesus Christ has given the church a teaching office. He's not going to start over with you and me and just you and your Bible in your closet and discover all that he intends you to see. He's been teaching the church for 20 centuries now. And we do this as we read, not just in community with the people who are alive today, not just with the saints in the past, but globally too. Because our time and day, we can become very ethnocentric in the way we read the Bible and not appreciate it. We just are blind to the way it challenges some of the things in our culture and our thinking. I do this every week. It's not just that I have seven years of graduate theological training. For 40 years, I've prepared sermons and lessons. I have an extensive library. I read, I learn something new every week about the Bible without fail. Seminary was a time of great getting some things straight in my head about the Bible, things that after 10 years of reading the Bible that I'd reached certain conclusions about, and my mind changed about a number of those things in seminary. And we ourselves need to recognize that none of us is finished being taught. The New Testament apostolic command to protect, guard, preserve, and nurture unity and peace is at least as much an issue of humility and character as it is advocating and contending for what we believe to be the right point of view. Divisions are sinful. And a divided church points to a profound failure or failures, and a church so divided cannot carry out the mission that Jesus has given the church. It will inevitably turn inward. Ron Bryce in his book, The Fingerprints of God, recounts this story. One day I assisted a surgeon who had me reach into the patient's chest and turn his heart so he could work on it from a better angle. And as I gingerly swivel it, he asked, how does it feel to hold a beating man's heart in your hand? And in spite of our manipulations, the man's heart kept thumping. A billion tiny heart cells communicated and coordinated their activities in unison. The cells in your heart beat rhythmically. They contract in unity, acting together to produce a heartbeat. And these living cells, when they're separated from one another in a test tube, will instinctively continue to beat, but not in coordination with other. But once they're brought back together, the instant they touch, their contractions become synchronized. That's the nature of heart cells. Individual heart cells can't accomplish their God-given functions alone. They were designed to be one of many cells in one heart. And while they serve a unique function in the body, they're not useful if they're not communicating and coordinating and connected to one another in their efforts. unless the members in the entire body don't work together. If they don't work together, life's not possible. A single heart cell cannot pump the blood of the body no matter how hard it tries. It needs other cells to fulfill its purpose. This is the consistent pattern of all living bodies, he writes. The only way a body can survive is its many members working together. And so it is for us, the body of Christ. The body of Christ not only cannot thrive, but it cannot survive unless its members work together in unison. Let's pray. Gracious God, be pleased to seal to our hearts and minds that which is taught here in your scripture. And give us the grace, oh Lord, to receive what you've said. Give us the meekness and humility we sung about this morning. For we pray in Christ's name, amen.