Well, welcome. Tonight, we're going to be discussing why we as a church will be studying the Westminster Confession of Faith. And also, we'll be getting into some of the historical background of this important doctrinal statement. We want to know what we say we believe. And we want our congregation to know the perspective that we as elders will be teaching from. And the Westminster Confession is our subordinate standard. That means that underneath scripture, the doctrine contained in this confession is our standard for faith and practice. We believe it's an accurate summary of biblical teaching and a sound guide for us as we seek to obey God and teach his truth. Now, some people are skeptical of confessional statements. They say they want no creed but the Bible. But there has not been a time in the history of the church where we haven't had a confession of faith. As William Hetherington rightly states, thus a confession of faith is not the very voice of divine truth, but the echo of that voice from souls that have heard its utterance, felt its power, and are answering to its call. And since she has been instituted for the purpose of teaching God's truth to an erring world, her duty to the world requires that she should leave it in no doubt respecting the manner in which she understands the message which she has to deliver. Without doing so, the church would be no teacher, and the world might remain untaught, so far as she was concerned. Now, as we approach the matter of what a church should believe and teach, we need to think through the four sources of authority, sometimes called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. The four sources of authority are scripture, number one, tradition, number two, Reason, number three, and then finally experience, number four. And we'll be dialed particularly into that second category, tradition, on these Wednesday evenings, more than we are on a Lord's Day morning, for instance. Scripture is in a class of its own. That's our first, primary, ultimate, only infallible authoritative source for what we believe and how we live. Scripture is the very Word of God and there is nothing like it. It is life-giving. It is our daily bread. But we don't just receive the scripture as if it falls directly out of the sky and immediately gets downloaded into our brains. No, we receive the scripture as it has been divinely and infallibly preserved and handed down to us by God through our fathers in the faith. And these fathers have not only handed down the Word of God to us, and praise God they did that, but the church has also been interpreting and applying the Word of God for 2,000 years now. Heresies that have cropped up have been refuted. We don't have to go re-figure out Christology. Confusions that have abounded among believers have been clarified through the iron sharpening iron of brothers and sisters figuring these things out. Teaching has been refined and polished over time. And all of this is called the tradition of the church. The tradition is not infallible, and at times it must be corrected by the word of God. But tradition is a great help to us. And there is sometimes this sentiment, like I mentioned earlier, of why would we need church tradition? We have the Bible, that's God's word, who cares about man's words? But the people saying this are men as well. And when they preach and teach and evangelize and address problems in their homes and churches and communities and answer the ethical challenges of the day and pray and answer their children's questions and so forth, when these people do all those things, they don't only quote chapter and verse from the Bible. No, they interpret and apply the word of God. They use the reason God has given them. They speak from their own experience as followers of Christ. And they probably also use the things that they've been taught by other men. And so to think that only our interpretations and our applications and our reason and our experiences and our lifetime are legitimate, And all the interpretations and experiences of our brothers and sisters who've gone before us are irrelevant because that's just tradition. That's just words of men. Well, that's quite hypocritical. God's word says that in a multitude of counselors, there is safety. We need our brothers and sisters in Christ to help us refine our thinking. And the tradition of the church is a great deposit of riches. given to us for this purpose. When we gladly receive the tradition, then we are, as Isaac Newton said, standing on the shoulders of giants. The book of Hebrews says that the saints who have gone before us, though being dead, speak to us today. Not literally, like Saul calling up Samuel from the grave, but through their holy lives and their testimonies that they have left, they speak to us. So tradition is a great gift. And one of the sparkling jewels in this great treasure chest of church tradition is the Westminster Confession of Faith. And that is what we are studying here as a church. And though tonight is more background and history, most weeks we won't really be studying the confession as if it is our main interest. Rather, we'll be using the confession as a lens through which we can better see and understand and enjoy in the great doctrines of the faith. Affirming and studying a confession of faith also helps us to identify who we are and who we are aligned with. We do not exist on a theological island. We are not the first ones to discover these great truths. And we want to identify who our brothers are that also believe like we do. By affirming that we hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, we are reminding ourselves and others, visitors or those who might be curious about our church, other brothers and sisters in Christ who are part of the broader body of Christ outside of our congregation, our community, we are telling them who we most closely line up with. We're telling them that when we affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith, we are the descendants of the Puritans in heart and mind. We are part of that group of churches generally called Reformed and Presbyterian. Having a confession of faith that we actually believe and teach also helps us not only to identify who we are and who we are aligned with, but also who we are not. and who we do not align with. For instance, when we say that we affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith as our subordinate standard, we're very clearly saying that we're not Roman Catholic. We're also saying that we're not another distinct type of Protestant, such as Lutheran or Baptist. We're of course not saying that Lutherans and Baptists aren't our brothers in Christ, not at all. Many of them are faithful, godly men and women that we can learn from. We're just saying that we see things on, mainly on secondary and tertiary issues, we see things differently. But also it's important. that through our affirming and teaching the Westminster Confession of Faith, that we make sure we're not confused with other groups who might bear the name of Reformed or Presbyterian, who have descended the slippery slope into liberalism, and even in some cases, atheism at what looks like a breakneck pace. For instance, the PCUSA, calls itself a Reformed and Presbyterian body. That is the largest, I believe, of Presbyterian denomination in the United States. But this PCUSA also affirms feminism, sodomite marriage, and the killing of babies in their mother's wombs. So learning in detail what we believe helps us draw the boundary lines that need to be drawn, even sometimes among those who would use some of the same labels that we might use. Now, we would wish, of course, that there were no boundaries whatsoever between those who are part of the visible church. That's our great desire, and we know we're going that direction. We are one holy Catholic and apostolic church, and one day there will be, praise God, no divisions between any parts of her members. But sadly, and I'm not talking about the faithful Lutherans and Baptists here, but people like the PCUSA, for instance, and others of that ilk, when so-called Christians exist to oppose Christ and his word, seemingly at every turn, then we have to draw sharp distinctions at times. And knowing and believing the historic faith that has been passed down to us from our fathers helps us to do that. Knowing and believing the doctrine contained in the Westminster Confession helps us to know when to draw those boundary lines. 20th century Presbyterian minister Ian Paisley once said this. He said, when you go to any, he's speaking to pastors here, young men who want to be pastors and who are pastors. He says, when you go to any little country town to start a church, you let people know you're against something. You let them know you haven't come as a sob voice sissy to be another pulpit ornament two times on Sunday. That you're not a soft peddling, fence straddling, cream puff pie preacher. That you're a man of God with fire in your belly and you're going to preach the word with power. Amen. Now we don't want to be known primarily for what we oppose. We want to be as open and Catholic in the lowercase c since that word charitable to our brothers and sisters in Christ as we can. But we also want people to know that we do in fact, oppose wickedness and every opinion that is raised against the knowledge of God. So that's one reason why we want to proclaim and study this confession. A confession also helps us to hold ourselves accountable. It is something that we as elders have agreed to, and it can help us, it can help rein us in if we start to walk down an unwise or dangerous road. The confession serves as guidelines and boundaries for us. It can serve as an arbiter. between us. If there's a disagreement or confusion and we just can't find unity in our interpretation of the Bible, we can say, well, what does our subordinate standards say? What did our fathers in faith come and over a series of several years work out and agree on? This is where we can find our common ground if we are having trouble interpreting or applying a particular doctrine. Now, does that mean we absolutely affirm every jot and tittle of this confession? No, it does not. There are groups that do. They're called full subscriptionist or strict subscriptionists. And that's fine, that's great. That's just not where we've decided that we need to be as an elder body and as a church. We do require full subscription to the Bible, of course, as well as to the Apostles' Creed. And among us elders, we do require the elders to have a good faith subscription to the Westminster Confession. And if our elders have some minor areas of exception to the confession, they have to be clearly stated and allowed by the other elders. Members, on the other hand, of King's Cross do not have to affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith, but they do have to commit to receiving the teaching of the church, which will in large measure be in line with this confession. And to be clear, there are a lot of things also that our confession doesn't address that we are confronted with today and need to be clear on. A lot of ethical things, for instance, like birth control, like in vitro fertilization, LGBTQ issues, cloning, and so on. These are all things that don't receive direct named address in the confession of faith. And there are also theological things that the divines didn't delineate because either everyone agreed at that point, or they were just assumptions, or because the debates hadn't got as detailed in certain areas as they have now. The tradition of the church didn't stop in 1646 when this document was written. No, the tradition of the church goes all throughout the church's history, however long it is until Christ returns. We are still adding to this treasure trove. So this isn't a dead document that only can stay in the past and has no relevance or cannot be added on to with other statements that we would affirm as a body today. For instance, the inerrancy debate of the 20th century, it was not something that the Westminster divines dealt with in the particular terms that we now use today. the specific distinctions regarding how exactly we understand the new birth, what makes us and what I would call traditional Puritan Presbyterians different from the federal visionists, some of those questions weren't being asked in the ways they are today, or they weren't being asked so clearly as they are now. The lines weren't drawn so clearly. So the confession isn't the end all be all of our church's belief. We hope to have a prophetic witness in this world and a teaching ministry from this pulpit and in our homes that expands beyond the confession, but the confession is important and it is a great place for us to dive into and study what our fathers have said and how we can apply this truth to us as we seek to live out and understand and obey God's word. We have freely chosen this as our confession and we freely submit to it. Just like a congregation chooses elders, they're not chosen by someone outside of the church and imposed on the church. but just like a congregation chooses her elders and then voluntarily submits to their leadership insofar as they are seeking to submit to Christ, so we also freely choose the confession and submit to it insofar as it reflects and distills the doctrine of the pure word of God. So that's a little bit about the why of having and studying a confession and the importance of confessions and the church tradition. in the continuing life of Christ's bride. Now, a little background on the Westminster Confession of Faith in particular. First of all, we ask ourselves, well, when did the Protestant Reformation begin? What date do we normally regard as the beginning of the Reformation? And of course, those of us who love church history would say 1517. That's the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. But our confession here is from 1646. And we still call it like a reformational document. But the reformation had begun over a century before the Westminster Confession was written. And England, which is the country where the Westminster Confession was produced, England itself had been Protestant in some sense for a majority of that time, between 1517 and 1646. Henry VIII was, in a sense, the first Protestant king, but really the first truly convinced Protestant monarch. who had real spiritual Protestant blood flowing through his veins was Edward VI, who reigned a hundred years before the Westminster Confession of Faith was drafted. In 1563, the Church of England wrote and adopted the Thirty-Nine Articles, which was a reformed confession of faith that is still a subordinate standard of several Anglican bodies. However, after Edward, the godly king, England was subjected again to the Roman Catholic rule of Bloody Mary, who killed hundreds of faithful Protestant men and women, hundreds of our heroes in the faith. And things really didn't get a ton better right away, somewhat better for sure, but it still wasn't amazing for the Protestants under Elizabeth I, or James I, and then things got much worse again under Charles I. And around the time that the Church of England began reforming in the 1500s, there arose this group of Christians that we call Puritans. The Puritans were believers who were absolutely committed to the Protestant faith, to the word of God, to Reformed theology, to warm-hearted devotion to Christ through the power of the Spirit, and to seeking to line up their personal lives, their families, their congregations, their larger church body, their society, and their civil government to God's word. Everything must be submitted to God and we must joyfully walk out our obedience to him in every sphere of life. That's kind of just the seedbed of Puritanism right there. Puritanism was really the theology of the Reformation refined and applied to every area of life. Puritans were men and women who lived in the beginning in the second or third generation after the beginning of the Reformation onwards until the latter half of the 17th century. Maybe a little bit, we could see Puritan influence still creeping into the 18th century. And of course the influence still exists today, but historically defined, we would say second or third generation after the Reformation begins through the latter half of the 17th century. There's a stereotype that exists that Puritans were a people with a haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. But this is probably the most incorrect stereotype that I have ever encountered. Puritans loved their Lord. They loved life. They were hardy workers. They enjoyed recreation. They loved the church. They played games with their children. They enjoyed alcohol, which was given to make Mary the heart of man. They embraced and enjoyed all the blessings of marriage and godly intimacy. They were not people who hated joy. They loved joy. They also loved learning. God created, governs, and redeems the world. And because of that, the Puritans wanted to know all about this world that he created. They didn't only study theology. They weren't eggheads. So these Puritans promoted learning. They founded educational institutions, and they worked toward having an educated society. For instance, early New England, which in many ways was founded by Puritan-minded and hearted men, had a higher rate of literacy than most other Western lands, even to this day. Well, by the time of the 1630s and 1640s, the Puritans had become a significant group but they were still mostly outside of the power structures of England, with the very important exception of the House of Commons. The king and some lords and certain significant church leaders did not like them. Archbishop William Laud made it his mission to make life difficult for the Puritans and discourage anyone from becoming like them. Worldlings never want to hear the prophetic word of God's people. And they are even turned off by our joyful submission to God's law. So the Puritans really became public enemy number one in England during this time, 1630s. and around that era. In fact, about one third of the ministers who would make up the Westminster Assembly had actually spent time in prison for living out their beliefs regarding the claims of Christ. Think about that. There is no Reformed or Presbyterian or any type of Christian church body in the West today that has that type of statistic. Think of if one-third of PCA ministers had spent time in prison for their beliefs. Just think of how different that would be. It's just amazing to think about one third of the Westminster divines had been imprisoned for some length of time for their beliefs. Chad Van Dixhorn, who's a contemporary theologian, said that jail was a kind of sabbatical for the Puritans. That's how they viewed it. They redeemed that time. It was like a sabbatical. A sabbatical is when a minister takes time off from his regular pastoral duties to refresh himself in the Lord and usually to write something for the benefit of his people and for the broader church. So, like Paul, the Puritans made the most of their jail time. They wrote books in jail. Think of that most influential Christian book, Pilgrim's Progress, that was written by John Bunyan while he was in jail for preaching the gospel. They wrote books. They labored in prayer while they were in their prison cells. They sent pastoral letters to people, just like Paul, talking about writing in chains, sending these letters to people. Some of these Puritan letters have survived today. And you wouldn't even know from reading them that they were suffering under the terrible conditions of 17th century prison. But they did things of that nature. That's warm-hearted Puritanism. That's what we want to revive. Not, of course, the going to jail, but the being willing to suffer all things for the sake of Christ and for the upbuilding of his kingdom. But while the Puritans were experiencing persecution in England, their Scottish counterparts were also beginning to suffer from Archbishop Laud's overreach. The Scottish church was convictionally Presbyterian and would not submit to episcopacy. That's the notion that there is a separate office in Scripture of bishop who rules in the church over several congregations within a region. This is an office that the episcopacy advocates believe is above that of local church pastor. And the Scots would not have anything to do with this. They were not going to have some state-appointed bishop that did not really believe the Word of God that wasn't born again telling them what they could or could not preach from their pulpits. So they wouldn't have anything to do with this. Nor would the Scots Covenanters have anything to do with other Anglican impositions, such as the prayer book. Well, the English Puritans, they didn't want Episcopacy or mandatory prayer book usage either. Most of them, like their Scots brothers, were also Presbyterian in their conviction, even though bishops still existed in the Anglican church. So the Scottish covenanters, and they're named that because of their commitment to the national covenant, which opposed Charles I's unbiblical impositions on the church, the covenanters began to fight back. And not just with their sermons and their speeches and their writings, but they've actually began to fight back at one point militarily against English overreach. And in the years leading up to the Westminster Assembly, they actually had made a couple of invasions into England. Now they were very much driven to this because they were not willing, most of them, to pick up arms at first. But when Archbishop Laud and the other men that he sent, when they came armed into Scotland to attack and arrest and kill perhaps the Covenanters who were having clandestine meetings, because they were forced like those heroes in the book of Hebrews to meet in dens and caves of the earth to worship their God, they began to fight back to protect their families and their churches. But they had actually, coming up to the Westminster Assembly, they had begun to make some invasions into England itself. So there's a lot of unrest happening on this one little island. and there were still more complexity and problems to come. The Scottish covenanters not only fought against English overreach, but they agreed to join forces with the English parliament to fight against the King Charles I. There's a civil war happening here and other nations are getting involved. Ireland actually ends up getting involved too. And some people during this, just absolute mess, they end up switching sides, switching loyalties, betraying each other at times, and it just gets crazier and crazier. There is very little political peace, very little ecclesiastic peace, and very little national or international peace on the British Isles. And out of that environment of unrest, the Westminster Assembly is called in 1643. Its initial goal was not narrowly defined, but people knew that the ministers had to do something. The shepherds of Christ's sheep had to do something to protect Christ's flock. They had to do something to fix things and bring peace and purity to the church. The nation, the kingdoms, needed moral and theological direction and footing. Politicians and pastors and parents needed to know which way God would have them go during this time of unrest. All around the British Isles, there was division, unity, I'm sorry, division, disunity, and strife. And what was needed was unity in the truth. So Parliament, which was much more sympathetic with the Puritan cause than the King was, Parliament called over a hundred Puritan-minded evangelical Calvinistic ministers together, along with some laymen and a handful of commissioners from Scotland and put them to work. Said, figure out where we need to go. Lead us and guide us, shepherd us through this time of crisis. Some of these men have remained well-known. amongst our little Presbyterian and Reformed community at least, men like Jeremiah Burroughs and Samuel Rutherford. But many of these men that went to the Westminster Assembly, we know very little about today, past their names. But the heritage they left for us in the Westminster Confession of Faith is a wonderful, wonderful gift. It is one of those sparkling jewels out of that treasure chest of church tradition. One of my professors at the Baptist seminary I went to, this is not a man who affirms Westminster. I remember him saying in class one day that second to the Bible, there is no better work of theology that exists than the Westminster confession of faith. Those are big words from a Baptist pastor. So I'm delighted that we can learn from this as a church. I'm praying for God's blessing on our endeavors, and I'm looking forward to diving in more deeply very soon.