Well, brothers and sisters, I've been given the Herculean task of closing out the book. And I have a lot of material, so I may have to move quickly through it. So we'll see how far we can get. Let me dive right into chapter 25. Owen begins with a direct statement. Jesus came to bring fallen man back to a state of holiness. You can see right away, Owen is not Using our generic thinking, Jesus came to save me from hell, which is true, is it not? But God wants more than that. He wants to elect people who are holy. And that's a motif that goes through all of Owen's work. Election, holiness. Election, holiness. This is something you'll see all through his work. He harkens back to 1 John 3.8. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. Now, everything that God claims, every territory that God claims, Satan seems to counterclaim. And that's why we're in a spiritual combat constantly. Now, to do so, Jesus was anointed to three offices, and he talks about these three offices, priest, prophet, and king. First, as priest. Jesus came to offer himself as a sacrifice for sin and to intercede for his people. There's a twofold path here. He came not just to sacrifice himself, but to intercede for his people. This harkens back to Matthew 1.21. He will save his people from their sins. If you read the book, you see how particular Owen's language is. He doesn't say he came to save a group of people. He came to save all of humanity. He says very particularly his people from their sins. Jesus did not die, beloved, for a faceless group of people and then hope by their own free will they'll sort of figure things out and accept him. In American evangelicalism, Jesus, unfortunately, is portrayed as some kind of punch-drunk fighter, all beat up, hanging over the ropes, begging people to be saved as they go by. But they won't come because of their free will. But that's not a picture of sovereignty. That is not a picture of what Jesus did. He certainly died for what? All kinds of people, did he not? Black men, white men, Americans, Chinese, et cetera, et cetera. But he didn't come to save every single person. He has a people in mind. As you know, if you've been a Christian for a while, mainstream Christianity in America teaches that Jesus died for every single person that ever lived. And whether you go to heaven or whether you go to hell is dependent upon you accepting the fact that Jesus died for your sins. If you marinate in that for about a few seconds, you realize the absurdity of that statement. It is a quite absurd statement. Jesus came rather to bring justification to his people, and the Spirit makes them holy. And this is a theme that goes through Owen's book. Holiness for the Christian is not some kind of ancillary thing out here. It's an absolute requirement. It's an absolute requirement. Jesus doesn't necessarily want you to be completely satisfied with your life, have beautiful children, have a good job, et cetera. He wants you to be holy, and he will do whatever he needs to do to make you holy. Holiness for the Christian people is not exceptional. It is, in fact, no exceptions. In American Christianity, it seems that holiness is ancillary. It's sort of like a side thing. The way the gospel is presented, just, you know, open up the little door of your heart and let Jesus come in and, you know, read your daily bread, sing a few praise choruses, and you're good. But that's not what the Lord wants. Believe me, Americans, as I have to use the term, pleasure sharks. We're pleasure sharks. We're sort of swimming, looking for the next entertainment, the next weird trend that comes down out of TikTok or whatever. And that's the way Americans usually conduct their lives. But we listen to God's direct word. And in John, Jesus says, you did not choose me, but I chose you. Whenever I read that verse, I wonder, There's a lot of denominations, I guess, that cut that verse out of there or something, you know. Anyhow. And to bear fruit. Now that fruit, what is that fruit? It's not just to be saved. It's holiness. It is holiness that gives us the spirit of evangelism and righteous works. You can't have the spirit of evangelism and righteous works without holiness. The two go together. And American Christianity has sort of eliminated that or made that a side thing or an ancillary thing. Secondly, he talks about Jesus as prophet and he gives a phrase which I think just explodes with meaning. Jesus told the whole truth about God. Jesus told the whole truth about God. Now that's a phrase that just wants to explode because the implication of that verse is what? There's a whole lot of people who didn't tell the truth about God. Did the Pharisees tell the whole truth about God? Did Mohammed tell the whole truth about God? Did Buddha tell it? No. Only Christ told the whole truth about God. There is nothing salvific in these religions or our efforts. And that's the point that Owen is making. Christ as prophet told the whole truth about the law. Notice, he gave the true spiritual meaning of scripture. He did not remove one jot or tittle from the law. He didn't say, now, I've come, and now the law is bad. And by the way, that is a strain of teaching in modern American Christianity, that the law, it's gone now, that's it, forget about the law. But we uphold the law, being good Presbyterians and Calvinists, of course. It's interesting, if you read the great rabbis, and I don't know why you would, but if you read the literature of the great rabbis, you will find that they agreed on one thing. That when Messiah came, he would be the ultimate interpreter of scripture. And in that, they were right. The law was not to be abolished, but the law was to be rightly interpreted and completed. And here's something that Owen says I think we could drink in in our modern world. Christ did not come to delight our senses. Christ did not come to delight our senses. He didn't come to give us the holy goose bumps and make us feel good. I occasionally torture myself. by going on various church websites, and some of them are very plain. But when I go on a church website, and the first thing I see is a guy with a blonde, three-foot-high Mohawk haircut with a Stratocaster rocking out, I say, maybe God doesn't really want that. That's kind of sensual, laser beams and things of that nature. God did not come to delight our senses. Christ as King Owen says that as king, in his kingly mediatorial role, Christ came to defeat your enemies. Of course, that begs the question, who are your enemies? The leftist media? The evil Russians? Your boss at work? Those are not your enemies. Your enemy is sin, lust, and temptation. Those are the things that are crouching at the door, wanting to attack the Christian. And Christ comes to subdue that. And so the world at large is already taken over by those things, is it not? That's all background interference. The world is overtaken with sin, lust, and temptation. But it's the job of the Christian not to be that way. And as your king, Christ not only comes to save you, but to protect you. Your king keeps you safe. The king as head of your life keeps you safe, even in dark providences. And I can't explain that. In a very dark providence, if something terrible happens, how is it that the Lord is keeping me safe, but somehow this is what he declares? And so we have to believe what he says. And that's one of the ways that a Christian can get through this life with victory. I'm in a terrible situation. Terrible thing has happened. What are you doing, God? It's okay to say those things. But the thing is, he will preserve you. How this all works together, I can't say, but we have to rely on his word. So the true holiness equals the true Christian life. True holiness equals the true Christian life. You can't just, you know, I was saved in a Baptist church, and then, you know, you get the invitation. Now, Johnny, when Pastor Smith gives the invitation, you go up and you have all these false conversions. No, you have to be truly saved and truly holy and that is the Christian life. We're not just in a maintenance mode where we accept Christ and then we're just good, everything's okay. So that is how Christ operates in his mediatorial offices. We move on to chapter 26, holiness in an unholy world. How do we live a holy life in an unholy world? We've just been speaking about how the world is, is taking over with sin, temptation, lust, et cetera. Owen begins with a statement as good Calvinists, I assume most of us are, have no problem with. The natural state of man is depraved. Men and women are under spiritual death. I heard a fundamentalist preacher recently preaching on something akin to this, and he said, we're dead in sin, but we're not that dead. No, we're dead. It's like comparing a person in a cast on crutches to a person who's embalmed in a casket. You know, we ask them to, right now, guys, we're going to have a race, you're going to go to that wall, touch it, and come back. You know, and the guy on crutches goes, he touches the wall, and we look at the guy in the casket, and he's not doing much of anything. See, that's us. We're the guy in the casket until God comes and changes our lives and retools us. Now, one of the main objections to God's election plan and making us holy in this world is that if you're a Calvinist, and now you've heard this argument, I'm sure it's what I call the same old, same old. We're somehow automatons. We're just celestial marionettes doing whatever God wants and so forth. We have no will of our own. But let's be clear. Men and women have a will. Nobody denies that men and women have a will. We have a volitional will. I make decisions every day, don't you? I make decisions about what I'm going to do that day, I plan my week, etc. The question is, is anything that we do outside of the direct intervention of Christ salvific? And the answer is no. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot do that. If we had complete free will, and use your sanctified imagination, You're in a room, a giant room, where every human being in the world is. And on one corner is a little black box with all the sin, in this little black box in one corner. And in the other corner is the Lord Jesus Christ holding out his nail-scarred hands, come to me. And we give everybody absolute free will. How many people would be saved? Well, the answer is pretty simple, nobody. In fact, we would run over to that black box and jump on it and cling to it because we love our sin. It's only the direct intervention of the Lord that allows us to believe, and he makes us willing to believe. I hate to keep bringing it up, but the same fundamentalist pastor said, you know, if you're a Calvinist, you may not want to be saved, but God drags you kicking and screaming into the kingdom. Or you want to be saved, but you can't be saved because you're not one of the elect. It's just a complete misunderstanding of what God's Word. It's a complete misappropriation of what God says. Now, Owen brings up an objection that many non-Calvinists or many people have regarding, or even atheists of the faith. Well, you Christians talk about holiness, and you say you're separate and so forth, but I see Christians sinning all the time. In fact, I see, you know, they would say to you, I see Christians rebelling even, and then questioning God. And Owen has a very abrupt and direct way of dealing with that. He says the outline, that the mind of the unredeemed is like the order of hell. The order in the mind of the unredeemed is like the order of hell, because hell has an order too. Hell has an order too, but it's not like the order of God's kingdom. He says that hell has that in the way it operates, but the mind of a redeemed person, there may be rebellion, and we do rebel, there may be things that we don't understand, We may sin, we may fall and sin occasionally, but the entire soul is not in confusion. You see that the mind and the soul of the unredeemed person is in total confusion. But that's not the case with the redeemed. They just have points of struggle because they're living in an unredeemed and fallen world. So what do we do? So what do we do with indwelling sin? How do we conquer this enemy that's crouching at our door? Well, we abide in the means of grace. We don't rely on our strength. We can't. We can't be like a football player getting himself psyched up for a a game, and I'm gonna beat this sin, I'm gonna hold my breath, I'm gonna beat that sin. No, we rely on the grace that Christ gave us. We rely on works, but it's not our works, it's His works. And so we rely on the grace that God gave us, we lean on Him, we don't lean on our will, we lean on His will. Our lives must be in concord with the fruit of the Spirit. If we're in concord with the fruit of the Spirit, we're giving glory to Christ. Our testimony has to be consistent, and this is why Owen is constantly bringing up holiness. Holiness. Holiness. We have to be consistent. Our holiness bears testimony to the power of Christ's work. You ever think about that? Our testimony bears witness to the power of Christ's work. Do you have a wimpy Jesus? You know, a beta male Jesus with little skinny arms? you know, barely able to stand, or do you have a robust Savior who can save? And that has to do with our holiness in our lives. How powerful, how powerful is your God? He's very powerful to save, to the uttermost, which means not only saving us, but giving us a sense of holiness. So no holiness, no holiness means we're diminishing the glory of Christ. And that's why it's not something ancillary, It's not something for super holy people, super saints or something. It's this Catholic mentality that saints are somehow different and they're holy. And the average Christian is called to be holy. And there's no exceptions in it. The one great work of the Spirit is to convince men and women, what? That the gospel is true. That they're sinners. That they need to repent. So with that, I just want to give you a brief summary. I sort of gleaned over Owen and pulled out the salient points. First of all, God desires us to be holy as he is holy. And let me add, once again, there are no exceptions. If God says you can be holy, you can be holy. You can't make the excuse, I'm not going to be holy, I just can't do it. Because he's given you the ability to, he says so, you could be holy. We just mentioned the one great work of the Spirit is to convince men and women that the gospel is true. That's the work of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the only impetus to our salvation. There is no other way we can be saved. We can't be saved by our own efforts. We need the Spirit. We need God to get in there, as I mentioned, and retool our being so that we come freely to him. I remember once visiting my mom out in Nevada, and we said, we'll go to the church up the block. It was a Baptist church. Well, this service was every Calvinist's absolute nightmare. I'm not making this up. They actually had a little girl come up onto the podium with a box that was wrapped with a big bow on it. And the pastor said to her, now, when you have a gift, what do you have to do? And she said, well, by your own free will, you have to take that gift. And he handed the gift to her. I had to take a pill and lie down after that. That was just... nightmare. But anyhow, that's how Christ is presented, unfortunately, in many of our services. God reveals himself in three persons, and therefore the Holy Spirit is not a force. The Holy Spirit, rather, is the third person of the Trinity. Unfortunately, a lot of our charismatic friends make the Holy Spirit almost some kind of celestial force. In fact, they almost reverse things, and it almost seems like they're worshiping the Holy Spirit rather than Christ and the Spirit making them holy. It's confusion. And there's much confusion in the American church, as you know. The Holy Spirit acts in concord with the Trinity. We don't have the Holy Spirit out here. Owen is not saying the Holy Spirit's out here doing something, and the Father and the Son are over here doing something. They act as one in unity. And this is another reason why unlimited atonement cannot be, because then you have confusion in the Trinity. The Father has a people, the Son dies for the people, the Holy Spirit convicts them, but they just won't come. That is not the way it works. The Holy Spirit acts as one within itself. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son since he is related from eternity to the Father and the Son. Now, there's a nuance of doctrine there, because the Orthodox churches, the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, et cetera, don't believe that. They believe that he just proceeds from the Father. That's a Sunday school for another time. That's a whole subject unto itself. But they're wrong in that. He's there in eternity. There was never a time when the Holy Spirit and the Father were not one. And so they're an error there. Last but not least, the Holy Spirit declares the mind of God. I think that's a very important phrase. The Holy Spirit declares the mind of God. So when we read the word, it's kind of awesome when we have our Bibles and we look at our Bible, we're holding absolute truth. It's even hard for me to comprehend sometimes that when I'm reading scripture, this is absolute truth. Absolute truth. It's not opinion. Jesus did not talk like a psychologist or a life coach or something of that nature. He's not a life coach. He's not giving you your best life now because you may have a life now where you're in tremendous travail. You could have a lot of trouble in your life. And what is a life coach going to do? Tell you to just keep smiling? He has the power to change men's souls. And we have to act this. Chris, I think what Owen is saying through this entire book is not only does God have a people that he elected, but he wants a people who are holy, and he gives you the ability to do that. And there are to be no exceptions. We have to lead holy lives. And it's very difficult because we're surrounded by a world that's fallen. I think we have too much input. I know I have a lot of input. I'm on the computer constantly in my work. I was a journalist years ago. I'm always interested in the news. But after a while, your brain can only take so much. And it's all really background noise. Because when we wonder, why is the world like this? Why is that politician like this? Why is it? Well, we live in a fallen world. They don't have the spirit. And we shouldn't be shocked by it. But our job is to lead a holy life before God and to stand firm in the faith. And we live in times where it's very difficult to do that, but we have to do that. We have to say, no, Mr. Employer, I can't go to that whatever. That violates my conscience. Well, we may have to let you go. So be it. We have to be holy people. And again, that testifies to the power of Christ. Well, that's the book. This book was very edifying. I found this book, as I was getting excited exactly when I was reading it, I found it very edifying. I think it's something we need to read more than once because we're in, as I said, an unredeemed world and we need encouragement. I felt this book was very encouraging and puts to the forefront the absolute necessity of holiness. Shall we pray? Father God, again, we thank you for men like John Owen. We wish we could clone John Owen, have many John Owens around. But you've given to the church many people who have said many things that have blessed us, has edified us. And we pray, Lord, that we would take this seriously. You want a holy people. We have to be honest with our sin, and yet you have given us the ability to be holy. Help us, Lord, in that journey. Help us now as we go to service, and help those who are proclaiming the word. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.