Okay, this is an extreme introduction to what we're going to be covering here on the London Baptist Confession, but let's look at a few scriptures right out of the gate and go over to the book of Titus. Now, take in But your mind wrap around what's happening here, the letter of Titus as it's being written here. This is an epistle of Paul, he's writing to Titus. I believe Titus was the pastor at Crete, if I'm not mistaken. And I think Crete was from all historical The things we've got was a rough seaport and it was a kind of a difficult place. But anyway, Titus here in chapter 2 and verse number 1. Paul told him to speak thou the things which become sound doctrine. Now he didn't say, say things that would later turn into sound doctrine. He was telling him to speak those things that complement, that go along with sound doctrine. say the things that if I were to go out to mow the grass and you came up and I had on work gloves and I had on a wide brimmed hat and I had on dungarees and I had on patent leather dress church shoes all polished up. And you would go, hold on a second. Now let's see, you've got a big old wide brim hat, you've got gloves on and you've got dungarees on and a work shirt but then you've got the finest polished shoes I've ever seen and you're going to do what? I'm going to mow the grass. And you say, those shoes don't become a man. Who's going to mow the grass? Oh, they don't. What should I wear? You should wear work boots or an old pair of tennis shoes or something of that nature. That would be more becoming to what you're about to do. That's what we mean when we see here, he says, speak thou the things which become sound doctrine. Now in our Bible, there's a colon and then he begins to tell him all these things to instruct the family. and what is supposed to be happening in Christian families. And he goes through that list. Now, if you're wondering what your Christian family should look like, Titus is a great place to go to, to look at, especially chapter number 2. But he's telling him the things that you need to be speaking to these things, they should be becoming to the doctrine that you know is true. The things that you see in scripture, the teachings that are in scripture, the things you say ought to go along with the teachings in scripture. Now, don't we know, a lot of folks, that They know what the scriptures say, but then they say but, and they give you some other teaching. That doesn't go along with it. And that happens so often. And we want to be careful with that because as Pastor Josh said, we live in an age where culture controls Everything. It controls what we wear, it controls what we eat, it controls what we watch, it controls what we drive, what we do. I remember when cars started coming out that were real boxy shaped. And I was like, why would anybody want to drive a boxy shaped car, you know? And boy, they took off for a while and everybody wanted a boxy shaped car. And pickup trucks would change styles and sell them for a while. And you're kind of You're kind of a slave to fashion and things of that nature because a lot of times there's not anything else to choose from. Somebody has set up that style and you're trapped with it. My wife complains about my being able to find certain clothes, certain size clothes and things of this nature and certain styles anymore. They just don't make this anymore. And you know she'll talk to somebody at the store. She'll talk to an employee at the store that's just a clerk there at the store and she talks to them as though they have all the power in the world to change. You know the styles are coming. Why don't y'all carry this anymore." And of course the clerk becomes an expert. Well, because that's what came in on the truck. And she's like, oh, that solves it. We've got to get to the people before the truck. So anyway, I was in Target the other day. And if you're not a Target shopper because of their evil nefarious ways, I have another country you can move to that has no Targets there. But I was in this Target store the other day and they were not playing any music. And so I asked the guy at the cashier, I said, why don't y'all play music here? Oh, you don't know the story about Target? and somebody hacked their sound system at one store in California and played something very pornographic over the entire thing. So they took music out of all the Target stores. I said, really? He said, yeah. They're introducing it slowly back in stores, you know, with heightened security and things of this nature because what we've discovered is that you have a feeling of uncomfortableness if there's no music playing while you shop. I thought, that guy, he's an idiot. He's just, he don't know nothing. So, of course, I googled it because that tells the truth and found out that there are these psychological studies that were made. Our culture has become extremely comfortable shopping with music in the background. But it was never that way before. I mean, you know, when my mom and dad was at the Five and Dime, nobody walked behind them and went, hey, diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, fiddle. You know, while they shopped. Nobody did that. They didn't have it. But now we go into a store and there's no music. What, is something wrong here? Something wrong? You can't even get into the shopping mode. You know, I mean there's got to be a noise in the background or we can't shop. And so The cultural? Well, the thing we don't want to fall prey to in the church is that every cultural thing that comes along sets the standard for what we think we ought to be doing. That's one reason you dig out of the dusty bins of history things like these old confessions. Because they work. Because they speak the things which a company become sound doctrine. You've got sound doctrine in the Bible and then you've got this confession and it fits perfectly with it. It's like a fellow going to trim hedges and he's standing there ready to trim hedges and he has tweezers in his hands. And he reaches out to the vine and he gets ready to trim that hedge with those tweezers and somebody takes the tweezers from his hands and puts in a pair of trimming shears for the tree. Cross cut maybe. Trimming shears and heat. Click. Oh, that works so much better. And that's what you want these confessions to do. We've got the sound doctor. We've got the Word of God. And then somebody asks you a question about, so why y'all do such and such in church? Why y'all believe this? And you'd like to just be able to quote a verse to them and have them automatically understand, but you know what you do when you quote a verse to somebody? Nine out of ten times you have to expound the verse, don't you? Well, you know the Bible says such and such, which actually means this, which means this and this and this and this. And a confession helps us to become real concise. and to be able to explain it in such a way that helps us. Go back to 1 Timothy. Some of you have traveled the journey with us in 1 Timothy on Wednesday evenings. And in 1 Timothy 1 and verse 15, and I think it's interesting that Paul says this multiple times in 1 and 2 Timothy. In 1 Timothy 1.15, this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. What is it? That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. He doesn't say the last part there, but he says this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. Go to 1 Timothy 3. This is a true saying. This is a, this is, when we talk about something being true, we mean truthful. But truthful has its root and its base in the idea of something being straight. Like if an arrow shoots true, When it goes straight as an arrow, there's no curvature in it. It goes exactly the way it's supposed to go. He says, that is what these sayings that I'm giving you are. This is a true saying. And then again, 1 Timothy chapter 4 and verse 9, this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. Then in verse 11, these things command and teach. You command people and teach people these particular things. Now, so the Bible is full of this type of of language and it's not always talking about the scriptures themselves, especially when he talks about the traditions and following particular traditions. Well, where do these traditions come from? What were they based on? They were based on true and faithful sayings. They were based on things that became sound doctrine. Say, if this is what it says, then this is what our practice should look like. And so we want to practice what we know to be safe. There's a few dates up here on the board. There's 325. All these dates have some meaning to them. And a confession of faith, basically, by definition, is a statement of what one believes. Now that is a real simplistic statement. A confession of faith is a statement of what one believes. Over the centuries there have been classic confessions that have stood the test of time. The Nicene Creed was in 325. written to really counter some heresy. There was some heresy in the church. They wanted to counter some heresy. And we're not going to go through all the confessions and the heresies that they were trying to circumvent. But every one of them, when they would have these meetings, they would come up with these confessions all through the years. They would be trying to end some heretical activity. And some, Some confessions through the years, some council meetings of all these churches, these ecumenical councils where these churches all came together from different countries, they would come together and deal with the same heresy over and over. You know, it'd go 10, 20, 30, 40 years, they'd get back together and have to deal with the same heresy again. Go 100 years, same heresy, pop back up, under a different name, different person, little bit different twist, but same heresy, always emanating from a lie. all the way from the Garden of Eden. So 325, very important confession in that time. Of course, then you have the 1644 confession, the London Baptist Confession. And then in 1646, you had the revised and corrected First London Baptist Confession, where they corrected a few wording errors and things of that nature. And then The Westminster Confession, which they always say, we were the first Confession, the Baptists stole that Confession in 1689. I always say, no, we just corrected the errors in this Confession, but that's not true. So many things happened in this time. This was also the exact same time the Westminster Confession was published. Then you have the Savoy in 1658 and this was another confession and a confession I think the Congregational Church and John Owen was a big part of that and we're going to read a little bit about that. And then finally in 1689 we had the second London Baptist Confession which is really Quite different from the 1644 in some areas and we're going to see that and you could lay them down beside each other and compare them. And then of course in 1986 my daughter Amy was born. I had my first child. A lot of important things throughout history. Make sure you know all of those dates. So they're good dates and a lot of good things happened on those dates. You think you can remember those? I hope so. Yes? Savoy. S-A-Voy. Yeah, this is Westminster and it is the revised and corrected version of the first. They did that here too. They got a spell checker. Are you going to do all of them? No, no, no, no, no. That's beyond the scope of this particular class and my abilities right now, I believe. So we probably won't. We're definitely going to look at some of them. Mostly the difference is more than the good additions. But we're definitely going to touch some of those. But if there's any that y'all want to include in the lecture and share with us, you're welcome to do so. The importance of these confessions and creeds have really been lost in our generation. And I don't think the importance of them can be overstated. I don't think that any of these have something in them that we don't need. And I would say carefully the 1646 Westminster has of course a much different church government, the issue of infant baptism, different things, civil authority, different things of this nature that we might not 100% agree with. They all hold to a foundational orthodox truth that we can agree with and we don't want to lose sight of it just because it happens to be a confession we don't use. If you were to ask the average church member that you work with or that you know in your neighborhood, say, hey, what confession does your church hold to? They would probably say, I don't know what you're talking about or I'm not sure. Oh, are you talking about the thing printed and hanging on the wall? that says, you know, we won't serve alcohol, we won't work in a place that sells it, it'll only be used for medicinal purposes, and that thing that was written up by somebody in the 60s, yeah, that one, okay, no, no, that's not a confession, that's just a church statement that was made up that everybody wanted to covenant and agree to, but what about a true confession of what you believe? Not of what you want to govern your little congregation. I'm talking about something that Christendom would agree with and say, that's right because that's biblical. Not house rules, but orthodox confession. Because these aren't house rules we're going to be talking about. And there's a difference between house rules and moral obligations. Let's take, for example, we've got several families in here. We've got the Pozada household represented, we've got the Sparks household represented, the Negrete household. I'll bet you in each of those households, there is a house rule that one or the other would think was a dumb rule. But if you lived in that household, you would see that rule and go, ah, that works for them. Because, you know, we don't own a 500-pound dog. The Negrete's don't own a 500-pound dog. The rule, make sure the dog doesn't get in the house wet, would be a stupid house rule for y'all to have. If you had, do not let the 500 pound dog in the house wet. And that was your house rule. Man, y'all got a big dog? No. We just have that rule. Well, I guess that's a good rule. You know, I've got these, I had these two little things on the front of my vehicle one time and they just looked like little tiny horns mounted on the bumper and somebody said, what is it? And I said, it's a, it's a, it distracts elephants from ever getting in front of the vehicle. They said, oh, they work. I said, I've never had an elephant get in front of the vehicle. They work. You see how silly sometimes our house rules would be? There's no elephants in the middle of the interstate out here in Alabama, so I don't really need to worry about that house rule. That's not what a confession is. A confession isn't a house rule. A confession goes deeper than that. It is a declaration of an orthodox teaching that has been held by orthodox Christians throughout the centuries. And really, those orthodox truths didn't start in 325 or in 1644. They just became articulated. What do we mean by that? I don't know. It's just a really good grown-up word. But they became articulated. They were written out. They were put into a form that explained a particular doctrine or A teaching found in the scriptural, not 1986. But those things, that's the importance of the confession, is that we are restating, articulating sound doctrine. In one place, you know, Paul made the statement, these things we confess. What does he mean? We say these things. We declare these things as believers. These are not just whims. So I'm giving you a defense of the confession. I have a pastor friend one time that said he sat down with somebody that said, I am sola scriptura. I just don't believe in this London Baptist stuff and all this other junk because I'm sola scriptura. And he said, yeah, I am too. I'm Sola Scriptura too. Then why do we need a confession? He said, then why do we need preaching? Why do we need someone to expound Sola Scriptura? I mean, if all we need is Sola Scriptura, then I'll just get up, read the Bible each week, we'll just all go home. Sola Scriptura was his confession. That's not a Bible verse. And that point was actually brought up to him. That's exactly what it was. He said, where did you get that? And he said, well, it just means the Bible alone. He said, yeah, but somebody confessed that. And when they confessed the soul of Scripture, they weren't saying Scripture by itself forever, nothing else. That's not what soul of Scriptura means. It doesn't mean The Scripture all by itself alone is all we ever have. It was saying that is what finally decides everything, including all these confessions. Now, Protestants throughout history and rejection of the ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church and much of the doctrine recognized that there were truths in God's Word that needed to be explained and expounded to individual believers. And while they argued that scriptures alone were the final authority in all matters of practice and faith, yet some of those things would need to be explained. and laid clear before people. This is what we do in preaching. We expound the Scriptures and we lay these things out clear before you as best that we possibly can. Now the Roman Catholic Church would argue that it was only the job of the ecclesiastical rulers to even have the Scriptures, much less expound the Scriptures to an individual. And there is a danger that in the evangelical community today There's an argument that each individual believer should decide all biblical truth on his own and doesn't need anyone helping, guiding, or directing and there's a danger in that. In the Roman Catholic picture, the ecclesiastical rulers are subject to error and corruption and would lean on tradition stronger than they would lean on scripture in some places and it could lead the sheep astray. The other, a person that's left to interpret the scripture for himself, may have a very faulty view of the Bible and may say, well, this doesn't apply to me. I had a relative one time that told me, I shared a verse with her and she said, well, that works for you, but that doesn't work for me. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. I've never even heard that argument before. Who would believe that? Well, she was Lutheran and she believed that the scripture spoke individually to her different than it did to me. She believed that if she read the Bible and it said something to her, then that's what she would go with. If I read it and it said something different, then we couldn't judge each other. Now I don't even know how you could have a church consisting of people like that. If everybody had their own separate interpretation. There's a church in the Bible that had a similar issue going on. You remember the church at Corinth when Paul said everybody has a prophecy and everybody has a tongue and he said what you've got is Utter confusion. So there needs to be some unity so you can conform to something solid. That's part of what a confession of faith helps us do. It helps us to be able to put our thumbprint on and say, yeah, this is what we believe and hold to. And it's not merely one man's opinion about the Word of God, nor is it a determination of just some small ruling faction. The confession of faith is the affirmation of leaders and congregants alike. Yes, these are the things we confess in respects of of authority, it doesn't recognize a single congregant as being the authority, nor a single elder in the church as being in authority. The confession recognizes that scripture alone has to be the rule. And we're simply affirming what that final authority actually says. So the test of a great confession is not that it's just pinned well, and somebody did a good job of writing it down, or that a bunch of people affirmed it, but that it properly expresses the truth of Scripture. So let that be the best guide for us. It is not that it was pinned well, or that a large group of people agreed to it, but that it properly expresses the truth that is found in the scriptures. Now, not all confessions stand the test of time. And some people would argue that if it's a good confession, it ought to. But sometimes modernization and sometimes men letting truths fall by the wayside cause good confessions to just kind of be left to the curb, kicked to the curb. Pastor Josh was mentioning that as you read some of these early church fathers as they're called, the ones that were apostolic, contemporary with the apostles. They believed things solidly, but over the years things seemed to get perverted. And then there was a resurgence of truth during the Reformation as they were talking about people were rediscovering truths that were there but had been put under. That's something a confession hopefully, if a church holds to confessions, prevents the church from doing is going by the wayside. How many of you have ever, that have got any age on you, have ever visited a church and years and years and years and years later went back to that church and the worship was completely different than how it was when you were there and it was different in a bad way? It had gone another way. It was set up differently. I have a friend who tells me that he went back to his home church after about two decades. They were traveling through and he thought it would be neat and they had a woman preacher. And he said, wow, things have really changed. They've become real contemporary and diverse. Now that's how he saw it. You know, we would have said something different about that setup. But that's what he discovered. Wow, they've become contemporary and diverse because they had a lady in the pulpit doing the preaching now. What happened to that congregation? What do you think happened? Somebody want to just give me a summary of what do you think happened? It was an old line Baptist church when he was in it. You know, they said the Scripture alone was their rule of faith. and some two, two and a half decades later it has shifted. Some generations may have a revival, other generations will go the other way. Most of them go worldly. But once in a while you have a revival and the church may be more biblical than the start of it. Hopefully we will see that happen. I hope so. And you know, when you look at a church, like you said, what in the world went wrong, it could very well be that. And you know, some of the Older church members that remember those truths may have decided that maybe those truths aren't that important, they aren't worth fighting for. And there wasn't someone that stood up and said, hey, wait a minute, you know, the Scriptures teach differently. And at some point they may have brought in a shepherd, an under-shepherd, A preacher that, yeah, the Bible is kind of the Word of God. I mean, it contains some words of God. You know, it's not our final rule of faith. I mean, we have to be reasonable. I mean, that could have happened. There was a shift somewhere, but what would have happened if you'd had a preacher that came in and said, hey, this is what we confess. And here's what the Scriptures say about these truths that we say we confess. And hail to those. Week after week after week after week after week after week. You say, well, that would have been boring. Well, it might have sounded boring, but you wouldn't have had such a great shift either as somebody was standing firm on the particular truths that were before them. If we decided that every year we were going to adjust the measurement of our rulers just by a quarter of an inch in one way or the other, it wouldn't be many years before we couldn't measure anything correctly anymore. And somebody would say, just move that about three inches closer to that wall. They slide it across the room. That's three inches now. What happened to the original three inches? Well, we made a little adjustment along the way. And so it won't work. He ain't a mechanic. So who knows what's wrong with his truck? But it is true. Just a little shift along the way can change so many things. And so part of the beauty of a confession is that it solidifies what we know we believe into a succinct statement that we can say, hey, this is what is meant by that particular scripture, the commandment. honor, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What does that mean? Well, a confession helps us get that. And you don't get down here to this day and age and say, well, it doesn't mean that I can't go motorbike riding and I can't go out and go shopping and I can't go to the football. It don't mean that. Now wait a minute, it did one time. One time it meant something very serious and very established and very solid because here's what men confessed that it believed. And here's what men confessed and they continued along the way to keep confessing these things. They kept saying that's what it means, but yet today we don't say it. Why? Because we've fallen away from even saying, well what do we confess about that truth? Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. What do we confess about that? That's what we have to ask. Honor thy father and mother. What do we confess about that? Thou shalt not bear false witness. What do we confess about that? I don't know. I don't know, pastor. What do we confess about that? I'm not sure. The Lord's Supper has two particular elements. It has bread and wine. What do we confess about that? Anybody that wants to come eat it can, right? Now wait a minute. Why would we say that? If it's a communion of the saints, Why would we let someone who's not a saint commune? Surely that's not what that means. But why do we confess? Why do we confess that? Because it's a reiteration of what the scripture says. It's an explanation of those things. So confessions become very important in holding the line of orthodoxy. Very important. Not, well the confession says that, that's what we do. No, but the confession best explains that command or truth in Scripture. Something we can understand. I can't help you, the word is always referred to as the light. In Revelation he said, I'll move your candlestick so we can relate to a candlestick having the light on it. So do we not know what he does to quote a church when the truth Yeah, very much so. Yeah, very true and of course all that gets reinterpreted under the light of modern entity and cultural demands. You know, sometimes we become more strict on something when the Bible doesn't demand strictness and sometimes we become more lax when the Bible demands more strictness. We'll become legalists like the Pharisees and Sadducees did. They became more and more strict on certain commands and became more and more lax on other commands. You know what Jesus called that? He said, you're straining now at what? What in the world was he talking about? We're taking truths of the scripture. We're making a bigger deal out of them than even God made out of them. We try to make Jesus Christ a teetotaler, for example. You know, Jesus had to be a teetotaler. Well, he wasn't. Oh, well, but yeah, but. But, anything you want to say, we want it straighter than that, we'll just gobble down the camel. We'll say, well, you know, this is the way that certain things ought to be done in church and this is how we, wait a minute, we want to be strict on certain things, even stricter than the scriptures. But we don't want to on other things. That's what a confession does. It keeps us balanced, helps us to stay balanced. Wait a minute, Men have for years confessed these same things. Why did they confess them? Because the scriptures specifically say this about those particular things. And of course, through time, things do need to be changed. That's what happened to the First London Baptist Confession in 1644. It was reprinted again in 1646. Why did we get the First London Baptist Confession? Well, actually, just in very simple layman terms, they were trying to distinguish themselves from a group known as Anabaptists. They were concerned that the Westminster confessors in 1646, they were busy drawing up their confessions to establish their beliefs, and one of the things that they were really pushing hard was There's a group of these people called Anabaptists, and they hate the king, and they hate rule, and they hate authority, and they want anarchy, and they want to go fight everybody. And a lot of Baptist churches were being accused of this in England. And they realized we are on the cusp of being kicked out of England. And so these Baptists said, what we need to do is we need to have a standard confession that shows that we are Orthodox. that we are not renegades, that we are not unbiblical, that we actually, on the foundational truths of Scripture, believe like the Westminster divines. We need to show them that we're not a cult, that we're not some some strange entity here in England, but that we really do believe biblical truths. And so they came up with this confession to show the same thing. The Congregationalists then modified the Westminster Confession in 1658 and they published something called the Savoy to show that they had solidarity with both the Westminster Divines and with Baptists. They were saying, look, we agree with these things as a whole. In fact, the Savoy Declaration, John Owen, as I said, this is something he said in the original preface of the Savoy Declaration. He said, in drawing up this, our confession, we have had before us the articles of religion, the Westminster Confession of Faith. So he said, we drew this up with that doctrine in front of us, approved and passed by both houses of Parliament. Could you imagine the Republicans and the Democrats coming together and approving a religious document that would in any way sound biblical, if they all got together and tried to do that? Well, both houses of parliament approved the Westminster Confession of Faith after advice had, within an assembly of divines, called together by them for that purpose. So, they said, we want you to give us something that we can say, this is what we believe. to which confession, thinking about the Westminster Confession, for the substance of it, we fully assent, as do our brethren in New England." He said, so here in England, and way over there in New England, you know that new place over there, they agree with it, and the churches also of Scotland, as each in their general synods have testified. So everybody's saying, yeah, we agree with the orthodox teaching that's within that document. However, when we're writing this, that's the Savoy that we're writing, a few things we have added for obviating some erroneous opinions that have been more broadly and boldly maintained of late than in former times. So he said there's things about us Congregationalists that have been said about us They just aren't true. That's what the Anabaptists were saying. We're not Anabaptists. We're not those rebels. We're not trying to upset the king, you know, and topple the throne. Things have been said about us, and we're wanting to show you this, and made some other additions and alterations here and there, and some clear explanations as we found occasion. We have endeavored throughout to hold to such truths in this our confession, as are more properly termed matters of faith, and what is of church order we dispose in certain propositions by itself." That was a very careful way of John Owen saying, the things that deal with the matter of faith, we have maintained those to a T. We've kept them like they should. The things that have really changed are not matters of faith. We've changed some matters of how we may order the church. how things might be ordered within our individual assemblies. They're not going to change the faith, but we don't do things exactly like you have shown them as ordered. Now, some people complain that there were no scripture references in the Savoy. And you'll get some London Baptist confessions with scriptures, notations, and some without. What did I give you? Does it have scriptures in it? Yeah, it has some in it. And John Owen said there's some people complaining that they didn't put scriptures in theirs and this is what he said. But there are not scriptures annexed as in some confessions. We give the same account as did the assembly which was this. The Westminster Assembly's argument was this. The confession being large and so framed is to meet with the common errors if the scripture should have been alleged with any clearness, and by showing where the strength of the proof lay, it would have required a volume." What do you mean? Well, because if you just stuck a scripture verse in there with it, People would have went, that's not what that means. He said, so we would have had to have included a commentary for that verse to explain why that verse applied to this particular thing. And he said there would have been a volume for every statement in the confession because there's so much. He was really complimenting the Westminster divines by saying, What you said is so scriptural. It entails, it encompasses, excuse me, so much scripture that if we were to include a scripture verse for everything they said and all the scriptures that would have related to it and then we had to explain why that related, why, there would have been a huge commentary for each single comment made. Yes sir? There's a lot of verses that are not real popular, but they're really great verses for backing up a lot of doctrines. And it seems like they're usually missing. They have, like the London, they'll have about three or four references that will not be in the verses. Usually they're not in there, and then another one's the same thing. And that's a problem. These references are not definitive. There are more that could be added, but you don't want to write commentary on them. That's exactly what he was saying. So, because we're going to miss the one that Scott Ward would have wanted, and we might have put one in that Galen said, no, I don't think that one goes. He said, instead of doing that, we've not put any in there, and we're going to rely on the fact that a man that's using the confession is a man who already is studying the Bible. Because you wouldn't want a new believer to come up and you say, hey, the first thing you need to do is read the London Baptist Confession. That's not what we would tell a new believer. We would start him off and say, hey, you need to start reading the Bible. And start reading a section out of Genesis. Read some out of Psalms. Read some out of the book of John. Start working there every day, reading the scriptures. And as you come up with a question, put a mark by it, write your questions in a notebook. That's the way a Christian is going to grow. Not, hey, the first thing you need is a copy of the London Baptist Confession. That'll get you on the right track. Why he would read that confession and be so confused? Because he doesn't have the fundamentals, the foundation of what that confession was written on. It would be like telling somebody who has never seen a house in their life. handing them a wiring schematic and say, here's a wiring schematic. I need you to go wire a house. And they say, I don't even know what a house is. First of all, what do I do with this wire and why is it drawn like that? They wouldn't know where to begin. And you don't want to do that with somebody. You want to start with the foundational truths of scripture with someone. Now he goes on to say this, and this is where he waxes very eloquent and careful in what he says, because he's dealing with a confession that so ordered the church that it caused people to leave the church and caused divisions within the church when the Westminster Confession came out. And he said this, we have laid down about churches and their government, what we've laid down about churches and their government, so what we've written about that, we humbly conceived to be the order which Christ has himself appointed to be observed. We have endeavored to follow Scripture light and those also that went before us according to that rule." We've looked at what historically the church has done and that's what we're trying to do, he said. Our prayer to God is that Whereunto we have attained, we may walk by the same rule, and that wherein we are otherwise minded, God would reveal it to us in due time." Now, that's Owen's preface to the Savoy, and we're going to look, of course, at what the confessor said about the London Baptist Confession and that's what we're going to be covering over the next few months in order to get that in our head very well. But the thing I don't want you to do in this class is to Put the confession above the Bible. The confession of faith is like a commentary. It helps us to better understand some truths, but it's not the soul of Scripture. It's not the final truth. It is to be judged by the Bible. There's statements even within the London Baptist Confession that I wish were worded differently. And when we get to those, I'm going to tell you what those are and we'll see it. Charles Haddon Spurgeon had some problems with various things that were worded in the London Baptist Confession, but he ascribed to the London Baptist Confession nonetheless because it was a document that was as helpful to him as could possibly be, he felt. Alright, pretty much that's the end of my first lecture. It's just the opening of it. We're going to get into more details about the various parts of it. We're going to look at every point over the course of time. I don't know how long that's going to take. We're going to cover a lot of scriptures in that point in time as well as to where they came up with these ideas and why they would have said such things as they said. And hopefully it will help you to understand why we practice what we practice today and maybe answer some questions that you may have had along the way. Any questions before we close? Just a little more introduction but we may start it by the end of class. Oh yeah, the first one goes a long, long way. So we probably will start touching on it by the end of class next week. So if you happen to have a little quiz and those dates were to happen to appear on that quiz next week, you might say, oh, I know Amy was born in 1986. That's the only thing you know. It's really the only thing you need to know. But if you can get these other ones, that would help you. And it's like, why in 1991 up there? Well, she wasn't my first, sorry. No, she's the baby. That's because they're Dutch. We know about the Dutch. Actually, next week, if we get into it, we will cover We're going to try to cover those confessions. As we look at them, we're going to read the confessions. Reading the confessions without commentary on the confessions is a whole lot quicker than commenting on all the confessions. But we're going to read the 1536 Helvetic Confession, we're going to read the 1559 French Confession, the 1561 Belgic Confession. And by the way, they're the ones that laid the groundwork and suffered the most for us to get the confessions we have here. They really are. And they were strong. So we're going to see the first, the second, the French. We're going to read every one of those. I'm not going to be remiss in teaching you that because here's how Pastor Josh and I look at it. We plan to teach this college class until we're dead. And if it takes us a few years to get through some of these things, so what, right? We're going to just get to them. And that's the goal of it. I could be just do all concise things like we did on the introduction last semester, but that's not what we want to do. We want to make sure we understand it all and can can flesh it out and enjoy being together. And thank y'all for coming so much. It's a blessing to have y'all here. Brother Galen, why don't you close us in a word of prayer and we'll be dismissed and you guys can go home and we'll see y'all back here this coming Lord's Day.