So we have with us today Dr. Jack Kinnear, and I'll just read from the back of one of his books. Dr. Kinnear has his Master of Divinity degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and he has a Doctor of Ministry degree from St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. He has been a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and is currently a minister in the PCA. He's a native of western Pennsylvania, southwestern Pennsylvania, and so returning there after pastoring in eastern Pennsylvania, he went home. to the hills and hollers and mountains of Western Pennsylvania. We're glad that he was willing to come down today and talk to us and preach tomorrow. And so I encourage you all to take notes, listen carefully, write questions down that you might want to ask, follow up. And we'll have plenty of opportunity for that. So take it away, Doug. OK. Go ahead and start. Oh, and the book I have in my hand is How to Grow in Christ. It's a book that he wrote for believers at any stage, but particularly it might be useful for new believers who need to know how to make advances in the Christian life. He told me that it was recently translated into Chinese. So excellent. And you will get copies of these. We don't have any, except the one I have. But we'll get some copies. OK. Thank you. I'm pleased to be with you today and to share with you from the word of the Lord. We're going to try some projection today, like I often do in the classroom at the seminary. We'll see if that works or not. I think I need to move myself closer to this projector and a little further into the room. I'm fine. I've got it. That's good. That's good. So I can get this to where I can. I can manipulate it. And today what I want to do, oh, by the way, just a way of starting, that's the Colorado River just outside of Moab, Utah. Just wonder where that picture's from. Out of the window of my Jeep. The pastor asked me to come down and share some in this leadership training class for you. And what I want to do is ask the question, what is the Reformed faith? with this proviso on it, as Jesus taught it. Now, that's a bit of an odd way to express it, isn't it? Normally we'd say, what is the reformed faith as Calvin taught it or as the Westminster Divines taught it or what have you. But for me, the conviction is that the doctrinal system that we find expounded in John Calvin, that we find expressed in the Westminster Standards or in the Three Forms of Unity, That system of ideas is not properly speaking the system of ideas of John Calvin or even of St. Augustine. It is rather the system of ideas that we find in the very teaching of Jesus himself. And when we pay attention to how our Lord taught and expressed things, we're able to work through not only a correct understanding of what the biblical faith is, but also we're able to work through problems and misunderstandings that arise in the life of the church. And we'll do some of that as well. And so we're going to be asking the question, what is the reformed faith according to Jesus? You see, one of the misconceptions we have about the New Testament is that we tend to view the New Testament as a flat collection of books. And then we have the books that are the most important books when we want to talk about theology. Like Romans. See? And I think Romans is an important book because I teach it every year at seminary. I think my students read it in Greek or parts of it in Greek. But the Old Covenant Scriptures have a structure to them. Even in the internal title of the Old Covenant Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets, there's a structure implied there that there's a fundamental revelation, the Law of Moses, the books of Moses. And the prophets sit on top of the books of Moses and comment on and apply the truths of the Law of Moses to the people of God. And the same structure exists in the New Testament. That the fundamental teaching, the basic ideas, the core material is in the teaching and doing of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And that the epistles sit on top of that and comment on that and apply that. And you can get yourself into all kinds of interpretive problems if you run too quickly to the epistles to think through a theological problem and don't begin with the teaching and doing of Jesus. So we're going to structure ourselves around the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, appealing then to how the epistles apply that in certain things, talking about how that structures our fundamental way of thinking about what the faith is, what the church is, what worship is. And then asking the question, what are some contemporary mistakes and deviations from that that we want to avoid? And in doing that, we're going to cover several ideas. We're going to look, first of all, at Jesus and salvation in our first lecture. Then at Jesus and his church. Jesus and the signs of salvation. And finally, Jesus and the worship of the Father. I'll do those four again real quickly so you've got the structure of today's four sessions. Jesus and salvation, this first hour. Jesus and his church. Jesus and the signs of his salvation. And finally, Jesus and the worship of the Father. Turn within your Bibles to the book of John. John, chapter six, I want to read you a somewhat lengthy portion to start with. John, chapter six, beginning in verse. Twenty eight. Well, let me start at verse 25, because that's the beginning of a section. Verse 25. And when they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, Rabbi, when did you get here? Jesus answered, to tell you the truth, you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for the food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him, God the Father has placed his seal of approval. They asked him, what must we do to do the works of God? And Jesus answered, this is the work of God, to believe in the one that he sent. They asked him, what miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our forefathers ate manna in the desert. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. And Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Sir, they said, from now on, give us this bread. And Jesus declared to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be thirsty. He who comes to me will never be hungry. And he who believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me. And whoever comes to me, I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my will, but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up on the last day. For this is my Father's will, that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him may have eternal life, and I may raise him up on the last day." I want to take you in particular to verse 39 of this passage here. And I'm going to put it up for you on the board. on the screen here. Let's see. That's too small to print. Let me change some font sizes. Give me one second to do a little techie thing here. Now, when I project this, there's going to be some Greek up there. Not yet, not yet. Don't be intimidated by the Greek. I teach from the original language all the time. I'm just used to having it up there, but I put it in smaller form. No tests on Greek today. There we go. Is that English print large enough for you? Okay. Jesus says here as the New International Version translates it. This is the original NIV. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. And then Jesus says, I think I just skipped the wrong. I said thirty nine. I gave you forty four instead. Sorry. Whoops. This will make more sense. This is the will of him who sent me and I should lose that I should lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up on the last day. Jesus, in this sentence, expresses the total picture of salvation in one sentence. And the entire Reformed faith is contained in this one sentence. But not all of it in so many words, but by implication. This is the will of him who sent me. This is God's will. That I should lose none of all that he has given me. And so at the very center of this idea is that the Father has given the Son a great people to redeem. We tend to speak of this in the abstract language that we find in Paul about the election. That there is an elect. God's elect people. And that's good language. It's in the Apostle Paul. It's correct. But for Jesus, it's very personal. And you have to see the personalness. The Father has given something to the Son. and entrusted that something that he has given to the son, that the son will finish the work needed to be done. And so at the heart of our faith is the conviction that salvation begins when the father gives us to the son. I want you to contemplate that for a minute. That before the world began, before you existed, if you are a true and real believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, God the Father not only set his affection upon you, and chose you to be His own, but He chose you to give you to Jesus. And so, election is election in Christ. In the sense that the Father gives this great elect people to His sons. And then Jesus says, and I shall lose none of them. And this expression here, I shall lose none of them, that's just about the way all the translations express this. I will lose none of them. The problem with that is the way the word lose functions in English. One of the things we do at the seminary, we do a lot of it with the students, is try to get them to understand But it's not enough to learn to read Greek and Hebrew so you can translate it into English and then think about the verse. You have to think about the verse in Greek and Hebrew, not in English. And the English word lose reminds me of these. Keys. Because in my age range, you regularly say, hey sweetheart, where's my keys? Get out. That's really not the real problem. The real problem for me is where's my cell phone? Yeah, where's my cell phone? Haven't seen a cell phone for two days. Where's that? I don't know. It's in the Jeep, which we've got three of them. I don't know. One of them. Let's try calling it. Oh, well, it shut itself down by now. Where's the cell phone? My daughter, who's, you know, 27, 26, very, you know, techie young person. Dad, I can never get a hold of you. Where's your cell phone? I don't know. I left it somewhere. That's what the word lose is. But if this were a class in Greek, I would make you look at this word right here, opaleso in the Greek, and say, now, can you tell me what the present active indicative form of that verb opaleso is? And you guys would say, what is this man saying up here? What's a present active indicative form of anything? I would ask my students, what does this word look like when it's in the dictionary list? And in the dictionary list, it's pronounced Apolumi. Oh, that's wonderful. A guy comes the whole way from Pennsylvania, the far end of Maryland, to tell me some full word that means Apolumi, and I'll never remember it. Why is he saying that? Well, you see, there's a noun that goes with Apolumi. It's Apollyon. Anyone know the word Apollyon from the book of Revelation? Apollyon, Apollyon, the destroyer. Apollumi, as opposed to the similar verb apolluo, apollumi does not mean to misplace. It means to destroy. And it's used for losing something, not in the sense of misplacing it, but in the sense of it being destroyed and ruined. In other words, if I misplaced my phone, I would never use this Greek word to describe it. But if I misplaced my phone on the sidewalk and promptly drove over it with my jeep, then I would use this word, because my phone would now be really lost. Like, lost, lost, smushed. Of all that the Father has given me, I will not allow to be destroyed. I will not bring down to ruin forever. I will not lose one of them. In other words, Jesus says, the commission the Father has given me, I will perform without a single failure. Not one of all it has given me I will allow to be destroyed. I will bring down to destruction. I will lose like my cell phone crushed by the wheel of my Jeep. I will lose none of them. But I will raise them up on the last day. And so, God the Father gives to the Son of great people. And of that great number, He will lose not one of them. Not a single failure, but everyone will end up in resurrection life. And so we can say that the Reformed faith is in its essence, in its very core, that Jesus is the perfect and all-sufficient Savior. He's the perfect Savior. I will lose none. And he's all sufficient. He doesn't get us halfway there. He doesn't get us two thirds of the way there. And I will raise them up on the last day. I will bring them to the very end to which salvation aims, which is eternal resurrection life in the presence of the Father. Jesus is the perfect and all sufficient Savior. Now, I stress that as I come to you, because if you think about being officers in the Reformed church, And we are a church with creeds. I've got my confession and catechisms with me. There's a tremendous amount of detail there. A lot of information. Some of it's more central, some of it's less central. And one of the problems we tend to have is we tend to define ourselves over against other people. What is the Reformed faith over against broad evangelical Christianity? What is the Reformed faith over against the heirs of Jacobus Arminus? What is the Reformed faith over against some of the misconceptions that are sometimes called federal vision? What is the Reformed faith over against Roman Catholicism? Now, it's always legitimate to ask those questions, and we will pursue them at points. But what happens when you focus that way in preparing for ministry in the church, is you're always defining yourself by somebody else. And the effect of that is, without intending it, you put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Because you see, the position that you were rejecting and standing over against may be not at the center of what you believe, but it's still wrong, and so you've got to stand against it. You say, well, aren't the five points of Calvinism The essence of the reformed faith. No, they're the defense of the reformed faith. The essence of the reformed faith is a statement right here that Jesus is the perfect and all sufficient savior. And he saves the ones the father has given to him the whole way to resurrection and loses not one of them. If you can see that that is Jesus's conception of who he is and what he does. then that has to become for you the center of your theological thought. Nothing can compromise this statement. Nothing can qualify it in the sense of take away its force and limit its meaning. I define salvation and the life of the church and the ministry in such a way that I allow for the possibility that some who were saved will lose their salvation. Or that some are saved in some sense, but not saved ultimately. That somehow they were part, but then they were lost. I'm in conflict with this truth. I'm in conflict with Jesus's own understanding of what the will of the Father is that he has come to do and which he says he will do without fail. That's the center. But the second thing that we will see in this passage that's important for us to realize is that as Jesus talks about this, he says in verse 40, This is the Father's will, this is my Father's will, that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. And two words are used here in English, to look and to believe. This is a use of a device in Greek very common where you say the same essential thing in two different ways to make the idea clear. Looking to the sun is not one thing and believing is not the other, but the two mutually interpret each other. Faith is a looking to the sun. A looking to the sun is not a mere seeing him, but a trusting and relying upon him. Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. And from this then we can draw our second principle. That everyone who in the sense Jesus here uses the word believe, and this is the Greek verb right here, that everyone who truly and really believes in the sense Jesus means it, That that person has eternal life and Jesus will raise him up. He, therefore, must be one of those that the Father has given to the Son. And this is a crucial second part of the structure of the Reformed faith. that the idea of election, all that the Father has given to me will come to me, and the idea of faith are not sealed off into two compartments. We cannot say, as some would say, that God's election is so secret and hidden in heaven we can have no knowledge of it. But, therefore, we must build the church on some other basis than the election of God. No, that misconstrues the truth. There is a connection between election and faith. It's not that faith makes us elect. It's rather that election makes us believers. And that's the point of the third verse that I had up first, that it was supposed to be third, in verse 44. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day." Now, do you see this literary structure in these passages? All of them end with the same thing. I will raise him up on the last day. No one can come to me. No one is able. No one has the ability, this is the verb that's used here, right there, you can't see it, dunatai, is the verb that means to be able to do something. Dunatai, the noun is dunamis, from which we get our word dynamite. Unless the father who sent me draws him. Now, this is an interesting metaphor, and I want to spend a few minutes on it. Draws him. This is the verb here, ek. Elkuo up here, that's the Greek word. This word means to drag, to draw, to pull. It is used in John's Gospel to describe the act of dragging a net full of fish onto the beach. So, the English translations, they all use the word draw here. Generally speaking, if the King James does it pretty well and people are used to it, all the modern translations try not to go too far from it because they've got to appeal to the same audience. One of the problems with translations is translations are to some extent market-driven and that creates some of the problems with them. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me drags him, pulls him. In other words, The idea is not simply the idea that the Father entices people to come, but that he sovereignly lays hold of them and brings them. And I will raise him up on the last day. So we can say that according to the teaching of Jesus, the Father has given him an elect people. that the father at his own appointment draws, pulls, yanks, drags those people to Jesus. No, he does that in such a way that they come willingly because they come by believing. And all those who truly believe are the elect and will be raised up on the last day. That's how Jesus conceives of His doing the will of the Father. That's His concept of His own ministry. And this then is central to the Reformed faith. Jesus is the perfect and all-sufficient Savior. The Father sovereignly brings His elect to Jesus. Jesus loses none of them but raises them up on the last day. All of this comes out of this speech about bread of life, I am the bread of life. But Jesus continues, and let me turn with you back to the Gospel of John and the text here, and pick up in verse 43. Stop grilling among yourselves, Jesus answered, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, they will all be taught of God. Everyone who listens to the father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the father except the one who is from God. Only he has seen the father. I tell you the truth. He who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate man in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." And the Jews began to argue among themselves, how can this man give to us his flesh to eat? And Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. And just as the Father set me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your fathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever. I want to take you now to verse 54 of this passage I just read to you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. Do you see the literary parallel? All that the Father gives me will come to me, and of them I will lose none, but raise Him up on the last day. Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him has eternal life, and I will raise Him up on the last day. And so we have in place of the expression earlier, everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him, we have instead a metaphor. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. Now, there's no doubt that the Jews at this point, as they're hearing Jesus, understood this in a crass and literalistic way. How can you go chomping on the guy's arm? And Jesus leaves them in their ignorance at this point. But this is a metaphor. Now, let me add here quickly that this is not a commentary on the Lord's Supper. If you read this passage as a commentary on the Lord's Supper, you will misconstrue it. The Lord's Supper is a commentary on this passage. It's a question of order. We'll get there eventually in Lecture 3. To eat my flesh and to drink my blood. Think about the metaphor. If you eat the flesh and drink the blood, then you take that person in his very substance into you. Right? And you are truly united to that person. You are joined to him. And you have this profound communion with him that his very life is your life. And Jesus is here showing us by this metaphor that those whom the Father draws to the Son, those who look to the Son and believe in Him, verses 44 and 39, are those who have such a real and true union and communion with Jesus Christ. They are so united to Him that it is as if They ate His body and drank His blood. Can you imagine a unity that is more intense than that kind of unity? That's the point of the metaphor. That by faith in Jesus Christ, We have such a true union and communion with Him that His very life flows into us. That He is like bread that feeds and nourishes us. That He is the very Word of the Father that gives us life. That through His sacrifice for us, we have this. But this is not the communion setting. This is not the Last Supper. There's no physical bread being passed around as a symbol at this point. Jesus, this is just a conversation. Keep that in mind, because you see the thrust here is not on the outward manner of signifying that we eat and drink of his blood, but on the inward reality that by faith we are true partakers of his very humanity, his body and his blood, which will be crucified for us and risen for us. When we get to the last Lord's Supper, we'll talk about how the Lord's Supper pictures this spiritual reality. But the Lord's Supper refers back to this, not the other way around. So then, to sum this up at this point, the faith that Jesus teaches is that the Father has given Him a great people. And of that great people the Father has given Him, He will not lose a single one. but will raise them up on the last day. And everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him is a member of that great elect people. And He will raise them up on the last day. And everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him has such a union and communion with Jesus as Savior that it's as if He ate His body and drank His blood, took His very being into Himself. Neal will have eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. That is the heart and the center of the Reformed faith. That Jesus is the perfect and all-sufficient Savior and that by faith we have not just benefits We have union and communion with Jesus Himself. And His very life comes into us. That's the center of our faith. When we think about Reformed faith, when we think about the life of the church, when we think about issues and controversies that exist in any given time and space, we have to always keep that center in mind. That we don't let issues on the sides becomes so dominant in our thinking that we lose hold of the center. Or to put it differently, if you were to come to church on a regular basis and as a result of the excellent instruction and teaching, you should find yourself to be thoroughly competent as a Reformed theologian, able to adequately articulate the faith. And you would learn your Bible well so that you would be a very good Bible teacher. You would open the Scriptures and explain them. And you should do all of that. And yet, if that's all you had, you have nothing. Because you see, you are not saved by the clarity of your theological perception. And you are not saved by the scholarship of your biblical interpretation. You are only saved by looking to Jesus and believing in him. By, as it were, by faith, partaking of him, eating and drinking of him. And so the center of the Christian assembly is that we would come hungering and thirsting for Jesus, that he might give us his very life. And so that's the center not only of the Reformed faith as a system of ideas, but it's the center of the Reformed faith as a piety. The piety, the practice of godliness in the Reformed churches properly conducted is always centered on this. We need to eat and drink of Jesus by faith. We need to partake of him. We need to hold to him. We need to receive him. We need to have him. And everything we do and say should help that process. No, I have water." And when we think about that, we need to say that on the one side, that means that we have to be careful that later on as we think through theological issues, we don't define things in such a way that we compromise that center. When the Reformed churches were confronted with the teaching of Jacobus Arminus in the early 1600s in Holland, and the great Armenian Calvinist controversy flared up. From hindsight, from our perspective, we tend to see that primarily in terms of the formula of ideas. But when we look carefully at what was being struggled over there, what the theologians of the church were trying to preserve was this simple truth. that Jesus is the perfect and all-sufficient Savior, and that we have a real and true communion with him through faith. And so they said, well, no, look, if you say that Jesus has offered only a hypothetical atonement that makes salvation possible, but that in fact by its own inner efficacy saves no one, and that that which is essential for a person to enter into salvation is that they of their own will, apart from the grace of God, should believe in Jesus, then you no longer have a perfect and all-sufficient Savior. If you say that there are some who were part of Christ, who believed in Him, who were in a state of salvation, and who have fallen out of that state of salvation and are now lost, then you no longer have a perfect and all-sufficient Jesus. You no longer have good news. And so the first point I want to bring to you this morning is that the center of the Reformed faith is that Jesus is the perfect and all-sufficient Savior, and we have true union and communion with him by faith. That's how Jesus understood his ministry. And we have to put that at the center of our thinking and then address questions like what are the sacraments and how do they function? What about those who say they believe but then leave the faith? What about infant children? All of those questions have to be understood. in terms of this uncompromisable center that we have here in the teaching of Jesus in John's Gospel. Okay, it's ten till now. Let me stop here, take a few quick questions, and we'll take a break and come back for a second hour.