Believing (Part 1 of 2)

Alistair Begg often says, The main things are the plain things.

But when it comes to our faith, how well do we know those main things? Our current series, Christian Basics, takes us to the heart of biblical teaching, and today on Truth for Life weekend, Alistair addresses the need for believers to have a solid grasp on what we believe and why, in a message he calls Believing. Father, we thank you for the immense privilege of being in this place at this time.

We thank you that you have plans and purposes for us. We're not here a ragbag of individuals brought together by happenstance, but that in the mystery of your purposes and providence, you have brought us together for this time. So then, help us in the balance of our time as we turn to the Bible and read it, as we think about its truth, and as we seek to have you come and apply it to our lives, whether to convince us of our sin, to convict us of our need of a Savior, or to establish us in our faith. Come, Lord, to our waiting hearts, we pray, for Christ's sake.

Amen. Colossians chapter 1 and verse 21. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you wholly in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.

If you continue in your faith, established and firm, not move from the hope held out in the gospel, this is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. I'm not sure what to call this. I don't think it qualifies, certainly, as an exposition. We could call it an introduction in search of an exposition. I don't want to call it a lecture.

Perhaps we could call it an address. Maybe we'll just call it a talk. But it is what it is. And why I say that will become apparent as I go along. But let me begin by trying to take you, in your mind's eye at least, far away from here and now. We're going to have to go back three centuries. It takes us back into the 1600s. We're in England. Let's choose 1675.

That day will work. It's now less than ten years since the Great Fire of London, which, if you know your history at all and have visited the old city of London, you will know that fire started in Pudding Lane and quickly spread throughout the city and destroyed vast chunks of it, including a significant number of churches. It's the afternoon of a Sunday. Sunday afternoon, we've had lunch, and we're out walking. And we walk down Bishopsgate Street, which those of you who are from a business background and have visited Lloyd's of London will know Bishopsgate Street, Threadneedle Street, and so on. And so some of you have a better grasp of this, at least in your imagination.

But of course, you've got to go back three centuries with it, so we're all about even. But as we walk down Bishopsgate Street, we discover a constant flow of people entering a building on the east side of the street. In checking it, we discover that they're heading for the great hall of a large home called Crosby House.

The owner is a man called Sir John Langham. And he's a nonconformist. In other words, he's not part of the establishment church of England.

Intrigued, we join the crowd and enter into this large hall, finding ourselves very quickly in a significant number of people that have gathered. And the reason for their gathering on this Sunday afternoon is to learn the basics of the Christian faith. Their teacher is a man by the name of Thomas Watson.

He has a colleague in ministry—an associate, not an assistant—and that man's name is Stephen Charnock. And together they had become convinced of the absolute necessity of making sure that their congregation was grounded in their Christian faith. So much so that they determined that they only right and proper approach would be to have them catechized—in other words, that they would give them oral instruction that would have a repetitive element and would be sustained in large measure as a result of questions and answers. Both of them agreed to try and set out what they would refer to as a body of divinity—in other words, the information necessary to understand the divine. Stephen Charnock died before he completed his, but those of you who have on your shelves the existence and attributes of God in these two volumes and who know the richness of them and the density of them will be intrigued to think that this is what he was preparing for those people on Sunday afternoons in Bishopsgate Street.

His colleague, and the one who was largely responsible for it, Thomas Watson, made a far more modest attempt at things and produced what became known as a body of divinity. In informing his congregation of what he was planning to do on the Sabbaths that were following, he said this, Catechizing is the best expedient for the grounding and settling of people. I fear one reason why there has been no more good done by preaching has been because the chief heads and articles in religion have not been explained in a catechistical way. Catechizing is laying the foundation. To preach and not to catechize is to build without foundation. And then he goes on and finally says, It is my design, therefore, with the blessing of God, to begin this work of catechizing the next Sabbath day. And I intend every other Sabbath in the afternoon to make it my whole work to lay down the grounds and fundamentals of religion in a catechistical way.

If I am hindered in this work by men or taken away by death, I hope God will raise up some other laborer in the vineyard among you that may perfect the work which I am now beginning. Sunday afternoon, in the mid-seventeenth century, he regarded it as the duty of every Christian to be settled in the faith. And he reckoned that the best way to be settled in the faith was for each Christian to be grounded in the faith. And he determined that in order that they might be grounded in the faith, he was going to have to do more than simply preach to them expositionally, but he was going to have to show them the way in which the whole story wed together. Now, one of his contemporaries, at least within the century, whose name will be known to some again, was the godly Richard Baxter, brought up as a lad in Shropshire and eventually had the body of his life's work take place in a place called Kidderminster.

And interestingly, in that same period, a little before Watson reaches his conclusion, we find that Richard Baxter is determining to operate in the same way. He reckoned that his preaching, which he did twice a week—preached for an hour on Sunday and another hour on Thursday and with enormous energy and urgency—he reckoned that his preaching was not enough, that a more hands-on strategy was needed to awaken sleeping souls. As a pastor, Baxter believed that conversion could happen at any age and that the most effective way of finding out whether a person needed to be converted was not by public preaching but by private conversation. He would spend an hour with each family using the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments to instruct each person and gauge his or her spiritual condition.

Every Monday and Thursday, Baxter would start at the one end of the town, his assistant would start at the other, and together they managed to interview fifteen or sixteen families a week—a total of eight hundred families each year. Baxter discovered that some people learned more in an hour's conversation than in ten years of preaching. He became convinced that personal instruction or catechizing was essential to ensure the salvation of parishioners and thus the reformation of the parish. It also helped people better understand his sermons and enabled him to know who was ready to take the sacraments and where loving discipline was needed. As a result of Baxter's one-on-one catechizing, he got to know his parishioners so well that he adapted his pastoral care to their widely varying spiritual states and needs. Rather than simply dividing people into godly and ungodly, he claimed that there were twelve different categories of people in his parish, including those who merely conformed to the externals of church membership, those who desired to live godly lives but did not yet understand the fundamentals of faith, those with skeptical tendencies, those who rebelled against their pastor, and those whose wrongheaded theology was leading them into lawlessness.

Thanks to his intimate knowledge of his flock, most of Kidderminster's two thousand adult inhabitants were converted under Baxter's ministry, and this town, formally infamous for its ignorance and debauchery, became a model Christian community. Tonight, the issue is knowing what we believe as Christians. We're not thinking now tonight about the nature of belief or the nature of saving faith.

We endeavored to do that last time. But rather, our emphasis this evening is on the need for every Christian to know what he believes and why he believes it. And that emphasis is not simply to be found in seventeenth-century England amongst the Puritans, but that emphasis is to be found at the very heart of apostolic preaching. It is impossible to go through the letters without finding that again and again the apostles are urging upon their readers the absolute necessity of knowing what and why they believe. And that's why we read from Colossians chapter 1, and he says, And you are in this condition reconciled to God, if by your continuance in the faith, established and firmed, and not moved from the hope held out in the gospel, your continuance gives evidence of the fact of your living relationship with God through Christ. But we could easily go back a couple of pages to Ephesians chapter 4 and find Paul making the same emphasis. Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 11, God the ascended Christ has poured out from heaven his gifts, and he has given some to be apostles and some to be prophets and some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers. And what are they supposed to do? Well, they're supposed to prepare God's people for works of service.

Well, and what will happen then? Well, the body of Christ may be built up. Edified is the word you may have in your version. Oikodomia is the Greek word, being built up, strengthened, secured, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then—notice verse 14—then and only then, we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. In other words, how is a congregation to hold on to the gospel in their generation when everything wages war against it? The answer is by being settled in what they believe and being grounded in that truth as a result of their own personal study and the instruction that they receive. Now, I don't want to belabor the point, but I have in my notes Romans 16 and verse 17 and 2 Timothy 3.14. The whole emphasis in these passages is on the basics—or, if you like, to borrow a phrase of our own, it is upon the main things.

Many disciplines—educational disciplines—are represented in our congregation this evening. And you know that in whatever you do, whether it is in art or in economics, in mathematics, in business, that there are certain first principles. And everything that takes place has to take place in reference to those first principles.

If you're a pilot and you understand the law of gravity, but you also recognize that there is a point at which the law of aerodynamics overturns the law of gravity and propels that craft into the air. And those essential first principles are the building blocks of every maneuver that you make in the air, of every decision that you make in response to the circumstances that you face. Now, in the same way, when it comes to Christian faith, when it comes to belief, there are certain first principles. And whether it is Paul in the passages we're referencing, or John in 1 John chapter 2 and verse 24, or Peter in 2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 16, all of them, without exception, say to their readers, if you are going to be able to detect that which is fraudulent, it is essential that you have a solid grasp of first principles and how those first principles then work their way out in the whole body of experiential Christian teaching. Now, it should already be obvious to you—and this is why I said I don't know quite what to call this—it should already be obvious to you that to address the core beliefs of Christian faith in one talk is virtually impossible.

And I realized this as soon as I began to prepare for the address. I said, Well, I could do one of them. Then I said, No, that would be the start of a series. And we don't have a series.

Well, we have a series, but it's not that series, and so we can't do that. But actually, what I'm going to give to you now and just run through these—there's nothing surprising in them—I anticipate, and I hope, will become, if you like, something of a core curriculum, whether it happens on every other Sunday afternoon or whether it happens on a Wednesday night or a Tuesday night or a Thursday morning, but I have it heavy on my heart as a result not simply of my reading in the past week but as a result of a lot of things that have been going on in my mind to ensure that as long as God gives me strength and my colleagues with me, we must labor to endeavor that our congregation understands the first principles of Christian doctrine and is able to bring those principles to bear on every aspect of their lives, lest they be swept away, if not now, then perhaps in a further subsequent generation. And the difficulty in addressing it all is obvious when you take Charnock's attempt that comes to two volumes, and Watson—this is dense material here—and it goes to some 316 pages.

What can I possibly do with so few minutes left to me right now? Well, let me just outline, if you like, the content of our curriculum, reminding you that the affirmations of the Christian faith all have to do with the being of God. They all have to do with eternal truths. And the being of God—God as God—and these eternal truths are not available to us by our own unaided comprehension.

In other words, there is no intellectual route to a knowledge of God. We cannot evidentially simply get to God by thinking it out. God has given signs and indications in our moral being, in the nature of creation, and so on. But in all of that general revelation, there is only enough to convince us that we need a God, there is not enough to convert us, and it is in the special revelation that he gives in the person and work of the Lord Jesus that such a conversion may take place. Only when God is pleased to take the initiative and reveal himself, may we know just what it is and why it is we believe it.

That happens, as we saw last time, as a result of God using his Word and as a result of God working by his Spirit. In case you weren't here last time, I'll just draw your attention to the wonderful story of how God worked in a lady's life. There may be a lady here tonight, and you're wondering about the Christian faith. This lady was a prosperous lady. She had a nice home. She had the gift of hospitality, and she actually was a worshiper of God. Boy, you say that pretty well takes care of her, doesn't it? Wonderful hospitality, a worshiper of God, a nice place to live. She's all set.

There's nothing more that would be needed. No, she didn't know the God that she worshiped. And when Paul and some of his colleagues arrive at the prayer meeting that they find down by the river, they meet this lady, Lydia, and then Luke tells us, the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. He preached the message.

The Lord opened her heart. There's no point in running through a list of core Christian beliefs apart from our own discovery of Jesus as Lord and Savior and King. You don't have to know all of these things to become a Christian. But having become a Christian, you cannot nor can I adequately fulfill the responsibilities of Christian life without an experiential grasp of these essential doctrines. Now, it's been well said that it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian.

And one of the great dangers that is represented in a study of doctrine is that it is studied in a very lopsided fashion. So you go to one church, and they emphasize one thing, and you go somewhere else, and they're banging on about something else, and you find people. They come to Parkside, and they always have a certain question. It's probably a good question, but you can see them. I can identify them before they even speak. They have a mark about them. I know this is going to be a King James Version question, or this is going to be one of the other questions. I don't mean that in any unkind or dismissive way, but I just, over time, in the same way, when a doctor sees somebody walk in, he says, Oh, here we go again.

This'll be a tonsillitis, I'm pretty sure. And of course it is. Why does he know that he just has built up a sixth sense over time? Well, that's what happens in pastoral ministry as well. And so it is that you need to be in a church where the pastors of that church are urging you not so much to listen to what they say as to turn to the Bible from which they teach.

We can start you off. But even with the best of attempts, it's going to involve your own determination. Now, it is, then, in these things that we have the anchor for our spiritual lives and the anchor for our intellectual discoveries as well. Incidentally, intellect is not the key in learning Christian doctrine. Obedience is the key in learning Christian doctrine. You can be a PhD three times over and a theological nincompoop. And you can be a crofter in the highlands of Scotland with a solid grasp of the Bible. You can be uncredentialed in every way, and yet you may be a teacher of the brightest intellects.

Why? Because it is not about intellectual capacity. It is about morality. It is about moral response. It is about obedience to the truth as it comes to us.

You're listening to Truth for Life weekend. Alistair Begg with a message today titled Believing in a series called Christian Basics. And as Alistair mentioned, we all need to be grounded in the faith in order to be settled in the faith.

Knowing what we believe and why we believe it enables us to share God's truth with those who need Jesus. Author and evangelist Roger Carswell believes that evangelism is the privilege for everyone whose life is grounded in Christ. He has a burden to reach the lost. He also has a burden to help believers feel more confident about initiating a gospel conversation. He has written a devotional called Facing a Task Unfinished, and it's a book that is meant to challenge you to become more proactive in sharing your faith with others. Now this is not a how to evangelize book. It's more of a prayer book. Facing a Task Unfinished is written to help us reflect on what the Bible teaches about evangelism. It's a devotional that lays out 52 short, weekly readings that are designed to bring our focus toward reaching the lost. This book is intended to be read once a week along with your regular quiet time.

Each reading includes scripture, a brief meditation, and the words to a hymn. There's even a prayer journal in the back of the book where you can record your prayer requests. This book will point you to God's Word and to prayer so that you can gain a heart of compassion for the lost and seek the help of the Holy Spirit to guide and direct your efforts.

Learn how you can request your copy of Facing a Task Unfinished when you click the book image you see in the Truth for Life mobile app or visit us online at truthforlife.org. While you're on the website, let me recommend that you check out our selection of Christ-centered resources. Right now you'll find a recommended reading list that covers a variety of topics including aging well, navigating the challenge of caregiving, and finding peace during trials and grieving. We've compiled this list of books that we believe are tremendously helpful so that you can know the peace of Christ even while you're facing challenges or facing loss. You'll find the list of books at truthforlife.org slash hope. I'm Bob Lapine. Be sure to join us next weekend when Alistair concludes his message, Believing by Presenting the Main Things and the Plain Things of the Christian Faith. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.