Believing (Part 2 of 2)

Is today's church ready to pass the Gospel on to the next generation? It's a task that requires a solid understanding of basic Christian doctrine. Today on Truth for Life weekend, Alistair Begg explains that every Christian needs to know what he believes and why he believes it. We're in Colossians chapter 1 verses 21 to 23 with the message titled, Believing. 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. 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. Well, you say, that pretty well takes care of her, doesn't it? A 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. Now, you 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 will 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. Well, then, let me run this list. I've been telling you about the list for an hour.

Let me just give it to you. And I'm just going to read them. I'm not going to stop.

I daren't stop if I stop. We're in dreadful difficulty. Number one, the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Godhead. The unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in other words, the doctrine of the Trinity. Number two, the sovereignty of God in creation, revelation, redemption, and final judgment. Thirdly, the divine inspiration of Scripture, its infallibility as originally given, its sole authority, complete sufficiency in all matters of faith and conduct. The universal sinfulness and guilt of human nature since the Fall, rendering men and women subject to God's wrath and condemnation. Redemption from the guilt, penalty, and power of sin only through the sacrificial death as our representative and substitute of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God.

In other words, the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement. He died in our place. We can only make sense of his self-sacrificial love when we understand what it was he was doing. He bears in himself all that we deserve.

But I'm not supposed to comment on these. Next one is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Not a resurrection in the minds of people, not a resurrection in the spirits of the apostles, but a literal physical resurrection from the dead. The necessity, next, of the work of the Holy Spirit to make the death of Jesus effective to the individual sinner, granting him repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ. And the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit in the believer. And the one, holy, universal church which is the body of Christ and to which all true believers belong. And the expectation of the personal return of the Lord Jesus Christ in power and in glory. All of those are main things, and all of those are plain things.

I don't expect you to have remembered more than one or two of them. But we do need to labor to ensure that this generation and the one that follows not only understands them but believes them and furthermore believes that it is so important to believe them. That's probably the greater challenge at this point. Now, people say, Well, that's okay if you want to believe that kind of thing and if you want to emphasize that kind of thing over at Parkside. But it's not really… It's tangential to the main issue, isn't it?

No, it's not. It is foundational. Paul's final letters are replete with warnings about false teachers. Just go to 1 Timothy, and let me show you this. 1 Timothy chapter 1, right out of the gate he reminds Timothy, verse 3 of chapter 1, As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, Stay there in Ephesus, so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies.

These are the things that promote controversy rather than God's work, which is by faith. Go to the fourth chapter. You only need to turn a page.

And what does he say? The Spirit clearly says that in the later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits. And he goes on to say how important it is that Timothy is aware of this, and he alerts his congregation to it. Into the sixth chapter and verse 20, and listen to how he wraps up the letter. Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care.

Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. And then into his swan song. To Timothy. Go to chapter 3.

Back on his same story, isn't he? Verse 1, mark this, There will be terrible times in the last days. And then he goes on to describe the nature of the impact of falsehood, and describes these people who are both deceived themselves, and they are being deceived. And he has very straightforward things to say concerning the depravity of their minds in relationship to the faith. You can see that in verse 8. And then the antidote in verse 14 of the same chapter. But as for you, Timothy, you continue in what you've learned and have become convinced of.

You see that? You know, you don't become convinced of a vacuum. You don't become convinced of nothing. There has to be a body of material that you're convinced of. Now, that is the work of the Spirit of God, without doubt. The Spirit of God confirms for us the veracity of the Bible. It is a mysterious thing.

But not in any self-focused way. I recognized as I prepared this talk that somehow along the journey of my life, wittingly or unwittingly, maturer people have taken me aside and made sure that I understood these things. Sunday afternoons, learning the Bible off by heart in a little green hut that I was sent to by my parents. The fellow said I could win a car if I memorized enough of the Bible.

That was enough for me. I'm memorizing. Might not have been the best of motivations, but I learned a ton of the Bible. And some of you are involved in our children's ministries, and you wonder what you're doing. Well, if you're giving them the elementary knowledge of the gospel, you're actually beginning to fashion and form the very lines down which their tiny minds are running. You are providing them with the wherewithal so as to be able to adjudicate as time goes by, so as to be able to detect error when it comes their way. You're at the very heart of the whole operation. And the same is true as we run throughout the congregation.

Now let me finish by making just one point of application. Because it seems to me that in one sense this is pretty ho-hum. People could say, Well, after all, it is a church, and they do have a Bible, and there's stuff in the Bible, and they're supposed to know the Bible. What's the big deal about that? But you know, when you read the Epistles, you recognize that Paul is saying to Timothy in his generation what actually needs to be said in every generation, and in some generations more than others—namely, Timothy, don't fall asleep at the wheel, stay alert to the context in which you're ministering, and make sure that those under your care are grounded in the foundations. Now, these are my observations with the help of some of my friends, as I conclude, and I don't give any authority to them beyond any authority that you may find in them with the concurrence of your own thinking as you consider the Bible. But it is my observation that at the present time, within the climate of contemporary evangelicalism in America, the lack of clearly defined belief is a clear and present danger. That's my observation. That the lack of clearly defined belief is a clear and present danger. And the reasons for that are multivarious.

But one comes from an interesting source. Because there is a prevalent belief—if I'm listening correctly, if I'm reading publications properly—there is a prevalent belief that the only way for the church to survive in the modern world is to adapt the Christian faith in some way to that world. Now, if you know any history at all, you will know that that is exactly what liberal Christianity assumed to be the case in the early part of the twentieth century.

They said to themselves, if we are going to reach a world that has been ravished by these wars, if we are going to reach people who now are post-Scopes monkey trial, if we are going to reach men and women who are educated and intelligent, then we're going to have to adapt our message to them. So, you don't like miracles. It's not a problem.

We got rid of them for you. You got a problem with the deity of Christ. That's okay. We'll just talk about his humanity. You don't like the idea of a resurrected Jesus?

That's okay. We haven't believed it for some time ourselves. And so, unwittingly, generations of people hear language that sounds orthodox from lips that are unorthodox, which finally bleed into a subsequent generation the very destruction of anything that was there to begin with. Well, you say, how could that possibly be akin to what is happening today? In this way, it is an increasingly influential notion among contemporary evangelicals—some—that the way that we need to adapt now is not in adapting our theology—I'm not suggesting that, I'm not suggesting that people are saying we're going to dismiss theology—no, we're going to adapt in the form of our delivery. And that raises a very, very important question. And the question is this. Whether orthodox Christianity can be dressed up in contemporary forms and still survive intact. Now, the jury's out, and it may take another generation to discover whether I am a false prophet or true.

But the question is still on the table. Is it possible to appeal to the consumer mentality, to adopt the methodologies of Disney World, which creates a little world where there's no filth on the street, no cigarette butt ends, no nothing at all, everything is wonderful and everything nasty is buried underground, and it makes people take themselves out of the ugly world in which they live and live in a funny world that we've created specially for you? And it's all there to cater to what you want and what you need and what your children want, so that you can be absolutely happy and contented and fine. Can you take that as a methodology and wrap the gospel of a crucified Savior in it without having it make an impact on the story of the gospel itself?

I suggest to you that you can't. Says David Wells, the very way in which survival is being sought, raises questions as to whether that strategy for survival may not in itself bring on the demise of its orthodoxy, just as it did in liberal Protestantism. You see, what happens in those churches is that they're bound together not by a theological vision of the world, but they're bound together by a common strategy for reaching particular segments of society and by a common methodology for accomplishing their strategy. And, says Wells again, it is a methodology which can be hitched up equally as well to evangelical faith as to New Age belief or to anything in between.

And why is this so? The reason is that there is no theological truth upon which the methodology is predicated and upon which it insists. Because theological truth—doctrine, it is thought—is not what builds churches.

So, let's go back to Sunday afternoon in London and ask whether that is not to go back to the future. Writing to his congregation in 1880, Spurgeon asked, "'How are we to expect the gospel to be kept alive in the world if we do not hand it on to the next generation as the former generation handed it down to us? O, shall it ever be said a century hence, the people of 1880 never thought of us of 1980. They let the gospel go. They allowed the doctrines to be denied, one after another. O, shall it be said in ten years from now, in half a century from now, all these people, with all their slick ideas and their clever methodologies, tried to wrap up this radical message in this beautiful package, and the people grabbed the package and never got the message. But since everybody was consumed with numbers and success, they decided to settle for their apparent victory while failing to recognize that they were actually sowing the seeds of their own destruction.'" Does it matter what we believe?

Yes, it does. Do you know what you believe? Why you believe it? I tell you, and I say it to you sincerely, we will do better as a church in the next period of time than we have ever done as a church in helping young and old to come to terms with basic Christian doctrine. Understanding Basic Christian Doctrine. That's a foundational building block for passing the gospel message on to the next generation. That's today's message titled Believing on Truth for Life Weekend with Alistair Begg.

Alistair will be back in just a minute to close with prayer, so please keep listening. In addition to understanding the basics of Christian doctrine, it's important for us to understand the heart of Jesus, but it's an insight we might miss. In fact, there's only one place in the gospel where Jesus describes his heart. It's in Matthew's gospel where he says, I am gentle and lowly of heart. Gentle and lowly is the title of a recently released book that helps us understand what Jesus was saying as he described his heart this way, his compassion for sinners. In fact, the book's subtitle is The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. This exploration of scripture results in a wonderfully encouraging portrait of a savior who promises to never abandon us regardless of our failures. It's a wonderful book that will reveal new insights about Jesus, no matter how long you've known him. Learn about how you can request the book Gentle and Lowly today by tapping on the image on the mobile app or by visiting truthforlife.org.

Again, that's truthforlife.org. At Truth for Life, we carefully select books to supplement the clear and relevant Bible teaching that you hear on this program, 365 days of the year, and we do it with three outcomes in mind. First, we want to see unbelievers converted as they come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. Secondly, it's our hope that those who already believe will gain a deeper understanding of scripture and will become more established in their faith. And then thirdly, our desire is that local churches will be encouraged to rely solely on the Bible as their foundation for worship and fellowship. We want to ask you to pray for us today that we will be faithful in carrying out this mission.

And now here is Alistair to close in prayer. Father, we thank you that you have given to us the Bible. We thank you that you've given to us the Holy Spirit so as to illumine the printed page to us and sensitize our hearts to its truth. We thank you that you've given us intellect so that we may be able to think rationally about things. And when we think about the nature of the world in which we're set and the blurring of so many distinctives, save us from any undue schismatic tendencies, lest we fail to embrace all who are laboring in the gospel. But save us also from cowardice that's unprepared to say, hey, are you sure about that?

Do you think that's right? Save us too from the very ease of things, from settling down to the drift. Help us as individuals to become men and women of the book. You have exalted above all things your name and your word.

Every other name is subservient to yours. Every other shepherd points to you, the great shepherd. Every teacher is a learner from you, Christ, the great teacher of your people. And it is in you, Lord Jesus Christ alone, that all of our hope is found. You are everything to us, Jesus. And may we share you in the days of this coming week. For we pray in your precious name. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to listen again next weekend as we continue our series titled Christian Basics. We'll be looking at what it means to live a life of obedience with Christ as our focus and foundation. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.