(The Markstein) - Part 1, The Doctrine of Salvation

Okay, everyone, I'd like to thank you again for coming, and we've had an awesome morning. We're thanking the Lord for it, and we're now blessed to have a brother being here from Minnesota who's now working for PEN, right? PEN is an organization that conservative men and I use as a charity group that go out all over the world helping people. And a lot of those conservative men and Baptist groups donate money. In fact, the Hutterites have several drop-off points. There's one at Hutchville where if you ever get tired of your dresses and whatever, you can drop it off there, and it goes to CAM, and those people appreciate it. They love stuff that comes from us. Anyway, Dean has offered to give us his time, and we really appreciate that because he only had today, actually. So we're very fortunate to have him, and we'll just have him tell us what he's planning to cover today and how it can help us to understand our culture better and also to appreciate what we have. We must not forget that I believe the Lord has preserved the Hutterites for over 400 years, and I do not believe that it's by accident. There's a reason for it, and we need to learn what that reason is and live up to it. And so thank you again for coming. Thank you, Robert, very much. I do apologize. I have a lot of material to cover. It's really a mistake to give this much in one day, but I'm three weeks from planning on heading to orientation with Christian Aid Ministry and then CAM and then head over to Lesbos Island working with the Syrian refugees that are coming there and setting up the discipleship school there. And so Brother Jake Fenton has been trying to do this for almost two years, and I've been trying to get it together with him. I have lots of different requests for something like this, but this was something I really wanted to do. And so even though we're in the midst of packing and doing these types of things, I really felt I wanted to come here. It is being recorded, so I'm going to be covering too much. I will admit I apologized from the beginning. Too much material that I'll be giving, but will be recorded so you can be able to look back on some of those and review this. I tremble over a little bit of how I'm presenting this because I can be easily misunderstood. My goal in you is actually to encourage you, and to encourage you that you have something very precious and very beautiful that the whole world needs. And so it can be said that, can we make too much of our heritage? Can we praise it and make an idol of it? Yes, you absolutely can, and that is a serious fear. I think it is something to be concerned about. But on the other hand, I honestly do believe that there is something that God has prepared you for, God has preserved you for, throughout these generations. As we come into this next century with all the different things that we have in front of us, I do believe that you have been preserved for a reason. And some of the things that I'm going to cover, I'm hoping to cover three topics if we can today. They're both a little over an hour. The three topics are salvation, two kingdoms, and missions. And all of those I would like to bring out of your Confession of Faith. I'm going to be quoting from the Confessions of Faith, the version, the Herald Press version translated in 1995. And so I'll try to make the coordination of these things. In the salvation sermon, which will be the first, I'm going to try to show some differences that I consider to be very important with modern American Christianity evangelicalism. And that I honestly believe what you have in here is beautiful, it's deep, it's rich. And to trade this for modern American Christianity would be too show. It would be too show. And so I really encourage you to do that. But again, if there's anything, if there's anything that I hope to do in these three messages is to lift up Jesus Christ. And I believe that is the theology that I see in Presser. That is the theology of why you exist today. And I know everybody says that, but I truly believe there's a theology of Christ followers, of Christ within us even, we'll get into, that I think is very important. So, let's start out with a word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you, O God, for your mercy. I thank you, O God, that you have preserved your seed. You have put your word into the hearts of men and women throughout these centuries. And dear Heavenly Father, as we come to this next generation and all the tests and trials that we have before us, I pray, O God, that you would truly just put your very presence here again. Bring us a fear of God amongst us. Bring us, O Lord, appreciation to the word. And Father, I pray that you would be with my words. Let anything that I say out of just ignorance, out of my own ambition or whatever it is, fall to the ground and only let you let stand what you want to be said. So God, I pray for your grace, your mercy on all of us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Okay, this is an interesting picture. This picture is Vintajos, Romania, the Alps and the Chronicles. And this is where about almost every Hutterite today can trace their heritage into this very spot. It ends up being during the golden years, the king of Transylvania went to the Hutterites and said, we want you to come down and bring your community down here in Hungary. And they're like, that's a trap. We're not doing it. So the representatives of the king said, well, our lord doesn't take no for an answer. So he kidnapped like a hundred and something from one community, 80 from the other, and dragged them down to here and put them in jail for a while, but then released them and they started a community. But interesting, years and years and years later, after persecution, the plague, famine, compromise, this spot became the last remaining community. It got down to 19 Hutterites left on earth around the year 1720s and 30s. A new revival broke out. People came into the, they were kicked out of Germany, Austria, excuse me, and came into Romania and were said, we'll give you some property. We'll let you have a farm out here, but you just need to do one thing. You must swear allegiance to Maria Teresa. I said, we can't do this. We've had a revival in Jesus Christ. We're going to believe Jesus. So they couldn't do it. And they went and were doing odd jobs and looking everything, and they bumped into a works man, bumped into a whip girl, and asked for odd jobs that they could do. And they ended up discovering the remnant of the Hutterites, and the Hutterites started looking through their old documents and saying, this is incredible. Why aren't you doing this? And they said, well, it's been hard, you know, and all those different things. Well, the end of the revival got started back again. They began evangelizing again, began taking this seriously, until it grew to what we have today. It's cutting through a lot. But notice the passage here by Hebrews. It's the very last verse in the Hebrews, you know, of faith, in Hebrews 11. A brother at church once preached this, and it really hit me. It says, God having provided something better for us, listen to this last part, that they, without us, should not be made perfect. What it means is that we, continuing faithful, we continuing on with this, they're not complete without you. That's what it means. All right, so while we're talking about this for two years, Jake Fetto, we've been talking about this, and we came up with the term Marchstein. Sorry for my German, brother. But Marchstein is what we had. And this is the passage that we would like to look at. Proverbs 22, 28 says, Remove not the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have set. Again, I really don't want to try to lift up anything other than Jesus Christ. But God did something in a living group of people. And they, without us, are not complete. I believe that God did this for a reason. And that these ancient landmarks, these ancient Marchsteins that were placed, are important every now and then for us to look at these. Another way that this meeting got started was, I do these, with several other brothers, Anabaptist identity conferences. We get German Baptists, Amish, conservative Mennonites and things, and we meet together. And it's a nice environment where we're not trying to convert each other or whatever, but to appreciate and to encourage, to strengthen that which remains. And I just thought, again, it was a shame that if we don't also bring this into the picture. So that's kind of what we're doing. Why I'm looking into the statement of faith a lot today, in every topic, it's for this. Let's remember what this Marchstein was, and why they did some of the things that they did and how they acted like that. Okay, so, I was going to put this as the last sermon, but I thought, you know, we should put the cart before the horse. Let's talk about salvation. It's the most theologically based one out of all of them, so if it gets a little bit theological, stay with me, we'll get to some more practical things with missions into kingdoms. But this one is incredibly important. It's incredibly important, and I believe it really shaped the revival, and when you look at salvation. All right, well, those are my disclaimers. I don't want to lift up a denomination. Even, you know, the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, he rebukes the church for, some say they're Apollos, and some say they're Paul, but he also says some say they're of Christ. You can be contentious in any, you know, I'm just a Christian, and I use the term Anabaptist, you'll hear me use that term a lot. I don't do it to lift up any denominations. As a matter of fact, it's not a denomination, a church, go join the Anabaptists, it's more of a way you interpret the Scripture. It's a fancy word called a hermeneutic, which means a Bible interpretation. And that's what you'll see in your statement of faith, and that's why, popularly, what you're getting from the radios, what you're getting from modern American Christianity, is not what you're reading here. And I'd like to talk about some of those differences right from the beginning here. Okay, so as you know, some of you know my testimony. My wife and I were in the military. This is us back in probably 1989 or so, in Germany. And this is us just a few years ago, as we went back to the Anabaptist Heritage Tour. We found the same place. And God has given us quite a journey through those times. Now we're about to head to Greece. This is our family. I have one, of course, older son that's also... And we're about to head to Greece, Lord willing. And there's still many things preying for us, and still many obstacles to get there. It was very much a blessing working with the refugees there. So I grew up as a modern American Christian. I read white and blue, joined the army, and it shaped me. I was always very patriotic. I'll get more into this in the two kingdoms. But I embraced the army. I enjoyed that. And I liked the idea of being a soldier in the United States Army. It meant something to me. My wife also ended up joining the army. I sent her off to basic training. And she came back, and both of us changed roles also. But this scene changed me. Anybody know what this is? That's the Berlin Wall in 1989, November. I was there a year earlier with my mother. And as we were there, it was very intimidating with the Russians, and the East Germans, and all that type of a thing. And with all the machine guns, and they're the enemy, and you get all these warnings and everything. But here now, in the midst of this incredible scene, I'm standing there, and everybody's just knocking holes in this wall. And this East German, or a communist, looks like maybe he's an East German guard, puts his hand through and says, Buddha, freedom. And it gripped me. And after I left that moment, I left it and I said, why could last year I be called on to kill this guy, and now he's my friend? What changed? And I realized that the change, because a few political leaders made some differences, and now my enemy is my friend. But this troubled me, and it laid seeds to me to be thinking. So following in my wife's getbacks from the Army, we got a really nice apartment, an apartment that didn't have television for the first time in my life. And for the first time in my life, I started to read. And we started to read the Bible, and we started to say, wow, listen to this, and listen to that, and God changes. One of my jobs, one of my main jobs in the Army, was to be in a rock band. We were musicians. And so the first thing God did was challenge us. And as I looked at my Christianity, I was going to the Evangelical Church in Germany, it was a big area in those days, Americans in that time. And I felt like my Christianity was just entirely superficial. I made a profession in my lips, I said a sinner's prayer, I was sincere, but the concept of being a follower of Jesus was frankly not something that I even had a thought about. But God was convicting us. And in a hotel in North Germany, finally one day in the midst of this terrible concert thing that we were going to play for, my wife and I kneeled in a hotel room, and we said, we're going to either completely follow Christ, or we're going to completely give this up. This messing around halfway stuff is just nonsense. So thanks be to God, we kneeled in that hotel room, and we said, Lord, we give ourselves completely over to you. We got it from there, there wasn't like a lot of rockets, a lot of explosions or whatever that was going on, but there was a settled feeling in our hearts, no compromise. We're going to take the word of God, and we're going to follow it. We quickly then went and got out of the rock band, that was easy. But then we also then started to looking at some things about Jesus' following teachings, and I'll get more into that a little bit into the two kingdoms on the next session. But this has been something, has been sort of a motto for me, and it's shaped my theology of pondering, what if Jesus really meant every word he said? What if Jesus' dream for humanity, and his cure for us, is really the way he wants us to live our lives? And as we began to look at those things, it's changed me, and it's still changing, and I hope it does for you too. Because this, this focus on Jesus Christ, was what caused this movement to start, and it's what God wants, I believe, for this generation, again through this age. Okay, it's been a journey, a long journey ever since. It's like around more of my neck of the woods than yours, I guess, you have mountains at least. Okay, so now what I would like to do is to look at salvation, and I'm sitting here as taught by Peter Rittman in the Hutterite Statement of Faith. Now, let me just say a real quick thing about the Hutterite Statement of Faith. It's kind of a shame that it says Hutterite Confessions of Faith on it, because people don't tend to read denominational booklets. You know, if you saw the Church of Christ Statement of Faith, the Baptist Statement of Faith, or something, whatever, I want it. But this was actually the very first complete work of the Anabaptists. It is a gem. And I read a lot of things just for its academic reasons, I want to know what Minow thought, or what someone, and honestly, a lot of it's pretty dry. But let me just tell you something, that when you read this, there's something different. There's a spirituality, there's a depth there, that you realize that the South Germans, the Austrians, during the beginning part of the 1525 Revival, it was meaty. And I'm hoping to show you some of that. And what I believe is what you're getting in American Christianity today is something different. And here's my concern. A lot of times I'll get an email, or a text, or something, from an ex-Hutterite, ex-Amish, ex-Mennonite, or something, or someone who's struggling, and sometimes I don't know what to say. Most of the times I don't. I'm excited that they're excited about God, but what I usually hear coming from it is modern American Christianity. And this Protestant kind of theology, and I say, oh that's great that you're in love with Christ, but then with this comes a package. And my burden for you this day is that you can get a hold of a faith. A faith that, frankly, your forefathers were revived with, and get a hold of this faith in a very genuine way. It is quite different than modern American Christianity. And it's not like you can just add on works, or add on community, or add on this. There's an entire frame of mind that focuses on Jesus Christ. It's just the cross of Jesus Christ, which is entirely important to everything. Jesus is what we see. All right. So to be part of this new kingdom, Jesus came to give us a new kingdom. Jesus said that we must be born again. He talks about a new humanity. Riddleman uses this phrase, new humanity, in the statement of faith. Born of the Spirit. John 1:12 says, but as many as received Him, as received this Christ in me, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name, which were born, watch this now, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. One of the things that I think we have to watch out for in very strong communities, the Mennonites would have the same risk, the Amish would have this, and we would certainly have this, is because community does tend to, and I mean this community in a broad sense, these strong communities tend to keep people in, and I mean in a good way. It's a healthy society. Because of that, there can be a tendency just to kind of, you know, I want to get married, and I want to join the church, so I just join the church and become a good boy, and we end up with sort of a Catholic kind of concept of Christianity. This is not what you'll find in your statement of faith. And so this is something that we have to watch out for, that this need to be born again, this need to have Christ within us is essential from the beginning. It hits this hard, we're going to see it. John 3, but here's an emphasis though. The emphasis that Jesus is giving this is the entirety of His kingdom. John 3 says, Jesus answered and said of them, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. So in other words, being born again is not an end in itself. Let me repeat that. Being born again is not an end to itself. It's the entry into the door. But the door is supposed to take you somewhere. It's supposed to take you to His kingdom. And the life in Christ, the life in His kingdom, His teachings and His way. From my background, you get saved, and you stop at the door and that's it. You never enter in. The purpose of being born again is to experience it. But if you're not born again, you know what? You're not going to get it. You're not going to understand Jesus. It's going to be nonsense to you. You want me to die? When we start talking about two kingdoms, when we start talking about all these different things, you want me to be on the cross? Unless you're born again, you're not going to see it. Alright. The difference also that I see the whole entire word of God is absolutely true. Every word of God is true. The problem that I see sometimes is where the starting point is. Where the Protestants, they start with the Apostle Paul and the Roman's road and these types of ways of salvation and then try to squeeze in a little bit of Jesus here and there. And this is wrong. Jesus is the priority. Jesus is the way. And when we start with Christ and then how do we do this, Lord? Then we come to Paul for his teachings on grace on how to live Christ. But Jesus is our essence. And you know if we start, I wrote here, when you read something the wrong way you end up with the wrong questions. And the problem is that with a little work we actually get the right answers to the wrong questions. And we don't want the right answers to the wrong questions. We want the right questions. Now, let me narrow Anabaptism. It's not a denomination. You can't go join the Anabaptists. I'd like to hear that it converts you to join the Anabaptists. There's not one. It's a way of Biblical interpretation. But Conrad Grebel, when he at the very beginning part of the Revival in 1525, wrote a letter to his friend who was starting to differ with him and he said, these two points he put in in the essence of Anabaptism. He said this, I believe the word of God without a complicated interpretation and out of this belief I speak. That's in essence. So it's simple. The Bible is easy to understand. The next thing he said is also profound. The teachings of the Lord has been given for the purpose of being put into practice. It's simple to read, it's simple to understand and the teachings of Jesus are for today. We'll talk about a little bit more of that in Two Kingdoms. All right. Jesus gave us the concept of the kingdom. To demonstrate this, John D. Martin has a beautiful thing. He says, what is the kingdom supposed to be? It's to show the whole world what the whole world would look like if it would only follow his kingdom. All right. My background. My background came with the sinner's prayer kind of concept which is really dangerous. And this is probably a joke but it's not funny. Here's a card. Someone says, read the sinner's prayer and be saved. God, I'm pretty rotten. I don't want to go to hell. I don't want to go to heaven. So I invite Jesus into my heart. Thanks for that. Amen. Congratulations. Please help me. Email me your testimony. It's not, it's probably an exaggeration but not far. What I call sometimes with my background evangelical salvation is a broken clock. If you talk about, you know, the lost sinful nature of man and the glory of God and His righteousness on the cross, that's all good. But you know, even a clock bashed and broken is perfectly right twice a day. Matter of fact, it's completely right twice a day but it's broken. Our faith must be alive. It must be working. It must be continual. Let me give you a quick story. That's, it's tough. But it'll illustrate the point of just how bad it can get. On August 4th, 1909, there was a terrible massacre here. This deranged man came in and put the end of the life of several, 25 or so ladies that were working in this gym. When I was at work when I heard about this and I looked at this, something caught my attention and what really caught my attention was this man was saying that he was an American Christian. And so as I looked at this, I said, actually he had his journal on, they began to publish his journal in the newspaper. And so right in the year before the murders, this man wrote in his journal about his involvement in church. Speaking about the pastor of the church he attended for 13 years, he said this, this guy teaches and convinces me that you can commit mass murder and still go to heaven. Skipping up to a year of the day before the murder, he left what I consider to be the most terrible thing that he wrote. And why I think it was so terrible is because it exhausts so much modern American Evangelical Christianity. Here's the quote, all the emphasis, all the capitals are directly from him. He wrote this hours before he went and made the crime. The journal text, maybe soon, I will see God in Jesus. At least that's what I was told. Eternal life does not depend on worse. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for every sin, so how can I or you be judged by God for a sin when the penalty was already paid? People judge, but that doesn't matter. I'm going to read the Bible in this book called The Integrity of God, beginning yesterday, because soon, I will see him. And he went and did the crime. Now, let me ask you this. At least that's what I was told. Who told this deranged man that you could kill someone and not lose your salvation? Who told him that faith existed in a mental belief? Who told him that it did not matter, actions don't matter? Who told him that grace was some kind of blanket forgiveness policy? Who came up with these strong doctrines? It came from our differences right from the beginning of the Reformation. Who? It started with Luther. Luther, although he did us many favors with bringing us the Bible, the Word of God, for lifting up God and faith, but his understanding of faith became something, a mental idea. Now, let me give you this quote that he wrote that really, it says a lot. Writing to his friend, Luther wrote, if you're a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary, but a true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ, who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. It suffices that God, it suffices that through God's glory, we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill, or to commit adultery thousands of times each day. Now, no self-respecting evangelical is going to say that today, and I'm assuming that Luther is exaggerating. He tended to be kind of a man, that would, you know, want to try to get his point across hyperbolically. However, this is more my point than his terrible last statement. It's this. It suffices that through God's glory, we have recognized this concept that thinking of a doctrine of the atonement, or the doctrine of faith, somehow makes you a Christian. This is a problem. And granted, this is an exaggerated case, disguised, a deranged murder, Dean, you're taking this way too far, you're using this murder, you're using Luther, okay, granted, these are exaggerated cases, but I'm giving them to you so that you can understand the differences, and why they are, because these are the exaggerated cases, but in a subtle way, they're affecting every one of us, including me. Every one of us. Alright. Follow me. It's what Jesus said. Follow me. Jesus said it this way. These are His words, not Luther's, not Peter Rittman, Jesus. Enter ye at the straight gate. That means, that's not straight like this, that's like a straitjacket, that means narrow. There's a Martyr's Mirror quote that said the early martyrs forced into a gate so narrow that they left flesh on the post of the gate. Alright. Jesus said, enter ye in at the straight gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction. And many there being which go in there. Because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth them to life. And few there are that find it. That's Jesus. Not every one that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. But he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. That's Jesus. And why, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say. Years ago I did a Bible school and I brought some little girls. I brought the two biggest smarty pant guys in the Bible school, you know the scholarly type, and I had them come up and I brought up my two, my daughters were really young and I brought them up and I said, okay, tomorrow I want you to come and I printed out the explanation of a pearl. So here's the definition of the pearl, all the things, the definition of the pearl is this, this dynamic and this molecular weight and all this and I handed it to the smart guys and I said, tomorrow I want you to come back and bring to me a pearl from that description. To my little daughters, I said, okay, to you, and I opened up, you could buy it on the internet and you could get a pearl, a clam, they opened it up there in front of everybody and pulled out this pearl. And I said, tomorrow I want you to come and I want you to write the best you can and describe what you have in your hand. This is the difference. Those guys come back the next day and the best that they could come up with, with all their thinking, they still have what? A counterfeit pearl. But my little girls, as they came up and they could say, well, it's wet, brown, you know, no matter what they said, they were dealing with the genuine. Do you get the difference? It's either Christ within us that is real, or it's just a theological trip. It's a nonsense thing and it's always going to be a counterfeit. The emphasis that you're going to see in this is an emphasis on reality. Okay, we'll keep going. A.W. Tozer has an excellent quote. A.W. Tozer said, to escape the errors of salvation by works, we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. This is what we have in modern American Christianity. So let's look at a salvation after Pentecost came. If you have your Bibles, you can open to Acts 2:38 and we're going to look at this and now I'm going to start getting into some of the nitty-gritty of what's in the statement of faith. Acts 2:38. Acts 2:38 says, starting at 36, Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made the same Jesus whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ. The Messiah, the Lord, which means the King, He has made Him Lord and Christ. So He's preaching to them. And when they heard this, they were pricked in the heart. What does that mean? Thank you, brother. Okay, yeah, pain. They felt this, they were pricked in the heart and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, men and brethren, what shall we do? Then Peter said unto them, watch now, Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. So let's look at it. Again, I'm going to be using the page numbers so now I'm going to get into some of the, pull out your statement of faith and I'm going to try to show you something. This is page 174. Okay, I'm going to still move relatively quickly. I do apologize for that, but I really want to get this stuff in. I really like your faces, you're very attentive and I appreciate that. I do keep going, but a brother just encouraged me earlier, if I say a big word or something, you want clarification, you can go ahead and do that. I might tell you, we'll talk about it later, but we'll try. Okay, I'll try to do that. Alright. Excuse me, Dean. I've got this one, probably a page difference. Yeah, I'm afraid it's going to be a page difference. Yeah. I have the, you have the, I'll do what I have here. What you have, let me see it. Yeah, you have it and I'll give these sources to you. I'll leave a PDF for you all also to look at all these. You can find it, you just have to read through it and find it in there someplace. Alright. Coming to all these quotes, almost all of them come from the statement of faith. Okay. So speaking on how the spirit prepares the heart, what you read there in Acts 2:38, Peter Redmond says, what does the Lord say? Listen now. No human shall see me and live. Therefore when God starts to speak to us, something must begin to die. We must hear, see, taste, and feel the Lord God in the countenance of Jesus Christ. All of this must happen before such construction can begin. This is that time when God begins to preach to you and he says, you've got to feel it. You've got to have it inside of you. It must be genuine. And that's what Redmond keeps hitting through. It's got to be real. Watch what he says next. Under the chapter, how people again may find God and his grace, he starts concerning about the remorse. Remember when Peter preached, he says they were pricked to the heart. Peter Redmond makes a big point of God speaking to us and giving us a fear of God. He says this. Those who want to repent with all their heart must first feel genuine remorse for their sins. Remorse, however, means first recognizing how wrong, evil, harmful, and destructive sins actually are. Otherwise, repentance cannot endure. You'll start for a little bit, but you won't last. And still less can a sinner receive grace. True remorse must follow the recognition of sin and is the basis on which people feel repugnance and horror of their sins. Yes, they even loathe themselves for being guided and controlled by sin for so long. Wow. This is remorseful work. He says, so this, to give a scripture base for this, he's quoting this, and I quote it also, in 2 Corinthians 7-11. Powerful passage on being serious with sin in your life. Paul writing says, But behold this self-saying thing that you sorrowed after a godly sore. What carefulness it wrought in you. Yea, what clearing of yourself. Yea, what indignation. Yea, what fear. Yea, what vehement desire. Yea, what zeal. Yea, what revenge. In all things you have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter. Paul, through the Holy Spirit, wants us to take sin very seriously. Peter wants you to take sin very seriously and he caught a hold of this spirit. And he says, this is an important spot for us to start with. And so, alright. And he's not alone. Several of the deeper thinkers of the preachers through the age have said the same thing. Here's Paris Reidhead. I don't know if you've ever heard the sermon, 10 shekels in a shirt. You can hear it on Sermon Index. Excellent, excellent sermon. And he says this, he says, No one can savingly receive Christ until they have repented. And no one can repent until they have been convicted. And conviction is the work of the Holy Ghost that helps the sinner to see that he is a criminal before a holy God and deserves all of God's wrath. And if God were to send him to the lowest corners of the devil's hell forever and ten eternities, he deserved it all and a hundred for more because he has seen his crimes. Later, Paris Reidhead said, A person repents when he comes to the place where he discovers that the will of God is the government of his life and the glory of God is the reason for his life. He only has repented who can change his mind about his reason. He only has repented who has changed his mind about his reason for being. Leonard Ravenhill, who I didn't have the pleasure of meeting, says if Jesus preached the same message ministers preach today, he would never have been crucified. Leonard Ravenhill also said, There is one thing we need above everything else. It's something we don't talk about these days. We need a mighty avalanche of the conviction of sin. And then Leonard Ravenhill also said this, speaking about revivalism and comparing it to modern Americanism in the 1970s, he wrote, Finney never made an altar call, Charles Finney that is, Finney never made an altar call within the first 28 nights of preaching. Most of our evangelists don't have 28 sermons. 28 nights in a row and he never made an altar call. He didn't preach the love of God. He didn't say you're a sinner, God loves you. He said God is angry with the wicked every day. Which the word of God says, he didn't preach grace, he preached law. He didn't preach love, he preached judgment. He didn't preach heaven, he preached hell. He didn't say you're a wonderful person, he said you're a rebel. But he got results. 64% of V.L. Moody's converts backslid. 72% of the converts, Finney, stood because he knew how to attack the human will, not just the emotions. This is an essential point and serious preachers even today are beginning to see a flaw. I'm leaving that point out. But don't leave it in your heart. Take very serious sin and as we look at this and come before a holy God, allow him to show you that remorse that Peter Rittman is talking about. As Peter Rittman puts it, you loathe yourself in the presence of God, of a holy God. And following that is repentance. In my book, on page 96, remorse then leads to true repentance. And repentance means to humble and submit oneself before God. To bow down and to be ashamed because of one's wickedness. This shame brings a genuine return so that one hastens to God, cries aloud, and prays to him for forgiveness and grace. That real sense of the fear of God brings this person to crying out for real forgiveness and grace. One of the very first words of Jesus in his ministry, John the Baptist, and the very first words in the sermons of Peter. Repent. This is an absolute essential. To think that Christianity is just saying a sinner's prayer and something in our mind is killing America. It's killing the world. A modern preacher today, David Platt, said that the very first word out of Jesus' mouth in his ministry in the New Testament is clear. It's repent. It's repent. What does grace do? What is grace? A marriage of favor. And what does it do? Titus 2 verse 11 says, For the grace of God that bringeth salvation appears to all men, and he's going to tell us what it does. Teaching us that denied ungodliness and worldly lusts we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people. Zealous of good works. That's what grace does. Grace doesn't just make you feel good to go on and be an American sinner. Grace changes you. You've had grace in your life. It teaches you to deny ungodliness, worldly lusts. It makes you a people zealous for good works. This is what grace does in our life. Going on from the statement of faith. After surrendering to Christ, Ritterman writes that God's salvation is real and life changing. He along with other early Anabaptist writers insisted that salvation goes beyond mere mental ascent. He offered beautiful analogies of how the nature of Christ is infused or poured into our hearts. He demands life and spiritual power. He even argues that this salvation gives us real assurance of our hope in heaven. Ritterman writing, page 61, says this. He has given us a new birth to an imperishable hope. Grafted us into his divine nature. And after we believed the gospel sealed us with his promised spirit. Listen now. This spirit now accomplished everything in us. Eradicating and destroying the sin that we have by nature so that what is good, true, and holy which he brings with him and plants in us may take root and bear fruit. Amen. Amen. Goes with Ephesians chapter 2. Look at this passage. For you are, for by grace are you saved through faith. And don't you ever forget that. For by grace, but what does grace do? Grace is powerful. By grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is a gift of God. Not of works lest any man should boast. But listen to this next verse. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained that we should walk in him. You see, Christianity taught in the statement of faith and taught in the Bible and taught in the early church is not as we cannot earn our salvation. But being born again is more of an evidence thing than it is something you can go and do. It's a person who becomes born of God. It's new and God is working in their life and they're changed. It's a reality. It's not just a theology. It's a reality. And that's why we're going to get deeper now. We're going to go any deeper. When you start to dig deep into some of the writers from different camps, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards and Spurgeon and many of these people who come from different Calvinist and Evangelical camps. When these men really know God you start to hear a depth. A really deep part of understanding God. It's this depth that drives them. Suddenly your faith isn't trying to be some weird theology of I'm supposed to have faith but I'm supposed to have words. You get into all these theological debates. When you start to get deeper in God you realize that a lot of this stuff is superficial. Ridderman has some powerful passages on how God accomplishes salvation through us. How he continues that salvation in us. I'm going to read to you. They're deep though. You might have to listen to it a few times and pray about this over the scriptures and look through it in your statement of faith. It's some really deep stuff. Here's Paul Washer. I have some differences with but he also tried to understand or speak to American Christianity. He says this. The four spiritual laws, that's the sinner's prayer, is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. That methodology and evangelism has done more to hurt this country than every heresy introduced by every cult combined. Millions of people in this country whose lives have never been changed believe themselves born again because we have so reduced the gospel of Jesus Christ that it now means nothing more than simple decision that will only take five minutes of your time. This is a heresy. It's wrong. It's American Christianity and different people are crying out about it that we're seeing the ramifications of this around our country. Now, years ago I came across a news article that really fascinated me. Just like y'all were talking about how we discovered new Hutterite writings in Germany, in 1898 there was a musicologist, a guy who studies music, went and he was trying to find all the Bach manuscripts. And as he was trying to find all the Bach manuscripts, we had a journal of Bach and he says, I wrote this, we don't have all those things, so he was trying to find some of those old writings. And as he was going around, I read this as a news article in the New York Times in 1898. And as this guy was going, he was coming on some manor, some castle in Germany somewhere, and he was coming by and he noticed the gardener was there putting his tree, where he'd wrap the tree to keep the tree straight with the paper around it. And as he walked by there, he noticed that the paper around that tree looked like musical notation. So he stopped and he went over and he looked at the gardener and said, can I see your paper of your wadding around that tree? He said, sure. And he looked at it and he said, this is Bach's manuscript. And the guy said, where did you get this? He said, oh, it's up in the attic, we've been using it for years, it's just some old paper up there. Here's the thing, we're using the Bible wrong. America is often using the Bible wrong. Jesus has a beautiful symphony that he wants to sing to the world. That he wants us to perform as the people of God, a holy people, called out of the world, living the teachings of Christ to the whole earth. And to do that, he wants to be present among us. By taking it and using this theology of that and that theology of that, and proof texting this and proof texting that, it's like using this wadding of paper. God has something beautiful to do. You know, when I grew up, I was told the Sermon on the Mount was not for today. I was told it was for a different time period. If I had to ask the question, you know, how hard is it to love your enemies in heaven? I mean, these teachings are for today. And this was what shaped the Anabaptist revival of 1525. This is what shapes your confession of faith. It's taking the person of Jesus. Paul Washer was complaining, it's not a theology. It's the person. I agree with him. It's the person, and I think he and everyone else, and me included, should take that person entirely. Scourge wrote it this way, If you trust your faith and to your repentance, you will be as much lost as if you trusted your own good works or trusted to your sins. The ground of your salvation is not faith, but Christ. It is not repentance, but Christ. If I trust my trust of Christ, I am lost. My business is to trust Christ, to rest on Him, to depend not on what the Spirit has done in me, but what Christ did for me when He did hang upon the tree. I take this one step further than Spurgeon is even meaning it there. It is Christ. Our salvation, our church, our existence, is the person of Jesus Christ. Alright, let's go deep. Let's go deep into what the confession of faith has to say about what Christ does and what Peter really tells us. Peter, taking this passage from 2 Peter 1:3.4 2 Peter 1:3.4 says this, According as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that by these you might be, watch this now, takers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. This is the deep stuff, and Riddleman really takes us deep into this. This is Christ within me that accomplishes these things. It is Christ from the beginning to the end. Look at what he says. Speaking of the incarnation and the receiving of this divine nature, Riddleman writes on page 75 of my book Through His actual strength and activity Christ leads us to be partakers of His nature His character and being. Christ is our righteousness and goodness. He is our life. We ourselves do not live, but Christ lives in us. Christ is our resurrection our salvation, and our all in all. We also believe that Christ's incarnation means that we can be transformed. His suffering and death are salvation and life for us. In Christ we truly have everything. Wow. Wow. Let's go deeper. I'm talking about this dwelling presence, page 97 of my book. We teach further that Christ came into the world to bring salvation to sinners. As it is written, this is the Father's will, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him shall not be lost, but shall have everlasting life. We teach also that a person may be planted. Please watch this. This is the deep stuff that you're going to miss if you don't really dig into this. It's in your Statement of Faith. We teach also that a person may be planted and grafted into Christ through faith. Page 97 continuing. This is how it works. This is how we do this. As soon as a person hears the Gospel of Christ and believes it from the heart, he receives the seal of the Holy Spirit of the promise. As Paul says, quote, after you believed, you were sealed with the Spirit of the promise. End quote. That is the Holy Spirit who is the pledge of our inheritance, the promise that we who belong to God shall be redeemed to the praise of His glory. The Spirit of Christ promised and given to all believers makes them free from the law or the power of sin and grafts them into Christ. He makes them one with Him in mind in His very character and nature so that they become one plant and organism with Him. Christ is the root or stem. We are the branches. Thus we are one substance and essence with Him. Truly one bread and body. He is the head and we are all members belonging one to another. Wow, this is deep stuff. Christ is the root and the vine and we are grafted in Him through faith. Just as the sap rises from the root and makes the branch fruitful so the Spirit of Christ rises from the root. Christ into the branches and twigs that makes them all fruitful. The twigs are the same nature as the root and bears its kind of fruit. Thus each person becomes one with God and God one with that person as a father is one with his son. Christ has given us His Spirit which joyfully and without compulsion accomplishes God's will within us. It goes back to that pearl. Do you have that reality? I want more of it. You want more of it? I want more of it. So in other words, instead of me, I still tend to want to be the boys who just kind of do the explanation and try to come up with my understanding of Christianity and try to create my own world. Riddemann is saying it has to be an entirely reality of Jesus Christ inside of you. Is that real? Is that genuine? It's not just a confession of a certain thing, it has to be real. An Anabaptist early writer, I'm going to skip this for time, but he said this, we saw this in the early, this is very early in the Anabaptist, they said, when we were with the reformers, we heard these things but we never saw anything change. Until finally we we wanted to see, we were I found them men, and finally he met the Anabaptist and he said, I found them men who had surrendered themselves to the adoption of Christ by, help me out. Everybody say it. True. That's great. Repentance, evidence by fruit. With their assistance, we established congregations in which repentance was an evidence by newness of life. That key in evidence. In evidence. Is it real? It's not just a head theology. Is it genuine? Is it real? Okay, fruit. Coming towards the end. Is fruit necessary? We just read from Jesus that it's essential, very essential. Can you just go on living a sinful life and just claim you have all this grace that claim you have this Christ within you? The statement of faith says that page 84 reminds us, faith is not an empty illusion, as it would seem from those people who only speak of faith and know nothing more about it. They think that Christianity consists in words only, therefore they look upon all who confess Christ with their lips as Christians, no matter how they live. True and well founded faith, however, is not a human attribute. This is not us doing this work on our own. It is a gift from God, given only to those who fear God. This is what Paul says, that not every person has faith. Such faith is the assurance of what is not seen. It grasps the invisible, one with only mighty God, making us close to God, and at one with Him. And also to partake of His nature and character. He keeps hitting this deep stuff. It despoils all waybringing doubt, and makes our heart hold steadfastly and firmly to God through all distresses. God, therefore, gives us assurance and confirms all His promises, as definitely as, for example, a man holding an object in his hand has it. In the same way, faith grasps the promises of God, which is invisible and clings to it as it were visible. Therefore, faith is truly a power of God, renewing people and making them resemble God and His nature, living in God's righteousness, ardent in love, and observing His commandments. So that no one is made uneasy by what we say, why we ascribe such power to faith. In case anyone here is a little bit uneasy, Peter Edelman is saying, that I put, I ascribe such power to the word faith instead of just a mental, it's a power. He says, faith is God's gift and is given to people so that they might seek and find God. When He is found, He stirs up and brings about all things in the believers through faith. Nothing takes place in them except what God does in proportion to their faith. Nothing but pure love will be within, and He Himself is this love. So He keeps coming back to the person. Thus all God's commandments will be fulfilled. For Christ Himself says, whoever loves Me, keeps My commandments. But the power to love God Himself, who is love, gives to us. Hence it's clear that those who transgress His command and continue to sin, do not belong to His temple. God works in the person who surrenders Himself and God gives proof of His power in the person's renewal. Through this work, God enables the person to partake of the Son's nature and character, and even in part of His unlimited power. This we read in the words, all things are possible to the one who believes. This is good stuff! It's good stuff! Um... And it's true. Not Catholic-ish. This is why I say of those deluded people that they do not know Christ, they have not known, received, or accepted Him. They only hear, heard, only a verbal confession from their forefathers, from generation to generation, and have learned how to repeat it. And Paris Reedhead's Ten Shackles in a Shirt, hitting my background, fundamentalist, he says, it used to be these were men of God, in the sermon, who knew God. They knew God. But eventually it became, if you can say, uh-huh, to a few statements of faith, he says in the sermon, someone will slap you on the back, shake your hand, and say, brother, you're saved. We can all do this from every background. It gets into just a repeating of what we heard in the generations before. Rittman is trying to challenge us that each generation, be it new, be on fire for God, and have the reality of Christ within us. The spirit of the parent, he's talking about God, is recognizable in their children. That's a good quote, isn't it? The spirit of the parents is recognizable in their children. Verbal confession, therefore, means nothing to them. The devil can also use God's name and confesses him his spoken words. Congrats to the end, I think. Assurance of salvation. This is something that's getting thrown around by evangelicals a lot, and I wanted to again, not to run into one ditch by the other. The statement of faith says this, page 76. He, the Holy Spirit, also teaches and guides us, assures us that we are children of God, and makes us one with him, so that through his work, we are part of the divine nature and character. It just keeps hitting that connection. We experience his work within us in truth and power in the renewing of our hearts. God be praised. In God, we have absolute certainty that he has drawn our heart to him and made it his dwelling place. Touch on this. Speaking of the assurance, he goes on and says, leaving everything else, we cleave to him and depend on him with absolute certainty that we can acknowledge that everything we have comes from God. Since God's nature and character is eternal life, he has made us partakers and sharers of himself by sealing our faith with the Holy Spirit, which is the security of our inheritance. Through his grace from which we praise him, we experience his works in us and he makes us certain of all his promises. Okay, so here's what it is. Unfortunately, again, if your understanding of Christianity is the sinner's prayer, which Spurgeon, Paul Washer, David Platt, John Russell, all these people are trying to warn us that it shouldn't be, well, then someone's going to come to you and say, do you know that you know that you know that you know? And you're going to say, okay, well, how do I know? Well, by saying the sinner's prayer. Oh, well, if I say the sinner's prayer, then I have this assurance. That's right. This is the danger. Assurance of our salvation should be based upon the reality of our lives. The reality. Now, he's not saying that we should live in fear. We are not to live in fear. It's wrong to live in fear. We must have a vibrant and real connection with God. But is it true? Now, does that mean if you're saved now, you'll be saved, you're going to stay faithful for the rest of your life? No. It doesn't. It doesn't mean that. This eternal security that is now also popular through American type of Christianity is a lie that has brought many to hell. But right now, do you have this assurance that your statement of faith refers to? Are you connected to Christ in this way? Or do you have that reality? Yes, we all, hopefully, even hearing these words, you're convicted and you want to come more. I do too. I'm convicted reading it. But in that, there's that connection. Your spirit bears witness with God's spirit, Ridderman is saying, and it's real. So you can answer to those questions, do you know? I do know. And God helped me be faithful to the end. But a kind of glib thing that I said in the sinner's prayer, so now I can say that I'm going to heaven and that's how I'm going to call that assurance, that's a false assurance. And that's assurance that I'm afraid that people are, but they bully us. People will bully you and try to get, are you born again? And you know in that's loaded with all this kind of, you know, talking and all that. Ridderman doesn't want us to shy away from this vocabulary. We need to own it in a proper biblical sense and to be able to have the reality to help that person who's coming and bringing you these challenges. And what's his emphasis over and over is bringing us to what? The reality of what? Christ. Christ in us. Christ in you. Christ in you is the emphasis over and over and over to the statement of faith. In acknowledging all. Thou believeth, James says, Thou believeth there is one God. Thou doest well. The devil's also in trouble. Real quick, and this is at the end. I don't have time. I should have a whole thing on baptism. I'm nervous a little bit that people make so light of baptism. I don't think you do. I think actually y'all take it very seriously and I'm glad for that. It is a very serious thing. And growing up with the evangelicals, they always say it's just this and just that. I've always thought the word merely or just shouldn't be in the same sentence with the ordinances of God. We don't know the mysteries and the wonderful things that are happening. But just real quick, I know it's too long of a sermon. I'm almost done. We're going to take a break after this. I just wanted to show you just a couple quotes here from the statement of faith on baptism. And they take it very seriously because remember in Acts 2 38, they were pricked in the heart, they loathed their sin, they repented, and they were baptized for the forgiveness of sins, and they received the Holy Spirit. So it goes on in the chronicles this way. Whoever is born in this way, it says, should receive baptism as the bath of rebirth. This signifies being inscribed in the covenant of grace and the knowledge of God. A little later, the baptizer first calls a person to repentance and points out that person's sin. Then the baptizer shows how the sinner, they come to God, find grace with him, and discovers how baptism is a bond with God, a bond, a covenant. In this way, the person becomes convinced of the benefit of baptism and is moved to desire. This desire for this request is a prerequisite for baptism. In other words, and I understand, I have children too, you kind of want people just to kind of get going sometimes, but rudiments trying to warn us as dads and teachers, they need to come be asking us because of the reality in their life, and we need to be teaching it up to get that. And so it says, it goes on, it says, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is what we should say. In accordance with your faith, God has forgiven your sins and drawn you into his kingdom. Henceforth, sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you, since in baptism, of a person's sins are left behind and forgiven. Baptism completes this beginning to Christ. It's not just merely this or merely that. We shouldn't, I don't think, take it so lightly. We don't believe that we're illuminated in the water like the Catholics or something like that. But to say it's, it's, I don't want us to belittle it. It's serious. It's a covenant with God. When my children were baptized, I took them to the water, and I said, okay, this place, it's like a marriage. You need to look at it like a marriage. It's a serious thing with God, and this is where your old life needs to die. And somebody once said, well, I give an analogy sometimes in baptisms. In World War II, people were beginning to say when the Germans were attacking England, they were all the English people were saying, this is the beginning of the end. This is the beginning of the end. This is it. And Winston Churchill, so the story goes, in his Winston Churchill fashion, said, you know, people of England, this is not the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. And this whole concept of the end of the beginning of what the sealing of faith, the beginning of this process, the Acts 238 model goes to that, is I just think we should take this very seriously, passionately, and zealously when we come into baptisms, you take it very seriously and come to God in a serious way, completing this whole beginning of your entry to God. I think it's beautiful and it's well said in the Confessions. All right. I think that's it. Great. One last quote and then break. Michael Sattler, the beginning of the Anabaptist movement, gave this warning. Beware the Scribes and the Pharisees. And he said, the Scribes and the Pharisees are this. The Pharisees are like what we came out of. We came out of the Catholics. And the Catholics, we tried to earn our salvation by works. We tried to go to pilgrimages or do things and we tried to earn our salvation by works. He said, beware the Pharisees. He said, we must also beware the Scribes. He said, the Scribes are those that write beautiful things and preach beautiful things, but their life does not follow after. We must beware both the Scribes and the Pharisees. It's a beautiful quote. Okay. So, in summary, you have a beautiful, rich heritage of some deep views of salvation in your statement of faith. I would really encourage you to take a look at that. More on this, I would encourage you that this would foster within yourself a seriousness with God and to be able to allow this reality that Ridderman is speaking of. I want to warn you that American Christianity, with its superficial understanding that Christianity is just a confession, is like that mass murder that said he was going to heaven. It's a lie. It's a lie that maybe won't have you do something as terrible as that. But it's eroding us and our holiness and our place with God. But do I want to encourage you to do this by your own works? No. Ridderman went over and over and over in the statement of faith saying this can't be our works. It must be a reality of being connected with Christ and allowing that in you. I don't know. Some young people are here. Many people are here that perhaps have never been to baptism and this type of thing. I would encourage you. Take your life seriously. The sin that you heard of that Ridderman said at the very beginning, let it convict you in its serious sins. Coming to God and repenting of that and putting it away from you and coming and allowing Christ to completely take that. So let's pray and then after this we're going to go into two kingdoms and then missions. Let's pray. If you haven't followed me, thank you Lord for the grace of God. And Lord in all of us, many of us that have been Christians for years, I'm just even reading these quotes I've convicted more Lord of wanting more from you. Wanting that reality. Wanting that purity that Ridderman spoke of so long ago. So God I pray for your grace upon all of us and work this out in us. We pray in Jesus name. Thank you very much.