Polemics - Discernment - What is the layout of the field?

So this morning, in a rare departure from my normal mode of operation, I actually have put together PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint is not normally the language that I tend to communicate and speak through, but there's enough visual stuff that we're going to be going over this morning that I thought it would be useful as a medium. Hopefully you don't mind it, and if you do, just let me know and I'll recant and not use PowerPoint again. the class this morning is, so we've gone over what is polemics, we've gone over how do we do polemics, and kind of the history of how we got here, and now we want to talk about what it looks like, our approach, what we're going to go over in the class over the remaining months of the year. So hopefully Hopefully this will build on things and kind of set expectations for what we're heading through.

But we're also going to spend a lot of time this morning focusing on the Gospel, which for me is always a wonderful place to spend time and energy on. There's not growth in the Gospel. We don't grow in the Gospel, right? What do we grow in? We grow in grace and we grow in the result of believing the Gospel, right? So that's an important detail, but not actually a point in any of the lesson, but just something I wanted to articulate because I think it's useful to have an awareness of. So let's start with the question.

In the beginning, when the church first got founded, they needed to immediately be able to identify and reject bad theology. They needed to apply polemics. What were the areas? that they needed to apply the polemics in. Okay, false teaching. Like we have the book of Galatians where Paul is very concerned that they didn't have discernment. And it was focused on the gospel, wasn't it? Immediately there's false teaching going on. Okay? Anything else? Stan?

OK, so the difference between Judaism and Christianity, which is related in many ways to that problem in Galatia, the Judaizers were trying to inject more of the Judaistic and Old Testament doctrines into what was the church. And they were trying to, you know, there was an attitude right when the church was founded that Christianity was just another sect of Judaism. And so with that as a mindset, there's a lot of stuff that came out that were wrong assumptions, not based on revelation, and error got introduced into the situation that the church was living in day to day. And so they needed to have discernment to know what was true, and then reject the falsehood.

So we have those two things, discern between Old Testament and New Testament doctrine, and then also watching out for Jewish and Greek influences, cultural influences. We don't think about it an awful lot, but there's actually a lot of New Testament doctrine that was historically or culturally very relevant But we see it in light of today's context. But in the time of the writings, there's actually a significant amount of cultural influence. For example, when we talk about the gift of tongues, the Gentiles in some of the mystery religions had a similar sort of experience that they would go through, where they would, this sounds like modern day Buddhism, and maybe even old Buddhism, but they'd try to empty themselves of thought until they would babble, and then the guru of their mystery religion would tell them what they said and it would somehow set the tone for their life. So the gift of tongues, as we see it expressed in the New Testament, is significantly different. But culturally, The idea of this glossolalia or this unknown language was something that was not unheard of.

And the consequence of that would be it might come in and influence the culture inside the church if they did not have discernment. So there's an example of secular things bleeding into the church that was there, especially if you had a Greek background instead of a Jewish background. Jewish background is going to automatically go, there's something different here. Greek background is going to go, oh, we have it too. So that's important.

There was a lot of syncretism, that is, where you take a bunch of different things and just kind of try to meld them together. And so a part of what they were battling was the syncretistic mindset, where I could just kind of mix and match. I'll take some of this Egyptian religion and mix it up with some Greek religion and throw some Jesus in there too. The establishing of elders that Paul did and then he sent Titus and Timothy to do was important because they needed to help set the standard, the plumb line of doctrinal leadership to carry on forward into the future. But it was immediately useful and it had ongoing benefits and purpose inside the body. When we read Revelation chapters 2 and 3, what's Revelation chapters 2 and 3? Anybody remember? The churches, okay?

So the letters to the seven churches. And what does he write about? Predominantly he writes about where they'd swerved off from biblical doctrine. And John, inspired by the Spirit, inspired by the Revelation there, writes these important things to correct the church and steer them back into biblical doctrine. So those are definitely important. The second sentence here, which is part of the bottom of that first paragraph, talks about something that I actually have an example of that I think will be useful, and that is that by the second century, there was already error being introduced into a lot of the churches. People were following different leadership styles, and were following different leaders, and error started to be introduced. So, I'm going to read briefly Acts 2, 42-47, and if you've got your Bibles, feel free to join along. Oops, that's my phone, not my Bible. I could still look it up on there, but that's not going to get me what I want. Acts 2, 42-47.

They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe, and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common. And they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day, continuing with one mind in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord was adding to their number, day by day, those who were being saved." So this is the first church on the first days of the existence of the church. So listen, everybody feels like they've got a pattern of the togetherness and the unity.

That's observable. Now I'm going to read to you a quote from about 200 years later. Okay, this is talking about a church service 200 years later. And we afterwards continually remind each other, and there are similarities, okay, it's not radically different, but listen for the departures. And we afterwards continually remind each other of our common faith, and the wealthy among us help the needy, okay, similar, right?

And we always keep together, and for all things wherewith we are supplied, we bless the Maker of all through His Son, Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Ghost. And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then when the reader has ceased, the President verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of those good things. Then we all rise together and pray. And as we before said, when our prayer has ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the President, in like manner, offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen. And there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given.

And to those who are absent, a portion is sent by the deacons, and they who are well to do and willing give what each thinks fit. And what is collected is deposited with the president, who suckers the orphans and widows, and those who through sickness or any other cause are in want, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word, takes care of all who are in need. and I could keep going, it's a little bit longer, but how does that sound different from what was going on in the Axe passage? Anything stand out?

Who's this president? Yeah, I don't think it was like our president that we would have. It seems a departure. What were Titus and Timothy sent to do? Establish elders, plural, and now we have a president, or senior elder, or chief elder, or someone who is singularly in charge. So in the Acts passage there is unity and the apostles, plural, are in charge, and here by this time we have a departure. the discernment of what was set in place has been lost and they're tilting off to the side. Now there's a lot that's similar, right?

Okay, so they haven't totally lost it and pulled away entirely, but 200 years later they've already failed to pass down some of those qualities that are there. And so that's an interesting observation and I thought it was cool that We could not just talk about it in some ideal sense, but we have an example of that in historical and written form. All right, so we have there in the beginning. Now, this is just a reminder of the three circles we've shown this general principle before, although I made it colorful because PowerPoint allows you to do that.

So the outer circle is Christendom. These are like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses would be an example of that. They claim Christianity, but they ignore the gospel as it's revealed. That's kind of a bit of a deal breaker for me, right? If we can't present the same gospel, are we teaching the same Christ? So even though they'll label it as Christianity, they're not talking about the same Christ and the same salvation. So it's definitely a problem.

But our culture, being liberal and uneducated, has embraced a lot of these groups as Christian and I put that in air quotes, but that doesn't show up on the recording Then the next group would be Christian and and this is that they'll they'll preach the gospel Okay, so they'll they'll and we're going to go into the gospel in the next couple slides They'll preach the gospel, but they'll ignore other doctrines and and they'll take certain things as liberties. The example that I know I've heard in the past that I think is pretty substantial is Alistair Begg is a reformed teacher, and I'm going to ignore the fact that he's reformed a bit, but I listened to him on the radio when I lived in Texas one time, and he talked about being a visitor in a Baptist church that did verse-by-verse teaching, and he was very excited.

He was like, awesome, we're going to go in, we're going to hear God's word, and the pastor was in First Timothy, and he said, well, we're at this part here where it talks about elders, but we don't have elders in our church, so we're going to skip that part and move on to the deacons. Ta-da! We fixed that problem. We just ignored it, right?

So this is an example of, okay, did they preach the gospel? As far as we know, they preached the gospel appropriately, but when it came to certain other doctrines and application of the scriptures, they just kind of looked the other way or dismissed it or worse, maybe ignored it because they thought they had a better idea, which is always dangerous. Then the last group there, and I gave that one the green light instead of the red, yellow, and green light there, is biblical Christianity. And that is that not only do we want to preach the gospel, but we also want to apply as many other New Testament doctrines practically day to day in the church. So hopefully, now I do want to articulate one important thing when I say that.

And that is that each church body is individually growing. Right? Sanctification is progressive. We're all growing. So it's possible that there's some gaps and voids in every church that the Lord is going to work on through time. So trying to apply those things isn't ideal. It's part of the tenets of what the church is doing.

But the body is constantly growing and shifting as different members are in it. When Al went into hospice and had to stop coming, we lost Al's contribution. So there's a shift in the body. Or when Hal Malloy passed away, he was an elder. His ability to teach in the body was definitely no longer there. So it was a shift in the body. So there's constantly growth and change that comes in that.

But the ideal, the foundation, is that we're attempting by the Spirit to apply all of the doctrines, not just holding to a biblical understanding of the gospel. And just in case, the last thing I want to point out, that outside of Christendom is the other religions that are not even remotely related to Christianity. And that's why we have apologetics. It's addressing those things that are out of there. But we moved from the first half of the class series where we focused on apologetics. Now we're narrowing it down into Christendom. All right.

So let's talk about a few groups that are in Christendom. I probably should have made this a blank slide at first and asked, what are some of the groups that are in Christendom? But let's instead ask why these groups are considered to be in Christendom. Why are the Mormons considered to be in Christendom? Stan?

Okay, they say they believe in Jesus Christ, they say they follow Jesus Christ. Do they believe in the same Jesus Christ that we understand the Bible teaches about? Only if he's the brother of Satan. Only if the Bible teaches that Jesus is the brother of Satan, which it does not. And they believe that Christ came and did works in the Americas. which we don't have any other outside recordings or historical confirmations of, which we'll get into that later on. But the Mormons say they follow Jesus, but they have a really different idea of the heavenlies. They have a really different idea of ecclesiology. They have a different idea of salvation.

They just use some of the same vocabulary, is how we might say that. Stan? As I understand it, if your works are written, if you get a plan in there, Yeah, if you do it just right. If you're LDS or Mormon, then you can have your own planet. I don't know why there aren't more astronomers in Mormon.

I think you touched on an important point, and that is when we're talking about these groups, or we're talking people who are in or from these groups, that they will use the same word, but mean something different. And I think that's something that is important for us to get clear on because you can't have a conversation with them and use the same words because they're hearing something different than what we intend to communicate. Yeah, and having different definitions means that you will not be communicating. You'll be using the same words, only increasing the confusion and or agreeing on something that you don't agree on because you didn't define it properly, which is even more dangerous because then now it's Now someone can be fooled into various things.

So I want to be aware of that. Jehovah's Witnesses, here's another group. I run into them more often because in my neighborhood the Jehovah's Witnesses have a building right down the street. It got burned down and then they actually managed to collect, as donations from a bunch of different organizations, stuff to repair it. So it's even bigger. Oh, boy. So the Jehovah's Witnesses are a little bit more regular in our neighborhood.

They don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God. So therefore, can their gospel be the same as the gospel that the Bible presents as we understand it? No. Their definition changes for who the person of Christ was. He's not the Son of God. He's not 100% God, 100% man, the hypostatic union. a good guy sent from God, but he's not God. The Trinity is not part of their doctrine. Christian science. This one is one of my favorites, and we won't go through all these in too much detail, but Christian science is one of my favorites, not because of what they teach, but because of Mark Twain, who actually wrote a book against Christian science.

He lost a wife and a daughter to some pretty terrible circumstances. And he was very personally offended that the Christian science teaching is that all pain and suffering is just in your head. And if you have enough mental control, you can subdue the pain and suffering. And after watching people that were near and dear to him suffer, he was very deeply offended. The first chapter of his book on it is hilarious comedic writing, though. And then after that, it's a scathing attack. No publisher would touch it. It wasn't until after Twain died that someone published the book. He was certainly not a... Twain is not a theologian and not a Christian man based on what he said. I don't think he was a believer.

But his attack on Christian science is something that I find somewhat amusing. Christian science is really about the power of the mind. If I recall, Dad, we had a relative somewhere that died of a goiter that she didn't have. That's correct. Because she was Christian science. Yep. distant relative back a few generations. Roman Catholicism. This one is near and dear to Mike Doyle's heart. He, being a former Catholic, was very strongly opposed to Catholicism for good reason.

Their doctrine of salvation, you, was it last week or two or three weeks ago, had the slide with the route to salvation within Catholicism and the jumping through hoops that you have to do. Yeah, we'll go through that. Yeah, and we'll go through it in the class that we'll do on Catholicism. But it is not the gospel of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone. It is the gospel of works.

And so it stands out. There's other Orthodox churches, the Greek Orthodox, and a lot of those denominations that are historical and old that split off early. but have abandoned a lot of what was presented in the scriptures. And then I said, and others, because there's a lot out there. There's tens of thousands of denominations in this country. Going through all of that is more than we can cover in this class, but there's a lot of different groups that you may run into. There's a group called the 2x2's that I ran to in Texas that I had previous to that not heard of. And met four folks that came to the church that we went to that had just come out of that group.

And that group teaches that they're the only way to salvation. You have to be as part of their group. And they use the same vocabulary. But they're very much based on works. So there's lots of groups out there. All right, so then moving into the smaller yellow circle that we had on the chart before, we got other Christian denominations. These are denominations or groups that teach the gospel as we believe it, by Christ alone, through faith alone. But they swerve off in various other things. We talked about the Lutherans a little bit last week. Where do the Lutherans come from? What's their heritage? But where did Martin Luther come from?

Roman Catholicism, right? He tried to reform the Catholic Church and it didn't work. But when you hear about reformed theology, a lot of that is basically how do we fix the Catholic doctrine, and so it's a clinging to Catholicism plus. Catholicism plus some other stuff that we want to fix.

Baptists, again, when I say these, I know people who are almost all of these denominations or backgrounds, and I love them dearly, so we don't put anybody's name on this list or denomination on this list. If you know somebody, think, oh, no. It would be ideal if they weren't distracted by some of these off things. But Baptists, Reformed is kind of a big group of people. There's Reformed Baptists and other Reformed things.

Methodists, Charles Wesley. The Presbyterians. In a couple weeks I'll be going to visit and stay with friends who are Presbyterian. I may even go to church with them, so that'll be interesting. And the Pentecostals and the Charismatics. My great-grandfather was a Pentecostal. And then in junior high and high school, for a period, we were in a Charismatic church. So that's very historically relevant to myself. On the right-hand side of the slide, we've got extra-biblical doctrines that are common amongst some of these different groups. And so I just want to quickly articulate these things. Gnomianism. Anti-gnomianism is the idea that we're not under the law and the law is not for believers, anti being against. Gnomianism, that the law is for the believer.

Obviously, at Holly Hills, you don't hear that doctrine, but at other churches, you might. Infant baptism. Again, that's not revealed in Scripture, but some denominations hold on to it. Non-elder based leadership. So we're going to have the pastor and then the deacon board, or the pastor's group and an elder's group and a deacon group, or some other thing, but it's outside of the structure that is outlined in Scripture.

Self-improvement or self-sanctification, that's a growing problem in the church today, this idea that I'm going to go through just the right steps to perfect myself. That's being taught in more and more what were formerly conservative seminaries. Dallas Theological Seminary is embracing that and requiring that. You can't graduate unless you've taken some of their classes on that.

And then experience-based decisions of various principles instead of revelation. Obviously the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements are very experience-driven in various regards. Some of them more than others. Nancy and I have found that we can't do our usual biblical counseling. We've tried it a few times. It doesn't work with folks who are of the Pentecostal and Charismatic background. because they essentially bypass scripture, even in their marriage decisions. What do you do in a church body where someone can say, I have a word from the Lord, and they say something, it doesn't line up with scripture, but everybody's okay with that?

Well, you start to take on more and more questionable or errant things that can participate. At the bottom in red, I just want to highlight one thing. A lot of these groups still preach the gospel as revealed in the Bible. It's still something that is there. It's just that they've lost focus in various other areas.

So then let's briefly talk about biblical Christianity. Biblical Christianity, most independent Bible churches and house churches preach the gospel as revealed and try to apply the biblical doctrine that is revealed in scripture. Most. We want to make sure we highlight that word most, because there's a lot of independent churches.

In fact, I had a conversation with Jeremy Doan in the last couple weeks, where he was telling me about some guy on the internet that he ran into. The internet's a scary place, right? He ran into a guy who was teaching, and he said, we're our own independent church, and we don't care if other churches disagree with our doctrine. we are not subject to their opinions on doctrine. You aren't.

Holly Hills is not subject to the opinions of anybody else outside of the church and our doctrine. But if I can clearly exposit God's word and derive a doctrinal truth, and you choose to ignore it and say, we're independent, it doesn't matter, you're missing something. So being independent, can bring in some question. Just because it says independent doesn't mean doctrinal correctness or that they care about those things, but there is a pattern of that in independent churches. Alright, so the other thing we want to do is beware of the outliers. And this is really, really, really important to consider.

Just as we're interacting with people from different groups, it is possible within the larger, broader spectrum of Christendom that there are believers that go to the Mormon Church. They heard the gospel, they responded to the gospel, They weren't properly taught and discipled, and they didn't have discernment, and some Mormon missionary came up and said, hey, why don't you come to one of our church functions? And they said, you're a Christian too, because they didn't know any better, and they started to go to the Mormon church, because there were nice people doing nice things there. Still saved, because they believe the gospel, right? That's fundamental to salvation. But then sadly, swayed away from that. So I put there confused believers. That's about the best way I could think to put it. Still saved, but probably not being taught anything useful.

Then in Christianity, still inside of our churches, there's believers and non-believers. It is possible for someone to go to church in hearing Crystal Kay's testimony. She said, I grew up in the church. and didn't become a believer until I was an adult, because I didn't understand the gospel. It wasn't clearly presented, and I didn't believe it. Even if it was clearly presented, she may have questioned it. But as an adult, she became a believer, and that's part of her testimony.

She said, I went to church. I did all the churchy things. So it's a thing that can happen. It's also why, as a parent, I talked to my daughters about the gospel a lot when they were younger to try to make sure we understood it, and I prayed with them. I said, alright, do you believe that Jesus is your Savior? Yeah, alright, well let's have you pray. And I walked through the gospel and then had them pray and make sure that the things that they're praying reflect a knowledge and an understanding of the gospel. Now, let's ask the important question, because we keep talking about the gospel, what is the saving gospel?

And so, let's quickly, we're going to look at these two passages, let's quickly look at Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, because we definitely want to not just proof text this, but look at it and make sure that there's valuable content here. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. So salvation is by faith, through what God did, and not by works, despite what some of the denominations or groups teach. If I believe If I believe that's good, if I do, it's even better. Now, James does tell us that faith should lead to action, but salvation doesn't come through action. Salvation comes by faith.

Stan? I think what's really important in that statement is, I also received, he received from whom? An outside book? Another man? didn't receive it from some other thing that he read. No, he received it from Jesus, his teacher, right? That's why the apostolic doctrine is so important. It came from Jesus, not man. In some of these false religions, the focus is not only on Jesus, but there's some man there somewhere who holds some importance. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Mary Baker Eddy, all these groups have somebody.

L. Ron Hubbard, yeah. Scientology is outside of Christendom, so we're really not going to hit it in this class, but the history of Scientology is just utterly fascinating, just to see how corrupt and man-focused it was. But yeah, so definitely a thing.

And then the second part here is from 1 Corinthians 15. 1 through 11 and this is the edited version so but we'll go ahead and read it now I make known to you brethren the gospel which I preached to you Okay, so he's already seen them and he's already preached this and he's reiterating it So he's restating the thing that he preached to them for salvation. Again, the scriptures are the authority.

Christ is the authority, and Paul is just the messenger, just the one bringing this from the Spirit, inspired by God. Paul's not in the middle, is he? Later on in Paul's letters to the Corinthians, what does he talk about? The super-apostle? Oh, I'm of Peter, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Paul. He doesn't want it to be of anyone but Christ. And he says so, very clearly.

So the gospel. Any questions about what the gospel is? Anybody not sure what the gospel is? Because if we're not sure, we might as well just stop here, because the rest of the class is not going to matter. All right. So now we're going to go through a couple slides, and these are bullet points in your handout if you want to follow along. But what is not the saving gospel? Salvation by works, the law, rules, or performance as either all or part of salvation. How much works, what percentage of works in the gospel is pollution, is error? Anything more than 0% is pollution, is error.

As soon as we start to say, great, you're safe, but now, You need to add to that. You need to bring to the table a percentage. If you're not 50% holy, I can see it in your life. Not sure. Or you're not doing this checklist of things. When I was younger, I wanted the checklist of things so I could keep God off my back. How good do I have to be so that God won't be mad at me so that I can go about my business? Sinning. It's not a great starting point.

But salvation by works is definitely a problem that various Christendom groups will teach. There was a time, although it's not currently taught in Mormon theology, that they have a president that can speak new scripture. So they have had a president speak this, that you can't die for your own salvation, but there was a time when you could die and sacrifice your own blood and pay for any remaining sins that you had that Christ didn't cover. Obviously, that one would be a bit divisive, mostly because someone else has to nail you to the cross, and, well, that looks a lot like manslaughter, and it gets a little sketchy, so they kind of did away with that one. So, what is not the Saving Gospel next item here?

Anything else which must be added to faith, such as experience, a feeling or feelings, water, baptism, or any other ritual, procedure, behavior, or accomplishment? How many of you have run into people who believe you have to be baptized to be saved? There's actually a lot of that. The Catholic Church tends to integrate that into their theology. And I ran into one where you had to list all of your sins. All of your sins. Before you were baptized.

And I had a fellow tell me, I'm not saved because he missed one. Oh man. That's good for you. I'm not baptized because I am. We haven't at least observed explicit sin of certain sorts, right? Unfortunately, being descendant of Adam, they've already got a strike against them. Fortunately, there's grace and that's a complicated issue.

We went to a church in Christ at one time and even if you were baptized before, 2, 3, 4, 5 times, whatever, you still had to be baptized in their church or you were not saved. And so we're going to take a look in a little bit. One of the items is that you have to be part of their denomination. And we're going to want to watch out for that. The experience thing is really important.

There are groups, especially within some of the charismatic fringe groups, that think that if you don't have speaking in tongues experience when you're saved, you're not saved. Sure, you believe the gospel, but you didn't get the Spirit outpouring through you, so you're not saved, because you didn't speak in tongues. Now, that's not all charismatic people, because obviously that's fringe and outside of, that's in the Christendom group and not Christianity.

Next one, asking for commitment to Christ as the sole basis for salvation or the Lordship of Christ in addition to faith alone in Christ alone. I want to be careful, and this can be a little confusing, this first part here. Commitment to Christ isn't the same thing as believing in Christ. It's a dedication of your life to Christ, so that after this we can now judge your behavior against what we think the water line is, or the measuring line is. And if you don't line up with that, then you're not saved. That's what commitment means. that you believe. We want to make sure that that's not confusing, because we don't want to have people walk out here and say, well, I thought belief was a commitment to Christ. Well, it is, but we don't mean the same thing as this group.

Or how many of you have heard of Lordship Salvation? John MacArthur is a major proponent. Ray Comfort is another guy that pushes this. And now, sadly, Kirk Cameron, a big mouthpiece for this position. And that is the idea that they teach a very long gospel presentation that articulates a bunch of stipulations on your behavior after you're saved, so that afterwards, if they don't see the behavior that they're expecting, they can say, well, you didn't make Christ the Lord of your life, you're not saved. You've got an out. Roy? With that, I've noticed a lot of your writings have saving faith. And so the term, maybe you've heard other ones, but the term I've heard is mental assent.

They'll say, oh, well, you just agreed with the idea on a high level, but you didn't believe. And that's how they'll put that. And okay, is that articulation possibly useful? Yes, it is possible that people say, oh yeah, I believe that Jesus was a good man who died for us. But they don't believe the gospel. They just, I'm a Christian, but I'm not a born-again Christian.

That's mental assent. But they make this articulation or this division that becomes the crux of an entire argument in a perspective. That becomes burdensome. I have two hands. Differentiating between hard belief and head belief. Yeah, hard belief versus head belief and chasing that down. Stan?

So doesn't 1 and 2 actually fit in with 3 because when you're talking about lordship, A lot of times then you can add things like law and rules and add things to faith to qualify for the Lordship. moment by moment, whereas in this is you believe and you're good enough afterwards, theoretically, and if you're not, then you're not saved.

So they don't believe that that first point of salvation by praying and responding in belief, they don't believe that was legitimate, rather than the Catholic Church says, that was legitimate, but then we've got to do more stuff. So the legitimacy of response to the gospel is kind of their crux. Next one, anyone who claims that a specific person, group, church, or organization is the sole channel through which salvation may be obtained. So you talked about that Church of Christ group, or I mentioned earlier the two-by-twos.

You've got to be part of our group or you're not saved. That's really a control mechanism. Yes, there is it's it is this is how I control people Mm-hmm, and I can kick you out of this church. I mean, I'm the president, right? You know, I'm the I'm the leader and I kick you out. Well, you're saying Christ is the means by which we're saved. We're saying the church is the means by which you're saved.

Yeah, that's control. Yeah manipulation and control is If it's controlled by anything but the Holy Spirit, it's not biblical, right? I think an awful lot of denominations have that mindset. There's a lot of that. Not this particular church, this building, but this denomination has the most chance of teaching the right thing.

And if you get to heaven, you'll probably think of the Lord and say, The corner on truth, and again it's a control thing, it's not something that Paul teaches. What does Paul teach? How does Paul approach truth? He says the truth is as revealed in scripture and it's not associated with any man or any denomination or any group. It's about truth.

Period. And you don't get to put your name on it. Paul didn't want his name on it, right? So, important. Alright, so then asking who decides who's saved. It isn't a person. It's not Christians. We don't decide who's saved. As a Christian, I don't ever get to decide if anybody else is saved. God gets to. I can discern whether or not I think someone is saved. That's a different thing. Paul and John and Peter all write about certain attributes and characteristics that are going to be common of a believer who not only says, I believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins according to the scriptures, and rose again according to the scriptures, but then also there's other characteristics. They'll know we're Christians by our love and things like that.

But I don't ever get to decide whether or not you're saved. I don't have that authority. Neither does a denomination and neither do governments. As it turns out through history, by mixing church and politics, we've had times where the government basically said if you're not part of our denomination, which we run, you're also not a Christian. You're not saved. That's not biblical.

God does. Bold, italics, exclamation point. God decides who's saved by which he knows whether or not we've had a relationship with him, that we believed his son, believed the gospel. We can discern what someone believed, but we don't get to decide whether or not they're believers or that they're saved. Then, and this is really important, why do groups have error?

Tradition. Tradition. Not only good for Fiddler on the Roof. Every time I hear the word tradition, I think of Fiddler on the Roof. Including acceptance of some views of the group from which the more recently developed group has broken away. So, aha, we've got a new group.

Actually, Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses broke off of another fundamentalist conservative group. and made Michigan an exciting place to be for a little bit of time. Groups breaking off of groups breaking off of groups is how we got 30,000 or so denominations. That's kind of embarrassing. But division for purity is a thing. Paul sometimes says we've got to separate ourselves from those with error. But It doesn't mean we go running off trying to start new denominations and new groups and new churches all the time because we're more right or more righteous.

Additional books or similar as a basis for authority. How many of you are familiar with the story of how the Mormons got Joseph Smith's material? In that, Joseph Smith had a set of gold plates supposedly revealed by the angel Moroni and he had a seer stone that he put his head in a hat and looked through the seer stone in his hat at the gold plates and then dictated over a curtain to a listener who would write down what the Holy Spirit told him to translate from the golden plates. New book, new things.

They even have an annotated version of the King James Bible that has Joseph Smith's corrections from the errors that are in the Old and New Testament. So even when you quote them the Old and New Testament, the errors are annotated by Joseph Smith, so you're quoting to them a thing that's got problems. So you're wrong. Not a great place to start from. in getting traction, because they already just think you're lying. Kind of an interesting thing. Groups or individuals recognized as either authoritative in their interpretation of scripture or as providing valid supplemental and ongoing revelation for the group.

So the Mormons and the Catholics still have someone who speaks ex-cathedra or from the church new doctrine. And in fact, the Mormons, I think it's every year, have some new thing that the president speaks ex cathedra. And one year it was that you needed to have a garden in case there was an emergency.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit. New scripture. Got a garden. Feel sorry for the Mormons who don't have a green thumb. Maybe if you walk by the Spirit, Mormon, you can make a garden grow. I don't know. But new revelation. Ongoing. New information for you to apply today. Personal experiences are revelations that are recognized as validations of personal viewpoints, perspectives, or decisions.

This one was a real problem for us at the last Charismatic Church. Well, I think it may have been the only Charismatic Church I went to. It was not originally. It became that way, yeah. It turned into that. You know, we'd have prayer meetings where people would have these prophetic visions and things like that, or someone would get up in front of the whole church body and speak things.

And it didn't matter if it was error, because they said, God has a word. God gave me a word. Oh, okay. Steve? Well, they have named religious leaders in the evangelical circles, promoting books and all kinds of things, because they're prophets. They have a personal revelation from God. Yeah. And they sell a lot of books, and they get a lot of followers, and they get a lot of money.

It's hard. When you know someone who's in the midst of that, it's hard because you want to talk about it, and you want to talk about God's Word with them, but they're so distracted by the fact that you don't like their teacher, that God's Word is no longer the authority, you are negative about their important person. which is radical to think about, wait a minute, is God's word the most important thing, or is it this teacher, this frankly false teacher? That's a big deal.

Acceptance and or institutionalization of approaches to scripture which provide for some degree of allegorical interpretation so as to provide a meaning that is not conveyed in the text itself. So that's a lot of words, some of them The idea here is that by not taking a literal interpretation of scripture, they can take a figurative interpretation and then make it mean whatever they want. How many of you are familiar with Paul being in the shipwreck situation? Paul's in the shipwreck situation and an allegorical interpretation of that is the church breaking against the secular arena around us so that God can break the church of its strong will. How do you get that? How do you prove that or disprove that? You can't. Well, I can. I can say I only choose to have a literal interpretation of the text.

But if you don't just take a literal interpretation of the text, then suddenly you've got all kinds of room for creative re-representation of things that took place in the scripture. And if you've already bought into that and I come to you and say, you know, the Lord really showed me in this passage with Ananias and Sapphira, Ananias and Sapphira, with the resources that they had, that they were selfish and they took those, I really think that inside the body we need to start doing things that we all share a same bank account, so that everything is everybody's. That's an allegorical interpretation and really fast and loose, but you've already accepted that that's an okay thing to do, and now at that point in time, We all have access to the same pot of money, and I'm really never in need anymore, which is good, but it's not the way that we ran an axe, it's the way that is derived like we saw 200 years later. The president now distributes those things.

That gets complicated, doesn't it? That's not as good. All right, so our class approach, and this is our last slide here. I think we're running out of time. We're getting close. We're going to move from the outside in. We're going to move from Christendom down into Christianity, and then maybe talk a bit more about pure Christian doctrine and the concepts there. But we're going to take a high level.

We may emphasize some. exceptions, but we may not. Anytime you're dealing with high level and broad generalizations, be aware that there can be exceptions. You may run into people inside of, because even in Mormonism, there's subgroups. So you may run into different Mormon groups that believe this, and some that believe that, and some believe that, because they all, of course, broke off to be more right than the other person, right? Just like within Christianity. All right. Any questions? Any other things? Thoughts? Roy? I'm just wondering, is it right to say that it is the interpretation of scripture that is different? It is a major piece.

Anytime there is a cult leader that broke off, Sometimes they don't even need interpretation. They just run with it, and people who are not discerning will just follow along. Assuming that you truly believe the scriptures aren't debilitating, then, you know, Christians, we are divided by the way we interpret. Yeah, for sure. Inside of Christianity, that's definitely a substantial problem.

We should close. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would direct our hearts and minds on things above. Do open our eyes to the scriptures as we study together. And Lord, give us truth as we seek to apply that in our lives by the Spirit. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.