London Baptist Confession Intro-Ch1

All right. I'm going to do— if you didn't know, we're going to— it's going to be a good long time, except for the times it'll be interrupted with someone else preaching or a special service or vacation or things like that. This has the number of messages to go through the rest of the year or more. So this is what we're going to be doing in the afternoons. I've done it once before. It's been more than 10 years ago, I think, that I did it. But I want to do something first by way of introduction to get you sort of in the mindset with the idea of a confession at all and why to do it. I'm going to talk a lot about that in the message itself, but just by way of introduction, I'm going to ask you some questions and you can say, "Amen," if you agree with the statement I make. Now, I often will tell you if I'm asking trick questions. This is not trick questions. The things I am going to say here are real doctrinal things. I'm not trying to trick you. And later in the message, I'm going to talk about some things that false teachers say, but not right here. Amen. Things that only Orthodox Christians say. So, but what I'm asking for from you is that when I say them, just say amen if you agree with that. That's all. That's— I'm not asking for anything else. So it's not a trick. I just want to see if you agree with me on these things. The first thing is the Holy Scriptures, 66 canonical books, are inerrant, which means they're without error, and they're infallible, which means they will not fail. Do you agree with that? Amen. Amen. Okay. Second one is mankind is fallen and totally depraved and cannot do anything to please God apart from grace. Amen. Amen.

Okay. Jesus Christ is the only way to God for sinful man. Amen. Okay. By the way, I agree with these two. The last one, the Holy Spirit is— and this is, again, I was saying this earlier that this is fitting from the morning message, but the Holy Spirit is both deity, which means he's God, And he's also a person. Do you agree with that? Amen. Okay, so if you ever hear anybody argue with the idea of confessions, what you just did was a confession. So you all just took part in a confession. So I made a statement, a creedal statement, something to believe in, and I stated it as a belief, and you said amen. That's all a confession is. You all just confessed. Congratulations. So you all, by saying amen to those things, are essentially saying you are confessional. That's what you're saying. Now, that doesn't mean that all confessions are equal. We're going to talk about that in a bit. It doesn't mean all confessions are good. It doesn't mean we should put confessions above everything else. I'm just trying to make the point that none of those statements I said are stated in Scripture the way I read them. They're not Scripture explicitly. They're the teaching that we find in Scripture. Amen.

And we all agree with that teaching. And when you agree with a teaching, first of all, you believe it. That's credo or credo. But when you agree with it, you're confessing. You're confessing a creed. That's what you're doing. And I'm not doing that to trick you. I'm doing that to sort of pave the way because there's a lot of— and a big part of the message this evening, afternoon, will be talking about people's objections to confessions. And I just want to make sure we're clear what they are before we agree or disagree with them, that we all do it. And in fact, you're even going to see there's confessional statements in the Bible itself. Mm-hmm.

So, just to get you rolling, if you're the kind of person that thinks confessions are the most important thing, I'm going to disappoint you. If you're the kind of person that thinks confessions are unimportant, I'm going to disappoint you. There's a right balance to have in there as far as history, tradition, and confessions go. And I'll hopefully give you enough balanced information to where you'll be able to see the London Baptist Confession that we'll talk to, talk about, and that we hold to will have some helpful background for you a little bit. I'm not going to get too deep into the history, but I do want to make sure we're clear and that it is okay to hold to confessions, and it's also okay not to give them too much credibility. There's a line to walk there, and we're going to try to find it this evening. And then we will also look at the opening, a little bit of the opening to the confession itself.

In the subsequent weeks, we'll be doing more of that. We'll be combining chapters and doing bigger chunks of the actual confession. Tonight, we're doing some introductory material and a part, the biggest part of the first chapter. So let's pray and we'll get going. Father, these are strange type messages and lessons for me to give. They're not the way we typically think of expository, so because of that, I want to make sure and be safe and be biblical and not get too comfortable in what anybody says, including myself. And when we think of things that are not actual exposition of Scripture, we need to be even more careful to keep ourselves in line and to not spout opinions and— Amen. Our desires and feelings. We really do only want to believe the Scripture. But Father, this confession and those like it, the better confessions throughout church history, have served a real purpose in keeping people looking at Scripture. Even this one today will tell us to look at Scripture instead of the confession. So help us see that and find the balance and not elevate it or diminish it. Help us find out how it can be a useful thing to look at confessions like the London Baptist Confession. We need that help so that we don't— Amen. Get things upside down, and we'll thank you for it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Well, why would we ever even look at a confession? If we have the Bible, why confessions? And we need to understand, everybody in this room needs to understand, that is not only a fair question, I would worry if you didn't ask that question. Like if I were to say, "We hold to the London Baptist Confession," and you said, "Oh, okay, I guess we hold to the London Baptist Confession," without any sort of hesitation, and hey, wait a minute, we always talk about the Scripture. All the time, Pastor. Now you're talking about confessions. Which is it? If you didn't have some hesitation, I would be worried. Because we want to be careful to think about confessions, creeds, belief systems, traditions. We want to take care not to just adopt everything. But we also need to be careful to know, it was said last week, that while we came out of the Reformation thinking of sola scriptura, that some people think that we are solo scriptura, which means that we say the Bible is my creed. I don't need any other creeds or confessions. And you'll see, I'll make that clear in a bit, that that becomes a problem really quickly because the Bible itself even will do confessional statements within Scripture. I'm not even talking about our confession of faith, the London Baptist Confession. If you didn't know it, I'm not going to dig in too deep into the history. In fact, I'm not going to talk about it at all except for what I'm saying right now. The London Baptist Confession that we hold to is the Second London Baptist Confession, and it was formulated in 1689. I emailed that to you this morning, by the way. If you didn't get it, I emailed a PDF file of that.

Okay. Confession. There are actually some paper copies of it around here somewhere. If you see them around— I'd seen some in my office at some point and some on the back table— just grab them. Take them. They're free. So we have them. They're real cheap to get them online if you need a paper copy. But the London Baptist Confession that we hold to is the second one. The first one was— if you look at the history of the first one, there will be a little bit of question as to whether it was the 1646 or the 1644. That first one, the first London Baptist Confession, was with 7 churches. And it's a more concise confession, and there's a lot of churches that hold it out there in the world, and that's just fine. This one comes directly— it's— I don't know if it's safe to call it this or not, but I do call it this, and I hope that's okay. I don't want my Baptist brothers to be mad at me, but it is essentially a copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It is a direct copy. There are some chapters that are just whole chapters of the Westminster Confession of Faith with no wording different. They're direct copies. And that's on purpose. That is— I say I'm picking on my Baptist brothers for that because I don't want— it sounds like I'm diminishing the Baptist Confession of Faith by saying all it is is a copy of the Westminster. I'm not trying to diminish the Baptist Confession, but I want to make sure we're clear that it is a copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith. And the only differences in it are the differences in covenant theology with Baptist theology.

Those are the things that they changed. They changed the covenant language of the Westminster Confession of Faith to more Baptistic language. So it is a copy. It is the same thing. And instead of that being a deficiency, it's actually a positive. I know that might sound strange to you. I don't use, just so you know, the word Reformed for myself. I don't use that word. I don't hate it, but I don't use it. The reason is, is because, just to boil it down so we're clear. Yeah. Covenant theology, which is the covenant of the Presbyterian Church or the truly Reformed churches, has to do with the interpretation of Scripture, the redemptive historical interpretation of Scripture rather than the grammatical historical. It focuses on the progress of revelation and the gospel, saying there's only one covenant of grace that's manifested differently over the ages. Abraham's covenant is the same as our covenant. They're not distinct, not at least in the way we would hold to it. So that is covenant theology. Then you have what I'm calling— The Baptist or even dispensational. I'm not a dispensationalist, but the more separate idea that says that all the covenants are bona fide separate covenants, okay? So now you have these two thoughts.

The Westminster Confession came from the Westminster Divines, and those were Calvinists. All of them were Calvinists. That's the one thing that's consistent in the Westminster Confession and the Baptist Confession. They were all Calvinistic. And the changes that we make are the difference between covenant theology and Baptist theology. And I'm saying to you tonight, that the reason I don't use the word Reformed, even though I'm Calvinistic, is because typically in history, in history now, not recently, but in history, Reformed also adopted the covenant theology. So that depending on who you talk to, even now, like if you were to talk to one of my professors, or not all of them, but one or two of them, and if I were to say, I am Reformed, tell me what that means. One of my professors is going to say, you're a covenant theologian. That's what it means. You believe in like baby baptism and those kinds of things. But I have other professors that will say, well, it means you're a Calvinist. You hold to the doctrines of grace, soteriologically. So that's why I don't use the word Reformed, because it depends on who you talk to what it means. So am I a Calvinist? Yeah. And would I hold to the Calvinistic parts of both Westminster and the London Baptist Confession? Yeah. I'm a Calvinist the way the confessions say so. But am I Reformed?

Now when you ask me that, I say, what do you mean by Reformed? Do you mean that babies are covenant children before they profess faith? I don't believe that. Do you believe that Abraham is exactly the same and the covenant of circumcision is the same as the covenant of— Amen. Infant baptism, I don't believe in that. So those are things I don't believe that would make me not hold to the Westminster idea. And in my opinion, they keep me from using the word Reformed. But I do want to make sure we're clear. When the Baptists came along and made this confession and put it together, they were seeking unity with their Calvinistic brothers. They were seeing themselves as brothers with those Westminster divines and the people who made the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Presbyterians and the Reformed people who held to the Westminster Confession, The Baptists were saying, "We hold to the things they hold to dearly, like they hold to them." And to me, that is important. So rather than seeing the Baptists come along and saying, "We need to throw away all that stuff," and we in the modern time saying we need to throw away— you all know, if you didn't, I went to a Reformed seminary. All 7 of my years, that should have been 3, were at a Reformed covenantal seminary. Those are my professors. Those are my other pastors. I love those men. Amen. You know, one of my heroes was R.C. Sproul, and he's as reformed as you get. So these are people I love dearly, and they're my brothers and allies in the gospel, but we have some pretty serious differences, and those differences are reflected in the confession. So I just want you to know that little bit of history, that you have various confessions, the— yep, even outside of the Baptist world, like the Heidelberg and the Philadelphia Confession.

The Baptist Confession is good. There's— I'm not going to say the merits or the problems with any of them. I just want you to know that our confession comes out of, first of all, the Reformation thought, the Protestant thought, and the Calvinistic anti-Rome thought. It was developed by the Westminster Divines, then the Baptists adopted it. And the Baptists in England, that's why it's the London Baptist Confession, those Baptists in England that are called what we would call ourselves, particular Baptists, right? That's the idea of the Baptists that believed in the Calvinistic doctrines of particular redemption. Mm-hmm. Those, almost all of them, people like Spurgeon, those people would have all agreed to what we hold to. There's going to be some things in this confession that we don't— well, maybe you might agree with, I don't. Because he full on, they full on call the Pope the Antichrist. And they mean it, mean it the way we think of the Antichrist. There's some language in there. They do use single covenant language in the Baptist Confession of Faith. Though I think there's some maybe minute language changes that are a little more comfortable to us who aren't Reformed or covenantal. So those things are coming. I just want you to know they're coming.

So now. The question is, for people who say using a confession is bad, you see in your notes it says objections, plural. It's really only one. It's one objection that has different parts. And that objection that many people have is that confessions— and again, think of all confessions. Think of formal confessions, confessions of churches, confessions of denominations, right? People would say that a confession undermines the authority of Scripture. The main objection is that somehow if you hold to a confession, you are demeaning Scripture. And again, I'm going to say it. I've already said it once. I'll probably say it 10 more times. That's a good thing to worry about. That's a legitimate thing to have concerns about. It's a legitimate thing to say, "Hey, man, I don't want to undermine Scripture." You should be thinking that. You should be guarded against elevating something that will make Scripture go low. You don't want to do that. But there are people that say that, and so I'll give you a few thoughts on how that's not the case, that confessions do not undermine Scripture when they're properly understood. The first reason is— is the idea of creed. When you hear creeds or confession, like the Nicene Creed, when you hear that word creed, all that word means from credo is to believe. That's all the word means. And it sounds more formal when you say creed, but it's not. It's the meaning of the word is to believe something. That's the core fundamental meaning of the word creed is something you believe. All right?

So if you say like you did earlier, "I believe that the canon of Scripture, the 66 books are the only inspired Scripture," if you say that, that's a creed. Whether it's formal, whether it's written down, whether multiple people agree with it or not, you're saying something credo. Like we say, we are credo Baptists versus pedo Baptists. A pedo Baptist believes you baptize babies. Pedo, pedagogue, that's a baby or a child. And we are credo Baptists. Credo, belief, that means we only baptize believers. So if you didn't know those words, pedo is children. I know in our day, that's a word that gets floated around there negatively. But credo is believers. And then the word confession, that word, particularly in the New Testament, homologeo, literally just means to agree with something. So a creed is a statement of belief, and a confession is an agreement that you believe that with whoever stated it. So if I say, I believe chocolate is good, there's my creed. If you agree with me, I also believe chocolate is good, you confess. Got it? So that dynamic is— it sounds simplistic, but it really is all that's happening. You don't need to complicate it. We don't need to go to 10 years of school to say that, that a creed is something we believe, a confess is an agreement. From more than one person that that belief is so. Okay?

So that— if you understand that, then you have to ask, "Well, then how does that undermine Scripture?" Because the Scripture says I have to believe things, and the Scripture says I have to agree with things that God says. I have to confess things. So if that by itself undermines Scripture, then we have a problem with the definition of the word. It doesn't undermine Scripture. The next one is people think it undermines Scripture, and that is wrong because it misses how necessary it is that we have to clearly outline doctrine. We have to outline doctrine. I'm going to read— now here's— I told you before that the confessions you all made a minute ago, the creed you all agreed with that I gave you, now I'm going to say one, and I'm going to just tell you up front, don't agree with it. It's going to sound like you want to agree with it, but don't, because this one is from false teaching. But listen to the language. If we just said, "The Bible alone is all I need," if we said, "The Bible is my creed," if we were solo scriptura, only the Bible, I don't read anything else, I don't listen to tradition, I don't listen to seminaries. I don't listen to pastors. I don't listen to theologians. If you have that mindset, listen to this, because you might agree with this and get in trouble. To arrive at truth, we must dismiss religious prejudices from heart to mind. We must let God speak for himself. To let God be true means to let God have the say as to what is the truth that sets man free. It means to accept his word, the Bible, as the truth. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth. I think that sounds like something we would agree with. The problem is that Jehovah's Witnesses say that. That comes from their doctrine, "Let God be true." So if we just say, "Only the Bible, no confessions, no creeds, no statements of faith, no clarity on doctrine," then we agree with Jehovah's Witnesses. And we know they're a cult. They don't even believe in the deity of Christ. So is it enough that— is Scripture sufficient? Yes, in the sense of sola scriptura.

But is it wrong to say that you can clarify doctrine, at least clearly teach doctrine with confessions? No, as long as those confessions are not taking away from the Scripture or undermining it. And then the third thing that you can take with you that confessions do not undermine Scripture is that we're not giving weight to the idea of confession in general, the idea that it is important to agree with what God says. Mm-hmm. So if a statement of faith is done in a confession and it's accurate— let's say the best— and I'll give you some today. We're going to read from the London Baptist Confession here in just a few minutes. When I read it, if you agree with it and would say the same thing that it says, it might be wrong to not agree with it. You see that? So if I say to you, "You have to believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. He's the only way to be saved." And you say, "You know what? Because you said that, Sloan, And that's not exactly the way Scripture says it, I'm not going to agree with you. But I am saying the teaching of Scripture. And you might need to agree with me saying the teaching of Scripture, even if it isn't in the exact Greek form or whatever, or Hebrew form, right? So we have to be careful because we might be throwing out confession in general when we dismiss confessions, you know, specifically as undermining Scripture. Confession is all over the Bible. In fact, our confession begins with, "The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience." Amen. If you don't agree with that, you have a problem, 'cause it says what the Bible is accurately. So it is true that we need to be careful, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second too. We do need to be careful not to adopt a confession instead of Scripture, not to replace Scripture with confessions, not to make Scripture equal with confessions. That's all true, but it doesn't mean that Scripture— or confessions by themselves undermine Scripture.

Now, a couple of things. There are historic reasons for confessions. Firstly, the Bible itself, the history that's in the Bible. The Bible. Listen carefully to Paul's language here in 1 Timothy. This is right around— it might even be the very next verse after the pillar and ground of truth. It's right there somewhere in 1 Timothy 3. Listen to what Paul says and tell me what you think of what he says. Well, don't tell me, but think about what you think that Paul says. And without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory. Did you notice when Paul said that to Timothy, he didn't quote Scripture once? He didn't quote Scripture, but everything he said was a statement that you find in Scripture. So Paul did a confession or a creed to Timothy. He did it himself. And there's more of those in Scripture, like at the Jerusalem Council and other places. Mm-hmm. There are confessions that are statements of faith in the Scripture that are not direct Scriptures themselves. Here's a really great one. This is a great one. You know this story really well. The Pharisee that's interacting with Jesus. This is really interesting. If you say, "Nope, it has to be only Scripture in the sense that it's only verses.

It's not a statement about the verses. It isn't an exposition or explanation of the verses. It just has to be the verses only." Well, listen to Jesus interact with one of the Pharisees. He says, "The scribe said to him..." This is not a Pharisee, it's a scribe. And those guys copied scripture and also interpreted scripture, right? The scribe said to him, "Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth, for there is one God, and there is no other but he." I always think of this as funny, that the Pharisee's approving of Jesus, like he needs your approval. "And to love him with all the heart, with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself." 'is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.' So what this guy just did, this scribe did to Jesus, is he essentially encapsulated the concept of the whole Old Testament, right? He encapsulated the whole Old Testament to Jesus. But look what Jesus says. You know what Jesus doesn't say? "Ah, you're not quoting verses exactly. You need to go spend more time in Awana. You need to go back through the Awana program and memorize more verses exactly." No, what Jesus says to him, "Now when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, 'You are not far from the kingdom of God.'" Amen.

But after that, no one dared question him. So when this man, this scribe, asks Jesus questions, answers questions, when they have this interaction, the thing he says, Jesus says, "You're close," meaning you're stating a true thing the way you're stating it. So again, we need to be careful to throw out confessions and creeds, because they're actually in the Scripture themselves. There are confessions and even creeds, a statement of belief in Scripture. Doesn't make them all equal. Again, I have to take a timeout because I'm the person that Wants us to hesitate going to creeds and confessions. I'm that guy. I'm the guy that's pumping the brakes. Be careful getting too far with your creeds and confessions. But it is important to see. I already mentioned the Jerusalem Council. They all had to come together and agree on what some foundational things were so that they could function well with the Gentiles. You have the creeds like the Athanasian Creed, Nicene Creed, the Chalcedon Council and the decisions they made there, all dealing with Trinitarian doctrine and the deity of Christ. Then you go forward into the Reformation times with the things that they were stating, the Synod of Dort and the Solas, the 5 Solas of the Reformation.

These are all statements that we're saying we— well, maybe you would say it, but it's the statements that the Christians at the time are saying. These are things we believe. We believe Scripture alone is the authority. We believe God alone, faith alone, Christ alone, right? All those Solas of the— to the glory of God alone. All those are the fundamental things that we all hold to as Reformers against— over and against the Roman Catholic Church.

So there are ways to undermine Scripture. You see in the notes I say proper use, but there's— to get the proper use, you can get the— you have to know the improper use first. How can you use confessions wrong? And can I say, this might be to me the most important lesson of the night, even though we're going to get into the confession itself and talk about Scripture in just a bit. Before we do, I want to make sure you are clear with me that it is possible to have bad confessions. It's also possible to have good confessions treated badly, used badly, used improperly. So you can have a really good thing. It's like having a really good sharp tool and then poking yourself in the leg with it. Right? You can have things that are good used improperly.

You can also have things that are bad used improperly. Mm-hmm. Right? But it doesn't do you any good to use a bad thing properly. Maybe you can think about that on your own. So I'm going to give you 3 improper uses of confession so that you know you're doing it wrong. And then I'll give you 3 quick ones on how to use confessions right. The first one is to use them— now listen carefully to this language I'm giving you, please— to use them to undermine Scripture or the things of Scripture. And you might think in this room nobody would ever do that. Oh, I hope you're not that naive. People do use confessions and creeds to undermine Scripture. I remember talking to somebody about one of the things you find in creeds and confessions. We were talking about church discipline. And I asked the question, when you try step 1 to reconcile and that doesn't work, then you go to step 2, Matthew 18, to reconcile and that doesn't work. Who do you tell it to after that? And their answer was, "The elders." And I asked, "Is that what Scripture says?" And they said, "No, but that is the right understanding of Scripture." You all know. What does it say? Tell it to the— Elders. Okay. So I'm saying that to you because that tradition— I knew this already, by the way, from their background. I knew that they were going to answer that way. But the thing I'm trying to tell you is, did you notice where would that come from? Where could that possibly come from where the first answer isn't the word church. He didn't even say— when I said, tell it to the— he didn't even say, church, and the way you do that is through the elders. He didn't say that. He just said elders. The reason I bring that up is because that is an improper use of your creeds and confessions. That is you saying, because you have a traditional historic way of understanding the Matthew 18 process, that you've overridden the Matthew 18 process with your tradition for something that's not in Scripture. So that's very possible. Don't be naive. People can— I overuse, misuse, undermine Scripture with the confession.

The other thing is, is to do more with the confession than identify biblical doctrine. What I mean by that is you can use a confession to add to the Bible. Now you say, "Who would do that?" I don't know, I just told you this morning there are a billion Catholics on planet Earth. Do you know how much they have added to the Bible that isn't in Scripture in their confessions and creeds and in the tradition of the church and the popes and the papal decrees and the See and the ex cathedra and all the other things they've done and the catechism? They've added so much to the Bible that it's almost hard to find any Bible at all in the teaching anymore. So it's very possible to use your tradition and your creeds and your confessions to undermine Scripture in a way that makes Scripture insufficient. One way is to say the wrong thing and undermine the teaching of Scripture. This way is to add to or to make sure that they're— to do more than biblically identify. In other words, you're not using the confession to clearly understand Scripture. Mm-hmm. You're using the confession to add to Scripture, right? So that's another improper way. And then lastly, the obvious one here, and I've had this one happen as well, where the error and the bad use of Scripture is to give too much weight to the confession. So now you have a good confession, right? But you give so much value to the confession that Scripture is getting smaller. And that— the people probably most guilty of that is us. When I say us, I mean conservative Baptist, even Calvinistic Christians. We love our traditions. We love our favorite teachers. We love our Spurgeons. We love those guys. And sometimes when we dig into creeds and confessions and traditions, it's very easy for us to give so much weight to them that we undermine the weight of the Bible.

So the proper use, I'll give you the proper use and then we'll actually look at the confession, the London Baptist Confession tonight, today. The proper use of a confession is first, and this is, Very important, 'cause this is what the London Baptist Confession does. This thing I'm about to tell you now is what the London Baptist Confession is really good at. The first thing that a good use of confessions is, is to systematize doctrine. Now, if you don't know what I mean by that, it means to put your doctrines in order, right? So that you have a doctrine of God, and then the verses that teach the doctrine of God. Then you have a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and then the verses that teach about the Holy Spirit, right? So you systematize your doctrine. You categorize things. You organize it. Now, we don't want to, again, we don't want to say that you can't understand those things without a system, but a good confession will do that. In fact, this confession is great at it. I just reread the whole confession a couple times knowing I was going to preach this, and I was thinking to myself, "Man, we have a good one." Ha ha. "Our confession is good." There's a couple things in it that I cringe at a little bit, like the Antichrist stuff and covenant language, but man, I love this confession. In fact, I noticed the language in it. I had forgotten how much I had— I'm going to use the right word here— borrowed from this confession for our discipleship material. Like, I'm really— I'm stealing. Who are we kidding?

From when the discipleship material that we teach. So a really great use of confessions is to systematize doctrine so that your doctrine's in order, it's categorical, you can study a subject in the Bible. Right? It's valuable for that. The second thing is, is to clearly define correct doctrine. A good confession can help you know if you believe a doctrine correctly or not. And it can also show you when other people don't believe a doctrine correctly. So people are cruising along saying, "The Bible is my creed and I don't need confessions. In fact, I love— John 3:16 is the only creed I need." Right? That's the only verse that I need that says, "God loved the whole world and he gave his only begotten Son." And that's all I need. Or your Philippians 4:13, you can have that one. You know, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." And you can pick your favorite verses. "All things work together for good." So I only need those verses. But when we do that, who remembers the name Marcion? Who knows that name, the heretic Marcion? Well, the heretic Marcion just edited his Bible like Thomas Jefferson did. And he took out all the miracles, and he took out all the parts that weren't specifically about Jesus. And eventually, he had this tiny little thin Bible. And he just edited his Bible to the things that were acceptable to him. Well, if you don't clearly define Scripture, if you don't clearly understand Scripture, you might be doing that. If you say there's only John 3:16, Philippians 4:13, and Romans 8:28, you're doing that with the Bible. But a good confession will tell you, go look at all of these passages in this doctrine so that you will clearly define that doctrine. And then the last one is just to teach sound doctrine.

When you do confessional things correctly, people learn sound doctrine. And they learn it doctrinally. Not just in order, and not just clearly, but they learn it in the sense of doctrinally. They get a doctrinal viewpoint of Scripture. Because doctrine just means teaching. If you didn't know that, maybe, especially the kids, when you hear these pastors up here all the time saying, "Doctrine, doctrine, doctrine." It's a funny word we don't use anywhere but church. But the word doctrine just means teaching. It's the same word. In fact, sometimes the word that you see in the New Testament That if it says doctrine, the word doctrine, that word in the original Greek is didaskalos. All that word means is teaching. And it can be translated teaching. So now you know, doctrine is teaching, same thing.

All right, now we get into the confession. And I'm going to go pretty fast through this. Just to— there's not a ton to say, but there's enough to say. And I'm going to say probably more than the confession does, but I am not going to say less than the confession does. I'm not going to read— and by the way, this is going to be true of all of the upcoming messages. I may or may not read big portions of the confession. I may not. It's more about that section of the confession and what it teaches. So if you want, you should read ahead, right? If you have the copy, read ahead and I'll— in theory, you'll get the bulletin note right through the week and it will tell you what section is coming up and then you'll be able to be out ahead. But you could just read it. You could read the whole confession in a few sittings, right? You can just go through it. It's not that long. No.

So Chapter 1 in the London Baptist Confession of Faith. It's about Scripture. It's about the authority of Scripture, and it's about the sufficiency of Scripture. Now, the one thing that's funny— this is a little bit meta, this is a little bit layered in understanding— is that the confession, and a confession that some people might be afraid to have because they don't want to have confessions, the confession itself says, "Trust the Scripture instead of the confession." Mm-hmm. Is that circular reasoning? Because you might say, "Well, then why am I reading you? If you're going to tell me just to trust Scripture, why am I listening to you at all?" Well, it does do that. You'll see it does do that in a bit.

And a quick word, this is— oh, this isn't just about confessions. This is about your life. Take this with you. This is bonus material. You're welcome in advance. If you take this and live it, your life will be better and you will have less to apologize for and you will for sure Be good to those around you. And that is the way that confession, a good confession, ours included, uses proof texts. Now, if you don't know what a proof text is, a proof text is, is when you're saying something of a biblical nature, of a Christian nature, something that pertains to our faith, pertains to the what we think and how we think it and how we communicate it, you can give a scripture text to prove the statement. All right? That's the idea. The idea is to— I'm going to make a statement, maybe even a creed, maybe even a doctrine, maybe even a challenge, maybe even an admonition. I might even give you a rebuke. And then I might give you a Bible verse to support that statement, admonition, teaching, rebuke. When you do that, that's called proof-texting. Okay? It's giving a text to prove your point.

Please, oh, please, oh, please. Take this little lesson with you. There is a wrong way to prove text and a right way to prove text. And oh my goodness, a lot of people do it wrong. I wish I could tell you. I could tell you stories that a lot of people use the Bible as little rocks to throw at people rather than correctly. "Oh, you think that? Well, what about this verse?" So they take out a little rock and put it in their little slingshot and shoot it at you. Do they care what God says? Do they care about God being glorified? Do they care about you being edified? Or are they using Scripture as a weapon against you? Yeah. How you use Scripture is really important.

The wrong way to use a proof text, it's really simple, is for you to try to make the Bible prove your point. That is the wrong way to proof text, for you to try to make the Bible to prove your point. I hope you're hearing me right now. So if you're trying to make a point to somebody, "Grrr, what's a Bible verse that'll prove my point?" You're already backwards. Mm-hmm. You're already backwards. You got the cart before the horse. The right way to proof text is to try and share what God says in His Word from His Word. And sometimes that's not easy to tell the difference in those two, especially if you're in an argument, especially if you're in a debate kind of environment. If I'm most concerned with proving myself right, I'm probably doing it wrong. But if I'm most concerned with presenting what God says accurately, the way I've understood it as it's come out of Scripture, then you're probably doing it right.

When you're trying really hard to say, "This is what God says. Please hear the Lord. This is what God says. Please listen to Him." That's a lot different than saying, "Oh, yeah? Well, I've got 10 verses that prove you wrong." The Bible is not your toy. It's not your slingshot. Don't use it for you. Use it to express the truths of Scripture. And the beautiful thing about our confession is it does that masterfully. Thank you. It's practically exposition of Scripture. You could practically take the passages in the Confession, take the passages, and then use the Confession to preach them, the passages. It does a really good job. In fact, the first one I'm going to read to you in a bit is practically an exposition of 2 Timothy. It's really well done.

So do it in your life, but also notice confessions too, or when people are making doctrinal statements or churches make doctrinal statements. Yeah. I've actually seen in a church doctrinal statement— this is years ago, so I don't want to throw that church under the bus— but in a church doctrinal statement where they quoted Job as a proof text in one of their doctrinal things, but they were quoting Job's friends, the guys that were the bad guys of the story. But the bad guy had said something that sounded biblical, and they found a verse that had the word in it they wanted, and they used Job's terrible counselor friends to make a doctrinal statement, because they don't know what they're saying. So be careful. Use the Bible correctly. But at least in our time tonight, know that at least we can say our confession— in my opinion now, this is me talking— does a great job.

Now, if you had the confession in front of you, you could read along. I'm going to read a big portion of it. And listen carefully to all the things it states. And maybe I'll just— I'll whet your appetite a little bit, or I'll give you a little bit of a— Whet your appetite. A primer, a little primer so that as I'm reading, do this, okay? As I read, ask yourself, do I agree with that? Do I agree with that? Would I say that? Is that what I think the Scripture teaches, right? So as I read, ask if the folks who penned the confession were right on or not. And I'm telling you, I agree with them. I love what they say here. Okay, here it is, the first section of the first chapter of the London Baptist Confession of Faith on Holy Scripture. So I also like, by the way, our confession starts with Scripture. Some of the old confessions start with God. They start with salvation. But ours starts with Scripture, the actual authority where we find out all those things. Okay.

The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. Although the light of nature— put that in your pocket for in a minute— and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God as to leave men inexcusable Yet they are not sufficient to give the knowledge of God, that knowledge of God, and his will, which is necessary unto salvation. This sounds just like our— the discipleship material. Therefore, it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in diverse manners to reveal himself and to declare that his will unto his church, and afterward for the better preserving of and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world— see, this sounds like this morning, right? To commit the same holy underwriting. Holy, when it says holy there, it means completely underwriting, like to make sure it was completely, sufficiently, and adequately written. Which maketh the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God revealing His will unto His people being now ceased. So the confession says the Bible is necessary, and in those old ways when God used to speak to people through the prophets and other ways, Now he speaks through the Scripture. Now we would say that is a little bit of a twist of Hebrews, right? He spoke to us through his Son, right? It has that language in it. But we also know what is Jesus called in John 1:1? The Word. So it's not inconsistent.

All right. So as you heard that, did you have any sense that there was anything wacky in there? Anything in there that sounded off to you? Anything in there that would say, "Whoa, whoa, timeout. That doesn't sound right." Or did you catch what I did, which it sounds exactly right, even to the point where it refers to Romans 1 theology that man is excusable, inexcusable, right? That all that language is built in to say, even though nature can teach man, it's not sufficient to teach salvation. These are all things that are taught in Scripture. And this, like I said, this could be almost an exposition of 2 Timothy 3:16, that "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped unto every good work."

You know what I thought of just this week? It's the first time I've ever thought of this. The reason I thought of this, by the way, some of you will appreciate this, is I was talking to my wife because we have this little thing going bad in our car. It doesn't affect the car. It's just noisy. And I was talking about like, it's such a hassle to fix it. It's like, when Seth saw it, he's like, "Ah, it'd be easy to fix." But yeah, easy for you. But I'm human. He's a good mechanic, you know? And so we were talking about it. And I was trying to tell my wife and tell the family, this car is 14 years old. I mean, it's still in great shape. And we got a really neat thing happen with the transmission. So we're going to have a lot of life out of it. You know, this is all really neat. Mm-hmm. And I think it'll go forever. I told her I'll probably drive it until I'm dead, not till it's dead, you know?

But as I was telling her, I said, "14 years." These days, that doesn't sound like a long time. But I was telling her because her sister— you know her sister— when they were young, Jack had bought Lori a '65 Mustang. Now, who knows how sought after a 1965 Ford Mustang is, right? And to make it weirder, it was pink. [LAUGHTER] And so— but I want you to think about something. When Lori was learning to drive— she's just a couple years older than us— That was in '82, '83, '84, '85. That's only not even yet 20 whole years away from a 1965 Mustang. So at that time, I was asking Jamie, "Didn't that car seem old to you at that time? Still in the teens away from you?" Yeah. Well, this car's in the teens away from us. Why doesn't it seem old? Isn't that weird? Like at that time. Well, I'm going to do the same thing for you right now with the confession. Because 1689 sounds like a million years ago to you and me, doesn't it? Yeah, but it's only— think, do 1776 away from 1689. What do you have left? It's not that long. It's not generations upon generations from the founding of our country and the Lundenbach's Confession.

Also, our country is 250 years old, right? This is our 250th year as a country. And as we celebrate our birthday, I was looking at the math. Okay, 1689 from 1516. That's the beginning of the Reformation. It's less time from the beginning of the Reformation to the time of the Confession being written than it is from the foundation of our country till now. I'm saying those things to you because sometimes when you do that, when you look at like how few generations there have been between us and say the founding fathers of our country, it's quite staggering how short time is. It's not as long as you think. It's also quite staggering how much bad doctrine there is out there. Yeah. When this was established in London in 1689. Like how far we've come in less time than the life of our nation from how bad doctrine, from false theology, from things that needed to be corrected at the time that the London Baptist Confession was written. So it's really wild that things move very fast. They seem like they move slow. It seems like that's ancient history, but doctrine goes— comes and goes really fast. Mm-hmm. And that's why I see the confession is, in my opinion, it's valuable because it's a snapshot in time of very valuable exposition properly understood of Scripture written down.

And could we update it? Yeah, we might be able to update it. In fact, if you want, there's modern English versions of the confession, of the 1689 Confession, if that helps you. I didn't want to give that to you because I don't want you to cheat. I want you to know the Old English, you know. But I do think it is important for us to see that. It's important for us to see that these times I think they would call them epochs, these various seasons of faith and things that have happened throughout history. They're shorter than we think. 1689 is not as long ago as we might think. And we have come so far in just, you know, 5 generations into bad doctrine. And we need to make sure and see that they have an important time in the— or important— they have import is the right word I'm looking for. They're important to church history. Thank you.

He mentions the Confession, I'm sorry, mentions natural revelation, referring back to things like the heavens declare the glory of God, right? That nature can teach us things, it just can't teach us everything. It can't give us solid doctrine, it can't give us the doctrines of salvation. It talks about the scriptures as we understood them. The Confessions reject the Apocrypha, the books that were later added to the Catholic Bible. It rejects those. Holds only to the 66 canonical books. In other words, the Bible that you're holding right now. Those 39 Old Testament books, 27 New Testament books. It is important.

How about this doctrine? This might be new to you. Did you know that Scripture makes the church, the church doesn't make Scripture? Have you ever thought of that before? I say that in our discipleship material. But I want you to catch something because they are alluding in the confession to this passage of 2 Timothy— I mean Peter, 2 Peter. 2 Peter. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Why am I bringing that up? Because God gave His word. He did not give His church to give His word. You got that? So if you put yourself or your church over the Word, you're violating that principle there that it says God gave the Word directly. So God doesn't need the church for there to be a Bible. All the church does is recognize the Bible. So these guys are saying effectively the same thing. They're saying that God revealed this to His people. It wasn't that He asked them their opinion and they confirmed it. It's that He revealed it.

Listen to this. It says, "Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts." That's the part I was thinking of this morning's sermon. How do you know that Jesus has come in the flesh? How do you know that you abide in His commandments? Because He abides in you. The Spirit of God makes that evident to you. These are things that are spiritually discerned. You can't understand God's things, including the Word, without the author of that Word. And the authors of the Confession are saying you can't understand Holy Scripture without the Holy Spirit. And that is a foundational doctrine. We believe that from the spiritual things are spiritually discerned, from the natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit. That same chapter and book right before that, the verses I'm reading to you or paraphrasing to you. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit, for yes, the Spirit Or sorry, "For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God." So the spiritual work, all of these things are said in our confession, that the Scriptures are what they are. Nature's not sufficient. You need Scripture to understand the doctrines of God, salvation. You need Scripture to enlighten you on those things. And the Holy Spirit needs to indwell you so that you can apply those things to your life. Every one of those things are things we should be saying amen to.

And did you know not everybody agrees with it? Thank you. You know that not everybody agrees with that. There are people that think the way you understand Scripture is intelligence and wisdom and knowledge and academia, that that's how you understand. But those of you who have been around Christians for any length of time, especially the kids, and especially the good kids like we have at our church, you find out really quick you don't need a degree to understand Scripture. Those kids understand it, you know, that God can reveal truth to children and they do understand it. They have a deep knowledge of the things of the Lord. Not always, not always the fullest knowledge, but it is important to see that it does not come by academics, it does not come by upbringing, it does not come by denominations. That understanding is a spiritual endeavor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets us see the spiritual things. And the confession is saying that. The confession is making that statement.

Here, side note for you, bonus, bonus material. There's a big difference— I actually just slipped a little bit ago. None of you threw a rock at me, and maybe you should have. I slipped and said revealed when I should have said illuminated or illumined. Those aren't the same. People say it all the time, "God revealed to me." That's actually not correct language because revelation is done. Revelation was completed in the Scripture. It was done at the end of the New Testament age and completed in Scripture. So since the close of the canon of Scripture, the 66 books, there is no new revelation. So you can say, "I was illuminated," but you can't say, "Something was revealed to me." And you can say it, but you'll be— you may not know that you would be teaching false doctrine, but be careful not to teach false doctrine. You can say, "God revealed something to me," because that's the way we use the language. But if you're going to be doctrinal, you would say, "God showed me something or illuminated something to me." In other words, the truth was already there. It wasn't hidden and needed to be revealed. It was there, and then God shined a light so that I could understand it. So that's technically accurate to say illumination instead of revelation. Okay.

Now, there are things that aren't easy in Scripture. You know this already. Some of you, if you're human, you struggle with biblical studies because it can be hard, right? It's a thousands-of-year-old book in different language and there's a big gap to bridge. Peter says this, he's talking— in fact, he says that about Paul's letters when he says, "All of his epistles, speaking in them of things which are "Some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures." So there are things that are hard to understand in Scripture, okay? Not everything in Scripture is easy to understand. In fact, lots of things aren't. But that doesn't mean everything in Scripture is hard to understand because the Psalms tell us, "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple." Right? So you take a simple person. That almost sounds insulting, right? If I called you simple, would you feel like I was insulting you? "You're simple." Or would you be— "That's a compliment. Thank you for calling me simple." No. But what the Scripture does, it says that the Scripture is able to take a simple person and give them wisdom, right? That's what the— so it is true, some things are hard, but it's also true that the Bible can make those harder things easy and teach the people.

If you didn't know this, we use the word inspiration. We use the word the way, even in the Confession, how we got the Scripture. There is a difference between translations and the original. I think you all understand that, that only the original writings of Paul, only the original writings of the apostles and prophets are the inspired versions, right? The first time Isaiah's prophecy was written down, either by Isaiah or whoever is, if you want a fancy word, amanuensis was, the person who writes those things down. That first one is the inspired one, and all the copies of it are copies of the inspired one, but the copies are not inspired. I think you know that. That's important. Translations are not equal with the original autographs. Okay? So you know that already. And also, if you didn't know, that even in the Bible we see— I said this earlier— we actually see translations even in the Bible, like we see Hebrew translated into Greek in the Bible. I'm saying that to you because some people say, "Oh, no, no, only the original languages count." In fact, there are churches that actually make their members of the congregation learn Greek and Hebrew. Yeah, I know, you might not want to learn, or you might want to learn, but they're like heavy-duty churches like, "No, only the originals. We only study the originals." Well, be careful, because if you're reading some passages like in Acts, the book of Acts chapter 15, there's a quote from the Old Testament. That is the Old Testament being translated into Greek. So does the Bible forbid translating the Bible into people's language? Well, I don't think it does, because it translates the Bible— translates the Bible into people's language. Yeah. When Jesus says from the cross, what he says, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" He's speaking in Aramaic. But what language is it recorded in? Greek. Okay? So we need to be careful to be such sticklers and say, "No, no, no, only the originals." Even the authors of the Confession are getting around that and not being that way.

One of the things that's really important, and the Confession alludes to it, is the interpreting Scripture by Scripture. That's called the analogi fidei. The analogy of faith. That means you take— if you have a fuzzy passage and you were looking for clarity, you go find a clear passage that speaks on the same subject, and you let the clearer passage interpret the fuzzy passage. All right? I know that's funny language, fuzzy, but you know what I mean. Hazy, unclear, right? I'll give you an example. When you read the book of Mark, Mark talks about baptism as though it saves you. You have to believe and be baptized to be saved, because Mark says that. So if you only have Mark, then you might think you have to be baptized to be saved. But now you take the rest of Scripture, you take Paul's testimony that he didn't baptize anyone, you take the other passages that don't include that language, and you come to the clarifying understanding that no, that is not baptismal regeneration.

The Confession authors talked about it being the final arbiter— it doesn't use that language, I'm using that language— of faith, that the Scripture is the final judge By which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined, and in those— oh, sorry— and in whose sentence we are to rest, can by no other but the Holy Spirit, or Holy Scripture delivered by the Spirit, into which Scripture so delivered our faith, is finally resolved. That's an Old English way of saying the way you test all those confessions and creeds and the other things is by Scripture. You use the Scripture to shine the light on those things to make sure they're accurate. And when they say what Scripture does, then they're accurate.

Well, the authors of the London Baptist Confession, who are saying all these strong things about Scripture, none of them would want us to refer to the confession first. They would all want us to know Scripture. I could tell you that none of the guys that penned the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession would be happy if all you did was study the confession. If they said to you, like if you were talking to them, if you had a guy here from Westminster who was one of the guys that helped pen the Westminster Confession, or a Baptist who also held to it, if they were standing right here and we told them right now, "I've read the confession 100 times. I know it by heart. I love the confession. I'm so thankful you gave me the confession." I guarantee you their first statement to you would be, "What are you doing with Scripture?" Yeah. That's what they would tell you. They would want you to be studying Scripture. And they would say, "Use the Confession to help you understand Scripture. Don't use the Confession as an authoritative doctrine in itself. The Confession is valuable when it helps us understand Scripture." So I know that those men would say that. They would all say that. If you told them that you were reading the Confession instead of Scripture, they would not be happy about that.

They would want you to see— think of a study guide, right? Like, think of a study guide. You're doing a study guide. You're using the confession as a study guide to help you understand Scripture. That's the way they would use it. That's a little different, by the way. I didn't go into catechisms and things like that. Catechisms are a little different. There are Baptist catechisms, and even Baptist catechisms based on the London Baptist Confession. That's not really what we're talking about, to catechize your children or to catechize a church or whatever. I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about the statement of your church. Mm-hmm. And if it holds to a confession like the Baptist Confession, this one, then you can say it's— what it's telling us is the foundational, systematized, organized beliefs of Scripture that this church holds. What do we hold on the subject of the Bible itself? Read chapter 1. What do we hold on salvation? Read the chapter on salvation, right? That's what the confession is valuable for. It's not meant to replace Scripture. It's not even meant to have, in my opinion, the most prominent place in a church.

I remember— This is a funny story to me. I love this story because I don't always think I'm doing the right thing. You know, I'm always struggling and wondering if I'm doing the right thing. I don't have a lot of confidence, you know. And so an insecure guy that I am, I had one of the funniest moments that gave me lots of confidence or assurance. Because here on these stairs, I was having a conversation with somebody who kind of came from a more traditional understanding, a traditional background. And he said something to me. He was bothered that we don't spend more time in the confession. "Your church says it holds to the London Baptist Confession. Why aren't you teaching it?" Now, this is the second time I'll be teaching it. That's— but 2 times in 22 years is not that much, you know? It's not a lot. But when we were talking about it, he picked the worst time to use that to criticize me. He picked the worst time because at that time, I remember vividly, Pastor Heinrich was teaching the Complete Christian series, I believe. From James, I was teaching 1 Corinthians in my Sunday school class, and I was preaching through, I think, Galatians or something at the time. So all of our classes at our church in that moment were all expository classes, right, where a Bible— a book of the Bible was being taught verse by verse. All of the adult— every time we got together, we were only opening Scripture and studying Scripture.

And I asked them in the stairwell, do you want me to apologize? No. Are you expecting me to apologize right now that I'm not teaching the Confession when in 3 of our classes right now and 3 of our services— 4 of our services, evening service too— all of them were at that time expository? All of them were books of the Bible. Do you want me to apologize for our church only preaching the Bible right now instead of preaching the Confession? Nah, I'm not going to apologize for that. Now, maybe I could talk more about it. Maybe like this we can find opportunities to teach it. But yeah, I wasn't feeling bad at that time because we really do want to elevate Scripture. We want Scripture to have the highest place. We really do want that. We're saying that in the Baptist Ecclesiology class too, that Scripture is supposed to be prominent and be at the forefront, and we need to be committed to that.

So I hope you see a value in the Confession, but I tell you, if you're worried that, you know, wait a second, I thought our church was supposed to be biblical. I thought our church cared about expository preaching, exegetical preaching, hermeneutics. I thought our church was a sola scriptura church. We are. And if you ever felt that we were putting a confession or a constitution or a tradition or anything else in front of Scripture, you should worry. I would worry too. But I think at our church we use them, if we use them at all, sparingly and carefully. We use them maybe to clarify some things. We don't use them authoritatively. Not once in my 22 years as a pastor have I ever said, "You have to listen to me because of the Confession of Faith or even our constitution or any other thing." I've never had to appeal to those things. I don't need to appeal to those things when the Bible speaks clearly on a subject, right? But these things can be helpful. And we're not going to agree. And you might agree with even less than I do on the London Baptist Confession when we dig into it. You might find out, whoa, I'm not sure I would hold to that thing that you agree with, Sloan. That's okay. Again, it's not authoritative. If we were saying you have to agree with it or else, that would be different. But we're saying it helps us as Baptists understand our doctrine and our history, incidentally.

And I also hope you see that the Confession definitely elevates Scripture already out of the gate. First chapter of the Confession should give you an excitement that we have such a confession, that its very first thing is the Scripture is supposed to be central.

Let's pray. Father, now as we close this service, we would ask that we, like the that the authors of the confession would elevate Scripture and put it in its proper place. And then like the other things, Father, the other parts of what I said tonight, that we would not misuse our confession if we use it at all, that we don't put it in the place of Scripture, that we don't use it to undermine Scripture, that we don't take pride in it and think that we're better because we hold a confession others don't, that we really do use the confession to properly understand Scripture. And that if there's any disagreements, if the confession gets something wrong, We'll dismiss that in favor of Scripture. We'll hold to Scripture first. So help us do that, please. We want to be faithful to the Bible and only use the proper tools to understand it that you would approve of. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.