Scripture:
John 19:31
Philippians 3:1-11
Luke 18:9-14
Matthew 7:1-5
Romans 2:1-3 Book
Recommendation: "The Whole Christ" by Sinclair Ferguson https://amzn.to/3o6LmaQ
https://youtu.be/sH_57WJnebU
Semper Reformanda Transcripts
Jon Moffitt: Welcome to Semper Reformanda. I think this is our second or third week.
We're always several weeks in advance, but we are finalizing the leader training to which as soon as the leaders are trained, we're going to get them into the groups. As soon as we get the groups done, we're going to launch those groups.
Justin Perdue: I think what we want to do, at least to start, as I understand it, is aim to love people who are—for lack of a better way to describe it—transitioning out of pietism.
Jon Moffitt: There's a lot of you that are brand new to Theocast and Reformed theology.
Justin Perdue: Yeah. If we're gonna talk directly, maybe humorously, and we hope lovingly to you, but there's a term called "cage stage", which exists for good reason because when people have their eyes open to realities, for example, of pietism and confessionalism and all of these sorts of things, and rest that is ours in Jesus, you have all kinds of feelings about that. One of the feelings that people often have is, actually two things: everybody's got to understand this because this is life changing, everybody needs to understand this right now; second, there's almost a sense of indignation because you're wondering why nobody has ever shown you this before. You're in this phase where you've been shown something, the toothpaste is out of the tube and you can't get it back in there, you've seen something that you can't unsee, and now literally every time you think about anything spiritual, or every time you open the Bible, or every time you go to a church service, your lenses are lenses of pietism, confessionalism, rest, and things like this. It's just constantly at the front of your mind and you're feeling all kinds of ways about it. Our word and encouragement to you is, as you're going through this season where you're kind of disoriented, there's a little bit of weightlessness, and you're trying to figure out what to do next, one of the things that you don't want to do is tear people up around you. Be patient, be kind, be gracious, be loving, be humble.
But also, you don't want to swing so far on a pendulum. You don't want to be a pendulum swinger where you are way over on one side, and now that things are swinging way over to the other, you overreact in pushing back against something that was bad. Pietism is bad, but you don't want to push off of that thing so hard that you then cease to be able to speak in biblical terms. For example, don't get to the place where any talk of obedience is you immediately labeling it as pietism, or any talk of obedience as legalism. We can't talk like that.
Christ is our righteousness, to which we would say, amen, yes he is. And knowing that Christ is my righteousness, I am now free and at rest, and can pursue obedience and good works, not for my own merit, but for the good of my neighbor and for the cause of Christ. So that's where we want to be.
Jon Moffitt: I was a fighting fundamentalist, and a lot of this stuff that the fundamentalists were for, I wasn't for it. I thought it was dumb. But there were parts of it that the attitude of standing up for what you believe—it was us against the world. If you're not careful, the world will get a hold of you and the road will take you under. These days, I'm not so much worried about the world taking us under as I am the self-righteous taking us under.
Then I changed brands of fundamentalism and I became an angry Calvinist, and then I became an angry Lordship Calvinist. What I realized is that I was not leading anyone to my side.
Justin Perdue: Notice the common denominator: it's anger.
Jon Moffitt: I was not attracting anyone. A lot of people were even beginning to agree with me, but they wouldn't join me because in their mind, if they believe what I believe in, they become like me—so they'd rather not believe it, which is sad. I have learned, unfortunately, through my own relationship in my marriage; my wife has about lost her mind with me because it was my way or the highway. That's how I presented it. You either believe what I believe, or you're an idiot, you're a legalist, you're a pietist, and everything was pietism. If she had any opinion about anything, whether I put salt on my pancakes or not, she's a pietist. It's ridiculous. You cannot throw pietism like you do on a pizza with pepperoni—you just throw it everywhere because you feel like it. You have to be careful.
We should understand the posture of Christ, where Jesus described himself as gentle and lowly. You guys do understand the fruit of the Spirit is meekness, patience, and longsuffering. These are important. I put a tweet out there that a good friend of mine told me because it was so good. He said to me, "You're not compromising if you're not always correcting." My conclusion to that is patience is the fruit of the Spirit.
At our churches, when people walk in the door—this happens at men's Bible study every week. I'll throw a question out there and a new guy who's really excited about our church and thinks he knows Reformed theology will spew out his answer, and everybody looks at me like, "Oh, Jon's going to correct him." And I don't say a thing. I say, "Anybody else have any other thoughts?" What happens is the whole posture of the group... the guys realize, "Oh, we're not going to correct him." No, he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Why are you going to crack the poor guy? He's talking so let him talk. He's not teaching heresy, it's just that that's not really what that means, but we're going to let that go.
What I learned was someone walked over, pulled the hammer out of my hand, and put honey in it and said, "You will attract more people if you use the sweetness of Christ and not try to beat them with the law." This is a true saying—it's a secular saying, but it's true—my dad used to say it to me all the time. He said, "Son, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." And you hear this as if Christ is drawing people to him because he cares for them.
The goal is for people to rest in Christ, and God's going to do that in His time frame. You just need to be patient and long-suffering with people as they're transitioning.
Justin Perdue: One of the ways that we talk about it at our church is this: if we're confident that somebody is trusting Christ and not themselves, then that's basically the criteria to be a member of the church. You need to be trusting Christ and not something else. And then yes, we have a confession of faith and you need to be willing to submit to the doctrine of this congregation. You're going to walk with us as we all look to Christ and cling to him. But I encourage—and a number of the other people at the church encourage this as well—when we have people who are newer to the church who just don't even have the categories that we're talking about, they come and they don't even know what even Reformed theology means, and they don't have categories for anything, for us, we always talk about slow drip. That's one of the illustrations that we use. You want to slow drip this stuff in people's minds over the course of time. You want to love them and then slowly give this to them in digestible pieces.
Let's be very clear: it's not that there are no venues where we debate. That can happen. But it needs to be understood that that's what we're doing. You were even talking about your men's Bible study, Jon. That's a larger group setting where this is not the time for us to debate theology. We can have a small little hang where we take a few guys, get beers together or whatever, and we're going to talk doctrine. Let's just go at it. That's fine. There's a time and a place for that. But in a general sense and an ongoing way in the church's life, in an ongoing way in your life with other people, you want to love people and then give them these little digestible pieces at a time. You want to lovingly point out where there's confusion. What you want to do is help them see not that they're stupid, but you want to help them see how they're being robbed of peace and rest, and how Christ has done something for them that's far greater than they even realize. So really what you want to do is help them see the greatness of Christ and the sufficiency of his work for them.
I'll just say this: the only time that I would get more defensive and have more of an edgy posture in being super clear on Christ and the gospel is when somebody is saying something that quite literally undermines sola fide or “faith alone”. It directly undermines the sufficiency of Christ to save sinners. Now we're getting into a Galatians type of situation where people are adding stuff to the gospel, or people are saying things that are just wrecking everybody's assurance in the room. That's when I'm probably going to step up and say, "Okay, no, here's what's going on." But other than that, we just want to continue to love people who are trusting Christ and point them to this. And like Jon said, honey is better than a hammer when we're talking to other Christians. We're trying to help them taste and see that this is good.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. The hammer is effective when maybe you're breaking down someone's self-righteousness that they think God is good with them. Take the hammer of the law; that's no problem.
Justin Perdue: The hammer of the law, not the hammer of the gospel.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. The gospel is sweet. The gospel is good news. The gospel should be something that's light. And yet somehow he turned it into something that's dark and damaging.
Justin Perdue: Or scary. Or we beat people up with the gospel. The law does that work.
Jon Moffitt: Going forward, this is kind of a little bit of a training session, two things: those of you that are part of Semper Reformanda, we should be the ones who are gently leading people along, not only in the Facebook group, but also in our online and local groups. You're going to get people who come in and are very zealous and they think they understand, but they aren't going to understand. I literally have someone who's a member in my church that was new to Theocast. It was brand new and they blew up the whole Theocast atmosphere. And they're gentle, great church members, but they took time. It takes time with people. Justin and I can explain to you that we did not come to these conclusions over a one night of coffee with somebody who introduced it to us. It was painful. It was long.
Justin Perdue: Even if the big shift moment happens pretty quickly, it's years in the making in God's providence. You're reading and wrestling with your own constitution and frame, and how that factors into it. The Lord is in control of this and He's going to accomplish His work in His people. We're just instruments that He uses.
I do agree. Simple exhortations to people I give when they're encountering this shift are, "First of all, calm down. Secondly, trust Christ. Okay? Good. Those are sort of the most simple things. Now, love other people and pursue obedience." That's it.
The other thing I would say to your point a moment ago, Jon, that you were talking to the Semper Reformanda crowd and how we want to lead well even in the Facebook group and things like that. I agree. I think that what would be awesome is if the general perspective of other people that are not a part of Semper Reformanda that are on the Theocast Facebook group, if they were to know who the people are that comprise SR, we want them to think that those people just ooze grace and charity and humility. That's the goal. Because we're all a bunch of sin-sick wretches who understand nothing on our own. We believe 1 Corinthians 2. It's in the Bible that these things are spiritually discerned and we don't discern them with human wisdom. So we ought not act like if people would just get their heads out of their backsides, that they would see this. There are better ways to go about conveying this.
Jon Moffitt: Someone recently asked Sinclair Ferguson what his thoughts are on Joel Osteen. If someone's asking Sinclair Ferguson, if they know what the man stands for, they know he doesn't agree with him. So what does Sinclair Ferguson do? He smiles and says he's got a great smile. The point of it is that we have to be careful.
I did an episode of Ask Theocast on whether the woke churches are another gospel, or BLM another gospel, etc. And these were guys who were going pretty heavy after Chandler and Platt. In the Facebook group, I have seen people call John MacArthur a heretic. I've seen them call John Piper a heretic or a false gospel. I think that it's better for us to clarify what we are for and be sure that we spend our time building a solid foundation so that people can see one-on-one and go, "Wait a minute. This one is clear and this one's confusing."
I think we also have to reserve the word "heretic" for actual heretics and not be foolish, unwise, and damaging. It causes me not to want to engage with people who quickly throw that word out. It's like when someone calls me an antinomian, they don't even know what that word means so I can't even engage with them in a logical conversation because they're using titles they don't even understand. When someone says that person's a heretic, you and I can't have a conversation because you don't know what you're talking about.
Justin Perdue: You don't know what that word means. You don't know how it's been used historically. You need to be very careful and thoughtful when using terms like that.
Jon Moffitt: Arius was a heretic.
Justin Perdue: Yeah. He’s denying the deity of Christ. That stands against the flow of the entire history of Orthodox Christianity and even just the creeds that were hammered out in the early centuries of the church. Completely different conversation that we're having there. I think charity and thoughtfulness are absolutely required of us.
I think we've communicated the gist of what we want to communicate here for our people.
Jon Moffitt: Especially when these groups are about ready to get started. We need these groups to be a safe haven where people can come and just have messy diapers, theologically speaking.
Justin Perdue: I understand that to be a faithful theologian, you need to define yourself both in terms of what you are affirming and denying. I understand that. And at the same time, if you were taking a posture where you are basically only defining yourself by what you're against and what you hate, it's just not a very winsome posture. A quick way to alienate people and make everybody angry with you is to do that, and I trust none of us want to do that. We want to be able to not only point to the things that are wrong, but we want to be able to pull people onto, like we always say, a better foundation, which is the solid rock of Christ. "See, friend, how good this is," should be our posture. " Let me tell you about this and how wonderful it is." The differences, I trust, are going to become more clear when you see what I really mean when I say that Christ is enough for you; when I lovingly point out how you may be, in subtle ways, trusting in stuff that isn't Christ.
Jon Moffitt: One last illustration I'll give: it's like you see someone who's eating some putrefying, grotesque food, but if that's their diet, that's all they know. You can walk over to them and say, "How dare you eat that? That is disgusting." All you're going to do is make them feel horrible, make them feel like they're nothing, and dumb, and stupid, versus walking over and saying, "Hey, I see that you're eating this. Have you ever tasted this?" And you hand them something they've never tasted before and they taste it and they see that it's good. And then they go, "What is this?" And you get to explain to them what is better. Paul says the kindness of God is meant to lead people to repentance, where they'll leave the putrefaction behind and walk towards Christ with gentleness and meekness.
Just to be clear, there are times for rebuking, because Galatians 6 says when someone goes back to that, we who are spiritual are to go there and restore them. I get that there are moments of confrontation. Please don't think we're not saying that.
Justin Perdue: I think we've been clear about that.
Jon Moffitt: Just so you know, Justin and I are relying on all of you. If you have ideas, concerns, updates, send them our way. We are wanting to build this community with you. We are but pastors who are trying to help as many people as we can. We are not professionals. We have no idea what we're doing. We know how to hit record and send it to somebody to edit. Thank God for Michael and Andrew. We'll give them applause right now. Without our team, we would not be able to do this and you are now a part of our team. Give us your ideas. The app should be out soon. We just want to help people rest in Christ. You're on the team to do that.
We'll see you next week.
