Hello,
welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Friends, it’s good to have you
with us as we continue on today in our study where we are going through the
Westminster Catechism, which is a shorter teaching document derived from the Westminster Confession.
We’ve been going through this together now for some time.
We are now 20 plus questions in,
and as you’ve seen,
there’s a lot of
theological substance here, a lot to reflect upon as we continue going.
And there’s a,
as we would expect in the Presbyterian system,
a very orderly process by which we’ve been traveling throughout this document.
We talked about the significant reality of human sinfulness,
a couple conversations back last week.
We talked about the reality of Jesus Christ and the real nuance of the
ways in which the Church has seen Jesus’s work on our behalf.
And now here today,
we’re not turning away from that,
though we are beginning to look at what
impact Jesus’s life has had on those who are called,
redeemed, justified,
sanctified, are all words in the orbit that we’ll be talking here today.
And so we’ll be doing our best to make some of this practical.
We’ll be trying to make
it clear as we make our way through this,
Clint, but there’s a sense here in which
we turn the focus from God’s eternal action in Jesus to God’s practical,
imminent,
real-life-ish action in our own lives and in our own hearts.
Yeah, I think as we focus today on this section,
Michael, part of what we see is how is it
that the work of Christ affects us?
How is it that it’s incorporated into our
lives?
What does it mean for us?
What does it do to us and for us?
And I would say, though,
we have traveled some significant theological ground.
It seems to me, Michael, that in some sense,
we are embarking into deep waters today.
I mean, there will be some theological terms.
There will be some theological
concepts that I think really in the Reformed faith, the Presbyterian understanding,
are loaded.
They have a lot of depth,
and I think that this is a
dense section with a lot in it that is going to call us to kind of think things through.
Yeah, it is certainly going to be asking something of us as we
travel through it, and so maybe the best way to do that is jump right in.
Yeah,
so we are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ.
Now, so inherent in the question,
redemption has been purchased by Christ,
how is it that we
partake in it?
How is it that we are included?
How does it apply to us?
And the answer here,
we are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ by the
effectual application of it to us by His Holy Spirit.
So,
the short version of
that sentence, the answer part, is the effectual application of it to us by His
Holy Spirit.
The prepositions matter there,
and we will talk about them in a
moment, but I think first, Michael,
because we are going to see it in several of
these answers, I think the word effectual maybe is something we should
unpack, and in this instance, in this catechism,
effectual means essentially the
effect it has on us,
as opposed to the idea of a general calling or a kind of
almost call for everyone.
This is how do those who are responsive to the call,
what do they do?
How are they brought in?
The word effect here is probably of
primary importance.
This is an interesting section in that I think it
adds a sort of complication to the idea of calling,
but effectual calling for
those who wrote the catechism is to say those who are actually responsive to the
call.
So, this isn’t generic.
This is very specific.
So, one of the problems being solved here is how we understand the action of a
divine God at work with human people,
and we’ve already had in the affirmations of
Jesus Christ that dual nature,
fully God, fully human, which is of course a
restatement of classical Christian Orthodox teaching,
but here as the creed
moves on and begins to ask us to look at how that impacts us in our lives,
we see that you have God who is perfect,
divine.
We’ve already talked about how he is judge, priest,
king,
how there’s this perfect encapsulation of the divinity and
the over humanness of God while yet contained in the humanness of Jesus.
That then belies the question,
if God is this perfect being,
how does God interact with humans?
How does that make a difference in a human’s life which is stained by sin,
which lives in the muck and mire and mud and difficulty of
basic human daily life?
And the answer is,
God has the power by his joining
together these two natures,
fully God, fully human.
God has the power to reach
from the divine and perfect,
and redeem is the word we have here in this section
here Clint, but it’s going to be flushed out in more ways.
God has the ability to make real,
effective,
on the ground changes in the life and experience of a
human because of God’s action.
And it’s critical that we see here,
how does that happen in this question?
By his Holy Spirit.
So it’s made effectual,
not by our faith.
The rubber meets the road of our soul,
not because we did something
right or we said it the prayer rightly or because we made our feelings turn the
right way.
No, no, no.
This is God is able to make real instrumental change in the
life of a human by the power of God’s Spirit.
Everything is gift.
It’s all great.
It’s all a thing given to us that we’ve not earned or deserved or worked for,
and
yet it is real.
And that’s what this word effectual is trying to point to.
It is actually there.
The people who are drafting this,
Clint, want us to be aware
that this isn’t some loosey-goosey,
pie-in-the-sky,
nice-feeling kind of theology.
That when they say that God has done a thing for us,
they mean God has actually
done it, and it actually makes a difference.
Yeah, you can read an answer like this without maybe understanding all of the
answers that aren’t here,
all of the alternatives that our catechism authors didn’t choose.
And I think maybe it’s most helpful to work backwards to see that.
So the effectual application by the Holy Spirit.
In other words, if you said, “Well, how do we partake of the redemption purchased by Christ?
How do we receive
what Christ offers?” Many people would say,
“Well, we make a decision.
We choose Jesus.
We go to church.
We read the Bible.” They would list something that we have to do.
They would give you the impression that we initiate the action,
that it somehow comes from us first.
And that is an unacceptable answer in Presbyterian theology.
So instead,
the authors here say it is applied to us by the Holy Spirit.
It is the Spirit’s work in us first.
Before it is our work,
before we participate, it is something that the Spirit does in us.
The Spirit itself opens our eyes
to the work of Christ.
And long before it’s some commitment on our part,
it is an action,
an effectual application by the Spirit.
And the second thing that matters here is this word
“effectual.” It’s not a matter of status.
It isn’t just “saved.” It has an effect.
It has an outcome.
It has bearing on what we do and how we live and what we say.
This isn’t simply, “We joined the Jesus Club.” This is an effectual application of what the
Spirit has done.
It moves us.
And I think, Michael,
there’s a ton of very significant
and very deep theology in the back half of this sentence.
And I think it is difficult maybe
for those who perhaps haven’t surveyed some of the alternatives or maybe don’t have the benefit of
some Reformed heritage to understand really how much is at stake in this part of the answer.
Yeah.
There may be a temptation here,
Clint, to think that this is just sort of universally held
belief or that it would be held in common by all.
I do think there is a distinctive here,
your right to point that out.
When we talk about this idea that the effectual application of it
to us by the Holy Spirit,
on one hand, every Christian is going to affirm that it’s God who does the saving.
But there are some branches of the Christian faith who imagine that relationship
between our salvation and God to be very relational and to very much require a certain
level of human input to make it happen.
And this is not to disparage that way of thinking
theologically, but it is to say that that’s not what’s being advocated here by the catechism.
When we see this by the effectual application of it to us by the Holy Spirit,
I want to make you very clear,
to us has been carefully chosen.
In other words, it’s not by us.
It’s not with us.
It’s not even for us,
though you might be able to intuit that.
But the point here is,
this is done to us by God and by God’s own self,
by God’s own will,
by God’s own purposes.
This is done in a way that is separate from our ability to stop or to contain,
even quite frankly, to understand.
None of that matters here to the framers of this,
that there’s such a high view of God’s action,
that if God chooses to do a thing to us,
God’s going to do it.
And if God, who’s perfect and is the full creator of all things,
decides it’s going to make a difference for us,
it’s going to be effective to us.
In other words, if God says, “I’m going to make it this way,” it’s going to be that way.
That’s what it means to be
the created ones serving underneath a creator God.
And that is,
it’s going to make some in
the larger Christian family uncomfortable,
but I do want to be clear that that is
intentionally chosen language.
It’s supposed to say what it’s saying.
Absolutely.
As Presbyterians, the very clear, very standard and very consistent idea is that we are
receivers of faith.
We are not instigators of it.
God creates it and we participate in it.
And I think we see that,
Michael, fleshed out if we move to the next question.
30 here.
How does the Spirit apply to us the redemption purchased by Christ?
So how does this happen?
The Spirit applies to us the redemption purchased by Christ by working faith in us and
thereby uniting us to Christ in our effectual calling.
Now we have another use of the word effectual.
We’ll cover that in a moment.
But look at this middle part.
The redemption purchased by
Christ by working faith in us.
Again,
notice the subtlety here.
Faith does not come from us.
Faith happens in us.
Faith is worked by Jesus,
worked through the Spirit and creates faith in
us.
It is not something we achieve.
It is not something we decide.
It is not something we
deserve.
It is a gift given through Christ of the working of the Spirit in our heart
that opens our eyes to that work and allows us to embrace the truth and the effect of it
by responding to it.
But it doesn’t begin with us.
And this is—I don’t want to be a broken record
here, Michael.
This is so important to these Presbyterian thinkers who were entirely committed
to the sovereignty of God and the idea that God is always the first actor and we respond.
We don’t create.
We don’t initiate.
We don’t decide.
We respond and receive to what God has given.
Yeah, the interesting way of phrasing this by saying by working faith in us,
I think, is really, really helpful to pause on because this language of redemption,
which I don’t know that we’ve
completely defined here yet,
is this theological idea that it is Jesus Christ who pays the price
for the cost of reunion with God.
The word redemption shares in our modern language that
idea of redeeming a coupon or being able to turn one thing over for the sake of receiving another.
Jesus Christ,
in giving of himself,
was able to restore the unity between God and God who is
perfect and the people who are broken.
Jesus pays the price for that brokenness and therefore
redeems or reunites or restores relationship with those who couldn’t have had it otherwise.
Here, when we talk about the fact that the redemption is done by Christ,
every Christian would affirm that, whether they would be comfortable with the exact word redeem or not.
They’re going to be comfortable with the idea that Jesus has done for us a thing
that we couldn’t have done for ourselves.
But Clint, I think the thing that’s so striking here
as we see this language,
the redemption purchased by Christ,
by working faith in us, that Jesus,
by doing this restorative work inside us,
that our even experience of having faith,
should work within us a kind of gratitude that the gift has been given to us.
And there are many,
many Christians who think of faith as a thing that is required of us,
of faith being something
that we need to manufacture.
The Reformers have no place to understand that.
They would not understand a conversation about working faith.
Faith is like the sun rising in the morning.
You’re grateful that that happens again.
Mysteriously, the sun has come again.
Let us be grateful.
They’re not going to say that we deserved it or that we,
even if we could
completely comprehend it, that we somehow can make it happen.
No, the sun rises every morning.
That’s a gift from God.
If we experience faith in our life,
they’re going to say,
“That’s a gift from God and it should be gratefully received.”
And this is not a criticism,
but there are other traditions who would say things like,
“We look at the evidence of faith and we make a decision.” We set out A versus B,
and as humans, we’re called, we’re forced to make a choice.
We have to choose,
“Is Jesus true or is something else
true?” And no disrespect,
but our tradition is so skeptical of human ability and so steeped in human
fallenness that we’ve said, “No,
we would never get that right.” The only way that we can come to
is if Christ brings us to himself,
if God brings us to Jesus and does that work in us.
It is the work of the Spirit.
It is not my work.
And so Christ’s redemption is working faith in us,
and thereby,
once we are in faith,
once faith is in us,
uniting us to Christ in our effectual
calling.
So the result of our faith,
which is a gift, is a unification,
a oneness with Christ.
And that produces in us a calling,
not just a generic calling,
again, an effectual calling, a calling on our life that has an impact,
that has a bearing.
Our faith will now direct
how we live.
And this is very,
I know, very structural,
very Presbyterian,
very logical, laid out,
but it’s extremely important to understand that for our ancestors in the faith,
there is step one and step two and step three,
because they understand that’s the only way that
it works.
Yeah, and to be clear,
we’re never in step one.
Never.
Never in step one.
I want to also
point out another thing here that we shouldn’t pass by,
the end of this phrase here in question 30.
A Christ in our effectual calling.
I want to talk a little bit about that word calling,
because that’s carefully chosen.
Presbyterians very much find in Scripture the constant theme that God speaks.
Of course, you have that at the very beginning when God speaks and the creation
happens.
God creates with but a word.
Of course, we go further.
God speaks to Moses and calls him.
God speaks to Abram and gives him a promise.
We move forward in the Scriptures.
The Gospel writer John talks about how Jesus Christ is the light,
how he’s the Son of God.
He talks about he is the one who proclaims the good news.
This idea of speaking and proclaiming a thing to be true
is very central to our understanding.
So that is actually mirrored in our worship.
That’s why we talk about this idea of proclaiming the Gospel proclamation.
It matters because we believe that God still speaks.
So in human speaking,
we are participating in a much higher divine kind of speaking.
Now, the word calling, of course, requires speech.
It requires naming something.
It requires us putting something to words.
When we say that there’s an effectual calling,
means that God has spoken over us.
Jesus says this when he talks about how God has
numbered the hairs on our head or God knows each of us by name.
This idea that we have been called
by the one who called all things into existence.
And yet there’s in the generality of God’s ability
to make all things clint.
There’s a specificity in the fact that God is able to work in real specific humans,
real specific redemptive works,
which results in faith,
which then unites us to
Christ in what is a real, proclaimed,
God-made, created kind of unity.
And, you know,
the gift of that is to say that there is a divine word,
that there is a divine,
I don’t want to go so far
as to use the word plan,
but we might see that fleshed out.
Otherwise, this idea of calling
is that God has named.
And in that naming,
there’s a kind of purpose that we find,
a kind of deeper
meaning.
And that word calling calls to mind all of that theology.
I think many Christian traditions would agree with this and historically land here,
Michael.
But I think it’s so important for the reformers that faith not only does something
to us,
changes our status,
is lost to saved,
which sometimes gets undue attention.
The reformers want to balance that with the idea that faith also does something in us.
It not only changes
our status, it changes our lives,
it changes our patterns,
our practices and our behaviors.
And so this idea of effectual calling is now fleshed out.
As we come to faith in Christ,
we receive a way to live.
We receive a calling upon who we are.
And so the next question
anticipates,
what is effectual calling?
And the answer here,
effectual calling is the work of God’s spirit,
whereby convincing us of our sin and misery,
enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ,
and renewing our wills.
He does persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ,
freely offered to us in the gospel.
So this moment when we come to faith is multifaceted.
How is the effectual calling found in our lives?
A, we understand that we are broken.
We face our sinfulness.
We have a moment of honest
confession about the reality that we are sinful people.
And we talk to this word misery.
We understand that we are in a condition that prevents us from getting to God.
We have lost communion with the holy,
enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ.
From our position of
sinfulness, we are shown the work of Christ,
and we are enlightened.
We are, again,
literally given light.
We are brought out of darkness to see what the light of Christ has done,
which then renews our wills,
changes us,
changes our intention,
changes our life.
And by these things,
he persuades and enables us to embrace Jesus Christ.
Notice we don’t do the persuading
or the embracing.
He persuades and enables us to embrace Jesus Christ,
freely offered to us
in the gospel.
There is no cost.
There is no test.
There is no hoop to jump through.
We are freely offered the grace of Jesus Christ,
and by the gift of God,
we receive the gift of God.
And again,
I know this sounds nitpicking,
but this really is the fundamental core of Reformed theology,
and if one sort of understands that,
I think you just see that stamped all over this answer, Michael.
So there are many things in our lives that we take for granted,
Clint, things that we just expect to work,
and then we realize that there’s a lot more to it when we
really get under the surface of it.
You know, it’s things like everybody takes for granted their car
when it gets them somewhere safely,
and then when suddenly it stops working and you break it
apart, you realize how complicated it is under the hood.
You have an appreciation for how much
depth of thought and engineering skill,
all those kinds of things are.
Well, that’s what’s happening here.
If you would like a class act, a primer,
and understand Christian salvation and what we
mean by that word,
this is a great place to start,
because as they begin defining effectual calling,
what they’re talking about is how it affects every part of us.
Notice the things named here,
enlightening our minds, number one,
but then renewing our wills.
Well, what does this mean?
It means that if there’s not a single part of the human experience that doesn’t need changed,
we need to think differently because of our encounter with God.
We need to also will
differently, actually desire different things,
take different actions in our life,
that there’s this all-encompassing vision which is intended here,
that when God calls us effectually,
realistically, practically,
in real life, it’s going to change not just how we think about our
world.
We need to be enlightened,
but we also need to have our wills renewed.
We need to be
different than we were before.
And then this idea that we have been freely persuaded,
enabling us to embrace Christ,
that language of enabling is important,
because what it says is,
after an encounter of the faith-giving grace that we receive by the power of the Spirit,
then we can respond to the thing that has been given to us,
the thing that’s on offer in Jesus Christ,
that it’s not that humans don’t have faith.
It’s not that we don’t really truly,
legitimately have in our hearts a transformed understanding of God’s closeness to us and a
trusting in that closeness.
But, Clint, what they’re saying is that we can initiate it,
that the faith was planted in our hearts,
that it grew because of the Spirit’s nurturing,
and that when that happens,
then we can embrace Jesus in the fullness of that gospel,
and then it begins this
beautiful cyclical cycle of God blessing,
us receiving gratefully,
and then trusting and
growing in the awareness of it.
It’s not that we’re not in the equation,
but God is always the
first actor, and we’re always the subsequent actor.
And if you’ve lived as Presbyterian your whole
life, you’ve been a Reformed Christian under this theological system, you might think,
“Oh, yeah,
sin,
sin, sin.
I get it.
I get it.
Sin.” But notice, that’s where we have to start.
That’s where we have to see the problem.
We have to understand our own inability to affect our righteousness.
And having seen that,
we then are renewed in our will and persuaded to embrace Christ.
We only can receive the gift when we understand how desperately we need it,
that we stand in need,
but that that need has been met in the gospel freely offered to us.
So, this is thoroughly Reformed in its language and incredibly important.
So, having said that, that we now receive this gift,
our wills are renewed,
our minds are enlightened,
we are what benefits do they that are effectually called partake of in this life?
So,
what is the good news of belonging to Christ?
And the answer,
they that are effectually called,
do in this life partake of justification,
adoption,
sanctification,
and the several benefits which in this life either accompany or flow from them.
So, again, keep in mind, this is a theological document,
the theological benefits,
justification,
adoption, sanctification, we’re going to debrief each of those,
and the many, many benefits in this life
that accompany and flow from them.
Very fascinating,
Michael,
that when they ask of
the realities of grace,
the rewards of grace,
what is it that we receive from Christ?
We don’t start with heaven.
We don’t start with after I die.
We start with, I think it’s very
telling that the Westminster authors structure this so that the first question is,
what are the benefits in the here and now,
in the way that I live,
in the moment that I breathe?
Because sometimes our temptation is to think that salvation is that thing that helps us after we’re dead.
But here,
we’re met with the challenge that salvation is first and foremost
about the way that we live in response to grace.
And again,
that organization of these questions is no accident.
Yeah, I want to be very clear here,
and I don’t want to go down too far of a rabbit,
whole rabbit trail here,
Clint, but this is a corrective to some misunderstandings of the
Presbyterian doctrine of election,
because sometimes Presbyterians are sort of accused
of being those who are obsessed with the people who are being left out.
And that’s especially true.
We’ve not really talked about this yet in this study,
the idea of double predestination,
some are predestined to be in,
some are predestined to be out.
We’re not going to be talking about
that a lot today.
I’m using this as an illustration to point out that the framers of this are making
clear right now that the effectual calling of God’s people should not be obsessed with the ins
and outs of tomorrow,
the who’s in, the who’s out, who was elected, who’s not elected, what’s the emphasis?
The emphasis here is,
what is the actual difference made by the salvific work in
the people of God?
And these words are shorthand,
we’re going to talk more about them,
but they’re shorthand for real life things.
Justification is a renewed relationship,
the restoration of relationship that didn’t exist.
Adoption is the restoration of our ability to relate to God as
father and not as judge.
And this idea of sanctification is that our lives are actually
being renewed and transformed.
We’re not stuck in the mud.
That the stuff that holds us down,
the ways that our sinfulness has trapped us,
that we’re free from that and that we actually can
experience a life which looks more like the intended creation that God made us to be
than the sin messes that we have inherited.
I mean, all of this is real now and in our life
kind of experience of God’s salvific work.
And so it does correct for that temptation that we have
to become obsessed with, you know,
is this all about a life insurance policy for eternity?
No, that’s not the point.
That’s not what these framers had in mind.
And that’s very clear by
the words and the theological sort of structures that they’re pointing us to at this point here
in the Catechism.
Yeah, I think it’s very significant that they start with what Jesus does
in our life.
And they use these three words,
justification,
adoption, sanctification,
two of which, justification and sanctification, are largely church words.
Adoption has a broader
context.
But these are theological words in this context.
So let’s look at each of them.
Question 33,
what is justification?
Justification is an act of God’s free grace
where he pardons all of our sins and accepts us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness
of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone.
So the short answer is that justification
is being forgiven.
It’s being pardoned.
It is the cleansing of our sins so that God through Christ accepts us,
sees us, looks upon us as if we weren’t sinful,
sees us as righteous.
And that righteousness does not belong to us.
It is given to us.
We are affected by it through Jesus Christ.
And we receive it not by works,
not by anything we’ve done,
not because we earn it,
then it wouldn’t be grace.
We receive it by trusting it.
We receive it by faith alone.
We receive it by embracing the
truth of what Christ has done for us.
And as we do,
that grace covers us with a righteousness
that belongs to Jesus but is imparted to us.
Let’s be very clear here.
We receive this
because we received this by faith,
but we didn’t get it by faith.
And that’s an important distinction,
is that by faith we’re able to accept this gift that has come.
But this word that may strike us
as strange imputed is very important because what it means is that the righteousness that has come
has not been something that we have handled or touched or a thing that we have worked for because
the moment human agency accomplishes righteousness,
it’s been stained by sin.
So when we use this word
imputed, we mean that it has come to us free and clear of our own actions.
So therefore it
belongs to us by gift,
not because it’s somehow been channeled by us.
And this idea of justification
does have a legal sense.
And to use this language at the beginning here,
where our sins are pardoned,
in our modern world,
it might bring to mind something like the presidential action where
a person can be pardoned,
right?
It doesn’t mean that the action that led that person to be held
guilty under the law no longer happened in their past.
It means that by nature of the law itself,
that person is no longer held under the authority of the law,
that they are made right
in the view of the law by the proclamation of another person.
Here,
this is not framed from the
idea of human law,
but rather from divine law, that God justifies,
makes us in right standing
with the divine one who set out and ordered the universe,
whose law we broke by our sinfulness.
But though that law was broken,
Jesus Christ imputes to us new spirits.
We are given the
ability to stand under the law because of Jesus Christ as people who are pardoned.
Not that we didn’t do those things,
but as it stands under the divine law,
because of Jesus’s work in us,
we therefore stand as those who are free.
And this,
Clint, is not supposed to be
some divine and untouchable theological rhetoric that we just sort of throw away after this study.
This is supposed to be good news.
People who stood as judged before divine,
just, mighty God, now stand as having received this imputed righteousness,
a gift of grace we receive
by faith.
Clint, we should all be celebrating in the streets.
That’s the force of this statement.
What was wrong has been made right,
and it’s been given to us freely.
Yeah, we have not been found innocent.
We have been pardoned.
And who pardons?
King,
judge.
We’ve seen that.
In this case, the ruler,
the creator.
And that pardon is found because the
penalty, the grace of Jesus Christ,
has paid that penalty on our behalf.
We have been given
a righteousness that isn’t ours,
and we stand under it,
and the effect is that we are pardoned by
that grace, and we receive it by trusting it.
We receive it by faith.
So, we then move on to this next question.
What is adoption?
Adoption is an act of God’s free grace,
whereby we are received
into the number and have a right to all the privileges of the sons and daughters of God.
So, this language,
Michael, is probably a word we’re more familiar with.
Adoption means to be
brought into a family,
right?
To be an outsider who is made an insider.
And by God’s grace,
we have been received into the number,
into the elect, into the saved, the justified.
We are among those who are affected by the grace of Christ because God has adopted us as children.
Yeah, this is not incredibly challenging to us who live in the 21st century,
American, specifically a religious landscape,
because there’s been a lot of time spent in the
last hundred years talking about sort of that father relationship.
We’ve talked a lot about
how God is good, God is loving,
and this is all rooted in the Christian tradition.
This idea of adoption,
of being taken in by God,
may not be incredibly scandalous to us, but
certainly in the ancient world,
if you want to look towards the scriptures and to some of the
first generations of Christianity,
there is a kind of scandalousness when Jesus prays to the
father and invites the disciples to do that.
That is a very,
very threatening act in first century
Galilee, for sure, because this idea that humans could in some way,
Clint, sit at the right hand
of a divine, just, almighty God is scandalous.
This idea that our brokenness would be able to
be looked over enough that we could be called sons and daughters,
that we might find that
prodigal son that we return home and the father’s been waiting for us,
this parable of Jesus.
There is this amazing note here because this is an analogy rather than familial relationships,
this chasm that the Reformers have already cast for us,
this gap between God and ourselves,
has been so restored and healed by the work of Jesus Christ that we can be as family to the Creator God.
Just sit with that for a moment.
The adoptive language is really, really
life-transforming if we are to hear it.
What’s being said here is not just a nice platitude about
it’s nice to feel a connection with God.
This is to say that we’ve been made sons and daughters of
the divine, and that’s a substantial statement if we hear it rightly.
Yeah, I think, you know,
this is the kind of language that if you really consider it for a
moment, it’s deeply impactful.
We are not simply accepted.
We are adopted.
We are made family
with a right to all the privileges of the sons and daughters of God, that we
stand in the privilege of relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
We’re not simply tolerated.
We’re not even just welcome.
We have a place in the family.
We are brought into
the home, the kingdom.
We are adopted.
We are made part of the family and treated
as son and daughter,
a precious one, a beloved child.
And, you know,
again, nobody’s going to accuse the Westminster Catechism of gushing emotional language.
But this is beautifully said,
and I think even deeper when one understands what it is saying is beautifully understood.
There is a depth to this that is staggering,
stunning, I think, when you really hear it,
what it’s saying.
Then we move on to the last of our theological words here.
What is sanctification?
Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace whereby we are renewed in the whole man
after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die to sin and live to righteousness.
So, sanctification for Presbyterians and for most Christians is the idea of what comes after faith.
What comes as a result of believing in Jesus Christ?
It is the following of Jesus Christ.
It’s our discipleship.
It’s our daily struggle to have less of ourself and to live more into
the person of Jesus Christ,
to become more Christ-like in our words,
in our actions, to turn from sin,
to die to sin,
as the language of the New Testament instructs us,
and to live into Christ.
I think, Michael, anyone who is endeavored to be a Christian for very long
knows that that’s got some peaks and valleys to it,
that can be a grind.
There are moments, it’s a beautiful,
almost easy challenge, and then there are times where it seems and feels impossible.
Sanctification is,
for most Christians,
I think where we live the bulk of our relationship with Jesus.
We’ve made the decision,
we’ve had the decisive moment where we came to
faith and we believe,
but now we try to let that belief influence who we are and how we are,
which is an ongoing struggle.
It’s just now we live in the tension between sin and righteousness
and we try to do our very best,
guided by the Holy Spirit,
to go the right direction.
So, Clint, sanctification is one of those shop words.
If you’re a pastor at some point,
you’ve had a conversation with people about sanctification.
What’s interesting to me is,
Christians have often been drawn to this idea of sanctification and the question that is so often
answered is, “How far can sanctification go?
How perfect can we be in the end?
How much sin can we
get rid of?” There’s actual,
I don’t know if this surprises you or not,
that pastors will get into debate.
Certainly theology students will get into these debates about,
“Well, how much can one be
perfectly holy?
Can you reach that?” and blah,
blah, blah, the conversation goes.
What strikes me here is the wisdom of this language, Clint.
More and more die unto sin.
And if you have some
spiritual maturity, if you’ve lived in the faith for some time,
you know that’s enough.
More and more is enough.
There’s no good fixating on how perfect can I be because the answer is you’re
never going to get far enough down the road that that question really matters.
The work for today,
the more and more is enough today.
If we’re people who’ve received salvation,
if we know
just a glimmer, I mean, I’m talking a shred of the goodness of God,
we know that we got work to do
today as we continue our journey towards that celestial city,
as we’re told in Pilgrim’s
Progress, that beautiful metaphor.
I think,
Clint, when we think sanctification,
this is a shorthand way for us to just take a moment to admit there’s stuff I need to do today.
There’s anger I need to confess.
There’s jealousy I’ve let live in my heart.
There’s unforgiveness that has festered for too long.
There’s addictions that are holding me back from a full expression of my faith.
I mean,
we could list for the rest of our time the things that have their grip on us
and the things that sanctification calls us out of.
The redemptive work of God inside us continually working here.
This is the image restoring nature of salvation inside us,
that we were marred
from what God intended and God is working to restore that in us.
You don’t need to worry
about how far you’re going to get in your lifetime.
The more and more is the task of today,
and I think that that is the great wisdom of the framers of this catechism, Clint, that
practically don’t debate the small little details of a theological idea,
work on the faith,
because we’ve all got work to do and that work demands something of us today.
Yeah, and there’s a preventative in the language itself,
Michael, I think that helps us there
because it is easy to read this and think,
okay, this is where Christians grab their bootstraps
and we go to work.
We dig in and get it done,
but listen to the language of the answer.
Sanctification is the work of God where we are renewed,
we are made new,
and we are enabled
more and more.
So even the language of this answer is couched in things that happen to us,
not that we perform,
not that we accomplish,
not the work that we finish.
It is the ongoing work
of God’s Spirit in us.
We participate in it.
We’re not necessarily in control of it.
And so, yes, there is effort to bring to the task.
The task ultimately is to let our spirits be held in check
by the working of God’s Spirit and to keep ourselves out of the way as God does continual
renewing work in us.
So it’s not that Christians don’t have work to do in trying to be better disciples.
We do.
But even that task is guided by the Spirit of God.
And I just want to point out,
Michael, the important connector of these three questions,
33, 34, and 35, if you look, you will see the words “free grace” in all three answers.
And again, no surprise that the reformers
that the authors here want us to understand that all of the good that happens to us and in us
is an opportunity to give thanks for what God does.
It is the work of God when we are saved.
It is the work of God when we act like we are saved.
It is the act of God when we live more
and more like saved people.
And to God be the glory for all of it,
and it keeps us from pointing
any of that glory at ourselves.
So, okay, let’s just take a moment here to honor,
if you’ve made it thus far,
way to hold on.
There’s been a lot today.
I mean, this is like a rollercoaster of theological
tradition and some very,
very deep words, and it belies a lot.
So if you made it this far,
I mean, go to the comments and put “I made it,” and we’ll celebrate that with you.
But I want to point something out here that I think,
Clint, is truly really important that we understand as
we come to frame the end of this conversation,
and that is justification,
adoption,
and sanctification
are all the ways that we understand this effectual calling that has happened.
I want to make it so clear that all of this has been done to us by grace.
And I know we said that
before, but this is important that we understand.
This is a radical departure from what we commonly conceive of faith.
Clint, I think a lot of people have heard that song,
“Jesus Take the Wheel,”
this idea of, you know, “Jesus take the wheel of my life.
I want you to be in control.”
The Westminster Catechism does not know what to do with that.
There’s no “Jesus take the wheel” here.
Jesus has the wheel.
Jesus made the wheel.
Jesus is in charge.
Instead, it is a surrendering of
the idea that we ever had the wheel.
It is a surrendering of the idea that we have ever been
in control, and that instead every gift we’ve been given is a gift of grace in Jesus Christ.
And the emphasis here is not one of demagoguery.
It’s not a bad word.
It’s actually intended from
the very beginning to be thoroughly grace and good news,
that Jesus Christ not only knew
the sin that beset us,
but he has the treatment and he’s already done it for us.
So the moments in life, Clint,
when if we’re honest,
we feel like it’s out of control,
like we don’t have agency,
we don’t know what to do,
that even if we do know what to do,
we don’t have the strength to do it.
We might find ourselves in the darkest night of our soul
to feel lost and isolated and alone,
not even knowing how we could make it another day.
And say it is not your responsibility.
It is not even in your ability or agency to live to the next day.
You don’t have to worry about it.
Jesus Christ has it.
When you feel out of control,
he’s in control.
When you feel like your life isn’t right before God,
you’re right.
It’s not.
He’s made it right.
I mean,
we sometimes take ourselves too seriously.
And the writers of this
are going to speak clearly to us that it is not you who you need to take seriously,
it is Jesus Christ.
That he is the one,
if we are willing to take seriously,
that the faith and trust in him will grow in our hearts,
a gift given to us by him.
And the more and more we trust him,
the more and more we’re going to discover some of those
things that we lack have been restored.
And that’s the great gift of the gospel.
Yeah, in each of these,
the foundational and fundamental word is grace,
but the modifier matters.
It’s free grace.
It is a gift to us.
The gift comes in our justification,
our forgiveness of sins.
It comes to us in our being made the family of God,
and in being called
to live further and further led by the Spirit into that righteousness as Christian people.
And then we wrap up this section, Michael,
with it mentioned that there are benefits
other than these three.
And so we just touch on what are the benefits which in this life
accompany or flow from justification,
adoption, and sanctification.
The benefits which in this
life accompany or flow from justification,
adoption, and sanctification are the assurance of God’s love,
peace of conscience,
joy in the Holy Ghost,
increase of grace,
and perseverance therein to the end.
As we move into the sort of culmination of this section,
we see here, I think, what sanctification looks like,
where the path of discipleship takes us.
We are assured of God’s love.
There are moments when it doesn’t feel that way.
There are moments when life is hard.
There are moments when we suffer.
We are assured through faith,
through grace, that we are beloved children of God,
even when life is painful.
We are given peace of conscience.
We recognize our sinfulness,
but we need not beat ourselves up with it.
We need not
continually be hampered by guilt and shame.
We are forgiven.
We come to trust that work of Christ in
us so that we are at peace in our spirit,
knowing that God is in control,
God is in charge,
and God has loved us.
We are given joy by the Holy Spirit.
Joy lives in difficult places.
We are to be people who rejoice,
who enjoy,
who bring joy.
We are to be joyful.
We are given an increase of grace.
We are to be more gracious.
We are to learn to be
grace.
We are to reflect the grace given to us,
to other people.
And grace should flow through
our lives into the lives of others.
And we are to persevere in these works,
in these realities, until the end.
We are to live our life from start to finish,
from the moment we come to faith,
till the moment we are received home,
in this grace,
joy,
peace,
and assurance of God’s love
and of God’s work.
This, Michael, I think is a beautiful answer.
It’s well-written.
I think it’s astoundingly deep, and I think if we understand it,
it is amazingly comforting.
It’s not an accident that the words highlight here “love,
peace,
joy.” These are restatements
of very scriptural, quite frankly,
commands.
And this is a treatment to the soul.
If you read the Westminster Catechism and think this is all head stuff, you’ve misunderstood it.
This is a very clear indication that faith should work within us,
the spiritual gifts of life.
And life is going to look like love.
It’s going to look like joy.
It’s going to look like peace.
And, friends, I just want to make it very clear.
Presbyterians are heady?
Yes.
I mean, we’re not going to deny that.
We’re not going to run from it.
But that has always been understood
to be a channel or a way of God’s Spirit to work in us,
these outward expressions of that inner work.
And these are really,
really good places to end a conversation as an invitation.
Survey your heart if you’re lacking in the assurance of God’s love.
If your joy isn’t there right now,
if you don’t have peace of conscience,
then these are signs for you to look within
yourself and to ask,
“Have I received in faith?
Do I trust in the work of Jesus Christ?” And all
these things we’ve talked about before in this conversation.
If I don’t see these expressions right now,
then maybe somewhere up the chain,
I have not yet fully engaged in the process,
or I haven’t fully understood,
or I haven’t fully applied my willingness to hear the good news.
And I just want to encourage you that this is what God intends are these things.
And God wants you to have them.
And that should be a good place to end is when we talk about this effectual calling.
God’s
believe that,
receive it, live it out.
And when you do,
dare to enjoy the life that God intends for you.
And if we do,
I think we’ll be surprised by the goodness that God truly has on offer.
Yeah, I think, you know, everyone who’s tried to follow Jesus,
Michael, has had these moments
where you think, “What does God want of me?
What does God calling me to do?
What does God need
from me?
What is it that God asks?” And I don’t want to minimize the question because I do think
there are specific moments where God leads us.
But if you’re ever there,
this is a good place
to start.
What does God want?
God wants us to be at peace.
God wants us to be filled with joy.
God wants us to be gracious.
And God wants us to do that over and over and over again until the end.
And that is a good road to travel if we’re ever looking for the “will of God.” That’s
a great place to start.
Friends, there’s a lot here today.
Thanks for being with us.
I hope that you’ve been challenged, encouraged, and maybe there’s been something in the history of our
church family that will be helpful to you as you seek to live out your faith today.
We pray these things for you.
May you be filled with love,
joy, and peace, and may you know the one who has called
you and whose love went so far as to do whatever was necessary to restore us to the one who loves
us.
May that be the last word and the final word that helps us persevere to the end.
Thanks.