How A Confessional understanding of the Church - In this interview, we will examine portions of the 1689 London Baptist Confession to glean wisdom for family life in the local church.

Hey, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Let me tell you a couple of things real quick before we get going. Hope you can come to our Theology of the Family Conference at Richcrest, North Carolina, May 20-23. Just Before that, a singles conference called Holiness to the Lord, May 19 and 20. Also go to our website.

We have lots of resources, over 5,000. Churchandfamilylife.com. Also, I just published a book called The Family at Church, How Parents Are Tour Guides for Joy. I think this book could really help sweeten your local church experience. Okay, let's get on now with the podcast.

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast, and I'm Scott Brown, and I've got with me Jason Doane from Sovereign Redeemer Community Church right up the road. Hey Jason. Hi Scott, good to see you. Okay, well Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture for the spread of the gospel across the generations. And this week we're going to discuss how a confessional understanding of the church can really set your family up to love the church, to experience the richness that God has invested in church life.

And so we've got Dr. Sam Waldron with us. Hey, Sam. Hello, brothers. Good to be with you.

Thanks so much. So, Sam is the Dean and Professor of Systematic Theology at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, and he's also a pastor at Grace Reform Baptist Church in Owensboro, Kentucky. And Sam, boy, I'll tell you, I just yesterday or maybe, well, maybe it wasn't yesterday, recently this week, somebody was asking me if I had an extra copy of your commentary on the Baptist confession. So, I went into my library and I did not have an extra copy. But so you wrote the book on the Baptist Confession, but I want us to talk about how a confessional understanding of the church can be a blessing to a family.

And of course, all three of us here subscribe to the Baptist Confession of 1689, and it has a very rich section on the church, chapter 26. And so I'd like us to talk through some of the things that are there and how this kind of understanding can help us have a healthy view of the church and can actually make church life sweet. So I think that's what we really want to do. What comes to mind, Sam, when I say these kinds of things? What comes to mind?

The fact that the confession teaches us that church is not a take it or leave it thing, and that our commitment to the church is not governed by our own druthers or desires, It's governed by a covenant commitment to Christ and to the churches of which we're members. Very interesting you'd say it that way. You know, one of the observations in this strange time of COVID-19, when churches, many churches have not met for six months, which is astounding. None of us ever thought that this kind of timeframe would be in play. But, you know, many churches, most churches around us anyway, who have been quote unquote meeting, haven't really been meeting.

They've been masked up, they've been ushered in one way and out another, and the protocol was to try to keep people from talking to each other, keep people, you know, from getting closer than six feet. So most of the people have not been practicing actually Christianity in terms of local church life. I'm pretty sure that one of the major reasons churches have operated that way is they don't have a confession to guide them. They don't, they haven't embraced propositions about the church that tell them that there really are things they are obligated to do, and they haven't been thinking biblically about the church, so they have been comfortable with doing whatever, like having live stream church with their pajamas on. So, I really think a confessional understanding of the church is pivotal for a time like now.

Amen. I think one of the big things is Scott that there hasn't been a commitment to the idea the churches actually are supposed to assemble that a church is an assembly and when it is symbols it is obligated to do certain things. This really puts a lot different constraint on emergency declarations and keeps them in our minds emergencies and not steady state kind of things. Right, I think we were told that this would last a couple of weeks and we thought that that was true and found out that it wasn't. So there are many different elements in this chapter that I think are centering that are very helpful to help families have real devotion to local church life.

And, you know, Article 3 really strikes me, which admits that churches are imperfect, that they are, quote, unquote, subject to mixture and error. Every church has its flaws, but you find people who get disconnected from local churches because of flaws. Now this article acknowledges that there are actual synagogues of Satan that you should run away from There are churches that you shouldn't go to So it acknowledges that but do you have any comments about this acknowledgement in Article 3? Oh sure, you know it's really sad isn't it when you see people, oh I had a problem in a church 15 years ago, I haven't been back to church since. Well just a second, I mean I want to take them back not only to our own confession but to the Nicene Creed which has four articles I believe in the Father.

I believe in the Son. I believe in the Holy Spirit and I believe in the church And say look The fact that you had a problem the fact that you have had a bad experience doesn't give you a right to disregard all the teaching of the new of the bible of the new testament particularly about the church you know I were I'm really glad the Apostle Paul didn't think that way about Corinth and the troubles that were there. And he wasn't asking people to leave Corinth, even though there were divisions and lawsuits and immorality, but that they should obey the Lord through the tumult in that church. So, what is a confession? Well, it's not Scripture.

It's subject to Scripture. It's beneath Scripture, but it's an attempt to represent what Scripture teaches across a category, because the Bible is not organized by categories. And the confession that we subscribe to has a very high view of the local church. It teaches that the local church is important. It's a big deal.

Well, that's because the authors of our confession believed that Scripture teaches from Genesis to Revelation that the gathering of the Lord's people is a big deal. So the confession teaches a high view of the local church. So a confessional church comes to a time of crisis like Ren now and says it's not right to stop meeting for a prolonged period of time, because actually the gathering has always been important. Old Testament, New Testament, anywhere in the Bible, the gathering of the Lord's people has always been important. It's a high view of the local church.

In fact, in Article 5, there's this acknowledgement that God commands us, and I'll just quote, to walk together in particular societies for mutual edification. So there is this life of walking together. That imagery of walking, I think, is really helpful and really powerful. You know, if you're part of a church and you're not walking together with the saints for mutual edification, you're not experiencing church life the way that God designed it. And the confession uses the language of particular society.

Well, a society is a socially interacting group of people, right? That's what it must be. That's what a society is. And you're going to walk together in such particular societies, which means you have to meet and And at some level you have to be able to eat together, you have to be able to, well certainly eat the Lord's Supper, but even other meals occasionally, and you have to be able to talk, and those things are not optional, They're part of what it means to be in a church. It's very interesting, you know, with the live stream movement you have people who have actually become content not to be in a particular society, but to be disconnected from that society, however, being connected to the message of the preacher, you know, in that society.

And the beautiful thing about the local church is that it's highly integrated. It's not a disembodied message. If God intended it to be that, we could just sit at home and read our Bibles. We would even have no need for a preacher. But God's design for the local church has been highly integrated.

It is the message with the messengers, with the relationships, with generations together, all these things working together for our encouragement. You know, there's another set of words that communicate that same thing. In Article 6, it says that church members willingly consent to walk together, giving themselves up to the Lord and to one another. Sam, what does that mean? Giving yourself up to the Lord and giving yourself up to one another?

Yeah Well, the language of giving themselves up certainly speaks of the kind of saving faith or entrustment to Christ that involves a kind of covenant commitment to Him that's symbolized in baptism and in continuing the ordinances of the church and And so when you're giving up yourself to him and to one another, it means that there's something more than an informal or casual commitment to the other brothers and sisters in your church. There's something much deeper than that, much more formal than that, much more covenantal than that. And I think that's a really important perspective to have. If you don't have that kind of commitment, you really don't have the kind of commitment that a church is supposed to embody. Sam, what does that look like in everyday life for a family?

I think it looks like, I think it looks like, spending a lot of money on food for one thing for other people. This, that's what it looks like in my family. And, it looks like, your wife making food for on another. It looks like, it looks like, spending time with, we had a, I guess I'll interact with this, just on the basis of the last couple of weeks We had an amazing Providence in our church a family had a baby and Lost a baby on the same day. No and The girl that lost the baby was seven and a half months long.

What it looks like is the whole church pitching in to make a meal for all the family that came to grieve with her and and Consoler from another state actually they were from North Carolina And what it looks like is the church pitching in to make meals for that family for the next week and at the same time the church pitching in as our church has done to make meals for the family that had a lovely little girl one family lost a lovely little girl and the other family was given a lovely little girl and so and it looks like that kind of interaction how do you do that kind of interaction if you're gonna let the state continually tell you that you can't you can't even get close to each other you can't eat together all this is too dangerous well I don't know how to do church under those kind of constraints. Right, and you know you talk about taking meals to people when they need help. Our church does that too, and there's a wonderful connection that happens. You have a family that is taking the time to prepare the meal, they're thinking about that family, probably praying for that family, and then they go take it, they deliver it, And there's just a heightened connection that happens when you do that for somebody, and it's a very good thing.

Now in our church, we have, and Jason does this too, at Sovereign Redeemer, we have a fellowship meal every Sunday, and all the families bring food, but there's a significant impact in the social structure of the church and the connections when you eat 52 meals together a year. It really changes the sociology of the church, and it sweetens it. It hapifies the church, because people are there enjoying this wonderful meal, and the kids are all there, and it's just a huge blessing. We've been talking about particular things that the confession, the specific confession that we all subscribe to teaches, which can definitely help a family. But just to zoom out for a minute, confessions in general, confessional churches in general, in what ways, Sam, would you say that a church subscribing to a confession, ours or another one, helps a church, helps a family over the long haul?

Oh, well, you know, in our day and age especially, with the prevalence of social media and all sorts of of things like that and and how quickly views and attitudes can change and waves can cross Facebook in one direction and across Facebook in another direction. I think it's a tremendous thing for a family to have an anchor of that. And in which which you say this is what we believe the Bible teaches, this is what our forebears for 15 or 20 generations have said about what the Bible teaches, we see it in the Bible ourselves and instead of just being kind of anchorless the ship of the family has an anchor that goes down deep rest on the solid bedrock of the of the ocean floor of the Word of God and holds it in place and keeps it from being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. That's what comes to mind. I love your imagery of the storm because, you know, while the storms blow, you're called together to pray, you're called together to sing, you're called together to read the Word of God, you're called together to speak the truth in love, You're sort of called out of the storm in many ways, and into sort of the safe place, the secret place of the tabernacle of the Most High, where you can weather the storm like that.

I think that's a really critical matter. Families need to be brought out of themselves and into the community and into the power of the Word of God. So, through the prayers of the church, through the singing of the church, if it's rightly regulated, as well as the consecutive scripture reading and the preaching there's a there's a unifying of the of the families of the church around the Word of God and there is a there is a Stabilizing effect on the people who will participate in that, you know, Sam I was I was grateful you had a chance to look at my new book which hasn't come out yet the family at church how parents are tour guides for joy, and I really wanted to communicate in that book how important it is that families come and they sing, they sing to one another, they teach one another through the singing, and they experience all those things. And the whole proposition of that book is, preach the gospel to your children a thousand different ways through local church life. Milk it for all it's worth.

And I really am writing to young families. Any thoughts about all that? I know you took a look at the book and and and or st yeah I I I just I couldn't agree more that children need to be in worship and they need to worship with their families and they need to be trained up in that worship from a very young age. And the notion of taking them out from under the ordinary means of grace, at least observing them, observing the congregational singing, the pastoral prayers, the men of the church praying, the scripture reading. All the things that want to extract children from that context, I really, I think, in many respects, a manifestation of lack of faith and God's appointed means of grace and And this is one of the reasons I like the book so much is because I think we need to have but we need to have our children with us, and we need to have a vision of what can be accomplished by having our children with us in worship.

Amen. Hey, let's talk about the matter of discipline. Article 7 talks about commands and rules and discipline in the church. So when a family is connected with the church, there's discipline, and there are different, you know, really life-giving things that flow from being in a church where there's discipline. You have, you know, husbands are held accountable, they're not the only authority in their families that you, they actually are being spoken to and maybe even corrected for bad treatment of their children or their wives.

You have, you know, the whole family is really under the scrutiny of the word of God and exposes itself to discipline. Talk about that, Sam. How is, how is that a helpful thing? Well, hopefully a lot of, a lot of what's going to happen will be Christian ever want to see to get to football and church discipline, but in my younger years, They used to talk about a kind of proactive or What was the word that was used? Anyway a formative church discipline formative.

Yeah, right. Yeah, and I Think that it's good for families fathers mothers To to live under the sense of the authority of the church. Sometimes I tell people in our church when I'm preaching that whether they know it or not, they're members of a religious order. And they are. That's what Matthew 18 teaches.

They're members of a religious order, they're accountable to that religious order. And I think there is a healthy structure that puts on the family. In terms of calling the family, the father and the mother in particular, trickling away from a loose and careless way of living, and back into a structured commitment to the discipline of the local church and to their obligations to the Lord in the local church. And of course, in a healthy church, there's a call to regular self-discipline. That is what preaching is.

It's the Word of God being brought to bear in the categories of life to call us to discipline ourselves so that we don't require the external discipline of our brethren. Yeah, and also, you know, all these matters point to the various jurisdictions that God has established, the jurisdiction of the family, jurisdiction of the state, the jurisdiction of the church. In fact, I'm getting ready to do a conference at the end of October called Jurisdictions Under Fire, Church and Family and the Balance, and It's so critical that we preserve the jurisdictions that God has established, and the preservation of the jurisdiction of the church, the authority of the church, the preaching of the church, the practices of the church, is so critical. And people, you know, people who call themselves Christians, you know, easily dismiss the jurisdiction of the church. And you have lots of people who they won't join churches, they don't think it's biblical, they don't want to come under that kind of scrutiny.

They don't want to subject themselves to discipline, even to preaching, even to the normal things that are supposed to happen in a church where you're speaking the truth in love to one another and things like that. They just don't want anybody to mess with them. Yeah. Amen. Amen.

I think it's really important for us to continue to preach the notion that the elders of the church, I was just saying this Sunday night, as well as the fathers and the family and don't derive their authority from the state the state doesn't give the elders their authority in the church doesn't give fathers their authority in the home though they're they're directly accountable to God and their authority comes directly from God. It's one of the reasons we believe in the independence of the local church, but it's also one of the reasons we believe in the right of the family to do what's right for itself and not be under the thumb of the state in terms of the tasks that God has given to the family. Amen, amen. Well, Sam, here's what I'd like you to do here as we wind this up. I'd like you to look eyeball to eyeball with families, with parents, and I want you to inspire them to embrace a biblical view of the church, and particularly to embrace the view in the 1689 Confession.

1689 Confession echoing the word of God teaches that the church is an essential part of the Christian life. I once preached it this way. When you look at what a Christian is in the New Testament, the Christian of the New Testament everywhere always is a part of a local church. The Christian New Testament is everywhere always in subjection to pastors. A Christian New Testament is a part of this society that practices baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the keeping of the Lord's Day.

Holy and Christian worship That's what a Christian is in the New Testament And and and the question has to be asked of a lot of of young families a lot of professing Christian families a lot of professing Christians in our day and the question needs to be asked. Where are you in this picture? The fact the matter is a lot of people are no place in that picture They say they're Christians, but when somebody comes and takes a photograph of the church on the Lord's Day I just saw one from a dear brother's church where they were meeting for the first time in new facilities this last week they're not in the picture and and what I want to say to a lot of professing Christians is look you're not in the picture the New Testament gives us of what a Christian is. Why aren't you in the picture? Where were you?

And where are you is the question we need to raise. Amen. Jason, any final comments on this? I would just say this. For those of us, and I'm really speaking to pastors now, who have a high view of the local church, and I'm assuming pastors have a very high view of the local church, we're committing to make a significant investment in the lives of the people who are part of the church.

And so, we're asking for a significant investment from those people, a significant commitment, and our hope is that we'll be able to live life together in a local church for a long period of time. I believe that pastors and churches who are asking for that kind of commitment and investment from people owe it to those people to let them know exactly what they think the Bible teaches in the different categories, and particularly about church life. And a confession is a way to do that. A confession is a way to tell people who you're asking a significant commitment of exactly what they can expect if you hope to live together for a period of years. Yeah, the beauty of the confession is it just outlines the basic elements of church life, and it's pivotal for coming to biblical order in the church.

Right. And that will help you come to biblical order in your family as well. So thank you. Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate your time.

Keep charging on. I can't wait to see you next time. And Check back with us next Monday for this podcast and and don't forget that scripture really is sufficient For church and family life. God bless you. We'll see you next time Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.