Does the younger generation know why you do what you do? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss (8) distinctives that have got Christians “in trouble” as they’ve embraced God’s Word rather than worldly trends: (1) the sufficiency of Scripture, not the sufficiency of culture; (2) the regulative principle as opposed to the normative principle of worship; (3) Sabbath-keeping vs. sabbath-breaking; (4) the continued applicability of God’s moral law, rather than antinomianism; (5) age-integrated, not age-segregated worship; (6) theologically-sound, rather than theologically unsound music; (7) biblical manhood and womanhood, instead of egalitarianism; (8) and a culture of modesty vs. immodesty in the church.
Here’s the backdrop. For the last several decades, a growing number of families and churches have gone back to the Bible and reshaped how they live and worship. Throwing off compromises that dominated the 20th century, they’ve sought to conform their practices to age-old biblical standards. But if the foundational reasons for these changes aren’t reinforced through careful discipleship, the next generation can easily fall prey to error again.
To learn more about these (8) distinctives, check out the resources below or search our resource library here.
1. The Sufficiency of Scripture, not the Sufficiency of Culture
Do Not Learn the Way of the Gentiles
2. The Regulative Principle, as opposed to the Normative Principle of Worship
Only God Can Regulate Worship
3. Sabbath-keeping vs. Sabbath-breaking
Confronting the Thieves of Sabbath Delight
4. The Continued Applicability of God’s Moral Law, rather than Antinomianism
The Harmony of Law and Gospel
5. Age-integrated, not Age-segregated Worship
A Biblical Case for Age-Integrated Discipleship
A Declaration of the Complementary Roles of Church and Family
6. Theologically Sound rather than Theologically Unsound Music
Can I Use Any Form of Music to Worship God?
7. Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, instead of Egalitarianism
The Sufficiency of Scripture for Manhood and Womanhood
8. A Culture of Modesty vs. Immodesty in the Church
Beyond Modesty: The Supremacy of Christ in Clothing
Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today, Jason and I are going to talk about particular distinctives, distinctives that have actually gotten us in trouble for many years because they make us look really weird and different, but they actually are distinctives that arise out of historic Christianity and particularly the great confessions of the faith that have been embraced for 500 years, yet many of them were suspended in the 20th century. So we've attempted to make corrections as best we know how, but we really want to encourage particularly the younger generation to understand why we do what we do. Distinctives. Hope you enjoy the conversation.
Jason, it's pretty clear, you know, our churches have embraced things that are distinctive to the culture, distinctive even to the culture of evangelical Christianity. Very. Very. Yeah. And one of the problems it has caused us is that we look weird, right, to a lot of people that we love, a lot of Christians, you know, in our area and around the country.
But the reality is our distinctives are pretty much confessionally driven. They are old things that were pretty much dismissed in the 20th century. Yeah, none of this would have been strange 200 years ago or maybe even 150 hundred years ago. Yeah, I mean we're embracing, you know, doctrine that's really been the bastion of historic Christianity for about 500 years, and the Baptist Confession of 1689, and the Westminster Confession of Faith. But the problem with the confession is that it makes you live differently.
And I read something by Chad Van Dixhorne. He said that the confession is not simply for head knowledge. He said not simply, we're not simply committed to doctrine but committed to a particular way of life within the doctrine. And that's what confessional Christianity really speaks to. So we want to talk about some of these distinctives and we want to just pound through them.
We're going to go so fast, we won't be able to develop them. But I think we've had some thoughts about our distinctives recently. Yeah, so for me these are things that are very near and dear to our heart and I've been thinking, I've over-corrected in this sense. A great danger for all preachers is to have a soapbox that you're always mounting to talk about the favorite thing that you love. An awareness of that can make you almost never talk about that thing for fear that this becomes your soapbox and you're always talking about it.
We want church life to reflect what the New Testament says church life should be about, and so we don't want our services being many church and family life conferences. They don't exist for that. But that can mean if you over-rotate away from that, that can mean that you're not talking about your distinctives and you're not giving the people who are closest to you a sense of why you think those things are important, what they are and why you think they're important. And you might end up with a younger generation that doesn't know why you do what you do. You just do it.
They've just been doing it since they were kids. But the foundation has not been, you know, regularly enough communicated so that they really get, you know, the foundation. Yeah. In the lead-up to this, one of the things that you said to me that I thought, yep, that's it, is you can't just cast the vision and then move on and just implement the vision and never recast and recast and recast the vision. We always have to be saying it again so that people know why, what it is and why it's important.
And that's what God does. He repeats, He repeats Himself over and over again in Scripture because we need the repetition. So I think maybe we're saying we wish we had repeated more of the foundational distinctives that we have that really are confessional. For sure. So let's talk about them.
The sufficiency of Scripture or the sufficiency of culture? That's one. We believe that Scripture is sufficient. Yeah, the foundational verse for this obviously is 2nd Timothy 3, 16 and 17. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God or is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
So this is a really audacious claim. What is it? Scripture is claiming for itself that it can make you thoroughly equipped for every single good work. So there's not a good work that exists that the scriptures can't thoroughly equip you for. Somebody wants to describe modern Christianity as you have two kinds of people.
You have the doctrinalists and you have the culturalists. The doctrinalists don't change. The culturalists move the culture. The sufficiency of Scripture binds you to Scripture. It holds you there.
It actually makes you a doctrinalist. And it gives you a way because you're tethered to it to understand when you're drifting. Yeah, okay, so distinctive number one, the sufficiency of scripture instead of the sufficiency of culture. Sure, And the heart of that is maybe the desert island challenge. We have talked about that much recently.
We used to talk about it all the time. If you were on a desert island and all you had was the Bible, how would you shape this or that in your life? Actually, that's how we should be going about things because the other influences often are really unhelpful influences that have colored us in ways that we haven't even detected as we were being influenced by them, but they're completely a different worldview than the worldview that scripture gives us. Amen. Here's another distinctive.
The regulative principle of worship or the normative principle of worship. Yeah, so there's probably not a better text than Leviticus chapter 10 verses 1 through 3. Listen to this, Leviticus 10 1 through 3. Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered profane fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. So fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord.
And Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, by those who come near me I must be regarded as holy, and before all the people I must be glorified." So what happens here in this text? Nadab and Abihu take upon themselves doing things in worship which God hadn't commanded them. So this is a really important distinction. They didn't do things that He had forbidden, said you can't do these things. They did things that he hadn't commanded them to do.
There was no warrant in his word for things that they took upon themselves to do in worship. So this is really the regulative principle of worship is that we only have the ability under God to do things in worship that He has told us to do in worship. Right, and that means we can't create worship, we can't do things that He hasn't already commanded. So we want to stay with a very tight list of things that we do in worship, the things that God has commanded. That's the regular principle.
The regular principle. We are regulated. God has set the boundaries about how we worship. And the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The object of worship ought to be the one saying what's pleasing in worship, not the worshipper saying, God, you get to be pleased by this kind of worship.
We invented it, now you have to accept it. No, that's not how worship works. Yeah, and the normative principle states that you can do anything you want as long as it's not explicitly prohibited in Scripture. Right, which really widens the field a lot. John Knox in talking about this said that anything that we bring into worship that is our own creation is actually idolatry.
It's not the worship of the one true God, it's the worship of an invented God, an idol. Yeah, it puts the worship of God in the hands of the next creative guy who's persuasive enough to do something really fascinating and interesting. So the regulative principle of worship or the normative principle. Next, the next distinctive, a Sabbath keeping culture or a Sabbath breaking culture. We believe confessionally that the Lord's Day is a holy day.
It's like no other day that, that, commerce is suspended. And the day, the, the whole day is given, to, to the worship of God, Not half day, not going out to lunch, you know, after the service, not making it just like every other day, you know, blowing out and going to the ballgame. It's a holy day. Yeah, it's rest for body. Your bodies need rest for mind.
Your mind needs rest for your soul. The Puritans called it the market day of the soul. It's where you go to the market for spiritual things and acquire them for your soul. But it's not just rest, it's a holy rest. It's a rest that God has set apart to himself for us to really go and be with him, enjoy him, worship him.
Yeah, North Carolina used to have laws prohibiting work and things like that on the Lord's Day. It wasn't that long ago. Most states in our nation had those laws until just very, very recently. But it makes us weird, okay, because we don't engage the Lord's Day the same way that everybody else does around us. There are many texts for this but I think my favorite one is Isaiah 58, 13 and 14 where he talks about not trampling on the Sabbath, like keep your foot away from the Sabbath, don't be stepping on it.
If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight the holy day of the Lord honorable and shall honor him not doing your own ways nor finding your own pleasure nor speaking your own words then you shall delight yourself in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, the mouth of the Lord has spoken." So this is actually a promise from God that if you don't trample the Sabbath, but you set aside your own ways, your own words, your own pleasures, and you call it an honorable day, you name it as a day of delight, then actually you'll see your delight in the Lord increase and God will give you victory. And so, you know, when I read this, here's what I think, man, if the Sabbath is no longer in practice, what a shame. What are the levers we can pull so that we delight more in God? And God is saying, dear, here's one you can pull this day. Come apart, be with me this day.
Have your souls fed on this day. Yeah. Amen. Okay, so the Sabbath-Keyming culture or a Sabbath-breaking culture. Then next, next distinctive, the applicability of the law or antinomianism.
So, you know, our confession has a chapter that describes the proper use of the law, breaking the law into the ceremonial law, judicial law, and the moral law. And we think that's a proper distinction, you know, in the law. But we kind of live in a culture where people don't think the law of God is applicable anymore. Yeah. I want to speak out of both sides of my mouth, is that okay?
Sure, yeah. Out of one side of my mouth, I think we want to stand with those who affirm salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Apart from the works of the law. Apart from the works of the law. We want to love that doctrine, embrace that doctrine, and at the same time be able to stand with the psalmist and say, oh how I love that law, and say those things actually aren't in conflict at all.
They go together as sweetly as any two things ever could. Yeah, so the applicability of the law of God or antinomianism. That makes us different. But again, it's not something new. It's something very, very old that was rejected pretty much in the 20th century by the church.
And it's really a statement that the purpose of the law is different for the two different groups in humanity. What are the two different groups in humanity? Believers in Jesus Christ who have been saved by grace alone through faith alone, and unbelievers who, unless their unbelief changes, will be cast into outer darkness for all eternity. All the curses of the law will fall on them. The purpose of the law for an unbeliever is to warn and to stand in condemnation.
But for a believer, that's no longer the purpose. The law no longer stands in condemnation because things have been made right, not because of what you are or what you've done, but because of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done, and those matters are settled forever for the believer in Jesus Christ. But does that mean that the law no longer has any purpose at all? No, that's not what it means. It's still a standard of life.
In other words, it tells us what Christlikeness is. Believers at the time of salvation, that's not the finish line, that's the starting line in growing in Christlikeness and the law actually tells us what Christ-likeness looks like and we're supposed to pursue it wholeheartedly. Amen. The applicability of the law or antinomianism. The next, and this one again was set aside in the 20th century, needs to be recovered.
Age-integrated or age-segregated worship of God. You know, before the 20th century, the whole church gathered, all the ages gathered together to worship God. And of course, You know, we've spent many years trying to convince, trying to encourage people to bring that back, to bring the children back into the worship of God just like it always had been. Here's an interesting question. Does a fish know it's wet?
Well, probably not. Why wouldn't a fish know it's wet? Because all it knows is wetness. All it knows is a life in water. And I think that is sort of where we are in modern evangelicalism is we all grew up in pretty much the same church culture, and that includes you and me, which is an age segregated, like breaking up into age groups for large portions of church life, and that's all we've known.
And so we're wet but don't know it. Meaning, where do we get this from? Well, that's a question that is often not even considered because that's just the environment and we just keep the ball rolling. I think thousands of churches have rejected age-segregated worship in the last 20 years, something that was normal. It was the only way we ever did it in the 20th century.
And So it's a good trend, but it's a distinctive because the Bible actually presents age-integrated worship. So the next distinctive, generational culture or youth culture. Now this has to do with a number of factors, factors of manhood and womanhood. It's tied to the commands of God for the church. The older women teach the younger women, the older men teach the younger men.
You have a generational culture in the church, not one where the generations are divided. Because God actually has designed the mature to teach the immature. You know, foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child and you don't need foolishness to mentor the foolishness. You need maturity. In some ways it's the same as the last distinctive.
Age integration or age segregation. But here's I think the point. The generations need each other. The sum total of what is needed for any believer isn't contained within a single generation. And everybody is probably familiar with the term echo chamber.
It's a really important term to just understand and to think about, because an echo chamber is essentially a group of people that only have a single voice, only see things the same way. And actually, generationally, across the age ranges of your life, you actually see things differently, and we actually need the multitude of perspective. It rounds us out in a way than staying within an echo chamber or staying just with peers. That's not good or healthy. Yeah.
So that distinctive is a generational culture or youth culture. And that does make us a little bit different and causes us problems. Hey, there's some frailties associated with youth. Youth isn't to be despised, especially youth in Christ. There's a lot of zeal and energy that can be harnessed for the kingdom of God in very powerful ways and that actually the church needs, but there are also some particular blind spots and frailties associated with youth having not experienced the things that people decades later will have experienced.
And so a youth culture can have a multiplication of foolishness effect, meaning youth can be given to foolishness and when you put more youth together, then you get a multiplying effect on that. Yeah. So the next category has to do with music, singing, and it's really a subset of the worship of God, Newton or Hillsong, okay? What do we mean by that? What we mean is that what has arisen in the culture are actually heretical groups that are producing the most popular songs in the church today.
The three most popular platforms, the largest platforms, are actually heretical groups. And I think what we want to say is, let's stay with outlets of sound doctrine. And again, you have musical genre waves that roll over the culture. You have to be very careful with where those genres lead. I think we would acknowledge that both Bethel and Hillsong, they've they've actually created some beautiful songs that are sound and elevation and elevate and elevation change.
But these are heretical groups. Okay. And I think what we would say is, we don't want our people to be led into those groups by their music. And this is easily misunderstood as old versus new. Newton, a couple of hundred years ago, Hillsong being modern.
It actually isn't that at all. There are people who are producing music today that Newton himself could have produced a couple hundred years. So it is not old versus new at all. It has to do with theological accuracy, theological truthfulness, theological depth, which can be found in old and new songs. And you can find old songs that are heretical to or theologically unsound or theologically shallow.
So really is an old versus new. Yeah. Yeah. And we're not saying you can't sing a song just because somebody fell away from the Lord. You know, this type of thing happens.
But I think that's a different environment that we have right now where you have massive, massive heretical platforms that actually are producing some good music. I've thought of it as those good songs are kind of like an angel of light and so we should be very, very careful. But a lot of this has to do with the culture and this is probably one of the most difficult subjects, music. Because music changes over time, you know, there are various genres. We didn't really have genres of music pretty much until radio.
So things have changed quite a bit and I think what we want to say is stick with sound doctrine, stick with historic doctrine, doesn't have to be old. We're not saying that Victorian era music is the holy music. We're not saying that. So next, pragmatism or biblicism? I don't know if biblicism is the perfect word to use, but it rhymed.
So you know, you know, I think what we want to say is the word of God should be the central concern, not pragmatic matters. Again, in the 20th century pragmatism ran the gauntlet in the church, and there were so many foreign inventions that were inserted into the church. And some of them we've actually addressed here in terms of age-segregated worship and things like that, the rise of youth culture. You know, I mean, you could... Pragmatism, you know, was implemented, you know, by people who figured out you could grow a really big church by doing really innovative things.
Yeah. A simplistic definition of pragmatism is do what works. You're right. And what we want to say about that and kind of address towards that is, actually, God knows what works. If your definition of what works is what draws a big crowd today, then that's the wrong definition and you're actually solving for the wrong variable in your math.
God actually knows over the long haul what's good and what honors him and that's actually what we should be solving the equation for. Yeah, amen. Let's talk about biblical manhood and womanhood or egalitarianism in the church. We live in an environment where women are doing a lot of the speaking and reading and things like that, but you got 1 Corinthians 13, 34 that says, let your women be silent in the churches for they're not permitted to speak. And it's shameful for a woman to speak in church.
And then you have 1st Timothy 2, 11, you know, which says that a woman should not have authority over men or teach in the church. So this is incredibly, it's incredibly counter-cultural and offensive to say things like this But we think the Bible is true. You know, why shouldn't women be speaking in church? There's really only one reason The Bible says they shouldn't yeah So Scott a couple of things about biblical manhood and womanhood that I want to say. First is, I just hate it that the view that unless men and women can do all things identically that one becomes a second-class citizen.
I just hate that because biblical womanhood is so beautiful. It's so full. It's so free. It encompasses so much that the thought is unless I can do everything a woman can do that I'm second-class or a woman can do everything that I can do that I'm second-class. No, that's not what the Bible teaches.
I think we just want to reject that out of hand and just say that what the world has been offering, which is infiltrated into the church, is that a woman can have everything. She can have it all. She can have the vision of the Bible and everything else that a man can do. That's actually not true. By embracing one, you forfeit the other.
So women actually have to make a choice, and we just want to say by experience we've seen the vision of the Bible for women is better, and you can't have both. The other thing I want to say is the egalitarians, those who reject gender roles, have taught hermeneutical tricks to other people, and they never intended to. Meaning, they wanted to erase gender roles, but they wanted to hold the line on homosexuality in ministry, in church membership, and things like that. Oh wait, you actually taught them the Bible interpretive sleight of hand that now are being used by the other groups because you've told them it's okay to handle the Bible in this way if something that seems to be the plain reading of the text isn't in favor with where you want to go. Now the other groups are latching on to the tricks that they taught them and this is the unintended consequence.
Yeah, amen. And at the same time, a harmonious biblical connection to manhood and womanhood is a power play. It's a beautiful thing. Yes. Okay, so these are some of the distinctives.
They get us in trouble, you know, pretty regularly. Hey, we want particularly the younger generation to understand why we have these distinctives. We really have these distinctives because they arise out of historic Christianity. We didn't make them up, you know, in the 21st century. We've really actually embraced what had been embraced.
The 20th century was a period of apostasy in many ways, setting aside the Word of God for the sake of our traditions. And we want to encourage a call back to the Word of God and the heartbeat of it all, the sufficiency of Scripture. And we know that we haven't produced the ultimate church with these distinctives, But they're important for the things that we have that are good and healthy, owe something to these distinctives too. And We really want those who come after us to build upon them, not abandon them and go back into things that are actually harmful that we came away from. We want our children to Embrace them and go further than we did.
We don't want them to go back to Egypt No, we don't want them to go back to the 20th century We don't want them to have to repent of the things same things we did a quarter of a century ago That's true. Amen Okay. Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time. Helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.