Did you know that there is a wrong way to pursue holiness? It is very easy, especially for those who have grown up in a Christian society that had no concern for holiness, to overreach and swing to the other side of the pendulum. History has seen this pendulum swing between antinomianism and legalism before and we need to be on guard against the same knee-jerk today. We don't want to swing so far that in twenty-years there will be conference to undo our wrong pursuit of holiness. 

The following message is a presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches where we're proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. More information about the NCFIC is available at www.ncfic.org Well, good morning. I want us to be wise in matters that matter, and holiness certainly is a matter that matters to the Lord, and it ought to matter to us. But I do want it to matter to us for the same reasons it matters to the Lord, and I want us to, I want for my own self to pursue it in a way that is in harmony with the way that he would have us pursue it. So we're going to look again at some things that have happened in the past.

Two very earnest ministers who were leaders of international movements that were particularly concerned about holiness. But these two ministers, under the pressure of watching a moral decline that they suspected in their movements, made some choices in order to promote holiness, they felt, but these choices, in my opinion, stepped outside of the biblical pattern and the cure that they offered for the disease became worse than the disease. So We're gonna look at the lives of Richard Baxter and John Wesley, but before we do why don't we pray? Our everlasting King we come to you and we Seek your face together God Where else would we go you have words of everlasting life? You have opened our eyes and you've shown us that Christ is the Holy One of God Father we come to you because we are a needy people but not only that but because you are so infinitely sufficient for us and you are willing and able.

We come to you because you have set your son, our kinsman, upon a throne of mercy and grace. So we do need these things, Father. We need mercy for the ways that we have failed to apply the word. We need grace in order to pick up our lives and to press on. God, we are grateful that the whole issue of holiness was not something that we invented.

It's not a scheme that we have manufactured, nor have our forefathers. But it is your glorious plan. It's you, God, that began the great work of salvation. Father, You have orchestrated all things that we need for our rescue in eternity past. We worship you, Son of God, for coming and procuring it by your life and death.

And Holy Spirit, for applying it to us, for seeking us out, for chasing us out from behind every false hope, our willful ignorance, our religion, our morality. God, you hunted us down and just at the point when we felt that surely we would be destroyed, you showed us the cross and you broke our hearts with your love. God, we pray that having begun a good work, not just in us as individuals, not just in homes and little churches, but the great work of salvation across this globe and down through the generations, we pray that we in our day might cling to you. And God that we would be a demonstration of the reality of Christ. Show us yourself again.

And then God we pray that you would show others who you are through us. We ask that you would help us Lord as we consider the work of your children in times past. Help us to learn from the things they did well and the ways that they aired. And we ask all these things Father in the name of Christ. Amen.

Well as I mentioned we want to be wise and wisdom would include learning from the past. I think that as Americans we would have to say that there is a general observable pattern, and that is we are, of all cultures, we tend to be a very gung-ho culture. And so when we go for something, We go all the way. And you know, if you think of a pendulum, as Americans, as evangelicals, we reflect our culture. And while other cultures may not be so extravagant, we are.

We tend to be all the way over here, and then we tend to be all the way over here. So there is the temptation that we feel to overreact to genuine problems in the church. And our overreactions then become problems 20 years down the line. So this is kind of what it looks like. The Lord teaches us some things, we rediscover truths in the scripture that have perhaps been neglected.

We're excited about these new truths. Then we look around at the general religious culture and we're horrified to see that things are worse than we expected, and the temptation comes to then overreact. The key, I think, to this problem is to realize that the safest place as a believer is not the furthest place from the error that you're viewing, alright? The safest place is the pattern of Christ. So in other words, if we see, with this topic of holiness, if we see the importance of holiness in a way that we haven't seen before, and then we go home and we look around at the general religious culture that we live in, and I live in a very religious area, the Mid-South, and we're bothered by the fact that it's not just the world out there, but it's those that claim to be believers that are unconcerned with holiness.

The temptation will always be to react to that. And the reaction we're tempted to have is that we think that the safest place is to be as far from the casual Christianity of our day as possible. So here's a version of religion of Christianity that doesn't talk about holiness at all, and we say well then we've got to go as far from that as possible. But if you do that, it is guaranteed that in 20 years, the problems that we create by overreacting will be the problems that in 20 years people will be having conferences about and how to correct what we did. And you can see this down through the ages, especially in our culture, just back and forth.

And so I don't want to waste the next 20 years emphasizing holiness in a way that someone else in 20 years will have to correct. So we don't want to go as far from unholiness, so to speak, as far from a casual and careless Christianity as possible to cure the casual and careless Christianity. We want to go to Christ. Now, this is a thing that is particularly tempting to people who are concerned about holiness. And this is a thing that is particularly dangerous when the culture around you and the spiritual needs around you become a pressure cooker, and they put the pressure on you, and in the midst of the pressure of seeing unholiness, we make decisions then that overreact.

And I mentioned that we'll look at the lives of two men from the past. Now these two men, very different in some ways and very similar in others. Richard Baxter was in the 17th century, all right, so the 1600s, and he was a Puritan, he was an Anglican, he was eventually put into prison for a short spell for rejecting Anglican issues, Baxter was a Calvinist. Later, nearly 100 years later, a man named John Wesley, who was also an Anglican, but he was a very Armenian Anglican, found the same problems. Both of these men were distinguished for their concern for holiness.

Richard Baxter wrote about 30 volumes. John Wesley's works are available now in 14 volumes. And the majority of their writings really deal with holiness. Richard Baxter, for one, wrote a book on what they called cases of conscience back then. Now a case of conscience, we don't use that word anymore, that phrase, but it was a book in which Baxter, as a pastor toward the end of his life, he took all the questions that pastors always get.

Like, what do you do if at work you work with unbelievers and they mock Christ? How should I respond? What do I do that if in my marriage I see this happening? What do I do if, And so Baxter lists all these pastoral questions and he gives all these very specific answers. So Richard Baxter was very concerned about holiness.

So was John Wesley. Both of them were leaders of national movements. Baxter was a leader in the Puritan movement, and John Wesley was a leader in the Methodist movement. Both of them saw what they feared to be a moral decline in their movements, and both of them reacted to this moral decline in a way that was unbiblical and brought real damage to those that followed them. Well, let me give you a historical refresher course.

Now, I know it's early in the morning, but we're doing history, all right? So I'm sorry, We're doing history. All right, I try to keep it from being boring, but you're going to have to put your thinking caps on, okay? And I will skip over all the super unnecessary stuff, right? So hang with me.

First, Puritanism, 17th century. Actually it began in 1558, we could say, because in 1558, Queen Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth I. Now what this means is this, all the reformation stuff of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and all that that's been going on on the continent and has been bleeding over into England but has been rejected by Roman Catholic England. All that that's going on is now under a monarch who will allow a certain amount of compromise, so the Elizabethan compromise. So the English church looks like this.

Kind of Roman Catholic on the outside, but Protestant at the heart. Now with this compromise, nobody's really that happy except the people that aren't that interested in religion. The Roman Catholics certainly aren't happy, but neither are the Protestants. And there was a group of Protestants who never really ever were happy with this compromise, and they were nicknamed Puritans. By the way, that was not the name that they chose for themselves.

They didn't get together and say, what are we going to put on our website? Well, let's choose Puritan. That was a slur. You think you're pure. You think you're purer than the rest of us.

So they were called other names as well. One of them was precisionist. You're so precise. Now the Puritans in 1558, it's a group of ministers and people who want to see the Church of England continue in its reformation and to be purified of unbiblical aspects in their opinion. Now what happens is this, for the next nearly 100 years, These people continue to preach and to pray and to write books in hopes of purifying their church.

But they are not allowed to really assume positions of great influence. So generally the Puritan did not get appointed to be a bishop or an archbishop in the church. So the good news is this. What we have today through Banner of Truth, Sprinkle Publications, Soli Deo Gloria Publications, we have Writings of men who were never allowed to really be influential in a big way in their denomination But they were able to print and so having printed we're able to benefit from it Well, Richard Baxter was one of those leaders, and as I mentioned, he had 30 volumes. He was a pastor of a little town called Kidderminster in England, I've been there.

There's a big statue of him there now. I went and rubbed his foot. It didn't help me at all, but I did it, alright? Deep down, I am a Roman Catholic, I think, all right? Now in 1664, nearly 100 years after Elizabeth becomes queen, Church of England, because of some political intrigue and their own civil war issues, the Puritan attachment to the parliamentary side, alright, so a lot of stuff.

Puritans are kicked out of the Church of England. Basically they're told this, if you want to stay a minister in this church, you're going to have to do what we say and these are some things that we expect from you." And the things that were expected were custom designed to make Puritans mad. And so the Puritans said, I can't do that. And so the Church of England officials said, then get out of the church. And so they were kicked out and they became what we call separatists, Baptist Presbyterian Congregationalists.

What happened after that was 70 years of moral whiplash. In fact, things got so bad morally, especially in England and Wales, that even those that were godless, but were in positions of political leadership were shocked. The common joke of the day was that Parliament and the House of Lords were gonna meet and they were gonna have a vote on the 10 Commandments. They wanted to remove the word not. Now that was a joke, but it shows the attitude.

Thou shalt commit adultery. Thou shalt murder. Now when the moral downgrade was felt to such a degree that even non-Christians were bothered, they tried a number of solutions, and it's fascinating, but let me just give you two. One was they published, they began to publish, the Church of England began to publish a whole series of books on how to live out the Christian life. I would call these the moralistic literature.

And now the things they said in these books were really good. The problem about these books was that they skipped the doctrine of regeneration. So they assumed that because you were a church of England and your children were baptized into the church and you attended church on Easter and Christmas, that you're already a genuine Christian, you're in the family of God, you just need to be given some instruction about how to do that. And so there were books on how to lead your family in prayer, how to lead your family in devotions, how to approach the Lord's Supper, and so books on how to, but they skip the issue of regeneration. So what happened was, and this was a wonderful byproduct, that people who were morally earnest but not yet converted, like George Whitfield and others, like John Wesley, they read these books when they got serious about Christianity, and even though they weren't yet born again, they read these books and they tried to follow these books.

But the problem is, of course, that being unconverted, they couldn't do what the books talked about and they just continued to be moral failures. And then they would beat themselves up, they would fast and they would pray and they would read the books again and they would try harder. And then eventually led to such a sense of failure that they were brought to the end of themselves and they were wonderfully saved. But after they were saved, they had nothing good to say about these books because these books pointed them to the law and not to the cross. That was one effort to fix society, to publish a lot of moral books.

That certainly is a popular approach right now. Another attempt was a really strange one, was a thing called the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Now the Society for the Reformation of Manners, these were little clubs that were set up throughout England and Wales in the cities. And here's what they basically said. They said, look, when you walk the streets of London, You hear profanity, you see people dressed immodestly, you see things happening that you have to say to your kids, kids, come let's go this way, don't look that way.

Alright, so we're gonna fix this. We're gonna pay informants to tell on their friends. So, if you're out in public and you're just sitting around eating and your friend shoots off his mouth and he uses a lot of profanities in public, you could go and you could inform on him and you get a small paycheck. Well, it didn't really work, did it? Because for one thing, it's not easy to be friends after you turned your friend in for 10 bucks.

And so he's fined $100 and you get $10 for being an informant and he finds out. But another thing is that it doesn't really touch the heart of the problem, does it? So you tell on each other for misbehaving, but the heart remains unaltered. Now that leads us to the Great Awakening, or what the British call the evangelical revival, and the Methodist movement. Now when I use the word Methodist this morning, I am not talking about a denomination that we know.

I'm not even talking, what we're talking about, Methodist was also a nickname that was given as a slur, like Puritan. Methodist was a nickname given to people who lived methodically. All right, so in 1730s, this group of young men who joined a club at Oxford University called the holy club, which also was not their choice of the title, that was everyone else's choice for them. Oh, you're the holy club. A group of ministerial students began to meet together to study the Greek New Testament, to read the old writers, these moralistic writers, to tell them how to be better people, and to do deeds of mercy out in the community, to go to the jails and witness to those on death row.

So this went on for a long time. Not one of these men was converted. The first to be converted was a man named George Whitfield. Some years later, Charles Wesley and John Wesley were converted, and others too, their names are not as famous to us. George Whitfield falls under terrible conviction, and in 1735, after a period of fasting and prayer that led to the collapse of his health.

He was sent away from the university and through reading the Puritans in the New Testament, he was brought to peace with Christ. At the same time, within days of George Whitefield's conversion in the little country of Wales, people that he didn't meet for four more years were converted, named Daniel Rowland and Hal Harris. And these three men became the leaders of what would be called, strangely enough, Calvinistic Methodism. That is, Revival people who were on the Calvinistic side of things as opposed to revival people who were on the Wesleyan, Armenian side of things, all right? Strange title, but that's what they were called.

They began to preach and there were extraordinary results from their preaching that we call the evangelical revival. Now, when they were young believers, they decided that they needed to rethink everything. And so they read the Puritan writers instead of the moralistic writers. And the Puritans talked a lot about the work of God in the soul and how that then works its way out into the life instead of skipping the interiority. It not only led to the conversion of many of the young leaders, but it led to how they understood what happened to themselves and it led to how they then shepherded other souls.

Two great emphases in the century, all right? Holiness and the new birth. But as the movement went on, there were problems, and as they faced problems, there were some wrong responses, particularly by John Wesley. All right, so let's go back. That's the big history, all right?

Let me see where we're at. All right, that's where we're at. All right, let's get to the two guys. Richard Baxter. Baxter was concerned about holiness, and what happened in Puritanism was, after a while, it's a big movement with a lot of different preachers.

So after a while, Antinomianism starts to creep in. Now here's what antinomianism is. It's just the Latin for anti-law against the law. And it taught that if the moral law of God was fulfilled by Christ, and if good works could not justify you, then perhaps the law has nothing to say to a believer. And so they were anti-law.

Most of this was what we would call theoretical antinomianism. All right, so if you're gonna have another kid, just name them theoretical antinomianism if you want to freak everybody out, all right? So theoretical antinomianism is this. It's being willing to get together and talk about the theology that the law doesn't apply. But most of these people that believe this did not live godless lives.

They were very godly men outwardly, but they were beginning to toy with this antinomianism. Well, Baxter was concerned and so were others, and so Baxter decided that being an author, he would study the antinomians' arguments And then he would write a book against it. So did other men like John Owen Baxter was unique because when he studied the antinomians he came to a different conclusion than all of his co-workers all of his other Puritans All the other Puritans studied the antinomians and said this, you have misapplied the cross. You have misunderstood grace and you've come up with the wrong conclusion. Baxter said this, no.

Antinomianism is not a misapplication of the doctrines of grace like the Reformed churches believed. Antinomianism is the only legitimate application of what we've been teaching about Christ's righteousness being placed on our account. And so the problem with the antinomians is not their application of these truths. The problem is that we reformed guys are wrong. And he began to read a French writer whose name was Amorot, and so it became known as Amoraldianism.

And what Amorot taught, and then later Baxter taught for the English people was this. It's a thing called neo-nomianism, the new law. Here's what Baxter taught, in a nutshell. And if you're a Baxter fan, you're not gonna be happy with this because it's gonna be too simplistic, right? But here's the cartoon version.

Baxter taught that Jesus Christ, having satisfied all that the old covenant expected by his perfect life and his sacrificial death. He is now the head of the new covenant, which we would agree. But as head of the new covenant, he renegotiates the terms for peace with God. No longer is perfect righteousness required Because Christ has already satisfied that now you just have a couple of new laws Which are keepable compared to the Old Testament laws? Faith repentance and sincere obedience So what Baxter began to teach was simply this.

You are presently justified, you receive forgiveness with God by faith in Christ. But then you must add good works. If you don't add good works, then you will lose your salvation, and on the final day of judgment, you will not be justified. So really what we're looking at is two justifications. Present justification by faith, final justification by adding good works, right?

Which is, in the eyes of most of his friends, this was just like Roman Catholicism. Well, they wrote back and forth and had lots of fights and if you want to read that, you can just start with John Owen's book on justification, hundreds of pages, lots of good stuff, but that's the context of it. Now, 70 years later, John Wesley looks around at the revival leaders under his camp, and they had an annual conference. And in the 1740s, about seven or eight years after George Whitefield was converted and began to preach in the fields. John Wesley looked at his men and he noticed that they were slowing up on their pace of what he considered essentials to consecration.

Do you know that John Wesley and George Whitefield both, though separated by some doctrinal differences, Do you know that they remained friends throughout their entire life? Throughout their entire life, they fasted two days a week. But John Wesley started noticing that not every Methodist fasted two days a week, and so it bothered him. Do you know that they were really concerned to guard against dishonoring Jesus? So lay preachers in the in the early revival movement, there was one called His name was preacher hog.

His last name was hog. He's actually was a butcher which was a good name for a butcher. All right Preacher hog or butcher hog was converted under the preaching of Wesley in Whitfield and he became a lay minister. Now he worked six days, but in order not to bring disrepute on the Methodist movement, He never shut down his shop early and never opened it late. Because what was happening was that the British opponents to Methodism, they were saying this, well, you love religion because you just love going to conferences and you're lazy, You don't like working.

So here's what Hogg would do. Saturday evening, he'd close his shop down, he'd go home, he'd clean up, he'd get his Bible and he'd travel through the night by horseback to the place he would be preaching somewhere in England. He'd arrive there in the morning, have breakfast, preach, travel to another place, preach, travel to another place, preach, get on his horse and travel all the way back home and make it home by Monday morning and open his shop up without a day off. So that no one would look at the Methodists and say, well your religion is attractive to you because it lets you be lazy. Well, the Methodists.

Now they were accused of being, on two sides, funny thing is that they were accused of opposite problems. Maybe you feel this way. They were accused of being overly righteous. So there was a sermon by a man named Trapp, and it became one of the most popular sermons of the day called The Danger of Being Overrighteous, or Righteous Overmuch. And basically what they said was this, you Methodists, you expect people to read their Bible all day long and then go to sermons all week long and all they do is religion, but God doesn't expect that and you're overly righteous.

Then at the same time that they were being accused of being overly strict, most people were accusing the Methodists or the early revival people of being overly loose. And so there were all these plays that were produced, like movies of their day, about Methodism. One of them was called A Plain and Easy Road to the Land of Bliss. Now this is what they said. You people talk about grace and you say that just by embracing the work of Christ by faith and repentance, you can be clean with God?

Oh, that sounds nice, doesn't it? Then you get to live any way you want, which of course the Methodist did not say. So in this play, the Methodist had a cloak with one seam down the middle. One half of the cloak was called performance, The other half of the cloak was called faith. They took a pair of scissors and they cut the cloak in half at the seam and they threw away the side called performance and kept the side called faith.

You see the picture. But it was a caricature. The early revival men were very concerned about holiness. John Wesley said this, the entire reason God raised up these men and brought revival to England and Wales was for one purpose, to teach holiness. But as I said, about 10 years into the movement, Wesley looks at his men and he sees that they're not quite as holy as he wants them to be.

So this is his conclusion. We've become like the Calvinists. We talk about grace too much. We need to talk more about works and he found Richard Baxter's books That he wrote when he went down the wrong path His neo-nomianism books actually it's called aphorisms on justification So there are 80 little statements about justification by Richard Baxter in this book in which he explains his new views that you're justified by faith but you have to add works or you lose your justification. And John Wesley thought, this is wonderful, this is exactly what I believe.

And one year he had all of his ministers at their conference read out loud the book and discuss it. So John Wesley basically came to view that you're presently justified by faith, but you have to be ultimately justified by good works. And so instead of saying we work from life, he started saying, no, we work for life. So we would say John Wesley, like Richard Baxter, became a works righteousness man, without meaning to. Now, they always denied this, but really when you read their writings, I don't see how they could.

And this led to a lot of fighting within the revival men and a lot of dishonor done to the Lord because some of the writing back and forth wasn't so nice. Now that's the story. Now what applications could that possibly have for us? Well, quite a few. Richard Baxter and John Wesley saw a moral decline in their movement.

We have seen a moral decline in evangelicalism. And even this conference has had its heart broken by many friends who have fallen. And so now the topic is holiness. In pursuing this legitimate topic, you have the temptation always to say the only safe place is to be as far from these people as possible. But that is not a safe place.

That's what Wesley did. If the Calvinists talk about grace, we need to get as far from them as possible, we're gonna talk about works. Richard Baxter, if the antinomians talk about grace, Instead of doing what John Owen did was to get a right view of grace We need to go as far from that as possible and talk about works It'd be very tempting to respond to the moral decline that we see because we do care And because there is a moral decline, the twin pressures of those on the Christian tend to push us to the extremes. And we don't want to do that because that's exactly what Wesley did and Baxter did. And They never thought that they were doing that.

But they did lead their people in a way that later became destructive. I have been to family integrated churches. Now I'm gonna say, I wanna say some things and I want it to be very clear, this is not a criticism of you. But let's be honest, I've been to one family integrated church I went to and preached at. They were having a meal, a fellowship meal.

And a lady met a visitor at the door who was bringing, you know, potluck supper. And she was bringing in fried chicken. And the woman met her at the door and said, we don't eat that, our bodies are the temple of the living spirit, and that's not welcome here. That woman never came back. I mean, why would she?

I went to another and the deacons, the elders got together with me and they said, we don't believe that anyone can be a pastor who isn't married and has children and of course homeschools. I told them I disagreed. There are families in my church where I pastor who have been a part of the family integrated church movement, who when we were talking about the shift in American theology around 1820s with Charles Finney, a British pastor was visiting. And so he asked the little group that was in my home, we were having a group Bible study. He asked the group, where did America go wrong?

How did we get from Jonathan Edwards to where we're at today to you know to the TV preachers today and a woman raised her hand very confidently and said the the invention of Sunday school and I just couldn't believe it because that's not the right answer. I mean, if you read history, there was a whole lot of moral decline before we started putting kids in Sunday school classes. It's so easy When you do care about the moral decline and the destruction of the family, it will be so easy to follow Richard Baxter or John Wesley, but just to do it in a modern context. To go too far to pursue holiness instead of pursuing Christ, or in other words, to pursue holiness in a way that Christ is not the great attraction and So morality becomes what we have instead of Christianity and morality to me is just a type of holiness. That's all about me Take the Take the metaphor in the Bible of walking with the Lord.

So that's all through the scripture, a walk. Well, in Paul's day, when he says that we're to walk with the Lord, he's talking about a journey where there's day-to-day choices, mundane choices that don't seem very spiritual, just like the steps we do each day, hundreds of steps, thousands of steps each day, and we don't even think about where our feet are landing the next step. But there is an ultimate destination in Paul's day. But in our day when we talk about walking, we say, oh, do you walk? We mean for exercise.

So I think of morality like treadmill Christianity. So I have a treadmill. And when it's ugly outside, maybe I'll get on my treadmill. And I walk a long way on my treadmill. But it's not because I want to arrive at a destination, it's because I want John Snyder to be a better version of John Snyder tomorrow morning.

I want to not be fitting into last year's Christmas clothes. Do you use the New Testament principles? Do you use the Old Testament principles? Do we use the statements about holiness and obedience and consecration and single-mindedness like a treadmill to make us better us's, to make our families better versions of what they were. Is it about us?

Do you like being good people or do you find yourself captivated with Christ? Two very different approaches to morality. Now I don't want to just say what they did wrong because these two men did wrong. I want to give examples of what they also did right, the groups, particularly the early revival men. By the way, Samuel Rutherford from prison.

If you've ever read anything by Samuel Rutherford, he is a hard go. I mean, his letters are good, but his big books, the ones that don't ever get republished, they're hard going. Every page looks the same to me, alright? Armenians, oh the Armenians, you will be punished. Alright?

King so and so trying to rule over the church, you've got no right to rule the church, you'll be punished. Antinomians, you're gonna get it too. And then he stops and talks about Christ. So the whole reason I own the book is for the one sentence where he talks about Christ on each page. But Rutherford was always attacking the antinomians, the ones that Baxter wrote against.

So Rutherford was known for holiness but listen to what Rutherford said about holiness when he was in prison. In a letter he said this, even holiness is not Christ. So when we pursue holiness, we remember even holiness is not Christ. We pursue it for Christ, with Christ, by Christ. Well the cure for all of this is not that we become loose and just talk about the concept of Christ-centeredness.

I mean, that just doesn't really help anybody. The cure is that we'd be very active in the right way. So let me give you just a couple of ways that the early revival men did it rightly. So John Wesley sees the moral drift. In my opinion, he has a wrong cure.

But George Whitfield and the others saw the same moral drift, and I feel that they had the right cure. So let me give you a few things, and you can write these down if you want to. Just simple things, right? Very practical things. These men in their 20s were leaders of a national movement.

Reading the Puritans, they came up with some fundamental approaches to holiness. Number one, holiness was always seen as flowing out of the real knowledge of Christ through the cross. We've already talked about this so I won't go very far with this. If you were to read the sermon titles by George Whitfield, by the way I think Reformation Heritage Table has a two volume of collection of Whitfield sermons. Most of Whitfield's sermons were lost.

All of his letters and remains, you know, literary remains were given over to a guy named Aaron Seymour who we've never heard about and if you've ever heard about Aaron Seymour All you know is you're supposed to be mad at him because Aaron Seymour lost it So we don't know all the sermons of George Wifford. We only have about 48 or so Get those two volumes. They're actually very cheap right now $27 for two hardback volumes Look over the titles of the sermons. You will find almost no sermon about revival. You will find very few sermons about how to live out the Christian life.

What you will find is sermon after sermon after sermon about the cross. Because these men were made holy by the cross and they felt that the only way anybody else was really gonna be made holy was not by reading the moralistic Anglican literature that gave you a certain prayer to pray every morning, but by meeting Christ who would then transform the outward life You remember the quote I gave you by John Barrage, a friend of George Whitfield. The Christian's task is to live outside of himself upon another. Christocentric. Well, we talked about that, So let me go to the second.

They wanted to give careful definition of what a Christian was. Now that is important for us. Years ago, an elderly minister said, the most important doctrine for The American evangelical scene is the doctrine of regeneration, that's what we misunderstand. And I would say that's true. In Whitfield's day, he was hated, hated by his church leaders, not for preaching repentance, not for preaching faith, not for preaching holiness.

The leadership of the church agreed that those were good things to preach. He was hated for preaching this you must be born again But in the Anglican system in Wales in England at the time The idea was this All of our church members are already born again because they have been baptized into Christ and those baptismal waters did it. Now they need to be told to live up to their baptism, so to speak. So you should tell these people that have no interest in Jesus Christ at all, but they are church members, you should tell them you need to be faithful. But don't tell them to be born again, they're already born again.

And Whitefield continued to preach, no, the baptism of waters did not give you the new birth just look at your life there's no evidence of that you must be born again. One of the greatest things we can do if we want to be serious about holiness, is we can get the definition of a Christian correct. We are not born again by water, the baptismal water. We are not born again by reformation, by personal reformation, turning over a new leaf. We are not born again by education being brought up in a Christian home and taught Christian things We are not being we're not ultimately born again by decisional Regeneration I just decide today.

I'm going to be a new person. We are born again by the Spirit. We are completely dependent upon God to change us internally. There are many good books on this. Stephen Sharnock wrote a book on regeneration.

There have been others. But go back and read the old writers on the doctrine of regeneration. What does God do? To make us to be his children. What does he do within?

What is the cause of our faith and holiness what repentance What is the cause of holiness? So the new birth. Now if we skip that, then the next point is going to be worthless. And the next point is this. They were very careful to disciple new believers.

But here's what the Puritans said. You can polish a lump of lead all your life, but you'll never turn it into gold. As a pastor of a new church plant, I used to get all kinds of phone calls from people that found out about the new church plan. So they would say this, oh this is a new church, yes. Well great, so what's your view on discipleship?

I knew what they were wanting me to say. They were wanting me to say that discipleship was the center of everything we were doing, but it is not the center of everything we're doing. And so they would not come. So many seeing the fall away rate of professions of those who profess to follow Christ, so many have felt that the cure was to do better discipleship, but what if the material we're working with is not Christian. What if you're trying to disciple people who are unbelievers?

What if you're discipling your children but they are spiritually dead? Now obviously we have responsibilities to point our children to Christ and to lay the foundation of truth that we pray that it's like kindling laid up, that one day God will send the spark. I mean, I don't mean for us to be careless with unconverted children. We are constantly laboring and praying and living in such a way that God would use that, but you can't disciple a lost kid. They did do discipleship.

Now with the revival movement, what you had was, believers were cropping up in churches all throughout the land, But when they became truly Christian, they didn't quite fit with the old religious system. And so they tended to be ostracized. And sometimes they were, you know, they brought it on themselves. But sometimes they were genuinely gracious and the church that they were a part of just didn't like them because they were believers. So the Methodists did this, the early revival men did this.

They gathered them together in little groups that they called experience meetings or societies and they would have these experience meetings. So maybe once a month in your area, all those who'd been affected by the revival would gather together, men with men, ladies with ladies, so that they could discuss internal issues without any embarrassment, and they would really probe deeply. Are you a believer? Yes, I'm a believer. How do you know you're a believer?

What's changed in your appetites? What doctrines are are there that you've grabbed hold of how are you living your Christian life? What about your relationship with your family? That means a very pointed kind of small group meeting. They called it the experience meetings.

And these went on for decades, really. It was the way that the little pockets of believers were nurtured, even though they were in churches that weren't very helpful. They didn't just meet together, they did other things. They republished good books, Puritan books. John Bunyan's book, The Pilgrim's Progress, became so popular with the revival people that many of the Welsh who could not read memorized The Pilgrim's progress.

They kept spiritual journals to keep track of their progress. They made personal covenants with God. This is very interesting. They read the Puritans who did this and then they did this. So they would basically draw up a covenant saying, God, in the scripture you said you would do this and you've called upon us to respond to you in this way and I want to do that.

And they would kind of refashion that in personal language and They would make a covenant with God and then every six months or every month or every year They would go back and read the Covenant now one warning about that a man named William Grimshaw Who was one of the great leaders of that century said? That he found that he himself being a very introspective and kind of melancholy man, that when he would reread his journals and reread his covenants, they often found that it just caused despair because he didn't seem to be moving forward. So he did warn those that are tempted toward melancholy. Maybe they shouldn't use the journal and the personal covenant in that way because it would always cause them to be looking within instead of looking to Christ. But for those of us that skirt along the surface of life and think everything's wonderful and tragedy, until tragedy hits us, we probably could use those means.

John Barridge, as I quoted earlier, warned the people not to let conferences and good books come in the way of the most important tool that God gave them for holiness, scripture and meditation and prayer. Listen to what he said. Believers who are much in secret prayer and meditation have more life and joy than others, who are chiefly employed in hearing and reading. All right, did you hear that? Waking up every morning, meeting alone with the Lord in the scripture, not with other good books necessarily, but the scriptures primarily, meditating on that through the day, agonizing, laying your heart open before the Lord, much better for you than just hearing good sermons and reading good books.

He says, because you're closer to the fountain head there. But he said, we do bring our hearts more easily to read and to hear sermons than to secret prayer and meditation. Because in the former there's more man and in the latter we approach the Lord. And our natures draw back from these more spiritual duties even though they are the most profitable. Well let me give you one more thing and then I'll open it up if there's any questions, we have a few minutes left.

They were very earnest, these revival men, that the enemy's lies, alright, even though they're lies, that they would be used to their advantage and that would be a good thing for you. There are many who despise the family integrated church movement And many of them have some good personal experiences for despising it because people who might leave this conference have applied things in a way that wasn't right. It's not what you want, it's not what your leaders want, but it happens. But let's say that every criticism of the family integrated church movement, let's say that every criticism is a lie from the enemy and none of them are true. You would do well to take every criticism and go to the Lord yourself and say, is it true?

Here's what the enemy says, is it true, Father? Is there some truth? Is there some way I can benefit from the criticism of those who don't really understand what I'm trying to do? The Methodists listened to that criticism. Oh, a plain and easy way to the land of bliss.

That's all you guys are interested in. That's not what they were interested in. But they took that criticism and they asked themselves, is it true? And so They were very careful to preach against that. Let's not act that way.

John Wesley said, don't be an enthusiast, which in the old 18th century it meant don't be a spiritual fanatic. And here's how he defined it. And He was right with this one. All right, he said a spiritual fanatic is a person who desires the end goal Holiness Christ likeness, but doesn't choose all the steps that God puts between here and there So it's like going to a conference and hearing this preaching and in your heart you say oh I do want to be more holy father, but on Monday morning I don't do anything different than I did two months ago. Just there's nothing that changed.

I just wished I could arrive I didn't choose the steps that God has clearly laid out in Scripture to grow as a believer So that's a religious fanaticism. We want to avoid George Whitfield Preaching to the group of revival converts he pleaded with them not to give their enemies any excuse to criticize them He said this show all the world the one in whom you believe Let all By your fruits know that the Lord is your righteousness and that you are eagerly waiting him from heaven. Let not the righteousness of the Lord be evil spoken of through your lives. Consider his dying love and let that love constrain you to obedience. Having been forgiven much, loved much, be always asking the Lord, what shall I do to express my gratitude to you for giving me this righteousness?

So the path that we learn from the past is this. When the Lord shows us a biblical truth that's been neglected Grab it When you look around and things are even worse than you thought, break your heart. But do not step outside of the biblical pattern in order to fix it. And when you, with a Christocentric way, with a simple New Testament way, when you're trying to, out of love for Christ, work it out into every area of life when you see how slow the process looks do not give into the temptation to add anything to Christ for this holiness. Well, I said I was gonna give you a chance to ask questions.

So do you have any questions about all that? Are you afraid to be the person to ask questions? Like do not, your wife would hit you if you raised your hand. Like Do not ask that question. How do you share the gospel with siblings who are not born again?

Who may be interested in the things of God but you try to show them scripture or you tell them certain sins are wrong. I have a father who is anti-gospel. He's Muslim and he never raised me. He came in and out of my life. But I just want to be able to share the gospel with him.

And I remember praying on my knees, just praying for like the last 11 years of my life. And the Lord said, until he see a need for a blood sacrifice, he would not see my goodness. And so my question is, how do you share the gospel and how do you evangelize in a way that is like apologetics without turning people off to the gospel. Yeah, I think that, so the question is how do we share the gospel within families, especially with those that are anti-gospel. I don't think there's any special way, you know, I don't think it's any different than the way we bring the gospel to others.

But we do have, it is in some ways more difficult we feel, and at the same time I think we have a lot more, we have a lot of openings we don't have with other people. So I would say this, the same fundamental things, that with people that know us, it is the aroma of Christ about us. You know, 2 Corinthians in chapter 2, that God is manifesting this wonderful aroma of Christ. First to him, the Lord smells his own son in our life it pleases the Lord like a sacrifice rising up but also to those around us and To some that aroma drives them away into some it attracts them and we can't we have no control over that But we don't want to be people that have no smell, you know? So you get into the elevator, let me, let me say that sometimes I go jogging and I, I'm on a jogging path and there's a group of guys that go past me, they all stink.

They stink, you know, smelly men. Then there's a group of ladies. Now these ladies perhaps aren't real serious joggers They're dressed in super bright brand new clothing, but they smell nice They pass by and they all have perfume on and I think I love it when the ladies jog because they pass you by, ah, and there's a little part of the trail that smells nice. When people come near us, alright, we don't want to smell like a list of rules that they keep breaking and we're frustrated with them and why don't you listen to me? But there to be this genuine, deeply happy life that they see in us that they can't reproduce and that it is because of Christ.

So the life. But also of course the words. Until people feel the need of a savior, they'll never go to a savior. They don't go to the doctor until they feel they're sick. So I do think that our words don't necessarily need to start with this.

Look, Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. But to say to them, and You can do it in an autobiographical way so they don't feel that you're attacking them so much. You can talk to them about what God has shown you. You know, you can say to them, look, I'm not preaching at you. I just want you to know that I used to think of God this way, you know, very small.

But then he opened my eyes. I see how big he is. There's such a gap. I see how clean he is, there's such a gap. And it wasn't until then that I felt that I even needed a savior, you know?

And as you have those kind of conversations, they hopefully will lead to other conversations. It's not just that when I saw the bigness and the cleanness of God that I felt that I needed something, but I also saw the provision that Christ was everything I needed and we're able to just say, you know, this is what Christ is to me. And we, we then through that we bring, you know, the gospel to bear. I mean with my own children, you know, we would often have them coming home from church after a sermon. They would sit in the back of the minivan and they would say, dad, am I a Christian?

And I'd say, well, I'd be driving so my wife would generally turn around and say we've talked about this a hundred times What is a Christian? This is a Christian. Is that you and they would say no, that's not me I've never trusted Christ with my life. I've never really surrendered and Then they would say so a few minutes later if we get in a car wreck, we all die, we're in hell and you're in heaven. And we would try to say, look, that's really not the question here, is it?

The question is, what are you going to do with Christ? They'd be quiet for a while longer. And then it would generally fade. And they'd go back to Lego, you know, and Lego would be more important than conviction. But that happened over and over and over about every three to six months in our case.

And sometimes at family devotions, my youngest one who would never show emotion until he just couldn't control it, he would burst into tears and he would stick his head, he would, he was like 11 years old, he would sit up on the couch and stick his head down into the cushion so his face wasn't showing and his bottom would be up in the air, and I'd say, Andrew, come back, Andrew, and he would just be in the cushions sobbing, and I'd look at his mom and I'd go, and she would say, I don't know what to do, you know, you went to seminary, what do you do with that? So we would just kind of dismiss the meeting and leave Andrew to sob for a while. But listen, he would sob and sob, we would talk about him, talk him through the Gospel facts again, point him to Christ again, but the newest cartoon would come on and he'd just forget it. Until, until the Lord really brought him to an end of himself and he was recently wonderfully saved. But it was age 16, not age seven, you know.

There was a long process. So Whatever the Lord does in your home, you know, we want to be careful with our definitions. What is a Christian in the little town? I'm in there are only a handful out of 8, 000 that would say they're not a Christian because it's the Mid-South Everyone's been baptized by somebody some Baptist has baptized them some Presbyterian some I don't know what And I'm a Baptist. I'm not poking at the Baptist.

But I know where I can find 70 people that say they're lost. It's on Sunday morning where I pastor. Because we've tried to be careful with the definition of a Christian, one of the byproducts is that our young people that are not following Jesus Christ, even though they're very clean, and when I preach, they sit on the edge of their seats, they don't look around. If a young person turns and talks to another young person in the sermon, I think something terrible has happened. I almost want to stop and say, what?

Because they don't ever do that. So I'm really happy for that. Their parents have been careful. I'm really happy. But they're not believers.

They don't follow Christ. And one time I had a meeting with a visiting pastor, it was Richard Owen Roberts, and I announced on two Sunday nights, and then I'll quit. First Sunday night I said this, tonight We're gonna have a meeting at my house. Everyone from age 13 to 20-ish. Parents are welcome, but come to my house.

Mr. Roberts is going to speak to you, but here's the only thing. Do not come unless you're a follower of Christ. So we had about 40 young people, that's half our young people, about 40 young people showed up. Mr.

Roberts talked to them next Sunday. We're gonna have another meeting, Mr. Roberts is leaving tomorrow morning, so before he leaves tonight, we're gonna have another meeting in my home. So if you're age 13 to 20 ish, come on. Parents, if you want to come, you're welcome to come.

One requirement, no young person is to be there except those of you that are holding Christ at arm's length and you know that you have rejected his claims on your life. Mr. Roberts, after the first morning sermon said to me, do you think that was wise? And I said, you're afraid nobody's gonna show up. He said, with an invitation like that, yes, I'm not sure who would dare show up.

Every kid that wasn't at the first meeting was at the second meeting because they're honest about the fact that I am not what the Bible calls a Christian. I'm not. Now the problem with that is this, having gotten over that hurdle and not calling themselves Christians, but people in church still loving them, they do tend to settle down and say, hey, I'm in this kind of no man's land. At least I'm not one of those hypocrites. I'm not a Christian, but at least I'm not a fake Christian.

So I'm okay with God. They feel like it's a third category, you know. They feel like at least I'm not that bad. And so we have to constantly remind them, you are still rejecting Christ. And even though we love you, and we don't want you to be a fake Christian, we don't want you to stay here.

So the Lord is kind. Well, I think we're out of time. So if there were other questions, if I brought more confusion than help, grab me afterwards, all right? Well, let's pray. Father, we ask that you would help us to be careful.

We don't want to be pushed by the enemy to any extreme. We know what the opponents say, and we want to take their criticism to you. And Father, we want to know what you think about us. And we do want to be aggressively pursuing a holiness that is in such wonderful harmony with your Bible and that flows out of a love to Christ that there will be the beauty of that And there will be a sweetness and an irresistible, captivating quality for those that watch us. So God, for all of that, we will need you.

Help us, we pray. In Christ's name. Amen. Thank you for listening to this presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches. We invite you to visit our website at www.ncfic.org, where you can keep up to date on what is new, as well as find articles, videos, audio sermons, and much more at no charge.

The N.C.F.I.C. Exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for both church and family life.