Christ Church (Moscow, ID)

This is session 3 of 6 of our Discipleship Seminar on Parenting Little Ones.

This is session 4 of 6 in our Discipleship Series on Parenting Little Ones.

This is session 6 of 6 in our Discipleship Seminar on Parenting Little Ones.

This is session 2 of 6 in our Discipleship Seminar on Parenting Little Ones.

Preacher: Douglas WilsonText: 1 John 1:8–10Confession of sin is a basic activity that all Christians need to understand and practice. It is the most fundamental form of spiritual housekeeping. There is no way for us to maintain covenant life together without this sort of understanding being woven into the fabric of our community.SUMMARY OF THE TEXTIf we decide to lie to ourselves, then obviously the truth is not in us (v. 8). One of the lies we like to tell ourselves is the lie that our current condition is “normal,” and that we have no sin. Or at least we have no sin to speak of. John tells us that this is self-deception, period. And if we lie in this way, we are making God into a liar (because He says we have sinned), and His word is obviously not in us—a lie is (v. 10). The meat of this sandwich is in verse 9, but these two pieces of bread make it a sandwich. Don’t kid yourself, John is saying—we all need to hear this. In the ninth verse, John gives us a conditional statement. If we confess our sins, God will do something. The word for confess is homologeo, and literally means “to speak the same thing.” If we say the same thing about our sin that God says about it (i.e. that it is sin), then God will do what He promises. What is that? God will be faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and He will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.TWO HOUSESImagine two mothers with a robust family—six kids each, let’s say. One home is bombed all the time and the other is spotless. The difference between the two homes is not that in the second home nothing is ever spilled, or knocked over, or left on the coffee table. The difference between the home that is trashed and the home that isn’t is the difference between leaving things there “for the present,” and picking them up right away.Given God’s promise above, we need to recognize what this means. The promise is good on Monday mornings, and Thursday afternoons. The promise is good in May, and good in October. That means there is never a legitimate reason for refusing to deal with it now. The vacuum cleaner is never broken, never at the shop, never too far away, never too hard to operate. The word is near you, in your heart and in your mouth. “God, what I just said . . . that was sin.” That is confession. And God’s promise is fulfilled at that moment.TANGLEFOOTThe writer to the Hebrews describes what sin does when you leave it unattended. It starts to trip you up—it starts to really get in the way. “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us . . .” (Heb. 12:1). Sin clutters, sin gets in the way, sin weighs you down, sin gets tangled around your feet. Set it aside we are told, and then run the race. You can’t run the race with a two-hundred-pound backpack on. You cannot run the race with snarls of rope tangled around your feet. Stop trying to be good with unconfessed sin in your life. It just makes you more irritable than you already are. John tells us how to get untangled. Don’t try to do that and run at the same time. Get completely untangled, take off the backpack, and then run.CLUTTER AND BACKLOGLet’s change the image. Suppose you haven’t cleaned the garage for twenty years, and you are overwhelmed at the very thought of trying to straighten it out. Every time you go open the door, you just stare helplessly for about five minutes, and then go back inside. All you can think of to do is pray for a fire. Now suppose that is what your pile of unconfessed sin looks like. You are tempted to think that you have to remember everything that is in there first, and then set about cleaning it up.But you don’t have to remember the sins you don’t remember—just confess the ones you do remember. The ones you stuffed just inside the garage door just last week. Don’t try to remember what is at the bottom of the pile; just look at what is on the top of the pile. If you deal with the sin you know about honestly, then God will cleanse you from all unrighteousness. The confessing is your job; the cleansing is His.HONESTYThe central virtue here that of honesty. No blowing smoke at God. No spin control. No attempts to make yourself the flawed hero in this tragic affair. We saw that homologeo means to speak the same. If God calls it adultery, don’t you call it an affair or indiscretion. If God calls it grumbling and complaining, don’t you call it realism. If God calls it theft, don’t you call it shrewd business practice. As the Puritans might have put it, had they only thought of it, bs and honest confession accord not well together.A FEW PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONSThis is not meant to sound flippant. Sin is a ravening wolf, and has destroyed many things. If you have held back from confessing your sins because you know that to do so could threaten your marriage, or cost you your job, or get you expelled from college, you really do have a significant practical problem. I am not saying you should charge off and start confessing your sin like a loose cannon on deck. But you should decide today to deal with it honestly, and depending on how tangled up it is, get counsel and help today in putting things right. Commit yourself now. Busting yourself is the best thing you can do to rebuild trust with those you may have wronged.And last, allow me to consider your feelings. You may feel like a hesitant cliff-diver, toes curled over the edge, and here I am poking you in the back with a stick. There are any number of things you might want to do—anything but jump. You might rationalize. “What I did wasn’t really wrong.” You might excuse. “What I did was not started by me.” You might postpone. “In my honest opinion, the best day for jumping will be sometime tomorrow afternoon.” You might blame somebody else, anybody else. “I think they should be here jumping, not me.” You might use vague terms to try jumping sideways along the cliff edge. “I think that, generally speaking, I have certainly sinned in some ways.”It is easy to dismiss this kind of emphasis as morbid introspectionism, but actually it is the opposite. If you confess your sins, and lay aside the weight of that backpack, you never have to think about it again. Now, with it unconfessed, you think about it frequently.

Preacher: Douglas WilsonText: 2 Thess. 2The letter of Second Thessalonians was written shortly after the first letter. The purpose of the letter was to correct certain misunderstandings that the Thessalonians had about eschatology, and some might argue, to create some new misunderstandings for us. There are some challenges here.SUMMARY OF THE TEXTThe steadfastness of the Thessalonians while facing persecution was evidence given by God that He was going to judge the wickedness of the persecutors (v. 5). Their courage was a manifest token that we were going to be counted worthy of the kingdom, on behalf of which they were suffering. It was obvious that it would be righteous for God to punish those who were troubling the saints with real tribulation (v. 6). They will enter rest, along with Paul and company, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from Heaven with His mighty angels (v. 7). They will bring the vengeance of flaming fire on those who do not know God, and who do not obey the gospel of Christ (v. 8). These people will be punished two ways—everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power (v. 9). When He comes, it will be so that He might be glorified in His saints (like the Thessalonians), and so that all who believed in response to Paul’s message might be amazed at Him (v. 10). That was the reason why Paul continued to pray that God would count them worthy of their calling, and that they might fulfill all the good pleasure of His goodness, along with His work of faith with power (v. 11). The result will be a mutual glorification, Christ in them, and they in Christ (v. 12). This would all be in accord with the grace of God and Christ.THE MAN OF LAWLESSNESS AWAITSIn the next chapter of this book, we are going to be dealing with one of the most complicated eschatological passages in all of Scripture. We are probably dealing with twenty percent more interpretations than we have interpreters, and the whole thing is very sad. We have a few intimations of these difficulties in this chapter, and so some words about it now are in order.As I understand it, our fixed anchor point should be that all passages that address the general resurrection of the dead should be located at the end of history, when the Lord Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead. That would include 1 Thess. 4:16-17, and it would also include 2 Thess. 1:7-10 and 2 Thess. 2:8. The challenge comes when we try to fit some of the surrounding statements on a timeline that appears to extend from the first century to the end of the world.“(1) All the preliminary signs and the day of the Lord have already occurred; (2) All of the preliminary signs have occurred, so there is now nothing preventing the coming of the day of the Lord, but the day of the Lord has not yet come. (3) Some of the preliminary signs have either occurred or begun to occur, but since all of them have not yet occurred, the day of the Lord cannot come yet, and (4) None of the preliminary signs has yet occurred, so the day of the Lord still cannot come” (Mathison, From Age to Age, p. 521).Like Mathison, my preference would be for the third option. The day of the Lord has not yet come, and yet Paul appears to be making clear reference at places to the sort of events that happened in the course of his lifetime. Remember that Caligula had attempted to have a statue of himself erected in the Temple at Jerusalem in 40 A.D. and only his murder prevented it.TAKE CARE NOT TO MISS THE CENTRAL POINTIt would be a great mistake to get caught up in the study of when the flaming judgment was going to come, and neglect the fact of a flaming judgment that was going to come.In this passage, we see who will be judged, and who will be vindicated. The Lord will appear in flaming fire, he says, and He will exact a strict vengeance when He does. This will fall on those who do not know God, and it will fall on those who did not obey the gospel (v. 8). What will be the nature of that damnation? The punishment is described here as an exclusion. They will be shut out from the presence of the Lord, and they will be shut out from the glory of His power (v. 9).What is the gospel that commanded their obedience, and which they refused to render? That gospel is the message that Christ died, was buried, rose again, and ascended into Heaven. From that place, He summons all men to believe in Him. The work we must do is the work of hearing and following Him on the basis of His death and resurrection.When we contrast those who are shut out with those believers who admire Him (v. 10), we can see the very nature of damnation and salvation. These are the states where we arrive at what we have been becoming. And this means that the very fact of Christ is a great invitation.

Preacher: Toby SumpterChrist is risen, and He rose in this world with a human body in order that all things might be made new. The center of this new creation is the forgiveness of sins, but that is merely the great and glorious foundation. Remember that Jesus Christ is the Creator of the Universe, and so it is no accident that Jesus is the One re-creating the universe in history.

Preacher: Douglas WilsonText: Ps. 25:9-10, 14One of the things that happens when you move into Reformed or Presbyterian settings is that you start hearing the word *covenant* a lot. I had a friend who once accused us of talking about covenant peanut butter and covenant jelly. He wasn’t wrong, but then again, neither were we.

Preacher: Douglas WilsonText: 2 Thess. 1One of the more difficult things for us to learn concerning our sanctification is the difference between repairs and growth. Both are involved in sanctification, but they are not at all the same thing. Imagine a potted flower that you have sitting on the window sill, flourishing there in the sunlight. Let us say that the cat knocks it over, shattering the clay pot. Now of course you repot it, and you hover over it carefully for a few days, and the plant seems to be doing okay. But then some weeks later, you are thrilled to see extra blossoms and more leaves, not to mention a couple of extra inches. This is all wonderful, but the thing to remember is that replacing pots is not the same thing as growth. Unless you replaced the pot, there would be no growth, but they are not the same thing.

Preacher: Ben ZornesFalse gods are mute. They can’t express their will, they can’t proclaim their delight in their worshippers, they can’t speak a single word, let alone a performative word of power. In contrast, the God of Abraham speaks continually. He speaks generally in the words of creation, and leaves every last soul without excuse, for even the stars hum their assigned tune of Triune glory.