Welcome back to the Messy Reformation. My name's Jason Rice, and I'm the lead pastor at Faith Community CRC in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. My co-host is Willie Kroenke. He's a member at Pease CRC in Pease, Minnesota. We're just a couple of guys who love the Christian Reformed Church and want to see Reformation happen in our denomination. But we realize that whenever Reformation happens in the history of the church, things get messy. And things continue to be messy in the Christian Reformed Church.
So we're taking the opportunity to have conversations with pastors throughout the Christian Reformed Church to find out what's going on in our denomination, but also to talk about what Reformation might look like. It's also important for you to know that you are our marketing plan. We rely on you to spread the word about what we're doing at the Messy Reformation. We rely on you to share our content. And we rely on you to give us five-star reviews and give good feedback for our podcast.
You are the marketing plan. You can also support us financially on Patreon or Substack. All of the money raised is used to further the mission and the platform of the Messy Reformation. With all that said, we're going to get to this week's episode, which is the final panel from the R3 Forms Conference, where all of the speakers talk about the implications of being a confessional denomination. All right, gentlemen, thank you. Thanks for your participation today. We are in our final two sessions.
We're going to do a little bit of Q&A. We had a bunch of pre-submitted questions, so we will go through some of those, and we'll see kind of how we're doing on time, and if there's any that we can take from the floor. Take your time, CJ. You're good. Then we will go from there. But I want to just, yes, again, thank you guys for your involvement, your participation in this. We've been building a case really all day, the answer to this.
But Reverend Vriesman sent this one in electronically ahead of time. He said, why do we need creeds and confessions when we have the divinely inspired word of God? I mean, a lot of you anticipated that question today. We've been building it, and we heard it this morning too. but give me your succinct, how do you respond to that? It's a common objection today. Who wants to start?
I mean, if there wasn't sin, I guess we wouldn't have to deal with it so much, except a lot of times creeds, of course, come about because they're answering problems in the church, doctrinal problems about how you understand Jesus Christ. I mean, you mentioned the Nicene Creed, the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, and that was one of the issues of who is Jesus? Was he a created being, or was he God? Is he God? And so our creeds come about. The church just comes together.
A lot of times, like the Synod of Dort, we heard a little bit of a history of that. And so the meeting of the mind, studying God's word, scripture, and really diving into it, talking it through, helps to address some of these, the sinful problems of mankind to tell lies to ourselves, even when the truth is right before us. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, you got one. Yeah, no, and I was thinking the same thing as Jason was speaking earlier about how Arminius would sometimes
avoid certain parts of scripture or not elaborate where it needs to be elaborated on. I had an experience like that in the city in which we previously ministered where we had an opportunity to worship at a large evangelical church and the minister was preaching on Ephesians 1, 1 through 4, where naturally he's going to talk about, or he's going to have to at least read the text
chosen in Christ. And I thought, how is he going to handle that? And he got to the phrase chosen in Christ and he said his full comment or exposition of that phrase was, isn't it great to be wanted?
and I thought that's a little lacking I mean it's beautiful to be wanted that's absolutely right but what does it mean to be chosen in Christ it's more than so in other words you could you can have phrases in scripture no one can deny that election for example the word or chosen is in the bible and that's perfectly it's inspired and it's absolutely true but what are you going to do with that phrase and it won't do in churches to have one person teaching one thing and another
teaching another. So how are we handling the word of God, which we believe is sufficient, but we need to handle it wisely. And it gives us a guidance in terms of how we're going to do that. Interesting. I think too, Chad Vindixhorn brought it up about the brethren, I think it was that he went to. And so behind that question, just realize we all have creeds, you know, so we believe the
Bible. Okay, that's a creed. Let's talk about the Bible. Do you believe the Bible is inerrant, infallible, inspired, you know, and based on their answer, they're going to have a creed
about the Bible because not everybody believes that about the Bible. So creeds help draw the boundary lines of what's true Christian orthodoxy and what's not in the presence of false teachers that will rise up as they have throughout church history on any one of these doctrines about God, the Trinity, all these different things. We have these creeds so that we know whether we're orthodox or non-orthodox. And if I could real simply, even when someone says, we have the Bible,
the Belgic Confession helps us by asking the question, which one? Which Bible do you have? Which one? What is it? I mean, so you talk about some of the confessional articles being a little trickier to preach, but one of them is simply a list of the 66 books of the Bible, and then the list of the apocryphal books and why we don't accept those. Well, that's a very simple answer to the question, which Bible do you hold? And I would say my mentor came out of the charismatic
church. So he became reformed, started reading Burkoff in the charismatic church is great. But he would make the same point that everybody has a creed. And the benefit of having written creeds is that it shows integrity because you're showing everybody, here's what I believe, Where if your creed is in your heart, it changes on the day. And there's no way to hold someone accountable because the creed always changes. And so there's a significant importance of just having it written down.
And as Van Dixhorn said, it's open and you're just openly saying, here's what we believe. Hold us accountable to that. Maybe one more quick thing on that. Chad mentioned that sometimes churches can be, or church members can be vulnerable to the influence of big name preachers if they don't have a creed. But it's even more closer to home than that.
What about your own minister? I mean, what if I was not part of a creedal church, and one Sunday I got up and said, you know, brothers, sisters, I've had a change of heart, and I don't leave in the virgin birth anymore. And here I'm going to explain why I don't. And there's no, I mean, talk about accountability. I'm the leader in some ways of the church, and now they're subject to my whim, my change of conviction.
And you might even want to use scripture to try to prove why you found something that nobody else has found all throughout the last 2,000 years. Right? I mean, that's part of it is you're doing theology and community through the centuries, not just in a wide community. I mean, Dr. Van Dixort encouraged us to do that, but you're doing it more deeply as well throughout those who have gone before and thought about these things well, and it's been proven, right?
So, I mean, that's, I follow the Bible. There it is. I see it. Well, you're misapplying it or you're misinterpreting it, so we need those guardrails. On that note, I'll say one more thing. My mentor was a very wise man, but he always would say that the creeds and confessions remind us that the Holy Spirit didn't hop, skip, and jump through history. That the Holy Spirit's been faithfully working in the church throughout history.
And it wasn't that all of a sudden, especially he came out of the charismatic church, that the Holy Spirit didn't just reveal himself in the early 1900s, but he's been faithful for thousands of years in his church. As succinctly as you can, what does it mean to be a confessionally reformed believer? And it doesn't have to be profound or new from anything we've said, but what stands out about the beauty and what does it mean to be a confessionally reformed believer?
It is someone who wholeheartedly believes the doctrines taught in them and has promised to promote and defend them. Good. Anything to add to that, anybody? I would come alongside that and just say that I really believe that the Holy Spirit revived the church during the Reformation and brought the church back to the Gospel. And because the Holy Spirit did that, and it is biblical, I wholeheartedly believe these things that came out, these truths that came out of the Reformation.
There's a return to. Returning back to the Bible, to the Scriptures, and to the Gospel, which is, like Paul said, if anyone other, in Galatians, if anyone preaches you, even if we, the Apostle Paul says, even if we, or an angel of the commitment, preaches you another gospel, let him be anathema.
And I believe the Holy Spirit truly revived the church and returned it back to the gospel that the Apostle Paul was preaching, that we are justified by faith alone in the merits and works of Christ alone. And it's also being conformed by it too. And that's part of even as a confessionally reformed church. There's that understanding that as pastors, we don't know everything, and we continue to grow in our knowledge.
We continue to even grow in our being reminded of things we used to know, but we're quick forgetters. I know I'm a horribly quick forgetter. And so that's one of the things I love about going back to, like, preaching through the Heidelberg Catechism, not only for the congregation, but for myself. I'm constantly reminding myself because I don't always have a great memory.
But because I have blind areas and areas where maybe culturally I can get beguiled by something in the age, by saying I'm confessionally reformed is I'm submitting myself to an authority that's bigger than myself. I'm not the end-all and be-all of authorities. And so I'm saying I'm going to conform myself to that. Even if I wonder if that's even right, I'm going to, in humility, submit myself to that and be conformed by that.
And again, let the depth of the church and the breadth of the church speak into my life and into my mind and into my preaching and teaching. So that idea of humility has come up quite a bit in recent years, and the case has been made that it's actually more humble to wonder and say these things are not certain and true. Like, who are you to say that they got it right 500 years ago and that we haven't learned and we haven't grown in that?
So there's been, you know, you talk about growing in it, but it comes through submission. So one pastor submitted this question, because I think it's a struggle in attention that some have had. that this is a real situation where a church member came to them regarding the confessions and they said, is there any other area in life, geology, physics, science, medicine, law, where documents written 400 to 500 years ago are expected to be affirmed without reservation?
What would you tell that congregant? How would you answer that? I think the argument using the antiquity of the confessions proves way more than the arguer wants to, because the Bible's way older than the confessions. I mean, to say that the confessions are not valid because they're old, Scripture's way older. And so, you know, this is, it doesn't matter how old the Bible is,
and if it's biblical truth, it doesn't matter how old that truth is. You make applications to the present day, but the age of the thing, you know, that would make Christ irrelevant himself, because he ministered so many years ago in a different situation. So antiquity is not a good argument against truth. Yeah, I would go right in line with that, looking at our 66 books of Scripture and how they close and the warnings that Scripture has on taking away from or adding to God's Word.
If the confessions were written and are faithful to God's Word 400 years ago, nothing has been added to or taken away from God's Word. And so even though we have a process where we can go through and question or update or change something if we find that it is not faithful to God's word, the expectation is that God's word is not changing. And so we are going to be staying in line with what God has already spoken to his church. Insofar as it's faithful to God's word.
But what if I don't like something in the confessions, and I don't even like how it's talking about it? And let me ask you this. Should we still detest the heresy of the Anabaptists? Surely we've evolved beyond that. I'm being facetious. Hopefully you can understand that. Yeah, the expectation was, well, what is the heresy? What is the wrong teaching? What is it putting forward and what is it denying about how God has actually spoken through his word?
And, you know, the Lord takes his word pretty serious. And his expectation for his people is that we would as well. That we would cling to what he has declared to us and value that which he has spoken to his people. And really, if, you know, the Anabaptists, whoever might be offended by that phrase, would also detest the error of Paedo-Baptists. I mean, it's just, you know, it's just being honest
about truth claims. So, for example, John MacArthur has spoken very strongly about the evils of infant baptism from his perspective. You know, good for him for being clear on his position. And so, Or Article 36 of the Belgic Confession talks about the errors of the Anabaptists and other anarchists. I think they have the Munster Rebellion of the 1530s in mind. I don't know anybody who doesn't detest what happened there. It was a terrible thing.
And so focusing on the error and recognizing that we may disagree with positions and we can do so charitably. And actually, those positions stated strongly in our confessions were fairly mild if we remember that they're written in an age when heretics were executed. And so they're just simply saying we detest the error. That's a pretty mild position.
I would also just add on a practical note, you pointed out, we do have structures in our church order to change the Belgic if we think it does not align with God's word. But as of right now, any office bearer has said this document does fully align with God's word. And so we can adopt it if we want to. But I also think it's kind of a weird equivocation. Anything, you know, when you get into apologetics about the authority of God's word and all of that, right?
It gets into like any ultimate authority is self-attesting. So somebody looking out at geology, of course that's going to change because that's our interpretation of it. And we understand those things. But nobody questions reinterpretation of a book over a long period. Nobody's going back and looking at the Iliad or the Odyssey going, oh, we have new revelations. No, you know what the book means. You've been setting it for thousands of years. It's pretty clear.
Let's think about that a little bit more, what that means. There's a higher standard for maybe office bearers, pastors, elders, and CRC polity deacons, really, because they have ruling authority at synods and classes and councils. What is the standard for a member? So let's think about confessional membership. Are all members of the CRC, not only the office bearers, expected to affirm without reservation the confessions?
The guidelines that have come out of our denomination say that people can have wonderings or questions, but yet then they must affirm without reservation. Is there a contradiction there? How should we understand those things as it pertains to members?
Well, members, when you make a public profession of faith, I'm trying to think from the wording in the back of the Psalter hymnal, that it talks about that I heartily believe that all the teachings of the Old and New Testament is taught in this Christian church, fully aligned with God's word. And so, aligned with God's word. And so, there is an element where every member, when they become a professing member, they say, yes, what's taught here is in alignment with God's word.
Now, there's also the understanding that they haven't exhaustively studied God's word. Not even pastors or theologians in seminaries have exhaustively studied God's word in one sense. And so that goes back to that humility part of saying that I haven't, and maybe I haven't explored this particular article of the Belgic Confession.
I just made a cursory reading over it, but I never really thought about it until some issue came up in the life of my family, the life of the church, or the life of the nation. And now I'm having to really kind of look at that. Earlier you've committed yourself to submitting to the teaching of the church. And so that always takes primacy in terms of thinking now through it, thinking through the issue and saying, okay, I've submitted to this.
I've never really deeply thought about it, but now I get to deeply think about it. And so you enter into that thought process with a posture of humility, a posture of submitting to the authority. And unless, again, there are weighty, weighty reasons from Scripture, and not just your own weighty reasons, but also, too, weighty reasons of other faithful Christians who are saying, oh, this is what Scripture says here. And so, okay, now we're going to have to deliberate into this.
And I just don't get on my own to kind of make a choice to say, okay, well, I'm going to overturn the confessions here. Now I have to go through a process. Maybe I've even heard other Christians, but let's run it up the chain. Okay, let's really discuss this then as a broader church community. Anybody else on confessional membership? What does that look like? Or a state of the union on it? Is it healthy? Is it not healthy? I mean, thinking outside your churches.
I mean, we intentionally asked pastors here who are doing some nuts and bolts and doing some intentional things in the life of their congregations and every other week, Wednesday, catechisms. But as we think about the state of the CRC, how do you think of that? We're in the United Reformed Church. What does that look like, confessional membership? Are we in a good direction? As I hinted at, I think we're beginning to head in a good direction. But I think we have been heading in a poor direction.
But I do believe it's a work of God right now throughout the Christian Reformed Church where there's a renewal in our confessions and a desire to know and dive into them. And so I think we're at the very beginnings, which means, as I'm used to saying, things are messy and it's going to take a little bit to start to really get traction But, yeah, I mean, I would say confessional membership is what Tyler said.
And then to build on that, it's also a commitment to grow in our knowledge of them and a commitment to just keep diving deeper into the confessions, into God's word. Why wouldn't we? As I listened to Van Dixhorn at the beginning of the day, if these documents help us to know God more fully, love him more fully, deepen our prayer life, who wouldn't want to dive into that more and more? And so it's this commitment to keep diving in and not only submit to them, but learn and grow in them as well.
Yeah, just tying together what Tyler and Jason said, it's submission and discipleship. And I think there's room for us as a denomination to grow in both those ways among our members, certainly. But that should be the goal because that's what we're called to in the Christian life, to grow in knowledge and wisdom and into the stature that Christ has set an example before us, to become more and more like him in every way.
I just, real briefly, I can't comment on the situation in the Christian Form Church, but our practice in Kalamazoo is to provide prospective new members with a copy of the Three Forms of Unity. Maybe your churches do the same thing, and we just say, please read the Three Forms of Unity, carefully. You can mark questions on the side of your copy or objections or, you know, never thought
of this before or whatever it is. And then after you've finished, we'll talk about it. And we're basically just asking you, insofar as you understand this doctrine, are you willing to be instructed in this direction? And I think that's just a good way of starting to walk together. And it lets people know ahead of time, okay, this is where this church is going. Better to know that right now than after 10 years when you finally get into, you know, say certain topics that
weren't anticipated or two years or so. So I think membership classes are a little bit like premarital counseling in the sense that you're trying to remove as many surprises as possible that may come down the road. And so some people will say, well, there's a lot of these things I hadn't thought too much about, but I can't see myself objecting to being taught these doctrines. And we say, well, that's good enough
for us. That's really helpful. I mean, submitting insofar as you understand, in fact, in the CRC, it actually used to use that language and they lost it in the 1890s. And then there was a way you could get discipled in that as you were a part of the church.
And I think it's important to remember that. Some of the origins of some of these questions, though, right, people have questions and wonderings that might be phrases used for somebody who has settled in binding convictions against the doctrines taught in the confessions and so there's a way in which I think that's getting that can be used to just say well we're not allowed to have questions anymore like no, genuine wonderings and I don't understand this and I want to write in the margin of
my copy that you gave me and I would like to be discipled in this and learn that's a different, go back to the humility that's a different posture. Yeah, and there's some premarital counseling that needs to happen in that. I want to just make sure, because this has been probably a pet peeve since I've served on the Gravamin Committee, so I have been accused of being someone who does not want anybody in the denomination to wrestle or wonder, which is slander.
And I've actually told my congregation if they were to look at my sermon notes each week, they might even question whether I'm a Christian because I wrestle with everything. I don't believe anything easily. I wrestle. I mean, this isn't a good thing. I just never believe anything unless I've wrestled with it for a long time. And so Synod never said you couldn't wrestle. You couldn't wonder. You couldn't. But it said you can't do that forever and ever and ever as an office bearer.
And I just think that's so important I have a congregation full of people who wrestle and wonder and have so many different levels of maturity. And none of them feel like they can't come to me and ask me a question. We do this all the time with office bearers, with young children. I mean, I'm discipling a guy right now who just converted out of the Satanist church. He's wrestling with some stuff. Yeah. And I'm not saying, don't wrestle with that. Just believe.
No, we're wrestling through this together as he comes into faith. And so I just, as much as I can, I want people to realize Synod never said that. And so if you hear somebody saying that, I think they should be corrected and say, like, that's not true. Let's stop slandering in that way. Do you have something? I was just going to say, rather than a pre-membership class, we should do maybe a class six months after they become members. You were listening. service.
Oh, speaking of the evening service, that is a really good, and CJ, you mentioned that, but as we talk about confessions and preaching the confessions, that's one of my laments in terms in the Christian Reformed Church, and more broadly, it's not just CRC, it's PCA and many churches, the loss of two services on a Sunday, and because I know just from my experience, I love expositional preaching, go through a book of the Bible, a richness in it,
and I know many pastors love to do that. But it's tricky. You really can't preach through a book of the Bible and preach through the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day by Lord's Day, at the same time, because they don't line up in that way. And so by only having one worship service, boy, I pretty much knock myself from being able to ever preach through the Heidelberg Catechism or the Belgic Confession or the Canons of Dorpa. I mean, two worship services. Boy, one allows me to preach
expositionally through a book of the Bible. Another one allows me to preach through the doctrines of the church, which, of course, you're going through the Bible, constantly rooting it in Scripture. But boy, I think for the future of the Christian church, I would love to see us regain also a vibrancy of the importance of two worship services in terms of just equipping the saints better. The challenges aren't getting less in our world. They're getting more. The challenges coming to
our youth, our covenant youth are not becoming less. They're becoming more. We're not entering more and more into a golden Christian age. We're entering more and more into a post-Christian age. And so how much more ought we to be equipping the saints and the next generation to do that? So it happens in a lot of different ways. But boy, why we would, we have a whole day set aside for that.
Of all the other busy days, I know there's Wednesday nights, but in theory, Wednesday nights are also work nights for people. I mean, God really said, especially take a Sabbath day. We have that. We have the Christian Sabbath. So let's focus, let's take that day, and let's make good use of it. Okay. Anybody else want to add? I would just add a little pastoral, maybe parenting, in light of this whole thing, 100%.
One time a guy was asked, an older guy by a younger generation of church, why do you go to church twice? He just said, because that's all we got. Think about it. Wow. I want to give you kind of two questions. One is specific, and then I want to give everybody a chance to add whatever they want You were hoping that was going to be asked. Just for the sake of time, we're not going to open it up right now, but we touched on some of the other things that were brought up.
But I want to think about this. How do we help our congregations, our elders, our deacons, grow in their confessional understanding? How do we become more robustly confessionally reformed in the CRC? And you can speak into that, Bill, right? How do we do that? And then end with anything else that you are hoping to say about this topic or that we didn't ask. So we can take it in any order. So training and hopes for the future. Jump in. I've been thinking about this a lot.
Anybody who knows me knows I'm in a church revitalization, so I'm in a church that was in a really rough spot, and we've been trying to figure out how to reinvigorate it confessionally. And I would say at a basic level, you do it one step at a time. Or even I try to take the metaphor that Jesus used that a little leaven leavens the whole dough. And so just start a little bit. Don't try to revamp everything, but just start doing it in faithful ways and strategic places.
And you would be surprised. I mean, the bare minimum thing I did coming into my church, they had never had the confession or anything. I just brought the Heidelberg Catechism in as part of our liturgy and said, I'm just going to ask the question. You read the answer. I'll explain it, and then we'll just move on. And we did that for about five years, and now I'm like, we've graduated. We're going to move into the Belgic. And they were like, oof.
Got a few little pushbacks, but it's like, you're okay. You can handle this. So we're going through the Belgic doing it that way. and I bring in the canons every once in a while. But even just bringing it into the worship in that way, I've seen it start spreading like leaven, where people who could care less about the catechism were like, you know, we're going to start a Bible study going through the catechism because we really want to dive into this more and more.
It's like, praise God. So start off little and allow the leaven to start working through. I would echo what Jason said there of starting little, starting somewhere. beginning to put it to use. We have many resources available to us. We're blessed with book tables back there with all kinds of resources. There's podcasts out there these days. There's all kinds of YouTube programs and others that we have. And so we have all these good resources before us, but
they're not going to do anything if they just take up, collect dust on our shelves. So we've got to start somewhere and actively working with and using them, sharing them with our families and building from there. I think some history has been mentioned, but you look at the Dutch Reformed tradition, once in a great while I would come across these old little books that each family would have. It was the Psalter and it was the Confessions in the back there. It was in Dutch.
And it was for family devotions. And so that's what they would spend time in family devotions, personal devotions. They would sing the psalms around the table. They would talk about the Heidelberg Catechism, for instance. And they would talk about the Belgian Confession and Cans of Door. I mean, that would be part of just the discipleship process of what happens in a home from one generation to the next.
And as you know, and we know as pastors, anytime you teach something, you learn it a lot better. you internalize it a lot better. And so for, let's say, fathers in a home to be teaching this to their children or for just a husband and a wife, for instance, to do that and be talking about it back and forth to each other, you're internalizing it.
And so that's one of the best ways in terms of discipleship, in terms of training and preparing men for positions in the pulpit, for instance, or as elders, or is one of these ways of just talking about it and teaching it to the next generation in a home life. Boy, people are powerfully shaped when that happens. I would just like to encourage, if there is any elders out here, to really remember how important your calling is an elder to devote yourselves to praying for the church, Acts chapter 6.
I've been so blessed to have elders. We meet every Thursday morning, 6.30, 7.30. They can't make it, no guilt. they pray for things that we ask them to pray for each from the ministries. But if you're in a situation like you described to the church, like, hey, how do we do all this like what you've been doing? I just want to say this with all humility, whatever. Find churches that have been doing this for a while and have started off slow, but then even matured where you got a full-blown.
Because in our church, the whole covenant community, as living out our baptismal promises as a congregation, We promise that we're going to do all that we can with the help of the Holy Spirit to teach this little one what it means to be a covenant child of God. What all this means with God's promises. And that means we have parents who come in on every other Wednesday. They make snacks. Everybody gets behind it from the elders, the pastors, all the way down.
It's a whole covenant community thing. It takes a covenant community to raise a child. And don't be afraid to ask any one of us or other churches that you know where they've been doing this well by God's grace and continue to prove for years. Hey, can you come out and help us or can we come see what you're doing and just learn together because we learn from each other in the covenant community.
And just have that confidence that God is pleased with that and he's pleased with these means of grace. and he will revive a church and help it when the leadership especially takes the lead to say, hey, we're all going to make some adjustments to get this done. I will add one last thing. I was losing to athletic coaches for high school catechism because we do it on Wednesdays, third grade, all the way up. And where's so-and-so? Oh, he's got basketball practice.
And coaches would not allow them to come to catechism because there's practice. And if they don't come to practice, they're not going to start and all this kind of stuff. And then, I don't know why I didn't think about it a long time ago. It's like, they got to eat sometime. So we bumped our hour back to dinner hour, and we just got to church to provide the meal. So we have a high schoolers and adult class, two different ones. And so we provide all the pizza and the pop, and we pray together.
And then we have 15 minutes of eating, and then we have 45 minutes of good catechism, and pretty much 99% of them all come. And we're not having conflicts with sports. On a Wednesday night. Every other Wednesday night. Wow. Yep. In fact, I will just share. Sorry. Just had two years ago, we had a graduate from our church. He's now in the United States Marine Corps. He had to go to Paris Island for boot camp training.
He sent an email back because they strip you of everything apparently in this boot camp of Marine Corps training. And he said the only thing that kept me through that all is I fell back at what I learned about catechism. I took it kind of oblivious when I was going through it. But that whole sovereignty of God and my Heavenly Father in Providence and Lord's Day 9 and 10 working in all things for my good, he had, as Tyler was saying, a Bible and a Psalter hymnal in his barracks.
And he would fall back on that. And he was telling me when I was visiting him, to go off the Marine Corps base, you have to have another fellow Marine sign out with you. They never allow, obviously, a Marine to go by himself off base. And nobody in his platoon wanted to sign off with him because they knew he lived out his Christian life and his Christian commitment. So he had to wait all the way until Christmas time to be able to go military leave to go visit family.
But for a pastor's heart and for our church and our elders to hear that, a young man going through catechism, going through the means of grace, now in the Marine Corps at boot camp, what did he fall back on? These things. And God will bless him and God will use him. So don't be afraid to ask churches that are doing this to learn from them and learn together. Anything else?
Can I ask for a volunteer to pray as a bunch of pastors sitting up here to pray for congregants, pray for elders, pray for people who do have questions and wonderings, what it means to grow in these things. CJ, would you pray for them? Let's pray. Almighty God and our gracious Heavenly Father, may your name be honored and blessed and known and loved.
We pray, God, thanking you for the blessings we've had this day and still have in hearing about church history, and how you, Lord Jesus, continue to build your church and raise up faithful servants to proclaim the gospel and to confess it and to live it and even be willing to suffer and die for it. We pray for our churches now, Lord. Lord, we are so beat up and we're so pressured by this world of unbelief that you would help us to have confidence in you, Confidence in your word.
Thankfulness for these treasure of confessions that have been handed down and entrusted to us. To learn them and to live them and to enjoy them. We pray for our covenant families. All of the struggles and battles that we are having. We commit that to you, Lord. We ask your Holy Spirit to work in us. Work in our churches through the word. Through pastors and elders who are faithfully shepherding the flock. feeding lambs and feeding your sheep because we love you, Jesus.
And we'd ask that you protect us from the evil one and help us not to become weary in doing good, but know that as we entrust all these things to you, a harvest will come to the glory of your name and the edification of your church, advancement of your kingdom. We pray in Jesus' mighty and merciful name. Amen. Amen. Can we thank our panelists? Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, guys. That's all we have for this week.
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