Category Archives: The Law of God
The Pastor’s Use of the Law II
Albert N. Martin
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Thursday afternoon, October 20th, 2011 during the annual Pastor’s Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Pastor Albert N. Martin and this is the eighth and final session of the conference.
Those of you who were here yesterday will remember that Dr. Ferguson had to do some patchwork when he was not able to complete all he had hoped to cover in his first lecture and trying to patch it in to what he had prepared for the second lecture.
As I lay on the pew in the back there going over materials with a similar exercise, the analogy came to me that the lecturer sits on the back of the horse called the preacher and if the lecturer lets the reins go, the preacher takes off and you don’t know how fast and how far he’s going to go.
Well, I let the reins go a couple of times in the previous hour and it’s put me in trouble trying to find a reasonable and edifying way to finish up what I had hoped to cover in the last hour and still give you the fruit of my study in some areas that I feel are crucial.
So, what I’ve decided to do is to conclude the material by basically just giving you the five heads connected with what I called The Fact of His Sinlessness Applied, hopeful that you will then investigate these areas on your own.
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The Pastor’s Use of the Law I
Albert N. Martin
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Thursday morning, October 20th, 2011, during the Annual Pastor’s Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Pastor Albert N. Martin and this is the seventh session in the conference.
If I were to take a text as a launching pad for what I want to convey to you this morning it would be a text such as John 5 and verse 39, where Jesus said,
“You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life and these are they which bear witness of Me.”
Our grand and glorious calling as ministers of the new covenant is succinctly identified in several places by the apostle Paul. One of them is Ephesians 3 and verse 8 where Paul speaks of his commission to be found preaching to the Gentiles what he calls the unsearchable riches of Christ, or, in the language of Colossians 1, having mentioned the Lord Jesus, he said, “whom we proclaim, teaching and admonishing every man that we may present every man perfect or mature in Christ” and he says, it is to that ministry I give myself, laboring, agonizing, but according to His working which works in me mightily.
And in the light of this calling, to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ, to proclaim Christ to every man, you and I must learn how to use the law, not only in the ways already highlighted during this conference—and I would simply, for what it’s worth, underscore in yellow and orange and red highlighters and under-liners, the various ways you and I have been instructed from the Scriptures that God would have us use His holy law, but in the light of this calling to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ, I want to suggest in these two final sessions that we must learn by God’s grace and through the Scriptures how to make the preaching of the law a means of making Christ more fully known, more implicitly trusted, more passionately loved and more diligently obeyed and if to any degree what I attempt to do behind this desk today leads to those ends, then I will not have labored in vain–
How to preach the law so that Christ Himself will be more fully known, more implicitly trusted, more passionately loved and more diligently obeyed.
Continue reading The Pastor’s Use of the Law I
The Law II
An Historical, Theological Probe
Dr. Sinclair Ferguson
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Wednesday afternoon, October 19th, 2011 during the annual pastor’s conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and this is the sixth session in the conference.
I know that Philip Ross’s book was mentioned yesterday—is it Written by the Finger of God? It’s a wonderful book, I do commend it to you, but I just had a message this morning saying that Philip’s mother has gone to be with the Lord this morning and I’ve been thinking about her because she exhibited everything that we were thinking about in the last hour of the joy and liberty of a believer who loves the law.
Well, you know a plane’s cruising altitude has a cruising altitude at 33,000 feet and the pilot dives to 3,000 feet, as perhaps you have to your alarm experienced, you always feel it’s very difficult to get back up to cruising altitude again and I have a friend who’s tradition is that at the end of the second point in the sermon everything stops and they sing a psalm and then they begin again, and although I admire him greatly, few things I could more admire him for than being able to get up to cruising altitude again after you’ve gone down to 3,000 feet as it were.
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An Historical, Theological Probe
The Law I
A Biblical, Theological Probe
Dr. Sinclair Ferguson
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Wednesday afternoon, October 19th, 2011 during the annual pastor’s conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and this is the sixth session in the conference.
When the various themes were being apportioned in preparation for the conference, I think I received a list of the topics that the organizers wanted us to cover in our thinking together about this marvelous theme of the law of God, and discovering what one another of the brethren were doing, I thought what I would try and bring for these sessions this morning would be essentially two probes. The first, a probe of a biblical-theological nature into how it is that the Scriptures as a whole understand the law of God, and then in the second address, in many ways far less stimulating and interesting than the Scriptures themselves, to take a look at how it is that our Reformed or evangelical tradition has understood the law, and one or two of the issues that have obviously arisen in the history of the Christian church around the place of the law and the significance of the law, especially of course in the life of the Christian believer. So, neither of these studies is by any stretch of the imagination comprehensive in character. It will be full of holes. It’s simply an attempt to fill in some of the dots so that we can get the big picture and see how some of the more detailed areas that are being dealt with also in the conference fit into the large picture of how it is that God has given His law, why it is that God has given a law to His people, and how it is, therefore, that His people are able to say that we love His law, meditate on it day and night, and rejoice in it in every way.
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A Biblical, Theological Probe
The Moral Law II
The Moral Law and the Christian Life, Romans 7:25
Dr. Robert Martin
At 3:21 Paul turns a corner–now to open up the gospel. His theme is Sola Scriptura, Sola fidei, Sola gratia, Solus Christus, Soli Deo gloria. He speaks of a saving righteousness from God that is imputed to the believer and of God’s righteousness in doing this, i.e., of his honoring his own law in such a way that he may be just and the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus.
At 6:1 he turns another corner–this time to speak of the implications of the gospel re. the possibility of believers continuing in sin. As he develops this question he assumes a number of truths, including the continuing prescribing function of God’s moral law as a rule of life for the believer. This is woven into the canvas on which he displays his case. By the time we get to 7:25, this is explicit. Now, we can’t follow Paul at every turn from 6:1 to 7:25, where he says, “So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God”–but we need to see enough to understand how important that statement is to our appreciating the place of the moral law in our living the Christian life.
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The Moral Law and the Christian Life, Romans 7:25
The Moral Law I
The Moral Law and the Gospel
Dr. Robert Martin
Now we know that whatever the law says,
it says to those who are under the law,
that every mouth may be stopped, and all
the world may become guilty before God.
Therefore by the deeds of the law
no flesh will be justified in His sight,
for by the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:19-20).
The relation of God’s law to the gospel is the most important practical theme in Christian theology. Charles Bridges (The Christian Ministry, 228) says,
We cannot indeed have too much of the Gospel; but we may have too little of the Law. And a defect in the Evangelical preaching of the Law is as clear a cause of inefficient ministration, as a legal preaching of the Gospel. In such a Ministry there must be a want of spiritual conviction of sin generally–of spiritual sins most particularly–and–flowing directly from hence–a low standard of spiritual obedience. Indeed, all the prevalent errors in the Church may be traced to this course.
J. Newton similarly says, “Ignorance of the nature and design of the law is at the bottom of most religious mistakes” (Works, 1:176). These statements seem excessive, but the more we consider them the more accurate they appear.
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The Moral Law and the Gospel
The Law of God II
Threefold Division
Dave Chanski
The following is a lightly edited transcript of a sermon delivered on Monday afternoon, October 17th, 2011 during the annual Pastor’s Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. This is the second session and the preacher is Pastor Dave Chanski.
Usually we have preaching in this conference, but I don’t think there’s really any sense in which what I’m going to be doing is preaching. It’s definitely more of a theological lecture.
My topic is the threefold division of the law.
So if you were hoping for liveliness in preaching to be the thing that would help you to stay awake we do need to rely on more supernatural sources than that.
There really isn’t a lot of practical application. I mean, there is a whole lot of practical application, but not which I’m going to be drawing out. The many branches of the tree, if you will, the main one would be the abiding relevance of the moral law—that’s the main practical application for all of us and I will—perhaps the most helpful thing I’ll be able to do for you is provide for you (not today, but, God willing, before the week is over) a helpful bibliography for the subject of the threefold division of the law.
Of course, the threefold division of the law refers to the ceremonial, the civil and the moral law.
Continue reading The Law of God II
Threefold Division
The Law of God I
Pastoral Exhortations
Dave Chanski
The following is a lightly edited transcript of a sermon delivered on Monday morning, October 15th, 2011 during the annual pastors’ conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. This is the opening session and the preacher is Pastor Dave Chanski.
I will say something, as I begin here, about the theme of this year’s conference. It is the law of God. We have the quote from Psalm 119, “I love your law,” on the cover of our conference brochure, and this really began (this, what led to our having the whole theme of the conference on the law of God) with a suggestion that I made sometime last year, I believe, when we began to talk about what should we do for next year’s conference and I suggested that we at least have a message on the subject of antinomianism.
I said that because I think there’s a sense in which I see an Antinomian behind every bush. I kind of feel like John Gill. Spurgeon, I think, wrote about John Gill, that he saw an Arminian behind every bush, and I don’t think the Arminians were always there were Gill saw them, but I think I do see an Antinomian almost behind every bush.
It’s a subject that I’ve been concerned about over the years and so I brought this up for discussion with my fellow elders. We discussed it a little bit and then we continued the discussion when a couple of the brethren who are here with us from NJ also drove with us, three elders from Trinity, out to a pastor’s fraternal in Grand Rapids Michigan back in—I think it was March (either that or April) of this year.
And then while we were driving I had said to the men, “Well, why don’t we have further discussion about the subject for next year’s conference and we could even get the input of these other brethren.”
Continue reading The Law of God I
Pastoral Exhortations