Teaching the Gospel: Heart, Grace, and Community

I have selected 12 quotes from the transcript that align with the key takeaways provided. Here they are:

"I love them very much and I want to help them see, not simply that they do wrong, but that their sin offends a Holy God, as we have talked about in this conference, and so it is thus an infinite offence against God. It is not simply a matter of them getting their Ps and Qs right with their mother and me, day to day, but this is a matter of the heart." [00:01:24]

"So, in other words, we are trying to approach parenting as if it is a heart issue, but then also make sure that they do understand what proper behavior is. So if I am setting this conversation in the context of their sin, of a great God who is justly offended, infinitely offended, by sin, I then have the door wide open to show them the glories of the God-man and the incredible nature of His Grace, and I am praying for them every day that they will take this to heart and love it." [00:02:03]

"I think we vastly under-estimate what children are able to process and learn, particularly a 10-year-old – a 5-year-old is another matter – but I think, if memory serves me right, my younger son at the age of about 7 or 8 came out of a catechism sermon on the justification and said it was like God reached out and touched me. It was not a children’s sermon, so I think, as Luther said, we never know when the Holy Spirit is going to do His work, so we must not skip even the most poor of sermons." [00:05:44]

"Speaking definitively, from the Dutch Reformed tradition, there are two means of Grace – the preaching of the Word and the sacraments of the church. Now there will be Presbyterians who will suggest that there is a third means of Grace, namely prayer. And they mean well by that. And certainly, we are agreed that prayer is gracious in the life of a Christian and so we don’t actually have to separate over this point." [00:07:08]

"Sometimes we can speak of the means of Grace as though somehow it suggests that grace is a commodity, a thing, that can be transferred, and it’s almost subtly Roman Catholic although it’s got evangelical terminology, but it’s almost like a medieval Roman Catholic – I can hear Sinclair Ferguson in my ears when he said famously, at a Ligonier Conference I think – there’s no such thing as Grace, that Grace isn’t a thing that you can convey physically and tangibly through some means, there’s only Christ." [00:09:18]

"There should be the fear of God within us as we consider the subject of hell, and RC has said, ‘if we really concentrated on hell for more than five minutes, we would go crazy.’ So it is a very serious and sobering subject that we do not take lightly. I would need to more about the question and the questioner so I would have to ask follow-up questions because that is still so broad and generic to understand the intent of the question and what they are expressing." [00:11:53]

"Of course they should be comforted from the fact that ‘there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ and it may well be that they are simply not well taught doctrinally and theologically, is one possibility. The second may be that – I can’t remember the question – whether they genuinely have a true assurance of their salvation, if there is some lingering doubt, then I could understand that they would still be uncomfortable with the subject if this is not sealed to their heart yet." [00:12:45]

"Reformed theology has a narrative, a very distinct narrative, going back to Augustine. Therefore the shape of these doctrines have a trajectory through history and we are doomed to repeat the errors of history if we don’t know them. So Reformed Theology is a way of expressing, perhaps the importance of a historical narrative, and I wonder if you wanted to comment on that in the wake, say, of a postmodern view of history that sometimes infiltrates the church?" [00:21:23]

"Reformed theology calls us to recognize that there is no salvation in and of ourselves, it is extra nos, it is outside of us. And so there is this sense in which, in terms of Catholicism and Islam and Mormonism and even just do-it-yourself American pragmatism, the Reformation continues and it requires this generation, my generation frankly, to take up the torch and continue boldly preaching the Word, even as preachers 500 years ago began to do so, preaching Book by Book and verse by verse." [00:24:46]

"It is the sequence by which God applies His grace to a sinner beginning with God’s initiative in eternity past in bringing about the reality of regeneration and applying the merits of Christ, and it can be any number, depending upon the one who is answering it, of how many sub-categories that there are." [00:25:28]

"So in Romans 8:29,30 you have an embryonic Ordo Salutis. Now the various strands of the Ordo Salutis that you can pull out and sort of identify are effectual calling, regeneration, faith, repentance, adoption, justification, sanctification. We can talk about two parts of sanctification: positional and progressive. Perseverance and so on. So you can identify these." [00:27:28]

"So I see it as an extremely useful tool in ensuring that the Gospel isn’t just something that’s up there and something objective, but it must touch my heart and soul, it must impact me, so that which Christ has achieved on the cross must, in some way, be applied to me as an individual according to a certain trajectory from God’s foreknowledge and predestination to His effectual call to my final glorification." [00:30:28]