Gooding, David: The Danger of Fluffing the Gospel

And if you would ask me this afternoon to speak my mind, uh, that I take to be not all the flattering things that, uh, you would like to hear, but, uh, some of those other things that cause such an one as myself some concern. Before I get on to talking about that, allow me to tell you a little bit about myself so that you can see my background and my slants and my biases, to know, as the American phrase is, and I've learned some American, where I'm coming from, you'll see. I was brought up in a Christian home, was taught scripture from my childhood. I think I was one afternoon in a Sunday school, but no more, because my parent, God bless his memory, felt it his own personal responsibility to teach the members of his family the word of God. And he taught us, not always to my delight, I have to confess, but he taught us so that by the time I came to faith, I knew large passages, not only of the New Testament, but of the Old. And as I have grown older, I have learned to thank God for that heritage that I was given, even as a small child. I notice, uh, with, uh, uh, uh, compassion, some of my younger brethren and sisters these days, so when they get converted, even though they come from Christian homes, have a very slight knowledge of the New Testament, let alone a knowledge of the Old Testament. The thing that, uh, uh, really made a mark on my life, I suppose, if one thing did more than another, was when I was around about the age of fourteen, when there came to our part of the world a teacher of the word, who, young as I was, seemed to me to be somewhat different from other preachers. The other preachers were good. They came and preached their sermons, and instructive and helpful they were. When this man, however, preached, it was as though the word of God itself was speaking. And there was an authority, and there was a warmth, and there was a wonder about it that struck me in those days as remarkable and really got hold of my mind and of my heart. The wonder of the word seemed to emerge from it. I needed no telling that this was the inspired word of God, because it glowed with the glory of the Lord. That has marked me in my own life. I wish I were a preacher like that. But it not only was, uh, beneficial at the time, but when as a student I went to university, it was that, amongst many other things, that became my sheet anchor in the face of the blasts of modernism and atheism and skepticism that one meets in a university. I found myself saying from time to time, well, I have no answer to what the learned professor says. I remember particularly the professor of Hebrew, and I was trying my best to learn some Hebrew, and he came up with all his modernistic notions about the Old Testament. Most of them I'd never heard of before. I had no answer at that stage to his, uh, uh, supposed problems. I do now. I know a lot of them were nonsense anyway, but I had no answers then. And I used to find myself saying that, you see, but I don't know what the answer to his questions are, but this I know, that if he holds that the Pentateuch is a hodgepodge of bits and pieces put together by some unintelligent foreformers, then he must be wrong, because the spiritual accuracy of the book of Leviticus is simply amazing. It was that gentleman that kept me. And in later life, when life's difficulties and sorrows and pains, uh, began to beset me. Very often, when I was tempted to think that the whole of Christianity was nothing more than psychological self-deception. It was the objective wonder of the Word of God that gave me that objective hold on reality and said, but if I were to say there's nothing in Christianity, how could I answer this wonderful accuracy of what is self-evidently the word of God? And I say that for your encouragement, if I may, but who of me to, uh, a little David in more senses than one, with my, my stick and my sling, to, uh, even to think of encouraging you giants that stand before me. But then you'll see, the man that so helped me was not an academic theologian. He didn't come anywhere near a BD or anything of the sort. He was a baker by profession, but eventually gave his whole time to the preaching of the word. It wasn't first and foremost the academic expositors of the word that were my sheet anchor, though I praise God for them and for the enormous help that they have been. It was the men who, in my youth, made me hear Samuel-like the very voice of God speaking through his word. And I do say it, my brethren, to encourage you in this modern day to give yourselves to that great task with all your might and main. As Paul said to Timothy, Timothy, my boy, be in these things, give yourself to reading and expounding, for in so doing you shall save both yourself and them that hear thee. I thank God for those who, doing what Paul told Timothy to do, in that sense save me as a young believer. When I went up to the university and in the growing post-war years, there became visible a trend in England that I have to say to you, gentlemen, has not led to desirable fruit. I would, in those days, be invited to preach, to go to preach, perhaps a hundred miles away, to a Saturday night. In those days, they were called rallies. Their name has differed over the centuries, gentlemen. In the first century I lived in, they were called rallies. In the second century I lived in, they were called squashes, and so they have gone on, you see. They were called rallies in those days. And you would travel this, uh, fifty or hundred and fifty miles, you'll say, and find that the thing started at, um, uh, say, um, half past seven, you'll say, of the evening. It would start with good singing, that's lovely, and then it would go on to all kinds of entertainment, question boxes, what's my line, borrowed generally from the BBC, rather poorly adapted, all kinds of events and witness boxes and goodness knows what, Jose. And this would occupy from half past seven nearly round till half past eight. And then the chairman would say, we've got Dog's body here tonight, we've invited him to come and speak to Jose. Now, now we've give him ten minutes, uh, Dulce, and I'm behind him if he should speak too long, and I can pull his coat, Dulce, and get him down and... Well, they didn't quite say, and then we can go on with the fun, but they might as well have said so. Gentlemen, if I had been brought up in that kind of atmosphere, you would have lost me completely. Or I soon felt that if Christianity is in fact such a bitter pill that to get young people to swallow it, you have to coat it with liberal coatings of the sugar of second rate entertainment, then I, I don't want the entertainment, of course, I can get better myself elsewhere. But I don't want the Christianity either, if that's what God is like. I believe in a God so stupendously marvelous, and his word so wonderfully glorious, that it is an insult to suppose and to represent it as a bitter pill that has to be liberally sugared with the world's entertainment before it can be even contemplated by young people. The Word of God says, does it not, and all of us would agree, that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And that all my fellow believers, of course, believe with all their hearts. I sometimes say, and your gracious invitation encourages me to speak freely off my cuff. I sometimes feel that we have lost our nerve over the second bit. The second bit is that all scripture is profitable for teaching. Of course, we have to grade the teaching, do we not, to the spiritual, uh, uh, uh, situation of our congregation. Even the inspired writers of the New Testament had to moderate what they were going to teach on times, didn't they? Josie, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He said, I've got things to say about the, um, uh, great high priesthood of our Melchizedek, but I can't say them now. Why can't I say them now? Because he said, you are not spiritually grown enough. Pity, wasn't it? Because that is precisely what they needed, those dear believers at that time, facing the persecution that they had faced. They desperately needed to know about Melchizedek and his ministry of intercession, and it was a cruel thing if their stunted spiritual growth and their continued babyhood made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to understand the typology of the Old Testament. Yes, I am aware, therefore, that we have to consider the spiritual state of those to whom we minister. But that said, if you can't make Chronicles, if you can't make Kings and Samuel and Judges and Joshua overwhelmingly and marvelously interesting because they are the voice of the living God, well, let's pack up Christianity and go home. But if God's word is such a bore now, what will it be to have to spend the whole eternity listening to God speaking? You know, that's, that would be frightful, wouldn't it? But excuse me, I speak more liberally than I should. I'm pleased to observe, as I travel around this world, that the word of God still has its ancient power. Countries differ, of course, and conditions in different country differ, and what works in one country doesn't necessarily work in another situation. Highlights of this last ten years for, uh, uh, for me, as I have visited many different countries in the service of the Lord, are two, Flemish-speaking Belgium and the country of Austria. Both of them hard Roman Catholic countries. The west of Austria and Flemish-speaking Belgium, very ignorant, if I might say so, an old-fashioned Catholicism. In Flemish-speaking Belgium, four missionaries plus later another two, with the help of recent converts in that country and some others, but mainly four missionaries, have planted in twenty years uh twenty five assemblies plus. God isn't altogether dead. And the way they have done it is by evangelism, evangelistic Bible studies in the homes, very often of the unconverted people. Or it could be that a believer will open his or her home and invite the neighbors in. These people wouldn't come to your gospel meeting if you had one. To all say. But, uh, they are prepared to invite the, uh, preacher in and give him, say, six Thursdays or five uh, Wednesdays. And of course, when that is the situation, there are no preliminaries, choirs, songs, everything else by way of, uh, getting people in the right form of mood. It's straight in. Ha. forty-minute talk, you see. It's under the guise of being a biblical study, but, uh, if you start in the first verse of the Gospel of John, they tell me you don't get very far that night, but that first verse, you know, God is the great communicator, the word of God, and the importance of the word of God, and people that don't take any notice of God's Word, their prayer is an abomination to the Lord. Of course, the Catholics sit up when they hear that. They're not given to the study of the Word, as you know. Uh, and then after a forty-minute talk or so, straight talk from Bible. Then there comes the coffee and the cakes, and after that, next two hours of ding dong, cut and thrust. So the gospel meeting turns out to be two and a half hours long. Not bad going, is it? And they say that if they're not converted after six weeks, uh, well, if they're not angry after six weeks and and refuse to come again, they get converted, you'll see. Hm. Twenty assemblies in twenty years by a handful of believers. So are they that, of course, the care of those assemblies is an enormous burden. And the missionaries do what they can, all four to six of them, but mostly four, two men and their two wives, uh, to train the believers and guide them in the ways of God, to teach them baptism, to teach them the Lord's Supper, to to get them ready to take part in these things. Then they have to lead them to stand or to sink or swim. You, if there's just four or five or six of you, you can't be at all twenty five assemblies every every day, can you? What? And if they don't go on, they sink. And the marvel is they go on, of course, because God is still alive, and these people have actually found them. They're not without their problems, their teething problems. Some of them are small assemblies of forty, some are large, over the hundred mark. In some areas they come of broken people, psychologically broken. In other places they are assemblies of professional people. But it has been marvelous to see the work of God thus go on. And you see, it appeals to my heart, that's why I told you my background. They are not obliged, in order to get an ear, to employ the kind of entertainment and music that in our country you would associate with psychedelic discos. They don't have to use it. And that's not because Belgium or Austria for that matter, are not modern countries, or that their youth is not modern. Their youth is as modern as any country in the world, and a bit worse. I suspect some of the morals of European continent nowadays would shock you. I have a friend who worked in student work in Germany for some years. He was based in the Baptist Church in Germany, and one of the things he told me with alarm and distress was in the Baptist church where he was, they held a party of all the young people Saturday afternoon, and the dress was complete undress. They all went naked, men and women. When my friend protested to the pastor's wife, she mocked him and said, ah, but you haven't got over your inhibitions yet. The youth of Europe is modern, but the plain word of God preached and studied vigorously still works. And in the other country that I mentioned, Austria, a similar movement of the Holy Spirit of God has been evident in these past fifteen to twenty years, as it has been in Belgium. In both of those countries, I have from time to time been invited by the workers, some who now have been converted in Austria and given themselves full time to the work. We would go up the mountains for a week of study, some fifteen, perhaps twenty people, and there it's a question of morning, noon, and night, morning, all morning, and late afternoon, and all the evening till twelve o'clock, vigorously studying the word. I was in Austria recently, and there came a man to me. He was rank Xerox manager in Vienna. He was a Catholic. He got converted, I know not how. He leads an assembly in Vienna at the moment, has done these ten years plus. And he was telling me of certain tapes that I had given, said he, David, I've spent two hundred listening hours to those tapes. And it's not just listening for the sake of being entertained, they take it and use it and develop it and add their own studies to it, and away they are in the homes of the unconverted. Marvelous to see the word of God thus thriving in those countries. It's still works. It is the power of God to salvation. And when the young people get converted that way round, they take it as normal because they'd never known anything else. I was in the city of Graz about three years ago or four, where there are a few more American missionaries and some locals. They work on this kind of method. You'll see study groups among the unconverted in various forms and phases. You'll see. And, uh, they were in one of these study weeks, the leaders, only about twenty of them, morning, noon, and night. One of the young gentlemen invited me to dinner. He was a PhD scientist on something or other in one of the big firms, recently come to the Lord a year or two come to the Lord. The missionary had now gone on furlough, so he was in charge of the evangelistic Bible study, and one of the reasons for asking me to lunch, uh, to dinner was to say, now, look, last week the people asked me this question and that question and the other question. I didn't know what to say to them. What is the answer to that? And it was marvelously charming to see such a recent convert. He doesn't know anything different. For him, Christianity is hearing the word of God and discovering God and finding it the wonder it is, and forthwith launched in even eh launched into evangelistic studies with his own neighbors, do you see? That's normal. That's what they know Christianity to be. One farmer I was with, up in the mountains of Austria, I noticed that, uh, he was out three nights a week at such studies amongst his neighbors. These things I find, my brethren, exceedingly encouraging. As I have said, the methods not- do not necessarily work in the exact same way in every country because of the different cultures and so forth and so on, but at least they stand to my mind as witness that God is not yet dead. And assemblies in Austria are forging ahead. And that is an interesting thing, because without telling tales out of school, assemblies in Germany have not found the way so easy. Yes, when they have their conferences in Germany, for instance, in the city of Dillenburg, they would perhaps get eleven hundred to fourteen hundred people to their conferences for two or three days, particularly of an evening time. But they haven't seen the growth of new assemblies planted, you'll see. They have tried to be faithful to God's word, but not exactly moribund, but not really planting new assemblies. In more recent times, they've gone down to Austria to witness this thing, to see how you can be faithful to the Lord in his word, in assembly principle, and yet be pioneer in the gospel, and folks actually get converted, and new assemblies are formed. With that said, now I come to what my main thesis is this afternoon, and the main concern that I share with you. It's a multi-headed hydra, my concern, so bear with me. But, uh, I base my mark remarks on what I perceive to be the thesis that Paul has in his first letter to the Corinthians. The Corinthians, as you know, gentlemen, were a reliable church. If there was a right way of doing something and a wrong way, they could be relied upon to do it the wrong way, do you see? So they were highly reliable. I must be careful what I say about them. I got to meet them in glory one of these days, so let me moderate my language about them, you'll see. But they were, as you know, in all sorts of difficulties and troubles. When Paul wrote to them, he wasn't afraid, of course, now and again to lay down an apostolic command or an apostolic prohibition. But the main method he had of correcting the wrongs in the church in Corinth was to bring them back to the fundamental principles of the gospel. I mean that in its broadest term. It's not merely, look here, gentlemen, come back to church. What he brings them back to is the fundamental of the gospel. Listen to the man. Oh, my dear Corinthians, you can't go on doing that stupid thing, calling yourself by different names after different men, Paul, Paulus, Cephas, and the rest of them. You can't do it. Why can't we do it? Because it conflicts with the very basis of the gospel. That's why you can't do it. Was Paul crucified for you, by any chance? No? Well, of course not. We are coming right down to the very first basic principle of the gospel, are we not? Christ crucified for us. Were you baptized in the name of Paul? No, of course not. Well, if, if Paul wasn't crucified for you, and if you were not baptized in the name of Paul, why do you call yourself after the name of Paul? It's inconsistent, isn't it? With the very basis of the gospel. Listen to him again in chapter five: My brethren, you'll have to take this whole situation in hand, this frightful immorality that has broken out among you, of such kind as even is never heard of amongst the pagan Greeks. And I may tell you, gentlemen, Greeks took some shocking generally. You would have to tell a Greek that fornication was wrong, they wouldn't have known that naturally. But here were the church allowing a case of immorality such as would shock the very pagan Greeks. You'll have to deal with it. You can't let it go on. Why can't we let it go on? Because it would undermine the very basic principle of the gospel. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast of unleavened bread, of sincerity and truth, and purge out the old leaven. For you cannot have the redemption of Passover without the obligation of holiness. For if you allow it, you are corrupting and debasing and misrepresenting the very gospel. Now come, says Paul, dear me, you fellow believers, dear, dear, dear, dear me. You, you cannot eat the table of demons, you can't. You know that, don't you? Why can't we? Because it would conflict with the very basis of the gospel, because that is disloyalty to God himself. Would be a case of idolatry of the worst. And you'll have to alter the way you're conducting the breaking of bread, my dear Corinthians, says he. Why's that? Well, because the way you're conducting the breaking of bread, it's impossible for anybody to eat the Lord's Supper. It has so become perclouded and overshadowed by all other kinds of things that the significance of the Lord's Supper is itself completely lost. You'll have to change it. And why bother about the Lord's Supper? Because it is the very basic covenant document of the church. This is the blood of the new covenant. Hm. We've got some very curious, uh, practices when it comes to the gifts, says Paul, hopelessly out of proportion and ill motivated, you'll have to change that too. Oh, really, why? Because your way you're going on conflicts with the very basic motivation of the Christian faith, which is love. You're using the gifts in a way that conflicts with love. And finally, he says to them, doesn't he, now you've got some very strange ideas circulating in, in Corinth. Some of you, I hear, are saying that there is no resurrection. But gentlemen, has it not dawned on you that if there is no resurrection, there is no gospel? Or if there's no resurrection, Christ isn't risen. And if Christ isn't risen, you are yet in your sins. There's nothing in the gospel whatsoever. You can't go on allowing this kind of false teaching in your church. It conflicts with the gospel. And the more I have thought about that over these recent years, the more important it has appeared to me to be. We do, from time to time, my dear brethren, need to look again at the way we behave in our churches, to make sure that what we are doing and preaching does not conflict with the basic principles of the gospel. So let me here generalize from that before I come down to particulars. It perturbs me, my, uh, my, my brethren, as I travel around the world, to see what appears to me, not to speak unkindly, as a fluffing of the gospel itself. I refer to the way in which now many evangelical churches and organizations are beginning to think it is perfectly all right to cooperate with the Roman Catholic Church or with the Orthodox Church in evangelical campaigns and in other situations as well. On the ground that there are an increasing number of believers among Roman Catholics, for instance, in these days. And that last is true, of course, and praise God for it. But Roman Catholicism itself, as you know, has not changed. Though it uses the same terms, here is our danger that it doesn't mean what we mean by those terms. For a year, I suppose, most weeks, I met with a particular group in Northern Ireland to study the word, the majority of whom were Catholics, you see. They were Catholic charismatics anyway, and a Christian friend of mine had assured me that these folks had got converted, and would I come and have a Bible study with them? So I, I said, yes, of course I would. So we met, you see, and over the weeks I found that they never used or didn't like to use the term justification by faith. They talked about sanctifying grace. So I went to a Catholic bookshop and got me a book on advice on sanctifying grace, you see. This was the new Catholicism. And I began to read it and was, like C. S. Lewis, surprised by joy as I read it. Marvelous stuff, so it seemed to be. They said, you know, sanctifying grace is nothing other than a personal relationship with the Lord. Now this is what counts, a personal relationship with the Lord. That's salvation. Do they? Hmm. It's Christ living in you. That is salvation. Oh, this is marvelous, this. Of course, they said if you sin, that breaks the fellowship, but you can have it restored by confession and so forth. But that's the main thing to get hold of. I thought it could have been written by John Stott himself, I'll say. Until I got to the chapter entitled What Happens When We Die, which began as follows. When we come to die, few of us, if any, will ever, will feel that we've ever done anything worthy of being damned. I said to myself, what's that? None of us have done anything worthy of being damned. What on earth is Romans three about that says we're all guilty before God with our mouths shut and liable to the pain pangs of eternal hell. We've never done anything worthy of being damned. Well, no, not on their terms, because baptism, as you know, is said to put away the stain of Adam's sin. And thereafter, if you've never committed a mortal sin, you haven't done anything worthy of being damned, only some, uh, peccadilloes, you know, smaller sins, venial. Exit repentance, therefore. And the next thing said, few of us will feel we've ever done anything worthy of being damned. None of us will feel fit to enter the presence of God at once. In fact, when we first see God, we shall sh- shrink away in absolute terror and be glad to go to purgatory. Exit faith, of course. And if you ask how that can be so in the minds of people that were writing this book, advocating that salvation is by grace, then you must understand that by grace they don't mean what you mean. They mean that baptism having regenerated you and washed away Adam's sin, you are now in the running to go to heaven. But it all depends whether how much you improve. It's the grace of Christ that helps you to improve. But of course, whether you ever get into heaven or not will depend upon how much you have improved by the time you come to die. And you can't know whether you'll be improved enough until the judgment, the final judgment. And the likelihood is, of course, you will not have improved enough, and therefore you'll have to go to purgatory. Of course, if you should eventually manage to improve enough to be admitted to heaven, you'll say it was by God's grace because he gave you the strength to do what was ever necessary to get the improvement. But it's likely you'll have to spend a long time in purgatory before the process is complete. That, gentlemen, is not salvation by grace as the Bible means it. And I am perturbed by the way many evangelicals in many countries are imagining that somehow Rome has become almost evangelical overnight. And to hear great gospel campaigns and others calling upon unconverted folks to come and renew their baptismal vows seems to me to be dangerous language. It presupposes that in their children's baptism they were born again, and what they must now do is come to come and renew the promises of their sponsors. If we're not careful, we shall fluff the gospel. Paul, you may remember, in Galatians tells us that when Peter acted inconsistently with what he really believed, and by his behavior gave the impression that he did not believe that salvation was absolutely by grace because he wasn't prepared to eat with Gentile believers, for they were not circumcised. Paul rebuked him. And he said, you'll see, uh, Peter was guilty of hypocrisy, not of pretending to be what he wasn't, but of pretending not to believe what he did believe. He didn't walk one hundred percent consistently with the gospel, and Paul had to rebuke him for it. We need to do that, don't we? We need to do it also about the Bible. Nowadays, in the gladness, and who wouldn't be glad, that the Bible is being read by multi-millions of people by whom it never would have been read before? The Bible societies have consented to publish Bibles with the Apocrypha added to them. Well, now, gentlemen, I happen to be a Septuagintalist. One of my concerns is the text of Old Testament. And the whole question of what book should be included in the Bible, of course, arises ultimately from the Septuagint. That is the crux of the whole business. It is no small thing, surely, to give into the public's hand a Bible that has books that our Lord would never have acknowledged to be the word of God. Books that tell the public, well, I've done the best I can, and I'm sorry if I've come short. Books that pre- uh, one book at least that preaches the rightness of purgatory. Here the gospel is at stake, and the question of what the word of God is. Scholars with whom I have to work in university level in Septuagint things, do see, will argue that there's no good going back to the old Hebrew scripture, for when the Holy Spirit had the translation into Greek done that we call the Septuagint, that was the Holy Spirit revising the Old Testament and reinterpreting it. And the church took that over, and as the centuries go along, the church reinterprets that, and, uh, today's interpretation is tomorrow's Bible. That's how it always was, that's how it always will be, they tell me. That isn't what you or I believe, surely. And in standing for what the Bible is, we're standing for the very basics of the gospel, are we not? Now, a few other minor murmurings, so to speak. And pray don't class me with the murmurers in the wilderness that assaulted the ears of Moses to say, I'm hoping to get into the promised land, gentlemen, if you'll have patience with me. Some other smaller, uh, things. Take the first section of Corinthians, where Paul forbids the believers to take the names of Peter, uh, Paul, or Apollos. I know, gentlemen, that the matter goes much deeper than mere labels. And how much deeper, I propose, God willing, to talk about next week. But even at that superficial level, it does surely ban the taking of labels. Why does it ban it? Why mustn't I say I am of Peter? Well, because as Paul says, it contradicts the gospel. I am perturbed, to be frank with you, gentlemen, about the sprouting forth in this last twenty years of denominational labels in assemblies. The groups of believers that hitherto were content to be Christian churches, now labeling themselves Christian brethren. Since I don't belong to that, you'll allow me to speak freely, I hope, without hurting any of your feelings. Why you should wish to call yourself Christian brethren and thus de- de- de- uh, demarcate yourself, show the world you're different from me, I- I- I can't really believe. I know I'm an Englishman, but there you are. Why must we introduce another label into all the confusion of criticism, of Christendom? I fancy perhaps, but here I'm unduly critical. I shall need your leveling judgment, but I fear that behind it is a process towards federation. I was at a missionary conference a year or two ago in London with a friend of mine who comes from the fair city of Dublin, a very gracious and delightful brother he, and kindly as most southern Irishmen are, also. There came the secretary, the then secretary of the Christian Brethren Research Fellowship. And seeing we both came from Ireland, he told us that he was coming over to Dublin very soon. We said, what for? He said, I'm coming as the Christian Brethren representative on the World Council of Churches Committee for Evangelism. My gracious Irish brother said, you don't come to represent me. There has been moves in Europe, have there not, and indeed in the whole world, to have pan-brethren conferences, that is, a kind of jamboree of Christian brethren churches. Very good, it's a lovely thing for Christians to get together, isn't it? But I was in Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain came down, when my brethren got used to me and felt some confidence. They confessed their worries to them. They had been invited out to some such conference where nations were asked to send delegates to this convention of the Christian brethren. They'd been paid to come out, and they came out to find to their alarm that this was some kind of international organization with all the skeletons of a denomination, and they trembled for what might happen to them when they got home and the communist government find out that what they thought were independent churches were in fact linked to a Western organization. My dear brethren, I mention it to you as a worry that I have. In my part of the world where I live, I'm surrounded by brethren on the left hand and on the right. You know what I mean, don't you? On the right hand, my good brethren, sometimes their conscience would not allow them to have me to preach, and they're probably sensible men for that reason. They are always, if they talk to me, they're very interested. When you go on the continent, they say, when you go to Russia, do you go outside our assemblies? They think in denominational terms, you'll see. They think to have a group of assemblies that are theirs. Oh, goodness me, how you would decide that question in Germany. I wonder whether any of you knows who are your brethren in Germany, short of all believers there. Which assemblies in Germany are the Christian brethren? The ones that are still in the Bund, or the Freienbruden, the ones that have come out of the Bund, or the really doubly free Freienbruden, which are three s- uh, two stages further removed out of the Bund. Which are the Christian brethren? If you want to force them into further division, well, force them to declare which sort of group they belong to. My earnest desire before the Lord would be to see these kind of things healed. All federation, gentlemen, of churches divides God's people. Ponder that remark. It has always been true. If you create a federation, you will divide assemblies between those that will join you and those that won't join you. Had we not been better, not to enforce federation, but to encourage fellowship and bring God's people together to get over those hang-ups that so very often keep them apart. On the question of chapter five and six, church discipline. We must have it, surely. I know for years, since Saint Augustine and others, then by the magisterial reformers, the idea became popular that we are forbidden to excommunicate anybody from the church. The church, according to the magisterial reformers, was the place where the sacraments were duly ordered, but it could contain believers and unbelievers. And the argument used to be, that's what our Lord said in the parable of the tares, you mustn't try and root out unbelievers, lest you root out the genuine wheat as well. And that was made an excuse for having a church compounded of believers and unbelievers. That, of course, most people see nowadays was false exegesis. Our Lord was not speaking of the church in that parable. The field was the world. The angels who came to separate out the tares were not the locals of the, uh, the elders of the local church, but the angels at the final judgment. They had nothing to do with the church. In the church, as Paul lays down in chapter five, there must be godly discipline. Why? Well, for the sake of the man who is offended, that he might be brought to repentance and his spirit be saved. That's the object of discipline, isn't it? But for the sake of the gospel too. You allowed such behavior to go unjudged in the church, then in Corinth you might as well pack up preaching the gospel, for no Greek would listen to you. So shocked would he be by that kind of conduct. Now, I'm not supposing that any such lurid thing is true of any assembly anywhere. But nowadays I do notice in some countries and some places a tendency to have the Lord's Supper and invite anybody who's there to participate if they choose to themselves, leaving it to them to decide. Well, that's lovely if you're sure they're believers, isn't it? I believe with all my heart that we are to receive all believers as the Lord has received us, but not unbelievers, surely, to the Lord's Supper. Not so long ago, I was in a church where such an invitation was given. An assembly it was. At lunch, there were present some who had been present there at the morning and had taken of the emblems. And over the table, they told us they weren't saved, they weren't believers in our sense at all. My brethren, it might be the tiniest little aberration, an exception to a general rule, but it's enough done in so many places that it worries me, lest we going back to what has become prevalent with many Christian groups over the years, so that you get the situation where people come and take the emblems and, uh, apparently belong to the church but are not converted, and the theory is that somehow you join the church and that's a help to you to get converted. No, surely. We know what that kind of thing has led to, at least we know in our country where it's led to. To many a church, where when the minister preaches, as one of them put it to me, you don't know who he's preaching to, whether he's preaching to the unconverted outside the church or inside the church, or who's who and what's what. You wouldn't just baptize anybody who came and asked to be baptized, would you? Wouldn't you first make out whether they were believers? Lest we give people the wrong impression that taking the Christian sacraments is somehow a way of being saved. This too is important. One final little thing. Take the Lord's Supper that Paul mentions in chapter eleven of his epistle. There too, the Corinthians had to be corrected, didn't they? However you use the terminology, and I know people disagree about that these days. What was actually happening in Corinth was that before the breaking of bread, they were having a fellowship meal, lovely in itself. But now the fellowship meal had become so abused and used as an ordinary secular meal almost, that the significance of the fellowship was gone, and it was quite impossible for people with their stuffed stomachs and half drunk, some of them, to concentrate on the significance of the breaking of bread itself. You mustn't do that, says Paul. Must you? Allow me a minor gripe, and a bigger one. Nowadays, in many places that I go to, while the emblems are going round, music is played. No, I love music myself, simple music that I can understand. I'm no great musician. But if when I'm trying to concentrate on the Lord and the emblems, wine and their significance. You play me a hymn. I shall know your hymn generally, and you'll fill my mind with the words so much so that I- I- I'm automatically following the words of your hymn, and I can't for the life of me concentrate on what I'm doing. Can't think. You must be aware, gentlemen, that you ha- have bears of little brain like me, sometimes in your congregation. Four months, five months, was it ago, I was in another country from here completely. They not only had music, on the balcony they had drums, such as I would expect to hear in a student, uh, psychedelic whatnot at a university. They had the drums too. While the emblems were going round, how on earth the drummers could concentrate on what they were doing, I didn't know. I did know that I couldn't concentrate what I was doing. The noise blew me off course completely. My brethren, that's not a small matter, surely. But I come to the bigger concern, and that is the way in which the Lord's Supper in some places is being turned down to be a five-minute or ten-minute conclusion to an otherwise general message. Now, there are no rules and regulations in Holy Scripture, are there, as to the length of the breaking of bread, but it is important. The second, uh, gripe is this, the kind of notion that we must, uh, not concentrate on the Lord's Supper so much because it's so very gloomy. Come, come. It is true that sometimes people have concentrated on the psychological effect of the cross. That isn't healthy, is it? Rome, with her crucifixes, has concentrated on the psychological effect of the physical sufferings. The New Testament is very sparing with the account of the physical sufferings of Christ. It's not the physical suffering so much as it is the moral and spiritual issues that were at stake at Calvary. If we find those moral and spiritual issues gloomy so that we can advise our young people not to concentrate too much on it. Then, gentlemen, we are unfitting them for heaven. The resurrection will tell us of the triumphant life of Christ, but it is not the resurrection, it is Calvary that shows us what the values of God are, what the values are upon which the very joys of heaven are found. The gems of heaven, the pearls and the gold are not imitation, they're not paste diamonds. They are real diamonds, spiritual ones, of course. Their value depends on what? The values depend on the values that God maintained when Jesus Christ, his son, died for our sins at Calvary. It will be a sad thing in assemblies if the, if the breaking of bread comes to be a minor little appendage, fraught with all kinds of spiritual decline. I was in a church in America. They were a young church, they were feeling their way. And, uh, yes, they had done valiant things. I was asked would I go and help them? They were trying to come more and more towards the new pattern, the New Testament pattern of things. So I went along. And the first, uh, session was a general preaching. Uh, uh, sorry, uh, uh, the first session was the breaking of bread. The second session was a general preaching meeting. The first session, the breaking of bread, was very poorly attended. The second had a large congregation. The young man and one of his fellow elders were asking me on the way home what I thought of it all. Well, I said, I've only been with you a day, how could I say? I said, I did notice the difference in numbers in the second meeting. I said, I suppose a large number of those were strangers and outsiders. No, no, he said, they were members of the church. I said, what do you mean, members of the church? They're members of our church, he said. I said, they weren't at the breaking of bread. Oh, well, no, he said, we have a lot of members in our church who don't come to the breaking of bread. I said, how long are you going to allow that to go on? Oh, he said, you can't, you can't, you can't. Break who? The about. But central to the Lord's Supper is the fact that our Lord took the cup and said, this is the covenant, the new cup, my Lord's on their hearts, their mind them. When we come to the breaking of bread, we come to meet the king, to hear rehearsed again in our the terms of the new covenant that he has made with us, and to do to learn of a marvelous promise there's never no more, and to be ready write his laws. Accords the he record to know how people what you'll do, gentlemen, and you'll be publicly baptized in the name of Jesus, that's what you'll do. He wasn't treating baptism as a somehow sacramental means of forgiveness. The question was this, this was the crowd that a few weeks before had publicly stood crying for the murder of Jesus Christ. Now they said they had repented, and God was not prepared to take their say so for it, unless they brought forth works worthy of repentance, and by their life and attitude showed that they had indeed repented. You will save yourself from this untaught generation, said Peter. You can't still stand with the murderers of the Lord Jesus and simultaneously say that you have repented of the murder of the Lord Jesus. Well, if you do, God won't take your say so for it. So then they that gladly received his word... and were prepared to give evidence that they had repented, continued in the apostles' fellowship and the breaking of bread. Attendance summoned by the king himself to observe his new covenant and his process of keeping and writing his laws on our hearts. Attendance is summoned by the king. And is the outward evidence that we have genuinely repented. And believers who say that they have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as King and Lord and have repented, but can't be bothered to turn up at the Lord's Supper. Pray, where is the evidence of repentance in that? If any of that is true, gentlemen, it means that we have to insist on the exceeding importance of the breaking of bread, not allow it to become just a little appendage added on while the music plays and the drums go before the next meeting. But I have gone on too long and probably abused your kindness in asking me to come. Coward that I am, if you start coming at me afterwards, I shall hide behind the broad back and and high reputation of James Fisher. He said that other Englishmen had done like this. They'd come and spoken their mind, and I, with a false courage perhaps, have done the same. The Lord grants us all wisdom in our day and generation, that we may be faithful shepherds of his people and faithful teachers of his word.