The Word of Truth Conference  at Bethel Baptist Church in El Sobrante, California is November 7-11, Wednesday to Sunday, this year, 2018.  The theme as it has been the previous three years is the gospel.  This is our last year with that theme.  We will prepare, Lord-willing, to write and publish a book on the gospel, as we did for the first four years on ecclesiastical separation.  I would estimate that this will take one or two years before it’s out.  We’ll keep you updated.

From the first four years, we published A Pure Church (you can get here or here).  From the second three years, we have not yet published a book on apostasy, but we will likely put together an e-book in years to come, that someone can download and then print if he wants it on paper.  The title of that series of conferences was I-Magination.

As usual, the evening will be preaching that is open to whatever particular text of scripture.  We want exposition of God’s Word.  In the mornings are sessions that will be chapters in the book.  On Sunday afternoon is our annual panel discussion on the subject matter of the conference with speakers or pastors from the conference.  Here’s the schedule.

WEDNESDAY EVENING
7:00pm — Chris Teale
7:50pm — Bobby Mitchell

THURSDAY MORNING
9:30am — Passages That Teach Salvation and Passages That Are Not Teaching Salvation—
                 John 15:1-8 — James Bronsveld
10:05am — Passages That Teach Salvation and Passages That Are Not Teaching Salvation—
                 Philippians 3 — Bobby Mitchell
11:10am — Passages That Teach Salvation and Passages That Are Not Teaching Salvation—
                  Luke 18:18-30 — Kent Brandenburg
11:45am — The Meaning of Faith (Commitment) — Thomas Ross

THURSDAY EVENING
7:00pm — James Bronsveld
7:50pm — Bobby Mitchell

FRIDAY MORNING
9:30am — The Extent of Faith (Intellectual, Volitional, Emotional) — Thomas Ross
10:45am — Repentance in the New Testament — James Bronsveld
11:30am (3rd and 4th Sessions) — 3rd, Lord — 4th, What’s Not Enough — Kent Brandenburg

FRIDAY EVENING
7:00pm — Bobby Mitchell

SATURDAY MORNING
9:30am — The Effect of Salvation:  Nature — Kent Brandenburg
10:05am — The Effect of Salvation:  Sanctification — David Sutton
11:10am — The Effect of Salvation:  Endurance — Chris Teale
11:50am — Unbiblical Methods of Evangelism — Bobby Mitchell

SUNDAY MORNING
9:45am — The Effect of Salvation: Marks or Tests of Salvation — Thomas Ross
11:00am — Regular Series through the Book of Acts — Kent Brandenburg

SUNDAY AFTERNOON
2:30pm — Panel Discussion

The content of this post is now available in the study of:

1.) Evan Roberts

2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905

3.) Jessie Penn-Lewis

on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study.  On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.

You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.

Back in the day, I sat in Baptist Polity class (we had that where I went to college), and I remember then Dr. Weeks (what we called our instructor) bringing up the fundamental pie.  He drew a circle with five pie slices on it and for each piece, because my pie was too small to start, I drew a line with an arrow to the inside of each slice and wrote out each of the “fundamentals” in each one.  It’s something I never questioned at the time, because that was typical, accepting without question. After that I proceeded to memorize the pie, including drawing the pie.  Later it occurred to me, “Why is it a pie?”  Why not just a list with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 fundamentals?  That would be the list of fundamentals, instead of a pie.

I have revisited the pie in my mind, and maybe it’s a pie because each piece is part of a whole.  There are five, get that, five, fundamentals.  Not four.  Not six.  Not ten or twelve.  Five.  Making up pie for a nice tidy pie chart.  The 9 Marks guys have to be shaking their head at the number five.  Nine is it.  I’m now saying, Nope.  I don’t even know why it is five.  It does remind me of the argument the Pharisees had about what the was the greatest of the laws.  Their discussion.  Pharisees.  Jesus could reduce the whole law down into two parts, because you could put all the laws into to two categories, two legitimate ones as spoken by the Lord Jesus Himself.

Today we return to the Pharisaaical attitude of numbering the fundamentals for, I believe and believe I can prove, many of the same reasons as the Pharisees.  You reduce everything down to a few number because you’re not prepared to have more than that.  You can hold together, maybe, a coalition with the number five, even if it does deny literal twenty-four creation or baptism by immersion for believers only.  Is God pleased with five?  Does God want five?  Does God even want us making up lists of fundamentals?  I’m saying, no.  Take seriously everything that He said.  Listing fundamentals is a basis for not doing that.

When men start making up a list of fundamentals, you should think that a major premise of such a list is making room for not doing something that didn’t make the list.  God didn’t make the list.  He exterminated Ananias and Sapphira for something not on the list and killed Nadab and Abihu for something not on the list.  That’s more like how God thinks.  He killed numbers of people for the numbering of people.

What got my attention on this — again — is another “fundamentalist” bringing fundamentals up as a bogus argument.  I’ve got three words now I can use every time that someone says something isn’t a fundamental as an argument for pandering or capitulation or obfuscation or just plain disobedience, sometimes out of cowardice:  same. sex. marriage. In a nicer way, maybe it’s just deceit or ignorance.  Delusion is defined as the misleading of the mind.  The Greek word translated “delusion” in the New Testament (plane, basis for the word “planet”) is most often translated “error,” and the portrayal of the Greek word is something wandering off the beaten path.

The recent president of Bob Jones University, Steve Pettit, played Rocky Top with a professing Christian musical group.  SharperIron linked to this occurrence and a long discussion ensued (at 62 comments at this writing [there will be more]).  Many questions could be asked about Pettit’s activity with the knowledge that he represents this fundamentalist institution in the most obvious way with its long, long time stand and standards on music, both for worship and personal listening, the latter as a matter of Christian living.  People should ask and in public, since it is public.

I know that this should not be considered a good quality of me, but I am very able at ridicule.  By testimony of others, I have been often judged to be quick-witted.  Well crafted mocking comments come to my mind.  I think they are best left unsaid and tamped down.  A high percentage of the commentary at SharperIron toward any criticism of Pettit was ridicule by some that think they’re good at it and that it must be a good way to deal with criticism, their mockery.  That isn’t a fundamental either in the fundamentalist pie, that is, whether it is right or wrong to mock critics.

A lot of mockery or ridicule occurs at SharperIron with almost no moderation.  It’s typical everywhere, not just there.  Much of it continues there because it isn’t moderated for whatever reason.  I see it as either a fear of a mob, the desire to be one of the cool guys, or the tendency to capitulate to the left.  The targets are deemed, it seems, worth the ridicule and in this case they are advocates of traditional or conservative music.  I think it would be better for them if they could be put in their place by defenders.  Answering them in kind wouldn’t be allowed, so they continue on with their unfettered scoffing. The scoffers are actually low hanging fruit themselves with their unmoderated attempts to diminish critics with this method.  If that’s the way things are there, more power to them.  I don’t think it is the right or even best way to deal with criticism.  It is the best a mocker can do, very much like the apostates in 2 Peter 2-3.

I want to get back to the idea of “fundamentals,” but first playing Rocky Top or even the place of blue grass among Christians.  The song Rocky Top expresses the virtues of wild fornication and desperate drunkenness, enjoyed and without judgment.  Someone might say, “It’s just fun; let it go.”  Meats for the belly and belly for meats.  If you watched, you saw singers and instrumentalists participating with great support and gusto.  They loved it (1 John 2:15-17).  It’s one thing to be attracted to it because it titillates the flesh, but another thing to push and promote it. If this is a Christian liberty, as some people judge it to be, which I don’t believe it is, even then it violates many of the limitations Paul requires of liberty in 1 Corinthians 6-10.

The big argument about judging such activity, which scripture says to judge and you should judge if you take the biblical and historical view of sola scriptura, is that it isn’t worth judging and that it isn’t a fundamental worth separating over.  They are really both the same argument.  Something isn’t worth judging because it isn’t a fundamental.

Scripture says everything is worth judging and God kills people for violating things not on the list of fundamentals.  It’s a replay of the practice of the Pharisees, ranking truth as a basis for what will be tolerated and what won’t.  It’s not how God operates.  It isn’t following Christ.  He doesn’t do it.  It’s also an attack on the perspecuity of scripture and the biblical understanding of unity (1 Cor 1:10).  Unity isn’t disregarding biblical teaching to maintain a coalition.  I know they would say they aren’t doing that, but the denial rings hollow — they are in fact doing that.

Someone in the comment section of SharperIron, G. N. Barkman, a pastor who is a regular contributor there, writes in two separate comments (here and here):

Fundamentalism, historically speaking, is about defending the fundamentals of the Christian faith against those who attack and erode them.  In the “old” days, the attackers were called Modernists and Liberals.  Now, they are just as likely to be called Evangelicals.  Along the way, cultural issues began to take their place as part of the definition of Fundamentalism.  That, in my opinion, is when things began to go off course.  Cultural issues are, for the most part, too subjective to defend or decry Biblically.  I have my opinions and preferences, and you have yours.  I will not break fellowship with you over yours, and expect you to do the same with me.  Liking or not liking a particular style of music is not a fundamental of the faith.  Let’s keep God’s Word central, and allow Christian liberty where clear Bible doctrine is not the issue. 

But back to the original premise.  Do you consider music styles a fundamental of the Christian faith?  How many other fundamentals do you include?  I believe that when everything becomes a fundamental, nothing is a fundamental.  The word “fundamental” indicates something of greatest importance.  If everything is equally important, nothing is of greater significance.

Barkman barks up the wrong tree.  Protecting fundamentals is a delusion, not intended to protect truth itself.  There are no “fundamentals.”  Where is this list?  I get the original idea, meant to gain a widespread defense of Christianity against liberalism, to attempt to salvage something.  I don’t agree with it.  I just get it.  But it’s taken on a shape of its own, mutating into deformity.  Fundamentalism is nothing scriptural to defend.  Defend scripture.  Defend truth.  Defend Jesus.  Defend the church.  Fundamentalism at the most was a means to an end, an unscriptural means that led to a less than scriptural end.  No one should be satisfied with it.

You can read the comments and there’s no scriptural basis.  He leaves himself some deniability with “for the most part,” which I’m assuming is to deny things like same sex marriage and smoking crack pipes.  Those are not fundamentals though and so the list expands and then you see truth as subjective, just conventional thinking.  It’s true because you cobble enough support for it to be true.  Every Christian was against rock music at one time.  Every Christian was against shorts on women. Now it’s no longer conventional, so it’s only a preference.  We’ve already arrived at effeminate male behavior, rampant in churches today.  God expects different from us.

The “fundamental” is now a tool for capitulation and pandering.  Rocky Top panders.  People who support it are pandering.  They want approval.  It’s the days of Noah, marrying and giving in marriage.  Just move along, nothing to look at.  Five things are worth looking at.

Read the first chapter of Ephesians.  The purpose of salvation, the reason we were chosen, what we read in the first three and half verses are “that we should be holy and without blame before him in love” (v. 4b).  Being holy and without blame in love aren’t fundamentals.  The adoption as children to Jesus and the redemption through Christ’s blood abound toward “all wisdom and prudence” (vv. 5-8).  In other words, true doctrine, what might be “fundamentals,” you know, what you’re really supposed to be parking on, are there to produce the right application of the knowledge of His will (v. 9), which is “wisdom” and then thinking straight, which is “prudence.”

Holy living, living without blame, loving behavior, the right application of knowledge, and thinking straight are tied to “the fundamentals.”  They are the purpose.  If you have “bad music” and “wrong dress” and all these cultural issues, that’s part of not knowing and doing the will of God, which necessarily proceeds from right doctrine.  The first three chapters of Ephesians, the doctrine, are about the last three chapters of Ephesians, the practice.

Paul ends 1 Corinthians in v. 22, saying this:  “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.”  It seems loving Jesus is a fundamental.  Yet, it isn’t on the list or in the pie.  Can you love Him by singing to Him like He’s your boyfriend or girlfriend?  Barkman would say that’s not a fundamental and its a cultural issue, so it’s impossible to judge.  You have to know what love is to love.  If love is actually lust, so someone isn’t loving the Lord Jesus Christ, then that’s Anathema Maranatha.  A curse is on that person.  Churches are full of a lack of affection for Jesus Christ.  They have passion produced by ecstatic experiences, choreographed by rhythm and syncopation, other atmospherics and instrumentation and suggestion.  It isn’t reverence and sobriety required by God from those who worship Him and love Him.

Dismissing the cultural issues as preferences is not prudent or wise.  Christians are here to say “no” to Rocky Top.  The world isn’t going to do it.

Intro   Part One   Part Two

Bakss begins his second chapter, “Predicament with Worship Music:  Who Really Wins the War?”, decrying theological and spiritual battles fought through the history of Christianity.  The point implied is the very existence of these battles was bad.  Fighting over things in Christianity is bad, and the worship wars is just another latest sad chapter.  Then Bakss provided what he said was a quote from an American newspaper in 1723 criticizing Isaac Watts music:

There are several reasons for opposing it: It’s too new. It’s too worldly, even blasphemous. The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style and because there are so many new songs you can’t learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than on godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances, making people act disorderly. The preceding generation got along without out.

Bakss took the paragraph from a blog, which I couldn’t find, so I googled it and found the same quote ten other times online, all used by CCM advocates in the same way Bakss did  and in several instances the surrounding wording verbatim (note: plagiarism).  Furthermore, does anyone really think it was (1) in an American newspaper in 1723 or (2) even written in 1723?  No one wrote that way, the way the “quote” is written, in 1723.  Someone’s got to think his readers are morons to accept that quote as historic evidence.  I am sure it is a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote or maybe even more, but the original writer wasn’t quoting from a 1723 newspaper.

Isaac Watts, of course, was English and is buried in England.  He never came to America.  He is buried in England at the Bun Hill Non-conformist Cemetery in London.  No one was making the kind of commentary in 1723 about anything, let alone Isaac Watts’s hymns.  The first British American newspaper itself started in 1704, the Boston News-Letter.  No one should take this kind of argument seriously. You’ve read material from 1723 and it does not read like anything anyone wrote in that supposed quote.  The premise itself then is a lie.  I’ve read the same argument elsewhere and it is a superficial, fallacious invention.  Someone who makes it doesn’t really care about aesthetics and the meaning of style.

Watts’s music wasn’t new music, rejected then accepted, followed by one generation after another of new music, rejected than accepted, so that the music used in churches was already rejected.  Bakss’s CCM is not just the latest iteration of Isaac Watts.  Worship wars have existed generation after generation, but the wars themselves are not the problem.  Bakss strategy is to make warring over worship style a problem.

Since music itself is amoral according to Bakss, any judgment of musical style he would contend is “strife,” a work of the flesh in Galatians 5:20.  The music itself isn’t fleshly in his assessment. It’s the war that is fleshly, because it is “strife.”  The Greek word translated “strife” is selfish ambition, essentially striving for some greater position for one’s self.  The warring in worship war attempts in a godly manner to eradicate from the church worldly, fleshly music that doesn’t worship God.  It is concerned with the honor and glory of God, not given through fleshly, worldly, profane worship style, which can be judged as such.

Bakss further argues that the warring itself is about “us” and “our personal preferences.”  About this, he quotes Chuck Swindoll as an authority, Swindoll contending as one might expect him, that what’s important is the essence of worship, an internalized adoration, and not the expression of worship, the outward forms, which might vary.  He doesn’t provide a basis either for the neutrality of outward forms or the equality of the various cultures that use different forms.  Bakss writes:

If you were to ask the Lord what kind of worship fires Him up, God would always come back with the same answer He gave to the woman at the well in Samaria.

God isn’t “fired up” by our music.  He isn’t waiting in His holy place to be affected by our passions, hoping that His worshipers might fire Him up.  God is impassible.  He is not subject to like passions as we are.

Jesus’ teaching to the Samaritan woman, Bakss says, was not a perversion of place or pattern of worship, but the Person.   With no proof, he asserts that worship in spirit is the subjective side of worship and the worship in truth is the objective side.  You won’t get that out of the passage.  From that he then concludes that “God is not so much interested in the style of worship as He is the worshipper.”  The latter doesn’t proceed from the former, but He elaborates:

There is sometimes such an emphasis on Bible knowledge (truth) that we are in danger of ignoring, or even opposing personal spiritual experience.

Scripture isn’t sufficient for worship, Bakss is saying that Jesus wants the contribution of personal spiritual experience.  Paul said “the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God” (Ephesians 6:17).  Jesus said His Words were spirit and life (John 6:63).  Spirit isn’t subjective and Word objective.  Spirit conforms to a Divine standard as much as Truth does.  Musical style should be judged by the Word of God too and not by some subjective or personal experience.

Then Bakss connotes spirit with “emotions” so that spiritual music was emotional music.  If someone was spiritual, he wasn’t hiding his emotions.  On this point, emotions don’t proceed from something spiritual.  They are tied more closely with the physical, which is why you cry when you are tired or when you hit your thumb with a hammer.  How we feel about God does matter.  The right feelings proceed from the right feelings, not vice versa. This was a major assertion of Jonathan Edwards in his Religious Affections.  There is a right feeling about God that comes from the right thinking about God, true thinking, not from passions that start with the body.

Bakss parallels music without necessary emotion as “formalism.”  Formalism can come in a great many “forms.”  Jesus pointed out two different extremes of false worship forms in John 4, the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim and the Jews in Jerusalem.  Both choreographed their adherents to something neither true or spiritual.  Neither were scriptural or sincere.  Bakss is essentially calling for Samaritan form and the rejection of the Judaistic form.

Fleshly, worldly music gives people a feeling that they interpret as the Holy Spirit.  It is manipulated.  A form is chosen that feels good, based on personal taste, and with the addition of ecstatic experience, which is very deceitful in corruption of true spirituality.  This is ecstasy and mysticism.  This is manipulating experience that Bakss calls the subjective side.

A few sentences from the end of the chapter Bakss writes:

Led by the Spirit, we have the right, even the responsibility, to express our praise to God in the manner that best reflects our individual personalities and cultures.

Bakss is calling for a subjective “leading of the Spirit” common in Charismaticism and revivalism, against the meaning of “led by the Spirit” in the New Testament.  The leading of the Holy Spirit is the same for every believer.  He leads through the Word of God.  This is something Bakss would call formalism, because it is just scripture, bereft of personal, subjective experiences, which people covet like a sign or a wonder.

Worship and praise should reflect what God says in His Word that He wants, not in our individual personalities or cultures.  Just the opposite, our reasonable worship should not conform to the world or our own desires.  We should look to scripture to find what God wants from us.  He does say and we can know from scripture.

Overall, chapter 2 for Bakss goes all different directions in an incongruous way.  What he wants his adherents to think is that music can’t be judged, that judging it or warring against certain music is bad.  Give God about whatever you want, because all of it is just personal preference.  These premises are not true, but they are also the recipe for rampant false spirituality and worship in the church.

The Bible establishes the meaning of justice through the usage of the word, related words, and then an explanation of a justice system laid out by God for Israel.  The American system of justice is based upon what the Old Testament teaches.  It’s been called a Judeo-Christian ethic, ethic being a representation of what’s right.  Others have argued for the same meaning from a position of natural law, asserting justice from Newton’s law:  for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  They argued that they could justify an identical position of justice from nature, separate from the Bible, yet compatible.

Numerical growth of a church isn’t hard. Most of the people I’ve met who see swift numerical growth aren’t either smart or knowledgeable. They haven’t discovered some secret.  They shouldn’t be rewarded, as they very often are.  Churches with big numbers are the most emulated in the United States. Their tactics are also the most likely to be sent to foreign countries.  The most notable standard for success is still size.

The content of this post is now available in the study of:

1.) Evan Roberts

2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905

3.) Jessie Penn-Lewis

on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study.  On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.

You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.

Part One    Part Two    Part Three 


True or not, whatever Christianity you grew up with had a lot of influence on what you believe and practice.  I wasn’t taught much to anything on biblical prayer.  From my memory, it wasn’t very good — a lot of “be with me,” “bless so-and-so and bless so-and-so,” “help this person or that person,” and “lead, guide, and direct.”  People are usually sensitive about having their prayers criticized.  It’s a good environment for a church to have prayers up for analysis.  I believe a main reason for group prayer is to agree on the will of God.  Agreement also assumes some disagreement.

Nonetheless, my focus here is on “lead, guide, and direct.”  What does someone expect as an answer to that prayer?  If someone wants God to lead him, guide him, and direct him, and maybe the varied parts of that little cliche are just synonyms, how does God do that?  People say that it happens in answer to that prayer, but I never received instruction on that.  It was assumed that God just did it, that someone was guided, led, and directed without explanation.  Has anyone every explained it to you?

I decided to look up whether “lead, guide, and direct” was used in a book in the 19th century.  Total, 15 times.  I was surprised it was any, but one of the times it was a Latter Day Saint book.  Once used in the 18th century.

Besides my doing this series on this subject, something got my attention this week when a hard-copy of a publication came by snail mail.  This is a regular mailing.  In it, the author talked about the direction of the Holy Spirit.  He said it a few times in the article.  That is not unusual to read from someone in fundamentalism or evangelicalism in my lifetime.   I’ve often heard a sentence, such as, “We need to rely on the direction of the Holy Spirit.”

The words “direction of the Holy Spirit” I found four times in books in the 19th century.  One of them was from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ.  You don’t get the exact words anywhere, but you can read the direction of the Holy Spirit in the Bible.  In a book called An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, Thomas Hartwell Horne wrote:

Maintaining that the apostles were under the infallible direction of the Holy Spirit as to every religious sentiment contained in their writings, secures the same advantages as would result from supposing that every word and letter was dictated to them by his influences, without being liable to those objections which might be made against that view of the subject.

That’s right.  One of the other four were quoting Horne.  The one other quote was strange, speaking about the Holy Spirit directing the priests in the tabernacle and temple, written in 1880 by Dougan Clark, a Quaker.

If you go back to the 17th century, of the only five times we read “direction of the Holy Spirit,” one is from Jonathan Edwards in his Treatise on the Religious Affections, where he said that the Psalms “were by the direction of the Holy Spirit penned for the use of the church of God in its public worship.”  This is identical to Horne’s usage.  Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather, in 1723 also writes “that not so much as one sentence is to be found in it, which was not inserted by the special direction of the Holy Spirit.”

Edwards, Horne, and Mather talk about the Holy Spirit directing the human authors in the writing of scripture.  By extension, the Holy Spirit directs someone’s life who obeys scripture.  This is how the Holy Spirit works — through the Word of God.  The Holy Spirit is not still talking to people or giving them impressions or sensations.  Scripture is sufficient.

Believers, true, genuine Christians are led by the Spirit of God, and not their flesh.  Believers are led by the Spirit.  The New Testament doesn’t tell believers to be led by the Holy Spirit.  It says that they are.  You can tell that they are by the way the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in their lives.

Just because scripture uses the terminology, led by the Spirit, doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit still talks to people.  That isn’t how He directs.  He directs through the already completed Word of God.  Believers who “let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly” (Col 3:16) are “filled with the Spirit” (Eph 5:18).

It’s not good to replace what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit with something made up by a man.  The Holy Spirit isn’t directing that.  You’re not more spiritual because you’ve got something mysterious, which is impossible to confirm.  People might think you have something, because they think they should.  Nobody can question these things without –ironically — questions of his love, his desire for unity, and the power of God in his life.

Last Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court justice nominee, said about his relationship to alcohol:

Yes we drank beer, my friends and I, boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer, I like beer, I still like beer, we drank beer. The drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal, senior year in high school people were legal to drink. Yeah, we drank beer, and I said sometimes, sometimes probably had too many beers, and sometimes other people had too many beers. We drank beer, I like beer.