The Heart Of Hebron: Reformed Theology

Good morning. I like how clappy you have been

this morning. We have just sung about the

goodness of our God. Yes, Amen.

Let's hear a great expression of the goodness of God that he

speaks to us. He speaks to us.

How awesome. How good is that?

My friends, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you

once walked, following the course of this world, following

the Prince of the power of the air, the Spirit that is now at

work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all

once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the

desires of the flesh and the mind.

And we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

But God being rich in mercy because of His great love with

which He loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, God

made us alive with Christ. By grace you have been saved,

and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the

heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He

might show His immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness

towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved

through faith, and this not your own doing.

It is a gift of God, not a result of work, so that no one

may boast. For we are His workmanship,

created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared

beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Amen. This is the word of the Lord.

Let's be to God. Dear Lord.

God, we pray that as we hear this word that it would not just

resonate in our heads, but that it would change our hearts.

Lord, we want to be transformed by the power of this word, by

the power of Your Word every time you speak to us, so that

indeed we might be more and more faithful servants of you,

followers of you in all that we do.

We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Please proceeded and grab your Bibles and turn to Ephesians

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

chapter 2. Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

Most of you are going to be familiar with the distinction

between believing something and really believing something,

between believing something and really believing in it.

Most of us immediately can associate what that is.

Kelly and I, past couple of weeks, went to the Grand Canyon.

By your grace, we were able to go.

We went to the Grand Canyon and beforehand, I believe that the

Grand Canyon was grand. Everybody says so.

I've seen pictures. It marks it itself out.

I knew that the Grand Canyon was grand, but once you get there

you really know how grand it is. I was young when I realised that

having children would change your life, that having kids

would be a major factor in your life and would transform what's

happening here. I believe that long ago, but

once I had kids, man, did I ever believe that.

It was a belief structure that was totally different.

Part of the celebration of my faith has always been a global

understanding of our God. How globally gracious and good

and powerful and overwhelming is our God.

You recognize that about God. And then I've had the

opportunity to worship with congregations around this world,

and you see God worshipped and praised around this world, and

believing this global picture of God takes on an entirely

different perspective. Once you see some of these

things. There's believing in something,

and then there's really believing in something.

Today we're going to talk about the fact that Hebron Church is

and desires to be a Reformed congregation.

And what we're going to emphasize in that understanding

is the distinction between believing in something and

really believing in something. As we've moved into the EPC and

there's a good way to get us going here in our understanding,

our self understanding of who we are.

I've come up with a phrase in which I think captures both what

Hebron is right now to some extent and what we desire to be.

Now, the distinction there is one that I think, as I talked

through a lot of these characteristics, I hope that

you've been able to say, Oh yes, that sounds like Hebron.

That sounds like who we are. And yet also that there's a part

of your mind always going, but boy, we could be so much better

at these areas. So we looked at what it means

that we are biblically based. And sure, we're a biblically

based church and I hope that leaks it out and I hope that

shows in everything we do. But my friends, we could do that

so much better. We're a Christ centered

congregation. I hope that shows in everything.

I hope that shows in our worship.

I hope that shows in our programs.

I hope that shows in our interactions with one another as

we're talking with one another. I hope that Christ centered

nature of who we are actually shows itself in those ways.

But my friends, we could be so much better.

We could be so much better in our worship and our service and

our nurture and how we do all these things so consistently.

This description that I have laid out for us, I think is both

a, a description of who we currently are.

I want it. If you can't recognize us in

this description, then we are failing you tremendously in this

regard. But also there should be a

yearning to have an even greater expression of this.

So here's the description that we've been using here.

Hebron is a biblically based, Christ centered community of

disciples, A Reformed classically evangelical church

in the Presbyterian tradition, worshipping, growing and serving

Christ in the East Hills of Pittsburgh.

OK, Now we've looked at a number of these characteristics already

today, and today what I want to focus on is this idea of

Reformed. We are a reformed congregation.

Now, if you've been a part of our congregation for any period

of time, if you've worshipped with us, you will have heard

that terminology. We're a Reformed Church.

We're reformed theology. We reform in our thinking.

Along these lines. What I want to take a little bit

of time is just lay this out now.

There are seminary classes that go on for years that touch on

the nature of what it means to be reformed, etcetera, etcetera.

And we're not going to do that tonight, today, tonight until

tomorrow. No, we're just going to have a

discussion, what I hope are some of the highlights about what it

means to be reformed. So what I want to do is I want

to hit on three characteristics really quickly.

I want to hit on two of them really quickly and one of them

in in a little bit more depth. When we say that we're reformed,

one of the things that we're doing is we are identifying

ourselves with a history and with a tradition.

A history and a tradition that dates back centuries.

Now, if you think about the Christian Church in terms of a

tree, it's always the imagery that works the best in this

regard as a tree that grows throughout time.

The starting from the very beginning of the church all the

way through time, there have been different branches that

have developed as the church has evolved.

As the church has grow, it developed into certain branches

that share a history in the tradition.

So you've got the Orthodox branch, you've got the Catholic

branch, you've got the Methodist branch, you've got the

Episcopalian branch, you've got all these branches.

Well, one of those branches is the Presbyterian or the Reformed

branch. That's the branch in which we

associate ourselves with. So when we say that we're a

Presbyterian, I'm sorry, I keep messing that up.

When I say that we are a Reformed Church, one of the

things I'm intentionally doing is identifying with a certain

history, a certain tradition. I am saying, look, the history

that brought us to this point right now is not insignificant

for the way in in which Hebron functions, and that is certainly

true. It is to our great detriment

that we are as ignorant as we are about the history, church

history, because it really does factor into and it shapes and

changes a lot of what we are. If you ask why we do certain

things, why we look a certain way, the way we function in

terms of our community, some of it is related simply to the

fact, well, we are connected to those men and women who have

gone before us that have helped shape and think through what it

means to be a faithful body of believers together.

So part of it is just the history in which we are

connected with. Again, we are at the default.

We are at a detriment to ourselves when we don't pursue,

when we don't understand more about that history.

We have a blessed but growth group that is growing right now

that is focusing on church history.

I would encourage you to spend some time learning some of those

kind of things. It is immensely helpful in your

growth and in your understanding of the scriptures.

So the first thing when we talk about Reformed is that we are

self consciously self identifying with the history.

I'm not spending a lot of time with this.

I don't know how helpful it would be to spend a lot of time

with it, with you from the stage, but it would be

incredibly helpful I think, if you went back and looked.

What does Reformed look like over the past centuries?

That's first, the history of the church.

Secondly, there's an an attitude of life.

There's an approach to life that the reformed churches embrace

that is essential to the way in which we do things, and that is

captured well in the phrase reformed and always reforming.

We are a church that is reformed and always reforming.

Now slow down for a second. Reformed.

Reformed actually does kind of mean what the word means.

You know, sometimes we say things and because they're

theological words, we assume that they mean something that

they don't. Reformed means to form again, to

shape again, to be molded again. So a Reformed Church is a church

that has been shaped again, molded again.

And the picture is to a Reformed Church is a church that is

reformed, remolded, and is always being reformed, molded.

Now, what do we mean by that? What we're capturing is the

reality that as any institution exists, as any person grows and

matures, as any thought process develops, there is going to be a

drift away from the norm that is before us.

What is the norm for all church? What is the norm for Hebron

Church? What is the norm for every

Christian? Of course it is Scripture

itself. Scripture is our norm.

Scripture is that straight arrow that is pointing straight ahead.

And as the church goes and develops, no matter how straight

it starts, the realities are in life that because of sin and

because of brokenness and because of our natural human

limitations, we start fading a little way away from that norm.

That consistently happens. Have you ever been driving and

the roads going straight and the car is going straight and you

let go of the steering wheel just to see how long your car

can go straight before it starts?

I have never done that. That is dangerous.

What a terrible illustration. Don't ever do that.

But you know what that would be like?

You would go for a while and the car would eventually, no matter

how straight the road is, no matter how straight the car is

going, in time it would drift. And So what do we need to do?

We need to reform always to the scriptures, reform always to the

word of God. Now, what does this mean for

Hebron? It means self consciously we are

aware that while our history is a beautiful one, and while what

we've done in the past 15 years has been beautiful and while

we've what we've done in the last 15 days has been beautiful

and what we've done in the last 15 minutes has been beautiful,

there is that constant tug of sin and worldliness that pulls

US ever so slightly away from that norm, that scripture.

And so we need to be self consciously a church that is

reformed and is always being reformed, always being shaped

back to the Scriptures. So what you should be able to

see, what you should be able to identify is that there are

moments in time where the leadership of the church kind of

Yanks us back, or where the congregation in the church Yanks

us back always to the Scriptures, where we're always

being measured by that standard, that authority, that word of

God. Now, I'm jumping ahead a little

bit, but it's hard not to say this to you.

If the institution can fade in time, so can every individual

fade in time. You could have a rock solid

faith and rock solid expression of your faith, and you cannot

think you are changing and deviating at all from that.

My friends, the power of sin is such that it pulls us away from

that norm. You too, if Heaven Church is

going to be a church that is reformed and always reforming,

you too need to be an individual that is reformed and always

reforming. That is, that is always holding

forth that concept of the standard that is before you and

checking yourself consistently so that you are always being

yanked back to the standard. That is the only truth, the only

role of life and faith, Scripture itself.

So we have a history. When we talk about reforms,

we're talking about history. We're talking about an attitude,

a way in which we approach things.

But primarily when we talk about reforms, what we're identifying

is a certain theology, a certain way of looking at the

scriptures, or rather a certain way of forcing us that the

scriptures force us to look at. When we read the Scriptures, we

see the Scriptures speak to us in certain ways and certain

fashions, and we want to emphasize what the Scripture

emphasizes. We want to stress what the

Scripture itself stresses. And we believe that that.

So there's a, a reformed way of looking at the Bible.

There's a reformed way of looking at the at the Trinity.

There's a reformed way of looking at our sin, of creation,

at the work of the Holy Spirit, of the Spirit's gifts in our

lives and the work of the church.

There's a Reformed theology that arises out of the Scripture that

captures those things. But when we talk about Reformed

in in a quick and helpful way, we are largely talking about 3

emphasis. Now these are this is that idea

that you know, you can believe it, but then you can really

believe it. The Reformed Church has a robust

view of the sovereignty of God. It also has a robust view of the

depravity of sin, and it has a robust view of the work of

grace. Now, there's more to Reformed

theology, but what we do is when we read the scriptures, we think

that the scriptures that are advocating robust, I'm talking

about a strong, definitive, aggressive, dominant, kind of a

thing like coffee, a robust flavor of a coffee or something

like that. So I hope the robust doesn't

throw you off. It's a robust view of the

sovereignty of God. Now let me stop for a second and

once again emphasize what I think you would automatically

realize is that every Christian to some extent throughout the

world thinks about the sovereignty of God and

recognizes the sovereignty of God.

You can't read the Scriptures, even casually, and not come away

with any other picture other than the God rules the world.

God is sovereign, He rules, He has authority, He has power,

etcetera, etcetera. That's what we're talking about

when we talk about the sovereignty of God.

God has sovereign control over all things.

Every Christian is going to embrace that to some extent.

When we talk about the Reform, the Reformed are insistent on

speaking definitively where we think the Scripture speaks

definitively. And where the Scripture speaks

about the sovereignty of God, it doesn't have a soft sovereignty

or a limited sovereignty. It advocates for a very robust,

a strong view of God's sovereignty.

So a lot of people think, well, yeah, God control everything,

but there are he does so limit He's limited in certain ways.

Now what do I mean by that? Well, our human actions shift

and change things in God's plan and he has to adjust and correct

himself or the the struggle with the devil that there is

spiritual warfare out there and and there then the struggle with

the devil limits God's sovereign expression or something like

that. Or that God limits himself in

his sovereign expression, that he controls what he decides,

what he's not going to do and what he's going to leave up to

somebody else to do, etcetera, etcetera.

When we talk not idolatry in the Scriptures, idolatry is not

necessarily in the Scriptures the displacing of God with a

different divine being, with the worship of something else.

In the Old Testament in particular, what you see with

idolatry, it's the elevating something else to the same

status of God. This is why the Scriptures say

you will have no other gods before me.

There will not be any other God but God himself.

He is a sovereign over all things.

And it is that, it is that robust understanding of

sovereignty that plays into the way in which we are saved.

How, my friends, are we saved? We are saved by God's work, by

God's initiative. God takes the initiative to save

us. God does the work in saving us.

God applies that work into our lives to save us.

Our salvation is in God's hands and God's alone.

There is no other competitor to that.

There is no other factor that determines things other than God

himself. This is that robust picture of

God's sovereignty. Again, lots of people recognize

that God can have sovereignty over all things.

The Reformed Church reminds, captures that picture from the

Scriptures that say, no, God is the one who is sovereign over

all things. God is sovereign over all.

We have a robust view of sovereignty.

Secondly, there's a robust view of the depravity of sin.

And once again, it's going to be really hard to be to find any

Christian that doesn't recognize that sin is a bad thing.

Every Christian across the board is going to acknowledge sin is

bad, etcetera, etcetera. But the Reformed churches have

tried to capture the biblical teaching about sin, that sin is

not something that is bad or disappointing or discouraging to

God. Sin is not something that annoys

God. Sin is something that God hates

with the full form of that word that you can imagine he hates

it. God hates sin.

Sin is not something that we have to work through.

Sin is not something that we struggle with.

Sin is not something that we, you know, we had kind of have to

work our way around or something like that.

Sin is something that God punishes.

God punishes sin in this world. Sin is not something that is

just kind of a bother to us. Sin is something that Jesus came

to give his life to pay for. If sin is as horrific as the

Scriptures identify it, then it makes sense that the only

solution is the death of God himself is the God man himself,

Jesus Christ. And so when we understand the

nature of sin as the Bible portrays it, we realize that sin

is not something that that. Now, we don't preach Hellfire

and damnation here at this church because we want to see

you squirm, although that's always fun.

I, I, I don't do that because I get a kick out of wagging my

finger at you or wagging my finger at me.

What we do is we proclaim A robust view of sin because the

Bible portrays A robust view of sin, and not just sin, but the

depravity of sin. Now depravity is a word that

doesn't just mean that we are as bad as we can possibly get.

Look, you all can be a lot worse than what you are right now.

We all know that we can be so much worse than what we are

right now. And it's by God's grace that it

restrains those sinful impulses. So you don't let go of the

steering wheel when your car is going straight down a straight

Rd. So we don't fall into sin in

those kind of in those kind of ways we can be worse than what

we are. But nevertheless, the Bible

teaches a depravity of sin that means that it impacts Everything

Everywhere. It is easy for us.

To talk about the sin out there and to look at what the sin is

doing in this world and say, my gosh, there is chaos out there.

And they come up with the silliest ideas and they promote

the most ridiculous concepts, and they are advocating for the

death of our society. According to the scriptural

norms. It's easy for us to identify the

sin out there, but the depravity of sin, a robust view of the

depravity of sin, recognizes that the sin out there is

exactly the sin that is in here, that is in here.

Yeah, it shows itself differently, but there's no

difference between the depravity that is out there and that is

here, that is sinful, that wraps its way around every aspect of

who we are. And so you've got the teaching

of this robust view of the depravity of sin, which reminds

us that it's not US versus them. It's not awesome. 1 standard and

them on a different standard. It is all of us standing under

the same position of being condemned and judged and guilty

in our sin, save for the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ,

which is that third picture of the Reformed theology, a robust

view of the work of grace. And once again, every Christian

one way or another is going to recognize God's grace in things.

We all know that God does things that are good to us.

We all recognize one way or another that we need God's help

to get over the hump and those kind of things.

So we kind of picture God's grace is functioning.

For a lot of people, God's grace functions like this.

Here's this big hill that is before us.

We're living this life here and we're struggling in life, and we

got this big hill that's before us.

And over here is salvation in heaven and God's blessings and

stuff like that. And we've got this big hill that

we have to climb and we look at the hill and we say, Oh my gosh,

I can't get over that. But I, we try.

And it's a responsibility to get pushing and we get a little bit

of a way. Some of you get 1/2 of the way,

some of you get less than that. And we get part way up the hill,

etcetera. And then God comes along and

gives us his grace by pushing us over the hill.

That is not a biblical picture of grace.

It sure isn't a Reformed picture of grace.

The Reformed picture of grace says this We are dead in our

sins. There's no going up that hill.

There's no looking at that hill and despairing.

There is a recognition that we have nothing, that we bring

nothing to the table but our sinful selves and our complete

inability to do anything but on behalf of our salvation.

And it's not that God gives us that little extra that we're

missing to get us over the hump. It's that we've got nothing to

give it all, and God gives it all.

God's grace is his unmerited blessing to every sinful Sinner.

That's his God's grace. When he pushes, he doesn't

pushes the final couple feet over the hill.

He grants us everything, every bit of salvation.

A robust view of grace recognizes that when we come

before our Lord and Savior, we come completely, completely

unable to do anything on our behalf.

And we are dependent completely and totally.

Now why are we so unable? Because of this complete

depravity of our sin? Then why are we left-leaning

completely and totally into the goodness of our God, our

sovereign God who takes all the initiative, who takes all the

work on our behalf? If we're going to be a Reformed

Church, that the teaching, the undergirding of everything in

which we do is going to stress this robust view of the

sovereignty of God, of the depravity of sin, and of the

marvelous work of God's grace and salvation.

If you're going to be a Reformed believer, you're going to be a

believer that sees in the Scripture that that recognizes

that the Scripture screams about the sovereignty of God, that the

Scripture screams about the depravity of sin and how horrid

it is. And it screams that God's

salvation, salvific grace is his solution to the trauma in which

we find ourselves is God's grace that brings us into his

presence. And that's nowhere pictured as

well is in the table that we come to.

I would urge you, I read through Ephesians chapter 2 earlier and

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

part of the intent was to walk through that text and just show

you how it screams out those 3 notions of a robust view of the

sovereignty of God, a robust view of of our depravity and

sin, and a robust view of God's grace.

I urge you, I beg you, look back at that text and see if it

doesn't speak exactly and directly to those, to those

points. But if we see it in God's Word,

it is wonderful to experience it through God's sacrament.

We come to the table, picture what is here.

We articulated the body and blood of Jesus Christ, His

death, predicated by whom? By God himself was his decision,

His initiative, His plan to lead you to this spot where we come

to the table of our Lord. Why is it body and blood?

Because it was his death, fully his death.

Why? Because of the great depravity

that we are under. If sin wasn't so bad, he could

have come up with a different plan that didn't involve the

life of his own son. But instead, we celebrate the

life of His own son here because we realize how bad sin really

is, and we see His love and grace for us, that He comes here

even at the cost of His own son, so that He might meet us at this

table.