Brian Sauvé contrasts the decline of a Utah Methodist church due to liberalism with its covenant theology successor, defining this framework as a binding compact involving redemption, works, and grace. He argues that God's saving grace runs through generations, mandating parents to provide comprehensive Christian education rather than treating faith as a supplement to secular schooling or evolution. Citing biblical mandates like Deuteronomy 6, Sauvé asserts that raising children in the fear of the Lord is as vital as missionary work, urging believers to build an inheritance of faith and trust in God's promises over worldly resources to ensure covenant succession. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Historic Church Building00:05:37
Joel asked me to speak on the centrality of covenant theology in the mission of God and in seeing the kind of Christianity established that Christ says will leaven the world.
And so that is exactly what we're going to do.
We're going to talk about the God who makes and the God who keeps his covenant.
We're going to talk about why that matters for us and for our children, for all who are far off, and why the story that we believe we are in matters and matters deeply.
So let's begin.
Let's ask for the Lord's help and we'll get to work.
Our Father in heaven, we give you thanks that you are an almighty God who makes covenant with your people and keeps your covenant.
We give you thanks that you are abounding in steadfast love, that you're slow to anger, that you have great mercy towards us, and that it's not an ethereal mercy, but one that you have demonstrated in history towards us through Christ and by your Spirit.
So help us now, we pray.
In Jesus' name, amen.
A few years ago, a member of my church out in Ogden, Utah, Refuge Church is the church that I helped pastor.
Out there in northern Utah, found one of those decorative plates that you've probably seen on the wall of your grandmother's, your great grandmother's, maybe your mom's house, those ones with the artsy prints on them that are not to be used under any circumstances as an actual plate.
And this one, which turned up in an antique store just right on the main historic Main Street down the street from our church, featured an illustration of three church buildings, historic church buildings on the front.
And the reason that it caught their eyes so quickly is that one of the churches.
They instantly recognize, hey, that's my church.
That's the church building that we meet in, which is a historic brick church building that we purchased about eight years ago and enjoy meeting in to this day.
So they bought the plate, which was, I'm thankful they did before anybody else got a hold of it.
And now it sits in my office.
I hung it on the wall as a reminder of important lessons.
And here's what I mean by that some of the first Protestant missionaries to bring the gospel to our area of northern Utah.
Were the Methodists.
Utah is the only state in the Union that I'm aware of, at least, that has never experienced majority Christian populace.
It's the only one.
It's never, I mean, I would be surprised if it ever even got above 10 or 15% in its entire history.
But the Methodists arrived with Reverend G.M. Pierce by railroad on June 28, 1870, and Reverend Pierce conducted the first Methodist worship service right there in the terminal, which makes me think that he's probably my kind of guy.
For a few generations after that, the Methodists labored in the rocky soil of Mormon country.
Ultimately, they established several thriving congregations and they ended up building three beautiful churches that are now on the historic registry, the ones that still stand, both in the state and in the nation.
One in Corinne, Utah in 1870, one in Salt Lake City in 1906, and finally the one that we reside in today in Ogden in 1929.
And it really is a beautiful building.
People that don't even have anything to do with it.
So, we were thankful to the Lord because we were looking for something cheaper than the mattress warehouse when we found this church.
It's one of the benefits of being in Mormon country that there are not enough Christians to fight over the Christian real estate.
At its zenith in the 1950s, the congregation that met in our building had something like 400 plus families in attendance.
Now, they had a boiler heating, no air conditioning at this point.
It gets over 100 in August.
I don't know how they did it.
And that's a very significant number for a railroad town like ours, again, in a state.
That's never enjoyed a majority Christian populace at any point in its history.
The church grew so large, in fact, that they ended up purchasing several of the parcels around the building, the adjoining lots, and they ended up building an entire educational wing and fellowship hall onto the building, along with a lot of other major renovations.
Unfortunately, some of them were done in the 1960s, and so they're hideously ugly when they had more engineers than architects in the 1960s.
The plate, though, that my congregant found was commissioned in 1970.
And it was a commemorative plate for the centennial of their arrival, the 100 year mark of that first minister arriving on the train there in Utah to the Beehive State.
And so you might be asking now, okay, that sounds like they're doing great.
How did we end up with this building?
Did they outgrow it?
You know, did they just, they had to build something bigger and give up their beautiful little church building?
Well, no.
Because right at the zenith of their growth, as the nation at large entered into the first stages of what we now look on as the, Sexual revolution, their denomination began to slide towards liberalism along with the culture.
Maybe a few years behind the culture, but they were on the same track.
And so it wasn't long before they began to ordain women, and then they began to tolerate all sorts of things in their organization.
Like maybe, sure, you can't technically affirm a gay marriage there, but Jesus befriended tax collectors and sinners, right?
So we're really just being like the Lord and welcoming our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, right?
Lessons from Thyatira00:02:33
Without judgment?
Doesn't that not follow?
Well, the story of the Methodists in Ogden is as predictable as it is ancient.
It's a story that we could tell a million times through history.
We could go all the way back, in fact, to Revelation chapter 2 with the church at Thyatira.
When Jesus, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands, strode into that church, what did he have to say to them?
Well, this is what he said He says, I know your works, Revelation 2, verse 19, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works succeed the first.
But I have this against you that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.
I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.
Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation unless they repent of her works.
And I will strike her children dead, and all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works.
But to the rest of you in Thyatira who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some will call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden.
Only hold fast what you have until I come.
The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces.
Even as I myself have received authority from my Father, and I will give him the morning star.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
Much like the church at Thyatira, there were certainly faithful and zealous brothers and sisters in the midst of the congregation that had labored to raise that beautiful building on 26th and Jefferson.
There were debates in the denomination.
There were those who disagreed with the denominational leadership and fought the current of liberalism that seemed to be sweeping their church away.
But ultimately, and as the years wore on, those who would fight lost.
And rather than seeing the lost converted and discipled, their attempts to pander to the culture only made the church grow emptier by the year.
And so finally, not long ago, less than 20 years ago, with the building falling into disrepair around them, the lady pastors at the helm decided to sell, that they were going to liquidate the inheritance and try to scrape out enough money that they could build one of those metal buildings that you can build for about $18.
Blessing in Covenant Headship00:14:55
At least in 2006, you could build it for about $18.
Now it's about $18 million in Marriott Slaterville, which is about 20 minutes north of us.
And they're still out there today.
Their website, you could go on it, features invitations to such liturgical wonders as Pause in the Pew Sunday.
Bring your pets to church day, which is an offering to attract revival, I'm assuming, in the dying congregation.
I've looked at the live stream out of a morbid curiosity, and when they panned it, saw about 15 or 20 gray heads still there on a Sunday, but you won't hear something in particular in that church through the microphone.
Something that would almost overwhelm our attempts to live stream our service should we attempt such a thing is the children.
There's no children.
There's no fussing.
There's no squeaking.
There's no crayons hitting the floor and rolling all the way down to the front while I'm attempting to preach through the Gospel of John.
It's never happened.
Every time I look over in my office and see that plate there to my left on my office wall, I think about God's covenant.
I think about blessing and curse.
I think about the God that keeps both aspects of his covenant, both the blessing and the curse.
And I think about that ugly metal building in rural Marriott Slaterville with the elderly women pretending to pastor it, frantically searching for ways to keep the light on in a church whose lampstand is all but extinguished.
But I think as well about the faithful saints that they're Methodists.
We're different.
Look, I'm not a Methodist.
I've never tempted, I'm not a son of a Methodist.
Never been tempted to be a Methodist.
But I do think with thankfulness about the labor of those saints in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, as they labored brick by brick and dollar by dollar to build the church that now rings with the singing of psalms and saints every Sunday in Ogden, Utah, and the shuffling and fidgeting of children, like 150 of them strong.
On a Sunday, we might have 165 adults and 100 and, you know, bazillion children.
And I hope that those saints who built that building, at least some of them praise God from the great cloud of witnesses as they see the things that they built in faithfulness, were not wholly lost, that God didn't write the story that way, that God's blessing may have taken a left turn from the track as their successors left faithfulness and turned around and said, We'll go with the culture, that God said, Well, you're not going to take the inheritance with you.
And he took it from them.
And he gave it to us.
And we're thankful for that.
There's a warning in that, and there's blessing in that as well.
Now, that story, and you probably see why, the story I just told you is a picture of why covenant theology matters and why it matters deeply.
It's not just a confessional, reformed, theological exercise that we do for some kind of personal entertainment.
And so, what I'd like to do now is to help us understand why that is, to understand what covenant theology is, why it matters, and why it ought to put cast iron strength into the spines of Christian men and women in the work that God has set before us, namely the work of baptizing the nations.
And though this is a work that is far too great for a single generation or two or 23, it is a work that might be undertaken by a God who keeps his covenant to a thousand generations and beyond.
All of us have come into this story, you, me, every one of us have come into this story that God is telling for a very brief time.
All of us will do some work, a few thousand good works that he set before us to walk in Ephesians 2.10, and then we'll leave the stage, and the story that God is telling will continue, and God will continue telling it.
But because our covenant-keeping God is our covenant-keeping God, we have a strong hope, not only for ourselves, but our children's children, in continuing to see that thousand-generation mission unfold.
So let's begin now with that first and most obvious question.
If we're going to talk about covenant theology, the first thing that Joel needed was a Presbyterian.
And so here I am.
That was a joke.
I'm going to speak some Presbyterian in this service, but you're all welcome to translate it into particular Baptist.
I don't know what that language would be called.
If people from France speak French, maybe particular Baptists speak potluck.
Let's call it that.
It's one of my favorite.
Yeah.
I grew up Baptist.
Potlucks are amazing.
We have one every Tuesday before Psalms Sync.
But I'm going to try to tell this story in a way that's.
That's not obnoxiously Presbyterian because this is a shared inheritance that we have with some disagreements about some particulars, but this is our story.
This isn't the Presbyterian story or the Anglican story or the Lutheran story or the Reformed Baptist story.
This is our story.
So, what is covenant theology?
Well, we should probably start by understanding what a covenant is.
A covenant is a binding compact between at least two parties to keep certain conditions.
And with those conditions being kept comes blessing.
And with the failure to keep those conditions comes curse.
A covenant is a legal agreement, and all of us are involved in many of them in our day to day lives and experiences.
For example, if you purchased a home using a mortgage, then you are involved in a mortgage covenant.
Maybe they didn't call it that, but you're involved in one.
There are rules for each side of the deal, the conditions of the covenant for you and the bank.
If you agree to submit to certain rules about the value of the home you're buying against the total amount, then you'll pay the principal and interest.
Which is a separate debate that maybe we could have a rousing debate someday about usury, but we'll just talk about reality right now.
You pay the PI every month on a certain date, and then you get access to a large amount of money to purchase a home you otherwise couldn't.
It's a blessing.
And if you keep making that payment, you get to keep living there.
It's a blessing.
They can't raise the rate arbitrarily outside of the conditions of the covenant.
That's a blessing in most cases.
But if you stop paying, if you break the terms of the covenant, Then there are curses.
They can foreclose on you.
They can take your home.
They can ruin your credit.
They can force you into bankruptcy.
So, this covenant between you and the bank is a binding compact that initiates a relationship between you and the bank with certain laws or conditions, with blessings for keeping those conditions and curses for failing to.
Biblically speaking, covenants between God and man tend to have these five characteristics.
Number one, they entail relationship with God, number two, they bring blessing to the ones who keep the duties or obligations of the covenant.
Number three, they bring curses to those who break those obligations or fail in those duties.
Number four, they ultimately point to Christ and his work.
And then, number five, they include the one in the covenant and their children, meaning the obligations and its attendant blessings and curses are typically passed on in some sense to the children of the one in the covenant.
At its most basic level, that's what a covenant is.
The reason that this is so important to understand, and hence why thousands and thousands of pages and volumes of books have been written with covenant theology somewhere in the title, I have some on my shelf.
It would stretch for thousands of pages, just that section on covenant theology.
The reason this is important is.
Is that God orders history from eternity past to eternity future and relates to his creatures through covenants.
We can't understand God's interaction with us or with his creation without understanding covenants.
Though God makes and keeps many covenants with man throughout scripture, including covenants with Adam, Noah, Moses and Israel, Abraham, David, Ezra, and beyond, it's helpful to see his covenantal working unfolding through three major covenants which order all of history and God's relationship. to humanity.
These are three covenants that Reformed theologians of just about every stripe will point to.
They're often referred to as the covenant of redemption, number one, the covenant of works or life or creation, depending on who you ask, number two, and the covenant of grace, number three.
The covenant of redemption wasn't made between God and man.
It was made in eternity past within the divine persons of our triune God.
And this is the covenant where God determines before creation even begins to save a people from their sins and for himself.
And so, Father, Son, and Spirit covenant together to save a people through Christ and by the Spirit to the glory of the Father, even from eternity past, with names and details and method and means all foretold beforehand.
God determined He would do this before He created a single cork or atom.
The second covenant is that covenant of works or life or creation, the covenant that explains why the world is in the condition that it is today.
Why is the world today in bondage to sin and death?
Why are human beings born captive to sin?
The answer to that question is a covenantal answer.
Well, this is the covenant of works between God and Adam, where Adam and his progeny are promised eternal life and blessing upon condition of perfect obedience.
And I can't say that without, in my head, starting to sing the catechism song upon condition of perfect obedience.
But some of you kids understand what I'm talking about.
It's conditioned upon perfect obedience to God's commands, like, especially, don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And commands like, take dominion and multiply.
And I'm giving you dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over all things.
So go and take dominion.
Adam failed the test, as Joel spoke of.
He sinned and he fell.
And importantly, the covenant had implications again, not just for himself, but for his children after him.
In the covenant of works, Adam represented mankind itself, and so mankind fell with him.
That's the point that Paul's making in Romans 5. 12 to 19.
Let me select a few portions of that passage here and just read those portions.
It says, Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin.
And so death spread to all men because all sinned.
Many died through one man's trespass.
The judgment following one trespass brought condemnation because of one man's trespass.
Death reigned through that one man.
One trespass led to condemnation for all men.
Everybody that came from Adam.
It wasn't just Adam and God, it was Adam and God and his children.
And this can be somewhat alien to us.
This is one of the reasons why covenant theology seems quite simple, but it can be sometimes hard for us to really grab a hold of in our day.
This idea of covenant headship.
That a covenant head has implications in his obedience and disobedience, not just on himself, but to his children.
And not just if his children see him obeying or disobeying.
Adam's children weren't there, and they still bore the brunt.
It's not mere imitation.
This is not mere sociology.
This is a deep theological principle that God has worked into the foundations of all things.
Adam's covenant breaking would affect the entire human race.
But we need to be careful here before we quickly say that doesn't sound right.
Because without that paradigm, believe it or not, you and I would have no hope.
Because without the possibility of this kind of covenant representation, then how could Christ represent us in his righteousness?
How could he make a new humanity?
After his own likeness.
How could his righteousness be counted to us if we say, well, Adam's sin can't be counted to me?
I wasn't there.
Well, were you there when Jesus obeyed God from his conception to his death, burial, and resurrection?
Were you there?
Were you coaching him?
Don't do it, Jesus.
Don't give in to temptation.
Obviously not.
Covenant representation Christ makes a new humanity from the sinful sons of Adam.
So covenant representation is what explains.
This question that maybe has baffled you before about what one man's sin at a tree 6,000 years ago has to do with me.
What does that have anything to do with me?
Well, you better be thankful it has something to do with you because one man's obedience and sacrifice at another tree 2,000 years ago is your only hope.
Romans 5 again, same passage, but without the removals that I made.
If because of one man's trespass, Romans 5 17, death reigned through that one man, much more.
Will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ?
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.
For as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.
Though all humanity is imputed with the guilt of Adam, a new humanity is imputed the righteousness of Christ by grace.
And through faith.
And this brings us to the third covenant, which is the covenant of grace.
The covenant of grace is the outworking in history of that covenant of redemption that God said, I'm going to do this.
The covenant of grace is Him doing it in history.
It's the Father actually and in history saving a people for Himself through the Son and by the Spirit.
The essence of this covenant is the same across time.
If you are saved, it is by this covenant, is what I'm saying.
There's not another way.
If you're saved, whether you're Abraham believing God in Genesis 17, or Paul believing God in the book of Acts, or Bill and Joe and Cindy and Susan and Sarah believing God today, you're saved through the work of Christ by the covenant of grace.
The covenant of grace, and this is where I'm going to speak Presbyterian for a minute, feel free to translate, has two basic administrations, we could say the old and the new.
It begins to unfold immediately after the fall of Adam in the garden with the promise of.
That the seed of the woman would ultimately crush the head of the serpent.
And though this promise is repeated and filled out and renewed in the preceding covenants in Scripture with Noah and Abraham and Moses and David and Ezra and Israel, all of them look to Christ and contain the seed of the same promise, which would reach its final fulfillment and immutable form in the new covenant, which we could call the final form of the covenant of grace.
I know some of you disagreed with some parts of that because you're Reformed Baptists again.
Crushing the Serpent's Head00:06:37
Don't lose track.
Don't start arguing with me in your head and miss the next 35 minutes.
You can do that later, but for now, just stay with me.
I understand.
That's the heart of covenant theology, though, for all of us that history is this one great unfolding story of redemption and glory that is written by the hand of the great playwright who is God Himself.
It's a story in which God made man to be His kings and priests on earth, His royal vicegerents, fearfully and wonderfully made, bearers of His own divine image.
This story, though, is not just the story of rainbows and kittens.
It's a story that doesn't shy away from the pain and darkness of the world.
It would be a useless story if it did.
It would be a useless story if it had nothing to say about suffering.
No, this is a story that makes direct eye contact with suffering.
Because man, who was created to be a crown of good and glory atop God's world, fell.
And so sons became rebels and brigands and slaves.
Man, who was made for glory, is capable still of horrors beyond comprehension and swiftly carries out those horrors in history.
God's kings and priests ally themselves with the wicked dragon.
And so the story also recounts the long, slow decline of man and the world that he's made us to govern as man rejected the fountain of living water that is God himself and instead hewed out for himself broken cisterns which hold no water.
Man, who was made to serve his God, becomes enslaved to dark and demonic powers and his own passions and fell creatures in the dark.
And so the story recounts the long, slow tragedy of man trying to be his own God, to save himself, to make himself clean and good and happy, all without God.
Thank you very much.
But this story doesn't just paint with a single color on that side either.
It's not just a crayon box with a lone black crayon rattling around the bottom.
The story has suffering, but the story also has bright white.
A white writer, faithful and true, wins in this story.
Have you read Revelation 21, for example?
If you have read Revelation 21, then you follow John the Revelator as death is drug out into the shed like old yeller and a single shot rings out and death dies.
You've seen that part.
If you've read the prophet Ezekiel, then you've watched where a valley of dusty bones puts on new flesh and walks.
In joyful life again.
This covenantal story tells us that the writer who is faithful and true cuts down the corruptor, the ancient liar, with the sword of his mouth.
So, in this story, we do see God's good creation corrupted by sin, yes.
In the pages of scripture, there are blacker blacks than in any horror movie that you'll find.
Don't forget that.
Again, Joel made this clear we're post millennials.
That doesn't mean that we're rainbows and kittens and Thomas Kincaid paintings.
Pasted to our glasses and everything we look at.
We're like, I'm post millennial.
That'll be fine.
Well, no.
Lamentation gets a whole book in the Bible.
Righteous Job sits there for the better part of 36 chapters, scraping his festering boils with potsherds while his wife tells him to curse God and die, and he laments the death of his children at the hands of the devil himself.
Lamentation happens, but in this story, lamentation doesn't win.
In this story, life swallows up death.
Everything in the end rises from the grave, everything that is, except death and those who love it.
And the question you should be asking is why?
How?
And the answer is because the playwright entered his own play, because the God man comes, because the God man fights the dragon, because the God man crushes the dragon's head, and then the God man dies.
But the God man knew the deeper magic, if we should steal from Lewis.
He was there when it was spoken, and so death couldn't keep him.
And the God man cracked the old world through and through, and the God man rose up, and so heaven took root in the soil of the cursed earth, and now a new world overtakes the old.
With a world swallowing tree whose fruits heal the nations.
It's a story in which the dragon is destroyed, not by shock and awe, by the way.
It's a story where God decides that he is going to do battle with the ancient dragon who devours the world in death with a baby and crucifixion.
That's what he says.
I need to take back the whole world, it's all corrupted, every molecule.
Every human being has made himself an enemy of mine.
How am I going to take this world back?
God thinks.
I know what I'll do.
I'll send a baby, and he'll be killed, and that'll do it.
God could have done it all with his hands tied behind his back, and he did.
He did it not by destroying all who wrought the suffering, but by entering into the suffering himself.
So, why does this matter?
What does this have to do with Christendom 2.0?
The title of this conference, right?
That's what we're here for Christendom 2.0, some blueprints for that.
There are probably 10,000 reasons why this story matters for that.
And I'm going to give you two.
So it's kind of underwhelming.
We'll give you two out of 10,000, because Joel only gave me an hour.
Two reasons.
Two reasons why it matters that you and I become a people who are deeply aware of the fact that we are threads woven by God in a covenantal tapestry.
One reason is going to be about everything.
It's going to be about nations and empires and peoples and realms, the very cosmos.
And the other reason is going to be much smaller, but no less significant.
It's going to concern the epic story of the people who share your last name and sleep in your house at night and what will come of them.
So, why does all this matter?
Number one, because covenant theology teaches us how to read history, and you can't live rightly in your chapter of the book without being able to understand those who have gone before.
Why We Believe This Story00:15:08
The story that you tell yourself deeply matters.
And stories are inescapable things.
Everybody lives their life by some story or other where they tell themselves who they are, where they come from, what they're for, and really what everything is for, where everything came from, where everything is going.
And the thing is, if you live by a false story, you can't live by no story.
So you have to choose one.
And if you choose the wrong one, then you will live a false life to some degree or other.
For example, what would happen if you believe the following story?
Once upon a time, there was nothing.
Or maybe it was foam.
But not just any foam, it was quantum foam.
This nothing foam, though, it was unstable.
And so it tunneled.
And when I say tunneled, I mean it exploded.
And when I say it exploded, I mean a singularity of virtually infinite density exploded outward and flung superheated matter out like a Jackson Pollock painting before it began to cool and coalesce into atoms, which made elements, which made stars, which made galaxies, and then everything else, up to and including professors of theoretical physics.
About nine or ten billion years into this explosion, some of those things floating through space decided to coalesce further.
Into a ball that was so dense that it eventually caught on fire and became a thing that some advanced primates would later name the sun.
The rest of this dust cloud in this region of space spun around some more and became some other objects important enough for a name, eventually Jupiter and Mercury and Saturn and all the rest, and ultimately a really important special cluster of stuff, which some primates again later named Earth.
Okay, so we're pretty far into the story now, but we need another two billion years or so before some of those atoms on that Earth cluster got bored.
And decided that they were going to become something else.
Now, I think that's kind of impressive that they made it two billion years.
They must have a decent attention span.
I don't think I would have made it 15 minutes as a hydrogen atom.
And so they decided that they were going to become something that could ooze and squish and divide and then taste and smell and then maybe even someday write the next great American novel.
So some of these particular clumps of living stuff came up with the story that I just told you.
Right?
In fact, this story changes a few times a year, typically sometimes minor details, sometimes major.
I remember in high school when the story needed to be altered because we found out that the universe was 50% bigger than we thought it was.
Which, if you're taking a test and you're off by 50%, usually that's an F. Usually that's what it means.
But the clumps of matter that tell this story are very confident in their story.
And so this story, this tale has rung in the ears and wormed its way into the hearts of at least a few billion people in the last century or two.
As this story goes, what even are you?
Well, you are a tiny speck of highly evolved stardust clinging to the skin of a fairly pedestrian planet orbiting a medium sized star in an average galaxy somewhere in a vast universe that has no meaning in it whatsoever.
You're an animal who's descended from animals, specifically an advanced primate that we call Homo sapiens, which is just Latin for wise man, but the truth of which has yet to be seen.
Apparently, we got to name things.
So, you know, if you get to name everything, then you can call yourself.
What should we call the things that are like a.
Let's call them geniuses.
Let's call the name of that class of being a.
Those are geniuses.
In this story, the world is just stuff, right?
You find yourself in this story on a particular story where the only actors on the stage are various atoms bumping into each other in a random and unguided and meaningless way.
And in my opinion, in a plot twist that requires the most astonishing suspension of disbelief.
Since John McClain surfed on an F 22 and then jumped onto a highway overpass in Die Hard 4, all of those atoms, for no real reason at all, because there is no reason in this story, decided that they would organize themselves into planets and stars and giraffes and frogs and theoretical physicists and evolutionary biologists and poets and podcasters and ice cream parlor workers, and then all of you sitting here right now.
So, in this story, what are you?
You are an animal, nothing more.
So, be a good one, whatever that means.
So I repeat the question What if you believed that story?
What if you heard that story and you didn't just, ah, okay, yeah, I'm going to pass the test, learn and flush.
What if you believed that story?
What if you heard that and you said, that's it.
That is the truth.
That is the way.
That is the life.
I will live by that story.
What if that's the story that you told yourself every day, or backing up a bit?
What kind of world do you think would result if you were to tell this story to, say, 50 million students in public schools in the United States alone every year?
What do you think happens when you teach men that they are animals, come from animals, come from a singularity, come from quantum foam?
What kind of world would you expect people who deeply believe this story to make?
What kind of men would it make?
What kind of women?
Would it make men and women who have no idea what they are for, who they are, and if they are actually for anything at all?
Would it make a society that ends up having no idea what a man and woman even is?
What does that even mean?
Would it make a people who think that a man might even become a woman with the right surgical alchemy and pharmaceutical elixirs?
Don't some frogs change sex under the right environmental conditions?
I saw Jurassic Park.
Why not Homo sapiens?
But we're Christians, right?
We're Christians.
We don't believe that story.
And good news, it happens not to be true.
It happens not to be a true story, so it's a good start.
But we're not off the hook yet in terms of story.
There are other stories that we might believe stories that you'd find in the Christian section of Barnes and Noble, stories you'll find stuffing the shelves of the average Lifeway, right?
Stories that are, in our circles, probably far more popular.
Than the one I just told, it's the one I grew up with, that the world is getting worse every day, worse and worse, because it more or less belongs to Satan.
It's more or less his.
So Christians might try to do some evangelizing and stuff, but for the most part, pretty much nobody is going to believe, you know, narrow path and all that.
So I know that sounds like bad news, but good news, you'll probably only have to put up with it for a few more months, maybe a few years at the outside, what with all the stuff that's going on at Gog and Magog, I mean, Russia.
And what with the chips that Elon is trying to put in our foreheads, Mark of the Beast?
So there's just no way it's going to last.
So, bad news, it's getting worse by the day, okay?
But, good news, good news, when there's only about 37 Christians left, God's going to rapture them off the planet like the troops airlifted off that rooftop in Vietnam.
And then he'll be able to get, and this is where the story is important, then he'll be able to get back to his main thing, which is all about a special zip code in the Middle East called Israel.
And a special people who live here, they're God's special people.
And even though they rejected and crucified him and forced him to turn away for a time to work with the Gentiles, that was kind of his plan B in this story, he'll be able to get the Gentiles safely out of the way, rapture up to heaven so that he can get back to fixing up that really important piece of real estate in the promised land again.
Well, what if you believe that story?
What if you, like me, I ravenously read the Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
I finished one of them shortly before a mission trip to Honduras, and it messed with me, man.
I was like, Lord, please wait until I get married at least.
You know, like the greatest fear of the youth group evangelical in my world was getting raptured his wedding day.
I'll leave it at that.
I'll leave it at that.
You do the math.
And you all thought it if you grew up like I did.
You all thought it.
So, what if you believe that story?
And again, I don't mean as a theological idea.
What if you really believed that?
When Pastor Wilson says that theology comes out of your fingertips, he's not talking about an option.
That, you know, Christians, hey, care about application so that your theology comes out your fingertips.
He's saying actually correctly that your theology, whatever it is, is what actually comes out your fingertips.
If I told you right now that an intercontinental ballistic with, you know, MIRVs and nuclear warheads were on the way to this building and it was going to arrive in 30 miles and blow a two mile radius around this building, and then I just kept giving the talk, none of you would think I believed that.
Because what would be coming out of my life wasn't, I think we need to all leave.
But let's talk more about covenant theology.
What comes at your fingertips is what you actually believe.
What if you believed that story in that way?
Would you try to build institutions for the centuries?
Would you try to build institutions that might need buildings that by themselves take 300 years to build?
Carved in rock that says, to the glory of God?
Would you build Christian schools and universities?
And I'm not saying that my dispensationalist brothers and sisters don't do these things.
They do.
Johnny Mack has built, what, 15 schools?
Like, the man has an empire.
You know, I just go, dude, what do you really believe there?
Would you worry too much about leaving an inheritance to your children's children?
Or would you instead make your fourth pilgrimage to Israel to tour the Temple Mount with the money that you could have left?
The stories that we tell deeply matter, and that's why we need to tell the right one.
We need to tell the true story of God's unfolding covenant of salvation from eternity to eternity.
When you understand and tell this story rightly, you're learning how to read history.
And you begin to see that story shape, repeat in different chapters and sections of the book.
As you watch the history unfold of nations and empires and peoples and realms, you'll notice that they fall along covenantal lines.
You'll start to notice that when peoples worship the Lord, as the leaven of the gospel spreads through the land and transforms men and women and families and cities and realms, That in those places, righteousness and peace and prosperity tend to explode.
That God still blesses his people along covenantal lines.
Righteousness still really does exalt a nation.
I know that's in the book of Proverbs.
Believe it or not, the Old Testament still counts.
It still counts.
Still counts.
You don't need to cut it out.
It would be a lot less, you know, your back would feel better carrying around a smaller Bible, but you still need the whole thing.
Righteousness really still does exalt a nation.
But when they disobey and when they apostatize and trade their God for new gods, the gods of the age, you see death and destruction and curse fall again and again on covenantal lines.
This is history.
This is the great British Empire rising to its Christian zenith and then giving it all back and fading now into apostate oblivion where you could be arrested for reading Romans 1 on a subway.
Subways that a mere 30 years ago or less, I was riding as a kid, we lived in England for a few years, and no such law existed.
That's how quick it happens.
This is the Methodist Church in Utah raising up generations only to give it all away for a seat at the cheap, plastic, cool kids table of feminist sexual revolution culture.
So, first, covenant theology matters because it teaches us how to read the book that God is writing with history, which is another book he's writing.
He didn't just write the scriptures, he's also writing the story of all things.
And so, locate our place in that story and live faithfully in that story with the promise of blessings seen in history.
And with the warning of curse seen as well.
But it also teaches us some things much closer to our grasp.
Why does this matter?
Well, secondly, covenant theology matters because it teaches us that likely the most important thing any of us will ever do is to believe what God says about our children and act like it.
That likely one of the most important things any of us will ever do is to believe what God says about our children and act like it.
See, there are two primary mechanisms by which the kingdom of God grows and expands out like leaven through the lump of the world, generally speaking conversion and covenant succession.
Conversion is what happens when someone who's not been born into a Christian home.
Is converted to Christ by the Spirit of God as they hear the gospel preached.
This is why we send missionaries to foreign lost peoples like Utah who have yet to be converted.
It's why Christians evangelize.
It's conversion.
Covenant succession is the biblical doctrine that God ordinarily, hear the word ordinarily, works his covenant faithfulness on down through generations of Christians within families, and that that is what God has told us.
Now, I'm not saying that in covenant succession you don't need conversion.
Don't hear me say that.
Need conversion, need regeneration and faith and new heart and all of those things.
Our children need those as well.
But the covenantal pattern of God's working from Adam to Abraham to the new covenant is not just believe and be saved, but believe and be saved, you and your household.
It's not just, and I'm quoting, by the way, I'm not interpreting.
It's not just this promises to you, but it's this promises to you and to your children and to all who are far off.
Again, God tells us this.
We're not presuming here upon his grace, he has told us this.
In Exodus 34, for example, we're told that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love and forgiving iniquity and sin to the thousandth generation.
Exodus 20 as well.
This covenantal pattern is demonstrated in the covenant with Abraham, which includes his children in Genesis 3 15 and Romans 5.
It's demonstrated in the covenant with Noah, which includes his children in Genesis 6 18 7 1 and 9 9.
It's demonstrated in the covenant with Abraham, which includes his children in Genesis 17 7.
It's demonstrated in the covenant with Moses and Israel, which includes their children in Exodus 20 and 34, Deuteronomy 4 and 6 and more.
It's demonstrated in the covenant with David, which includes his children in 2 Samuel 7 12.
It's reaffirmed, as I just said, in the New Covenant in Acts 2 38 to 39.
This pattern is affirmed in proverbial form in Proverbs 22 6 when Solomon says, Train up a child in the way he should go.
Even when he's old, he will not depart from it.
Let's not asterisk that until it means train up a child in the way he should go and eh, flip a coin.
Godly Education for Children00:11:43
That's a proverb, but it means something.
And it doesn't mean the opposite of what it says.
That's not how proverbs work.
It's affirmed in the requirements for elders, which demand that the children of elders be faithful.
It's evident as well in Malachi chapter 2.
What does the prophet say God is seeking in marriage?
A holy seed, godly children.
Does God ask us for that which he will not also freely give?
No.
God accomplishes in us, as John Piper loves to say, he accomplishes in us what he requires of us.
As Robert Rayburn puts it, covenant succession is the purpose of God that His saving grace run in the lines of generations.
I'm not here again saying that our children don't need inward faith and regeneration.
Of course they do.
But I'm saying that God delights to and has purpose to save the children of believers ordinarily, and He has called us, their parents in particular, to be the particular means by which this happens, humanly speaking.
So, what I'm telling you is that covenant theology ought to lead you to the conclusion.
That one of the most important things that you will ever do, likely the most important thing most of us will ever do, is to believe what God says about our children and then act like it.
Did you know that depending on what polls you believe, something like 80 to 90% of Christians today were born in Christian families in the U.S.?
If you were to go to the average church and say, Are you a Christian?
Okay, were you born in a Christian home?
80 or 90% would say yes.
What I'm saying is.
Is this?
Do you want Christendom 2.0?
Do you know how it's going to happen?
Yes, by evangelism.
Yes, to the conversion of the nations, the conversion of family lines that have never tasted the grace of God yet.
That's a glory.
That's a great glory.
But it's evangelism that begins a new covenantal pattern in families.
This is how we disciple the nations.
It's that covenant.
This is why the psalmist says every family of the earth will turn.
Every individual unit of humanity will turn.
Every family will turn.
So, do you want Christendom?
Then have babies, believe God, and obey God in raising them.
I'm not talking about magic.
I'm talking about applied theology.
I'm talking about applied theology.
I'm talking about things like give them what they are owed from you.
Do you know what they're owed from you?
Your children?
There owed a godly father and a godly mother who worshiped the Lord in spirit and truth, in secret and in public.
There owed a father who would present them to the Lord and pray for them and earnestly seek their faith in God, their fruitfulness before God.
There owed parents who would look at their children and say, God has said of me to you that I owe you being raised up in the fear and discipline of the Lord, the paideia and nuthesia of the Lord, which Sums up to this give them a Christian education from the cradle on up.
Teach them how to think like a Christian about everything, from Cicero to science to calculus to their career.
You owe that to your children.
You don't owe them the thing that evangelicals have been doing very unsuccessfully for generation after generation in recent memory, which is to treat the Christian faith like the seasoning packet in a top ramen, where the bulk of the thing has nothing to do with Christ.
And so, you know, go to public school, learn about everything and how everything works, and that whole story I just told.
You're basically an animal come from animals.
But then when they get home, we're still not going to do anything.
But then on Sunday, but then on Sunday or Wednesday night, and then Sunday, we're going to go to the church and we're going to leave you in a room with some underqualified teachers who don't know their catechism.
And you're going to get 45 solid minutes of seasoning packet, the Christian seasoning packet.
And it's going to change everything.
It's going to change everything.
Well, top ramen's not that actually good, you know, good at all.
Neither is the seasoning packet that it comes with.
But the point is that that's not how this works.
The point is that they are body and soul to belong to the Lord.
And so give them a Christian education.
It doesn't matter what it takes, give them a Christian education.
Some of you are Charlotte Mason homeschoolers.
Some of you are Dorothy Sayers Trivium classical Christian school people.
We have a classical school at our church.
We have homeschoolers at our church.
But there's one thing that, ordinarily speaking, meaning when it's permitted by law, some cases where there's divorce and mass and there's other problems that come up.
But ordinarily speaking, it means that the pastors hear from their pastor, the congregants hear from their pastors, no, you may not send your children to the public school.
You can't, you're not allowed because of Ephesians 6 and Deuteronomy 6.
You're not allowed because of Proverbs 22 6.
The principle is plain, Christian education.
You can land it in method in a thousand different ways, really faithfully.
You know, we don't argue a lot about that.
We, you know, have a friendly dinner debate.
We don't argue about that.
But they are owed a Christian education, they're owed that from the earliest days.
I want my children like Timothy.
It says that he learned the faith from his infancy, this is what it says.
In the Proverbs, when it says, I learn to trust the Lord at my mother's breast, that's how it is.
That as my children grow up from their mother's breast in a way appropriate to the age of that child, they are going to be taught, You belong to the Lord Jesus Christ who died and rose for you.
Believe in Him, be saved from your sin, and then go and obey all that He commanded.
And in ways appropriate to them, as six months old and six year olds and 16 year olds and 60 year olds, I hope that they.
Continue and trust that they do because our God is a God who does not demand bricks without straw.
Build an inheritance for them and don't squander it on RVs and vacation homes.
You can have an RV and a vacation home, that's fine.
I'm not saying, but if you have to choose, and most of us probably do, let's be honest, my main problem isn't that I have too much money.
Now, every eye closed, every head bowed, raise your hand if that is your problem and we're going to direct you.
I'm just kidding.
Just kidding.
Build an inheritance.
That's what, again, God tells you.
These are not suggestions.
Do you want to be a godly man?
Well, here's what godly men do they give an inheritance to their children's children.
Of faith, yes.
Of wisdom, yes.
Of training, yes.
And of financial help.
Help them get a financial foothold in the place where you are.
Help them get a house.
Help them get started.
Help them marry well.
Help them live with you until they are.
Help them.
Help grandparents.
Help pay for the kids' school.
Catechize them.
Then pour yourself out when grandkids start to come and hope to see your grandkids worship and know their God and his covenant faithfulness.
What I'm saying is basically when we have children, is to put your back into it.
Put your back into it.
Put your back into it.
I know that's unpopular in today's age.
I know that somebody is going to write a blog post about this talk and they're going to say, Where was the gospel centrality?
And I'm going to reply, First of all, it was at Joel Webbins' conference.
What did you expect?
But the second thing I'll say do you mean the gospel of the kingdom of God that sets captives free and starts new legacies to the thousandth generation in families that were enslaved to demons and sexual sin and alcoholism and a million other evil, wicked, soul crushing humanity destroying vices?
The gospel that starts new legacies that actually shows up in marriages and parenting and finances and legacy?
Put your back into it.
It's okay if you put the majority of your energy into building a Christian house in the seminary,
or maybe you never plant a church, or maybe you never become an office holder in Christ's church, and you're not a deacon, or you're not an elder, you don't pastor.
Maybe you don't go as a missionary to the New Hebrides, and we need those people.
If all you do is to faithfully build a Christian household in Christian faith, having and loving your children, working a job to the glory of God to faithfully provide, setting good food before your children, mothers, three meals a day, cooking to kids who aren't always that thankful, Cleaning muddy clothing, loving them and catechizing them and homeschooling them or taking them to school and doing all of this day after day after day,
and you lay your head down on the last day of your life on your pillow and you see some grandkids around you, hopefully singing some psalms, you're not less in the kingdom than a missionary to Papua New Guinea.
You're not.
It's probably, in fact, going to be the main thing all of us do.
And guess what?
That was God's idea.
That was God's idea.
Remember what he decided to do in his covenant story?
Remember how he decided to take over the world?
A baby and death by crucifixion.
That's what he did.
A baby and death by crucifixion.
Not shock and awe, not humanly impressive things, not by eloquence or the wisdom of the world or human power.
He didn't trust in horses and chariots.
He's going to continue working that way most of the time.
It's going to be ordinary Christian faithfulness leading to the conversion of the lost, the conversion of our children in a covenant succession.
So may God give you the hearts of your children.
May you behold your great grandchildren before you lay your head down in the grave singing psalms over you.
And let's pray.
Our God and Father, we thank you that you do not ask us what you don't richly provide for us in Christ and by your Spirit.
Lord, we thank you that you have not left us to wander in the wilderness of life with no instruction on how it is that we're to live.
Lord, we thank you that you do not only save a people, but that you sanctify a people, that you don't just justify us, but you take us all the way to glory.
Lord, we pray that you would train our hands for war, that you would train our hands for the good fight of the faith, that we would run with endurance day by day.
That we would walk in good works like one footstep after another footstep through our day, choosing to lay our lives down for our people, for the lost, for our neighbor.
That we would be a kind of people who would choose to die so that we might live, to die to our own preferences in 10,000 blue collar ways that nobody ever sees or writes a book about.
Lord, help us to love our children well.
Pray that you would richly bless these families here with many children and that you would bless them.
With the grit and the steel in their spine to put their back into it as they love and raise these children in the faith.
Lord, we thank you for your great and mighty promises.
We put our trust in them and in your faithful character, not in our hands, not in the flesh, not in horses or chariots.