The Servetus Affair and Calvin’s Summary of the Christian Life

John Calvin, Geneva, Zwingli, Servetus, Augustine, Reformed, Presbyterian. We praise you that before there was a universe, you thought of us and gave us our identities and our names, and that you brought us into this world at the right time. We praise you that you have called us by the voice of your Holy Spirit into your church, the body of Christ, your Son, and our Lord. We pray, O Lord, that by that same Holy Spirit, you will speak to us tonight. I pray that you will be our teacher. In Jesus’ name, amen. Okay, so about half a dozen people that either spoke to me in church or called me at home and said, I hope you’re ready to take because I can’t be here tonight. No, please do not. So Chris is ready to take, and so we’re going to say hello to all those who are ready to take.

And Carrie. So last week I hoped that we would get Calvin through his life, kind of biographically, and get him married, and we didn’t succeed in doing that. And I realized about myself that we’re probably not going to do that tonight either, and so we’re just going to cut it short. There’s one more biographical issue that I want us to talk about, because if you haven’t already heard about it, will sign it and you need to kind of deal with it uh that kind of episode down the slide and and so we’re going to try to take care of that and just say to him that um that he died in 1564 and buried in a what was wrong about being on the park right eventually somebody didn’t find the grave and it says just a very little simple stone with jc on it and whatever reasons people concluded.

I mean, I know there’s a reason for not concluding. Our conclusion has been made. This is Calvin’s prayer. But let’s back up into the 16, pardon, the 15 borders and talk about this guy here, whose name I’ve written up here. Anybody ever heard of Michael Servetus? Do I need a physician for that? Well, Michael Servetus is someone we probably would remember if he had not encountered John Calvin. He was a physician in France, and he was one of the several people who more or less simultaneously figured out why our bodies are so constructed that our heart pumps blood through our lungs first. Okay? The pulmonary circulation of the blood. In other words, to get oxygen into your blood, you take the rest of your body. Well, a number of people figured this out all at once, why this was, so we just used one of those.

And so, he was probably, in that respect, he may have been enough to figure that we would probably have remembered him, or at least some specialists in the history of medicine never remembered who Michael Servetus was even if he hadn’t encountered John Calvin. But in addition to being a gifted physician and, you know, student of the human body, he was also just a little bit odd religiously. He was just personally a very, very difficult person. Not that Calvin wasn’t, but two very difficult personalities came head to dead when Michael Servetus and John Calvin, two very stubborn people, let’s say, theologically, came together and Servetus lost. And that’s been held against Calvin all these years. People with, you know, historians of science have eventually said, well, this is just one more episode in the terrible story about theologians and persecuted times.

Well, that’s That’s not strictly speaking true, even the great, I mean this is totally a way to waste time in a class like Calvin, but even the great story of how theologians persecuted scientists between Cardinal Bellarmine and Galileo is not quite all we’re told. Well, that’s another story for another time. The incident between Calvin and Servetus, well, Calvin has been held against him since his own lifetime, that Servetus died in Geneva, was burned at the stake as a heretic in Calvin’s Geneva. Well, Servetus, the problem with holding that against Calvin is that the only reason that he was in Geneva at that time, and was identified as this character, is that he had already escaped from prison. You know, the French were about to do the same thing to him, and he escaped.

And he takes the same path that Calvin does. If you’re a free laborer in 16th century Europe, the place you want to be is Basel. And if you’re in France and there are constant wars going on, along with the direct battle between Paris and Basel, what everyone does is head south and goes into Switzerland and Geneva and up. Well, this is what Calvin did in 1536, and this is also, of course, what Servetus does. He has two apostles. He actually gets there and practices medicine for a time, actually for a dozen years or so, in Vienne. But all that time, he sends the annotated copies of Calvin’s work back down to Geneva Hill. All Calvin sermons and books, and he writes in margins, you know, critical notes, and sometimes just vicious things. I mean, not even very smart.

He just is, you know, Chinese water culture. Pest and hell. Well, John Lennon was fine for years and years. He keeps all these things. He didn’t respond. But one day, Servetus can’t take it anymore. He can’t take it anymore. He goes to Geneva. He, okay, this is another little story. story. The, another piece of background. The pastors of Geneva would get together and preach for each other. And it was like a little preaching seminar. It was a way, if you want a prophet sign, and it has a long history. You can find prophet signs. Actually, Queen Elizabeth came to where she felt like being outlawed and hanged. Because people started doing this all over the European world. But it started out in Geneva. These prophesies and pastors would preach to each other, and they would try to help each other with their preaching.

So Servetus shows up at one of these things in Geneva. And all the pastors in Geneva are there listing one of their brothers’ creeds. Calvin, again, tied up with something. Calvin turns up late for the prophesying, and here’s this guy. For whatever reason, he recognizes Servetus, and things go badly for Servetusus. Calvin does his civic duty he brings me to the attention of the city fathers the presidents of this notorious character you know this is a hard thing for us isn’t it we don’t want to I bet you too don’t want to live in a place where somebody you know in Greenwood we don’t want the city council to be too interested in archaeology, right? I mean, I certainly don’t. I don’t want the city council to be testing my orthodoxy. And I bet you don’t either.

And I know Chris does that. But that’s just the world we live in. I mean, you just have to kind of mentally think, okay, if I’m not in 21st century Greenwood, instead I’m in 16th century Geneva, everybody realizes it’s part of the deal. There’s no place you can go and hear it where it isn’t murdered, you know, because that may be possible. But pretty well everywhere, this is part of it. So a notorious, famous, infamous heretic who’s published his views all over Europe, shows up in your church, is pretty much your obligation to make this back on, you know, who this is. It’s your civic duty. It’s like, I mean, I don’t know how to explain it to 21st century Americans. They say, you know, we have, we certainly have primes in our world in which these obligations are laid upon us, both as a minister and as a professor, and it’s true for political positions.

It’s the law that requires that if I, in the course of my professional work, know that a child is becoming, that a child is being abused, I am required by the law to let this be known. Right? I mean, I can be prosecuted for not letting it be known if I know about it. He would deny the primary things. He would deny the divinity of Christ. Well, I mean, it’s a little bit like that. I mean, in that world, they just thought of things counting. They probably abused children all over the place, but denying the divinity of Christ was one of those things that they did in that culture and in that situation, so they thought, you’ve got to report that to the authorities. And so Calvin kind of goes into this obligation. Here’s this guy who must be involved in this issue, and so he lets it be known.

From that point on, Calvin’s whole involvement in this situation is, one, advocating for clemency. He’s been blamed far and wide, and if you kind of go on the internet and put in on Google Calvin and Servetus, you’ll find out from 100,000 different sources that Calvin had So we turned it to say, the reality is that the city council, the small council, and they didn’t know how to do it. And Calvin didn’t know how to do it. He said, what we need to do is cut the guy’s hair off. Well, you know, that may be a small difference to you, but if you don’t know how to do it, it’s a whole lot easier to mess up rather than someone can say, And he said, in fact, he had it in his handwriting. Words to be effective. We don’t know how to burn people. And we will mess it up and we will torture the guy.

While we try to figure out how to do this. And they said, no, no, this is the standard way It was terrible. It shouldn’t have happened. But Calvin was the first man to say he shouldn’t have done it, and he would have danced with him before. And so I just wanted to know if you guys, you’ll hear about this, if you start messing with Calvin, one of the first things you’ll find out about him is what’s called always the Servetus affair. We can’t blame Calvin for the vicious sense of the time in which he lived. He was, in many ways, he was an early modern man, and in many ways we can sympathize with him. in many other ways as a layman and you know I and you, we just have no idea how to fit ourselves into the mind of a layman person, it’s a different kind of world but he wasn’t there for the cafe he wasn’t there for the cafe he wasn’t there for the cafe as every other Christian leader in all of Europe would have been and with me like I say, the only reason that Servetus even came under the capital punishment in Geneva was because he escaped from the French Catholics.

I mean, Geneva, yeah, the Swiss province was burning, but the French Catholics were saying, darn, you know, they got to him and he got away from us. So, there was no, Servetus was, his case was hopeless anywhere he went. There was no place that he could go. unless, well he could go to Basel as he had for a number of years he would go to Basel if he would just be quiet but this is what he couldn’t do he had to he had to he had to how do people grab one of these sheets it’s just a little paragraph it’s the same thing as I said I think it’s unlikely I have to apologize, too. Chris had been so good at the screen and everything, and I came off without the presenter, so we’re doing it without PowerPoint tonight, and some students are going to send me and investigate things that feel like they need PowerPoint.

I don’t know how Mark’s students got that. But, uh, huh? Yep. Sometimes we moderns, we look kind of like a witch bird, and say we’re superior to them. And the least of what we’ve done for our witches now is not for the better of them, because we don’t believe in spiritual realities. We don’t think they’re really our witches. Yeah, we don’t take witchcraft seriously. We don’t take it seriously, but there’s some issues, especially in Central America, things they don’t get serious. So maybe the way it is, we don’t for our heritage, because the city council doesn’t care about the Bible or the Bible. Okay. Well, let’s start in a little bit about Calvin’s theology. And I had this all divided out very neatly on different PowerPoint slides so we could go step at a time.

But like I We’re just going to have to deal with it on paper tonight because I didn’t get here with the presenter. This is a paragraph from the Epistle Dedicatory to Calvin’s commentary, what, on Isaiah, I think? No, Catholic Epistles. I really think that the little dedicatory instances at the beginning of any of Calvin’s, well, all of Calvin’s works, are one of the most interesting moments in his singing. You go to, people always go to the Institutes, for a good reason, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, I have a big book that I’ve worked on all my life in several editions. And for a good reason, because this is the full exposition of all of his thought. But in these little dedicatory epistles, where he dedicates the work to someone or another, some usually very prominent figure, or a political figure, or a king, or some person, he talks about those things that really matter to him most.

This is a piece that he wrote to the Earl of Somerset. Anybody know, I mean, people care about the Tudor monarchies, right? And my wife is a kind of aficionado of the Tudor monarchs. Anybody know the significance of this Earl of Somerset in the 1540s? Okay, he is the brother of, okay, anybody know enough about the name Do you have any two Catholics who were wives of Henry VIII? Hmm? No? Not Aragon. Oh, not Aragon. The other one. No, the other one. The other one. Huh? I can’t remember. Seymour! Jane Seymour. There he is. Jane Seymour. I’ll get it all right in just a minute. So the Earl of Somerset, this is Edward Seymour, the Earl of Somerset, James’ brother. And when James’ child, who’s who, anybody know? She has a son, the long-desired male heir from whom all these divorces happened, He was actually born to Jane Seymour, Edward VI, King Edward VI.

And when Edward was 10 years old, he becomes king. His father, Henry VIII, dies. Edward becomes king. His uncle, Edward Seymour, becomes the Lord Protector. and he is this Earl of Somerset, and Calvin was writing to him. And so it’s important. It’s 1548. This guy’s basically running in for all my records. Let me get my dates straight here. Yeah, okay, so the king is about to die. He may be dead by the time this thing is published. He’s 16 years old, always had been a king himself. The Earl of Somerset is, for all practical purposes, king of England. And so Calvin writes to the region. Among other things, this summary of the Christian life, this is just a fascinating summary, I think, of Calvin’s whole theology in just a few sentences. So let’s start in there.

It’s important, let’s just say, pretend that before the ellipsis, at the beginning it says, it is important, that’s not what it says, go pretend, that we see God as the only Lord of our soul, and his law as the only rule and spiritual instruction for our conscience. so that we do not serve him according to all kinds of foolish human regulations. What would count as foolish human regulations? Let’s see what we’ve got. Okay. Okay. Again, we’re right about the same reason. In fact, he said these letters to the Bible are all Catholic and this is nothing to do with it. You’re right, but that’s the other thing he is thinking about, the whole medical Catholic condition system. Those letters, just to be the letters to the Bible called Catholic and this is, these are not the only particular, they’re two different verses.

But, but you’re on the, but it led me to the, you are right about substance of the matter. He is concerned about the Roman Catholic penitential system. You know what that means? Anybody know? Okay, indulgence is a part of it. What happens, what do we have to do once a year? Sure, you’ve got to go to confession. At least once a year, which becomes, the minimum becomes a vaccine, right? In a lot of people’s practice. Really, really wanted you to do it every day, but fairly every day, they say at least once a year. And what kinds of things, how do you get, I mean, post-mortem too, it’s a little different. But supposing that you are a Catholic in 1548, how do you receive the forgiveness of sins, of your sins? What would it do? Confess your faith.

Confess your faith? Confess your faith for free social life. Oh, okay. You have to do so many calendars and so many social documents and it does the social documents you get venerated documents or, you know, if you don’t have time to go out and find a card, what can you do? You pay. You can You can, you can let your, there was a great preacher of indulgences about the indulgences that funded the building of St. Peter the Celibate. The great preacher of indulgences who, the fundraiser who made that happen, in fact, had a little motto he came around all the way around saying, When the penny in the copper clings, the soul from purgatory springs. And they built St. Peter’s Basilica based on that little divvy. Calvin thinks it’s crucial that you understand that the Bishop of Rome is not the Lord of your soul.

The local priest is not the Lord of your soul. So many Hail Marys is not God’s rule. that God is not served by obeying human regulations. Calvinist is God-obsessed. We really don’t know when Calvin was converted to Protestant faith. It was sometime around 1534. So he’s born in Noyon, so he lives this, he lives a number of years within the heart of medieval Catholicism. In fact, he was never ordained as a priest, but he was a chaplain, and he received the income of three altars. Anybody know what that means? So what you can do is a pretty cool little deal. If you have a father or somebody who has family connections that can make it all work with the bishop, Now, if, go back to purgatory. That’s the problem with people in purgatory, right?

Sold, you die, go to purgatory, you’ve got to work, you know, go through a certain amount of pain, a certain amount of work, whatever kind of work you have to do, right? But if you can get somebody to endow masses, if you can get a mass set every day, you know, for you in your honor, why, this helps. You know, this takes years and days and so forth off of your time in purgatory. If you go on pilgrimage to visit certain relics, well, it was this elaborate accounting system, and everybody knew how many days of purgation, that is, how many days in purgatory, a certain relic was worth. So if you went on a pilgrimage to see the rock, see some rock, the true cross, somebody’s got a little scrap of wood, there was enough scraps of wood, well, this is the true cross, to build a big ship.

So you can go off and find the ice at your crossroad, but it’s just worth so many days of vacation, right? If you could get a mask set in your honor, it would take so many years or an opportunity. This is worth so many days of vacation. And well, so these altars proliferate around the European world. And they’re just in every corner of the church. You know, if you were to do it here, you might be having an altar back there, an altar there, an altar up there, an altar in all the corners. Any place where you can sit an altar, you sit an altar, and you assign a priest to the altar. And that priest is going to say a mass every day, and he makes it his whole day, saying he’s endowed with masses for a certain person who’s died. Well, this turns out to be a pretty good business enterprise for young middle class men.

Donald Marshall, you know, he’s got a powerful father, gets him, at the age of twelve or so, a sign as a chaplain at that altar to say those masses all day long in honor of all these people. And these endowments, the endowments work then just like they work now. You know, you put a pile of money away and it throws off a certain amount of income and that income is used to pay the priest. But what if you can find a priest who will say masses all day long for less money than the endowment for a while. Well, pretty good. No problem. So you get a young man like Calvin that gets an income of three endowments, and it’s no problem to hire three priests for a lot less than the endowment is. They stand and say, the masses of people can take the rest of the money and go off and say, you know what, you know, I don’t know where you want to go.

This is exactly what he did. In 1534, he’s realized this is wrong. He’s not taking his money anymore. He goes back to Noyon and resigns on all this money. And that’s the point where we know Calvin has come to realize that God is the only Lord of our soul. And His law is the only rule and spiritual instruction for our conscience. And we don’t serve Him by all kinds of human regulations. You see, now he has come to see that God is the center of his life. And from then on, he’s going to live this totally God-obsessed life. Sometimes he feels like he has to defend God. I don’t, I mean, I want to pray that I have a place where I feel like God needs my defense. Right? But Calvin felt like God needed to defend him sometimes. And so he would go so far as to defend God’s honor. which, I mean, I think God, he doesn’t need my help, but he does appreciate loyalty.

Right? I think that’s a way that modern people can appreciate what Calvin was up to. I mean, Calvin sometimes feels like he has to defend God. Well, I don’t know about defending God, but I didn’t know God appreciates loyalty. Right? He appreciates receiving from us the honor that is duly his. And I think that’s a good modern way of putting what Calvin was after there. He says further, God wants to be served by us in spirit and with a clean heart. And I don’t doubt that that’s true. Do you doubt that’s true? How does it go for you? Do you find it easy all the time to serve God in spirit and with a clean heart? Everybody finds that easy? Speak your name out loud. and Calvin realizes that’s true God desires to be served by us in spirit with a clean heart but that’s the one thing we can’t do if my heart is going to be clean and it’s going to be an appropriate offering to God that’s going to be God’s gift it’s not going to be my gift to God it’s God’s gift to me if I’m able to do that and if I had my projector At this point, I would show you this wonderful emblem that Calvin had with his personal motto and his personal seal.

And what it is, it’s a big circle. And in the center of the circle, there’s a hand. Calvin drew it himself. He just took a pencil and drew it out himself. There’s a hand in the middle of the circle. And it’s got a heart. like a valentine’s day card. It was just the same as 1500. It does now. You know, two thumbs on the top. He’s holding his heart with some little blood coming off of it. And on either side, there are the letters. On the left, J. C. What is J. C. C. John Cohen and what else? Jesus Christ. Exactly. He wants, and it’s not lost on Calvin, but he has the same initials as the Lord. And he wants his whole life, really, to be a reflection of Christ in this way. So instead of putting his name, he puts these initials, which he shares with the Lord. and if you don’t get that then he puts it very explicitly and in Latin around the outside of the circle it says my heart I give to you Lord and this is Calvin’s the model my heart I give to you Lord Confidence is And so this is This is what Calvin wants to do That he realizes that if he’s able to give his heart To Jesus Christ Promptly and sincerely That’s not going to be something he is able to do Because his own life is so pure His own life is so spiritual His heart is so clean He goes on On the other hand we admit that in us there is nothing but unrighteousness and that we are corrupt in all that we can do does that mean that nothing you do can possibly be good but it does mean that everything a person does is touched in some way by sin right John Leith, my great teacher I don’t think Chris, Chris came along too late for me, didn’t you?

I knew him through Arnold. Okay, through Arnold. He taught theology, due west maybe, but left due west, graduated from Mercer College, left due west, after he graduated from Mercer and never really came back except to visit his mother. I knew him in Richmond after a long time later. he was a professor for 30 years at the Union Seminary in Richmond where both Grace and I went to seminary and he would say summarizing this thought of Calvin’s he would say if you could ever make yourself humble by trying hard you’d immediately be proud of your humility right this is the problem in us there’s nothing but unrighteousness. That doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything right, but as soon as I do something right, I’m proud of it. I say, not bad. C.S.

Lewis has this wonderful passage in a letter that he wrote to his old friend in Iowa, his longtime friend, that they communicated through thick and thin all of Lewis’s life. Right after Lewis’s conversion, which his friend had prayed for for years, he says, I find that in regard to the big sins, I’m being supported. So he thought, I don’t have any problem, I don’t have any real challenges with lust, and greed, all these big things. These are, you know, the things that you should… He’s able to deal with those things, but he says the problem is that as soon as these little demons arise, and you know they say arise, but I mean not arise, it says greed, and he said I lop off a tip, and what I mean, I lop off a tip, and lust, I lop off a tip, but after I lop off all their heads, another little demon arises at the end and says, what a time to tell you all that.

And that’s the one that gets you. And that’s the one Calvin will do will get you. That’s why he says that we have to admit that in us there’s nothing but unrighteousness because even when you do the right thing again and again, you still say to yourself, what a fine fellow you are. Right? For doing all this stuff right. That’s the problem. We therefore doubt ourselves. Calvin says. Right. It’s very wise. Again, a little leethism. I don’t know that he said he said I always find it prudent to assume that the tradition is wiser than I am. And, you know, we always find it prudent to assume that God is more righteous than I am, right? And this is what Calvin means. We doubt ourselves. Denying things we’re only using wisdom, worthiness, or aptitude for the good, and instead turn to the fountain of all good, which is Jesus Christ.

And so he offers his heart, right, to J.C., to Jesus Christ, and receive what he gives us. Whatever righteousness you have, whatever holiness you have, whatever moral perfection you have, or even goodness, when you do the right thing, and you choose well instead of badly, it’s something you’ve received from Him. It’s a gift. It’s, Calvin says, the reward of this suffering and death so that we may be reconciled to God. And so, I wasn’t able to do the right thing out of my own power, But, washed clean in his blood, we’re no longer afraid that our sins will prevent us from finding grace at his heaven and the throne. So Calvin speaks here in what lawyers call aspirational language. Maybe you are still a little bit worried. they have the right to find grace that is heavenly throne but you don’t have to because because of righteousness of Christ we can watch when we receive his grace now there’s no reason to be afraid you don’t have to be afraid that your sins will prevent you from finding grace that the Lord has given you and so assured that our sins have been freely forgiven on the basis of this sacrifice, we find our rest and assurance of salvation.

Now, last week, when we sat, what have you heard about God? One of the issues that came up was the issue of predestination. So, how do you reconcile these two things? You know kind of what predestination might be. Everybody knows one thing about God, one thing about his own work, right? Predestination. And yet we just heard him say that when you’re washed clean in his blood, you can be assured that your sins have been freely forgiven on the basis of his sacrifice and be fine, not anxiety, not worry about whether I’m going to be elect, right? He doesn’t say wash clean in his blood, you’re not going to be worried about whether you’re on the elect. You’re not washed clean in his blood. You are not now free to question God’s justice, because some are right and some are not.

Is that what he says? No, he says, washed clean in his blood, we are now no longer afraid. And we are assured that our sins have been freely forgiven and find rest and assurance of salvation. How do you make those two things work together? How do you both achieve it? Well, that’s really the answer, isn’t it? What is it? before okay we’re talking about god right when is before to god there is no before that’s right and so when you start talking about god’s free anything you’ve got to start by saying god i don’t know if you know what the word god means maybe we need to go back and say okay who is it we’re talking about here are we talking about someone whose mental world is constrained by the sequence of one thing after another. You know, we’re not.

God is not constrained by one thing after another. St. Augustine, one of the greatest minds, I mean, somebody said he’s not the greatest Latin writer, but the greatest man that ever wrote Latin. You know, probably the most capable Christian theologian ever, says that time begins in the beating of angels’ wings. You have to have, in order to have time, you have to have one thing after another. You know, the heart of the concept of time is the idea of sequence. Well, in the inner life of God, that’s what you don’t have, right? Sequence is not part of God’s interior life. God takes in everything all at once. And so a thousand years is as a day in your sight. Well, that’s putting it mildly. You know, millions of years are instant in God’s sight.

And so, and then we’re talking about destiny. Well, this is the good thing. The problem is that so many people think that destiny means the same thing as so you get predestination. I don’t know how to quite put this so that it’s parallel, but people confuse predestination with predeterminism, which is a totally different issue. In predeterminism, that makes sense. You can talk about predeterminism. That is, everything happens just in the way that it had to happen. Well, no responsible Christian theologian has ever been predetermined. It’s secular physicists in our world who are predetermined. Stephen Hawking is a relentless predeterminist. And he’ll tell you something. He writes it in his books, that everything just unfolds mechanically, and you can’t help it.

The world is just unrolling like a carpet, and whatever’s going to happen is what’s going to happen. Hawking’s very explicit about this. This is not the way Calvin views it. The predestination is not about everything unfolding like a carpet that’s been kicked open. Instead, he wants to talk about some actions. And this is a much more apt term for it. That out of the mass of people who have gone wrong, who can’t depend upon our moral intuitions, God has chosen some. I mean, we can’t help it. There is an artist like this. But not all are, well, put it bluntly, only half. in his pure grace there are those who have faith in Christ and those who have faith in Christ who have received this gift can be assured this is the assurance that you can live with Calvin just says do you worry about your election he says do you have any faith not as your faith perfect not as your not do you know anybody who has you think more faith than you not do you know anybody more pious than you, not do you know anybody who talks Christianity than you but be him and him with faith to where you are and if you do or if you ever did Okay, that’s about decent, by the way.

Let that be. And so, this is why you can be assured. You know, you probably saw all the news coverage coming around about Mother Teresa. Anybody see that stuff right? Not long after she died and they got hold of her diaries and things. What was the insight from those? I see some nodding hands. What did we find out? One was that she was doubting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she didn’t, I mean, she was very, very problematic. She had one big experience of God when she was quite young. And on the basis of that one big experience of God’s grace, she did all that she did. And for 40 to 50 years, it was like God was asking. and she was right. It’s enormous frustration that God was acting in her life. You know, he had given her this one thing and she had to go and do this other side and she was just scared of this.

But what’s Calvin’s message to her? I mean, she got it right. I mean, it’s not that she liked it. Wouldn’t it have been better if it had felt most about all of life? Sure. But Calvin’s word to her is God didn’t mess this thing up. he extended his grace to you and on the basis of that grace you have had faith all these years and then you go with it because your feelings by the way are terrible right to faith and to not being able to and exactly if you’ve ever I mean maybe I’ve dated myself I don’t think you can say this stuff anymore but you know at one time you’ve watched TV or you know your friends it’s the people who are up to know good and say, how can something feel so right being wrong? You can’t do it better. Oh, you know, easy! I mean, the fact that it feels right should be your first clown.

Because your feelings are the realm in which sin lives. The fact that it feels right makes no odds. And it’s the nods that God placed at one point may be for those who are richly blessed. God sustains that year after year, but given the gift of faith. And on the basis of the gift of faith, you can feel, you can be assured of your election. And just go along with that and trust God for good. Don’t worry that God’s out to get you. God’s not out to get you. And Calvin expresses this so beautifully. We can’t, I wish we could, we just have four weeks. We can’t go into the institutes of the Christian religion in four weeks. But the big book, from the very beginning, Calvin always talked about the doctrine of election at the very end of his discussion of the Christian life.

Now, how do you like that? You’ve got four big pieces of this book. You’ve got a piece on God the Father, you’ve got a piece on the Son, God the Son, the redemption we’ve received in Jesus Christ, and you’ve got a big piece on the church and the Christian life, the Holy Spirit and the Christian life, and then you’ve got a piece on the church, the Holy Spirit and the Christian life. But right at the end of the third book, Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, you get this discussion of the doctrine of election. Well now, later on, Calvinists, people who were going to be Calvin’s followers, put it right at the very end, in the doctrine of God. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen how this works. We’ve got God. No biggie would be ever sitting on the cloud, right?

He’s just you, you, you, you, and not God. Right? The doctrine of God is pretty rough. And Calvin was hard to hold in his praise before Calvin started doing this. His very successors, men who took over from him in the leadership of the Church of Geneva, they were the best, did this. But Calvin didn’t. Calvin did not talk about the legends as a piece of the doctrine of God. He talked about it as the concluding summary piece of the doctrine of the Christian life. And just think about how this looks. At the end of the Christian life, I mean just take this literally. The end of the Christian life, and you can look back in hindsight, and say, golly, it didn’t make sense at the time. If I look back in hindsight, I can see God working on my life.

Here and there. And that is a special temple. And I think I’m going to go through it. But now, you know, I can see what it was good. My friend, Chris was there. He said, as a pastor, he’s had people tell him how thankful they were for him. you know, that’s tough but if you’ve been through it and you’ve lived the far side of that then certainly there are people who have said that’s what it took for God to get my attention and I’m so grateful that’s not to take anything away from you pain and touch but at the same time there are certainly in the experience of some people that you look back at those most painful experiences, most even tragic experiences in the life of this man. I wouldn’t have asked for it, but this is what the Lord did in my mind.

And that’s really what the doctor said about Calvin. Later on, Calvin was messed about. He said, oh, you know, Steve, you’ve got a guy picking people, you know, the great team guy in the sky. Well, this is a big mistake. the document of election is just about this issue that we can be assured if we receive the gift of faith, be assured that our sins have been freely forgiven on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice and time and rest and assurance. Election is all about assurance it’s not about anxiety, it’s not about worry about whether I’m on God’s team or not it’s all about assurance I heard a minister once preach on the faith besides the muster seat and he said there’s so much besides the faith it’s the object of the faith okay, where it’s headed that’s important okay, yes you know, trying to have all the space you know, generate all the space yeah yeah, it doesn’t take much just the least little bit You know, I know you’ve got mustard seeds in our kitchen.

I bet you do too. They’re just that big, right? They’re just little things. Nothing to them. And that’s all it takes. To be the assurance of your salvation. You’ve got one of those little things in your heart. Then you don’t have to be the most pious one in church. Just have a little bit. And that’s assurance of your election. So he doesn’t want election to be the source of anxiety for you. What’s the next step? You’ve got this. My clock says we’ve got five minutes. Is that right? Or you want me to stop it by now? Yeah, five’s enough. Seven to be five is about the stop time. Okay, I’m going to say one more thing, and then we’re going to go. The next step, what do you do after that? You’ve got the assurance of your salvation. The appropriate response is obedience.

And this is where Reformed Christians that have made our reputation in the world. And as you know, being upright and responsible, sometimes it’s a burden. When I was growing up in central Kentucky and going toward the east, and they would handle the city. I don’t know if y’all ever heard of it. Somebody, have you ever heard of somebody who pays like a vegetarian? We haven’t had somebody who pays like a vegetarian pay. You pay like a Presbyterian. You pay on time and in full. No full and round. It’s very responsible. Almost too responsible. You know, it gets to be a little scary to have to try to live up to it. But the ethical imperative of the Reformed tradition is tremendous, and it’s because of this sense of gratitude that Calvin’s talking about here, this sense that having received so much for nothing, now I better get busy, you know, not because I’m going to earn anything, but I just got such a sense of obligation of having received so much for nothing. that now I feel like I’ve got to do something back.

And so he says, even this that will be received in the Spirit of God is not something that I have to make happen on my own. We’re sanctified through His Spirit to devote ourselves to obeying the justice of God. Having received this free gift, There’s another way of coming, that the Spirit of God will live in you to enable you to obey the justice of God. And then I’ll just read to the end. Finally, as members of his body, that is of the church, if you belong to the Lord Jesus, you belong to those who belong to him. This whole business of worshiping God on the golf course is fiddle-fouled with Calvin. There’s no such thing. If you belong to Christ, you belong to those who belong to Christ. There’s no being Christian outside the church. Christians are found together in places like this.

As members of his body, we do not doubt that God counts us among his children. And that we may with full confidence address him as our father. Because we’re adopted as his children. My children had a wonderful experience. They taught a Sunday school teacher at another church somewhere that she had outrun nurses five times really quickly. You know, y’all have met many of them. I know many of these from Sunday school. Lynn knows nothing about the college track. But, you know, a previous Sunday school teacher in their life said that, how, said my children, Richard and his children, all in the room, how do you all know that you are children of God? You’re children of God, right? How are you children of God? Well, I don’t know what the teacher said, but this chorus of youthful voices said, by adoption! but this is the reality we are free to call god father because he’s adopted us to be uh his children the brothers and sisters of our lord jesus he’s our brother and we belong to his family.

And so belonging to his family, we’re now free to say our father. Not, you know, not to find fancy words for God or whatever, but to tell his daddy, you know, oh daddy, you know, I need this. Please help me. That’s the freedom we should have in Christ when we’re part of him, when we’re part of that body. I know Chris is very anxious to stop. I can see him up there. He says he’s innocent And he is In Christ So Let’s have a little prayer You all help me with this I’m trying not to say little prayer No If you ever said this I’m going to have a little prayer No I won’t, I want to have a big prayer Because all prayers are big A little prayer Prayer is big And so I don’t want to say this anymore So let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your goodness. We thank you that you received this along with so many brothers and sisters in the faith, including Calvin, into your family. We pray that you’d go with us now. That you’d teach us to be not only quiet,