← Back to sermon library

Next question, so how will the 
Confession of Faith Conference promote unity among Reformed 
churches? Because there's many denominations 
and flavors. You have the Dutch Reformed, 
Presbyterian, Baptists. Well, I'd like to think that 
our brethren outside of Confessional Reformed Baptists at least have 
an idea of who we are. As I've been in this town for 
some years, though, I'm not always convinced that's the case. So, 
perhaps this is going to be a foray into that. You know, our confession 
is not, you know, it wasn't written in the 1980s, it was written 
in 1677. So, it's there, it's accessible, 
it's online. So, my encouragement would be 
for our Reformed brethren outside of the Baptist, you know, confessional 
Baptist, hey, we're on the page, we're on the map. It's historic 
Christian orthodoxy, very similar to the Westminster Confession, 
Savoy Declaration. So, I'm hoping that brethren 
from those denominations will come and they probably won't 
be surprised in terms of the content or the subject matter. 
It jives very much you know, down the line with the three 
forms of unity and that sort of a thing. So, I think it should 
facilitate that unity that Christ prayed for in John 17, that the 
people of God be unified. We have so much that binds us, 
so much that is common to us, a few differences along the way, 
but we should all be dead by the time we get to those in our 
confession. So, baptism is way down the line in terms of our 
confession of faith. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, there's 
a very rich shared heritage there, 99%, right? Yes, yeah. And yeah, 
he's in the same book, if you look at our bookshelf here, right? 
Oh, yeah, we got the same stuff, yeah. Same thing. So, yeah, but 
just personally, I didn't really discover the confession until, 
I guess, eight, nine years ago when I started to search and 
got convinced on baptism. And I just read it, I'm like, 
okay, this is like solidly reformed. There's so much in common with 
Westminster and the Belgic and the Heidelberg, so. Yeah, so 
hopefully other peoples have that experience also. And if 
I could add, historically, when they wrote the confession, it 
was to highlight solidarity with the Presbyterians and the Westminster, 
and also the Congregationalists with the Savoy Declaration. So, 
yeah, there's lots there. And even though we talked earlier 
about the differences, or a few differences, between Chapter 
1 and London Baptist and Westminster, it's pretty much, pretty much 
historic Reformed orthodoxy. Yeah, they said in the preface, 
we have no itch to clog religion with new words. They didn't want 
to be, you know, the new kid on the block showing their muscles. 
No, they wanted to be consistent and show their agreement where 
they could, differences along the way, but not a ton, as you 
said. You know, we have a great amount 
of agreement on most of the doctrine. The things that do separate us, 
you know, good men disagree. And if we can't accept that and 
live in light of that and nevertheless treat each other as good men, 
then we've missed it somehow. Yeah, we all look at these reformers 
from 300, 400 years ago, and they didn't all agree with each 
other either. They sure didn't.