262 sermons · All speakers
The Permanence and Primacy of Christ and Christianity
Paul's argument in Galatians 3:19–26 is pressed from every angle: the Mosaic law was given because of transgressions, temporary in design, never a rival to the promise but a servant of it, and fulfilled entirely in the coming of Christ. The law functioned as a pedagogue — restraining sin, exposing guilt, and driving the sinner toward the one it signified — but with Christ's advent that tutelage has ended. True sonship before God belongs not to national Israel nor to any who ground their standing in works of law, but exclusively to those united to Christ by faith, who are thereby Abraham's seed and heirs of the promise. The sermon calls the church to be guarded against any doctrine that introduces human works into the ground of justification, and to be ardently and exclusively attached to Christ as the sole Savior of sinners.
SLBC Chapter 13: Sanctification
Sanctification is a work of God's free grace — not of human effort — wrought in the elect by the Word and Spirit through the virtue of Christ's death and resurrection. The 1689 London Baptist Confession, Chapter 13, sets out the nature and cause of sanctification: its undeserving recipients (the effectually called and regenerated), the initial definitive act of sanctifying grace at conversion, the progressive ongoing work of the Spirit, and the instruments God employs (Word and Spirit). The confession guards this doctrine on two fronts simultaneously: against moral-improvement schemes that reduce sanctification to human effort, and against sinless perfectionism that denies remaining corruption in the believer.
2LCF Chapter 10, Of Effectual Calling
Effectual calling is the sovereign, gracious act by which God brings those predestinated unto eternal life from spiritual death to faith in Christ, through His word and Spirit, with no contribution from the creature. This lesson works through all four paragraphs of 2LCF Chapter 10, tracing the definition and character of the effectual call, its Trinitarian foundation, the two-fold nature of outward word and inward Spirit, the extraordinary provision for elect infants and those incapable of hearing the word, and the fixed inability of the reprobate. The session closes by pressing the doctrine against Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, Arminian, Socinian, and Roman Catholic errors, and by insisting that there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ for those who receive not the Christian religion.
The Promise of the Covenant of Grace
Galatians 3:15–18 presents Paul's covenantal argument that the Mosaic law, given 430 years after the Abrahamic promise, cannot annul the covenant of grace nor supplement faith with legal works as the ground of justification. The sermon traces four interlocking points: the immutability of God's redemptive promise, the nature of Abraham's faith in Christ as the singular promised seed, the pedagogical and temporary character of the Mosaic covenant as a distinct covenant of works, and the inheritance as freely given by promise rather than earned by law. The pastoral application is a call to rest entirely on Christ, the champion of the covenant of grace, and to resist every system that adds law-keeping or circumcision to faith as the basis of standing before God.
2LCF Chapter 9, Of Free Will
2LCF Chapter 9 ('Of Free Will') presents the doctrine of human will through four covenantal states: innocency, sin, grace, and glory. Reformed Christianity does not deny free will but insists that the will is conditioned entirely by the state in which man finds himself — created upright yet mutable, fallen into total inability, sovereignly freed by effectual grace, and finally made perfectly and immutably free to good alone in glory. The session traces this framework against the errors of Pelagius, Arminius, the Socinians, and the Jesuits, grounding the Reformed Baptist rejection of paedobaptism in the same biblical anthropology: there are only two states for man, dead in Adam or alive in Christ, leaving no room for an external covenant category for the children of believers.
The Glorious Curse Bearer
Galatians 3:10–14 presents the law's curse as a judicial sentence of divine condemnation from which no sinner can escape by obedience, since perfect and perpetual law-keeping is universally failed. Christ, the covenant champion, redeemed his elect by becoming a curse in their place — bearing the wrath due them, answering on a mountain at a tree the curse that entered the world on a mountain at a tree. The blessing of Abraham — the imputation of Christ's righteousness received through faith alone — comes not through circumcision, ceremony, or ethnic connection to the covenant community, but through union with the crucified and risen Christ. Those outside Christ remain justly under divine condemnation; those in him are freed from the curse and heirs of all the promises of God.
2LCF Chapter 8, Of Christ the Mediator, Part 3
The sinlessness of Christ, the efficient and instrumental causes of the incarnation, and the hypostatic union are examined through a clause-by-clause exposition of 2LCF Chapter 8, paragraph 2, with supporting analysis of paragraphs 3 and 7. The confession's language — 'yet without sin,' 'conceived by the Holy Spirit,' 'of the seed of Abraham and David,' 'without conversion, composition, or confusion' — is unpacked against the background of patristic Christology, Chalcedonian definition, and Reformed theological precision. The ministry of the Holy Spirit throughout the entire mediatorial life of Christ is recovered as an often-neglected dimension of Christology. Incarnational and interpretive rules drawn from paragraph 7 equip hearers to handle Scripture passages that appear to diminish Christ's deity, by distinguishing what is predicated of a nature from what is predicated of the one person according to a nature.
2LCF Chapter 8, Of Christ the Mediator, Part 2
The incarnation of the Son of God — his taking to himself a true and complete human nature — is the greatest of all gospel mysteries and the life and soul of the church. Working through paragraphs one, two, three, seven, and nine of the Second London Confession chapter eight, this study examines the timing, manner, and extent of the Son's assumption of humanity, arguing that the incarnation was neither a subtraction from deity nor an addition to it, but a terminative assumption by which the eternal Son united human nature to his own divine person in the hypostatic union. The full extent of that assumption — body, reasonable soul, human will, human affections, and the common sinless infirmities of our nature — is not a speculative nicety but a soteriological necessity: what is not assumed is not healed.
The Command from the Mount
Matthew 28:16–20 presents the risen Christ commissioning his disciples from a mountain in Galilee — a location Matthew treats as theologically laden with the entire biblical theology of mountains, from Eden to Sinai to Zion. The sermon traces that mountain typology across Genesis, Isaiah, Hebrews, and Zechariah to show that the Great Commission is nothing less than the eschatological commencement of the new covenant. Christ's declaration — 'All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth' — is expounded as the mediatorial kingly inheritance he receives by virtue of the perfection of his redeeming work, not a restoration of suppressed divine glory. The commission therefore binds the church to gospel proclamation, believer's baptism, and the continual instruction of the baptized, all undergirded by the abiding presence of the exalted Christ through his threefold office of prophet, priest, and king.
2LCF Chapter 8, Of Christ the Mediator, Part 1
The 2nd London Confession of Faith Chapter 8, 'Of Christ the Mediator,' stands at the structural and theological center of the confession — all that precedes it tends toward it, and all that follows flows from it. This session examines paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 7, and 9, focusing on the identity, deity, and divine relations of the Son of God as the appointed mediator. Drawing on the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds and the biblical witness, the study argues that the Son is very and eternal God, eternally begotten of the Father, of one substance and equal with him, the creator and sovereign governor of all things — and that this high Christology is the necessary foundation for understanding the incarnation and saving work that follows.
2LCF Chapter 7, Of God's Covenant
God's covenant with humanity is not an afterthought to the fall but the divinely ordained means by which the Creator bridges the infinite distance between himself and the creature. This study of 2LCF Chapter 7 traces three movements: the necessity of covenant rooted in the creator-creature distinction, the necessity of a covenant of grace arising from man's fall and God's sovereign pleasure to save, and the progressive revelation of that covenant from the protevangelium in Genesis 3 through its ratification in the blood of Christ at Calvary. The sermon insists that the covenant of grace is not merely administered across multiple Old Testament epochs but revealed through them and finally ratified — not administered — in the new covenant, a distinctively Reformed Baptist reading of covenant theology. The hearer is called to rest entirely on the covenant obedience of Christ, the only mediator, rather than on any obedience of their own.
A Vision of the High and Lofty One
Isaiah 6:1–7 presents the prophet's visionary encounter with the enthroned Lord — holy, holy, holy — and his subsequent cleansing by a coal from the altar. This sermon works through five movements in the passage: the introductory contrast between dying earthly kings and the eternal High King of Heaven; the exemplary posture of the seraphim before the divine majesty; the superlative holiness, glorious titles, and unbounded presence of the Lord of hosts; Isaiah's fitting confession of his own uncleanness; and the gracious divine initiative in purification, which anticipates the definite atoning work of Christ. The congregation is called to approach the living God with the humility of Isaiah and the seraphim, confident that the same sovereign who commissioned his prophet will fill the whole earth with his glory through the proclamation of the gospel.
2LCF Chapter 6: Of the fall of man, of sin, and of the punishment thereof
The fall of Adam and Eve was not an unforeseen catastrophe but an event God sovereignly permitted according to his wise and holy counsel to order to his own glory. Working through all five paragraphs of 2LCF Chapter 6, this study traces the anatomy of the fall — from man's original uprightness under the covenant of works, through the willful transgression of the law of their creation, to the imputation of guilt and conveyance of corrupt nature to all of Adam's posterity by ordinary generation. The totality of sin's consequences — total depravity, total inability, spiritual death, and the inheritance of wrath — makes the second and last Adam, Jesus Christ, the only and necessary answer, whose active and passive obedience reverses both the imputation and the inheritance fallen humanity bears in the first Adam.
Redemption, Restoration, and Righteousness
Isaiah 61 presents the anointed Messiah declaring his own mission of redemption, restoration, and righteousness for his people. The sermon works through all eleven verses, arguing that Christ alone — anointed by the Spirit without measure as prophet, priest, and king — fulfils the role foreshadowed by every Old Covenant anointing and reverses the covenantal curses of Deuteronomy 28. His saving work springs up the church, the true Zion, from the ruins of Old Covenant desolation, and clothes her not in her own merit but in the imputed righteousness of the Mediator. The sermon closes with the church's response of rejoicing and a call to the unbeliever to believe on Christ and receive everlasting life.
2LCF Chapter 4, Of Creation
2LCF Chapter 4 expounds the doctrine of creation across three paragraphs, addressing what creation is, the triune God who creates, the nature and dignity of man as image-bearer, and the covenantal framework that gives creation its redemptive telos. The sermon argues that creation ex nihilo (qualified as God bringing forth all that is not God) and creation ex materia are distinct but complementary categories, and that divine immutability is preserved because no change or new perfection accrues to God through the act of creating. Ultimately, creation serves as the theatre within which God executes His eternal decree of redemption, bringing a multitude of elect sinners to glory through the perfect work of Jesus Christ.
CLIP: The Trinity in 2 Minutes
The doctrine of the Trinity is not a division of the divine essence into three parts, but one infinite and undivided substance eternally subsisting as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The confession's language moves deliberately between the oneness and the threeness of God — the Father unbegotten, the Son eternally begotten, the Holy Spirit proceeding from both — holding the unity and the distinction together without confusion. This doctrine is not speculative theology but the very foundation of the Christian's communion with God and the ground of confident, joyful worship.
CTF 2025 - Session 8 – Q&A Panel
A Q&A panel from a theology conference on the doctrine of God addresses questions arising from the preceding lectures on classical theism. Three theologians field questions on divine impassibility (including whether God can be grieved), the eternal decree and the covenant of redemption, divine aseity and the Son's relationship to the Father, the nature of time in the eternal state, the role of philosophy and natural theology in arriving at the classical doctrine of God, and whether genuine evil exists within God's sovereign economy. The discussion throughout presses for formulations of doctrine that protect divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility while preserving the integrity of biblical language and confessional categories.
The Gospel's Indispensable Glory
What is the gospel? Paul's answer in 1 Corinthians 15:1–4 is not what we do or feel, but the objective, once-for-all work of the Lord Jesus Christ: his death for sins, his burial, and his bodily resurrection on the third day according to the Scriptures. This sermon works through two categories — the necessity of the gospel and its essential content — showing that the gospel is both the lifeblood of Christian existence and the only ground of justification and resurrection hope. The sermon closes with a direct summons: for the Christian, the risen Christ is blessed Savior and interceding High Priest; for the unbeliever, he is the coming Judge.
March 30 PM
Galatians 2:17–21 closes Paul's autobiographical defense of justification by faith alone, and these five verses press three weighty questions: Is Christ a minister of sin when believers forsake the Mosaic ceremonies? Who is the true transgressor? And what does Judaizing heresy actually do to the cross of Christ? The sermon argues that to impose any measure of works upon the economy of salvation — whether old-covenant ceremony or its modern legalistic counterpart — is to render the incarnation, the perfect obedience, and the atoning death of the Son of God as vanity. The single ground of the believer's justification, assurance, and perseverance is the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us, in whom alone everlasting righteousness is found.
Our Robe of Beauty
Galatians 2:16 presents a five-fold declaration that justification is by faith alone and not by the works of the law — a doctrine that stands at the very heart of the Christian gospel. This sermon works through four categories: a definition of justification as a forensic declaration set in opposition to condemnation, its foundation in the obedience and satisfaction of Christ alone (not infused righteousness, works, the act of faith, or evangelical obedience), the transaction of imputation by which sin is credited to Christ and his righteousness credited to the believer, and faith as the empty instrument that receives rather than earns that righteousness. The pastoral application presses the believer's assurance away from inward evidences toward the finished work of Christ, and calls the unconverted to look to Christ in faith as their only standing before a holy God.
2LCF, Introduction and Preface to the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689) did not arise in a vacuum — it was forged under persecution, shaped by theological antiquity, and published to correct misrepresentations of Particular Baptist doctrine. This study introduces the Confession through its original preface, examining the necessity and utility of creeds and confessions, the historical context of 17th-century England, and the specific additions, changes, and deletions the Particular Baptists made to the Westminster Confession and Savoy Declaration. The Confession stands as a faithful summary of biblical doctrine and a demonstration that Particular Baptists stood firmly within the stream of historic Protestant orthodoxy, differing from their Presbyterian and Congregationalist brethren only on baptism, church polity, and certain covenant theology distinctions.
The Apostolic Magnitude of Justification
Paul's confrontation of Peter at Antioch in Galatians 2:11–16 is not merely a biographical episode but a defence of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Peter's hypocritical withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile believers, driven by fear of the circumcision party, was not an open denial of the gospel but a compromise of it — and Paul's rebuke exposes how even the appearance of impropriety can bring the truth of the gospel into disrepute. The sermon then turns to the apostolic doctrine set forth in verses 15–16, tracing the five-fold reiterative negation and affirmation of justification by faith and not by the works of the law, grounding Christian peace in the imputation of Christ's active and passive obedience. Hearers are exhorted to carry the doctrine of justification beyond the service itself, resting their peace not on any measure of personal performance but on the sole and complete work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Authenticity of Paul's Gospel, Part 2
Galatians 1:18–2:10 records Paul's autobiographical defense of justification by faith alone against Judaizers who insisted that circumcision and adherence to Mosaic precepts were necessary for salvation. The sermon traces Paul's independence from the Jerusalem apostles, the uncompromising refusal to circumcise Titus, and the apostolic unity between Paul and the Jerusalem pillars — all marshaled to prove that Paul's gospel came by divine revelation, not human tradition, and that it stands as the only true gospel. The application presses both the vital importance of the doctrine of justification and the necessity of an uncompromising ministry: Christian peace rests solely in Christ's perfect obedience and atoning death, not in the ebbing and flowing of personal works or church attendance.
Chapter 30 - Of the Lord's Supper
The Lord's Supper is a perpetual ordinance instituted by Christ on the night of his betrayal, appointed for the corporate observance of the church until his return. This confession study works through all eight paragraphs of 1689 LBCF Chapter 30, surveying the historical positions on Christ's presence in the Supper — transubstantiation, consubstantiation, Eastern Orthodox epiclesis, Anglican via media, exclusive memorialism, and the Reformed spiritual presence held by the Particular Baptists — before examining what the confession affirms and opposes. The Supper is shown to be simultaneously a memorial, a proclamation of the gospel, a means of grace conferring spiritual nourishment, and a bond of communion both with the ascended Christ and with fellow believers. The Roman Catholic Mass is rejected as abominable, injurious to Christ's finished and unrepeatable sacrifice, and productive of gross idolatry and manifold superstitions that flow inevitably from the doctrine of transubstantiation.
2LCF Chapter 29 - Of Baptism, Part 3 - Paedobaptist Arguments
Believers' baptism rests on the covenant distinction between Israel after the flesh and the spiritual seed of Abraham, and no paedobaptist argument survives the scrutiny of those covenantal boundaries. This third study in the confession's chapter on baptism works through six major paedobaptist arguments — from the Abrahamic covenant, household baptisms, federal holiness, and more — and answers each from Scripture, the 1689 confession, and Nehemiah Cox's seventeenth-century Baptist covenant theology. A question-and-answer period then addresses practical matters: rebaptism after sprinkling or infant immersion, communicating credo-baptist convictions to paedobaptist family and elders, prerequisites for baptism, minimum age, and the necessity of immersion as the sign that answers the thing signified.
The Authenticity of Paul's Gospel
Paul's vigorous autobiographical defense in Galatians 1:11–24 establishes that his gospel did not originate from any human source but came by direct revelation of Jesus Christ — a claim with profound implications for the doctrine of justification. The sermon works through three arguments for gospel authenticity: the nature of the gospel itself as something no man would invent, Paul's pre-conversion conduct as a violent persecutor of the church, and his post-conversion movements that deliberately bypassed human instruction. The application presses the congregation to hold with confidence to a gospel that rests on the triune God's sovereign grace alone, not on human tradition or legal observance, and to hope for the conversion of even the most hardened opponents of the truth.
Late in Time Behold Him Come
Galatians 4:4–5 declares that the Son of God entered history at the precise moment determined in the eternal covenant of redemption — not a moment early or late, but at the fullness of the times. The sermon works through four heads: the moment of Christ's coming as the convergence of eternal decree, prophetic anticipation, typological terminus, and Old Covenant tutelage's completion; the mission of the sent Son as the assumption of humanity by the omnipresent divine Word; the mystery of His humiliation in being born of a woman and born under the law as last Adam, obedient servant, and satisfier of the law's penal demands; and the meaning of the Incarnation as the redemption of law-breakers and their adoption as sons of God. The sermon calls believers to daily joy in so great a salvation and urges unbelievers to repent and believe before the day of forced submission.
2LCF Chapter 29 - Of Baptism, Part 2
Credobaptism rests on five mutually reinforcing theological arguments: covenant theology, federal headship, the doctrine of salvation, the clarity of New Testament revelation, and the regulative principle of worship. This session (Part 2 of a study on 2LCF Chapter 29) works through the final three arguments, demonstrating from Romans 6, Acts 2, Acts 8–9, Galatians 3, and 1 Corinthians 10 that baptism signifies union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, and therefore belongs only to those who actually possess that union. The session closes by showing that infant sprinkling not only lacks any express divine command but positively contradicts the explicit command to baptize believers only — an inconsistency that even notable paedo-baptist writers (Owen, Calvin, Matthew Henry) expose in their own defenses of the regulative principle of worship.
2LCF Chapter 29 - Of Baptism, Part 1
Reformed Baptists administer baptism only to professing believers — but why? This confession study works through 2LCF Chapter 29 on baptism by examining the two foundational theological arguments that undergird credobaptism: covenant theology and federal headship. The covenant of grace and the new covenant are shown to be identical in substance, not merely different administrations of one covenant, meaning that only regenerate, believing covenant members are proper recipients of the covenant sign. The argument from federal headship reinforces this conclusion: since baptism signifies union with Christ as covenant head, it cannot rightly be administered to those still under the federal headship of Adam.
2LCF Chapter 28 - Of Baptism and the Lord's Supper
2LCF Chapter 28 presents baptism and the Lord's Supper as two ordinances of positive and sovereign institution appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ, the only lawgiver, to be continued in His church until the end of the age. This session traces the confessional groundwork laid in 2LCF chapters 8, 14, 17, 22, and 26 before examining Chapter 28's two brief paragraphs in detail. The particular Baptist choice of 'ordinance' over 'sacrament,' the exclusion of 'seal,' and the inclusion of 'positive' are each shown to be polemically deliberate — asserting that baptism and the Lord's Supper are divine commands to be obeyed only by those who can render obedience, that is, regenerate believers. The session closes by grounding lawful administration of the ordinances in Matthew 28 and the commission given to qualified, called ministers of the gospel.