Episode Transcript
Jon: I know you do this at your church. I do it at my church. I tell people our confession is to protect you from me.
Justin: Yeah.
Jon: And to protect me from you. So that neither of us will abuse each other because we have sinful tendencies to do so.
Justin: Sure. I mean, so I, I think the question could be asked in one of two ways.
I mean, you could be asking, I'm, I'm in a context where my conscience is being bound outside of the scriptures.
Jon: Yep.
Justin: Uh, or you could be saying, I'm in a context where my conscience is being just bound in a general sense, some of it may be good, some of it may be bad.
Jon: Yeah.
Justin: And there's no real objective standard that we're both appealing to.
Jon: Yeah. Like you're unwilling to adopt a child from another country, and you're feeling guilty for that.
Justin: Let me start with the one that's easy. This is one of the values of confessional theology. I'll just go ahead and say it, because what we have is a confession of faith that is substantial and robust that deals with primary and secondary matters and makes pretty plain what we're to believe and how we're to live.
Jon: Yeah.
Justin: And we appeal to that because we understand it to be biblical. So in our congregation, we appeal to the second London confession, and our- our congregants all have copies of this, and it's a public document. I mean, they can, they can look at it anywhere.
And so if we're, like we've said a couple of times, if we're as pastors asking people to do things or we're preaching something that's contrary to that. Then they ought to be able to appeal to the confession and to the scriptures to say, Brother, I disagree with you. So if, if that's not the kind of environment you find yourself in, or if your church has some just very vague, ambiguous statement of faith and it always ends up being sort of the pastor's opinion versus your opinion, that's tough, and may the Lord give you wisdom.
Jon: And what you may hear is "Well, we just believe what the Bible says here."
Justin: Yeah, which is biblicism,
Jon: Right.
Justin: you know, a lot of times. That's just a different way to frame it. Uh, but then I think for me as a pastor, you know, I think some of the, the more difficult people to deal with are those who are very sincere, very zealous, and mean well, and, and take very seriously godly living and faithfulness.
Like, I, I want to be faithful to the Lord in, in every area of my life. And I don't, I just, I, I don't want to do things that are contrary to the will of God. Sometimes those individuals, meaning, well, you know, just want to be super clear, end up doing this inadvertently. They're binding the consciences of, of their families or those around them to do A, B, and C because they have inferred and reasoned from biblical principle that this must be a good thing.
Jon: Yeah.
Justin: To where what I try to do in those situations is, "Okay, brother, sister, let's, let's back up a little bit and, and state what is clear unequivocally from the scripture and the confession." Now, once we've stated that, we need to agree that anything that's not specifically that, Christians actually could disagree about this and it's okay. And so now what I pray is that the Lord give you wisdom. And, and you've got some real problems in your home, or there's some real problems in some of your relationships because you're so rigid and dogmatic here ,and you actually shouldn't be.
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Justin: You know?
Jon: Yeah.
Justin: Those are conversations that I've had a number of times as a pastor with people. And those are conversations we should have.
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