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Our scripture reading of the morning is from the second letter of Paul to Timothy, the third chapter. I begin at the verse number 10. "Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my practice, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, my sufferings, what befell me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra, what persecutions

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I endured, yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceivers and deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it, and how from childhood you

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have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." And may God bless to us and to our understanding

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this reading from his word. "Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." There is precedent for a flag gallery such as ours, both historically and biblically. Such a gallery, such a collection of flags, speaks to us not only of our believings, but

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also of our beginnings. This morning I would like to think with you about the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the best known of all of the Presbyterian standards, and which has been the principal guide to the Presbyterian Church across the last 300 years. I wish we had the time this morning to go into the history that surrounded the writing

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of the Westminster Confession. It's an exciting story, with kings and queens and parliaments and Puritans, with murders and revolutions and all kinds of political intrigue. It would make a thrilling film, but we don't have the time to go into that today. All we can share is that in July of 1643, a number of clergymen, so assigned by the Parliament, and a number

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of the Parliament laymen got together in Westminster Abbey, specifically in the Henry VII Chapel there, and their task was to develop a statement of belief for a new national church in Great Britain. Well, they met for a long, long time, across many months, and eventually they did come up with a statement, but by that time the plan of the national church had so changed

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that this statement never became its theological standard. But it did become the theological standard of Presbyterianism, and so stood for 300 years. The flag which represents it, you notice, is divided into three vertical columns. Those three columns, or panels, speak of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At the bottom,

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in purple, is an alpha and an omega, the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet, reminding us that Jesus Christ is from the beginning into all eternity. In the center of the banner, there is an open Bible, and this accentuates one of the two principal teachings of the Westminster Confession of Faith, namely, the Word of God and what it means to us. And on

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top of the Bible, you will see an eye looking forward, and above the eye, a crown. And this speaks of the sovereignty of God, God who sees and knows all things, and not only sees them and knows them, but rules so that nothing happens which is outside his providence. The two principal doctrines taught by the Westminster Confession are the authority of the Word of

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God, and the supreme sovereignty, the rulership of God. Now let's look at each of those doctrines. First, the authority of Scripture. At the time when the Westminster Confession was written, two views with regard to God speaking to humankind were popular. Now the first of these had been developed by a man named Francois Turettini.

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You must realize that following the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church made a very, very strong counter-Reformation, an attempt to win back those it had lost to Protestantism. And one of the arguments used by the Roman Catholics was this. In the Protestant Church, you have no final and infallible standard, but in the Roman Catholic Church, we do have

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such a standard. You can never be sure, but if you become a part of our Church, the Roman Church, then you will have that certainty which comes with absolute infallibility. They claimed, you see, that the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church had developed a system of doctrine that was so perfect that all you had to do in order to know anything about

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the living or practice of your Christian life was to ask the Church, and the Church would tell you. Now that argument appealed to many new Protestants, because, you see, they were having to struggle with the development of their own theology, and they were suddenly put in the place of standing in a position of individual responsibility before God. It

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was nice to have someone else who would tell you what to do and how to do it. So Protestants, some of them at least, began to think about returning to Roman Catholicism. And at that time, Francois Turettini, in order to oppose that, developed a doctrine of Scripture in which he said that the Bible was absolutely infallible. That is, the Roman Catholic trusted

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the Church, so the Protestant could trust the Bible as its infallible guide. He made of the Bible what we might call a paper pope. His understanding of the authority and the infallibility of Scripture was so complete that he stated that even the punctuation marks in Scripture were divinely given by God. Now still today, there are many Roman Catholics

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who believe in the infallible authority of the Roman Church. And at the same time, there are many fundamentalists, Presbyterians among them, who believe in the absolute infallibility of the Scriptures, in every word, even to the punctuation. Now the other view that was very popular in the time when the Westminster Confession was

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written was the view commonly called "enthusiasm." Now that word comes from two Greek words, "entheos," "entheos," "enthusiasm." It means literally "to be in God." These were people, you see, who believed that they didn't really need the Bible at all. God spoke to them directly. The Holy Spirit whispered in their ears. This last week, one of the West Virginia preachers

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on a West Virginia radio station announced that God had told him that the stock market was going to crash last Monday. God had also told him that as a result of that crash, Ronald Reagan would resign his office as President of the United States. God also told him that when Ronald Reagan so resigned, the end of the world would come. And fourth, God told

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him that with the end of the world would come divine judgment on all humankind. And when asked where he got this, what the man said was, "God himself by his Holy Spirit told me." That's an enthusiasm. That's an enthusiasm way of thinking. Now there are still, as is evidenced by this preacher in West Virginia, those who hold

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to this. In general, we might say that the two views that were popular in the Westminster days and still popular today were first of one group that thought it knew God's private telephone number and could get direct instructions from him, and the other group that said there is an infallible source of guidance. The Catholics said it was the Church, and the Protestants

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said it was the Bible. And into the midst of this two-view understanding, the Westminster Confession came, and it offered a position between the other two. It said first, in response to Turatini, "No, the Word of God is not infallible to its punctuation marks and in all of its historical and scientific details. It is infallible when it speaks to us about matters of faith

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and how we are to live our Christian faith, but it is not infallible in these other regards." And then, against the enthusiasm, it said, "It is true, God's Holy Spirit does speak to us, but we hear him most clearly through the pages of Scripture, and if you get any message which you think came from God and it does not line up with the Scripture, then

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the message you have received is not true." In other words, the Westminster Confession took the position of saying, "We will not go to an infallible curse or to an infallible Scripture, for both can err, and in like manner we will not go to whispers from the Almighty to the unheard individuals. Instead, we stand for a view of Scripture which says that when

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it speaks of faith and the living of faith, it is absolutely infallible, and any word that anyone hears that is contrary to that, even if they think it comes from an angel of God, such a word is untrue." In a sense, the Westminster Divine divided the Scriptures into two parts. The first part had to do with faith and the living of it,

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and this, they said, the Holy Spirit teaches us. The rest of it, cultural norms, scientific data, historical details, those kinds of things, we are to approach, they said, with rigorous study. Now, this view is summed up in the text which is before us this morning. The Apostle Paul was writing to his son in the faith, Timothy,

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and he says, "Timothy, you are a Christian, and if you are a Christian, that means you have to be persecuted. And the two things that you can lean on when you are persecuted are these. First, you can lean on me, because I have given you an example of how a person should withstand persecution. But second, Timothy, Paul says, you can lean on the Scripture,

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for," and these are his words, "all Scripture is inspired of God, profitable for teaching, for recourse, for correction, and for training in righteousness." Now, to understand this word of Paul, you have to carefully notice two details. The first detail is this, that the word for "Scripture" which Paul uses in this sentence is not used

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by him to describe the Old Testament any other place in all of his letters. Paul had a certain word he used to describe the Old Testament, but he doesn't use that word here. He uses a different word, and that leaves some people to say that he's not referring to the Old Testament when he says "all Scripture." That's a debatable point. We don't know exactly what

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was in his mind at that point. It could not have been more than the Old Testament, because you see, at the time when Paul wrote these words, the New Testament hadn't even been written yet. So at the very most, Paul was referring to the Old Testament, possibly to other sacred writings. But the other thing we have to notice about this verse is that

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in the Greek language in which this verse comes to us, there's no punctuation as we know it. And that means that this verse can be translated in a slightly different way, and many versions of the Bible do translate it in a slightly different way. They translate it so it reads like this. "Every Scripture inspired by God is profitable for teaching,

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for reproof, for correction, and so on." In other words, not all Scripture is to be used in these ways, but only that Scripture which is inspired, which implies that some Scripture is inspired and some Scripture is not. Now, we can't know the answer to that question. There's no way we can know what the punctuation is. There's no way we can get behind this

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precise using of an unusual word here. So this text of Scripture can't be used as a pretext for any kind of fundamental infallibility, no matter where we encounter it. Now, the Westminster Confession people, when they looked at this verse, they said that it was referring to the Old Testament. And they said that what Paul is saying here is this. All of the Old

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Testament, all of the Scripture that exists up till this time, is profitable for training and teaching and reproof and correction for the life of righteousness. In other words, for the living of Christian life. Paul is not saying that all Scripture is profitable for teaching and reproof and correction and training in science or in history or in matters

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that have to do with cultural standards. What he is saying is that Scripture is profitable for teaching and reproof and correction and teaching in righteousness. That is, the Bible infallibly speaks to our faith and how we live it, and not to other questions. See, what Westminster was saying to us is this, that this book is really a collection

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of love letters. Love letters from God. And when you get love letters, you don't sit down and argue about the historical context or the scientific background or the cultural standards that are implicit in the love letters. You read the love letters for one reason, to hear how the author loves you and to seek to respond to that kind of love. That's what

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the Westminster Confession of Faith says to us. It says that here in this Word, God sends to us the expression of his love, and we can depend upon it absolutely. It is without error when it speaks of those things. It is for that reason that Presbyterians are a people of the book. And we approach it both with our heads and with our hearts. And its message

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that comes to us is that the great God, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, the sustainer of everything that is, this God, infinite, beyond our understanding and measurement, this God loves us. Now that brings us to the second major doctrine which is represented in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is of course the sovereignty of God, the all-seeing

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eye and the crown. What Westminster was saying to us is this, that God is great beyond our imagination. The constellation would be nothing but the scepter and the rings on his fingers. In his bottle he can encompass all the seas of all the planets. His splendor is more grand than the most spectacular sunrise or sunset or rainbow or iridescent peak of coral brought

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up from the depths of the sea. Any words we use to describe him and all words that we use to describe him are light years away from his infinity and his greatness and his glory. He rules and he rules forever and his rule is the rule of life. There was a man who served as captain of both the original Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and his name was Jesse.

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And he wrote a book about his experience which was called Captain of the Seas. And the title of this book about him was a very young extreme and he was on a small, small extreme and there was a chief engineer who had a crew down the engineer. They were all down valley, lightly uneducated and very superstitious at that time. Now this chief engineer had a black eye

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so every time he wanted to go upstairs to take a little rest he'd take out his eye and he'd put it there on his desk looking right at the crew and he said I'm going to be watching you even when I'm upstairs. And they all believed it. In fact they would even salute the eye as they walked down. It was a remarkable story. Well when I look at this eye on this confessional

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band what it says is this. God sees everything. If we move as strictly as we can, if we try to immerse ourselves in the very best of power, God is going to see us. And that means that we are to be obedient to him and salute him in every moment of our lives. We are to examine ourselves. And where we find sin we are to repent because we have no secrets from God.

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His will, either deliberate or permissive, encompasses every detail of our lives. It is actively and passively at work in our experience. But we must also remember that this God who sees us also loves us. He comes to soothe the soul and to mend the mind and to heal the heart and to bless the body. I have a minister friend who was sitting out in the

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pasture one day with his little girl and he picked up Pastor Daisy and he started to play that game, you know, he loves me, he loves me not. Jamie loves me, Jamie loves me not. Jamie loves me, Jamie loves me not. Jamie loves me, Jamie loves me not. And of course he ended up with Jamie loves me and his little girl sitting beside him. Fox, you try that.

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So she picked up Daisy and she started only, she made a mistake. And as she took off the pedal she said, "Daddy loves me, daddy loves me, daddy loves me, daddy loves me, daddy loves me." And that, you see, is the way God loves us. Not he loves me, he loves me not. He loves this infinite God loves. I knew a little girl who once prayed, "Our Father which

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art in heaven, how did you know my name?" Well, she might have had the prayer wrong, but the truth is right, you see. God knows us. Jesus Christ is the most perfect photograph that God ever had taken and in him we see his love made manifest. Grab hold of that. You sitting there in that blue suit or wearing that brown necktie or wearing those pearls

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or with that pretty hat on your head, remember, God knows your name. You robed in blue and gray, God knows your name. God knows all of our names. He is in every dimension of our lives, but not as some dictating determinism, but rather as a comforting and controlling presence. He is sovereign and he is love.

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My dad died on December the 10th, 1975, and I miss him very much. Sometimes people say to me, "Time will make the wind blow less." That's a lie. It's not true. In fact, time makes the separation longer and in some ways harder. Now, my father was not perfect, but I miss his imperfections as much as I miss his perfection. So one day in the summer about

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five years ago, after dad had been gone for five years, I was going through some tapes. People sometimes send letters or send me tapes and I listen to them and then some of them you don't have to listen to them again. They're one-time tapes and so I put those in a separate box and every once in a while I pull them out and erase them so that I can use them

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again. Well, I had pulled this box out and I was going to erase the tapes, but just to be sure, I listened to a minute or two of each one so that I wouldn't be erasing anything I wanted to see. Can you imagine my joy and delight when suddenly one of those tapes brought to me the sound of my father's voice? It was a letter which he had sent to me by tape when

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I was ministering in California. Now, the substance of the letter had long passed as far as its significance was concerned, but to hear his voice and to have it fill the room, well, I treasure that tape. And that's what the Bible is, you see. It's a love letter from Father. The Father is in God. The Father is with us always. He owes us nothing, not

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even a word, not a syllable, not a whisper. He is perfect in his completeness so that he needs no other person or group of persons. And yet, in all of his goodness and in all of his perfection, he speaks to us and he says, "I love you." So if someone asks you tonight or tomorrow what went on in church yesterday morning, say to them, "God spoke

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to me and he said, 'I love you.'" If you believe that, you'll never be alone. If you believe that, nothing will be too great for you to confess. If you believe that, then you will never be the same again. Praise the Lord. Our Father, thou knowest the thoughts of every heart. Thou seest, hearst, and discernest

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them all. Thou knowest if there are those in this room who are listening to these words who do not yet know thee in terms of thy grandeur and of thy generosity, in terms of thy sovereignty and thy love made known to us in Calvary, the places of thy love. We pray that by your Holy Spirit you will speak to those people this day. Lead them to offer themselves to

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thee, to confess anything that might keep them apart from thee, and to come to thee saying, "O my Father, O my Father, hold me in your love forever and ever." Be bolder and be with me. Amen. [Silence]