ARBCA 1

ARBCA 4.04.06
This morning's keynote speaker was Jon Hueni, pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Bremen, Indiana. His focus was humility and repentance. This was a wonderful and convicting message. He said humility is recognizing who God is and who we are and the natural result will be repentance. He followed that by stating we will not be finished repenting until we are finished sinning.
Each group or class or type of people have peculiar sins that are specific to that group. That being the case, Reformed Baptist also have group specific sins and we need to repent. There are three things we need to do to repent: (Speaking to RB ministers)
1. Watch your life and doctrine closely. 1 Tim 4:16

• Have we scrutinized our lives as closely as we have reading a book with false doctrine?
• Reformed Baptist flesh is not one bit more sanctified than Arminian flesh.

2. Shepherd the flock graciously. 2Tim 2:24

• Am I as full of grace as I am truth?
  Pastor Hueni challenged us to consider the grace we have when we are the ones under attack. Are we gracious when confronting church members in sin? Have we considered that we have perhaps bigger logs in our eyes than they?

3. Evangelize the lost passionately.

• One of the charges against Calvinism is a lack of evangelism. In our defense, are we only pointing back to the evangelistic zeal of our forefathers like Calvin and Spurgeon? Do we have any zeal for the lost of our own? Do our efforts to evangelize the lost defend those charges or validate them?

Pastor Hueni's message was very relevant to today. I appreciated his strong exhortation.
I was very encouraged today by the role of prayer in the ARBCA General Assembly. Prayer played a major rule in today's agenda. After the morning message, we went into a 20 minute season of prayer with the focus being repentance. Some of the prayers seem to be genuine repentance as it concerned a lack of love for the lost. I was convicted and edified.

Pastors from the various member churches come forward to give ministry reports. After a five minute report, a volunteer from the floor offers prayer specifically for that pastor and church. Wow!

Each year ARBCA has a circular letter written by an elected pastor on an elected topic. This year's letter was written by Matthew Brennan from Ireland and the title was, "The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Second London Baptist Confession." Again, a strong exhortation to the attending pastors concerning our dependence on the spirit for ministry and preaching.

Fellowship here is wonderful. I had lunch today with Sam Waldron and Richard Barcellos. These men were great encouragement to me. They are both very down to earth, easy to talk to, fun-loving guys. I was pleased to discover Richard enjoys "cutting the fool" as much as I do. (For my readers in CA, that means joking around).

Tonight we will hear from Fred Malone on the doctrine of Justification. Lord willing, I will post again tomorrow afternoon.