Becoming a Settled Christian

In this opening episode, I explain why Christians need to become grounded and settled in the faith. Using Thomas Watson’s A Body of Divinity and Colossians 1:23, I argue that many Christians today know controversies, personalities, and secondary issues better than they know the central doctrines of Christianity.

I also introduce the goal of this series: working through the Westminster Shorter Catechism to build steady, rooted, confessional Christians. Catechism is not busywork. It is foundation work for worship, obedience, suffering, discernment, and faithful living in an unstable age. 

Music: Exit by Beyza & Contemporary by Cody High 

Transcript

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We live in an age that produces a strange kind of Christian. There are people who know all the big words, they know all the tertiary doctrines, they know every controversy and every personality. In fact, many define their camps and tribes by their loyalty to those personalities. But when you press them on the cardinal doctrines, the great truths at the heart of the Christian faith, they often become surprisingly shaky. They can tell you who said what on some obscure issue, but they struggle to explain who God is, what Christ accomplished, why justification matters, what it means to glorify and enjoy God forever, and how to take these doctrines and root them down in the everyday, ordinary life that God calls you to live. These people are always moving, rarely maturing, always reacting, rarely rooted. Their existence isn't new, but perhaps their concentration is. I'm invested in Sherwood because I'm one of the two owners. And if you have a kid who rather do anything than read, Sherwood is the app that changes that. We have thousands of audiobooks and read-alongs where your kid hears the story while the words light up on the screen one at a time. It's real authors, real narrators, the whole family on one subscription. You pick what they see, and it works screen-free on any speaker. You can try it free for seven days at SherwoodKids.com. If you use the code foster, you will uh get 10% off the lifetime of your subscription. So that's SherwoodKids.com promo code Foster. Thomas Watson opens a body of divinity with a preliminary discourse on catechizing. And he begins with Colossians 1.23. If you continue in the faith grounded and settled, and that's a good word for our age, we live in unsettled times. And because we live in unsettled times, we're producing unsettled Christians. Christians who are always moving but rarely maturing, always reacting but rarely rooted. Christians who are always learning some new controversy, some new framework, some new enemy, some new online war, but who still cannot clearly explain justification or adoption, sanctification, providence, the moral law, the sacraments, prayer, or the glory of Christ. Watson's concern is simple. Christians are called to be settled. That's what it says there in Colossians. Watson says it's the duty of Christians to be settled in the doctrine of faith. The word settled matters. Watson's not arguing for dead formalism or commending a cold, lifeless orthodoxy. He's not saying Christians should be stiff or dull or incurious or afraid to think. He is saying Christians need ballast. They need weight and root. They need to become the kind of people who are not carried off by every new wind of doctrine or controversy. Watson says unsettled Christians are like wandering stars. They move from opinion to opinion, teacher to teacher, emphasis to emphasis. They are impressive for a moment, maybe even bright for a moment, but they are not fixed or stable. They do not hold their place. He says they will lose their former strictness and wander from one opinion to another. Boy have we seen that over the last couple of years. Now that was the seventeenth century. And now we have the same problem. One year a man is all about family worship, then political theory, then nutrition, then eschatology, then some obscure controversy from church history, then a tribe, a brand, a personality, a fight. None of those things may be wrong in themselves. And some may be very good. The question is whether the man is being formed by the central doctrines of Scripture or merely dragged around by whatever has his attention this month. Or this minute, really. Watson compares unsettled Christians to a ship without ballast, overturned by every wind of doctrine. A ship does not need ballast because the sea is calm. It needs ballast because the sea is not calm. The ballast gives a ship weight beneath the surface so it can remain steady when the winds rise and the waves begin to roll. That is what doctrine does. Doctrine has truth received from God, taught from Scripture, confessed by the church, digested by faith, and applied to all of life. This is why Watson moves from being settled to being grounded. The best way for Christians to be settled is to be well grounded, he says. There is no shortcut. You cannot become a subtle Christian by having strong reactions or listening to lots of podcasts or having the right enemy or joining the right online camp. You become settled by being grounded in the faith. Watson says the word grounded is a building metaphor. A building stands because the foundation has been laid. The taller the building, the more necessary the foundation. The more pressure it will bear, the more carefully the foundation must be set. The same is true of the Christian life. If a man is going to bear suffering, raise children, lead a wife, endure temptation, worship God, resist error, confess Christ, bury loved ones, forgive enemies, labor faithfully, and die well, then he needs more than spiritual excitement. He needs a foundation. And that is where catechizing comes in. Catechizing is not busy work for children, a quaint habit from a more literate age, or a memory exercise. It is foundation work. It lays down the basic structure of Christian truth so that the Christian can understand scripture, worship God rightly, resist error, and grow in grace. Watson says catechizing is the laying the foundation. He then says something even sharper. To preach and not to catechize is to build without a foundation. That sentence ought to haunt pastors because much of modern ministry is busy building without a foundation. We build programs and platforms and brands, we build sermon series around felt needs, we build reactions to whatever controversy is burning through the internet. We build churches full of activity, but if our people are not grounded in the faith, we are building high walls on shallow footers. Watson's point is not that preaching is unnecessary. He was a preacher. His point is that preaching must not float above the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith. The pulpit should not merely inspire, provoke, entertain, or inform, it should establish, it should drive the nails deeper. Watson says the preached word is like a hammer, and every blow of the hammer is meant to fasten the soul more firmly to Christ. That gives us a much better vision for the pastoral ministry or the sort of church we should be looking for. The goal is not to produce Christians who are always impressed. The goal is to produce Christians who are grounded and settled. This is one of the reasons I want to work through the Westminster standards, especially the catechisms. The Westminster standards do not exhaust the Bible. Scripture alone is the word of God, and the final authority, the standards are subordinate. They can be corrected by Scripture and must be tested by Scripture. They do not contain everything the Bible teaches, but they do faithfully summarize the cardinal doctrines of Scripture. Most Christians are not in danger of knowing those doctrines too well. They are in danger of barely knowing them at all. Many Christians have strong opinions about secondary and tertiary issues while remaining weak on the first principles of the oracles of God. They can spot the errors in some other camp, but cannot define repentance unto life. They know which teacher they distrust, but cannot explain the covenant of grace. They have a developed take on politics, educations, economics, masculinity, missions, or culture, but they are thin on God's decree, providence, effectual calling, justification, sanctification, assurance, the moral law, and the Lord's Supper. And these things matter in the day-to-day. So this is backwards. This is where I want to introduce the idea or concept of what I call being vanilla Westminster or vanilla Westminsterian. By vanilla Westminsterian, I'm not talking about being bland or safe or passionless or avoiding hard truths or avoiding secondary doctrines. I care about secondary doctrines, but I mean ordinary, sturdy, confessional Christianity, that historic biblical Christianity that is settled. I mean giving the greater part of your life, if you're a pastor, that means your pastoral ministry, if you're a Christian. I just mean the core of your studying to the doctrines of Scripture as summarized in the Westminster Standards. So that's the confession, the shorter catechism, and the larger catechism. And I have decided that this is what I'm about. And it's brought great stability to me, Emily, and the kids. And it has helped us navigate some difficult things. The death of my brother, the death of my mother, the death of my daughter, the death of my son, struggling with all sorts of illness, being poor, and then having money, then being poor again, the ups and downs of ministry, people stabbing you in the back, people uh trying to have you canceled at work, all this stuff, understanding who God is and the nature of scripture and the nature of creation and how covenant works, and what do we mean by redemption, and how repentance uh produces so much fruit in your life, and how uh adoption works, and why good works are necessary and where they fall in the Ordu Saludis, understanding worship in the Sabbath and oaths and civil authority, uh, the nature of marriage, the nature of the church, sacraments, uh, resurrection and judgment and the power of prayer, all that stuff, that is enough to occupy a lifetime. And here is the pastoral instinct behind this. If something sits outside the standards, it may still be taught. I do that. The Bible teaches many things that are not exhaustively developed in the standards. Pastors must preach the whole counsel of God. We must apply scripture to the actual age in which we live. We must address current errors and sins and confusions and threats, feminism, all that sort of stuff, right? But those things should not set the agenda. We should not live a reactive life. The agenda should be set by the great doctrines of the faith. The central thing should remain central. The foundation should remain the foundation. The wall should rise from the footers rather than hover in the air. Watson believed that Christians who are not grounded will be easily unsettled. He warned about seducers with silver tongues, men who use clever words, flattering speech, pretended piety, and attacks on faithful teachers in order to draw people away from the truth, and ultimately to themselves. And that doesn't sound distant at all from our day, our day of subscribers and followers and Patreon and Substack and all that stuff. He wasn't a naive man either. He understood that error is not always ugly. Often it's attractive. It comes well packaged, it sounds fresh or brave, deeper than ordinary Christianity, like the thing nobody else has the courage to say. But Christians who are grounded in the faith, they have armor. They have categories and doctrinal instincts that have been developed. They're not easily manipulated by novelty. They can say where does this fit? What doctrine does this touch? What does this do to God or Christ, grace, law, worship, the church, or the Christian life? That kind of Christian is harder to deceive. Watson also says grounding in the faith enriches the mind. It gives Christians a whole system and body of divinity, hence the name of his book on the shorter catechism. Christianity is not a heap of disconnected truths. It is a body. The doctrines fit together, pull out one joint, and you injure the whole. Providence strengthens suffering saints. Justification guards tender consciences. Adoption teaches us to pray as sons. Sanctification keeps grace from becoming lawlessness. The moral law teaches us what love requires. The sacraments strengthen faith. The doctrine of the church teaches us that Christianity is not a private hobby. The resurrection teaches us to hope with our bodies. Final judgment teaches us to fear God and not man. The doctrines of faith are not museum pieces. They're living truths for living Christians. So the goal of this series is not merely to explain an old confession, to create theological trivia experts, or to help people win arguments online. The goal is to become settled Christians, Christians with roots and ballast, Christians who can withstand error, endure suffering, worship rightly, repent honestly, believe firmly, obey carefully, suffer patiently, and die hopefully. Watson says that a tree must be well rooted if it is going to be well settled. A rootless tree cannot stand long. It may look alive for a while and even have leaves for a season, but when the storms come, the truth will be revealed, and the storms they do come. A tree that it may be well settled must be well rooted, he says. That's what the catechism does. That is what confessional ministry does. That is what steady pastoral labor does over years. It pushes the roots down deep. So as you begin working through the Westminster standards, and especially the shorter catechism, the aim is not novelty, the aim is not to be impressive or entertaining or to find some untouched doctrine nobody has ever noticed. The aim is to be grounded and settled in the faith once delivered to the saints. In other words, the aim is to become steady, and in an unstable age, steady Christians are not boring. They're necessary. They're necessary because God works through ordinary, faithful people to build his church. His church was not built with famous people, the smartest people, not many wise, right? He likes to use the ordinary, lowly things. So if you're thinking that you can't do theology where you're not interested in confessional theology, I want to let you know, yes, you can. This has been radical in my life. It has made me so stable. It has been such a blessing. It has kept me away from so many ditches in this life. And it has allowed me to build something as a first-generation Christian. I'm watching now my boys graduate high school and move into marriage and live out their own faith. And they weren't like me. I grew up being catechized by the culture of MTV and the culture of the internet and all that stuff. They've been catechized by the standards. They grew up in a confessional home, in a confessional church, and now I'm seeing a very stable life. A life that is not going to be unsettled easily. I just praise God for it. So over the next few months, perhaps even years, I'm going to walk through the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the other standards. We'll do it together. These episodes are going to be fairly conversational, and I'll be leaning heavily on a number of resources that have helped me over the years, and I want to share them with you. One older but very helpful work is The Shorter Catechism Explained from Scripture by Thomas Vinson. I'll lean on that pretty heavy next episode. Another is The Truth Be Confessed by R. C. Spruell. It's really big. Sproul has a way of explaining things that are complicated very simply. So I appreciate that. It's not my favorite though. If I had to recommend two sources above all others, they would be G.I. Williamson's Westminster Shorter Catechism for Study Classes and Thomas Watson's A Body of Divinity. I love Watson. He's so rich and devotional. But Williamson is remarkably practical. And his book includes lots of questions, some pictures. It's very helpful, even just for household discipleship and family religion. So if you'd like to follow along more deeply, those are some of the resources I'd encourage you to pick up. They're on Amazon.com. If you're only going to start with one, I'd begin with Williamsons, and I think you'll find that to be very helpful right out the gate. As always, thank you for listening. If you found this episode helpful, I'd be grateful if you leave a rating or review and share it with a friend. Until next time, God bless you.