Sunday School | Doctrine - Introduction

It's good. Alright, you guys. What we're gonna be doing for our class for the next—I mean, it's gonna be a long time. It's gonna be a year. It might be two years. It's gonna be a long time. Is I'm gonna basically turn Sunday school into a systematic theology seminary class. That's what we're gonna do.

Here's how we think about this. Doctrine matters, and we want you to understand what God's word says about all sorts of things. And so by doing a class on doctrine for—I mean, probably literally it could be a hundred weeks that we do this—we're gonna cover everything. It's gonna be a chance for me to talk about everything everyone wanted to talk about in a kind of an organized way. And I hope that it's gonna be really fun. I hope that you're gonna learn a ton of stuff. I hope that you'll participate. I hope that I will learn things from your own insights that you share into it. And I think it's gonna be a blast.

You could come for any given week and pick up, you could just drop in any given week that you're here, but if you come for the whole time, what you're gonna end up with, I think, is a very well-organized structure in your mind of how we think about innumerable biblical doctrines. I think it's gonna be a blast.

And this morning, we're not really gonna get into any particular doctrines. I just wanna help you think about why does this matter? And our guide for that is gonna be the book of Galatians.

The Galatian Controversy

So, what do you guys know about the book of Galatians? What's Galatians about? If you had to give like a brief summary of it, key ideas, what's going on in Galatians, you guys?

Basically, it's cautioning against the Judaizers. Very good. What does that mean, Judaizers? People that were saying that to be a follower of Christ also had to do the things that Judaism required, like circumcision and all the other kind of. Okay, excellent.

So the Galatian controversy was largely a controversy about circumcision. So if you can imagine in the early church, as the church is beginning, it's a Jewish concern. It's Jewish people who follow Jewish practices, who've been following the Mosaic Law for centuries. And then out of this Jewish community comes this believer—I mean, comes this particular man, Jesus—and then Jesus starts this community and this community begins to attract non-Jews. Bunch of Gentiles start coming into the club, and as they do, there's this huge question: Do you—okay, fine, if we let the Gentiles come to the party, do they need to become Jews first? Do you need to become a follower and observer of all Mosaic rules in order to be a follower of Christ? And the church really has to struggle with this. It's a huge question, right?

And you see essentially in Acts 15, the church leaders gather and they talk about it all and they're like, no, they don't. For a Gentile to follow Christ, it does not first need to become a Jew because we are saved by grace through faith. And this is a fundamental central claim of the New Testament. We're not saved by our religious observance, we're not saved by ceremonial adherence. We can have all of our sins forgiven simply and only as we trust in Jesus, as we place our faith in what he has done, accept his sacrificial death on our behalf—everything is wiped away.

This is an absolutely central, and hear this, doctrinal claim of Christianity. And in Galatia, they knew it. Galatia, by the way, is not a city, it's a region, so it covers a large area, but they knew this truth. Nevertheless, despite knowing the true doctrine, they began to get drawn away because there was cultural pressure to stop welcoming all these dirty Gentile dogs.

And what we see out of that is it's often the case that doctrinal error is fueled by cultural pressure. There are numerous things that the scriptures teach and that Christians have taught that are well known to be orthodox—meaning straight, honest, accurate, correct Christian teaching—that the culture shows up and says, "Yeah, we think that's stupid." And then we're like, "Oh, it is? Okay, then I'll go with you." And we drift away from faithful doctrine, tempted away by cultural pressure.

That's what was happening in Galatia, that's what Paul is writing about, and I want you to look at the first chapter of Galatians because he comes out of the gate so strong and so hard and he has a lot of interesting things to say that I think we can mine as we think about how we ought to think about doctrine. All right, proper teachings.

So go to Galatians one. Paul tends to begin his letters somewhat graciously. He tends to begin with warmth and affirmation and all the things he approves of.

He will get to the places they're kind of screwing stuff up because every letter to every church is addressing some problem that needs to be corrected, maybe except Romans. But most of those letters are like that. But in Galatia, there's like no small talk. He comes in hard and fast because there's so much at stake.

Take a look at what he says. Galatians 1:6—I'm astonished. This is how he starts the sentence. Can you imagine you open the envelope?

Dear you, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. — Galatians 1:6-7

Now, his opening paragraph to this whole conversation—just mind that for me. What do you see there if we're to draw lessons about doctrine? We know there's a doctrinal controversy, and this is how he begins. What observations do you make there? Just out of that paragraph, what could we say is true about good doctrine? All kinds of things you might observe. I got a few. You can play the read my mind game, but I'd love to hear what you think.

Observations here, that first paragraph. It's always open to attack. Doctrine's always open to attack. This is right. What's happening in Galatia is not that unusual. Of course, the single truth, it is under attack, and Paul sees it as such. He sees very quickly the stakes are incredibly high. Very good. What else do you notice?

He says they're deserting him who called you. That's such a big deal. What does that mean? It just makes me think like Jeremiah 2 where they turn from God and they dig new cisterns. Like their first step is turning away from God when they go look for others. Because if you heard what Chris said, it's really important. They're turning away. What he says is, "I'm astonished you so quickly, deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ."

In case it's not clear, that is the God the Father. He says, when you drift away to bad doctrine, it's not just intellectual, heady stuff—it's a relationship tear. Bad doctrine tears relationship with God. You are, as you drift off into theological error, abandoning God himself. That alone is the showstopper. And you're citing Chris, Jeremiah 2:13, where Jeremiah basically says all sin is an abandonment of relationship with God. It's a forsaking of God. So we're putting doctrinal error in a very similar category to Jeremiah 2. It's a relational tear. Excellent.

Anything else in that paragraph? Distorting the gospel. Okay, not refuting it completely. They're twisting. And we all know that. What's the best way to lie? It's to mix it with the truth, right? And so they're taking this thing and as they distort the gospel, it's a relationship tear. It's a distortion, which is bad news. And now it's not a complete altogether thing. It's got something in common, but it's a horrific thing to do. The gospel is something we don't want to distort. We want to get this right.

It's the speed at which they're doing it. So quick. This thing, we've said before that the gospel is always one generation away from being lost, right? If we biff this, if we don't pass this on to our children, then they're just gonna believe some mix of Christianity. We call it syncretism—we combine actual Christianity with whatever the culture says. We syncretize these, you know, you get this mixture, this kind of half and half. And the truth is that your Christianity has already been syncretized. You're already, particularly, American, capitalist, conservative, liberal, whatever you are—it's already mingled in with your Christianity. And that's part of what we want to do. We want to strip all that out. Let's just kind of get what's the actual pre-distorted message that we've got.

All kinds of great stuff there. How about this next chunk? Not only does bad doctrine tear a relationship with the giver of good doctrine, but look at verse 8.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. — Galatians 1:8

That's strong. Verse 9:

As we've already said, so now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned. — Galatians 1:9

What do you see here? What is this teaching us about good doctrine and bad doctrine, for that matter? Life and death. What's that? It defines what it is, not man. That's right. Not relative to what I view it as, and God says, no. I'm on the throne. I define what this is.

You're gonna adhere to me, not vice versa. That's right. Okay. So these two things are great. Number one, the stakes are incredibly high. It's life and death, so much so that Paul is making what we would consider an imprecatory statement, where Paul is saying, if anybody shows up and starts teaching you false doctrine, may they go to hell. That's what he's literally saying. When he says, "may they be eternally condemned," he is wishing upon them their most severe and ferocious and final judgment whereby God will destroy forever the wicked. And Paul says, yeah, that on the bad teachers. Which is why James says, not many should presume to be teachers because those who teach will be judged more severely.

A lot of times the false teachers are from the church. Of course. I mean, that is exactly where the false teachers are gonna be. And so when we have, we can sometimes approach doctrine with a sense of just being cavalier like, I don't know, I read my Bible once in a while, think maybe it's like this, but what do you think? We can just take this with flippancy towards these things. And Paul is saying, no, no, no, no. It's crucial that we get it right. And how do we know that we've gotten it right? Is that we're faithfully adhering to what God has revealed in his word. This is not my intuition. This is not my preference. This is not the way that I would like it to be, the way that I would frame it. But God has actually spoken into the void of our own ignorance to reveal things. And what good doctrine does is that we lean in and we study and we wanna do all that we can to understand correctly what has he said that we would say that, we would think that, we would trust that, we would teach that. Because this whole thing matters immensely.

Paul is saying, don't just believe everything that I say. This is a call for you to seek good doctrine yourself because you are responsible for yourself. Paul doesn't want us to simply believe him. In fact, do you know where the Bible explicitly commends a group of people who did not believe Paul? The Bereans, right? In Acts 17, it says the Bereans were of more noble character because they studied the scriptures to see if what Paul said was true.

The Bereans were of more noble character because they studied the scriptures to see if what Paul said was true. — Acts 17

What's going on here, what we're observing, I'm gonna say the same thing. I'm gonna do my part. I believe everything I just said to you, that teachers are judged more severely, so it feels pretty urgent to me to get it right. And so I'm gonna try to get it right and if I find out that I've gotten it wrong, gonna apologize to you, we're gonna correct it. But don't believe me either, right? What I want to do, hopefully more than anything else in my whole ministry, is to model to you a love of this book, that you will do the work. Go back and look it up. And if you think I'm wrong, tell me, right? Let's go, let's figure it out. What has God really revealed so we'd understand it? The stakes are incredibly high.

You Can Only Please One

What else does he say? Verse 10 maybe? Yeah, verse 10. Galatians 1:10.

Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. — Galatians 1:10

What did we learn there? There's only one person you can please. There's only one person you can please. But there's a lot of other options. And there's a lot of really appealing options for sure. We are vulnerable to the opinion of others. There is something tempting about people not thinking you're an idiot. Do you notice this? Like, it's more fun when the people are like, ah, you're so right, you're so wise, you're so whatever our culture happens to value at the time.

We wanna be like Jacob. You know what, if everybody in the whole world thinks that I'm an idiot, that's okay. I don't really care. We want to be the person that will follow Jesus even when nobody else does.

But it's hard because when you're at work, when you're in some social setting, when you're with family, when you're with friends, at Thanksgiving or whatever that setting is, it's just so easy to just go along, just say what everybody else is saying. And some of you have that personality trait that you don't really care what other people think. It just doesn't really trouble you very much. But most of you really like it when other people agree with you, right? And what he's saying here in Galatians 1:10 is like, Paul's like, yeah, everywhere I go people disagree with me and I don't really care. I'm gonna tell you what is true, what God has revealed even when it's unpopular. That's what good doctrine does. But it's difficult, right?

The Source of Good Doctrine

Galatians 1:11 — Paul says this:

I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. — Galatians 1:11

What do you learn about good doctrine there? Not from man. The source. Not from man, it comes from God. It's unchanging, right? Generally speaking, novelty is not a value in theology. We're not trying to be more creative. That's not our game.

Now, that doesn't mean you gotta be careful of this. Good doctrine comes from God's word. It's what he has revealed. It's a revelation from Jesus Christ that will sometimes put you deeply in step with tradition as the churches recognize things over the centuries. And we're like, yeah, we've been saying this for years. And sometimes it will leave you at odds with tradition. Because an old error is still an error, right?

And so for us, we neither embrace uncritically tradition, nor do we just ignore tradition. We have a huge advantage in saying, what has the church been saying for two thousand years? And let's understand that. But at the end of the day, the Bible eats tradition for breakfast, okay? If you think that tradition gives insight into what the scriptures say, you're right. It does. But it doesn't trump it. It doesn't overwhelm it. It just helps us understand. And if you're gonna go against tradition, you probably should have a good reason for doing so. But there have been good reasons for doing so. That's what the entire Protestant Reformation was about. It was like, y'all got this wrong. You've been getting it wrong for a long time. We're gonna start to get it right. We're gonna correct some errors.

So we care deeply about what God has revealed in his word. We're gonna take every resource available to us, including tradition, including good teachers, including the people that we respect. But at the end of the day, we all bend the knee before God as revealed in his word. Makes sense?

C.S. Lewis said, "A true progressive is the one heading in the wrong direction is the quickest to turn around." That's right. When we recognize that we've made a mistake, and you guys have done this, have you not? In your own life, personally? There have been critical moments in my own theological development where I thought one thing, but as I studied the scriptures I came to the conclusion that I misunderstood that.

I remember, like, we will get to this and this may trouble some of you already, but that's fine. When we get to soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation, how does salvation really work? We'll get there in several months. We're gonna talk about how it works. How does God move towards unbelieving sinners and draw them into salvation? How does that go?

And I remember, I went to a Presbyterian church and I remember the first time my pastor ever taught on the doctrine of election. And I went home from church that day, and I was just so dismayed. I was like, what in the world? I was just so troubled by the things that he said, and I just disagreed with him sharply. And I remember my roommate, Chris Brooks, specifically saying, wasn't that amazing? And thinking, no, it wasn't amazing at all. I hated that.

Well, that began me on a journey to study the scriptures. And it turns out that I was wrong and he was right. And I'll share with you the things that I learned from Phil Schmueland and from the scriptures. Phil Schmueland was just a giant in my life when I was a college student. So we'll talk about those things, but there have been numerous U-turns that I have made, understandings that I had that ultimately had to bend the knee to scripture.

And I imagine that's already happened for some of you, maybe for all of you, and I hope that it will happen several more times in the next year or two as we kind of build up this whole case. Okay? So far so good? Yeah. First, Brad, and then I'll come over here.

Paul's using the word gospel, and you seem to be interchanging that with doctrine. Great. And I struggle with that a little bit. Excellent.

Think of the gospel as being kind of like the tight essentials, but doctrine expands into your beliefs about eschatology and lots of things about which it's really hard to know you're right. That's such a great thing.

So Brad, that's an insightful comment that Paul here is not using the word doctrine anywhere in Galatians one. In fact, the word doctrine only occurs five times in the New Testament. I'll show you them in just a second. And I am somewhat interchangeably using doctrine and gospel. So let's define those terms.

Gospel—the word that Paul is using is euangelion, it just means good news, right? We actually stole the term. You may have ever seen Apple Computer used to talk about having Apple evangelists. Do you remember that? When they would talk about Steve Jobs having an Apple evangelist. And initially I was kind of prickly, like, "What are you doing stealing our language?" Well, truth is, we stole it, right? The evangel was a Roman concept. "Hey, good news, we just beat up some other foreign country and Caesar's great. That was good news." Christians borrowed the concept of a euangelion, they borrowed the concept of good news and said, "You wanna hear good news? We've got like the goodest news of all the good news." And we kind of trademarked it.

Now, the gospel—the good news—is all that Jesus is king and that in him we can be forgiven, we can be restored. All that is the central claim. And then we could draw circles around that. We'll probably at some point during this year talk a little bit more about theological triage. Where we could—I would suggest to you that I think it is good doctrine that Jesus is God. Right? And that's incredibly important. If you get that one wrong, you're messing this thing up.

I think there's a correct answer about whether we can baptize infants or not, but that's like several steps outside of this center, right? So we could say doctrine—we wanna get it all right. I wanna get the important stuff right. I wanna get the clear stuff right. I wanna get the less important and less clear—I'm not really sure at all. I still wanna get it right. It's all doctrine, but not all doctrinal matters are equally weighty, right? There are some things, there's a handful of things. This is where why we have fundamentalism, which has kind of taken on a bad taste in people's mouths. But there are fundamentals. There are essentials. Those are things we care most about. But it's still possible to know what God has revealed about even things that are less clear or less central. Good enough? Good.

And then, Sloop. I was gonna say, not only is doctrine from God, but Paul here is saying, and I needed God's help to see it.

Yes. That's excellent, right? So in case you couldn't hear Sloop, not only does doctrine come from God, it's revealed by God, but we need his help to see it, right? And so the help that he gives is sometimes that he's written it down and his word is available. We will talk at some point when we get to our bibliology, the doctrine of the scriptures. We'll talk about the perspicuity of scripture, which is a funny word. The word perspicuity is an unclear word that means clear. So the perspicuity of scripture means it's comprehendible. You can read it and know what it means. But it's not that perspicuous, right, because we all need the spirit of God to enliven our hearts. God has given us teachers to explain it to us. And so we need help. It's there, but in everything else, we need help in all sorts of ways, including to understand what he has said.

The Five Uses of "Doctrine" in the New Testament

Let me show you, Brad, the five times the word doctrine is used in the New Testament. I think this is a little bit instructive for us.

First Timothy 1:10 says:

Ultimately the gospel is for adulterers. This news, this message of redemption, is for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders, for liars, for perjurers, and for whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. Sound doctrine is the secret, is the key for all these things. — 1 Timothy 1:10

First Thessalonians 4:16:

Watch your life and doctrine closely, persevere in them because if you do, you'll save both yourself and your hearers. — 1 Thessalonians 4:16

Second Timothy 4:3:

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around themselves a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. — 2 Timothy 4:3

Titus 1:9 — He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who hold it.

Titus 2:1 — You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine.

Those are the only five times the word doctrine appears. It's in First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus. Do you notice anything about that? Do you know what First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus have in common? They are the pastoral epistles, which is interesting. The only five times that the word doctrine shows up in the New Testament—it's always in the three letters that are specifically written not to churches at large, but to pastors in particular. To Timothy, and then again to Timothy, and then to Titus. Although in these letters he's not just talking about pastors, he's talking the leadership of the church, the elders, and what they should do.

What's interesting there is that good doctrine is in particular the job of pastors—presbyters, elders, the leaders. Right? It is the pastors in particular that have this charge to hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught. But notice what they're supposed to do. Our task is to hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught. You pay us to spend time alone in our offices studying. That's our job. Our job is to understand this book, to get it right, but not that we have some secret knowledge that you don't have. Right? We are to hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught so that we can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.

Our job is to make sure that we have good doctrine so that you can have good doctrine. It is not simply some idea where we keep the Bible written in Latin and nobody else can read it and you just gotta trust us. Never trust us. Don't trust us. Sincerely, diligently study the scriptures to see if what we say is true. Right? But our job—Sunday, every Wednesday, every Tuesday, every Monday—is to make sure that whatever's going on in your life, we can bring God's word to bear so that you'll think well about it.

It's ultimately focused here in these pastoral epistles on the leaders of the church. But all we care about is you. Right? And that's going to include us directly teaching you things, but it's also going to encourage us telling you over and over again: spend time alone in your Bible. Study this. Come to a class like this and then go home and read your Bible.

2 Timothy 2:15 — Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

If you have a King James Bible, that's going to say "who rightly divides the word of truth." And that word basically means to cut a straight path. Our job, your job, together—our job—is to cut a straight path. Let's get this right. Not some crooked, jagged line, but let's understand what it is.

Ten Doctrinal Categories

Now, I've only got about ten minutes left, and we're going to have to end sharply by quarter of every Sunday because we gotta get out the way and let people come into church. We're going to walk through this in ten groupings. If you want to jot these down on some piece of paper, here's what we're gonna do. This is a well-established way that we divide Christianity into ten groupings. I think it's helpful and orderly to give you a straight cut on this, but of course everything is related to everything else.

The first and most fundamental doctrinal category is what we would call theology proper. On the one hand, theology is all—it's all theology. Everything we're doing is just one big, overarching theology class. But within that there's also a subset. Theology proper means the doctrine of the first person of God. God, so theology proper is the study of God the Father. And that's where we start because that's where everything starts.

Then we're going to move, once you spend some time there, into Christology—doctrine of the second person of the Godhead, doctrine of Christ. So God the Father, God the Son. You guys know the fancy word for the third person of the Trinity, what we call this? Pneumatology. Pneumatology—it's like who in the world would ever say that in real life? But pneumatology. Pneuma is the Greek word for spirit.

And so probably Latin too, same as Latin. Pneumatology, so God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit—that's where we begin. Our theology is deeply Trinitarian, and it can't be anything but. So we will begin with the doctrine of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. That's gonna take us months, okay? And to a certain extent, that could literally be all we ever talk about, because everything else flows from them.

But we're gonna then break from there and go next—can you imagine where we might go next? God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Amen. At this point you can fork in a couple different ways. We could go into anthropology—let's talk about us. Anthropology is the doctrine of man. Let's talk about what we are like. And I think that's probably the way we will do it, and that's great. We could have also instead gone into bibliology—the doctrine of the scriptures.

We'll probably go: God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, then we'll talk about us, and then we'll talk about the scriptures—bibliology. How do we understand this book? Some of you might wanna say, "Well, shouldn't we have done scripture first since that's our source for all of it?" And that's fair. But God does not come from the scriptures. The scriptures come from God. Right? The scripture is our revelation of him. But we're gonna start with the Father, Son, Spirit, man, Bible.

Don, I was gonna ask you the question: why we didn't start with the Bible? Yeah, and it's appropriate. The Bible is our source for all these things, but God is not a fictional character in a book. He wrote the book. We'll start with the Author before we get to his book. Cool?

You've got nature. That's true. Very good. So Psalm 19 is gonna say:

The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. — Psalm 19

Right? So we have multiple sources of revelation of God. Very good.

Alright. So then, we've gone God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, man, Bible—where do you wanna go next? Salvation is good, but first we gotta get lost. So we're gonna study the doctrine of sin. You mentioned Jeremiah 2:13—we'll be in Jeremiah 2:13 when we finally get there. And by the way, the fancy word for that is hamartiology (H-A-M-A-R-T-I-O). Who cares? Hamartiology. That's the doctrine of sin. And then after the doctrine of sin comes salvation.

What's our fancy word for that? Soteriology. Good news, right? We're gonna talk about what are we saved from? How are we saved? What are the mechanics of salvation? That's gonna be a huge topic. Right? It's like, finally, we get to this. We wanna study how this works, right? So we'll study the doctrine of the atonement. We'll do all kinds of great things. Maybe in a year we'll finally get there, okay? You're gonna be lost for a long time.

Sin, we've done man, sin, salvation. What are we missing? What's next? The Church. Right? God has created a gathering. The word for church is ecclesia (or ecclesia, depending on how you transliterate it into our language). It's the gathering. We need to understand what, as He gathers us in and we create this ecclesia and we are now a people—what are we to be? What are we to do? What's the church supposed to be? We'll study that.

And then we kinda go on this funny little side trail into what's next? Angels. Angels. And when we say angels, what we really mean are angels and demons and Satan himself. Okay, now we could have shoved this under the doctrine of sin, but we're gonna do a section on angelology. What is this thing? Are there other creatures besides us, and what are they? Where did the demons come from? Who the heck is Satan? And why was there a snake in the garden in the first place? That'll all be under angelology.

And then the final section, as we study the last things and what this story is all driving toward—what do we call that? Eschatology. Eschatology. And that's where you're like, "That's all your Revelation, right?" But it's not just Revelation. The Bible over and over again—Thessalonians is a huge source for the doctrine of last things, end times. And in a couple years probably we'll get to that. Eschatology.

We're gonna study theology proper, Christology, pneumatology, anthropology, bibliology, hamartiology, soteriology, ecclesiology, angelology, eschatology—and just think how brilliant you're gonna be by the time that's all over. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be so fun. You're gonna love it.

But here's the thing—the whole time through, the goal is not to make you smarter. It's never our goal. The goal is to help us love Jesus, that in all of this we're gonna see some deeper revelation of how great he is, how worthy he is of our worship and our obedience and our lives. That's really, at the end of the day, what this whole thing is about. It's about him.

So I think there will be things that will be intellectually satisfying. There may be things that are volitionally challenging. Don't be surprised if it's a direct result of the things that we talk about for the next hundred weeks. Something in your life's gonna have to change. Something in your loves will need to get reordered as you find yourself—every one of us loves worthy things too little and we love unworthy things too much. We're gonna be reordering our loves, not just tickling our minds as you walk through this. It's gonna be a good time.

Class Resources and Questions

Now, in the last minute, jot this address down. I should've made a slide and I didn't, so I'm sorry. Here's our new email: chsdoctrine@gmail.com.

If you email me at that address, we will create a mailing list for this class so we can send out resources—handouts, digital documents, announcements, whatever it might be. If you want to be on the mailing list specifically for this class, send a note to chsdoctrine@gmail.com and we'll add you.

The second thing I would like you to do is use that same address to send in questions. Throughout the year, as we go through this, I will sort your questions and file them for when we get to that topic. So if you're thinking, "Hey, when you cover the doctrine of the church, could you talk about this?"—I'd love to make sure we're including the things that are particularly curious to you. You can send me any question, any time, about any topic, and I'll file it for when we get to that moment in the whole course.

If you don't send me any questions, I'll have plenty to say. But I'd like to make sure that if there's things that are particularly curious to you, we get those covered.

Closing

CHSdoctrine@gmail.com. I think we gotta stop. I'm grateful that you came. I was wondering if anybody would come since we're no longer over there, so thanks for coming. That's great. We'll be in here every week at 10:05. It's gonna be a great time. Appreciate you guys coming. We'll talk more again.