Have you ever heard someone say, it really doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere?

That idea communicates that what God is really concerned about with us is that we be religious.

Doesn't matter what the religion is as long as we're sincerely religious.

Well, that idea is on a collision course with biblical Christianity.

Well, it does matter what you believe. Just a cursory examination of Jesus teaching leaves no doubt about that.

That's precisely why Dr. R. R. C. Sproul devoted his life to studying and teaching God's Word.

He believed strongly that reformed theology best summarized what we read in Scripture.

And he's going to explain those foundational doctrines this week here on renewing your mind.

This is from his series What Is Reformed Theology.

A few years ago a professor from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, north of Boston, Dr. David Wells,

published a book that fell like a bombshell on the playground of the nation's theologians.

And the name of the book was No Place For Truth.

Now the subtitle I think is significant as he wrote in the subtitle Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology.

And in this book that caused quite a stir in the evangelical world, Dr. Wells outlined his concern for the demise of

confessional theology in the life of the church today.

And I'd like to begin our series by reading a brief comment from that book by Dr. Wells.

He makes this statement. The disappearance of theology from the life of the church and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders is hard to miss today.

But oddly enough not easy to prove.

It is hard to miss in the evangelical world in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith in the

psychological and psychological preaching that follows this shift in the erosion of its conviction in its strident pragmatism in its inability to think incisively about the culture and in its reveling in the irrational.

I recently attended a meeting in Philadelphia of the board of an organization known by the acronym ACE, which is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was brought together in the first place largely through the stimulus provided by Dr. Wells's book for this group is concerned to help call the church back to its confessional foundation.

Understanding that Christianity has a theology. Now the purpose of this series that we're beginning today is to give an overview, kind of a glimpse of the essence of that theology that is called reformed theology.

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