Sinclair Ferguson

You're on your own now.

And so I think it's so helpful that the Westminster Confession and the catechisms emphasize that, yes, on the one hand, it's the pardon of your sins, but it's also you are now accounted righteous in Christ for Christ's sake.

Yes, well, thank you for having me, Nathan.

And it is really, I mean, it's wonderful to be here in Malaysia and to meet brothers and sisters from what we call the Far East, but for them it's the center of the world.

A catechism is a way of instructing people

by using questions and answers.

And I think if you think about it, actually, we do that a lot in any case.

So when we are bringing up our children, we teach them by asking them questions and teaching them answers.

And in many cases, actually, it's really amazing how many mums and dads will teach their children by rote.

That is, they will

teach them to memorize things without actually thinking that that's what they're doing.

So I remember a friend of mine telling me it dawned on him one day what he was doing when he was teaching his little girl to say Mary had a little lamb.

The lamb was white as snow and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

And he realized he was teaching her by a catechetical method.

so there was an implied question.

Mary had a little lamb, she would say, and then she would build it up.

And the catechisms, when they were used for children, they were used for both children and adults, were ways of teaching basic Christian truth in very simple ways by

in the best catechism, short questions with short answers.

Now, there were some catechisms, quite a lot of catechisms actually, written around the time of the Reformation and for about the next 150 years that were longer.

They were like short manuals of Christian theology.