I'm struggling and could really use your help...

What is up, everyone? I want to talk to you directly for a few minutes because I need your help to think through an issue.

So this is me coming at you raw. I'm going to be as transparent as I can be.

At the end of the video, I'm going to ask you what you think, and I could really use your responses to help me decide what to do about this, all right?

I mean, decisions about making videos, all right? This sounds dramatic already. I'm not going anywhere.

I just need help making decisions about videos. By the way,

I know a lot of you are watching the Crowder thing, right? So as of this recording, the whole

Crowder thing has dropped. Just yesterday, I think

Tim Cass came out with the interview with Crowder, and boy, I'm following it.

I was watching it with my wife. My wife and I have been keeping up with this, and she turned to me after the Tim Cass interview, and she's like, what do you think?

And I said, well, my big takeaway is I should probably get on Rumble also.

Bad joke. Real quick, as of this recording,

I want those of you in the Dallas area to know that I'm going to be in Dallas all next week, all right?

It's February, or January the 31st all the way through February the 3rd.

I'll be in Dallas. I'll be taking part in a big conference called Ideas Summit. I think registration for that is closed at this point, although I'll try to leave the link for that in the notes below.

I'm not sure if it's open or not, but if you happen to be going to that event, you know some of you, the viewers are pastors and church leaders.

So if you're at that event, come find me. I'd love to chat with you. I'll be teaching First Aid Evangelism there.

Dr. Tony Evans is also going to be there. Alan Parr is also going to be there. It should be a great time. If you're there, come find me at the

Summit table, or just come check out my talk. I would love to chat with you. All right, well, to the issue.

Let me tell you a story, because I think that this is going to help articulate my issue.

I grew up as a non -believer wanting to read as much as I possibly could, as far back as I can remember.

When I was an atheist, and I was old, and this is like college, like late high school, college age, and I was an atheist,

I wanted to read as much as I possibly could with the understanding that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here.

We in this country are standing on the shoulders of giants, and it would be wise for us to learn from the people that came before us because they were tremendously wise.

All right, so chronological snobbery is not something that I have had, or if I've had it,

I've been very sensitive to it. Anyway, so as a non -believer, I would read things that influenced me.

I think I mentioned this in a video, but I would read a lot of Nietzsche. I read a lot of the ancient

Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato.

I read a little bit of Jung, a little bit of Hegel, but anyway, the point is,

I realized that I needed to know some things, but it put me in this dynamic of learning that was very

Greek, very heavily influenced by the culture that I came up in, very

Western. Western, our Western ethic, the Western way of living in America, not only

America, but Europe, it stands on Greek thought, which

I'm not criticizing, I'm just sort of making an observation here that it's heavily influenced by those things.

Learning is heavily influenced by those things. The way that we explain things and the way that we articulate concepts is very heavily taken from the way that the

Greeks did it, which is really great, because I think it's provided a lot of insight. When I became saved, my journey to learn things shifted, and it wasn't that I wanted to stop learning things, now it's just I wanted to learn now about God and learn about all those things.

So, I immediately jumped into school, I got a theology degree, and learned a bunch of stuff about that, and read a lot of things on the side of Christianity, of early church history, of doctrine, theology, all of that stuff.

Systematic theology, but I just, I want to press this point that it was very heavily influenced.

My learning now on the side of being a Christian was very heavily influenced by Greek ways of thinking.

And so, then you fast forward to I became a pastor, and just because of where I believe the

Lord had me on my journey, sort of retiring from being a public educator, from being a public high school teacher,

I taught literature and then I taught debate, to going to then become a pastor,

God had me on this journey of discovery, which is I needed to understand two things as part of my job at this local church over here in Las Vegas that I was a part of, where I became,

I joined the staff and I became a pastor. And so, for the last five years, about six, my primary focus was on understanding the historical context of the

Bible, to understand more specifically the Jewishness of Jesus and the Jewishness of discipleship.

And I also recognized that we needed to do that, I needed to do that, because a lot of us are just missing it.

We're missing it entirely. And again, not taking away from our influence and the way that we think in this country and in the 21st century in America, but not trying to take that away, but trying to fill in the other side of it, because we are, as Christians, beholden to an ancient document.

The Bible is an ancient document, and it was written in a particular time and place, and so it's –

I'm trying to say behooves us. There's probably a less pretentious way to say that.

But it's our responsibility to really try to understand as best as possible the

Bible that we have in our hands, that we read every day. And I've said it like this, but the

Bible, for a lot of us today, is like a coloring book, but it hasn't been colored in because we don't know the history.

We don't know the historical context. But if we did know them, it would be like coloring in with vibrant colors, and what we would find to believe is that the imagery of the text of scripture, wherever we're at, if we know that history, will just come alive.

It'll pop. And so, I spent the last, like I said, about five, six years trying to understand as much as possible the historical context, and as I did,

I realized that I needed to unlearn some bad habits.

I needed to undo some of the habits that I had developed that are very

Greek in the way that I approach concepts and the way that I think through things. And I think probably the easiest way to say this, and I'm going to get to my issue.

I appreciate you sticking with me. This should be a short video. Probably the easiest way for me to articulate this is

I was just going through this with my discipleship group. So, I have a local discipleship group here, a couple of guys, and we're just reading through the scripture.

We're going through an area in 1 John, and it just, it's a perfect illustration of what

I'm talking about. In 1 John, it talks about practicing truth.

I think it's right there in 1 John 1, practicing truth. And if you stop and think, because I think a lot of us, we just read through really quickly as Christians.

We go, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, I do the same thing. But if you stop for a moment and you press in, you go, well, wait a second, that's not how we talk about truth.

And I think this illustrates the distinction that I'm trying to draw out. It's very

American and Greek for us to speak of truth as knowing truth.

It's very Hebrew and very Jewish and very first century

Christian of someone to say that they do truth. And that's,

I think, what John is trying to communicate in that epistle in the first chapter there.

And that's what I'm trying to get at here is I became very sensitive to the fact that we just think through things in ways that are unhelpful if we're trying to go deeper into the scripture, which should be our goals, to go deeper in understanding the scripture, because if you do that, you'll understand the

Lord. Recognizing that the scripture, the very Bible that you have in your hands contains the words that came from God's mouth.

I mean, that's what the scripture teaches us, is that in the same way that God breathed into the dust and created Adam and Eve, He breathed, and out of the breath came the words that we have on the pages of the scriptures that you have in your hand.

And so, our job is to try to understand that on a deeper level and then, by extension, knowing

God more on a deeper level. But in order to do that, I think it would really help us if we could think more like a first century

Christian, in a more Jewish Eastern, Middle Eastern sense than in the ways that we largely learn the scripture now.

And so, I say all that to say that there is a very

Hebrew attitude that I've been very sensitive to and trying to adhere to as much as possible that,

I've described it like this, but Jews in the first century were known as men of two hands, on the one hand and on the other hand.

And they would see, in other words, two different categories that appear to contradict. Just at face value, it appears that these two things contradict.

And I think I brought up in the illustration in a previous video, when it comes to Calvinism and Arminianism, the issue of election and human freedom, right?

It appears that in the scripture, you have two categories of teaching. You have on the one hand the scripture teaches that God is sovereign and he's in control.

That's taught in the scripture, you can't deny it. Then on the other hand, you have in the scripture areas that clearly show that human beings are free to choose.

So, then you go, well, what do we do with this? And it's interesting because when

I went up through school and I studied theology, I very much wanted to resolve that tension.

I very much wanted to understand what the scripture teaches and these kinds of things in ways that resolve.

Now that I've been a pastor and I've been going through these things, I recognize that that would not have been the attitude from someone who was with Jesus walking in his dust.

If you walked up a first century Christian and you said, congratulations, you're saved.

Did you choose God or did God choose you? They would say yes. And so, you know, this is why people, some of you have asked me this question before, you know, reformed.

Are you reformed? Are you Calvinist? Are you this or that? Or people have just thrown that label at me because I apparently sided with a

Calvinist in a particular debate reaction, and they just assume that I'm Calvinist.

Which, by the way, everybody from every stripe can acknowledge this, but it appears that the

Calvinists are better trained in terms of debate. This is probably why they're winning, okay? Just throwing that out there.

But anyway, this is why I've been trying to articulate that I'm really trying to walk in the way that a first century

Christian would walk. That is my primary, the heart and the spirit behind this ministry, why this

YouTube channel exists. Because when Jesus told his disciples, when he sent them out, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,

I think the way that we are wise today is if we try to understand and return and get as close as possible to the way that the disciples walked after Jesus in the first century, okay?

There's a lot of translation that goes into that, not advocating that you sell your possessions and go move to Jerusalem.

I'm just saying, I think it would help us if we tried to be sensitive to those areas, okay?

This brings me to the issue that I'm struggling with, and here it is. I'm struggling to make more

Debate Teacher Reacts videos, okay? And here's why. Those of you who are more vocal in the community, who, by the way,

I'm so appreciative that you share your thoughts with me. The only way that I really can try to put my finger on the pulse of where you're at so that I can try to find video—I'm not making videos for myself here.

I'm trying to find the best way to intersect my passion and interests with where you are and what you need.

And so that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. And the only way I can really do that is from feedback. So, I'm so grateful to those of you that are sharing your thoughts, those of you that are communicating what you want.

Those of you that are, it seems like a lot of you want to see in -house disagreements about theology, whether it's debates on doctrine, you know, particularly like the

Calvinism versus Arminian debate. You want to see more like that.

Don't get me wrong, I want to do more of those, by the way, so don't hear what I'm not saying. I want to do more

DebateTJ Reacts videos, but the reason I'm hesitating and I'm kind of struggling right now to make new ones is that right now

I'm just very sensitive to this idea. I just wonder if I'm communicating implicitly to you that these kinds of doctrinal disagreements in debates, you know, and everything that goes with that, right?

The evaluation of the arguments, the academic adjudication of the arguments, that's what a DebateTJ Reacts video is.

I wonder if I'm communicating that this is what I'm about at this channel, that this is my primary focus, is to shine a spotlight on and evaluate and judge doctrinal disagreements, maybe even

Orthodox versus heretical teaching. Like the James White versus, you know,

Joe Ventillacion on the Trinity. I mean, newsflash, if Joe Ventillacion denies the

Trinity, he's a heretic, right? The reason why I hesitate to do these kinds of videos and why it's easier for me, actually, to do

Christian versus non -believer is because ever since my time studying the historical context of the

Scripture, the Jewishness of the discipleship and the Jewishness of Jesus, I'm sensitive to not trying to resolve these apparent contradictions, these apparent issues and tensions that come in from the clear teaching of the

Scripture. My primary goal, and what I like to do, is actually talk about what the

Scripture says and affirm it. And what I don't want to do is try to lean too far over the skis of Scripture.

And so, what are you saying, Nate? Are you saying you're never going to do another Debate Teacher Reacts video?

No! I'm going to do more. I would love to do more. I mean, hopefully, very soon, I can do more, when

I get back from Dallas. But the kinds of debates that I choose to react to, that's what

I'm just currently struggling with right now. I've been struggling, actually, for the last couple of months, which is why you haven't seen another

Debate Teacher Reacts video, and I hope you can understand why. So, here's what I ask of you. Thanks for sticking in, um,

I was trying not to ramble, you know, the problem with pastors is being concise. Here's what

I need. I have two questions for you, okay? Number one, which debate do you really want me to react to?

Understanding my heart in this, what I just communicated to you, I've been trying to be transparent, what my struggle is, which debate do you really want me to react to?

I'm going to take a look at your responses, they're really going to help me out. And number two, here's the other question. What other kinds of videos do you want to see from me this year?

Again, not making videos just to please myself. I really do want to serve you and where you're at.

The best way that I know how is if you let me know. I lately have been struggling to respond to the comments in a lot of the videos.

I want you to know that I'm reading them. I've been struggling because I'm gearing up for some engagements to go travel and do things through Summit.

But then also, Wise Disciple, it looks like in the month of March, there's going to be an opportunity for me, again, to go and teach

First Aid Evangelism to a college, so out of state. So, I have to prepare.

It's hard. It's funny, because I hate the phrase influencer, or the word influencer, and then what's the phrase, like, content creator.

I just, ew, I'm Gen X. So, it's not natural for me to be talking to a camera.

It's not natural for me to do the things that I've been doing on YouTube. So, I kind of cringe with it.

But it's very difficult to create content in a way that actually is beneficial for you.

So, anyway, I'm going to respond to your suggestions. So, thank you for responding, and I really appreciate all of you for watching.

Look, either way, you and I are going to have a great year, I think, 2023. It's going to be fun.

It's going to be informative, and I look forward to making more videos for you and seeing your responses, all right?