NJ Pastors rescue school children from indecent exposure David Platt rhetoric remains elusive | Ep 6

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00:01

Use your mind in obedience to the will of God to feed one another, to serve

00:06

God in ministry. How could we serve the children who would fall victim to this bill that's being passed or being proposed in New Jersey?

00:19

How could we love them? I'll give you an example. You can call your congressman, your

00:31

New Jersey congressman for the New Jersey state. This is not federal, this is local. We have three of them in district seven.

00:39

What if everybody, every adult in this room were to make a phone call to our three representatives, two congresspeople and one senator, and tell them that we do not support the quote -unquote

00:54

Freedom to Read Act? Would you be willing to do that? Would you be willing to take action that actually makes a difference in the lives of little children?

01:07

It's one thing to feel an outrage against those who harm children, but it's agape to do something about it.

01:15

Do you see the issue? And welcome to Tearing Down High Places.

01:42

My name's Average Joe. This is Tim Robinson and Jeff. Pastor Tim and Pastor Jeff are here as per usual.

01:53

And today's topic is gonna be Victory in Christ. Winning and losing.

02:00

Win some, we lose some. So we were doing the Galatians study earlier today and you were talking about miracles.

02:08

And I didn't bring this up, but I was thinking to myself, I think it's a miracle that this bill that was going to allow teachers and librarians to be exempt from a criminal code in the state of New Jersey that prevented them from sharing pornography.

02:28

I mean, literally, if you were, they were going to exempt teachers and librarians from the criminality of sharing pornography with little children.

02:37

Yeah, the decency laws that are already on the books they would have exemption from. The vice laws. Yeah. It's like we used to have a vice squad years ago.

02:45

I think they got rid of the vice squad. I don't know. What did the vice squad do? Well, they enforced laws that were really based on morality.

02:54

Okay. Prostitution, we've changed that. We've got a new word for prostitution.

03:00

I think they're called sex workers. Oh. Yeah. Okay. So get your green card.

03:06

They always change the verbiage for a purpose. Yeah. Yeah. The battle of words.

03:12

Yeah. The battle of words. And we got to go back to what the Bible says. Yeah. And I was just amazed. I mean, this was so, so for the audience, if you're not a member at Cornerstone, you might not know that a couple of weeks ago or a few weeks ago,

03:25

Pastor Jeff came into, was preaching through John. And I forget how it tied in, but he made the point that there was a bill that was going to be passed, that it was wicked and evil.

03:35

And he asked the congregation to call three politicians that are in our district in the state of New Jersey, two assembly people and a senator.

03:45

And the calls went out, the emails went out. We actually invited them to come onto this program. We got a response from one of them who graciously declined to attend.

03:55

But I'm just going to thank them for getting rid of the bill. You did that at a sermon?

04:02

I did at the end of the sermon. You're such a Christian nationalist. Oh man. Oh, wait a minute.

04:09

Not a Christian nationalist. I just read that in one of Jeff's books. They were calling you a Christian nationalist last year.

04:15

It almost got you fired. Yeah. Because it's a hot word. Well, it's sad when people that are on our side of so much start using the tactics of the left because the left thinks that the people who called me a

04:28

Christian nationalist are themselves Christian nationalists. Because they don't believe in the alphabet soup movement.

04:35

So while you're a Christian nationalist trying to impose, or they wouldn't approve of gay marriage and such, but they don't recognize that the world lumps us all together.

04:45

So if I'm a step to the right of them, the world doesn't see a difference there.

04:50

We're all just Christian nationalists to them. And the world made up that term to label us that way.

04:56

I thought it was. I think the devil could have made it up because I think he's the accuser. I think he's always trying to accuse

05:02

Christians of stuff. So what I don't understand is you're being accused of being a Christian nationalist, but I don't see that as a bad thing.

05:10

I don't think I totally understand what Christian nationalism is. I think it's just a word that you could be accused on.

05:18

But I look at it as, yeah, I'm a Christian. I love that I'm a Christian. Jeff's a Christian. I love that he's a

05:24

Christian. He's just a Christian that loves his nation and likes to speak about America. Yeah, he doesn't hate

05:29

America. Why can't you speak on, why is he less credited to speak on things that are going on in the world?

05:35

Well, Christianity Today is a magazine that's devoted to the causes of the left. Only they put everything in evangelical garb to make

05:44

Christians be influenced by it. So this guy named Paul Miller wrote an article on what is

05:50

Christian nationalism a couple of years ago. And what he was trying to do there was to say, yeah, the

05:55

CRT, far left stuff, that's bad. But over here on the right, you have Christian nationalism and that's equally a threat because it's like this

06:04

Hegelian thing, right? Well, there's a thesis, an antithesis, and the synthesis is somewhere here in the middle.

06:12

Well, what that does is it moves everything a little bit because they know they can't get the full leftward pole, but they can at least make it like, well, you gotta move away from that and come a little bit in this direction.

06:22

So that's why they made up Christian nationalism. Is that what they call evangelifish? Evangelifish, yeah.

06:30

I don't, I really thought I was a Christian nationalist and I actually, when I heard it described, but then

06:36

I heard the left describe it as well. And I was not that. Right. Because what they say is

06:42

Christian nationalist is more of an emphasis on the nationalism and really there's not a lot of good isms out there.

06:49

Right. Yeah, because what they're trying to say is we are going to impose our morality on everyone and be draconian and try to run everybody's lives.

07:00

When in fact, the freedoms of this country that were born came out of Christianity. Right, right.

07:05

It was actually the Bill of Rights and all of this was born out of the reformation and then the revolution, which was really a

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Presbyterian revolution. Right, right. And is there really any freedom or any liberty without a

07:18

Christian worldview? Because I don't, I can't think of another religion that doesn't have their own blasphemy laws.

07:25

And even we got our blasphemy laws, we used to. And the secular humanists have their blasphemy laws too.

07:31

Right. When this country was founded, there were treaties made.

07:36

Like for example, one with France that opened in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

07:42

Yeah. Naming the Trinity. Right. It was a treaty between France, England and the United States of America was formed in the name of the

07:50

Trinity. Well, even just recently when the new king was installed in Great Britain, there was a huge amount of Christian ceremony around that.

08:01

And it specified his roles in the triune roles of governance, not government.

08:11

But God gave, established three entities. He established the government and then he established the church and made a distinction in that, right?

08:20

Absolutely. Under God. Yeah. He was called the King of England. And we were,

08:26

I think we came from England, didn't we? We got some of our laws from that. Some of our traditions. Yeah, very much so, yeah.

08:32

Yeah. From Blackstone and yeah, legal precedent of England, yeah. I heard another phrase

08:38

I kind of liked. I don't know, do you think it's any better? Because I know you didn't like Christian nationalism. I was just reading about how you were slandered.

08:45

I just finished up War Torn Nation. War Torn? War Torn Church.

08:51

I always end it with church. War Torn Church. And it was talking about what you went through in California and how they were slandering you as a

08:59

Christian nationalist. What did they mean by Christian nationalists? Well, that's the really hard part about that whole situation is that they never defined it.

09:09

Like it would be on the one leveling a charge to explain what you mean by that and why it's bad.

09:15

But that was something they were never willing to supply. So at that point, it's like, okay, you want to just call me a name and leave it at that?

09:23

It's gotta be defined so we can at least know or agree. Like, am I a Christian nationalist? Yeah. Or whatever you're calling me, maybe

09:29

I am. Do you mean by it and would it be bad or? Yeah. So we started this podcast saying, hey, we had victory, we had a great victory.

09:38

So let's remember that. But there's, you know, like so many battles, there's no time to celebrate the victory.

09:43

Right. There's other things we gotta do. Let's celebrate it. You wanna celebrate it? Yeah, like right now. Let's celebrate it. Yeah, let's do it.

09:49

So here's what happened. No more in school. This is how it happened. And Tim, you brought up that they would call us Christian nationalists for doing this, for bringing it up in the pulpit.

09:57

But it didn't start or originate in our pulpit. Okay. We were at, Tim and I went to a meeting of pastors.

10:03

Okay. South Jersey pastors. It was about 20 of us. A lot of Calvary Chapel, a little bit of Evangelical Free.

10:10

We're not the only E -Free church there. And a few other independent and Baptist.

10:16

I think there might be some other Presbyterian, whatever. Big group of pastors. And one of the guys stands up and says, there is a bill being introduced this week called the

10:26

Freedom to Read. And he explains what's happening. Well, many of the pastors went back to their pulpits.

10:33

And so it wasn't just us. It was Bill Luebkman over in Marlton. And I know many others told all their people about it and said, call in.

10:40

So what ended up happening is so many people flooded the senators and the assembly people's inboxes.

10:47

I never talked to anybody. When I called in, I just left messages. But I hear like Antoinette, she said that she got all three of them and just had long conversations with these people.

10:57

So like evidently people were getting through and eventually within days, they pulled the bill.

11:05

Completely pulled the bill. And the reporter said that they weren't willing to say why.

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It was just like, oh, we're just pulling it. No reason to give, but I think we know why. It was so much public outcry.

11:17

And that was coming from us. It was coming from the Christians. You know, the pastor group will be celebrating that victory too. Oh man, let's go.

11:23

When do you guys meet again? Don't tell us where. Yeah, it might be on this location. It is, it's next week though.

11:29

Is it? But they'll never be able to find us. I don't know, do a good underground. Just shh, that's great. Keep meeting and keep giving us good reports because I really think it was a miracle.

11:38

I mean, you know, the political winds in New Jersey are just so far left.

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I mean, do they really need to fear us? No, not really. I don't think they fear us or respect us or even account for us.

11:54

No, and that's the battle we've got to talk about today. The problem is so many gray and blue churches in New Jersey.

12:03

There's very few red churches and I think we're going to have to talk about in the coming weeks celebrating other red churches.

12:08

Yeah, what do you have up your sleeve? You started to say something. This isn't a promise, but what are you thinking? So, well, it was

12:15

Ivan's idea to have a red church summit. So Ivan Solero's, that's his idea.

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But then you said something to me because I picked up some video of some really gray stuff.

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But we talked about some of the gray stuff that we saw out there from gray churches and what they were saying.

12:35

It was horrible, but we don't want to call out or give publicity to the evil. Yeah, or we could ourselves become so negative.

12:43

Like, we're like spotlighting negative stuff happening right around us. It's just like, we don't want to be like so poisonous.

12:50

No, we want to lift the brother up. We want to lift it. If you see a brother down, lift him up. Yeah, if you see a hot place, tear it down.

12:58

And by place, we mean it's the ideology. So maybe if it's like, say, a national figure like David Platt, who has a ton of influence and he's just influencing all these people that like lapdogs are listening to everything he says.

13:12

Right. Maybe we should tear that down. We can tear that down. We'll do that now? Let's tear that down. Well, let me talk about that.

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Let's tease out the red church summit. Oh yeah, you didn't tell us about that. Yeah, people want to. So we're thinking in maybe just after the new year, having a red church summit.

13:29

2025, you're talking? 2025. Okay. Give us some time. Yeah, give us some time. So 2025, have a red church summit.

13:35

Leading up to that red church summit, maybe starting next week, we'll have a little segment at the end of the show where we put up a video and we highlight a red church doing something awesome in the culture.

13:50

Nice. Tearing down a high place or lifting a brother up, one of those. Love it.

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And we get that on video. And then we could ask people who are listening, hey, go out, tell your friends that go to other churches all throughout

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New Jersey, everywhere in New Jersey, because New Jersey is one political body. And our calling is to be

14:12

Nathan and call out David and we're in, David is New Jersey, right? Let's go. So call out your friends at other churches, call out your friends that want to highlight their pastor or someone in their church that did some red church stuff, some blood red church stuff.

14:30

Let's go. And we'll put it on. So we're going to go positive instead of negative. We're going to spotlight these pastors that are taking a stand.

14:37

Yeah. And then at the end of the year, then we're going to have to pick the blood red church of the year.

14:44

Oh, I love it. You know? It's like an award. And we'll give out the award at the blood red church summit.

14:50

The blood red church award. Yeah. I like it. This is good thinking. So there's this guy in ocean city named

14:55

Matt Marr. Okay. I think that's how you pronounce it. But he, I listened to him preach when the war broke out in Israel and he showed how the history of the

15:05

Bible relating to Israel in the land and who the people in Gaza descend from and that whole, the

15:11

Philistines and amazing sermon. So I nominate Matt Marr.

15:16

Matt Marr. As a possibility for the blood red church award. All right, well, we got to get some video of him. I'll have to find it.

15:22

We got to find some video and we'll put it on. I'm sure he's still going because I think he's been preaching that for a while. Yeah. But there's guys like this all over New Jersey.

15:29

Yeah. Well, they don't, they need to be, they need to be known. I mean, especially, you know, you run into, you know, so like Tim and I were out witnessing that last week and not everybody lives around here and can come to our church.

15:40

We want to have, we want to know where to send them. Yeah. We want to send people to good red churches.

15:46

You know, there's no, this, there's a, I think there's a fallacy out there that you can go to this church and you'll definitely move on.

15:52

A lot of people move out, you know? And yeah, so we want to do that. So back to tearing down high places.

15:59

Let's tear something down. Let's tear something down. Let's go. We got to tear something down. All right. Talk to us about David Platt. David Platt sent out something new this week.

16:07

All right. He wrote a new book. And so he's out on a tour going on the radio shows and all, it's called Don't Hold Back.

16:13

And really what he's doing is justifying the position he took in 2020. Okay. When he took the gray church position, explicitly so.

16:21

Saying, when I look out in my congregation, there are Democrats and Republicans sitting side by side.

16:27

One might be a staffer working for the Democratic party, another working for the Republican. And all that matters is

16:33

Jesus. You should not divide over political differences. Meanwhile, we're over here saying, look, abortion is not just a political difference.

16:43

It's the life of an unborn child made in the image of God that's getting slaughtered. And you're to rescue those taken away to the slaughter, according to the word of God.

16:52

Yes. Right? So we're saying no to that. Well, he's doubling down. After all the havoc it wreaked in his church, because McLean Bible Church really suffered greatly because of this.

17:02

When he introduced wokeism to their church, he did the whole race thing. You know, look how white you all are and blah, blah, blah.

17:08

It was MLK 50 in 2018. So he's had a history of doing this, but the problem is he's not repenting.

17:15

No. He's doubling down and he's written another book. So here we go. It's his shtick. Don't hold back. It's his shtick now.

17:21

It's his shtick. Yeah. So we won some victories, but he would not have been with us in that red church movement to tear down the freedom to read bill in New Jersey.

17:32

He'd be like, well, you know, we'll preach Jesus, but don't talk about that here. So he's on the other side and he's got influence.

17:40

Sadly, he's on remnant radio here. You guys ready? Yeah, let's go. All right. David Platt. If you want to watch on remnant radio, we're picking up at the 652 mark.

17:48

We'll have to get the link. Yeah, you can throw it at us. Even in the same local church we disagree about. And so as a third bucket would be things that even in the same local church, we just agree to disagree about.

18:01

And so as an example of how that played out over the last few years, like, I mean, at one point this was back in 2020, just made the statement, like we're not going to divide as a church over how you vote in this election.

18:15

It's not that you might not have strong opinions or even convictions about what that voting calculation will look like in your life, but that's not what unites us as a church.

18:26

Like that's third bucket. And I heard people saying like, you can't be a

18:31

Christian and vote for fill in the blank. And different people would kind of put different names in the blank there.

18:40

And it was like, wait a second. Whoa, we've just taken like how you vote in an election in 2020 in the

18:46

United States of America and put it in the first bucket of, you can't be a Christian and do that. Like that's not a first bucket issue.

18:54

And what I was saying is that's not a second bucket issue in our church. Like we unite together around Jesus. We have around in our local church around certain convictions, but this is in the third bucket.

19:03

And I think our muscles in the church for how to keep those buckets separate and how to love people and understand where people are coming from across different buckets, those muscles just haven't been strong.

19:18

And it's been beautiful to see those muscles strengthen through a lot of hard days actually in our church family, but to come to a much better place where we're like clearly united around Jesus and not some of these political preferences that we might be prone to unite around.

19:37

Political preferences. Oh man. What do you guys think about this bucket idea? So you have three buckets.

19:43

Bucket one is the essentials, the non -negotiable resurrection of Jesus, the inerrancy of scripture, the cardinal doctrines.

19:53

Where's that in the Bible? Is that a platitude? I think that's been a common teaching and there's something to it.

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Like Moeller talks about theological triage and kind of distinguishing between what is really an essential versus non -essential thing.

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So for him, for Platt, bucket two is baptism, it's eschatology. And we can maybe be in different churches from a

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Presbyterian because they baptize babies. We need to be separate churches. But now bucket three, that's just preferences.

20:24

Just little differences that we can be in the same church, not divide, not have really make a big issue out of.

20:31

So what bucket do you think that really belongs in? In maybe the second bucket? Maybe you could even say that it could be in the first.

20:39

Okay. But he was saying, it can't be in the first. He's saying, not even the second. And the reason I say it might be in the first because if you can't define right and wrong, you have no gospel.

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Think about this. Like if you can't call someone to repentance because there's no definition of what is sin, how can you preach repentance and faith?

20:57

This is why I love theonomy. And that's a big word that we're gonna have to define.

21:05

It means - We start with Christian nationals and now we're gonna go down to - Well, you can't have one without the other. You need an objective standard.

21:11

Well, define it for us. Well, so I would say that theonomy, well, theonomy means theonomo, it's

21:17

God's law. A lot of people would say, oh, it's too simplistic. And that's true.

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But I do think it is the expression of,

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I don't know if it's 1st or 2nd Timothy 3 .15 that says that all scripture breathed out is theanostasis.

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It's God breathed and it's profitable for proof, for teaching, for correction.

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And it's absolutely essential that we follow all of God's law. And that doesn't mean that we neglect what has changed in the

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New Testament. But if it hasn't changed in the New Testament and we know

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God's nature does not change, it is good. If he designed it, it's good.

22:04

And if I care about the nation that I live in, which every

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Christian should care about the nation they live in, you're called to love your neighbor. Why wouldn't you care about your neighbor? In order for me to love my neighbor,

22:17

I need to give them what God's given me, the best of what God's given me and the best of what he's given me is his word.

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And that's what Paul carried around. And when he was writing to Timothy, he hadn't written the

22:28

New Testament yet. So he's obviously he's talking about scripture as being the Old Testament or Deuteronomy numbers and those things.

22:36

So, but what people get, people get bent out of shape about that. It's very controversial because they, oh, you're gonna say we're gonna stone this person and stone that person.

22:46

Well, no, but we're gonna say that there is a general equity in the law that we can translate into our culture.

22:54

And that's the language of the Westminster Confession and the Second London Baptist Confession, general equity of the law.

23:01

So what's the high place here? Let's imagine in the Old Testament, they would go up on a high place and they would sacrifice their babies, making them pass through the fire in offering to Moloch.

23:13

Got it. Watch the end of the video, we've always got a picture of Moloch burning babies. And so in our culture, where's the high place?

23:23

Yeah, there's so many. And that's what I think - Relative to that. Abortion, right? Yeah. Oh yeah, abortion.

23:30

At the abortion mill, that's the high place. Physically, babies being killed. Yeah, and the Democratic Party is saying yes to abortion, right up to the moment of birth.

23:38

And actually most Democrats now in the Senate and in the House believe that it should be after birth in a botched abortion, that the baby should be left to die, okay?

23:48

So is this just a third bucket kind of thing? No, not even close. I hope if I was not even -

23:53

Not even close. Yeah, great. Someone wouldn't be treating it like a third bucket issue. And there's people that are on the speaking circuit now who survived a botched abortion.

24:01

Right. And they just go out and plead for their own life. Like, should I be allowed to be here right now? Am I? Should I be alive?

24:07

And some of them have burns from the saline solution that was injected in there to create a toxic environment for the baby.

24:15

So we are, God. Sorry, I have a question. So what happens, because Jeff, you're a pastor. If someone comes up to you in our church and says,

24:22

I really believe in abortion, and then you have another person say, well, you know what? I'm against abortion.

24:28

And they're arguing right in front of you. Are you supposed to just say, oh, well, we coexist. You're allowed to have your opinion.

24:34

Wouldn't you have to, as a pastor, make a judgment call on that and say where you stand?

24:40

If you're going to be a shepherd to the flock, you have to speak the truth. And if you're not willing, if you're not willing to share any kind of truth related to the

24:49

Bible, then there's something wrong there. And the only way you could just sweep that under the carpet would be by compromising the truth of God's word.

24:57

Now, that said, we don't lead with, you know, a rebuke on somebody's view on abortion.

25:04

What we're leading with is the gospel. The reason they've come to the church in the first place is we're telling them about Jesus and we're trying to bring them to faith.

25:11

And we're telling the good news that, hey, if you've committed an abortion, there is forgiveness for you in the blood of Jesus.

25:19

We're preaching gospel to everyone. We love them enough to tell them the truth. Now, we're not going to water down the ethics of God's word to accommodate someone who is stuck in that and holding onto that and claiming to be a

25:32

Christian, sitting side by side in church every Sunday, voting for the murder of babies and for the dismembering of little boys and girls.

25:42

You have to address that if you're going to walk in righteousness, if you're going to be the church of Jesus Christ.

25:48

So yeah, you have to work that out. You can't just leave it undone. Yeah, and then also was talking about how you can't, some people will say you can't be a

25:57

Christian, vote a certain way. Now, what did you think about him saying that? Have you heard Christians say that?

26:03

And do you think there's some truth to that? And maybe, yeah. I've heard him say it. Yeah. Well, I just said it just now.

26:09

No, say it again. I've heard him say it in the pulpit. Yeah. And I'm not saying you have to vote for someone.

26:15

I'm saying the Nazi party is disqualified because they killed Jewish people.

26:21

They take them in boxcars and you can no longer support the Nazi party. You can elect them in the 30s.

26:27

Yeah. Or the 20s. Maybe. Maybe in the 20s. Yeah, 20s and 30s. Somewhere in the 30s, you have to make a call and say, no,

26:32

I can't vote Nazi anymore. I'm done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I'm done. Same thing, Democratic Party today. Read their platform.

26:38

That's their platform. Christians have to say, compare that with the word of God and say, no, a Christian cannot support this.

26:45

It doesn't mean you have to vote for somebody else, but we can say that that's evil. That party platform is evil.

26:50

That's good. So people can look back and see that the Nazi party was evil. Yes. And they can see that the killing of Jews is evil, but the people back then didn't see that.

27:01

They didn't see it. So maybe today they're not seeing that abortion is so much worse than even that.

27:07

Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. 60 million plus babies in this country alone. Yeah, yeah.

27:13

It's insane. So, and you, but you really, you know, I'm thinking about the guy we were witnessing to last week, the very first two guys, right?

27:23

And the one fellow said, I'm a Christian. And he said, and you asked him, well, what does it mean to be a

27:29

Christian? And his response was, well, I know that as long as I, as long as I accept

27:36

Christ, any sin I do is covered. I can go to heaven.

27:42

That's not true. I mean, that's, that's not, that's the other ditch. It's not, you know, we're talking about Galatians today.

27:48

We're talking about not being legalists, but that's antinomianism. That's the other ditch. It does matter what you do and how you live.

27:57

And God, and Jesus said, love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbors yourself. You can't love your neighbor when they're being deceived but, and tricked into thinking that it doesn't matter that their baby's being murdered.

28:09

Right. Shall we go on sitting so that grace may increase? Paul says, Romans 6, 1, by no means, no.

28:16

First John talks about that too. If you walk in darkness, then you're not a child of God.

28:22

There is a test of that. So your works need to follow genuine faith and the work of baby murder or child mutilation, or read, you know, right to read bills.

28:36

This kind of thing is not the fruits of righteousness. It's not a sign that someone is genuinely born again or voting for those who support those things.

28:45

Right. That's the issue here. And we can help. I mean, nothing better than to help people see their sin by seeing how evil this is, you know?

28:53

So when we call this out, this is to love people. We're doing a loving thing by calling people out and saying, no, you can't vote for the democratic party at this point.

29:01

If they got rid of that one thing, I think there, you know, some people argue you still could vote for them, but I'm going to say individual politicians on the

29:10

Republican side, you can't vote for it either. Agreed. And you can't blanket state, but it's not in the Republican platform that we're going to destroy a whole section of humanity.

29:20

Right. Right. Very well said. Very well said. I mean, in fact, there's all kinds of issues

29:25

I think that are sinful that I don't think most Americans are aware of that's happening. Yeah. The bureaucracy has gotten so big.

29:33

Right. We don't see all the darkness that goes on. No. So you got to remember that Jesus sees what's going on in the churches.

29:40

And I think that when Jesus talked to the churches in Revelation, he gave them, you know, things that they did good and things that they did bad.

29:49

And one of the things in the church of Ephesus, Jesus says, but I have this against you that you have abandoned the love that you had at first.

29:58

Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first.

30:04

If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent. Yet this you have, you hate the works of the

30:13

Nicolaitans, which I also hate. So I think it's cool that Jesus knows what's going on in the churches and he sees like the church was hating the works of Nicolaitans.

30:24

And I think like, it's good that we hate the works like abortion and we hate the works of like LGBTQ. I think

30:30

Jesus is on our side. What were the Nicolaitans doing? Well, the Nicolaitans were promoting sexual immorality and it was kind of getting mixed in with the church.

30:39

So I guess some churches probably see that as like a third bucket and they think, oh, it's okay.

30:44

You know what I mean? But really it's not okay. And I think the light will leave from there. I think just because we don't call out everybody's sin, some people are under the impression that it's not sin.

30:57

We're trying not to, we don't want to, because we help brothers and sisters in Christ that say, hey, keep me, make sure

31:06

I'm on the right path. But we don't go after every single person saying, hey, I saw you sin.

31:11

But the idea here is promoting sin and saying the sin is okay. That's works that we have to hate.

31:18

Right, and people are mixing that up. Yeah, it says for land that had, this is

31:24

Hebrews six, seven and eight. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God.

31:37

But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed and its end is to be burned.

31:46

The land has to bear fruit. We can't just live in the church side by side without any concern for the ethics of the people that we're sitting next to.

31:56

We have to tell the truth and say these kinds of things and warn of this coming fire, this flame, this curse that will fall on those who hate

32:06

God. So how do we help a guy like David Platt who is so focused on what motivates his lack of care for his neighbor?

32:19

I think that he might be missing here the fear of God. And he's fear of the culture maybe that comes in.

32:28

And what do you think, Jeff? I think there was a major change in Platt when he moved from Alabama to Washington, DC.

32:35

When he moved to the swamp and the church, he was trying to create this sort of social justice thing to bring the different...

32:45

He boasts in having a hundred different ethnicities all in one church kind of thing. And when he was getting pushback from a certain quarter from Mike Kelsey, his associate pastor, saying and to be

32:56

Deanna Weebling was also a big influence in this, telling him that they're actually racist.

33:02

And the way that other people are experiencing this church is through a lens of racism.

33:07

They feel like they're discriminated against all the time for no actual reason, but it's just a feeling that they had.

33:15

David Platt began to imbibe that. Then he read a book. And this is dangerous when you read a book that doesn't comport with the word of God, but comes from sociology.

33:23

It was by Christian Smith and Michael Emerson. It was called Divided by Faith. And he read it.

33:29

It was Marxist in its root. And he unfortunately took that root of bitterness and imbibed it and then began to spout it himself.

33:40

And he's the one that really popularized that book in 2018 at the Martin Luther King 50 anniversary event for Together for the

33:49

Gospel. This big gathering where Platt gives a speech and he points out, look how white you are, you know, to the whole audience we are.

33:56

And he basically divides the body of Christ like a pizza, just cuts it up between people based on the ethnicity or the color of their skin.

34:07

And it was really critical race theory, although he didn't know it at the time. That's what Divided by Faith was all about.

34:12

So he got hoodwinked. He took it in. When he got to DC, when he started with that church, and then before long, the snowball was rolling.

34:19

And now it's like, he can't stop it. He's been going so far. The church is so far invested in this.

34:25

He even made Mike Kelsey the senior pastor and made himself kind of the associate pastor. Flipping that in order to kind of practice what he preaches about elevate black voices and all.

34:36

So he's so far invested in this, he can't stop. And he still doesn't believe there's anything wrong with it. So you think he was like kind of good at first and then got bewitched?

34:46

Yeah. Bewitching from Galatians 3 .1 would be, yeah, a great way to put it. All right.

34:53

So just for audience, I think some people don't know what CRT is, critical race theory.

34:59

And that leads me to think about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think people who are actively working in corporate

35:07

America are being force fed a lot of this stuff. I know they are. But do you want to define those terms a little bit for people?

35:16

That might take us a while to go down that route. Basically the big idea of diversity, equity, inclusion, critical race theory, is that there are oppressors and the oppressed.

35:27

And that could be a difference based on the color of skin is normally the main one, oppressed. So if someone has darker skin, more melanin in the skin, then the whole system, the whole structure of American society is oppressing them.

35:42

And especially the majority culture. So people with lighter skin. So that's the whole concept of critical race theory.

35:51

It's to look critically and then to be woke is when you wake up to see, oh yeah, there's systemic oppression everywhere.

35:58

You just never saw it before. To be woke is when you wake up to notice that actually the police force is systemically racist.

36:06

And the reason that George Floyd died is racism. Nothing to do with all the other factors involved there.

36:12

It's just race. I think it promotes repentance with no forgiveness. Yeah. And the way

36:22

I explain the DEI thing is, you get, it's like a point scale. If you're a male

36:29

Eskimo, you get one point. Right? But if you're a female

36:35

Indian, American Indian, or if you're a female Native American lesbian, you get three points.

36:42

Yeah. Right? So, just this point scale. And I literally can tell you -

36:47

That's the intersectionality. If you're a Christian, what do you get? Minus points. Oh, that's definitely. Yeah. You're out of it. So this point system, and then there's other groups they throw in there just to try and bring more people to buy into,

37:01

I'm gonna get something extra. So it's coveting. Yeah, it's covetousness. It's coveting.

37:06

It's all these wicked sins put together, but we don't, because we don't talk about sin, it's so hard for anyone to identify.

37:13

It's like, oh, we're just being nice to people who are oppressed. Right. No, you're stealing. And they're encouraging people to identify as oppressed.

37:20

Right. Believe that you're a victim. That's the message. And if you can be a victim, then all of a sudden you have this elevated position.

37:28

So nowadays, if you're in a high school and you're kind of like an outcast or you just don't feel like you fit, if you'll simply identify as gay, that's a bold stand, and now all of a sudden you're part of this group that's elevated and exalted, and you're gonna have the entire month of June to affirm you and to celebrate you.

37:49

And so that's the incentive there is that it's a victim mentality. And if you'll take that victim mentality, they will reward you.

37:57

Dangerous. It's very dangerous. Confess that you have no hope, and then you will have hope. And how fast did that come?

38:04

Because when I was in high school, sure, there was a couple of lesbians, maybe a couple of LGBTQ, but there wasn't a club or there wasn't like, you might see a girl kiss another girl or a guy flirting with another guy, and you're kind of like, you look at it like, oh, that's kind of weird, let me go the other way, or let me like,

38:22

I'm just trying to get to my class, didn't really want to see that. It was kind of like, they were still the outcast in a way, but it wasn't like people were calling them out.

38:31

But nowadays it's like, they have clubs and it's like, you're almost like, now you're the cool kid.

38:37

Right. In a way. Yep. There's no shame for sin. Do we need shame? Is shame a good thing?

38:42

Shame is a good thing in some sense. Yeah. There is an agenda from the university system up and on down from there, pressed into the democratic party, the media, to transform

38:56

America fundamentally. Fundamentally transform America. And they're doing that ideologically.

39:02

So they're pressing these doctrines into the curriculum of the schools, in health classes, in mathematics classes, in every kind of way that they can, they're inserting this teaching because they have an agenda to overthrow

39:16

Christianity, what was a Christian based nation, to this new leftist supposed utopia.

39:23

It's going to turn out to be like every other experiment, like communist experiment. It's going to, it's going to destroy.

39:29

It's not going to build up, but they have a vision of this, this society of equality and diversity and inclusion that is to them looks like a utopia and they're pushing it everywhere.

39:41

So we're standing up against that saying, Christians have to hold the line. And then you have guys like this that are claiming to be

39:48

Christians and maybe he is a Christian, but compromised. And he's touting the same line of inclusion, diversity, equity, and it's only advancing their cause all the more.

40:02

I want to make sure we don't give the Republicans a pass. Okay. I personally wanted to vote for Trump twice, but chose not to because I didn't want to give the

40:13

New Jersey Republicans an attaboy. Right. Like you guys are doing something good. They don't, they've never put a pro -life candidate in governor since I've been around.

40:22

I'm hearing that they're going to put up a gay man to run for Senator, this like Kate May guy or something.

40:30

So, so here's what they do from my perspective. And you were talking about the Hegelian dialectic.

40:35

Yeah. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The, I see the, the thesis comes from the cultural winds.

40:44

They just go, where are we going? You know, maybe it comes from Hollywood or some other place and the

40:51

Democrats go, ah, antithesis. And they pull it all the way over here. And then the Republicans say synthesis.

40:57

And we keep moving. Yeah. They just compromise in that way. They're just compromise, compromise, third way, third way.

41:04

Yeah. Mr. Kelly. So true. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. Yep. It's not as if the

41:09

Republican party is holding pure, but now you have some, some Republicans do step up and hold the line.

41:16

Yeah. Yeah. There's not a lot. They're mostly in Tennessee. Tennessee. Texas, Florida, Idaho.

41:23

Oh yeah. And Oklahoma. Well, here's some good news. Let's talk. We're doing good news, bad news, right? Right. Good news, bad news.

41:30

Good news. New Jersey, New Jersey pastors destroy a bill that was going to allow teachers to give children pornography.

41:38

I'll tell you what, in Idaho, they're trying to get rid of the marriage license altogether.

41:45

We can put that on another show, maybe. Okay. It's too much to explain. In Oklahoma, there's a bill to get rid of no -fault divorce.

41:54

Ah. Is that Dusty Devers? It is Dusty Devers. That dude is awesome. Yeah, I like Dusty. Yeah, Dusty. I'm a little critical, so he left some psychological stuff in the bill, but I guess, you know, he had to get to the thesis somehow, right?

42:06

Yeah. Anyway, there's just a lot of good stuff, you know, that's being promoted out there. And, you know, who knows?

42:14

But I'm not really putting my faith in that. I think before we can put through, and this is something

42:20

I want to talk about with Theotomy, the idea behind Theotomy or Christian nationalism shouldn't be to force the culture to embrace

42:27

Christian law, but to share the gospel so much that people say, well, we're all

42:34

Christians, why don't our laws reflect that? Yes. You know, and that is what we had in 1789, when we had 13 independent nations come together to form a constitution, and they all had an established religion at that time.

42:49

A lot of people don't know that. New Jersey did. Yeah, I think it was, were they Presbyterian? Or? I don't know if they actually were sectarian like that, but they had language in their state constitution.

43:01

Oh no, they had an established religion that was supported by the government. Every state did. Which denomination?

43:06

It was either Congregationalist or Presbyterian, I can't remember. Oh, okay. Don't know.

43:12

Yeah. Anyway, so this has been a great show. I think we covered a lot of topics. I'll try to put some definitions in there.

43:19

If you heard something we talked about that was, you want more information about or you got questions about, it could be

43:25

Hegelian dialectic, that was big. We talked about Theotomy, we talked about a whole lot of big issues.

43:30

Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism. Give us questions, send them in to, send them in to podcast at cornerstoneSJ .org.

43:41

That's podcast at cornerstoneSJ .org. And until next time, if you see a brother down, lift him up.