The Gospel Coalition - Losing and Teaching Others to Lose

AD Robles

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Whew, if you guys did not watch Reform Jellicle live last night, you missed a doozy. You really did.

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We had Marcus Pittman on, and Marcus Pittman, he's a little bit of a firecracker, you know what

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I mean? He said some things, man, he really did. And it got me thinking about Gospel Coalition.

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So let's just take a look at Gospel Coalition, because they've got a big blog, and it has a lot of traffic, and they've got a pretty big

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YouTube channel, at least compared to mine. But I want you to see something about these guys. Gospel Coalition, let's just see here.

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I'm typing Gospel Coalition into YouTube to see what comes up, because I gotta say, ya boy, ya boy is on the first page of Gospel Coalition.

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The algorithm is helping me out here. I've got an incognito tab here, so you know it's not just skewed by it being me.

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But look at this. I typed in the Gospel Coalition, right? And let's just do regular Gospel Coalition, see what happens.

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Yeah. Okay, so if you type in the Gospel Coalition, I am on the list, but I'm like fifth on the list.

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See? There it is. Gospel Coalition test, am I a political idolater? Now if you have not watched that video, watch that video.

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I find out whether or not I am an idolater when it comes to politics. But anyway, if you type in Gospel Coalition, what you'll get is me.

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I'm the third result here. This is pretty good. And what's interesting about Gospel Coalition, they have 77 ,000 subscribers, 77 ,000.

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I've got a little over 3 ,000. But if you look, turn off. If you look at their views, this is the recent videos that they put out.

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For 77 ,000 subscribers, they really don't have a whole lot of views. I mean, they get 1 ,000 views per video.

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Some of them, a couple hundred and things like that. Now they do have very popular videos too that have thousands upon thousands of views.

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But this is not very good for a channel that has 77 ,000 subscribers.

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They get 1 ,000 views per video. This one, you can see this one, this has 52 ,000 views.

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That's Tim Keller. He's the big guns. Anyway, if you look at 80 Robles, my videos here,

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I've got 3 ,000 subscribers, right? And my videos get 600, 700 views on average.

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I mean, I've got quite a few that have 1 ,000 views. The percentages there, the engagement there is a lot better.

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If you look at their Twitter page, let's get out of this incognito tab for just one moment.

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If you look at Gospel Coalition's Twitter page, let's check this out.

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They've got 271 ,000 followers.

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271 ,000 followers. That's a lot of followers. But look at the engagement that these tweets get.

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Like this one, one retweet, 12 likes, one retweet, 12 likes, five retweets, 36 likes, four retweets, 20 likes, three retweets.

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This is very low, very low engagement for someone who has 270 ,000 followers.

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I've got 4 ,000 followers, and I get roughly the same engagement that they get.

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And then every now and then, you'll get a doozy where they'll get a bunch of engagement and all that kind of stuff.

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Now, what's going on here? That's the question. What's going on here? Now, the Gospel Coalition puts a lot of money into their stuff.

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There's no question about it. The production value of Gospel Coalition materials is very high, and the production value of my stuff is as high as I can make it.

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I don't have a big budget. I really don't have a big budget. I pay for very few things. I pay for the music that I use.

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I bought this camera. It's like a $50 camera, $50 microphone, and that's pretty much it.

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You know what I mean? How is this happening? How is this happening? I think that they buy a lot of followers.

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I think they buy followers. I think they buy subscribers and all of that kind of stuff. I can't prove it, but the low engagement numbers when they have high followers tells me that they're probably not real people, which is so interesting.

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Now, why would they do something like this? Why would they do something like this? I don't know, but the

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Gospel Coalition, there's a lot of things that bother me about the Gospel Coalition, but one of the things that bothers me is they essentially are training people, training

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Christians how to lose all the time. How to lose with maybe some style, but to lose.

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They're losers. Now, what I mean by losers is not like they're the dweeb in the corner kind of thing. No, they expect us to lose in the culture.

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They expect the Church of Jesus Christ to be failed failures in the culture, and that's ridiculous.

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They will say things like, well, you can't be too mean on Twitter. Marcus last night was saying how Twitter is for trolling.

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You should troll people on Twitter because, and Marcus is from his perspective, it's not just trolling because you like causing problems.

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It's trolling so that people will respond to you, and they will hear truth because when they engage with you, they're seeing truth all the time.

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You troll them, and then they respond, and they start engaging, and they're hearing truth all that time.

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It's a strategy to spread that Gospel, to spread that message. I think it's a great strategy, a very effective strategy.

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Marcus trolled people yesterday, and he got retweeted by Vox, and so people are mocking him as long as, like crazy, but with the responses, when

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Marcus engages, and when they start to follow his tweets and go through his Twitter logs and try to find things, they call him racist, whatever, they're going to get tons of truth through that process, and God can use that truth in those people's lives.

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It's a very effective way to talk to a lot of people. The Gospel Coalition doesn't train you to do that.

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The Gospel Coalition is only brave with stuff that the pagans agree with, stuff that is acceptable for them to be brave with.

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They'll say, well, we're against porn. They're against porn, but being against porn is popular these days, so it's very safe to do that.

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We're against racism. Okay, great, me too, but everybody's against racism. We're against abortion.

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That's the one that people would say, well, no, not everyone's against abortion, yeah, but they limp -wrist abortion, though, do you understand what

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I'm saying? They don't speak about abortion like a man speaks about abortion. They speak about abortion like a wimp does, like a wimp does, and that's a problem, because people will accept you if you are apologetic about your opposition to abortion, and you admit that women are victims, and it's not really murder murder, but when they get pissed at you is when you start saying, well, it's abortion's murder, you're crushing the skull of an infant.

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You can't do that. You should get the death penalty for that. The Gospel Coalition will never take a brave stand like that, and that's a stand that's very

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Christian. People who commit murder should be killed for that murder. It's just that simple, but the

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Gospel Coalition doesn't take stances like that. They take wimp stances. They take stances that are acceptable, that will allow them a seat at the table.

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Stop following the Gospel Coalition, especially if you're a male, especially if you're a male, because I can understand why a woman might want to be softer about things, might want to engage in a more emotional level and things like that.

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I still don't think you should follow the Gospel Coalition if you're a woman, but I can at least understand it, but if you're a man, the

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Gospel Coalition is not going to tell you how to be a man. The Gospel Coalition is not going to show you how to be brave.

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The Gospel Coalition is not going to show you how to preach Christ as king to a culture who hates him.

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They're not going to prepare you for that. They're just not. And so that's why I'm so glad that my stuff ranks high when you type in Gospel Coalition to YouTube, which apparently not too many people are doing, but when you do it, my stuff ranks high, high there because, and I want to live there.

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I want to live there. I want to own that keyword. You know what I mean? Because listen,

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I might have faults here, but at least I'm going to tell you and show you how to engage some of these topics from a biblical perspective that is uncompromised, that is no holds barred, that doesn't pussyfoot around some of these issues.

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I really hate that kind of thing, where they're walking gentle like a cat. Nah, man, we got to be brutal sometimes.

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We got to be brutal sometimes, and Marcus Pittman was exactly right. Twitter is a war zone. Twitter is a war zone, and we got to treat it like that sometimes.

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I don't know. I mean, like, can you think of any brave stand that Gospel Coalition has taken?

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They don't take brave stands. They only take stands when they think they've got cover. They only take stands that think will appeal to pagans, and that's a problem.

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That's a real problem. Anyway, I hope this video was helpful. God bless. You know,

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I was thinking it makes sense that everyone was having a lot of problems when I said that there are blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, that God's sanctions in history are predictable, and it makes sense that people had a problem with that, especially

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Gospel Coalition types, because again, they're setting us up to lose. They're losing and setting us up to lose, and so of course they would have a loser view of cultural engagement, and when you think about it, no wonder they're socialists, because no matter what the church does, whether we do our job well and we keep that covenant or we do our job poorly and we disobey that covenant, the sanctions are all the same.

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It's just socialism. It's just eschatological socialism when you think about it. That's not how it works, though, boys.

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That's not how it works, though. What we gotta do, of course, is kick down those gates of hell.

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We gotta kick those gates down with brutality, with reckless abandon, and that's how you win.

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So don't buy into the hype of a loser church. We're not a loser church.

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We have the King of Kings. We have the Lord of Lords, and we have the plan of attack that will guarantee victory in time and in eternity.