What is Happening with the SBC with Justin Peters

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00:23

This is Apologetics Live, to answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:40

All right, we are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your apologetics questions. We're gonna have hopefully a very good show for you tonight.

00:48

We got a lot of things on the agenda and a lot of special guests. But the fact is, we're gonna have, well, our other co -host,

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Anthony Especial, was supposed to be back tonight. Not happening, he's not here. Sorry about that.

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He's got some things to take care of. For those who don't know, his father passed away recently, this year, and he's trying to take care of the estate there.

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So that's what's happening there. Be praying for him, be praying for Pastor Justin Pierce.

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His wife is not feeling good, so he cannot be here. And since we're praying, or at least asking for prayer, let me also mention to be praying for Matt and Neek Slick.

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Their daughter, Hannah, was in Los Angeles, was going in for what was supposed to be a routine surgery.

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So there were some complications, and now Matt had to quickly fly down to LA, and he's down there at least now, and he's trying to help take care of his daughter.

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So if you'd pray for that, he thinks, last he told me, he thinks that they're out of the danger zone, but there was some complications that they didn't plan on.

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So that's that. We got a couple people that are gonna come in, give some other announcements that will be coming in.

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Let me get one of them in, out of the way early. Let me bring in Pastor Josiah Nichols here.

02:38

You had been talking with Dr. Svestro about giving a plug for your books that we also end up selling.

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So I'm gonna give this over to you for a couple minutes, so you could share some information about your books. Oh, cool.

02:52

Hi. Yeah, I'm Josiah Nichols, the author of,

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When My Ox Scores My Neighbor, and also the author of, What Does It Mean to Me?

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When I wrote, When My Ox Scores My Neighbor, I wrote it whenever I was, you know, waiting for God to give me a church to minister to, and I thought, well, maybe

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I can just help people out by showing them how to properly interpret the Bible, not according to how, what we want it to mean, but how the authors intended it to mean.

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So I really did a deep dive into, into hermeneutics, the study of biblical interpretation, and I had it almost published when

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I gave it to Andrew Rappaport for a foreword, and he said, we gotta work on some things here.

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So he really helped me out with doing the finishing touches on that, and he wrote the foreword for it, and the, basically,

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When My Ox Scores My Neighbor's written to, it's written in a way it's really easy to follow.

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It takes one passage of scripture, Exodus 21, verses 28 through 32, and it just takes you through that passage and helps you to use the principles of observation and differentiating between the biblical audience and the contemporary audience, drawing principles from the passage, applying those principles, and it also, at the end, gives you a way to transition to the gospel message.

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What I'd like to say with your book there is that it really is a good primer for learning hermeneutics, which is the way we interpret scripture.

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It really, it takes one passage, walks you completely through it, and for people who are new to hermeneutics, wanna learn how to interpret the

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Bible, I find it to be a great resource. Takes on that people go, what in the world does The Ox Scoring My Neighbor have to do with me?

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And walks you through how to interpret it, how to apply it all the way through, and so it's very good for that.

05:21

That's a little bit longer than your other book. Your other book is a little shorter. Yeah, this is 20 pages long, 24, you know, if you wanna add notes.

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Even Justin Peters would be able to get through that one, 20 pages. If he, yeah,

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I think he has a little bit of time. Most of the time we just drink coffee. When I had my surgery a couple weeks ago,

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I was witnessing to my nurses and asking them questions about their beliefs, and I'd tell them about this booklet, and I took like 25 with me, and I had like,

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I think six left by the end of the week. Hey, so real quick, Chris is asking you, in regards to the book, does it come from the historical, grammatical, or Christocentric hermeneutic?

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It is literal, historical, grammatical, contextual. In other words, biblical.

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Okay. Yes, biblical. Yeah, that's, so. So where can people get these books?

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Strivingforeturning .org sells the first book, and if you buy this book, if you buy this, you get this for free.

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So there you go. We also sell the smaller one. I don't know if we have it on the website. If not, I'll make sure

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Webmaster has it up. I think we have it up there as well, but if not, someone will let me know. So thanks for coming in.

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I'm gonna try to get to, I wanna get to someone else real quick before we give you guys more updates.

06:54

Now, many of you know, and I'll bring, I'll bring, there's

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Justin Peters. I didn't know you were gonna be here. How'd you get in here? Just barged my way in.

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Well, see, if you mention his name, he just shows up. But Justin, you and I have been for a long time now, like, it feels like two years now, planning a trip to Israel.

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Yeah. And it's just, if anything could go wrong, it did go wrong. So what

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I wanna do is bring in the man behind the scenes that has been helping us,

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Eric Johnson. And this is the guy that's been doing all the work for our trip.

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We've got some updates with the trip. And Eric, I wanted to let you kind of go over stuff briefly with what's going on with the trip and how things are breaking out now.

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There's been some changes due to all these COVID nonsense and problems with, well, problems with vaccines.

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So could you quickly give us an update on what's the latest status with our

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Israel trips and how people can get involved if they wanna go? Yeah, we have the

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COVID vaccine policy Israel has that has basically, it's gonna eliminate our

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October trip in two weeks if it doesn't change. And we don't think it's gonna change. So on July 15th, we're going to go ahead and cancel that trip.

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And we've already, we're gonna move the people from that trip into two other trips. I happen to have in February and March.

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One, Justin Peters is gonna go on and that is gonna be February 9th.

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And that's a 13 day trip that will be happening in Israel.

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It's a great trip. And then also we're gonna be going in March, another trip that Andrew, you're gonna go on along with Matt Slick.

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You mentioned him earlier in the show. And so there's two different trips, 13 days.

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We don't have much room on that first trip in February. If anybody is interested in joining that trip with Justin Peters, they can certainly let me know.

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My email is eric, E -R -I -C, at mrm .org. And that would be a way for you to sign up without having to pay a deposit if you're interested in that trip.

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That trip is 39 .95. That does not include the air. But it's a great trip.

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You can look at that trip, kccisrael .com is the address for that.

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And then the second trip, we do have a few spots left that you can go on and karmisrael,

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C -A -R -M, israel .com. And you can find out all the details there. That trip is 52 .95

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for 13 days, flying out of Newark. And Andrew, you're gonna be flying on that trip. We have until November to find out if Israel is going to overturn the vaccine policy.

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We honestly believe it will be overturned by then because according to our agency, the authorities they've been talking to from the tourism department are saying they are going to change that in the fall because they're being decimated.

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Trips like ours are getting canceled and Israel does not have many tourists. They really need the tourism back.

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So they're expecting that to happen. And if it happens by November, our trips both will be on.

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If not, they would get postponed. But if you wanted to go on either of those two trips, limited room, you can certainly contact me, ericatmrm .org,

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the February trip, kccisrael .com. And the March trip is going to be karmisrael .com.

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I think if you wanted to go through that, it will answer all your questions. But if you wanted to sign up for that, you can do so by contacting me.

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You don't have to pay the deposit on either one. I will put your name down, you'll be in. And then once the vaccine policy is rescinded, you'll go ahead and pay the $500 deposit.

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And the rest of the money would be due in December. So just a few details. Those who are already signed up for the trip, if you're listening to us, you've already made your decision as to what you're doing.

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We've had some people who are not gonna go, others who are gonna go. We have 11, actually, who are going on the

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February trip with Justin and then 11 more going with Andrew. And also with this guy right there, right underneath me,

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Jim Osmond, he's gonna be there. He will be, Jim will be, yeah. It looks like he's sleeping there.

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Oh, there he is. He's just outside enjoying the nice weather, you know? So this actually, again, this just kind of worked out.

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God is sovereign and works things out. But you guys all know each other and Jim contacted me,

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I don't know, four or five months ago and was interested in doing a trip. So we set one up for him in February for 13 days.

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And so Justin wanted to go anyway. And actually I told

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Justin today, we had that one last spot on the air. So Justin will be able to fly with the group

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Jim Osmond is gonna be leading. So they have from Spokane and from Idaho, I think they have like 30, 35 people or so that are going.

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So it's really a lot of Pacific Northwest type people, but others are gonna be coming from all over the nation.

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Friends of Justin, 11 total, including Anthony's gonna be going on that trip.

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Justin Pierce also will be going on that February trip. Yeah, so it's, and I think that one was one that was, if not full, close to full, right?

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Yeah, literally probably only one or two spots left on that February trip. We had some people transfer over to even out our trips and it worked out great.

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So it is - The advantage of the March trip is we have an archeologist who will be with us,

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Joel Cramer. Yeah, you'll actually have a chance to - That balances out having Matt on it, right? You have

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Matt, but at least you need some benefits. So we have an archeologist. Matt has actually been with me.

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I've taken Matt in 2013 and he got to spend three days with Joel Cramer. He's a good friend of mine.

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He does DVDs. He does videos and he's also an archeologist, lives in Jordan.

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He's so good. In fact, if you're part of the group, I will be sending you videos that I have done of Joel on site at some of these locations.

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So we do get Joel on that March trip. He's hard to get. He has to actually be there for me to actually do it.

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And he happens to be there in March. So three days, we're gonna be seeing some sites that a lot of people don't get to see.

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Bethel and I, I mean, are sites nobody goes to. We'll go to Mamre. We'll go to Hebron.

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We'll drink water out of Jacob's well. Some of the same sites that Jim and Justin get to go to, but we'll add a few others because Joel knows where these places are.

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There are no signs or anything else. You have to kind of know where these places are. So Melissa is asking, so did we cancel our 2021

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Israel trip? Not yet. Basically what we're doing, Melissa, is we're holding off for two more weeks, but it really doesn't look like,

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I mean, Israel originally was gonna open to tourism, I guess, the beginning of July. They pushed at the beginning of August and we have to make a decision by July 16th.

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And so it doesn't look like they're gonna loosen the policy in time after just strengthening it.

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So unfortunately, we're 99 % that we're gonna end up having to cancel because of the policies that they have there right now, and that we're hoping they're gonna drop in the future.

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Right, Eric? Yeah, that's right. Well, and it was individual tourists. It wasn't even anything to do with us, but they were supposed to open up to it.

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They already have the groups open, but for individuals, well, because of the Delta virus strain, they decided to move it back.

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And by moving that back, it pretty much assured they're not gonna make any major decisions, we don't think, until...

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And it won't happen in August. It might not even happen in September, but we really think by October, November.

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Will it be in time for these two trips? We'll have to see, but we have a certain deadline we have to get to before people would lose their whole deposit and we're not gonna sacrifice people's money.

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So the first trip, November 4th, we would just postpone that if it does not get rescinded by November 4th, we'll make it

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February of 2023. So that's the latest, folks. So Eric, thanks for coming on in.

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Now, real quick before you go, you've been helping us with this Israel trip, but why don't you quickly plug the ministry you work for on a full -time basis, so we can know about that.

15:50

Thank you for doing that. I'm with Mormonism Research Ministry. We're a evangelical

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Christian ministry that has been around since 1979. You can go to our website, mrm .org.

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We have written a number of books on the topic of Mormonism, including Mormonism 101 in 2015 with Baker, Answering Mormon's Questions in 2013 with Kriegel.

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2018, I co -edited a book with Sean McDowell called Sharing the Good News with Mormons. And I have one with Harvest House coming out next year called

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Introducing Christianity to Mormons. Mormons are leaving the church in droves and only 10 % become evangelical

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Christians. 45 % of all Mormons who leave end up in atheism, agnosticism, or nothing at all.

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We're having a terrible time here in Utah of a lot of atheists added to, because they're just losing people in droves.

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So we also have a podcast that airs five days a week. It's a live radio, or it's a tape radio show as well on five different radio stations.

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And it's made into a podcast, a 14 -minute show called Viewpoint on Mormonism. You can go to mrm .org

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slash podcast and you can listen to the shows. And also we have a library of over 2 ,500 podcasts that you can go in and on all kinds of different topics.

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Bill McKeever, who founded the ministry in 1979 and I do those podcasts.

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So yeah, we're very active here in Utah. Yeah, they're very short podcasts, about I think 14, 17 minutes, 14 minutes long,

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I think. So some great stuff there, great research being done there. So thanks for coming in,

17:30

Eric. And - Thanks for having me. Don't know if you want to talk about SBC stuff, but that's really outside, you talk about different cults.

17:37

Oh, wait, sorry. Oh, sorry, I'm gonna get myself in trouble. Yeah, a lot of things going on in the Southern Baptist.

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I'm gonna let you guys are the experts. I'm gonna let you guys handle that. I'm gonna stay out of the fray. Well, thanks for coming in,

17:50

Eric. So folks, just to let you know, this weekend on The Wrap Report, we're gonna be dealing with a very scary topic.

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I know it's gonna be coming out on July 4th and we're gonna be talking about a threat to America. So some scary, scary stuff going on within the

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Biden administration. But some good news, KT was letting us know early that Pastor Tim Stevens has been released.

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So for folks who don't know up in Canada, the pastor up there who was arrested, if you didn't see that video, man, that was heartbreaking.

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Seeing him being dragged away by his children, his children sitting there crying and not understanding what's going on.

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And I mean, they could have done that anywhere else had they wanted to. He wasn't resisting, but man, that was hard.

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And as usual, we're being trolled by Chris Honholz. He says, Andrew, getting himself in trouble, what else is new?

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This is a guy who gets trolled by James White, okay? If any of you guys heard the dividing line about two dividing lines ago, at the end, he's even sitting there and giving

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Chris Honholz a hard time on his show. So here's

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Chris, he trolls us, he trolls James and James trolls him back. I don't get that, you know?

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I think Jim Osmond may be having some trouble with his screen there. But we have another person to add to the discussion here,

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Justin. And it is the guy that has been writing a whole bunch on the

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SBC lately. We could see his name right behind him there in bright lights.

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It's Bud the Wiser from the Rap Report. And he just realized, oh, I gotta get my headphones on to hear what they've been saying about me.

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But now he doesn't know what we said, he'll have to go back and listen. It's always fun to read his -

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It's recorded, right? It's recorded. His shirt's always great. It's actually, I've seen like three of those shirts there.

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The same thing, I like to party and by party, I mean read theology. It's I think the third version of that I've seen.

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Bud, welcome. Thank you. How are you? Good evening. Justin, how are you, brother? Doing well,

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Bud, doing well. Good to see you. You too. So, Bud, you have been like writing up a storm at Striving for Eternity lately.

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Oh. And well, there's a lot more that needs to be said and we're counting on Justin to say it tonight.

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You even wrote a, you're trying for Babylon B. I don't know, you should submit your last article, the satire one to Babylon B, because that got a chuckle.

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Yeah, that was, yeah. You know, sometimes I wake up really early.

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Usually it's the Lord, I think, just sort of prodding me, nothing mystical or charismatic, but get up, read, you know, tolelegay.

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And I woke up that morning and that was on my mind. I'm just like, this is so ridiculous.

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This is just satirical. If it weren't so true in a lot of cases, it's just crazy.

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Well, it's kind of like the Babylon B. You know, they say things as a joke and then find out it's closer to reality.

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Yeah. It was fun. So let's talk about the

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SBC, what's been going on. And let me just introduce folks who don't know. Justin, I think a lot of people know you.

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I just introduced Bud, but Jim Osmond, the pastor of Kootenai Community Church in the, shall we say the lovely country of Idaho?

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I don't know. I don't know that he thinks it's that lovely. We prefer the free state of Idaho. Yeah. What do you think about Boise, Idaho?

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That's in Idaho. Yeah, but Boise's kind of like the armpit of the Northwest. I mean, it's in Idaho, but it's really not

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Idaho. He doesn't want to say what he usually says.

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Given the choice between Idaho and hell, which are you gonna choose? If I owned hell and Boise, I would rent out

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Boise and live in hell. We get a great story.

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I'm from the deep South. I'm from Macon, Georgia. And that's the line

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I always use about it. Where are you from? The armpit of the South. Cause it used to be a paper mill town. And in the summertime, woo.

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Well, Bud, someone is saying that, where was it? I just skipped it.

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Someone was saying that you have a great radio voice or the best radio voice. Here it is. Melissa says, Bud has the best radio voice.

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So there you go. Wow, cool. Thank you. I probably got the best face for radio. You got my picture off then.

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Bud, you've been writing a lot on the SBC. Justin, you did a long, I think it was about an hour and a half video on this as well, that we'll put in the show notes.

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Both dealing with some things going on with the SBC, with the new president,

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Ed Litton, and some accusations of plagiarism.

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So I don't know which one of you guys want to start off. Either Bud or Justin, let you guys kind of give us an overview of what's been going on.

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We're going to make Bud, let's make Bud do it. Because - No, let's defer to wisdom. Well, you're

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Bud the wiser. So if we're deferring to wisdom, it's got to be you. Oh, no. No, there's, yeah, there is a lot going on in the

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SBC. I'll announce it now since I've kind of kept it quiet. I had

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COVID for two weeks. And by the Lord's providence, I was home when the convention, the 15th and 16th was going on.

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So I was able to watch both days of the goings on at the convention. Just absolutely ridiculous.

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I mean, it really is very political. There was an agenda at work and that sort of played out.

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And certainly it played out even more egregiously with the events surrounding

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Ed Litton and the plagiarism. And, you know, he's touting integrity and humility and transparency.

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And, you know, I think it was the day after he touted that, he wiped 143,

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I think Justin said, 143 videos from his website because apparently there's some concern with those in light of the plagiarism accusations.

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But there's a lot going on in the SBC and I am not in the SBC. I have escaped the

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SBC, was formerly SBC. But because of its size, because of its influence in broader evangelicalism, it's important to pay attention to what's going on here because you've got all the other mainline denominations that have certainly gone liberal and you have other denominations,

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Methodists and Presbyterians. They're dealing with some of the same issues that you would expect to see the

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SBC dealing with. So it's important to watch. It's the largest Protestant denomination in the

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United States. What they do has influence, whether you're in it or not.

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And so watching it and just lamenting over how the direction of the convention is going,

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I at least wanted to put a few observations out there. But Justin's video, if you have not watched that, incredible, he just kind of walks through, particularly the issue with Lytton.

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People need to be aware of this. I mean, sin's not sin anymore. You know, this -

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It was funny because you and I were talking and you did an article on this whole thing of plagiarism.

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And I said, you know, I just don't, I find it hard to believe that, you know, that even

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J .D. Greer, that this was an original sermon with him. And I said that to you. I said, you know, let's go do some searching.

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I bet we'll find that that was someone else. And sure enough, watching Justin, you know, his video talking with Justin, it's like, yeah,

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Tim Keller. That seems to be the source. Okay. So, you know, and that's one of the things that you and I talked about on our podcast is, you know,

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Lytton kind of put J .D. Greer in a bad position because he either has to do with what they ended up doing. He ended up saying, oh,

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I borrowed it from Greer. And, you know, I just, I should have said that because otherwise he, you know, he ends up admitting that he and Greer both got it from some other source, you know, which you did a really funny satire piece on about Lifeway now selling, having their sermonizing.

26:58

Well, look, it's a pragmatic convention. They'll do anything they can for a buck. And, you know, if this works, let's do it.

27:06

Yeah. So I did link in the show notes here, the articles that you've been writing and the satire one.

27:12

So Justin, why don't you give us a quick overview as well with some of the things that you deal with in your video and what you see as a concern with what's going on in the

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SBC right now. The SBC is an absolute train wreck.

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I really believe without any hyperbole that the SBC is under the judgment of God.

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I really do. I believe it is under God's judgment. I believe it's been under God's judgment for a number of years.

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I know there's still some good guys in SBC, good pastors, good churches.

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Some of those pastors are friends of mine, but I tell you that every time the

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SBC has an opportunity to correct, you know, right the ship, so to speak, it just continues to list further.

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And at this point with all that we're seeing, I really believe God is bringing the ship down.

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God is taking the, he's sinking it himself. And I'm, you know, I think the point has come where I'm not even sure why at this point we would want to save a ship that God himself is sinking.

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I think it's that bad in the SBC that there is rampant corruption.

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There is rampant, a rampant lack of integrity. You see from the current and the immediately preceding presidents of the

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SBC, Ed Litton and J .D. Greer, respectively, you see two men, both of whom are plagiarists, both of them,

28:52

Greer too, and both of these men have said that they believe that the

29:01

Bible whispers about sexual sin. I can't even wrap my mind around that.

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I mean, I knew before I was even converted,

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I mean, I knew when I was in vacation Bible school that the Bible doesn't whisper about sexual sin.

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I mean, it's just, I just find myself at a loss for words. You know, these men, these are the presidents of the largest

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Protestant denomination in the country, supposedly conservative, and they think the Bible whispers about sexual sin.

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And one of the things I said in my video, the Bible doesn't whisper about any sin, much less sexual sin.

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How many, I mean, my goodness, what Bible are they reading? These men are manifestly unqualified to be presidents of the

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SBC. They're unqualified to be pastors. They're unqualified to lead in silent prayer in a church.

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You know, and I know I'm coming across strong, but my goodness, these are not, this is not high -level discernment here.

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This is not high -level theology. This is basic stuff. This is 101 ground -level stuff.

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And if you think the Bible whispers about any sin, much less sexual sin, as much as the Bible has to say about that, then you are manifestly unqualified to be behind the pulpit.

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It honestly makes me wonder about the state of their soul. And, oh, and Ed Litton's supposed apology.

30:40

That's no apology. That's no apology. You know, he only mentioned one sermon, this one that first made news.

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And then as Bud was saying, and I said in my video, he proceeds to remove 143 of his videos from his

30:55

YouTube channel. Well, there's another video out now. I don't know if you saw it, but there's another video out that John Harris played on his podcast where he has another video of the two of them doing yet another sermons.

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I think it was out of Romans chapter eight. His podcast is, I'm trying to look it up now because I forget the name,

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Conversations That Matter, I think. Yeah, Conversations That Matter with John Harris. And he played another video.

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I think it was from Romans chapter eight where it's the same thing. Yeah, it is. It's the same thing. And not only the same points in the sermon, but even the same illustration.

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When you watch that, J .D. Greer, now I'm going to paraphrase him. This is the NIV version of what he said, but he said,

31:40

I can remember when I was in high school taking driver's ed, and the driver instructor was in the passenger front seat and he had this big brake and he could stomp on that brake at any time and let me know that he is the one really in control of this car.

31:56

And then it goes to Ed Litton and Ed Litton says, I can remember being a high school student taking driver's ed and the instructor's over in the passenger seat and he's got this big brake and he can step on it at any time to let me know that he's the one in control of the car.

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I mean, it's the exact same illustration. One, either one or both of them is lying.

32:23

One or both of them is lying. For sure, Ed Litton is lying. And who knows where J .D. Greer, whether he's -

32:30

And you're saying lying because of the fact that I think, Bud, you dealt with this in one of your articles, is the fact that just because he said that he got permission doesn't mean it's not plagiarism and plagiarism is stealing.

32:44

And so when he's saying he didn't steal and didn't plagiarize, that's not true, that's lying.

32:50

Because he didn't give credit, even if he had permission, he still passed it off as his own.

32:57

Yeah, well, I mean, the problem is that the people sitting in the pews in his church, they have no idea where this is coming from.

33:03

They presume it is coming from the studious labors of their own pastor.

33:09

Well, in fact, no, it's just some guy standing up there reading the fruit of someone else's work.

33:17

And I'm suspicious that that someone else is even J .D. Greer. But to Justin's point,

33:24

I just wanna make this observation. On the one hand, with regards to the God whispers about sexual sin issue, you've got the current president and the former president of the

33:35

SBC having preached the same sermon. We know the one was plagiarized. But that issue, consider that in the context of the

33:44

SBC still embroiled in the sexual abuse scandal that it's dealing with. So on the one hand, you've got your president saying, well, just, you know,

33:52

God whispers about this. On the other hand, you've got a independent investigative agency to look into the issues of sexual abuse and a potential coverup in the executive committee and a task force that was created or will be created.

34:06

It was passed as a resolution at this most recent convention. You've got a, how can you not put these things together and say, wow, we may have what really amounts to a theological problem.

34:21

We may have a biblical problem. We can say authority, sufficiency, but over here, we're just not gonna practice it.

34:30

Yeah, well, let me throw this question out to Jim, but Chris asks this, would it be fair to say that Ed Litton and J .D.

34:38

Greer made their statements about the Bible whispering about sexual sin that it is a public relations move so that the secularist won't go after them?

34:52

I suppose it could be a public relations move, but it seems to me that the whole intention behind that is more to soften up the entire denomination or at least their stand regarding sexual sin, mainly because if they make that claim, then they don't have to defend what scripture says to their people.

35:08

They don't have to defend it, obviously, in the public arena, and they're, of course, being seen as more tolerant and loving and kind, which seems to be their whole motivation, which is why they said publicly at the convention that the whole world is watching.

35:21

They seem to be more concerned of what the world thinks of them and how the world will respond to them than what

35:28

God does, and so they make statements like that, that the Bible whispers about sexual sin. I would add to that that if you think the

35:35

Bible, if they think the Bible whispers about sexual sin, what do they think the Bible does concerning the virgin birth of Jesus? The Bible has more to say about sexual sin than it does about the virgin birth of Jesus, so what other type of doctrines, what other theologies now are gonna be up for grabs because the

35:49

Bible has little to say about those things? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I brought up on the podcast that Bud and I did on this was, how many cities,

35:59

Pastor Jim, do you know that were destroyed for greed and materialism? I couldn't get the answer either.

36:09

Yeah, how many cities, you know of any cities that were destroyed because of homosexuality? I know a couple.

36:16

Yeah, I mean, that's not like shouting, not whispering. I don't know. You destroy a whole city, like, that's a little bit more than just, oh,

36:25

I'm just whispering to you. Yeah, that's exactly right. I would just add to what Jim said to make the point that we would all agree on, and any faithful believer sitting in a pew would understand if they've had any exposure to Scripture at all, and that is that it only needs to be in Scripture one time for it to carry the weight of a holy

36:44

God who has inspired it to be there. We don't weigh, you know, we don't do counts of, well, this one gets 10 verses, and that one's got one.

36:53

This one, obviously, is being whispered. No, we don't do that. If it's in Scripture, it's inspired. Yeah, yeah.

37:03

Chris Humpholds says, I get the feeling it was to cater to them. J .D. also said in his sermon that Christians should be defenders of LGBT rights, as I recall, and, you know, this is the thing that, and I think the four of us agree, but the thing that was most striking to me was not the plagiarism, though that is egregious because not only did he play it off as if, oh, it's not a big deal, but now trying to defend that what he did isn't wrong.

37:40

But, you know, Justin, you said this in your video as well, as Bud said in some of his articles and we said on the podcast, is the worst thing is, you know, making light of a sexual sin as compared to greed and materialism.

37:56

Let me ask you this, Pastor Jim, you know, when we look at this issue, why should we be concerned for these men who are previous president, current president of the

38:08

SBC who are making statements like this about homosexuality? J .D.

38:15

I think it portends a horrible thing in the future concerning the entire denomination. They're heading down a slippery slope and it is the same slippery slope the rest of the world is going down and other major denominations have gone down.

38:29

They have slid toward embracing these cultural hot button issues of homosexuality,

38:36

LGBT rights, et cetera. What are they gonna say if somebody comes up in their churches and is involved in sexual sin?

38:45

Well, you know, if I was in their church and I was involved in sexual sin and J .D. Greer and the elders called me on the carpet for that,

38:51

I would just say to them, well, the Bible whispers about this, why are you here shouting in my face about it? And I think that that illustrates one of the dangers of this whole trajectory that they're on is that they are abandoning the authority of scripture.

39:04

They're abandoning the Bible itself and the authority that they have in that office to confront people who live in sexual sin and to confront an entire culture that seems hell -bent, to use a word advisedly, that seems hell -bent to plunge into those areas of sexual sin.

39:26

Yeah, you know, one of the things that, you know, I have been saying to some folks, you know, here we end up seeing this, you know, they did before the vote, they did this whole thing with a woman crying and pulled all these stunts to, you know, kind of smear

39:40

Stone's name. And then they get up there and say, but the world is watching. The world is watching, we have to do this.

39:46

The world is watching. Well, what about now? I mean, the world is watching. Newsweek is the one that,

39:53

Bud, you had the picture in your article of Newsweek pointing out that Ed has removed over 140 of his sermons with this.

40:03

The world is watching, Ed Litton, it's time to step down. But it's very interesting what they're saying about that now because what they're saying now is, well, this is just the conservatives are just trying to get, you know, the more moderate person out of there so that they could take over, you know, the extreme conservatives.

40:23

And as if they're the ones doing the ploy, as if they're the ones trying to do something to remove

40:30

Ed Litton from this position. And yet, you know, it's like the, right out of the

40:37

Democrat playbook. I mean, who is it that plagiarized? It wasn't any of the conservatives there.

40:42

It was, well, maybe J .D. Greer, but definitely Ed Litton, right? And yet he doesn't want to take responsibility for his own actions.

40:51

I mean, Justin, what do you think about the way we've been seeing

40:56

Litton handle this publicly? It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing.

41:03

And just honestly, just repugnant how he has handled this.

41:10

His apology was no apology, deflection. And obviously this problem with him is far, far bigger than that.

41:20

And I think that's what we've seen in that one sermon. And bring up a couple of other points here while I'm thinking about it. Both of these men said, and they plagiarized one another, and they plagiarized, so originally,

41:31

I guess, this came from Tim Keller, who is hardly a bastion of rational thought, theologically speaking.

41:43

But they said that, they both said this direct quote, homosexuality will not send you to hell.

41:51

Do you know how I know that? Because heterosexuality will not send you to heaven. That has got to be one of the dumbest statements

41:59

I have ever heard. And that's saying a lot given the kind of stuff that I'm known for engaging.

42:08

I mean, that is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard, theologically speaking. It is completely illogical.

42:14

It's theologically bankrupt. Homosexuality will send you to hell, as will lying, and being a blasphemer, and an adulterer, and all those other things, but absolutely will send you to hell.

42:27

And if you die in that sin, you will clearly go to hell. Read 1 Corinthians 6, nine through 11.

42:34

But to say that heterosexuality will not send you to heaven as the basis for saying homosexuality will not send you to hell, that has got to be one of the dumbest things

42:44

I have ever heard. Heterosexuality, in and of itself, is not sinful. Heterosexuality was in place before the fall.

42:52

Adam and Eve were attracted to one another before the fall. It's not a sinful state.

42:58

Now, heterosexual sin is sinful, but being a heterosexual is not inherently sinful.

43:07

Murder is not wrong. Murderers don't go to hell. You know how I know? Because not being a murderer doesn't send you to heaven.

43:15

I mean, just replace that. Rape doesn't send you to hell because monogamous faithfulness to your spouse doesn't send you to heaven.

43:23

Stealing doesn't send you to hell because giving to charity doesn't send you to heaven. That's the stupidest. I mean, there's no sin then that sends you to hell since the polar opposite of those sins don't send you to heaven.

43:33

That's just utterly stupid. The fact that somebody would utter language like that is evidence that they're not qualified to be in ministry, let alone stand the pulpit, let alone lead an entire denomination.

43:43

Right. That's the thing that gets me is that these men lead pastors. Okay, so here's my thought.

43:50

When Bud first talked to me about this and he's like, look at what is going on.

43:55

We should talk about this. And I'm looking at it going, you know what got me was, so even if you say, okay,

44:02

Ed Litton got the sermon from J .D. Greer, you know what Ed Litton should have done when listening to that sermon?

44:08

He shouldn't have plagiarized it. He should have called J .D. Greer and go, we need to sit down and correct your theology here, sir.

44:14

Yeah. The fact that he had a full year to listen to that sermon, read that sermon, study that sermon, he still plagiarized it as mind -numbingly stupid of a statement as that is.

44:27

And there were apparently no alarm bells going off in his head. I would have, oh my goodness.

44:34

I would have, oh, I can't even wrap my mind around that. I would have flunked out of seminary if I had half as bad theology as that.

44:42

You know, that - They would have packed my bags for me and shoved me out on the street.

44:49

What were you gonna say, bud? Go ahead, bud.

44:55

No, I was gonna say, the one -year thing, don't miss this, because Greer did his

45:01

January, 2019. Litton did his plagiarized version of it in January, 2020.

45:07

You had a year. And it takes him a year to offer an apology, realizing, oops,

45:15

I didn't attribute this. Why? Because he got caught. That's the reason that an apology was forthcoming.

45:23

This is not the first time. The first time happened at the convention when suddenly his name is still being voted on.

45:31

They haven't reported the numbers yet. And a messenger gets up to one of the microphones to ask, at that time,

45:39

Al Mohler, who was giving his presentation on Southern Seminary. And a messenger got up and said,

45:45

I'd like to ask you, Dr. Mohler, and I'm paraphrasing this, what does

45:50

Southern Seminary teach about the doctrine of God? Because Ed Litton, on his church's website, has a heretical statement.

45:58

And we'd like to know. And Mohler, you know, he had to shuffle a little bit, and he deferred to Dr. Litton, who he was sure would wanna speak to it.

46:07

He didn't wanna speak to it, and he didn't speak to it, but within minutes, the church's website had the heretical statement removed and a reasonably orthodox remainder to it.

46:21

So what is that telling you? He only reacts when he gets caught in something. He did it with the heretical doctrine on the website, and he's done it now with the plagiarized sermons.

46:31

And I don't know which one of you brought this up. One of you brought it up is the fact that, so how did this happen?

46:37

How did this go? It so quickly got changed. A doctrinal statement, typically doctrinal statements need to go through committee and things like that.

46:47

And, Bud, you and I addressed this on our podcast when they blamed, he blamed the webmaster. And I'm like, look,

46:52

I've been in software development for 30 years, okay? As a software developer, you never put out content.

47:00

You develop the website, okay? You design the code and they give you what to put on there.

47:07

Someone has to give that to you. The web developer doesn't just put that out there, okay? So even in my opinion,

47:16

I could be completely wrong. And maybe this web developer is different than every other web developer, but I kind of think they're lying and blaming the web developer for something that they just go, oh, we got caught.

47:26

Our hands are caught in the cookie jar. Instead of like realizing we need to apologize, we'll just smash the cookie jar and blame someone else.

47:35

Yeah. No, this was done by pastoral fiat. This was like a papal ex cathedra statement.

47:40

My church this minute believes this and now it believes this. Why? Because that's what

47:46

I've done. Yeah. I'm gonna show you how malleable they think theology is for their own purposes.

47:53

Yeah, good point. Yep. Yeah, and I wanna bring up another point here and I think this gets kind of to the root of the issue.

48:04

In his apology, in Ed Linton's apology, read it, I presume it's still up, but he actually says we have an eight member team that writes each sermon, each sermon, every single sermon.

48:23

He has an eight member team that does his research that according to him looks into the grammar and the

48:32

Greek and languages and all that kind of stuff. I highly doubt that, but whatever, that's what he says.

48:38

Consults commentaries and all this stuff, an eight member team. Jim, you've been pastor of Kootenai Church for a quarter century now, thereabouts.

48:47

I only have five people do mine. I don't know how they get eight people. Well, and the people you have do yours, that's

48:55

Jim, James, Jim Osmond, Mr. Osmond. You see, yeah,

49:01

Pastor Osmond, Mr. Jim. I mean, basically a lot of different names to call you by. Yeah.

49:08

But that tells you that Ed Linton is. Go ahead, Jim. I was just gonna say, I don't know how you preach a sermon that was written by somebody else.

49:15

I don't understand that at all. To me, I just can't even imagine being that shallow.

49:23

You might as well get up and just read something. And I don't understand how you can preach something that was composed by eight different people when you didn't create it yourself.

49:32

It goes entirely against the grain of what the nature of a sermon is and the purpose of a sermon is.

49:38

It's not, if you're getting up and reading something or saying something that were words that were prepared for you by somebody else, that ceases to be a sermon.

49:46

That ceases to be an exposition of scripture. And therefore, whatever he's doing is just reading other people's words in front of his congregation.

49:55

Well, that's why I said he turned his money that he was getting paid as being a pastor because he wasn't doing his job.

50:01

I mean, when Bud and I dealt with this, I pointed out the fact that both of them are reading the sermon.

50:07

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a sermon where you have everything written out. In fact, I mentioned Phil Johnson has all of his sermons written completely.

50:18

Manuscripted out, yeah. He is a complete man. I've actually watched him preach with his manuscript. I've had his manuscript on my iPad and I watched him preach.

50:26

You can't tell he's reading it because he knows the content so well that he's dealing with it as if it's from him.

50:37

You know why? Because it's actually from him. But both of those guys had to read. And here's the interesting thing.

50:44

This is the thing that was so telling. They're reading personal stories, okay?

50:50

You do not need to read a personal story. It's a personal story. Okay, when you have guys that have a personal story, when

50:57

Justin, you see Justin talk about in his seminar about his friend that he grew up with that he knows is a good friend and he just, he comes to mind and Justin prays for him.

51:09

Justin doesn't have to look down at notes for that. Right? He knows that. These are personal stories that we don't have to look at notes for, but these guys were reading notes on a personal story.

51:22

That to me told me that there's something, they don't know the content well enough.

51:28

Even if eight men did help them write it, they haven't, that sermon has not gone through them because they don't know the content well enough yet to be able to just say it.

51:40

Phil Johnson can just say what, even though he's gonna say exactly what's written down, he can do that because he worked on that sermon.

51:47

It went through him. Those are his words. Yeah, when I said, Jim was my pastor for several years.

51:56

Kathy and I lived in Idaho. I would not have sat under - Do you miss that?

52:01

I mean, you left. What was wrong with him, Jim? What in the world?

52:07

He left the world's best church for grandchildren? I mean, really, you gotta get your priorities here.

52:22

But I would not have sat under him if I did not know that he had spent hours and hours and hours during the week studying, preparing.

52:35

I wanna know that the man I'm listening to rightly divide the word of truth, exposit scripture, has been impacted by that same scripture.

52:44

I wanna know that man has studied it. I wanna know that it has saturated his mind. It has filled his heart.

52:51

He has been conformed more into the image of Christ through the study of his word and that it saturates his being, that he believes it and that he lives it.

53:03

And if I don't get that sense from a pastor, I'm not sitting under that man.

53:10

Not in a million years. You know, not that any pastor has to be perfect because no one is, but I wanna know that man has devoted himself to the study of God's word and prepared that message.

53:24

And I mean, I can go pick up a copy of Macbeth and read it to someone.

53:30

You know, it doesn't mean I wrote it. It doesn't mean I understand it. It doesn't mean it has made any impact on me. You know, you can get a trained monkey to get up and perform, but I wanna know when it comes to something, we have so lost sight of the magnitude of the responsibility that lays, that is at a pastor's feet to preach the word of God.

53:56

We're not expositing green eggs and ham here. We're talking about the word of God. And it is just such a low view of scripture, a low view of preaching, a low view of God.

54:08

And, you know, I find myself wondering when these men made such horrific statements from the pulpit,

54:17

I would think anyone in that church that had any kind of theological wherewithal about them whatsoever would have been lined up outside of the pastor's door.

54:29

What do you mean by this? What do you mean? The Bible whispers about sexual sin.

54:35

There should have been a line a mile long outside of J .D. Greer and Ed Linton's office after they preached those sermons.

54:42

I think you have to get tickets to get into the green room, Justin. Yeah. Probably, there may have been a line, but I'm suspicious there's any success.

54:51

The thing is, people in those churches love it that way. They swim in that circle.

54:58

So it's just like what Jeremiah writes in Jeremiah 5 .30, an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land of the prophets.

55:03

Prophets love it falsely. The priests rule on their own authority and my people love itself. So the corruption in the leadership ends up, these men, even though they would vocally and publicly say that, they would denounce false teachers who tell people what they want to hear and scratch their itching ears, they're doing the very same thing.

55:23

And the fact that they can get up in a congregation like that and say such horrendous things and nobody leaves, nobody calls into account, nobody's outside their door on Monday morning demanding an answer, an explanation, shows you that the people that sit in the pews that have gathered around these men love that kind of compromise.

55:43

They love that kind of message. Yeah, that's right. And apparently, no one went up to J .D.

55:49

Greer after he preached that sermon in January of 2019 and said, hey,

55:54

J .D., you know what you said there about the Bible whispering about sexual sin? That's not right.

56:01

And J .D. knew that Ed Linton was going to preach his sermon and he didn't go to Ed Linton and say, hey,

56:09

Ed, I just, I really blew it. There's a really bad thing I said in this sermon.

56:14

I mean, it's like no alarm bells going off. And that's after, because even J .D. Greer had gotten some flack when he had said that.

56:22

He should have. Rightfully so. Chris Honholtz from Voice of Reason Radio, one of the other podcasters at Christian Podcast Community says this.

56:31

When a pastor prepares a sermon, two things should be in mind. One, glorifying

56:36

God, and two, shepherding the sheep God gave him. At no time should a quote, off -the -shelf unquote sermon be considered doing that.

56:47

And I think he nails it right there. Yeah. You know, so I'm gonna, I wanna bring someone in, but before I do,

56:55

I just, you know, here's the thing that really puzzles me, you know, and it's amazing how these guys could sleep at night.

57:03

But I think I know the reason. I think I know the reason. The reason these guys can sleep at night is very simple, because these guys have gotten themselves a

57:14

MyPillow. See, now this is Robert McIver. He sent in a pillow, a picture of his MyPillow.

57:20

There he is sleeping on his MyPillow that he got with the promo code SFE for his pillow.

57:27

And if you guys wanna save on your pillow and get a good night of sleep, you can do the same. If you have a picture of you with your pillow, send it in to us at info at strivingforeturning .org,

57:38

and we'll be glad to show that as well. But if you want to get a great night's sleep,

57:44

I have, Bud is like laughing, because I've been talking about this on our show. I got the mattress topper from MyPillow.

57:54

I used the promo code SFE so I can get the $100 off. But other than getting my sleep comfort bed, that has been the one thing that has given me a great night's sleep.

58:04

And Justin, you know I don't sleep very much, but I actually have been getting a really, really good night of sleep with the mattress topper.

58:13

I love that thing. But it is, so these are products made here in the United States. I know

58:19

Jim likes that fact. But you know, there's the design of it is,

58:26

I don't know, they're just really well designed, get to get a good sleep, gives you a good comfort. It manages the temperature somehow.

58:35

But it is a great product. I think if you do it with the promo, you even get two pillows.

58:41

I'm not sure if they're still running that. But you know, you can get yourself, if you don't have a MyPillow, you need to get one.

58:48

They're great products. You know, this is something that not only can you get a good night's sleep, but you can also support

58:56

Striving for Eternity as they support this show. So really consider going out and getting one. If you wanna call them, the number is 1 -800 -873 -0176.

59:07

It's on the screen there, 1 -800 -873 -0176.

59:12

If you're listening on the podcast, I'll have it in the show notes. But if you just go to mypillow .com, you click on the radio,

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I think it says radio promo. Let's see what it says. I forgot what it says.

59:27

Radio listeners is what the square says. And if you go to click on radio listeners, just use the code

59:32

SFE and you'll get your discount. So let me bring in now, you guys have not been able to enjoy what

59:39

I've been able to enjoy as the host. But we have someone backstage that while you guys are talking, his antics are just classic.

59:47

I'm watching him fist pump you guys. And he's pointing at the, it's really entertaining.

59:52

So we should just keep him here just in case, just as we talk, just for the antics of it.

59:58

But it is none other than the host of Matter of Theology, Mr. Chris Honhoff.

01:00:04

Sorry, Chris, Chris Honhoff. Hey, I will take the microphone, that is fine.

01:00:13

Brothers, how are you this evening? Chris, doing well, brother. How about yourself?

01:00:18

Good to see you. Doing very well. Good to see you, Justin. I thoroughly enjoyed your video, bro. There's so much to say.

01:00:27

And I feel like you guys have done a phenomenal job. Just a couple of things, if I may, speaking of reading others' materials,

01:00:37

I'm gonna pull up a quote real quick. So my camera may disappear, but an avatar with my face will show up. I apologize to all.

01:00:45

So I'm gonna read this quote. It's a black screen, we prefer that better. Okay, even better.

01:00:53

This is a quote by Martin Lloyd -Jones. D. Martin Lloyd -Jones said this, quote, a preacher who does not preach his sermon to himself before he preaches it to anybody else is exposing himself to hypocrisy.

01:01:07

He is in a very dangerous condition, period, close quote. And I mean, if that does not describe what we have seen in Ed Litton, J .D.

01:01:23

Greer, the fact that they are parroting sermons word for word from others shows, two things that stand out to me, and I've said this to a few people, it brings reproach on the name of the

01:01:36

Lord. And it's lying, it's deception, it's at its core, it's idolatry.

01:01:45

And the idol there is the world is watching instead of I want

01:01:50

God's favor and the fact that God himself is watching. It's a reproach upon his name.

01:02:01

Speaking of the whispering aspect, Justin, and I love the way you highlighted this in your video, but my mind immediately went to Colossians chapter three, verse five, just one verse, and then

01:02:12

I have one more thought to share and then I'll be quiet. Colossians 3 .5 out of the

01:02:17

Legacy Standard Bible says this, therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and greed, which is idolatry.

01:02:31

So it starts with the core sin of idolatry and it works backwards. But Paul said to put your earthly,

01:02:38

I mean, consider the members of your earthly body as dead. That is anything but whispering.

01:02:46

So, and on a positive note, I'll say this, I continue to praise

01:02:53

God for times like these. I continue to thank the Lord for times like these because, nice,

01:02:59

Hanholt, Hanholt said, I don't mind being confused with the hot. Thanks, brother. So I praise the

01:03:06

Lord for seasons like this because here's what God continues to do. And we have seen this in huge ways over the last 15, 16 months.

01:03:15

God is continuing to show the wheat from the tares and he's continuing to purify and build his church.

01:03:24

So I praise God that stuff like this comes to light. I praise God for you brothers who continue to stand in the gap and say, we need to be concerned about this.

01:03:33

But in all seriousness and honestly, from the side of the elect,

01:03:39

God's chosen elect, what a wonderful time to be a part of his bride and to watch him build and purify his church.

01:03:50

So that's all I had to say right now. There was, you know, I could say a lot more to that, but.

01:03:55

As it's getting darker outside, we're not seeing, you know, with the black screen, you know, we don't see all the fist pumping going on.

01:04:02

And you did look like you were supporting Black Lives Matter there for a while with the complete black screen. I gotta bring

01:04:08

Josiah Nichols back in because I've been watching him just, he's been tearing apart his bed there to show his mattress topper.

01:04:18

I've been watching the whole time. He's like, hey, he's pulling it off the bed. So there you go.

01:04:24

That's the mattress topper. Josiah, you enjoy your mattress topper. I know you actually told me that your wife, it's helped her, not only her sleep, but some of her,

01:04:35

I guess, health issues with getting a good sleep helped with that. Yeah, both my wife and I, as Vex, were always hurting whenever we got up in the morning, or me, or not.

01:04:47

So I get up in the afternoon. So when we got this, she doesn't get up in pain anymore, and neither do

01:04:59

I. So, I mean, I still got back issues from my skeletal structure not being what it should be, but I don't wake up in pain anymore because of this mattress topper.

01:05:13

And it's really easy to put on your bed, too. It just has these little flaps on that you put under your mattress.

01:05:21

And it's native polyurethane foam, which

01:05:29

I'm guessing that means baby angels. That's what I'm guessing. I've been sitting here the whole time watching as you guys are speaking.

01:05:38

I get to watch Chris Huff doing the fist pumps and go, come on, like Justin's speaking, I'm seeing this, like, come on, come on, come on.

01:05:46

And now I'm watching Josiah rip his bed apart. It's kind of funny, the things

01:05:52

I get to see behind the scenes with the guys. So, yeah, so Chris, do you have anything more you want to add?

01:06:04

I mean, it's one of those things, too. I had this thought watching Justin's video this afternoon.

01:06:11

You know, even if God did whisper, it would still be louder than the loudest shout any of us could ever muster.

01:06:23

He doesn't, but even if he did, it's not...

01:06:29

James tells us where sin comes from. Sin does not come from an action.

01:06:36

It comes from the lust inside of us, James says. So it's ridiculous to say something like that.

01:06:44

It's ridiculous to say that the sin of homosexuality is an affliction and not a sin of choice because of an unanswered prayer.

01:06:53

That's just biblically irresponsible. So on that note, they are both unqualified.

01:06:59

But the fact that they would willingly deceive and then only show worldly remorse instead of biblical repentance, they need, both of them need to resign immediately.

01:07:11

And if they don't, they are showing that they are not repentant. And, you know, according to Thomas Watson, those of us who know the truth and continue in willful sin, that brings a bigger reproach on the name of Christ.

01:07:25

So it's heartbreaking and incredibly frustrating. Yeah, absolutely,

01:07:33

I agree 100%. So Chris, if you want to come back in, I'm gonna put you backstage, just let me know.

01:07:40

I should leave you in here for, where was that quote? Here you go, from Chris Honhold says, boom, straight truth from the huff.

01:07:48

Thanks, brother. Okay, so Justin, let me ask you, you sent me some videos.

01:07:55

You sent me a couple of videos for us to play. Which do you want to play first?

01:08:00

Play that one by James Merritt. Okay, so let's - Okay, so James Merritt is the - Yeah, you go ahead.

01:08:07

Does anyone of you remember the name? I can't remember the name of the church he pastors off the top of my head, but he is a former president of the

01:08:13

SBC. So this is a bit dated, you know, this is 2007, but watch, okay, watch what he says.

01:08:22

Just go ahead. I mean, just play it. I love pastors and I know that Father's Day is coming and I want to give you something.

01:08:32

If you'll go to pastorsedge .com and go to the newsletter section, there's a

01:08:37

Father's Day message there complete with PowerPoint notes for your people, a complete manuscript. And I hereby authorize you to preach every word you're not plagiarizing.

01:08:45

So just enjoy yourself, okay? But tonight I was given a topic of holiness.

01:08:54

So there you go. Okay, the levels, the levels of error and sin here.

01:09:07

Okay, he says, go to pastorsedge .com or whatever, download my sermon, everything's there,

01:09:15

PowerPoint, slides, manuscript, everything outlined. And he says, I give you permission to preach this in your church on Father's Day.

01:09:24

And so it's not plagiarism. Yes, it is. It is plagiarism. Unless every man who downloads his sermon, takes his advice and gets that stuff, unless he begins his sermon by saying this, there is not a single original thought that is about to be presented to you.

01:09:41

Everything I'm about to say to you, I got directly from James Merritt. I spent no time in study this week.

01:09:48

This is all someone else's material, but I thought it was pretty good, so here we go. And you start reading.

01:09:53

Unless you do that, yes, it's plagiarism. But then he says, right after he tells every man in that, whoever's listening to him at the convention, he basically tells every man in there to sin.

01:10:09

And then he says, the topic I've been assigned tonight is holiness. What?

01:10:17

What are you talking about, holiness? I mean, I'm just gobsmacked by this.

01:10:23

This is a, and Jim Osmond and I were talking about this the other day on the phone. This is a culture in the

01:10:30

SBC. It's not just Ed Litton, as bad as that is. It's just a culture in the

01:10:36

SBC. Rick Warren, who, if Southern Baptist had a pope,

01:10:44

Rick Warren would be the Southern Baptist pope for at least the last two decades. I mean, he is basically the

01:10:50

Southern Baptist pope, or at least has been up until very recently. Rick Warren has a website,

01:10:59

PastorSermons or SermonsPastor, whatever the heck he is. And he encourages people, he encourages people, men, and now women,

01:11:08

I mean, that's a whole other issue. You just ordained some women. I'm sorry, I'm getting worked up here. But he encourages people to go and download his sermons and get up and preach them.

01:11:17

And at one point, there were at least 5 ,700 different churches, most, the vast, great majority of them

01:11:28

Southern Baptists, that were preaching Rick Warren's sermons on a Sunday morning, for all intents and purposes, word for word.

01:11:37

5 ,700, the vast majority of those Southern Baptists preaching his sermons, word for word.

01:11:45

And of course, I went and checked just the other day, and $4 per download.

01:11:52

So that's pretty good money, $4 per download, 5 ,700 each week. This is the culture in the

01:11:58

SBC. This is, nobody's saying anything about this. This is, this is, this is promoted.

01:12:05

This explains why the apology that you get from Ed Litton is such a mealy -mouthed, milk -and -toast apology.

01:12:13

I mean, he honestly does not think that what he did was wrong. And so the apology, of course, is going to reflect it, but I've been doing this, everybody does this.

01:12:22

Like, why am I being called to account? Why am I being held to a different standard? Rick Warren's been doing this for 25 years, minimum.

01:12:29

And Mary's been doing this for this amount of time. And now I get called, I'm the president of the Southern Baptist denomination.

01:12:35

Now all of a sudden, everybody's in a big to -do over this. We have to be honest about the fact that nobody in the leadership of the

01:12:41

Southern Baptist Convention has had a problem with this approach to preaching for at least the last 20 years, probably better going on 30 years.

01:12:50

And so now all of a sudden, everybody is up in arms about it. Is there anybody in leadership of the Southern Baptist denomination, the

01:12:57

Southern Baptist seminaries, or Lifeway Christian Resources that would think that this is bad?

01:13:04

This is the culture of the entire denomination, and therefore, when the leadership does it, and all of a sudden, people point it out, the leadership has to be sitting there wondering, like, why am

01:13:13

I getting accused of this? It'd be like a kid who, every night after dinner, he goes in and he puts his hand in the cookie jar and takes cookies without asking, and he's been doing it for years, and his siblings have been doing it for years, and all of the aunts and uncles have been encouraging him to do it for years, and nobody says anything.

01:13:30

And then all of a sudden, one person outside the household raises this as an issue, and then everybody in the family turns to the kid and says, yeah, you really should apologize for doing that.

01:13:38

And the kid would be right to ask himself, why in the world am I being asked to apologize for this? We've all been doing it, and this is the worst kept secret in the world.

01:13:45

So why am I called to account for it? That's exactly what's going on with this supposed controversy.

01:13:51

That's what makes Bud's satirical article so grand, because it really is like, if you can find a way to make money off it, hey, yeah, but then there's nothing wrong with this.

01:14:00

Life -wise sermons for sale. Jim, are you aware of any sermons of yours that have been stolen and preached?

01:14:08

I mean, why don't they ever steal it from somebody's sound? They're not gonna have heard a

01:14:13

MacArthur sermon. Yeah, there's plenty of guys that they get to, if you ever listen to the testimonies at master's graduates, you have the guys that they admit that they were preaching, they would start off by just preaching

01:14:24

MacArthur sermons. And Bud, we shared on our podcast,

01:14:30

I had a pastor who contacted me from Georgia. His brother, he had a dilemma.

01:14:35

His brother found out that his pastor was preaching MacArthur sermons. How did he find out? Because his pastor has never been out of the state of Georgia and his pastor is sitting there in the sermon talking about growing up outside of Philly.

01:14:50

I was like, wait a minute, you've never been out of Georgia. How does this? So he starts

01:14:55

Googling and searching. Well, we don't want to do Google. Ducked up going and finds out, oh, that's

01:15:01

MacArthur's sermon. And literally he just started looking ahead and finding out every sermon was MacArthur's sermon every week.

01:15:08

That's where you turn to a guy and say, can you return the money we gave you for pastoring? You weren't doing the job you were getting paid to do.

01:15:19

Do you want us to go to the next video you sent? Trying to remember what that was.

01:15:25

It was the one with the apology for LGBT comments. Oh yeah, yeah, we could.

01:15:31

Yeah, sure, why not? You want to set this one up? So I didn't put this together.

01:15:39

I'm not going to take credit for it, especially in light of what we're talking about. Yeah, that would be bad for you to take credit for this.

01:15:45

So I think this is a YouTube channel, doctrinal watchdog, if I remember right, where this comes from.

01:15:51

Yes, that's where it's from. This clip will also speak for itself. You know that the

01:16:05

Bible never gives the classification of heterosexual or homosexual. You may find a translation that may use the word homosexual, but it's only because it's in the modern vernacular.

01:16:17

Oftentimes, and I'm confessing a mistake in thinking, a mistake in theology. I've often interpreted this passage to say homosexuality is the sin he's talking about, and everything he mentions afterwards is a spiraling down because of that sin.

01:16:33

Now, it is true that once we enter into certain sins, we do spiral down. We don't evolve, we devolve spiritually.

01:16:41

But I now believe that is not what Paul is saying here. In the Bible, sexual sin is whispered compared to the shout

01:16:51

God makes about greed and judgmentalism. Stand up and be among the fiercest advocates for the preservation of the dignity and the rights of LGBT people.

01:17:01

Jesus representing churches will be known as the friends of the

01:17:06

LGBTQ community. That is stunning.

01:17:16

You know, Bud, there's something you have there that you wanna say for this?

01:17:22

No, no, no. It just, I was listening to both of them and it reminded me of. A screaming goat?

01:17:30

The screaming goats. It's easy to see what the agenda is.

01:17:38

I mean, it's not hard to see what they were. They wanna take the entire denomination. Right. Yes.

01:17:44

So now this raises the question, guys, why are the solid guys staying with that denomination?

01:17:51

That is what is unanswerable to me. I do not get it at all. They've seen it.

01:17:57

It's not like this happened overnight. It's not like they have had no warning. It's not like they haven't seen it happening.

01:18:03

We've seen it happen with the woke issue. We're seeing it with the social justice issue. We're seeing it happen now with the homosexuality, the

01:18:11

LGBT, transgender issues coming into the Southern Baptist denomination. They've been fighting this fight and pushing back on it for a long time.

01:18:17

And they have been unable to make any perceivable headway or any advance whatsoever for the truth.

01:18:25

And so you just have to, I just wanna sit down with these guys and ask them, what are you fighting for? Where are you told in scripture to try and save a denomination?

01:18:36

Yeah, they've done a lot of good, but why are you trying to rescue this denomination? Don't you have enough to do just in shepherding your own people that you think you have to try and shepherd people who the

01:18:46

Lord has not given to you and rescue churches that the Lord has not put under your charge? How much effort and work has gone into trying to save this denomination when obviously the leadership and the majority of the people in the denomination do not want truth?

01:19:02

They do not want biblical teaching. So why are the good guys sticking in it? I don't get it. I don't understand it, and I don't think

01:19:08

I ever will. Well, you know, that's where, you know, Kofi had a great point on this was, you know, the fact that where are we gonna spend our time?

01:19:17

I mean, the reality with what you said, Jim, is the fact that they're not shepherding their people. They're not focused on their flock.

01:19:22

They're focused on their politics, on the denomination and the status they can get at being president or whatever.

01:19:28

But this is not shepherding the people. They're probably justifying it saying, I don't have time to work on sermons because I got so many other things to do.

01:19:36

Working on sermons is your primary responsibility. This is your job.

01:19:43

The other stuff - I'm talking about the good guys. I'm talking about the good guys. Why are the good guys sticking around there? But then you carried over to the good guys.

01:19:50

The point there is, I think that you have people who are just not, we got to get to the question of how much are we gonna spend time, or what are we gonna spend our time on?

01:20:03

You know, are we gonna spend our time on trying to save a denomination that's, you know, okay, so what?

01:20:08

You saved it for a couple of years? They've already set this trajectory. They're willing to soften the issue of abortion and not address the issue of CRT, right?

01:20:20

There was a proposal for the issue of abolition. And what did they do? They needed to soften that.

01:20:27

And they were saying that they'll edit and work on. But when it was brought up to revise the

01:20:33

Proposition 9 from years ago, no, no, no, that's already done. We don't want to edit things like that, you know?

01:20:43

What would do more to advance the truth? If those men stick around and have these conversations year after year, resolution after resolution, discuss, debate, bring it to the floor, do the convention every two years, new president, try and fight this going on for 10, 15, 20 years now.

01:20:57

And they're gonna do it for another 10, 15, 20 years. They're not gonna be able to overcome this momentum, this slide to the left.

01:21:03

What's gonna do more for the truth? To continue to sit there and nibble around the edges like a duck? Or if they were to just, every last one of them, to a man, all the good guys, all the solid guys, get up and say, we are done, we are leaving the denomination.

01:21:17

You have written Ichabod above the door, so you have it, you get it, you own it now.

01:21:23

So let the world watch and let the world watch what happens when all the faithful men leave you. That is a testimony to the truth.

01:21:29

These guys are trying to say the denomination is that the denomination is gonna be the testimony of the truth. They should leave the denomination as a statement of the testimony of the truth.

01:21:37

And it should be done on a national scale. It should be a coordinated effort. And every last one of them, to a man,

01:21:42

Josh Bites, Tom Buck, Gabe Hughes, all of them should write their statements and release them all on the same day.

01:21:48

There should be a mass exodus from the Southern Baptist denomination. And every last one of them should say, we're done, you've written

01:21:54

Ichabod above the door and we're done. You want nothing to do with the truth. We want nothing to do with you. We will stand for the truth and you guys can slip, slide away into a

01:22:02

Christless eternity and take all your goats with you. That's what they should say. And they should say, because the world is watching.

01:22:10

Yeah, that's exactly right. Because the world is watching. I love those guys. I think those guys are faithful men.

01:22:15

I think their motives are right, but I do not understand the mindset of why they just do not abandon it in whole.

01:22:22

Well, Jim, I mean, that's a valid question. And it's one I've had.

01:22:28

And I mean, I was watching the thing live and I knew a few of the pastors who were there as messengers.

01:22:33

And as the thing progressed, I'm getting text messages saying, well, going back home,

01:22:39

I'm gonna lead my church out of this. So there are faithful pastors who are recognizing that.

01:22:44

And then you've got some that are more platformed that seem to be in it for the fight. And I think part of the reason for that is they look back 20 years ago to the conservative resurgence, which took five, 10 years to conquer and win on the issue of the inerrancy of scripture.

01:23:02

And they did, they prevailed in that. And I think they're willing to do that. But I get behind it and ask the question, what is worth saving?

01:23:10

And what I have heard now, not from platform guys, but from some of the other SBC pastors that I know around the country.

01:23:16

And it is the answer of, well, we need to be doing missions. Okay, well, how confident are you after looking at what the seminaries are teaching, what the denomination proper, the leadership of it, the things that they are doing, how confident are you that the money that you're giving for missions overseas or domestic remotely resembles a gospel that you would let one of those guys come in and preach in your church?

01:23:45

How are you assured that what they're proclaiming and what they're preaching is actually sound? It's a disconnect.

01:23:53

Who is the denomination sending out? If this is what the denomination's putting into their leadership, who are they sending out into the rest of the world?

01:24:01

Right. And why would you wanna support that? Why do you think that that's worth supporting? Yeah. Right, exactly.

01:24:08

Absolutely. Yeah. One of the comments, one of the guys said in the chat was that there needs to be a coordinated exit strategy.

01:24:15

I agree with that entirely. There should be a coordinated exit strategy. And if the trickle happens, then basically the denomination is gonna go into a slow decline and it's gonna be unnoticeable like a frog in boiling water.

01:24:30

So yeah, every year you have two or three pastors that go back and say, I'm leading my congregation out of this. And probably out of the pastors that go back and want to exit the denomination, they're gonna be met with resistance from the old guard that doesn't wanna lead the denomination.

01:24:44

So the people that say they're going to actually don't, and then a few of them do. Yeah, every year there's probably a handful of churches that lead the denomination.

01:24:51

But nobody's gonna notice that. That's no testimony to the world at all because the world doesn't notice that.

01:24:57

But if every last one of the good guys got up and walked out, the world would have to take notice. And it wouldn't be a slow drift into apostasy that would almost be noticeable.

01:25:06

It would be an absolute plummet right off the edge in the leftism. And the world would see that and it would be a testimony for the truth.

01:25:14

And they wouldn't be able to say, oh, that was just some extremist right -wingers like they've been trying to say.

01:25:19

No, this is the majority of folks. And then I think that might wake up some of the others to go, wait, why is everyone leaving?

01:25:25

What's really going on? You know, let me put this question that was asked in the chat for you guys to answer.

01:25:32

The question is how do we go about talking to our elders and pastors on these issues if they haven't already addressed them?

01:25:42

Who wants to take that one first? Okay, I'll give it to -

01:25:49

Somebody else with a little bit of a more gentle tone should probably take it. Justin, you've got the velvet glove around the iron fist.

01:25:56

Why don't you try it? Yeah, Justin hadn't been fired up tonight. I'm not sure how velvety I've been tonight. Justin and velvet glove,

01:26:03

I don't know. But Justin, what do you think? How should someone go about talking to their pastor?

01:26:11

Well, oh gosh. I mean, there's a lot of pastors out there that don't understand what critical race theory is and intersectionality is.

01:26:21

But you know, you don't, we all understand what the Bible teaches about homosexuality.

01:26:28

And when you've got the current and preceding presidents, presidents of the

01:26:34

SBC saying that God whispers about sexual sin and homosexuality will not send you to hell, then that's,

01:26:44

I mean, that's softball stuff. You know, that's easy. That's the ball sitting on the tee.

01:26:49

And I don't know, I just, you know, I guess just bring, ask them what, how can you stay or why should maybe say how, why should we stay in a denomination that is clearly veering into apostasy?

01:27:05

Why should we stay at, you know, why should we stay with it? God doesn't, God doesn't need the

01:27:10

SBC. God does not need the SBC or any other denomination for that matter.

01:27:17

And yeah, I don't know. It's, I mean, speak to your pastors and elders gently, but firmly on this.

01:27:27

I think it's, I agree with Jim. It's time to get out. And when, and the reason

01:27:32

I wanted you to play that clip a minute ago, Andrew, is, okay, how stunning is it when you hear the president of the

01:27:38

SBC say that the Bible does not have a word for homosexuality?

01:27:44

What Bible is he reading? What? Is this a new Lifeway Bible?

01:27:50

The SBC Lifeway Bible that just takes all that out? Nothing in there. Josiah's comments here is absolutely right.

01:27:59

Malakoi, effeminate, arsenokoitai. Arsenokoitai, okay, yeah. 2000 years ago, yeah, there was not a word that said homosexual, but arsenokoitai, it basically means men laying with men.

01:28:16

I mean, that's the sense of that word. So what do you think that means?

01:28:21

I don't know. I mean, my goodness. I mean, it's just, I just,

01:28:27

I'm shocked, shocked. This is the kind of stuff you would expect to find in Episcopal church with a lady pastor with a rainbow whatever draped around her neck.

01:28:40

I would expect that there. I would expect that kind of idiocy, theological idiocy in a church like that.

01:28:50

In the SBC, it's a sad state of affairs. I mean, it is a sad, sad state of affairs.

01:28:58

Yeah, so we've got a question that came up. We kind of answered it before, but Canadian Carlos is asking, brothers, can you please talk about Ed Litton's apology?

01:29:09

So we talked about it briefly. You missed it, but when you guys want to cover it.

01:29:14

It wasn't an apology. He isn't really sorry. He's been doing it for years. All of his leaders have been doing it for years.

01:29:20

His peers have been doing it for years. He's following the example of other Southern Baptists. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar for something, doing something he didn't really think is sinful or wrong at all.

01:29:29

And he's done nothing but make excuses for it since the whole thing came to light. It's only people outside of his circles that see it as wrong, not anybody within the leadership of the

01:29:38

SBC. Yeah, it's posturing for optics. Yeah. As with everything else, it's, oops,

01:29:46

I got caught. Let me see how to recover from this. He doesn't think it's wrong. Nobody in leadership as SBC does.

01:29:54

That's the end of the sentence. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I find funny, I was talking with, you know,

01:30:00

John Harrison, and it's like, every time they try to get out of the mess they got themselves into, they get themselves in a bigger mess.

01:30:08

It's like, well, let me lie to get out of this one, but now I got caught with this lie, and then I got caught with the next one.

01:30:14

It's like, they just keep making a bigger mess. But it goes to Justin's point. They're under judgment.

01:30:21

They're not gonna wiggle out of this. That's right. The Lord has, the Lord by his providence is orchestrating this.

01:30:27

And until you see repentance and a return to the word, it's only gonna get worse.

01:30:34

Yeah. That's right. I agree, bud. I'm glad you said that. If, in fact, that is what is happening, and I'm absolutely convinced as much as I know my name, that God is the one bringing this ship down.

01:30:50

God is sinking the SS SBC. He's sinking it. He is the iceberg that has punctured the hull, and it is going down.

01:31:01

Why try to save something that is clearly under God's judgment at this point? I mean, maybe 10 years ago, you could say, yeah, we can try to right this ship.

01:31:10

Yeah, we can, now, uh -uh. Nope. Okay, so let me do this.

01:31:16

We got someone that backstage, he doesn't have video, but he is an SBC pastor, a brother

01:31:22

I've gotten to know in the last year and really draw very close to. His name is

01:31:27

Darren Studd. He's down in Indiana. So, Darren, how you doing?

01:31:34

I know you got a chance to listen to some of this. What are your thoughts on everything that's been going on with the plagiarism and all in the

01:31:41

SBC? Darren, can you hear me?

01:31:48

I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yep, we hear you now. All right, good. Sorry, I got you going through my truck

01:31:54

Bluetooth, and I got everything all kind of fangled together here at the SBC way. So, hey,

01:32:02

I appreciate you, definitely appreciate you having me on, and I appreciate, I have been listening to the conversation.

01:32:08

I definitely appreciate the conversation. I appreciate all of the brothers here. I watch the show regularly.

01:32:16

But having said all that, I also think I wanted to come on after spending some time watching.

01:32:21

I'm on my way to do a hospital visit, so I'll have a few minutes here, but I wanted to come on as an SBC pastor who has chosen, at least for the foreseeable future, you know, this could change at any point, but to stay in the

01:32:33

Southern Baptist Convention, I just kind of wanted to give the other side of that discussion. But I mean, in terms of the plagiarism that you guys have been talking about, and then the truly mind -blowing thing is the content that was being plagiarized.

01:32:47

I mean, plagiarism is bad enough as it is, but the fact that the ideas that were being plagiarized were so bad and ungodly and unscriptural.

01:32:57

I mean, I remember when I first heard that sermon by J .D. Greer, I mean, I was sickened by it, because,

01:33:03

I mean, that's the kind of sermon that's gonna condemn people to hell. And I have no patience for that kind of a thing.

01:33:11

I have no patience for sort of, you know, placating to the culture for the sake of growing a church, which is what

01:33:17

I think is happening there. And so on all of that, we have 100 % agreement across the board.

01:33:24

The fact that a pastor would say that from the pulpit, the fact that another pastor would come along and think that it's a good idea to copy that, and then the fact that both of those guys are president, are either presently or have been presidents in the

01:33:36

Southern Memphis Convention, though all of those details are tremendously problematic. And so that whole thing,

01:33:43

I agree on. On the other side of it, unfortunately, when, I mean, when a guy like J .D.

01:33:51

Greer, a guy like Ed Linton, who I've actually met and had discussions with both of those guys, but you know, when one of those guys becomes president of the

01:34:02

Southern Baptist Convention, you should, I mean, this is expected. These men, these are the types of things that they preach.

01:34:09

These are the types of things that they say. And so, you know, when you're talking about the

01:34:16

Southern Baptist Convention going off the rails, and, you know, I think, I can't remember which one of you guys it was, made a comment about God bringing his judgment on the

01:34:25

Southern Baptist Convention just a minute ago. Man, I mean, there's a lot of truth to all of that.

01:34:30

I'm following along with all of that, but I also have some reasons why I'm staying in the Southern Baptist Convention.

01:34:35

I just want to take a minute maybe to present the other side of the discussion. Yeah, that's, I mean, it'd be good to get the other side.

01:34:44

So I had a conversation with a few of the guys that were named on here earlier, who are guys that I know, guys

01:34:50

I love and respect, like Tom Ascol and Tom Buck and some of these guys.

01:34:57

And I kind of, for me, here's the reality. I've been a

01:35:02

Southern Baptist longer than I'm a Christian, right? I was, my parents were sort of moderate, you know,

01:35:10

Christians. I mean, they professed to be Christians, but we really, we kind of went to church on and off. The church we went to was

01:35:16

Southern Baptist Church. I got saved at Southern Baptist Church, but I have been discontent with the Southern Baptist Convention since long before any of this came up.

01:35:24

When I was a church planner and I saw some of the problems of the inner workings of the way missions is actually done in the

01:35:30

Southern Baptist Convention. So anybody who has a discontentment with the Southern Baptist Convention, I understand,

01:35:36

I've been in that boat for a long time. But here's a thing that one of these older brothers, older Catholic brothers, which

01:35:45

I'm always striving to listen to and pay attention to what older brothers who have been faithful are saying.

01:35:51

And one of the things that was discussed with one of these brothers, actually multiple of these brothers is, you know, the question was asked, well, how many conventions have you come to?

01:36:00

And my answer to that question was two. I came in 2019 and then we didn't have one in 2020. And then

01:36:06

I came in 2021. And the point that was made, which

01:36:11

I think was a good point and something I had to think about and actually sort of repent of is, you know, you've been here twice and now you're ready to leave and all these conservatives are ready to leave.

01:36:24

And we haven't done anything yet to fight for the convention at all whatsoever. So you're talking about a convention where one third of the seminary graduates in the

01:36:35

United States of America graduate from Southern Baptist seminaries. You guys are aware of the numbers in regards to the

01:36:43

International Mission Board and the, or the, yeah, the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board.

01:36:49

Lots of missionaries are being trained in these seminaries and sent out into the field. Many of the church plants around the

01:36:55

United States of America are Southern Baptist affiliated church plants. And one of the guys who was on here earlier talked about, do you have confidence in those church plants?

01:37:06

And I would say many of the men that I know that are Southern Baptist church planters, yes, I do, because I know them and they're good and they're godly men.

01:37:13

But just because somebody's Southern Baptist, do I have confidence in their mission work or their church plant?

01:37:19

Well, the answer to that question is no. But the question that I think guys like me have to ask is, are we ready just to let everything that I just described go to the liberals and the progressives in the convention, be overtaken by critical race theory, be overtaken by feminism, which is another big problem in the

01:37:38

Southern Baptist Convention that I don't know if it was discussed here tonight, but it is a big problem in the Southern Baptist Convention.

01:37:43

Are we ready to take our hands off and just let them take all of this stuff over? Or do we stay around and fight for as long as we can and see if we can win the convention back?

01:37:54

It can be done. It has been done before. The Southern Baptist Convention is not like the

01:38:00

PCUSA or the Methodist Church because of the way that the domination is structured. The thing can be won back, right?

01:38:08

So, and because it has been done before, we've seen it done before. And so do we stay around and fight and force them to actually win the convention from us before we just take our hands off and say, yeah, go ahead and take, you know, six of the largest seminaries in the

01:38:23

United States of America. Go ahead and take the two largest mission boards in the United States of America and billions and billions of dollars in resources.

01:38:31

Just take those things that we've helped amass and use them to help turn the culture progressive.

01:38:40

And for me, I'm not at a point where I'm inclined to take my hands off and allow the progressives not to at least have to consider the fact that I'm here and they have to fight me before they take the convention in a leftward direction.

01:38:54

And so that's my, that's sort of my thought on it. Yeah, I mean, that's, it's a good point to point out is the fact that, you know, here you end up seeing that, you know, after that first vote for Stone, people thought that he won and they walked out and didn't realize there was gonna be a second vote.

01:39:08

And because of that, he lost by, I think, like 300 votes that could have been changed very easily.

01:39:14

Now, before we go into anything else, we had someone do a Super Chat. We always have to read the Super Chats. Jim, this one's for you.

01:39:22

FullBellyBear gave $5 to ask the question is, is Jim Osmond in Hawaii? Well, I guess someone has to make the sacrifice and evangelize there, so.

01:39:33

So it looks like you - I can't believe anybody paid $5 to talk to Andrew Rappaport. He paid $5 to ask you that question.

01:39:40

And you do know who FullBellyBear, you've been in a cemetery with him, so you'll know exactly who it is.

01:39:47

I have. Yeah, so Darren, I mean, there is that point where, you know,

01:39:52

I had said, and I think I even said this to you when we were in Indianapolis, you know, give it the one shot fight.

01:39:59

And if it goes, you know, to the left, then it's time to get out. And I can see after the, you know, this convention, there is an argument to be made that, did the conservatives really lose?

01:40:13

Well, part of it is not really because, I mean, Stone probably would have won had people stayed and voted the second time.

01:40:21

You know, they did lose on the, you know, CRT issue. I, you know, and I mentioned earlier,

01:40:28

I think it's appalling that they would soften the abolitionist proposition that, or I forget what they call it now.

01:40:37

But when resolution, you know, they soften that, but then they don't want to look at the resolution on, you know, on CRT.

01:40:48

And I kind of see this is where it's heading, but it's gonna take a large amount of effort, a lot amount of time into writing the ship.

01:40:59

Yeah. Andrew, one thing here, I think

01:41:05

I would make the argument in response to everything that you just said, with all due respect, I'd make the argument that they've already taken over the seminaries.

01:41:12

They've already taken over the mission sending organization. They've already taken over the nomination. They're already controlling the billions of dollars.

01:41:18

Look who's been president for the last six years. And before that, I can't, we can't really say that the presidency of the

01:41:24

SBC, I mean, just what was it, four years ago, they're talking about having some of the luminaries, the intellectual theological luminaries, the rock solid guys in the

01:41:32

SBC are talking about having Beth Moore as the president of the denomination. They've taken over the religious and ethics, religious liberty lifeway has been churning out heresy at an alarming rate for at least the last 10 to 15 years and publishing it.

01:41:48

What exactly are you fighting for? I mean, the fight seems to be, look, do we just let them take it all over?

01:41:55

I would argue they've already taken it all over. They already control it. You're just, you're there fighting about it. And it's not, hasn't been just the last couple of years.

01:42:02

I would say it's been for at least the last 20 years that we've been watching the Southern Baptist denomination, the conservative guy trying to keep the denomination from sliding to the left.

01:42:11

They've been fighting against this leftward drift all that time to no avail. Yeah, yeah.

01:42:18

And Darren, if you're still listening, I appreciate all of our faithful shepherds out there.

01:42:25

I really do. I have a tremendous heart for all of the faithful shepherds out there that are laboring away in anonymity and shepherding their flock.

01:42:33

And I really love our faithful pastors out there. But I agree with Jim.

01:42:41

I mean, what we're seeing in the SBC is being done by the conservatives. Theoretically, the conservatives won those battles back in the 80s, in the early 80s over the liberals between the conservatives and the conservatives theoretically won it.

01:42:57

So what we're seeing now that, I mean, every single, and look, hey, I was born, reared, educated

01:43:04

Southern Baptist. So, I mean, they didn't come more Southern Baptists than yours truly.

01:43:11

I was one. So I'm not like casting stones as an outsider that's detached.

01:43:20

But the conservatives theoretically control. Every Southern Baptist seminary, all six of them would say, we believe in the inerrancy of scripture.

01:43:28

We believe in the authority of scripture. Theoretically, even though it's a whole other problem, but they would say, we believe in the sufficiency of scripture.

01:43:36

They don't, but they say they do. I'm a graduate. I got an MDiv and a THM from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

01:43:44

So, but the conservatives supposedly are running this thing.

01:43:52

I just don't, I don't know. I don't see, I think God is bringing

01:43:57

SBC under judgment. If according to what, per what

01:44:02

Jim said a second ago, spit this out, okay. So a few years ago, yeah, there were serious conversations amongst the leadership in the

01:44:13

SBC, the big names about Beth Moore being the president. Now, I never thought

01:44:19

Beth Moore would be the president of the SBC. The first time I heard it, I said, she's not going to be the president of SBC. Not because the

01:44:26

SBC doesn't want her, but because she doesn't want that position. She's got her own gig.

01:44:33

If someone toted her up to the podium on a throne and made her by fiat the president of the

01:44:40

SBC, she would turn it down. Cause she, it's just not her thing. But here's the point. If you're even having that conversation, you've lost.

01:44:50

If you're even entertaining the possibility of Beth Moore being the president of the SBC, you've lost.

01:44:56

It's over. And not only have you lost, but they're mopping up the battlefield with you. Yeah, that's right.

01:45:03

Battle's over. That's right. There's nothing to fight for at that point. Yeah, no, there's nothing to fight for.

01:45:10

And Jim was my pastor for several years. Jim, your church is not

01:45:16

SBC. So do you not care about missions? Do you not care about evangelism?

01:45:21

I mean, how do you do missions if you're not giving to the cooperative program? Yeah, we do. We support independent missionaries, some of them, new tribes, some of them,

01:45:32

I forget the name of the organization, but some of them supported even by our church.

01:45:37

We sent out a mission family from our own church that were part of AMF. And we have,

01:45:44

I think, five or six missionaries that we support. Some of them even still into retirement. That work of missions can be done.

01:45:49

And when it's done under the auspices of the local church, as a local church, we have control over the fact that our money goes and is spent to send people to the mission field that I would have preached in my pulpit.

01:45:59

And they are solid people, and they are fruitful and productive and faithful, and they're doctrinally sound. And that is all stuff that we can control, how our money gets spent in that way.

01:46:08

Or if we send it away to a cooperative and they send those people to mission field, then we might be supporting missionaries that we never see and have no idea who they are, and, or what they're teaching on the mission field.

01:46:21

Yeah, yeah. It's the conservatives that are theoretically running this thing. They all claim to be conservative.

01:46:28

Ed Greer, I mean, JD Greer, Ed Litton, James Merritt, they all wave the conservative banner.

01:46:38

These are the conservatives. Well, part of the reason, when you go back to the precedence of the victory and the conservative resurgence over the inerrancy of scripture, they won that.

01:46:50

And what did they do? They put the scripture on the shelf over here and completely disregarded it.

01:46:57

And so, yeah, the conservatives, as Justin's implied correctly, they've been in control of this.

01:47:03

The slide, the downgrade occurred under the control of the conservative wing.

01:47:09

Now, what you see with some of these guys calling themselves a conservative is this sort of post -modernistic redefinition of what the word is.

01:47:17

Well, those who have eyes to see can see it. But I will tell you this, I did speak to a Southern Baptist pastor this afternoon who made the observation that the reason that Beth Moore may have left and maybe what precipitated

01:47:31

Russell Moore's departure was because they saw what they presumed may be the success of something like a conservative

01:47:39

Baptist network that would eventually push them out. Now, I don't think

01:47:44

I buy that argument, but from the standpoint of being a pastor in the SPC, which I'm not, I sit in a pew,

01:47:50

I am a member, not of an SPC church. The thing that I would think

01:47:56

I'd go and consider is a 2 Corinthians 6 kind of situation. Am I really dealing with darkness?

01:48:03

Am I having fellowship with it? Am I trying to put Christ and Belial together?

01:48:08

Or am I being obedient to come out from among them, which is what Jim spoke to earlier. It needs to be a visible and vivid departure of the faithful so that the world that is watching actually sees something of faithfulness.

01:48:26

So let me give a chance for Darren to respond. Yeah, so I mean,

01:48:31

I appreciate all of that. I mean, there's a lot obviously that, I mean, Justin, I don't know everybody's name here,

01:48:38

I apologize. Even if I knew you all for years, I still may not know your names, but these are terrible names. It's the pastor for power, right?

01:48:45

But I mean, there's obviously a lot of things that you guys said that I wholeheartedly agree with. I think the thing that we disagree about is, whereas I think several of you guys are making the case that the convention is lost.

01:48:58

I would argue it may be the case that conservatives are losing. We didn't win when we went to the, although we did win on the resolution, the abolition resolution, even though it was watered down with that word, but as a whole, we didn't win.

01:49:12

But is the convention lost? And I think that there's a general, I think that among many conservatives and especially those that are outside of the convention, you know, it's tempting to stand back and say, this is lost and we should just pull out of it.

01:49:30

That's where we disagree. I do not believe that the Southern Baptist Convention is lost at this point. And I'll tell you why

01:49:36

I'm saying that. Number one, because I know several of the trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and they are good men who love

01:49:46

Jesus, who love the word of God, and who are fighting to preserve the integrity of those institutions.

01:49:52

Now, there are also progressives on those boards because the president gets to appoint whoever it's going to be that goes on those boards.

01:50:00

And when you have progressive, which that's another thing, the definition of terms, I wouldn't call

01:50:05

Ed Litton a conservative. I wouldn't call J .D. Greer a conservative. Those men say that they affirm the inerrancy of the word of God, but they're doing what progressives always do in this type of context.

01:50:17

They're not just gonna come out. This is what wolves do. They don't just come out and say, I'm a wolf. They say, oh,

01:50:22

I believe what you believe. And that's exactly what we have these men doing in the

01:50:28

Southern Baptist Convention right now. These guys are not conservatives. They're not the same conservatives that won the conservative resurgence.

01:50:35

Some of those men are still around, like Al Mohler, for example, who I think many of us are very disappointed in at this point.

01:50:43

But I do, and here's the second reason I don't believe that the convention's lost, and I'll leave it at this. The conservatives almost won in Nashville.

01:50:52

We almost won. We lost by less than 600 votes. We were talking about 15 ,000 messengers voting, and you lose by 600 votes.

01:51:03

I'm sorry, but that's not the enemy mopping up the floor with you. That's, we had a fight, and we almost won.

01:51:10

And many of us feel convicted that being a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, we had a duty before God to steward these things that we have better than what we have.

01:51:23

We haven't shown up. The Southern Baptist Convention has a leftward drift because conservative pastors like myself haven't shown up to fight the fight.

01:51:32

And so some of us are just saying, we need to fight this fight a little bit longer and a little bit harder before we just step back and walk away.

01:51:39

And honestly, many of us need to repent of the fact that we didn't show up and fight the fight.

01:51:46

It's the conservatives' fault that the Southern Baptist Convention is in the position that it's in right now. Liberals are always going to try to take over the things that conservatives do.

01:51:55

We are the ones that build things, and then they come in and try to take it over and move it in a leftward perspective.

01:52:01

This is the course of history. It's the direction history tends to go. And so conservatives in the

01:52:07

Southern Baptist Convention, men like myself, should have been more vigilant and more active and more involved.

01:52:14

And so I'm repenting of that now and fighting. At least I'm going to make an effort to fight for this thing before I leave because I take personal responsibility for the fact that it has come to the place that it's come to.

01:52:25

And I don't think the fight's over. I think it can still be won. Yeah.

01:52:30

I mean, and that's really what it comes at. Justin, you got something you want to say? Yeah. Yeah.

01:52:37

And I know, Darren, I know you're a conservative and champion the things we would champion.

01:52:43

I appreciate that. Again, let me say, I appreciate that very much. I appreciate how you're shepherding your flock.

01:52:52

But I would say, okay, so when dealing with SBC, at least theoretically here, we're not talking about a secular organization.

01:53:02

We're not talking about the political realm in the secular world.

01:53:07

We're talking an institution that should be, by its very nature, inherently intrinsically different.

01:53:18

The SBC is a reflection of the local SBC churches.

01:53:24

I could not stay in a church in which

01:53:29

I thought, let's say 49 % of the congregation did not hold to the authority of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture, was not complementarian.

01:53:45

I couldn't stay in a church like that that was so evenly divided on those issues. It would come apart at the seams.

01:53:53

You'd have a church split is what you would have. You'd have a church split. It just wouldn't, it couldn't function like that.

01:54:00

Jim, I mean, if Kootenai Community Church was that evenly split, that closely, if it reflected a split like in what we see in the

01:54:09

SBC and your elders were that closely split, could it function? No, it couldn't function.

01:54:15

You couldn't have any impact at all. It would just be a group of people getting together. I would wanna know, and Darren, maybe you can tell me this.

01:54:23

What does winning look like? So if Todd Stone had become the president instead of Edward, what does winning look like?

01:54:31

Does that just hold the rope on what you still have, probably by most estimates, close to 50 % of the

01:54:39

Southern Baptist churches who are aberrant in their theology and have aberrant leadership and pastors that don't preach, you still have this going on.

01:54:48

Even if Todd Stone had become the president, how do you correct, how does he correct life, way, Christian resources?

01:54:54

And even when the good guys supposedly were leading the denominations, they never did anything about Rick Warren and they never did anything about Stephen Furtick or any of the other people that have the labels

01:55:06

Southern Baptist but are leading people astray by the thousands. Even when the good guys that we want to be in control have that control and influence, they don't do anything to push back on it.

01:55:18

It's like when Republicans take Congress. It's great to have them in there, but then they do nothing once they have the power and control.

01:55:25

And so we end up losing, our victories end up being brief pauses in wrapping up losses.

01:55:33

And this is on, let me put this on a super chat we'll end up having to, we'll probably have to wrap up and end on, but a super chat of $10 and more of a statement, but that you guys can interact with.

01:55:45

I talked to my elder, an elder of my church about what's been going on in the

01:55:50

SBC and also with Beth Moore and the SBC. And all that he told me was he just didn't get involved in it.

01:56:00

And he loves Beth Moore. And he - That guy needs to find a different church. Yeah, he's not.

01:56:07

I mean, any pastor that loves Beth Moore, I wouldn't pass go,

01:56:12

I wouldn't collect $200. I would be hitting the doors. I would be, I would not come back another single

01:56:20

Sunday. Thing is you're not gonna change a church from the floor up.

01:56:27

Congregation is not gonna rise to a level of spiritual maturity above that of its leadership. It's just not.

01:56:32

Nope. So you're not gonna change. I know there's good hearted, tenderhearted folks that are wanna say, yeah,

01:56:39

I'm in a, I know I'm in a weak church, but I wanna be a source of truth and help change the church from the inside out.

01:56:44

It ain't gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. So get out. Oh, and by the way, so we can all leave on even a more depressing note than what we were already on.

01:56:55

Just today, just today. Have y 'all seen this? The video of a testimony from an

01:57:04

LGBTQ Christian, quote, unquote, who has been baptized at Andy Stanley's church.

01:57:14

That came out, at least today I saw it. Openly. I mean, openly, he calls himself.

01:57:21

Is he Southern Baptist? Yeah, Andy Stanley is a Southern Baptist. You have what

01:57:26

Rick Warren did. You have this now. I mean, it's just. Yeah, I mean, you've got the biggest names in the

01:57:31

SB, the biggest churches in the SBC. See, but here's the reason.

01:57:38

I think the reason this has gone on is because those big names have never been, no one ever says anything. That 11th commandment.

01:57:44

Had they said something to these people early on, it would, maybe it would be different. And this, you know,

01:57:49

I'll just, Dr. Bob asked this question earlier on, where's Al Moller at? This is dereliction of duty on his part.

01:57:57

I'll say that, Dr. Bob, there, if you go to the articles that I put in the show notes,

01:58:05

Bud has an article dealing with Moller. You covered that. You know, so if you check that out.

01:58:11

Come get that. If you check that out, you'll see some of the stuff that, you know,

01:58:18

I mean, I think it is. He's been silent on all of this stuff. Well, the one thing

01:58:24

I would interject about Al Moller and Southern Baptists and evangelicals need to recognize this.

01:58:30

Al Moller is the reason critical race theory has become an issue in the SBC. He delivered it by his failure to speak to it in 2019.

01:58:40

He could have stood up and in a minute and a half, vetoed that thing. He could have made a statement about it and they would have followed him because he has such a platform and such a provenance, but he didn't do a thing about it.

01:58:53

He handed the Southern Baptist Convention CRT. That's a huge problem.

01:58:58

And I agree with what Darren said. And this is part of the problem. There are more Southern Baptists than there are

01:59:05

Southern Baptist Christians. And that is heavily reflected in its leadership and in its seminary staff.

01:59:13

That's the problem. And until you can distinguish that and recognize all this occurred under the presumed, you know, watch of the conservative wing, you need to get scripture back off the shelf.

01:59:29

When you want it, you need to use it. You know, and Darren's trying to get back in, but, you know,

01:59:35

Canadian Carlos says, you know, pastors like Darren are right to want to fight all issues in the

01:59:43

SBC, but how about everything else wrong with the SBC, including Andy Stanley? You know, and that's the thing, you know, so.

01:59:54

Let's name it. I'm sorry, Andrew, not to interrupt you, but let's name them. Andy Stanley, Rick Warren, Steven Furtick, Ed Young Jr.

02:00:04

These are all Southern Baptist churches. These are some of the biggest named churches in the

02:00:10

SBC. Mm -hmm, I mean, they should have been - And the leadership of the

02:00:15

SBC, including Al Mohler, has done nothing. And Mark Devereux have done nothing to stem the tide of that.

02:00:23

No, they've helped it. That's the whole thing. So just so you guys know, Darren is texting me.

02:00:29

The phone kicked him out. He said he wanted me to let you guys know that he loves you and respects each of you, and just wanted to thank us for letting him come in.

02:00:38

But I think it was good that he came in and he said he'd love to discuss the resolution, and I think it'd be good.

02:00:45

But unfortunately, we're at the end of the show. And so, but Bud, you and I got a scary podcast we're working on for this

02:00:53

Sunday, for July 4th. We're gonna do a very anti -American

02:01:00

American podcast, I guess. Just what - We're not doing the white nationalism thing, okay. Yeah, yeah.

02:01:08

Well, that's what Biden calls it, yes. But it's gonna be a pretty important one,

02:01:13

I think, for Christians. I believe that what we have, it's scary because what we see going on is gonna be an attack on Christianity like we have not seen before ever in this country.

02:01:25

And if you think it's bad now, they have laid out their game plan.

02:01:31

And Bud and I plan on going through that step -by -step. So I encourage you to, if you don't follow the rap report on your podcast app, check that out.

02:01:43

Justin has a podcast, just broke, what did I send you, 100 ,000 downloads? Is it you just broke?

02:01:49

100 ,000 downloads on his podcast, Didache, with Justin Peters. So go check that out.

02:01:55

That's on Christian Podcast Community. If you wanna go find it, just go to christianpodcastcommunity .org. Pastor Jim Osman, you can hear his sermons every week.

02:02:06

His sermons are on the Kootenai Community Worship Podcast that we have, again, that's also on, can be found at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

02:02:17

Bud and I do the rap report, which is on the christianpodcastcommunity .org. And there's a little birdie telling me that Bud may branch out and do his own.

02:02:25

He may have his own podcast on the community soon. We'll see, we'll see. You gotta get through the interview and all that.

02:02:32

And I don't know if he's gonna make it. I mean, Jim made it, though. Jim, Justin, I'm gonna need a reference, brothers.

02:02:42

Yeah, because your co -host, he's voting against you. The Lord's will be done.

02:02:49

Yeah, but it's great having you guys on. I think it was a good discussion. Good to have all sides represented.

02:02:56

And I do think there's some serious questions for a lot of people to decide on. We didn't get to the question of what people do when they're discerning question of, if they're in a church that's in the

02:03:07

SBC, should they go find another church? I don't know that I would do that. Just my two cents.

02:03:12

I think that your local church is your local church. And unless the pastor is saying, hey,

02:03:20

I love Beth Moore. Okay, that's a different thing. But if he's a conservative like Pastor Darren, then

02:03:26

I don't see a reason to leave. That's my two cents. But next week, I forget what we have going on next week for the show.

02:03:39

I'm trying to see, to look. I know that I will announce that on the 15th,

02:03:45

Pastor Jim Osmond will be back on the 15th with Drew, formerly from Matter of Theology.

02:03:54

If you've listened to past shows, we had the discussion where Jim came on and he did his view of his support for premillennialism.

02:04:02

Drew did on his podcast, A Counter, and they both have a lot of respect for one another and we're gonna have a great discussion.

02:04:11

And that's what's gonna be, not a debate, but a discussion between the two of them on their different views. And both of them, I think, have brought up good points.

02:04:18

And so it'll be one worth checking out. So we hope that Anthony will be back next week.

02:04:25

But until then, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. And we'll see you next time.