Another Road Trip DL with Commentary, Some Keller Response, and Enduring for the Elect

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is another road trip dividing line. I am in the wilds of East Texas, sort of halfway between Shreveport and Houston, where the debate will be taking place on Friday evening.

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And I understand that the other side is going to have plenty of folks there.

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So it's going to be going to be an interesting evening. That's good. In fact,

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I understand there's all sorts of stuff bouncing around the internet these days. All going back to the young kid that thought he could dismiss

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Greg Bonson as if Greg Bonson was only relevant because he could speak well.

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I'll be honest with you, I hate to disappoint you guys, but I'm not even paying attention to it.

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There is absolutely nothing that can be said in defense of a 20 -something kid saying what he said about Greg Bonson.

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He also talked about living people, which is a violation of scripture. As far as I can tell, he's not an elder in the church.

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He was attacking pastors, people with lengthy ministries. I didn't even get into that because it was just so obviously silly.

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So obviously infantile. The problem of what's come up with this is the people defending this.

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That's what's just absolutely amazing to me. It has really revealed a level of immaturity and childishness on the part of others.

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It's just, well, I guess understandable in our day. But like I said, some people mentioned some things in passing and I'm just sort of like, really?

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Okay. I'm too busy driving, preparation. For a while it was just too busy surviving ice.

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Ice, you know what? I like living in Phoenix.

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Ice is no fun. You try to stand on ice and it doesn't work well.

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I mean, yeah, no. I've enjoyed it for a few days.

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When it's in the teens, that's pretty cold.

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And so that's sort of nice, but no. For months on end, no.

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No, no, no. I can't. You folks live up where I was born that live with this all the time?

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No. You have my condolence. And that's why they didn't build

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Sun City in Minneapolis. I can assure you of that. Anyway, so I was fighting with trying to,

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I should have done it the first night, but figuring out how to cover your, because I'm out in the open. I can't park underneath anything.

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And so how to cover your windshield and how to find your windshield wipers after they've been buried in ice and snow and they're so far down there, you're not even sure they're still there.

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Yeah, that was fun. And a few other things I learned in the

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RV world, like if you bring your slide out in and you've been in an ice storm and yeah, you thought it was all melted off, but if it's not, it will melt inside while you're driving.

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And so you'll be spending a while on your hands and knees mopping up the floor. But these things are made to be pretty hardy.

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In fact, interestingly enough, a couple pulled in from Colorado. They just bought this thing.

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Rich, I think you would have liked this one. It was like a four wheel drive fifth wheel.

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Well, it wasn't a fifth wheel, it was pulled behind, but it's from Australia and it's got like knobby tires and high suspension.

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And it just, it looks like it's meant to be going out to places you just wouldn't go otherwise.

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I've seen those before. They are amazing there. You can hook them up to a Jeep and go just about anywhere.

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Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, now that they had just bought it and they're about to spend their third night in it.

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And even she said, I don't think we want to go some of the places they showed us on the video.

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It can go. Okay. But it was, I mean, there's a trade off.

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There wasn't much room in there. I mean, I can stand straight up everywhere in this, in this unit.

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And I don't think it was anywhere in that one. They could stand up straight. And so anyway, you see interesting stuff.

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I, one of those Greyhound bus size ones pulled in while I was there, you know, they cost anywhere from probably a low end $650 ,000 to well over a million bucks.

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And, and man, I mean, it's just, it's just a luxury house on wheels. It's amazing.

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Anyhow, so I learned, I've learned stuff and learning more stuff. And the fact of the matter is

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I've got to know everything about this thing because someone actually, someone actually thought

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Rich that you actually travel with me. And I said, no, no, no, no. We wouldn't, we wouldn't last three days before one of us would be hitchhiking home.

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That ain't happening. Nope. Nope. So I'm the one that's got to make all this stuff work.

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So anyhow, so I'm looking forward to Friday night. And if you're in the

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Houston area you're certainly invited to come out. I understand certain people from that same group and the same school are going to be in attendance.

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So come on out. It could be interesting. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a second debate afterwards and go till, you know, 11 o 'clock at night or something.

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Who knows? That would be, that would be interesting. But that's Friday night.

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I'll be, did I finally send you the stuff on Sunday or did

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I, have I not done that yet? What time? I'm not even sure what the time is Sunday morning, but I will be preaching in Houston Sunday morning.

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I'll try to make sure to get that. I'll try to get that stuff linked on this program's blog entry.

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And then that's it because after that it's get across Texas, which is, which is like get across half the continent, basically.

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Get across Texas and get back to, get back to Arizona. And I understand it's already getting up into the upper seventies back there and all that kind of stuff.

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And man, time, time goes quickly. Anyhow, I don't, just briefly, the other reasons that we're on Odyssey is

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I did want to be able to mention how, you know, things are changing and I just heard that the democratically controlled legislature in Virginia just got rid of their school mask mandates, which have been child abuse all along for two years.

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But then there's this stuff and I haven't had a chance to dig into it as deeply as I would like, but I'm reading these reports about the 40 % increase in mortality rates between 18 and 64 year olds over the past couple of years.

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And, and some of the reports are saying it has, they're not including COVID deaths in that. And some say they are.

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And some, you know, no one will ever know because of the playing around with the death certificates.

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We played around the death certificates. And so, you know, I mean, seriously, people who died in motorcycle accidents, as long as their body tested positive for COVID two weeks later or something, they were listed as COVID deaths.

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And I am very firmly convinced without, I've, I've experienced it in my own circle of acquaintances and things like that, that the protocol that was forced on hospitals, and I'm not sure how you forced us on hospitals.

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I guess it, I guess it's financial or, I mean, what kind of power do you, how, how can, how can individual doctors who are convinced that this is the best way to save a patient's life, how can they be overridden by these protocols that were put in place everywhere?

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And I am fully aware, have been involved in family situations and church situations where the family was saying, do not give them this drug.

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Please give them this and not allowed to give them that. And we're going to give them this drug whether you want us to or not.

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I mean, basically, once you sign the papers, they owned you. I've never seen anything like it.

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And when you combine the reality that the global elites are individuals without question that this stuff is published, this is not, this is not conspiracy theory.

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This is not craziness. This is, this is not some weirdness. These people believe that the world's population must be brought down.

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That it's, there are way too many human beings and it must be brought down.

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Now you got to remember places like Russia and China have no interest in doing that. They have to keep their military nice and big and strong.

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And so the only, the only end result of this is really bad for freedom and liberty anywhere you go.

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And freedom and liberty, by the way, are blessings from God, just in case I've forgotten about that. So we, we look at these, at what has been taking place in this, this 40 % increase, especially in the, in the, in the age range where COVID is not a major issue.

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What is it from? And the one thing you, well, depression and, you know, lockdown sickness and whatever, whatever in the world that's supposed to mean.

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I don't know what lockdown sickness is. But all of this is the one thing you cannot, you can't, you can't even say, you can't even mention it, is you think maybe possibly our immune systems have been completely thrashed and trashed by literally billions of doses of experimental stuff, maybe?

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Nope, can't say that. You'll get cancelled. If anyone, I mean, that's why they're going after Joe Rogan and everything else.

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It's like, can I even talk about it? Can't, just hush, hush, hush, cannot, cannot discuss it.

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I'm really longing for the olden days when we had something called journalism.

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We had a press that the story was the big deal, not the narrative.

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And all of that has changed massively. And we are seeing the result of that, of censorship is an ugly, ugly thing.

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Yeah, it's the last bastion of cowards. There's no question about it. But censorship is an ugly, ugly thing, because when you have a free press, you can at least have some hope that the truth about what's going on will be known.

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When you don't have a free press, will it ever really be known? I mean, we know that in eternity, it will be known.

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But in our lifetimes, because there's lots of things right now that we can talk about that I just go,

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I don't know what the truth of that is. And I don't know that I will know in this lifetime.

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That's a challenging thing. So right now, I couldn't find the graph, but I know where it is.

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But right now, Israel, the most vaccinated nation on the planet, fourth booster level stuff, has just equaled and surpassed its daily

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COVID death records from last year. And they're the most vaccinated nation on the planet.

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Now, how do you explain that? And I know people are like, well, it's still it's all the unvaccinated people.

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No, it's not. Not in Israel, it's not. They're not even close. It's time to be honest and recognize that Pfizer has far more power than Pfizer should have.

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And if you're not allowed to even talk about these things, even mention these things, that probably tells you what's going on.

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And it's playing beyond all controversy right now that the current vaccines do nothing for Omicron.

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And so, you know, they're rushing to get that one out. And as soon as that comes out,

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Omicron will have peaked and being going down and you'll still have mandates for that.

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I mean, because in some ways I'm sort of looking around and it's sort of like there's some signs of some level of logic and rationality breaking through in some places.

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But then the other, what I'm always looking for is what's behind that?

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Is it because there has been a worldview shift to where people are starting to recognize the foolishness of the worldview that has brought us this insanity?

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Or is it just because for their own personal reasons, they're sick and tired of a lack of convenience?

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If it's the latter, then we're just being set up for the next round.

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The next variant, the next disease. I get the feeling that the

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Bill Gates's of the world and the WEF and WHO and all these people, they would rather be doing the climate stuff as their way of pushing all this totalitarianism.

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But it just didn't produce the fear. It didn't produce the necessary amount of fear that the virus did.

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And so, is that what they're gonna be waiting for? Or, remember when

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Pope Francis, remember the amazing statement Pope Francis made a while back, where he connected, he turned

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Mother Earth into a personal being, basically. And in essence said that the virus was due to, this is

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Mother Earth reacting to our abuse of the environment stuff.

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And I'm just waiting for somebody to come along and say, that's where this is all coming from.

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If you continue to drive internal combustion engines, there will always be new variants.

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Now, logically, rationally, that's absurd. But so much of what we're experiencing is absurd, and that's not changing anything.

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Because absurdity has become commonplace. It's what people believe.

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It's what people experience. And critical thought, being able to examine it and go, well, that doesn't make any sense.

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I'm not gonna go along with that. Yeah, there's more and more people saying, hey, hit the brakes.

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You've got the truckers in Ottawa, and they're trying to do a similar convoy across the United States, I guess.

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And man, the powers that be are doing everything they can to squash these things.

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And I mentioned briefly on Twitter, what GoFundMe did is just a picture of what all banks will be doing once the social credit system becomes established in the

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United States. And it's well to its way of being established. There'll be a period of time where there's going to be a small number of recalcitrant financial institutions and new

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Christian banks and stuff to try to start up to try to get around this stuff. But if we allow ourselves to go to a cashless system, we're done.

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It's all going to come down around us in one big burning conflagration, because they've got you.

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And you just, okay, if you want your money, then you have to say these words.

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You have to say, Kaiser kurios, Caesar is Lord. And that's how they're going to, that's how they want to do it.

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Now, again, these are evil men and women. And evil men and women become selfish.

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They don't remain united. They will turn on each other. And all that's true.

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But I've already had the conversation on this program. And I'll just mention it again. Secularism is an enemy of Christ that must be put under his feet.

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There will be no, there will be no, the last enemy to be defeated is death, right?

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So all other enemies will have been defeated. Think how many enemies there are right now against the knowledge of Christ.

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A lot of work to be done. And this complex of falsehoods and errors known as secular humanism, secularism, leads to the most repressive forms of totalitarianism.

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That's what the Chinese communist system is. And this stuff has to come down.

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Now, I would love, I'm not the only one who's mentioned this. Many other people have mentioned this too. I would love to see, right as the

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Chinese nation becomes world dominant as we fade into second and third level as we are.

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Because, I mean, they have been successful in shredding the very fabric of our society, turning us against each other because of our own foolishness.

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And as China becomes this ascendant, wouldn't it be just awesome if that church just explodes across China?

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And I've been thinking about that for many, many years. That would be awesome. That'd be wonderful. But I don't know.

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All I know is every enemy must be put under his feet. This is an enemy.

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It's going to be put under his feet. And it may take time. And it may be a massive challenge in the process.

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And we are called to be faithful through all of it. But my goodness, what we see going on along those lines is truly astonishing.

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And the utter sacrifice of truth, the things that people are willing to say to promote their narrative just would have been embarrassing only 20 years ago.

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But there you go. I heard this morning a little bit about some of the possible shortlist nominees for the

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United States Supreme Court. I can assure you that every single one of those individuals, and they're seemingly going for as young as they can go so as to have the longest impact.

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And man, I can tell you that the Founding Fathers never, never intended the

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Supreme Court to function this way. Never. We really have a non -functional system right now.

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The legislature was supposed to be doing these things. The legislature was supposed to be connected to and responsible to the people of the nation.

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They weren't supposed to be professional politicians that moved to Washington and stayed there forever. All of the founders who drew up the

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Constitution would have recognized that a Joe Biden, who never did anything but sat in Washington and never had a meaningful job, would be absolutely destructive to our system of government.

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And he and everyone like him on either side of the aisle have been utterly destructive to the system of government.

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But that's what we're facing. And you look at what they're doing, where they're going, the legislation that they want to pass.

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And I look at this November, and part of me is really concerned because we all, y 'all heard the phrase, wag the dog, right?

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When you have a fumbling, bumbling, collapsing administration like you do with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, man,

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I don't want to see us in some kind of a war that we can't win and that will only bring about our national demise all that much faster.

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I look at the Constitution, the situation in Ukraine, and I'm very, very concerned about my friends in Ukraine.

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From what I've been told by them, they will fight to the last man.

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When they talk about being in Kiev in 72 hours, well, they might get into Kiev in 72 hours, but it will be a long, bloody occupation because many of these people in Ukraine served in the

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Soviet forces, and they know, and they will not go quietly into the night.

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I can assure you of that. So there could be a tremendous amount of lost of life.

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And I hate to even think of that. With my dear friends over there. At the same time, it just seems like, it's almost, doesn't it feel like a slow motion car accident?

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You see it coming, but you don't feel like there's anything you can do about it. Like there's just forces at work here that sanity can't even touch.

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That's sort of how I feel. We can't win over there. And we would never allow, remember the

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Cuban Missile Crisis? The closest that this world ever got to nuclear war?

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And it was very close. We found out years later, it was right there.

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And what precipitated that? The Russians trying to do what we're trying to do, or not us, well, yeah, some people in our administration, but people in the

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West trying to do in bringing Ukraine into NATO. NATO doesn't want Ukraine. And it should just be said straight out.

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No, Ukraine will not enter into NATO. There's way too much corruption there anyways. But that's, that's the reasoning that they're using.

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So I don't know. I don't know. They're just, when you have the ineptness, and the evil of the current regime, war is always a way to try to distract things.

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I don't think it would work this time. But it would be, it would have very, very, very bad consequences for all of us.

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So anyways, just some thoughts. Colossians chapter four, verses five and six says, walk in wisdom toward outsiders, redeeming the time.

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Let your words always be with grace seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should answer each person.

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Now, that is a sort of a right at the end of the letter thought that Paul provides to the

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Colossians. And it's right before he starts talking about Tychicus and Onesimus and starts doing some of the personal correspondence aspect of this particular epistle.

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And so it's sort of right at the end. It's a generalized statement. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, redeeming the time.

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Let your words always be with grace, seasoned with salt, so that you will know how to answer each person. Now, this is not meant to be some kind of overarching system that the apostle lays out that you just apply in every social situation, things like that.

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But as you know, these are the verses that were referenced by Dr. Tim Keller, who decided to do what

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Tim Keller does. Let's just be honest. This is what

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Dr. Keller does. He's done it over and over and over again. He's done it for years.

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And it's purposeful and it's intentional. And you throw out a tweet.

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And I know people are always saying, well, you know, his son does that. No, no, no, I'm sorry. If you're going to have a social platform and let more than one person do it, but you do it under your name, it's under your name.

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All right. This is how it works. And he throws out a statement about the

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Colbert interview. It wasn't an interview. It's just a part of an interview. And I don't even know what the woman's name was, but she raised some issue about Colbert's faith.

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And over the years, I've seen various statements made by him.

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I know he is a Roman Catholic. But I know he is nowhere near an

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Orthodox Roman Catholic. And it's not just because he's a comedian and therefore does, at times, raunchy comedy that wouldn't fit even within Roman Catholic parameters.

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But it's actual positions on church teachings, such as abortion, the

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LGBTQ stuff and human sexuality and basic foundational things like God has the right to define how humans are supposed to behave and act, that he doesn't follow the church's teachings at these points.

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And so, you know, he makes mention of it once in a while, but he's had just an incredible amount of blasphemous stuff on his program.

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And he plainly stands against the Roman church on a number of different issues.

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So when she asked him about this, now, I do believe he was trying to be,

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I don't think he saw it coming. And so he was trying to be as serious in his response as he could.

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But if you listen to the response, and this is what bothers me, is it seems like many

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Protestants don't know enough about Roman Catholic, not just soteriology, but especially elements of that, threads of that in what

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Colbert says. And my point is, his response to that woman's question, and his comments did not reflect any kind of understanding of the redemption that has been provided in Christ Jesus.

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I can think of numerous Roman Catholics who could have provided a significantly better response than he did, because they're more consistent.

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But he gave a response that cannot be described by the term contextualization.

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And this was the term that Dr. Keller used. And if you read the

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Keller thread on Twitter, you know that we were all being lectured, we were being talked down to, we were being scolded by Dr.

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Keller. And obviously, he feels like everyone who criticizes his positions that he takes has just missed the wisdom of Colossians 4, that using the kind of terminology that Colbert did is walking in wisdom toward outsiders, that he was using words that would communicate with his audience.

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And I just go, communicate what with his audience? What was it that Colbert was communicating?

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It wasn't the gospel. And so you can't turn to Colossians chapter 4 and call a vague, inconsistent enunciation of a sort of related to themes in Roman Catholicism, but they're the worst themes in Roman Catholicism, and they are the farthest from anything that represents the gospel stuff, and excuse that on the basis of contextualization.

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Even if you, you know, there's an appropriate use of the term contextualization.

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When you're standing outside, well, they're going to do the Easter pageant again in Mesa, amazingly.

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They're already building the sets and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And so, unfortunately,

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I will be elsewhere for all of that, but I'm going to miss that. When you are standing on a street corner in Mesa, Arizona, surrounded by Mormons, you want to contextualize your proclamation, which means you are sensitive to the reality of where you are.

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Now, interestingly enough, that has changed over the years. When we first started doing that, you could assume that the vast majority of people walking by you were

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LDS. That's not necessarily the case anymore, especially in Mesa.

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It's not nearly as Mormon predominant as it once was. But still, if you see someone and they got seven kids, you can still probably guess that they're either

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Mormon or they're from Apologia. That's about the only two options,

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I guess. And in that context, you will contextualize.

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So, in other words, if I start presenting the gospel to someone in that context,

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I'm going to be focusing upon what I know Mormons need to hear, especially in regards to what grace is, man's inability, who

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God is. I'm going to contextualize it to Mormonism. And that's the appropriate thing to do.

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If I'm in a mosque, you listen to the presentation

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I made of the gospel. For example, in the Abu Bakr Asidic Mosque in Erasmus, South Africa, in October of 2013.

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And I used phraseology and examples in talking about the imputed righteousness of Christ from Paul's terminology and writing to the

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Corinthians that I wouldn't use in other contexts, because I am seeking to wisely communicate to a particular group at that point in time.

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So, there is an appropriate use of the term contextualization. Can we all agree on that? Was Colbert contextualizing something?

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And the answer is no. There was no gospel there. There was no redemption there.

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And it's only the fact that many people on the left side of the spectrum of things, and you might be sitting there going,

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Tim Keller is not on the left side. If you look at the spectrum, Tim Keller isn't over at Union Theological Seminary.

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That's true. No question about it. But he is to the left of his own confessional tradition.

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I realized that years ago when he wrote a book on suffering, and I listened to him on a radio program.

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It's funny the things you remember. I listened to him on a radio program when

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I was in Colorado, and I had rented a bike to ride up there.

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I don't remember why. Maybe I had to fly in. That's probably because I had to fly in. And I had rented a

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Cannondale Super 6 Evo. And the funny thing is,

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I'm looking at it. It's right there. It's three and a half feet from me.

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The very same bike. I rented it. I rode it in my races up there. And when

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I was driving back from picking it up, that's when I heard the radio program that Tim Keller was on. I'm not sure why those two things are connected, but that's how it happened.

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How did I end up with it? The next year, I called again to see if I could rent it. And they were like, no, we've taken those out of our rental fleet.

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But which one did you have? And I told them the size. Yeah, it's actually for sale. And that's the bike

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I ride on my trainer these days. It's still by far the lightest frame I've ever owned. I'm still stunned at how light that thing is.

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It's just ridiculous. And it's 11 years old now. Anyway, I was coming back with that bike.

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And I listened to him on a radio program talking about suffering. And I've said before,

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I said out loud in probably the rental car that I was driving. I said, he's not a

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Westminster man. And I don't mean Westminster Seminary. I mean, Westminster Confession of Faith.

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He's not a Westminster man. He does not hold to a real understanding of the concept of the freedom of God in his sovereignty.

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He's not explaining suffering in a way that's consistent with the Westminster Confession of Faith. And so this is not something that's new.

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He is to the left of what should be his anchor point.

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And as a result, it just seems to me that people who are leaning that direction away from where they were raised or what was definitional for them tend to be willing to give a lot of space to Rome.

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To give a lot of space to Rome. I've just seen it over and over again. And there's nothing in what

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Keller said that seems to recognize just how far off the basic foundational tenets of what

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Colbert was saying really are. And I think back to the 90s, sitting at the

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Christian Booksellers Association with Ralph McKenzie. Ralph McKenzie was

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Norman Geisler's co -author on their book on Roman Catholicism. And he and I had a long conversation at the

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Christian Booksellers Association because I was criticizing the book. And one of the things he said to me is, how do you put it?

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Not stiff upper lip. You've got. It was some description he used of, I take a hard stance on Rome.

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And I said, that's because I'm actually debating Roman Catholics. And I already had been,

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I'd already done how many debates with Roman Catholics by that time. But at least a dozen.

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And I could just simply quote the sources to him. And more than once he was like, yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

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You know, maybe we should have thought about that. It's a good point, I think. But there was, even back then, there was this willingness to, well, you know.

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And I think part of it is because we want, we see people and we see we have so many things in common and we want to believe the best for them.

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And that leads to confusion between believing the best for them and not recognizing they are one issue, what they believe and what

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Rome teaches is another. You've got to recognize that. And so this has been going on for a long time.

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And so I saw all these people responding to Keller's thread.

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And I just didn't see a lot of people saying, hey, this just starts in the wrong place. It just simply starts at the wrong point.

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And you've got to deal with the foundational issue of where Colbert is coming from. And the influence of Roman Catholicism on him.

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And then the fact that he isn't even a faithful Roman Catholic, as far as the theology is concerned.

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That's really at the foundation of all of it. Well, anyway. So there's some,

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I wanted to, I had mentioned that on Twitter and I had said, the funny thing is, by the time I comment on this on Tuesday, it'll be old news.

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And that's how quickly things go. And it's unfortunate because these are moments that are, we can learn from.

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And I'm telling you, I mentioned this in the class. And by the way, it was such a wonderful class. Oh, by the way, I was at Grace Baptist Church last night in Shreveport.

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And the folks were wonderful. We had a great turnout. Good questions afterwards.

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Beautiful location. Looking right out over the lake. They actually managed to get that place just during the

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COVID stuff of the past couple of years. But great folks. And they're real kind to me.

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And I was really blessed by the fact that there was a young woman who asked a question.

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And she says, I've just recently been introduced to Doctrines of Grace. And some started going, okay, that's where that question is going to go from.

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But then it was like, me and my family came out of oneness Pentecostalism. And my book had a lot to do with that on the

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Trinity. And so you've got someone coming out of oneness

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Pentecostalism. And now they've got questions about how to, in light of Reformed theology, how do you reach your family and stuff?

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It was good stuff. It was, there were really good questions from everybody. There were some serious questions about Mormonism.

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And, and, and so it was a good evening. It was one of those. And again, roadtrip at aomin .org

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is the, is the email address roadtrip, one word at aomin .org. If this is a

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Monday night, I was pretty much dressed. I think I was wearing a shirt. I had a, I had a yellow and black flannel shirt.

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Cause it was a little bit cooler up there over this, but I was dressed very casually because I had spent many hours in the, in the vehicle.

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You, when you do this stuff and you do a fifth wheel and you're going to go speak someplace, I have to disconnect.

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That means I have to get set up. There's, there's things you have, you have to break down in the morning, set back up.

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It, it, you're, you're normally tired by the time you get there. And so if, if churches are willing to have a somewhat tired traveler come in and I'm not going to be dressed fancy,

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I'm, I'm staying at the local RV park. And yet we ended up talking about apologetics.

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And I went through first Peter three, 14 and 15, and I went through the background information and all the rest of that fun stuff with them.

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And then we took questions and, and we had people coming from a, you know, around the area. It was great.

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If that's what you, if you want to be considered to do that, if you want to be because I've got a map and when

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I'm putting my trip together, you know, I'm literally running through how many hours will it take me to get from here to here.

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And, you know, I can't do it every night. But I look at that map and there's these little pins that one of our dear volunteers has put there from everyone who sent it in an email to, and make sure that your pastors know about this.

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It'd be best if the pastors do this. We've had a lot of people send in emails and then I respond to it. I was like, well,

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I'm not the pastor, but I'll tell them. And it almost sounds like I'm inviting myself and I'm not inviting myself.

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So but if, if your church would like to have me consider that as I'm traveling and do something on a

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Monday, a Tuesday, a Thursday, Friday, not, not a normal, normally not a normal evening. Then send an email and give us contact information, roadtrip at aomin .org.

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And that's what we did last, last night. And like I said, the class this weekend was just great at GBTS in Conway.

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Great students. Eventually almost everyone was able to make it. We had to fight an ice storm and it really was an ice storm.

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I mean, we're all walking around like penguins on especially the second day on the solid sheets of ice everywhere.

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But anyway, at least we didn't lose power. That was the important part. But great students, great interaction.

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It was, it was very, very, very encouraging as to the future of the school and, and the students there.

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And so I was, I was very, very pleased. It was, it was great. So I appreciate everybody and, and their being able to be a part of it.

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I want to close out with looking at a passage of scripture. And if you want to grab your

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Bible, I will eventually put it up on the screen. But because when I get to a certain point, but I want to give the context.

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And so this is from second Timothy chapter two, Paul's final epistle to Timothy.

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You, therefore, my child, be strong and in grace that is in Christ Jesus. Second Timothy 2 .1. Second Timothy 2 .2,

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we could spend an entire program on. It'd be worthwhile doing. We have in the past. And the things that you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trustees and faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

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There is, in my opinion, the clearest, most compelling statement in scripture as to what

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Christian education is to look like in the church. The things that you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trust these two faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

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You can't know if they're faithful men, if they're not a part of your church, if they are not a part of the people that you are living with.

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This is all there is to it. It's important. Suffer hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.

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Man, is that politically incorrect. What a patriarchy thing that is. No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.

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So there is an ultimate authority. You have made a commitment and that commitment is similar to the commitment that a soldier makes, which may require of him the entirety of his life.

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And also, if anyone competes as an athlete, I'm not going to say anything about current athletic events.

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Also, if anyone competes as an athlete, he is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. A hardworking farmer ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops.

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Understand what I say. The Lord will give insight in everything. So discipline the Christian life, military discipline, discipline of the hardworking farmer, the discipline of the athlete.

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These are all appropriate descriptions of what we need to be doing.

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Remember Christ Jesus, remember Jesus Christ, sorry, risen from the dead of the seed of David, according to my gospel, for which

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I endure hardship even to chains as a criminal, but the word of God has not been chained.

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We could spend a lot of time on this and I'm almost thinking about maybe doing that in a future program.

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But this was the verse I wanted to get to and there's awesome stuff afterwards too. All the pastoral epistles are just phrase by phrase rich with deep truths that we need to think about today.

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But it was just this one thing I wanted to get to and we only have a few minutes. Verse 10, for this reason,

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I endure all things for the sake of the elect, so that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

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I remember in the 1980s when I had the experience of being challenged to think through what we would now know as the doctrines of grace.

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And I remember reading this first, I think I could be wrong about this, but my recollection is that I read this verse in that context while reading

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The Sovereignty of God by Arthur W. Pink. So I read it too.

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I had my cage staged like everybody else. And I remember realizing

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I've read this over and over again in my young life and I, why did

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I not see the phrase for the sake of the elect? Did I just simply redefine it?

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Was it because of the traditions that I had heard? And I remember, like I said, my dad was a graduate of Moody, his systematic theology was written by Presbyterian.

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I did have elements of Reformed theology, but they were in the context of fundamentalism, general association of regular

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Baptists. It wasn't Reformed Baptists. And so I had a mixture. It was not a consistent thing.

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And so that had caused me to struggle. And so in those contexts, you will hear people defining things and the way that you do the public altar call stuff and setting the mood and all that stuff that had been a part of my youth militated against my being able to hear what was being said in the text.

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For this reason, I endure all things diatus eclectus for the sake of the elect.

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That is a fixed group. But Paul is not saying he knows the identity of the elect before.

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It's not like he's walking through the streets of Ephesus and, ah, there's one of the elect over there.

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Ah, there's another one of the elect over there. No. He endures all things for the sake of the elect so that they also may obtain salvation, the salvation which is in Christ Jesus, together with eternal glory.

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So what he's saying is he has endured hardship. He has been put in chains as a criminal.

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Can you imagine what it's like to walk down the street between Roman soldiers in chains?

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You can't tell the people around you, this is because of Jesus. And they're looking at you.

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What kind of an evildoer is he? We call it the perp walk now, right?

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Make you walk with your hands behind your back and go get that horrible picture.

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That's part of the punishment, even if you end up not being convicted. That's part of the system.

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But he says, I endure all things for the sake of the elect. So he recognized that even his suffering, as long as he was doing what

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Christ called him to do, then he was being used by God as part of the means by which the elect were being brought to the salvation which is in Christ Jesus, and together with it, eternal glory.

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Could he always see how that was going to happen? No, of course not. But he had confidence in the sovereignty of his

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Lord that whatever he would experience, as long as he remained focused upon being obedient to the lordship of Christ, and that's what he had said up above, remember

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Jesus Christ risen from the dead of the seed of David according to my gospel. That's the focus

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I mentioned last night at the church. There in 1 Peter 3 15, set the

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Messiah as Yahweh apart in your hearts, as treat as holy in your hearts, and when you do that, you're going to be different, and therefore people are going to ask you a reason with hopes of sinning, and that's when you give that reason defense.

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That's what apologetics actually is. It's very much a part of evangelism, but it requires a theological commitment to who

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Jesus Christ is. Same context here, different apostle, remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead of the seed of David according to my gospel.

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The resurrected Lord defeated death. How is that related to the seed of David?

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He was prophesied. He was the Messiah. For hundreds of years the prophets had spoke of his coming, and that empty tomb puts out a flood of light down through the history of the world that cannot be put out, and think about what he's saying here.

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He can be in chains. Word of God's not chained. He can be shamed, but the tomb's still empty, and the light cannot be extinguished.

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Light cannot be extinguished. You think of all the powers that were arrayed against the primitive

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Christian church in the days of Rome, or go ahead and bring it up to our day, and you think about the technology, and the power, and the trillions of dollars that could be arrayed against the

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Christian faith in our day to crush us. Cannot extinguish the light that comes from that empty tomb.

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That empty tomb changed this world. The cross and the tomb are the center point of history.

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Everything points to it. Everything afterwards has to be defined within the light of it, and so Paul says,

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I endure all things for the sake of the elect. He knows God has his elect. He knows

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God's going to save him, and he is part of the means that God has chosen to shine the light from that empty tomb all across the world, and you and I as believers are in the exact same position, no matter where you are.

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Homeschool mom, the dryer broke, and the kids have just been wild, crazy people today, and sometimes you just wonder, why in the world am

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I here? Believe it or not, you're enduring all things for the sake of the elect, and those children, the

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Lord is gracious to them, draws them unto himself. We're going to look back, and you are going to be one of the primary means by which they obtain the salvation, which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.

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You are being used in that way. You can't avoid being used in that way. It doesn't matter where you are, who you are.

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Endure all things the sake of the elect. There is an elect, and God freely chose them.

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He's going to bring about their salvation, and he uses us in the process. Wonderful truths, wonderful truths.

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Thanks for watching the program today. We're going to try to sneak another one in hopefully tomorrow, because Thursday I head down to Houston, and it's going to get busy there for a while.

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So, we seemingly had a decent internet connection from in the middle of nowhere today.

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So, yee -haw, that's good. We'll hopefully be able to have it again tomorrow, and be back with you to open the

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Word of God, and consider these things. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time on The Dividing Line.