F4F | How to Biblically Critique a Sermon Part 2

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Rosebro. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. So I thought what we would do today is another installment of how to biblically critique a sermon.

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We're going to deal with a particular Bible -twisting technique known as narcissus.

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Narcissism and eisegesis mixed together. We all know what narcissism is, love of self.

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Eisegesis is reading into the biblical text things that are not there. We're supposed to exegete, we're supposed to read out what's in the biblical text, not eisegete, read in things that are not there.

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And this is a kind of a classic example of it, but with a text that many people are not familiar with.

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And so we're gonna spitball this together. I intentionally didn't cross all my t's and dot all my i's.

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I was gonna say cross all my i's and dot my t's. But you get the idea. I purposely left the sketch for this particular episode not fully filled in so that I can walk you through, again, what is my process when

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I'm critiquing a sermon? What am I looking for? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna head down to Church of the

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Highlands down in Alabama, and let me pull this up here, and there we go.

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We're gonna be listening to, her name is Charlotte Gamble, G -A -M -B -I -L -L, not gamble as in gambling, but Gamble, I don't know.

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And you're gonna note already, if you are biblically discerning, then you're gonna note that if you see this, what you're seeing right now happening at your church, your church is in rebellion to the

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Word of God. Now I'm not gonna dedicate any time talking about that because I've talked about it exclusively and in -depth in a other episode of Fighting for the

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Faith, and what we'll do is we'll put a link to it up here, and this is the episode, the name of the episode is

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Living Proof Beth Moore is an Autonomian. Living Proof Beth Moore is an

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Autonomian, and let's just say that I go in -depth as to why you would immediately, just by looking at this, know that you're dealing with a church that is in rebellion to the

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Word of God. All of that being said, we're going to listen to her sermon, the name of the sermon is

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Lo Debar, and let me set it up this way. What if I told you that God had, through inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit, written a story, had a historical account recorded for us in the

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Old Testament, whereby if you lost your job because of COVID -19, there are promises there regarding you and your circumstances, and immediately you might be cynical and skeptical, and you should be.

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So what we're gonna do, we're gonna listen to a large swath of this and kind of pick it apart, and like I said,

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I haven't done all...I haven't fleshed everything out, so that way you can kind of see how I work through things like this, what am

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I looking for, and how would I work on correctly handling a historical narrative like the one she's gonna be working through.

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So here's Charlotte Gamble and Lo Debar. I'm gonna open the Word and talk to us about something that I really hope helps you this morning, and more than that,

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I hope it becomes a message that then you use to help someone else. We heard, didn't we, from Pastor Chris last weekend that we're here right now...

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I wasn't there, it's a different Pastor Chris. ...to get this good news out. There's never been a time when the gospel is more needed to be heard for those that have lost all sense of hope...

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Now I agree, people need to hear the gospel, and my immediate question for Charlotte would be, how do you define the gospel?

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If you want to know what the gospel is, by the way, Scripture defines it for us, so we do not need to speculate regarding that.

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It's found in 1 Corinthians 15. Opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15. ...and I hope that this becomes something else, language for you to help yourself and then help others in this season we find ourselves in.

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Have you found at all, at any time in this kind of pandemic season that we're in, saying these words, it's just unfair?

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Has anyone said that, or is it just me? Like it's just unfair that we can't do church as usual.

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It's unfair that I can't go to the store in the way that I want to go to the store. Okay, now, when

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I am evaluating a sermon, one of the things I immediately want to figure out is, what is the problem that the sermon is going to address?

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In the last installment of How to Biblically Critique a Sermon, we took a look at this concept.

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I kind of fleshed it out. Every sermon has a problem that it is going to be addressing. So I think

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Charlotte here is beginning to lay track on what the problem is, you know, the circumstances being what they are, because of the consequences, the ramifications of the

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COVID -19 pandemic. And I know some of you don't believe that there's a pandemic. I get that.

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I'm not trying to make a political statement here. The point is, is that regardless of whether or not you think it's a pandemic or a plandemic,

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I don't even want to go there. The idea here is, is that people have lost their jobs.

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That's undeniable. And, you know, with the riots, there's been businesses that have been burned to the ground, there have been businesses that have been shuttered, that have been closed up.

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And then, don't even get me started about the hurricanes. We continue.

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It's unfair that my job doesn't look like it used to look, or I can't see my friends like I normally see them.

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It's unfair that I have to sit in service with this mask on my face. It's unfair that I can't hug all the people

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I want to hug. I don't know whether you've said that, but I have said that several times.

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And the truth is, this season that we are in, it has treated us all differently.

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And for many of us, we have experienced some unfair circumstances.

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We didn't ask for them. We didn't create them. We kind of just have had to put up with them.

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And, you know, a lot of us in this room and watching at home right now, it's affected us in different ways.

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For some, there's been a loss of employment. For others, if you're in the hand sanitizer business, you're doing really well right now.

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Others, you're not. Bummer that I didn't have stock in Purell. Oh well. Your business is struggling because of the circumstances beyond your control.

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It's unfair. It's unfair. If you're a parent in here, you'll have children that have probably used the same words to you.

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It's unfair. Something in their way. It's unfair. Why do I have to take out the trash? Yeah, I've heard that.

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As siblings treated, they might say, it's unfair. And as a parent, what do you say in response?

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Life's unfair, right? You've all said it, yeah? You have. And that's the truth. Life is unfair.

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And you might think, well, this is not a very uplifting message, Charlotte, this morning. But we need to know that about life.

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We need to face that about life. There are seasons that are just unfair. That's the best way to describe them.

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And just like we try and teach our children, I think sometimes... Now, this is where I have a problem with the way the problem is presented.

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So if you want to kind of put this in a proper biblical perspective, the reason why the world is, you know, in the futility that it finds itself in is because of our sin.

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If you really want to drill down in this, you can go into Ecclesiastes, talking about how everything is meaningless.

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And so you'll know that the story of humanity is the story of calamity, of catastrophe, of despite all of our best efforts to construct something that is lasting and that is good, it all comes crashing down, and then, of course, we all die.

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So, you know, if Jesus tarries in a hundred years, we're all dead.

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So, you know, it's just... Is that unfair? No. This is the consequence of our sin and rebellion against God.

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So already I have a problem, because at a church, a church should be taking a biblical worldview and understanding how the biblical narrative comes into play regarding catastrophes and pandemics and global economies melting down and things like this, that this is all a result.

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This is the consequence of our collective sin. No one particular sin, but as a whole, our rebellion against God.

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So already we got a problem here. We forget as adults that these are the things that we have to learn to navigate as believers, and so today

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I want to speak into the place of unfair, whatever that looks like. Speak into the place of unfair.

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What's the cash value of that statement? And so you'll note that even from back when

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I was, you know, a kid in an evangelical, there's

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Christianese, and so now we've got new phrases that have been added to Christianese, and one of the phrases is speak into.

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I'm gonna speak into unfair. Okay, all right. I have no idea what that means.

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In your life right now, and I want to give you hope today in your place of unfair, because there's something else that is also...

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All right, so if you want to give me hope, then you need to point me to the solution to our sin and its consequences, and that's our crucified and risen

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Savior. Okay? So let me give you a couple of assumptions that I work from based on Scripture.

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So let's take a look at a couple biblical texts to get things rolling here, at least lay a little bit of foundation.

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In the Gospel of John chapter 5, Jesus is talking to those who do not believe in Him.

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He says, you search, or, you know, one translation says, you diligently search. You search the

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Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. It is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me so that you may have life.

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Okay? So according to Jesus, the Bible is about Jesus, and coming to Him is the necessary thing.

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He is the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in Him, even though he dies, yet shall he live.

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They will never die, Christ says. So the Scriptures are about Jesus. They're not about me.

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They're not about you. If you must read yourself into the Bible, then read yourself in as the problem, not the solution.

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Yeah, just say it, because each and every one of us are sinners. And then you'll note, then, when we talk about the

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Old Testament, how do you rightly understand the Old Testament? Well, one of the texts that helps us out along these lines is found in Colossians chapter 2.

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After hearing, after Paul writing about the record of death that stood against us being canceled, that Christ set it aside and nailed it to the cross, he goes on to say, therefore, in light of that, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink with regard to a festival or a new moon or a

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Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come. The substance belongs to Christ.

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So the New Testament teaches us that the Old Testament are types and shadows that point us to, to one degree or another, point us to Christ.

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And so we will know that we're gonna rightly handle a biblical text when we end up with Jesus as the solution.

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You know, you get the idea. So sin's the problem, Jesus is the solution, and as you read different accounts in the

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Old Testament, especially when you read the writings of the Church Fathers, you're gonna note that they obsessed with finding a way to connect it back to Jesus, and saw these historical narratives as types and shadows that point us to Christ.

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Now, there is one other text that I'm thinking about off the top of my head, and it's found in 1

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Corinthians chapter 2, I think, let's see.

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Yes, here it is. So Paul says, "...and when I came to you, brothers, I did not come proclaiming the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom."

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Paul apparently was a boring preacher, he even killed somebody during one of his sermons because a fellow fell asleep and fell out of a window, broke his neck, but don't worry, the

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Apostle Paul could operate in signs and wonders of the Apostles, and raised him from the dead. So that was kind of him.

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But anyway, he says, and listen to these words, "...I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified."

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Now, just take this verse out of context, post it on Twitter or Facebook, and watch the people come unglued.

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I've had that happen to me before. What do you mean, nothing except for Jesus? That's ridiculous! The whole

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Bible isn't about Jesus, just the little parts of the Gospels, that's about Jesus. Uh -uh, uh -uh, the whole thing.

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"...I chose to know nothing among you except for Christ and Him crucified." All right, this is like a major thesis sentence.

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And then if you really wanted to, you know, to kind of drive the point home in...

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I think it's the Gospel of John, it's the tail end of the Gospel of John. Yeah, let's see here,

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I'm not quite there yet, let's see here. There it is. Now, Jesus did many other signs,

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John 20, verse 30. Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the

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Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name. And I think this is more than just the thesis statement of the

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Gospel of John. I believe this is the thesis statement of all of Scripture, all the

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Scriptures God breathed. It points us to Christ. And then kind of in that regard then, a wonderful statement in the book of Revelation chapter 19.

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Again, there's no notes here, I'm just kind of doing this off the top of my head. Oh, did

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I put Romans? I did put Romans. Hang on a second here. This senior moment, so tragic, yet so true.

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Anyway, Revelation 19, there we go. I'm in Revelation chapter 19, and there is a wonderful statement.

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The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

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Even the prophets, they're all pointing to Jesus. So the the prophets are pointing to Him coming, the

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Apostles have written about what He did when He was here, and also then point back to what He accomplished in during His earthly ministry, and where He is now, ascended to the right hand of the

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Father, ruling and reigning presently. So you get the idea. So everything's got to find its terminus in Christ.

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All the consequences of our sin have to do with sickness, disease, poverty, catastrophes, natural disasters, all those things.

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You get the idea. So that's our groundwork here. So let's see where Charlotte goes then with this.

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Unfair. And that is the grace and the favor and the goodness of God.

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Now, I'm gonna back this up because I am a firm advocate for the grace and the favor of God.

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Absolutely. But the question is, how is she defining that? See, that's the next question. Just because somebody uses the term grace and favor doesn't necessarily mean that they're talking about the real grace, the real favor that's found in Scripture.

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So I back this up 15 seconds so we can hear the context again of this statement of grace. That looks like in your life right now, and I want to give you hope today in your place of unfair, because there's something else that is also unfair, and that is the grace and the favor and the goodness of God.

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Okay, so the grace and the favor and the goodness of God is unfair. Okay.

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It is really unfair. He lavishes it upon us when we don't deserve it.

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And what do you mean by that exactly? We're talking about the forgiveness of sins, eternal life. What are we talking about?

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He sends it following after us on a daily basis. Following after us?

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Mercy and His goodness and His kindness is extended towards us when we're not actually deserving of it.

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We do not deserve God's kindness at all. So here's the thing. You'll note that oftentimes you're going to hear things that sound right, and bits of it are going to be spot -on.

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The trick in discernment is not determining between right and wrong. Oftentimes it's determining the difference between right and almost right.

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Correct and almost correct. That's the subtlety about doing this, and it requires you to have a firm grasp and understanding of the

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Scripture. It's unfair that He would do so much for us when we feel in return we can do so little for Him.

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So the good news is if you feel like you're in an unfair scenario right now...

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The good news is that Christ died for our sins. See, that's the thing. The good news of the Gospel is that Christ died for our sins and was raised again bodily on the third day.

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That's the good news. See 1 Corinthians 15. What she said is not the good news, but she's saying good news in the context of the problem that she set up.

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That there is hope for you today. That there is a story that God is writing by His grace and favor today that maybe you just need reminding of.

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God's writing a story. Okay, so already I'm frustrated because there's a lot of error mixed in here, and the way she's talking about things is not the way the

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Bible describes things. Unfair.

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Now she's kind of ripping biblical stories out of context and weaving them into the problem that she's laid out for us.

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It was unfair that Moses was born. It was unfair? That's not an emphasis of any text as it relates to the

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Exodus or the birth of Moses. That she endured to bring him into the world.

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And so literally called him Jabez, which means pain. Imagine if you were in a household with your siblings.

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Okay, time for dinner, Stephen. Come downstairs, Heidi. Pain, get down here right now.

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You'd be like, this is so unfair, right? But I love Jabez because you know what?

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He took his unfair circumstance to God. And he said, God, I wonder if you could write me a different story.

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I wonder if where I was named Pain, you could enlarge my territory.

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Okay, so this reminds me of the big fad that occurred more than a decade ago.

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This is like a decade and a half, almost two decades ago. The big prayer of Jabez fad.

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I mean, one verse in all of the scripture turned into a whole book. God expand my territory.

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Boy, people want to hear about that. So, okay, we're majoring on minors here.

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I wonder if you could do something to change this script and God said, I like you. I like you've not just lived with the title somebody gave you, but you've come to the one who can rename you.

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It's not a faithful retelling of the mention of Jabez in the Old Testament. We've read a few things into the biblical text that are not there.

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That's who we are coming to. The one who rewrites, renames the story.

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All right. So when I see something like that, you know, my familiarity with the scripture tells me there's something wrong.

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But let's do this. So Jabez, let's see here.

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I need to find the actual reference. It's not in the New Testament, Roseboro. When I do my searches,

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I need to open up to all text here. So Jabez. All right. So Jabez is mentioned.

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Not that much. Okay. Yeah, that's kind of the thing about Jabez. The clans.

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Okay, so we are looking at First Chronicles 2, 55. The clans also of the scribes who lived at Jabez.

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That's not what we're looking for here. So we're looking now for First Chronicles 4 and starting at verse 9.

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All right. Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother called his name

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Jabez, saying, because I bore him in pain. Yes, that's his name. Jabez called upon the God of Israel, saying,

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Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain.

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God granted what he asked. Yeah, that's all of it right there.

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Whole book written on it. I mean, there were tchotchkes, whole prayer of Jabez prayer shawls and tchotchkes and Bible covers and things like this.

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Oh, God, that you would enlarge my border. A lot of border enlarging prayers were out there because of the book,

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The Prayer of Jabez. But that's all we know about him. That's it. So already, you know, you got some major issues here, because what

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Charlotte said regarding Jabez and what God said to him, that's not in the text. So already she's twisting it pretty bad.

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Let me back this up so you can see that. And God said, I like you. I like you've not just lived with the title somebody gave you, but you've come to the one who can rename you.

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Yeah, God didn't say any of that, so that's a problem. Today, that's who we are coming to.

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The one who rewrites, renames the story... God didn't rename Jabez.

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...of our lives. So I want to take us to a place in the Bible where there's a story that plays out of a very unfair circumstance that someone has to deal with, and I want us to learn from what they did so that we can do the same thing in our life.

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All right, now that's an important statement, and that tells us a lot about her theology and how she understands the

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Bible. Listen to what she said. So we're supposed to learn what they did so that we can do the same thing in our life.

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Yeah, this is not what the Old Testament histories are about.

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Jesus said, you diligently search the scriptures because you think that in them you have life, yet they are the very scriptures that testify about me, and you refuse to come to me so that you may have life.

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So I assure you the story that we're going to hear regarding Lodabar and Mephibosheth have nothing about some application that you're supposed to perform so that you can get the same results as Mephibosheth.

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Because you've got to know, Mephibosheth, he didn't do anything except for receive the good graces and the mercy of King David.

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I'll let her spin the story. This message is about a place called Lodabar.

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Everyone say Lodabar. Which means no pasture. That's what the word means.

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Lodabar. Lodabar was an actual place where people actually ended up living.

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It was not a great place. It wasn't a place that you would go into Zillow and say, I think I would like to live there.

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Now, in my research regarding Lodabar, it's important to note this. Lodabar is on the other side of the

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Jordan. And that's important. It's in the area of Gilead. And that's also important because Mephibosheth is a surviving son of Jonathan, which would make him a competing heir to the throne of Israel.

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And so Lodabar is, well, it's technically outside of Israel.

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That's kind of the point here. I'm pretty sure the property was fairly cheap in Lodabar.

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It wasn't on the top tourist spots in the area. Lodabar literally means this.

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It was a place of no pasture, no woods, and no thing.

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Not attractive, right? Where do you live? Where there's no pasture, no woods, and no thing.

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The word, the two words, Lodabar, I think is the way it would work when you're not declining it.

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It just means no pasture. That's just the literal translation of the name of the place. But that was an actual place that existed.

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And I think in this season, maybe we can feel, or maybe there's something that's happened in your life that's caused you to feel, wow,

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I am living in Lodabar. Now, this is a classic technique.

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And this is where you are already way off the rails, and you're not understanding a proper sense of what the

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Bible is saying. Lodabar is not an allegory of a problem in your life.

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And see, this is the issue, is that when you do this, you're allegorizing the biblical text, and rather than the biblical text being a type and shadow that point us to Jesus, the biblical text then become a type and shadow that point us to something in your life.

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So you do not have a Lodabar, you do not live in Lodabar.

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That's not the point of this text in this way. Again, the terminus needs to find it in Christ.

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This is type and shadow, Jesus is the substance, so we're going to look for a way, how do we connect this back in a way that we can see, that we maintain the historicity of the text.

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We don't want to deny that, while at the same time, noting that the theological significance is going to have a connection back to Jesus.

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So what she's doing here is doing violence to the text, and this is always like the major move in Narcissus, where you're going to read yourself into the biblical text.

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I assure you, you're not in here, at least in the way she's playing it out.

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I feel I have no pasture, I don't feel secure anymore. I feel all the things that made me feel comfortable have been removed.

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I feel like I don't have a voice anymore. I don't have a place where I can express myself anymore.

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I feel like everything that was connected to me is somehow has been disconnected. That is called

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Lodabar. No, it's not. You're the first person

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I've ever heard say that. And if that is where you are, or where you know someone that you love is currently living.

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Do you live in Lodabar, Alabama? Wouldn't that be low to bar?

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I'm to help them step out of Lodabar into the grace and the favor of God.

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So you have to step out of Lodabar and into the grace and favor of God. So you gotta, you gotta, you gotta.

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And you're going to know when you gotta, that's law. So are you in Lodabar? Well, it's kind of your fault because you haven't stepped out of Lodabar.

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God's grace and favor is there for you, but you gotta leave your Lodabar. This is just bad theology all around.

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The person that lived in Lodabar was a young man. He went there from a very early age.

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His life was very unfair. That's how he ended up there. His name was

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Methibosheth. Methibosheth's story is told in Samuel, the book of Samuel.

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And in 2 Samuel, we're given a context for what actually happened to Methibosheth.

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Let me read to you how his life literally in a moment turned from good to very hard.

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It says in verse 4, This is what happened.

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He was five years old when the news about Saul, who was his granddad, and Jonathan, his father, came from Jezreel.

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Now, the news that came to him at this young age was that both his father and his grandfather had died on a battlefield.

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Right. And this is in the bigger story of the struggle between Saul, who was a wicked king whom

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God was judging, and cutting him off and cutting his descendants off from being the monarch dynasty of Israel.

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And the ascent of David, who was at that time the anointed but not yet coronated king of Israel, which has messianic implications like you wouldn't believe.

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The story of David, in so many ways, is parallel to the life of Christ. His story is in type and shadow, and the fulfillment is in Jesus.

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You can make connections back. And you'll note that Jesus is the descendant of King David, will sit on the throne of his father

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David forever and ever, in a world without end. Absolutely, that's going to be the case.

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I would point you to Revelation 20 and 21 to give you an example of what we're looking at coming here.

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All of that being said, you can't understand the theology properly unless you are making connections back to Jesus, the son of David, and things like this.

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There's a reason why things go poorly for Mephibosheth, and this has to do with his grandfather's evil and rebellion against the

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Word of God. It's pretty unfair that overnight this young boy lost the two people in his life that he looked to, his father and his grandfather.

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And now because he's in the royal household, there's an urgency to get him to a place where he's not endangered for his life because there will be a fight over who took over the dynasty of the household.

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This is most certainly true. So he would have a competing claim to the throne of Israel. And so the person that he should have been able to trust, the nurse looking after him, it says she picks him up and she was beginning to flee, fleeing out the house.

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And as she hurried to leave, she dropped him. He fell and he became disabled.

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His name was Mephibosheth. In one moment, his life went from one reality to a whole nother reality.

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He went from a prince to a fugitive. He went from able -bodied to disabled.

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He went from a palace lifestyle to the location that he was taken to of Lo -Debar.

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Maybe you feel right now you were in one place and now you're in another. Are you in Lo -Debar?

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See, this is just a violent, this is doing violence to biblical text. That's not why this account is written.

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The stories ultimately have their terminus in Christ, not you and me.

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This is a ridiculous way of handling these texts. This is wrong. Are you in your

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Lo -Debar? Are you experiencing your Mephibosheth moment? It's not what this is about. By the grace and mercy of King David.

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I'm not in Lo -Debar. I left it long ago because I never went there.

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None of us have been there. I'm going to leave Lo -Debar. Some of you don't think it's possible to get a different story out of this season.

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But God is writing the story already that's going to blow your mind.

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Now, this is where I have to make an important point. And that is that already we can see what she's about to do.

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And I've seen this done thousands of times. And that's not hyperbole.

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Over the time that I've done my podcast, reviewing hundreds of sermons every year, and there was hundreds more that never made the cut, that being the case,

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I've seen this done thousands and thousands of times. And the idea here is that what she's going to end up doing is making promises for God that God has not made and read into this text steps or decisions that somebody made in order to get themselves out of a bad circumstance.

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And if you just follow that pattern, you can get out of your bad circumstance too. That's not a promise that's given to us in Scripture.

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So keep this in mind. In the New Covenant, what we are promised is the forgiveness of our sins and eternal life given as a gift.

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God is the one who raises us from the dead spiritually, and then as our

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God, he cares for our needs. We are also promised suffering and persecution in this lifetime.

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This is just what we are to expect as Christians. These are the promises for us. And we're just passing through.

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Our life is a vapor, a smoke. We're here today, we're gone tomorrow, and nobody remembers us anymore.

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That's how that goes. So the idea here is that if you lose sight of what the real promises are of the

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New Covenant, and you start to make promises for God that he has not made, note this,

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God is not required to keep those promises that you're making for him that he didn't make. And when you come up with artificial or counterfeit promises, you get people trusting in God for things he has not promised to give them, and when the inevitable happens, and God doesn't make good on these promises because they were not promises he ever made, people say

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Christianity is false. It's bovine scatology.

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It isn't true. The preacher lady told me that I can get out of my low dabar, and my low dabar has gotten worse.

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I followed all the steps she said I needed to follow, just like Mephibosheth followed. And my low dabar is even worse than it was before.

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And they'll say Christianity isn't true, and the reason being is because this woman's in the real sense.

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She's blaspheming. She's making promises for God he has not made at all, and that's the problem here with this technique.

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This is not exegesis. This is eisegesis, and she's reading in promises that ain't there.

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And so I want us to learn from Mephibosheth's story. The first thing I want us to learn is this.

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Number one, your status life gives you does not alter the significance within you.

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The status life gives you does not alter the significance within you. So now we've got a problem.

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We're scratching itching ears, and we're ignoring an important text. Let me pull that up here.

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Romans chapter 3. You want to talk about your significance? Okay. Paul writes, and this, by the way, this verbiage that we're about to read, and this is found in Psalm 14 and 53.

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This occurs three times in Scripture. Pay attention. That's a lot. So what then? Are we Jews any better off?

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Not at all. For we've already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, they're under sin.

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Everybody, every one of us, we're under sin. As it is written, watch this. None is righteous.

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These words are found in Psalm 14, Psalm 53. None is righteous. No, not one.

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No one understands. No one seeks for God. All together have turned aside.

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Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one.

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Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to see. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouths are full of curses and bitterness.

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Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery. The way of peace they have not known.

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There is no fear of God before their eyes. Okay. So now we've got a problem here.

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When your first point is, is the status life gives you does not alter the significance within you, immediately you've got a problem because she's scratching itching ears.

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Well, of course. It's me. I'm important. I'm significant. No, all of us, me included, because of our sin and rebellion of God, we've become worthless.

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Let that sink in. Come on now. Listen to that again. The status that life gives you does not alter the significance within you.

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Mephibosheth lost his title, but he did not lose his value. What text says this?

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He did not lose his value. He lost his title, but he didn't lose his value. Listen, in this pandemic, a lot of people's roles have changed.

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A lot of people's status has changed. This text is not about the consequences and the ramifications and the things that have happened to people as a result of COVID -19.

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It has changed, but your status does not determine your significance.

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You are a child of God. You are chosen.

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You are valued. You are loved. Loved, yes. I'm going to go with that.

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But, you see, God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for our sins.

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We'll take a look at that text in a minute. You are called. I think in this season of shaking, there's been a whole lot of shaking going on.

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Grab your Prophecy Bingo card. She's using prophecy buzzwords now. Some of the things that we clung to for our identity, some of the things that we have built our life upon have revealed themselves to be that unstable structure.

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You know, we were in church, and we said, well, I'm building my life on Jesus, and then you lose the job.

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And you're like, whoa, I thought I built my life on Jesus. If somebody loses their job and says, whoa,

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I thought I built my life on Jesus, my immediate question is, what did you tell them building their life on Jesus meant?

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Because, you know, I'm a pastor, and nobody who attends the congregations

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I serve would ever sit there and go, well, because I follow Jesus, that means

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I'll never lose my job. Yeah, that's not going to happen. Maybe I built a lot of my life on the status of my employment.

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Maybe I built my life on that relationship rather than on my sonship or my daughtership.

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You'll notice sonship and daughtership is not about being a humble, penitent sinner and recipient of the mercy and grace of God, but it's this idea that I'm royalty, and there's privileges and rights that go along with royalty.

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My whole identity is wrapped up in that. There's something really wrong with that.

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Jesus. And in that shaking period, we can begin to realize that we've allowed some things to define us that God never intended to define us.

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Your label that life gives you is not the same as what God calls you. You are not single, disabled, single parent, divorcee, ex -addict, unemployed.

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You are not any of those things. When God calls you, He calls you by name, not by label.

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So we have to realize that. You'll notice she's not doing this with any text.

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Now, I pointed out in one of the previous episodes of Fighting for the Faith, 1

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Corinthians 15, talking about that do not be deceived, the adulterers, the idolaters, the thieves, the murderers, the revilers, they will not inherit the kingdom of God.

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1 Corinthians 6 then goes on to say, and such were some of you, but you were washed.

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So you'll note that...in fact, let me pull that text up, because I think putting it back in context is going to be helpful in this regard, because our identity is as forgiven sinners.

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So do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor the drunkards, nor the revilers, nor the swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

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And such were some of you, but you were washed. So you know, our identity in Christ is wrapped up in our baptism.

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And so you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, declared righteous, in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. And so our identity is as forgiven sinner.

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Justified, sanctified, washed, and all of this in the name of Christ. That's where our real biblical identity is.

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Where she's pointing us to ain't that. So we got some problems. Let's keep going. If we were to look at the status of someone like Gideon, he was the weakest of the weakest of the weakest of the weak.

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That's a lot of weak. Yeah, that was on purpose so that nobody would get the credit except for God. Yeah, that's why his army was whittled down to 300, so that nobody would get the credit except for God.

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Maybe that's what you feel right now. I just feel weak. I feel like I have no energy. Isn't it funny how you can get into this?

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She is really twisting up these texts, and she's not reading any of them properly. Lifestyle in this season of thinking that pajamas are everyday, all -day wear.

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Hello, anyone else? It's like, oh, clothes. I don't even remember what we do with those.

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If you're watching at home, you're PJs. No conviction, but please get changed at some point today. It's amazing how we can begin to change the way we look, the way we dress, the way we speak because of what's happening around us instead of looking to what's happening on the inside of us.

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And so Gideon's the weakest of the weak, but God says over Gideon's life, hey, mighty warrior, hey,

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I'm rewriting your story. That is not who I... Yeah, God didn't say, I'm rewriting your story.

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So she's not reading out the Gideon text. She's twisting the Gideon text, rolling it into her narcissistic isogesis, narsogesis, story of Mephibosheth.

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And this is the kind of message that scratches itching ears and feeds the narcissism of our sinful flesh.

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This is a problem. Say you are, what about Mary? She was an unwed teenager.

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But when God spoke over her life, she was the carrier of a savior. You see, just like Mary, she had the title of unwed teenager, and now she's the carrier of the savior.

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You too can be like that. That's not what the

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Bible is teaching. So we've got to realize that God's labeling of our life does not look like man's.

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The grace of God will rewrite your story every single time.

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In what way? Yeah, the grace of God does rewrite our story. Rather than sinner heading to hell,

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I am forgiven sinner, declared a saint, made holy by God, by Christ and what he's done for me.

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And my story is rewritten. Rather than spending an eternity in hell like I deserve, I, by the grace of God, am given eternal life as a gift.

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See the difference? In 2 Samuel 9, that begins to happen for Mephibosheth.

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Because in 2 Samuel 9, we find that God begins to put Mephibosheth on somebody's mind.

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I love this part. Okay, now this is where it gets really weird. Okay, so 2

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Samuel 9 is what she said she's doing. And so you're going to note here, in fact, let me do this.

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Let me grab my Hebrew text. There we go. And I got to make that a little smaller.

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There we go. All right. So let's take a look. Well, I'm going to let her...

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Let's go ahead and take a look at the context of what's going on here, because she sees this as a pattern that's going to follow out in your life.

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So David said, Is there still anyone left at the house of Saul that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake?

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You'll note that Jonathan, fascinating fellow, although he was the crown prince of Israel, his fealty was to King David.

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And he made no pretense of wanting to have the throne at all.

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And although he died on the battlefield, his loyalty was to David, who was the king, which is just amazing when you think about it.

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It's like unheard of. Usually people and families protect the monarchy, if it's in their family, at all costs.

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And we all know how that goes. First order of business when a king rises to power is to kill everybody who's got a competing claim to the throne.

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But David doesn't do that. And that's kind of the point. So let me look for a text here.

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I think it's in Romans 5. Enemy. The enemy. Let's see here.

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When we were still enemies. There we go. And I want this in the epistles.

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Again, we're just, we're thinking a lot. Yeah, here we go. Romans 5. I was right. Romans 5, 10. All right.

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So here's how you can connect this back to Christ. I'll start at Romans 5, verse 6 for context.

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For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

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And I want you to consider this for a second here. This is an amazing thing here. If you don't see yourself as part of this group, the ungodly, you don't need

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Jesus. And that's a problem. Because if you don't think of yourself as part of the ungodly, then you're deceiving yourself.

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The truth is not in you. And so Christ only died for the ungodly. And when you recognize that you have fallen short of the glory of God horrendously, then you recognize the great mercy of Christ.

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So while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person.

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Though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God shows, and you could translate this as demonstrates if you want to.

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God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

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Since therefore we have now been justified, declared righteous by His blood, how much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God?

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And that's what we're being saved from, each and every one of us. Me and you included. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, how much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by His life?

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More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation.

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So therefore just as sin came in the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sin.

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For sin was indeed in the world before the law was given, but sin was not counted where there is no law.

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Yet death reigned from the time of Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one to come.

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Here we go again, the Old Testament types and shadows. But the free gift, it's not like the trespass. For if many died through the one man's trespass, how much more have the grace in God and the free gift of grace of the one man

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Jesus Christ abounded for many? And the free gift is not like the result of the one man's sin.

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For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.

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For if because of the one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more now those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man

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Jesus Christ. Therefore as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.

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You get the idea. So here we got this great gospel text, and here we got a real theme here.

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While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God. And God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies,

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Christ died for our sins. So for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled. So here in this story then of Mephibosheth, David, for the sake of Jonathan, whose loyalty and love was for David, even though he was the crown prince, he laid that down.

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He made no effort to maintain the throne for himself.

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In fact, he even was lost in battle. And technically, Mephibosheth, as a surviving son of Jonathan, should be the mortal enemy of King David by his lineage.

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But David exemplifies this love of Christ to be reconciled even to his enemies.

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That's kind of the point here. So if you're going to find a way to connect this to Jesus, these are your themes that you can work with.

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Now there was a servant of the house of Saul whose name was Ziba, and they called him to David, and the king said to him,

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Are you Ziba? And he said, I am your servant. And the king said, Is there still not someone of the house of Saul that I may show the kindness of God to him?

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You can see this. He wants to demonstrate the love and the kindness, not of him, but of God.

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Ziba said to the king, Well, there is a son of Jonathan. He's crippled in his feet. And the king said to him,

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Where is he? And Ziba said to the king, He is in the house of Mehir, the son of Amiel at Lodabar.

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And the king sent and brought from him from the house of Mehir, the son of Amiel at Lodabar, and Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face, and he paid homage.

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And David said, Mephibosheth. And he answered, Behold, I am your servant. And David said to him, Do not fear.

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And he should have, and that's the whole point. Oh, no, the king wants to see me. I'm a dead man. And David says,

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No, do not fear. For I will show you kindness. For the sake of your father

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Jonathan, I will restore to you the land of Saul, your father. This is a little bit of a picture of our own salvation.

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You see this, and it's all kindness and mercy. What did this guy do right? Nothing! And you shall eat at my table always.

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Well, wait a second. I seem to recall that Christ feeds us in the New Testament. Anyway, so he paid homage and said,

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What is your servant that you should show regard for a dead dog such as I? Uh -huh.

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You know, in our relationship to Christ, who are we that Christ would show such kindness to us?

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But you get the idea. So if you're going to connect it to anybody, you make David stand in for Christ, and that's a good way to look at this.

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And look for passages that exemplify what you're seeing, you know, here, that you can say,

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Hey, listen, Christ demonstrates his love for us in that while we were ascending, Christ dies for his enemies, and he reconciles them.

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And here, there is no greater enemy to the king of Israel than a man who is living who can make a claim that he rightly should be on the throne.

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Rather than kill him, David blesses him. All right? And this is all, as the text says, to show him the kindness of who?

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God. That's what this is all about. But, well,

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Charlotte, on the other hand, I don't think she quite gets that. You know what, church? You need to know

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God can put you on someone's mind. God can put you in someone's thinking.

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God can put you in someone's thought process that you don't even know right now is sat at home or is watching online, and your name is coming to mind, and they're going to help write the favor of God into your story.

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There's no promise that that's going to happen. None. So you've lost your job because of COVID -19.

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And she's making a, you know, kind of a veiled promise for God that, oh, he's going to put you on the mind of somebody.

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Don't worry, you're going to get out of your low debar. Some of you, as I'm speaking right now, someone's going to come to mind who is currently living in low debar, and guess why they're coming to your mind?

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Because God's going to use you, like you heard last week, to take the good news to that person and say, it's time to leave low debar.

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The good news is not that it's time to leave low debar. The good news is that Christ has demonstrated his love for us, even when we were enemies of God by dying for our sins.

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Come with me. And I love this.

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It says that just all of a sudden, in 2 Samuel 9, David says, Hey, is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom

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I can show kindness for Jonathan's sake? Favor will find you.

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So now she's promising that God's favor is going to find you. That's not a promise of the new covenant, and it's a torturous misuse of this text.

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God's grace knows exactly where you are. And you might be trying to plan all these ways to get your life back on the track you want it on.

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And God's like, what if I have a better track? What if I have a higher way? What if I have a...

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What if you never find a job making the same amount of money you were making before you were fired after COVID -19?

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What if the only job you're able to get is as the greeter at Walmart? And that's the rest of your story.

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A plan that exceeds your plan. What if right now I'm placing you on someone's mind, and they're asking a question that's going to lead to another part of your story being written?

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Again, these are like tacit promises she's making for God. Implied, not explicitly stated.

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But these are not the promises of Scripture for us. So David says, is there anyone? And so somebody replies, hey, there is the son of Jonathan still.

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He's lame in both feet. And David says, where is he? And the servant says, he's in Lodabah.

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He's living in a place of no pasture, no word, no thing. And David says, send someone and bring him to me.

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I love it. When God gets involved, he sends for you. I'm going to lose my mind here.

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I'm running out of patience for this sermon. You see, it started off just visually, you should have known you were dealing with a church that was in rebellion to the

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Word of God. And now Charlotte here has utterly twisted this text, scratched itching ears.

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Notice she's not calling sinners to repent, and she's not correctly anchoring a proper understanding of these biblical texts in Jesus.

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If you don't do that, you're not going to understand what the Bible's about at all, because it's about him and his kindness, his mercy, his grace.

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And King David is a major figure in the types and shadows as it relates to Jesus.

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I'll listen to just a little bit more, just this much. And he calls for you.

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Now here's what you need to know. When he calls for you, you've got to respond. See? God is not going to call for me in my

01:00:07

Lodabah. My duty when he does is to respond. Mephibosheth was going to have to respond to the invitation to Lodabah.

01:00:18

To Mephibosheth goes all the glory then, because he responded. Leave Lodabah.

01:00:26

And you're going to have to respond to the invitation God has for your life to leave that place that you've become really comfortable in.

01:00:34

Maybe you're like, I don't want to put clothes on again. I kind of feel these PJs have molded to my body form.

01:00:41

They fit me perfectly. I don't know that I ever want to wear shoes again. You're not in Lodabah, and God's not going to call for you.

01:00:53

Not in that sense. This is, you get the point. There's no way to rescue this sermon.

01:01:00

It's fully off the tracks. So hopefully you found this helpful.

01:01:05

Again, the purpose of this series that we've launched into is to give you some basis, some things that you can hang on to so that you can rightly understand

01:01:16

Scripture and identify when somebody is not rightly teaching God's word, what are the different ways in which they twist it up and really kind of make it void of its meaning.

01:01:26

So I assure you, you're not in Lodabah. God isn't going to call you out of your Lodabah. That's not the point of this text.

01:01:33

It's a type and shadow pointing to the kindness and mercy of Christ who demonstrates his love for us even while we were yet sinners, ungodly and enemies of God.

01:01:43

He died for our sins. That's the point. Because that is the ultimate expression of the love and the mercy and the kindness of God to poor dead dog sinners like me and like you.

01:01:56

So hopefully you found this helpful. If so, all the information on how you can share the video is down below.

01:02:01

And just a reminder, we are supported by the people we serve. That's you. And those of you who during the summer join our crew at Gunner's Mate or above.

01:02:14

I had to think it through because we had several. I am going to send you an autographed copy of my fine art print here.

01:02:22

And I shot this in Warroad, Minnesota. It was a wonderful sunrise.

01:02:29

So this is the Warroad sunrise composition that I did. I will send you an autographed copy as my way of saying thank you for supporting us financially.

01:02:38

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01:02:44

So until next time, may God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ, his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.