God Doesn't Try

Justin Peters

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God is trying to build His church. God is trying to speak to us. God is trying to save people.

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Or is He? Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen.

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My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today. I want to thank you so much for joining me.

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I am going to be talking about a book that I highly endorse, and the title of it is

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God Doesn't Try. It's authored by Jim Osmond and Dave Rich. Both of these men are friends of mine.

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They are elders at Kootenai Community Church. Jim has written a number of books. This is his most recent book, and it is absolutely excellent.

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It would make a great book study for your small group class. I'm going to interview

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Jim and Dave about this book. I think you'll find this very fascinating. It's an immensely, immensely helpful book.

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I can't say enough good things about it. If you haven't gotten yours yet, you need to. All the links are down below in the description.

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Here's my interview with Jim and Dave. Towards the end of this interview, you'll see we have a little fun there at the end.

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So here we go. Well, Jim, Dave, brothers, thank you all for joining me. How are you all doing today?

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I'm doing well. Doing well. Good to see you, Justin. Yeah, you too, brother. I think most people are probably familiar with Jim, but Jim, brief intro for us, bio sketch.

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Yeah, I pastor Kootenai Community Church up in rural North Idaho, a small little church up here in a rural community, and I've known

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Justin since 2009. I've been pastoring here since 1996. All right, and Dave?

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I'm Dave Rich. I have been at Kootenai Church since, I think, 1999 or 2000.

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I've been an elder at Kootenai Church since 2001. I'm what some people call a bivocational pastor.

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I have a day job, I guess you'd say, and I'm just glad to be here to talk about the book and anything else that you want to talk about.

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Yeah, all right. All right. Well, thank you both very much, both of their elders at Kootenai Community Church.

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I do want to talk to you about the book. So I have my copy here.

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God doesn't try, and it is an excellent, excellent book. You got yours too,

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Jim? Yeah. Yeah. I think mine's almost in the shot. You want me to sign it for you?

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What's that, Dave? It's almost in the shot. It's a little low. Oh, there you go. There you go.

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Yeah. Well, this is a great book, and the two of you co -labored on it and wrote this book.

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So give us a little bit of background information. How did this book come to be? What was the genesis of it, and how did it come together between the two of you?

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So the idea for the book came out of a sermon that Dave preached in 1 Peter. He's been going through 1

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Peter, and every time he preaches for me a couple times a year, he'll go into 1 Peter's, working his way slowly through that book.

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So this was probably way back in like 2015, 16, 17, somewhere in there, maybe.

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Dave was preaching in 1 Peter chapter 1, and he made a statement in the message. He was talking about the sovereignty of God and salvation in the first few verses of 1

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Peter, and he said, I forget even how he was describing it, but he said, he just made the statement,

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God doesn't try to save people. He kind of made a couple other statements like that, and instantly in my mind,

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I thought, that should be a book. God doesn't try. God doesn't try to save people. He doesn't try to speak to us.

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He doesn't try to protect us. God doesn't try to do anything, really. So I went up to Dave after the sermon. I said, one of these days, you and I are going to write a book, and we're going to call it

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God Doesn't Try, and I kind of gave him the gist of what I wanted to do, and he sort of nodded, and said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, and then

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I got one writing project after another, and finally a couple years ago, we decided to sit down and start organizing it, and we organized it into kind of an easy, easily divisible set of chapters, and we kind of each worked on it together and met together to work on it and think through what we wanted to present and how we wanted to do it and who was going to tackle what, and it was a real joy to be able to work on the book together.

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Yeah. Yeah, I think it was, you know, 1 Peter begins with the first word that he uses to describe his readers is elect, chosen, and then he goes on to talk about God has caused us to be born again.

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Yes. So the context of that is, you know, God hasn't made our salvation possible.

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God hasn't made our regeneration something we may choose now. God has caused us to be born again to a living hope to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, so it really is a strong statement of God's sovereignty and salvation, and so yeah,

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Jim came up to me afterwards, you know, and I don't preach as often as you guys do, so for me, it takes a lot of effort.

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You know, it's really an unburdening. So I step down off the stage, and Jim comes right, hey, that's a book, and we're ready to go.

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So yeah, it was really, it's one of the great joys of my life to have been able to just spend the time with Jim and working through talking about God's sovereignty, and that doctrine has meant so much to me personally and so much to the people that we've helped in counseling and preaching and teaching, and it's such a meaningful doctrine for people that it was a real joy to think about and to study and to learn what

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God's Word has to say about God and His power and goodness, so yeah. Amen, amen.

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Well, back then, Kathy and I were still, we were members of Kootenai Community Church. We still live there in Sandpoint back in those days, and I remember you preaching through 1

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Peter, Dave, and I can't honestly say that I remember that exact line, but I do remember you preaching through that book and doing a very, very good job at it, so yeah, appreciate that.

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I'm all the way up to chapter 2, verse 8, Dustin, so. Oh, man. We did that last week. That was a powerful one.

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You're flying. Yeah, I need to bring up the, Jim's taking over. Yeah, yeah.

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All right, well, let's dive into the book a little bit more. There's a line here that I have highlighted,

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The Idol of American Evangelicalism Can't Fall Soon Enough.

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This book aims to accelerate its demise, and I don't know which one of you wrote that line or that particular section, but what does that mean?

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The Idol of American Evangelicalism Can't Fall Soon Enough, and you aim to accelerate its demise.

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I think that sounds like it comes from the introduction to the book where we talk about your perspective of God and how that informs our worship and our ecclesiology, our eschatology, our soteriology, everything comes back to our view of who

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God is and what he is doing and how he does what he does, so basically, my point there is that American Evangelicalism has a

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God that is very much in our own image, and I think often of that phrase in the psalm where God condemns

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Israel and says, you thought that I was altogether like you. American Evangelicalism is created a God that is very much like itself.

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It's consumer -centered. It's seeker -centered, seeker -driven. It's your own personal Jesus, as Tepesh Moed used to sing about, and it's a

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God with a small g who really can't do anything without our permission. It's the

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God preached by Joel Osteen. It's the God of the New Apostolic Reformation. It's the God of the Word of Faith Movement, the

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Charismatic Movement. But you know what? When you ask a question, and I know that many people have said this, maybe in these exact words or possibly you've rephrased it, but you've said, why does

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God let things like this happen? You know, when you say something like that, that shows that you are making an assumption that God could just control things if he wanted to, that God could stop this, and you know what?

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That is an absolutely wrong assumption. And I can guarantee you with a lot of the religious doctrine that we have, especially the sovereignty of God teaching, there are going to be people all over the world that are just shocked that I would say something like that, because they believe that, of course,

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God can do anything he wants to. That is not true. And that really is an idol of our age, and a lot of people adopt those perspectives on God and those doctrines of God without even really thinking them through, especially without thinking through the implications of what those doctrines mean for our life and for handling difficulties and trials and afflictions and stuff like that.

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So, in writing the book, what we wanted to do was give people a lofty view of God and remind them that no matter what we're talking about in terms of our interaction with God and God's dealing with us as individuals, with his church, or with all of creation,

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God is not attempting to do anything and then failing to do it. Right. Because, Dave, to say that God tries—and you hear that lingo a lot, you know,

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God is trying to do such and such, he wants to do this, you know, blah, blah, blah, variations of that—but to say that God tries to do anything, doesn't that by definition imply the possibility of failure?

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Yeah, we go through that. It's kind of the explanation in chapter two. We call it do or do not, there is no try, that famous Yoda line.

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You must unlearn what you have learned. All right,

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I'll give it a try. No! Try not! Do! Or do not!

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There is no try. Right. And that's true for God. God does or does not.

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He doesn't try, and so we look at that. There's basically one Hebrew word and one

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Greek word that could be translated try with the meaning to attempt, and those words are never in Scripture applied to God in that way.

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Why? Because God is not capable of trying. God cannot try, God doesn't try, and it's because to try includes the possibility of failure.

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God can't fail. Why? Because God is omniscient and omnipotent. One who knows all and one who can do all that he pleases is not capable of failure, and so if you're not capable of failure, you can't try.

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So all of the stuff that talks about how God's trying to speak to me, and God's trying to teach me this, and God's trying to sanctify me, or God's trying to prosper me.

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Kosti Hinn in the forward to the book does a great job of connecting this up to the prosperity gospel, where God would prosper you if only you would allow him, or only you would sow the seed, or only you would do this or that or the other thing, putting the power back into the hands of people.

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We had multiple purposes for writing the book, but it really is one of them is to correct that careless use of language that really blasphemes the sovereignty and goodness of God.

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Yeah, indeed, absolutely, and we often think in terms of God can do anything.

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He's omnipotent. He has all power. There's nothing he can't do, but there are some things that God not only will not do, but cannot do, and God cannot lie.

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He cannot change, not just that he won't lie or he won't change, he can't change. He cannot deny himself, and he cannot fail, right?

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Right, and for the same reasons, God can do anything that is consistent with his character, and can do nothing that is inconsistent with it, nor would he, so he can do all that he pleases, but nothing that he doesn't please.

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He's not capable of failure because he can't fail. He's not capable of trying because he can't fail, right?

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It's perfectly legitimate to say there's some things that God cannot do, but he cannot do them because of the perfection of his character, not any defect in his character.

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It's the opposite of us. We fail because of limitations. God cannot fail because of his perfection.

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Anything we say God cannot do, it's because of his perfections, and that's really the emphasis that we make throughout the book.

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We take God's sovereignty, his perfections, and we try to show the absolute nature of his perfections and all the implications of that for a person's thinking, doctrine, for their life, for comfort and affliction, all of those areas where I think

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God's sovereignty is just the most lovely and important doctrine that we can contemplate as we go through this life.

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Yeah, that's right. Amen. This is a loose quote from Charles Spurgeon, but the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which

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I lay my head at night. I've seen a few different iterations of that, but the doctrine of God's sovereignty is a great comfort to us as believers, and it's something that I think every professing

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Christian would at least give some lip service to God's sovereignty, but they don't really think through the implications of what

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God's sovereignty means and entails and logical conclusion of that.

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This may be my favorite line out of the book. It's on page 43, and Jim, I can tell you wrote this just because it's your style.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Oh, why do men entrusted with proclaiming the gospel and unflinchingly preaching the whole truth avoid the hard edges of the gospel and dance around the truth like a tribal shaman conjuring a rainstorm?

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That was me. That was you? Yeah. Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about that.

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What do you mean? That's in the chapter on God doesn't try to save his people, and in the beginning of that chapter,

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I tell a story about a time that Dave and I went to a funeral of a man who died here in our community, and it was in a big church that seating capacity was probably three, four times the seating capacity of where we were meeting at the time, and the place was packed because this guy grew up in the community, knew almost everybody in the community, and he died at kind of a young age, and the pastor got up, and after talking about spiritual things in the most general and benign sense possible, he basically said, so -and -so,

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I forget what the name was, but so -and -so made that decision, and I hope that you will someday too, and he didn't even talk about sin, he didn't talk about atonement, he didn't talk about the cross of Christ, the death and resurrection, the wrath of God, none of the things that were associated with the gospel, just generally he made a decision about God and Jesus in his life, and I hope that someday you'll make that decision too, and that was the closest he swerved to the gospel, and so my point in that is that there's only one, well, there's a number of things, but primarily there is something that explains such an aversion to being close to the truth, and that is that by not speaking the truth in a forthright and what could be offensive manner to unbelievers who are present, your hope is that you sort of nudge them toward the gospel, but not so much that they would back away from it, that you kind of just give them and almost inoculate them or expose them to the gospel enough that they would not be offended by it, and then leave it at that, hoping that somebody sometime down the road is going to come along and move them a couple inches closer to the gospel, and the assumption behind that is that God is desperately trying to save this person, but he needs us not to run them off with a bold and straightforward presentation of the gospel, and that's how most people handle in gospel presentations.

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Dave and I have been to Iwana conferences and massive Iwana events and heard guys stand up and present the gospel in front of, you know, say 2 ,000, 3 ,000 people there at an

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Iwana games event or something like that, and you just want them to speak the truth in a bold way that would just make people realize what they're being told rather than put it in the shadows and shade it, hoping that nobody is offended by the truth.

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Yeah, yeah, indeed, indeed. That's one of the early chapters there.

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God doesn't try to save his people, and you know, Jesus said, I came to seek and to save that which is lost.

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He didn't say, I came to seek and to make salvation possible. Or to try and save.

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Or to try and save. I came to seek and say, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will try to save his people from their sins.

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No, he will save. Yeah, and in that passage, I go through John 6 and John 6, 10, and 17 are three chapters that all describe the same sovereignty of God and salvation to three different groups of people from three different perspectives using three different analogies.

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And John couldn't be any more clear about that subject, that Jesus will save all the

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Father gives to him. They will all come to him. He'll give life to all of them and raise all of them up on the last day. That's John 6.

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John 10 is he's the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. He doesn't lay down his life for the Pharisees. He said, you do not believe because you're not of my sheep.

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And he lays down his life for his sheep and then saves them and secures them infallibly and everlastingly.

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And then John 17, triumphantly, Jesus says, I've kept all that the Father has given to me. And Judas was lost.

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Judas was not a believer given to him for the purpose of betraying him and fulfilling prophecy.

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And Jesus' point and John's point in his gospel is that Jesus came and did exactly what the

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Father sent him to do, which was to pay the sin debt and then to secure through his death and resurrection on the cross, to secure infallibly the salvation of all that the

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Father chose. And that's what Christ has done. So he doesn't come and attempt to save a whole bunch of people the Father hasn't chosen and try to save a whole bunch of people that the

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Spirit's not going to regenerate. There is a perfect unity among the persons of the Trinity in saving

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God's people. Amen, amen, and amen. And Dave, you wrote a chapter, one of the chapters that you wrote,

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God doesn't try to sanctify his people. And I really appreciated that chapter because one of the things that I've seen, unfortunately, a lot in our circles are soteriologically reformed.

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You know, I view of God's sovereignty and salvation, our more Calvinistic circles, is unfortunately in some pockets of our circles,

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I guess, there seems to be a real lack of sanctification, a lack of personal holiness, a relationship with the things of the world that's just far too chummy.

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So talk to us a little bit about sanctification. God doesn't try to sanctify his people. Yeah, and that's true,

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Justin. I hadn't thought about that. In churches that insist on doctrinal precision, there is that risk that people come for the academics.

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They kind of come for the doctrinal nuances and so much that they're not necessarily devoting themselves to those same doctrines.

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So we do see that. I wrote this chapter in part as a polemic against free grace, the free grace theology movement, which is really nothing new.

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It's just antinomianism in a new form. The idea that you come to Christ as Savior, but you needn't come to him as Lord.

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There are no ethical requirements in the new covenant. It's all by grace, what

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Daryl Harrison calls gracism, that idea. And then partly it was as kind of a pastoral emphasis that the degree to which you're sanctified is the degree to which

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God would have you sanctified in the moment, and the sanctification process is a discipline process, and sometimes difficult, and sometimes involves trials over illness and difficulties, job loss, loss of people that you care about.

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These are all part of the sanctifying work of the Spirit. And so we go through 1 Peter. I think the whole point of 1

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Peter is to demonstrate that our difficult life is a sanctifying work of the Spirit, that there's purpose in our life, and that purpose is the glory of God and our good through sanctification being made in the image of his

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Son. And then 1 John. I mean, that's a great book. 1 John is so insistent on the sanctification of people.

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He believes that it's inevitable. The way he writes, anyone who is a believer demonstrates certain fruits of the

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Spirit. He gives it in terms of tests, and I look at it as three tests. There's a doctrinal test there that every believer believes certain things.

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There's a moral test that the believer keeps the commandments. He says that over and over again. And there's a social test or a love test.

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Believers love other believers. That's just inherent in having eternal life, sharing in the same eternal life.

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So that level of sanctification is inevitable. The idea of a carnal

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Christian that has been so popular is an oxymoron to John. John would have no part in that.

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We look at Hebrews 12 and the discipline that's part and parcel of being a believer. So I want people to understand that, and there's also a little bit of an edge to that.

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You ought not to have assurance of your salvation if there is no evidence of your salvation.

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If Jesus is not in fact your Lord, then you cannot claim Him as your Savior. Be holy because He is holy.

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That's given to us very clearly. So that was kind of the point of that chapter, and we preach that.

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I mean, Jim preaches that Sunday after Sunday. If you're sitting there in our church, we don't want you to be comfortable in a state of sin.

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Yeah. We perform church discipline as is necessary, and I think that's a hallmark of a decent church.

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If your church never practices church discipline, I don't think they have a solid enough commitment to the

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Word and to the body of Christ. So that's kind of the point of that chapter.

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God doesn't try to sanctify. God is sanctifying, and when you're going through something in life, that's its purpose.

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Yeah. Amen. Amen. Unfortunately, we've seen a rather dramatic example of that in the last couple months in our circles with Steve Lawson.

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All the doctrinal I's dotted and T's crossed, and yet he was living this double life.

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You said it well, Dave. If you don't know Jesus, if you can't claim Jesus as your

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Lord, you can't claim Him as your Savior either. Jesus simply is

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Lord and Savior. We don't make Him either one of those things, and to hear that kind of language again, it's careless language that blasphemes the person of Christ.

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Yeah. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Amen. Amen. Jim, I'm not going to go through all these chapters, but I want to hear a few of them.

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One of the chapters you wrote, God Doesn't Speak, and this kind of harkens back to a book you've written titled

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God Doesn't Whisper. Is this a chapter kind of like a summation of that?

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We hear that language a lot in the evangelical world. I think

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God is trying to tell us such and such. I think God told me this and that. Yeah.

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In one sense, the book really expands upon the theme of God Doesn't Whisper. Dave mentions that in the first chapter that he wrote there, the

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God doesn't do or do not. There is no try. He mentions how we're really just applying that thinking to all of the

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Christian life and to all of creation. Then that chapter really is God doesn't whisper.

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I tried to boil that down into one chapter, and it was the toughest chapter to write because the book

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God Doesn't Whisper was tough to write because I had to boil down a whole bunch of stuff into just that one 300 -page book, and then

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I had to try and take that book and condense it down into one chapter. That chapter is not going to answer all your questions that you might have answered or answer all the objections to that perspective, but it really is just trying to show that when we try and portray

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God as a God who is attempting to communicate, attempting to talk to us, attempting to teach us things, we're really talking about God as if he were a two -year -old that's unable to form complete sentences and put multiple words together.

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That's the perspective of John Eldridge. John Eldridge, when he talks about God speaking to him, it's in one - and two -word sentences that are opaque and mystical and undefined and uninterpretable nonsense.

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It's gibberish. That whole perspective of how God speaks to us in that type of language, the type of stuff that's described by John Eldridge, the type of stuff even, frankly, that's described by Matt Chandler in his pirate ship analogy that you've had on your channel and we've talked about multiple occasions, that is just a blasphemous presentation of God.

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That is not how God speaks. God is able to clearly articulate exactly what he wants to say when he wants to say it. Right.

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What exactly is the hermeneutical grid for pirate ships? I don't know. I don't recall studying that in hermeneutics.

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I don't know. Maybe that's the PhD level. I hadn't gotten to it yet. Dave, back to you, brother.

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God doesn't try to provide. Talk to us a little bit about that.

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We all know that God provides, but maybe you can kind of weave this into your answer.

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I've been to, by God's grace, I've been able to preach in some of the poorest countries in the world, and I see precious believers who are living in basically dirt houses, grass huts, some of them no power, some of them no running water.

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What do you mean by God doesn't try to provide? And how do we square that with believers that we see around the world who, from our perspective, they don't seem to have any provision?

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Yeah, Justin, I'm a little bit trepidatious to answer that question with you, because I think you could probably answer that much better than I with all the work you've done over the years.

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I saw this chapter as a bit of a pastoral rejection of the idea that we're seeing a lot of today, where people say they have anxiety, they have depression, and so that's their excuse for basically denying the sovereignty of God, and that's the biggest point of this.

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So look at all the words for fear and anxiety in the Scripture, worry, and you get three basic principles.

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You look at all of those words. We're to fear God. Over and over again, we're told to fear God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, you know, over and over again.

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We're told not to fear man, right? Fear not him who can kill the body, but is not able to kill the soul, rather fear him who's able to throw both soul and body into hell, and then we're told not to fear anything else, and an example of Hagar, when she was told not to fear because God hears.

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The widow of Zarephath was told, don't worry because God will provide, and God chose to provide for it.

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The whole Matthew 6, do not worry. What will be provided for us?

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Food and shelter will be provided for us, but we make a mistake. That's all that God promises is to meet our basic needs until such time as He determines we no longer need them.

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That's the extent of His material promise. We are nowhere promised any level of what we would call prosperity on this planet, and again, at some point when

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God determines that the end of our life is nigh, then He is, of course, well within His rights to do what

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He wishes with what is His, and to end our lives through the lack of provision of those things.

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Jim has a quote that I've heard him say many times. If he were to wake up in a ditch,

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God has done him no wrong. We deserve nothing more than this, and you know,

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Justin, from your experience, some of those people who have next to nothing are the happiest and most satisfied believers on the face of the planet because they understand that God has provided for them graciously.

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We sit here in our abundance, and if we don't have even more abundant provision, then somehow

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God has failed us, and that's kind of the point. God has nowhere promised us the level of provision that we hold

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Him accountable for very often, and no one has done more work in this area than you have. The whole prosperity gospel, word of faith movement, the whole idea that God must provide for us at some extravagant and you know, highly prosperous level is again a blasphemy.

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It's calling God a liar because He doesn't do something that He never promised to do. Yeah, amen, that's right.

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God was certainly providing for Stephen even as he was being stoned in Acts 7.

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God was providing for Paul and John the Baptist as they languished in prison and were executed, and God was providing for Peter as he was executed.

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Even in our hardships, even all the way up to martyrdom, God's provision for us is still there, maybe not in creature comforts, but He sustains us ultimately for His glory.

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And then He does so eternally, and that's the ultimate provision that should be our hope and what motivates us all the time.

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We fix our hope on that, and then we can live through whatever happens on this earth.

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Yeah, amen, amen. And He provides for all of our mental needs, spiritual needs.

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I've said in sermons before, you know, when we go through hardships, when we go through even times, if you want to call it depression, which

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Paul even refers to himself as depressed in 2

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Corinthians chapter 7, but Paul over and over, he calls God the

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God of all comfort who comforts us in all of our affliction, not some, not most, but all of it.

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Yeah, right, and we have to get, we're not denying affliction. We're not denying that these trials are heavy, as the

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King James says, or distressing. They are. We know that they are.

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We don't deny that. The point being, God has not failed in those things. They're for a purpose, and God is providing for His glory and our good through them.

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I think very often we insult God as we look at our station in life, and we're not happy with it.

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We're not content, and that's kind of the point. So there's an extended quotation from Tozer's Pursuit of God in the book, and I wrote down one of the quotes

32:30

I think is really good from Tozer. It says, Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust.

32:38

Where's your consistency? Come on, humble yourself and cease to care what men think. I think if we can understand that,

32:45

Tozer also said, you have nothing of which to be ashamed except your sin. If we can get to that level where we're not measuring ourselves against other people, we're seeing ourselves as God sees us, and we who've come to the cross have already admitted that we have nothing to offer.

33:00

We come begging for salvation as abjectly poor men with nothing to offer, and yet then we take pride, and we're upset because the other man got the promotion, or because somebody else has a new car, and we don't.

33:15

It's completely inconsistent. So if we remain as we are at the foot of the cross, then we see these things in the right light.

33:23

Yeah. Amen. Amen. And you have two other chapters here.

33:30

Maybe we can kind of combine them into one discussion. God doesn't try to build his church, and God doesn't try to organize his church.

33:41

Building his church I think goes right along with God doesn't try to save his people. I guess maybe let's talk a little bit about organizing his church.

33:52

I grew up in a Southern Baptist framework and was Southern Baptist for the first 37 years of my life, and I just assumed every church was supposed to have a senior pastor, and he pretty much calls the shots, and you've got the deacons, and they're there, and they do stuff, and they might offer some opinions, but ultimately it comes down to the head cheese there, whoever the senior pastor is, and what he says goes.

34:23

Is that not how God tries to organize his church?

34:28

God doesn't try to organize his church. That's not biblical in the least, actually. And just before, I mean,

34:33

I'll kick this off to Dave to talk about biblical eldership here in a moment, because I'll leave it to somebody who's the lay to talk about that, not the lay, yeah, is a lay elder, not the paid elder to talk about this, but you'll notice as you kind of move through the sections of the book that we're dealing first with individuals, save his people, speak to his people, prosperous people, provide for his people, et cetera, and then we expand that to the church, and we say, okay, this is how

34:58

God works with us individually in his sovereignty, and now in terms of the church,

35:04

God's people corporately, the same thing applies. God doesn't try to do these things for his church as a body of people either, and then the last third of the book is applying the same theology of God's sovereignty to creation and in controlling creation, executing justice, and establishing a kingdom, so there's a sort of an expanding scope to the book as we work our way through, beginning with the individual, moving through to all of creation.

35:28

It's intentionally laid out that way, so yeah, in that middle section, we deal with the church, not just Jesus promised to build his church, there's a difference between I will build my church and I will try to build my church.

35:38

Obviously, there's a parallel there with salvation. God doesn't try to save his people, he does. God doesn't try to build his church, which is a collection of saved people, he simply does.

35:46

He has promised to save them all and to establish and build his church just as he has ordained that he would, and now in terms of the organization, the structure of the church, we were just simply applying the right of God to rule over his people according to how he would structure the shepherds of the church, and with that,

36:06

I'll just hand it off to Dave, and will you have a comment on that? Both of these chapters really are, they're looking at the fact that God is sovereign over his church.

36:17

God has determined the way in which he will build and organize his church, and so our responsibility is only to follow his instruction.

36:27

We're not free to go outside of that, it is his church after all, it's his bride, and so we're not free to come up with fantastic marketing gimmicks and all of the seeker -friendly nonsense out there to try to be more welcoming to the world.

36:42

We can't adopt the standards of the world in order to become more attractive to the world.

36:48

It's never worked that way, and it will never work that way. We're not going to be loved, and Jesus is not going to be loved because we're cool and he gets us and all that nonsense, right?

37:00

So all we're doing in these chapters is taking what the scripture says about God and his church and making sure that we understand that God is sovereign over his church.

37:09

These are his rules and his ways. All we are to do is to follow those. In the chapter on organizing his church, there's a very clear pattern for how the church should be organized.

37:20

The elders and deacons are the offices that have been ordained for the church. Those offices are to be held by qualified men, and we go through the whole egalitarian argument, and I think in a pretty good way.

37:35

And honestly, this chapter, chapter eight for me was the easiest chapter to write. I think that the scriptures are just crystal clear on this.

37:43

I understand how it's such a controversy. It's a controversy because we're just setting aside scriptures in order to do what it is we think is popular.

37:55

But if you search the scriptures at all, it's extremely clear. It's unequivocal that the leaders of the church, elders and deacons, should be men.

38:05

All right, so that's the point. Again, we're applying God's sovereignty to everything that we can think to apply

38:11

God's sovereignty to in a book that can be something people can read, and these two are about what

38:19

God has said for his church. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And Dave, as an elder there,

38:25

Kootenai now has five elders, correct? Yeah, blessing we recently added. Yeah, yeah, so five elders.

38:33

There was four when I was there, but five elders now. Jim, you would be considered, you know, you're the only paid elder.

38:39

You do most of the preaching, the great majority of it, but when you're out of town, one of the other elders,

38:47

Dave or Cornell or Jess or, you know, whoever will step up into the pulpit and fill that pulpit.

38:56

But the other elders, or let me frame it this way.

39:02

Jim, you have no more authority or say so really in the church than any of the other elders, correct?

39:09

That's true. There are certain areas where each of us functions according to our giftedness and according to our focus.

39:16

So, I mean, there are decisions that Dave makes and the things that Dave does that I don't have oversight over.

39:21

He simply functions in the area of his giftedness, and that's true with all of the elders. There's tons of decisions that I make on a day -to -day basis that I don't bounce off of them.

39:30

They just, they trust me to make those decisions, and I do, and likewise, I do the same with them.

39:36

So, it's truly a team of ministry in that sense that, you know, I'm making decisions about the use of my time, sometimes the spending of certain funds within the church or decisions about things that need to happen or who should do what, and we just kind of all operate trusting one another and functioning in that way.

39:53

And we don't bring every decision back to the entire group because we don't need to, because we mutually submit to one another and trust one another, love one another, and work with one another.

40:04

It works like a fine -oiled machine, really. Yeah. Yeah, I've never seen a church

40:11

Kootenai size. They all are running somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 now, right, give or take.

40:17

I've never seen a church Kootenai size that only has one paid staff member.

40:24

It's pretty astonishing. Right, we're able to do that up to this point because the other elders are all active in ministry and serving well and using their time well and shepherding people, and we have a lot of volunteers as well and a great group of deacons that take a lot of our load as well.

40:44

So, it's just a lot of work that goes on. I'm not Superman. I'm not doing more than any other man in my position would do, but there's just a lot of people behind the scenes that believe in the work and do it, and it works.

40:59

Yeah, indeed. Indeed. All right. Well, excuse me, brothers.

41:06

So, who is this book for? Who are y 'all trying to reach here, laypeople or pastors, elders, or all of the above, or what?

41:17

Well, there's kind of a threefold emphasis in each chapter where we do a little bit of theological teaching in each chapter.

41:23

We have a little bit of a polemical aspect to a chapter where we'll kind of address some false teaching or false ideas that exist within the church or challenge people's assumptions, presuppositions, bad thinking, bad theology, bad practices, things like that.

41:37

And then we have kind of a devotional element where we really try and address the hard issues and what this means to our life in terms of application.

41:45

There's some discussion questions in each chapter, and then we have a little section called For the Shepherds where we kind of take the truth of that chapter and sort of apply it directly to the shepherds, the pastors of the church, the leaders of the church in terms of how to think, how this should maybe inform their ministry, their hearts, what they do with their families, their wives, etc.

42:03

So, it's kind of a narrow focus theologically, but it's sort of a broad focus in terms of the intention of it.

42:11

We want people to think of God rightly and think of highly and to speak of God accurately.

42:17

And that's a challenge for all of us. There have been times even in the writing of this book where accidentally from the pulpit,

42:23

I would say something like, God is trying to, and I would stop myself immediately because that language just, part of that verbiage just comes out naturally as part of our vernacular.

42:33

And we want to challenge people to think of God rightly and to speak of him rightly because I think that it is a sin to misrepresent

42:42

God in how we speak of him and what we say about him. And we want to be clear. We want to be accurate and precise and theologically clear, but also honoring

42:52

God with our mouths and with our lips. And that's kind of what the book is intended to do. So, we challenge a little bit sort of the language that people use to speak of these things and then how people think about these things.

43:04

And we want to bring our thinking and our language and our hearts into alignment with the word of God.

43:10

Yeah, indeed. Dave, any final thoughts, brother? Yeah, I just agree with what

43:17

Jim said. Calvin said, I hope I get this quote right, ignorance or providence is the greatest of all miseries and knowledge of it, the greatest of all, the highest happiness.

43:29

And I believe that. I've experienced that in my life daily and with the people in our body, that's proven to be true.

43:43

All we can really comfort people with is the goodness and sovereignty of God. That's really all we have.

43:50

Everything else is just words. So, to the extent that we can get people to fully ingest that, that aspect of the reality of their lives, that God is sovereign over and in control over it, then we provide great comfort, we provide great motivation and encouragement.

44:10

And so, that's our prayer in this. I'll give you an example because you dealt with some of this when the incident with Steve Lawson, we don't need to talk about it, but some of the response that came from that from the

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Armenian side, and of course, not everybody, but some of them that took such a glee in that to say, well, doesn't this show that your whole worldview is wrong and you should be happy that this happened because it's the will of God.

44:42

And that is not in any way, shape or form what we believe or what we teach. It's a grievous thing and we are grieved by it as are the people close to him.

44:54

But we can find comfort in it, in that we know that God ultimately is sovereign over that and will resolve that to his glory and for the good of his people.

45:08

So, we can still have that confidence. What else do you have to offer? You know, if somebody goes through something terrible, somebody has cancer, what can you offer?

45:18

What can you say? Well, God has no part in this. If you say that as trying to get

45:24

God off the hook, what are you telling this person? Your illness is for nothing. Your condition is for nothing.

45:33

It's just random chance and God is powerless to do anything about it. And so, that's the kind of idea that we're trying to battle in this book and give people the comfort that comes from knowing

45:44

God. Yeah. And we come back time and again in the chapters, Justin, to two truths, the sovereignty of God and the goodness of God.

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Because if God is good, but he's not sovereign, it means that we can have no comfort at all because he might attend to the very best for us.

45:57

But if he can't pull it off, if he's only trying to do what's for our good, then that's no comfort, right?

46:03

So, goodness without sovereignty is no help at all. But sovereignty without goodness is terrifying to us because then we would have no confidence at all that this

46:13

God who can do anything his heart desires would actually bring about anything for my good and for his glory.

46:18

If he's not good, then his sovereignty is a terror to us. And if he's not sovereign, then his goodness is of no help to us.

46:25

So, we try and mix that in nearly every chapter where we talk about this and really try to apply it to our lives, specifically, particularly in the individual chapters and dealing with the individuals in the first part of the book, sort of the individual application of this.

46:39

We just try and remind people that because God is good and because God is sovereign, this can be of great comfort to us.

46:44

Yeah, absolutely. Indeed. That's very well said. That's a great, great summation.

46:52

I really encourage folks to get this book. Laymen, laywomen, if you're just, you know, if you just attend the church, get this book.

47:02

If you're a pastor, elder, shepherd, those terms are used interchangeably, but if you're one of those, get this book.

47:09

I'm really, really want to get behind it. And this would be a great book too for like a

47:14

Bible study, small group Bible studies, you know. Yeah, 11, 12, 12, 13 week

47:21

Bible study or something like that, a chapter a week you could work through and give you plenty to discuss, especially if you're in kind of a group where people haven't been exposed to these kinds of ideas before.

47:31

Yeah, right. And even if you have, it's just, go ahead, Dave. Sorry, some of the elders and teachers in our church put together some study questions at the end of each chapter that were really good.

47:44

I kind of wasn't sure how I can answer some of the chapters that I wrote. Those are really, really thoughtful to work through as well.

47:53

Yeah, absolutely. It'd be a great, great Bible study or book study rather. But for a

47:59

Sunday school class, small group, whatever, folks, pick up your copy of God Doesn't Try.

48:06

And speaking of picking this up, where can folks pick this up? Best place to get it is amazon .com.

48:14

That's just the world book market, I guess. Okay. And Justin, as you held that up, it reminded me, we got to give a little credit to your friend who did the cover, the beautiful cover.

48:26

Yeah, I thought of that too. Mr. Comstock. Josh Comstock.

48:32

He put that together in just a real quick minute. It was, he's just astoundingly creative.

48:39

We're very grateful for it. Yeah. How did he do that? Did he, is this? Well, we met for lunch at Fiesta Bonita, a local

48:46

Mexican restaurant. And we said, here's what our book is about. And here's kind of what we're thinking, you know, a scepter, a crown, a throne, something, you know, that speaks of God's power, ability,

48:59

His right to rule His creation. And so he pulled out his phone and he said something like this. And we said, yeah, something like that would be good.

49:04

And then Dave and I left Fiesta Bonita. It was not even a five -minute drive back to our office. And like five minutes after we got back to our office, we had a proof copy of that in our email.

49:14

And we were just like, oh, that's perfect. That's exactly it. That's what we want. I mean, there was no going back and forth and finding the revisions.

49:22

He fine -tuned it to make it what he wanted in terms of polishing up the beauty of it, but incredibly gifted guy.

49:30

Oh, he is. Josh Comstock, he's one of my dear friends.

49:35

He's on my board of directors, Jim, you're on there too. And Josh Comstock's on there. He's a deacon at Kootenai.

49:41

And Josh and I, Josh goes with me on a lot of my international trips and travels with me and is a tremendous, tremendous help.

49:51

He helps me with computer stuff, tech stuff. Man, if I didn't have

49:56

Josh Comstock, well, we probably wouldn't even be doing this video right now. So he's a great, great guy.

50:02

Great servant of his master. Oh, he is. He is. He absolutely is.

50:08

I love the socks off of Josh Comstock. So one of those precious saints that doesn't get enough recognition for what he does.

50:17

But anyway. All right. Well, brothers, thank you very, very much. Hey, thanks,

50:24

Justin. I appreciate the opportunity to come on and to talk about the book, discuss theology. It doesn't really feel like an interview so much as it feels like just three friends sitting here talking doctrine.

50:33

That's what it is. Yeah, it's really nice to see you again, Justin. Thanks, Dave. You as well, brother.

50:39

You as well. And looking out your window there, seeing the beautiful North Idaho woods makes me a little homesick.

50:49

It would be beautiful looking out your windows of your old house today. Yeah. Yeah. It's a beautiful part of the world.

50:58

All right. You're welcome back anytime. We will. We want to get back up there. We sure do.

51:04

All right, dear friends. We'll link down below in the description to Kootenai Community Church.

51:10

I guess I could put a link to Lighthouse Salad Dressing if you want me to. I don't know about that.

51:17

But at any rate, Kootenai Community Church and the link to God Doesn't Whisper at Amazon, where you can pick that up.

51:26

And I encourage you to try. You can get that one there, too. What's that? You said God Doesn't Whisper. You can get God Doesn't Try at Amazon .com

51:32

as well. Oh, did I say Whisper? Try. Yeah. God Doesn't Try. That's a good book, too. God Doesn't Whisper.

51:37

Yeah, that is a good book. I'll tell you what, I'll put a link to all of Jim's books. Thank you. What a man. What a man.

51:43

What a man. I know. I try. I try. God doesn't, but I do.

51:51

I see what you did there. So you see what I did there? All right, brothers.

51:57

Well, much love to you and your families. And dear ones, thank you so much for watching. Until our next time together, may the grace of our