Dr. Jared Langshore Interview- TiL

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We have a very special guest and we're thrilled. We're honored to have our new friend,

Dr. Jared Longshore with us. We're excited to have him with us because him and his his coworkers, his friends have brought up a very important topic, a very important conversation that I think we all need to be having.

And we want to have that with him tonight and pick his brain and get some more details about this conversation and share it with you.

And so without any further ado, I want to let Jared introduce himself.

Jared, go ahead and introduce yourself. If you don't mind, tell us who you are. Yeah, Jared Longshore married to my wife,

Heather, and we have a big old satchel worth of children and live in Moscow, Idaho, up here in the cold and recently from Florida.

And it was much more warm back there. But we're up in Moscow, Idaho. I serve

Christchurch and also New St. Andrews College. Jared is being very gracious because this is our second attempt.

I'm just being very transparent. We're recording tonight and this is our second attempt at our introduction.

He's being very gracious. So and I want to honor Dan and Jared's time tonight.

So we really appreciate him being with us and taking time to do that. So the conversation stems from an episode of CrossPolitik that I was watching about two

Sundays ago. And in that last segment of their podcast, they were bringing about some observations that they had made concerning the last three years and what's happened in the last three years.

Has brought to surface some inconsistencies, some deficiencies in in our theology or the theology in the

American church as a whole. And it's a conversation that that I think that we really need to have is really important for many reasons.

And we'll get into that tonight. But there's two main reasons why I wanted to have Jared on with us to to give us more detail, to give us more explanation of that conversation.

Number one, I really feel like this conversation is so important that it needs to snowball.

It needs to pick up speed and it needs to grow and it needs to permeate all of our circles.

We need to have this conversation with our friends, with our brothers and sisters at our local church. And this conversation just needs to continue to grow.

And we want to be a part of it here. Number two, part of our goal,

Dan and myself, the goal with this podcast is to reach our community and share

Jesus with our community and share the truth of God's word with our community. And they may not all follow or be a part of the same circles that we are on Facebook or on social media or follow the same ministries and pastors that we do.

So when we have those conversations like you guys were having the other night, some of the language may be unfamiliar, some of the concepts.

So I wanted to have this conversation to make it more clear for the layman or the lay woman.

And so with that being said, let's jump right into the to the conversation. I've titled it tonight

Addressing Exposed Theological Inconsistencies. So the first question is, what has exposed theological inconsistencies?

The thing that has exposed our shortcoming in doctrine has been the chaos of the last two or three years.

We had the Black Lives Matter riots, which set cities ablaze across America. We had COVID with all sorts of governmental tyranny, with all the threats against John MacArthur and Grace Church out there in California, James Coates up in Canada.

We have walked through the whirlwind here in the past two or three years. And we thank God for that because it exposed where we were as as Christian America.

And you could see the you can you can begin to see the missing pieces now that that storm has rolled through.

And I think that it is calming down a bit. I make no predictions that it's going to continue to call. I just think we're all kind of like, all right, we walk through those two things and we're hopeful that things will go back to normal a little bit.

But the danger then is to actually think that everything's OK. You know, it's like a bad mix into your house and you have some people finally get up the courage to, like, throw them out.

And we're like, all right, we threw this critical race theory, intersectionality, social justice, woke nonsense out of the house.

Everything's OK, you know. And but you need like Uncle Johnny comes up and it's like, yeah, but how did he get in here?

Can somebody tell me how? And then it seems to me that the tendency will be no, no.

I mean, it's all good. We all we all renounce critical race and intersectionality. Now, all of your conservative, your conservative leaders of conservative institutions have had enough donors and had enough pastors kind of rattle their swords.

That it is not contagious to be anywhere near social justice and the woke the woke nonsense.

Now, Eric Mason wrote his book, Woke Church, back in the day, and I'm sure it was quite popular back then.

And now you could write the book, Not Woke Church, and you would sell a bunch of copies.

It's just that's where all the momentum is. That's where everything that's where everything's going. And that's great.

But we have to be more than not woke. You have to actually say as a pastor, why was this particular lie so tasty to so many people?

And you can actually look at some of you look at intersectionality and you can see the lies.

Paul says in Romans one, these people that worship the creature rather than the creator, they've exchanged the truth of God for a lie.

And you can almost people have looked so deeply into this critical race theory, intersectionality stuff. Now, you can actually see the lie.

You can understand how they err. But then if you replace it with the corresponding truth, like what what should what should have been doing?

You can see that we were not doing those things. And I fear that we we still won't do those things.

So we'll define ourselves by what we're against. And I have no problem doing so. But that's all we will do.

And so it's like it's like only playing defense. I wrote an article recently at Reformation and Revival.

It's a blog that I'm writing that there are kind of three different kinds of Christian communities.

One of them being a separatist pietism that just kind of has divided the sacred and the secular and just just doesn't even concern itself with this world at all.

The second category is a defensive evangelicalism. And these are evangelicals that love the gospel and they're going to vote

Republican. But that's kind of the totality of their engagement in the world. They're defensive.

They're angry. They're all pent up. They don't know why this has happened. They wanted to go away, but they haven't actually worked out the particular doctrines that you need in the recipes so that that bad thing doesn't happen.

And they still aren't cooking that meal and they still aren't filling up their house.

So it's going to be like, you know, Jesus said when the demons cast out, he goes and grabs seven other demons that are more wicked than himself and brings them back and just finds that people tidied up.

They swept up and they've garnished the house for him. And I think that's kind of the danger now is have we really learned our lesson?

Why did we err in this way? What were we doing wrong that this kind of thing happened? And let's go ahead and do the right thing now so that we're ready for the next attack.

So what would you say would be the nature of these inconsistencies or these deficiencies?

Are they a failure to think through doctrine in relation to other doctrine or doctrine of practice or maybe a little bit of both?

Or was it just a void in our in our everything that our worldview as a whole that kind of led to to all of this?

Yeah, it is all of those. It is particular doctrines and doctrine and practice and worldview. And that's what makes it so crazy and such an interesting conversation.

And because intersectionality, take intersectionality, take Marx's framework of haves and have nots, bourgeoisie and proletariat people, people, you know, like for those laymen and laywomen you're talking about.

You probably if you haven't read Votie Bauckham's book, Fault Lines, it'd be a wonderful book to get. But basically, just think, put a worldview, put glasses on that sees everything in those in the paradigm of there's people that have stuff, there's people that don't.

That's the world, buddy. And so but then intersectionality comes up with all sorts of categories of haves and have nots.

So you have white people that have things and black people don't. And men have things and women don't. And straight people have things and gay people don't.

And Americans have things and non -Americans don't. And Christians have things and non -Christians don't. You come up with all these categories.

So, by the way, side note, we three don't have a single victim status to claim.

We are we we are the bourgeoisie all the way down the line of intersectionality. And that's there you go.

But the idea of that of that system, once you get that system and then just to claim those victim statuses and you need to critique society such that we will get to a future state of equilibrium, of equality or equity.

You know, we'll get to where everybody has the same stuff. And then that will be that will be the glorious utopia.

So if you take that view, that's a whole worldview. It's really fascinating.

It's a whole worldview. You know, if you get rid of God and you make you make

God you make the creature God and then you get rid of a divine standard and you make a human standard and you get rid of the power of the spirit and the word of God that brings forth the promises of God that causes the causes the kingdom of God.

To to flourish and bud forth on the earth and you replace that with human willpower and might is that is what brings in the utopia.

If you just exchange all of the Christian things for the pagan things, and I'm using pagan as a pagan or pantheism, meaning exactly what

Paul says in Romans one. We have turned from worshiping the creator to worship the creature. You just take all the human things,

Vox Populi, Vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God.

So just take that. And the problem is you got a bunch of Americans that don't know the difference between how we worked as a democratic republic in the past and that very statement, the voice of the people's voice of God.

So you have conservatives even that say, you know, well, you're just supposed to do what your constituents tell you to do.

OK, yeah, generally enough. But what happens when they tell you to go kill? You know what happens when they tell you we want you to throw all the pastors out and not let the churches meet as the governor.

That's the voice of the people. That's your constituents. You know, you're supposed to tell your constituents to go fly a kite. There's a higher standard than just the voice of the people.

And so you can see how it seeps in even to kind of American conservative thinking that as actually neglecting

God. Same thing with the Constitution. We love the Constitution. Praise God for the Constitution. If we get back to the Constitution, that's going to be a really good thing.

But the Constitution is a work of man. And when you start saying, you know, there's actually a God and a law above the

Constitution that informs and governs, regulates that Constitution. Then even the conservatives start to go,

OK, this is that. Yeah, this is a new thought we're talking. It shouldn't be a new thought, but it is for many modern conservatives.

So there are all sorts of doctrines at play. After giving that whole big sweep of kind of of the lay of the land,

I would key in on one. One is clearly law. So the whole social justice world is is not falling into the error of to each his own.

There is a to each his own error. Right. It's just the way somebody to each his own.

If you want to be straight and I want to be gay to each his own. You know, there was a man who used to say something like that.

And that's an error. But social justice is not that error. Social justice does not say to each his own.

I remember watching back one of Trump's addresses, maybe it was a State of the

Union, and Nancy Pelosi ripped up his speech when he got done. It was like famous. She's behind him, just tore that thing to shreds.

I thought that is not to each his own. What happened to each to each his own, Nancy? I mean, you might not like the speech, but somebody else might have.

And here you are tearing it up, trying to make this universal axiom that this thing was horrible. And that's the spirit of the age.

That's the social justice. They actually have a standard. They have a law and it's a universal law.

It's a law for all peoples. It doesn't matter if you're a Christian, doesn't matter if you're black, white, doesn't matter where you live. Doesn't matter if you're in your home.

Doesn't matter if you're at work. Doesn't matter if you're on a plane. It doesn't matter where you are. This this axiom of social justice holds this faux standard.

So it's interesting. They've taken you've taken the divine standard and you haven't just gotten rid of it and said we'll be standard less.

No, you've replaced the divine standard with the human standard. You've replaced the true standard with a false standard, but it's universal.

OK, so that's the error. And I would say people people bit on that.

Even even people in the evangelical community bit on that because Christians have not been advancing

God's law as the universal standard. They've not been advancing his word, his truth, his his order as the universal order and standard for all peoples.

It doesn't matter who you are. So we've truncated that and we've done all sorts of different things with it.

But you could say I think you would still find a lot of conservative Christian churches that would say as a

Christian, you have to obey the standard. As a Christian, you have to obey

God's law. They would say that and they would even say as a church, we have to obey

God's law. God's law is fully binding here in this in this ecclesiastical body.

But if we were to walk over to City Hall and if we were to walk over to the government schools, if we were to walk into some of these areas and say, you understand that that all of you in here in this organization itself has to bow to King Jesus.

And I'm not talking about, you know, some Jesus you made up. I'm talking about like the Jesus of the Bible that when we say one nation under God, we really mean it.

We mean one nation under Yahweh, like you all have to do what he says all the way down to the ground.

Every one of you and your families have to do this. And you say, well, I'm not a Christian, you know, and there's too many

Christians that have been thinking that way. Well, you know, they would say, well, this standard worked for me.

Well, do you want to give it a try? And it's like, well, if you're saying things like that,

I mean, there's nothing wrong with trying to be winsome. And, you know, you can have in the back of your head that they have to, and you might just be an apologetical approach or something like that.

But you have to know, and we need to just start proclaiming that everybody has to bow to Jesus Christ.

It doesn't matter who you are. And we've neglected that universal standard of God's law,

God's word. And that left people very susceptible to buy it into a system of thought that had a universal standard, just the wrong one.

You just grew a branch off this tree. That's going to lead to a second interview. We're not going to talk about it tonight, but you may be thinking about the conversation based on what you were just talking about.

The abolitionists versus smash mouth incrementalism. So part two, part two, we need to have that conversation.

So here's my next question. And this is something that a statement that you made that we created this environment that produced social justice movement,

BLM, woke ideology, intersectionality. Question is, how did we create that?

Can you explain that? What you meant by that? Yeah, we did. We created it by by leaving that vacuum for it to fill.

So the law, the law principle was one. We did not declare

God's law as a universal law, as the truth for everyone to to acknowledge and to bow to.

And so that was one way we left the vacuum. Another way, another vacuum was the the vacuum of justice.

Now, that sounds very close to law when I say it, but they're they're slightly different ideas.

Social justice. I mean, what was the infamous phrase that we heard going around all over the news?

We want justice. When do we want it now? We want it now. You know, we're not talking about, you know, we don't want justice 10 years from now.

We don't want justice in some heavenly sky palace. We want justice right now, partner. And we want to see we want to see the standard that we hold to that law.

We want to see it enforced. We want to see it come to fruition. We want to see the nations obey all that we command.

They had their own Matthew 28, you know, the false standard. And then they were serious about seeing it come to fruition.

And Christians are not put together that we actually are to do justice in that way, except we're supposed to see the true standard come to fruition all around us.

And again, this is where I think conservatives left the door open, because the sense was, well, yes, you should embody the law of God as an individual

Christian. And even in your home, you should obey God. And, you know, you should have your homes well ordered.

And in the church, we want to see justice done. We want to see the right thing being actualized in the way that we're living.

But we didn't have the sense that it was that that that Jesus tells us to have in Matthew 28, that Matthew 28 is not simply about going making converts.

You know, it's not just about going and getting people to say the Lord's Prayer or walk an aisle. Or even if you're more of the reformed line,

I see Calvin hanging out there on the computer. You're supposed to you're not just supposed to confess faith in Christ.

You know, that is the beginning. Be born again. Be born again. You must be born again. You must call upon the name of the

Lord and be saved. But what does Matthew 28 say? Jesus told us to go into all the world, make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the

Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded. That we're actually supposed to teach the nations to obey

Christ, to obey all of Christ. And that's justice. That's the idea of taking the standard and actually orienting yourself toward that end, praying it like God sanctify.

And by sanctify, I mean, bring into conformity to Christ all of these people in this whole town.

Do this for me. May justice be something that I do as I'm brought into conformity to Christ and do this for my family and do this for our church and do this for our town.

Do this for our county. Do this for our state. Do this for our world. We weren't thinking that way. The evangelical world in America was mainly about getting people justified.

We would pray hard and fervently to get people justified. And thanks be to God for doing that.

But we didn't have this understanding of sanctification. We didn't have this understanding of actually seeing our society conform to the image of Christ.

Now, what's interesting is you did have that in the Young Restless and Reformed movement and the whole

New Calvinism. And this going back a decade or two now, there were there were those who wanted to do that.

There were those who went out into cities and, you know, there were those Chris Tomlins. You're the god of the city.

You're the king of these people. You're the world being of this nation, all that. And so they actually had that that impulse to actually see justice done, to see people morally brought into conformity with Christ.

The problem is they didn't have the standard. They didn't have the first error that I was just talking about last go round.

They they they lost that law and therefore they they fell into the social justice that we see.

So that's another way that we leave the vacuum because we're not actually people. People wanted something that related to their lives.

They wanted something that was concerned with morality and this earth that they're living on.

And Christians were not actually giving them that. They weren't giving them a law that was to be lived out every day.

And so they bought they bought the fake. So can

I ask you to define who we are? You say we a lot. And the reason why

I ask that is it seems like there's going to be some of we who have erred in different ways.

So how would that affect moving forward as we try to address our inconsistencies, our different shortcomings from, you know, either the world and its standard or even brothers or sisters who may have erred and even erred greatly?

No. So how would we define and point in the right direction to try to address these issues?

Yes. Yeah. Yep. So first of all,

I'd say, you know, what I mean by we is determined by context. And I say we at different times that I mean different people.

So I don't have a universal definition. But but I very often mean the covenant community by which

I mean Christians. When I when I'm using we very often, I mean Christians.

Hey, these people that have claimed the name of Christ, these people that have been baptized, this body.

And very often, I mean, in the American context, I'm thinking of our nation and I'm thinking all the saints in America.

And I think it's important to speak that way and to think that way, because I think another problem that we have is a hyper individualism to where we actually don't get the significance of group identity.

That's another error of intersectionality that people bit because we didn't have it.

We had a whole bunch of individuals living for Jesus. Right. You know, we have this idea of I'm a pilgrim on the highway.

And thanks be to God for John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It's like best book ever. So you should go buy 10 copies and read them all twice.

But that's that's kind of the vision for our Christian life is I the individual on my way to heaven.

And that's totally a biblical theme and a right thing. It's just not the only thing. And so what do we think the kingdom of God actually coming on earth as it is in heaven, as the

Lord's Prayer says? And you start to say, OK, well, what is that kingdom of God? Well, this is the people of God. So certain confessional traditions speak of the visible church.

These people that are baptized, these people that are at the Lord's table, these people that are marked and marked out by God and are a real entity in the world, not just the invisible church.

Right. Not just that. Not just the. Well, we're with John Calvin and Martin Luther. Yes. Yeah. All the individual saints, we can think of that way.

The elect. But we're talking about this, this visible entity on earth, the church militant on earth.

Here we are marked out and using that plural we is something that we desperately need to do.

It's one of the truths we need if we're going to guard against what's coming next. And again, we didn't have that.

And people know that they're not just singularities walking around on earth and they bit into false entities.

So find your here's your people, white people. Here's your people, black people.

Here's your people, men. Here's your people, gay, straight, whatever it is.

We start to use those categories. Some of them are actually realities and some of them are just, you know, made up nonsense.

But the idea of this corporate entity was another thing that we missed that I think we need to recover.

And then the response is interesting. So as you said, there are people that messed up in different ways.

And so I'm not saying that we should only have the plural we going on.

There are individuals who really messed up and there are individuals who toyed around with it.

And then there are individuals who really stood strong. But I think the it would be wrong to neglect the we and just start pointing fingers right now.

Like now's the time to have that plural operating and saying some of y 'all mess with it too long and now you're not messing with it anymore.

And we're glad and welcome. Well, we love you. And let's let's move forward. Let's talk about how we move forward.

So we need that kind of corporate people of God operating right now, while not pulling any any loving brotherly punches about individuals that really screwed things up.

Sure. The reason why I thought it was so critical that we identify who the we is, is because we need we

I need to take ownership. My neighbor needs to take ownership. The person beside me in the pew needs to take ownership.

Just speaking on my experience in the Southern Baptist Church, there's been the mindset that's so rampant for so long is the role of the pastor is to to be the evangelist, to be the missionary.

And so I don't have to worry about those things. That's the role of my pastor. He's going to take care of all those outreach ministries that that I don't have to do.

You know, I can live my life. And so I think that that type of mindset is carries over into all these other aspects.

I don't I don't need to worry. This is somebody else's job. This is somebody else's responsibility.

It's the you know, the greater SBC, the greater this denomination that whatever. And we we fail to look at ourselves and our ownership in it and our responsibility in it and how we can be a strengthening help to our churches in having this robust theology that that closes those gaps.

And as you were talking about the social justice movement and their their mantra, you know, justice, we want justice.

We want it now. I was thinking about that. We're on such total opposite paths with those folks, because I was thinking about what what their prayer would be compared to the prayer that the

Lord gave us. You know, my kingdom come, my will be done is their prayer and their path, as opposed to our prayer that that kingdom come and that will be done.

And that that's what you were leading me to think about in your as you're speaking there.

So our next question is, we've talked about these social issues and you brought up how

COVID has been a part of the past several years. So how did

COVID expose theological inconsistencies? Yeah.

Wow. The biggest one was certainly the tyranny. But it all.

So there's a there's a tyranny issue that came up with government, particularly something a shortcoming in our theology of government was a massive one.

But also a materialism.

So like the Marxist materialistic worldview that was so evidence in Black Lives Matter riots and and intersectionality, all of that.

It also that same materialism popped up and hit some conservatives, people that wouldn't be down with BLM and wouldn't be down with CRTI.

But it hit them on the COVID front because the CDC became, you know, the voice of God.

I mean, it was CDC, CDC. How many pastors said, you know, we checked with the CDC. That's what

CDC said to do. We're going to do it. You know, or how many of them? Maybe they didn't say that, but they at least they at least went to it.

And that was the primary source. And that's the things the CDC has done are insane.

I mean, the things that they have, like all sorts of crazy wokeness stuff going on there.

So I remember telling telling our people when everything was happening, we thank

God for modern medicine. Praise be to God for all of that. And all of that is to be received as a gift directly from God's hand.

And if you, you know, if you don't understand how amazing it is that we have modern medicine and go read a few

Puritan biographies and see how many children died and you'll know real quick how to be thankful.

In addition to that, we have to recover the distinction, but not the separation between heaven and earth, between spiritual reality and physical reality.

So on the level of kind of worldview ontology kind of things, nature of reality, we were short on that.

So I remember telling our people, I just want you to keep in mind that, you know, once a plague stopped in the

Bible because God told an angel to stop killing people. And just like, okay, all right.

Okay. Yeah. So keep factor that into the equation. When you see people like OD on the

CDC, this is the world that we live in. We live in a world where angels kill people and it comes out as pestilence.

And so this enchanted world and Glenn Sunshine gave a message a couple fight left feasts ago.

I don't think it was the last one, maybe the one before on an enchanted world. And it was just remarkable to me.

It was wonderful. And I think that would be some background to how we came up bad on the

COVID issue. And then you just have straight governmental tyranny where I alluded to earlier.

Everybody was talking about Romans 13. And I thought it was so interesting because I'm like, you're all citing

Romans 13 and saying that we should submit to government. And Romans 13 is the very text that says that that governor is a minister of God.

And and I was like, well, just think about it for a minute. If he's a minister of God, you know, if he's a servant of God, do servants have to obey their masters?

Answers. Answers. Yes. Does that mean Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has to obey his master?

Is his master Jesus Christ? Yes. His master is Jesus Christ. OK, well, what if he's not a

Christian? What if he's not a born again Christian? What if he's not a baptized Christian? What if he's never been anywhere near Christianity? Is Jesus Christ still his master?

And does he still have to obey him? The answer is yes. He is a minister of Yahweh. And so we didn't have a category for that, right, because of our shortcoming in worldview.

It's like, well, if he's a Christian, then Jesus would be his Lord. If he wasn't a Christian, then Jesus wouldn't be his Lord. But we had no context for a man who is not regenerate actually having

God as his master, having to obey him in his station, in his office, that he actually has to consider what

God has said to him and God has actually said things to him. It's not just a matter of, oh yeah, he has to obey

God, but God hasn't really told him anything about how to govern California. No, God's told him how to govern California.

You know, you can find all sorts of little intricate laws and details that, you know, God has not told him exactly what to do at eight o 'clock on Tuesday.

But he has revealed to him far more than we let on in the Christian world.

And if you start to talk too much about it, you know, people start to get worried about the big bad theonomy thing.

And, you know, we don't see how foolish it is. It's just how we are stumbling over ourselves and we are slaughtering children.

And then you have a Christian conservative community that's worried about theonomy when we are slaughtering more innocents than Adolf Hitler ever did.

So, yes, we need to come back and say, what does God actually require of our political leaders, of our civil leaders?

And what is the role of general revelation in that? What is the role of special revelation in that?

And we didn't have any of those things going on. So I think the liberty of conscience doctrine is huge.

It's in multiple historical confessions and beginning to think when

James Coates went into prison because of a statute advanced by.

I still remember the woman's name. It's Dina Hinshaw. She was the health director or something at the time who had established that law that was contrary to God's revelation.

And James Coates did the right thing by saying, I've got to obey God, not man. I've got to obey

Yahweh, not Dina Hinshaw. When he went in, he was doing exactly the right thing.

And if you take some time with liberty of conscience doctrine, consider it in the confessions, it's really fascinating. It shows that God's law is over man's law.

And the case with James Coates opened that box for us where you had to choose a side.

Either James was wrong about the Bible and needed to submit to Dina Hinshaw or he was right about the

Bible and could not submit to Dina Hinshaw. And you were just left in that situation of having to determine how you were going to understand that one.

So that's some of our errors on COVID. So what happens if we just fail to address these deficiencies and inconsistencies?

Like what happens if we keep on going down the road and we don't pull over to fix the thumping going off underneath the car?

We just turn the radio up and keep on driving. Yeah, we shouldn't be surprised at all with that cyclical pattern.

It's exactly what happened in Scripture, right? You see judgment comes and we'll fix it, we'll get it right.

But then you haven't actually done it and more is going to come. But when the initial judgment lets up, everybody can look around and start to feel like everything's good, like everything's

OK. It's all settled down now and you can even fly on a certain airline now and not wear a mask and all of that kind of stuff.

But even if you start going down that line, you're going to have conservative Christians that are anti -woke that are going to say, well, yeah, but they're going to come with tyranny again.

And but then the solutions that that conservative community is going to offer are not going to be the doctrinal ones that we need.

So I think there's a number of areas that could happen. I think there could be a

Christless conservative increase in a defensive evangelicalism increase where there are there are people who rise up that don't want to take it anymore.

They don't want to deal with it anymore. And they're going to want a they're going to want somebody with some backbone.

And that person will step up. You know, there will be such people. And the tendency will be to put trust in man on the conservative side of things.

Right. And the problem is that's always the we need to vote. We need to vote.

Right. And just we all need to do that. We need to trust God and vote.

Right. We need to trust God and use the means that he has supplied. But I think a danger that is that is going to come if we don't get the doctrines right, if we don't get to deal with God, then we're going to end up putting our trust in man, which is the fundamental error of everything that we're against, of everything that we're that we're concerned about with the with the social justice stuff.

That's such a great point. And as you were talking about James Codes and the the stance that some many began to take.

We would we would oppose the government. We would oppose the tyranny when it comes to coming against our local church, shutting down our church.

And this is something you guys brought up during your conversation. But that mindset didn't bleed over into the tyranny against our brothers and sisters when they're outside the local church walls.

And so do you want to address that or touch on that? Why it's important to stand against the tyranny, not just when they're coming against our local church, but us as Christians, our brothers and sisters at the workplace or outside the four walls.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of Bible loving people that grew up in churches that tasted that division of the sacred and the secular so strong that they they grew up and they realized that they were their worldview was so faulty that it seemed that their faith was not real.

Because the only place it was real was a church on Sunday. So like I go

I go to church on Sunday and and I love singing these hymns and I I do believe in God.

But then they would just have no no connection to what they're supposed to do six days out of the week.

And they did not know how their faith related to their work. They didn't know how it related to education. They didn't know how it related to the family.

They didn't know how it related to society, civil government, all of that stuff. So why is it important?

I mean, goodness gracious, it's not just important so that we'll be ready when the next political leftist assault comes.

It's important because it's what it means to be a minister of God, to actually minister God's word to people.

If you're if you're if your worldview as a minister, it doesn't it doesn't equip people to actually be conformed into the image of Christ.

In a sense that Kuyper would say all of Christ for all of life, then you're simply not doing it right.

You're not you're not actually living under the authority of God in the world that he created.

This is his world. Every last inch of it belongs to him. Every last inch of it must bow to him.

So that is so we certainly have to recover those truths. So I think we're ready to look at the list.

So I jotted down, you know, listen to your conversation, took note and created a list based on what you guys said.

Looking at the different places where we need to shore up and have a more robust theology on certain issues so that we can kind of close that gap, fill that void and prepare for the future.

You've already touched on a right understanding of the law. So I think I think we'll skip over that one.

The first one on our list then would be a right understanding of the kingdom.

If you want to touch on that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the question about the kingdom is a big one.

I think many saints don't don't know what they're praying when they say the

Lord's Prayer. And they haven't thought about it. They haven't thought about the kingdom of God actually coming on Earth. It sounds carnal.

It sounds fleshly. It sounds not of faith, not spiritual.

You know, and immediately the text like beware of earthly wisdom, you know, the wisdom from above is better, not wisdom from below.

And those those texts matter and they have important things to say. And yet the God tells us to pray.

Christ tells us to pray your kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven. And so the question is, is it really coming on Earth?

And what is its nature? You have parables in the Gospels that speak of the kingdom as this dragnet that gathers in both good and bad.

And then the angel sorted out at the end. You start thinking, like, what does it mean that there's there's bad fish in the kingdom of God?

That's a weird idea. You would think you're not allowed to have bad fish in there. You can't have can't have bad fish in the kingdom.

It can only be good fish. And yet you say, OK, so so the kingdom of God is this very real thing that is full of real people, embodied souls.

It's the kingdom of God includes people that have bodies and the king of the kingdom has a resurrected body and he has all authority in heaven and on Earth.

And as Ephesians 1 says, he is united to all things in him, things in heaven and things on Earth. So the tangible, the tangibility of the heavenly kingdom is remarkable.

It's a mystery, but we need to actually be thinking about its reality.

When we when we worship on Sunday, right, we're coming to the

Lord's table. And I know that there are other brothers and sisters all across our nation, all across the world that are in the kingdom of God with me.

They're in a real thing with me and they're marked out. They're signed and they're sealed and they're coming to worship

God and they're coming to sing to God. And we're all together. So that's kind of a sketch.

And much more could be said doctrinally. I would encourage people to dive into it. Would you mind touching for us on the idea of the myth of neutrality?

It seems fairly relevant here. I'd like to hear you flesh that out some more.

Yeah, Rush Dooney would be would be a great resource on this.

Talk about myth of neutrality. But because there is a

God, then there is no neutrality. You're not going to have a middle. You're either going to be moving more and more toward God or more and more away from God.

Heaven and hell, this binary reality that there's a rejection of the binary. We want this is where it's really interesting with the transgender stuff and the androgyny stuff that's going on, where we somehow want to claim we can we can go to the middle.

No, it doesn't work that way. You're going to go more and more toward heaven. You're going to go more and more toward hell. It's not whether but which.

It's not whether you're going to serve a God. It's which God you're going to serve. It's not whether you're going to have a law.

It's which law you're going to have. It's not whether you're going to have a savior. It's which savior you're going to have.

You're going to have a divine savior, the real savior. You have a human savior, the false savior. It just runs. Adopting that mindset helps you to see what's really going on in the world.

And you can ask yourself that question. It's not whether but which. Well, before we run out of time, we've got a whole list here.

And Dan and we can. Oh, my power source.

Oh, those who sit in darkness have seen a great light.

It's going to it's going to blast back on here. Well, while he's working on that,

I think I know where he's going. Let me try to point us in the right direction. Yeah. Yeah.

What are some very practical steps that we can take in order to kind of take the blinders off of ourselves or where we are able to exert influence?

What are some practical steps that we can take to show our brothers and sisters or our families to shore up those deficiencies, those weak spots, the blind spots that we might have?

How can we. How can we make sure that at least on our end that we're taking steps not to be taken off guard by the next thing that comes around the corner?

Yeah, I would say you need to do whatever it takes, make all the sacrifices that you have to make to ensure that your children receive a classical

Christian education. You just need to pour into them. So I think government schools, you need to be done with them.

There are very, very, very, very, very few exceptions given somebody's particular situation in life.

I could think of I can think of a couple of reasons that you might be forced to go and do something like that.

But otherwise, you need to realize that we we are in Babylon and you are going to have to live distinct, sharply distinct.

And it's going to be laboring that your children would be raised up in the nurture and admonition of the

Lord. And it's going to take some time. This is the kind of thing this is going to be planting and watering.

And so you're going to be willing to do that. And the temptation is going to be panic, panic, panic, stress, stress, stress, loud noises, loud noises.

You know, vote right. And you're going to be neglecting the diligent laboring work that you need to do.

So raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Practically, as far as a book,

I would encourage people to read through Pro Reggae, Abraham Kuyper's Pro Reggae. Now, that's those are huge books, like three volumes.

But get your hand on some Abraham Kuyper. His lectures on Calvinism would be another source that might help people to start to think about the implications of of their

Christian faith for for all of life. You need to find a

Christian community that certainly is not woke and not playing around with the social justice stuff, that has the courage to call all of that stuff out.

But then you need to start asking yourself the question, is this church creating the culture that is distinct from everything else, from the world around me?

And not in a way that's fear mongering and just trying to pull the shades down and protect, protect, protect.

We actually have to have this this sense that the knowledge of the

Lord indeed is going to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea and that's permeating everything. And so you have you have men that are being entrepreneurial, that are trusting

God and that are getting to work and that are serving other people by providing goods and resources that are that are a blessing to them.

And that's catching on and it's not spiraling further and further away into just the guarded cave, but they're actually they're actually taking dominion.

So there are people that are connected on that cultural mandate principle to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and have dominion.

I think you need to find that church. You need to find that community. And if you're not there, if it's not around you, then you need to move.

I'm telling people you need to go find that because you you're not going to be able to walk this one out in isolation.

There's different circumstances for all different people. You have to get wisdom on all the factors. But you're actually going to need a community of people that are not woke and then are not just against wokeness, but actually have are imbibing these doctrines and principles and seeing that fruit.

I would say find those people, find your people and link with them together to live distinctly for the next decade or two as we walk through the hot mess that we have walked through and it's going to keep coming.

That's great advice, but hard advice, too, because of some of the circumstances we're in.

But you lived up to your own advice and we we could follow your lead for sure.

So your your walk was where your talk is and we we admire you for that.

And so I think you're a good example for all of us. Let me go over this list and so that people can be aware of the other things that are on there.

We don't have time to go over all of them and maybe we can do that on a different date. But we want to talk about the theologies of the

Lordship of Jesus. And these are these are things that are areas that became exposed because the areas that we talk about tonight that we need to realize we're had some inconsistencies, has some deficiencies in our in in my in us as an

American church, as Christians had some holes, had some deficiencies.

So the Lordship of Jesus Christ offices. The sovereignty, the spheres of sovereignty, creator, creation, distinction, eschatology.

You know, we've hit on that and the dominion mandate corporate entities, the gospel's true work and intentions above and beyond just justification and how it works itself out in in the world.

And then the idea that Christians are being are afraid to be

Christians outside of the four walls. And we kind of touched on that tonight. So I'm very grateful,

Jared, that you joined us tonight. Grateful for the work that you and your your co -laborers are doing there in Moscow.

And we will continue to follow you and be praying for you and your families, of course.

And with that being said, before we leave, we would really appreciate it if you would share the gospel to to us and to those who are listening.

So I'll turn it over to you to share the gospel for us. Yeah, the gospel is a good news about Jesus Christ.

He is the son of God and he is the son of man. He was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.

He descended into Hades and he rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the father almighty.

He's the only righteous one who has ever lived. And he died in the place of sinners. And so you need to call upon the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is

Lord and you will be a Christian. That is good news. Forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you in Jesus name.

Well, let's pray and we'll we'll hop over here. Father, we thank you for the time that we've been able to spend together.

We pray that we take these things, sink them deep in our heart, that we would look to your word as guidance, that your spirit would guide us into the truth, that we would gather together as your people and do your work, knowing that you are going to bring the increase.

We thank you for your grace towards us and the forgiveness found in your son. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Amen. All right. Thank you guys for watching. We hope that you'll come back. Do you want to say something else?

I'll say thank you guys. Thanks for having me on. Oh, yeah. And we hope you guys who are watching will come back.

In the meantime, remember that Jesus is king. Go live in the victory of Christ. Go speak with the authority of Christ and continue to go out and share the gospel of Christ.