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#NoDespair2020
So you may not believe this about me, but I'm actually well-known for maintaining a reasonable tone in my videos. But at the same time, I say things that people think are objectionable and bombastic and disgusting and all that kind of stuff.
So I know some people think I'm like too aggressive, but even my enemies oftentimes will criticize me for maintaining a reasonable tone as I'm saying things that they think are pretty crazy. And I've said a lot of controversial things over the years, but nothing has elicited or solicited, whatever, however you say that, the kind of aggressive and underhanded pushback that I've received for saying that people who vote, Christians who vote for Democrats in elections at this point should be church disciplined.
So they should be confronted of sin. And then if they don't repent and don't repent and don't repent, they should eventually be excommunicated for the sin of voting for Democrats. Nothing has gotten such pushback as that statement has.
And so I think I'm over a target that needs to be sat over quite a bit longer. And so I'm going to do that. And I wanna talk about sort of why that is and why I'm not going to apologize for saying it.
Yeah, yeah, I think there's a few reasons for this. I think number one, most importantly, I think church discipline is almost unthinkable in general in our culture. People definitely get church discipline for certain things, but in general, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
In fact, I remember talking to a pastor who I really respected and I really loved, and he was a great guy in general. He was very good at teaching the Bible and just a very passionate guy about the word of God.
And I remember there was a situation where there was a woman and a man coming to the church that were fornicating. I mean, they were living together and all that kind of stuff, and they were gonna get married eventually, but they weren't yet and all of that kind of thing.
And I remember I asked him, I said, so what's the deal with this, right? What's the deal with this? Like, why is this just happening and no one seems to really care? And he told me something along the lines of, if I were to just get rid of them, if I were to confront them too aggressively and excommunicate them, they would just go to a church down the street.
And so I think it would be better for them, more loving for them to be here where I know they're gonna get sound biblical teaching. And pragmatically, that makes a little bit of sense, because it's definitely true.
If you excommunicate someone from your church, they're just gonna go find another church. And that's obviously what they're gonna do. But at the end of the day, we definitely have clear commands from God on this kind of a thing.
So despite the pragmatism of something like that, it's just really not an option for someone who's seeking to follow the Bible. But there's this idea though, unity is more important than stuff like that.
There's this idea that really, it's almost seen in many circles as, if not the highest good, a very high good. Unity is one of the prime directive for the Christian church. And I can see why someone would say that, but it has to be a certain kind of unity.
I saw this tweet from Samuel Say. I think this is really astute. Samuel Say is a very sharp guy. In fact, I'm a Patreon supporter of Samuel Say. I think his writing is very good. Anyway, here's what his tweet says.
He says, truth divides our evil culture more than lies do. And lies unify our evil culture more than the truth does. We should remember that when we make unity in our culture, our biggest, we should remember that when we make unity in our culture, our biggest priority.
This is really good. If unity is one of the highest goods, then the way to achieve unity is oftentimes to sweep things under the rug, to maybe be dishonest a little bit, to maybe go with the flow a little bit too much.
In other words, to tolerate all kinds of untruthfulness in your culture. If you want to have unity in your neighborhood, it might make sense to tolerate craziness, like those transsexual story hours at your local library, or to tolerate horrible teaching about sexuality in your public schools.
Tolerating that stuff, your life will be in the short term much easier because there won't be quite as much conflict, there won't be division, and there will be a veneer of unity. So it's like, yeah, sure, if you're willing to hide things and be untruthful, you can have a lot of apparent unity.
And I say apparent unity because it's actually fake unity. It's not really unity at all. It's just the appearance of unity. It's the optics of unity and stuff like that. In fact, I think that this is something that Christ in the book of Revelation actually chastises one of the churches for.
In the beginning of Revelation, we see he writes letters to the churches, right? He writes letters to the churches, and what he says is, this is what you're doing well, this is what I have against you.
It's kind of like a little bit of like a report card sort of for each church. This is Revelation chapter two, verse, let's see, let's start at verse 19 here. So he's writing to the church of Thyatira, Thyatira, I don't know how to pronounce that.
That's fine. He says this, I know thy works and charity and service and faith and thy patience and thy works and the last to be more than the first. That sounds pretty good, like your report card started very good.
You've got good works, you've got charity, you've got service and faith, and you've got patience. And so this is like a pretty good, a lot of the fruits of the spirit are there, right? Like he's saying, look, I know what you're up to.
There's a lot of good stuff there. Then verse 20, here's what he says. He says, notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication and eat things sacrificed unto idols.
So he's saying, this is what I have against you. You're demonstrating some fruits of the spirit here. This is all good, but I have something against you. You tolerate a false prophet. You tolerate someone who's teaching poorly.
You tolerate someone who's teaching sin and helping people commit sin. You tolerate that. He's not even saying that you've agreed with her. He's not even saying that you in your heart of hearts, you actually want to go with her.
He's not even saying you participated in the fornication. What he's saying is you tolerated her. That's very interesting because especially in our culture today, it's almost like tolerance is, if unity is one of the highest goods and tolerance is kind of right there.
And I think it makes sense because in order to have a lot of unity in our culture, you kind of have to tolerate a lot of nonsense. You have to tolerate a lot of lies. And so Christ is writing to this church and he's giving them the report card.
And he tells them, there's a lot of good stuff here. You're demonstrating some of the fruits of the spirit. That's great. But here's a problem. You tolerate someone who's teaching people to do evil. Tolerance is not good in this case.
Tolerance is actually one of the things he has against this church. Now, I was reminded of this verse by Michael Foster. I actually have read this verse many times. You know, Revelation, you ever get it?
It's one of those books that you get it in your mind to read it and you don't really make it past chapter three a lot of the time, right? Because it's hard to read sometimes. There's a lot of books like that where you've read the first three chapters a hundred times and then the last three chapters very few times.
Revelation's one of those books for me. So I've read this chapter a lot, but I never really noticed that the tolerance is what he has against them. That is very interesting to me. And so I would say this, guys, that like, if I'm right, if I'm right, like, I think that, you know, one thing you should take a look at and just try to be objective about this.
Chances are you have a lot of friends who are voting Democrat this year, right? Your friendship can't be more important to you than the truth because the truth is actually a person. So if you're Christ's friend, if you're Christ's follower, if he's your King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Christ said, I am the truth.
And so the truth, you need to be devoted to the truth more so than you're devoted to your friends. So try to be objective about this. I know you have a lot of friends that you would have to confront for their sin.
But if I'm right and the Democratic Party platform is evil top to bottom, and I think I can demonstrate that quite easily. I think I've done that over the last few weeks and I can continue to do that more and unpack it and all of that kind of stuff.
If the Democratic Party platform is actually evil, pretty much in toto, why would you tolerate someone in your midst who is not only planning on supporting that platform, but also writing article after article after article bending over backwards to affirm the legitimacy of tolerating that in our midst?
Do you want to get a letter like this church did in the book of Revelation where it's like, look, David Platt, you're very kind. You've set up all kinds of charities. You are faithful in many ways. There's patience there.
Those are good things. Notwithstanding, I have a few things against you because you sufferest that Jezebel, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or whoever it is, Nancy Pelosi or whatever it is, right? Whatever it is.
Why would we tolerate this? Why would we settle for false unity? Because there is no unity between people who say, look, God created them male and female and people who are voting for someone who's saying no.
Not only did he not create them male and female, but we can decide for ourselves and by the way, we're gonna set up culture in such a way that if you don't affirm this, you can't buy or sell. If you don't affirm this, you can't be part of civilized society.
If you don't affirm this wicked teaching, then you're just as good as a prisoner or you're just as good as dead, that kind of thing. Why would that be okay? Why would that be something we ought to tolerate?
They're coming for children, right? They wanna make it a right for children to decide what gender they are. They wanna make it, if you can't see, if you can't prophetically see into the future how this is gonna work, where it's gonna become child abuse to not affirm this and to not get them the sex change treatments that they want and all that kind of stuff and they're gonna take away children from Christians, from people, not even just Christians, people who just have the common grace to say, yeah, he made a male and female, that's obvious.
If you can't see that far into the future, may I suggest to you that your powers of prophecy are probably not that honed at this point. You're naive, too naive. You should not tolerate people that are turning God's world upside down like that and attempting to recreate the world in their image instead of Christ's.
You should not tolerate people that are so backwards. We're not talking about nibbling around the edges here. We're not talking about deciding whether or not to put a pool into our local town or to resurface the basketball court.
We're not talking about nonsense decisions like that. We're talking about fundamental foundational issues here. Why are you tolerating that woman, Jezebel? It doesn't make any sense to even tolerate her, even for a moment.
Have patience, yes, but eventually you have to act. We've got a word from the Lord here. We've got a word from the Lord here. There's no reason to settle for false unity. Yes, they're gonna just wheel across town to another church, but if they're liberal progressives and they're following that woman, Jezebel, let them go follow her all the way.
Let them go to the synagogue of Satan. That's not your concern. Your concern is the unity around the truth, the unity around Christ. In fact, the New Testament talks about that kind of unity. That's the kind of unity Paul wants the churches to have, unity around the doctrine of Christ, around the truth.
False unity isn't unity. It just makes it easier for you to manage. It makes it easier for you to rock the boat. In fact, in David Platt's book, I heard someone read an excerpt from it, like the reason he wrote his book on voting is because of the turmoil it caused when he did something that was so obviously basically good, praying for the president of the United States, and he's like, well, I wanna avoid this turmoil.
Pastors, your job is not to avoid turmoil. Your job is to preach the word and to accomplish the role that God prescribed for you, and that requires you sometimes to have disunity with certain people. And I would argue that tolerating the woman Jezebel, and at this stage in our culture in 2020, it's October right before the vote in 2020, this is your duty.
Do not tolerate a political party that is seeking to remake the world. They don't like how God made it. They wanna make it different. That is something that you should not tolerate even for a moment. There is nothing noble, there is nothing good about maintaining a false unity by tolerating something like that.
People who vote Democrat at this point, at this time in the year 2020, the Democratic Party is so far gone that people who vote Democrat should be confronted, told to stop, rebuked for it, and if they refuse to repent over time, they should be excommunicated from the church of Jesus Christ because that kind of unity is a false unity.
It's not a unity that you should be after. I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.