On The Road Dividing Line from Pennsylvania

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:29

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I'm coming to you live from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I will, well sort of live,

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I guess, anyways, where I will be speaking at Chris Arntzen's pastors conference, pastors luncheon, sorry, conference, but luncheon tomorrow, and then at his church on Sunday here in the

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Carlisle area. And I visited this area a good bit when

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I was younger. My dad actually worked at a mobile home sales lot in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and not far from Gettysburg.

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I'm not going to really get down to Gettysburg this trip, which is unusual being in this area. I almost always hit

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Gettysburg, but I've got too much other stuff going on. And it's very green here.

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And there are some trees that are actually changing color, just a few, not a lot, but a few. So there's a little bit of color.

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Next month, next few weeks is when it really gets nice. But anyway, so that's where I am.

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I wanted to make sure to get to this because I forgot last time. The fellows that put on the conference, coming up on two weeks ago now, man, it seems like it was just a few days ago, there in the

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Nashville area, gave a really neat little gift to each one of the speakers. It's a stamp.

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Turn it right the direction there. It is a stamp, and you know, it's in a nice plastic thing to protect it.

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And it says Apollo 8, and it's too small for me to see what it says.

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It says United States, but I'm not sure how many cents it is. And it says, In the Beginning God. And it's a picture that Jim Lovell and his crew in Apollo 8 took.

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And if you remember, I think it was Christmas Eve. What is that, 68? Might have been.

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As they swung around the moon, and you had Earthrise, and they had this view of the

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Earth, and they closed out their broadcast by quoting from the first chapter of Genesis.

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All three of them read a certain section from the first chapter of Genesis. Good days.

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I would like to think there might be someone who would be willing to do that now, but it'd be just as likely that somebody would read from the

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Quran, or Nietzsche, or something like that now, sadly.

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But I want to thank them for that kind gift. That's a neat thing to have. I was around back then, so a young person, if that was 68, then

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I was just about to turn, well, Christmas Eve, I would have just turned six.

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Yeah, six years old. But I was a pretty nerdy kid, so I definitely paid attention to all the

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Apollo stuff. And was it even 640 by 480K resolution?

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I'm not even sure that it was. Anyway, so I wanted to say thanks for that.

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We have not been on the air since Charlie Kirk was murdered, and we were thinking about possibly doing a program that very afternoon.

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But I decided I just had too much stuff going on. There was some stuff I wanted to get done here in the unit. Each trip there's little things

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I want to try to get done, and I actually did get that project done. So I was pretty much right where I am right now, listening to the coverage, saw the early footage, knew that he was gone pretty quickly.

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And with everybody else was stunned. There was a lot of political violence in the 1960s, and less since then, but it still happens.

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And one of the issues that we're facing right now is, how do you differentiate between political and religious violence?

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Especially because our society has adopted such an anti -Christian stance.

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The LGBTQ movement is anti -Christian. I know that there are people who call themselves Christians involved in the movement.

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They're false teachers. There is no way they can substantiate their position. That's why they all run and hide when it comes to challenges to debate these things.

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But was this a political assassination, or was this a Christian martyrdom, or is it both?

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And that day or the next day, I saw two friends, one of whom is older than I am, one of who's younger than I am, but they're both well -known individuals.

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If I told you who they were, you'd know who they are. And one made a comment about Charlie Kirk being a

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Christian martyr, and the other said, I'm not comfortable with that, and here's why.

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And both sides made good arguments, and then agreed this wasn't the time to have the conversation, which means they're both mature and recognized what, unfortunately, the vast majority of people in social media refuse to recognize and refuse to honor.

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We are barely a week past the event of Charlie Kirk's death, and what has happened since then has, unfortunately, revealed a lot of the heart of at least evangelical

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Christianity that has a voice and speaks out. I am well aware of the fact that a large portion of the church in general—believing church, unbelieving church, apostate church—there's lots of ways of looking at that today—are not big

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Twitter users or Facebook users or Instagram. I mean, I don't even have Instagram or TikTok and stuff like that, so I'm not really central there.

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I do spend a fair amount of time on X, and I have to be on Facebook once in a while, though I don't want to be.

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Anyway, I realize that the loudest voices in social influencing, social influencers—there's a new phrase that no one knew what that meant only a few years ago—I realize that a lot of people just aren't that influenced by social influencers, but there are others that are, obviously.

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And we learned a lot. We've learned a lot about people who call themselves

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Christians. We've learned a lot about the younger generation and how it's responding to this, both positively and negatively.

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And we've learned a lot about the nature of the left. There is, first of all, events that day, you know, people are jumping to conclusions, and all the stuff you shouldn't be doing immediately, you know, does take place.

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I get all that. And, you know, pretty quickly, people were identifying

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Frank Turek as someone who was signaling a shooter, you know, all this kind of silly stuff.

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And, by the way, pray for Frank. I mean, just briefly in passing,

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Frank and I don't get along very well. We did when I met him the one time that we met, but since then he's ignored everything

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I've ever tried to say in engaging him. But those who do know him, he's going through a lot now.

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And since he was there, he was in the vehicle, he was all the, you know, being very, very close to that situation.

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What you need to realize is he's probably in shock right now. Shock doesn't just last for a few hours.

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Stuff like this will last for a couple weeks. And then the grieving process, that's when he'll really need his friends.

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And that's when we in the West stink, okay? We don't realize that the hardest work of grieving is many months down the road.

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You know, you take two weeks off work, you get over it, you move on. No, it's not how human beings work. And so, you know, three, four, five months down the road, if you're friends with Frank Turek, that's the time to be asking him out to dinner and seeing how he's doing.

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You don't have to be real obvious about it. Just, you know, be available. And, you know, for all the people who were close to Charlie, the same thing.

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That's the time to be especially diligent. That's the time when most people tend to go away and start forgetting about things, is when the grieving process becomes the deepest.

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So, just a word in passing there. Anyway, obviously, the way that the press has handled this, you know, people on the right who knew him, you know, devastated, very emotional.

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What we've seen on the left should make

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Calvinists of you all. It really should. If you don't believe in total depravity after what we've seen,

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I don't know what would convince you. I mean, people calling for the death of his wife, the death of his children.

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One wanted Erika to be killed so the children could be raised to learn to hate their parents.

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And the mockery, the songs, you just, you really have to realize what this reveals about the heart of leftism, what this reveals about what that movement is really all about, its spiritual roots.

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It's just demonic. In fact, I did mention on social media that the term that I've been seeing is soulless, soulless.

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And that's a good term. That is a very good term. These people have no souls.

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They've been burned out by their constant rebellion and constant rejection of God's truth, suppression of God's truth.

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And that's the only explanation for the behavior that you see from these people.

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I can't tell you some of the memes I've seen. They are just beyond imagination vile, beyond imagination inhuman, especially involving the kids.

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Oh my goodness. I mean, they're the kind of things that if I was standing there and I knew that the person who had created this was standing in front of me,

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I don't know that I could keep from assaulting them. And with righteous indignation,

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I mean, wow. Demons are alive and well on the internet.

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Demons know how to use a modem, that's for sure. And so we've learned a lot from that.

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You know, I never met Charlie Kirk. Even though he was in Phoenix, I could have probably a dozen times.

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I kept my distance from TPUSA. And I did that because at first there were connections to people and groups that—look,

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I've told the story before. I was the public media spokesperson for Operation Rescue in 1989 when we shut down an abortion clinic in Phoenix of our

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Tiller the Killer, our version of him. He eventually was arrested and stuck in prison for sexually abusing his patients.

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But I think he died in prison, as I recall. There's a demonized man.

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I mean, it was just obvious. I mean, the demons could hardly keep from cackling within him. So in love with death and killing and everything else.

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But I would go on radio programs. I'd debate people, answering reporters' questions during the shutdown of—it was

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Brian Finkel's abortion clinic. But shortly thereafter, in 89, shortly thereafter, my book,

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The Fatal Flaw, came out, which is on the subject of Roman Catholicism. And I was basically asked to leave the organization.

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Because you can't talk about the gospel in the pro -life movement. That's considered divisive.

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You know, leave that for someplace else. And I just couldn't put myself in a position of being somewhere where I couldn't speak the gospel truthfully and openly and plainly.

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So I get how this works. And so I was just sort of like, no, y 'all do your thing.

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I'll do mine. And I even met John Cooper at a TPUSA thing.

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But I just met him outside the hotel. And we talked for an hour or so, sitting in the truck.

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But I didn't go in. I had just been contacted by someone from TPUSA about doing some stuff on Islam for them.

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And I don't know if that'll still happen. I don't know. So we had never met. And it wasn't because I disrespected the man or anything like that.

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It was just simply, it seems, wisdom to not complicate things and have to answer for stuff you don't want to have to answer for.

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And so, obviously, I didn't sit around for hours watching

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Charlie Kirk videos. But you couldn't not see them. I mean, they would show up on my feed all the time.

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And most of the time on college campuses and stuff like that, you know, just incredibly sharp, fast command of facts.

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Did I agree with everything that he said? Every emphasis that was his? No, I didn't. But his ability to engage young people, motivate young people, organize young people, was truly amazing.

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And the boldness of his Christian faith was very, very, very refreshing.

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No two ways about it. So once the event took place, you know, the first, the first thing

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I thought of, I mean, the first report I heard said that he was answering a question about transgender mass shootings when he was shot.

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And you're like, you know, you jump to conclusions, you're like,

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Oh, I bet you I know what happened there. And, you know, this type of thing. And so we all went through all the various conspiracy theories that immediately started popping out and, and all that kind of stuff.

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Then, you know, Erica put out her video, you start getting the commentaries from people.

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The very same day as his murder, there were people who obviously had decided they needed to make a play for some of Charlie's many supporters to start supporting them and following them.

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And I made a comment about it. I said, I really wish to people who are standing up on a stump, standing on a, you know, a kitchen ladder, banging a drum and saying, look at me, look at me, look at me.

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Could you folks just sit down and shut up for a while. We also learned that the idea of sitting down and shutting up after an event like this does not exist in social media.

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There used to be a time of mourning. It used to be a time where, you know, let's all just chill out, sit back.

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We don't have to say a bunch of stuff about this. We don't have to make a bunch of commitments. We'd have to start a movement.

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We need to understand what happened, seek for justice if it's possible to do.

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And then we can have a lot of the conversations later on. That's not there.

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A bunch of people, sadly, many of the Christless Christian nationalists jumped on this.

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They're trying to grab Charlie's audience and start sniping them off and getting clicking on my stuff and all that kind of stuff.

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And it was just like vultures. It's like, whoa, this is gross. And, you know, you all can figure out in your own experience who

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I was talking about. And so that stuff started happening.

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And then this guy's name comes up. And I don't know about you.

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I'm really troubled by a bunch of stuff about the suspect.

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And I guess this morning, text messages were released.

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And people are saying, oh, that's not how Gen Z talks. And this is incomplete sentences. There's punctuation.

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And it's like, well, no, there are people in Gen Z who can still use

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English language. And from what we've been told, anyway, and who's to know?

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How many times have you seen screenshots of text messages, and they're completely fake?

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You didn't even have to use AI. Doesn't take a whole lot of graphical and electronic skill to make up a text message or something like that.

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But allegedly, you know, this stuff starts coming out. And this young man is, well, he's raised in Mormonism, which isn't unusual in Utah.

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And, okay, raised in Mormonism. So people are going to say he's

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MAGA, and all the rest is, that doesn't follow at all. He's got a

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Mormon family, probably raised in the Ward Chapel. How active were they?

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I don't know. So far, there's very little information.

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You know, interviewing of him, answers to the real questions have to be asked. I'm sorry, maybe it's just change from a regime to an administration, possibly.

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But with the school shooter, the transgender school shooter, what was that?

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Three years ago, three and a half years ago? It took forever to get that, quote unquote, manifesto.

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It took forever to get information out of the authorities.

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How is it so different this time? I mean, it wasn't, how many hours was it before you first saw that there were things etched onto the shell casings in the gun that the suspect allegedly had?

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I mean, do you have any idea why the guy in Las Vegas did what he did a few years ago?

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There's anybody else, and we're never gonna be told. You can make all the inquiries you want, you're not gonna be told.

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But in this one, all of a sudden, you've got private, you have, you literally have private text messages between this guy and his gay lover who's transitioning, being publicly released in less than a week after all this took place.

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I don't know, man. I'd like to think that it's cut and dried, and we can literally start talking about the penalty phase, and if there's any possibility whatsoever that this guy could get the death penalty, which

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I, sadly, I don't really think there is. But it just seems too easy.

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I don't know, something makes me go, this is weird.

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I know that allegedly he's confessed, and all the rest of this stuff.

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You see what's going on with Mangione? That child? How long is it before the left starts making a hero out of this guy?

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I don't know. I can't say, it's frustrating.

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But it just does strike me as, how convenient, you know that phrase?

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That this guy revealed the things about himself that he did, and I just,

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I don't know what to believe about that kind of stuff. And it's obvious to me that a lot of folks, they want to believe what they hear, and so they just throw caution to the wind, and it's like, oh yeah, well, you know, if he had a gay lover, then, you know, that means this, that means that.

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They don't have evidence of that, but they'll run with it, and a lot of people are doing that. There's not much we can do about it.

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So come Saturday, come

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Saturday, the conference is winding down in Nashville, and I start seeing people saying online that if your pastor doesn't,

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I don't remember what the first one said. Some of them may have said if he doesn't mention or pray for.

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Okay. But a lot of them are just like, if your pastor does not preach on this topic, then he isn't, ain't much of a pastor, first of all, and secondly, you should get a new church.

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And so I think it was Sunday morning. Yeah. I think it was

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Sunday morning that you start seeing people doubling down on this stuff, and I made some comments.

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I'm like, look, please don't do this. This is setting new heights of absurdity.

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I can't believe that Charlie Kirk would do that. I don't see how you're honoring Charlie Kirk by doing stuff that he would find silly.

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But it got to such a cacophony that I probably did one or two tweets, just one or two, where I challenged this stuff, and I challenged the people saying it.

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And I'm going to most definitely, I heard from all sorts of folks about, how dare you do this?

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How dare you do that? You can't say that kind of thing. And I literally was sitting back going, look, we're not going to be able to have a mature conversation about any of this yet.

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But the conversation's going on, and the problem is people are coming to conclusions. And I know,

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I'm well aware of the fact that when people who are grieving come to conclusions on key issues, the chances of their ever saying anything else, of their ever accepting any other viewpoint than the one that they came to, almost nil.

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It's almost nil. So that means you can have, and I warned about this in my grieving book.

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I said, be careful when you're in the process of grieving, making big decisions when you're emotionally compromised.

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You know, that can lead to disruptions of friendships that have been there for years and years and years. And it's true.

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It's just true. That's how this type of stuff happens. And so I'm trying to warn about this kind of stuff.

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And then these people are coming along, like I said, and if your pastor doesn't mention

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Charlie, doesn't pray for Charlie, or doesn't preach on the same topic, you need to mention

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Charlie's murder, and you need to preach about it. And if you don't, you're a terrible, horrible, nasty man.

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And it's Sunday morning, and I'm like, at least at home,

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I would have the mornings to process this stuff, because our services aren't until the afternoon. It was just so childish.

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It was just so, I think the vast majority of the people who are promoting it,

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I mean, they might be Russian and Chinese bots for all I know, but it seems like the vast majority of people promoting it were not pastors, and had no idea the amount of time that it takes to prepare a sermon.

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If you're doing a sermon series that's going to match up with certain chronological things, throwing that off messes everything up.

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But everybody all of a sudden decided that they knew what to tell their pastor. They knew directly,

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I need to ask him about the

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Charlie Kirk stuff. And if he doesn't, and this is the thing that got me, this is what, and if he doesn't, you need to find a new church.

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And the fact that pastors were doing this, that's what blew me away. That's what I would expect that pastors would know better than to do something like this.

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You can't know what's going on in a church on any given Sunday. You don't know what's happening, what's going on.

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How in the world can you literally tell people, I'm going to use my social influence, and I'm going to tell people that if they don't hear what

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I tell them they should be hearing from the pulpit this Sunday, that they need to leave that church.

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There are a lot of churches that, you know, are right on the margin, and you do something like that, you can put church out of business.

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So the few members left have no place to go. Have you thought about that? I don't think most of the people who made these comments have ever thought about anything.

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I don't think most of them are pastors, but the some that were, I was just like, you would literally tell people to leave a church over an issue like this, whether you would mention a political, religious leader, more of a political leader who's very religious, okay?

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You would tell people to leave the church they've been a part of for 5, 10, 15 years, where their friendships are, they're co -laboring in doing, you know, kingdom ministry work.

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I don't know. You're saying to them, get out. You're saying to them, you're saying to those churches, die, because you're saying your church, your church's ministries, those things that maybe you are involved with, are second, they're second -class topics in comparison to promoting a particular narrative about Charlie Kirk at this particular point in time.

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That's what you need to be doing. And so I pushed back. I didn't spend a bunch of time on it, but I pushed back against certain people who are just making very blatantly false statements.

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But what does this tell us when there are people who respect, who disrespect the local church so much, that you can literally demand that pastors change their preparation, and there's something about Charlie Kirk, change their preparation, just days before delivering a message.

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It's foolishness. It's absurd. Um, but that's the way it is.

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That's, that's how these people do, that's what they were saying. And like I said, at first it was like, oh, okay, some random people just, you know, not thinking.

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And then I started seeing it being repeated by people with a following, maybe people

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I've even respected in the past. And I'm just like, what is going on here?

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So it was, it was troubling.

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It was disappointing. It said so much about where people are in their view of the church, their view of elders and deacons in the church.

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And of course, some people tried to run with it and, oh, you're saying it was wrong to honor Charlie. No, I said no such thing.

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If your pastor and your elders made the decision to address the

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Charlie Kirk situation, whether it was special prayer time, the whole sermon was directed to,

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I don't know, get new heart cry missionary people getting in to be trained so they can be sent out in the mission field, whatever.

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Um, fine. Wonderful. But the issue is why did you do it?

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If, if you had a special prayer time for Charlie, great. If you did the whole sermon, great.

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If you covered grief and loss and death and evil, great.

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If that's what you chose to do, my question is why did you choose to do it? Because there are

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Christians martyred every day. Leaving aside the meaningful argument that could be have, whether this is an assassination, whether it's persecution, whether it's martyrdom, is it a mixture?

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How do you draw the lines? Unfortunately, when people are at 99 % emotion and 1 % rational thought, that's not really the time to be having the conversation.

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We might, we might six months down the road be able to have that conversation without all the emotions getting in the way.

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But for some people, not even that's gonna, I mean, that's gonna work. And so I don't have any problem if didn't, if, if the, if the elders came together and said, well, what, you know, what do we need to do here?

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Well, let's go ahead and address the situation. That is completely up to your church. That's completely up to you people.

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I didn't say a word against any of that. What I did was what

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I did say, and what I continue to believe is if you literally went on the internet and told people that if your pastor doesn't spend this amount of time on Charlie Kirk, then you need to leave that church.

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And that's where I'm like, do you not realize every idle word will be judged according to Lord Jesus, every idle word and doing the, the witch is dead or something like that at the end of a song, that's like a change.

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That's like a change in judgment. Like I say, well, we didn't really mean it. No, you were telling people to leave churches.

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You were telling people to destroy ministries. You were telling people to destroy friendships and all over what your emotionalism, the fact that you are absolutely pegged in the emotional scale and you want as many people with you out there doing your thing as you can get.

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And so you, you want people to know just how hurt you are. And you know, this is how, this is what people do when they're in the grieving process and they don't know how to get past a certain stage and they want to bring everybody else in on it as well.

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Anyway, so I, I pushed back. I tried,

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I tried to stop people. You need, you need to think about what you're doing here. And even the pastors that were doing it just doubled down.

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They did, they just doubled down. And I'm like, look, if you're going to force this on a local church, then you need to, you need to ask the question, what have we been doing before this point in time to prepare our people for this point in time?

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Well, how could you see it coming? Well, you can't, you can't see who's going to, who's going to die the next day.

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It's beyond our capacity, beyond our abilities, but we should be preparing them each and every

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Sunday by exposing them to what? The full counsel of God. It should be our, our, our goal to do as John, or John, Paul said,

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I'm, I am guiltless of the the entire counsel of God.

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And if you're going to do that, and if you are going to deal with the tough sections of scripture, you're going to have dealt with this.

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You're going to have dealt with death and grieving. Why do horrible things happen to young, good people?

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Well, they may be young, but there's no good, none at one. But these should have been things that were already discovered and discussed in your church.

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I was thinking about, one of the things

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I learned as a hospital chap was that, well,

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Ecclesiastes already told us, there's a time for speaking, there's a time for silence. And the toughest part was figuring out which one was which.

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You know, some families just really, really, really wanted me to talk a lot about salvation and things like that.

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Others just wanted me to be quiet, just to be there if I was needed. People grieve differently.

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And one of the things that became very clear very early on in my time in the hospital, because I had to do this lost support group on Sunday afternoons, it was very, very hard to do.

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Aside from the fact that, you know, two o 'clock on a Sunday afternoon, every Baptist is supposed to fall asleep.

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It's a genetic thing. And it was especially hard because I was not dealing with a

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Christian context. So a lot of these people would be non -Christians. And so, they're already running into some of the dangers of the grieving process.

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Because if you don't have hope for the future, especially if you're a woman, you're a widow, long time husband passes away, if you don't have the ability to get out of the downward spiral and to look to the future for some type of hope and happiness, fulfillment, if not in your family and people around you, you can get caught in that downward spiral of grief.

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And it was so easy to see in the counseling that I had done that the time to lay the foundation for understanding evil and death and suffering and why would

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God do this, it's not after the death, it's before.

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That's the time to be doing it. Because once the loss has taken place, we start engaging in coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms.

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And if anybody comes along and even tries to pull off that dirty old band -aid, oh, it all comes back, and there's an explosion, and it's rough and difficult to handle.

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And so what I said online was we aren't anywhere near to the point we can even start having a meaningful conversation about the difference between a political assassination,

42:07

Christian martyrdom, because everyone's caught up in all this emotion. And you're just supposed to go with the flow, just go with what everybody else is doing, ride the wave.

42:23

Well, if I'm convinced that the wave is heading to the wrong shore, and there's no way you can get out of that riding that wave without getting completely destroyed the process, yeah,

42:38

I need to warn you against it. And that's what I've been trying to do a little bit.

42:45

I mean, initially, what I said was, let's just wait till next week.

42:52

And, you know, don't be trying to get a bunch of followers.

43:00

Don't be trying to exaggerate stuff. Don't be trying to blame this group or that group, whatever it might be.

43:06

I've seen a lot of that online, too. It's just like, oh. Don't be doing any of that kind of stuff.

43:15

Let some time pass. And I know, I know, I know, I know, this is the least popular advice

43:21

I can give anyone. Everybody's in social media, oh, yeah. What was it?

43:29

Oh, what was that? Come on, mouse, work. It shuts itself out for power reasons.

43:38

And I appreciate that, but it also can be a little bit of a problem.

43:45

Let me see. Where did I put it? Where did

43:50

I put it? I thought for sure that I had put this where I could pull it out and go, ha ha.

44:04

Yeah, Jenna Ellis. I'd only met her once at the G3 conference in Washington, 22?

44:13

Was that 2022? And that was where we had this Q &A that had gone really well.

44:19

It really had. People wanted more, and then no one ever saw it after that, because she was involved, and something happened afterwards.

44:30

Well, Jenna Ellis, let me see here if I can find it.

44:38

She said something to me about, you need to touch, what was it, touch grass in the church.

44:47

Is that the new thing? Touch grass? I don't even know where it came from. I don't know.

44:57

Let me see if this is it. Nope, it's not.

45:07

Anyway, I basically said, you know,

45:15

I'm involved in pastoral ministry. I've addressed these subjects in published articles and books, and to say that I'm not touching grass in the church is just, it's a really cheap shot.

45:32

I didn't say that, but it's really cheap shot, but it just also just isn't true. And if I recall correctly,

45:39

I was responding to Steve Deese, who had, again, made a comment somewhere along the lines of, well,

45:51

Charlie was part of the family, and he was murdered, and therefore if you don't mention him, would you not leave a church that had a member for 40 some odd years that gets killed, and there's nothing mentioned about him at the next meeting type thing.

46:09

And so, you know, there's all sorts of folks out there. They've got their agendas, and they've decided that the way to do it is to intimidate people.

46:21

And literally, there are a lot of churches that are struggling.

46:27

They're on the razor's edge. And if you just sort of snip off the excess from that, you know, whatever type of tree, just snip a little bit of that off and get them on your side.

46:45

Get a few more clicks and a few more followers. You don't realize you may be destroying that church.

46:52

When you tell people, leave a church, is there anything more difficult, defeat -inducing, discouraging than to be a pastor, to have worked hard and invested in people, and then they turn on you and do this.

47:17

And they come up to you and say, hey, you know, sorry, but, you know, we need to go someplace else.

47:29

They never tell you the real story, by the way. That's just, every elder will tell you the same thing.

47:35

What they tell you behind closed doors, and what they tell everybody else out in the church, it's always completely different things.

47:42

They never tell you the right story. But you could destroy certain churches by making that, you just need to leave, just need to get out of there.

47:53

If they don't do what we define is cool, what we say should be the way that you do things.

48:02

There's going to be a lot of responsibility. A lot of responsibility on a lot of people because every idle word will be judged.

48:11

Jesus said it. He said that every empty, idle, meaningless word is going to be judged.

48:19

And the point is, that's not what the focus is on. Most people understood that, you know, your big speeches and stuff like that might have, you know, impact on people.

48:29

So judging that, Jesus is saying all of it. And believe me, that's everything you type online, too.

48:37

I don't care what the letter number is, you will be judged by what is right there in those texts on the judgment day.

48:46

God knows what you wrote and what you didn't. So on Saturday, I'm warning against it.

48:56

On Sunday, I'm going to stop it, just stop it. And Monday, it morphs into, you know, the next, the 11th commandment in the non -denominational denominations is going to be that, the 11th commandment.

49:14

Never break it, but don't say anything against other Christians, and do as we say.

49:21

Do as we tell you to do. You need to get in line with the new movement, because there is a new movement.

49:28

How long is it going to last? I don't know. And they don't know either. They're assuming this is going to, this is going to steamroll secularism right out of America.

49:39

Well, that would be wonderful. I wish, I wish

49:44

I could believe it would have that staying power. But I know, I know something from history.

49:55

Joseph Smith had a strong second leader in Brigham Young, and so Mormonism grew.

50:04

And Judge Rutherford, Russell, you know, you've got a second generation anyways there to allow movement to grow.

50:15

Who's going to take over TPUSA? I don't know. Whoever it is, you know,

50:24

I don't ever want to be the pastor of a church that takes it over after the other guy who's been there for 40 years retires.

50:35

That's asking so much. That's horrible. And the same way, you know,

50:42

Charlie's wife clearly wants to have a leadership role, and she wants this movement to continue.

50:49

And I've been told, I mean we all saw the same numbers, that they have between 900 and 1800 chapters.

50:57

They've had like, what, 18 ,000 inquiries about how someone can start a TPUSA organization on their campus.

51:04

Okay, that's great. But what is, what's going to be the long term on all this?

51:12

What, is there, there needs to be a strong second generation leader, or it all just fizzles out.

51:20

So who's going to be? How's that going to work out? I don't know.

51:28

But then have you noticed? I hate to laugh, but it's, it's just like, now everybody's telling us that the

51:44

Kirks were going back to Roman Catholicism, or as soon as that was said, all of a sudden, oh actually,

51:52

I heard it was Orthodoxy, and I'm really, really interested in Orthodoxy. And I was like, let the man be who he was for crying out loud.

52:06

You're not, you're not going to be making up your proselytization goals, and making up the lack in getting where you needed to go, by having one guy who allegedly was, you know, well he had taken a piece of bread once, or something like that, and therefore he's

52:25

Eastern Orthodox, he's Roman Catholic. Trying to turn him into something he wasn't, is just another good example of just how icky, honestly, this whole thing has become.

52:43

How repulsive in many ways it has, it has become. The people who are trying to build a brand, the people who are trying to do that kind of thing, it's just reprehensible, and they should do it.

52:58

So, if that map of, you know, where, you know, where's

53:07

TPUSA going? Who's gonna, who's gonna take over? What's gonna happen? I don't know, and you don't know.

53:16

But the problem is, with social media, you have to talk about this stuff before anyone's ready to talk about it, before anybody is over, you know, has gotten to a point emotionally to be able to speak rationally.

53:30

So much of the stuff that's been thrown at me online, it's just pure emotionalism.

53:36

It's almost a waste of time to respond to it, because the person you wrote to probably isn't going to remember it.

53:43

They're just going to remember the emotions that they felt. And there are a lot of people that are very, very, very, very, very emotional about what happened.

53:53

You can't watch those videos with those, that precious little girl running up to Charlie and stuff, and, you know, your heartstrings are, if they're not moved by that, then you don't have a heart.

54:09

But here's the problem. God made us the ability to control our emotions, and the people at TPUSA who are making decisions about leadership, they need to control their emotions.

54:25

The Christians online need to control their emotions. If you can't control your emotions, you are the most easily manipulated person on the planet.

54:37

You will just become a follower, you'll become a part of the mob. And Charlie Kirk didn't want that.

54:46

That's not what Charlie Kirk was trying to get people to do, is just follow a mob and be emotional. One of the things

54:53

I appreciate about him is how many times he called people out on their emotionalism and said, that's your foundation, that's who you are.

55:03

And that's why you can't answer my questions, because it's all based upon emotion. It needs to be based upon fact and logic and things like that.

55:10

He had to do that. He was facing it every single day on college campuses. So if you're going to be a follower of Charlie Kirk, then you probably shouldn't be a person enslaved to your emotions, or he would have.

55:28

I mean, think of the disrespect he was shown over and over again by people in those audiences.

55:35

Why didn't he just walk away? Because he valued what could be the result of that kind of meaningful discussion.

55:42

He kept going back to logic, he kept going back to reason, he kept trying to be presenting facts, because he knew that outside of that, what can you accomplish?

55:53

You get a bunch of people all riled up about the same thing. They can all be riled up about something that's a lie.

55:59

But if they're all riled up about it, then they'll look at you as the weirdo person if you say, actually, I'm not sure that y 'all have quite got that down right.

56:10

And that's what keeps going through my mind as I listen to just the pushback and the nastiness.

56:16

And it's just all based on emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion. Well, the man died.

56:22

What do you mean? You're saying we shouldn't have emotions? No, I'm saying you should control them. Yes, you have those emotions.

56:31

But if those emotions take you over, if those emotions keep you from being able to be truthful, honest, fair, you're not really honoring

56:48

Charlie Kirk's legacy to do that. That's for certain, because how many times during those on -campus debates do you have to call people back to thinking logically, thinking rationally?

57:00

And so we should definitely pray for TPUSA, its leadership, people that were most directly impacted by what happened, that they would have guidance and a sound mind over the next number of months.

57:27

Normally, when I do grief counseling with folks, I say don't try not to make big decisions while grieving, because it can skew your perception.

57:37

And again, emotion can end up twisting what would normally be logical thinking on your part.

57:46

Now all of a sudden emotion makes it look logical, because it'll make you feel better, but it really isn't logical.

57:52

So try not to make those big decisions. They're going to have to be making big decisions with emotion presence.

57:58

They need to have people that are stable to come along beside them in those types of things.

58:08

Don't try to find another Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk's unique.

58:16

There isn't another one, you know, they didn't clone him, and nor should they. So it would be foolish to try to reproduce him, recognize that he was a gift when we had him, the

58:32

Lord has his purposes for taking away, and find someone who can organize well, do things well, maybe in other areas.

58:40

But I feel sorry for anybody who's going to be shoved out there, and you be Charlie Kirk.

58:47

That doesn't work, that's a bad thing to try to do. It really, really is.

58:52

And by the way, as I'm getting close to wrapping up here, have you been tracking with the theology of what people are saying?

59:01

You know, you get all the people who are like, ah, you know, hate that Calvinism stuff, this is just a terrible tragedy, but then three tweets later, you know,

59:16

God could do something great with this. There's a movement starting here, and it's like, ask yourself a simple question.

59:27

This is important, I wish I had more time. I've tried to cover way too much today,

59:33

I've been all over the map, and I get it. And I knew I would be, because there's just stuff flowing into your mind as you're thinking.

59:41

When did God know that Charlie Kirk was going to die? This is basic theology 101, but let's be honest, a lot of people are uncomfortable even thinking about that particular question.

59:59

What do you mean? Well, does God have a sovereign decree?

01:00:05

Let's put it this way, a lot of churches had visitors on Sunday that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

01:00:14

No one's going to complain about that, but lots of churches had visitors back in September of 2001 too, and that lasted for a few weeks, a few months at the most, and then it faded away.

01:00:29

And in all probability, that's what will happen here too. But let's say that people came to church this past Sunday because of Charlie Kirk.

01:00:40

They hear the gospel and they get saved. What if Charlie Kirk hadn't died?

01:00:51

Let's say they get saved and they die in a car wreck a week later. See what

01:00:58

I'm saying? If it was God's intention to save those people, and unless you just got the

01:01:06

God has no idea what the future is, open theism, he's doing the best he can, maybe process theology, all that kind of weird wacky stuff.

01:01:13

But when you think about it, if you praise

01:01:18

God that Charlie's death has resulted in people professing the name of Christ, what does that mean?

01:01:26

What's the theology behind that? And did

01:01:35

God know that Charlie was going to die that day? And if he did, did he have a purpose for the way in which he died?

01:01:42

Could he have stopped the shooter? These are all theological questions that people generally don't want to talk about and think about.

01:01:52

But I'm hearing, it's been said many, many times, pray like a

01:01:59

Calvinist and evangelize like an Arminian. I'm seeing a lot of people showing that they are schizophrenic.

01:02:07

They don't want to believe that it was God's will. They don't want to believe that the date of Charlie's death was written down for him in God's book of life long, long ago.

01:02:24

But at the same time, they want to go, and God's using this to do this, this, and this.

01:02:30

Maybe they mean that in the worst possible sense of God's just running around doing the best he can with a mess of stuff in the process.

01:02:38

But a lot of theological schizophrenia being expressed in social media.

01:02:46

So let me just summarize a few things. We pray for the Kirk family. We pray for those children.

01:02:53

And what ghouls, what ghouls? I've seen all these articles about how this sports star and that sports star has paid for all the

01:03:08

Kirk children, education, and all the rest of stuff. It's the same story with names changed.

01:03:14

It's all fake. It's all fake. I mean, are there really people so shallow and vacuous that they would invest their lives like that?

01:03:29

That they would spend time to be producing stuff like that? What kind of a life is that?

01:03:36

I don't know. But to all of those, and I could have named lots of names, but to all of those who have decided to double down and say, if your pastor didn't talk about Charlie Kirk, so this

01:03:57

Sunday you need to get to another church, need to understand something. That's not the last demand these people will make.

01:04:04

There'll be other things that will come along the line, and they'll say the same thing. They'll demand the same things.

01:04:13

And that's why I say we've got to mark these people. I tried for some to say, look, that's shameful.

01:04:21

Stop. Double down. I'd like to think that six months from now, when some of the emotional rawness has worn off, that some people are going to go, we sort of went overboard there.

01:04:37

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, type of thing. Maybe. But I think most folks are just going to hope it just all goes away, and they'll come back at you the next time and say, if they don't do this, then you need to leave that church.

01:04:54

If they don't do this, you need to leave that church. Telling people to leave a church is a weighty thing.

01:05:00

There are reasons to do so. You know, I look at the mainstream denominations that are ordaining women and doing gay marriages and denying the inspiration of scripture and penal substitutionary atonement and the very resurrection itself.

01:05:19

I will tell you, get out of those churches without any problem at all. But when you're talking about gospel preaching churches that simply don't do what your political theory demands, wow, you're going to have to answer for that.

01:05:36

You're going to have to answer that. I'm going to have to answer. Anytime I've said, leave a church like that, I'm going to have to answer for that.

01:05:43

Okay, then you need to have the right basis. And it was truly disappointing to see many, many people falling into that trap this past weekend.

01:05:52

And then even when they're challenged, they double down. They double down. That was astonishing.

01:06:00

I don't know what Friday is going to look like as to maybe doing another program, maybe a little more better organized one.

01:06:10

But we'll try. Because once I start home next week, they are long legs.

01:06:19

It's at least 2 ,500 miles home. And I was on the road.

01:06:28

I was in the saddle for eight hours yesterday. That's way longer than I'm comfortable with and way longer than it's safe for me to do.

01:06:36

And so the trip back may be a little bit difficult and challenging. And you might even have people knocking on your door as you're closing up the program.

01:06:46

But anyways, I appreciate you. We will let you know when we can hopefully do another program next time.

01:06:54

Just watch the app and we'll go from there. So all right, I think the music's coming up.