Gutting the Scripture of Its Power | Theocast

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Many Christians today feel absolutely drained and powerless. They have tried every solution under the sun to overcome their sin, to grow in Christ, to be mature, to be sanctified, and they feel defeated.

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And they even often even question, am I even God's? Do I belong to him?

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It seems as if the power for Christianity is gone. How did that happen? It's exactly what

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Justin and I wanna talk about today. What happened? And how did the power of the gospel get gutted from the

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Bible? Stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, you may not have heard of this word. It's called pietism.

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You ever felt like the Christian life is a heavy burden versus rest and joy? That you wake up worrying about how well you're gonna perform instead of thinking about what

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Christ has done for you? It's dread versus joy, really. That's pietism. Pietism causes

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Christians to look in on themselves and find their hope, not in what Christ has done, but what they're doing.

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And we have a little book for you. It's free. We want you to download it. And we're gonna explain the difference between pietism and what we call confessionalism.

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Reform theology, really. How it is that we walk by faith, seeing the joy of Christ, and when

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Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest, what does that look like? You can download it on our website.

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Just go to theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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We have conversations here at Theocast about the Christian life from a confessional, Reformed, and pastoral perspective.

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Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And I am

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. John, we've met to podcast today, and we've been catching up personally a little bit.

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It's been a couple of weeks since we've been together to record. So we're catching up on life and pastoral ministry and various kinds of things.

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I've enjoyed that time so far, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today. I don't know, we didn't talk about announcements beforehand.

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I'm just gonna shoot from the hip here, guys. I'll do this quickly, a little bit of housekeeping. We do have our

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Theocast conference next April. We are still planning to have that conference here in Asheville, North Carolina.

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That will be April 11 and 12 of 2025. Registration is live.

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Limited spaces are available. Our friends Chad Byrd and Ken Jones are gonna be joining us.

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So that'll be John and myself, Chad and Ken, giving messages on the law and the gospel.

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We trust that'll be a good time, and there will be singing and a lot of time built in to hang and get to know people who are like you.

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And who are also, like all of us, learning more and more of the gospel of God's grace and the sufficiency of Jesus for us.

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There's also the Theocast community. We would encourage you to head over there. It's a wonderful platform.

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It's like social media without all the nonsense and without all the ads and the distractions. You can interact with people, again, who are thinking through the same things that you are.

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You can find out all the information that you need about that at our website, theocast .org. All right, John.

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I've done that part. Hopefully I did that well enough. And you can take it away, my man, and let everybody know what we're gonna talk about today.

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Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It's good. It's been a couple weeks since we've recorded, so it always feels like, you know, we gotta spend some time to get back up on the horse.

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And at times, you and I almost would rather just keep talking than record. But we're gonna record, because we wanna do it for you guys, and I enjoy recording.

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But no, today is kind of, it's birthed out of some thoughts I've been having.

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Just read The Whole Christ Again in a class I was teaching. Great book, by the way.

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That's right, yeah. Finished doing a small series, preaching through portions of Corinthians. Just started 2

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Peter. So having, like, Oras Salutas, the pietism, thinking about the spiritual warfare, the fight, all of that, it's kind of been in my mind.

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And, you know, we have, you know, thinking just through a lot of what's going on in the election, and just a lot of the evil that is in our world.

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There's just like, there seems like a lot going on, right? And as a pastor, Justin, you know that when you stand up in the pulpit at times, you can feel your flesh, and thinking,

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I can't do this. Like, how in the world am I to help these people? There's too many burdens.

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There's too much sin. There's too much, like, there's too many problems. And you can feel that.

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And what I love about our confession, and what I love about our Reformed faith, and the tradition that we stand in, is it is built upon, and it is a reclaiming, and a reforming away from humanistic wisdom and power, and it pushes us towards Christ alone, and His power.

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And I don't think we realize how much the

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American history and revivalism, and even I would just say the rationalistic movement and liberalism has influenced even portions of the

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Reformed tradition in modern contexts, where we've made a hybridation of revivalism and rationalism, and kind of connected it to Calvinism.

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You and I have used this phrase for years, the event, you know, Calvin -gelicalism.

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It's kind of this mixture of the two. And when this happens, you are left with going towards the flesh, going towards fleshly means.

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So the moment you remove the supernatural nature and the powerful work of the

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Spirit through the Word and through His church, you are left with, I'm gonna have to solve this by my own means.

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And it can come across that it works, and that it's actually wise, and it's powerful.

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This is why Paul even acknowledges it to us, saying, hey, just so you know, they have an appearance of wisdom and righteousness, but they're of no value stopping the indulgence of this flesh.

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This is the second chapter, end of chapter two of Colossians. So I wanted to do a little bit of a, and you and I didn't really script this out, so this is just gonna be a fun conversation, just kind of like shooting it from the hip here.

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There's this quote from Michael Horton about Charles Finney. If you don't know, if you're not familiar with Charles Finney, he's kind of famous for the new measures and really gutting,

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I love this title, gutting the Bible of its power and really using winsome logic and human fleshly wisdom to bring converts and control them, right?

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So this is a quote, no single man is more responsible for the distortion of Christian truth in our age than Charles Finney.

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His new measures created a framework for modern decision theology and evangelical revivalism.

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In this excellent article, Dr. Michael Horton, it was just a description of who Horton is, sorry,

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Finney, love Horton, not Finney. But it is true.

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One is not like the other. That's right. There are times in history where men and movements have influenced us theologically without us even realizing it.

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And I think that one, revivalism and the second great awakening, a lot of this, the, I would say, fleshly measures to build the kingdom of God in their perspective has damaged a lot of what people feel.

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We kind of summarize it calling it pietism. I also think that the humanistic and rationalistic view of scripture, where this is where the fundamentals of the faith, the fundamentalism in its original sense was a good thing.

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We were fighting for the fundamentals of the faith. We're putting Jesus back on his throne of power.

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He was born of a virgin. He did walk on the water. He did heal people. Thankfully, that part of reclaiming and fundamentalism is good, but there is an essence now where we don't preach

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Christ as the word. The word became flesh, which is Jesus. Therefore, we preach all of Christ, and in doing so, all of Christ for all of life, and believing and trusting it's sufficient for the supernatural, not only salvation of sinners, but the transformation.

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That's where, Justin, sanctification has lost its supernatural nature. We no longer believe in a spiritual warfare, and we not only fight back, but grow by means of Christ and his means of the word.

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So that's what we wanted to talk about today, kind of the history of where this came from, and really reclaiming and putting back in the real hope of our faith, which is the gospel is the power of God.

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I'll start with a few observations on some of the, you brought up so much there. I mean, you basically framed the whole conversation.

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Yeah, I just wanted to give us an intro. Yeah, frame it, baby. I mean, you launched us out, for sure, and we'll do the best we can with it. The movement known as revivalism, it starts even before the second

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Great Awakening. That's right. There's a lot of methodology and different things that you and I might even have concerns with as it pertains to the first Great Awakening, as it's known, because revivalism as a methodology is concerning to us as churchmen, because what it effectively does and what it effectively represents is the subjectivizing of religion to an extent that is unhelpful and it is not good, and does,

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I think, take the human being's eyes off of Christ and puts our eyes on ourselves somehow.

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Like, revivalism at its core, right, it's about this conversion experience, and really what matters is my own fervor, intensity.

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Something within me is the thing. And then it's about revivalism in its system and in its methodology.

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It's about the moral transformation of life after conversion, and it's very related, as some of our listeners who have heard us talk about these things for years, it's very much related to a movement known as pietism that is also doing a similar thing in terms of taking our eyes and our focus and our gaze off of Christ alone and turning us inward on ourselves, and we become overly introspective or introspective in a way that's not actually beneficial because now my focus in the

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Christian life is on my performance and my sincerity and things of that nature.

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My disciplines, you know, you fill in the blank, you get it. So both of those, pietism and revivalism, present this subjectivizing of religion that actually, from our vantage point, not only is,

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I mean, if you wanna talk about conversion and how revivalism sometimes tries to reverse engineer the new birth, that's obviously problematic, but then, like you said, when it comes to sanctification in the

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Christian life, revivalism and pietism both actually cut the

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Christian off from the source of power for them, which is their union with Jesus, and the question then is asked, right, well, how is a

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Christian sanctified? The law and some of the things that we would say rightly from Scripture in the forms of imperatives will guide us in our sanctification, but the power unto sanctification can only come through the real presence of Jesus Christ as he is preached from his word and as we even feed at his table, and so when we lose sight of that, we're really stunting the sanctification of us all and of the saints, and I mean, we're talking as pastors here, so if we are not thinking rightly about the fact that Jesus is really spiritually present to minister to his people as he is preached from his word, then we're not doing anybody any favors, right?

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It's like, you wanna see holy people, you wanna see sanctified people in the church preach

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Christ, man, because he is the power unto transformation, because you and I are all about transformation.

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We get shot at, you know, people in our streams, and I mean, even Theocast in particular, it's like, yeah, you guys just don't care about anybody.

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Everybody lives, and all you wanna talk about is grace, and people can just do whatever they want, and it's inconsequential, and you don't care about transformation.

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You don't care if people change. Twitch would say that is nonsense. We're all for transformation.

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The issue is - I literally heard this again recently. Oh, I know. I mean, I'm not making it up, because people say this all the time.

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It's like, we're all about transformation. We're all about change, but what we do care about is how does real change happen, and it is not through the efforts, like you said, you know, fleshly means and measures.

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It is not through our willpower. It's not through white -knuckling religion. It's not through our own discipline that we somehow produce and work up what it takes to be sanctified.

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We participate in our sanctification by virtue of the fact that we are alive.

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We seek to live intentional, mindful lives. We try to pay attention to what we should.

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I mean, all that's true, and God is the one who sanctifies, and he does it through his power and the means that he's given us, starting with the preaching of Jesus Christ and his real presence to minister to us as he's held out in the word.

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So yeah, like one of the problems, I mean, we could go this direction if you want to, is that whenever you turn the scriptures, you know, into mainly, you know, some kind of Christianized version of Aesop's fables, you know, where we're always going to the

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Bible to learn how to live right, or, you know, get the wisdom or get the insight, get the principle that's gonna help me to get to the next spiritual plane.

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If that's how we're looking at the scriptures, then we're gonna miss Jesus for us, which we're saying is the power.

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So if we're not heralding Christ from all of scripture, we're not preaching the power of God from the scripture, right?

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And often what happens is with the best of intentions, sermons become eloquent moral discourses on Christian living.

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And that, not that you can't talk, not that you can't talk about Christian living, not that you can't talk about implications of the gospel, not that you can't talk about how we live horizontally with our neighbor and things that are good for us to pursue and give our time to, of course you can talk about these things.

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But when the thrust of the sermons becomes moral living and godly living and not who

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God is, his posture toward us, who Christ is, what he's done for us and our union with him, then yeah, we're robbing the saints of the power of God onto their transformation.

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I mean, full disclosure, Justin, nothing more than I want for our church is two things.

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I want them to feel safe and loved and I want them to share that love with everyone because it not only is it wonderful to feel loved and to rest, but it is,

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Jesus says it this way, it's joyful to give love as well.

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And a healthy Christian who is underneath the growing spiritual power in his life of rest and love, will, this is like, hello, this is the new covenant.

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I will cause you to walk in my ways. We believe that, right? So this is why we wanted to have this conversation because we agree with everyone that there is nominalism, there seems like there's

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Christians who are trapped in their sins, they're wandering off. It's just been interesting to even watch

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Christians during this political climate where you hear them singing, you see them saying and doing weird things and you look at that and you're like, wow, we really are going towards the flesh on this, man.

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We are really trying to use fleshly measures and this is not a political podcast, has nothing to do with voting, nothing at all.

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I was just observing that because we don't believe in our king, his kingdom and his power, we can go towards physical and fleshly power sources and find ourselves adjusting and living and embracing and often teaching that.

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I'm obviously, you're gonna be thinking about what you're preaching, because you're in John, right?

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Yep. Yeah, and what chapter are you in? I just finished chapter three this past Sunday and I'm preaching chapter four this coming.

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Yes, it's super sweet. That's why you're thinking about the woman at the well, because you got that coming up. Exactly. So, by the way.

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Stay tuned for next week's podcast, because we're gonna talk a little bit, not about the woman at the well directly, but about God and how we think about him and what he's like.

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If you wanna hear that sermon series, go to theocastcommunity .org and listen to it. All right, listen to this.

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So Peter, this is his letter before he dies. Such a powerful letter.

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I mean, it's amazing. I told this story on Sunday. I'll go ahead and tell it now. When my dad died three days before my 21st birthday, and I remember walking to his bedroom to check on him right before I left.

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I was leaving somewhere and obviously, I didn't know he was about to die. I just knew he was really, really sick. And so he said, hey, come here.

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He could barely talk. And so I kneeled down and I get really close to him. And he just says this one little phrase to me right before I leave the house.

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And he says, John, be teachable. Well, that literally was the last conversation I had with my dad.

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That was his dying phrase to me. And so that has just lived in my heart and my mind for years of I love my dad.

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And if that's the last thing he wanted me to know, then I probably should really pay attention. Because I know where that came from.

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He was a godly pastor, a godly man who loved Jesus and loved me. And the wisdom he wanted to leave me with is be a teachable man.

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And so Peter knows, he says in verse 14, he's about to die. Jesus told him he's about to die.

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And so he writes this little letter to the churches to encourage them and kind of correct them and remind them of what they should be focused on.

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And so he opens the letter. We're gonna talk about the first two verses tomorrow or next week, but I'm gonna jump down to verse three.

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He says this, his divine, meaning God's, his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.

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I don't think that's confusing. No, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You know, and then you say, well, how, how does his divine power come to us?

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It's not just through osmosis, like how? He says through the knowledge of Christ.

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Hey guys, real quick. Some of you are listening to this and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions. So where do you go?

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How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources? We have started something called the

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Theocast Community. We're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there.

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You can share it and ask questions. You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. A couple of things here, man.

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I was very measured in my comments before. I'm probably gonna just shoot from the hip and just speak a little more freely. Let's go. So we just getting lubed up and ready to go, baby.

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Look out, y 'all duck out there. All right, so a few things popcorn around in my brain. Like this,

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I'm just gonna state this. I'm not gonna unpack it. I think a lot of times you alluded to this. We give away the fact that we are very earthbound in our thinking by the things that we get worked up over.

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I think that's dead giveaway, you know, that we think too much in terms of a paradigm of the here and the now.

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And we don't think in these otherworldly supernatural ways. I think that's absolutely true. All right, we talked about revivalism and pietism.

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You also mentioned liberalism and humanism and some of those things and how that has affected the

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American church or the Western church or however we wanna frame that. Well, so our associate pastor here at CBC and I were looking at this essay yesterday, literally, because he had come across it, he had read it, and he was like, bro, this thing just made me mad.

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And it was effectively, it was a former evangelical pastor who has deconstructed the faith.

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And he is writing these things about still wanting to hold onto Jesus somehow, but is stating that Jesus as the way to God is wrong.

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And he basically says all kinds of blasphemous things about Jesus, but states that Jesus did not come to do anything for us.

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Like he did not come to do anything for us. He did not come from heaven to rescue us. And basically as well, that we are as, it was kind of a very panentheistic perspective.

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So pantheism is - I felt dirty just listening to this. So pantheism is God is in everything. Panentheism is everything is in God, right?

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It's this kind of overblown, like in him, we live and move and have our being perspective. And so this guy is arguing that Jesus was no more one with God than we are.

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I mean, it's just insane. But the thing that's interesting is when he really kept reiterating that Jesus did not come to do anything for man's salvation.

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And I was like, this is the antithesis of confessional reform theology. Because our whole message, and what

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I'm getting at is if we don't preach Christ, who he is and what he did, then what in the world are we doing?

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Because our entire message, the entire gospel is wrapped up in who

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Jesus of Nazareth is and what he came to do for us that is not grounded in anything in us.

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It's not grounded in anything subjective about us. It's about him only and what he did.

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And then all we do is come to him with an open hand and receive it. I mean, we come to him like a beleaguered soldier or a weary pilgrim, and we see the one, the only one who can save us and the one that we know loves us and we fall into his arms.

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That's all we do. But it's all grounded in him and what he did. And if that's not the emphasis of our preaching, or if that's, we'll get into this more next week.

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If every time we're going to the scriptures, even individually, thinking about them, reading them, praying over them, whatever, if that is not the lens through which we're viewing them, like I want to see

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Jesus for me and his love for me and what he did for me, if that's not what we're going with,

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I think that maybe we'll glean some things here and there, but we're missing the power.

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You know, to add on to what you're saying, JP. So that's how liberalism and humanism has destroyed this.

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Yeah. It becomes all about us. It's all about the human. And not only that, but the human physical nature side of us and not the spiritual nature.

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Oh, sure. As if, I mean, that's just pure, you know, Pelagianism is all it is. I mean, you're thinking that, anyways,

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I'm not going to get into that, but so to add on what you're saying, think of it this way. We always assume our problem is a fleshly problem.

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Therefore, this is why it's natural for us to slide into physical solutions.

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My daughter recently had someone tell her that the best form of Christianity is to be a monk.

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It's like, have we not figured out that to remove, like, okay, so I'm going to remove any clothing, any food, like I'm just going to shave my head.

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And that actually does not, one of the greatest monks of all time said, didn't work, his name was

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Martin Luther. It's like, you can't deal with, now, our confession says that there are three enemies that we face.

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Now, one of them we are okay with because the modern America is like, yeah,

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I mean, everybody's human. Everybody has a problem. So we agree that the flesh is one of our enemies.

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But then our confession through means of scripture tells us that there are two other enemies.

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The world and Satan. And that's, Justin, we, first of all, think we can play with the world like it's our friend.

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And Jesus, and first John says, no, you cannot be a friend of the world and a friend of Jesus. You will hate the one or serve the other.

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Like, it doesn't work that way. So first of all, we are being attacked by the world and it's because the world is under the control of the evil one.

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And this is why I think going back to believing in the supernatural preaching of Jesus Christ is so important.

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Paul is writing Ephesians, right? The first three chapters, ah, beautiful. Christ for you, union in Christ, right?

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Glorious. Then he gets to chapters four, five, and six, which are gonna be the application of Jesus in all three aspects, in our flesh, in the world, and in the spirit.

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So he's dealing in chapter six with the spiritual application of Christ for us in all of life.

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And so he says, finally, at the end of it, it's gonna do with the spiritual nature of it. Be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might.

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Put on the whole armor of God that you might be able to stand against the schemes of your third enemy, the devil.

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And he says, now listen, if you think this is a fleshly problem, it's not, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

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And then what is the solution that he offers? By the way, fascinating list of things that you're fighting, super terrifying, super scary, terrifies me as a pastor and as a dad.

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And I'm thinking to myself, Paul just names a list of horrible things.

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I don't ever wanna face them, but apparently I'm wrestling them. And what is Paul's solution?

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Sorry, I'm gonna get a little excited here. It is all of Christ because he goes through every part of the armor and it's

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Jesus for you. The armor of God is Christ for us. That is absolutely right.

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So this is why I get a little worked up because I get people who are, I think, are constantly being drugged down by their flesh, the world and the evil one.

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And they keep being told of fleshly measures. And we're over here saying, no, it is

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Christ being preached in all of life that will free them from all three enemies. So briefly, the armor of God, like what you're talking about in Ephesians 6, what is the emphasis of most sermons on Ephesians 6?

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It is, first of all, it's an extrapolation of every piece of armor and what it might conceivably represent that is a little bit out there sometimes.

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But then the main thing is how we go about putting on the armor. That's right.

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Our diligence and our faithfulness and our discipline and putting on the armor and putting on the armor the correct way.

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It's like, that is not the point. The point is this armor is ours. And the armor, as we've said multiple times, just don't want anybody to be confused,

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Jesus Christ for us is the armor of God. And so we put, literally, it's like Paul says elsewhere, we put on Christ and he is our protection against all of the schemes and all of the weapons of the evil one and the principalities and powers of darkness.

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And yeah, and that's missed, you know, because of how we go to the scripture with these other paradigms in our mind.

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Yeah, well, I'll throw this back out there. I put a thing out on social media recently.

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Once in a while, I'll hop on there and put my thoughts out just because I'm curious. And I did,

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I said, ask your pastor to pull out his notes from seminary on Ephesians 6.

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And people lost their mind because what I did was I connected pietism and legalism to an improper view of, listen, if you do believe in all three enemies, you can't use fleshly means because he says you're not wrestling against the flesh.

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I'm just trying to force us to actually admit how weak we are.

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Like we're so weak. Agree, agree, yes. And there are a lot of things that exist in the world in terms of the transformation of people's lives that has nothing to do with God at all, has nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever.

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So when you talk about using fleshly means or if we talk about using human strength, I mean, we could give example after example after example in various arenas of life where people really do change a lot, but it has nothing to do with Jesus because it is all about their own effort.

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It's about their discipline. It's about patterns and habits of this and that and the other and then you get into a church service and we're sitting under what is supposed to be the preaching of the power of God for us.

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And we're effectively, like you said, we're being given a motivational speech or we're being given a guilt trip as to all the things that we need to be doing in order to live an upright life.

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And we're all about the upright life thing, but don't just tell me to try harder or don't just give me measures to put in place.

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I mean, where you could just stare a non -Christian in the face and tell them to do the same thing and their lives would go better. There's nothing supernatural.

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There's no grace in that. Where the grace is found and where the supernatural is found and where the power is found is in the unique message of the

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Christian faith, which we keep saying is Jesus Christ for us. And so if we ever, man,

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I know that sometimes people may get tired of us saying this, but the reason we keep saying it is because there is all over the place a lot of really sincere, well -intentioned teaching that is really focused on the human being more than it is focused on Jesus Christ and then viewing our

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Christian life only through the lens of Jesus. And like we, our Christian life is the backdrop.

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He is in the foreground. There's just too much out there that gets that relationship inverted.

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Yeah, I just wanna point to another passage. And sometimes we just, we don't think about the implication of what

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Paul is saying. You know, I can hear the strain in his voice. He's like, for though we walk in the flesh, like we, let's admit life is lived in the flesh.

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We are not waging war according to the flesh. I mean, this is a whole nother letter to the

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Corinthians, right? He says, for though the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but of divine power to destroy strongholds.

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Well, what is the weapon? He goes, we destroy arguments of every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and taking every thought captive to obey, what?

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Christ. So this is so important when we're thinking about your life. And if you're just listening to this,

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I wanna talk to the listener, then I'll talk to the pastor for a moment. But as a listener, if you are looking at your life and you can't seem to find rest, you can't seem to find assurance, you can't seem to be like, my soul is just, there's something wrong.

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My encouragement to you is that you might be trying to do this according to the flesh.

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And I think it's very clear that you can't. You can't look at your good works. You can't look at what you have or have not done.

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Sometimes, you know, Justin, have you ever looked at the drug addict or the porn addict who says, I haven't done this in so many years? I see that as a setup for a fall.

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Don't look at how many years you've gone. Look to Christ today, not how successful you've been.

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Guess what, Justin? In 21 years, I haven't beat my wife. That's not gonna bring you rest at the end of the day.

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Like, what are we doing? So for those of you who have the turmoil of the soul, that's called a stronghold.

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That's called that Satan has gripped you. Go ahead. Well, I mean, even just, I think it's a paradigm shifting thing for people when this actually clicks in our minds.

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And I mean, you and I fight against this too, John, because a lot of this stuff is hardwired into our legal frame. And we've all grown up.

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When I say grown up, I don't mean from childhood necessarily. I just mean like we've cut our teeth and come of age in a church context where the emphases have been different.

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When you can wrap your mind and heart a little bit around this paradigm that you have been describing, where, man, stop focusing so much on your sin.

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Stop focusing. I'm not saying don't be mindful or vigilant. Please don't hear what I'm not saying. But when the focus is taken off of my sin or my failure or how long it's been since I did this, and I actually put my gaze on Christ and the love of God for me in Jesus, and I just start to live an honest, transparent life with my brothers and sisters in the church, tons of good can happen.

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Anyway. I wanna talk a little bit about 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. Yeah, go.

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Yeah, just my encouragement to you when we're thinking about, that was to the listener, to the pastor who feels hopeless in a world that feels out of control.

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We have to believe this to be true. We need to encourage each other to believe this is true, that we are fools doing a foolish work, and it's not through our foolish wisdom.

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But if we stand up and through the foolishness of preaching Christ, we can see strongholds pulled down.

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We can see people liberating themselves and we can see them grow in Christ because what other hope that you have?

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We tried the wisdom of the flesh thing and look what it's producing. I mean, the churches, unfortunately, the churches, it's a sad place right now, but if we can reclaim it through preaching of Christ, then the power can be put back in and we can see people finding rest and transformation once again.

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No, amen. And the church is always gonna be comprised of sinner saints and there's always gonna be hard things in the church, but the church can actually be an outpost, a light, an outpost to the kingdom of God, a light in a dark world, a city on a hill, because there's mercy there and there's grace.

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There's forgiveness and absolution and righteousness that God gives to us. And Christ is ours and we're his and he walks with us.

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That's where the hope is found, that emphasis. So I'll conclude my thoughts here with 1

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Corinthians 1 and 2. And I know these are familiar verses to many people, but I do think we often miss the significance related to this conversation today.

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Because the things that Paul says about preaching and about what he meant to communicate and do in terms of his apostolic ministry is pretty wild.

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Because he says, he calls the word of the cross, he calls it folly. It's foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

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That sounds like Romans 1. Come on. I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation, right?

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And by unto salvation in Romans 1, I think he means all of it. I don't think he just means justification.

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That's right, start to finish. I think he means the entirety, right? And then he goes on to say a lot of different things about how

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Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom. So Jews are like, hey, do something impressive, do something powerful.

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Greeks are like, hey, give us the Gentiles, give us the wisdom, give us the insight, give us the principles, tell us how to do this thing.

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And he says, but we don't offer either one. We preach Christ crucified. And again, he says, a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both

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Jews and Greeks, what? Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. And then he goes on to say that because of God, we are in Christ Jesus.

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And what has Christ Jesus become to us, John? He's become to us everything, literally everything. He has become to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

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So that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. And then we get into 1

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Corinthians 2, and I won't labor too much of this, but this is where Paul says that I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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And I spoke the way that I did so that you would know that your faith doesn't rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

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He keeps using this phrase. And then he starts to talk about how everything for the

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Christian is imparted by God, by the Spirit. It is spiritually discerned and given.

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This is a supernatural thing. You can't reason your way through this. You know, and anyway, wonderful stuff, man, of just how the

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Lord just does not do things the way that we think He would do things. You know, it's like Psalm 50. We know that Psalm because that's where the

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Lord says He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. But later on in that Psalm, He rebukes the people and He says, you thought that I was altogether like you.

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And what we have to acknowledge is He ain't like us. Praise the Lord, He isn't. But He doesn't work like we think

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He would work or even like we think He should work. You know, Jesus came and turned the world upside down, you know, in terms of how

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God saves and what this looks like. It's a supernatural power of God under the new birth and union with Christ.

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And it's not what we would ever plan. It's not what we would ever expect. But this is how

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God works. You know, I find a lot of comfort in Paul's, my last thought, when you close it down, but.

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And Paul says, when I am weak, then I'm strong. He's talking about fleshly spiritual dynamic, right?

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When my flesh is at its weakest moment, I realize I have to rely on the spirit for its power.

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And that's when I am my strongest. And I think that as we, you know, many people wake up every morning kind of finding, well, how do

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I find purpose for life? Because you've had so much fleshly failure. And Justin and I, every

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Monday morning, we wake up and be like, I don't know if I want to do this again. And thanks be to God.

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You know, we look to Christ, the hope beyond the grave, the hope on our body, the hope behind our flesh.

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And I think that as we continue, as Theocast continues to spread this message and you guys are doing an unbelievable job of sharing the podcast and joining the community and supporting us, a lot of, we hear from a lot of pastors, a lot of pastors from around the world who are being encouraged and strengthened by this.

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And I just want to say, I love you brothers and trust the preaching of Jesus.

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You know, if this is new for you, we've got a lot of episodes on how to preach Jesus. It really is the hope of the world.

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You know, we've put a lot of hope in a lot of things, but America will come and go. Justin and I will come and go, but what remains is

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Jesus. And that's the thing we got to remember. Justin Perdue Yeah, amen, dude. Yeah, and he uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong and the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

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And this is how he is, man. He doesn't do things like we would if it were up to us.

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And yeah, preach Jesus. And for the church members, for the Christians out there, look to Jesus always.

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And we're gonna talk about that more next week in our episode that - Justin, does it matter what you think about Jesus?

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Justin Perdue It does, it matters. Yeah, what you think when you think about God, what you think when you think about Jesus, there's nothing more important for your life.

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And we're gonna talk about that in next week's episode. So if that sounds interesting to you, stay tuned,

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I guess. It's been good. It's been good to have this conversation. John, for the listener out there, thank you for tuning in.

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And we're encouraged by you and thankful for you. And we hope this conversation has been hope -giving and put some wind in your sails, perhaps, as you think about the fact that God has saved you supernaturally.

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You didn't do this. You didn't start your faith and you weren't called upon by God to finish it.

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He's gonna do the job and you can trust him. Until next time, grace and peace. Hey, everyone, before you go,

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Justin and I first wanted to say thank you. And if this has been encouraging to you in any way, please feel free to share it.

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But we also need your support. And it's when you give that it really helps us financially reach more people.

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So the next time you consider giving to a ministry, we hope that you would pray about Theocast and partner with us as we share the gospel around the world.