Justin Peters and KJV Only Discussion | Rapp Report Weekly 0032 | Striving for Eternity

Ministry Introductions and Conference Conversation

Welcome to the Rappaport with Andrew Rappaport where we provide biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity. For more content, or to request a speaker or seminar for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right, so I'm here in.

Kootenai Community Church. This is a conference that is being hosted by them. I happen to be the speaker. I may or may not play some of the audios on future podcasts, but I'm with two dear friends, and so I want them to be able to introduce their ministries to you.

First, Justin Peters from a very narcissistic name of your ministry, justinpeters .org. You were thinking all of yourself, right?

Yeah, I tell people I stayed up all night long trying to come up with a name for my website, and I hope it was more just a lack of creativity than narcissism. I like to think that anyway. I wasn't trying to be narcissistic.

So basically creativity is not your strong gift. No, creativity is not my strong suit at all.

So describe your ministry. You travel a bunch, so what do you do?

I travel, and I preach, and teach, and I tell people I'm most known for my work in the Bible, biblically combating the Word of Faith movement, the Prosperity Gospel, but it's not my only interest. My first commitment is to expository preaching, but kind of what I'm known for.

I've been typecast, I suppose, into the Word Faith stuff, but full-time itinerant preacher.

That's why some of the times when I've had you out at some conferences I've run, I've always had to do something else.

So you're just dealing with the text of the Scripture. We're going to have one of those conferences in March.

Yeah, March. We're not going to talk about Word of Faith at all. We're going to talk about suffering, struggling with things like depression, and anxiety, and long-term disabilities. Some people suffer.

Christians actually suffer, and people don't often talk about that. Yeah, that's going to be in Jersey. You're going to come to see the beautiful side of the country, right?

No. The free side. No, you are in the free side here. Oh, here in Idaho. So I'll be actually suffering when I come to New Jersey.

Which means you got to leave your gun. Yeah, I got to leave my gun. At home, because, I mean, we can carry here in Idaho. Yes, open carry in Idaho. Yeah, even I can carry in Idaho, but I can't do that at home.

We also have Pastor Jim Osmond, and he's with Kootenai Community Church, and he's the one putting on the conference. Yes. So talk about your ministry. You're very talkative. I know. You're very talkative when there's not a mic in front of you.

Why is that?

Because I'm fearful that this might get edited in a poor way.

There's no way to edit what you say in a poor way. It's all poor.

Yeah, I'm a pastor of a small church here in North Idaho, Justin Peters. I have the distinguished pleasure of having Justin Peters as a member of the church. And it's intimidating speaking in front of the Doctor of Discernment every Sunday, never wondering if maybe on Monday morning I'm going to show up in one of his video clips or audio clips for his conference.

So that's me. I get up every Sunday morning and sweat it out, the grind, as we work our way through a book of scripture. So how long you've been pastoring here? 22 years this December. That's not bad.

You only look like you're about 30. Yeah. No, I started when I was 8.

Well, hey, that's not too bad. The first time I ever preached, I was 12. Really? Yeah. I had to preach out of the... Preach on green eggs and ham? No, I had to preach. My Bar Mitzvah passage was out of the Leviticus, and I had to preach with all of my friends from school in the congregations.

I had to preach on the burnt offerings. Wow. So that was my text. You don't get to choose what text. It's whatever text is on that week. And I had to take that as my sermon text and talk on the burnt offerings, the sin offerings, before I really understood what sin really was.

Yeah. And communicate that, take it from the Hebrew, translate it.

So I was 12 the first time I did. My first sermon, I was 22 years old, I think, or no, 18, 19. I was 19 years old, and it was in this church, actually. I came home from my first year of Bible college, and the pastor asked me if I would want to preach.

I said, yeah, I got three messages I could preach. I preached three messages on 1st John. God is life, God is light, and God is love. Those were my three messages. I preached through the entire book of 1st John in three sermons.

Yeah, you do that today, don't you? You've kind of tapped the brakes a little bit.

Justin, are you saying he doesn't go that quick through books anymore?

No, he's slowed down a little bit.

So, it was really interesting, so we got to have dinner with some different folks, and sitting around the table, everybody dates when they came to this church by not just what book Pastor Jim was in, but what chapter of what book, because he would be in the chapter so long.

So it was like, yeah, I came here in John 4, I was here in John 17. So that's how everyone dates when they came to Kootenai. Do you remember what book he was in when you came? I was in 14. You were in John 14?

Yeah.

So, you slowed down a bit. Yeah, I did. From three sermons in 1st John to today, we're working through Hebrews. I just started chapter 4 last Sunday, and that was message number 34 in Hebrews so far. John was over 300 messages, seven years, seven solid years.

MacArthur was seven years in Matthew.

Yeah, and he was seven years in Luke too, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, it could be. And the question really is not how, the issue is really not how long you take in the text. And my goal is never to just grind it out as slowly as we can.

It's to be thorough, it's to be deep, it's to be profound, to enjoy the richness of Scripture. And the real issue for preachers is how you handle the text, not necessarily how many verses you cover.

Yeah, and you know, one of the things I ended up learning about you is you've grown up, this is, you've been here, this town your whole life.

Yeah, I moved to Sandpoint when I was three years old. My family comes from this town generations, going back generations. And so my mother had returned back here as a single mom by the time I was three.

So this is the only place I've ever known. I grew up in this church in the sense that I started coming to Sunday school and vacation Bible school and youth group at Kootenai Community Church as a young teenager.

And I got saved as a result of the ministry of this church. They sent me to a camp that's about 20 minutes south of town where God saved me in the summer of 1985. That's about the closest I can nail it down is about 13 years old or so.

And God saved me that summer. And I came back to the church and started to be discipled and attended church regularly. And then I went to Bible college and came back. And when it came time to find a new pastor, I seemed like the most logical decision, most logical one to take it over.

And so I did starting in December of 1996. So now I pastor the church that was instrumental in my salvation.

I mean, other than maybe when you're a Bible college and stuff, this has pretty much been the only church you've ever been a member of.

Yep. Only church I've ever been a member of. While I was a Bible college in my fourth year, I was nine months or eight months in an evangelical free church up in middle northern Saskatchewan. And I was an associate pastor there as part of my internship.

But I wasn't a member there. But I was serving on staff, as it were, with youth group and preaching occasionally.

Justin, how did you get out to Idaho? Because you're from the deep south. I mean, we hear it in your speech, especially when you say y 'all, you know. Yeah. Actually, I'm expecting y 'all.

You know, is it all y 'all? I don't know how people communicate without that word. I honestly don't. It is such a convenient, useful word. I don't know how people communicate without it.

And we know that you're from the south because as we found out last night, you not only like frog's legs, you like catching them yourself.

Yeah, I've gigged my fair share of frogs. So how'd you come out here?

Alligator skull in my office. That's true. I was, that was pretty cool. I was, as soon as I walked in your office, I was like, oh, that's cool.

Did you actually catch that alligator? No, that alligator, my mom's dad and his brother, so my grandfather and great uncle, used to raise alligators in Shreveport, Louisiana. They just had, they just liked alligators and raised them.

And that was one of them. Raised them as what? As pets or? Basically, yeah. They never ate them. They never did anything with them. They never sold them. They just like alligators. They had three ponds, one for the babies, one for the adolescents, and then one for the adults.

And they would go out to Cross Lake, catch a gator, bring it back to their property and just raise it. They would go to the fish market and get fish guts and fish heads, put them in big, big barrels. And that's what they would feed them.

So how did they get the, like the mid-sized ones into the bigger cage, into the bigger pond?

Oh, that was before I was born. So I don't, you know, but, but yeah, I mean, they were, that's the South. Sounds like Tales of Cro-Magnon, man. That's like, if Mississippi were to put out an episode of the Flintstones, this is what I would expect to see.

I was thinking, I'm more thinking like, you know, Crocodile Dundee with Justin's face on it, you know, we give him the hat and a big, big knife.

That's not a knife, that's a knife, you know.

My granddad used to have his own service station, and that's what they call them back then, service station. And so he was, he was old school, you know, he had the hat and the tie, and car comes up, he comes out and, you know, fills your tank, washes your windows.

And now only Jersey is allowed to, it's the only state where you have to do that.

Yeah, well, they did this by their own, you know.

Yeah, in Jersey, we're not allowed to pump our own gas. We're the, we're now the only state in the Union. Yeah, because Oregon was. Yeah, Oregon was. And so they actually had it up for vote in Jersey.

And the, this is the private, this is why I say all good things come out of Jersey, the things that stay are a problem. We're more, I'm more than happy to give you guys some of our politicians. No joke, this is what happened.

They're sitting there voting on whether people should be allowed to pump their own gas. One guy from the, from the, you know, the senator or whoever who's voting gets up and says, they're giving their justification whether they're going to vote for or against.

And his argument was, I'm married to a Jersey girl. Jersey girls don't pump gas. I'm voting against this because I want to have a happy home life. And there was clapping, people are like, really? So that's, that was what swayed the votes.

Wow. Well, at least he thought it through. He thought it through. Yeah, you know, I mean, it would have been good if Jim thought through like singing happy birthday to his wife yesterday. No, he plans a conference on his wife's birthday.

I mean, I don't know.

Just shows you their mutual love for the gospel in there. There we go. Ah, hey, that's an angle I didn't try. You should have tried that with your wife. I should have gone for that. You know, praise her spirituality.

It's a reflection of their love for their flock and the wanting to, you know, equip the saints. He's good at this.

He's better than you. Next time you do this, you should call him to figure out, hey, look, I just forgot that I booked a conference on my wife's birthday. Can you help me out here? Yeah. How do I spin this better?

And he said he wasn't creative. Right. I think you've been listening to the Word of Faith folks too long. Yeah. You're starting to realize how they spin things. Yeah.

Well, the latest thing I've heard is that there's some lady went to heaven and she says there's in heaven, cows drive tractors.

I want to get a picture of that. Yeah. Did you? We should ask her if she got, you know, did she get any video? So how'd you get out to Kootenai?

That's right. He never answered that. Yeah. Yeah. No. He's been trying to avoid it, I think. So Jim had me to his church to do a conference at his church.

March 2010. Wow. He can't remember when his wife's birthday is, but he's got that one down. Right.

Yeah, it was. We were, we, you and I met at the creation museum at the wretched creation vacation in June of 2009. That's when you and I met. Okay. And then I, we contacted each other and I said, Hey, I'd like to have you come out and do a, do your conference seminar.

And so the following year in March, you came out just starting to thaw out and it was rainy. It was wet and it was cool. Yeah. There were still eight feet of snow up on the ski hill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rainy, wet, cool. Yeah. It's that way for a month. He's been trying to convince me. It's that way for a month here. A month. Uh huh. So, but anyway, yeah, that's, that's, that's how we met. And then, um, long story short, my wife is originally from Billings, Montana.

And so this is closer to her neck of the woods. And, um, we were living in Oklahoma and we didn't want to stay in Oklahoma. We got tired of dodging tornadoes there. And so, um, we figured, well, Justin doesn't, Justin doesn't dodge anything.

Well,.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, so he basically, so Jim basically put the same pressure on you. He's been doing to me to tell me, you know, we should move out here and yeah.

I mean, you fell for it. He encouraged it, but it wasn't a, it wasn't a hard sell. I mean, as long as I've got reasonable access to an airport doing what I do, I can live anywhere. I knew we would have a good church here and it's a beautiful area when you look around.

It is.

It is. I wonder why. More than anything, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just and you're, and you're able to carry guns out here. I'm not used to that in Jersey. Yeah. My, my son, my son moved to Texas.

He went to school in Texas. So my son goes to Texas and what ends up happening? He calls me up and he's like, dad, do you know that people out here, they have rifles in the back of their pickups. My response to him was welcome to America.

You know, he had never seen a gun before he moved out there. He was like, you know, it was a new thing for him. Right.

When I was in high school, we, we brought our hunting rifles to school with us to high school with us and kept them in our vehicles, in the school parking lot so that you could just get out of school, get into your vehicle and zip up into the woods to go hunting after school before dark.

Yeah. That was only 20 years ago. I could picture that in a, in Jersey. Yeah.

Maybe not. All right. So you, you've been out here for 10 years then? Or? No, four years. Four years. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think when, I think when we first met, you were in Oklahoma is, I think.

Yeah. So we were living in Oklahoma. So yeah. Okay. So maybe we shouldn't talk about this on the air. Do you remember our very first conversation? I was telling Pastor Jim about this. Oh, you should talk about this.

You, you use a certain Yiddish word. Oh yes. What was it? Um, schmuck.

Yes. Yes. Now that you bring that up. Yes. I remember you pointing that out to me. I had no idea I was using what Jewish profanity.

Basically it is a, so, so you were up there, you got done. People want to talk to you. I just kinda, I didn't want to take too much time. I definitely didn't want to be overheard. So I kind of waited till most of the people left and I just walked up.

I'm like, uh, Mr. Pierce, you know, being all formal, I didn't know yet. And I'm like, I just, uh, just let you know, you know, so you understand I grew up in a Jewish home. I grew up, you know, hearing Yiddish.

And that word you used, it's basically a derogatory term for the male genitalia.

You went,. Oh, no, I'm never doing that again.

That was our first introduction to each other. I was glad that I was invited back to the house where you were staying. And we got to know each other after that. Cause it was a bad first impression. I'm sure.

No, no, no. I was grateful.

I was just stunned. You know, I'm stunned that a guy who teaches against tongues can swear in so many different languages.

Yeah. This way you should stay away from speaking in tongues, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Right. Yeah. Because if there had been an interpreter, they ought to know what I was saying.

And there was, and you found out, well, actually that's a, that's a great illustration though, right?

You should have stood up and interpreted for me. Oh, that would have been so funny.

Oh no. But I mean, that, that actually is, I think what, you know, Paul was saying there, right. In, in Corinthians where you could be saying something, you could be saying something blaspheming God and not know it.

Right. Yeah. In, I mean, not that that word would blaspheme God, but, but it's not one that we'd want to use. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we're going to, I know folks are going to be starting to come in for, for, for this conference.

Jim, what's the conference about this year?

We had you come out to do an equipping conference for training people to do personal evangelism. And we've trained our youth and we've trained our kids and we've trained an adult Sunday school class about using the way of the master style approach to evangelism, law before grace, a lot of the proud and grace to the humble.

And we wanted to kick off our series of conferences, just equipping people to do that with a real intensive time of focused attention on that issue. How do we transition from the natural to the spiritual?

How do we share the gospel appropriately? How do we avoid Christian jargon and, and and words that we typically say, like asking Jesus into your heart, making a decision for Christ and present the biblical gospel in a biblical fashion.

So we wanted to equip people to do that. And we thought that Andrew, you was the best person to do that for us. Well, you were cheaper than Ray Comfort.

Well, so I was glad after hearing who's, who's going to be following me, I guess I am glad that I'm first because you know, Jason Lyle coming in next and Scott Klusendorf and then Paul Taylor, you know, that'd be a hard act to follow.

Yeah. They're not going to be saying, well, Andrew's a really hard act to follow. You know? So, yeah, I mean, I'm hoping it'll be good. Uh, we, we got an evangelist here though. With Justin Peters. I mean, most people don't think of you as an evangelist, but, uh, I mean, you share the gospel everywhere you go, take people's dogs that they put on your lap, you know, and it's, yeah, that was, that was a fun experience.

Yeah. I know nobody knows what we're talking about, but we'll share it.

You were, you were, you were sharing a gospel. You gave a guy a million dollar bill and he gave you his dog in exchange. Yes. And the dog felt that that was an appropriate time on your scooter to, um, have a bowel movement.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Best was that, that girl going, Oh, that guy pooped on the handicapped guy's scooter. And I caught the whole thing on video. It's going up on YouTube. I searched for it everywhere. I couldn't find it.

Just as well. Oh yeah. How would Benny Hinn use that one? Hey. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Benny, yeah, it's, uh, Benny would use it as a, see, he touched the Lord's anointed and look what he gets.

So, yeah. So who, so I mean, like with the faith healers, things like that, who would you think is probably the most dangerous of, of the different faith healers that you talk with or not talk with, but talk about, well, probably one of.

The most dangerous ironically is also the one that's perceived to be one of the nicest and that's Joel Osteen. Um, I've heard MacArthur describing him as a mouth mouthpiece of Satan. Uh, no matter how nice he appears to be or how much he smiles, he is, he is, I think with little doubt, the most popular, um, preacher on the planet.

Uh, he's quote unquote pastor of the largest quote unquote church in the United States of America. I say that cause he's not a real pastor. He doesn't have a real church, but, um, Lakewood church and his reach is global everywhere.

I go around the world, people know him, they listen to him and, uh, he's leading people straight down the primrose path to hell because he doesn't preach.

I thought you might've said Beth Moore because she's getting there. Well, I thought, I thought because she's the one that's in the more conservative circles where I think Joel Osteen, people know, people in conservative circles know he's bad news.

It's the people who are on the fringe that don't know where Beth Moore is taking the people from more conservative churches and leading them down the primrose path to destruction.

Yeah, I'm increasingly worried about Beth Moore. Um, increasingly so she has friends with Joyce Meyer, partners with Joyce Meyer. She's friends with Joel Osteen has preached at Lakewood church, Joel Osteen's church.

So, um, yeah, Beth Moore is, um, um, steadily going the wrong direction. I mean, we were just looking at a tweet of hers today and she allegorizes, spiritualizes, uh, the text and hyper, hyper emotionally driven.

Uh, and, but for all intents and purposes, her theology is now just about full blown word of faith. Uh, she's, uh, it, yeah, she is teaching many of the same things that the people in my seminar are teaching.

And with no small wonder, because she's associating with them and becoming friends with them. How long has that taken for that transition to take place? I've watched her 15 years ago and thought there was reason for not really thinking that she was a danger, but just thinking that she wasn't necessarily all that deep, I couldn't really see what the attraction was, but in recent years, it seems like she's what, how long has that taken for you to see that descent just plummet?

Yeah, from what I can tell, um, really in the last, say, I would say eight or nine years, um, her descent has really become pronounced, but in, I would say in the last five years, it is, it is almost just at warp speed, like she is just in the last five years, she is taking a steep nosedive in her doctrine, theology, and her teaching, uh, become, I mean, now she's all about the social justice stuff and, uh, she's all woke and all that.

I mean, she's just practically in, in every facet of her theology, she's steadily going downhill at breakneck speed. And it seems that there's nobody in the Southern Baptist denomination is pumping the brakes.

I wanted to bring that because we talked on the Apologetics Live podcast that we did, and you mentioned that, that's the other thing you said, that no one's willing to address it.

No, there's not a single prominent voice in the Southern Baptist convention that dare speak a word against Beth Moore. No one raising a caution flag with her, no one in the SBC institutions, none of the seminary presidents, none of the seminary presidents are saying a word about Beth Moore, uh, she's untouchable.

Why do you think that is? Because she is so enormously, if Southern Baptist had a female Pope, it would be Beth Moore. Who would the male Pope be? I don't know. I don't, I don't know that they would have, all the male Popes, all the male Popes are pushing for her to be the president.

So maybe she would just be the Pope. There's actually talk of her being the president of the Southern Baptist convention in a couple of years.

So I, I don't know, maybe, you know, when Josh Bice and I did the podcast on, on the statement of social justice and the gospel, we talked about that, about she was going to, you know, they were thinking of having her as the president.

And my issue is I, I'm not against Beth Moore being the president of the Southern Baptist because she's a woman. I have an issue with her being, uh, not being the president because she's a.

Heretic and, and, and yeah, and I would say both. I mean, the Southern Baptist convention, at least there theoretically, it's a theological institution. And so as a female, she should not be in a position of leadership in a theological institution.

Some say, well, the SBC, it's not a church. It's just a collection of churches. Well, if she, if she shouldn't be a pastor of a local church, what makes it right for her to be a head of a, an association of thousands of churches?

How does that work?

And speaking to those churches and speaking and having authority over those churches. Right. Yeah. Right. Let's, uh, before we wrap up real quick, um, the, the, uh, you mentioned this, this, uh, you know, social gospel, right?

You, you were one of the 14 people involved in this statement on social justice and the gospel briefly, you know, talk about that. What, what was the pressing need to address these issues in our day and time?

There has been a movement afoot that, uh, the pieces of the chess board, if you will, have been put in place in the last number of years, more, uh, more or less behind the scenes without any kind of fanfare.

But once the pieces were in place, then in the last, really just in the last year, the trap has been sprung basically. But there is a, a concerted effort to, to make social justice issues and integral component of the gospel itself that, um, the church should busy itself about writing, writing social injustices, uh, perceived or real, some of them are real.

Some of them are perceived. Um, but this church should be about, um, you know, racial sensitivity, uh, egalitarian issues. Uh, we've got to write all these societal wrongs. Well, that's not the primary mission of the church.

The mission of the church is to preach the gospel and then hopefully, which is what we see happen when you preach the gospel, um, it, the preaching of the gospel making of disciples has a trickle down effect into the culture that has a happy effect on the culture, but that's trying to change the culture is not the mission of the church mission of the church is to preach the gospel, make disciples of observe the ordinances, you know, do these things.

Um, one of the aspects of the social justice movement that really grieves my heart is that there are a lot of people in this movement. Kyle J. Howard would be one of them, a prominent voice in this saying that basically Kyle J. Howard and to BD and you Billy, um, if you are white, you are guilty in contributing to this systemic racism that is even in the church.

And if you're white, you're guilty of it. And, um, to BD and you Billy wrote an article for the gospel coalition. He said, if you're white, you need to repent of the part that you played in the assassination of Martin Luther King jr.

I wasn't even alive when Martin Luther King jr. Was assassinated, but apparently I'm, I have some role to play in that. Some fault to, to, to, um, um, confess to and repent of. And my family members, you know, just because they're white, you have some, you know, it's lunatic.

That's the end game. The end game is that there is no end game. It is a perpetual cycle of victimhood, but that's in and of itself, antithetical to the gospel because none of us are victims. Sure. We're not victims.

We're enemies of God. We violate his law. God owes us nothing. God owes us absolutely nothing. And so there's so many facets to this, but, um, it's, it's diverting the church's attention away from its primary responsibility, its primary mission.

And it, and it says, it says in effect, a lot of the people in this movement, they're saying, yeah, the gospel is enough to cleanse your conscience and behavior from adultery, from fornication, from blasphemy, from idolatry, but not racism.

For racism, you got to bring out the big guns. And somehow the gospel is not enough to cleanse one's heart from, you know, the sin of racism. And I reject that.

Yeah, I reject it. I don't know if you heard this and we'll wrap up in a bit, but you know, I had, after having signed it and have my name on there, had some people contact me and one, one tried to argue appealing to Calvin and Geneva saying, but look, you know, the, the leaders of Geneva brought Calvin in because they wanted to clean up the, the Geneva.

It was a cesspool and look, it worked. And my argument is it may have worked, but it was unbelievers who saw something. You saw the Reformation cleaning up other areas and they thought it was the Reformation that cleaned it up.

And when he came in and preached the gospel, they kicked him out at first for like two years because they didn't like the gospel, but it wasn't, it was not the Reformation that cleaned up Europe. It was the gospel that changed people's hearts.

And because of that change, the by-product was yes, Geneva got cleaned up, but that's the by-product. Even if unbelievers say this is the reason for doing it, that wasn't Calvin's reason for doing it.

Calvin's reason was the gospel. And yes, Geneva got cleaned up, but we shouldn't set that as the goal. The goal for Christians in the church is the gospel. Let God do the rest. Yep. That's right. At least that's my impression.

My opinion. Jim, you have anything to add? Nope. Nope. I think it's well stated. All right. Well, thanks for, uh, well, thanks for not only coming on to the show, but thank you, Pastor Jim, for having me out here.

Thank you.

I, I'll go ahead and thank you ahead of time for coming out, even though I haven't seen the product of what you're going to produce just yet. He's got such faith.

Two, two, two great books in one website. Visit strivingforeternity .org. There are two books that I would like to recommend you purchase. What they, meaning people who aren't Christians, other religions believe, and what we believe, Systematic Theology Made Simple.

Both are great resources, especially if you plan on witnessing to somebody. Strivingforeternity .org.

Justification by Faith and Christ's Righteousness

Justification. This theological term is legal in nature, but to understand it, we must first understand our legal predicament. Because we have sinned against God, i .e. broken his law and thought, word and deed, we are guilty in his court and must be punished as lawbreakers.

You see, since we have sinned against an infinitely holy God, we deserve an infinite punishment. Enter justification. This is the one time event when God declares the lawbreaker, us righteous in his court.

It's been said that to be justified means that God sees me just if I'd never sinned. This is more appropriately stated. God sees me just if I'd been Jesus. See, Jesus lived the life we couldn't live and died the death we should have died and was resurrected on the third day.

In this, Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the law and paid the fine for our lawbreaking. If we repent and believe in him, God credits his righteousness to our count. Only then are we seen just if I'd been Jesus.

This has been another Growing Moment with Robert Houghton. For more information, visit growthproject .org.

Evangelism Methods and the Conference Focus

All right. So in this segment, we're again with Pastor Jim Osmond. Actually, there's no D at the end, but since he doesn't like to pronounce the T at the end of my name, I figured I should add a D on his, you know, Donnie and Maria, probably his cousins or something, but no.

We're still here with Pastor Jim and we also have with us That's their nephew. I cannot take responsibility for anything that may happen in this segment. I'm just saying, it's not my fault. But we have Josh Comstock who goes to Jim Osmond's church and we figured this might be more in the comedy section.