Voddie Baucham and "Ethnic Gnosticism" on the Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:01

Okay, so there you have, there you have, well, what took place.

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You have the elephant room 2, you have the discussion concerning the

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Trinity and manifestations and all those things like that. And look, everyone listened, if you're listening right now, you listened to what

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I said back on Friday. And what did I do? I played stuff from what TD Jakeson said in the past and we looked at oneness sources and we did all that stuff.

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And I thought what I was doing was discussing the important issue of the doctrine of the Trinity. And over the weekend,

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I began to realize that, to be honest with you, a lot of people didn't hear me talking about the

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Trinity. And all of a sudden, I started realizing, you know what? There are a lot of folks that aren't hearing what

01:09

I said about the doctrine of the Trinity because to be honest with you, they don't really think that I have the right to be addressing this subject because of who

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TD Jakeson is. And I was very, very concerned as I began to realize that the issue of race was taking a central place in this conversation.

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And I don't understand it and so I reached out to someone who might be able to help us and he's joining me on the program today.

01:44

I am talking to Dr. Voti Baucom. Hello, sir. How are you? Happy to be with you.

01:50

It's good to be with you too. Most folks in the audience know you better than they know me, but one thing that they need to know is that you're the pastor of preaching at Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas.

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Now, where... Texas is a nation unto itself, so spring would be approximately where in that big place?

02:20

Okay, you're a Houston suburb. Okay, all right. Well, I was in Houston not very long ago, but knowing how much you travel and I travel, we probably weren't there at the same time anyways, but that means it's real nice and dry there during the summer, right?

02:32

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You didn't... You had the humidity, you just didn't get the rain that was supposed to come along with it.

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How long have you been pastoring down there? And you've also served as an adjunct professor at the

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College of Biblical Studies in Houston, Union University in Jackson, lectured at Southern Seminary, and you know a little something about this situation because rumor is, and we haven't had the opportunity of actually meeting yet, unfortunately, but rumor is

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I've heard that you're actually a black man. Am I right about that? I've also heard that you are a little bit larger than I am.

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Is that true? Are you... How... In fact, Todd Friel said, he mentioned you,

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I was listening to a Wretched Radio broadcast from a couple days ago, and he said you could break him in half like a twig.

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Well, that's true. A stiff breeze could do that, I suppose, but I think what he meant was that you're even bigger than he is.

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Okay. So, when you do apologetics, then you have an advantage that I no longer have.

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I was once a pretty big guy back in the... About six, seven years ago. But I've gotten back on the bike, and so now

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I'm not that at all. But you do apologetics. I do apologetics.

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I think we're about the only two Reformed Baptist apologists on the planet. So we pretty much fill out the entire club, and we still haven't met.

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So I was thinking Spring, Texas sounds like a great place to have a debate someday with a

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Muslim. What do you think? Yeah, I was going to say, think you can find a church for me there?

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Really? Yeah, they don't need one, but they still... So that could be even more interesting.

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Oh, yeah. Oh, that could be very, very interesting, yeah, especially since the Muslims are going for Friday. They're going for Saturday.

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We go for Sunday. At least we know which days we can X out of the calendar there. Well, anyways, I got in touch with you because I am honestly confused.

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First of all, obviously, you know far more about this situation than you probably wanted to know.

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I read your blog article where you related the situation because you actually...

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How many people, grand total, had been invited to the elephant room, too?

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I mean, we know of at least two. Are you and Mark Dever the only two that declined?

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Do we know of any others? What do you know about that? Okay. And so you declined an invitation to be there, and yet there was something...

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Was it the next day or two days after elephant room that you were supposed to speak at? And so in fact, you had been booked even before the elephant room stuff even became an issue, right?

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Okay. All right. And that was just a... I don't know. I hate to use the term standard men's conference, but I guess that's a term

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I'll use. It wasn't necessarily related to elephant room or anything like that.

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Okay. All right. Now, we know that you flew from Texas, I would assume

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Houston, up to Chicago, and it was decided in conversations that it would be best that you did not speak because...

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Well, because of why? Because of what you had said on your blog? It's a way for people to be there to say hi to.

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Right. It's also another way for me to publicize the event for people who live in the area.

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And I wrestled with whether or not to do that with this event, but I didn't want to be dishonest.

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I sort of did what was my normal practice. And of course, when I did that, immediately all of the questions came about, wait a minute, the elephant room was there.

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Are you... The elephant room, are you against this?

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Are you... You know, so on and so forth. So what I did was on Friday, I answered as honestly as I could the questions of those people who had raised them on my fan page, and basically said that...

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And no, I'm not... I said at that point that I had been invited or not, but basically

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I just said that I was in opposition to it. But I was still going because I had a previous engagement, and I was going to keep that engagement.

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They were committed to me still coming anyway, even though I was not in favor of it. And that's kind of the story of it.

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Right, right. And so you got there. I guess you had an assistant with you.

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You actually... When you went to the church, were you assuming you were going to be speaking? Yes. Okay, okay.

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So you had everything prepared, and it was only once you got to the church, the discussion took place, and you discovered that there was already somebody there to take your place,

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I guess, at that point. Right, right.

08:55

All right. Okay, so you had that level. So you spoke with James McDonald there, and you had that level of involvement.

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But my contacting you really didn't have to do with that too much.

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Let's get to the important issue here and what really is troubling me, and that is when

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I... As soon as this happened, Todd Friel was on my cell phone. And, I mean, from Todd's perspective, this was the reversal of the

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Council of Nicaea, okay? I mean, it was just... I mean, you know the Friel Meister.

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I love the guy, and he just... He operates... If we're all 12 -volt batteries, he's a 24 -volt battery.

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It's just the way it is. On an iPod, he's on the 2X speed all the time.

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I had not been looking forward to this. I knew it was coming. I had sort of kept some of an eye on it, because I've spoken about Jake's and stuff like that in the past.

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But I'm trying to write a book on Islam, and I've got too many other things going on, and so I didn't spend much time on it.

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And so when it took place, and I listened to the conversation, my...

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Honestly, Bodhi, I can tell you with complete integrity, the only thing

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I was listening for was accuracy in handling the issue of the Doctrine of the

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Trinity and a recognition and understanding of modalistic language on the people asking T .D. Jake's questions.

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That was honestly all I was concerned about. And I didn't even watch the videos, because I pulled the audio from what was posted on YouTube, and I listened to that.

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I wasn't even watching it. I didn't know who was talking to him. I mean, I recognized Mark Driscoll's voice, but I didn't know if there was two people, ten people.

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I didn't know, and I didn't care. That's not relevant to me. What was relevant was the issues of accurately handling the

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Doctrine of the Trinity. I'm sitting here trying to reach out to Muslims, and it's somewhat of a distraction to have this going on in the rearview mirror, where you're discovering that a lot of people who you thought were on your side actually don't even know what it is you're talking about when you're defending things like the hypostatic union or the eternal existence of the sun as the sun and all the rest of this stuff.

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And so I do my thing on Friday. You even referenced the video when I posted it on a blog article that you wrote, where I just went through it, did my thing.

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And over the weekend, I start realizing that there are people that have started to talk about middle -aged, white,

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Reformed guys. Now, I think I'm still middle -aged. Is 49 still middle -aged?

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Does that qualify? Yeah, we'll let you pass. You'll let you pass? Okay. Now, who's the elder here, by the way?

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Because I don't know. I'm 42. Oh, okay. Well, you're still young then. Okay.

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Okay. Well, you're definitely middle -aged. I think 55 is about the end of middle -aged, personally.

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So I think you'll take that. And as we get close to 55, we'll push it down to 60. So that's just how it works.

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But anyway, I honestly, it had never crossed my mind.

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It's a difference between you and me because, as you know, as you would have noted, because they intended to talk to PDJs about race.

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And there are certain factors in the discussion as a result of that particular decision.

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It made it a lose -lose for anybody who knows what those issues are.

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And, again, I've said my piece about the event and all this sort of stuff, and that's going to continue to be rehashed.

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But the issue right now that I think is very important is the one that you raised, the one you were talking about, and that's the issue of people who aren't aware of these sort of, on how they impact this and other decisions that we make.

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I want people to be aware of those. I want them dragged out in the open, and I want them dealt with.

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Well, that's what you're going to have to help me with, because I don't understand the rules.

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I really, I don't get it. I thought that Galatians 3 .28

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was pretty clear. When it says there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, you're all one in Christ Jesus, I thought it was pretty straightforward that what that was saying is that this whole issue of race,

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I mean, if we looked at the Council of Nicaea, there weren't any middle -aged white reformed guys there, because first, reform wouldn't have made any sense, and most everybody there would have been a lot darker than me, that's for sure.

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And they really wouldn't have looked much like either one of us, even though Athanasius was, they called him the little black dwarf.

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I mean, these issues are not defined by race, but they're being heard in that way.

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Help me to understand, how do I get past this, or what is the real problem here?

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Should these types of divisions even exist within the Christian faith? So there's tremendous animosity between black people and white people.

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So that's one problem, is that that animosity still exists in this country. We're talking about where do we start?

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We're going to start there first. It's obvious to anybody who looks that there's still residue from that in the

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United States in this division. Within the church, again, black people and white people being separate for a long time, even after that, blacks not being allowed into certain schools, cultures being segregated, even churches being segregated.

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And so black theology, for lack of a better word, developed independently in that context because of that division.

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But then there's another issue that's within black church culture, and that is there's always been this sort of debate between guys who were separatists, some of them who wanted to go back to Africa, and others who wanted assimilation to greater or lesser degrees.

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So you've got these three layers that are always happening. That's kind of a historic backdrop. Now, you bring that into today, and when you're doing a conference like this, you've got all three of those layers.

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So you've got to look at the fact that when T .D. Jenks, who was a national figure, is coming into this role, the culture at large who knows him and goes on the cover of Time magazine is going to see this event through the lens of that ethnic divide that's recognized in the

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United States of America, and sensitive to it are going to respond to him accordingly.

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There's also that second layer that you see of sort of black church, white church.

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Again, I'm using these terms because they're out there. Not because I think they were.

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And then with the most recent video, that third layer, and David D 'Agnanuele wrote an incredible piece about this a couple of days before that video came out, and was just rather prescient in his plea to our white brothers not to play black brothers against one another on the same issue that's been going on, some being more for assimilation, if you will, others being more for separatism and trying to sort of create a divide on which black guys are on which side of the issue.

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So for a few of the reasons that this was going to be an issue from a broader point of view.

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Okay, let me tell you a story, and then as a background of asking you to tell me from your perspective what

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I need to do or how I need to try to understand the perspective that was expressed by some of the black pastors in response to the

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T .D. Jakes situation, and maybe tell me...

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See, the very idea of black theology or white theology or any epithet attached to theology gives me the creeps.

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I mean, just badly, because there is no such thing as a black god or a white god or anything like that.

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And the reason it gives me the creeps... Let me tell you a story, and then I'll get your response to that.

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I was listening to Todd Friel, and he said the same thing. He said he was oblivious. He lives in an oblivious state to a lot of the layers that you were just talking about.

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And it's not because I live in the quote -unquote white church, because I don't. I mean, my church has

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Hispanics and blacks and whites, and most of us are just mutts. We don't know what in the world we are, and we don't care.

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That's not why we're there. So it's not something we even think about. It doesn't enter in. And for me especially, the first best friend you have in life really impacts you.

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And my first best friend, the person that I, in my little mind at that time, defined friendship was named

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Kevin. And Kevin was brown. And Kevin was brown because Kevin's mommy was almost albino.

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I mean, she was Mrs. Holden, wasn't it? She was so white. Well, we lived in Minnesota, and I'm afraid that there's a lot of very, really white people in Minnesota because you can't get out in the sun very much, and if you do go out during the summer, you get eaten by mosquitoes.

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So it may have just been you stay inside all the time. I don't know. But she was as white as could be. But Kevin's daddy,

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Kevin's daddy scared me. Not because of what color he was, but he was huge.

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I mean, to a 3 - or 4 -year -old, this man was huge. He was a big cop, and he was as black as midnight.

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I mean, he was one of those guys who's so black that in the dark, unless he smiles, you're not going to see him. He was that kind.

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We're not talking brown. We're talking absolutely black. He was the polar opposite of his wife.

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And so my first best friend is brown, and his mommy and his daddy are different colors, and I think that's just wonderful.

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And in fact, I still remember learning from my parents that, well, there's a lot of people who don't think that they should be married.

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I'm like, but why? Because they were members of our church. So I'm like, I mean, I'm a kid. I don't know. And so my first experience with friendship was with a boy who had a black father and a white mother, and I'm just like, yeah, but he's my friend.

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And so from the very start, my brain has been wired in such a way that all this stuff about, yeah, but I'm this color, and he's that color, and we're this, it does not compute with me, and it just doesn't become a part of the process by which

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I even think about things. And that's why when I listened to The Elephant Room, and that's why when

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I first read Brian Lawrence's blog article, it never crossed my mind to even ask the question, what color is this man?

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That's why I was so shocked when the issue of race came up. I was like, why would somebody raise that? It is just that far removed from my experience, my thought process, because of my upbringing.

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That's just the way it was. And so with that, I'm not sure,

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Bodhi, if I'm smart enough to develop a set of filters to avoid, to start running stuff through a filter to know how to address stuff.

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Do I need to? How do I handle this? I honestly don't know. Just because you recognize those traps are out there.

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But again, we have to realize this surface, and as innocent as Doves, and everything that we see in politics today, and in a variety of other areas today, you know,

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Jeremiah Wright, and the sort of Marxist, black liberation theology,

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I mean, that world is absolutely real. And one of the points that I tried to make, you know, one of the big red flags for me with Mr.

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Baird was the fact that I know, I am just absolutely aware of that reality, and know what it does to certain people.

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I happen to be on the side that says, go ahead and take your hit for the cause of Christ.

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But I still know that those issues are out there. I know those issues are out there.

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For what you were doing, for what you've been doing at all, you were wrong in what you were doing.

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What you were doing is necessary. It is important. It is absolutely essential. And for me, this is not an issue of, oh,

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I really wish that James White knew about this so that he wouldn't have made a mistake or whatever.

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But for me, it's, I want James White to know about this because I want my brother to partner with me in another sin here in this area.

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And I think the sort of injection of race into this and the intentional use of race in this regard.

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These kinds of and using black justify what happened with DDJs in that role.

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It is appalling. It is absolutely appalling to sit behind young black pastors in order to justify what happened.

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Especially when you sit and watch that video. I watched the second part of the video today. And one of the things that just made me almost want to weep is that one of the brothers in the video, because today was the part of the video where James was asking him, you know, how do you think he did on the train?

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Right. And irony of ironies, these guys thought he did well on the Trinity. They thought he was orthodox on the

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Trinity. And one of them even pointed to the fact that he referenced 1

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Timothy 3 .16. And he made, he alluded to the fact that that really helped him understand

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James better. When those of us who have dealt with modalism from the apologetics perspective knows that that was actually the smoking gun.

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Yeah. That was not something that should have made others sit in that room and go, wow,

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I never thought about that. It should have been something to make brothers who were sitting in that room go, oh, he just went back to it.

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You know, he just went back to it. And so it's so ironic that we, you know, move away from these issues of first importance.

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And by the way, one of the other problems is that the real issue, let's just say that the brother, let's say the brother's

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Trinitarian, okay? Let's say he's infused, let's say, you know, as brilliant as he is, all the things that he's been able to write, all the, you know, as advanced as he's been able to become in all of these areas of his life.

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By the way, this is another thing that's ironic. It is that one of the most racist things that you can do is actually say that black people get a pass on theology and they get a pass on, you know, things like,

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I don't know, Titus 1 -9 and the duties and responsibilities of theology simply because they're black and because of the way that they were raised in of disrespect.

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But let's just go ahead and say that he's

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Trinitarian, he's moved away from modalism, he's orthodox in his view of the Trinity, he just, you know, he just doesn't really know how to express it well.

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That brings up two questions. Number one, if that's the case and you respect him, then take care of that in private, help him, and disciple him.

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But number two, what about the word of faith, prosperity gospel, which is poison, poison, and particularly poisonous in the black community.

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So, now what I'm hearing from you right now, interestingly enough, is the issue, see, the first place that I saw race brought up was in the

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Lawrence blog when it talked about white middle -aged reformed guys. And I'm hearing you saying you're seeing it in its fullest expression in essence the misuse of three black pastors as a mechanism of defense for what took place.

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And yet it's interesting, a lot of folks in listening to that have heard statements that sounded like some of those pastors,

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I think specifically Brian Lawrence, were basically saying, well, I think there are some black pastors out there that want to have a wider audience and so they're sort of ganging up on Bishop Jakes.

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So, it sounds like there's multiple different streams coming all together and creating a massive amount of confusion depending on how we're listening and how we understand what the motivations were behind the person speaking.

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Yeah, and it's in the midst of all of this is

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T .D. Jakes. T .D. Jakes, that's true. Yeah, you're probably right, there's no two ways about it.

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Even though I would like to think that on the positive level, people have been caused to think about modalism a little bit, it is discouraging to recognize that those who actually know modalism best have the quietest voices in this situation and those, the loudest voices, in other words, the biggest platforms, did not show themselves to be overly insightful as to not only what modalism is and how modalists speak, but making direct application to the

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Christian life, the gospel, the reasons, the importance of why modalism totally undercuts the sacrificial work of Christ and the worship of the church and all the rest of these things.

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There just doesn't seem to have been, to be almost anybody who has a really big platform that has brought that kind of thing to the fore.

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Now, you had mentioned specifically, though, a lot of people had mentioned to me – let's put it this way – a lot of people had mentioned to me that they interpreted some of the things that were said in the interview, especially the first part of the interview, as being directed at pretty well -known individuals.

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That's not really the case, is it? No, I don't think so.

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Right. It definitely wasn't directed toward me.

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And his statements weren't really directed towards anyone in particular. And he just talked about how he felt.

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He has to speak for himself about it, and I'm not here to – Right, right, of course. I don't know his motives.

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I can't get there from here. But what I am here to do is that the body is being divided over this issue, and the body is being divided over a man who is one of the most poisonous influences in the church today.

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Now, you've been speaking about this for a long time. Help our listeners to understand. Why would you say something like that?

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Because so many people look at him, and they see success. They see – he's been on the cover of Time magazine, for crying out loud.

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Is Time still being published? It might be. I don't know. Who really knows anymore? But here's the very picture of success and prominence and all the rest of this stuff.

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And yet, here, you're talking about a poisonous influence. Why would that be?

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And I don't mean teaching public, you know, teaching on the

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Trinity, but you've got to go and search.

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It is a poison. It is a cancer. It is destroying people. It is absolutely destroying lives.

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It is another gospel. It is to be condemned. And it was not even addressed in this whole process.

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And he is the chief purveyor. I mean, he is the Godfather. Again, you know, there's been this sort of meteoric rise of, you know,

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Smilin' Joel here in Houston. But T .D. Jakes is the Godfather as it relates to, you know, more faith teachers and so on and so forth.

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And it just breaks my heart that this is being allowed, and that he's basically given entree into a whole other layer of evangelicalism.

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Besides that, you know, my wife is from Dallas. I have seen firsthand the influence that T .D.

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Jakes has had over the last decade since he came to Dallas. He has not made evangelicalism in Dallas more thoughtful, more theological, more biblical, more impact.

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His impact has been quite the opposite, in fact. And yet that was not raised.

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There really wasn't much of an explanation as to why. But still, even with that, looking at the interview that James McDonald did afterwards, none of these pastors would be pastoring churches that would be friendly toward that type of perspective, would they?

35:47

No. No, I wouldn't say so. Yeah. Again, I don't know these men.

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Right. I know a lot of these men. I know, you know, friends of friends. These are not word of faith guys.

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These are not at all. But I think, you know, one of the things that we saw, especially in the second video, this emphasis of relationship over truth, of love over truth.

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Again, as those two can be said against one another, 1 Corinthians 13 says, you know, love rejoices in truth.

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Without truth, you can't define love. You can't define grace without truth. You know, grace doesn't have any meaning without truth.

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We have to pursue truth. We live and die on truth. But that was one thing. But then we saw the fruit of that kind of thinking, which is people who are ignorant about Jesus' modalism, ignorant or just, you know, don't care about the word, faith, gospel, who are just celebrating the fact that people were able to sit down together like that is a monumental accomplishment.

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It takes a lot more to refuse to sit down with somebody than it does to sit down with them.

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Yeah, you can pay for that. And in many, many different ways. Help me to understand if you can.

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And if it's just beyond where we want to go, just let me know. But help me understand if you can why we have seen some from the black community listen to what

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Phil Johnson is saying. Okay, Phil Johnson is a white middle -aged reform guy and James White and people like us.

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And they hear us and yet they hear us in a racial sense when it's not anywhere in anything that we said.

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I mean, you couldn't find anything in what I said last Friday about that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be connected to anything racial at all.

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It never once crossed my mind. And yet people are hearing it. What do we do about it?

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What can I do about that if there's anything at all? And therefore you cannot understand my black experience.

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Now, I can understand your experience. You know,

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I can understand your experience and my experience, but you can't understand my experience. And actually it's racist if you try to act like you can understand my experience.

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It's gnosticism. It's gnosticism pure. When we start talking about issues with people of color, it is very easy.

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And, again, that's often what we call, you know, playing the race card. It's very easy for me to go back to my blackness, my experience, my upbringing, so on and so forth, as though white people don't have backgrounds and upbringings and experiences.

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Exactly, yeah. White modalists are modalists because, you know, the intellectuals and gents actually came to this because of this background and its upbringing.

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What else brings people to Harris? Anyway, but it's that kind of ethnic gnosticism.

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You have to bring black guys in to have the black guys speak to the issue to give you cover.

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Because if you buy into ethnic gnosticism, then you admit that you can't speak to these issues because you're not part of the community.

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And I think that does violence to the gospel. Well, not it does violence to the gospel.

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Here we're talking about the very nature of God. And, again, it's not something that each ethnic group gets to define, though I have to disagree with you about one thing.

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You said you can understand my experience, but I can guarantee you you've never worn a kilt.

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You know what's really funny about that? You have? I have. Oh, man.

40:58

I had a feeling. I had a feeling. Yeah. But you didn't get it in Scotland.

41:08

But, again, that's the whole irony. I think you hit the nail right on the head. Because people get away with it.

41:15

Again, remember those three, you know, with black church, white church.

41:23

Again, not my terms, but your terms will be used. And then the division within black church circles of people who are, you know, more on the separatist event than other people who are more on the assimilation event.

41:35

You know, when you get to that point, that sense of ethnic gnosticism, it's almost like you're negating the fact that other people have backgrounds.

41:51

And that's a huge problem. And the other thing, of course, is that you look at, you reduce the black experience like there's a black culture.

42:00

Right. I mean, I grew up in south -central Los Angeles, California. Gang -invested, gang -invested, south -central

42:06

L .A., raised by a single teenage Buddhist mother. Never heard the gospel until my freshman year in college, okay?

42:17

Then a guy who grew up in Tennessee in, you know, a black community, black church, and a guy who grew up in Brooklyn, you know, and so on and so forth.

42:28

So there's no such thing as a black experience. But the other side of it is there's no such thing as a white experience.

42:36

But then there's a third truth. The gospel transcends all of that. Right. And so our goal ought to be to get to Galatians 328

42:46

Christianity. That ought to be our goal. That ought to be what we fight for. And, you know, this whole ethnosticism puts people in knots.

43:00

And unless there are black people who are speaking to this issue, unfortunately, because of the inroads that this ethnosticism has made, there are people who will be afraid and who won't say anything.

43:14

Okay, if I honestly am colorblind in the church, if that's where I am,

43:22

I am convinced, I'm convicted by the word of God, I'm convicted by Galatians 328, that's the way it needs to be.

43:28

We're all, one, the body of Christ, the same Holy Spirit indwells you that indwells me.

43:33

We read the same scriptures. If that's where I really am, then how can

43:42

I talk to someone? Because you've used this term a couple times, and it, again, is so far outside of my experience.

43:50

But you're talking about those who aren't really for assimilation or something like this. Almost like, let's stay in our own group.

43:58

And I go, but our group is the church. It's not based upon the color, it's not based upon the melanin counts.

44:05

I mean, really, the guy who died for you and I both wasn't the color of either one of us.

44:13

He was a Palestinian Jew. So what am I supposed to say to someone who looks at me and they say, you shouldn't say anything about T .D.

44:25

Jakes because you're Scottish. And you don't, therefore you are showing yourself racist if you engage in this.

44:37

Isn't that, is that not sin in the sense of an improper division of the body? I think it is an improper, it is absolutely, there's absolutely no merit to the idea that there are different communities within the

45:07

United States, within the diversity of the United States, and that we don't need to be purposeful in the way that we plant churches and reach people within those different contexts.

45:18

And I know, I know you well enough to know that that's the case, but I just want to say that because that's where a lot of people go when you have this discussion.

45:26

Right, but I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with me. I also don't think, I mean, a church in an area that has a primary, one particular primary ethnic makeup is going to lean toward that for obvious reasons.

45:39

But my concern is specifically creating a church based upon ethnicity.

45:47

I mean, that's, you know, if the Lord brings in people from all over the place and gives you just complete mixed soup, that's great.

45:53

But, you know, I understand that a church in a certain area is going to reflect the ethnicity of the people that are close enough to get to it.

46:00

That makes perfect sense. But what I'm hearing is people saying, no, we don't mind creating an ethnic group whereby we sort of see ourselves.

46:11

It reminds me of Galatians 2, and it reminds me of, you know, Peter going over and sitting with the

46:17

Jews at the table. And, well, you know, it's just the way we do things. And Paul said, no way, you're not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel.

46:26

Absolutely. And, again, that's what I meant in my post about these things being dragged out. They have to.

46:34

We have to drag these things out into the light. And I think part of the difficulty, what we've seen in recent days, is a direct result of these things not having been dragged out into the light and a direct result of these things being ignored.

46:56

Because here's one of the things that happens, and this is the great irony. It's almost cult -like.

47:02

On the one hand, you can say to a person, you can't say that because you don't understand the black community and the black experience.

47:11

Well, then somebody like myself or Anthony Carter or B .D. Andy Willey or somebody like us comes out and says, oh, actually,

47:20

I agree that there are these problems with T .D. Jakes. Then the immediate response is, well, you're just a sellout.

47:27

You're just Tom. You're just trying to curry favor with white people. And the bottom line is, you're not really black.

47:34

And so that's what the cults do. If you can't answer my question, it's because you're ignorant.

47:42

If you can answer my question, then I'll find another way around. And that's why

47:48

I say it's ethnic Gnosticism. So what do I do?

47:55

Put yourself in my shoes. You've already said, look, you've got to do what you're doing.

48:02

You've got to address the issue. But do I have to? I need to be aware of how my words are going to be heard.

48:11

There are only so many filters I can install, though. And so isn't there a need to call anyone who is a fellow conservative

48:24

Christian who happens to be black? Isn't there a need to be able to say to someone like that, you know what, we are all one in the body of Christ.

48:34

This has nothing to do with my experience or your experience. This has to do with our common confession of faith in who

48:41

Jesus is, what the doctrine of the Trinity is, how all this relates to the gospel. Can we set all of that stuff aside?

48:48

Do I have to make that special effort each time, or do

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I only do that once I start getting a pushback and realize that I'm encountering it?

48:58

Do I just assume the best, or do I assume the worst? Which do I do? Here in our city, where during the main man march, when

49:29

Moses Farrakhan came to town, and he was promoting the main man march, there were a number of black pastors who hosted him, who stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

49:41

And again, we're not just talking about Moses Farrakhan here. I mean, we're talking about... We're talking about somebody that the

49:49

Muslims think is a cult. I mean, you can't get more cultic than that. Exactly. And, you know,

49:58

I'm going to make a mistake and mention, nobody called these men out.

50:05

And they didn't call these men out because of all those filters that you're talking about.

50:12

And so associating with a cultic heretic wasn't bad enough for these men to be called out.

50:20

I'll tell you one better. One of these men ended up being found out as a homosexual.

50:28

He's still in his church and has never been publicly condemned by the powers that be in white evangelicalism in his circles.

50:42

And another one got arrested for having sex with a minor. And again, the response didn't come.

50:48

So open sin being tolerated in the name of this ethnic gnosticism...

50:59

The filters. The filters. It's got to be dragged out into the light. And if people do things that are racist, they need to be called on it because it's sin.

51:10

But if people do things that are, you know, other areas of sin, they need to be called out on that as well.

51:17

And we can't say that because of our fear of being accused of the sin of racism when that's not our motivation that we'll refuse to call out other things.

51:29

That's just wrong. It's just wrong. And the idea that, you know, the relationship has to be in a certain place before you can call that out, that's just not

51:40

Bible. And it's not loving the brother. If you love someone, you have to confront them in their sin.

51:47

You have to confront them in their error. That's the height of love. We've got about a minute left on the program today.

51:56

What can we do? I mean, as far as I can tell, a vast majority of pulpits are wide open to you.

52:07

I mean, you're much beloved, and it doesn't have anything to do with your ethnicity or anything like that.

52:14

And so clearly people have seen you hand in hand with well -known, especially

52:22

Reformed leaders and things like that. Is it continued cooperation that makes the inroads?

52:30

How can we chip away at this ethnic gnosticism? You know what?

52:38

In 35 seconds, yeah. I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ because it is the power of God and salvation.

52:51

It is the gospel. The gospel has to be the place where we land. That has to be what we fight for.

52:58

And the one who is my brother is the one who is fighting alongside with me for the cause of Christ and for the cause of the gospel.

53:05

And that has to be more important to me and more significant to me than anything else.

53:11

And I gave up a long time ago being afraid of people calling me names.