Social Justice Is Actually Succeeding And I'm Happy About It!

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All right, two quick things this morning. One of them is more positive and one of them is a little bit more negative.

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I'll start with the negative. Yesterday on Twitter, I tweeted a thought about wolves in sheep's clothing and there's a warning in the book of Acts about wolves coming in among us.

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And he's talking obviously to a specific people at the time, you know, in I think it was Ephesus. But it obviously has application for the church for beyond just the church in Ephesus.

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And the questions I was asking on Twitter was, you know, when wolves come in among us, what's it going to be like?

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I mean, I think Christians ought to spend some time thinking about that. What would it be like and what are you going to do when wolves come in among us?

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Because I don't think there's any question that that's going to happen or has happened or is continuing to happen over time.

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And what's it going to look like? Right. I mean, when wolves come in among us, it's not going to be easy. I think sometimes we read these kinds of passages and we almost forget that it's just like these are human beings.

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These are people that have emotions and have, you know, nature's like ours. It's going to get ugly.

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I mean, when there are wolves coming in among us, it's going to be people that we trust. It's going to be people that we wouldn't expect it from.

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Otherwise, it wouldn't be sneaky. It would be obvious. You know, we don't call, you know, Muslims coming in among us wolves because it's very obviously they're against Christ.

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They're not for Christianity. In fact, if you ever read the Koran, it's specifically explicitly against Christianity.

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The Koran is written almost as a almost as a polemic to Christianity. So that's not a wolf.

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But a wolf is someone who seems to believe what you believe and seems to say the same things you say. But then they start to reveal themselves as wolves.

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I'm thinking about, you know, what it's going to be hard. It's going to be emotionally charged. It's going to be difficult for people to accept.

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I think when when you start to say, well, hey, he's saying these things and that's not in the Bible. People are going to get mad.

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They're going to rage and they're going to accuse you of being on Christlike and uncharitable. And this is happening all over the place.

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Look, guys, I'm not saying I'm perfectly discerning every person that I'm criticizing their words.

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I'm not saying that I would never say that I'm not that arrogant. But I was talking to my brother today and yesterday, and some of these things that we're criticizing, they're just so obvious, like, like, and I'm not saying he's a wolf.

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So don't hear me saying this. But but but Carl Truman's article about is Tim Keller Marxist is just so it's insulting to your intelligence.

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I heard Jordan Hall say this. Somebody sent me his his live stream last night about about this article, this

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Truman article. And he was saying the same thing. It's insulting to your intelligence to say that, well, he can't be a

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Marxist because he believes in the Imago Dei. I'm just thinking to myself. Who would argue that way?

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This is an intelligent man. He's smarter than I am. And he says, well, he can't be a Marxist if he believes in the

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Imago Dei. But that's a joke. That's a joke. And so when you point that stuff out, you say that's actually not that true at all.

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And then someone says, well, you're not being Christlike. You're not being loving to that person. I think that's what you can expect when you know, when when when when this happens, when wolves come in, they create divisions.

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I think what you need to look at is who's creating the divisions here. Who's the one that's saying unbiblical things and thus creating divisions?

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Is it the people that are calling for ecumenical councils to anathematize people unless you're woke? Or is it the people that are saying, hey, that's not correct.

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We shouldn't do that because we have unity in Christ. That's a question you need to ask yourself, because this whole situation,

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I think that some of the people in this movement are wolves. I don't say that, you know, like just trying to be alarmist.

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They're definitely wolves among us. The question is, who are they? How do I how do we identify them?

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And what do we do about it? That's the question. So I think all of us should spend some time thinking about what that looks like.

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Now, that's the more negative thing. Now, the more positive thing is I was thinking this. People got mad at me earlier this week and last week about me saying that there's unintended positive consequences of slavery.

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And as a reformed Christian, I believe that my family was saved through the slave trade.

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And again, I don't say that that's the only way God could have done it. He couldn't have done it any other way. Blah, blah, blah.

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No, that's a caricature of what I'm saying. It's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that God did do it this way. He brought people over in the slave trade, excuse me, in the slave trade, my family, my ancestors included.

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And he saved us through that. It wasn't a good thing. But the fact that we're saved is a good thing. So anyway, so that's an unintended consequence of a bad thing.

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And I'm thinking about an unintended consequence of this whole controversy, this whole controversy where there's wolves in among us.

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And there's people out here with big platforms and lots of money behind them saying divisive things, intentionally divisive things to hurt the body of Christ.

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And even if it's not intentional, the things that they're saying is hurting the body of Christ. There's no question about it.

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The Gospel Coalition is having a negative impact on the body of Christ with this social justice stuff.

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Now, some of their other stuff is good. And so I'm not saying that everything they put out is awful. No, some of it is good and some of it is poison.

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And that's the problem. When there's some good and some poison, it's even more dangerous. And so I say the

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Gospel Coalition is dangerous. I say the ERLC is dangerous. They're causing harm to the church. I say that Black Christian Collective, Jamar Tisby, these people are dangerous.

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Eric Mason, these people are dangerous to the church. And again, I'm not saying any of them are particularly wolves.

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I don't know. But among that group, there are definitely wolves in there. No question about it. Now, the unintended consequence of this is that I looked at my

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Twitter feed last night, and I got to be perfectly honest with you. I saw amazing ethnic diversity all united around doctrine.

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And that is beautiful. That is a beautiful thing. Nothing can do that. No one could do that except for the

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Holy Spirit of God. God brings you this is the unity that matters. It's not the unity of behind a country or behind an ethnic group or things like that.

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The unity that matters in Ephesians 4 is a unity around doctrine. Let me read to you from Ephesians chapter 4.

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This is about unity. This is a beautiful passage. It's critical in this debate. It says, there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call.

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One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.

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But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore, it says when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men and insane.

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He ascended. What does it mean? But that he also had descended into the lower reasons of the earth. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things.

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And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, the teachers to equip all the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we attain, get this, this is it until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

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That so we should make that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves carried around by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

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But rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who was the head into Christ.

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Do you hear what that's saying? The unity that matters and the unity that I find on my Twitter feed is around doctrine.

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So you're not going to be tossed to and fro by all this human nonsense, by all this socialism and Marxism and all these ideas, intersectionality, all these ideas that do not come from the scripture, but lots of Christian pastors are talking about these days.

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White privilege is another one. Unity of doctrine. I look at my Twitter feed and I see black people all coming together in unity around the doctrine and the knowledge of the, of Jesus Christ.

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I see, um, Latinos, I see Asians. I see, um, people from other countries, other nations, not just African Americans, but literal

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Africans. Um, people from all over the place, people with Russian last names, people with Jewish last name.

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It, uh, Indians, Pakistanis, it is like a UN and they're united around one thing that matters to them.

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Common faith, unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God. This is not superficial nonsense.

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This is people that are coming together around something that actually matters. Knowledge of the son of God, doctrine, the unity of the faith.

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And this is an unintended consequence of all this racial reconciliation talk because as they are dividing the church, they're also uniting people around doctrine.

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That is amazing. They're actually ending up doing what they are setting out to do accidentally because they're, they're out there causing problems and causing division and causing a distrust between whites and blacks and hatred.

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And they're saying vile things and all that. But then the people that really care about the doctrine of Jesus Christ, they're coming together and fighting against it.

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And if you look at the people that, that retweet me and like me, it is absolutely ethnically diverse.

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And that is a beautiful thing because no matter what their ethnicity is, Christ has his people everywhere and they have a unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God.

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I remember when I was in college, you know, like I've said many times, my parents were Christians and they taught me to treat people in a

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Christian way. When it comes to ethnicity, I remember my junior year of college, I believe it was my junior year. I lived in a place called

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Leonard town in university of Maryland. And these were like large apartment built apartment flats essentially.

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And six people to a, to an apartment. So we had six guys in this apartment and it was me and another

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Puerto Rican. It was a black guy. So it was me. It was a guy, Raphael. He was another Puerto Rican black guy named

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Dalton, a Pakistani named Zeeshan and a white guy that we used to call big country.

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Um, yeah, his name, it's kind of racist, right? No, but his, his name was, uh, was

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Brian. And, um, anyway, so we, we, we had this apartment together. We all got along.

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It was a beautiful United thing, but we all had kind of a superficial unity.

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We were friends. We all drank together. We all did these things. Um, and that's, that was our unity and we all got along and it was totally fine.

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But that ethnic unity meant nothing. That was not progress because we did not have true unity in the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God.

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I always say this, that my friends that I thought I cared about back in college, I really did not care about at all. In fact,

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I hated them because I encouraged them to destroy themselves, uh, with alcohol, with drugs, with, um, with, uh, illicit sex and stuff like that.

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Like I always say like, yeah, I thought I liked those people and I thought they liked me, but really we didn't like each other very much at all because we were not encouraging each other in the knowledge of the son of God.

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In fact, we were encouraging each other to rebel. And so that kind of unity, the kind of unity that Eric Mason thinks is so great from hip and he felt so convicted.

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That's worthless unity. It absolutely makes no difference. The fact that I had essentially a UN, uh, in my, uh, in my apartment when

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I lived in at the university of Maryland, that was worthless unity. The unity that matters is the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God.

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And ironically, these people that are calling for racial reconciliation, dividing the church, accusing the brethren, they're actually causing that except in an unintended way, because there are people with every skin color, every ethnicity that are fighting against this because they can see that it's destructive to the faith.

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And they have unity with me. Blacks have unity with me. Latinos, Asians, Pakistanis, Indians, all kinds of people have unity with me because we have one faith and we have unity in the knowledge of the son of God.