Response to Jim Wallis Pt3

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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We are in our program today, it is August the 26th, 2020.
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And if you are in our daily Bible reading with us, August the 26th is Acts chapter 25.
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So we encourage you to read that chapter, take an opportunity to observe, interpret, and apply the text as part of your daily devotion.
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Now we are going to jump right in with today's program because we have been going through a response to Jim Wallace.
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Jim Wallace is a minister, he is a theologian, and he was a former spiritual advisor to President Barack Obama.
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He has made some statements about Jesus, he has made some statements about Christians who support Donald Trump, and essentially said that if you support Donald Trump you are supporting a racist, a nationalist, and you are supporting Antichrist.
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In the last two days I have played his statements, I have responded to them, and today is the third day and I am not sure if we are going to finish up today or not.
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I am really going to try because I have other things that I would like to get to this week and honestly I think I have said about as much as needs to be said.
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We are three minutes into a six minute video and this video was put out by NowThis, NowThis is a website that puts out videos on social issues and Mr.
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Wallace was videotaped for NowThis and this is a six minute video, you can go to NowThis, you can look up Mr.
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Wallace, his name is Jim Wallace, and you can watch the whole video if you would like and compare it to what I am saying here, but I am going to be playing the audio, you will be able to hear what he says, and I am going to respond to it.
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So we are going to begin, as soon as I hit the start button, it is going to start at the beginning, but I am going to immediately pause it and jump to the three minute mark because that is where we left off in yesterday's program.
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To be a Christian is more...
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Alright, so jumping to three minutes, and here we go.
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The Black Lives Matter movement, shoulder to shoulder with his neighbors, especially those who are immigrants.
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That is where we left off yesterday, he said Jesus would have marched with the Black Lives Matter movement and I made the point that the Black Lives Matter movement isn't so much about the protection or the uplifting of black people, but is a Marxist organization that by its own statement, and I read some of its own statement yesterday, is unbiblical.
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It is opposed to the biblical understanding of the family, the biblical understanding of sexuality, it is not a movement that I believe that Christians should support.
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Should Christians support black people? Certainly.
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Should we love our neighbors? Absolutely.
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Should we be racist? Absolutely not.
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But should we support an organization like Black Lives Matter? No.
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That is why I say I can say black people matter, I can say I love black people, black people are made in the image of God, but I will not say Black Lives Matter because I am not going to support, even with the language, an organization which is ungodly and unbiblical.
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To say that Jesus would march with them is something that I would absolutely disagree with.
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But let's go on and hear what he says next.
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For refugees, Jesus would furiously defend our warming planet.
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Okay, right there, I have to stop.
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Jesus would furiously defend our warming planet.
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He's not saying it overtly, but implicitly in this statement he is saying that Jesus would agree with the argument that man is the cause of global warming.
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Global climate change and that the only way to deal with global climate change is through policies and bureaucracies and limitations on freedom that would ultimately destroy life and destroy business and destroy commerce and is doing so in many places.
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And this is a very common leftist argument and that is that anybody who denies man-made global warming is anti-science and is anti-truth.
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And yet at the same time, this is, that's not the case.
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There is certainly a lot to be questioned about the quote unquote climate science that is often used to argue for man-made global warming and so to say that Jesus would furiously defend our warming planet is to say without saying that Jesus would adopt a far left green policy and I don't think that that can be defended biblically because essentially what you're saying is that Jesus would blindly accept the argument of scientists with an agenda and I don't think that that's the case.
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But again, it goes to show you this is not an impartial man.
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This is not a man who's not coming from a side or with an agenda.
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He may consider himself to be without sides and consider himself to be a man who's just searching for truth but he's throwing out all the hallmarks.
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He's using the language of homophobia which we saw in the first time we listened.
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He's using the language of, he's talked about immigration, Jesus being a brown skinned Jew and now he's talking about global warming.
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All of these are hitting the major points of the left and so, and again he's already said if you, Donald Trump, he is the anti, well he didn't say Donald Trump's anti-Christ but he said that his positions are anti-Christ and white nationalism is anti-Christ and those different things.
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So we'll go ahead.
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Regardless of whether that activism was popular, Jesus would stop at nothing to combat the inhumane treatment of families at the border.
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It's time to reintroduce this Jesus to our American churches.
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Too many churches.
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See he's painting a picture of Jesus who is not the savior of mankind, not the one who came to take the wrath of God but one who was ultimately a liberation activist, a political left leaning activist and arguing about the children at the border.
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Again have there been things that have happened that were, has there been mistreatment? Yes but also there is, America is within her rights to have a sovereign border.
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It is within the right of the United States to have a law about who gets to come in and who does not and it is important that we understand that it wasn't too long ago that the people on the left were saying the same thing about the border.
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They were saying the border has to be protected.
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Even some of the most liberal of people, even some of our most liberal presidents have talked about the danger of having an open border and allowing for people to cross undocumented and the importance of documentation and this is certainly an issue that can be discussed with all of its parameters but ultimately to simply say the left is the only ones concerned about the families being separated at the border and the right doesn't care about those things, it's a disingenuous statement and again just listening to it I believe is very unfair but we'll continue.
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Primarily white churches in our nation excuse their silence by claiming they aren't political, that they don't have to weigh in on the extraordinary injustice we see all around us.
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You know what I have to say to that? Well before I hear what you have to say to it, I want to say something.
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When you say white churches excuse their silence by saying they are not political, we are told we cannot say things that are political.
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We should not say things that are political and this is what we hear from the white church from those in government that churches are to not endorse any type of political positions that churches are to stay neutral and I don't think churches can.
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I really don't think that it's possible that a church stay neutral on the issue of truth so I think his statement here is disingenuous.
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The problem he has is not that churches aren't making political statements, it's that they are not making political statements that he agrees with.
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We are making political statements.
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We are saying marriage is between one man and one woman.
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That's a political statement.
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We are saying abortion is wrong and that abortion should be abolished.
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That's a political statement.
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And we would say that the mistreatment of human beings in any way that is unjust is wrong.
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You see I've heard recently somebody say all you care about is abortion.
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You don't care about babies after they are born.
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That's hogwash.
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Because the groups that are out there doing the most in regard to establishing orphanages and creating places for children to be taken care of if they are without mother and father and the places that are establishing places for men and women to receive help, they're often Christian or at least religious places.
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I have two adopted children.
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I adopted my children not through the state, even though they were in foster care, they were in Jewish family services and there was Catholic family services and there was the Baptist Children's Home.
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There are these different groups and they all are religious organizations.
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Not all Christian mind you, but they all have a religious reasoning behind what they're doing.
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And so the idea that Christians only care about abortion, they don't care about children after they're born, that's garbage, it's a canard, it's not true.
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And so I just want to make that point.
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Enough.
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I do believe in the separation of church and state, but not the separation of values from our public life.
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Get the f**k out of my country.
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All you Arabs and Democrats.
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Go back where you came from.
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Jesus is...
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This is cutting in the video, it's cutting to other short videos.
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Again, now this edited this together and thankfully they bleeped out the bad language.
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And are there people out there that mistreat others? But see him, Wallace, saying that this is Christians doing this.
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He's not saying that, but that's the implication.
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Christians need to get it together.
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Because look at this person dropping the F-bomb.
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Look at this person saying that Muslims need to go back to where they came from.
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This is what's wrong with Christianity.
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What makes you think the woman dropping the F-bomb is a Christian? What makes you think the man telling the Muslims they need to go back to where they came from, that they're Christians? What makes you think that they represent the Christian right? That they represent conservative traditional biblical Christianity? They don't.
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And this is all, again, this is a red herring.
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Remember for asking very powerful questions like, Who is my neighbor? And what is truth? Often directly to politicians.
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The religious right has forgotten the heart of Jesus' message and its focus on two specific issues.
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Let me be clear.
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To be a Christian is more than your stance on abortion and same-sex marriage.
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This is what we talked about in week one because that's what they started with.
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This is where he leads into.
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He says Jesus spoke to politicians and he said, Who is my neighbor? And he spoke to politicians and he said, What is truth? Yes, but what was the heart of those messages? And we're going to see that the heart of Jesus' message, I think, is quite different than the heart of Jim Wallace's message.
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Stay in the closet.
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Make sure your closet is in another closet.
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To be a Christian is to fiercely defend your neighbor, including especially those who couldn't be more different than yourself.
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To be a Christian is to stand against white nationalism and the anti-Christ policies coming from the White House.
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Again, this attack, it's aimed at Donald Trump.
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It's aimed at the current administration.
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It is aimed at white nationalism, which he apparently sees as the greatest of all evils.
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And how he defines white nationalism apparently is that which Donald Trump is doing and seeing him as a supporter of white America, not all of America.
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And this, again, is his argument.
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And you can see who he's aiming at.
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And he goes on.
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No dancing around that fact.
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To defend the image of God in all circumstances is every Christian's calling.
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LGBTQ are all initials that stand for people who are beloved by God.
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All human life, whether at the border or in the womb, has dignity.
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Furthermore, women who have abortions are beloved by God.
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We have to go deeper in our thinking about how we protect the vulnerable.
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There are 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor.
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2,000.
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Jesus tells us that the most important people are the ones he called the least of these, even while they are the least important ones in our politics today.
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See, I have to stop right there.
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Because, well, a couple things that he has said.
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He's talked about the LGBTQ represents individuals.
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While that is true in a sense that those letters, there are people who identify with those letters, the movement and the idea of these letters identifying individuals is more than just, well, we need to love these people.
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Because we do need to love people who are homosexual.
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But how do you love them? Do you love them by affirming that their lifestyle is right and wholesome and good, even though their lifestyle, according to scripture, is opposed to God's will, is opposed to his desire for them, and will ultimately lead to them being separated from him, not only in this life, but in hell and the life to come, separated from his grace and mercy.
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You see, people like Wallace and I assume would say, I don't believe that.
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Homosexuality will not cause somebody to be separated from God.
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But yet, this is what the Bible says.
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The Bible clearly says that homosexuality, like all sin, separates us from God.
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And if we hold on to this sin and say, this sin defines who I am, then what we are saying is this sin that defines who I am is more important than the God who created me and is sovereign over my life and defines by his standard, not my standard.
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And then, of course, after mentioning the LGBTQ, I'm going to back up just a few seconds here.
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I want to go back to what he said.
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Yeah, he said the least of these.
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Jesus talks about the least of these.
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But what's the context of that verse? Jesus talks about the least of these, my brothers, that which you've done to the least of these, my brothers, you have done also to me.
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This is an important reality because he is automatically assuming that the least of these is referring to the minorities and those in the LGBTQ.
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That's who he's referring to.
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And that is making an assumption on the text, making an assumption of what Jesus is talking about.
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And it's a dangerous assumption because it's saying that Jesus is speaking of a certain group.
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And this group is the focus.
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And let me look at it right here.
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It's in Matthew chapter 25.
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He says, it refers to, Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it also to me.
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And then he says it again.
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That's chapter 25, verse 40.
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And then in chapter 25, verse 45, he says, then again, he will answer, Truly I say to you, those who have done it to the least of these, as you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me.
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This is in the context of giving food to the poor.
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I'll look it up.
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Let me see here real quick.
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This is, he says, this is beginning in verse 31.
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It says, When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.
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Before him will be gathered all the nations.
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He will separate people one from another.
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A shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
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The king will say to those on his right, Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
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For I was hungry, and you gave me food.
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I was thirsty, and you gave me drink.
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I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.
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I was naked, and you clothed me.
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I was sick, and you visited me.
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I was in prison, and you came to me.
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Then the righteous will answer and say, Lord, when did we do these things? When did we give you drink? When did we give you food? When did we welcome you? And when he said, the king will answer, Truly I say to you, as you did this to the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me.
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And so there is a context here that is simply, this does not simply refer to poor people in general or people in prison in general or anything like that.
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Even though I think, obviously, there can be a broader application made for that.
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This is referring to the church and how the church is to operate and how the church is to function.
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And the church does feed the poor.
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That is part of the mission of the church.
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And food pantries and food banks are often started by Christians.
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It's what they do.
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But again, turning this into a social justice statement about how we are to accept everyone with a blanket acceptance and there be no calling out of repentance, no calling to sin, because the context of this is judgment.
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At judgment, these things are going to be looked at.
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And at judgment, they're going to be righteous.
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And at judgment, there are going to be those who are on the left who are depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
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Why? Because they denied being good to the least of these.
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But again, the focus here is the least of these, my brethren.
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I do think that that part's often missed.
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I think this first and foremost is referring within the church.
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And I think that those who attack the church are going to find themselves in a dangerous place on judgment day.
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And I think that those who have loved God's church and have loved God's people and have supported God's people and these my brothers, I think that's going to be a very important part of that that is often missed, the my brethren portion.
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Okay, so we're to the end, but we are out of time.
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So I'm going to take one more day to deal with this.
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Tomorrow's episode may be short because we're only going to deal with the last few minutes.
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We're at five minutes and 28 seconds.
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We're going to finish up now.
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I'm going to finish out and I'll see you guys tomorrow.
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So thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.
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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6.30 a.m.
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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.
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May God bless you.