Theological Ordination Examination of Pastor Rob Kimsey

It is great to be with you all, great to see you. It's actually my first time in the building here at Laurel Bible Church, but I feel like we're greatly attached.

It's been a blessing to see Pastor Rob come and to serve you guys. I just thought, just to sort of kick us off this morning, maybe

I'll just first wanted to read from 1 Timothy chapter three, well -known passage about the qualifications for elders and deacons.

So let me read here the first 10 verses of 1 Timothy three. It says this, it is a trustworthy statement if any man aspires to the office of overseer is a fine work he desires to do.

An overseer then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money.

He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under the control with all dignity.

But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God and not a new convert so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.

He must have a good reputation with those outside the church so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

Deacons likewise must be of dignity and not double -tongued or addicted to much wine or fond of sort of gain, but holding to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.

These men also first must be tested, then let them serve as deacons if they are beyond reproach.

And I wanted to read there through verse 10 because of this line that says, in reference to deacons, these men must also first be tested.

The testing of deacons implication is that elders are also to be tested before they serve.

It's sort of a model of what we might be doing here today, just examining the new pastor of Laurel Bible Church and in his fitness for this capacity to serve as your pastor.

So we would, as a group of fellow elder pastors, want to examine him, test his theological acumen, his awareness of pastoral ministry, and then we'll lay hands on him and sort of ordain him tomorrow in the service as we install him and we'll pray at the end of service.

So excited to do that with you all tomorrow. But just as a bit of an introduction, my name is

Joe Schreibweis, pastor of Valley Bible Church. This morning, Kurt Spencer, one of our elders and former pastor, of course, you know elders are pastors, so fellow pastor alongside me at Valley Bible, next to him,

Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministry. I know that he's preached here before. Rich Schwartz of Billings Evangelical Bible Church as well here in Billings.

And then Seymour Heligar, Long Beach. He'll be preaching tomorrow at Grace Community Church of Long Beach.

He's the one who's been sort of grooming and training your pastor now. So thankful that he would come out and preach.

But with that, let me pray and we'll go from there. Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for this time.

We thank you for the opportunity just to think about your word, think about theology, think about how you've revealed yourself to us in the pages of scripture.

Lord, and also to think about the role of shepherds, overseers, pastors. And as we think of Pastor Rob coming to serve this church and to teach

God's word here and to faithfully shepherd the sheep. Lord, I pray that this morning that this would just be a time of where we examine and look into the truth that he's already known and studied and that it would just come freshly to his mind and he could share from the wealth of his studies in his time looking deeply into your word.

So Lord, I just pray you'd lead and guide this whole process. May it be edifying for each one here.

And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So just a little bit of a note about how we'll do this.

I'm gonna try my best to function as a moderator. I'll also ask questions, but the five of us will all ask questions.

Really, any question related to pastoral ministry or theology is fair game. I would like us to sort of move quickly so that we'd cover a lot of ground.

So brother, don't spend too long on any one particular question. Just kind of give us an overview of what you know.

We can always ask follow -up questions. And if I feel like we're getting bogged down, I might just start waving my hand.

And if I do that, that means land the plane and we'll move on to the next question, okay? So we've got two microphones it looks like.

I'm gonna ask Pastor Seymour if he'd actually lead us off and ask the first question. But brother, come on up and we'll swap places here.

Thank you for that disclaimer. I might be long -winded. Yeah, so I grew up Catholic.

I was raised as a Catholic, I guess you could say. Spent the majority of my adult life as an unbeliever.

Yeah, we were Christers. We went to Christmas and Easter service. I went to private

Catholic school eventually. I went to public school. We stopped attending church. And yeah,

I never knew the Lord. I grew up in a secular home. When I was 24, my father took his own life and I really hardened my heart against God and the idea of believing in the

Bible. And yeah, I lived that way for a long time. Just an angry atheist, hating

God, hating God's people. When I was 35, 10 years ago, the

Lord graciously saved me in a church at a Bible study. The pastor had challenged us to memorize three scripture verses.

I memorized those verses because I wanted to say them out loud. The next, you know, that he had kind of said, hey, make sure you know these verses.

I'm gonna call on someone. I memorized the verses because I had sort of a fantasy in my mind that he would call on me and just out of pride and just wanted to show even

I don't believe and I know this better than you. Just look how cool I am. Look how smart I am. And the

Lord used that just prideful, just really self -exalting attitude.

And over the course of that week, reading those three verses, I knew that those verses were not written by man.

I knew that God was speaking into my heart and it caused me to believe that his word was the truth.

I knew that I was a sinner. I knew I was going to hell. I just searched through the gospels.

Anything that the Lord said, any print in here that Jesus spoke,

I just listened to everything Jesus said and God graciously allowed me to believe in the gospel, to repent, to, yeah, to acknowledge the

Lordship of Christ in my life. And so it was a really a 180 paradigm shift for me as the

Lord saved me. It was sort of like, I remember making the statement, you know, the creator of the universe died for me.

Am I supposed to just now go back to work and worry about getting a 40 -hour work week and life is normal so that nothing's gonna be the same?

And yeah, immediately the Lord put, I think kind of an evangelistic desire in my heart and I just could not stop talking about the

Lord. With everyone I could just, coworker, family, friends, sphere of influence,

I just talked about Jesus and what had happened to me and it just never really went away.

And I think through the guidance of some of the elders at the church I had got saved at, they just kind of shaped that, directed that and then, yeah, things changed in my life.

This happened when I was an apprentice in the sheet metal worker program. I was in the end of that program, a five -year program.

It happened in the fourth year of that program and I just, you know, I went from kind of like a reprobate mind, you know, to where I just couldn't stop talking about the gospel.

I couldn't stop talking about God's word and I had a desire to share what I, what the Lord was doing to me, what the

Lord was teaching me, to tell others and to teach others. And although, you know,

I have fear of man issues, at that point especially, I'm afraid of public speaking, I just couldn't not talk about it to anyone that would listen.

And I think that was, I just had a desire to tell the truth and especially coming out of Roman Catholicism, seeing people on TV like Joel Osteen, you know, before I got saved,

I thought that was Christianity. And then once I got saved, it was like, these people are lying.

Like these people are lying to people and I just had a really strong desire to correct that, to call that out, to say what the truth was.

And then over time, this desire just grew and grew and grew. Yeah, I had actually approached the pastor at the church that I got saved to say,

I wanna be a missionary, I wanna go in the mission field. I can't go back to life as normal. I wanna go do something with, you know, with this faith.

I wanna tell the truth about the word of God. And that was the first time that someone had said, well, have you thought about pastoral ministry or the pastorate,

I think is the term they use. I didn't even know what they were talking about. I said, what's that? And yeah, and they said, well, that you would be a pastor.

And I was like, well, I don't, I just didn't, it didn't, I didn't understand what, you know, elders, deacons, what it meant to be a pastor according to what the

Bible teaches. Just the raw, this was in within probably the first two years of getting saved.

And then just thinking through that, praying through that, the idea of going to seminary, getting trained. So yeah, the

Lord saved me in 2013 and over two and a half, three years, that sort of desire grew and there was a leading and a directing towards seminary.

And the elders had a high admiration for Pastor John MacArthur, and it was recommended that if I was going to go to seminary,

I needed to go to a faithful Bible teaching seminary. And they directed me to go to the master's seminary.

And then over that time, you know, five years in seminary, the Lord helped me to shape what my understanding of the word of God was.

But yeah, just a strong desire. And just thinking about, there's a bug up here.

Just thinking about, you know, this call, I would just point us back to 1 Timothy 3 and how

Paul explains the office as he starts the conversation, or really the conversation about what it means to be a deacon or an elder.

It says, it's a trustworthy saying, if any man aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a good work.

So for me, the call in my life was this strong desire that I just could not,

I could not ignore. And I think over time, that was affirmed by other

Christian brothers and sisters. Yeah, so I would just point us to the first book of the

Bible, Genesis, and what the word says about our being created in God's likeness.

So we can go to chapter one, verses 26 and 27. Yeah, then

God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the skies of the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and God created man in his own image, and in the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.

So as image bearers, we are not in the likeness of God in terms of God is spirit, but we have dominion over what

God has created, we are made with a physical body, we have a soul or spirit, and we understand moral things, moral law, emotion.

So yeah, the makeup of our body, both physically and spiritually, we, you know, are image bearers in that way, that we have been made by God, and we are to rule over the creation that God has made.

Now, the second part of that was, what is the implication, or after the fall? Yeah, so there are certain attributes of God that we don't have, we are not omniscient, not omnipresent, omnipotent, but we can perceive truth, we have the ability to reason and logic, and so that would be the communicable attributes, that we can function with emotion, we have volition, we have will.

Now, after the fall, that was damaged to some extent as being finite creatures, and living in a fallen world, and being under the, really, sin of Adam, there is an idea, the noetic effect of sin, that as fallen man, there is some limitation to our understanding, because we are in a fallen world, and we're fallen.

So we can still reason and logic, we can think, we can understand truth, we can perceive truth, we can learn, we can grow, but there is some level of disconnect in the fallenness of our sin, where it's almost like a brain -damaged, sinful mind, something has occurred, where, you know, we think of the promise of glorification, where at some point, we will have right thinking, we will know without having any kind of veil of uncertainty in the truth.

Yeah, I think just some helpful passages for us to look at. I think we should go back to First Timothy, and thinking about what the pastor is called to do.

Of course, this is a pastoral letter written by the Apostle Paul to his ministry partner, the pastor of Ephesus.

Paul has some really, I think, maybe the right way to think about this is like a public versus private ministry.

In First Timothy, chapter four, verse 13, we see this, it says that, "'Until

I come, give attention to the public reading "'of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.'"

And so, I would say that is the public ministry of the pastor, he is called to the public reading of Scripture, and there's an implication here of teaching and preaching the word of God.

And so, I see this as the calling of the pastor, but, I mean, just thinking about that word, that you're a pastor, you're a shepherd, there's more to that, we just,

I think we could probably even think about what Peter says, and we could maybe look at First Peter five, that we're to shepherd the flock, that we're to give oversight to the flock.

Yeah, I mean, Paul tells Timothy to set a good example for others to follow in his conduct, his faithfulness, that he would be an imitator of Christ, and that the people that he has oversight over, that he's shepherding, that they would become imitators of Christ.

Yeah, in First Peter five, it says, in the context of giving in this instruction, he uses the word exhort, he says, in chapter five, verse one, therefore,

I exhort the elders among you as your fellow elder and witness of the sufferings, partaker also of the glory that is to be revealed.

He says, shepherd the flock among you, overseeing, not under compulsion, but willingly according to God, and not for dishonest gain.

So there's an aspect of that pastoral ministry and being a pastor, to preach the word of God, but to also shepherd

God's people. You know, I heard a wise pastor say that he does his best counseling from the pulpit and caring for God's people, to preach the word of God, to teach the truth, but then there's also that sort of more private, intimate, one -on -one discipleship, training, teaching, drawing the biblical principles of the word of God out and helping that person to see those principles and apply them to their life.

And so, yeah, I mean, probably another place we could look is even

Acts chapter 20. If we see, this is sort of the end of Paul's ministry in Ephesus, as he's giving a farewell to the elders in Ephesus.

And yeah, Acts 20, you just see this really, just amazing section where Paul is saying goodbye to them, but he's kind of also describing his ministry to them and the time that he spent with them, caring for them.

It's a long section, it starts in verse 13 of chapter 20. But even, yeah,

I mean, just a few areas, even in verse 27, he says, I didn't shrink from declaring the whole purpose of God.

He tells them, the other elders, as he's saying goodbye, he says, be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock among which the

Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the church of God. He purchased with his own blood.

So there's just such a deep care and love for God's people to shepherd them, to dedicate your life, to sacrificing your life for them, for their own good and their benefit, shepherding them, helping them.

And yeah, bringing it back to the word of God, there isn't one thing that he shrunk away from teaching them from the word of God.

Yeah, I would point to the faithfulness of the pastor to the word of God.

Definitely not looking at success in terms of, pragmatic issues or having a desire to have a large church.

So not numbers, not a large church, otherwise we can say a false teacher, a heretic, really like Joel Osteen or Andy Stanley have the biggest churches

I think in America. So that's not a success. Yeah, I went to a breakout session at the

Shepherds Conference and there was a brother named Alex Montoya and he was talking to a room full of pastors.

And he said, some of you guys have churches that are about 40, 50 people and you're praying for churches of like 500.

And he said, thank God that you don't have that because you can't handle that. You have the exact amount of people that God has allotted to you.

And we can even see that in 1 Peter 5 again. The Lord allots to a pastor the souls that he should care for.

So I think we could look at even 1 Thessalonians. I think is a good 1

Thessalonians. A book of course we connect with eschatology but it's actually a book that deals with ecclesiology.

And 1 Thessalonians chapter four, I'm sorry, chapter one, 1

Thessalonians chapter one verses six and seven. Paul says this, you also became imitators of us and of the

Lord. Having received the word in much affliction with the joy of the

Holy Spirit so that you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

I think that's a successful church when first the elders are imitating

Christ setting a good example. And then the believers, the members of this local congregation themselves are imitating

Christ. He says that they became imitators of us referring to Paul and his ministry partners.

So to imitate the disciples of Christ, to imitate apostles but the key is that you became imitators of the

Lord. They grew in their Christ likeness. It says they received the word even in suffering or affliction with joy in the

Holy Spirit. So to have a church that has small numbers but are very spiritually mature where you have congregants that are

Christ like in their daily living, have theological depth in the understanding of the word of God.

I think to have imitation of Christ and Christ likeness that should be the faithfulness that we see in congregants.

That should be the mark of a successful church. Yeah, you know,

I just want to stay in the scripture. And so if this is what Paul is telling Titus that he should be instilling in his congregants and the folks that are worshiping there.

Also just coming from the biblical principles out of Proverbs and what Solomon is saying. We can,

I don't want to put restrictions on the roles of women and how they are living in terms of contemporary life and thinking of the need to have a secular vocation outside of the home.

It seems pretty clear from the word of God that the prescription for a wife is to be in the home, to be working in the home.

Now, if there's a situation where financial need is arisen and the wife has to work outside the home,

I think that we need to stick to what the word of God says. And if the opportunity is there for the husband to provide for the family, that the wife would be at home and that she would care for the household.

And that might even be as we can kind of look at some hints in 31 that there maybe even is some business or trade going on.

So she can be working at home and also thinking of ways to bring supplemental income into her home to support her husband, to support the children.

And if there was that necessity in terms of having a certain amount of finances to hold a mortgage or hold a place of rent so they have a roof over their heads,

I think it would just need to be under the direction and headship of the husband so that the wife is not going and just kind of doing whatever she wants, that her husband is approving that, giving his approval, supporting her.

And so I would wanna have that be sort of an exceptional case and have a desire to teach that the husband would be the provider for the home and that the wife would serve in the home, taking care of that.

And like I said, maybe even bringing in some supplemental income, sort of there's opportunities for entrepreneur type of things.

But yeah, just that the house is the domain of the wife and she's taking care of business for her husband, yeah.

Yeah, the Lord has blessed me with a very godly woman. And what we see in 1

Peter, that the husband can be saved, the unbelieving husband can be saved by a wife who has pure conduct and faith, a husband who's disobedient to the word can be saved by his faithful wife's pure conduct, even without a word.

That's my life. The Lord used my wife to save me. And so she's just very strong in the word, spiritually mature, very wise.

And yeah, so to try to just encourage her continual spiritual growth, nurturing her, talking about the

Bible, talking about the word a lot, having a regular pattern of prayer and discipleship and just ongoing fellowship with, you know, it's my wife, but also my best friend and a dear sister in Christ.

And then, yeah, I mean, thinking about ministry and the wife of a pastor, she hasn't been called by God to pastor the church.

So, you know, I tried to make that clear with the Pastoral Search Committee when I came here, that my wife has no requirement to serve in any capacity or in any official role or an office.

She's my wife. She's a Christian woman. She's gonna wanna serve in ministry here at whatever congregation she's at.

But yeah, just, you know, encouraging her to serve, to set a good example for other women.

And in God's providence, he has used Laura to disciple and teach women.

And so, yeah, she's just got the gift of counseling and discipleship. And so I just, you know, in some way,

I just need to get out of the way and just help her, support her, pray for her. She's currently in the middle of getting trained as a certified counselor with ACBC.

Just a very godly woman. The congregation that we worshiped at prior to coming here,

Grace Community Church of Long Beach, she just met with several women, counseled them through difficult seasons of life, adversities and other things.

And she's continuing to do that here. Already the Lord has brought occasion for her to counsel and just to be a helper and set a good example for the other women, to teach the younger women to set a good example.

And so, yeah, I just encourage those spiritual gifts that the Lord has given to her and make, you know, it's sort of one of the, we live in a real world, we live in the fallen world, and it's kind of one of those things where the wife is gonna get a lot of flack for her husband.

The wife of the pastor is gonna get a lot of flack for what her husband is doing in the church.

And she's kind of like the first line of defense in a way where it's gonna get to her ear first probably before it gets to mine.

And, you know, just to encourage her that we're serving the

Lord Jesus Christ, he's the head of the church. And to just continue to live

Titus two out, to have faithful conduct, to do what she's called to do as a

Christian woman, which is to serve in the local church, to help others. Yeah, and just, you know, if those things happen, then

I'll hear about it, we'll pray about it, we'll go to God's word, we'll read the Bible, and we'll move on and tomorrow's a new day.

But yeah, just trying to protect her from having any kind of incorrect or wrong implied expectation that she's supposed to do something because she's the pastor's wife.

I would wanna try to make sure that doesn't happen. And it's the fact that just in political cities, in rural cities and the outlying cities, you started in the midst of all that to make sure that, making sure that she's counseled to share a little bit about full sin, full sexual revolution, leading to that second.

What boundaries are you and many counselors moving on?

Yeah, no, that's great. But, well, I mean, we live in an age that even 10 or 20 years ago, it's almost unrecognizable in terms of just even in the last, you know, decade,

I guess decade or more, and the Supreme Court acknowledging same -sex marriage and some of those things.

Yeah, what we would, I don't know what we're thinking of when we're talking about the sexual revolution, but there is a broad acceptance of immorality in society.

And, you know, even the government made up of unbelievers are declaring what is moral for society to live by.

And so that's a reality that's gonna touch the church in multiple ways. And we can even think about what

California is like, just the broad acceptance of sin.

And, you know, there were men that said when that happened, that it's gonna be where a person that's practicing an immoral lifestyle.

And we can think of just rampant fornication where people are living together without being married as if there's no moral law to live by, the redefining of marriage.

So we can think about adultery, fornication in that way, but even the sort of just pervasive lifestyle of homosexuality that is being pushed on our kids today, what is going on in the world, it kind of has transitioned from that the acceptance of that sin in society is a right that is being fought for.

And then it's sort of is almost now is if you're not participating in it, you're immoral, or you're the bigot for not doing that.

And we can see that with the transgender movement, where a person is a biological male, they have an operation or they don't.

And the LGBTQ community is saying that if you are not willing to have a relationship with that person, then you yourself are a bigot because that's not a man, that's a woman.

So yeah, I mean, this is something that we deal with in life, it's just part of our lives now.

This is not something that is just happening in California. I mean, society has transitioned to a point where you have sort of a softness from the pulpit that is unwilling to really come down hard on this sin, and almost indirectly affirm a sinful lifestyle to the point that, you know, in our society, we have allowed men who are practicing a sexual fetish to perform that fetish in front of children.

When you have a drag queen story hour, this is a cross dresser.

The term I grew up with, the person was called a transvestite, this is a male cross dressing, performing a sexual fetish in front of children, and it's applauded, it's applauded.

This is good, we should go attend this, we want to promote this. And just kind of transitioning to the counseling topic,

I think the reason, I guess one more comment there, the reason that we are dealing with this problem,

I don't think it's just that we are seeing this change in society, of course, this is a spiritual issue, but I think the problem is is that we have men in the pulpit who are afraid to call sin sin, who are affirming this activity.

When we have a gospel event at the zoo, and we're inviting like -minded pastors to come and engage in the public reading of scripture, to engage in prayer, to engage in corporate worship through the singing of songs, to engage in proclaiming the gospel in a public setting, and the reason that they're not participating is because that could be offensive to that community of the

LGBTQ. There is a gross misunderstanding of sin.

It's almost like we don't believe in the doctrine of hell. How could you not want to preach the gospel?

And how could you find that offensive to preach the gospel to people that are in open rebellion to God, who the word of God declares are going to be thrown into the lake of fire, but you don't want to proclaim the gospel because it could be offensive to that person?

The person is dead. They're dying. It would be like walking by a person's house, and the house is on fire, and saying, well, that's their choice.

It's like, wouldn't you want to do everything to say the judgment of God is coming? Turn away from your sin.

I heard a sermon recently where the person said that tax collectors and sinners are the

LGBTQ of today, and they were referencing the marriage ceremony that Jesus attended where he performed his first sign miracle, turning water into wine, and the person is in the pulpit saying this, that Christians today are like the

Pharisees then, accusing Jesus and his disciples. Why does your rabbi sit with tax collectors and sinners, and the person is making this proposition that we should be eating and drinking and having fellowship with the

LGBTQ community, openly, openly, and what does

Jesus say? The doctor doesn't come to heal a person who isn't sick. The physician heals the person that is sick.

He says, I came to call sinners. He wasn't having fellowship with them.

He was calling those that would listen to repentance, to faith in the gospel.

We should do the same. We would do well to just follow the pattern or example that Christ has given us to follow, you know, even in the context of false teachers and Jude, to snatch some out of the fire.

We are called to proclaim the judgment of God, but also the forgiveness of sins in God's grace by believing in Jesus.

So the reason that we're having drag queen story hour isn't because of the society in Billings and Laurel.

It's because of the men in the pulpit in Billings and Laurel over many years, not preaching the truth.

It's an abomination before the Lord. So if we're not looking at a sin like that, and we're not preaching that it is an abomination for the

Lord, you're saying, well, that's unloving. Well, if you're not calling that sin an abomination, then you're not being as loving as God.

We have to tell the truth. We have to call sinners to repentance and to believe in the gospel.

Sounds a little bit of a rabbit trail. But yeah, thinking about counseling and how to have good boundaries in place, even in normal communication outside of counseling, when we're texting to try to limit that or to even include another person on the text when we're emailing, to include,

I've tried to get in the habit of doing emails and I'll include some of the deacons on those emails. I've had a few of them ask me like, oh, what about this and what about that?

And I'm like, no, no, you were just CC'd on it. You don't have to do anything. I just wanted you to make sure you're in the loop.

In the context of counseling, a good practice is that I'm just not gonna meet with a woman one -on -one.

There's gonna be somebody that's gonna sit in on that meeting. Even trying to avoid a one -on -one conversation with a woman outside of the congregation to just include another person to make sure that they know that that conversation is happening.

So this example has happened since I've been here where another church was having their children's director, a woman, contact me about an issue.

I reached out to the elders and was wanting to talk to them and just make sure I was okay to talk to her.

Yeah, and then when an issue comes up with a female congregant, whether it's a regular attendee, a visitor, and they're needing discipleship and counseling, then

I'm gonna have someone sit in on that meeting. Right now, being the sole elder, I would normally have another elder sit in on that meeting.

Now, there could be a situation where I would ask one of the deacons to sit in on that meeting.

In a more recent situation, I asked my wife to sit in on the meeting. So we had a meeting with someone that needs help, that's looking to get some counseling on a certain issue, and yeah,

I invited her to the church building, set an appointment, asked my wife to attend as sort of just an observer, but also thinking of how, you know, if the

Lord would have Laura serve in that way to help this particular woman through a period of counseling and picking a good godly resource, coming up with a preliminary discipleship plan for her.

Praise God that this person is gonna be, wants counsel, wants counsel, has filled out a

PDI form, a personal data inventory, wants to go through a good resource, wants to commit time, and so Laura is gonna be taking that on and counseling the person.

Yeah, so just not meeting alone is a good practice. Amen. With a society that's so into relativism and experience to regulate what they consider to be an external evidence, would you be able to prove that the

Old Testament? Yeah, I mean, you can think about external evidences, and we have to, you know, probably point to archeological data.

What do we have a record of? Is this a book that was, in my foolishness as an unbeliever,

I used to say the Bible was written in the 1200s or that King James rewrote the

Bible, and there's not even proof that Jesus exists. Of course, just a statement of ignorance, but understanding that the scrolls from the

Old Testament exist in antiquity, that we have copies of these things really going back to the beginning of time.

As soon as they could essentially write alphabet, they were recording exchanges with Yahweh.

The writing of the Old Testament, even going back to the first five books, about 1446 BC, later copies of that being discovered with the

Qumran scrolls or the Dead Sea Scrolls, that we have external evidences that these things exist in antiquity.

These are not a new fabrication. Yeah, and I would probably point to,

I mean, there's so many archeological discoveries too in different writings or scripts that then have the name of kings or the name of individuals that are in the narrative of the

Old Testament, so we can point back to this clay tablet or this rock or these things with inscriptions that show that the historicity of the

Bible is accurate, so we can look back on history and look at the facts of history. But even the,

I think I would point to the preservation, if we're staying in the external evidence, the preservation of God's word, so that we can read biblical

Hebrew and we can understand that what we have now in the

Old Testament is what they had then, that even through multiple translations or really just copies being made, that there was a preservation of the word that still exists today, where we can look at this scroll that was dated all these hundreds of years

BC and it matches exactly what we have today, that the Lord preserved his word.

So archeological finds, external evidence is like that. The New Testament, we have much more because we're just closer to our history, so you have things in the scriptures.

Luke's a good example where he's giving specific dates. Who was the

Caesar ruling? We can look at Pontius Pilate and he was this governor and he's ruling this area and then he was under Tiberius Caesar and there's those dates.

Well, those things exist in antiquity. They exist in the real world, historical facts and data and the claims that are made in the

Bible, you can match up to the facts of history and you can see, wow, there really was a

Tiberius Caesar. Wow, there really was a Pontius Pilate. They actually reigned at the time that Luke said they did. I mean, yeah, the external evidence, we have to go archeological data finds.

Now, there's other elements too where you have New Testament writings in general in the tens of thousands, tens of thousands.

I think the Gospels alone are 5 ,000 to 6 ,000, just the Gospels and you get a guy like,

I believe it's Socrates. His writings from antiquity survive today and they're in the double digit.

I think it's about 20. So you're thinking like, well, this is the greatest philosopher that we know in contemporary times.

You think of like this wise Socrates, 20, and then you look at the Gospels, almost 6 ,000.

There was a preservation. Something is happening in human history that has changed everything.

I would even point someone to the way that we date everything. A national

Israelite 2 ,000 years ago in a dump in the middle of the desert in Nazareth out of Galilee changed human history.

I mean, it's BC, it's AD, before Christ, after death. So those are some external evidences, but the internal evidence is just the claims that the

Bible makes about itself. The word is inspired, it's breathed out by God.

The Bible isn't written by man, but men who were moved along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

So the claims that the Bible makes about itself, yeah, 2 Peter, even the sufficiency of scripture, 1

Peter 1, and the idea that the word is sufficient for all things, everything pertaining to life.

Yeah, I mean, there's just so many claims. The Bible makes about itself that the word of God is breathed out by God.

And so, yeah, I would point people to the passages on inerrancy, Peter, sufficiency,

Peter, Paul's writing it to Timothy, 2 Timothy 3, and just look at the claims that it makes about itself.

And ultimately, the strongest claim is that what the Gospel of John says about Jesus Christ, that the word existed from the beginning, that the word was with God, that the word is

God. Jesus is the living word of God. And what the Bible says about the word of God and what it says about Jesus Christ.

You know, even thinking of the Gospel of John later, you can look at the high priestly prayer.

So I would point someone to the external realities. You know, we have church historians, they're not saved, but through history, of course,

Josephus mentions the cult of Christians, he calls them donkeys, Tacitus, Suetonius, you have

Pliny the Younger writing letters about whether he should execute certain Christians. The historicity of the resurrection is hard to ignore with that, because we have a document that exists from antiquity where a governor,

Pliny the Younger, is writing to another person with more authority, saying, how should I kill these

Christians? Are you killing them? Oh, you're killing them this way? Maybe I should kill them, should I kill them? And he's writing a letter to get advice on how to execute

Christians, because they're part of this Christian cult. So the early church believes so strongly in the resurrection that they were willing to die over it.

So that's one document we can point to. And many of these men, they're not

Christians. So the external evidence is strong for the resurrection of Christ, that he lived, that he really did live, he really did die on a cross, and he really did rise from the dead three days later.

Multiple sources, usually describing Christ and his followers in a denigrating way, that they're, like with Josephus, they're donkeys, they're these cultists, the ones that believe in this

Christos, he's named. They believe so strongly they're willing to die over it.

And these aren't historical writers that are they themselves Christians promoting Christianity.

They're taking a swipe at Christianity. And there it is in antiquity, that 2 ,000 years ago,

Jesus of Nazareth lived. He lived, he died, and he rose again. And then yeah, just the sufficiency, inerrancy, and truth claims of the

Bible about itself would be the internal. All right,

I made some notes there. That was a good question. Well yeah, regeneration, the washing of the

Holy Spirit as a person is dead in their sins. We can look at probably a few passages.

Without going there, I'll just kind of quote Ephesians 2, the first few verses there, that you were dead in your transgressions.

There's no hope of salvation for the sinner. They are dead. They cannot clean themselves.

Absolute walking dead corpse, unregenerate dead. I'd actually think of Titus, yeah,

I think it's Titus. Let me see here. Yeah, Titus chapter three. And I think this is a good explanation of regeneration, what it means to be cleaned by God.

Yeah, it says even in chapter three, starting in verse three that, and this is the description of the unbeliever, that we ourselves,

Paul talking about himself and other ministry partners, that they were in unbelief.

It says we also were foolish, disobedient, deceived. The person is deceived. They're enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice, envy, despicable, hating one another.

And this is an act of God. It says, but when the kindness and affection of God, our

Savior, appeared, he saved us. So the regeneration isn't that a person does this.

I think we could maybe just talk about that decisional aspect. The person is not gonna be able to make a decision to save themselves.

There's no decisional regeneration, if I'm taking that, that your meaning is that.

It says, when the kindness and affection of God, our Savior, appeared, he saved us, not by works, which we did in righteousness, but according to his mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the

Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ, our

Savior, so that having been justified by his grace, we would become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

I mean, even thinking about regeneration, this comes from heaven, it comes from God. We can maybe even think of John chapter three, without going there, just thinking about the exchange of Christ with Nicodemus.

It says, how can I be born again? How can a man go back into the womb and be born again? And Jesus tells him, you can no more be born again than you could control the wind.

The wind goes where it goes. You have no control over that. The Holy Spirit must come. You know, the regeneration, the being born again, isn't something that Nicodemus can do for himself.

Jesus says, you have to be born again, and that comes from heaven, and pointing even to this idea that the

Holy Spirit is like the wind. We don't know where the wind goes, and we don't know where the spirit goes, but at a proper time, according to God's ordained plan for that individual, they will be saved exactly when

God wants them to be saved. And so we're regenerated. Instead of being dead in our transgressions, we're made alive by Christ, and it's that time of belief, the exact moment of belief that you are indwelled with the

Holy Spirit. I think we could, without going there, go to Ephesians, I think it's 1 .13.

It talks about being sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit. When you believed, you were sealed with the promise of the

Holy Spirit. So, you know, baptismal regeneration is just really not biblical.

You're not saved because you get baptized. You're not regenerated in Christ when you get baptized.

Even thinking about this question, you know, a person could say, well, in Acts, it says that when they were listening to Peter preach, it's

Acts chapter two, and he's preaching, and it says it pierced their hearts when he called them out. He said, the one that you killed, that Jesus whom you killed,

God raised him from the dead. He is the Messiah, the one you killed. And it says they were pierced in their hearts.

So pierced, they just cried to him, brothers, men, what should we do?

And he tells them, repent and be baptized. And so the question could be asked, well, why are they being baptized if the disciples were baptized by John the

Baptist? Why would they need to be rebaptized? And it says right there that to receive the

Holy Spirit, repent and be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit. So don't you have to be baptized to receive the Holy Spirit?

And so I'm just trying to help this person to see that we're looking at an element in historical narrative that is describing the founding of the church where Jesus sends the apostles out.

He really validates their ministry by giving them the ability to perform signs and wonders as he did.

This person is an apostle because they're doing these signs and wonders. So we're not receiving the

Holy Spirit to then perform miraculous healings and cast out demons and speak in tongues and all these things that we see in the early church.

Paul says those things will cease. Those will fall away. So the right way to think about that is what

Paul says about the Holy Spirit, that you receive it when you believe. When you believe, you were sealed with the promise of the

Holy Spirit. Why would a person need to be baptized if they were already baptized by John the Baptist?

Because Christ hadn't died yet. They needed to be rebaptized into that public proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ because it's a command that he gave.

You're talking to Peter who very recently heard and saw the resurrected

Lord. Before he ascended, give them a command. Make disciples.

Go and baptize them. Teach them to observe all that I've commanded. So if a person is now responding to the preaching, what's the first thing

Peter says? Be baptized. Well, why does he say that? Because Jesus told him to say that.

Baptize new believers. Baptize them into God the Father, God the Son, God the

Holy Spirit. Baptize them. The disciples would have, the people that were there listening to him preach, they would have had to be baptized again because the resurrected

Christ before his ascension commanded that they would be baptized again into a proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, that we believe in the lordship of Jesus Christ.

I'm attaching myself. I believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He is my

Lord. And so we're gonna be baptized. So we're not regenerated in baptism.

We're regenerated by the Holy Spirit at the time we believe. So I think I got regeneration, baptismal.

Yeah, and then faith versus repentance. I may be kind of segwaying out of the decisional element. We can think about it in probably a couple ways.

Yeah, and I think, did you say the order salutis as well? Yeah. Okay. Okay, so this one we're gonna turn to the scriptures.

So I have in front of me, this is just Romans chapter eight. Just a term in Calvinistic theology, the order of salvation.

And so I don't think the word regeneration is actually used, but if we look at Romans chapter eight,

I think it's 30 and 32, or through 32 rather. Let's see here. No, it's 29 and 30.

Yeah, because those he foreknew, he also predestined. So we see the first element would be predestination or calling, that God called them.

It says that he predestined, he foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son so that he would be the firstborn among many.

And here's verse 30, whom he predestined, he also called. Now, the next calling, so you have something happening here.

So he predestined, he called, and then you have really that calling is the regeneration.

You've been regenerated, he's called you. The next thing that he says is he also justified.

But I think after that calling, we would then have to put in their faith and repentance. And I would put it in that order, that he predestined us, he called us.

Now, in between the calling and the justification, something happened, we were regenerated in the spirit.

After being regenerated, we had the faith to believe, the free gift of God's grace, to have faith in the name of Christ.

And then repentance follows faith. So you're regenerated in the spirit, you're given that aspect of the

Holy Spirit, being saved, being clean, and then the free gift of God's grace, not that you earned it, you can't do anything about it, it's a free gift given to you, and then you have faith, the faith to believe, the faith that God gives you, and really the gift of repentance.

You can't really have repentance and return to God if you don't believe in God. You have to believe in God.

Who is, what are you returning to? What are you changing your mind about? So there's the regeneration, the faith, the repentance.

So I would put faith and repentance in that order after the calling. And it says then he also justified.

And in between justified and glorified, I would put sanctification and perseverance. If you think about positional or sanctification, that you're justified once and for all.

But there's also that progressive element of being continually built up in Christ, that you're not gonna start, you're not gonna finish the way you started.

Yeah, so yeah, true faith is not possible without true repentance.

True repentance is demonstrated by true faith, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's sort of, since we're already in Romans, we're just gonna stay in,

I mean, really this whole letter, there's so many things that Paul touches, but if we had to give it a one sentence nutshell, it's really faith, justification by faith in Christ alone.

I'll just say, we have so many examples of how that happens. I think really even starting in three, chapter three, going chapter four, chapter five, just a long segment treatise on justification.

Yeah, it's a work of God that he justifies us. This has nothing to do with us.

It's not possible for us. We are justified by God through faith in his son,

Jesus. Paul has so much to say here. He gives the example of Abraham, David's faith, counted to righteousness.

He's quoting in chapter four, Genesis 15, six, that Abraham believed, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

He was justified by God with faith. He believed

God. It was counted as righteousness to him. So justification is a thing that God does to people outside of their, it's not possible for them to be, you can't justify yourself before God.

So the doctrine of justification is this righteousness that is put on you by God, where he changes your nature, your affections, your will.

Yeah, I mean, so much to say here. We can even look at chapter five and the results of justification.

I mean, just look at five one. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. We could stop there. We're justified by faith in Jesus Christ.

It's a work of God. We have peace with God. We've been justified by our faith.

It says, through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

I mean, this isn't a section where he's talking about the results of justification by faith.

You know, Romans 5, 6, for while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, for one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man, someone would dare die, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners,

Christ died for us. It says, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him.

We're reconciled to God because of faith in Christ. Outside of works, there's no works here.

There's no contribution. So this faith comes from God as a gift of his grace.

I mean, even what he's talking about in chapter three, that no one is good. There's none righteous.

He makes this clear. No, this wasn't because you were doing well. There's none righteous, not even one.

There's no one who understands. There's no one who seeks after God. All have turned aside. Together, they have become worthless.

There is none who does good. There is not even one. You know, the idea that we are, we're dead, for all have sinned, all have sinned.

323, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. I love what he says in verse six, chapter six at the end.

Coming off of this really like three, four, five, and six, for the, 623, for the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our

Lord. That's the doctrine of justification. You're saved alone by faith in Christ alone as a free gift of God's grace.

He causes you to be justified. So that's the doctrine. I wanna ask if you're understanding lordship, salvation, and priesthood of believers.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I mean, let's think about what it means to have lordship salvation.

I'm just gonna stay right here in the scriptures. We could look at, I mean, I'm in Romans. Let's look at Romans 10, nine and 10.

That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So we can think about, well, is it possible for you to believe that Jesus is

Lord, but not to submit to his lordship over your life? Well, James says,

I believe in chapter two. Yeah, chapter two,

I think verse 19, he says that you do well to believe, even the demons believe. They're not saved.

We can look at Luke chapter six or Matthew chapter seven. I think Luke six is a good one.

They're gonna come to me. Lord, Lord. He says, why do you call me

Lord and you don't do what I command? So it's impossible to be saved if you don't submit that Jesus is the

Lord over your life. You follow his commandments. Those that are called by God will listen to the apostles.

The way you know it's God's elect is they do what the apostles teach. There's no way to be saved without Jesus as your

Lord. Yeah, and I mean, just thinking of like a priesthood of believers is the, yeah,

I mean, we're called a kingdom of priests. You can even think of going back to the question about being image bearers and what it means for us on this side of the cross, that we're called to be ambassadors for Christ.

We're not of the Levitical order. We're not of a priestly order, but we're regenerated sinners, redeemed by the grace of God with a calling.

We've been separated out of the world to proclaim the truth of the gospel to fallen people that they would be saved.

So we are under our great king who is the high priest. And yeah, we are to go.

And so this idea that we're, you know, you're a kingdom of priests on earth, that we're fulfilling the command of our master, who is the high priest.

And we have been called out of the world for the purpose of serving Christ and being ambassadors while we are still here on earth to not bring in the kingdom, the

Lord is gonna do that, but that many would be saved by our testimony of the truth of the gospel.

Yeah, so that's, I don't know if I would answer it that way. Separation of those essential, excessive, push for obedience or obey the law of God.

So as a pastor, how do you think of showing that these rich and glorious indicatives in each stirs affection?

So as a pastor, how do you shape the mind always to see that?

Yeah, I think I would wanna, you know, just make sure that the person understands that following a command is just that it's commanded by our

Lord. And so when we see these imperative commands in the scripture, they're not to be taken lightly, not to be taken lightly, but also wanting to,

I would not want to develop in any congregant the idea that they have some kind of a, like a performative or,

I wouldn't want them to become legalistic in any way. They have been redeemed by the blood of Christ forever.

They will not perish. I guess while we're still here in Romans, I would just remind them even as Paul is having a discussion in this part of the letter at the end of seven where he's talking about the nature of the flesh and the battle of the spirit and how those two are at contrast.

He says, the things I want to do, the things I know I should be doing, I don't do. Things I hate,

I know I shouldn't be doing, I do. He says, I'm a sinner. But he reminds them as he segues in, he says, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our

Lord. He even says, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death, struggling with living out the commands that he knows.

And he says, praise God. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So he says, then on the one hand,

I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other with my flesh, the law of sin. And he gives them this reminder.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.

So just to make sure that the person understands, they can't lose their salvation because they didn't perfectly follow the commands in scripture.

Yeah, I mean, how to shepherd that and increase in a person's life to live, to have a genuine zeal for God's holiness, to have a pursuit of godliness living by the commands of scripture.

I mean, pointing them back to the gospel, pointing them back to what Jesus Christ did for them in their salvation.

I think a letter that we could look to is Ephesians. I mean, this letter so helpful for our life in Christ, what it means to live as a

Christian. The first three chapters are really these amazing truth statements.

This would be the indicative section. I mean, just the first three chapters. I mean, even thinking about how he was how he starts chapter two, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience among whom we all also formally conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

What an amazing indictment. We are dead in our transgressions, but these wonderful truths that Paul is pointing them back to the gospel, pointing them back to what

Jesus, what God did for them. But God being rich in mercy because of his great love, which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, by grace you have been saved and raised us up with him.

And amazing, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, amazing.

It says in the ages to come, he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Take that indicative truth statement, the reality of our salvation and what God has done for us in his rich mercy.

And then you think about even chapter four, having unity in the spirit, not living the way you used to live.

You know, chapter four, 22 through 24, to put on the new man, to put off the old self, to not live the way you used to live, to lay aside, verse 22, in reference to your former conduct, the old man, it's being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind and to put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

You can't live that out if you skip chapter three, we have to go, chapter two, we have to go back to what the truth is in our salvation, in the gospel of our grace, that we are different, we are changed, that Christ came, he's changed us, he gives us new affections, new heart affections.

I mean, even thinking of a more practical example, like a biblical conflict, personality conflicts in the church, reconciliation, you know, think of verse 32 in chapter four.

What does he say? He says, let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you along with all malice.

This is the conduct of the old self. That's how you used to be when you weren't in Christ.

You're still struggling with these things. The old self is manifesting here, and he's writing to believers, but he says instead, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, graciously forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has graciously forgiven you.

So to help a person see, to live by the commands, these imperatives, really four, five, and six are the imperatives, chapter one, two, and three are the indicative truth statements.

They can't ever be divorced. We live out these imperative commands based on the truth of our

Lord's sacrifice for us. Yeah, I think

I would say that. Amen. I would say, you know, we folks from, I would say it's a rarity to give names to someone like that.

And we're not going to speak of various faults. Can you say that again?

Monogamous. Monogamous, okay. The only thing I want you to speak to that these heresies are monogamous is in regards to Jesus being a created being, and then also the other term, protocos, in regards to firstborn.

Yeah, I mean, this is really just going back to the early church, a new heresy that's just been recycled.

Going back even to, I think it'd be Arius, that Jesus is a created being.

Having to go back to the historic, even early church, very early church councils on this, where they have to come out and proclaim the deity of Christ, his eternality.

Not just his deity, but his humanity as well. That he was not a created being, that he existed from the beginning.

So we would just, I would just look at proof passages, such as the idea that he's the only begotten son,

John three. Yeah, that he existed in eternity past.

And so this, what is actually being communicated in the passage, so if they're pointing to a specific passage to try to say, oh, here, look at this, this is,

I have evidence now that he was born. That's not the context.

Only begotten son, the idea of a divine love and affection from the father to the son, existing in eternity past.

The context here is not talking about how Jesus was born. So I would try to get the context back.

We're talking about being born again in the Holy Spirit. So you even think about John and how he may be using specific language.

He just got done taught in this exchange between Nicodemus and Jesus, being born again. The one that is the born of God.

So he may be using this terminology here. I don't think this is a proof passage to say that Jesus was born.

Yeah, I mean, just thinking about, I mean, just so many passages. You think of it even in the beginning of this letter, that the word was with God from the beginning.

The word in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

This section, chapter three, we could even look at Colossians, how that Jesus created everything.

We have to look at proof passages, and I just have to point them to the scriptures, and say you have a proof passage here that it says he was existing in the beginning with God, and he has a quality with God.

All things came into being through him, and apart from him, nothing came into being. That has come into being.

This is the eyewitness testimony of one of the apostles, and a historical figure that we can point back to.

This is a real statement. Eyewitness testimony of truth claim in the word of God.

So if they're pointing to specific passages, and using those passages out of context to try to prove that he was a created being,

I would point them to other passages that clearly demonstrate that he's not a created being, that he existed in eternity past.

So yeah, you could look at John. Yeah, let's look at Colossians. He created everything.

He's the creator. Nothing came into being outside of him. All things were made by Christ.

The language that Paul uses, that he's, the idea that he was born, and I know that some of the

Mormon doctrine in terms of that there was a God, the Father, and there was sort of like a, even like a

God, the Mother, and there was a physical union of the two, and that Christ was born out of this union.

You know, Jehovah Witnesses sort of claiming that he didn't exist in eternity past, that he's a created angel, and that Jesus is on earth.

Essentially, he's Jesus while he's here, but when he's in heaven, he's Michael the archangel. Just taking some of those statements and then matching them up to what the

Bible says. Yeah, and if we look at supporting scripture in its correct context, he can't be a being that was made.

It says he is the image of the invisible God. So he is

God the spirit. I mean, these statements in Colossians 1, starting in verse 15,

Jesus Christ, and I would also point this back to the gospel, because in Paul's comments here about Jesus being the creator, they're not divorced from the scripture's proclamation of the gospel.

What did God do for us? God the Father is who Paul is talking about. He rescued us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the son of his love, in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins.

And in that context of the gospel, who is the image of the invisible

God? It's Jesus, the firstborn of all creation. So if they're pointing to this passage saying, oh, see here, it says he's the firstborn.

No, it says that he's the image of the invisible God in his earthly ministry, in his incarnation, a visible expression of the invisible.

In him, all things were created, both in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers, authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

And it's like, you're gonna point out this verse 15, just read two more verses, and he is before all things.

He's before all things. So he's not a created being, he's not a physical, he's not the result of a union, a physical union between God the

Father and a mother God. No, he existed before all things, in eternity past.

He's the creator of the universe. And so, yeah, I would just want to point them to what the gospels claim about Jesus, to what the other

New Testament scriptures claim about Jesus, and just point to what the

Bible says about itself. We have to read it in context, and when we do read it in context, we take away the argument that they're making, and then the gospels, compared to the epistles, are never in contradiction to one another.

This is the analogy of faith principle, that scripture is to interpret scripture.

Let's let scripture speak about it. Let's see what the gospel says. Does it match up with what Paul says? And no element of scripture, no interpretation of scripture can be, really, scripture can't be interpreted in a way that it is in conflict with what is clearly taught elsewhere in scripture.

So if we stay in the context, we stay with the biblical writers and their authorial intention, we can see very clearly that the

Bible claims that Jesus existed in eternity past, and he's not a created being. And so this would be, yeah, really the council of Nicaea, the deity of Christ, and the later councils all just continue to affirm that.

So the first, you know, Nicene creed, really, and then all the additional ones that come after are just reaffirming, reaffirming deity, and then, of course, later we get into the trinity, co -equal with God the

Father. I'm doing great.

In the case of the gospel of the one and only

Son, or only unique Son, ESV, I read it says only Son, what is the significance of those decisions?

If you are a unique Son.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I would, I would just, you know, kind of the acronym

KISS, keep it simple, stupid. I would look in a Greek lexicon, and whatever that meaning was, I would try to land on that.

And I'm trusting here that LSB guys did that, and they probably looked at other supporting scriptures.

So if the original Greek is saying that he's a begotten, then that's the language that was being used in Greek culture in the

Hellenistic age, in the time of this writing, then I would use that. As you're asking that question, and I'm hearing the only unique, so is

NASB unique? No, what was the unique? NASB, LSB are only

God. Okay, yeah.

No, I don't have a problem with that. I think if it's conveying the significance and the truth that Jesus is the only

Son of God, I think that's where we just need to, what is the, you know, John was a real person.

He was moved along by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. What is he trying to convey here?

There isn't another Son. There's only one Son. It's Jesus of Nazareth.

This person, Jesus of Nazareth, is the Son of God. And so that is,

I would wanna just focus on, like, what was the intention? What was he trying to communicate? There's no other

Son. There isn't a second -choice Messiah. Like, well, if this doesn't work out, we got plan B Christ.

It's just Jesus. He's the only special Son of God. And even thinking what

John is writing to in a more evangelistic gospel meant to be delivered to Jews, the idea that the

Son and the Father are equal with each other would have been well understood in Hebrew culture of the time in the context.

So by saying these words, he's saying that Jesus is God. The God the

Father has God the Son, and they're equal with each other. Jesus is God.

So just trying to think of what is John trying to communicate. But yeah, if we have evidence that in this time of writing, they had an implied meaning, then that's what

I have to write down in the English translation. Question. Gracious, appreciate that.

Yeah, had a good conversation with a brother who had a similar background, another brother at TMS, and we were talking about this and actually used this in some witnessing we were doing in Long Beach, where the idea of a current doctrine that is taught is that you're not saved by faith alone.

They would say you're saved by faith, but you're also saved by faith plus the works.

And so an anathema, which is part of the Roman Catholic catechism is that if you essentially don't agree to the doctrine, so you're saying, if you believe that you're justified by faith alone without works, you're damned to hell.

You're anathemaed. And he was giving me a suggestion in witnessing. He's saying that now if you don't accept that, you're also anathema.

So if you're Catholic and I'm not, and I'm saying, wait, you think that I'm gonna go to hell if I believe that you're justified by faith alone?

And you're my friend, so no, no, I don't believe that. Well, your own catechism says that you're damned to hell because you don't believe that.

Just a ghastly, ghastly, satanic belief.

It's not a different position. It's not a different denomination. When you take into account, too, that Mary had a perfect, sinless life, she had an immaculate conception.

She ascended to heaven just as Christ. She sits at the left hand of the throne of the

Father along with Christ, and if you don't pray for salvation and forgiveness of sins by Mary also, then you're going to hell.

We're not in the same ballpark. Different gospel, different gospel.

Go to Paul, if anybody teaches you a different gospel, I don't care if it's an angel from heaven, you are cursed.

So they are, unfortunately, not our brothers and sisters in Christ. And I would just make the comment,

R .C. Sproul talked about this so often, that he believed there were many, many, many people in Roman Catholicism that could be saved or that actually were saved, they just didn't know what the doctrine was.

They believed in Jesus. They didn't understand even what was going on in the mass. You know, that you're like re -crucifying or re -drinking that Christ makes a physical sacrifice every

Sunday. They don't even understand that. They just believe that Jesus is their Lord and he died for them. So it's not that every

Catholic isn't in the kingdom. Unfortunately, they believe in a different gospel.

They're not a different denomination. They would be a mission field. They have been tricked by an evil, satanic cult, a world religious system into believing something that is not the truth of the gospel.

Yeah, and just thinking about imputed righteousness versus infused, I think, yeah,

I mean, for me, maybe just helpful as I think about my, you know, my thoughts here and what

I would want to talk about in the idea of imputed righteousness, I think would be to preface imputation with their idea of infused righteousness so that you're not saved by faith alone, but righteousness is attained through grace that can be earned by doing good works, by going to confession, by doing penance, to doing offering, so that over time, through good works, the righteousness of God can be infused into the individual believer and over a long time period, they're subsumed into God's righteousness.

So they get God's righteousness over a long period of time, starting with that individual infusion of righteousness by doing good works.

So it's believing in Jesus, but also look at the works I've done and then confession, penance, giving offering, you know, all of these things, praying the rosary, whatever the human works are.

So that's the, they're infused with righteousness because of what they're doing and then they're subsumed over their life into God's righteousness.

So that would be the Roman Catholic imputation. Now, what we see in the scriptures is exactly the opposite, exactly the opposite.

To have that we are imputed with righteousness, and I'm in Romans five, so I wanna stay here, but as I'm thinking about this a little bit more,

I'm thinking even of what Paul wrote in the second letter to the Corinthians. Second Corinthians five,

I believe it's verse 21, that we were given the righteousness of God.

Yeah, it says, he who made him, I'm sure, excuse me, he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God.

So Christ's righteousness is imputed to us by God. It's not anything that we have to do.

So I would start with that statement, but just thinking of even the, what Paul is talking about in chapter five of Romans.

Yeah, that we're all in sin because of our head our head,

Adam, right? This is where we get the term federal headship. It says, therefore, as just as through one man's sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned.

We're all under Adam's sin. We're all dead in our sins. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.

So it's a section here talking about this imputation, right? He says, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the trespass of Adam, who is a type of him, capital

H, to come. You are under Adam's sin.

It's been imputed to you even when they weren't breaking the law because those in between Adam and Moses, the law didn't come until Moses, they were in sin too because they were under Adam.

And then he says, but the gracious gift is not like the transgression, for if by the transgression of the one, referring to Adam, the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift, by the grace of one man,

Jesus Christ, abound to the many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for on the one hand, judgment arose from the transgression, the one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand, the gracious gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification.

If the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more, those who received the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, capital

O, Jesus Christ. Our righteousness is imputed to us by God through Christ.

So that's the biblical, you know, the imputation of righteousness that is just in stark, stark contrast, opposite of what is taught in Roman Catholicism.

Yeah, and I would probably go back to what Sproul said. I think he was asked about this in one of those Q &As at a

Ligonier, and I think his comment was that they wouldn't stay and that he would say that if they did stay, then it was probably a sign of unbelief.

They really didn't believe. Once you're hearing the gospel and these truths, but you decide you're not gonna listen to that and you're gonna stay in that other false teaching, he said then at that point, they're probably not saved.

So I would agree wholly with that statement. Yeah, the Lord is not gonna wake you up to the truth and then leave you there.

He's gonna rescue you out of the pit of hell and then bring you out of that satanic teaching and twisted distortion of the gospel.

I don't think you could hear the gospel and to have been genuinely regenerated and washed by the

Holy Spirit, but then to stay in it, that just doesn't seem like it makes sense to me. Thanks, John.

Yeah, so this is, I guess, a little bit personal to me because when I was a professing atheist, as Justin pointed out, there's really no atheists.

We're just a bunch of liars pretending that God doesn't exist, according to Paul in Romans. I was really,

I think, just hook, line, and sinker. I was really into evolution and science and promoting

Darwinian theory and all of those things. And I think it was a stumbling block for my heart and my pride and just brain damage, sin, mind, and debased thinking and even pointed to some, what

I considered scientific evidence that this can't be true. I remember reading books by Stephen Hawking's A History of Time, The Universe in a

Nutshell. I thought of myself as a cosmology nerd. I just loved all that stuff. And when

I got saved, it was actually one of the things that God did to my mind. And the idea of faith really was something that God used to save me.

One of those three verses that I memorized in that Bible study was Ephesians 2, 8, and 9.

And growing up in Catholicism, this idea of faith and how you're saved. And it says, for by grace you're saved through faith.

And that just tripped me out so much. It says that by grace you're saved through faith. And the idea,

I thought of people believing in something or if I was gonna believe in God. And Paul is saying it's not the result of works, it's a free gift of God.

So you don't even have faith without the gift of God's grace to have the faith.

So God's the one that causes me to have faith. It just was so bizarre to me. And I thought about those books and I realized like, like one example would be like the planetary bodies and there's a giant planetary body and then there's a smaller one and there's a gravitational pull, a perturbance that happens because there's a larger body of mass and it's messing up the smaller one.

And I thought like that's, you know, I know that, I'm smart. I thought about it like, well, I've never seen that planet.

I've never, I've looked through telescopes and looked at planets, but like, I just believe it to be true because it's

Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking said it, it's true. It's of course it's true. And I realized like, oh man,

I've never seen half of the stuff that's in this book, but I just believe it to be the true. 100 % factual truth.

And I realized I was believing in things that I had never seen. And the

Lord just woke me up to that. And I had this, like the Lord did something to my mind where it was like, well, what if I read the

Bible and I believed it to be true 100 % just like I read that Stephen Hawking book?

And it was like a light flipped on in my brain where it was like, yeah, then I read the, I did read the

Bible and I had that same like faith. I just, it's true, I believe it's true.

And when that happened, I just, I read the words and I believed that they were the truth.

I just knew in my heart, it was like God removed a blindfold. So I went from the biggest evolution and it's a miracle because there's so many, you know, one of the distinctives is creation for us in a

Christian community and we have faithful people that have a misunderstanding and a doubt.

I don't wanna say that they're not believers, but I have concerns when we look at scripture and we don't take it at face value.

So when you think about theistic evolution, you know, where you have Christian churches, you have,

I believe, genuine profession of faith believers, but they're just trapped in their thinking where they don't, they look at these verses and they still say, well, that's just symbolic or that's just, you know, describing something because God created, oh,

God's the creator. I believe in Genesis. I believe God created everything. He just used evolution to do it.

But what does this say in the fall? That sin entered, that death entered after sin and evolution is death and decomposition and the survival of the fittest and animals killing each other and then the stronger animal surviving and then mating with another one and eventually all this evolution happens.

So you're saying that God created using sin? I just can't understand that.

So yeah, I look at what this says and it's not an intellectual assent from me personally or individually.

It's a gift of the Holy Spirit that I can read the word and I believe it to be true because the Holy Spirit is illuminating in my mind that this is the truth.

And if I pair that up with a scientist who gathers data and puts rocks on a table,

I point back to the scripture. I don't care about what the rock says. And then understanding too even more internal claims about what the

Bible says for itself, the idea, even the word day in Hebrew, yod, it means one day.

It means a 24 -hour period. It's used about 2 ,000,

I think it's like 2 ,200 times. And it's like over 1 ,900 times the word just means day.

Moses wasn't giving a symbolic mythology of creation. He was saying it was created, all of that stuff was one physical day, 24 -hour period.

He restates that in Exodus and then even Christ's words later in the gospels that are recorded, he makes several statements that go back to the beginning.

He makes a statement about Jonah, that it was really a fish that swallowed and Jonah was in there. But he makes a statement about Noah and the ark.

It's a physical, real historical world, but he also makes a statement where he's being challenged about marriage and divorce.

Matthew, I believe it's 19. Let's look at that. So Matthew, he's being, you know, isn't it, they're trying to trap him.

So they're saying, isn't it okay for us to be divorced? Let's see.

Yeah, it's Matthew 19, teaching about divorce. They're coming to him, some Pharisees came,

Jesus testing him and saying, and they're just testing him. They want him to make a mistake. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

And he answered and said, have you not read? He points them back to Genesis.

He points them back to the scriptures. Your Pharisees, have you not read the book of Genesis?

Have you not read? And he says, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

And then he continues his refutation of their, you know, these ridiculous questions they're asking him, that a man shall leave his father and his mother.

So he's talking about marriage. It's in the context of marriage and divorce, but look at that statement. The Lord himself says, have you not read that he who created them created them from the beginning?

Not through thousands of years of, you know, changing evolution.

And then going back to the history of what true science is, observation, making a hypothesis, testing that against various experiments and seeing a repeated pattern.

You know, the history of science theology was called the queen of the sciences. All other ologies were under theology.

And then thinking about what we know about the world and it was thousands of years old, then it was tens of thousands, then it was hundreds of thousands.

Even later in our more contemporary time, that number changed to millions, then tens of billions, then hundreds. Now it's 14 billion.

You have scientists even understanding what is in our atmosphere, carbon -14.

They're pointing to a rock or a bone that has carbon -14 in it. Well, we know how old the bones are because we know how old the rocks are.

We know how old the rocks are because we know how old the bones are. It's like, what? We're just going in a circle.

And carbon -14 testing is radioactive decay testing. They're measuring the molecular structures decaying and saying this is how old it is.

That testing is only good, accurate for thousands of years. So they're putting little formulas and things in there to make it say, to come up with that it's millions or billions, that number has changed so many times.

And it would not surprise me if it changes again. And, you know, there is not a consensus that Darwinian theory is an accurate model to describe our physical world.

I'm drawing a blank on the name of the website, but there's about a thousand scientists in all fields of scientific study that have come together as a consensus to say this model is inadequate to describe what we see in our surroundings.

We need to come up with a better model. So there isn't a widespread that evolution is true.

God created, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This is a work of God.

So you have secular man who don't believe in God trying to point back to the

Big Bang, and it's a miraculous supernatural event.

It can't be measured, it can't be described because it breaks the laws of what we think of as nature or physics.

Man can't point to a supernatural miracle and try to describe it with scientific method.

That's the point. It's a miracle, it's a supernatural working of God. So I just became a strong creationist, young earth creationist, and that's where I stand today because that's what the scripture says.

Yeah, let's talk about. Yeah, I mean,

I always start here with thinking of the inspiration of scripture. We've talked about it a little bit, what Peter says that no utterance, no prophecy, no interpretation has ever been given by man, but men were moved along by the

Holy Spirit who spoke from God. Paul will talk about this.

All scripture is God -breathed. It's profitable for teaching, right, for reproof, correction, training.

The claims that the scriptures make about itself in that it is all -sufficient, it's inerrant, it's authoritative, inspired by God.

Understanding that, starting with that presupposition, taking the word of God at face value for the claims that it makes about itself in the

Bible. So we're gonna start there with the authority, inerrancy, sufficiency, and also understanding the inspiration of the word of God.

And I think with hermeneutics, the seminary that I attended,

I was trained in historical grammatical hermeneutic, the facts of history with the normative plain use of language under the rules and principles of grammar with a single meaning of the text.

We look at the historical context, we look at the immediate context, the big picture in the

Bible, the way it's put together, what the author's intention was with those historical settings, who was writing, who was he writing to, what was happening at that time, maybe the theme or topic in a particular book, what is being discussed, and then in the immediate context, verses before and after, what point is the author trying to make, and staying in the author's intention, in the original meaning that he was conveying, meaning as in the intentional, willful communication of truth.

They are willfully intending to communicate information that is meant to be received and understood, meaning what the author's intention is.

And so having some of those kind of common sense principles, I think that we can even start externally, just in the way we read information, having reason and logic that you don't read an email and try to find out what is the secret deeper meaning under this email, you just read it at face value, the normative plain use of language.

But then going into the claims that the scriptures make about itself, and then this is one that we see with some of our brethren that hold to a different eschatological view, where they will point to Old Testament scriptures and make claims that the

New Testament points out these Old Testament citations, and that there's proof that the Old Testament verses had more than one meaning.

Even in Matthew, when it's in the first part of the gospel, when Christ is rescued out of the death sentence of Herod killing all of the babies, and it says that they came back from Egypt after hearing

Joseph and Mary, hearing the news that Herod had died, and there's a quotation where it's talking about that out of Egypt, I rescued my son.

They had fled to Egypt to avoid Herod's death sentence. And it's essentially

Matthew is making this comment that the reason, yeah, it's in Matthew 2, verse 15.

It says he remained there until the death of Herod in order that he had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled, saying out of Egypt I called my son, a citation of Hosea 11.

It's like, oh, here's the proof. So Hosea 11, he said out of Egypt I called my son, so that Hosea had a different meaning.

There's two meanings. Well, we go back to Hosea 11. What is Hosea about? It's about the faithfulness of God versus the harlotry of Israel.

Hosea, the faithful prophet, Gomer, the harlot, prostitute wife, she's representing

Israel and their unfaithfulness. Hosea is representing the Lord and his faithfulness,

Yahweh, the faithfulness to the nation of Israel, even though they're acting as harlots with these foreign gods and idols.

And so you can kind of think about this as an analogical use,

Jesus being put in the place of son. Son in Hosea is the nation of Israel.

The Lord Jesus is an Israelite. He's the king of Israel. But the context in Hosea stays the same.

And when we look at this passage, it's an analogical use. There's analogy made from Jesus as the king of Israel to Israel itself, that he represents

Israel. So it's an analogical use. It does not change the original meaning intended to be communicated by Hosea.

So that's a difficult proof passage. Guys have written books on this stuff. The Old Testament citations in the

New Testament, when you look at them case by case, don't actually show that there's a deeper, more spiritual meaning.

There's not a dual meaning in the passages. There's a single meaning to the text that was originally communicated.

The way that Jesus interpreted the scripture, we looked at that first example in Matthew 12, where he's being attacked about this topic of marriage and divorce, and he quotes the passage in Genesis.

So Jesus believed in the literal interpretation of the Old Testament. He looked at Genesis as actually having happened.

I did mention earlier, so that was in Matthew 19. In Matthew 12, again, an attack is being made against him by some

Pharisees. Says in Matthew 12, verse 38, some of the scribes and Pharisees answered and said to him, we want to see a sign from you.

Well, what does he say? He said he answered and said an evil and adulterous generation eagerly seeks for a sign, yet no sign will be given but the sign of Jonah.

And he says in verse 40, but just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the

Son of Man be three days and three nights in the earth. Jesus looked at the

Old Testament scriptures as literally having happened. They were historical fulfillment. It wasn't a mythology.

It wasn't a story that had a thematic expression that was trying to be communicated. There was a prophet named

Jonah and he was swallowed by a giant fish. That happened. We can even think of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24.

He's talking about Noah, that you're gonna go, the proceeding coming of the

Lord. His disciples ask him, what will the times be like in your coming? And he says it will be like it was in the days of Noah, that people will be marrying and drinking, living their lives.

There's no account to give. It wasn't until the door closed on the ark. And so he's looking, the flood isn't a thematic story that tells a fable.

It's not like a truth, a moral claim. No, the flood happened. Historical fulfillment, literal historical fulfillment.

Getting into the original languages, I think is a good proof case for the single meaning of the text.

So we're gonna go by the principles of grammar. We're gonna go by the normative plain use of language. We're gonna go by the facts of history.

We're gonna go by examples that Jesus Christ clearly gave in the

Gospels of why he looked at the Old Testament the way he did, historical, literal fulfillment. And then there's two examples,

I think that we can really just put this to bed. It's the single meaning of the text. According to the very original autographs in the original languages, there's two citations of the same passage.

In Matthew 9, 13, two separate cases, two separate incidents, but he's quoting the same passage from the

Old Testament. Matthew 9, 13, again, we're seeing this same constant attack by the

Pharisees, constantly trying to trip him up. You can look at even 9, 11. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, why is your teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?

But when Jesus heard this, he said, it is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.

And he says this, he says, but here's verse 13, but go and learn what this means.

It's like, oh, well, he says means, so it's more than one, right? Go and learn what this means. I desire compassion and not sacrifice.

He quotes Hosea 6, 6. The point of Hosea is that God doesn't want burnt offerings.

He wants their love. He doesn't want sacrifice. He wants faithful obedience.

In even the illustration of a man and a woman, faithfulness in the marriage. I don't want burnt offerings and sacrifice.

I desire love and faith. And so he quotes this passage, I desire compassion and not sacrifice.

And as we talked about earlier with the sexual revolution, but I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

He came to call sinners. So when the man is preaching about this sexual stuff and having fellowship, just make sure you keep reading the verse.

Don't quote half the verse. So that was the other topic you brought up. But in this original language here, this word means is actually the verb that means to be or to exist.

It's translated in English as is, and this is a present singular indicative.

Go and learn what this singular meaning is. So it's the word estin in Greek.

It means is, to be, to exist. So when we go to the original autographs, we can read it just like this, but go and learn what this single meaning is.

And he quotes Hosea. He does the same thing in Matthew 12, seven. Same passage, but a different setting.

Totally different setting, different attack. They're attacking him this time that the disciples are eating on the

Sabbath. I got the wave. Yeah, and the point is, is it's a different setting, different accusation.

This time it's why are you eating on the Sabbath? He says, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. But he says, but if you had known what this means, and he quotes

Hosea 6, six. I desire compassion and not sacrifice. You would have not condemned the innocent for the

Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. In that, that word means estin, present singular indicative.

Go and learn what this single meaning is. What is the emergent?

Yeah, I do. You know, the emergent church culture is, it's different than the seeker -sensitive, where we're trying to fill the church with unchurched believers, with kids programs and things that will keep an unbeliever in the church and entertainment.

The emergent church, they're both sinister and unbiblical, but the emergent church, I think, is very deadly, because the idea is that as the culture changes, as the culture's changing all around us, that a new church should emerge to meet the culture, that we should change along with the culture.

And if we have a good ecclesiology, just understanding that the word, it's, you're saying the redeemed sinners, saved by God's grace, purchased with the blood of Christ, as the church, the people, the called out ones, the assembly, the gathering, that we should change along with the culture to accept the new cultural norms.

And so this is the idea that a new church should emerge out of the culture, to be like the culture, where you're, you're, you know, you're basically, it's subjectivity over objectivity.

It's experience, feeling over propositional truth.

So the propositional truth doesn't matter, it's the experience or the feeling or the emotion that matters.

And so it's similar in a way to the secret sensitive, is that it's directed to fill the church with unsaved people, that you would make the church attractive.

So propositional truth no longer has the authority or the high place, it's a subjective feeling and emotion that you're reacting to.

And some of the early proponents of this have turned out to have heretical understanding in their own soteriology.

Yeah, Rob Bell, Mars Hill, I'm drawing a blank on the name of his book, but he's, at one time

I think he was Oprah's like, counselor or Oprah's pastor or something.

And Rob Bell is essentially teaching universalism. There is no hell, there is no judgment, everyone's going to heaven.

So it's where it leads to in salvation and a different twisting of the gospel. I think the other guy was

Jack McClure, Water's Edge. Yeah, and they're taking the, so it doesn't, the word of God doesn't, we don't have to go by that.

That's not what matters, it's the experience that we get when we assemble. So then you would have a church that's not willing to make a stand on what the

Bible teaches. Rob Bell and Jack McClure don't care about the teaching of the apostles.

Paul says the exact opposite of what they're saying, that the church, Ephesians 2, that the church is founded on the teaching of the prophets and the apostles with Jesus as the cornerstone.

I don't care what you're feeling, because if we go by the ever -changing tides and shifts of morality and culture, we don't, we can't be like that.

The church is a, you know, the idea that don't have friendship with the world.

Don't you know that the Lord is at enmity with the world? We are not the culture, we are counter -culture.

We are the opposite of the ever -changing shifts and tides of morality, because we're standing on an unchanging truth that will never change.

So the emergent church culture, while it may seem benign, I think is actually very sinister and dangerous, and it ends up, the end of the road is a different gospel.

And I think there's probably many, many people that the devil used Rob Bell to lead to hell.

And it's in God's providence, he's elected those who would be saved, and he's elected those who would not be saved.

That's, Rob Bell didn't do anything. It's the Lord is sovereign over everything. But an unbiblical, satanic teaching that there's no hell and we're just all gonna go to heaven is the by -product of the emergent church culture.

I'm here to give you a splinter, and it's clear that you've studied these things, and just before we left, the spiritual gift within you, which was bestowed on you through prophetic evidence, ordained in you, laid in our hands, the

Holy Spirit gave it to you, it's been exhibited here today, as you teach, communicate, create. We're focusing now on verses 15 and 16.

Take pains with these things, be absorbed with them, so that your progress will be evident to all.

Persevering in these things, for as you do for those who hear you.

What an amazing comment to hear. Be absorbed in your teaching, so that your progress will be evident at the beginning.

Really, pay close attention to yourself, to your life, to your godliness, your sanctification, and to your teaching, and to persevering in these things.

And as you do, it's amazing to souls. Thank you, brother.

Praise God. Amen. Praise the

Lord. Yeah, grateful for you guys that you came, and you're here to support.

You weren't here to see me at the hotbox, were you? Yeah, love you guys. Well, let's have some fellowship.