Rebuke for David French and his After Party | Ep. 25

Cornerstone Church

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In any church that fits on this particular project, leave that pastor who would put this pernicious lie into the hands of his people without having the

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Titus 1 -9 stewardship to protect the sheep from this kind of thing, refuting the lies.

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You need to leave. If someone is doing the after party in their church, that pastor is not fit to lead.

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And welcome to Tearing Down High Places. My name is Average Joe, here with the regulars.

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We got Pastor Tim and Pastor Jeff. How are you guys? Better than I deserve,

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Joe. There you go. Of course you are. How about Jeff? You're back from vacation.

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How was your vacation? I am refreshed. I feel rejuvenated. It was amazing. Just family time to see the kids just running with their cousins and just having so much fun swimming and just having a blast.

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It was a great week. But I'm ready to be back, man. I'm ready to get back in ministry. Just today, somebody came to Christ, right,

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Tim? Amen. This guy came in and got to share the gospel with them.

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He came to saving faith. It was a beautiful thing. That's a great way to get back in the office here. Oh, man.

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I'm so glad you're back, man. Satan was active while you were gone, and I just felt like not another.

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There were so many dominoes falling around the world. I'm like, oh, man, Pastor Jeff, get back here. We can't even possibly talk about all the wacko things that have been going on.

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Supreme Court rulings and so much heresy, so little time, right?

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Yeah. So Pastor Jeff today is going to introduce to us a video, and this video is called

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The After Party. We're going to watch it, and then we're going to comment on it. But Pastor Jeff, you want to give us a little introduction about it first?

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Absolutely. The biggest divide in evangelicalism today, I think, is between these ideological diversity people and those who hold to a biblical ethic.

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It's not between the blue churches, which fly rainbow flags out in front of the church, because we already know who all of them are.

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But within what we thought was a conservative evangelical church, we have a division between those who are all about ideological diversity.

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And really, the question comes down to, is the Democratic Party in promoting abortion, the killing of babies, up to the point of birth, and even in some cases, beyond the point of birth?

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Like Barack Obama said when he was a senator in the Illinois Senate and running for re -election there, or the former governor of Virginia, Northam, said the same thing about killing babies up to the 21st day of their life after birth.

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These kind of things to us, with the biblical ethic, are as grotesque and horrible as the killing of the

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Jews in the Holocaust. Same thing. It's human life made in the image of God. Add to that the mutilation of children because of transgender surgeries.

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Add to that socialism, which resulted in the most deaths in the history of the world in the last century, communism, atheism, in the name of equality, not in the name of God, but in the name of equality, the

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Marxist communist regimes killed more people than all the religious wars in history put together.

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In the name of these things, which is now being brought into our country through the platform of the

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Democratic Party, these things are as destructive as Nazism or communism or the evils that have appeared on the scene throughout history.

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And so there are those of us on one side saying you have to stand against that if you're genuinely a

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Christian. Hold to a Christian ethic in public square as well as in private spaces.

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There are those on the other side now who are making a concerted effort to push ideological diversity.

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And the main Joe, do you have that that clip from Andy Stanley? Oh, this one that can't be.

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You can't possibly be a true Christian if you're a Democrat. He agrees with us.

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I can't believe it. Did you have a meeting with him on your vacation or what? What happened? That was a cheap fake,

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Joe. You were cutting and pasting there. I was. It's true. I admit it. So Andy Stanley is on the left side of this debate.

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And I'm going to introduce you to three other guys on there just on that side. These are the thought leaders,

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OK? These are the guys who are not just like the Andy Stanley, who's the populist, who's making it popular in the churches.

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These guys are the ones behind the scenes. The editor of Christianity Today, Russell Moore.

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David French, who's always being platformed in these major newspapers, considered a very important thought leader.

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And then Curtis Chang, who created this website called Redeeming Babel, and now has made this initiative called

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The After Party. So we're going to listen to David French for 12 minutes explaining the theology behind his thinking and the practice of ideological diversity in the church.

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So that's what we're going to do. Fantastic. You ready? That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats in the

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United States of America. That is nothing compared to the difference between a representative of the

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Roman regime and a zealot in the first century. And these people are both disciples of Jesus Christ.

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There is a real downside to this idea that we need to find a place where more people are like us.

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I don't think it's good for that place. I don't necessarily think it's good for us. I grew up the

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Republican son of Democratic parents. They didn't stay Democratic my whole life, but when

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I was growing up, I was growing up the Republican son of Democratic parents. I was a

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Reagan Republican from way back, from the earliest points where I really remember engaging with politics was early in Reagan's first term.

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And I was sold. I went to college as a Reagan Republican.

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I went to law school as a Reagan Republican, specifically, and very importantly, a pro -life

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Reagan Republican, with pro -life as the primary emphasis of my political engagement. So in late 2005,

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I'm living in Philadelphia, running a small civil liberties nonprofit. And I was reading an article about how the

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United States Army was having difficulty recruiting. This was the height of the Iraq War. American casualties were really increasing.

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And I got, frankly, really convicted that I had supported the Iraq War, but I wasn't deploying to it.

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I wasn't in the military. This was something that, as a civilian, I had supported. But now, I was asking other people to go.

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And so I decided to join. I went to Officer Basic at Fort Lee at age 37, and then deployed to Iraq during the surge with the 3rd

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Armored Cavalry Regiment in 2007, when I was 38. And I spent almost a year there in eastern

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Diyala province, in the heart of the Sunni insurgency, in the middle of the

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Sunni -Shia civil war. And what I saw there profoundly affected me on a number of fronts, because I'm serving with a band of brothers that was all over the political spectrum, all over the political spectrum.

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And all of those differences did not matter. They did not matter at all. Now, we would argue sometimes, but that was almost like recreational arguing.

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It was like a relief from what we were dealing with. But we were brothers, no matter our political affiliation.

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So that was something that was deeply impactful. Actually seeing the Sunni -Shia civil war,

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I realized how much of it was rooted not in political or even religious differences, but a sense of grievance.

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So a Sunni member of the insurgency might say, the Shia killed my cousin. That's why they were fighting.

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Not because of the division in oil revenues, or not because of an ancient theological split between the

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Sunni and Shia strands of Islam, but something much more immediate and visceral. None of these big political things.

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So then when I came home to the United States of America, and this concept that says, I'm a Republican or Democrat because I strongly dislike the other side, seeing

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American politics, these fresh eyes, I began to see that we were interpreting everything through the lens of grievance.

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This is what the Democrats did to us. This is what the Republicans did to us. And each side has its own story of grievance, rooted often in very real and true things that actually occurred, in much the same way that the atrocities in Iraq were very real and true.

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Our ability to get past those grievances was hampered by the fact that there were a lot of grievances in our own lives.

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That sense of grievance that was giving the real emotional weight to our politics.

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We've always had political differences. We've always had political arguments. But what was being layered on top of it is a sense of hurt and wounding and anger that for a lot of people is deeply personal.

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When I came back, there was a shift in my outlook towards my political opponents.

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And I'm embarrassed to tell the story, quite frankly, because this will give you a sense of how partisan I was.

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Shortly before I deployed, I was speaking at a Republican gathering in California. And I was talking about my work in courts in America.

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And I was also talking about how I was preparing to deploy to Iraq. And somebody in the crowd asked me a question, something like, well, with you doing all of this important work here at home, why would you go abroad?

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I mean, you're doing stuff here. And I answered in this way that it's almost painfully to say it.

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I said, I think the two great threats to America are the radical left at home and jihadists abroad.

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And I feel called to fight both. And then I go to Iraq, serve alongside people of pretty radical left against these jihadists who were beheading their prisoners on tape, blowing up hospitals and restaurants.

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And I just felt incredible shame that I had even said that sentence.

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Grouping my political opponents at home with these people who were vicious and brutal, and the idea that I would use these two groups of people in the same sentence was embarrassing, frankly.

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And I don't think repent is too strong a word. This was wrong. But it shows you how step by step, dispute by dispute, grievance by grievance, you can put yourself in a position to where you genuinely think that many of your fellow citizens are your outright enemy on par with an armed enemy abroad.

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And I had to really ask for forgiveness for this because it was wrong. People are becoming more extreme.

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Within religious circles, people are becoming more extreme while believing they're becoming more righteous.

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And so when they're tying their increasing extremism to their self -perception of increasing biblical literacy or increasing biblical understanding of what

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God requires of you in politics, that can become particularly dangerous.

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What you've done is you've kind of sanctified your own attitude. You've sanctified your own extremism.

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You know, I used to really wonder how religious wars broke out, which sounds crazy.

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Because I was living in a country with a broad degree of religious tolerance. You could drive down any given road in the

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South and you're going to see a bunch of different Christian denominations living together peacefully. And I took for granted this sort of miracle of religious liberty that we have in this country.

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But then I began to see as our politics became more toxic and as it became more polarized, it was absolutely going to happen in a country as religious as ours that a lot of that polarization would start to center around different and competing religious understandings of how to engage in politics.

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And when you're talking about eternal matters, it doesn't get much more important than that in a person's heart.

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And so you can begin to see how their political affiliation, when it becomes completely tied to religious identity, can escalate the stakes of political conflict dramatically.

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And so you begin to see how the tying so closely of all of my religious perspectives to politics can escalate the stakes of conflict, especially when our affiliation, our religious and political affiliations are blurred without the necessary degree of humility, the idea that we might be wrong.

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It is incredibly dangerous to surround yourself only with like -minded individuals.

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There's actually a term for what happens to people when they do this, and the term is the law of group polarization.

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And so here's what happens when people of like mind gather. They tend to become more extreme.

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So over time, they'll even become so extreme that the whole group will sometimes be more extreme than the most extreme person was at the beginning of the gathering.

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That's called a cascade effect. And this is something that we're seeing across the United States of America.

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It used to be that there was a bell curve of American politics where most Americans were in this big, broad middle, and there was just a few people at the edges.

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What's happened is Americans have increasingly associated only with people of like mind.

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So we live around people of like mind. We work around people of like mind. And as our communities have become less ideologically diverse, we've become more extreme.

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To the point where that bell curve is starting to slowly flatten out on the way to becoming a

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U with more extremists gathered at either end and fewer people in that middle.

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And so you can see how that would have an incredibly toxic effect on relationships, how that would have an incredibly toxic effect on the

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American body politic. And it's not necessarily the result of everyone getting together and carefully reasoning through all of the competing arguments.

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And what's really critically important about this is you're often just not even conscious that this is happening. And so you wake up three, four, five years down the road, a very different person in many ways than you were three, four, five years ago.

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And you won't be quite sure how you got from A to B, but we know how you got from A to B.

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And that's because you're surrounded by people who agree with you. In the United States of America, we're in the middle of something that a writer called

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Bill Bishop named the big sort. And what the big sort means is that Americans are moving to locations or increasingly living in locations where they're surrounded by people of like mind.

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So, for example, I live in a bubble community. My community is about 85 %

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Republican. There are people who live in bubble communities that are blue communities. There are entire cities, for example, that are so heavily

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Democratic that they're more Democratic than your average evangelical church is Republican.

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So you have this phenomenon where millions upon millions of Americans are now less likely to live with people they disagree with than any time in recent memory.

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This sort of idea that we're going to find our safe place in this world,

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I think, is fundamentally misguided. It's always going to be fallen. It's always going to be flawed.

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And you don't even recognize it. I think being a true disciple of Jesus requires being open to different perspectives for a really simple reason, and that is we're not

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Jesus. We don't have all knowledge. We don't have all information. Scripture says we see through a glass darkly.

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We only know in part. And I have found in my life that I've had my thinking changed.

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I've been exposed to truth, sometimes from unlikely sources and in unlikely places.

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Humility is not optional. A lot to unpack there.

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But Jeff, you're the one that found this video. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts first.

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I don't know about average Jeff. I would say that was an evil video. It was twisted in its logic.

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Presenting the zealot as a political party person and the diversity that that brings to the group.

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Jesus did not learn from the diversity of the zealot. He told the zealot to not be a zealot.

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He taught a different way. His way, the Christian way, which unifies around the truth of his word.

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The big idea there, having people like us isn't good for us. What is that?

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Horrible. That is horrible. Having people like us means we are becoming more and more like Christ.

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And those who are more and more like Christ are more and more like each other. We're being conformed to the image of Christ.

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But this is actually an explicit effort to break up the body of Christ.

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Cut it up like a pizza and distribute it. Because as it is in many evangelical churches today, like ours, which by the way is in New Jersey, not in a bubble.

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We don't live in a bubble. We rub elbows with so many people outside of our congregation. But we're being conformed to that norming standard, which is the word of God.

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And that brings us closer and closer to one another, more like Christ as we pursue him in his word.

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But what they're trying to do, the agenda here is to diversify the body of Christ, which means essentially make room for leftist policies in the church.

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That leftism is not that bad, not that big of deal. So this idea of the radical left at home and the jihadists abroad are the greatest threat to America.

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True. That was true. He seemed like he was on the right track. He was.

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And now he says it's wrong. But did he ever demonstrate why that's wrong? No. Didn't prove that abortion is not that big of a deal or that the other elements of the democratic platform are not that big of a deal, that they don't rise in comparison to the killing of people innocently on the jihadi front.

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He never proved that. He never demonstrated it. He assumed it. And he did so with a really sneaky tactic.

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Did you catch this? Humility equals we might be wrong. Right. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.

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Faith is taking God at his word, the things that he's delivered. Read Hebrews 11. And standing on the word of God, even if external evidence in the sense of the site that you see doesn't prove that, the word of God has spoken and you take

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God at his word. To have certainty over what God has said is the very definition of faith.

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But he says humility is we might be wrong. Let's just be more specific then. We say that the life of a baby begins at conception.

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That the baby in the womb is a living person deserving of protection.

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Might we be wrong? No. No. No way. God said that in Psalm 139 that he fashions his baby together in the mother's womb.

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John the Baptist leapt for joy in the womb because he was a living person in the womb. We have the revelation of God.

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It is not humility. It is the height of arrogance to deny the word of the living

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God. Agreed. That's what the French is doing. He thinks he's humble now because he can just stand over against his own view and judge it as being arbitrary or not at all to be believed with certainty.

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When in truth, he's denying the very revealed scripture and calling it humility.

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So I'm worked up. I need to just take a breath and let you guys talk. I watch that thing and I'm thinking that is just evil scripture twisting.

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It's the forked tongue maneuver of the serpent himself speaking through this man.

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Well, I felt like it would have been better to go through section by section because he seemed to break his sections into,

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I'm going to promote this sin. Then I want to promote this sin. Then I want to promote that sin. He's promoting living by feelings alone with no objective standards, right?

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Then he is promoting bitterness, right? When he's like interpreting through a lens of grievance. Let's interpret through our bitterness because things didn't go the way we wanted in the past.

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Then being of denying that there can be any truth. Did he not deny that there could be any truth?

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There's no way we can know truth. I mean, these are the sections. Yes, essentially he did. That is a postmodern philosophy underlying what he said, but catch what he said about grievance.

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He actually didn't say that we should live by grievance. He wasn't saying that. He was saying, and notice they put the pro -life picture up as the first example of grievance.

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He's saying that we are motivated by grievance because we've been wronged or we feel we've been wronged in some way.

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We're motivated by grievance, just like the BLM activist is motivated by grievance.

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He's saying that's what's pushing all this energy. He doesn't think it's principled from the word of God.

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He thinks it's an aggrieved spirit within us, kind of like the woke right idea, which is nonsense.

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Hmm. What'd you think, Tim? I cut you off. So talking about humbleness and humility, and he's talking about how it's a bad thing to have one mind and it's a bad thing to be around like -minded people.

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He couldn't be more wrong. He needs to read Philippians chapter two. It's all about humility and how

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Jesus left his throne and came down and became a human and the most humble act that's ever been done.

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And to start that chapter off, listen to the first couple of verses. Philippians two, verse one.

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So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

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He needs to see those verses because he's saying the complete opposite of every single word in those verses.

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And you can even back that up to the end of chapter one, verses 28 and following, where he's calling us to stand side by side in that kind of unity.

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And just continuing on with what you said, the thought continues there. It's exactly the opposite of the kind of unity he's prescribing.

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It's hypocritical because we're supposed to have one mind and have the mind of Christ, not just bring all of our minds from all over the world that could be wrong thinking and putting it all in one pot and act like we can live together.

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No, you need to have the mind of Christ. It's not just the mind of a Black Lives Matter activist or an abortionist or no, you can't do that.

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Every one of those people need to repent and believe the gospel. And he says he needed to repent from his right thinking.

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And he's saying that we need to repent from our right thinking. But really what he needs to do is now repent of his wrong thinking that he believes now, if that makes sense.

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He's saying that he repented of the right thing, but really he should repent now is really what he should be doing.

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That's right. It was actually Philippians 1 .27, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.

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We are to come to a common mind, which is the mind of Christ. Our minds are conformed to the likeness of Christ.

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Joe, what do you think? What was your impressions of it? I think the big thing here is we've already identified all the problems.

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So I wonder what his call to action is going to be. I think that's the next thing we should talk about.

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How would you summarize the problems, Jeff? The problems were he's trying to say we're all bitter, so we're acting out of bitterness.

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He's trying to say that there is no truth. And he's also saying, what's the other one?

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There's no truth. I don't know.

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I think where he's going is the thing. I think he's trying to shoehorn all these things to get to a certain goal.

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And his goal is to have a watered down church that really has no gospel because there is no sin and there is no problem.

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Yeah, that's the goal. He wouldn't say it that way because he does believe the gospel, as he claims, right? But he wants the tax collector and the zealot to be able to happily coexist in the group of disciples.

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And he equates that to the church, right? And he says it's gone wrong. So he pictures that as the ideal, although he's not understanding that these are disciples who have repented of their sins and have come to follow

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Christ and to do things his way. That's the ideal. So he starts with the wrong ideal.

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But then he says what's gone wrong is this theory of the bubble, his theory of the bubble, that we've become so not diverse that all we do is rub elbows with our own types and we don't really hear what the other guy is saying.

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The truth is he is living in the old bubble of liberalism, the old bubble of secular liberalism where, look, we can all just get along in church here.

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We don't actually need to have a standard. And all these different things work well, all the different churches on the different corners have coexisted for these couple hundred years in America.

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And it seems like we're losing that. The truth is he doesn't know what time it is.

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And what's dividing us is real ideological differences that are built on principles, not just living in a bubble.

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So the way he put it was the theory of group polarization. Joe, I don't know about you, but I have neighbors on my right and my left and on down the street that have a whole diversity of views.

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And I rub elbows with them all the time. I live in a condo. I've got Jews above me.

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I've got Catholics to the left. And we're talking scripture with all of them.

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And we're talking about how different we are. They know how different we are. And we can do it peaceably without compromising on our values.

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I mean, the problem, I think, too, there's a problem. It's too much.

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They claim that we're too political, right? That we're talking about politics in the pulpit, right?

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They're way more political because they want everyone to agree with them.

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They can't live. And I think it's a little bit of hubris. It's a lack of humility. They can't live with people who don't agree with them.

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They won't join their party. Yeah. And they're so angry at us.

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They're calling us Christian nationalists. Well, what about that church, the Church of God in Christ in Philadelphia, which this week literally had

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Joe Biden preach in the church for eight minutes or share for eight minutes? I think that's great.

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How is that not Christian nationalism? They're supposedly a church, Church of God in Christ. And yet they have

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Joe Biden, and they're all clapping and applauding and supporting him. Yeah. Is that not

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Christian? So the issue of Christian nationalism, that's such a canard, a way to shut up those who are on the right, with their hearts inclined to the right.

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Would you invite a Catholic into your church to have communion? I mean, certainly you'd want them there to hear a sermon.

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But would you invite them to have communion and to pray over them and to bless them? I don't understand.

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Well, the Catholic view of the sacrament, as they have, is a blasphemy, the so -called mass at that point with transubstantiation.

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But even worse than that view of the materializing of Jesus's body in the bread and in the wine is the making of propitiation on the altar, the re -sacrificing of Christ again on the altar.

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That's not an altar. That's just a table. And the only altar, so to speak, was the cross itself, where Jesus died once for sins, a finished sacrifice.

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Right. So a Roman Catholic priest who stands up to make propitiation on the altar as an alter Christos, another

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Christ, that's a blasphemy. But I brought it up because this pastor's bringing Joe Biden in and he's acting like he's one of him because he's, you know, we're all one.

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We're all of one mind. There's no difference between that. I guess I'm assuming that that pastor was a

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Protestant, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Church is not in Christ. Yeah. And that's actually what

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French is arguing for. Right. You could have this view in the church. But to me, that would be just like the sacrifice of the mass, the so -called sacrifice of the mass.

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We could not tolerate that ideological diversity in the church because Galatians chapter one verses six to nine would condemn us if we did.

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Yeah. We have to stand upon the word of God and stand on the truth and not just compromise with everything that's different for the sake of diversity.

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Since when did diversity and equity and equality and inclusion become the

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God of this country? Because it certainly has. Right around 2020, I think. Yeah.

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All these guys are very wealthy. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. You're right. I feel like it's gone back a lot farther than that.

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Yeah, way further. And what 2020 did is expose the myth of it. That it really can't be.

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How can you stand side by side in the church when part of the church is advocating that the church is not allowed to meet for these 15 months?

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That's what opened their eyes because in March 2020, they locked down the churches. We reopened right away because we finally realized we never should have closed the door for a minute.

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We realized this is not of God. This is leftist authoritarianism.

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Well, half the church sitting over there said, oh, no, we agree with this. And now you can no longer feign that there's no difference.

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The difference became clear in 2020 and then even more so since then. How long was

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Cornerstone closed for, Jeff? I think five or six weeks, Tim, do you remember? Before we started meeting outdoors.

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We met outdoors from... I thought we only closed for like one week, but I could be wrong.

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I knew worse than that. It took... We thought there was something to this. You know, it took a while for us to figure it out.

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So during that time, I believe I might have even been at Cornerstone, Kensington.

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And I know they closed for a while. Yeah. But I do know, I know that you preach at least one sermon online, but did you do more than one?

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Yeah, I did. I did a few. Okay. I remember the first one. The first one

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I was like, oh, no, why are we doing this? And you even called me out because there was another time months later where we had a major outbreak.

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And because it was spreading, you know, in the church, I did take a walk. That's what it was.

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You told me like, you really should just leave it open for those who are healthy. And so I was getting a lot of chatter.

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I remember texting you, Jeff, and I'm like, hey, there's a lot of chatter. I think people are going to want you to close.

34:34

I really feel like you should keep it open. You're like, oh, sorry. The board already decided to close it for the week.

34:40

I'm like, oh, no. I was proud of you, but I was a bonehead. So awesome to hear you repent of that,

34:49

Jeff, because that's the biggest problem. Our leaders won't repent of anything. None of them.

34:55

The best ones we have refuse to repent. That's what this video is. These guys, they bled their conservatives, right?

35:01

The church used to be, you know, these mega churches used to have so many hundreds or thousands of people.

35:07

All the conservatives flew the coop when they closed their churches, and they're still holding to their integrity.

35:13

This was the right thing that they should have done. And they don't realize that they suffered because of their own sin.

35:20

First Peter talks about like suffering for righteousness sake, but he also mentions, you know, if you suffer for something you did wrong.

35:29

I'm not talking about that. You need to repent of that. That's not suffering. There is a suffering that we bring on ourselves.

35:36

And when these pastors told everybody to mask up, we never did that, did we, Tim? No, no.

35:41

Mask on somebody's face. When they forced their people to mask up, that was sin.

35:48

They don't have the authority over those who bear the image of God and their faces shine the radiance of Christ, according to 2

35:55

Corinthians. We're reflecting his glory. To mask that, to keep the mouths from speaking the gospel with clarity, that was a wicked sin that happened in the churches.

36:09

And many pastors have not repented of having done that. Yeah. You know, these guys though,

36:17

Jeff, that do this compromise and they get you know, they bring people together.

36:25

I mean, their speaking fees are a lot bigger than yours though, aren't they? Oh, yeah. We don't charge any speaking fees.

36:32

Yeah, they make a pretty penny on the circuit. Yeah. That happened with Paul. Paul and the super apostles, they're like, oh, this guy doesn't even charge any money, probably.

36:42

You know what I mean? Yeah. And they look down on him because he was not making money off of it.

36:48

Right. Whereas their super apostles were. Yeah. He's big time, biggie. That's why it got the name

36:54

Big Eva, because it's like a corporation, right? Big evangelicalism, lifeway Christian resources.

37:01

You know, they keep putting out Tim Keller books, even though it has heretical doctrine in it, because that's a moneymaker.

37:08

He's still, Tim Keller's dead and he's still got an X page. You know, he's on X slash

37:13

Twitter all the time. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Pull the guy down. Will you? I mean,

37:18

I feel bad. I don't want to mock Tim Keller what he just said on X because he's dead. You know,

37:24

I mean, I feel that might be sinful even, you know, to do that. But I mean, there's these people sitting, propping up this dead guy.

37:33

Right. And pushing out, you know, heresy. Well, that's what the

37:38

Democrats do. They prop up dead guys. So here,

37:44

I think it's even more. I think there's more sinfulness in this than we're even scratching the surface to.

37:51

And I bet you do, too. And you're just not opening it up. But I think, you know, I was listening to you ever listen to Steve Dace.

37:58

I was watching Steve Dace last night. He was talking about some of the compromise that's come along in the

38:03

Republican platform right now. So we're seeing some compromise there. And, you know, that's one of the things we talked about before.

38:11

We talk about why we can't be Democrats is because literally in the platform.

38:17

What does it say? It says we want to kill babies. Killing babies is good. You know, you can't be you can't possibly be a true

38:25

Christian if you're a Democrat. You know, so I had to play that one more time. You got to do that from time to time.

38:33

Got to hear Andy Stanley. But I want to make a point about that.

38:38

What Donald Trump has been saying and J .D. Vance said it as well. That the abortion pill is acceptable in their view.

38:48

And he's kind of exceptional. That's wickedness as well. Yeah. Now, I like what

38:54

Trump has done in appointing the Supreme Court justices that overthrew Roe vs. Wade and just leaving it with the states, because that's kind of how federalism was meant to be.

39:03

Let the states write laws. Now, every state should outlaw abortion outright.

39:09

We should be abolitionists. We should abolish abortion just like we abolished slavery because it's an evil.

39:16

Right. But to come out like Trump has done and say that in his view, these exceptions are good.

39:25

Right. You don't kill the bystander of a crime because they were party to it in that way.

39:34

In the same way, a baby that was conceived by rape should not be killed on account of the rapist.

39:42

That father who fathered the child should be put to death for his rape. Rape should be a capital crime.

39:49

The mother who was raped is an innocent victim, and we should support her and do everything we can as a church to help her.

39:57

It may even be that she might need to give her baby up to adoption if she can't really be a mother to that child.

40:02

Mm -hmm. But you can't just kill the innocent bystander who is the child.

40:08

Mm -hmm. Now, Trump is being completely inconsistent because he's not coming from a biblical world view.

40:13

He's not grounded in scripture. However, he is leaving it with the states, and he's saying, let the states decide.

40:20

If you believe as we do, then go win the argument in your state. That's his view, and I think that's acceptable.

40:27

I think that's good. But whenever he speaks against life in the womb, he himself has become wicked in what he's saying, unqualified.

40:38

That's wickedness. Yeah. We don't say he has no fleas.

40:43

That's for sure. But I think in the compromise department, when we're in the

40:50

Republican platform, Trump's been very... We got to call these out because I hear this from...

40:56

We got to be able to speak clearly to people and not have them align us with him completely just because he's the best option that we're going for.

41:07

He is very pro -homosexual. There's a lot of stuff where he's out there catering to...

41:15

I forget the name of the group of Republican homosexuals, but he caters to him.

41:21

He kowtows to him. And yeah, it's wicked and evil. Yeah. Grinnell and Dave Rubin is part of the

41:29

Daily Wire. That whole contingent is very compromised. And that's tearing down high places.

41:35

We will consistently stand on the truth and tear down rebuking compromise in love.

41:41

So we love and so we tell the truth. Truth and love are not against one another.

41:47

Never. Truth and love walk hand in hand. So yeah. But I think these guys that make a lot of money on speaking circuits, they want to see unity at all costs.

41:59

Unity within diversity. They want to see that because it feeds their organizations.

42:06

It keeps their organizations thriving where there's always compromise, there's no unity or vice versa.

42:17

I'm sorry. I think I said that wrong. Where there's no compromise, right? You're not going to have everybody agreeing.

42:24

You're going to have to stand up. You're going to have arguments. You can't build a massive, massive organization.

42:30

I think that's one of the reasons why we promote small churches, right? We promote the idea of this whole megachurch thing.

42:38

I mean, is that good for Christianity? Is that? What do you think? Well, I think the word can bring, first of all, unity in the church and then by the power of the gospel, continue to grow that if it's done organically the right way.

42:51

I'd say like John MacArthur, right? He's preaching for 50 years, the word of God without compromise.

42:57

And so now there's thousands of people that come, tens of thousands probably, right? So you can have a megachurch built on truth, but it takes a long time.

43:06

It takes the organic growth of the proclamation of truth. What's happened in the megachurch movement is they've taken a shortcut.

43:15

They've taken a major shortcut. They've stopped talking about those things which would offend the unrepentant sinner.

43:24

So someone who is not repented of sin will feel comfortable going to the megachurch because they never confront sin.

43:30

They don't talk about things that go against their sensibilities or their political views or whatever.

43:37

They keep it so basic and dumbed down that everybody can come in. And that kind of big tent unity is very destructive to the proper building of the church.

43:48

Now, one more thing I wanted to bring up, just to turn it back to French, because we probably got to wrap this up anyway. I thought when he was on the battlefield, for whatever reason he went there, whether it was a political reason or as he said, he just felt this conviction that he was being hypocritical for supporting it and not going.

44:07

Who knows? A lot of people go into the military for different reasons. And I just think it's great that he went in because I love our military.

44:15

Tim, your brother has done that. And how much we applaud him for that. We have a young guy that we're going to pray over on Sunday because he's going into the

44:23

Marines. And this is something we encourage. But when David French got there and he saw that he had some leftist fellow soldiers with him and he said, all those differences did not matter.

44:39

Hmm. What didn't matter? Did the life of the baby that's being slaughtered matter?

44:50

Did the baby no longer matter because he has a brother in arms that he's going into battle with?

44:55

Whatever happened to him on the battlefield where he concluded that these political differences back at home don't matter?

45:02

That is an extreme wickedness because baby's lives matter. All lives matter.

45:09

And for him to come back and say that these differences in the pro -life movement was only his grievances motivating him and such things, that was the turning point.

45:20

Whatever happened to him on the battlefield when he decided that his fellow soldier, the leftist, who's willing to kill babies at home and defend babies in Iraq, whenever he made that political calculation or that determination in his mind, that's where he went off the tracks.

45:38

This is where I love to ask you guys these questions because I know that promoting my feelings over logic and reason is always, always, always wrong.

45:50

And I've got lots of long things in scripture to share, but where in scripture exactly is it going to say, really pithy, you can't dismiss logic and reason and run with your feelings.

46:04

It's going to destroy you. I mean, I know it's probably an hour long sermon to put it out there, right?

46:09

Yeah, I would start with John 1, 1, because when it says in the beginning was the word, that word is logos, logic, reason is how it's interpreted philosophically.

46:19

But what John is doing there is showing that logic, reason, as the Athenians on Mars Hill would have understood it, is actually not as you think.

46:29

He's a person. He is truth personified. What John says there is that logic, logos, is defined by and flows from the person of Jesus Christ.

46:43

And he presents Jesus in his first word there as the word, the logic, the reason.

46:49

He is God's logic and all wisdom, all Sophia is wound up in him.

46:55

That's the point of Colossians 1 and 2, that all wisdom and knowledge is wound up in Christ and revealed by Christ.

47:02

Then Romans 12, 1 and 2, that talks about the living sacrifice. And then what happens in Romans 12, 2, it's the conforming of our minds to understand the will of God and so do it.

47:15

This is the essence of Christianity. It is a revelational religion that we receive the knowledge of God from his word, and we are then changed by it.

47:27

It's not an emotional religion where whatever we feel then changes how we are to interact in the world.

47:34

And we go with what feels or works pragmatism of Jeremy Bentham and so many of the philosophers.

47:40

The philosophers have many different views of how you come to truth and ultimately philosophy jettisoned truth altogether in the postmodernism of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s.

47:51

And that's what we've inherited today. But Christianity has always been a religion built on truth, not on feelings.

47:59

And I think another one is feelings. Another one would be Matthew 4, 4, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

48:10

So it doesn't, you're not supposed to live on every feeling that comes out of man, but it's every word that comes from God.

48:16

That's how we are to live. And I think the problem is when we start looking at the world and being afraid of them and wanting to please them, that's when we lose our way.

48:25

When we fear God, that's when we make right decisions and stand up for something that's true.

48:32

Nice. Yeah. And that's, and that's comes back from Deuteronomy 8, 3, 2.

48:40

Yeah, I got that one. I'm good when I'm behind my keyboard. A lot quicker than those pages.

48:49

So that's awesome. Yeah, yeah. It's a good, it's a great call. I mean, there was, like I said, there were so many things that went awry while you were on vacation,

48:56

Jeff, and there's so many things we could have talked about. I didn't even know about this David French thing. So I hope we really bless some other people out there because it's so important.

49:04

We cannot let these leftists trick us. And it is, it's trickery to trick us into making decisions with our feelings instead of truth.

49:16

And especially when we have truth and when we're talking to other Christians, I mean, David French, we're going to see him in heaven.

49:22

You know, I think, you know, so. We hope, yeah.

49:28

I think that some of the, the encroachment of leftist politics in the church being ushered in so explicitly by the

49:36

David French, the Russell Moore of the world, these guys, it does call into question their salvation, in my view, because it's so pernicious.

49:46

It is clearly the work of George Soros, which turns out to be the funding behind so many of these projects that eventually get unearthed.

49:56

I don't know which ones in particular related to Soros, but the funding of the and campaign, which was the last chance that the last time they did this with Justin Gibney and that movement.

50:07

Now, again, with the after party and the, all of the work of Russell Moore at Christianity Today, if they're not political operatives being paid to do what they do,

50:19

I'm actually surprised. I can't see how a genuine Christian could be so used of the enemy for purposes so contrary to the word of God.

50:30

And they're actually a genuine believer. Wow. So, yeah, I'm not convinced that we're going to see these men in heaven.

50:37

Wow. When these things are shown and the truth of God's word is brought to bear on these obvious lies about political ideology, ideological diversity, when the truth of God's word, like it was just now, they will hear this video and they will not repent.

50:54

It's been shown again and again. So I'm not convinced any longer that they're genuinely saved.

50:59

Wow. That is well said. That is well said. Tim, any closing thoughts?

51:06

Oh, man, I agree with Jeff. I'm glad that we looked at it. I, yeah,

51:12

I'm the same way. I think just there needs to be a fear of the Lord and something like that where it's emotionally driven and it's almost in the name of love, but it's not.

51:25

I hate that. I do not like that because it's very deceiving and people fall for that stuff.

51:31

It's in the warm, gushy feelings. The warm, gushy feelings. I've been in situations where the choice is obvious to do the right thing.

51:40

And then someone from the crowd or someone with power stands up and says like, oh,

51:45

I love this person so much. So we can't do this for them. But it's like, wait a minute. No, you don't want to help them because you love them.

51:52

I don't like that stuff. I hate that stuff. Yeah, and they want to cast us as dangerous extremists.

51:58

Did you notice when he was talking about the polarization and all, they go to the church and they show the cross.

52:04

And then they talk about how dangerous the extremists are that are in the churches. This is a concerted effort to paint us who live happily and peacefully with our neighbors as we have since 1776.

52:18

Since this nation was formed, conservative evangelical Christians are the ones who built this nation and the truly tolerant ones.

52:26

They're presenting our views, which haven't changed as being the dangerous one.

52:31

He literally used that word when he cut to the cross in the church. So yeah, if you go back and watch that video again, you'll be able to see how they're trying.

52:40

You probably picked up on more flaws just watching it a second time through, right? Yes, I did. Yeah. And it's not only that video, by the way.

52:47

This is a whole project. It's like a 10 -part series. Each part has multiple videos.

52:53

So you're supposed to do it in a community group at your church. And any church that fits on this particular project, leave that pastor who would put this pernicious lie into the hands of his people without having the

53:08

Titus 1 -9 stewardship to protect the sheep from this kind of thing, refuting the lies.

53:14

You need to leave. If someone is doing the after party in their church, that pastor is not fit to lead.

53:20

Wow. All right, guys. Well, you heard it here. That's a strong rebuke.

53:27

And it sounds deserved. So that is. And it's way more loving to rebuke our neighbors, especially here in South Jersey.

53:37

We're not saying leave your church, but go talk to your pastor. That would be the first step. Yeah. Yeah.

53:43

Go talk to your pastor. It is possible that an unknowing pastor might just come along and be like, oh, this looked really good, and just be deceived by it.

53:51

But that person would be correctable then when shown the truth, which normally these guys,

53:57

I'm telling you, I've rubbed elbows with a lot of them for a long time. They don't repent.

54:03

They don't hear truth, examine their ways by the word of God, and repent.

54:10

So at that point, yeah, you need to find another church. CornerstoneSJ .org.

54:16

Come on over. Yes. Yes. All right, guys.

54:21

Well, it's time. If you see a brother down. Pick him up.

54:26

Lift him up. Oh, sorry. Pick him up. Come on, Tim. Let's do it again.

54:32

If you see a brother down, lift him up. There's a lot of brothers down. If you see a high place, tear it down.