Response to Rick Warren on the Nature of the Church and More

Alpha & Omega Ministries

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

Comments are disabled.

00:38

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, another remote edition of the program today, hopefully lighted a little bit better,

00:46

I guess. I think I know why it's lit up a little bit better, but I guess yesterday I looked like I had the plague or something, so it's like wonderful.

00:54

Hey, we're doing the best we can. Brother Rich is still a little bit under the weather and seems like everybody is these days.

01:01

And of course, everybody immediately is like, ah, but we talked about that yesterday. We're not going to go there today.

01:08

Things we want to talk about, I briefly, if you want an example, a horrific example of cancel culture,

01:21

Michael Brown wrote an article about this yesterday.

01:27

Well, it was published yesterday. I had seen the story sometime last week about a young woman who at age 15, in a three second video, when she got her learner's permit, used the

01:46

N word and she's not N. And she was basically imitating rappers who use the term constantly.

02:01

I'm sorry, I have absolutely, there is no place in a logical mind for the idea that one group gets to use a word and it's cool and then another group can't use that word because it's not cool.

02:17

If you're going to use it, then you can't complain about it. It's just all there is to it.

02:22

But that was, you know, I'm from a different age, different planet, it seems these days.

02:29

Anyway, and then someone who doesn't like her saves the video for three years.

02:39

And when she gets into a university, then drops it and gets her kicked out of the university.

02:46

Now, I hold the university accountable. Any university that is run by such morons as would kick someone out of the university for something they said on a three second video when they got their learner's permit at age 15, that shows you our universities are run by five -year -olds.

03:06

They really are. The mental and moral age of most university presidents today is about five.

03:16

They are frightened out of their minds that these skulls full of mush are going to attack their offices and do a sit -in or whatever else.

03:31

And so they just do whatever they're told. And so the inmates have taken over the asylum. And look, any parent, you just need to recognize looking at the university system today, there are a handful of Christian universities left that are worth any of the investment that you would put in.

03:53

None of these Ivy League schools are, how can any Christian parent justify spending that kind of money, sending a child to a place that is so soaked in absolute rebellion and utter insanity?

04:13

I mean, that's the only way you can put it. And so here you have, and if this is, just think of anyone's digital footprint.

04:25

I was talking to a friend today and he was talking about this great Republican Christian man.

04:33

He's going to be president someday. And I'm like, impossible. Well, someday, maybe after the great reset collapses, maybe, when mankind has come to realize that it's

04:48

Christ or chaos, when you see people recognizing the need to control the expression of evil in the sense of genetic manipulation and all this, when abortion has been abolished because it finally becomes recognized as the murder of unborn children that it is, okay, fine.

05:15

But right now, just think of the people that seemingly are sitting around at computers, just waiting to pull up everything they possibly can on anyone.

05:31

And I don't care if you delete it or not, you can't delete something. Once you hit send, it is undeletable.

05:38

It is out there forever and ever and ever and ever. And stuff that you said 40 years ago, that was utterly unremarkable then.

05:51

An immature, childish society will ignore that time shift because that's what the whole social justice thing is.

06:01

I mean, you judge everyone in the past on the basis of the standards you have now. So you can do that for dead people, you can do that for living people, it doesn't matter.

06:11

What they said at the time may have been perfectly accepted by everybody, including you, but there is no redemption, there is no forgiveness in the social justice movement, and so you can dig anything up and hold anybody accountable for absolutely, positively anything.

06:27

So I feel sorry for this young lady. Obviously, she shouldn't have been imitating people that we pay millions and millions of dollars to to be rude and obnoxious and profane and everything else, but there you go.

06:40

That's what we're looking at. I don't know if any of you saw this, but my comment on this was the government of the

06:57

United Kingdom owes George Orwell royalties.

07:05

They really do. If you go to https colon backslash backslash actearly .uk

07:17

or just actearly .uk, you should pull it up. actearly .uk.

07:23

Is someone close becoming a stranger? Act.

07:29

Action counters terrorism. It's a UK government website that you'll notice on the very first page, share a concern.

07:42

You click on share a concern. If you're worried about someone, call the National Police Prevent Advice Line.

07:48

It gives a number and confidence. Share your concerns with our specially trained prevent officers.

07:56

The advice line is available every day, 9 a .m to 5 p .m, so there can be no worries about terrorist activities at 2 a .m

08:03

morning. Calls outside these hours will be transferred to specialist counter -terrorism officers. Well, that's even scarier, etc.

08:11

There's the advice line. You can click on that. What details do we need? We'll need some information about the person you're worried about, but it will help the prevent officer know your details in full too.

08:22

We may need to ask you more questions. This is a website that is fundamentally asking the citizens of the

08:35

United Kingdom to become snitches on anyone around them.

08:40

If you haven't noticed recently, this is really dangerous.

08:49

Right now, it's just really annoying, but it's really dangerous. I keep remembering, and I don't think it's in the movie.

08:57

I think it was in the book, but I keep remembering that Winston, in 1984, was very, very concerned about the children living across the hall, even though he helped them unplug their drains and stuff like that, living the slums they were living in under socialism, which is where we're all headed, by the way, willingly, but for our good and for the safety of everyone and for Christians, for loving your brother.

09:28

Winston was really frightened about the children because he could tell by the way they were looking at him that they were constantly thinking that he was guilty of thought crime, which he was.

09:43

You're seeing that all over the place right now. It's the government and media that's telling people, this is a good thing.

09:52

You need to be reporting your neighbors when you think there's something wrong.

10:00

You might say, well, but what about 9 -11 and what if somebody had reported those folks and stuff like that?

10:07

It really seems that no one has taken the time to think through the background and thinking of the movie called

10:20

Minority Report, pre -crime. Remember pre -crime? People think that the role of government and police is to stop crime before it happens.

10:33

Now, as a Christian, just stand back a second, leave all the techie, weird stuff out.

10:39

Where is that in Scripture? You educate the people as to what God's law is, you educate the people as to what the punishment of God's law is, but where is there anything about preventing someone from doing something based upon you're trying to read their minds?

10:57

You're trying to read their hearts. Is there anything like that at all? I'm not aware of anything.

11:05

And so God has not given us this ability. God has not given us the capacity to look into the hearts and minds of individuals and to determine they might do something like this.

11:20

Instead, we're supposed to be responsible individuals who take care of ourselves and protect ourselves against people like that, which is why demanding the people be unarmed in the presence of evil is an absurd action of an anti -Christian worldview.

11:39

And yet many Christians support it because they've been deceived into ignoring biblical worldviews regarding God's law and things like that.

11:47

So here is a creepy, creepy website. Ken Ham actually pointed it out.

11:54

And you must understand the things that spot the signs, what to look for, what to look for.

12:03

They're talking about basic radicalization. Okay, all right, so you know a young Muslim man who used to talk to you on the street and things like that.

12:16

And now all of a sudden he's dressing differently and he's very obviously doing all the prayers and he's going to a different mosque.

12:24

Now he won't talk to you. Okay, I get that.

12:31

But you need to understand, and my Muslim friends will tell you, I've been consistent on this line for a long, long time.

12:39

Christians need to understand that every anti -Muslim action of a secular government logically and consistently must result in the same type of actions being taken against Christians.

12:55

So when France says no more homeschooling, what they're trying to do, ostensibly, is to stop radicalization of young people by placing them in the state school.

13:10

Not recognizing, of course, that secularism is a radical perspective as well, but they're a secular state, so what do you expect?

13:20

You do that in regards to Islam and you can't avoid the reality that you then are having to do the same thing in regards to Christians and putting

13:32

Christian children into that anti -Christian, anti -God context of the secular educational system.

13:41

So it's not just Christianity. This is the kind of stuff that will be used for anyone who opposes any of the

13:51

Great Reset, because the Great Reset will always be expressed within the context of the greater good.

14:01

So you're creating a hive mind. You're creating people who have been taught that they need to think a certain way, and thinking another way means that's a bad person and we need to help them.

14:19

Reading this website, if you've not read

14:25

Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, then I suggested to you, remember it's not a

14:31

Christian book, there's profanity in it and things like that, but not as much as you get in a lot of movies, to be honest with you, but you'll see.

14:43

It comes from a worldly viewpoint, but the point is the medical intervention that they use, the treatments that they use, create a mindset where everybody is unified.

15:00

It's great, everybody wants to help everyone else and everyone wants to be very, very humble and smile and la, la, la, la, la, but the whole idea is if anyone thinks differently than what

15:17

Uni wants them to think, Unicom, the computer that controls the entire globe, then you're considered sick, and since you're sick, you need to be treated.

15:33

That's what this is about. It's like, wow, so if you question the motives of a government, and I'm seeing this,

15:44

I'm watching this on Twitter constantly, people just shocked that you would go, man,

15:50

I don't trust the government. You don't trust the government? I remember, oh, how long ago was it that I was in New Zealand?

15:58

I've told the story before, and sitting around with some folks and there are

16:03

Christians going, I just don't understand you Americans and your guns. It's like, well, I don't think you should trust a conglomeration of government.

16:12

We trust our government explicitly, and I'm just like, that's what you're going to be asked here, too, and so when the masked people, well, they're all masked people, when the masked people show up with their syringes ready to go and they want to inject you, you trust what's in there?

16:39

Do you know what's in there? Do you know? How do you know? How do you know?

16:46

What happens once they start saying, well, you know, now we have another strain and another strain, and so we're going to put this in there, we're going to put that in there, becomes a cocktail, and how do you know what's in there?

16:59

Just have to trust, just have to trust, got to trust, trust, trust, trust, trust, trust, trust, trust, trust. Well, yeah, so actearly .uk,

17:08

man, just spend some time reading through there and just think about, you know, some people,

17:14

I had some guy on Twitter just get all upset. How can you judge us? You're an American. You don't know what's going on here.

17:20

You can't judge our society, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm just like, what does, does

17:26

Big Brother have to come out and start the two minutes hate and put a sign over his neck that says,

17:31

I am Big Brother before you get the idea? So it's astonishing. It really, really is astonishing, but check it out.

17:39

It is, it is amazing to look at it. It's wow.

17:46

Shocking stuff. Okay, let's, oh, and let me show you something.

17:53

I've shared this screen earlier. I mean, I shared it with Rich and he said it looked good, so I'm going to try sharing it again and see if this works.

18:01

Hopefully you can, you can see this, share. So hopefully instead of my ugly mug, you're now seeing a screenshot from the

18:11

World Health Organization. The two are from January or June 9th, 2020 and November 13th, 2020, but they're the same page.

18:25

This is coronavirus disease serology, coronavirus disease, COVID -19 serology.

18:31

What is herd immunity? What is herd immunity? Okay. There's been small changes up here, but it's answering the question, what is herd immunity?

18:39

Now back in June, you were given the definition of herd immunity that most of us learned back in March, when this started being discussed in general quarters rather than in specifically only amongst odd people called virologists or epidemiologists.

19:03

Herd immunity, here's the original definition. Here, herd immunity is indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune, either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.

19:18

This means that even people who haven't been infected or in whom an infection hasn't triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person.

19:31

The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID -19 is not yet clear. So the idea of herd immunity is a relevant idea whether you have immunizations or not, whether you have vaccines or not, because herd immunity has always existed.

19:49

When a disease hits the human population and you have survivors and they have antibodies, they become vector breakers.

20:00

So an infected person is only going to put out so much virus. And if two out of every three or three out of every four or four out of every five people that they hit with their virus, unintentionally, but they do so, is already immune, then you're breaking vectors.

20:20

And you eventually develop herd immunity and the virus can no longer thrive and increase and the outbreak ends.

20:29

That's the historical definition of herd immunity. But that doesn't help. That doesn't help.

20:37

And that needs to be changed. And here is where, again, if George Orwell were being paid royalties by all the governmental organizations that are just stealing his ideas and putting them into practice, his estate would be doing really well.

20:53

Because just a few months later, so five months later, the answer to what is herd immunity is not what it used to be.

21:04

Now, herd immunity, also known as population immunity, is a concept used for vaccination in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

21:18

Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.

21:24

Huh. That's a whole new definition that's actually the opposite of the old definition.

21:31

So there's never been herd immunity until vaccines were developed. So no one ever developed herd immunity before the modern era.

21:41

That's absurd. Of course, it's absurd. But the Ministry of Truth doesn't care about whether something's absurd or not.

21:50

That's just how they're going to do things. And there you go. There is the World Health Organization showing us that they are very much a part of the

21:59

Ministry of Truth and willing to redefine terms and change meanings and everything else just on the fly.

22:10

So there you go. Isn't that exciting? Yeah, I'm excited. Someone else sent me a video of a policeman who followed a guy home from the grocery store because he didn't wear a mask.

22:22

That's exciting. And the policeman doesn't understand the difference between a governmental mandate and a law.

22:27

A lot of people don't. Laws are passed by legislatures with duly represented representatives doing the voting and all this, quote unquote, emergency stuff.

22:42

Well, there you go. You got to trust the government to do what's right in situations like that.

22:47

And I don't know about the rest of you, but I've come to the conclusion that that's not a good thing these days.

22:54

All right. This has led to a very, very interesting development on the theological side of things.

23:04

I don't know if you saw the Christian Post from December 23rd.

23:11

I'm not sure why it took so long to get out, but Leah Marianne Klett wrote an article for the

23:22

Christian Post. Rick Warren, COVID -19 has revealed a fundamental weakness in the church. Now, to my knowledge,

23:29

Saddleback Church closed up shop in March and has not met since then. To my knowledge.

23:35

That's what I've read. And so Rick Warren, and we know that over the past number of years,

23:48

Rick Warren has swung wildly to the left. And in regards to being ecumenical and woke and everything else, and it was just a few weeks ago, they did the segregated for African -American only people meeting and all this kind of stuff.

24:09

So two left wings woke as can be. And so here you have a allegedly 20 ,000 member church not meeting.

24:24

So they're not doing the ordinances of the church as far as I can tell. But notice what he told

24:32

Relevant Magazine. He said COVID revealed a fundamental weakness in the church.

24:38

Oh, weakness in the church. Well, it's always good to know where the weaknesses in the church are.

24:46

Most churches only have one purpose. Now remember, this is the author of The Purpose Driven Life.

24:53

Most churches only have one purpose, worship. And if you take worship away, you've got nothing.

25:00

They're in a hurry to get back to worship because that's all they've got. Okay. He goes on to say, but the 20 ,000 member

25:13

Saddleback Church is built not on one purpose, but on five. Warren explained.

25:20

You take one circle out, you still got four other circles. You've got ministry going on. We've got mission going on.

25:26

We've got fellowship going on. We've got discipleship going on. Those all stand on their own.

25:32

Now just stop for a moment and think of these five circles.

25:39

Evidently, worship is one, ministry is another, mission is the third, fellowship is the fourth, and discipleship is the fifth.

25:53

And those all stand on their own. They all stand on their own.

26:00

So you can have discipleship without worship, without ministry, without mission, without fellowship.

26:13

You can have fellowship without worship or without discipleship. You can have ministry without any of the other four.

26:21

I think most of us are going, no, you can't. I mean, it's one thing to be able to conceptualize and distinguish certain aspects, especially so that you can prioritize appropriately.

26:40

But when you say that each one of these can exist without the other four, then they're equal, right?

26:50

They'd have to be equal. How else could it be? And I'm just left stunned.

26:56

I shouldn't be stunned. What this is revealing is how wildly outside the boundaries many of these churches have been for a long, long time, and how unbiblical their ecclesiology has been for a long, long time.

27:21

But when you think about that, he actually claims that Saddleback has seen over 16 ,000 people come to Christ since March.

27:38

Now, I've got a question. How many have been baptized? Yesterday, there it goes, disappears.

27:48

Yesterday, my glass kept doing the ghostly thing. I'm gonna get a drink of water. It started to there at the end.

27:57

It's not actually green, so I'm not sure why it does that. But anyway, 16 ,000. Have they been baptized? Are they being discipled?

28:05

Have they partaken of the Lord's Supper with the rest of the body? How can you say that you have discipleship without worship, without the gathered body partaking of the supper, observing baptism, and most importantly, listening to the

28:27

Word of God opened amongst the people and the gospel being proclaimed in that context?

28:37

Once you fracture New Testament ecclesiology in this way, once you shatter it, break it into distinguishable but not disconnectable elements, and then you say, don't need worship.

29:00

We'd like to have it, but it's not definitional.

29:07

You have truly abandoned any meaningful claim to being a

29:13

New Testament church, and this is, of course, let's just be honest, this is what happened with liberalism at the end of the 19th century in the

29:27

United States. Do you remember the video last year?

29:34

I think it was actually, I think it was 2019. Well, I guess it still is last year. You remember the video last year of the, well, there's been a couple videos.

29:45

So you'll have these processions into these leftist churches of various people dressed as plants, you know, trees, it looks like something out of Lord of the

29:57

Rings or something, the ants are attacking, throwing rocks or something, I don't know. At Union Theological Seminary, you had the plants put into a circle and everyone gathers around the circle and are asking the plants to forgive them for their acts of aggression against mother nature and, you know, this kind of stuff.

30:17

So you think about that kind of mindset, and how did that happen?

30:31

I mean, you didn't have a sound worshiping church with someone proclaiming the

30:39

Word of God with authority and consistency one Sunday, and the next

30:45

Sunday they're walking in in their tree suits. That doesn't happen. There's a process that takes place, and there is no reason to have true

30:59

God -honoring worship if you don't have the conviction that that is what the church is called to do.

31:09

So you look at Revelation, you see worship going on in heaven, you see the connection with here on earth, you see that the picture that is presented in Revelation 4 and 5, going back to Isaiah chapter 6, reveals to us that there is a consistent worship service going on throughout all time in heaven, and that our worship on earth is to be a pale but meaningful reflection of the reality of what has been going on since creation itself.

31:52

And hence, this becomes our connection to every other generation, both past, present, and future.

31:58

We are involved in that one worship of the one true God in the way that He has revealed that He is to be worshipped.

32:07

Once you have the leftward arc, which is so consistent in denominations and seminaries and so on, heading to the left, you no longer have the high level of confidence that comes from believing the

32:29

Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that the Bible is consistent with itself, and the

32:37

Bible reveals to us the truth about who God is. Once you lose that, you have no foundation for any meaningful worship.

32:43

And so for a while, you still end up with the external forms. You see this, sadly, in a lot of churches in Europe and UK, where you still have the external forms, but the fundamental stuff of the theology is gone.

33:02

And so you still do the outward stuff, but you'll have people who literally can quote the

33:08

Nicene Creed, but the Nicene Creed has no meaning to them, none whatsoever.

33:16

And if you were to ask them, so do you really believe that Jesus was very God of very

33:22

God, light from light? Well, they know the words, but it's like, you mean like really?

33:28

Like as in the man Jesus who lived was really God incarnate? No, that's just a story.

33:37

And that's what happens. And so that eventually the old forms die out and are replaced with the walking trees.

33:50

And the stuff that we see all the time, you know, the woke stuff and everything else, just there's nothing to keep it out any longer.

33:57

And so it just flows right on in. And so I'd like to know from the folks at Saddleback, I would like to know from Rick Warren, what have you done with these 16 ,000 people?

34:15

I mean, your church should now be 36 ,000 members, right? Start at 20 ,000.

34:22

And if you're claiming to have led 16 ,000 people to the

34:28

Lord since March, then your church should have a membership of 36 ,000 people now, right?

34:38

I mean, you're going to have real problems if they eventually do open things up, finding enough room for everybody.

34:47

But right now, what are you doing with these 16 ,000 people? You're not leading them in worship.

34:56

So how do you do discipleship? How do you do ministry? How do you do missions?

35:01

How do you do fellowship when you've cut off one arm, cut off one leg?

35:09

So we can do without that. We've got our five, we've got the head, and we've got two legs, and we've got two legs, two arms, and we cut off the head.

35:19

So we're still good. Got our five circles, but they're sort of connected, you know?

35:26

I mean, fellowship, when do you have the sweetest fellowship? When there has been true worship, right? It's based upon God's truth.

35:32

It's based upon the proclamation of God's word. I remember just a few, that's a couple months ago.

35:41

In fact, I'm going to have to mention to Elliot, I want to do this again, but we had a service and the sermon, and honestly,

35:50

I don't remember whether I preached or Jeff did, but we had a service where the sermon was convicting and uplifting and strong.

36:02

And then during, the Lord's Supper was just special. And then our music leader will start a song as the supper is ending, that we all join in on.

36:19

And we did a song that is really honestly, in some ways,

36:26

I mean, I've sung it all around the world with saints in many different languages. And it's just like Amazing Grace is quasi -canonical.

36:38

Because it just touches so many people. It is well of my soul. And when it is well began, everyone began seeing it, but in such a reverent way.

36:53

And it was such reflection upon the supper and the gospel, and it just all came together.

37:02

So that I would say the fellowship that we had with one another in that supper, as we sang that song together, was incredible worship.

37:19

And it was ministry and it was discipleship and it prepared us for mission.

37:26

So you can't, this idea that you can break these things up and they stand on their own and you can just, you know, we'll go ahead and we'll just, we'll not worship.

37:40

Well, so someone rightly pointed out that aside from the fact that I think the apostles would have looked at something like this and gone, what?

37:56

Aside from that fact, when push is going to come to shove, when the

38:04

Gavin Newsom's and all the rest of these totalitarian dictators decide that that Christian church thing is a real downer.

38:20

It's a negative. We, this isn't helping us out the way that needs to help us out. And they say, you're not going to meet anymore.

38:29

They're going to point to people like Saddleback and say, and these people agree with us. These people are on our side because they're going to be the first people who go, hey, we just want to do whatever, you know, the government wants us to do.

38:42

And it's interesting. Warren said, we're in revival.

38:53

He said, we're in revival. So his church, which is not meeting and is not worshiping, is in revival.

39:07

Well, there you go. There's what you have. There's what's going on.

39:13

And it just makes you go, how strange has the world become?

39:20

There will not be a united Christian front in California.

39:26

So if eventually grace communities, legal stuff, and the other churches there comes to court, as is happening faster in Canada, people standing up there, as is happening in the

39:44

UK, when it eventually gets to court, I can assure you that these people will be asked to testify against those who stand up and say, no,

39:57

God has commanded us to worship Him. And they're going to come along and say, well, no, there's another way of understanding these things.

40:07

And that weakens us. There's no question that weakens us. What do you do about that?

40:16

Well, you point out their errors, but when it comes to the time in the courtroom, we better be blatant and clear in what we have to say about those situations.

40:31

It's sad. It really, really is sad because you can obviously look back at a time when things were very different and Rick Warren was in a different place, but there you go.

40:44

Ecumenism never, ever, ever leads to a stronger spine in what's going on.

40:50

I mean, as mentioned in passing, I do not, some people on Twitter are surprised, they must not listen to the voting line, surprised that I responded to Peter Hitchens.

41:09

Peter Hitchens tweeted this yesterday. He said, if in 100 years there are any future historians in a free country, rather than a vast regimented

41:20

PRC from poll to poll, the question they will need to answer most urgently is, quote, why did the free peoples of the world fail so completely to defend their liberty?

41:32

End quote. To which I responded exactly, and the answer is not far to find.

41:37

The secular worldview reduces men to ugly bags of mostly water, fizzing chemicals with no cosmic significance.

41:45

Freedom and liberty means nothing to bags of transient chemicals, but they mean a great deal to men.

41:53

And Steph Theis responded, ugly bags of mostly water sounds like something out of a

42:00

Star Trek episode, specifically The Next Generation, which mostly proves your point. And I responded just before the program started, it's a direct quote from the

42:08

TNG episode Home Soil, and I misspelled it, should be, and is a very accurate description of the human being when removed from God's creative design.

42:19

Steph responded, thanks, I'm totally geeked out now, my brain feels like a rusty steel trap. So you had remembered the background of ugly bags of mostly water.

42:32

It's actually ugly giant bags of mostly water, but you don't use that part because that was, these were little critters, silicon critters that lived in sand, and so we would look very giant to them.

42:47

That doesn't really translate into the discussion of what we're talking about here. But then again,

42:56

I don't know, if you wanted to, and I think there's some people who do, if you wanted to spend your every waking hour right now doing deep dives into strange corners of the internet, you will hear and see a whole lot of strange things.

43:24

Like for example, everybody saw the video that was posted a couple days ago of something burning up in the atmosphere over West Virginia.

43:36

And I followed a few comments on Twitter and ended up in some weird places where people were talking about how a

43:46

Moab had been detonated in Massachusetts and 50 ,000 invading

43:51

Chinese soldiers had been killed. And this was part of a space battle between the

44:00

United States and China, and just all sorts of really interesting stuff that you can find out there.

44:09

I never did find out what the story of that was, if it was even real. That's the other problem.

44:16

Who knows if what you see online anymore is even real.

44:23

I saw that dancing robots thing yesterday.

44:29

Is that real? I don't know. Because it looks just like a robot that I saw last year in a video that turned out to be a guy.

44:37

It was a fake. Because it was where you're beating up on the robot and trying to keep it from doing stuff that it's trying to do.

44:46

And then it turned around, beat the guy up, and it ended up being a fake. And how are you supposed to know?

44:52

I don't know. I have no idea. I mean, we're putting actors back in movie and television who are now 50 years older than when we first saw them, and we're de -aging them.

45:10

Carrie Fisher was still acting in movies after she died. I mean, okay, some of that you can tell, but some of it's starting to get to where you can't tell.

45:23

I don't know what to believe about almost any of that kind of stuff anymore, because there's no way of knowing.

45:31

There's no way of being able to analyze this stuff. All of that to say that there is a lot of speculation going on about what's going to happen in a matter of a week,

45:47

January 5th and 6th. So on January 5th, we have in the

45:53

United States the election in Georgia. I can certainly never think of a situation in the history of the past 150 years where a senatorial election in the state of Georgia would literally have the attention of the entire world.

46:15

But it does. And there are some interesting developments in that particular subject, to be sure, in regards to the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and some of the things are coming out about him, which again, who knows?

46:39

But evidently, the Me Too movement only goes one direction. So Me Too only matters if your politics are a certain way.

46:50

So I don't know. But that's January 5th.

46:55

And I don't know if there are enough eyes on this election to overcome the

47:10

Dominion algorithms. I don't know if they've made sure these machines are not connected to the internet, cannot be messed with.

47:20

I have very little confidence, I'll be honest with you, on any of that stuff anymore for the future and anything else.

47:29

That's January 5th. And then January 6th, I've taken the time to read some of the scenarios by people who know what they're talking about in regards to what the president of the

47:43

Senate has the power and authority to do. And the president of the Senate is Mike Pence.

47:51

News coming out today about Josh Hawley not accepting the electors for Biden.

48:02

And I don't know. Beyond my field of expertise,

48:11

I know that, not that I'm going to be traveling at all in the future anyways, but if I were, that would not be one time period that I would choose to be traveling.

48:25

In situations like this, we as believers need to be level -headed.

48:32

But we also need, you know, every generation faces the same thing, wise as serpents and gentle as doves.

48:45

I'm not sure what that means other than it requires being aware of the times.

48:58

And Jesus told us to observe the times. You know, He talked about, you know, the red night, sailors' night, red morning, sailors' warning.

49:08

You know how to read the weather, but you don't know how to read the times around you. And that was not meant as a compliment.

49:17

And so we are to be a people who recognize, for example,

49:24

I am stunned and disappointed deeply in so many

49:30

Christians who are so naive as to not see the Christian worldview ramifications of socialism and the massive leftward lurch in our world.

49:45

And they don't see how this is going to impact the church and their children, their grandchildren and everything associated there with.

49:55

Deeply disappointed at the naivete of many along those lines.

50:01

So we have to observe those things. But we should also be well aware that there is deception all around us from all sides.

50:14

We should not be gullible to only what's on our side and not on the other side type of situation.

50:23

And that's not always easy to be. That's a huge challenge to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.

50:35

That's not an easy thing to do. We need to pray for wisdom. And as we need to be peacemakers as well.

50:43

That doesn't mean, peacemakers does not mean a doormat for evil.

50:50

A lot of people think being a peacemaker means you just let evil people walk all over you. That's not what it means.

50:58

And when you recognize, for example, that the intended cultural revolution of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would result not only in the fundamental destruction of the freedom of the

51:20

Christian church to proclaim gospel, but the fundamental destruction of human lives on a massive scale.

51:28

Then to be a peacemaker in that situation is not to be a compromiser, but to fight evil, to fight systemic evil.

51:40

Let's go ahead and use a big term that's common today, systemic evil. So what is that going to mean on January 7th?

51:51

I don't know. I have no idea. I really don't know what's coming.

51:57

I don't know if there are enough people that are going to stand up and say, this can't be allowed to happen.

52:04

There needs to be a free and fair election without the

52:10

Chinese Communist Party running the voting machines. But is that even possible?

52:19

I don't know. I do not know. But we're going to be watching very, very carefully and very, very closely to see what goes on there.

52:29

Just a few thoughts. 2021 has the advantage of not being 2020.

52:40

But let's just be honest, especially once you get to my age, years are rather short little creatures anymore.

52:48

They go by very quickly. And I think most of us recognize that part of the problem of 2021 was the rapidity of the change in how our lives are lived.

53:09

The danger of 2021 is the establishment of that as the new norm.

53:17

And the new norm is a continued trajectory off into a very anti -human totalitarianism.

53:28

Think what you're told to think, say what you're told to say, live according to globalism.

53:38

And if that's the case, then 2021 will be filled with far more challenges than 2020 was.

53:48

For the church, as I see it, as I feel it,

53:54

I'm a member of the church. I don't preach every Sunday. So I'm in the audience.

54:01

I'm in the congregation, hearing the word of God and singing the songs and participating in the

54:08

Lord's Supper. And the danger is that we develop, as many generations have, let's be honest, develop a schizophrenia.

54:23

We have our religious life and we have our real life. And Christianity doesn't have room for that kind of schizophrenia.

54:32

Our faith informs all of our life. But when the future is so uncertain, how do you not slip into that Sunday worship experience mindset that is so different from watching the breaking news on Monday morning and disconnecting the two?

55:04

The only way that I can understand you hold those things together is you have to have a solid foundation.

55:13

And it's hard to be laying that foundation in the midst of turmoil. That's why that kind of stuff had to have been established a long, long time ago.

55:25

Vital that those foundations be laid in times of peace rather than attempting to do so in times of battle.

55:37

And so with 2021 around the corner, you know,

55:44

I'm asking myself the question, what do we focus upon here at this ministry? We have thousands and thousands of people, literally around the globe, that listen to what we have to say.

56:00

And many others for whom we are a lifeline, where we are filling in where we shouldn't have to fill in, but we are in connecting people to groundedness.

56:17

And so part of that involves continuing to focus upon biblical history, church history, the text of Scripture, the translation of Scripture, transmission of Scripture over time, the foundational things that are often lost in the shuffle, often lost in looking at everything else, the things we've been doing for many, many years.

56:48

I hope and pray that we will get to celebrate 40 years of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

57:01

I'll be honest with you, 2023 feels like a long ways off as far as the speed of censorship, the speed of cancel culture, the speed of destroying free speech in Western countries is concerned.

57:25

But I would love to still be functioning in that way, and I think one of the things we have to do is we're going to have to get more clear in telling people, look, if one day you log on to YouTube and there's no

57:41

Alpha and Omega Ministries anymore, this is what you need to do. This is where you need to go to find out where we will be, what our outlets are going to be, how we're going to try to continue.

57:52

Because once they take us out, they're going to be taking a lot of other people out at the same time, and there's going to be a huge need for a continuing source of consistent sound information and truth about Scripture upon which we stand, and an application to what's going on in the world around us.

58:19

There's no question about that in my mind, and so we'll need to be clear about that.

58:26

So I'm not one of those people going, oh, I can't wait for 2020 to get over with, but I'm also not one of those people that's going, oh, 2021 is just going to be much, much, much worse.

58:39

It might be, but God was faithful through 2020, and I think if a lot of us are honest and we look back on this year, we've been purged of a lot of silliness.

58:57

We've been purged of a lot of worldliness, and part of the question

59:02

I think we need to ask as we think of, I've not heard a lot of talk about New Year's resolutions this year, but as we think about the

59:11

New Year is, how much do we want at the end of 2021 to be more like Christ in being obedient to God and sensitive to His Spirit than we are at the end of 2020?

59:30

Is that even a priority? Something tells me there's gonna be lots of opportunities for us to be able to do that very kind of thing, to increase in our sanctification in a big way.

59:46

So thank you for your support through 2020.

59:52

We have been astonished at how many people have stood with us. We did lose a lot of folks.

01:00:01

These days have caused division, sadly, but we do thank you for standing with us, and as we go into 2021, especially those first few days, well, we'll be here to try to seek to respond to these issues in a

01:00:17

Christ -glorifying, biblically consistent fashion. So thanks for watching