Southern Baptist Convention Leaders Lose All Credibility

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris. We're gonna have a brief podcast today.

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I only want to talk about one issue, and then I want to make some application. I want to talk about the book of 2

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Kings from God's Word, and draw some parallels between what Israel was going through during the reign of Hezekiah, and what we are going through right now in the church in America, the visible church.

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And I know that not everything in history is completely parallel, but things tend to rhyme, because human nature is such that when presented with similar scenarios, we tend to act in similar ways.

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And that's one of the great insights I think the Old Testament gives us, is understanding the nature of people, the nature of God, His law,

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His character, and then the nature of people, and how they react to not just His law, but the circumstances they find themselves in, and the ways in which they sin.

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And that's why we're grateful as Christians for the redemption found in Jesus Christ, because without it, we would be completely lost.

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And there are stories, especially ones I'm thinking of in the Old Testament, the book of Judges being a great example of this, that show us what happens when man is left to himself without guidance, with, well, really rejecting guidance.

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Wisdom cries in the streets, as Proverbs says, but when there is not a witness to be found, and people tend to to do their own thing, and it's not good.

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But even in those circumstances, God leaves Himself without a witness completely, because He even used imperfect people, used judges.

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Some of them, I mean, read the life of Samson. They have their issues, and yet He uses them to do things, to restore, to bring restoration, to defeat enemies.

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And anyway, I want to talk about 2 Kings, chapters 16 and through,

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I think, probably 18 or so, and make some application, draw some parallels from that particular portion of Scripture and what's going on today.

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And the Southern Baptist Convention, I'm not gonna lie, is on my mind a bit. And part of it is because of this story.

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And if this story that I'm about to share with you does not tell you everything that you need to know, and I don't care if you are even on the

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Me Too side of things, on the BLM side of things, on the social justice side of things to an extent, but you still have a concern for character, you don't want corruption in your denomination, because I know there's plenty of people like that out there, this should jar you.

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This should jar you. If you're against the social justice, it probably jars you more if you're against the social justice stuff and the

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Me Too stuff. It should jar anyone who just cares about integrity, basic integrity, which is fundamentally essential for any institution to survive.

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And this is one of the things that has caused me, not the story in particular, but what the story demonstrates, it's caused me to come to the conclusion that I don't think it's salvageable.

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I don't think there's anything that can really be done if these are the leaders, if it's this pervasive.

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It'd be one thing if what I'm about to share with you is only unique to a small section of the

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Southern Baptist Convention or one school in the denomination or something like that, but this kind of thing touches, it seems like, almost every institution.

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And one of the big ways to illustrate this is to show how many people, or to ask, how many people are willing to stand up against the evil, corruption, double standards that are so flagrantly on display?

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Well let me share this particular story with you, if I may. And it touches close to home for me, because I'm a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I kick -started this,

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I guess to some extent, at least the recent focus on this, last week with a podcast. For those who haven't seen it,

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I'll summarize for you. I talked about Bruce Ashford, who's a former provost at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I just said there's a

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Me Too moment here. His wife publicly posted Me Too on her

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Twitter profile. She reached out to Rachel Denhollander, who is very active in advising the

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Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee, who is very active in seeking to represent the victims of abuse in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, and Bruce Ashford's wife reached out to her very publicly on Twitter.

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Bruce Ashford's wife reached out to Beth Moore very publicly on Twitter. Bruce Ashford's wife accused

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J .D. Greer, where Bruce Ashford and Lauren Ashford went to church, where Lauren Ashford, or Bruce Ashford rather, was an elder at one point.

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J .D. Greer was also a roommate of Bruce Ashford when they were in college, and Lauren Ashford reaches, or doesn't reach out, but states essentially on Twitter that there's hypocrisy going on.

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That's my summation of her, and in regards to abuse. So this all happens.

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I pointed it out, and I just asked the question, because Bruce Ashford was employed for months after this all came to light on Twitter.

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Where's the consistency here? Why didn't this make it to the Guidepost Report? The Guidepost Report was supposed to advise the

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Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee on how to handle abuse, and there was a report on all the instances, the major instances of abuse within the convention.

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It was very long, and this wasn't even mentioned. Of course, Joni Hannigan's name doesn't come up in any of this either, and we've talked about her before in her reporting on an issue of abuse that ended up getting her, getting a lot of pressure applied on her from Kevin Eazell in her own words, and you can go watch our episode that we did on that.

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It didn't even show up, and so I asked the question last week, did they actually care?

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The people who claim to care about abuse, and they claim to have these principles that they abide by.

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Believing women, taking their word at face value and not questioning it.

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Believing that the standard ought to be to convict someone, or at least to put someone on a ministry watch list of some kind, the preponderance of evidence.

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Not innocent until proven guilty. If you have 51%, you just lean towards it, it's probably the story that the alleged victim tells seems plausible, then that person needs to be examined, and to some extent blacklisted, or at least people need to be warned about that person.

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These are new standards, relatively, that are now becoming very popular.

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Not just the Southern Baptist Convention, this is all throughout our society, and it's in other denominations, but these are the new standards, popular standards, and there's others as well.

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But those are the two big ones that stand out to me in the way abuse is now handled. Of course there's also a centralization of power in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, whereas before autonomous churches handled these things in conjunction with law enforcement, now there's an effort to make the

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Southern Baptist Convention itself liable and responsible for abuse and abuse prevention.

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So many of you already know this, and this is review for you. I just tried to point out there's hypocrisy here.

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Well, Wartburg Watch, according to them, because I went and did this and brought some attention to Bruce Ashford, they put out a story here, and there's a lot of documentation that I don't have time to go over all of.

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The Wartburg Watch, I don't think, would be necessarily critical of the things that I just said

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I was critical of. They are more on, I would say, probably more on the MeToo side of things, but they're believers as far as, like, they don't like the double standard either.

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They actually believe that abuse should be rooted out. Now, the way they go about it, I might quibble with, but they are...

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the commonality here, I guess, between what I did and then what they saw me doing and wanted to capitalize on or follow up on, is that we both have a common concern about corruption in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. And this is the kind of thing that the denomination can't survive. They just can't.

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They just can't. So, they put out a story about Bruce Ashford, and in this story, they talk about a number of things.

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They talk about... actually, this isn't... I don't think I pulled up the right story here. Let me see here.

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If I go to the Wartburg Watch, and here it is.

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They've had a number of stories on Bruce Ashford, and maybe that is the right one. And this is the one that...

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anyway. So, in this particular story, they point out that Bruce Ashford was on the leadership at...

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basically how integrated he was. He was integrated into Southern Baptist life at the

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Summit Church, and of course he has connections with... he did the whole... it's still there...

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the whole course on public theology, government, that kind of thing, for the Gospel Coalition.

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It's still there. He's written for nine Marx Ministries. His articles, or article... it's still up there.

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He just endorsed biblical critical theory by Watkins, which is a book promoted by the

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Keller Center. And this is recent stuff. The publisher just tweeted, what, a day or two ago about it, and included

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Bruce Ashford's endorsement. So he's surviving, to some extent, in evangelicalism, as far as his name still carries some weight with it, even though he hasn't been provost now for, what,

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I don't know, two years or so. Now, they put some clips from...

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that I just kind of went over with you from last week, and what I talked about, and then they bring this up.

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So I don't want to focus too much attention on this, and I...

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the thing... here's the the way that I want to navigate this. I'm going to first tell you that I don't know what the truth is.

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I don't have enough information as far as whether the allegations I'm about to share with you are actually...

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they actually happened, right? I don't have that information about Lauren Ashford, either. I mean, all

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I know is she's crying out for help, and she's saying, me too. And there's a legal battle where she files for emergency custody, and then she files for custody multiple times, and she tries to get orders of protection against her husband.

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Her husband also files for emergency custody multiple times, and they have a divorce. And it looks like it's a nasty divorce.

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That's just from the public documents that are out there. Well, and I think the address, even on the court...

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now that I'm thinking about it, on the court documents indicate that Bruce Ashford, during part of this time, was living on... must have been living in campus housing, or on the campus of Southeastern or something, because that's the address that's used.

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But anyway, there's... he still has a connection to the school when that whole battle starts between him and his wife, in court at least.

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Well, fast forward to about three months ago, late last year, there's a story that breaks in the local...

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and some of this actually went national... newspapers and news shows in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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And that is that there's a Lyft driver who... and I'll just summarize it for you, the story...

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a Lyft driver who potentially tried to drug a young girl,

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I think she was 17 or so, and a black girl too, which not significant for the purposes of establishing whether it's true or not for a rational person, but for the

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Me Too, and not even the Me Too, but the social justice movement, that becomes significant because the power disparity in their minds becomes greater.

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You have a white male driving, and then the passenger who's... there's three factors that are automatically give him an advantage.

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She's younger, she's black, and she's a female. So the... on the intersectional chart, her words should carry more weight, right?

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So anyway, she's getting a ride from this Lyft driver, and this particular

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Lyft driver supposedly starts spraying something, and she thinks it makes her faint.

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And it's... and while he's doing this, he's being flirtatious with her, according to her, according to these news reports, saying things like, you're pretty, and I would date you if you weren't so young, and things of this nature.

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And so she opens the door to the car while it's moving, and she either jumps or falls out, and she goes to the hospital.

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Now, the Lyft driver in this particular incident is

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Bruce Ashford. The license plate was revealed by the individual who jumped out of the car.

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Bowden is her name. And the...

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she also gave a screenshot of the driver. There's other documentation here that Wartburg Watch puts in that indicates that he worked, at least at times, for Lyft.

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And this is like, I don't know, 10 -minute drive, something like that, from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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And he lives in the area. It's... it's... there's really no question in anyone's mind, it's him. And so this is what

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Wartburg Watch puts out there, and they put all the documentation. They put some other things, too, that I don't care to necessarily go over that are, if true, kind of shocking.

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They even put in... there was a clip of Danny Akin. It's not in this article, I guess in another one.

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There's a clip of Danny Akin, the president of the seminary, a few years ago, talking about his book on sex.

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Danny Akin wrote a book on sex. And how much... basically, it impacted

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Bruce Ashford more than any other book, with the exception of the Bible. It's really weird.

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It's... especially with everything else that's come to light, it's very odd that the president of the seminary... I'm not gonna play it, but it's...

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I don't want to belabor the point and drag you through salacious things, or,

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I don't know, the... the mud... we don't need enough mud on us. We have enough mud on us as it is. So if you guys want to go look it up, anyone out there, you can go do it.

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But I just want to describe it for you, to give you the impression of the way it looks. If you consume all this material and you see all these things, how does it look?

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Well, I'll tell you how it looks. If you're putting your

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Me Too hat on, and your BLM hat on, which Southeastern, as I demonstrated in the podcast last week, the

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Southern Baptist in general, Bruce Ashford as well, has been involved in this.

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If you put on those hats and you accept the standards that I just outlined at the beginning of this video, then

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Bruce Ashford needs to be called out. Not only at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary should students that he had be asked whether or not he was appropriate with them, or inappropriate with them, but because he was also in leadership at Summit Church, the

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Church should make sure and publicly make a statement asking if anyone has been abused or anything by Bruce Ashford.

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That's standard. That's what happens in other cases in the denomination.

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The other cases that made it to the Guideposts Report are just accepted at face value, even with less evidence.

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I mean, this is out there. This story is out there, and I don't know enough about the situations to know to what extent

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Bruce Ashford is guilty in these things. It could be very well true that he's innocent of the accusations, but in order to accept that possibility, you have to pick one.

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You have to throw out the Me Too stuff and acknowledge that there's been hypocrisy in the convention, or you have to treat

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Bruce Ashford in the same way that people like Johnny Hunt and David Sills, Paige Patterson, have been treated.

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It's not happening, though. Not happening at all. In fact, it's being ignored, and there was a thread on Twitter.

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This is from more recently from the

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SBC Underground. This is probably the best, most comprehensive treatment

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I've seen of this. This is SBC Underground. They posted this, I think, a day ago, March 15th, and it goes into detail on all of this, and it has all the the primary sources.

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Bruce Ashford talks about how he, and I mentioned this to last week, he went to, he's very public with going to a rehab program for alcoholism.

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He says it's PTSD, but I would note that Southeastern does have, if you are teaching or you're a student there, you have to sign a document that says you will not drink any alcohol, not a drop, and when

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I was there, I didn't, because that meant something to me, and I know a lot of people there, I know, even people who worked for the school did not abide by that, but that was something, that's my word, right, and Danny Aitken's very adamant about this.

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He's even said things that would lead me to believe that he thinks it's a sin to drink alcohol. Now, don't quote me on that, but I've, he has either overstated the case, or maybe that's his actual conviction at times, but he's adamant, adamantly against drunkenness, that's for sure, and you have the

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Provost, just not that many months after, I think it was a probably a separation of maybe six months or so, it was it was less than a year, way less than a year, he is at a rehab facility after having taught at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and so there's multiple, multiple things going on here, and this is what

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SBC Underground covers. So if you're looking for something comprehensive, but it shows that, look, people like, you know,

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I already mentioned Rachel Denhollander, I mentioned Beth Moore, but even people like Julie Royce, who picks up a lot of the stories, was reached out to in 2021 about this story of Bruce Ashford's wife, and did nothing with it, and it's interesting that this story, according to SBC Underground, earlier in the week it was starting to grow some legs.

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Some of the Me Too folks who are active in the Southern Baptist Convention started to give it a little bit of attention, and all of a sudden, no one, it's a ghost town, no one's giving it any attention, no one's talking about it.

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Does that make any sense to anyone out there? Does that make any sense, with the details, the extreme details, and the nature of this is just,

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I mean, if you're looking at something that captivates attention and is juicy, as far as, which you would think would attract a lot of eyeballs, this story blows all the stories and guideposts out of the water.

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I mean, none of them have a girl who's, you know, going down the road in a lift car and jumps out because they're afraid that there's someone who may be setting them up for like a date rape situation, which is what she seemed to indicate.

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I mean, that's not in the other stuff, but it's in this story, and all of a sudden, silence from that particular crowd.

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I mean, you have people like the Warburg Watch focusing on it, but who else? Now, John, why'd you bring that all up?

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What does that have to do with anything? It has to do with the

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Southern Baptist Convention's lack of ability to defend itself, not only against bad ideas or bad doctrines or bad theology, which

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I focused on for a long time, but against very, very basic corruption. I don't really want to answer the question, but I'll ask it, and this is rhetorical, but I think you know the answer.

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Why would a story like that not get any oxygen? How come it's not being picked up anywhere?

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Any of the reporters who have been involved with this? There's been at least like three major reporters. I'm thinking of the

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Tennessean, I think, the Houston Chronicle, and then I think that even the

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Wall Street Journal's gotten involved in this, if I'm not mistaken. None of these reporters are interested in this kind of thing.

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The activist for the MeToo side, not a word. Rachel Denhollander says nothing about this, even though it's now publicly coming to light.

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Danny Akin says nothing about it, as if he doesn't even need to defend Southeastern.

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That tells you something. Some MeToo situations are different than others. They are not all the same.

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On what basis are they not all the same? Is there a group of people, a guild of some kind, is there an untouchable group of people that you're not allowed to say anything against?

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If you're in the Southern Baptist Convention, it sure seems that way, doesn't it? Sure feels that way. There are people that cannot be charged with anything, apparently.

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This is pretty crazy to me, and it's not—the craziness to me isn't—I mean, the stories are kind of nuts.

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The story about the Lyft thing is nuts, but look, crazy things happen.

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I have a life filled with crazy things, so I think for me, and I'm young, but I've had some nutty things.

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I lost my van over a cliff once in a snowstorm when I was working. That's a crazy story. Well, I better not get in all my crazy stories.

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People are gonna start using this against me. I have a number of crazy stories, and so I can see that crazy situations happen.

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I don't have a problem seeing that. What's crazy to me, though, is the corruption here.

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The fact that a story like this doesn't get oxygen, I think, tells you everything you need to know in an environment where all these other stories with less evidence are getting oxygen, and they happen to be—they happen to—interestingly enough, they frame people who tend to lean more conservative, generally, and the old guard in the

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SPC, if you will, and they tend to paint as the white knights certain more favorable figures in the denomination.

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This one indicted or would indict a number of people close to SPC power.

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At least the provost, the current provost, and the president of Southern Baptist or Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Keith Whitfield and Danny Akin, would both be in trouble, in a way, because when

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Bruce—when this whole incident was happening with Bruce Ashford and his wife, they gave Bruce Ashford glowing reviews, and then they quietly dismissed him in the middle of the semester.

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It doesn't reflect well on Rachel Denhollander or Beth Moore, who are supposedly the ones championing the abuse victims when there's silence about the situation.

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And the question you have to ask, I suppose, is do these people not believe

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Lauren Ashford? Do they not believe—I think it's

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Aziah Bowden, I think that's her name, Aziah Bowden—do they not believe either of these people?

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These women, one being a woman of color, right, young woman of color, do they doubt their story?

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And if so, on what basis? And if that's the reason this story isn't getting any oxygen, it's because maybe they've looked into it and Bruce Ashford isn't guilty, then on what basis is he not guilty?

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And then, was that same standard applied to other situations like Sills -Patterson,

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Hunt, etc.? Did they use the same level of examination and proof?

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Now, I don't know the answer to this, but there is no way to answer that question that doesn't—literally, there's no option that doesn't expose these people as hypocrites.

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What would cause a story like this to be stamped out? How much power—we call it the platform in the

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Southern Baptist Convention—but how much power does the platform have to control information, to control what is said, what is not said, to dismiss the concerns of some?

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Truth isn't the one—truth isn't helping make these decisions, I don't believe, anymore.

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And for all the talk about power and privilege, the people that have the most power seem to have the most privilege and seem to lord it over those who don't have power and privilege.

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It does seem that way a bit, doesn't it? Which is the height of irony. So that's—I wanted to bring that story up to you, and then

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I wanted to show you some biblical stuff here that I was reading in my own time with the

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Lord, and it made me think of the Southern Baptist Convention. I want to start here with 2 Kings chapter 18.

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Actually, do we want to start there? Let's start with—let's start before that, I think. 2 Kings chapter 16.

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In 2 Kings 16, Ahaz is the king of Judah. It says that Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath -Pilesar, the king of Syria, saying,

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I'm your servant and your son, come up and deliver me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are rising up against me.

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Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of the Lord—so he's taking God's money here—and in the treasuries of the king's house and sent a present to the king of Syria.

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So the king of Syria listened to him, helped him out. Now, King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet

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Tiglath -Pilesar, and listen to me on this. He saw, when he was there on his visit, the altar which was at Damascus, and King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest the pattern of the altar and its model, according to all its workmanship.

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So Uriah the priest built an altar according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus. Thus Uriah the priest made it before the coming of King Ahaz from Damascus.

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So what's going on here? What's going on here is, you have a king who is supposed to be a follower of the true

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God, visiting a pagan regime.

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He's in a pagan setting, and he sees the way that they do worship, that they conduct themselves, and he says, I want that altar.

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Give me an exact replica so I can do what they do. And that's what he does. And if you continue reading, it says that King Ahaz commanded

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Uriah the priest, saying, Upon the great altar burn the morning burnt offering, and the evening meal offering, and the king's burnt offering, and his meal offerings, with the burnt offering of all the people of the land, and their meal offering, and their drink offerings.

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And sprinkle on it all the blood of the burnt offerings, and of all the blood of the sacrifice. But the bronze altar shall be for me to inquire by.

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Inquire means to divinate by, to do what he had observed being done in a pagan nation.

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So Uriah the priest did according to all that King Ahaz commanded. This is called syncretism, and it's throughout the

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Old Testament, you see the children of Israel get involved with worshiping foreign gods, or worshiping the

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Lord in inappropriate ways. And in this case, you have a mixture of, here's what has been passed down to us, the tradition that we've been given from Moses on how to worship

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God, and side by side with that, we're going to take elements of a pagan religion, and we're going to do them together.

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We don't see a contradiction, we don't see a conflict there. Do you think, in that time,

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Ahaz was aware that that's what he was doing, that this was syncretism, that this was an abomination to the

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Lord? Do you think Uriah thought that? He just willingly went along.

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What could have held Uriah to go along? Well, fear, maybe? I don't want my head cut off, I'm just gonna do it.

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Okay, fear of what the consequences could be if you oppose it, that could be part of it. What other things?

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Maybe ignorance, you know, but that's a pretty extreme ignorance to have, but okay, let's say that that is a possibility.

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If you're that ignorant, you shouldn't be the priest, right? What other things? Maybe there's a maliciousness there, maybe there's an evil behind all of that that says, you know, we can get our way better by going through multiple channels to get what we want.

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So we go through the God of Israel, and we go through other false gods. Well, those are the possibilities, right?

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And I would like to suggest to you that we are seeing, and we have seen in history, similar behavior from men.

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I think we're seeing something similar in the Southern Baptist Convention. You may say, it's not that, it's not on that level, really?

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I mean, it's been, what, now, four years since Resolution 9 and receiving critical race theory as an analytical tool.

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We've gone through painstaking detail on this podcast to demonstrate that critical race theory is pagan, and it's part of the pagan religion, and the children of God should have no, absolutely no, business being involved with critical race theory.

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The whole structure of it is built upon assumptions that are anti -Christian. That's been going on now for years.

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It's been in our seminaries before Resolution 9, but the whole body of the Southern Baptist Convention came together and said, we will accept these as analytical tools.

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And so, was it, you know, level 10 red alert because they also said that they should, whatever tools are used should be subservient to the

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Word of God? Many said, no, no, it's okay because of that. But I would submit to you that syncretism had started, and it's continued.

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And now, with secular, trauma - informed, Me Too -directed principles for how to navigate, quote -unquote, abuse, the

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SBC has once again adopted part of a worldly religion. And it's politics, but it's also religion.

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That's what the whole book I wrote, Christianity and Social Justice Religions and Conflict, is about. This stuff has a different set of standards, of holy perspectives that can't be questioned.

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It has a different way of obtaining forgiveness or expiation, really.

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It's not really possible, actually, if you take it to its conclusion. I mean, forgiveness is not available in the social justice religion.

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People are canceled. The standards for ethical standards are tweaked.

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This is a problem. And the Southern Baptist Convention, these are just two examples, there's more than that, but the

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Southern Baptist Convention has been going in this direction. The cancer is stage four.

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It might be past that at this point, guys. It may be. And I don't mean to try to discourage, I'm not trying to discourage

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Southern Baptists out there. I mean, I've been saying for, I think, now at least two years, that it's beyond help.

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It's time to pull out. It's time to start something new. But, you know, I know there's a few of you still hanging on and wanting to see something, wanting, and you're thinking of the, you're thinking of, you know, how good it used to be, and how powerful it is, and all the assets it has, and I understand that.

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I understand the desire, but at some point you have to look at things realistically and say, what's actually going on, and is it possible?

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Well, Second Kings 16 says what

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I just read. The next king of Judah, what says Akai, he was a good king.

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And it says this in Second Kings 18, and this is where I want to challenge people.

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Think through this, okay? If you are someone who values the

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Southern Baptist Convention so much so that you're willing to sacrifice ministry, opportunities, and resources, and whatever's necessary to stay in the convention because the brand means something.

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The experiences, maybe when you were young, mean something, and I'm not talking, I'm primarily not even talking to conservatives on this.

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I'm talking to those on the left, but I think it could apply to those who possibly,

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I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but it could apply to people who are possibly hanging on too tightly to an institution, which

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I very much understand is hard to let go of. Hezekiah, Second Kings 18, says this.

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He removed the high places and broke down the sacred pillars and cut down the

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Asherah. He also broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the

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Son of Israel burned incense to it, and it was called Nehushtan, which means the great bronze, the great serpent, the bronze serpent.

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So what's going on in this particular section? Well, you'll remember from Numbers chapter 21, the story of the bronze serpent, right?

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The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that they may, many in Israel died.

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So the people came to Moses and said, we have sinned, so they repent. And the Lord said to Moses, make a fiery serpent and set it on the standard, and it shall come about that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live.

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And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard, and it came about that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.

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So this is what takes place, and this is actually used by Jesus to give an example of what he was going to do, just as Moses raised up the serpent in the wilderness, so the

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Son of Man must be lifted up, that all may who look on him might be saved. So the example was not wrong to even continue to reference.

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What happened there was right, that's what the Lord said, and it was faith in God, that the bronze serpent would, by having faith in God and looking to the bronze serpent, taking that act of obedience, that there would be healing from these serpents.

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Now, in 2 Kings chapter 18, we find that this bronze serpent's been around a while, and this is, you know, generations later, people who didn't live through that, they've, in their tradition, somehow adopted the idea that the bronze serpent itself should be worshipped, should be worshipped.

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It says that they burned incense to it. They burned incense to it.

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Now, I don't know fully what was going on here, because the text doesn't tell us exactly what they thought of the bronze serpent, but clearly, they had in mind that the bronze serpent would deliver them, would bless them, would give them nice things, there would be a positive response to their act of burning incense to it.

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Did God ever command burning incense to the serpent? No. It was only for one particular time, it was a short dispensation that the

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Lord used the bronze serpent to deliver from a malady that was no longer affecting them.

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And anything outside of that is not in accordance with what the

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Lord commanded, right? It was a temporary measure. And I would like to suggest to you that there are many things in life, life is very transitive, there are many things that are not eternal, there's many things that are temporary.

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Organizations are very temporary. No matter what organization, it will not last forever.

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You know what will last forever? The Church. The Church will last. God's Word will last.

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We have an eternity in heaven if we are redeemed in Christ. I'm not going to be taking my denominational label with me.

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These denominations, these organizations, missions agencies, they do some great work but the only work that they do that's worth anything is the work that forwards the kingdom of God because that's the institution that belongs to Christ.

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That's the institution, it's the Church that he died for. It's not these other things.

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Doesn't mean they're not important. We need 501c3s and the corporate structure that we have in this country for tax purposes and otherwise we need to form things.

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I obviously, I have branding, I don't have an organization at this point but I have what could become one easily and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

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There's some great organizations out there but organizations in and of themselves are temporary at best and they serve purposes for the time that they're around and then there comes a point when they no longer serve that purpose and when that happens it's time to let it go.

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When the bronze serpent was, when the serpents were gone and the bronze serpent's purpose was complete there was really no reason to have the bronze serpent around but yet the children of Israel kept it around and it became a snare to them and it took

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Hezekiah to come in and rip it down. Now a statue is much different than an organization, right?

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So I understand there's a number of senses in which this is not a complete parallel. I think though that the nature of man on display here though is a parallel.

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Can you imagine the person who grew up in Israel at this time and thought to themselves, or in Judah rather, and thought to themselves, you know, as far as I can remember we've been sacrificing to that serpent.

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I have so many good memories associated with it. It's part of, I don't know, you know, the legend of the serpent and it's a good story.

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It's a true story. Jesus used it. It's so near to my heart. I don't want to see it go.

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I don't want to see that destroyed. I don't want to see that taken away. And if they weren't worshiping it, then maybe, like, maybe it could be a reminder of God's grace or something, like a monument.

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But they worshipped it. That's the problem. They did, they offered strange fire.

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They did what God said not to. And how does this look today? Well there's probably a number of examples people could point to, but I think one of them may be this.

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In Southern Baptist life, and it's not just the Southern Baptists, it's other denominations, you have people running these things and they're willing to sacrifice anything for the institution or to the institution.

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The institution becomes the thing that provides life resources, gives you the paycheck, right?

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It's the institution that strategizes how to survive the current attacks on the church.

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The institution will promote people who are intelligent enough to argue on behalf of the church.

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The institution will be a safe haven from those things. And I've lived in the bubbles, and I know that there's an attitude that you have to fight it if you live in them, in those bubbles, that just assumes that the institution will continue.

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There's people who owe everything to the institution. I mean, they've, it's an educational institution. They might have gotten their undergrad, their grad degree, they may be working for the institution now, and it's,

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I mean, that's their life. You take that away and they have an identity crisis because that's, they're so wrapped up in that.

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And when things come up that challenge the institution, that show hypocrisy in the institution, that show rot at the top, there's a serious ambivalence about it or a resistance to doing anything about it.

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Even those who have position are able to do something they would not, they don't want to risk themselves, and they want to protect the institution.

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They're willing to sacrifice people to the institution. They're willing to let people get canceled to appease the institution.

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They're willing to let other people go scot -free to appease the institution.

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They're willing to turn a blind eye to heresy to please the institution, to allow it to survive.

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And they're, and they're willing to attack people like myself who point out the obvious because we threaten the institution.

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I don't want to be a threat to any institution. I think institutions are fine and they need to just get on the biblical track.

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They need to repent and they need to do the right thing. But institution for institution's sake, that's just institutionalism.

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And that needs to be eradicated in no less a violent way. And I don't mean shedding blood here, okay?

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I mean with urgency. In no less a violent way than King Hezekiah took away the golden or the bronze rather serpent.

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There are times the institution just needs to go. People are treating it in a way it was never meant to be treated.

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They're making sacrifices to the institution instead of using or working through the institution to sacrifice to God.

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Because their body's a living sacrifice and it's the service of worship that the institution is supposed to be forwarding.

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The same conflation, the same problem that afflicted those of Hezekiah's time is with us today.

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And it's a subtle thing and you don't always notice it. And it seems good sometimes. There are those out there who think if you speak against the

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SBC, you're the problem. You must be. Because the

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SBC is right. The SBC has to be right. Because it's the

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SBC. And we don't need to examine anything more. There are people like that out there.

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Now this isn't everyone that's listening to this who loves the SBC. There is a proper love to have and a grief if you love the

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SBC that you should be having right now that says, man I know it used to function in the way you just said, John.

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It was functioning the way God intended and it was being used for the purpose of worship.

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But now there's people that are just worshiping it. And they've shown the disregard for God or His standards.

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That's the assessment I have. All right, well I hope that was helpful and probably challenging and a little heavy for some of you, but I think some of you need to hear that.

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Some of you definitely need to hear that. And I need to hear it. That's the thing. I need to hear this for myself.

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I'm blind in my own spot sometimes. And what are the things in my life that could compete for the affection, the worship, the time and energy that I should be giving to my

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Lord and Savior? I have things in my own life that can potentially do that, and so we all must be on guard about these things.

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But I think with everything that was happening with Bruce Ashford and how this illustrated the absolute hypocrisy of the

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Southern Baptist Convention leaders, and especially at the seminary that I went to, I'm ashamed to say

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I needed to bring this up. I hope that was helpful for all of you. Well I want to talk about an institution in closing here that is a sponsor for this particular podcast.

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And I'm grateful for them, and I believe in the work that they are doing. And they won't last forever, like every other institution.

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No institutions last forever. But for right now, they're doing a great thing that's very needed, and that is Equipping the

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Persecuted, equippingthepersecuted .org. And if you go to the website, you're gonna find a number of things there.

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In fact, in two days they have an event in Sioux City, Iowa with Kevin Sorbo, and they're gonna talk about, they're gonna update about their mission and what they're doing.

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But they're doing all kinds of really, really great things. You can sign up to be a prayer partner and get the updates of what's happening in Nigeria.

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You can donate. They are efficient with their funds. They have a podcast, they have media, they have all kinds of things if you want more information.

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But I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to missions organizations, and organizations in general.

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Missions organizations aren't unique to this, but I think of some of the experiences I've had, some of the things

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I've seen, I just want to make sure the money's being spent in the right place, and the people that are there are actually, they're giving the gospel, they're doing what they say that they're doing, right?

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And I've unfortunately seen in other large organizations, I've been given evidence that that is not happening. And I have confidence in equipping the persecuted at this point.

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And my friend Judd Saul is the one who started it, and they are providing aid for Christians, our brothers and sisters who are under the persecution of Islamic terrorists.

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I mean real persecution. They're getting blown up, they're getting targeted in physical ways, and they're providing resources, they're building orphanages, and they're doing it though with the gospel.

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Not just giving out humanitarian aid, they're sharing the love of Jesus Christ. So I hope that for those of you who may be giving money to other organizations, like maybe

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World Vision, or organizations that just have proved themselves not to be, unfortunately, as faithful as one might like, whether that's theologically or with their resources.

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I hope that this can be a good option for you. So let them know if you end up donating to equipping the persecuted, let them know you heard about it on the