About that Plagiarism Thing

Greetings. Welcome to the dividing line. My name is Jamie Dwight. We're going to try to do something here. See, I'm back in the AOMIN mobile command center, whatever you call it. We're going to be going out on our first test run tomorrow.

And so I'm doing the packing and things like that. So we thought, try to get one in. The problem is that unlike most places where I will be stopping, I don't have Wi-Fi here. We are doing this through my phone.

And I've noticed that my particular neighborhood only has what we call two bars and 4G. So Rich may just jump in here in a couple of minutes and go, nah, ain't even worth it. And we'll see. We'll find out what happens.

Who knows? Maybe it'll clear up. Maybe it'll be just sort of so-so. No way of knowing. But honestly, it shouldn't. We should actually do better. I just realized it will be distracting to see people walking by in the future.

I'll have to learn to deal with that. But anyway, well, we should have Wi-Fi any place that, well, most places that I stop. Oh, it's the Amazon guy. Amazon guy just delivered. Yay. This is live. It's about as live as you can get.

Yes, please don't run to the Amazon guy as he drives away. Anyway, there are things to be talking about. We're going to try to do a program tomorrow when I get to where I'm going remotely. But like I said, there's Wi-Fi there.

And so hopefully things will be different. But I'm heading north and looks like it's going to be cooling down and rain. So who knows what rain may do to Wi-Fi signals and things like that. It could always just be an adventure.

Life's an adventure. There you go. So, hey, how about that plagiarism stuff? Oh, goodness. I'll be honest with you. Reading the statement from Ed Litton's church and then from J .D. Greer and then from Jen Wilkin and finding out what Jen Wilkin was quoting from and then how J .D. Greer used that.

And I mean, it's just the SBC is doing its standard circle the wagons type thing. But folks, when Newsweek is reporting on the fact that how many 140 sermons have disappeared from Ed Litton's church's website that made private?

140 in a matter of days? I don't even know what to say about things like this, because when it came up, there were a bunch of folks who said that in their circles, or at least in circles popular in their areas, sermon services, sermon websites are extremely popular.

I had heard of stuff like this before, but, you know, okay, liberal Episcopalians, liberal Presbyterians, liberal Lutherans, you know, the people way over there on the left that don't believe that Scripture is literally the Word of God.

That have redefined, you know, even some of those people will still say things like out of tradition, they'll say this is the Word of God is like that. But there is a huge difference between saying that out of tradition and actually believing it because you are convicted that you're handling the Word of God.

That makes all the difference in the world. And so I had heard of these things. Just a second. Definitely gonna need this. I had heard these things, but I never gave it much thought because, yeah, you know, if you don't really believe you're handling the Word of the living God, then why should you, why not get somebody to alliterate a sermon for you and give you three points and some poems you never would have found otherwise.

And if all you're trying to do is entertain your people in the first place, then why not? What does it matter? I got that. But I'll just be honest with you. I cannot conceive of what it would be like to walk into the pulpit and try to preach, try to deliver someone else's words as if they were your own words.

Okay, look, I've said many, many times before, I do not consider myself some great preacher by any stretch of imagination. I know great preachers. I know people who truly can craft an excellent sermon.

I view myself much more as a teacher than a preacher. You know, I can get very passionate about something and passionate about things in the Word of God, and there are sermons that I've delivered that people really felt had a huge impact upon.

Okay, but I'm not going to sit here and say, well, this is how you need to do sermons, and that kind of thing. I just don't view myself in that way at all. However, I've told this story before. The first time I preached at PRBC, oh, I forget when that was, 91, 92, somewhere along those lines.

The first time I preached at PRBC, as we were walking in, there's this little anteroom as you're going into the worship center, at my worship center. That sounds so, I don't know. Anyways, into the church itself.

And Pastor Fry said to me as we were walking through there, play the man, Mr. Ridley. And if you know church history, and I was teaching church history at the time, that was Latimer and Ridley right before they were burned to stake.

And it was encouragement to stay firm even in the midst of one's death, which I found rather interesting as you're going into the pulpit. But what it did reflect was a real urgency, a respect for what you're doing when you're opening the Word of God and teaching and preaching the people of God.

I mean, okay, a lot of this goes back to what you really think church is, okay? I get that. A lot of this goes back to what you think church really is. And if you think church is primarily focused upon how people feel when they leave, then okay, I get it.

I understand you want alliteration. You want to manipulate their feelings, their emotions. Okay, I get that part. If you believe that the gathering of the people of God is meant to be worship and that God's gonna meet with His people in worship and that He meets us in the reading of Scripture, in the singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, in the prayers, and then especially in the opening and proclamation of God's Word, recognizing that Jesus held men accountable for what was written in Scripture as if God spoke it directly to them.

I mean, this is where God truly meets with us in the fullest sense. If you believe that, then how can you bring somebody else's sermon into the pulpit and pretend that this is what you've gleaned from your study of the Word of God?

I don't understand that. I can't begin to conceive of it. Now, there's not just one way of preaching. When I just look at, for example, when, well, Don Fry, Pastor Fry at PRVC, when I first went there, he had handwritten manuscripts.

Now, it was not a word-for-word manuscript. Some people have word-for-word manuscripts. Some people read their sermons in totem. There's nothing wrong with that. I could not do that. There's something wrong with that, but I could not do that.

He was not necessarily it wasn't just an outline, but it wasn't a full manuscript either. So it was sort of in between somewhere. That's how he preached when I first came to PRVC in 1989. And I think when he turned was it 65 or 70?

I don't know. It was one of those big numbers. He informed me because I noticed he went into the pulpit, and he no longer had a notebook. All he had was his Bible. And so I asked him, and he said, I felt like I needed a new challenge, and so I now need to memorize my sermon outline, all the cross-references I'm going to be using.

Now, most people, when they turn 65 or 70, that's not what they're doing. They're going to the direction. But that's what he did. And so you have that kind of thing. You have outlines, bullet points, lists of just references.

I have used I've had outlines. If you look, for example, Sunday night, Sunday afternoon, we meet at 4 o 'clock. We only have one service on Sunday. We rent our facilities. So I continued for the third week in a row.

I hadn't expected that. Preached last three weeks of the Polyvia. And I've been continuing our baptism series. We started a series on baptism. I think that was our fifth or sixth in the series. And I had basically, all I had on my iPad was the references I wanted to cover.

Because, you know, if you look at that sermon, it was much more of a study than, say, okay, a number of months back. Remember, I preached a sermon where I changed my eschatology and said this is why I'm now a post-millennialist.

Here's my argumentation. Here's what convinced me of this. Here's what, you know, reasoning from the top down. And so I had those key texts. And then underneath it, I had information about some of the language issues, some of the key references, both in Hebrew and Greek, because they're mainly in the Old Testament, some in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

I had some of the Greek terms that were being used and where they were used in other texts and things like that. So I had a little bit more for that sermon. But that was more of a sermon. Sunday night, I was looking at, what did we look at?

About four or five texts. And the last text, the last two texts, one was Simon, the magician, and then Philip in Ethiopia and Eunuch. Because what we're doing is we're looking at what the New Testament says about baptism.

So we've defined the term. We've looked at it in other uses and sources and things like that. And now we're looking at all the references in the Book of Acts. We're looking at the history of the church and how the church baptized and who was baptized and what was the context.

And getting all of that down before we get into the epistles and the teaching material that would help us to come to final conclusions as to what the New Testament as a whole teaches on the subject of baptism.

We just felt that was really the necessary way to approach the information rather than starting way up here someplace and trying to, you know, reason your way down to a final conclusion. So there would be a difference between those sermons, my postmillennial sermon and this sermon, both in what I brought in the pulpit as well as in the form.

Again, it's not that I didn't get into preaching last night, but you know, and I made various applications in regards to, well, for example, the Ethiopian eunuch. Behold, here's water. What is preventing me from being baptized?

And so I spent a couple of minutes exhorting those in the congregation who have believed in Christ who have not yet been baptized. Why have you not? Here's a man who only for a matter of minutes, at the most hours, has had Christ proclaimed to him from the Old Testament.

That's all he has with him, maybe only from the prophet Isaiah for that matter. And yet he has received so much information from Philip that he already knows what baptism is. He already knows it's the command of Christ.

And he sees a body of water because they went down into the water. They came up out of the water. This was baptism by immersion of a believer, a confessing believer. That's called credo baptism. He wanted to be baptized.

He wasn't putting it off. I mean, he could have easily said, well, when I get back to Ethiopia, we'll do it properly and in nice water. Because I can't imagine that whatever they found along a desert road was the nicest, clearest water that ever existed.

But anyway, so I made application to things like that. It wasn't just a study, a dry study, something like that. There's exhortation involved, encouragement of the saints involved. But it still was pretty much a study.

And so that's going to determine a little bit as to what kind of notes you're going to have. But look, still, the fact of the matter is if somebody had handed me that stuff, that's not the same as I put together those lists of references and I looked at the passages.

And when I mentioned that the original language says such and so, it's because I looked at the original language. It's not because someone who knows the language told me what it was about. Now, look, I realize there's so many things.

You know, ice is a wonderful blessing. Those of you in the Pacific Northwest are recognizing that right now. We pray for you up there. It's about the same time up there as it is here. It's 100. My house, anyways, in the back porch is 115 right now.

But it's going to cool down tomorrow. It might start raining pretty soon. That'd be wonderful. It'd be great. Anyways, but it's a blessing. And these things, I love these things. I put ice in it in the morning and it's still there in the evening.

It's great. I'm thankful. I'm really, literally thankful for these things. Good attitude to have. Anyway, when you're preparing a sermon, and I know I'm in disagreement on this point with certain well-known individuals that I will not name, but when you're preparing a sermon, for me, when I teach on this subject, if people ask my opinion for whatever it's worth, I am very strongly committed to the idea that you need to, if you are going to be bearing your soul to your people, if you're going to be speaking, not with the feigned passion.

That's what drives me nuts about this. These fundamentalists who all try to sound just like all of the fundamentalists and try to mimic people and this put on air of, oh, who's that one guy? You scream everything.

You know what I mean? Independent Fundamentals Baptist flips on Twitter or whatever it used to be. I don't mean that kind of being passionate. I mean, really, you walk into that pulpit having prayed, Lord, I want to communicate these particular truths and realities to my people.

You've put me here. You've given me this position, and I want to minister to them. I want to be used of you as a shepherd in this flock to bless these people. So you have to have something in here. It has to be something that's already entered into here.

And so I believe what I do is I start with the text. And whether Old or New Testament, for me, if I have the time. Now, I travel. I speak in places. I literally have been in churches where I was assigned a topic as we were driving to the church.

So you do what you have to do in those situations. But in a normative situation where you have a week to prepare, for me, I'm going to translate the passage. And I've said many, many times, if I have time and I really want to be grounded in a particular sermon, then the best way for me to do that is to preach the sermon exegetically and to only bring the original language text with me.

So preaching from John, and you're going to have the Greek New Testament. If I'm preaching from Isaiah, then I'll either have the Hebrew text or, as I did at G3 last year, and people really seemed to enjoy that sermon from Isaiah 6, I had the Greek Septuagint as my text.

But I figure if I am prepared well enough to go that direction, to live translate and to allow the text to be my notes, then I'm really prepared for that sermon. I cannot always do that. I do not always do that.

But that's the ideal. That really is the ideal. And so you start with the text. And if you don't read Greek and Hebrew, you still start with the text. You read it. You read it in multiple translations.

You utilize resources you have. You list questions that you have. And you seek your answers, first and foremost, by comparison of Scripture to Scripture. Then we do have great things available to us, wonderful things available to us in commentaries.

But for me, they're the last thing to look at. And for me, they are icing on the cake. If I have time, I might pick up something that I didn't pick up from the text. And the problem I have with commentaries, if you don't know the languages, you'll frequently get contradictory information from different commentaries.

That can lead to confusion on your part. The primary use of commentaries for most people is if you still have questions left, having worked through the text yourself, then maybe you can get answers and insights from the commentaries as to where your questions are.

Because if you still have questions going into the sermon, that's the part where you're going to lose people. Because you're not clear on yourself. And the simple reality is for human beings, if you are not clear in your understanding of what the text is saying, then you're going to be even less clear in communicating that to other people.

That's just how it works. And so the commentaries can help to clarify when you still continue to have questions. Or if you've come up with multiple answers to your questions and you've got to make a decision.

Or, look, sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to say to your people, Well, there's a lot of discussion about how to take this text. And here's what some people said. Here's what other people said. And I'm not sure which direction to go on.

There are a lot of pastors that are not willing to do something. They aren't willing to do that because of some fear of compromising some level of authority or something. I feel for anybody who has that issue, that has that problem, you really shouldn't.

I have known, I've been in churches with pastors years and years and years and years ago. That was absolutely crippling to them. It was crippling to them. They could no more admit that they were unclear about something than anything.

Rich knows what I'm talking about. Because they would consider that really a, I don't know, a capitulation or something, a sign of weakness, something like that. That shouldn't be. Your relationship to your people shouldn't be that way.

You should be in a position to be able to say, I've done due diligence. Here's the best that I've been able to come up with. There are other people who view it this way. I leave it to you. I'm not talking about key central issues.

But look, there are historical issues and interpretational issues on all sorts of things, both in the Old and New Testament, that we should be upfront about and say, hey. And you should also always be willing to admit a mistake.

I made a mistake. My son blew it Sunday night. Oh, that's good. I blew it Sunday night. And it's funny. So keep this one handy. All you folks that say I never admit to having made a mistake, I was talking about the Ethiopian eunuch.

I was talking about something, obviously, that I hadn't thought to before. Yeah. And so I was talking about the really unusual way in which the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip parted company, which seems to be right on par with the enterprise beaming somebody up.

Philip was supernaturally transported, disappeared and found himself at Azotus. I don't know what that would be like. That'd be pretty amazing. I'm sure Philip told the story. And I can just see the Ethiopian eunuch telling his grandkids about that.

Eunuchs don't have grandkids. Yep. It happens. And we all make our mistakes. And I think that's a great one. That's one that I'll be reminded of many, many times. Anyway, look, you should have the relationship with your people that they would smile and laugh and enjoy something like that, not get all angry or upset or anything else in the process.

So back to what we were saying about sermons. So there's lots of different ways of doing this. No one way is right for everybody. If you're completely lost as to how to do it and all of a sudden you've been thrust into a situation, then I think it's fine to read Spurgeon sermons.

Just realize something. None of us, with the possible exception of Doug Wilson, have the vocabulary or the wordsmithiness to get anywhere close to Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Okay? So don't try. Because when you try, it's going to look very forced.

It's going to sound very forced. It's going to sound very stilted. But it's fine to read other people's sermons and learn from their ability to communicate. But what you do has to be what you do. It has to come from you.

It has to come from your heart. It has to be your conviction, not a website's conviction. That's the only way that, you know, when you walk out of that pulpit, when you get done shaking hands and you go home and you're in the quietness of your thoughts, what do you say to the Lord?

How do you want to feel in that situation? That's the question. And if you've been using a committee to skeletonize somebody else's or other people's sermons to cobble together something yourself, I just can't conceive of it.

I cannot begin to understand how that works. I just don't see it. I don't understand it. So, all this, hopefully some of that was at least some interest or encouragement to those of you who are preaching and teaching.

Everybody has their different ways of putting it together. Just make sure it's yours. What has happened in the SBC right now is sad. I have to admit, I don't understand why it is that all this stuff is coming out now about Ed Litton, but not in the week before the Southern Baptist Convention election.

All this stuff about whispering about sexual sin and blah, blah, blah. I'm not surprised to find it, but now to see the very political mechanism. It's politics. It is all politics. The covering up, the deleting and privatization of videos, and then sending the same troops out into social media who would attack anybody that would go, hey, this isn't good.

This isn't how we should be doing things. It's an old playbook. It's a playbook we've seen primarily in political context, but now we're dealing with it, sadly, in the Southern Baptist Convention. And the people who will cover for it, just shame on them.

Just shame on them. But that's how the SBC works. You circle the wagons, and you put out statements, and you talk about how supportive you are, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's just how it's done.

That's just how it works. It's a sad thing to observe. It really is. But make your sermons your own, folks. It is far better to deliver your best understanding of the text that you honor as the word of God than to have all the wonderful alliteration and poetry in the world, but it's somebody else's words, and you're just mouthing them.

You're just mouthing them. I suppose there are some congregations that would rather you did just that, but most congregations, they want their shepherds to be working hard. And I don't think having a group of eight people cobbling something together from various sources, sorry, I don't see how that works.

I don't see how that works. So there's some thoughts on those particular issues. I thought I would... Oh, yes, video has been in and out. Well, personally, there's not much to see. It's just a sweating old Scottish fellow in an RV.

I may go through this whole thing in one hour. Now, the sad thing is I don't have this on my iPad yet, because I'd like to be able to show it to you. But we do have an announcement. So Rich, is the blog article up?

I'm assuming that it is. So people, I can just simply say, go to the website and about to hit public. That means that you're hitting it now, I hope, because I want to be able to say, go to AOMN .org. And what you will find there is a link to the new Alpha and Omega Ministries app.

Yes, finally, folks, after all these years of people saying, why don't you have an app? Because everybody else has apps. There will be an article. It should be an article there now. That will give you the links to download for iPhone and the Google Play Store and all that kind of stuff.

So you can get hold of the Alpha and Omega app, which I believe... I should know more about this, but I saw the earlier version. And it's up. You just go to AOMN .org. It will be on the blog. And you'll find there the...

Here we are. You'll find there the links to the app. And you should... I believe there will be announcements of upcoming dividing lines and lists for those dividing lines and all that neat, fun stuff.

And I'm looking forward to using some more of the features so I can... Because the only way I let people know about the dividing line is on Twitter or something like that. So if you get the app, then you're part of the inside group, shall we say.

And you'll be able to know when the dividing lines come. And that's going to be really even more useful as I start doing some traveling this fall in here. Well, I do realize that when this is moving, I'm not in here.

I'm in the truck. But at least we hope I'm never in here while this is moving. That would be a little weird. But I have a feeling that the time frames will have to be very flexible. Because it all depends on construction zones, weather, all sorts of things like that.

And so having an app that will pop up and say, hey, the dividing line is starting in 15 minutes or something like that. And it may have to start at 20 minutes after the hour instead of at the top of the hour or something like that.

That may be sort of the new norm for a while when I'm on the road. So if you've got the app, you will be up to speed on things like that. And if there's breaking news and stuff like that, I might want to pull over and do a live feed discussion, conversation, stuff like that.

And if you've got the app, you will be able to know about these things and won't miss out on anything. You know, if I have found a way to get Will Ferrell to show up at Chris Hanhold's house in his elf costume and we're going to be covering it live, now you'll know.

You'll be able to watch. The whole world will be able to watch when that happens. Because I'm still hoping. That's still sort of a pipe dream, sort of a bucket list type thing. But I would love to be hiding in a bush with a live cam when Will Ferrell showed up in his elf costume at Chris's house.

I think that would be really cool. Who knows? It might work out. I might have something that Will Ferrell needs or wants. Maybe Will Ferrell will be converted. So that'd be great. So get the app. Get the app.

We'll talk more about it when I have it installed on my iPad so it's big enough for you to see. And that will be really cool. I'm looking at stuff on the iPad here right now. Every day is something new with Pope Francis.

Every day is something new. What's the news now? Well, I thought I saved this. No, no, Chris. That was not low. We were just once again showing our love for you. If Will Ferrell showed up at your front door, you'd be an amazed person.

Let's just put it that way. I thought I saved this. Great. Well, let me see if it's on here. Sorry, I wanted to have the article up. Specifically, I saw someone sent me a thing yesterday, and then it was confirmed.

Yeah, it's right there. Huh. Well, I must not have saved it to Evernote. Sorry, iPad. I was accusing you of having done something that's not working. Rich says getting really must be a Catholic flock.

Either that or Chris Honholtz has decided to do a DNS attack on the dividing line after I mentioned Will Ferrell and Al showing up at his house. Do you want to give it a few seconds to try to clear up?

Or shall we say good enough for today? We got through the discussion of the sermon and call it good. I'll leave it to you. You may not even be able to hear me well enough to know what I'm saying. Actually, now I think about it, but I'll see if something pops up here in a second because I was.

Okay. All right. All right. Rich says it's gotten pretty bad. I can't tell from this end, but hopefully tomorrow when we have Wi-Fi and we are at the new location, travel location, we will pick up from there and talk about Pope Francis and Father Martin and homosexuality and all that kind of fun stuff.

But for now, the phone tethering situation has caused us to go. That's enough for now. Well, Lord willing, see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. God bless.