August 4, 2017 Show with Scott Clements on “It’s Happened Before: Has America Repeated Australian History? (Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left)”

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fourth day of August 2017, and hopefully we are going to be joined by a first -time guest today.

I don't know if he's having problems with his phone, but he said he was trying to get through, and I don't know what is going on here, but our number is, if you're listening there—actually,

I'm not going to give our number, and I'll have everybody in the world calling me—but we are supposed to be joined by Scott Clements, and Scott Clements is hopefully going to be providing an interesting story here.

We are going to be hopefully discussing It's Happened Before—Has America Repeated Australian History ?—Lessons

to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left, and Scott Clements is an

Australian lay preacher. He is a church planter of the Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, South Wales, Australia, and he actually contacted me this morning and said to me, hey, would you ever care to do a discussion on how

America has mirrored, in some ways, the decline of Australia from right to left?

And since it just so happened that I providentially was without a guest today, I took

Scott up on his offer, and I don't know if he's going to be joining us.

I think that he may be having phone problems joining us from Australia. This is a first time that I can recall such a thing happening.

But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a station break, and if we are not joined by Scott Clements when we return from the break, we will come up with another idea.

So keep us in prayer as we seek to rectify the situation in some way, and we'll be right back,

God willing, right after these messages, so don't go away. We'll be right back,

God willing, right after these messages, so don't go away. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

We are a Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back, and I think that we have been joined by Scott Clements.

Are you there, Scott? Yeah, Chris. How are you? Well, thankfully, it's not a telemarketer that we have on the line here.

I get calls from those guys sometimes from America, too. Well, thankfully,

God apparently wanted us to have this interview, since we've been able to rectify the situation here with the phone lines, and as I was mentioning earlier, we have as our guest today,

Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher, a church planter of the Kuma Reform Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia, and we're going to be discussing the theme,

It's Happened Before, Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left, and it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Scott Clements.

Hi, it's great to be here. And in the studio with me is my co -host, the

Reverend Buzz Taylor. And it's good to be here, and it's good to have you on, Scott, because I was just trying to figure out what

I was going to get to do for the rest of the two hours, what Chris was going to have me do, you know, unexpected, so you came in right on time.

He's allowing you to speak. He's turned your microphone up again. Well, as it turns out,

Reverend Buzz Taylor is actually an Australia -phile, or an

Aussie -phile, I don't know how you would say it, but he is a boomerang enthusiast, not only knows how to throw a boomerang competitively, but actually makes boomerangs.

Yeah, I've made and sold many, many boomerangs. So I've always been very intrigued with Australia because of that.

I love kangaroos, and it's just a place I've always wanted to go, but I've never been there.

Well, let me tell you, you don't love kangaroos after they've destroyed your automobile. Oh, I can imagine, yeah.

When it comes to crossing the road, they're suicidal. They're like kamikaze pilots. Oh, kind of like deer and elk and everything up here, yeah.

By the way, you... Go ahead, Adam. To boomerang, the only time

I ever threw a boomerang, I was a young fellow that was at primary school, and it did come back, but it didn't come straight back to me, it came back past my left -hand shoulder and hit the kid behind me in the head.

Yeah, well, I used to compete with them. The Buffalo, where I grew up,

Buffalo Museum of Science used to have workshops on boomerangs, the little sport boomerangs, and so I got involved with them back then, and I never traveled with it.

We've had people travel to Buffalo to compete, but it was a lot of fun. It was a very fun hobby, and it's just kind of cool to make something that behaves in such a mysterious way.

Well, obviously, much more fun than talking about it. Anyway, Scott, I guess...

I can see you've never thrown a boomerang before. Well, just one more thing, though.

I need to assure everybody in the world that's listening, they do come back if you throw them right.

They do come back. And this young man that was hit in the head behind you by your boomerang,

I guess that would have been a great opportunity to ask him if he believed in the sovereignty of God. I was not a

Christian at that time and was certainly not thinking of the sovereignty of God. I was in a school which still exercised corporal punishment, and I was wondering how many times

I was going to be hit with the cane. Oh, yeah. Well, I want to hear something about not only where you're from in New South Wales, Australia, but also about your story of conversion before we even get to the subject at hand.

First of all, tell us about Kuma, New South Wales. Is that near the bush or is that in a city area, or what is that area like?

You would definitely call it rural. If you were to look at a map of New South Wales on the east coast of Australia, you'd find

Sydney pretty much in the dead center of that east coast of New South Wales. If you went southwest from Sydney, around 350 miles perhaps, you would find

Kuma. The nearest major city to Kuma is Canberra, Australia's capital.

It's about 60 miles away. Kuma is—well, it calls itself the gateway to the

Snowy Mountains or the capital of the Snowy Mountains. Australia has a small alpine region, and Kuma is probably 20 or 30 miles from those mountain ranges which get snow every winter.

Oh, by the way, something I forgot to mention. I played—you didn't hear this because you had not yet connected with this, but I played at the very beginning of the program,

Down Under by Men at Work, a bit of a clip of that song. And can you believe it?

Although my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor, is an Ozziephile, he had never in his life heard that song.

Can you believe this? Oh, dear. That just got played to death when

I was young. That's why I was surprised he never heard it, because it was played to death. But anyway, tell us something about the religion of your youth, if any, and how the

Sovereign Lord got a hold of you and providentially drew you to himself and saved you. Yep, sure.

I was born into a not -Christian family.

My parents were nominally Anglican and had me christened as a baby, I think largely to satisfy the requirements of my grandmother more than anything else.

But they themselves had no Christian faith whatsoever, and it was just very much an empty ceremony.

My religious education was the ladies who used to come to the primary schools and tried to teach scripture lessons.

They were faithful in what they did, but I honestly, from the very start, didn't believe a word that they were saying.

To me, the things they were saying sounded like the stories in little golden books, and I'd learnt that the stories in little golden books weren't true, so I pretty much switched off and ignored the whole thing.

If you get through to when I was around the age of 20, had you asked me,

I would have said I was an atheist, and I would have said that I was an atheist, and I never really thought about it.

I just assumed that atheism was the basic truth of all knowledge, and I was not a

Christian at all. So how did our Lord providentially introduce you to true

Christianity and lead you to Himself? Well, you see, I met a girl.

That's always a good way for it to start. Yes, yes, a beautiful girl of a very, what's the word

I'm trying to think of, gracious nature, a lovely person. And I was smitten, and I wanted to date her,

I wanted to go out with her. And she was willing to see me on a social basis, just, you know, we were not dating as such.

But the third week that, or the third weekend after I'd met her, we'd had a meal, we'd walked our dogs along the beach the following weekend.

The third weekend on Sunday morning, she telephoned me at 10 past 9 and said, we're going to church and I'm picking you up in 15 minutes, be ready.

And she hung up. And she did turn up at my door and did,

I was pretty annoyed about it, to be honest, I didn't want to go to church, but I honestly felt that she was probably the nicest girl

I'd ever met. And I honestly had the cynical thought, I'll do this just enough to keep her happy.

And so she dragged me along to church, and there I sat, a very unhappy boy, didn't sing,

I stood up and everyone stood up, I sat down and everyone sat down, was basically switched off.

Anyway, on the way home, as she drove me back to where I lived, she said, and what did you think of that? And I kind of exploded at her,

I said, that was a load of rubbish. She said, why do you say that's a load of rubbish?

And I said, because everybody knows that it's not true, who I don't even understand why you'd want to be there.

She said, have you ever read the Bible? And I said, no. Funny thing is, in the back of my mind,

I'd always wanted to know what was in the Bible, just as an intellectual exercise. I'd never, you know,

I was curious to know what it said. And she said to me, okay, if I give you a Bible, will you read that Bible?

And I said, yeah, I will. And so she gave me a Bible. And I set myself the target of reading two chapters every morning and two chapters every evening, starting at Genesis and working your way forward, because when you read a book, you start at the start and you work through to the back.

So when did the light go on and you finally fell to your knees and called out to Christ in repentance and faith?

It took months. I started to talk to myself, you know, in that strange sort of way.

I don't know if you've ever been in that, but I started to ask myself questions. I remember I was reading through 2

Samuel and I was deeply upset with David's sin. I so wanted him to be the faultless hero, and he sinned with Bathsheba and had

Uriah put to death. And I was deeply upset with that. And I remember asking myself, why do you even care?

You know, why does this even bother you? And then the other thing that I'd have to say is, if someone ever comes to the

Bible as a novice, not knowing any scripture, and just reads the Old Testament, there are two things that become crystal clear to you.

God, and these two things usually walk hand in hand. God hates idolatry and God hates sexual uncleanness.

And I couldn't help but realize that the unit or flat in which

I lived was filled with, if I had a religion, my religion was heavy metal, particularly the band

Iron Maiden, and I lived in a house full of memorabilia and stuff like that dedicated to Iron Maiden.

And also, look, you know, I won't say too much about it, but as many men of my age who consider themselves to be atheists and single,

I had a cupboard full of pornography. And so I basically looked around the unit in which

I was living and realized, or the apartment, I realized, you know, if there is a

God, he really is not happy with me. Yeah, and then anyway, long story short then, continuing to read on through the

Bible, I got to Psalm 91. And there's a line in Psalm 91 towards the end of the psalm when

God starts to speak. And he says, He will call upon me, and I will answer him.

And I remember it was a Saturday night, I was home alone, and I read that line.

And it was as though there was nothing else in the world at that moment other than that line.

He will call upon me, and I will answer him. And I knew that I had to call upon God.

I couldn't escape the conviction that I had to call upon God.

And I did fall to my knees at the side of the bed, and I started to pray. And he did answer me.

And I was converted from that moment on. Great. Praise God. Well, were you eventually led to a specific congregation where you became a member before you ever came around to planting the church where you are a member now?

Go ahead. I was with that girl. I started to attend the church that she attended, which was a

Church of Christ or Churches of Christ. I know you had that denomination in the USA. It was, you know,

I guess you would have a fair idea of what they're like. Yeah, although today there's a lot broader spectrum of people under that umbrella than there was years ago.

But the old school, classic Church of Christ, the Campbellites, were those that might appear very much like your average evangelical church, but they believed in the necessity of baptism by immersion for salvation, for the forgiveness of sins.

Correct, yeah. And strictly a cappella, although there is a division among them. Some use music.

Well, here in Australia, the Churches of Christ that I've known,

I would call them evangelical. They're not so wrapped up in the idea of baptismal regeneration, although baptism is certainly important in their operation.

They're congregational. I'd call them like evangelical and Arminian. Usually in Australia they do have a band playing the music, and this church certainly did have a band playing the music.

And I was, I got involved with that church along with, you know, I mean, I was still,

I was smitten by the Lord and also smitten by His servant, the girl who gave me the Bible. And so that was where I was going to church.

In my, you know, Christian naivety, I assumed that everybody was like me and read the

Bible and believed the Bible. I didn't realize that in a church like a

Church of Christ, that was not necessarily the truth. And, you know, I sort of found some things out the hard way.

As I continued reading forward in the Bible, and I got to John chapter 6, where it told me that no one could, no one could come to the

Son unless he was drawn by the Father. I had absolutely no problem with that. To me, that made perfect sense.

I remember reading the chapter and sort of sitting back and thinking, okay, so that's what happened to me.

So that really meant, although I had no words for it nor any formal understanding of it, it really meant that from the very start, my understanding of salvation was reformed.

Though, as I said, I couldn't have put that into words and I couldn't have defended the position, but I certainly took the

Bible to mean exactly what it said, and I felt that my own conversion experience certainly matched that approach, that understanding.

Yeah, well, it is interesting that I've told this story on the air before, but years ago when

I worked for WMCA 570 AM radio in New Jersey, I had been approached by an elderly

Jewish journalist who wanted to buy two hours of time from me, air time, to have a debate with a fundamentalist

Baptist, and I sold him the air time, and when I was listening to the program live, the

Jewish journalist, who, by the way, identified himself as a student of the

New Testament, even though he did not believe in the claims of Jesus Christ nor in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

He considered himself an expert on the New Testament. He had read it a hundred times or more over, and he actually said to the fundamentalist

Baptist during the debate, so let me get this straight. You believe that before the foundations of the world,

God chose a certain people to save them and save them alone, bypassing all others, and that all others will go to hell because they have not been chosen by God before the foundations of the world to receive eternal life, and the fundamentalist

Baptist said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you don't know me very well. I'm not a Calvinist. You're talking about Calvinism, and this

Jewish journalist said, what's that? He said, well, Calvinism is what you're talking about.

You're describing unconditional election. I don't believe in that, and he goes, I don't know what this

Calvinism stuff is. I'm talking about your Bible, the New Testament. This man just came to the conclusion that that's what

Christians in general, if not all Christians, at least serious ones, who took the

Bible to be an inerrant scripture, he believed that we all thought that God unconditionally elected a certain group of people before the foundations of the world.

Why not? Well, it's certainly what the scripture says. You've got to do all sorts of verbal gymnastics to escape from that.

Right. So what eventually led you into a more biblically sound church?

Oh, that really took years. There was a

Presbyterian church up the road where we were at that time, and I asked somebody what the Presbyterians were like, and I was ignorant, and unfortunately the person

I asked was as ignorant as I, and they said, oh, look, I think they're like the Englicans, only they're Scottish. Well, if only that were true, there would have been thousands of Covenanters that were never martyred.

But anyway. And yet, you know, the only Anglican churches that I knew were entirely liberal in that part of the world, and I didn't even bother looking into them.

I didn't really meet with any Reformed people for many, many years, to be honest.

My wife and I sort of came to Reformed convictions and bumbled through a few churches that were not at all

Reformed and couldn't work out why it was all going wrong. You know,

I mean, interestingly, it's sort of the thing that made it plain to me in the way that I finally worked out that it was all going wrong was when

I read Arnold Dallymore's two -volume biography of George Whitefield. Yeah, that's supposed to be one of the best, for certain.

Oh, yeah. You know, and that's sort of how I came to that book was, to me, it's kind of providential.

I mean, I found a book in a friend's house called Why Revival Parries by Leonard Ravenhill, and I had no idea of who anyone was, but I read his book, and in his book he spoke of two people,

David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards. And the next time I was at the Christian bookshop, there was on special in a table in the middle of the bookshop the diary of David Brainerd edited by Jonathan Edwards.

And so I thought, bonus, I'm going to pick this up and read it, and I certainly did pick it up, buy it, take it home and read it, and that was almost life -changing in itself to me.

But the thing about it was it was printed by the Benner of Truth, and I read the whole

Benner of Truth blurb at the back of the book, and I thought, okay, these are the publishers for me. Next time I go to the bookshop, if it's

Benner of Truth, I'm buying it. And I went back to that bookshop, and I found a whole lot of books, and I had no idea what

I was buying. I bought the two volumes, Dallimore's two volumes on the life of George Whitefield. I bought the two -volume works of Jonathan Edwards.

I bought every Ian Murray book that I could find,

Revival and Revivalism, and there were a few others there. I bought some books by Martin Lloyd -Jones, or transcripted sermons of Martin Lloyd -Jones.

I took all that stuff home and started to read it, and I remember I read or I tried to bury myself in Jonathan Edwards and realized that he was such an in -depth author that I couldn't read him at great speed.

I had to sort of read a page a day and digest it. So I sat Jonathan Edwards by the side of my bed and did that from that time on and picked up instead the biography of Whitefield.

And when I finally read through the two volumes on Whitefield and Dallimore's explanation of the split in the early

Methodist movement over Calvinism and Arminianism, I finally realized what was going wrong for my wife and I.

We were Calvinists. We were Reformed. We had a different theological approach than the people we were trying to fellowship in church with.

So how eventually did you come about to be one of the planters of the

Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia? Our life and work took us to this part of the world, and in this part of the world,

I mean, it's a corner of Australia. I'll run the numbers by you and you'll get some idea.

You know, in American terms, it's a county, a rural county, 25 ,000 roughly is the total population and the total church attending population, and this includes all denominations,

Roman Catholic, Salvation Army, the Assembly of God, you know, put them all together and you only get 250 people in weekly church attendance out of a population of 25 ,000.

And there was no distinctively clear gospel -preaching church in the district.

There was certainly no church preaching the gospels from a Reformed point of view. There had been an attempt at a

Reformed Baptist church some years previously, which, you know, I won't go into all the details, but it just didn't work.

And so as there was really nowhere that we felt at home and as we had other friends in the district who were of similar convictions, we put our heads together and said, well, look, just between our own two families, there's at least enough here to start a church, and we'll see where the

Lord takes it from there, and so that's what we've done. Great. And if anybody wants to find out more about the

Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South, Wales, Australia, they can go to the Sermon Audio website, sermonaudio .com,

sermonaudio .com, and I'm assuming if you just type in the word Kuma, C -O -O -M -A, that your church will come up, and probably the only church that would come up,

I'm assuming. Yes, yes, definitely the only one from Kuma. Well, we are going to be discussing when we come back from the break.

It's happened before. Has America repeated Australian history? Lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left.

If you have a question that you would like to ask of my guest, Scott Clements, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

If you live outside of the good old USA, and if you are asking about a question or an issue that is personal and private, that compels you to remain anonymous, we will give you that liberty to remain anonymous.

But other than that, if it's just a general question about theology, doctrine, history, in regard to the subject we have at hand today, the lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left, please at least give us your first name.

Right you mean? Excuse me? Left to, oh yeah, right to left. Sorry, yeah.

I know you are from the land down under, so maybe everything is reversed. Yeah, some things go in the opposite direction here.

But if you are just asking about that, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher and a church planter of the

Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales in Australia. We are talking about It Happened Before.

Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

And before I even go into this subject, how did you come to discover Iron Sharpens Iron Radio? Because I know that you have listened for quite a while, and on a rare occasion have took the time to write a question.

I think I heard about it when James White on the Dividing Line mentioned that you were restarting

Iron Sharpens Iron whenever that was, it must have been two or three years ago now.

2015 is when we relaunched it. We started it originally in New York in 2005, 2006.

Yes. Well, I'd never heard of it before 2015, but James White on the

Dividing Line mentioned it a few times and gave it a recommendation, and that was enough to get me interested, and I've been listening ever since.

Well, I really appreciate that. And right now it's about 6 .30 in the morning in Australia on Saturday the 5th of August, correct?

That's correct. I'm a day ahead of you. Well, I thank you for being up so early to conduct the interview.

I was going to say I'm always awake at this hour. Okay. Well, tell us something about the theological climate of Australia.

That may be too broad of a question because here in America the theology may be largely reflective of a particular city and a particular state, and there's really a wide range of theological atmosphere depending upon where you live or visit here in the

United States. But what can you tell us about Australia in the 21st century, what you are familiar with anyway, what's surrounding you, and other places you may have visited within your own continent?

Any American would find that Australia is far less overtly

Christian than the USA. We don't really have anything like a Bible belt, although we do certainly have some areas that you would say the churches are better patronized or supported than in other areas.

But Christianity is certainly a much lower key thing here in Australia.

Some of the strongest areas in terms of church attendance and just general

Christian impact would be the Sydney metropolitan area where the Sydney Anglicans, the Diocese of Sydney is.

I mean, they are a very evangelical diocese, very much a Reformed diocese.

Not that anyone could claim to be perfect, but they are certainly there, and certainly a strong Christian presence in many parts of Sydney.

The northwest side of Sydney is often called the Bible belt, jokingly, although everybody knows it's not really a

Bible belt. You don't get anything like over 50 % church attendance in those areas. But certainly there are more church attenders there than other parts of Sydney.

There are certain parts of rural Queensland to the north of New South Wales that would probably be far more

Christian than many other parts of the nation. But generally speaking, Australia is...

You know, you're looking at a continental landmass that's pretty much the same as the continental

USA, but our population is only 20 million people. Once you get outside of the cities, you know, people are few and far between in many ways.

The towns are few and far between, and within those towns there are many abandoned church buildings, actually.

Once you get into country Australia, the church seems to be on the decline here.

Cultural Christianity has been very much abandoned. It was abandoned by the baby boomers in Australia.

And what would be some of the competing religions outside of Christianity that are in existence there in Australia?

The fastest growing religion outside of Christianity is, surprise, surprise,

Islam. We have Islamic immigration into Australia, and they are quite happy to continue in their religion, and they are quite happy to propagate their religion either through having children or being very missionary -minded in the things that they do.

Also, you'd find, you know, the other range of Eastern mystical -type religions that you'd find in various different parts of the

USA. Well, you came up with the theme today in regard to...

It's happened before. Has America repeated Australian history? Lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left.

Tell us about specifically what Australia was like before the decline that you described.

Well, if you go back to 1950, the church attendance rate in Australia for the whole population was something like 44%.

In other words, in terms of cultural Christianity, Australia could certainly have been called a

Christian nation. You come through to 1980, and church attendance rates had dropped to 24%.

And the generation that, you know, and I'm speaking in broad sweeping terms, and when you speak in that way, there are obviously exceptions to the rule, but in Australia, the generation that turned away from the church wholesale was the

Baby Boomers. The Boomers, you know, they basically, they were taken to church by their parents.

The moment they got away from home, they got away from the church. They swallowed the

Beatles and, you know, the sort of hippie revolution hook, line, and sinker, and they wanted nothing to do with established religion, full stop.

By the way, I heard that in Australia, if you actually swallow a Beatle, you could choke to death very easily because of the size of the

Beatles. Sorry about that.

All right, the Beatles, you know, John Paul, George and the rest. Yes, I know who you're talking about. When you say that there was a very high rate of church attendance, what would have been the dominant denomination or church that you're talking about?

Definitely Anglicanism, followed closely by Roman Catholicism, and then you would have had the

Presbyterians, the Methodists, and Baptists all running fairly closely back there behind the

Anglicans and the Catholics. Now, would the Anglicans be, I know that the Sydney or Australia Anglicans, at least today, are very

Protestant. They're Calvinistic, they're low church. Would that be the dominant type of Anglican you're talking about, or would it be the

Oxford movement, Romish, very high church and Catholic Anglicans, Anglo -Catholics, basically?

Unfortunately, outside of the Sydney diocese, the Anglican church is a mixed bunch.

I actually, honestly, was speaking to an Evangelical Anglican minister last Wednesday, and he said to me, you know, and we were just talking about one thing or another, he said, you know, outside of Sydney diocese or the

Armidale diocese, which is another Anglican diocese, he said I wouldn't go to an Anglican church. And I said, yeah, well, you're right, there's a lot of high church, there's a lot of liberal theology.

The Anglican church in our town has two female ministers. Yeah, you wouldn't get outside of Sydney in the

Anglican churches a whole lot of solid theology and solid teaching. So, the timeline seems to be very reflective of what has occurred here in the

United States of America, but there seems to have had a greater impact by the left upon Australia than has occurred even here.

I mean, obviously, leftism has infiltrated every sphere of life here in the

United States, and we are on the brink of being a socialist nation, but you are actually already impacted by socialism in a far greater way than we are, correct?

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, it's not that Australia and America are moving in a parallel dance, just in a slightly different time frame, but there are certainly many similarities.

With the rejection of cultural Christianity, there was definitely a very strong move to the political left, and it happened at exactly, basically over exactly the same period of time.

In 1972 in Australia, a man named Frost Whitlam become the

Prime Minister of Australia. He won an election, and he was the first leftist or socialist leader to win government in Australia for 23 years at that time.

Whilst Australia was a culturally Christian nation, Australia was a culturally conservative nation, and our politics were conservative.

Whitlam got in in 1972. He was in for roughly three years, and in those three years, he introduced national health care.

He introduced no -fault divorce. In other words, he played around with the marriage law, and he tried to standardize education, the whole education system right across the country.

Do those three things sound in any way familiar to you? Oh, yeah. As far as socialized medicine and things like that, what is your personal experience with that?

Because sometimes I hear, especially when I'm hearing from people in the

UK, there's an interesting phenomenon with the

UK. I don't know if you have had the same experience with people that you have had dialogue with from the

United Kingdom, but there are some elements of the leftist socialist governments in the

UK that even some theologically conservative Christians, who might even believe identically with me in regard to my being a

Reformed Baptist and so on, they seem to be not at all troubled by that, and they even are in favor of things like gun control.

They view America as being a nation of gun -crazed people who just can't wait to shoot anything moving that looks suspicious.

Go ahead, if you could. Yeah, look, Australia was very much until the mid-'80s,

Australia very much saw itself as a child of Great Britain.

I remember, for example, going shopping with my grandparents. They were looking for a new color

TV, and they were specifically looking for the brand that was made in Britain, and they would not buy any other brand than the brand that was made in Britain, because everything else had to be of inferior quality as compared to the

British. That's the way they thought, and Australia probably until the mid-'80s really did think of itself as a child of Great Britain, and many things that you would see in British society are reflected to a greater or lesser degree still here in Australia, although from the mid-'80s on,

Australia became more and more a satellite of the USA, especially culturally.

You know, if you go to a sandpit and there were some little boys playing in the sandpit with their trucks and stuff today, you'll probably find that they're playing with each other and talking in mock

American accents. Oh, it's true. That's the influence of American movies,

TV, cartoons, etc. And so when they're playing, they're talking in American accents. I remember one of my sons particularly,

I used to get a little cross with him at times because I'd keep saying to him, drop the

Texan drawers, son. Well, going back to the question as far as your personal opinion about how you think socialized medicine and things like that are helping or hurting the society, what are basically your own thoughts on that?

I'm definitely in the unpopular minority in Australia. I don't think that it's a good thing, and I don't think that it is doing any good for our society.

Any time you create the impression that you can get something free from the government and that this thing that you're supposedly getting for free from the government is your natural born right, you are encouraging nothing other than irresponsibility and outright laziness.

Our health system is overloaded and bulging at the seams, and it is often difficult to get the treatment that's needed when it's needed.

People often, though we pay our taxes, and in our taxes we pay for the government health care scheme if anyone can afford it.

They pay on top of their taxes for private health care in order to be able to get the care they need from the privately owned hospitals.

We're going to be going to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for our guest,

Scott Clements, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail dot com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. And of course you may remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you are asking about.

And God willing we will be right back right after these messages with Scott Clements. So do not go away.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the Pastor's Study every

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today for the full two hours with about an hour to go is

Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher and a church planter of the

Kuma Reform Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia.

And we are discussing It's Happened Before Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be Learned from the

Decline of Australia from Right to Left. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail dot com chrisarnzen at gmail dot com

And before I return to our discussion, I have some important announcements to make in regard to some special events that are coming up that are being orchestrated by some of the

Iron Sharpens Iron sponsors and supporters. First of all, the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York in cooperation with Long Island Spurgeon Fellowship present the

Gospel of the Reformation, a 500th anniversary celebration. And this will be held

Friday, September 29th and Saturday, September 30th featuring, as far as guest speakers are concerned, my dear friend

Dr. Tony Costa who is the Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

And joining him will be Pastor Caleb Bunch, Pastor Bruce Bennett, Pastor Dave Corson, and more.

If you would like to join me at this conference, I do intend to be there, God willing.

Call the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York at 631 -806 -0614 631 -806 -0614 and you can also visit the website of the

Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island at wotchurch .com That's W -O -T which stands for Word of Truth Church .com

wotchurch .com Then on the following day, Sunday, October 1st,

Dr. Tony Costa, who I just mentioned, will be preaching at the 11 a .m. service at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Medford, Long Island, New York.

For more details, call 631 -696 -5711 631 -696 -5711 631 -696 -5711 or you can visit the

Hope Reform Baptist Church of Medford, Long Island, New York's website which is hopereformedli .net

hopereformedli standing for longisland .net hopereformedli .net Then, coming up in November from the 17th through the 18th, the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their Quaker Town conference on Reformed Theology at the

Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. The theme is for still our ancient foe, obviously a reference to Satan from the classic

Reformation hymn by Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress. And the speakers at this conference include

Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant.

If you would like to be at that conference, where I also intend to have an Iron Sharpens Iron radio exhibitors booth, from November 17th through the 18th, go to alliancenet .org

alliancenet .org Click on Events, then click on Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology.

Then, coming up in January from the 17th through the 20th, the

G3 conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia and I do intend to have an exhibitors booth there as well,

God willing. Thanks to Pastor Josh Bice and the wonderful folks at Praise Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia, who are running this conference.

G3, standing for Grace, Gospel, and Glory. This time around, the theme will be

Knowing God, a Biblical Understanding of Discipleship. On the 17th of January, it will be exclusively a

Spanish -speaking edition of the G3 conference, and then from the 18th through the 20th, the conference will be exclusively in the

English language. And speakers include Stephen Lawson, Votie Balcom, Phil Johnson, who we just had on the program yesterday,

Keith Getty, H .B. Charles Jr., Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James White, Tom Askell, Anthony Mathenia, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, and Martha Peace.

If you would like to register for the G3 conference, go to g3conference .com g3conference .com

g3conference .com And please, if you are either registering for any of these events, or if you're just contacting these organizations running these events because you want more information, please, when you contact them, let them know that you heard about the events from Chris Arnzen and Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

And now, again, I have to do that uncomfortable task, perform that uncomfortable task of begging you for money.

The sponsors, the advertisers that have kept this program running ever since its inception, and some ever since we relaunched, have urged me to come to you with public appeals for donations.

For years I had never made one single public appeal back in the old days in New York. But things are desperately urgent right now in regard to finances.

If you want us to remain on the air, if you enjoy what you hear, if it's become a part of your regular habit of life, if you are blessed by this program, then please seriously consider donating to us by going to ironsharpensironradio .com

ironsharpensironradio .com ironsharpensironradio .com and clicking on support, you'll have a mailing address where you can mail a check for any amount made payable to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

And of course as I keep repeating, I never want anybody to siphon money out of the regular giving they are accustomed to provide to their church where they are a member.

And if you're not a member of a Bible -believing church, you should be, and you need to repent of that and do what needs to be done to find one and join one, and put yourself under the headship of elders of that congregation.

And also, I don't want to take food off of the dinner tables of families that are struggling to make ends meet.

But, if you are capable financially to obey God in those two areas, two commands that are certainly in scripture that you provide for your church and your family, then by all means, if you're blessed above and beyond your ability to do those two things, please consider sponsoring and helping

Iron Sharpens Iron to remain on the air. And if you'd like to advertise with us, whether it is your church, your parachurch, your business, your professional practice, whether it's a law firm, a medical practice, a chiropractor's office, whether it is a special event you're having, whether you're a pastor or a parachurch leader, please send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com and as long as what you are advertising is compatible with the theology expressed on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I would love to speak with you about advertising, whatever it is that you intend to promote to our audience.

That's chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com and put advertising in the subject line.

And now we are back to our discussion with our guest Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher and church planter of the

Kuma Reform Bible Church in Kuma, New South Wales, Australia. We have been discussing it's happened before, has

America repeated Australian history, lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left and we do have a couple of we have already several listeners actually.

We have another Scott. This Scott is from Bryan, Ohio. He's got to be a good guy then.

And Scott says America's decline has been much like a boulder rolling down a hill gathering speed and with seeming no end in sight.

Dr. D. James Kennedy, Francis Schaeffer and others warned this country repeatedly. Even Alexander Stolzenitsyn was laughed to scorn in the 1970s.

Am I wrong to say America's path to destruction is in large part due to the failings of churches preaching the gospel?

Well, I don't think that anything good can come from churches failing to preach the gospel, but your comments

Scott? Oh, look, definitely. Churches were put in the world by God to be preaching the gospel.

You know, what did He give us? He gave us preaching, He gave us prayer and He gave us love, whether we like to think of it or not.

We were put in the world to be preaching the gospel. You know, our help is not going to come from political parties and our help is not going to come from anyone and any other place than the throne room of heaven and by the power of our almighty

God, and churches should definitely be preaching the gospel. We've failed to be salt and light in our society and we must accept our responsibility for that.

We understand all these things are under the sovereignty of our God, but even so, that doesn't that doesn't deny our own responsibility and our own failings.

Yep. And I'm assuming that you would say that that would be echoed in Australia.

This question was specifically about the United States I believe, but Look, you know, certainly when

I spoke of the collapse of cultural Christianity in Australia in terms of theological trends

Australia was sadly very weak theologically as all of that was happening.

We have some strong areas and some strong Christian and faithful institutions and some strong churches, but the truth is that in denominational terms across a large swathe of the country there was no gospel being preached.

There was a liberal do good and everything will be okay sugarcoat, you know, sugarcoat the story kind of theology that was destroying the impact of the church upon our society.

Now you mentioned the phrase cultural Christianity. If you could define that for our listeners because I think there can be very good things and very harmful things in regard to cultural

Christianity, but if you could comment with your definition. Okay. It's kind of a hard thing to define in a way.

Cultural Christianity would be the idea that you have a certain amount of your population involved in church worship and that church worship or that church activity provides a moral basis for basically the right and the wrong of the things that you do.

Cultural Christianity is not necessarily a missionary thing.

It's not necessarily a thing where we're talking about whether or not people are regenerate, but we're talking about whether or not the church was exercising or being used by God to exercise moral restraint through preaching the truth.

And when you get enough people involved in church worship and hearing, for example, the commandments, the law, and the message of grace, you build up a certain credence or a certain cadence within society.

You exercise the moral control within that society. Cultural Christianity can be a terrible thing.

You know, when you've got a situation where everybody thinks they're a Christian, but the truth is nobody has ever been convicted of sin, no one's ever been regenerated, you've got nothing but problems.

But in terms of its benefit to society, cultural Christianity certainly can be used by God as a means of general grace and in the restraining of evil.

Yes, that's why I brought up the two -sided coin or the two -edged sword of cultural

Christianity because of the fact that here in America, obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is the

Bible Belt, where you have a cultural respect, by and large, although that is really rapidly deteriorating and evaporating, but you have the idea that there is a at least for over a century, there has been a recognized public reverence for things related to God and the

Bible and for church and things that were deemed to be right and wholesome, but then you had on the other side of the coin people thinking they were right with God, thinking they were truly

Christian or born again, just because they were raised in a Baptist or evangelical home or just because their daddy and their granddaddy and their great -granddaddy were preachers, they think that they are saved.

And of course you had one of the worst blights in American history on taking place predominantly or for a longer period of time on southern soil and that being slavery and so on.

So you have that problem and of course even for centuries in Great Britain I think that the term

Christian was synonymous with being white and British. It was just... It's not all good and to be honest do

I want cultural Christianity for the sake of cultural Christianity? And the answer is certainly no and I'm not even sure

I want it now but what what I think is that the existence of cultural

Christianity is evidence of the fact that you have a core of genuine let's just call it genuine

Christianity you have enough people of genuine Christian faith who are exercising an influence to our society.

Well thank you Scott and Brian Ohio and keep listening to Iron Sharp and Zion Radio and spreading the word in Ohio and beyond.

We have Excuse me? Oh sorry I was just going to say one thing to Scott. I have said in in sermons

America is sprinting to run off the edge of the cliff and Australia is having a barbecue and a few beers along the way but we're going to go off the edge of that same cliff.

I don't know why I'm laughing at that but just the way you phrased it. We have

Linda in Hilltop Lakes Texas speaking of the Bible Belt Please ask

Brother Clements how Christian media is today in Australia compared to 20 years ago both in radio and television.

I heard one minister say that he couldn't he could I'm sorry I heard one minister say that he would not read a book unless God told him to and it greatly saddened me.

I remember ministers from 40 plus years ago who spoke of revival going on in this country many worship and scripture songs which impacted

Christian church music around the world. May God richly bless the remaining Christian works in Australia and the

Iron Sherpins Iron Radio ministry around the world. Thank you very much Linda in Hilltop Lakes Texas.

If you could comment on Linda's comment and question. Sure there are some

Christian radio networks in Australia. They're not extremely big but they are here and just recently what's the is it a cable

TV network in America filled with all of the worst Pentecostal excesses Trinity Broadcasting Network is the most well beyond that even we had

Sky Angel for a while that was satellite programming with tons of channels and you couldn't watch anything

I just noticed a new channel appeared on my TV the other day called SBN and it seems to be

Australia's attempt at TBN Perhaps using the word

S the letter S for Satan to be more honest about it. Yeah well

I think it's supposed to stand for spiritual but yeah there's not really a

Christian media here in Australia in any great degree. There are some Christian radio stations as I said and a

Christian radio network and that's actually a big difference between the media in the

USA and Australia just generally speaking. In Australia there is no genuine right wing media outlet.

There is no genuine conservative media outlet. I could honestly count on one hand the number of journalists that I would count as genuinely conservative journalists and that's on one hand and Australia's media is incredibly deeply hopelessly leftist and you get almost no variety at all from the media here in Australia.

Yeah well we're not that far away from that. We're not that far different either. Although there is we do have a remnant of conservatives.

Well you know just like I was involved in a local station here and we had a doctrinal statement that was very very basic because we wanted to minister to the widest number possible and I couldn't believe that people still complained about how divisive it was because of things like the authority of Scripture and the deity of Christ and so forth.

What has happened is we've for the sake of that cultural evangelicalism that we have in America we had to jettison a lot of our cargo and the monster that we have created in the wake of that has now started to consume the rest of the church to the point where I'm hearing comments like very derogatory things against the organized church and religion and when

I hear those things I'm like do these people realize what they're actually saying? I mean what's the opposite of the organized church is the disorganized church isn't it?

The whole idea is if it's part of church history if it's part of what used to be it's got to be bad and got to be torn down and that's

Marxist. Oh for sure I mean you've got every generation seems to think that they're the only ones that understand anything such as the shallowness of their education these days that they're willing to cast everything off.

They think that no one's ever actually understood anything until they open the book. We have oh by the way thank you

Linda in Hilltop Lakes Texas please continue listening to Iron Trump and Zion Radio and keep submitting questions to us keep spreading the word about our program in Texas and beyond always a joy to hear from you and to receive your very very encouraging emails about this program.

Tyler in Mastic Beach Long Island New York asks are you familiar with J. Gresham Machen's book

Christianity and Liberalism? Machen of course was the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Do you think that the church has a part to play in engaging the culture with the gospel and keeping it from backsliding?

Yes I'm certainly familiar with the book I've read it once and I also like to I like to read a book and then listen to it as an audio book whilst

I drive so I'm now listening to it as an audio book. What was the rest of the question? Well I have to enlarge it again because Tyler's question was the font is microscopic so I'm enlarging the let's see do you think that the church has a part to play in engaging the culture with the gospel and keep it from backsliding?

Well I don't know if that culture can backslide because a culture is not redeemed or regenerate or I can't say that I'm sure that I understand what people mean when they say engaging the culture as I see it we've got the gospel and the gospel it just doesn't change it's the gospel the gospel is for all people at all times how do you engage the culture you preach the gospel to them and often that engagement can be negative

I mean you know just because you're coming to people with love in your heart and bringing them the good news that there is salvation in Jesus Christ that doesn't mean that they want to hear your message and they're most likely going to reject your message and reject you if you know

I don't really as I said I really don't understand what someone means when they say engaging the culture

I'm sorry. I think what they mean I mean of course there could be a multitude of different ways people intend that phrase to be understood but the people that would be closest in a theological identity that I have would mean that whatever it is in life that you do whether you are a pastor whether you are a doctor whether you are a lawyer whether you are a musician whether you are a painter or a sculptor or a housewife whatever it is that you are to have that that sphere of life where you have been placed and the gifts that you have been given you're to be using you're to be doing those things that are involved in that role in life that you have to the glory of God and you are to using your gifts and your role in life to lead others to Christ in some fashion that you are to redeem the world of music you are to redeem the arts you are to redeem every area of life that has perhaps become polluted or taken over by Satan and his minions okay if that's what is meant yes 100 % and absolutely

I don't believe we're supposed to circle the wagons and hide behind them I don't believe we're supposed to run off and form supposed little utopian

Christian communes where only good people go we are supposed to be out there in the world mixing it with the world from one day to the next and as Christians we are supposed to not be set apart by some kind of superior aloofness we're supposed to be set apart by the indwelling of the

Holy Spirit of God which makes us stand apart or it makes us appear to be different people in the eyes of the world they should be able to see something completely different about us in our life in our words in our behavior and in our activities if what is meant by engaging the culture you mean living as a

Christian in all the things that you do I 100 % agree we should be doing that we should you know whatever you do whether you're working in transport whether you're working in education or nursing or the police force or the fire brigade you name it if you're a doctor if you're a dentist of course be a

Christian and proclaim your faith and let God do with it as he will yes and Tyler actually sent in a clarifying email sorry for the confusion what

I meant to say was should we confront the culture with the gospel in hopes that they will be converted well

I assume he means those in the culture around us of course a

Christian is always to be doing that of course yeah I think now it sounds like he's getting at the idea prophetic proclamation and you know that's one thing the church has to do we have to speak prophetically to the people we have to bring

God's well as the Old Testament prophets did we have to bring God's God's prosecution against those who sin against our

God and you know it's a terribly hard thing to do with love but you have to do it you have to actually speak the truth you're not you're not helping anyone by telling them that it's okay

God likes you just the way you are you don't have to change a thing about your life and there's not really any such thing as sin all you're doing is sugarcoating the road to hell they're going to end up in the same hell and you'll end up in hell with them because their blood will be on your hands so you must proclaim the truth and of course sometimes

Christians perhaps well meaning they sin by robbing their employers of time that they're being paid to do a specific task by sitting around and evangelizing their co -workers that's not what we're talking about right

I mean you're supposed you're actually supposed to be the best employee that your boss has

I love the little story that Spurgeon told he was interviewing a baptismal candidate it was a girl who worked as a housemaid and he asked her what's changed about you since you've been converted and she said now when

I'm sent to clean out a room I roll up the carpet and I clean the floor under the rug that was around the rug.

Amen. Yeah and we are to it doesn't specifically mean that we were to constantly be proselytizing when we're doing our jobs even if we own the business but we are to conduct the business as a

Christian I mean some people seem to compartmentalize their Christian life and they are a lawyer just like any other secular lawyer or doctor or whatever it is that they're doing and they seem to leave their

Christianity on a shelf until Sunday and they wind up you know deceiving those around them just like every other secular person they wind up inflating unnecessarily their prices just like any other secular business they wind up having a cut throat mentality in regard to competition just like secular businesses and corporate executives may be prone to have this is where we are to be behaving like Christians and not losing our our

Christian identity and our morality and our integrity just so we can be competitive with the world.

You know we're told to be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks us for the reason for the hope that is in us that means that people actually have a reason to ask you the question they're seeing something different in your life that you know that those great few verses about being an apologist that anyone who takes the task of being an apologist on behalf of God seriously always end up going through those verses are telling us that people are going to be asking us the reason for the hope that is in us.

They're going to see something about us that makes them ask the question you know I think of my wife who worked for quite a while in Australia snow resorts and they brought in every year many workers from overseas and one particular girl, an

African American girl actually went to my wife and she drew me to the end of her contract up at the snow fields and said why are you so polite to me?

Why do you speak to me so kindly? There's the classic example someone actually asked a question they saw the way my wife lived, the way my wife treated people even and she was the manager in the section of the resort where she was working and yet she treated people with such decency and respect whilst still having authority that they realized there was something different about her and of course

I'm praising my wife. Yes in fact my late wife Julie, she was a charge nurse in of all places a nursing home for nuns and the nuns loved her and they saw a stark contrast between her and many of the workers in that nursing home who treated the patients, the residents with great rudeness, with physical roughness you know when they were moving them from a bed to change the linens or whatever it is to you know they sometimes were physically,

I'm not saying that they were beating these people but they were sometimes just very rough, not concerned about the physical discomfort that they might be going through, yelling at them and being very rude and nasty and they saw such a contrast in the way my wife behaved with them and they, whenever I would visit her at work the way that these women would in their wheelchairs flock around her and she had opportunities to present the gospel to them, what happened with those moments of evangelism and kindness and compassion and love that she demonstrated, only

God may know that but it was just a, it was precious to see that. And I think

Buzz you had something to say. I just wanted to say to Tyler also, you know I just have a little bit of trouble understanding how we could possibly take the

Great Commission seriously without in some way confronting the culture. But I think it is being done to a large degree.

I mean like for example Chris, you've had debates, you've organized debates and things. We have this program, we are confronting the culture, there's probably at least a handful of unsaved people who are listening to this.

At least one in this room. I wasn't going to bring up your name at this point Chris. But you know, there may be a number of people who listen to this program and get kind of hot under the collar because of some of the things that are said.

Actually it's more the Christians that get hot under the collar. The thing about it is though, you know,

I think we are to a large degree confronting the culture. We're confronting a culture that perhaps isn't listening.

But there's a difference between what's going on through the church and for example you get a lot of these loose canons out there that like you know, go picket drive -ins and things like that.

You know, that obviously they're confronting the culture with a look of obnoxiousness if I can put it that way.

Well we're going to be coming back from our final break in a moment and when we return Scott, I would like you to basically give any kind of warning to those here in America that may be perhaps even secretly admirers of Bernie Sanders.

They think that a more socialized America would be a more kind and compassionate

America that is really going to help those who are less fortunate, those who are poor, those who are physically ill or disabled.

They may have this idea in their mind that it's better for the government to be the big daddy than it is to receive charitable help and assistance in other avenues or from other avenues and perhaps you could start with that and then

I'd like you also when we return to give your opinion as honest as you could be as an outsider from a land down under of what how you view the

United States of America both good and bad and we will get to all of that God willing when we return from this final word from our sponsor so don't go away we'll be right back after these messages

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Or go to BatteryDepot .com. That's BatteryDepot .com. Welcome back.

This is Chris Orens. And if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes and the next 20 minutes or so to go, our guest has been

Scott Clements. And he will continue to be our guest and discuss for the last 20 minutes.

It's happened before. Has America repeated Australian history? Lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left.

If you have a question, I would strongly urge you to submit it immediately because we are running out of time.

Our email address is ChrisOrensen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

And please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside of the USA unless you are remaining anonymous because of its personal and private nature.

And if you could, Scott, if you could give us your own warnings to Americans who think that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, they think that there's something really of value to this socialization of medicine and in many other spheres of life where the government is their big provider, their big daddy, their sugar daddy.

And if you could just comment from your own experience and your own opinion what you see in Australia and give our listeners here in America a word of warning about their perhaps misled desires.

When the theologically weak Australian churches handed social responsibility over to the government, basically they destroyed the church's impact within our society.

Not only is the church supposed to preach the gospel, the church is supposed to live the gospel.

We might not like to say that things were better when people who had trouble turned up at a church seeking help, but the truth is they were.

When people turned to the church for charity, when the people turned to the church for help and they got that help, the church had an entrance point into their lives to help them out and to give them the gospel.

When you hand over social responsibility to the government, people turn to the government as though the government were

God. And as long as the government provides what they want, and that is basically just free money or what they consider to be free money, they have no interest in any other alternate scheme, they have no desire to take any responsibility for their own lives.

The average state of mind that you find in a society that is being run on socialist principles is, as long as I get enough money to dull the pain,

I don't care. As long as I've got enough money to buy the carton of beer every Friday, I don't care.

Or enough money to buy the other chemicals that they may be using. As long as the internet's coming in at broadband speed and I can just bury myself in a mountain of porn or whatever it might be, computer games, you name it, as long as those things are there,

I don't care. And what you see when you look at Australia today and when you look at the fact that the

Australian church is struggling so hard to get any kind of genuine traction or influence in our society, is you see the people closed off by the attitude that I've got enough,

I can dull the pain, I don't care. That's what socialist handouts produce.

They simply produce people who are dumbed down and they don't care.

Heaven is for heaven. The new heavens and the new earth, that's where we're going to have paradise, where all is going to be great and wonderful.

Don't trust anyone who tries to tell you that that can be delivered here and now on this earth.

Praise God. And is there anything specific that you are aware of where getting medical assistance, getting particular surgeries, or whatever the case may be, is in any way inferior because it's under the rubric of socialized medicine?

Or what can you say about specific things like that in regard to the turn to the left that Australia has experienced?

What you usually see with regards to government sponsored health care is that it's much more a production line.

I wouldn't want to say that the doctors aren't as good or that the nurses aren't as good. They are certainly good.

But the plan is to push people into the hospital and out of the hospital as fast as is possible to open up the bed for the next person because the demand is greater than the supply.

And so as I said to you earlier, you have a nation here where in our taxation forms it tells us that we're paying a certain amount of money every year for this government sponsored

Medicare scheme. And yet at the same time, any of us who can afford any kind of private health insurance opt for the private health insurance to get us out of that government scheme because it is so overloaded.

It is under such great pressure. Once again, a personal story, some years back my wife dislocated her thumb.

We had to drive 300 miles to get to a doctor and a day surgery to fit her in within a week because the closest specialist who could have handled her problem told us, oh look, it's not really that bad.

Yeah, sure it hurts a bit. Take some painkillers. The next available appointment is 12 weeks away. Wow. You know.

Well, now I'd like you to give us the opinion of someone from the outside looking in, an

Australian looking at the United States of America, looking at the church in the United States of America and what your opinion is overall, both good and bad.

Yep, sure. As a conservative Christian here in Australia looking towards America, first of all

I'd say I love what is good about America. You know, the best books that I study, the best materials that I get, the best things that I hear online, they're coming out of America.

You know, you've got just, you've got the best of the best there at this moment in time.

Sadly, when I look at my society around me and the things that are destroying my society around me, you know, porn and perversion and a terrible, horrible culture of, oh,

I'm trying to think of the right word, a terrible, hard, uncaring culture,

I see also, sadly, the American influence. It's like you're shining light into the world and at the same time you're flooding the world with sewage.

And I hate to put it that way, but that's kind of the way it is. The good that comes out of America is so very good.

The bad that comes out of America is so very bad. And it breaks my heart to see from a distance what appears to me to be a country that is bent on self -destruction and is bent on putting out that light.

Whatever's good about America, it appears to me that the left absolutely hates in America and they're trying to shut you down.

You know, on the positive, it's actually a good thing that you're seen to be a target.

You see, in Australia, the church is not even a target. We're seen to be utterly irrelevant and completely without impact or power.

And so, largely, we're ignored and people feel that they could ignore us in any way they please.

At least in America, you're still in the fight. I realise that American Christians, you probably don't enjoy being in the fight and you're used to actually being on top there and now you're realising, hey, you know, we're in a genuine battle here.

But that's actually a good thing. It means you're worthy of fighting. There's something there that's worth fighting for.

We have Bibi in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says, I mean no disrespect for your guest, but I have seen great mischief spiritually and theologically come out of self -ordained maverick churches that were planted by no one and the ones who actually were involved in forming the church with no oversight from any solid biblical established church.

Does your guest realise that this is a phenomena indeed and that there are great dangers in planting a church without any supervision or oversight from an established church?

Certainly we do realise it and we have actually a short list of three senior

Christian men to whom we go for oversight and consultation. I mean, the

Baptist church model is not like the Presbyterian model where you obviously have a synod and things like that, but a presbytery, the whole deal.

But I certainly understand the question that's being asked and the point that I would make and it was asked respectfully, so I answer respectfully.

We apparently, where I live, aren't actually important enough for anyone to come there and do anything.

If you don't do it yourself, it's not going to be done. Apparently, you know, there are a lot of qualified men coming out of seminaries that feel certain that they are called to minister somewhere near the beach, somewhere, you know, a nice well -appointed town where everything goes well and, you know, that rural backwaters in their eyes, like Cooma and many other country towns here in Australia, well, no, they're not called to minister in those places.

There's no real benefit to being there. You know, if there were a solid reformed church in our area, don't imagine that I wouldn't have been a member of it.

Well, thank you, B .B. from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Thank you for asking your question respectfully and keep spreading the word about the program in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and beyond.

Well, I'd like you to make sure that you have at least five minutes, uninterrupted, to basically give a summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding the subject we've been addressing today.

Okay, you're in a battle and you're actually fighting from a fairly good position.

You do actually have some strong institutions. You have some strong leadership. You have some good solid churches.

You have some numbers. You can actually fight this war in Australia.

I'm sorry to say the war is over and we're trying to rebuild from, you know, somewhere down near ground level.

With regards to Australia, I would say to anyone in America, pray for the gospel preaching ministers of Australia.

It is so easy here to feel like you're isolated, you're alone, that no one's listening and that you're not making a speck of difference.

The difference between ministry here in Australia and the USA, I can only imagine, is enormous.

I'm sure many ministers feel isolated and alone in America too. But, you know, most

Australian pastors are struggling with discouragement. We wonder when God is going to hear our prayers.

We wonder when we're going to see good things happen. The faithful ministers here, you know,

I have a friend who's a minister in Sydney who trained at Master's Seminary and came out here to Australia and he is somewhat shocked at just how tough our society is, how hard it is to get any traction in our society.

It's not like things that he's seen before. Yeah. We have a question from CJ from Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York who says,

Are there any indigenous Australian preachers that you can recommend that we listen to other than yourself on YouTube, Sermon Audio, or other avenues on the internet that perhaps many people here in the

United States are totally unaware of? Um...

That's a hard one. You see, indigenous has a completely different meaning here in Australia.

Indigenous is at the moment the politically correct term for the Australian Aboriginal. And I only actually know one

Australian Aboriginal preacher and he's over in a town called Wagga Wagga and I know that his sermons aren't coming up online.

The person simply means an Australian -born preacher and an Australian preacher here in Australia. My friend in Brisbane, Josh Williamson, his sermons are up on Sermon Audio.

He's an evangelist, does a lot of street evangelising. He preaches in many churches around about Brisbane and I would...

He's a 1689er guy. Good, rock -solid theology there and a real good guy and I would certainly recommend his sermons to anyone.

And there are other churches that I would happily recommend to anyone.

Go to... I'm just searching for it online.

I'm sorry while I'm talking. There is a Reformed Baptist of Australia website and I'm just trying to find that now and it lists the 1689 confessional churches that there are here in Australia.

Go to that site, find those guys. Most of them I would recommend quite happily. And while you're looking that up,

I know that we've had on this program David Olde, O -U -L -D, who is one of the

Sydney Anglicans. Yes. There's Stanmore Baptist Church in Sydney.

That's Michael Podigulod. I'd give a recommendation for them. They're not on Sermon Audio but you could find them online.

I'm not finding the website that I'm looking for. I'm sorry. Well, people can always contact you at any contact information that you care to give to our listeners before we conclude the program.

Simply, if you find us on Sermon Audio and click on the contact link there, that'll get an email in to me and I'll certainly be answering any emails that come my way.

Well, how can our listeners, how can our Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners best pray for you and the congregation at Kuma Reform Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia?

Pray that we have impact in the town in which we live. Pray that the ministry that we're seeking to act out here in Kuma would be effective and powerful.

As I said, it just honestly feels like from one day to the next you're making a lot of speck of difference and that's a very tough feeling.

To be honest, if I wasn't convinced that our God is sovereign and can do wonderful things, I'd be inclined to want to throw in the towel.

And that's not just for us. I mean, that's for any gospel preaching church in Australia. We feel the need for refreshing and for renewal by the

Holy Spirit of God. And I don't mean that in any charismatic way. I mean that in general, in a genuine

Great Awakening way, you know, a genuine outpouring of the Spirit that's both doctrinally strong and aggressively evangelical.

That's what we need here in Australia. So please pray for us and we're praying for you.

I mean, I know that I pray for your nation and the Christians of your nation. I pray that they are preserved from what looks to me like onrushing disaster.

Yes. And I appreciate the fact that you listen to this radio program and pray for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And it's always good to hear from you. And I do occasionally hear from you and hope to hear from you more often with questions for guests in the future that we have on the radio.

It's just amazing to me that the modern technology that God has blessed humanity with.

This program here coming out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania is listened to by people globally over 20 countries and that I know of 49 states of the 50 here in the

United States. Well, we may be going back to 49 soon with California leaving, right? If that actually happens.

And I'm going to reserve my public comments about that. But I know that as I said earlier

I know that people can contact Kuma Reform Bible Church and they can hear your preaching by going to sermonaudio .com

sermonaudio .com and if you type in the search engine Kuma C O O M A you will most certainly get the

Kuma Reform Bible Church come up and that church alone I'm assuming. And if you could any other contact information that you care to give?

Um just um we'll stick with the

Gmail account I think is the best way at the moment. It's simply Kumareformedbiblechurch at gmail .com

that comes to me and I'll certainly be answering any inquiries that come my way. That's kumareformedbiblechurch at gmail .com

and Kuma is spelled C O O M as in Michael A Kumareformedbiblechurch at gmail .com

Well Scott it has been such a pleasure having you on the program

I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing you today and I really appreciate again your reaching out to me the value that you place upon Iron Sharpens Iron Radio has definitely moved me and I hope that we have interaction for a long time to come and who knows maybe even meet each other face to face at some point this side of heaven.

That would be good it would be wonderful. Well thank you Reverend Buzz Taylor for being my co -host again today.

It's been my pleasure thank you. I want to thank everybody who listened especially those who wrote in. I hope that you all have a very safe and blessed and refreshing weekend and Lord's Day and please if you are not a member of a local

Bible believing church prayerfully seek one out. Contact me if you need help in locating one.

I have contacts with solid churches all over the United States and all over the world actually. But I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests next week on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.