Discussion About What Matters: Freedom, Dividing Lines, Catholicity, the Lordship of Christ

And greetings, welcome to the dividing line. I'm not sure why I'm just seeing a blank screen up there and now everything stopped and now, are the cameras on maybe? Yeah, they are. But nothing's, oh, hey, there it went.

I don't know. It was just still showing the other thing. What can I say? Technical difficulties. Of course, most people are aware that there's something going on in France right now. I'm seeing, of course, this is Al Jazeera.

Several attacks reported across Paris. Don't know what the nature of them are. I guess some report you just had a dozen dead so far. Civilization is such a fragile thing. And what's going on in Europe?

Secularization, Civilizational Fragility, and the Crisis in Europe

Secularization eats the heart out of meaningful civilization. It really does. Civilization requires that mankind have a view that he has a transcendent purpose, that there is a value to human life and the secular worldview can't provide those things.

And Europe has been fully secularized a lot longer than we have. We're catching up at lightning speed, but they've been there longer. And the secular socialist communist worldview cannot stand up to the barbarian, Salafi, radicalized form of Islam.

And I don't know what's gonna happen there. I really don't. But it does sort of fit in with what I want to talk with you about today because I got up this morning and we had Clementine over last night.

We're doing this on a Friday instead of yesterday. My daughter was due yesterday and both children so far, she has had exactly on time. I taught the young lady to be prompt. So I will take credit for that.

She actually gave me credit for that yesterday. So I'll gotta take it when I can get it, you know? And so January Owen Pinch was born at 5 .37 yesterday morning, a full pound heavier than her sister. And she's been eating really well.

So I think Clementine's only gonna be the big sister for a while. I think January's hot on her tail already as far as that goes. But Clementine stayed with us last night. We were doing the grandparents thing and that was very enjoyable.

Generational Anxiety, Moral Confusion, and the Need for Discernment

But I get up this morning and I even make comment on Twitter and Facebook. The absolute insanity, moral, ethical, common sense insanity stuff that just deluged me this morning was really depressing. I mean, you know, you've got all these young people that have no earthly idea how things work.

They have no earthly idea the history of this nation, the sacrifices that have been given to allow them to have the many things they have. They have no clue. And the fact that our educational system has been taken over by communists for a long time now and it's now coming back to bite them.

A lot of people are commenting about, oh, gosh, look at all the liberals. Now they're getting thrown out by the people that they have liberalized. Isn't that fascinating? But bringing destruction in the process.

I mean, you know, there was a day when we were concerned about turning out competitive college graduates so we could compete with other nations. We don't even think about things like that anymore. Now it's just gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, you know, take all the money.

I mean, they're literally Karl Marx level communists running around going, just take all the money from the rich and give it to us. And that's just the way things should be. And then you've got the wild eyed ethical pygmyism of the transgender movement and the bathroom stuff and just a complete and total lack of common sense, which again, the only explanation I can give for any of it is the judgment of God.

And I just, I'm looking at all this and I'm going, you know, and of course when you have grandchildren really makes you think more. You know, I didn't think a lot about what it was gonna be like after I was gone until I had grandkids.

Because yeah, your kids are gonna survive, yeah. But then you start thinking about that next generation and you start seeing things in a little more of a timeline. And I think, well, I was holding January yesterday and I looked at my wife and I said, if she lives to 85, she'll see the next century.

And we both just looked at each other like, wow, wow. And you just go, what's this world gonna look like? Barring the Lord's return, what's this world gonna look like given current trends? I don't have any earthly idea.

I am not a futurist. I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet. But it does make you think. It really, really makes you think. And so I'm looking at this stuff and I'm looking at the, just the, you know, we've said it before, the people who are calling good, evil and evil good and openly turning morals and ethics on its head and don't even seem to recognize what the effect of that is going to be upon the nations in which they live.

I mean, there's, you know, anarchy right around the corner when all the systems of authority and control and appropriate things, Roman 13 level things are just being thrown off. And you think about these things, especially when you're holding little teeny babies that are completely defenseless.

And it really makes you fearful if you don't know that God has a purpose in all these things. And even then, let's be honest with ourselves. We may know that our eternal destiny is sure in the hands of God.

We may have that great confidence, but it doesn't change the fact that you look at what happened in Israel when God brought judgment against Israel, the godly suffered along with the ungodly. And when God brought judgment on nations like Germany and Japan and World War II, a lot of Christians died.

A lot of Christians died on both sides of that war. So I'm thinking about all this. And at the same time, in the back of my mind, I've been wanting to talk for a long time about how we get along with each other as Christians.

Disputable things. And it struck me, I don't know, sometime over the past couple of weeks that some of you listen while running on treadmills and stuff, I don't want you to fall off and sue us, okay? So I want you to listen carefully to what I'm about to say before you freak out, all right?

But I was looking at things online. I was looking at some of the conflicts that exist between Christians and how Christians will treat other Christians and things like that. And I thought about the fact, you know, for someone who has a reputation, what was it?

What was that guy's name? McKinsey. He was the co-author with Geisler on their book on Roman Catholicism. Ralph McKinsey. I'm not even sure if he's alive. I could be wrong about that. But I remember sitting with Ralph McKinsey, 95, 96, 20 years ago, somewhere around there.

And we were talking about our different approaches to Roman Catholicism. The one of the things he said to me was, James, you're such a hard nose. And we need to have hard noses in some situations. And for someone who has a reputation for being hard nosed, you know, I'm an apologist.

And so for a lot of people, I'm just constantly attacking and constantly arguing. And the funny thing is most people who know me know that I actually try to avoid conflict. I mean, I really do, probably too much so, to be honest with you.

In certain situations, it's a weakness in some areas. But for someone who has such a reputation to be such a hard nose, I'm very Catholic with a small C, small C. In other words, I seem to get along with a much wider variety of people than a lot of my compatriots do.

I think the vast majority of my Presbyterian brethren will tell you that though they root against me when we're debating baptism, in the vast majority of instances, and I'm talking about conservatives here.

I'm not talking about the liberals here. I mean, liberalism, that's all, let's put that off to the side. When it comes down to important, vital things, we stand side by side. I speak in a lot of churches that, well, a number of my Reformed Baptist brethren probably would not speak in.

And I don't have any problem doing it at all. And I've taken a lot of heat for my relationship with Michael Brown, and he and I have been on the air, and we've talked about all sorts of things, and we've honestly dealt with areas of disagreement.

We've debated each other. And so for someone who most people would think would have a very, very narrow spectrum, he had a lot wider spectrum than people would expect. And I talk with, a concern I've had over the years is I talk with people who maybe watch this program, listen to this program, read some books and things like that, and I hope that people that listen regularly to this program do not develop a attitude of, well, hyperjudgmentalism.

I am concerned about that. I am concerned that when they hear us seeking to apply discernment to certain areas, that they would be imbalanced and going, well, you know, if you demonstrate that Jehovah's Witnesses are wrong on the Trinity, and you don't have any fellowship with Jehovah's Witnesses, and in fact, you say this is a salvation issue, then I should be free to apply the same reasoning over here to this issue.

Unfortunately, that's not a gospel issue that they apply it to. Most of us today know the negative connotations to the term fundamentalism. Now, there's a historical use of the term fundamentalism that would describe me, to be honest with you.

But today, that's generally not how the term is used. Even in our chat channel, we'll have folks who say, I'm a former fundamentalist. That doesn't mean that they've denied the return of Christ or the virgin birth, the inspiration of scriptures, existence of miraculous, none of that stuff.

Generally, the negative term, use of the term fundamentalist, is in reference to someone who is not willing to hear what someone else has to say. They're not only convinced of their position, but they are convinced of that position primarily out of ignorance, not out of interaction.

And as such, are very convinced that everybody else who does not think, look, act like them, draw their T's in the same way and dot their I's in the same way could not possibly be a Christian. Could not possibly be a Christian.

Now, it is natural when people grow up in a particular Christian tradition to think that way. To be Christian is to look like me. And so when you see somebody else and they're doing something differently, well, that's not right.

That's not the way it should be done. The whole emergent church movement, if you ever listened to the thing I did with, what's his majiggy? Oh, I can't hit guy's name. Brian McLaren. I don't know why his name just doesn't come to me very quickly.

If you listen to the unbelievable radio broadcast I did with Brian McLaren, you'll sort of hear that whole movement was made up of people who were raised in a very narrow, conservative mindset. And then at some point in time, anybody who's raised in a narrow, conservative mindset is gonna discover that there are other perspectives out in the world.

And there's only two ways to respond to that. Well, no, there's a couple ways to respond, but there are two imbalanced ways of responding to that. Let's put it this way. One of the imbalanced ways is to bounce off of that new knowledge even deeper into your own tradition and become a rock ribbed King James only Christian.

Sam Gip type guy, okay? You know, where you just, you get out the flamethrowers and you just double down on the Christianity only looks like me type stuff. The other imbalanced response to that is what Brian McLaren and the rest of them did.

You realize that there's actually areas where there's appropriate disagreement and can be appropriate disagreement. And that someone can actually hold views other than your own in certain areas and they're still Christians.

And not just in eschatology, though that's frequently a good starting place. But that people might have different views on the consumption of alcohol, on having body art, on going to movies, whatever.

And what happens is those people, once they start going, you know, there's valid differences of opinion in these areas. And then what they do is because they've been so bottled up in that is they explode out of it.

And now everything is up for grabs. Trinity, biblical inspiration. It's all, if I was wrong about this, I must have been wrong about everything. So they go off that direction and the others go off that direction into an even double down fundamentalism.

What should happen, of course, is that as you grow up, you recognize that there are other valid opinions and you learn to prioritize. You learn to find out what defines my worldview? What defines the Christian worldview?

What defines Christianity? And you learn to prioritize these things and to recognize, you know, this gives rise to this and this is foundational and that gives rise to that, that gives rise to that. And each one of us has to, at some point in our life, create, whether we do it, you know, on a computer or write it out, you know, people actually use pens and things like that.

We create a priority list and we draw some lines where we say, this is definitional, this is what's called adiaphora, the things that do not determine what the faith is. And we will disagree with one another as to where some of those lines are.

Now, some, you can only go so far back. I mean, once you get back to Trinity, non-Trinity, justification, non-justification, you know, now you've got nothing left. There's no essence, there's no core left that would distinguish Christianity from anything else.

So obviously when people go that far, they've lost balance. But what is the very essence of negative fundamentalism? But the idea that everyone has to look like me, think like me, dress like me, act like me, respond like me and believe like me on every single issue there is.

And we all have seen how repulsive that kind of Christianity is. We've all seen it. We don't want to be viewed that way. We want the world not to look at us like we're like those folks where, well, I have sat in churches and pulled this thing out of the hymn rack where a particular view, not just pre-millennialism as a whole, but a particular sub view of that, absolutely necessary to be a member of that church.

I mean, just, and so, you know, you get down to those churches to where, you know, the kind of dress that you have, it's prescribed by the leadership of that church. I've told the story many times. My mom took me to a church once and I can remember what it looked like.

I remember we sat up in this little balcony thing. It was really teeny tiny. We were in the very back. But the, and why I'd remember this, maybe it's just because of Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure, but the entire sermon, the entire sermon, lost you there for a second, didn't I?

The entire sermon was about how anyone, any woman who would wear pantsuits, that's, there's a connection. Anyone, any woman wearing a pantsuit, the Greece slide into hell. And I'm sure something about wearing men's clothing came up somewhere along the line.

But, you know, that kind of mindset, we see it and we go, no, I don't want to be associated with that. I don't want to be associated with that. But where's the balance? And if someone, if you recognize there needs to be a balance in the middle, how can you learn to extend the balance grace to those who disagree with you as to where that balance is?

And if you do that, how can you do apologetics is what a lot of people want to ask me. Because their assumption is if you do apologetics, you have to have this very narrow spectrum. Well, actually, if you do apologetics, you have to have a really clear view of what the core of the faith is and what the adiaphora are.

The things that do not determine the definition of the Christian faith. That's what you need. You know, today I see more in social media, I see more in blogs and things like that going after side issues than almost anybody.

Well, I did see, for example, I saw, I was glad to see that Ligonier put out an article, I think it was Ligonier, pretty sure it was Ligonier this morning in one of my feeds, put out an article about the importance and the centrality of the doctrine of imputation.

And yet how many who are quick to judge others for drinking a thing of wine, for going to see a movie, for having body art someplace, having a cross or whatever, they're on them in a second and would never even think to ask about does this person believe in the doctrine of imputation?

Does this person teach the gospel in a way that is consistent with the concept of imputation? How many of those people who are so quick to go after those things even recognize how central the idea of imputation is to our understanding of what justification is?

As a result, so much of the stuff going on in our social media produces all sorts of heat, but not much in the way of light. And here's where I'm going with this. We're living in a very, very, very anti-Christian society today.

And it seems every morning I get up, it's incrementally moved farther toward being willing to see persecution in a full board sense. I mean, right now people are getting fired for being Christian, no problem, no problem.

Not an issue. But when's it gonna get to destroying property and burning down churches and moving on and on and on? And it seems to be happening really quickly. When that happens, great pressure is going to be put upon us within what is called Christendom.

Within what's called Christendom. Don't worry about it, it's something for Rich to deal with. To start compromising so that as our numbers shrink and we're pushed closer together with one another, all of us are going to have to think through what defines the faith, what's gonna define our fellowship with one another, and where we're gonna have to draw the absolutely strict lines and say, I'm sorry, though the world is gonna treat us both badly and persecute us both, I cannot have fellowship with you.

And this is already a big issue in regards to Roman Catholicism. It's already a big issue to where a lot of Christians are already like, as long as you believe in the least common denominator of Christianity, just the minimal Trinity, there's a lot of folks that are even questioning that, but Trinity, resurrection, cross, what the cross does, that's way too sticky, don't worry about that.

There's a lot of folks that are already at that point, can't go there, can't go there. But each one of us, this is not something you're gonna be able to look to somebody else, you can't look to me to do it.

Each one of us is going to have to think through in a very serious fashion how we're gonna draw those lines and why, why we're gonna draw those lines. And that means for a lot of folks, traditions, things they were raised with are going to have to be challenged.

And things you're just uncomfortable with, but are not definitional, and where you have to admit, all right, I'm uncomfortable with that, but, and I can't go there, but it's not definitional. For example, let me give you some examples, and I'm gonna blow some of you away with these.

This is where you really start finding out where your tradition stuff is. I was totally shocked when I went to England the first time, first couple of times. The hymnal wars in England, the hymnal wars, yeah, oh yeah.

Hymnals are very different in Europe. I should have brought some in, sorry, I didn't think to do that, but I have some. Very different than ours in the States. Ours in the States are fairly large books and they've got the music and well, that's for churches that still have hymnals.

Whenever I go to a place that doesn't have hymnals, I really miss them because, do forgive me, but I'm, I sing bass. And I like to sort of know what that is. I actually read the music and I can sing the bass part for most everything.

There are a couple in the Trinity Hymnal that I just go, what? Nevermind, forget it. Can't do that, can't do it, no. And so I was blown away by the fact that there were serious, just almost fist to cuff level divisions amongst people who otherwise would believe almost the exact same things over something like what hymnals you're gonna use.

And over here we have the, we have music wars and I'm not saying that it's not a important issue to think through the regulative principle and what's the purpose of the worship service. Do we, why do you have a praise band?

All the rest of that stuff. I'm not saying that there is not a place to discuss these things. What I am saying is even once you've discussed them and you disagree, are you really ready to send the people who disagree with you off to the flames of perdition because they disagree with you?

And there needs to be a balance. For a lot of folks it's, you know, if you've got drums in your church. Now, you know, for some folks feel so strongly about that that they can't attend, they cannot worship in that situation.

Okay, then don't. But are you really ready to send those folks to hell? Think of it, I'll give you some other examples in just a moment. I was gonna read these texts. Remember Galatians 2? Galatians 2 talks, but it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in who had sneaked into spite of our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus in order to bring us into bondage.

We did not yield and subject to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. There's your rock ribbed, truth of the gospel cannot be any compromised text. Okay, all right.

So the person who wants to go there then has to realize that the same apostle wrote Romans chapter 14. And Romans chapter 14 talks about things that don't define the gospel. Eating of things sacrificed, you know, buying meat in the market.

Some people can, some people can't. Primarily because some people were concerned that it had been offered in sacrifice to idols and Paul elsewhere says, now, if you know that it was, then don't do that.

But otherwise, if you don't know where that meat came from, you know, I had my wife pick up some ground turkey yesterday. I've made some really good burritos since then. And it never crossed my mind to go, I wonder if this turkey was properly sacrificed.

I wonder if it was raised by a Mormon or maybe by a Satanist, never crossed my mind. That turkey is long gone and it doesn't matter. It's just turkey meat. And all the rest of that stuff just doesn't matter.

Now, somebody walks up to you with meat and says, I sacrificed this to Satan. Do you want some? That's a different issue. Now you got a witness issue. But the point is there are things where you will stand or fall before your own Lord.

It's between you and your Lord and everybody else just simply needs to not worry about it. And, but boy, do we like to worry about things like that. Boy, do we like to worry about things like that. Now there's, where do you draw the line?

Where do you draw the line? How do you determine? You start talking about alcohol. Oh boy, you get everybody up in a tizzy. You get everybody up in a tizzy and we should be able to talk about it. And we should recognize that I think it's obvious beyond any shadow of a doubt, you cannot prove from the Bible that you can make it a dogma.

Thou shalt not partake. Can't do it. But at the same time, there's all sorts of warnings against drunkenness. There's all sorts of warnings about what this stuff can do to the mind. And if we don't have enough evidence in our culture of what this stuff can do, well, then we're blind, deaf, and dumb.

And so we should recognize the dangers that are inherent in it. But in most of my, most situations I've seen, what do you get? You get the abstinence folks on the one side and the folks that think you've got to smoke a stogie and drink a beer every time you get together on this side and they just launch missiles.

They just launch missiles at each other. And it's sort of like, and they can't have almost anything to do with the other side. And you end up going, in other words, the middle gets evacuated and you end up with everybody out on the outside.

And if you are in the middle somewhere, you sort of feel out of place and you sort of feel like you're gonna get attacked from either side. And so you keep your mouth shut because you just don't want to be attacked about stuff like that.

You just don't want to go there. There's enough stuff to get attacked about that you just keep your head down and you end up not really having any meaningful conversation. I have used it as an example.

I have presented it in multiple situations. Leviticus 18 .29, 19 .28, as an example of where a tradition needs to be examined. I was certainly raised. Well, I was certainly raised that if someone smoked or drank, had long hair, rode a motorcycle, I've had a motorcycle license since I was 19 now, I think, long time, rode one in today.

Well, can we really call that a motorcycle? Hey, it's got two wheels and it's legal on the road. So it's It's an over 50 guy bike. Yeah, yeah. Oh, thanks. It's an over 50. It's a 112 miles to the gallon bike, is what it is.

Okay, let's just keep that in mind. If you did any of those things, and if you had a tattoo, auto pagan stamp right there, that's it. So I get the mindset. And when that's all you've ever known, it can take a lot of work to get out of that mindset.

And so I've told the story on the program before, we've gone through it on the program. When I preached through Leviticus 19, I discussed it directly. When I wrote the book on homosexuality, I was challenged to be consistent in the, have you checked to make sure that there's no mixed fibers in your shirt thing, shellfish, and the issue of Leviticus 19, 28 came up.

You shall not cut yourself the dead. You shall not tattoo yourself. I am the Lord your God. And so I dug into it and discovered certain things. First thing was the Hebrew term, aka, that is used there is a hapoxlegomena, a disputed hapoxlegomena.

What does that mean? Well, hapoxlegomena is a term that's used only once in the Bible. And if it's disputed, we're not a hundred percent certain as to what it actually means. Right there, that in and of itself is enough to put that issue into the Romans 14 category.

Because a basic element of exegesis is you never make a dogmatic case out of a text that has a disputed hapoxlegomena. You just, you don't do it. It's just inappropriate exegesis and interpretation. But there's more to it than that.

I could have done what most people did with the text and then go, well, it's a ceremonial law. It just has to do with Israel, dismiss it. I don't go there. Anybody who's listened to my holiness code knows that I don't dismiss it in that way.

Instead, what I discovered was there is a Deuteronomistic parallel in Deuteronomy 14 .1 to Leviticus 19 .28. And there, the parallel to a tattoo in Leviticus 19 .28 is to shave your forehead, which for some of us, we do every day, actually.

Couldn't think of it. If I didn't, I'd have these two little spots that grow and they look like horns and the King James only folks would love it. So, you know, there's nothing I can do about that. But, oh yeah, the comb over thing?

No, could never, no, could never ever happen. It's terrible, it's terrible. And what connected them together? For the dead, for the dead. So I started looking into it. I started thinking about the religious background.

This was an altering of your appearance. Could be permanent, not permanent, shaving, whatever, cutting. It's a alteration of appearance for the dead, for the dead. Well, in the religions those days, you either could be honoring the dead.

That's a possibility. There was all sorts of people that would do things like that. But in those days, you look at those religions, curses of the dead, man, fear of the dead. And then you think about it, you go, oh, they're trying to hide from the curses of the dead, alter their appearance.

And so what are both of those texts saying? They still have relevance to us today. Why? Well, because there's still a whole lot of people that are concerned about the dead. It's funny, I've talked to people overseas, people in Ukraine.

And it's like, oh man, are the Orthodox into the dead saints and the dead and stuff like that. And I'm like, really? And in South America, oh, bring in the dead and the Santeria and all that. Oh, it's all over the place, it's all over the place.

So both texts are still relevant, but in the fundamentalist mindset, that only goes, don't tattoo. Well, we don't know that it's tattooed, but don't do it anyways. We're gonna interpret it in the modern sense.

They missed the real issue. And the real issue is, God says, the dead can't do anything to you. I'm God, I'm in control, fear me. So I came to those conclusions. And so I go, all right. You wanna get a cross or something like that?

Romans 14, it's between, well, you're married, it's between you and your wife and the Lord. Because there's that little thing about your body is not your own type thing when you're married. So immediately everybody wants to go.

So did you? Yeah, actually I do. Shocking, isn't it? Yeah. And the guy that did it now knows more about Greeks than he ever wanted to know. But yeah, I've got a little art, means a lot to me. Very encouraging to me actually.

And probably saved my life because I'm a Scotsman. And once you invest in something, you don't want it to get destroyed. And I live in Phoenix. That means I love sunscreen now. And it'll probably keep me from getting skin cancer.

But be that as it may. And I know a bunch of other people have done the same thing. Okay, fine. But I sit back and I go, you know, it has never crossed my mind. Not once, not once in my life have I sat in a service or in a lecture hall and looked at that professor and gone, I wonder if he has moles on his back.

I wonder how hairy his chest is. Never crossed my mind. Not once. And yet there are people who are so wedded to their traditions that they'll think about those types of things. And I just go, ooh, that's weird.

And ooh, that's not healthy. Now, when you dig into things like that, the people who are comfortable with their traditions are gonna go, well, I'm just, are you looking down at me if I don't do that? No.

And no one ever should. That's one of the things that bugs me about some of the stuff I've read about alcohol and stuff. I have seen people who partake of alcohol looking down on those who will not as if they are lesser Christians.

And I think Romans 14 is saying exactly not to do that. I know their arguments, you know, their arguments are, well, the Lord's Supper is supposed to, I've been in churches where they actually believe that unless it's alcoholic, you're not even partaking of the Lord's Supper.

Okay, all right. I appreciate being in the churches that when they make alcoholic stuff available, they also make non-alcoholic available. So I like being in the churches where the outer ring is the alcoholic, the inner ring is the non-alcoholic or whatever.

And they leave it, they allow for the recognition that there are people who might have a serious problem because of alcoholism in their life or whatever else it might be. I honestly have never heard anybody, seen anybody who has body art look down on somebody else as a Christian and go, well, you should, I've never seen it.

Not once, never seen it, don't think it exists. But the movie going thing, the music thing, I mean, there's just so many things where we glom onto this stuff and we go, this is definitional of the gospel.

And yet at the very same time, I could ask so many of those people about things that are definitional of the gospel and they don't even give them a second thought. They don't even give them a second thought.

Imputation, how many of them have thought through the actual meaning of the cross? What does propitiation mean? If you are more concerned about what somebody else does in the privacy of their home at dinner or what they have on their shoulder or whatever else, they love Keith Green.

I mean, there's another one. We're back in the old fundamentalist days. They love certain kinds of music that you just don't. All right. If you are not more concerned about the central doctrines of the faith, if you don't know the Trinity, if you can't recognize when liberals functionally deny the deity of Christ, if you can't give a meaningful defense of the resurrection and the centrality of the resurrection of the faith, if you don't know what the high priest did in the Old Testament because it becomes central to what the high priest does in the new covenant, if you don't have all that stuff front and center, why in the world are you thinking about these other things?

Why? I don't understand. I don't get it. And it seems that those are the same people then that draw very narrow theological lines. Some will say, and I get it, some will try to say, well, I think these folks, people over the practice, this kind of view or that kind of view, if you can't make the connection between what you object to and the gospel and make it real, then you don't have any business criticizing them.

A lot of folks recognize the need to be able to do that. And so what they'll do is they'll take Lord's Supper issues and they'll literally draw a line to gospel issues and say, if you do it differently than I am, you're denying the gospel.

Even though the other person does not consciously, purposefully, confessionally make the necessary statements to create that bridge. They'll say, well, if that person believes this, then they must believe this, this, this, this, this, this.

And that means they deny the gospel. I've seen that. That's what people do to Michael Brown. That's what people do there is they'll say, well, if he can't see that this person is wrong about that, then that must mean consistently that he must believe this and this and this.

Now, Michael will say, I don't believe this, this, this, and this, but they don't care. If you're consistent, then you're gone. You're straight off into hell. And I just wanna say, folks, why don't you leave that to God?

I have, Michael Brown will tell you that as his friend and his brother, I have looked him in the eye and said, what on earth are you thinking? And he listens to me because I listened to him. And I don't just simply close the door, slam the door, and send you on your way.