Apologetics Session 2 - What is Faith? - Part 2

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February 24, 2022

Cornerstone Church Men's Bible Study. Apologetics. Presenting the Rational Case for Belief. This video is session 2 focusing on the question "What is Faith?".

Apologetics Session 7 - The Bible - Part 3

00:02: Let's start with a word of prayer on here. I think I'll pray and start off there.
00:09: Father, we come together today. We come under your glory, your salvation,
00:15: Lord. The blessed gift you've given us by your grace. We thank you, Lord, for these wonderful men who are here.
00:22: They came here for a purpose. And I hope we fulfill that purpose in honoring you,
00:29: Lord. Things we're going to talk about today are, in some ways, are controversial.
00:36: In some ways, they divide people. But they're truth, and they're truth from your law, from your word.
00:45: And I pray, Lord, that our discussions here will be godly, will be open, will be honest.
00:55: And these are important things that we have to talk about now as we see how the world is starting to collide.
01:01: So, Father, I pray that you would just open our hearts and our minds as we do this, as we learn together.
01:09: And fill our hearts with love and compassion for each other. We ask this in your name, in Jesus' name, amen.
01:16: So, last week, I felt like I was a pitcher, just pitching things at you.
01:25: And they were very heavy concepts that were coming there. But I wanted to try to get you to start thinking certain things that are happening right now.
01:39: And I asked some provocative questions for us to think about. And I got some feedback, which was actually really, really good.
01:47: Some of the provocative questions I was asking was, one is, can you have faith and not know the enemy, or know evil?
01:56: Can you have faith in that? That was one. Number two is, and this stirred up a little bit of banter, was, if the church is practicing paganism, people who are going to the church, do we consider them believers or not?
02:15: It wasn't a statement of saying that they weren't believers or not, but what do we consider them to be if they go to a church?
02:22: Because the church is a community of believers that is supposed to feed either milk or meat to the congregation and build up the body of Christ.
02:33: So that was another question that I had raised out there. That's what it should be. What? That's what it should be.
02:41: That's what it should be, right, right, right. And so what I started going down the path was, and trying to understand how what we call faith, and what the church is calling faith, and what people actually think is faith.
02:55: So, and I brought an example last time of that over 65 % of the people in the
03:01: U .S. right now believe they're Christians. They believe they're Christians. So this says one or two things about all this.
03:08: One is that Christianity is an umbrella for all types of religions now.
03:15: If you just name God, it seems like it falls under this umbrella, you know. Two is, Christians is a name that's a brand, or a style, a lifestyle, or what have you.
03:30: And probably number three, which is probably the worst thing is, is that 65%, a lot of those people are going to go to hell.
03:41: They do not know their Lord and Savior, which is a horrific, horrific thing. So, trying to peel that onion is difficult for people, because they don't understand the dynamics that are happening within the country itself, within the church itself, within the body of Christ that's happening right now.
04:00: We are very, very blessed in this church, with the elders and deacons, and with John and Jeff, how they're pushing forward the truth of our
04:10: Lord and Savior. And that is something that is being cemented into the souls of us every, every day.
04:17: And we thank God every day that that's what they're tasked there. But we need to understand the genesis of what's going on here, so we can have an idea.
04:27: Because this is one thing you're going to find out very quickly. The people you're going to be talking about apologetics about are not people that are unsafe.
04:38: You're going to be talking apologetics to people who claim they are safe, and they call themselves Christians.
04:43: And you always know the axiom, give them a little bit of knowledge and they think they know everything.
04:51: That's what you're going to run into. I've had more debates with fellow believers about the sovereignty of God compared to what they call universalism or what have you.
05:06: So, that's going to be the majority of the apologetics you're going to be dealing with. It's really defending what you believe and why you believe it.
05:16: So, one of the big questions that came up, and I loved it, was this whole idea about race and about white churches, black churches, what's all that stuff like that.
05:34: And that's a debate that has been going on for the last 50 years in church when
05:40: I was in school. That was like a major theme. And now we see it across the board with the woke or the
05:46: CRT movement or whatever we want to call it. But, again, we want to go back where the
05:53: Genesis is happening and how paganism works and why is it happening now, what's happening now.
05:58: So, what I have here, what I did very unskillfully here, is really what the paradigm is.
06:10: And it's a rather simple paradigm. And once you know it, you can actually go to almost any church and check it out.
06:17: It's not something that's very, very hard. So, tribal spiritualism, let's review it again, is really using past or current cultural relevance and then turning your message to align with whatever that's going to be.
06:36: And they've created a religious norm or polarizing what
06:42: God's divine laws are about. And it's not overt. The thing is that it's never overt.
06:49: It's sleight of hand. That's the way Satan does it. It's always a sleight of hand.
06:55: You're looking, you're nodding your head, and blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden it's like, what? And before you know it, you're going down a different path.
07:04: Oftentimes they use scripture to bend God's word. That's what Satan does all the time. He never goes, you know, in the
07:10: Bible it says he's a liar. Yes, he's a liar, but he's more of a bender than a liar. We're smart enough to really figure out what a liar is.
07:19: But Satan bends the rules, bends scripture to go ahead and do what his agenda is. And the result is moral truths are culturally defined within the church.
07:30: And that's a phenomenon that's happening all over. I just read a couple days ago that this particular problem is in over 95 % of the churches in the
07:42: U .S. right now. Right now. This is a huge, huge problem. So, you know, what's pushing all this?
07:51: Why is this all happening? And why does it seem like for us that it's happening now?
07:57: Well, this has been around for, since Abraham's days. Go ahead. Could you just define paganism for us, just to jump back up to your title there?
08:07: Anything that moves away from God's truth. Anything that moves away from God's scripture. Anything that's used as a religious premise that makes you little
08:18: God compared to God. That's paganism. Okay? And it's hard for people to accept that.
08:26: We're being, right now, people like myself, everybody who's here, we're going to be looked at as the troublemakers, the agitators.
08:36: Because we're calling it what it really is. Alright? This has a long, long history.
08:43: From early in Moloch and Baal, all the way through Egypt, all the way through the judges during the time of the
08:52: Bible. When we had the kings. Even to Jerusalem with the Pharisees. The Holy Church.
08:59: All the different things. Even Nazism and Zionism.
09:05: All that's paganism. Okay? So, understand that Satan's greatest job is to divide and conquer.
09:13: Makes it very, very slice and dice to confuse everybody to figure out what's going on here.
09:21: But if you put this in a huge umbrella, all that goes underneath that, you can understand what's going on and you can have a better direction of what
09:28: God wants you to do. So, it is paganism. There's no doubt about paganism.
09:34: Okay? So, oh, I'm sorry. Let me see if I can get this down here.
09:41: Oh, I'm sorry guys. Okay. So, the driver is ethical nihilism.
09:50: And basically, this is the engine that makes this work for them.
09:56: It denies really moral principles. Or godly principles. Or biblical principles. Or scriptural principles.
10:02: It denies it. This doesn't deny it outright. It bends it. Okay? Human beings are not seen as responsible for what they do.
10:11: Which is totally against what scripture says. We're in a fallen state. We live in a fallen state.
10:17: So, they don't see themselves as that. Okay? There's always a cause and effect for why they do what they do.
10:24: Hence, we have the woke movement. We have the church of the abortion. Church of pro -choice.
10:30: Church of social justice. All these churches go underneath here. Driven by this.
10:36: And they take no onus of it. Because what's happening there is the experiences outside the church that's driving this.
10:44: And it's really darkness, evil, Satan. Whatever you want to call it. So, the result that happens with these two paradigms is this religious speciesism.
10:55: Now, speciesism, just in general, is that anything that looks over at anything else, and looks down on it, means it's less than.
11:04: And once it's less than, you can do whatever you want to do with it. A perfect example is Nazism. The Nazis are the edge of Jews.
11:11: Jews weren't human. You can do whatever you want with Jews. Okay? Same thing with ISIS.
11:17: Same thing, you know, with all different types of terrorist groups. So, you know, the religious speciesism part of this is a big deal.
11:26: So, if you and I leave Cornerstone, we're visiting another church. And we're walking into that church.
11:32: Okay? And if the church is somewhat friendly, they're going to ask you, where are you from?
11:40: Yeah. I said I'm from Cornerstone. What do they believe? Well, we believe in Reformed theology.
11:47: We believe in, you know, the Trinity. We believe that, you know, Jesus Christ died on the cross, rose up on the third day.
11:55: You know, this is what we believe in. Yeah? What else do you believe in? That the Bible is the interim order of God.
12:01: Yeah. But what they do is they begin to add on to it these things because the construct that I just called out needs to have some appendages to it that has some cultural relevance.
12:14: So if you believe that, then you must believe in social justice. If you believe that, you must believe in racism.
12:21: If you believe that, and those connected dots is how they built up the body. You'll be able to see it once you know this type of paradigm.
12:31: Okay? So, religious species, and now we will get separated out. And there's usually two groups.
12:38: Less -thans are us. We're the less -thans. And it's very obvious. You know, we're the ones that are unloving, judgmental, you know, reformed.
12:48: You know, we listen to that guy Calvin. You know, it's like, what's going on there? And, you know, we really believe every single word in Scripture.
12:57: You know, that's a problem. We're less -thans. Okay? And the other group, which is the group that's part of the 65%, is the nones.
13:09: They're not affiliated with really anything. They don't have, they believe in a higher authority, but they don't know what that higher authority is.
13:19: And it usually splits off to New Age laws, which a lot of people are involved in that, or universalism where, you know,
13:26: God is big, huge, and we're all involved in that, and God is love, and all that. So we're breaking that.
13:33: And then here is the latest thing, and this is really important to know now, because in the next two to three months, you're going to learn about this.
13:45: Christian Nationalist. Okay? Christian Nationalist is the enemy of tribal spiritualism because we believe that our country was built on godly principles.
14:01: You know? And because our country was built on godly principles, we are being basically name -called and pigeon -holed and categorized into this whole different type of thinking because of the godly principles that our country is built on.
14:16: Not that our forefathers were all Christians, but they did believe in godly principles to build the country.
14:22: So they kind of squeezed this on there, and we'll get into that in a minute. But before we do all this, does anybody have any questions about this?
14:32: Does this make sense to you? Does anybody have any questions? Not specifically about what's there, but maybe
14:45: I'm stupid, I'm not sure, but what is your definition of apologetics?
14:54: Of what? Apologetics. Oh, yeah, you're right. Apologetics is...
15:03: Okay, it's a logical defense of the Christian faith. Apologetics is a branch of Christianity.
15:10: It's a science. It defends the authority of God's word, the character of God, the
15:15: Christianity as a whole. Also uses the Bible as an offensive weapon to do that. And I'm going to be sending you all this.
15:22: I actually sent it to both of you, but everybody's going to get the whole thing there. All right?
15:28: We use it as a sword, as a weapon. Against all worldviews and opposition.
15:34: And it's really about preparing the believer to become a warrior for Christ.
15:41: You want to become that. There's no more... We've lost time for pew potatoes.
15:48: They actually have to stand up now, because they will be at our doorstep any second.
15:55: You're seeing it right now in Canada. So, did anybody have any questions on that, what
16:01: I just had up there? Because what I'm going to go to next is really look at biblical axioms.
16:09: So, the reason why this happens is...
16:16: Has anybody heard of Augustine? Augustine. Augustine? Augustine.
16:22: Okay. So, he... Hippo. Hippo, right. He was really the first apologist.
16:30: And he was really trying to figure out where the genesis of this comes out of in terms of what our belief system is going to be.
16:39: And so, he had three reasons for existence. Number one is,
16:49: I am eternal. The second reason is,
16:58: I am self -created. And the third reason is,
17:13: I am created by someone or something greater.
17:30: Okay? For us, this is
17:37: God. And we are made in His image. Okay?
17:49: So, these are the three premises that he developed, which is really the spark that formed the
17:55: Reformation later on. Because this happened right around 410
18:00: AD when he came up with this. I am eternal, which really doesn't have a relevance there because, saying
18:06: I am eternal, humans don't have the capability of knowing anything that's not finite. So, it's very hard for someone to say,
18:17: I am eternal, although this is one of the clear messages that Satan does. He's trying to convince you that somehow you are a little god and you are eternal.
18:27: Which, in truth, you really are. Souls go forever. Heaven or hell. Right, heaven or hell.
18:33: Or, I am self -created. And this premise goes underneath here where I am self -created.
18:42: And that means that I am God. So, I am
18:47: God. Little God, little G. Okay?
18:57: And then the third premise, of course, is what we have here. So, all three of these things have a certain context about how we go ahead and grow in what we believe, in our faith, and what is happening there.
19:09: And I won't delve too much more than this, but one of the things I want to talk about is the causality.
19:16: When we accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, one of the peaceful premises we have is causality versus irrationality.
19:24: And causality is that, once we grab a hold of this and understand it intellectually, and we have it in our mind, it's easy for us to have peace that God is in our lives, that he controls all things.
19:36: And we have that peace because, you know, the causal framework of a fallen world and God's glory and grace is over that, gives us the peace and assurance.
19:48: All right? Irrationality can't give an answer like that. So, when you're looking at causality of things, are we surprised at what's happening in the world right now?
19:58: No. It was foretold. How? What we read in the Scripture. It was told by the prophets.
20:04: We knew it from Isaiah. All those things. Yeah? Do you see this as part of the prophetic falling away of the
20:11: Church? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's this sifting that's happening right now in the Church. And it's moving away.
20:18: And please, you know, please, we need to talk this through. So, ask questions as I'm going through this.
20:25: So, when we accept Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, we have this causality, there's this peace of mind that we know that we don't have to feel like we have to control everything.
20:35: God's in control of everything. Even when everything is happening.
20:41: People don't have that assurance. All right? Everything becomes irrational for them. They can't put a finite ending to what is going on there because it's a spiritual war that we're in.
20:54: And the only way they can try to figure out how to move through this is because they want to be like God to control what other events are happening, they come up with irrational propositions that don't make sense.
21:08: Hence, the Church of whatever it's going to be that's happening over here. Okay? So, as believers, we balance this.
21:15: We balance it back and forth. We do it almost every day. And it also affects our faith.
21:21: Some days we're saying, oh man, we're so close to the Lord. And some days we're like, what's going on there?
21:26: And it's because in our own finite mind we're trying to rationalize all the things that are happening around us.
21:33: And so the wax and wane in our faith is based on that balancing act between causality and irrationality.
21:40: Does that make sense? That happens a lot. And it's good to know this when you're talking to somebody else who claims to be a believer and it's missing that part.
21:52: It's a missing ingredient. So, know this. Our Lord will always glorify himself.
22:00: Always. And it's throughout Scripture. Okay? Second thing is our
22:06: Lord will allow evil to dwell to show his power to all. In Exodus 9 -16 it says, but for this purpose
22:14: I have raised you up to show you my power so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.
22:21: In Exodus. That's number two. Number three is, and this is, unfortunately, it is a fact of life.
22:29: Our Lord uses our human ineptitude to expand his reach in our beliefs to show his holiness with the result of lifting our faith.
22:40: So, it's an interesting paradigm. He doesn't use our strength. He uses our weakness to lift our faith.
22:47: Last week I had mentioned it very briefly, but the truism is this. In our walk with the
22:53: Lord, we're either leaning towards Christ or we're moving away from Christ.
22:59: There's no middle ground. You're either going this way or you're going this way. And with our fallen nature, and just because of our sin nature, we're never going to be perfect.
23:09: And God uses that to raise us up. He's always going to use us to raise us up. And there's a reason for this because the
23:16: Lord created us in his image to have a relationship with him. So, the things that we have that are finite, we do have the attributes of God for that purpose of leaning towards him and our relationship with him.
23:31: And that's very important to what was happening here because the relationship that people are having here...
23:37: I'm sorry, it's not coming up. But what's happening here is that people are having more allegiance to the cause than having allegiance to what
23:46: God can do. And actually limiting God's power by the causes than trusting
23:54: God to overcome everything. And that's a big, big, big problem.
24:00: All right. So, you know, we're made in God's image and in Genesis 1 -26 he says...
24:11: He says that. He says, let's make man...
24:17: Let's make man in our image after our likeness and let him have dominion over the fish, the sea... You know the story.
24:23: The birds in the heavens, livestock, blah, blah, blah. Okay? In Genesis 1 -26. So, the image of God is not a quality.
24:31: Okay? So, understand this, which is part of the causality. It is a status.
24:38: It's not a quality. It's a status. He made us. It doesn't matter if you believe him or not.
24:44: He made us like that. Okay? So, it's binding in that belief. It's a binding promise that he made all...
24:52: He made all in his image. Regardless if you believe in him or not. That's how he made us.
24:59: Like that. Okay? So, it's distinct from all other creation.
25:10: And we are his visible... Those who are in Christ, we are his visible representation.
25:16: So, that's why this whole thing is so dangerous of what we're talking about.
25:22: Okay? Later on, we'll talk about election of free will.
25:28: And I don't know how we're going to toss it around. We may have to play that among us three. But that goes back and forth.
25:35: But one note to this. There's no such thing as just free will. There's no such thing.
25:43: Alone in salvation. Okay? Salvation is not man -centered.
25:48: It's rather God -centered. And if someone's claiming to you that you have free will, then what they're basically saying is that I control over God my salvation.
26:02: That's not how it works. That's not grace. Okay? God will not give glory to any man's decision.
26:10: God will not yield his glory to anyone or anything. Specifically, with respect to salvation,
26:15: God states in both the Old and New Testament, I, even I, he who blots out your transgressions for his own sake,
26:22: Isaiah 43, 35, and your sins have been forgiven on account of his name, 1
26:28: John 2, 12. So, it's not the way we look at it in the
26:35: English language, what free will's about in terms of I'm just going to decide, whatever. It doesn't happen that way.
26:40: Those chosen simply respond to the free gift of grace, faith, and repentance, not by their will, but by his will.
26:47: Again, salvation is all of God, none of man. As soon as you put part of man into the salvation process, you've lost what salvation is about.
26:59: It's really, really important that we understand that. It is a total gift from God.
27:06: It's his grace. Okay? Simply put, okay, and this goes back to the original premise that I was talking about, about race, about ethnics and nationalities there.
27:18: So, race plays no part in salvation. And in the church, or in our relationship with God, race is a made -up term.
27:25: It really is a made -up term. Okay. So, let's talk about race real quick.
27:32: So, race, the way we look at race now, well, actually, before I even go there, do you think there are black churches?
27:45: Do you think there's just white churches around? And if you think that, do you think that's biblically correct?
27:53: Man -made ones. Man -made ones. There are clearly churches whose congregates are...
28:03: It's okay to talk about it. Homogenous, yeah. Yeah, right. Okay. So, when we're looking at that paradigm, okay, and we're looking for the community of Christ and what that umbrella is of what
28:20: God made us in His image, you know, one blood, one God, all right, is it right for the church to separate color or race?
28:31: Is it right? Is it the responsibility of pastors? I'm not going to weigh in there.
28:36: These are things you need to think about. Is it a responsibility of the church or the pastor, the elders or the deacons, to go out into the communities and go ahead and to your term, homogenous, you know?
28:54: And these are very, very deep, deep questions that really need to be wrestled with because it's affecting the way
29:02: Christendom is right now. And actually, people are not coming to Christ because of this.
29:08: It's a very bad problem. If we go with the belief that salvation has color tense to it, okay, we're under, what's athema?
29:22: You know what I mean? It's really a curse. And churches who project that, and again, it goes back to that whole thing with tribal spiritualism, that the cultural premise is that we're going to be the church of a black church or the church of a white church or whatever church that is.
29:37: It's not really a church under God's name. That's not a church. That's a country club. That's not a church.
29:44: So do you feel that there's black churches that if a Caucasian was to walk in, they'd be asked to leave? No. I think there probably is cases of that.
29:53: I think a Bible -believing, scripturally sound church doesn't turn away, first of all, they don't see in color, and they don't turn away anybody in the church.
30:03: The church is a spiritual hospital that needs to have people come in there. So I don't see that.
30:10: If that does happen, that's the responsibility of the leadership of the church to go change that. And not only do they have to answer to leadership, but they also have to answer to God for it.
30:19: So there's no room, especially now, to have that happen.
30:26: That's why the whole conversation with CRT and WOKE and everything is so blasphemous what
30:31: God's law and God's word and his truth is about. It is absolutely blasphemous.
30:36: And to have different organizations that kind of look over the theocracy of the church, making a position on that is so heretical and so anti -human, anti -believer.
30:54: It's something that you can't tolerate. That's why Jeff's at war right now with Allama because he's basically saying the same thing.
31:02: You cannot be neutral on this. You cannot have both feet, one here and one here.
31:09: It cannot happen. All right. Even with our church, not that we're open to anyone, but I've seen a lot of black people come into the church in the past couple years and they don't stay.
31:23: Yeah. And it's our responsibility. Are we not welcoming them? It's... And I think a lot of it's fear -based.
31:30: I think a lot of it is just not knowing. And again, this is not a new phenomenon that happened.
31:38: This has happened for hundreds of years. But it's our responsibility as believers in Christ that our brothers and sisters are in that same family.
31:47: And if you can't accept that, then there's something very wrong in what your belief system is. You have to accept it.
31:53: It's not a question of like yes or no. You know, this is a church and it needs to be that way.
32:03: And then everything else that happens that comes with it, you know, you have to work through it. You know, Jeff had mentioned we had this one side conversation and I just asked him, you know, what do you think the biggest fear you have right now?
32:18: And his biggest fear was, and he was very forthright about it, he says, I'm afraid of thieves in wolves' clothing, or wolves in sheep's clothing,
32:28: I should say. Yeah, that coming into the church and disrupting the church and undergirding it, you know, to make it go wherever it's gonna go.
32:38: But if we start here and we start that this church is a loving, compassionate church open to all no matter what, you know, there's no way that can happen.
32:49: Because sooner or later, and it's been my experience, sooner or later, they will be found out. They will be found out.
32:55: And there's enough love and compassion in this church to lovingly push people out of the church that will try to do that.
33:02: But make no mistake, there's gonna be people coming to this church that are gonna try to undermine it. They won't. It's just the way it is in terms of our fallen state, you know.
33:13: So without exception, we were all born of one blood. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say, not so much a black and white thing, but I will say that in the church that I came from years ago that I was there, they started to tell, when they started to move away from the
33:29: Bible, they started to say that we need to be more welcoming. We hear these buzzwords, we need to be more welcoming, to the point where they allowed all of this non -biblical stuff in, in the guides of being welcoming.
33:46: And I'm not saying, it wasn't a black and white thing. We welcome anybody, any color. It's all about the
33:51: Bible and whether they're Christian and they're following the word. So we didn't see it that way.
33:58: But it was like, they actually went to the point where they went to gay pride parades in Philadelphia and actually had a booth there.
34:08: And they thought they would try to recruit people to the church by saying, we apologize on this booth for being biblical.
34:17: Please come to our church in Moorestown. We, you know, we welcome you.
34:23: And you have to be, when you take wolves in sheep's clothing, they'll say, well, you're just not welcoming enough.
34:29: And so, and you talk about bending, how the devil will bend. They want you to bend a little.
34:36: Like, okay, well, we have to follow that part of the Bible. Can we go a little bit more away?
34:42: We don't want people to feel like they're not Christian, that they're not good enough. So we want to have a, we want to be a big tent.
34:49: We want to be a very big tent. So, and what happens is you let the leaven in, it ruins the whole loaf.
34:56: So you have to be very careful. And when I hear words like welcoming, you don't want to welcome to the point where you're distorting the word.
35:06: And the precedent, thanks for saying that, we have a lot of precedent to look at, especially in scripture.
35:13: And God was very clear, especially in the Old Testament, of having the Israelites not mix because of that specific reason of not mixing with other nations or other tribes or anything.
35:26: Not because there was hatred or anything. It's like, this is a slippery slope. You start here, and one axiom is very, very true.
35:35: Heretical teaching never happens from the big starting point. It always happens two to three generations later in the church.
35:42: It's consistent. Sometimes it may go to a fourth generation, but usually it's two or three generations from that church.
35:49: With the best foundation we can have, our children are the ones who are going to have to carry that mantle when we're gone, and their children after that.
35:59: And somehow, between us children and their children, the falling away begins.
36:05: And that's what ends up happening. And that's proven through scripture, and that's proven through the church, it's proven through the
36:11: Catholic church and all different types of churches. But usually that's how it works. That's usually the thing is, is that, so what we're talking about today is something that needs to be carried by you guys and carried out, you know, down in the next generation.
36:27: That's the only way it's going to work. And God kept on reminding the Israelites to remember what happens and to carry from generation to generation.
36:36: And I'm pretty sure you all know this, but it was the responsibility for the father to explain the history of their own
36:46: Judaism and culture and heritage. It was the responsibility, it was one of the principal responsibilities.
36:55: They had to explain to their children why they are, or who they are, why they are there, and where they're going, and what happened.
37:04: And that's what it is. That's why they had so many holidays. That's why they have Passover. That's why they have all these different things.
37:10: But time and time again, in the Old Testament, it was the falling away. And it only took about 75 years to 100 years, and it was the falling away.
37:19: Regardless of what God's mandate was saying. Same thing's true here. And we just lose sight.
37:27: And so today's point is that once a church begins to compromise on truth, in the guise of love, that's that slippery slope that begins to happen.
37:41: And so, there shouldn't be any compromise when it comes to Scripture. There shouldn't be any compromise when it comes to God's laws. But it's always with compassion and love.
37:50: And it's perfectly fine to say, I'm sorry, but you're on the wrong seat of the spiritual bus.
37:56: You can't do it. You need to go a different way. We want to have an open church. We want to have their...
38:02: I mean, we know every church will have a certain percentage of unbelievers in there. We don't know why that happens.
38:09: It just happens like that. But they will be accountable later in life to God about what was told to them.
38:20: And the question is, do they finish strong or not? Are they finishing strong or not? Go ahead. I think I'm going to answer your question from way, way, way back.
38:27: I think you asked us how many races are there? Yeah. I think you said last time.
38:32: Last time, how many races? We're either in Christ or in Adam. Right, exactly. And that's what ends up happening in Adam, in Christ.
38:43: And because of that, in Adam and Christ, and the other paradigm from that is that either sovereignty of God or sovereignty of man.
38:50: So, in Adam and Christ, like that. But a church would want to have unbelievers in the church. Yeah.
38:56: I mean, that's really an aim, is to get unbelievers into the church. Because I used to go to a driveway with a friend of mine who was a pastor.
39:06: And the number one thing is, as they slowly drifted into the stands, you know what I mean? A lot wouldn't even want to be there, but you could see them kind of leaning, which was really great because they were trying to hear.
39:17: You know what I mean? But the best ones were that didn't have the Bible in their hands. Yeah, and what ends up happening, there's a percentage of unbelievers in all the churches.
39:26: And that's our role, is to help lead them to Christ. Yes. And do that. But once the compromise starts to happen, and the percentage is higher, going with the cultural relevance part, the church is now in trouble.
39:43: And they're trying to catch up. That's where they've got to put them out. Yeah, they've got to put them out. It's kind of like if you had a gay couple or something that came into the church, you want to love the sinner but hate the sin.
39:54: So you're not going to allow them to be holding hands or showing signs of affection in the church when the church doesn't endorse their belief, you know, as far as that goes.
40:03: But you still want to try to love them because maybe they're going to turn their ways. Yeah, very, very true.
40:10: And also this percentage of agitators are going to come in here. The more Jeff and John talk about what they're talking about, agitators are going to come in and they're going to stir up trouble.
40:20: It will happen. So to that point, discernment, loving discernment, is really, really key.
40:29: And they'll try to flip it. Believers will flip it. One of the biggest arguments about that is believers try to flip it, that's legalism.
40:35: You're being a legalist right now. Like, no, that's what the gospel and that's what scripture says.
40:43: But they'll use that as a foil to try to defer what's really, really going on here, which is paganism.
40:52: There's a difference between people who come into a service.
40:58: We have a membership class to try to sort things out. Right. And make sure of their salvation status and so forth.
41:08: But that's, I mean, part of our job is to invite people who need
41:13: Jesus, of course. Absolutely. Sorry, guys. Anyone that has to go through a membership class and there's a membership interview as well, for the express purpose of getting to that.
41:31: Because we, to your point, want unbelievers in the church so that we can teach them the word of God and that they can become believers.
41:41: But you can't have them as members and you certainly don't want them trying to, as Ivan said, undermine what the church believes.
41:52: You want unbelievers but not infiltrators. Right, right. But the more we know that, the more that's...
41:57: Yeah, Bob? Go ahead. Oh, my name is...
42:02: Oh, I'm sorry. We came from a church in Ocean City and what
42:09: I really appreciated about that pastor was he kept emphasizing the fact that don't bring your unsaved friends, relatives to church to be saved.
42:20: It's not my job to save people. You save them. You lead them to the
42:25: Lord. Bring them to the church and we'll grow them in the Lord. Amen. Absolutely. That was...
42:31: It's probably the first church I've been in that the pastor taught that or shared that with us.
42:38: Yeah. And I go back to friendliness in the church.
42:45: I think I've found that you can be the most friendly church there is but if the people coming in the door don't want to be friendly, they're going to walk out and say, that's not a friendly church.
42:57: Friendliness goes both ways. Right. We can only do what God allows us to do and then it's up to the
43:06: Holy Spirit to really move that. Unfortunately, there's pastors out there where they're also running a business and they want numbers and they want to try to do that and that ends up being a slippery slope.
43:22: Jeff talks about this all the time where if you're preaching truth, people are going to come.
43:29: And that goes hand in hand. And we all have to accept that and believe that.
43:35: You want to be in a place. My personal story with my wife Joyce, we went, after we left the churches that's not too far away from here, we went to a number of churches to try to figure out where it can fit.
43:52: And as you can tell, my biggest thing is, is a church standing for certain truths?
43:58: Are they being scripturally sound? These are like basic elements. I shouldn't be like tossing a rod out there and hoping that I catch something.
44:07: I mean, this should be a standard, but it's not. And unfortunately, this, what happened here, is all over the place, especially in South Jersey.
44:19: And I can say that, truthfully, some of the pastors,
44:24: I think that they have the best intention, but if they don't know the
44:31: Bible or they don't know scripture or they don't know that part of truth, which is hard for me to understand with as many churches as we have out there.
44:41: So, this is a beacon. This is a lighthouse, a spiritual hospital for people that are coming to find truth.
44:51: And we thank the Lord that we have such a great body, Christian body, to go ahead and embrace it and do that.
44:59: And more people will come. More people are going to come. And there'll be a ceiling point.
45:04: That's a whole different thing about church splitting up to have other churches and stuff like that. So, I just wanted to finish up this whole thing with that word enemy and what
45:19: Christian nationalism is and what's going on here. And you're going to start hearing about this in the next three to four months.
45:26: You will start to hear the word Christian nationalism. It is gaining momentum among the churches around the
45:34: U .S. And there's actually a number of church organizations that have signed a letter denouncing
45:43: Christian nationalism. Okay? And it's starting to get out to the press. So, the spiritual war is being cloaked as a civil war.
45:54: So, the people who are on the woke side, this side, whatever else, and the people who they're labeling us as Christian nationalists are the ones that are troublemakers.
46:05: We're the ones who are going to school boards and doing all the things there. So, when
46:13: America was born, many of the laws were aligned and intertwined with scriptural truth and still do. It didn't make individuals
46:20: Christians, but it gave them a framework of how we can all work across nationalities, creeds, and tribes, plus, most importantly, enemies from a foreign source.
46:31: So, the way, uniquely, the United States is is that we had a different construct based on a framework that had a lot of scriptural truth within it and it set us apart from the rest of the world.
46:45: And so, it made us different because we followed that. It didn't mean that the people who wrote it were saved, but the framework that was there was based on that.
46:54: People always seem to get that confused. It spells out in language what freedom was against.
47:02: However, it did not show what truth was for, which is part of the problem that we're having right now.
47:07: So, we have this thing called the Constitution. We have the Declaration of Independence. We have the Bill of Rights and everything else. If you link them back to the
47:14: Bible, it lines up very, very well. But they're considered documents.
47:20: They're not considered truth. But, again, going back to causality, we can look at that and say, it's truth.
47:27: We know it because the Bible says that. So, there's a clear distinction because we're living in a time where justification of who we are and why we believe is so foreign and abstract.
47:41: We have that assurance because the Lord has given it to us. The Holy Spirit is in us.
47:47: And we can look at people and look at countries and we can look at things and we can say, okay, their ideology or their religion or whatever else is so foreign to what it is because it doesn't really speak what the truth is from the
47:59: Bible. And so, we have assurance for that. But it's amazing because we're a small minority compared to what's going on there.
48:06: So, make no mistake, this is an equation that is rooted back when God was leading.
48:12: But, as I said before, about the fourth, third, fourth, the fifth generation, there's a falling away.
48:19: Israel had lost its allegiance to the Holy God and forgot or forsaken what God had done for them as his chosen people.
48:25: In Hosea 4, 6, it says, My people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge. And because you have rejected knowledge,
48:32: I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your
48:37: God, I will forget your children. And we're getting very, very, very close in this country that God is, if it's not already happening,
48:48: God's wrath is on us. So, what is Christian nationalism? And you really need to know this.
48:56: So, it's a belief that America's nation is defined by Christianity. That the government should take active steps to keep it that way.
49:05: Popularity, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a Christian nation, not merely as an observation about American history, but a prescriptive program for what
49:15: America must continue to be in the future. It argues that America is defined by the
49:21: Anglo, okay, the Anglo nationalists who believe
49:27: American identity is inextricable from Christianity. So, notice the bend, okay.
49:35: Our country is based on scriptural truth, but it's all about white men.
49:41: They do it. The Anglo white person that does it. That's what's happening. And the church is rejecting that by using tribal spiritualism, okay.
49:52: The church's rationale is to put race Marxism, which is what is happening now, into the church.
50:00: So, we don't call it communism. We call it racism. And they're bending the language there.
50:10: So, they're using the race card to push in a political agenda or religious agenda.
50:15: Really, when you think about it, about communism, there's a religious agenda that's happening there. So, if the church is pushing this, and again,
50:26: I pose the question to all of you, can there be believers in those churches that's propagating this type of nuance that's happening, where you have race
50:40: Marxism? And that's a question that needs to be asked and needs to be answered. If you believe in the truth of the
50:51: Bible. This form of paganism is not new. It's been seen from Baal and Moloch.
50:58: Worship during the Israelite migration to religious sects in Jerusalem during Jesus' time here with the
51:03: Pharisees and the Sadducees. There's a lot of scholarship about the
51:12: Sadducees that were into pedophilia. It's not me making it up.
51:19: Take a look. This was happening back in Jesus' time. Jesus made a point of making sure that we would have faith of a child because the purity of a child was so important to our
51:33: Lord and Savior. And now we're seeing it again. What do you say to that person that says to you, there is no absolute truth.
51:40: It's all relative. We'll cover that. Your truth is my truth. You're going to cover that?
51:46: Yeah, we're going to cover that. Everybody's truth is their own truth. And so the Roman Catholic Church during the
51:52: Dark Ages, Zionism, Nazism during the turn of the 20th century and now we're here, always catering to the cultural relevance.
51:59: So the causality of this was the Bible taught us that man will divide man in defiance of God using the power of ethnic usury and dominance.
52:09: They're going to use power like that. So the social economy is the dividing line.
52:16: That's where slavery comes from and all that comes from. And we have many examples of this in the
52:21: Bible. The Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, Babylon's Nebuchadnezzar, King Saul, you can go down the list in the
52:28: Old Testament. This is something that's not new. So when I talk about you need to know
52:34: Scripture to understand the future, you need to study it because it gives us a precursor, of what we're seeing right now.
52:41: This is not new. It's happened. The rationality of all this is to intellectually examine the virtues of race relations through the lens that defines our own biblical common sense and decency.
52:55: Hence, when we place God's divine laws and mandates as truth, or we don't do that, this can cause a level of internal strife of all relations towards it.
53:05: So our first response with all this is that, and I've had many debates with brothers of different colors and all that stuff, when they start talking about the race card,
53:16: I said, no, you claim to be a believer in Christ. You're my brother. What do you mean?
53:22: Well, it shouldn't be a, what do you mean? It should be an automatic. You're my brother in Christ. You're a part of my family.
53:29: Regardless of whatever happens, I die for you. I live for you. This is part of what
53:34: God's plan is. It doesn't matter about what's going on with your color or status or anything.
53:40: You're my brother in Christ. You're my sister in Christ. That's it. End of story. It shouldn't even go past that.
53:46: But we've gone into this habit of making it go past that. So that's the irrational part of it that goes against the causality that's happening there.
53:54: So how does this affect the believers? This quickly becomes the line in the sand now, where evangelicals are labeling and branding believers who identify with the inerrancy and scriptural truth, and we tend to find our own nature for what is right.
54:08: And so the question is, how can we call this faith? How do you call it faith? So this is the example that I keep on going through in my mind.
54:21: It's like, you claim to believe Jesus Christ is your personal Savior, that he died on the cross and he lived on the third day.
54:29: How does this paradigm fit into that paradigm? How do you make that? It's like a round hole and a square trying to get into it.
54:38: It doesn't even make sense, logically. And you don't want to talk to a Christian brother and say, you're ignorant.
54:45: But when they come across like that, and they're claiming to be indwelled with the Holy Spirit, yet they do this, it doesn't even make sense.
54:56: It's illogical. And the problem is, our reaction is that we can call people ignorant, we can call people baby
55:07: Christians, we can call them that. But from my experience, this has been something that's been going on for generations.
55:15: So you're trying to break the generational habit of that. That's where the church is so important to being open and loving and caring and being blind to any of that other stuff.
55:28: Secondly, it's meant that as a derogatory description of individuals who do not embrace a globalist worldview.
55:34: Because that's what's going on right now. Because everywhere this has happened. These problems that we're seeing right now already happened in Europe.
55:40: And then before that, it happened in the Middle East. And before that, it happened over in Israel. If you read, again, if you read
55:48: Scripture, you see this is just same old thing, just a different time.
55:56: And God did have divine rules regarding the sovereignty of a nation and its alliance to their Creator. And we here in America take that blessing for granted.
56:04: Much akin to what the Israelites did during the Exodus and eventually their wanting of a physical king. So what do you do?
56:11: So what do we do in a situation like this? So we're in an apologetics class. We're defending the faith. We're trying to say to other people, this is who we are.
56:20: This is what we believe. This is how we do that. But you're in a church that's doing this. Dave talks about it and Bob talks about it.
56:26: They were in a church and they were trying to change that within the church. I can tell you from my experience, you can't.
56:36: You have to leave. And people can push back on that, but you have to leave.
56:43: It's not a question. You give an effort that the Lord allows you to give, but you have to leave.
56:49: You cannot stay in a church. A few months ago when Jeff was preaching and he said this demonstrative statement was you can't say you're a
57:04: Christian and be a Democrat. You can't say that and believe in abortion.
57:11: You can't do that. He was absolutely 100 % correct. People walked out and he was confronted afterwards on it.
57:18: But he's absolutely correct. You can't stay in a place like that. It's like you're being too neutral.
57:29: And that's the most dangerous person to be is being too neutral. I hope that answers the question about Christian nationalism.
57:39: It is going to come up. It is going to be a dividing line. It probably will start in schools.
57:47: They're going to label you. They already label us as that's a guy who's a believer going to a
57:53: Christian. So it's going to happen now more front and center on that.
57:59: Does anybody have any questions about that? Does that make sense? About what I started about? I'm going to go to the next thing which is the age -old question.
58:13: I don't think we're even going to get through all this today. There's too many things that's going on there. The age -old question
58:22: Who is God? Am I God? I like to try to get to the Nicene Creed. Is everybody familiar with the
58:28: Nicene Creed, by the way? Is that the Apostles' Creed?
58:34: No, the Apostles' Creed is a game and a movie. If you can, you can read this.
58:44: This was done in 325. Most biblically sound churches have this as their standard.
58:57: Phil, can you just read it out? One God, three persons.
59:02: We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
59:08: In one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten Father before all ages. God from God, light from light, true
59:15: God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made.
59:22: For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven. He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made human.
59:30: He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. The third day he rose again according to the
59:36: Scriptures. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.
59:44: We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, giver of life. He proceeds from the Father and the Son. And with the
59:50: Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He spoke through the prophets. We believe in one holy,
59:56: Catholic and apostolic Church. We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. And we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and to the life of the world that will come in that.
01:00:06: I'll be sending you all that. It's something that you should have. I would keep it near your
01:00:12: Bible, inside your Bible. It's something there that... It's an important creed that we live by.
01:00:23: And... You can also Google it. Yeah, yeah, you can Google it. You can also Google it too. Alright. And...
01:00:31: I'm trying to find my section here. And I apologize guys. I was... I didn't want to...
01:00:36: I'm not going to go in there yet. So... Okay, here we go.
01:00:43: So... Again, like I said, I'm going to be sending this a lot to you. So... So we had this over here with Augustine.
01:00:50: And he was creating these premises there of who we are. And obviously, the third is
01:00:57: I was created by someone or something better, God, as the image of man. And Descartes, Rene Descartes, said,
01:01:04: I think, therefore I am such as the existence man. So in apologetics, when you look at atheism... By the way, like I was saying before, most of the debate you'll have with people are not believers.
01:01:15: It's not that. It's going to be believers in the church. Believe it or not. So the angel question is, who is
01:01:23: God? You know? Am I God? Or... Who is God? You know? So...
01:01:29: As Drew was talking about before, we break down the whole premise is that from the fall of man, alright, what happened was open your eyes if you want to be like God.
01:01:39: So two premises. People who want to be God. People who believe in God.
01:01:46: Two different premises. People make it all confusing. It's really two premises. That's what it all comes down to.
01:01:53: But many people today believe a certain set of facts about God, and in some cases their facts may be completely orthodox.
01:01:59: Believe it or not. It could be completely orthodox if they just don't believe them. However, if they've never committed themselves to God, or if they have not trusted
01:02:06: Him, then they do not have faith or biblical belief in Him. So there's belief, there's belief in the orthodoxy of something because it feels good and it seems right, and then there's the faith of that belief that it's actually true that it happens there.
01:02:20: So biblical faith is never simply giving assent to a certain set of facts. Biblical faith is trust and commitment and the result of the change of one's inward and outward behavior.
01:02:31: We're not put on this earth to judge other people about their behavior or their relationship with Jesus Christ. That's between God, Jesus, the
01:02:38: Holy Spirit, and themselves, like this. However, as in James talks about there, there should be some fruit when it comes to your faith.
01:02:47: There should be that. When a person accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior, my experience has been is that one of the first things that ends up happening with them is they want to forgive people.
01:02:59: It's the most amazing thing. I've seen that so many times where they get regenerated and the first thing they want to do is forgive people that did them wrong.
01:03:10: It's an amazing spiritual phenomenon. We can talk about this later on in terms of one of the fruits of the
01:03:18: Spirit is this whole idea of forgiveness and what forgiveness is and how does that work in our
01:03:24: Christian life, in our spiritual life. They also want to say I'm sorry and apologize for the wrong things.
01:03:30: Yes, exactly right. They also want to do almost restitution and say I apologize.
01:03:37: My experience has been that they've asked for forgiveness. We know this that belief and faith are two different things.
01:03:45: Demons believe that God existed and they even knew more about God than most people do but they do not have faith in him.
01:03:53: Unfortunately, many people have the same type of faith in this. I would reference James 2, 18 -26 to go ahead and really talk about the distinction between that.
01:04:05: But how does God describe faith and what does that all mean? There's really four premises on how
01:04:13: God describes his faith and Hebrews 11 -1 alludes to it.
01:04:19: It says, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the convictions, the feelings, the convictions, the feelings of being sure that what you believe or say is true of things not seen.
01:04:29: So how does he declare himself to us? Remember I was saying earlier about really no free will and no respect in there.
01:04:40: So he does it through his logic. He gives us a mind. He allows us to go ahead and parse things out, get things out in our mind and all of a sudden as the whispers of the
01:04:51: Holy Spirit are working in us we're like, it's truth. It starts to work in that. He has his jurisdiction, what's going on from around us all over.
01:05:00: We see it in nature. We see it in science. We see it in education. We see it in language.
01:05:06: We see it all different ways there where he has his jurisdiction. He has his divine presence within us that does that.
01:05:15: And most importantly he has his authority to go ahead and tell us his creator of his power and his holiness to glorify him and he created us to glorify him but most people who they have a hard time parsing that out in their lives and even believers go through this because the success model that we have set up here in our country kind of a corporate model of what success is is something that's so ingrained in our psyche to being
01:05:53: American and West and all that stuff but it's the antithesis of what God does.
01:06:00: That's not what he is asking for us. And we confuse.
01:06:06: We become very, very confused on that. When we're going down that path that whole thinking that you can control everything that's happening in your life and I can tell you as a proof point you can't.
01:06:22: I have so many things that from actions not that Joyce and I ever did that happened to us and we don't know for whatever reason happens that God tests and he builds us up by doing that way.
01:06:37: But he's not a God of confusion as in 1 Corinthians 14 33 for God is not a
01:06:42: God of confusion but of peace as in all the churches of the saints. There's a process to faith.
01:06:52: There's a process of what happens there. We we we don't think of it that way but there's a logical premise of what happens when we accept the
01:07:04: Lord Jesus Christ. Number one is the Holy Spirit's calling as I mentioned before. This becomes your action.
01:07:11: It's not quite what we call free will but your action to accept it to hear his calling and accept that.
01:07:18: And then there's a Holy Spirit indwelling that would be permanently present in your life which is an amazing thing.
01:07:27: Jeff was preaching yesterday and he's and he was talking a little bit about the
01:07:33: Holy Spirit and how they're always present with us. A couple sermons earlier he was talking about the prodigals the prodigals and he was praying for prodigals there.
01:07:43: Well that's that's an issue. I was a prodigal at one point. But God's truth is the thing that keeps it together.
01:07:52: That he will never let someone go who genuinely accepts Lord Jesus Christ as a personal
01:07:58: Savior. He will not. He won't do that. And then of course the last part of this is a faithful result.
01:08:05: You know so the big question from all this is that and we don't have to answer it right now but why do people accept
01:08:14: Jesus Christ? Why? Is it conviction? Or is it convenience? You ever think about that?
01:08:23: I hope so. Okay. Yeah. Which takes me to the next piece here which is the sinner's prayer.
01:08:34: What time? Do we have time? We got time for that? Okay. So we have the sinner's prayer. I'd like you to try to get this there.
01:08:45: And what is the sinner's prayer? We've got a lot of stuff to still cover but it's okay.
01:08:52: So to give you some background and this again this is another
01:09:00: I know this is going to sound crazy that's another tribal spiritualism thing to do is to have a sinner's prayer.
01:09:10: It's one of the greatest weapons Satan uses to trick people. I hate to say it like that but it really is because when the rubber meets the road true faith believers stick to it.
01:09:26: They're convicted. People who are not in their faith in Christ they will walk away.
01:09:35: And a lot of the cause and effect of that the causality about that is the sinner's prayer.
01:09:42: So the sinner's prayer is less than 500 years old. Okay. It was popularized by revivalists like Billy Graham Bill Bright Greg Laurie those are the ones that we know but Billy Sunday was a big one back then.
01:09:55: The central idea is to develop a spiritual hook to manipulate people into believing that they can determine their salvation by simply accepting
01:10:04: Jesus through mouthing a simple prayer. This left open a mass delusion of interpretation of what it means to be in Christ.
01:10:11: However the theatrics of hundreds of people coming towards the stage was impressive to watch and hear.
01:10:17: Who would not want to be involved in that? So the big question that happens now is that are some people transformed by the sinner's prayer?
01:10:31: The answer is yes. There are some. There are. God can use anything to convict those to repent and accept
01:10:36: Jesus Christ. However more than likely this becomes an exercise of feelings over faith.
01:10:44: Tribal spiritualization. Feelings over faith. Which is a dangerous place for anyone to be.
01:10:51: It also becomes a distortion of what the Bible teaches and the manipulative soundbite that leaves the person more confused than before.
01:10:57: And it's one of Satan's best weapons of deceit. Think of what is happening in a church today with heretical teachings of woe within it.
01:11:04: And the sinner's prayer is coming out there. And so people are listening to the bent of whatever the woe ideology is going to be and then at the end of it they're asking people through the sinner's prayer to come in there.
01:11:19: Which is such a dangerous axiom such a dangerous equation to put together. So you've heard this before below this example just accept
01:11:29: Christ into your heart through prayer and He'll receive you. It doesn't matter what the church you belong to or if you ever do good works you'll be born again at the moment you receive
01:11:37: Christ. He's at the door knocking. You don't even have to change bad habits just trust Christ your
01:11:42: Savior. God loves you forgives you unconditionally. Anyone out there can be saved if they just accept
01:11:49: Christ now let's pray for Christ to now come into your house into your heart.
01:11:56: Sounds great. Really does. The danger lies in the lack of accountability the lack of repentance not having a clear understanding of sin or the cross or the depravity of man.
01:12:15: And that's a dangerous premise to be. Each one of us has their own testimony about how they accept the
01:12:22: Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Savior. And every single one of you you hit a crossroads and you repented.
01:12:29: That's how you become regenerated. But you had to get to that place to have that happen.
01:12:36: It doesn't just happen. Nowhere in Scripture is this biblical.
01:12:43: If you can find me a verse that has it it doesn't happen. Repentance confession and acknowledgement of Jesus Christ look up Romans 10 9 to 13.
01:12:54: And I used this example last time. I was making kind of a joke of all of you can be seminary students but it was about the thief on the cross.
01:13:02: And the thief on the cross looked over and it was a very simple thing. I'll just read it quickly again.
01:13:08: But the other rebuked him saying do you not fear God since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
01:13:15: And we indeed justly for we indeed justly for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.
01:13:21: But this man has done nothing wrong. And he said Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.
01:13:27: And Jesus said to them truly I say to you today you will be with me in paradise. Just a short few verses and explains everything about salvation about the gospel about the great commission about repentance about everything that they would possibly do.
01:13:45: And we mess this up all the time. We make this more complicated than it should be.
01:13:53: And I may have mentioned last time I'm saying the thing that comes to my mind is like the guy who was on the other side saying why don't you accept you're going to die.
01:14:02: Why don't you accept it? But it proves a point that biblically holistically man's heart can be hardened so much so even when they're looking at death in the face they will not accept the
01:14:17: Lord Jesus Christ as a personal savior. Hence some of these churches. I don't know if you know the word
01:14:22: Ichabod if anybody knows the word. The glory has departed. The glory has departed. A lot of these churches are
01:14:28: Ichabod. The glory has departed. And they're saying the words but the
01:14:36: Holy Spirit's not there anymore. So does anybody have any questions about the sinner's prayer?
01:14:45: Does it go? I think when you mentioned the
01:14:52: Nicene Creed I know this comes up all the time the word Catholic. Yeah, Catholic means universal.
01:14:59: Just in case anybody was confused. Not Roman Catholic. Correct. Yeah, not Roman Catholic. It's a
01:15:05: Catholic, yeah. Salvation's very interesting.
01:15:11: It is truly a mystery to us because it's God's work, not ours. Right. But when you look at Acts and Peter preaching when 3 ,000 came and he went through a lot of the
01:15:24: Old Testament scriptures and he hit the five points that Pastor talks about as far as giving the gospel message.
01:15:32: The last one being repentance but certainly the cross, paying the penalty for our sins, us not having a way to save ourselves,
01:15:40: Jesus being God in the flesh, and his resurrection. I can't remember exactly what the five are in order but then at the end they are cut to the heart and they say what much did
01:15:52: I do to be saved? Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.
01:15:58: And sometimes it comes out that way. Sometimes you have the opportunity to give the whole story like Peter did in a sermon.
01:16:06: But sometimes when Paul and Silas are in prison and then the miraculous happens and the earthquake happens, they are released from prison and the guard is going to kill himself, and he says what must
01:16:21: I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus. That's all he gets told. But the Lord was working there.
01:16:27: So sometimes you get a chance to share an in -depth message with some nuance to it.
01:16:33: But other times you just share something very simply and the Lord works and converts a heart.
01:16:40: It's so true. It's so true. My interactions with people that I've talked to about the
01:16:46: Lord Jesus is one sentence or one phrase or something that's a commonality and it piques their interest and they want to know more.
01:16:56: So they ask about that. My belief about church when it comes to sermons is almost every sermon should have something about the cross.
01:17:08: They should either point towards it. Jeff does a marvelous job of always talking about that.
01:17:16: And I've often said this when I've taught this class is that unless you understand sin and we don't truly understand sin, we only scratch the surface as human beings here, you can never understand the cross.
01:17:33: You can't just do it blindly. You have to have an idea of your own sin, your own sin nature to really understand what
01:17:42: Jesus Christ had to do as a propitiation for us. And that goes to the absolute truth or moral relativism all that stuff.
01:17:55: When you're looking at the ethical nihilism over here, where there's really no truth, that means they're not recognizing sin and they're not looking at their sin nature.
01:18:06: So how can they go ahead and understand what Jesus Christ was doing on the cross? It's logically and spiritually impossible.
01:18:14: You can't make that connection between the two. So as a mentor of mine always says, the only people that get saved are broken people.
01:18:25: It doesn't matter what your status is. You have to be broken to accept the Lord. And as a corollary to that, they can't understand what repentance truly is.
01:18:34: It's a transformation of your mind. Yeah, it is. There's also with the sinner's prayer they used to always have the argument too about once saved always saved.
01:18:46: But then the argument goes back to with the always saved, you know, were they truly saved?
01:18:52: Because if somebody goes to church and they have a fall and then they run or whatever and other people are like if they died doing that run, are they saved?
01:19:03: And then the argument goes back to were they truly saved? And again, it's a slippery slope to not be judgmental about that.
01:19:13: I grew up in a Christian home. I was an iron man. I planned to be a doctor.
01:19:20: I flunked out because of organic chemistry. And I ended up going to a
01:19:27: Christian college which made me very jaded on what was there because of the issues that I talk about today which are causality and rationality and all that stuff.
01:19:40: But the tendency from our human nature is to judge people like they're not saved. But if you're doing that, there's no place for the story of the prodigal son or there's no place for the story of Peter denying
01:19:53: Jesus three times. So human beings the way they are here, it's not going to be that when we're over in paradise, but here we're always going to trip ourselves up somehow.
01:20:07: That's why, you know, in Romans where there's no combination for those that are in Christ and that's a given.
01:20:17: That's done. It's been done. If it's up to us, we will always screw it up.
01:20:23: We will always have a problem. That's why we can't be part of salvation. It's just God that can do that.
01:20:30: It's just Jesus Christ that can do that. We have not the ability of doing that. So we always have to be mindful of people who feel like they're falling away.
01:20:41: The Lord will not let anybody go who's truly in Christ. It's just not going to happen. And my personal experience has been, and I joke about this a little bit, is that when you're falling away, there's a little bit of a whisper from the
01:21:01: Holy Spirit saying you're screwing up. And then he goes to the next step which is kind of like a push and you still deny it.
01:21:11: You don't want to go to the last step which is a boot on your neck because he will not let you go but he will make life very difficult for you to make sure you understand the decisions you're making.
01:21:21: And that's a truism. I've experienced it. I've had other brothers in Christ that have experienced it.
01:21:30: And so... And if they do fall away, 1 John chapter 2 tells us they were never with us to begin with.
01:21:37: Right. Yeah, that's true. Absolutely. And those are going to be the people that are going to be... 1
01:21:43: John talks about false teachers, talks about agitators that come into the church. Those are the ones that are...
01:21:50: which Paul had to wrestle with all the time in Corinth, in Ephesus. I mean, people coming in there and making all kinds of ruins,
01:21:56: Judaizers and all that. So that's something that's just endemic in the Christian faith. All right, gentlemen.
01:22:04: I think I've taken up as much of your time. Did you guys have any questions or anything? Has this been helpful for you?
01:22:10: The whole idea behind it was when we start to get to the apologetics part of it, we really want to have an idea of what faith is all about.
01:22:18: We want to have some grounding on faith there so we can really speak, knowing that we have an assurance of our
01:22:24: Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, what He's done, a wonderful, magnificent work in our lives and continues to do that.
01:22:33: All right. Last time I stood up, everybody was like gasping because I almost fell over.
01:22:41: But thank you. Thanks, Ivan. Father, we come before you, Lord, and we're just amazed at what you've done and what you've given us in your
01:22:50: Son, Jesus Christ, Father. We could spend so much time, we could spend the rest of our lives studying what it means to be in Christ.
01:22:58: And, Lord, we barely grasp the understanding of what it truly means to be in you as our
01:23:06: Savior. We're so thankful, Father, for your Holy Word, and Ivan bringing us all of these things today.
01:23:12: And, Father, the things that, Father, just so press upon my heart is, you know, we have a choice.
01:23:19: We can either glorify you with our lives, or we can exalt ourselves.
01:23:25: And, Father, I thank you so much, Father, that some of these very simple truths come out in this introduction part about what is faith all about.
01:23:35: And we're so thankful, Father. I pray that you would have everyone go home safely, and, Lord, to bring us back again and hear about how wonderful you are,