Bill Mounce and John 3:16, Slamming TMU/TMS, More on “Color Blind,” then Open Phones with Good Calls

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, prayer request right off the top of the program. Just a reminder for those of you who know, Brother Mike Gaydosh will be having some fairly complicated open-heart surgery tomorrow morning, 830 in the morning, Eastern Time, Solid Ground Christian Books.

Many of you have benefited from Mike's ministry over the years there. He's normally at G3, he's been at the last two years of debates that we've done there at G3, and so your prayers for Mike Gaydosh and his family, and of course the doctor, Dr. Martin is his name, tomorrow morning.

Well, it's supposed to be about six hours, so it's not just the morning, so prayers appreciated for Michael and all those involved therein. We have known Michael many, many years, and lo and behold, we're all getting old, pretty much the same rate of speed, but that is definitely happening.

I'm not sure if any of you have seen Tony Miano's, he wrote it, I think a million tracks, our same guys published this, but he has a track called What Comes After Pride, and of course it's on a rainbow background, so your mind automatically makes a connection, even though the text of the track does not ever mention homosexuality or anything like that, especially when you're, well, almost anywhere anymore, but even more so in the UK or Europe.

If you want to get any of them passed out before being arrested, you have to have at least some kind of excuse, I guess, some being careful. And anyway, despite that, a counselor slams extremist Christian flyers that speak of God's love.

A local counselor, let's see, David Burton Sampson, a Basildon counselor, said the content was appalling and excludes people. Leftism rots your brain. Leftism rots your brain. It allows you to exclude people while complaining that they exclude people.

The leftist worldview, secular worldview, is the petri dish of hypocrisy. It has to. There's no way around it, because a secular worldview has you in the middle, so you're going to end up being hypocritical, because none of us will ever judge ourselves the way we judge others.

So it is a Christian track, and it is described as appalling and, of course, resulted in police report and investigation and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And good job, Tony. We already know that in the UK, just having the Bible being randomly read in your restaurant could be enough to get you into a tremendous amount of trouble, so what can we say about that?

That's just sort of how it works these days. Let me see which order I want to go here. Yeah, let's jump into the text for a little while. I do have a number of things I want to get to. I'm going to try to be disciplined and quick, maybe get to phones.

I don't know. We'll see what happens, but I do want to get into the text at least a little bit here. Earlier in channel, someone had mentioned this article. I had responded to an article by Bill Mounts earlier this year regarding John 3 .16, and I guess he's put another one out.

It's not all that different, and it actually doesn't contradict my position, but as you read it, it sounds like it does. Bill Mounts, great guy. I don't know him personally. I use his grammar. It doesn't make him infallible.

You can be a great Greek grammarian and still miss the forest for the trees. But I don't think that he did here, but I think I can see how people—it wasn't clear. It's just not a clear statement. This new article says, does John 3 .16 say whoever?

Now obviously, if you've not heard the discussion of this subject in the past, let me just bring you up to speed very, very quickly. John 3 .16 says, In order that—so when you have a Hinnah clause, it is explaining the reason and purpose for the action that came right beforehand in this context, and that is to give, edukon.

He gave his unique son for a purpose. In order that, Hinnah, pas ha pistumon, everyone believing ais auton, in him. The him takes us back to the tan huion tan managone, the unique son. Everyone believing in him may apolitae, might not perish in the subjunctive, but might have eternal life.

So he gave him so that this won't happen, but this will. So there's a purpose. There's a reason for the giving. Now, you have probably many times heard someone preaching or teaching on John 3 .16 emphasizing the word whoever, in order that whoever believes in him, and the idea behind the emphasis upon the term whoever is that there is a general capacity of all human beings at all times in all places to be able to exercise saving faith.

Now, first of all, that is not what John 3 .16 is about. That is asking the text to address an issue that, if it is addressed at all in the Gospel of John, it would be addressed in passages such as John 6, John 8, 10, 17.

It's not what's being discussed here. But, that having been said, many of us have emphasized that while you can say whoever believes in him, that the literal rendering of the text, and ironically, the literal rendering that Dr. Mounts himself gives at the end of this article, God loved the world, so he gave his only son, that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

No disagreement. It has been my emphasis for years, really emphasized it probably in a way that most people first were introduced to it in my open letter to Dave Hunt coming up on 20 years now, two decades ago.

And so, the point is that the phrase pas ha pisteun does not contain within it some kind of assertion of universal capacity on the part of every human being to believe because there is a limitation inherent in pas pisteun, the one believing.

And there's even a more, and in fact, there's even more of a limitation with eis auton, in him. So it's anyone exercising faith in Christ. It's not saying anyone has that capacity. What it's saying is anyone who does that will not perish, have everlasting life.

Well, a lot of people, I don't know why Dr. Mounts addressed it this way, but anyway, he says, correct, the indefinite relative pronoun hostess does not occur in John 3 .16. But language is not so monolithic, there is only one way to say something.

In fact, whenever a commentary argues if the author had meant to say one thing, he would have said it this way, you should be suspicious. That's a naive approach to language, and that he's exactly right.

I hear that all the time. And I just chuckle when I, well, maybe I don't chuckle, sometimes I get upset. When I hear somebody say that, I'm really left going, how much reading in the text do you really do?

Because that's just simply a ridiculous statement. However, we do have an indefinite construction in John 3 .16 with the use of pos and the articular imperfective particle pos. He has it wrong here. It's pos.

He has pos. Hey, Pistou. It's pos. Hop, Pistou. It's just a typo. Used to indicate a generic general utterance. Just do a search for that construction. You can see it is universal in intent. Universal of what?

Universal of everyone believing. There's nothing here about everyone having the capacity to do this. For example, and then this is interesting because the examples that are given illustrate exactly the point that I'm making.

For example, but I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart, Matthew 5 .28, and it is a parallel construction. But I say to you, hati pos hablepon gunaika prosta epithumesai autein.

So everyone looking upon a woman for the purpose of lusting after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So pos hablepon, everyone looking. That's not everyone just opening their eyes, is it?

Everyone looking at the sunset, everyone looking at a car, everyone reading a book. No. There is an object, everyone looking at a woman, and then there is further delineation, prosta epithumesai, for the purpose of lusting after her.

So obviously the pos hablepon is not saying that every person has the ability to do this. It's not even addressing the subject. It's simply saying in a generic fashion that there is this category of activity which is looking on a woman to lust after her, and everyone doing this, this follows.

So take that over into John, everyone believing in him, these are the results. So in both situations, you have a limited group, not a universal group. Does this include women? Does this include little kids?

Does this include the blind? No. I suppose it could include eunuchs, but the point is there is a specific action with a specific context, and everyone doing this, this is the result. Same thing in John 3.

And then he says, well, he says, isn't Jesus saying this is a generic statement true of all, true of whom? All who look with the intent of lusting. Of course it is, exactly, exactly. So right there, there's a limitation.

It's not universal. Not every man does that. Not every man when he looks at a woman does so for the purpose of lusting after her, right? So it's a limited group. So it is an indefinite with a specific limitation, just as John 3.

Interesting verse 28 is followed by verse 32, which uses another explicitly indefinite contraction, 532. So there's actually two there. But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

Hasan is explicitly indefinite in general. That's true. But it is only of a specific group. A single man cannot divorce his wife and make her commit adultery because he's not married. So there is a limitation.

There is a specificity that is right there in the text. So he goes on to say, contextually, John is asserting a relatively unusual notion that God not only loves those who follow him, John's normal usage, but he actually loves the entire world, hence requiring an indefinite construction.

At this point, you'll notice that no argumentation is provided. And that's where I didn't understand where he was going because the Hinnah Clause is describing the giving of the son, not the love of the father.

The love of the father is the foundation of all of this, just as it is in Ephesians 1 and so on and so forth. But the hosta ton huyan ton managane edokin, so that he gave his only begotten son in order that it's in light of Didymi here, it's in light of Edokin in order that everyone believing in him might not perish but have eternal life.

So you can have all the grammar you want, but you still have to follow the thought. To limit the meaning of the statement to a subgroup of people, those among you who believe is to read a theology not supported by the Greek, and I am reformed.

Now I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Those among you who believe there's nothing about those among you who believe it is specifically saying that everyone who believes in him. So I would argue that the use of the articular participle in the present is emphasizing true faith in John in contrast to his use of the aorist and a couple of other places to indicate a false faith.

But there isn't anything about this subgroup of people, those among you who believe. Among you? I mean, I don't even know where that's coming from. It's certainly not anything I've ever said. I've never heard anybody else say it, so I don't get it.

In the larger context and again, he keeps saying, and I am reformed but in the larger context it agrees with statements like 1 Timothy 2 .4 that says God wishes all people, pantos anthropos, to be saved and to come into a knowledge of the truth.

Well, again, pantos anthropos in 1 Timothy chapter 2 is in regards to the intercessory work of Christ, and the anthropos that is defined there in the first three verses are kinds of men, not individual particular universalism.

Again, contextual issue at that point, and so we would have to ask the good doctor if he likewise believes that Christ intercedes for every single individual person, including those who have been under the Father's wrath for quite some time.

True, each every person who believes is a subset of the whole, the world. Okay, that's true. I mean, Kosmon is there, even though the specific statement here is in regards to why the Son was given. And the gift of eternal life is only for that subset.

Well, there you go. If the gift of eternal life is only for that subset, then the believing is only a reference to that subset. But to somehow limit God's love to a subset of people runs counter to the Greek.

No one has said that. That's an irrelevancy. Now, I would argue that there is redemptive love over against a generic love, but that's not what it's talking about. So, God's love for Tan Kosmon results in this amazing way of salvation through the giving of the unique Son.

But I don't see any connection that is being somehow raised in Dr. Mounce's mind, let alone runs counter to the Greek, the meaning of pos, the grammar, the immediate context, and larger context. That's a whole lot of stuff, but I don't know who's said any of that.

It seems a bit of a strong man there. If you believe in election, as I do, then you understand pos hapistio, and it was referring to the elect. Well, yeah, they're the only ones who are going to exercise pistio, that's true.

But let's not dismiss the clear meaning of the text and suggest that God does not, in some way, love the world. Who does? Who does? I honestly don't know who does. I mean, maybe hypers do. I suppose some hypers do.

But notice he says, in some way, love the world. I make a distinction between God's, you know, that which expresses itself as common grace over against the specific redemptive love for his people. But even he says, in some way, love the world.

Can you translate the verse without whoever? Sure, as long as you choose words that are not limiting. God loved the world, so he gave his only son, that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

That's how I translate it. So, I'm not, that was confusing. That was confusing, especially the 1 Timothy 2, 4 citation. So, he ends up saying the same thing that Reformed people are saying, but in the process, it sounds like he's saying what non-Reformed people are saying.

It is confusing. No two ways about it. Okay. Now, I want to try to be brief and focused and really handle this in an appropriate fashion. I want to finish up my response to the article I was reviewing in the last program.

I will try to avoid preaching, as I did in the last program. Laid a lot of basic foundational stuff out, mainly ignored by most people out there. But that's okay. You just put it out there and leave the rest to the Lord.

But I do want to just mention in passing the article that was, that appeared initially on a fellow by the name of Terrence Jones' website called, The Truths of Dr. MacArthur's Social Justice Series Won't Change.

And it was then picked up, and I do not know why, reposted by SBC Voices. So, maybe there's just people at SBC Voices that don't like Dr. MacArthur. Let me tell you something, folks. Those of you who have been rejoicing in the news concerning Master's University and Master's Seminary, and they're being put on probation by WASC, one of the accrediting agencies, I don't get you.

I don't understand you. I really don't. Maybe you just really want to see destruction of wonderful, great things. Or maybe you are just so narrow in your thinking that if anyone's even slightly different than you, then you want to see them all destroyed until it's just you left.

I don't know. But I've been pretty disgusted, to be perfectly honest with you, at the glee that certain people have had about this news. Of course, I have a unique perspective, having taught in both accredited and non-accredited situations, studied in accredited and non-accredited situations.

I was teaching for a seminary, a Southern Baptist seminary, when the local campus that I was teaching for went through the accrediting process. So I got to see it up close and personal. Folks, it's ugly.

For a long, long time, accreditation has next to nothing to do with scholarship. It has everything to do with, well, as we're going to find out here sooner rather than later, it has everything to do with controlling education.

If you haven't learned anything from what happened up in Canada with Trinity Law School up there, that's what's coming for us. And if you didn't hear, the school up there, the high court in Canada, ruled that basically because this Christian school had a moral covenant that excluded homosexuals, then you could preclude their graduates from practicing law in Canada.

Canada is just as leftist as it gets. Evidently, the cold weather freezes the brain cells or something, but just as leftist as they come, and religious freedom just doesn't have a ghost chance there. And so the school has now dropped the covenant, has made it no longer mandatory.

Only way they can survive. Sad thing. Sad reality, but that's what's taking place. That's already happening here, and it's coming here. You need to understand that. And for literally 20 years now, I have been warning about the reality that if a Christian institution, a Christian school, accepts Caesar's money, Caesar is going to try to control that and what it can and cannot teach, and it's now happening.

When you hear the language that was used in the announcement about the suspension, it shouldn't take you a whole lot to figure out what's really going on. What's normally behind intimidation and bullying?

What does that normally indicate? I thought of the illustration recently. Can you imagine if I was teaching for a school and they dug into what I have taught and they found my sermon series on God's law?

You know what that would be used to do. This would be bullying. This would be intimidation. And all you need is one student to file a complaint, one homosexual student, one minority student, one woman student, to use terms like bullying, intimidation, whatever else it might be.

They've already said, well, some of the problems we have is there's just far too close a relationship between Grace Church and masters. You know, a lot of people go there, find that to be a wonderful thing.

But no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We need to have that academic freedom there. You can't have an institution that has deep and abiding convictions that would be represented by a local church. I mean, come on.

And you just don't have enough female faculty. You got to get the women in there. You got to get the women teaching. And you know, there's just too much uniformity amongst the people teaching here as far as what they actually believe.

And yeah, it's just sort of like, and yet there are Christians going, oh, this is wonderful. And it's just like, oh, man. So those of you who are just all, oh, this is wonderful, I don't get you. And I'm not sure where you're going to end up going before long.

Anyway, Terrence Jones is a graduate of Master's, and he's doing a series in, and again, Dr. MacArthur has only done a couple articles so far, has not gotten into the primary issues yet. And already, the kind of pushback will be very much indicative of, I mean, you could write the rebuttals right now, and they won't necessarily have a whole lot to do with the biblical argumentation.

It'll just be, how dare you actually address these types of things? You're just an old white man, and you don't have the right to do this type of thing. But I read through the article, and I'm getting a crick in the neck again.

And I read through the article, and I was very concerned, because Terrence Jones is a Black man, and he, by the way, makes the allegation that the blog series may be, quote, no matter how they try to change the subject from the real elephant of the room, probation and potential loss of accreditation by WASC for lack of integrity mixed with a culture of fear and intimidation, I can just guarantee you, you are wrong about that, sir.

You're completely, utterly, 1 ,000 wrong. And it is sad to me that a graduate of Master's would take that kind of shot. It's cheap, and I hope you will withdraw it and say, I was wrong. Obviously, I am prejudging.

I'm being prejudiced. I'm being unfair. But I can tell you, that's just absurd. I have had discussions on this subject long before this accreditation stuff came up, and it's just totally untrue. But anyway, what concerned me in reading this article was the statements from Mr. Jones that we didn't read enough, a diverse enough curriculum.

And I'm like, you know, when I went to Fuller, I loved my church history class. He talks about being angry and in tears because he reads these books and there's nothing about black people in them. And when I took church history, all I was concerned about was learning about what Christians believed.

I wasn't looking for people who looked like me, never even crossed my mind. I knew vast majority didn't look like me, dress like me, wouldn't have sung the same songs that I sing, none of that. I knew all of that.

Never crossed my mind. I never shed a tear that there was not more about my tribe. I was just stunned. You've already got to have to have already embraced a very strong narrative that you should find this kind of stuff.

How about just learning about the most influential people that have impacted what has ended up happening in church history? I mean, I knew Athanasius didn't look like me. Didn't bother me. Didn't even cross my mind.

Those Italians, they don't look like me. They talk with their hands all day. You know, I mean, that's not why I say church history. That's not the point. How could I be so distracted from what the real point is?

Because I've been told that there needs to be a different point and the different point needs to be affirming me and my narrative and telling my story. I want to know the story about other people. I'm not worried about me.

I'm not worried about my ancestors, not worried about my skin color. I want to know how Christ has built his church. And you know what? I knew that any book I was reading is going to have not only its biases, but it's also going to have to select.

And if it's written for a primarily English-speaking audience, then, you know, I mean, one of the sets I had to read was Lauterette. Lauterette had a lot about the Eastern church. It would have been a lot about a lot of people with very different practices and history than me.

But I read all of that and I learned from that. And that's been helpful when I've gone to Ukraine and interacted with the orthodoxy there and stuff like that. But it just, I mean, there were things that really concerned me when I was at Fuller, but it was because of theology, not because I was looking for the color of people's skin in the books I was reading.

I mean, I just don't even begin to understand that. And I don't know how to interact with someone who's looking for that. Other than to say, you've missed the point. You've completely missed the point.

I want a curriculum that's actually going to prepare me to do what God's called me to do. That's a foundational thing. If you think seminary is meant to get you to the ultimate point, it's foundational, guys.

There's so much more. So you get the foundations down, you get the big ideas down, you don't worry about people's skin color, you get your foundations. And then when God calls you to such and such a place, well, you know, you might get called to plant churches in Utah.

Well, good luck with that. That's going to be pretty challenging. But you're going to have to then add the foundation, that which is going to help you to do what you need to do in that location. You might end up in Saudi Arabia.

Where none of this racial stuff is going to have any meaning at all. No one's going to care what hyphenations you use in your name. Nobody cares. And neither should you. And neither should you. So if you're in seminary in a rage, there's a problem right at the start.

And you might want to look at yourself, not at everybody else. I mean, like I said, I went to Fuller. I can tell you, if I was looking to be a victim, if I wanted to play the victim card, oh, goodness, I could do it all day long.

But I didn't. That gets you nowhere. It puts you in a constant cycle of victimology. You never go forward. You're always spinning in circles. I don't want to be stuck in a circle. I want to go forward.

So there's going to be more on this. I just thought it was just, to borrow from Peter Pan, bad form. Bad, bad form. Big time on all of that. Now, I don't think I brought that back up, did I? No, let me look in.

Where'd that thing go? Show full history. I thought I had that up. Tuesday. There it is. Let's hope it's still there anyways. I want to, and I'm going to have to be briefer than I wanted. We were looking at the article by Brad Mason.

I've already given the background on that. We looked at the biblical passages, Colossians 3, Galatians 3, and we read, sort of finished off with this paragraph, while there are many things wrong with employing these passages to get to colorblindness.

And by the way, some guy on Twitter has been accusing me. You're moving the goalposts. You're redefining stuff. I haven't redefined a thing. Language is one of the biggest problems here, and I will say without question, there's one side that thinks that language should be defined consistently and historically, and the other side is the one that thinks language is Plato to be changed with all the time.

If you're a critical race theorist, if you're into the social justice stuff, you're the ones playing with definitions, not us. You're the ones that are the new kids on the block here. So don't go telling me I'm changing stuff.

I was clear. I was straightforward when I, what, 20, I forget when it was, 2010, whatever it was, when I first started talking about some of this stuff, when I had Votie Balcom on, when I've talked about my own personal experience, which has been mocked by people, a number of the people that are still leaders in this group, I get to define how I'm using the term colorblind.

And it has nothing to do with thinking that once you become a Christian, everyone just simply becomes the same color. It has nothing to do with abandoning that which is true, honest, just, lovely, of a good report that comes from God's grace in one's ethnicity.

It is not pretending that you cease to be who you are, but it is saying that because there is only one righteousness that is imputed to believers, and that is the active and passive obedience of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then that means that there is a radical and new unity between believers in the church that destroys any concept of ethnic division within the body of Christ based upon history of your people versus my people, because now we are one people, and those other connections that would bring division in must be severed and destroyed in our thinking.

That is what I'm talking about, and I'll defend that against anybody. And if you've got a brain in your head and you know anything about the New Testament, you will not accept a challenge to debate that because you will get crushed, because that is plain biblical teaching.

That's plain biblical teaching. That's what I'm talking about. There is one body because there is one Savior, one righteousness, and your ethnicity, on the one hand, can be a beautiful gift of God, so everything that is from grace is certainly still there.

But as soon as you start getting together with the rest of your ethnic group in opposition to the rest of the body and begin to divide the body, saying, well, your people did this and your people did that, that is where you have a clear misunderstanding of the nature of the unity of the body in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

There's the problem. There's the issue. And so we saw that Mason has a different definition, and so we're going to reject that definition. We're going to expose that definition, say this is not a proper definition.

So he says, but there is simply no warrant for assuming all embodied distinctions are therefore to be eschewed among the members of the body. Not eschewed unless they divide. So what happened to your great-great-grandpappy or what happened between your great-great-grandpappy and my great-great-grandpappy does not matter.

I do assert that must be rejected in light of the unity that exists between us because there's one body and one Savior. Definitely. No two ways about it. So we could just stop right there and say, see, wrong definition, therefore wrong argumentation.

But he then expanded upon that and talked about no difference via the book of Romans. And so he quotes Romans 1 .16, for I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

And we did read his statement that he recognizes the Jew and Greek distinction does not map directly to white, black or white and all the rest of the colors. South American, Asian, Russian, whatever it might be.

I mean, there's just so many ethnicities we can cram in here if we want to start finding ways of dividing the body. But we also emphasize the Jewish and Greek distinction is one that has deep religious context to it in regards to the covenants and Jewish thought and all the rest of that stuff.

Romans 2, Jew and Gentile, Romans 3, we've already charged it all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin. He goes 4, 9, 10, et cetera, et cetera. So finally, Paul declares there is no distinction when it comes to salvation among the Lord Jesus Christ, Romans 10, verses 12, 13.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Amen. Herein is the unity spoken of in Colossians and Galatians.

Mainly, except that Mason fails to recognize that Paul specifically introduces ethnic distinction when he uses Barbaros and Scythian in Colossians 3. It's not just Jew-Greek, but it goes beyond that.

Both are alike guilty before God and will be judged impartially. Both will be justified by the same means, faith in Christ. Absolutely agreement. If we would just stick with that and then live in light of it, it would make a huge difference.

Further, believers are effectually called by God from both Jews and Gentiles, having alike the same Lord Jesus Christ, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, verses 12 through 13. This truly is the basis for all Christian unity, including all racial and ethnic unity within the church.

Exactly. Exactly. That is why if you accept this, if you see the ramifications of this, then you will not allow people to then withdraw back into a position that allows them to begin to define relationships within the body based upon something in the past connected to their ethnicity.

That's the problem. That's the application issue. There is no distinction to be made with reference to guilt, redemption, or unity in Christ by the Spirit. Exactly. There's neither barbarian, Scythian, none of that.

But here's where the problem is. But the supposed colorblind reading of these passages is simply not available, for Paul nevertheless continues to make important distinctions between Jew and Gentile Christians without thereby diminishing their unity in Christ.

Again, no one has said that you start pretending that everyone is all the same color or that no one has a Jewish background or a Gentile background or anything like that. You recognize those realities, but those realities must be viewed through the lens of this new radical thing called the single body.

Look, just look at Twitter. Just look at Twitter today. Look at Anthony Bradley. Evangelicals never had the gospel. Look at what's going on. Who is defining the relationship between Christians based upon ethnicity today?

The very distinctions that are done away with in regards to our unity in Christ. That's where the issue is. That's where the issue is. So, obviously, the primary thing here is once you misdefine what is being said, once you strawman it, then it's easy to make it look like what you're doing is giving a biblical response when you actually haven't addressed the issue at all.

It's one thing for someone to say, oh, I agree. Up to that point, I agree with what you're saying. Unity, that's a wonderful way of describing that unity, but it's not enough. And I think what's happened with a lot of these guys is they have read and been deeply influenced by teachers that have promoted critical race theory, critical theory, oppression paradigms, and they are more influenced by the embracing of that than they are influenced by the biblical categories of the radical unity that is to exist in Christ.

A friend of mine has, over the past couple of days, jumped in and assisted me. I don't know if any of you saw yesterday I had about an hour and a half with a couple of Romanists, and we're talking Romanists here.

I mean, this is a very good description of these guys. We're talking the radical, yeah, the Pope Francis may be weird, but we're not going to worry about that type of guys. The guys who wouldn't touch biblical exegesis with a 10-foot pole because we're not allowed to, they'll then apply it to somebody else.

But just super inconsistent because they try to be consistent but can't be consistent in following Rome. And but in the midst of all that, someone started posting 1689 London Baptist. And did you see that?

You know who that is. The same guy I told you to get a hold of today. Yeah, yeah, that's our friend in London. And that's another reason I'd like to, if we end up making a swing by there, then maybe we can do something like we did last time.

As in, hey, you know, have Oyster Card, we'll travel. They're just not that far away. I mean, depending on where I stay. Well, okay, from Heathrow, it is. But you know, the tube's the tube. I can get where I need to go.

So we'll have to work that out. But my brother's jumped in on this. Why is that? Because my A, by his own testimony, I had something to do with his conversion. And B, he is a black man. But his background is not American, quote unquote, African American.

He comes from another part of the world. And it's just fascinating to see the difference in perspective. And of course, over there, it's a much more multicultural context. And just a lot of the baggage isn't there.

And we end up saying the same stuff, coming from very, very different ethnic backgrounds. Because we have the same source, the Christian scriptures, and allowing them to define things rather than all the rest of this stuff.

So anyway, I thought about saying a whole lot more about that. But I have covered it so much now that I'm... And let me say one other thing. You're going to get tired. Because I already am. You're going to get tired of the battle.