Simplicity of God

It's Sunday school time, and I believe we need to be done in 45 minutes. So, I was trying to think what to do.

It's very difficult to think back over what you have done in the past, over 21 years.

You try not to repeat yourself, but is there really anybody who would know if you did? That's the question that I would have.

And so I decided to do something different this morning, somewhat unusual. We're going to actually bring

Penny up and give a theological quiz in a moment. I thought

I would just share with you a little bit and talk a little bit about some of the experiences of being in a position like I'm in.

I have an unusual profession, in essence. Being a

Christian apologist primarily, I'm also one of four pastors at Apology of Church.

And recently, just over two months ago,

I was made professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, where I'll be next week, actually.

Teaching my first class there with folks like Owen Strand, Jeffrey Johnson, Scott Annual, and folks like that.

But most people know me from doing a program called The Dividing Line, which is generally in the apologetics realm, though we have, over the past couple of years, dealt with issues of application and Christian worldview.

And of course, over 20 years ago, we were discussing homosexuality when

I wrote The Same -Sex Controversy with Jeff Neal. So it's not something new for us to address things that are considered to be politically charged, because especially in our day, so much of what we address biblically has direct political ramifications in light of the fact that our society has embraced a worldview system.

Secularism is not the absence of religion, it is a religion unto itself.

It has ultimate authorities, it has creeds, it has sacraments, these days. And so, if you're going to consistently proclaim the

Lordship of Christ over all of life, there's going to be conflicts, just as there were when people suffered greatly because they would not offer a pinch of incense and say,

Kaiser Kulios, he's the Lord. They already said, Jesus is Lord, so we could not do that.

So one of the things we've been doing for years has been inviting people to think about how is the world tempting you to offer a pinch of incense, even in the situation we are in today.

All of us are facing those types of challenges and things like that. So it's a wide variety of things that I am involved with.

Two weeks from last Friday, the last two weeks from now, I'll be debating Dr. Tim Stratton on Middle Knowledge in Houston.

Most people go, wow, you've done some much more interesting debates than that. Actually, I think it will probably end up being a fairly interesting debate.

I appreciate your preference for that. But that just gives you an idea of the breadth of things that we deal with.

So sometimes, a controversy will absolutely sneak up on you.

And you didn't see it coming. You all of a sudden wake up one day and what you thought was stable and sane isn't any longer.

That's sort of every day. Those of us who are over half a century old and older will admit that it was probably much more comfortable for us back in the days when every morning you'd wake up and it would be pretty much like it was the day before.

You didn't expect society to have changed radically since you went to sleep. And now that's simply not the case.

The ground is moving under our feet, morally, ethically, and in many other ways.

But also within the church. So recently, I thought I'd catch you up on this and make you aware of these discussions.

And it sort of connects a little bit to what I want to do in the Sunday morning sermon when we look at some passages from...

That's why I asked, am I on? And I got a positive response from that.

So there you go. What's that? Start over.

Oh, no. Not starting over. That was the most important part of the study.

Sorry you all missed that part, but that's OK. OK. So my tribe, you might say, is broadly the

Reformed tradition. And then specifically, I was for 29 and a half years at a

Reformed Baptist church, specifically Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. And if you're familiar with Reformed Baptists, we use the

London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, which in most sections is pretty much identical to the

Westminster Confession of Faith. Obviously, differences in church government, baptism, and a couple interesting phraseological differences where the

London Baptist Confession follows the Savoy Declaration primarily rather than the Westminster on a few issues.

And so I've taught in that context for literally decades, and especially when it comes to the doctrine of the

Trinity and things like that, never had any disputes or issues whatsoever within that context.

And then starting just a couple of years ago, I started hearing interesting statements being said.

And at first, you interpret these things within the context of, well, they must mean what

I've always meant by that. And so when you're listening to your own folks, it's easier to assume that we're all saying the same thing rather than to assume that we're actually starting to say something different.

And so if you have my book from 1998 called The Forgotten Trinity, you'll see that there's a discussion in the more theological section after I do the exegetical material in regards to the deity of Christ and things like that.

I have a discussion of certain aspects of God's being and God's attributes.

And in that section, I have a brief discussion. And I actually wrote an article for Ligonier Ministries, a

Table Talk magazine, I think about 2003 -ish, somewhere around there, on God is one, monotheism.

I'm getting sort of a hum hum after each thing I say, so it's making me feel like I am speaking from Mount Sinai.

And I don't want to feel like I'm speaking from Mount Sinai. And so I've published a number of things on the various aspects of the attributes of God, and especially in regards to the relationship of the divine persons, for example, and the issues that come up when we talk about the doctrine of the

Trinity. And we've done the Trinity here two or three times over the course of the past 21 years.

That's about every seven years. That's sort of probably numerologically significant. But anyway, and so, in my book, you would see that I addressed the assertion of the simplicity of God.

The simplicity of God. Now, let's just be honest, for most evangelical Christians, that's not normal terminology.

When we think of God and we think of the Trinity and we think of the relationship of the divine persons and such doctrines as perichoresis, the interpenetration of the divine persons and their sharing of the one being of God, we don't think of the term simple as having much relevance at that particular point in time.

It sounds rather complex to us. But that's not what simplicity is about. It's not saying that the doctrine's easy or things like that.

As I defined it in my book, simplicity is the assertion that God's being is not made up of parts.

You don't have not just a third of God or something like that, like you normally have a discussion of the

Son isn't one third of God, and the Father isn't one third of God, and the Spirit isn't one third of God. All of that is true and very, very important.

But more so in the assertion that the very being of God is pure, unmixed, and His being is not made up of adding lesser constituent parts together to make the final product.

And so it's not like you take a whole bunch of holiness and a whole bunch of power and a whole bunch of knowledge and cram it all together, and that makes

God. That would be a complex being made up of constituent parts.

And if you take any part of that away, you no longer have the perfect God.

And so the idea of God being simple is not simple as in easy to understand, but simple as in His being is pure and not made up of lesser parts that have been added together to make a bigger whole.

And so, again, for decades, this would be a part of what was being said.

I think it's an important aspect. I think it's important also because the fact that if God's the creator of all things,

He can't be made up of lesser stuff that, therefore, He couldn't have created, or He couldn't be

God to create all these things. And so it has to do with monotheism, the fact that God is not dependent upon His creation.

He doesn't come out of His creation. And there's so much in Scripture. I was going to look in Isaiah 40 and 41 and a few texts like that, where when you realize that the

Old Testament text was being written in a context where there was so much false religion all around Israel, there's actually a tremendous amount of apologetics in the

Old Testament. When you recognize what the Assyrians believed, or mainly the

Canaanite gods, what they were all about, and the Babylonians, you will see that the

Holy Spirit is intent upon providing to His people accurate understanding of who

He is in contrast with the false gods around them. And so all of that was,

I thought, pretty much uncontroversial, unless you were dealing with Mormonism or something like that.

All of the various cults have problems in those areas.

Certainly within Mormonism, God is not simple. God isn't actually even God on an ontological level in Mormonism.

There is no ontological God. God is an exalted man.

And every god is an exalted man within Mormonism. So it's just completely removed from any semblance of Christian theology along those lines.

And even people like Jehovah's Witnesses, which this really surprised me the first time I was witnessing to one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and I discovered that they, in essence, are open theists.

An open theist is a person who believes that God has all present knowledge, but He does not know what free creatures will do in the future.

And so God knew, for example, that September 11th, 2001, was a possibility on September 10th.

He knew what the plans were. He knew what people were intending to do, but He did not know whether it would come off or not.

He did not know whether it would happen. Which means He doesn't know when you're going to die. Your days have not been written in His book.

And prophecy is truly predictive, but not something that can actually be depended upon, and so on and so forth.

Open theism is an extremely sub -biblical perspective.

Some of you may know that back in the early 2000s, they tried to get open theists removed from the Evangelical Theological Society and failed to do so because the

ETS Statement of Faith was insufficiently clear to banish them. So Jehovah's Witnesses.

I don't know, I sort of figured if you believe Jehovah is the one true God, you might think that He actually knows the future.

But nope, they're pretty much open theists along those lines. And so you'll have these kinds of errors amongst the cults and isms and things like that.

So, as I said, starting a couple of years ago, I started hearing some things that were being said in my own tribe.

And I didn't pay it too much mind. I pretty much interpreted it within the context of things that I said.

But now I've discovered it had become embroiled totally unwillingly. I had absolutely positively no desire at all to get stuck in the middle of something like this.

I do not seek controversy.

I do not seek having division taking place amongst brothers and things like that.

It's one thing to have friendly conversations. But as in so many situations, we tend...

Here's what happens. Let me use an example. Most of you know that I've had a positive relationship with a man who's well outside my confessional circle as a brother in Christ for a number of years by the name of Dr.

Michael Brown. And Mike and I have debated each other over and over and over again.

You can go online and we've debated predestination and election. We've debated healing and we've debated tongues.

And he is what would be classically called a pretty much Armenian charismatic now, even though he once would say that he held to a reform perspective while he was in seminary.

And then moved away from that. And really in listening to him speak about it,

Mike associates his reform stage with a period of spiritual coldness.

And so I think in his mind, that's such a strong correlation that I'll never really get a full hearing, shall we say, on that particular subject.

But anyway, we have debated each other, but then we have worked together. And I think it was 2011,

I think, he and I debated two Unitarians on the

Jewish Voice broadcast. If you want to have a pretty quick, interesting discussion of the

Trinity, that's a good debate to listen to. And we worked really, really well together.

We were finishing each other's sentences and we were right on the exact same page and the other two guys were not.

And so that made for an interesting evening. And then just a few years ago,

I think 2018 or 19, he and I debated two homosexual pastors in Florida.

And I think I mentioned yesterday during the conference that, man, the refutation period that he and I did together, it was simply a supernatural experience.

We were just finishing each other's sentences and people thought we had memorized this, and we hadn't.

We had not done any preparation like that at all. So there's an instance where there are things that bind us together and then there are things we disagree on.

And now what happens for most of us, and I see this within my circles all the time, when you're involved in apologetics, there does tend to be an attitude of, if you don't agree with me on everything, that's probably because you're a secret heretic.

If you don't cross the T's and dot the I's exactly as I do, then eventually the mask is going to come off and we're going to find out what you really are.

There is a tendency to think that way. But I think a lot of evangelicals have the idea that if I'm looking at somebody else, if I'm looking at Michael Brown and he's over here, then the natural thought process that I have is that if he's over here, he's going to keep going the direction he's going.

And eventually that will lead to something out there. And he might say, no,

I believe, you know, he's a synergist and he and I have debated and I'm like, you know, consistently, that's going to have to lead you to a fundamental problem with sola gratia and sola fide.

And he says, nope, not going there. Nope, that's no. And so the idea for many people is

I just can't see where the stopping point is for you. Now, look, I have seen people do that.

That's because we've seen people do this. I can think of a certain young man who is the son of a former

Southern Baptist convention president that we all knew for over a decade was actually a homosexual, but no one was allowed to say it.

And so he was given a platform to speak and to write and to do journalism and all the rest of this stuff.

And then last year came out like it was like, yeah, we already knew that. But there are trajectories that you see and you've seen many people going down that going down that path.

So part of the reason we think this way is, well, we have seen it happen in other areas and in other instances.

And so we can just simply assume that unless you agree with me on these things, that you're going to do the exact same thing, even though they may never do it at all.

And this ends up causing us to have confusion between primary and secondary and tertiary issues.

There are key things at the center you cannot have compromise on. If you don't have a divine

Jesus, we're not talking about the same faith. If you're not a if you're not a monotheist, we're not talking about the same faith.

There are absolutely central defining aspects of what the

Christian faith is. But I was raised in an independent fundamentalist

Baptist context. And one of the problems with being in the IFB is that the definitional thing is this big.

And there aren't any issues outside of that. Everything is definitional.

How you dress. I'm looking at the brother's tie over here. Okay. Now, I wasn't asking you to hang yourself with it.

I was just going to say. There is, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there is a very, very well -known

Christian speaker who teaches how to, he basically teaches how to preach homiletics.

Travels around the world. And if you've ever noticed, he is always wearing the same tie.

That's not the exact same tie. But if you take his courses, he is literally going to teach you that there is an appropriate tie.

And I'm sorry, your stripes are too narrow. Now, I'm not exactly sure what that means, theologically.

But your stripes are too narrow. He literally will tell you the exact width that the stripes are supposed to be.

And by the way, yours are tilted the wrong side. That probably, red and tilted that direction, definitely liberal tendencies there.

I'm just letting you know. So, I'm not making that up.

I'm absolutely, believe me, I've spoken with this individual. I'm telling you the truth. And so you have the independent, now he's not going to say this, but the independent fundamentalist

Baptist, you know, dress, musical tastes. Okay, there's no drums, so you're okay for now.

But if you had anything like that, you're just absolutely doomed. And so they take the whole of the

Christian experience and they make it all the definitional thing. And there's nothing left on the outside called the

Adiaphora, the things that just don't matter. The things that are a matter of Christian freedom. So, we've seen that.

We don't want to go there. But then we have the leftist liberals that have a mustard seed in the center.

And then everything else is Adiaphora outside of that. You think of Union Theological Seminary today, which is significantly more

Buddhist than it is Christian. And they didn't get there overnight. There was a period of change.

And so, you have the two extremes and we need to be balanced and we need to be biblical and things like that.

And so, getting back to what I've found myself involved in, let me just tell you what the argument is.

And let me say this from the beginning. I do not believe this is a definitional issue. And if you want to believe what

I don't believe on this, I am perfectly fine with that. I don't think...

I'm not one of those folks that's sitting here going, well, you know, if you believe what you're telling me

I have to believe, that will eventually lead you into this. Now, I can say

I don't want to go there because that does seem to go that direction.

I'm not saying you're going to go there. I'm not saying you're running off toward that. I'm not saying it's going to eventuate in that.

But I would say that I think this is the central path and that's going off this direction toward what's out there.

I don't think you're going to go there. You say you're never going to go there. And you say, I'm going to go this direction.

I'm saying, no, I'm not. We both can stay on this same path together.

But so often we don't allow that. We don't allow that freedom. We don't seemingly even allow...

We don't seemingly trust the Holy Spirit to keep someone from wandering off into craziness because we've seen people wander off into craziness.

And these days, everybody's deconstructing, right? That's the new term for apostasy, is deconstructing.

There was another big guy, another big Christian rapper guy who two weeks ago puts out a video about how he's renouncing

Christianity and all the rest of this stuff. And we keep seeing that. And therefore, when we encounter it, we assume, well, you're going the exact same way.

I would rather trust someone who tells me, no, I continue to believe

Scripture and we just have a disagreement on that. If they end up going that direction, that's in God's hands.

But I need to be the type of person that is not going to automatically... This is the problem with our day.

I automatically think the worst of every brother and sister in Christ. But unfortunately,

I'm experiencing being on the other side of that, where the assumption is, oh, well, if you don't agree with this, you're...

So what are we talking about? The doctrine of simplicity went through stages of development.

And the biggest stage of development was under the auspices of a man by the name of Thomas Aquinas.

And Thomas Aquinas, of course, had a huge impact upon Christian theology.

He was a Roman Catholic. He believed in purgatory and transubstantiation and the ultimate authority of the

Pope and all sorts of things like that. But he was brilliant. He was brilliant. There's no question of how brilliant he was.

And Aquinas was deeply influenced by a man by the name of Aristotle. Now, a lot of people's eyes start glazing over when you start going

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, realism, nominalism, da -dum, da -dum, da -dum, da -dum.

And I'll be honest with you, mine do too. I've had to study all that stuff, but I will be perfectly honest with you.

When I look at what the New Testament says about philosophy, it is not a positive thing.

Now, we all do philosophy. We're all philosophers in one sense or another. We all have a theory of knowledge.

Hopefully, our worldview and our philosophy of life is deeply influenced by what we are given in Scripture.

Many people will tell us, No, you have your philosophy. You may not know much about it. And then you apply it to Scripture.

And I've seen that happen too. There is elements of truth in these things. But Aristotle is the one who gave us the unmoved mover concept.

The God is the unmoved mover. And now,

Aristotle's God was not even close to the Christian God. And very, very, very, very, very different.

And Thomas tried to, in the words of one of my colleagues, baptize Aristotle and fix some of the issues, whether he was successful in doing so is another issue.

But when it comes to the doctrine of simplicity, what the application of Thomas Aquinas' thinking was is this, that when we think of the attributes of God, when we think of His mercy and His grace and His justice, and therefore

His wrath against sin, when we think of His omniscience and His omnipresence and His omnipotence, all the various omnis that we think of, we think that God is glorified when we learn more about Him and know

Him better as He is. And that it's His intention to demonstrate these things.

That's what Romans 9 says. What if, even though willing to endure vessels prepared for wrath,

He wanted to display His love and grace and kindness to us? And what if He wanted to demonstrate His wrath and His power as well?

For example, in Egypt, with the destruction of Pharaoh and his armies, and so on and so forth.

But what Aquinas said was, in his day, if the human mind could conceive of something, then it had a concrete existence.

So if you're familiar with the ontological argument, part of the ontological argument is if a person can conceive of a greater being.

So God is the greatest being, greater which none can be conceived. Because that conception is extremely important in the thought process and in the epistemology of this day.

And so, basically what Aquinas said was, God is simple, so much so that in God, God's justice is

His mercy. And His mercy is

His omniscience. And His omniscience is His omnipresence. And His omnipresence is His omnipotence.

And that is His love. They're all the same thing. You cannot distinguish between the attributes of God in God.

All that is in God is God. And so all the distinctions that we make, and all the distinctions that Scripture makes, that's ad extra, that's outside of God.

In God, all the attributes are the same. I don't agree.

I do not see that as being forced upon me by anything from Biblical revelation.

At all. I don't have any problem if someone wants to say, well, in a mysterious way, in God, God's justice and His mercy are the same thing.

They're identical to one another. Now, you see, people who have rejected that, and many people have, Reformed theologians have, there's been numerous people who've said, no,

I'm not following Aquinas down this particular path, and others have. It's been an area of disagreement for quite some time, actually.

But a lot of them, a lot of people have said, that seems to move toward pantheism, where all the distinctions that allow us to identify who

God is are wiped out. The other side will say, all we're talking about here is in God this is the way things are.

For us, all these things are distinct, and we can learn about God.

And we can learn important things about God by distinguishing between the attributes. That's ad extra.

Ad intra, we make this assertion that all the attributes are the same.

Now, one of my arguments, it's not so much an argument, but just simply, if God is glorified and our coming to know

Him as He is, and if one of the primary ways that we come to know

Him is through recognizing His attributes and growing in our knowledge of their relationship to one another.

For example, there are attributes that interact with one another. So God's mercy and God's justice interact with one another.

If they're the same thing, how do they interact with each other? But the point is, in essence, to affirm the other position, for me, is asking me, you need to believe that the way that we know

God greater and glorify Him is not true inside Himself.

It's false inside Him, but it's true for us. And if you want to go there, if you feel that that gives you an insight, more power to you.

But here's the problem. How do you look at me and say, and if you don't believe that, then you are not truly of our tribe?

How did that become definitional? Especially since you can go back and, you know,

Calvin doesn't have much positive to say about Aquinas. He hardly ever pops up.

And the schoolman, he has almost nothing positive to say about them either. This is not some central aspect of his assertion.

And anyone who's familiar with Calvin, knows that he was willing, for example, to break with the post -Nicene consensus on such things as Jesus being autotheos, the

Son being God in and of Himself. He recognized that if you don't make that affirmation, subordinationism is a large specter.

So there have been, you know, Turretin, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man. I mean,

Turretin is the kind of guy, you have to read every paragraph like four times over, and then go take some aspirin, go take a walk and come back, try it again, and you'll finally figure it out.

So he's brilliant. And he affirms the position that I do not, and yet he senses the struggle.

And so he very clearly says, yes, that's true of God internally, but outside of God that it's not true.

And we have to make these distinctions, and these distinctions are proper. And so then you ask the question, then how do we know that this is something that we should believe, in the sense of promoting it and saying, if you don't, then you somehow are rejecting what?

Because I can guarantee you one thing, there is not a syllable in here that gives us any basis for demanding that you need to believe that ad intra, the attributes of God, are considered to be identical to one another.

Okay, you can make an argument, but what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to establish Biblical foundations, and then you're going to have to connect, you're going to have to make the next step up, because of these you have to believe this, then the next step up here, and some of these are proper, but eventually you just simply get to the point where it's pure speculation.

There's only so far that the light of Scripture is going to take us, and people have liked to go way, way beyond that on a lot of things, unfortunately.

And so what's happened is, I find myself hearing over and over again, people from my own tribe, individuals who

I introduced to the Reformed faith 10, 15 years ago, all of a sudden going, well, we're starting to have to rethink that guy, because he doesn't accept this kind of a formulation.

And it seems to me that we live in a day where I would think most of us would be going, you know, look around the world, look around what's happening.

We as Christians should probably be adopting an idea not of compromise. The world's coming after us.

Look at what's happened in Canada, and I'm not talking about the truckers either. God bless them, but I'm talking about what happened two weeks earlier when

C -4 became law in Canada. And in essence, a clear biblical testimony concerning the nature of human sexuality is now illegal.

If that kind of thing is happening all around us, and we see people in our own nation really wanting to promote this kind of stuff.

If you haven't read the Equality Act, you need to. It's the same mindset. You would think that we would be focusing our attention on the core issues and extending even more and more grace to one another on the

Adiaphora, because we need to stand together. Because we may end up sitting in a jail cell together.

We can argue the Adiaphora then. We'll have plenty of time. We really will. But it might be good not to end up there first, and maybe if we stand together, we can put that off, if not for ourselves, if not for our children, our grandchildren, or something like that.

But have you noticed that doesn't seem to be what's happening? What seems to be happening is so much more, and I blame social media for most of it,

I'll be honest with you. I mean, there are benefits to social media. We had people who attended a conference this weekend.

How did they hear about it? Somebody tweeted something. They hadn't heard it on radio advertisement or anything like that.

That is a way that a lot of us communicate and learn what's going on. So, it has positive benefits, but man, the negative aspects.

I think it has led to a fundamental shallowing out of the narrative and the conversation we have with one another.

Partly because you can't really say a whole lot in 280 characters anyways. And then worse, you expect people to be able to say something important in 280 characters.

Or even lesser than that. I mean, people used to write really long books, and you would actually read the whole book and contemplate it before you would make a comment about what the person said.

Now, what happens on Amazon? People write reviews of your book, and in the review they'll admit,

I didn't read the book, but this man tweeted this once, and therefore he can't possibly have anything positive to say.

That happens all the time. We all know it. So, there has been this shallowing out of the conversation, and as a result, we just become so tribal over something that honestly, honestly, and the other side in my camp has admitted this.

In the 1990s, no one ever talked about this subject. No one preached a sermon about it.

No one did lectures in seminary about it. Nothing. The way I had defined simplicity,

God is not made up of constituent parts, everybody was like, we're cool with that. And now, just a matter of years later, nope, that's not enough.

That's not enough. Now, if we were having some massive influx of tritheism amongst before -baptists, where all of a sudden we're coming up with the idea of three gods or something like that, okay, great, fine, then let's have the conversation.

But that's not happening. Instead, it has become the new big thing, the new badge.

And it just strikes me that at this point in time, and I'm guilty of not doing this, but I'm just thinking it would probably be best for everybody.

I wonder what would happen if we spent, if we made up a rule that I will spend only one half the amount of time tweeting or Facebooking, and I'm not just talking about scrolling through.

I'm talking about actually writing something. I only spend one half the time that I do that activity that I spend in praying for the people who will be reading what

I write. That would not only cut back on our time a lot more, it would also increase the amount of time we spend praying.

And I think it would make a massive difference in the attitude that we would have when you see that, you see somebody say something, and it may be something you're really convicted about or something like that, and the speed with which we respond to it without even thinking about the fact of the matter is all of us have stuff going on in our lives that other people don't know about.

And that may impact how we expressed ourselves or something like that. It truly is, though, you've got to admit, if you put yourself in my shoes, when you have individuals who start off by saying,

I was introduced to the Reformed faith through this man's writings and this man's debates, and then they're six years younger than your youngest child, and yet it's time to cancel this guy.

And you just sort of stand back and go, for what again? For a disputation over where you put the emphasis in regards to the recognition of the attributes of God?

All the attributes of God are in perfect harmony in God's being. There is no question about it. No one's saying anything other than that.

The whole thing is us demanding that you believe that in God's experience, which none of us can really fully grasp in the first place, in God's experience,

He does not differentiate between His own attributes. And yet He is glorified when we do it.

And that somehow has become a basis for something like this. It's just, it definitely makes me go, why would things like this be happening today?

But anyways, so there's a little bit of an insight into some of the stuff that comes up.

I mean, in the middle of my debating William Lane Craig, we didn't debate, we had a discussion on a radio program, but that came up in the middle of that.

And so I've got the Molinas coming after me from one direction and my own tribe coming after me from the other direction.

And sometimes you get up in the morning and go, you know, I'm thinking about opening a tire shop in Alaska.

What do you think? I think that would be really sort of cool, you know, no internet and sell tires in Alaska because you need good tires in Alaska.

I really, I really think you do. And, and I'm thinking, what do you think, Kenny, you want to, you think, think

Viv would want to move to Alaska? No. Okay.

All right. Anyways. All right. So there's a, there's a, an unusual direction we, we went this morning and it will be tied in a little bit.

I'm going to be looking at both Galatians one and Philippians one and two contrasting passages in Paul and discussing more about how it is that we as Christians should be looking at other

Christians, especially at a time where we are seeing divisions over almost everything.

And it's not a, I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but hopefully it will cause all of us to think and maybe be a little bit more mature.

Let's close our time with a word of prayer. Father, we do thank you for your church and I do thank you for the fact that you continue to work within your people.

We just ask that you would bless your people with a desire for unity as Jesus prayed in John chapter 17 and that we would balance that with the many biblical admonitions to stand firm for truth as well.