The End of Tolerance - The Biblical Solution to the #WokeChurch

So many of you have seen my video Farewell Woke Church, where I outline why I no longer assume that if you're a vocal, you know, woke church advocate, social justice pusher in evangelicalism, I no longer assume that you're a believer out the gate.

And that was viewed by over 70 ,000 people. I got a lot of positive feedback about that. And and I'm glad that it did well, because that's I think that's an important message right now. But one of the questions that I got continually about that exact video is what should be done about this?

Like, what is your solution here? What does the Bible say we ought to do? And I touched on that a little bit in that video. But I wanted to expand upon it a little bit more here. In short, I believe that the solution to the woke church movement inside the Christian church is less tolerance.

Much less tolerance. I want to read to you a passage from Deuteronomy chapter 13. Now before at the outset, what I'm going to read this, and I'm going to tell you that I understand that we are not Israel.

However, there are moral principles at play here that I think are directly applicable to the church of God, to the kingdom of God, to the church, the polity of the church, right? So when I read this, I don't want you to think that I'm advocating punishing idolatry in the civil realm necessarily, but it clearly applies in the church.

And I'm going to read this and we're going to talk about the moral principle. Here's what it says. Deuteronomy chapter 13, verse six, and I'm reading from the New King James. It says, if your brother, the son of your mother or the son of your daughter, the wife of your bosom or your friend who is as your own soul, secretly entices you saying, quote, let us go and serve other gods, end quote, which you have not known, neither you nor your fathers of the gods of the people, which are all around you, near to you or far off from you from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth.

You shall not consent to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him or conceal him, but you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be the first against him to put him to death and afterwards, the hand of all the people.

And you shall stone him with stones until he dies, because he sought to entice you away from the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage. So all Israel shall hear and fear and not again do such wickedness as this among you.

This is hardcore, straight from the Bible, straight, no chaser, double edged sword, serrated edge law from the law of God. This is scripture. This comes directly from the mouth of the Lord. This is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and this is important for the church to understand.

Now, let me say it again. Now that I've read the passage, what I'm not saying is that this verse applies one to one to our context. I'm not saying that the civil magistrate should be punishing apostates in this way.

I'm saying that there is a moral principle here for the church to take heed on. Notice what God says here. There is no tolerance for anyone trying to entice you away to go serve other gods. It doesn't matter who they are.

He says it could be your brother, your blood. It could be your son or your grandchildren. It could be your wife. Is there any more close, closely related person to you than your own wife? And this scripture says to Israel, if your wife tries to entice you to serve other gods, you are the first one to throw stones at her.

The first one. And it's saying, don't consent. Notice that it said the first thing it says, don't consent. Don't listen. Don't pity. You understand what I'm saying? So this is saying to you, God, your relationship to Christ, your relationship to God has to be more important to you than any other human relationship.

Even your wife, your kids, your brother, it doesn't matter. You have to serve God instead of, you know, these other things, right? And we see this repeated in the New Testament. Jesus Christ says that you should hate your father, your mother, your brother, even your own life.

If you don't love Christ more than those, then you're not worthy of Christ at all. And so here's the thing. We need to cultivate in ourselves a completely relentless devotion to God, so much so that we can't even tolerate when someone tells us to go serve other gods or secretly entices us.

Instead, we have to expose that. And I think that there are steps that the New Testament tells us on how to do this in the church. No, I am not saying the church should stone people, but they should do something far more drastic.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Far more drastic. Excommunicating people that try to entice you away to go serve other gods, to go into this woke cult, that should be absolutely on the table and it should be happening like crazy right now.

There are steps that we take. Your brother secretly entices you to become woke while you confront them and hopefully they repent and you win your brother back. You snatch him out of the fire, right? But if they don't, there are scriptures, there's lots of, there's lots of approaches to this, but they all say the same thing.

You warn him, you warn him again, and after that you have nothing more to do with him. We know about the steps of church discipline. That is in play when it comes to the woke church. People should be getting church disciplined for getting woke.

Do you understand what I'm saying? This is a different religion. They have a different original sin. They have a different atonement. They have a different way that they forgive and it's through all kinds of works.

It's a works-based system. It's a religion. It's a total worldview. It's an ideology. And so many of us recognize that and now as a church leadership, as a pastor, you have certain requirements on you.

And I think you need to really read Deuteronomy 13 and read how this is applied to the church later. You know, Paul often says, or a few times says, you know, cast him out to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.

Like that's the thing, like excommunicating from the church is more serious than being stoned. Because what you're saying when you excommunicate someone from the church is that you're cut off from Christ.

And we ought to be fearing him who can destroy the soul and the body more so than just someone who can stone you. You know, you could stone someone all day long and that's bad enough. I'm not saying that's not bad.

It's bad, but that's just the body. If you're getting, if you get excommunicated from the church, that's that pastor saying to you, that's that elder board saying to you, we don't think you are saved.

You are on your way to hell. And in fact, we're going to go send you to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Now that's not the end of the story, right? Because we know from first Corinthians to second Corinthians, they welcome that guy back into the fold and they say, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna bring you back in.

You've repented you, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's not the end of the story, but this is something that we need to do. We need to apply Deuteronomy 13 the way that the scriptures apply Deuteronomy 13 in the church context in the new Testament.

That's something that that's how we know how to do church. We don't just have our own opinions on how to do church. We do church the way God says we do church. And so we shouldn't tolerate anyone trying to seduce us into other things.

When someone tries to seduce you into a new system of sin and atonement and new ordinances where you're shining people's shoes and washing their feet and all this kind of stuff, according to sins you didn't do, new definitions of sin, whiteness is wicked, all this kind of stuff.

When they start seducing you into doctrines of another religion, you shall not consent to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him. And you should not spare or conceal him, rather expose him, expose him.

And your hand shall be the first one to go through those steps of church discipline. God willing, he repents immediately. But sometimes they don't. And so you throw them out of the church. You cast them out of the church over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.

And what does God promise will happen? You see, this is how you put down this new religion in the church. No tolerance for it. What does God say will happen, right? He says in verse 11 in Deuteronomy 13, so all Israel shall hear and fear and not again do such wickedness as this among you.

First Timothy 5 verse 20, those who are sinning rebuke in the presence of all that the rest may also fear. First Corinthians 5, starting in verse 5, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus.

You see these verses, and there are others all throughout the Old and New Testament. These verses are not easy verses. We don't, nobody wants to cast somebody out of the church. Nobody wants to say, look, I don't think you're saved.

Now go, uh, you know, leave our presence, go, we're going to cast you to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Nobody wants to do that. But the life of a pastor and an elder is not an easy life. And you've got people under your charge that you need to worry about.

And so when we see these people enticing others into serving other gods into, into believing wrong doctrines and things like that, and nothing is done. All it does is encourages others to do that. There is no fear in their eyes.

There is no fear of God. When you allow sinners to come in and to teach sin, to teach others to sin, to teach others covetousness and all of these sins, and you just allow it to happen and sometimes even ratify it, that is going to do damage to people.

No question about it. And so what we need is no tolerance for this stuff, none. There is no quarter for people to teach wrong doctrines and sometimes opposite doctrines of what biblical theology teaches.

There is no quarter for that in our churches. And so pastors need to man up. Pastors need to man up because what we need to do is apply Deuteronomy 13 to our churches, the way Paul taught Timothy to teach, to apply Deuteronomy 13, the way Paul taught the Corinthians to apply Deuteronomy 13.

Excommunication is a lost art and we need to bring that back. There is no tolerance for this kind of thing in the church of God. Don't consent to it. Don't conceal it, expose it, rebuke it, and cast them out.

That is the solution in the Christian church for this woke church nonsense. It's not fun. It's not fun, but God makes requirements on his people. And so if you have friends that are secretly enticing you to go and serve other gods, it starts with you.

You have to be the first one. You have to be the one to not consent and to expose it and start that process of church discipline. I'm sorry, it's not easy, but the Christian life is not an easy life. Hope you found this video helpful.

Have a great weekend. God bless. Look, I know this is going to sound ruthless to a lot of people, and there is a certain ruthlessness to it. I'm not saying that it isn't ruthless. It is. But we have two things to consider.

The first thing is we need to consider our duty before God. God commands us to handle this kind of thing in this way, so that's how we have to handle it. And that should be enough for any Christian. But two, there's a pragmatic reason for this, because when you start to put up with idolatry and apostasy within your churches, you're actually not doing them any favors because it leaves them in a false sense of security.

And I think there would be a lot less people dabbling in woke church apostasy if they really felt like, from their sessions and from their pastors, like they were playing with actual fire. They were playing like as if they were about to leave the faith.

If people would have enough gall to say, look, you're leaving the faith, man. Please come back. Come back. It's not... We shouldn't get any glee out of casting people out. On the contrary, it should be a solemn thing and we should be begging and pleading with them to come back to the faith, to leave their sin behind and to look to Christ in faith and all of that kind of thing.

That should be our goal and that should be our mission. I think if we were more willing to turn our backs on people and to say, look, you are now outside of the faith, I think less people would be dabbling with this stuff.

I think we have from scripture, it says that that would be the result. People would see and fear. Not fearing us, fearing God, fearing He who can destroy the body and the soul. You understand what I'm saying?

And I've seen some glimmers of hope in some of the most woke people. One of the most woke unbelievers that I know about is this woman, Mika, not Mika, what is her name? I don't know, Sista Theology online.

She's an unbeliever. I mean, there's just no question about that. She's the whiteness is wicked lady. Even she is starting to see, you know what? Some people are decolonizing their faith so much that they're leaving the faith.

So even she is seeing that her trajectory, the people that are on her wavelength, some of them are going too far. I hope that there are people in her life that love her enough to say you need to leave this partiality behind.

You need to leave this vomit behind you and turn to Christ and leave all this ideology and all this pagan religion behind. It's worthless. There needs to be someone in her life that loves her enough to kick her out of the church if she doesn't stop this nonsense.

That's the plan. It is ruthless. But number one, God requires it. And number two, we have to love people enough to show them that this is not the way. If they continue down this path, it only leads to destruction.

You see, God is merciful. He's merciful today and he was merciful to Israel when he told them, your eyes shall not pity them. We have to embrace a mercy that takes into account what God commands us to do.

And sometimes what God commands us to do is to not consent, to not pity and cut the cancer from among us. That's the point. It's not done in glee. It's done for their own sake and for the sake of God, for the sake of the church.