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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon
Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet Earth, listening via live streaming.
This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fifth day of February 2016, and I'm very delighted that today we have on Iron Sharpens Iron a guest by the name of Dean Birch.
He is an old friend of mine from back in the 90s when we both would regularly attend the
John Bunyan conference. Actually it was typically just known as the Bunyan conference, but I don't want our listeners who are unfamiliar with that conference to think that we were going to some kind of podiatrist conference, somewhere.
It is not a foot disorder we're talking about. We're talking about the great legendary
John Bunyan of Pilgrim's Progress fame from the 17th century.
John Bunyan, yes, was the the Reformed Baptist in England imprisoned for preaching without a minister's license in the 1600s, but wrote, thanks be to God, Pilgrim's Progress while in prison.
But I digress by speaking about John Bunyan right now. That's where I originally became aware of this dear brother
Dean Birch, and he is currently with Reaching and Teaching International Ministries, and we're gonna find out more about that during the interview.
But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you, Dean Birch, to Iron Sharpens Iron. It's a pleasure to be here, Chris. Thank you so much.
And tell our listeners something about Reaching and Teaching International Ministries before we get into the heart of our interview today.
Absolutely. Reaching and Teaching exists basically to take training to so many parts of the world where people serving in pastoral roles or pursuing a role of being a pastor have little or most likely no access to any sort of training.
So the idea is we take training to them so that they can be equipped to be able to plant churches and raise up disciples.
And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question, our theme today is going to be Missions and Sovereign Grace. Our email address here, if you have any question regarding that, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
Please include at least your first name and the city and state where you reside and the country where you reside if you live outside of the
USA. And we hope to hear from you no matter where you live and no matter what you believe.
You don't even need to be a Christian, by the way, to send an email with a question to Iron Sharpens Iron.
We would welcome your participation on the show, whether you are a Christian, an atheist, an evangelical, a
Roman Catholic, a Sweden Borgianist, anybody that is out there listening who cares to ask a question, feel free to do so at chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
And before we even go into the theme, Missions in Sovereign Grace, and learning more about reaching and teaching international ministries, tell us something about your own personal testimony.
Well, Chris, I was raised in central Pennsylvania, up in the metropolis of Pottsville, raised in a
Christian home, attended actually an American Baptist Church, and back in the late 60s, early 70s, a man came to that church who actually, he preached the gospel, he preached it faithfully.
And I'll be honest, I'm one of those who cannot tell you the date or the hour when I was actually converted, and to be honest with you, for a number of years that bothered me.
You know, I would go to these conferences and men would say, if you don't know the actual day or the hour, if it's not written in the front cover of your
Bible, you're probably not a Christian, that sort of thing, until I actually sat under some sound preaching of the
Word and realized that God had miraculously saved me when I was in my teens.
I would probably say I was probably 14 at the time, but somewhere in that stretch of my life,
I was converted. I grew up in the home of a World War II Marine who was a schoolteacher, and I pursued that for a while, to be an accounting teacher, as my father was, but also just that pastor under whom
I sat had placed a love for the Scriptures into me, well, God did through him, and a desire to study
His Word and to know it better. Was that John Thornberry? No, no it wasn't. He was also pastoring in an
American Baptist Church for years. Yeah, he was. He was up in, what, outside Lewisbury in, what was it,
W, can't think of it right now. Yeah, you're right. But no, this was a man by the name of Carl Hand. He was a good man, took me aside, worked with me,
I remember taking, he took me into his study one day in his parsonage, and I think he pulled down A .T.
Robertson's word pictures and some other books, and was just showing me that the Word of God was not just something to sit on your shelf, it wasn't just something to read, but it was something to study, and that had an effect on me, and I'm grateful for it.
Not that this was going to be the heart of our discussion, but I think a lot of things come hand -in -hand with what the topic is, missions in sovereign grace.
You said something about the belief that there are fundamentalists out there who teach that if you don't know the day and the hour, or at least the date of your salvation, you're probably not saved.
I don't know this for certain, but I wonder if that kind of thinking developed out of the truth that there are many false conversions, and people who claim to have come to Christ have a very lackadaisical attitude about that whole thing, because they're just being told, hey, if you say this prayer, you will become born again, and you'll never have to worry about going to hell, you know, just recite this.
And you yourself, I'm sure, go on to some kind of evangelistic meetings, whether it's the
Billy Graham Crusades or other things, where you see people online going forward to allegedly receive
Christ for salvation, and they don't look like they are any more eager or urgent than people just waiting online at the
DMV, you know. I think you're right. I think a lot of it is just an emphasis on decisionalism, you know, and if you need to know the day you made that decision.
Again, it's very man -centered, it's not an emphasis on the Spirit of God working inside of a person. And again, with the whole thrust being on man, what he does, you know, the day you made the decision,
I just think that's really a big push behind that date, hour, write it in your Bible kind of thing.
Okay, we've been speaking about, or I've been mentioning at least, the term
Sovereign Grace in regard to missions. Some people may be tuning in for the very first time, may have just discovered this program today.
In fact, I just recently heard from somebody from Wisconsin who just discovered my show for the first time and began listening.
But you never know who's gonna be hearing this program, who may not even understand what we're talking about in regard to Sovereign Grace.
What exactly, in summary, is that? Well, Sovereign Grace is basically the the words of Jonah when he came up on the shore, saying salvation is of the
Lord. I would not be here, if it were not for God's grace moving me,
I would never have sought Him in the first place. There's something about the biblical references to a person being dead in sin.
There's a limit to what dead people can do, a very high limit. And I don't mean to be grotesque, but if I were to go to a funeral parlor and walk up to the casket, even both of my parents have passed away, to walk up to either of them and say, hey, get up, or hey, have a meal, they're not gonna respond because they're dead.
And what they need to be able to respond is life. And the only thing that imparts life to enable someone to embrace
Christ and embrace the gospel is the grace of God first moving in a person. Yes, I would say unfortunately that the majority of Christendom today believes that man has within themselves the innate ability, prior to being born again, to savingly trust in and believe in Christ in such a way that pleases
God and actually brings that person to conversion, whereas the scriptures are clear that man cannot please
God in the flesh. So if believing in him is pleasing to him, how could he possibly do that while he is still dead in his trespasses and sins?
Yeah, I mean, you look at Psalm 14, which Paul quotes in Romans 3, and that is, if I can paraphrase it,
God looked down through the corridors of time to see who would choose Him, who would pursue Him, and the answer is no, not one.
You look at the analogies that are used in the scripture for salvation, I just mentioned one, being dead and needing to have new life, regeneration.
I have some friends who have adopted children. In not one of those cases did the child say, I choose you to adopt me.
It was the parent who chose the child. You think of being freed from slavery, you know, being redeemed, redemption.
I don't know of slaves who say, hey, I choose to have you redeem me. It's the Redeemer who redeems the slaves, and that's what we mean by sovereign grace.
It's God's sovereign will and choice to call sinners into his kingdom.
Now the the retort to that by those who object to what we believe is very often that in your system of theology, meaning us and the others who call themselves either sovereign grace
Christians, Calvinists, theologically reformed Christians, whatever label they so choose to use, they will say your idea of God is that he makes men into robots.
Well, we don't believe that at all. In fact, one
Roman Catholic hurled that same accusation against me once, and I said, well define what do you mean by robot?
What does that mean? Well, if you can't freely choose or reject
Christ to either be saved or to go to hell, then you are a robot.
And I said, oh that's interesting, that's your definition of a robot. Do people sin in heaven? No, of course not.
So you're saying they're incapable of sinning in heaven? Yes. So is your highest goal in life to go to heaven?
Yes, it is. Then your highest goal in life is to be a robot for eternity then, right? He goes, what are you talking about?
You just said that the inability to either believe or reject
Christ is the definition of free will, which is a core teaching in your religion or ideology.
Well, if you can't freely choose to reject Christ in heaven, that must mean you're a robot.
You've lost your freedom, yeah, exactly. And so we do believe men make choices and make decisions all the time.
Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, you know, if it were not for God's, to use our term of the day, sovereign grace, man has already made his choice.
You know, men have made their choice in Adam, and every man has ratified it ever since. I mean, people are doing what they have willfully chosen to do, and that is they are going their own way.
Like sheep, they've all gone astray. And so, yeah, I think sometimes people who have an objection to sovereign grace,
I think their starting point is in the wrong place. And what I mean by that is they often start picturing humanity as being basically neutral.
And as a friend of mine said, we were just in Ecuador teaching a module on systematic theology, and my one friend, a co -pastor who was teaching, you know, made the statement, you know, election does not send anybody to hell.
Election does not hurt anyone. I thought it was a profound statement, because basically most people think, well, you know, there are those people out there who they want to choose
God, they want to choose Christ, but if they're not elect, they can't. And it's just a faulty starting point. The starting point is every man is rushing away from God with his fingers in his ears, not wanting to hear a thing, and it's just sovereign grace that reaches down and, the word of an old song, arrests him on his mad dash to hell and gives him life.
I think if we start with that the basic premise which the Bible meets us with, and that is man is not basically good, nor is man basically neutral.
Man is deceived, man is in sin, man is blind, and apart from God's regenerating grace, man would never choose him.
Right. They somehow think it's an injustice that God would leave some in their own sins where they deserve to be in hell anyway, and rescue some while leaving others behind.
Yeah, injustice or the word you often hear is the word fair. Right. They'll say it's not fair, and you know,
I don't mind when a person says that if the person is being genuine, but my response is twofold. Number one, what would be fair would be for God to just allow everyone to perish.
We've all chosen that, that's our plight apart from his grace, so fairness would be rejection of the entire race for our sin, our willful disobedience, and the only thing that I can say that has ever happened that even borders on not being fair was
God the Father pouring his wrath on his innocent son so that sinful people could have life.
So if you want to talk about not fair, the only thing that comes close to not being fair is the fact that God the Son willfully granted but absorbed the penalty of our sin.
That's the only thing that's not fair. Yeah, the other two alternatives outside of the doctrines of grace are not even fair anyway in regard to a human understanding of fairness.
If you go to the extreme of universalism, why is it fair that the godly missionary who lived a life of obedience obviously not in perfection because we all sin, but lived a notably and demonstrably godly life, sacrificed much to help people in foreign lands, perhaps in impoverished nations, perhaps this person even gave up wealth and so on and comfort to live in the jungles and so on, and this person perishes and winds up in the same heaven with Adolf Hitler, you have that as the true full -blown universalism, or you have those even that would include fundamentalists and many evangelicals who admit, no, there are people that will perish in hell and spend an eternity in hell for rejecting
Christ. Well, how is it fair that there are people who have lived for thousands of years in nations where there was no gospel, and even today you don't have people living on an equal playing field, you have a child being brought up in a
Muslim home in the Middle East that may be killed if he were to convert to Christianity, compared to the children of Christian parents or even a pastor and his wife having a child where the child is instructed from his infancy in the ways of God, how is that fair that they both have the command to believe in Christ in order to receive the eternal life?
Yeah, when one is significantly advantaged over another, yeah. I think also we also have to deal with the fact that, you know, we are fallen creatures, and even our concept of fairness is going to be worked.
The only concept of fairness that, you know, that we can come up with is one that's got to be informed by God's word, and that's what we that's what we seek to do.
So tell us some of the work, tell us about some of the work that you have done with Reaching and Teaching Ministries, international ministries, some of the specific countries, and some of what you have witnessed there, and what you have seen
God doing in these various places. Wow, that could take a bit. Well, we have about 90 minutes, actually more than 90 minutes.
Well, I can do that. Over the past year and a half since I joined the staff of Reaching and Teaching, I have traveled to northern
Ecuador four times, I've been to northern Brazil twice, I've been to Panama. This coming
Sunday I'm actually going to Haiti. I just came back from Ecuador last week, and then after returning from Haiti be going back to northern
Brazil. What we do is we have a training program that we put together. When I say we, our organization was founded by Dr.
David Sills. Dr. Sills was a missionary in Ecuador for a number of years, returned to the
States, he's a professor of missiology at Southern Seminary, and he is the one who has put together pretty well the whole training program, thankfully.
What we do is we have a nine -module program where over the course of three years we'll make three trips a year to a certain location where men who are currently serving in pastoral ministry or people who are aspiring to a leadership sort of role will come in and will be instructed.
We'll do one week of intensive teaching. We call it hard head and hands. It's not just academic teaching, though that's a component, but for pastoral leadership
I mean we'll deal with spiritual disciplines, we'll deal with just ministry issues with which they're facing, as well as the academic teaching.
As I said, I've personally been on a number of these trips teaching some of the different modules, whether it's surveying the
Old Testament, surveying the New Testament, Christian doctrine, hermeneutics, and on and on the modules go. One of the things that overwhelms me is just the fact that once you leave the shores of the
United States there are, let's just say it's a huge minority of pastors who have ever had access to any sort of training.
When we were down in Ecuador back in September, I remember specifically asking some of the men who were attending the training how much training have they ever had, and usually they would say none, and they've been pastoring five years, eight years, ten years, without having ever been exposed to the scriptures.
So it's frustrating at one level, and it's very, I don't mean to sound selfish, but it's very rewarding on another level, because just to be able to go and provide what we take for granted, you know,
I mean people can tune in and listen to this radio show. They can go online and take courses for free on seminary level classes right now, but places where either because of the language barrier or just because they don't have adequate internet access or something like that, they have no access.
In fact, I would say that's the one word that drives us, and that is just simply the word access. Here you've got
Bible colleges, you have seminaries, you have books, you have resources, just we are so ridiculously rich from the standpoint of having access to education to serve in a pastoral role or a leadership role.
Once you leave the States, in fact, about two years ago I was on the Gospel Coalition website, I saw a statistic which is what probably had the biggest impact on me.
They put this statement there that said outside the United States, 85 % of the world's 2 .2
million evangelical churches are being led by men with little or no training, which means out of every 20 churches you walk in, three of them will be pastored by someone who has had some semblance of training.
It's just overwhelming and it's just, no pun intended, but it's foreign to us here. We don't realize what it's like once we leave our shores.
Yeah, there's an element of Christianity that you have witnessed and been confronted by that has an exaggerated and even unbiblical concept of the perpiscuity of Scripture.
They will think that we don't need training and lofty teachers and all these kind of things because the
Word of God is sufficient. Now obviously we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, but that Scripture itself says that you should not let anyone be a teacher.
So obviously there's a high role that a teacher has even in this inerrant
Word that we believe is easy enough to understand in regard to the primary things regarding salvation and so on.
Yeah, true. Now a lot of places where I've been though, actually the experience has been very positive in that they, number one, have not had training, but number two, they're very hungry for it.
They don't have the attitude of, well we don't need teachers, we have Scripture. They have the attitude of, come teach us, we don't have a clue.
In fact the first international training trip I'd ever made a couple years ago was with a different organization before I joined
Reaching and Teaching. I was in Mongolia and there was a gentleman there. This was a poignant moment for me.
There's a gentleman at the end of the week. I had taught a module on Genesis 1 through 11, just establishing basic worldview, but a man with whom
I had traveled, a missionary, he had taught a module on hermeneutics. At the end of the week this man stood up in a debriefing session.
This is all through interpreters because I don't speak Mongolian, they don't speak English. And this gentleman, and by the way this man, he was converted in a
Mongolian prison. You wouldn't mess with this guy, okay? But he was speaking during the debriefing and the person whispering to us what he was saying, all of a sudden he said, he just said when he gets back to his church on Sunday he must apologize.
And we're looking at him, why? And then he said he learned this week he has not been teaching his people what the
Bible says. He's been teaching his ideas and then going to the Scriptures to try to find verses that seem to support it.
And my first thought was, plenty of that goes on in the States. But seriously, just that impact from seeing, wait a minute,
I need to go to the Scriptures, I need to read, I need to interpret and then apply.
Observe, apply, or interpret, apply, not just get your ideas and then go to the Scriptures first.
And now there's a congregation somewhere in the nation of Mongolia, week by week, who's being fed from the
Scriptures, where prior to that they weren't. They were just hearing a man's ideas. Hmm, amazing.
And this book that we call the Bible, which is really a collection of books, has been called by the
Apostle Paul, the unsearchable riches of Scripture. And we should not take lightly the fact that seasoned men of God should be those that open up the
Scriptures on a regular basis to the flock and shepherd over them. So, this is a very important thing, which is why even the
Scriptures themselves warn against laying hands on a novice and exalting a new believer, a new convert to the position of a teacher or elder and so on.
So, overseas, this is even more flagrantly disobeyed from what
I understand. It's a huge problem. Like I said, you ask these men, how long have you been a pastor? Five years, seven years, ten years?
How much training have you had? None. And then the next question sometimes will be, well, then why are you the pastor?
And I don't mean that in a negative way, like slamming the person. I'm just curious. Answers you'll get would be something along the lines of,
I was the oldest. I was the first one in my village to come to Christ. In my secular position,
I was a leader in the community, so I automatically became the leader in a church. And so, many of these men,
I don't question their heart at all, but they end up serving a pastoral role not knowing whether they've ever even been called into that role.
They just get thrust into it. And it's almost like a default position. They're serving in this role saying,
I don't know. All I know is I'm it. And I don't know what I'm doing. Please help me.
Right. Well, this is a totally different issue, but I think there is some overlap.
I have heard, when I've had discussions with black female
Christians in ministerial positions of leadership and pastoral roles, even with the titles of bishop and things like that.
And when I have questioned some of them as to how they can possibly believe they are appropriate candidates for those offices when the
Apostle Paul is very clear that a woman is not the teacher, have authority over the man. Very often you will hear, well, the men just ain't doing it.
The men aren't rising up to this role. And without the women grabbing hold of the reins and getting things done, very often they would just not occur and so on.
Now, I'm not justifying that these women have taken those positions.
I want to be careful as to not to be too overly harsh about it either. But it's still a violation of what the
Word teaches. But what you were saying seems to be almost the same scenario where you have, well, nobody else is doing it.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You're it. They just point at me and they say, well, you're the guy who's going to lead us because you're a leader.
Or you're the guy who's going to be leading us because you were the first one to come to Christ in our village or something like that.
So you're right. And a lot of those cases, we had one, again, when I was in Mongolia, there was a woman in the training.
And I asked the man about that. And he said, yeah, yeah, she's not a pastor. She's not pretending to be a pastor. She wants to learn more scriptures.
And we found out more. This is a fascinating story, Chris. This woman, and I hope you don't mind my saying this.
I'm going to be honest. This woman had planted three churches by accident. It's funny. Her husband is an unbeliever.
And she was shopping in this one area where she'd go to shop. And she just couldn't stop talking about Jesus.
And people were coming up and asking her questions. They were being converted, 10, 15, 20. And finally, like a church.
But she said, I cannot be the leader here. I'm not qualified. So somebody would be raised up, kind of take over.
And the husband, who was an unbeliever, you need to stop shopping there. You need to go shop someplace else. So she went to a different part of the city and kept talking about Jesus and leading.
And people come into faith. Three different times this happened. And she came to the training saying, look,
I'm not a pastor. I don't want to be a pastor. I'm not qualified to be a pastor. But I want to learn the scriptures so I can minister better.
Particularly, she had a passion to reach out to ladies. And she just wanted to be better equipped in the scriptures.
And there's nothing wrong with that at all. Absolutely not. In fact, the Bible really commands that the older women teach the younger women.
Absolutely. In fact, a number of places, we have women who attend the training. Now, we do have a module on homiletics, where it's preaching -centered.
There, the ladies don't participate. That's who we are. That's a part of what we do. But we have a lot of women who will come in and sit in the training because they minister to women or because they minister to children.
And they want the children to grow. If I have the moment, let me... Well, in fact, if you have a story, let's go to a break right now.
Good, please. It is the half -hour mark for a commercial. So, just remember where you left off, and we'll pick up as soon as we return.
Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dean Birch and more on our topic for today,
Reaching and Teaching International Ministries, Missions in Sovereign Grace. Don't go away.
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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.
This is Chris Sorens. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dean Birch of Reaching and Teaching International Ministries.
And for some reason, whenever I think of or whenever I hear his name, Dean Birch, I think of two different separate organizations.
One is the John Birch Society. That's my uncle. And one is the Dean Burgeon Society, which is a
King James only group. It's not a relative. Let's combine them and form the
Dean Birch Society where people must use the King James only and be libertarian and an anti -communist.
But anyway, in fact, somebody told me something very funny about the Dean Burgeon Society, which is a
King James only fraternal organization. You must be a
Baptist to be in the Dean Burgeon Society. But Dean Burgeon was an
Anglican. So Dean Burgeon could not join the Dean Burgeon Society. Who needs consistency?
Right. And our email address, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own on missions and sovereign grace is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And please use your first name at least and give us your city and state of residence in your country of residence if you live outside of the
USA. We do have a listener in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, Jordan, who asks, as someone who is looking into missionary aviation, do you have any suggestions as to how to begin?
Are there any organizations that should be avoided? Missionary aviation,
I'm not really sure what he means by that. Well, I mean, right away, two organizations come to mind right away are MAF, Mission Aviation Fellowship, who has done incredible work down in South and Central America, South America in particular.
Is that like flying missionaries? Absolutely. And like taking supplies and removing, you know, they've done wonderful things.
I mean, you think back to the whole, you know, Nate Saint, you know, aviation, MAF now.
And Jim Elliott. Yes, exactly. That whole, the Ecuador Five. MAF, now they're being squeezed out of some of the
South American countries who are cracking down on some of those things. JARS, Wickliffe's organization, which is aviation -centered, is another good one.
Beyond that, I actually have a connection or two I could look into. So if Jordan would be willing,
I could maybe look in and find some further information in email if you would, if you wouldn't mind my sharing, you sharing an email address with me.
Sure. I have a feeling that Jordan would not mind that. And of course, you could give your contact information as well.
I know that the website is reachingendteaching .org, and that's end spelled out.
But any other email address or anything? Yeah, I mean, my email address is the longest email address in history.
I think if people email me, they really want to, because if not, they're not going to type all this out.
It's my first and last name is Dean dot, or a period, Birch, and my last name is spelled kind of differently for most.
It's B as in Bravo, E -R -T as in Tango, S -C -H. So Dean dot
Birch at reachingendteaching .org. And that's unlike the
John Birch Society. Exactly. Yeah, those little forms where you have to fill out your email address, there's never enough room.
And of course, Jordan, assuming you're still listening, if you give me permission to share your email address,
I will. Yeah, and I can look into it and find some, maybe a better answer. Great. And by the way, before we went to the break, you were going to tell a story.
We were talking about women attending the training and things. And I mentioned
Sunday school or teaching youth. I don't know about you, Chris, and I would imagine many of our listeners out there, we grew up hearing stories.
We hear the story of Abraham or the story of Noah, the story of Moses, the story of David. A little while ago, you mentioned how the
Bible is one book. Well, it's 66 books. Well, we really emphasize it's one book. It's one book written by one author, tells one story.
And especially when we survey the Old Testament, we try to equip teachers to work with our youth by emphasizing, look,
Abraham is not a great story in faithfulness or David is not a great story in courage.
These are all stories, which is part of the one storyline that points to Christ. How many times have people heard
David taught on in a Sunday school program or preached on where we have to slay the giants in our lives and things like that, whereas the purpose of the story is not to teach us to slay giants in our lives.
The purpose of the story is we need a David. We need a deliverer. We're more like the people of Israel who were shaken in our boots because there was an enemy called the
Goliath and we weren't capable of taking him on. And we need one who will step up and will slay the giant, who will slay our enemy.
And what we try to show is how these are not individual, separate, distinct stories, but it's one story.
So the question when you look at Abraham is how does Abraham fit into that storyline, the promise of Genesis 3 .15
that runs all the way through to Christ? How does Noah fit into that? How does Abraham, I just mentioned, how does
Joseph or Judah in Genesis 49, the lion, how does
David fit into that storyline? And our emphasis is, again, to point people to Christ.
And our hope is that it also impacts those who will be working with the youth. So from an early age, as Paul said to Timothy, from the early age, they understand the true meaning of the scriptures, and that is the scriptures are pointing them to Jesus Christ.
How much is an understanding of the Old Testament, how important is that in the evangelism of the gospel of Christ, when you are, especially in foreign lands, when there are many people in the
Western world and in America who have some semblance of what may have occurred in the
Old Testament. They may not have their theology right, but they have an idea. But you may be in lands where the whole thing is a total foreign story to them.
Right, and therefore you need to start with creation. There is a God. There is a God to whom we are responsible. We have offended
Him with our sin. And you can't start with John 3 .16. For God so loved the world.
First of all, who's God? A good exercise that was given to me one time is somebody said, read
John 1 and look at the number of references or statements in John 1 that you need a familiarity with the
Old Testament to even understand what he's saying. You know, law came through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and on and on.
In a biblically literate culture as ours used to be, you can probably go straight to the
New Testament scriptures to talk a person about the gospel. But honestly, you're right, in what's coming in our day and is probably here now and in other cultures, you need to go back to square one.
You need to go back to creation and establish our accountability to a sovereign, holy creator
God whom we've offended with our sin. How much, to your awareness anyway, are the cults doing a far better job at converting individuals into their lives than Christ's church is?
And I'm not speaking as if this is some kind of contest where innate abilities and talents and gifts of persuasion are involved, but I'm just curious to your knowledge about, you know, are there other lands that you know where there's actually more
Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness and other false gospels prominent than the
Christian gospel? Yeah, I think two things. One is, I don't know about more, but some areas where the
Jehovah's Witness are extremely strong. The problem is when these organizations are seen as also being some level of Christian, and what it does is it perverts and confuses an understanding of what the gospel actually is.
But I think as big of a problem as the cults, Chris, is, well, two things.
One, the problem which is ubiquitous, I mean, worldwide, that is the problem of syncretism.
For instance, like the church in Mongolia, it's growing by leaps and bounds, but if you look carefully, you are going to see the effects of shamanism and Buddhism in the
Christian church. When you go down into places in South America, you will see animism and Catholicism in the
Christian church. In fact, to be candid with you, after going on some of these trips and seeing the syncretism in these other cultures, you know,
I come back to our culture and I'm thinking, wow, are we exempt from it? Are we exempt from syncretism in the church in America?
And then I look at our materialism, I look at our embracing of modern psychology in the church, especially under parenting and things like that.
The problem is worldwide. The self -esteem movement. All of the above. It's exactly right. So I think one problem in the church is syncretism.
The other problem is just, I don't want to say aberrant forms of Christianity, but Christianity, I'm hoping
Christianity, but whether it's a level of Pentecostalism or extreme legalism.
One quick example. I had the opportunity when I was in northern Brazil last July or August, whenever it was, it doesn't matter.
I had the privilege of preaching in a little village church. And at the end, it wasn't like I didn't give an invitation and all this kind of stuff.
But what he did is he got up and he basically said, in Portuguese, this is Brazil, you've heard the gospel tonight.
If God is moving on your heart and you want to talk to one of us afterwards, you know, and he said this one gentleman in the room, young guy, started to raise his hand and his wife grabbed his arm and pushed it back down.
I didn't know all this was going on. I was sitting up front and that evening afterwards, the pastor called me over, wanted me to talk with this gentleman.
Here's what happened. He, this is a true story. He's sitting there and this is 90 degrees, high humidity.
And he's sitting there with a t -shirt, a pair of shorts on in this church service, hearing the gospel. He started to raise his hand to say,
I want to talk with somebody about this. His wife grabbed his arm, pushed it down and whispered to him. This is,
I believe a verbatim quote, whispered to him, you can't do this because if you do this, you'll have to wear long pants and we can't afford them.
You can't wear shorts anymore. What I'm saying is there's such a legalistic version of Christianity floating around down there that this young lady is trying to, humanly speaking, prevent her husband from responding to the gospel because she believes responding to the gospel means he can't wear shorts anymore.
And if he can't wear shorts, it's going to put them in more extreme financial problems because they don't have money for him to buy pants.
First, I'm just trying to process this because I'm incredulous that this is actually happening, but this is truth.
This is what If you're going to be legalistic about that, at least give the people the pants for free.
Yeah, I mean, it's a true story. We talk with them afterwards and try to convince them that, no, it's not a matter of shorts or long pants.
It's an issue of the heart. But again, that's just their association, and those built -in, humanly speaking, defenses against the gospel because, well, that's what the gospel is.
It's the clothing that you wear, and this is what the And that's the biggest barrier sometimes you're fighting against.
Well, that actually brings up an interesting question, because I don't know if everyone who might even agree with you on a great deal of theology would have the same answer.
There are standards of modern—I'm sorry—modesty in the scriptures, and when you go to some foreign culture, there's going to be all varying degrees of dress and undress, things that may not even be viewed as sexual in the culture where you are.
It may be completely because of climate or some other cultural reason. You have women walking around completely bare -breasted and things like that.
How much of the Western world do we insist upon when we are evangelizing foreign cultures, especially when it comes to the modesty issue?
Because obviously, if you have men who are missionaries coming from countries where that is very inappropriate dress, it may be a very huge stumbling block for them.
Yeah, yeah. Obviously, you're raising the question of contextualization, and yeah, different people are going to come down with some pretty different answers on that.
I agree if it's going to be a major—for instance, in much of South America, women with young children, breastfeeding is as common as—I heard one person say it's as common as apple pie in America.
I mean, wherever you go. Outside of urban areas, urban areas are very westernized, and therefore, where I was in northern
Brazil, that is not an issue. I mean, if you make it an issue, I'm not sure that would be wisdom.
In Sao Paulo, probably you could make an issue out of it because there, the culture is more westernized, and I think they would have that view of modesty.
I think you've got to be very careful. On the other side as well, for instance, there are places where I would go where if I wore shorts, it would be an offense, and therefore,
I won't. We might look at that as Americans and say, well, that's crazy. It's 95 degrees, it's incredibly humid, what's wrong with wearing shorts?
And the answer is, in their culture, from a modesty perspective, wearing a pair of shorts, cargo shorts, would be offensive, and therefore,
I won't do it. And that's that whole cultural—one of the things I've learned from missionary friends is when people think of a missionary going to a foreign culture, the first thing they think of is learning the language.
As important as that is, learning the culture is every bit, if not more important, because of these very issues.
You can offend or take as offense areas where you shouldn't, just simply because you need to be culturally aware.
So I think cultural sensitivity is huge, but trying to balance that line with legalism, it's hard to give a cold, hard, fast, firm answer, because I think it may even vary a little bit from culture to culture too.
Yeah, because it's interesting, here in this country, the church has gone wild in appeasing the appetites and tastes of the world and seek to pattern their worship and structure as a gathered body to appeal to the broader group of humanity and what they would be listening to in regard to music, how they would be dressing and so on, outside of the context of worship.
So therefore, you have this being done here, and you have it be done, as I'm sure you would agree, to the point where the gospel is compromised, and the holiness of God, the awe, the reverence, the
God -centeredness of worship is totally being distorted and balanced and in favor of man -centered worship and appeasing men.
So when you go overseas, people could be actually guilty of doing the same thing, couldn't they?
We don't want to rattle their feathers too much, and that might be even more than a pun there. Yeah, or their fig leaves, yeah.
Right. Where do you draw the line with that? I don't know if that's an easy answer.
No, I don't think it is. It's certainly not for me to just flippantly throw out an answer. I think a lot of learning has to take place, like, okay, what is this?
Because there are things in every culture that need to be redeemed. And there are things, I mean, God is a God of culture, and what is beautiful...
It's funny, sometimes I think we go the other way, and what I mean by that is also we don't just export the gospel.
We're very concerned about, we don't want to compromise the gospel, but sometimes we add to it, and we end up exporting not the gospel, but American version of the gospel.
So you go into some place where every day they're wearing grass skirts or whatever, but when they come together on Sunday to meet, you know, the guys are wearing white shirts with ties, you know, they're singing
Amazing Grace translated into their language, and there's nothing wrong with that at one level, and yet at the same time, it's like, okay, we've made them
American Christians, not whatever the people group happens to be Christians. And I think there's a tension on both sides.
On the one side, you have to look at something and say, no, that is wrong. That has to be changed. That is wrong, that's an offense, and that one is worthy of being addressed, whereas another issue, no, that's a cultural issue, that's not a right and wrong gospel issue.
And that's tough. It's very difficult to go in, especially, I'm not anti -short -term mission trips, don't get me wrong, but I think short -term mission trips have hurt there, where people go in for one week, for two weeks, they don't know the culture, and yet they're very quick to make those pronouncements that this is evil, this is wrong, when it may not be.
I have some dear brothers who attend our church, brothers and sisters from India, and we would look at some parts of their culture as being very, very dirty, and yet they look at some parts of our culture.
That spoon that I just ate with, that was in somebody else's mouth at breakfast this morning.
Okay, it was washed, but that's not clean to eat a spoon. It's not right, wrong, but they're cultural issues, and it's very easy to go in from your cultural perspective with your glasses on and see wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, when really that's a lack of maturity.
And that's why we have to rely on the people who know the culture, who have learned the culture, who can say, when we teach in northern
Ecuador, we have a missionary who lives in Quito, and a lot of times I rely on him. I'll say,
Cody, talk to me, what's going on here? And he'll tell me, no, Dean, this is something we really have to work on when you're teaching this week, because this is a problem, this is wrong.
But he knows because he's there, he's learning the culture. The doctrines of grace, do you see the doctrines of grace beginning to spread in a significant way in some of these lands that you've been to?
Not as much as what we're seeing in the states. Whether you call them the young Russellson Reformed and some of the other terms.
My younger son is a student at Boyce College in Louisville, the undergrad school where Southern Seminary is.
Named after James Pettigrew Boyce. Absolutely. One of the founders of the Southern Baptist denomination.
Exactly, yeah, absolutely. In the 1800s. Yeah, and the abstract principles and all the above. The majority of students there at Boyce, at Southern, are going to be ones who embrace the doctrines of grace.
Southeastern, similar as well, you're seeing it growing in the seminaries, and I see that more stateside.
Fortunately, organizations, and I don't say this in an arrogant way, organizations such as ours, there's one called
TLI, Training and Literacy International, doctrines of grace organizations, and this seems counterintuitive to some people, doctrines of grace organizations who are extremely mission -minded.
My friend David Sitton down at Two Every Tribe Ministries. I've had him on the program. David, doctrines of grace guy, and not only exporting the gospel, but the scriptural gospel from both an evangelistic perspective, leading people to faith under that understanding, but also organizations such as ours, which are also going in and doing the discipleship, teaching them and teaching them from the perspective of, what does the
Bible say? Let's just look at it. As many as were ordained to eternal life believed. What does that mean?
You know, Romans 8, those whom he foreknew, he predestined, those he predestined he called, those he called he justified, those he justified he glorified.
What does that mean? And teaching them and having, it's not, okay, we're coming, and this is what we're teaching you, it's, no, let's look at the scriptures and let the scriptures teach you, and I think from that, we're going to see the doctrines of grace spread.
Praise God. And you mentioned something that I actually had as the, nearly the entire subject of an interview, those that are turning missions trips into vacations, churches and other groups that raise a ton of money to send the youth and other people to a foreign land for some kind of a so -called mission trip, when if they had actually given that money to the indigenous people, it would have went a lot further and so on.
What is your comment on that there? Both. Well, I want to be careful because I don't want to paint with too white of a brush.
You might even, the good side is that you could actually possibly plant within the heart of a young person a desire to be a missionary.
Absolutely. I think the important thing is that a trip be done correctly. Just one or two for instances.
One was last year, two years ago, one of our deacons from our church, Mark Saylor, my son Josh, and I went to the
Ivory Coast to visit missionaries, and it cost a couple thousand dollars for this trip, and one or two of the people that we visited up there, indigenous people, the
Nyerafolo people group, Chris, one or two of them said, we know you care because you came.
I've heard David Platt say that. He gets off a plane in Somalia, and a pastor will come up and say, the fact that you actually came.
So there is something about physically going with your body, showing up being there, that is not replaced by a check.
However, comma. A lot of short -term mission trips, that's all wear the same color
T -shirt, and I'll be careful. I just offended someone with that one. I didn't mean it, but you know what I mean, where we're all going to go, and here to me is the big thing,
Chris. So many times we go on mission trips to some location, and we go there saying, we're here, and here's what we're going to do.
Rather than going to a missionary on the ground and say, number one, would it be a help and a blessing for us to come, and number two, if we do, you tell us what you want us to do.
We just had this conversation in Ecuador two weeks ago when we were down there teaching. We're looking at taking a small group of people from our church in Camp Hill down there in September.
And what we said, we had this little meeting with some of the leaders of the one church, and I just said, listen, here's the bottom line.
If we come, we want to leave with you saying, we're glad they came, not we're glad they've left.
And honestly, I've talked with missionaries, Chris, and you probably have too. Some of them have had short -term trips come where when they leave, it's a blessing.
Because teams come, here's what we're coming to do a VBS, we're coming to do a medical clinic, we're coming to do this.
We don't know what we're doing. They know what is necessary. So when it's driven by the people on the ground, and they say, one, it's good for you to come, and two, here's what we need you to do,
I think short -term mission trips are wonderful, and it gets people out of this, as John Piper calls it, this
Disneyland called America, gets them into a different culture and exposes them to things, and who knows, may plant a very seed that God will water and someday raise up a missionary from that.
And I would imagine it would be wise to have most, if not all of what is going to be done determined by dialogue with the foreign pastors and those running those churches before you even leave
American soil. Before you even think about going. Right, right, right. Before you make a commitment to go, you want them to have told you, here's what we want you to do on this trip.
Right. We have to go to our next break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
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And you may remain anonymous if it's about something personal and private that you're asking our guest about, but if not, please at least give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the
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that's linbrook baptist .org welcome back this is chris arnzen if you just tuned us in for the last hour we have had on the program dean birch who is with reaching and teaching international ministries we are discussing discussing missions in sovereign grace and before we go to a listener question uh you wanted to jump back to where we left off uh during our last discussion before the break about short -term's mission trip yeah i just wanted to make sure i didn't come across like too negative like i don't think they're good or helpful or whatever because personally it was a short -term mission trip that opened my eyes um i had been asked through a friend to serve on the board of to every tribe ministries back in 2003 and honestly i saw a as just some parachurch secondary whatever and uh when i accepted this position i i didn't know what to do you know so i went on a short -term mission trip with with the organization and it was it was that first cross -cultural experience that really had a deep impact on me and uh subsequently on my family too as we've made a couple had made a couple trips with them so you know i'm not being negative or poo -pooing short -term trips because as i said i think they're wonderful i just think sometimes sometimes a little more homework needs to be done up front to make sure that we're serving those to whom we're going rather than almost having them serve us um people may not agree with every theological t that he crosses or i that he dots but steve saint at um itech nate saint's son um steve and his kids and the organization down there have done some wonderful research and provide good information on putting together good short -term mission trips so i just wanted to try to be balanced on that uh we do have a listener pastor ed roman of carlisle baptist church carlisle pennsylvania i usually don't give out the full name of our people our listeners i should say uh emailing questions but i wanted to allow ed to have a plug for his congregation carlisle baptist church on walnut bottom road and carlisle pennsylvania is listening today and he asks what are the reactions you've you have received from students as you have engaged them with biblical teaching i'm not 100 sure if he is referring to foreign students or students here i imagine he's referring to the students like the the attendees of our training when we're when we are over in the other cultures okay uh it's been very very positive um even occasionally when you have some people who come who think kind of what you said earlier chris i don't know they really need this training and all of a sudden they have their eyes open they see things a good for instance was after having taught that old testament survey module how the whole old testament points to christ um my wife and i were actually down in the same community in ecuador a little city called city called octavalo in the andes mountains about two hours hour and a half north of quito and we were with some of the people and the one man who's one of the leaders in the church just said wow ever since that module when you guys did that my old my whole old testament has just opened up to me now when i read it it just has purpose it makes sense i can see it's just the response has been very very positive um it's nice to go to a place one time but when you have the chance to go back a second or a third or a fourth time and just see a hunger on behalf of the students you see them open up a little bit more during q a time they feel more free to ask questions because in some cultures that's that's almost difficult for them because you know you're the teacher they're the student and asking questions can almost be seen as disrespectful and sometimes when you go the first or second time they don't really ask questions but once you develop some relationship there and some of that stuff breaks down you know the response on behalf of the students has been incredibly encouraging um just regarding their their biblical acumen opening up they're seeing the scriptures and and their own ability to open their bibles and read their bibles and and understand what the scriptures are saying such that they can you know our ministry motto second timothy 2 2 so that they can entrust it to faithful men who can then entrust it to others and it's it's it's been extremely encouraging well pastor ed roman has a follow -up question tell the stories perhaps he wants you to give anecdotes uh about what has happened well just i mean what one of the one or a couple one of the stories that just was very humbling was uh the first time we went to this little city called otavalo there was uh the man that i just referenced a few moments ago he got up in the very beginning and just looked at there were three of us there to teach and he just said because you are here i know god answers prayer and that goes back to the point i was making earlier about you know many of these people are biblically illiterate but they realize that they are and they're hungry to be taught they're hungry to be fed um there was a man who raised his hand with a question during we we try to have q a time um number one about what we taught that day in case there are questions that need to be clarified but also we open it up to anything ministry wise anything that's going on in ministry they have a question about um a gentleman who i think was one of the sharper people in the room raised his hand and said i have a question in this community not the church but in the community during month of july june whatever they have a celebration where they actually sacrifice animals to the sun doesn't your church do that no they sacrifice preachers anyway he said uh they they southern baptist church i guess they uh they sacrifice animals and i said okay you know we're not in kansas anymore toto and he then said my question is as christians is it okay for us to eat the meat that's been sacrificed and i'm thinking you know i think i've read something on that so i honestly i said well take your bible open the first corinthians chapter eight and he opened he just started reading and his eyes what did my mom used to say his eyes got as big as saucers just wow the bible actually speaks to that and answers the question you know and we talked about it and everything but it's just it's real life ministry it's it's if you pardon the cliche it's rubber meeting the road and you know the anecdotes are they're real you know marital issues in the church you know you have the machismo culture where these guys are are just being you know if i can use it they're just being jerks as husbands you know because that's the macho thing to do you know and yeah dealing with i mean it's real life you know and and and not just coming and saying well here's what i think you know i'm the american i know all this that's that's baloney but it's let's open up the scriptures let's see what god says about this and it's been so encouraging to see people just get that frame of reference turn to the scriptures to see what god is saying i brought this up on other programs and uh i know that some of my listeners who listen regularly probably were rolling their eyes when they hear me oh here he goes again when i repeat myself but some things i think are worthy of repeating especially since we're specifically talking about sovereign grace and missions um i have heard nightmare stories of from people who are familiar with denominations that reject the doctrines of grace who send out missionaries and it's all about uh a numbers game if if a missionary is not bringing in converts numerically to the satisfaction of whatever denominational mission board that's paying for them that person will be yanked and because they are really looking at this from a totally man -centered perspective on is this human being that we have sent out as a missionary gifted enough and talented enough and articulate enough to persuade people to make a decision for christ to convince them to change their minds and so on which really uh demonstrates that they don't understand how salvation works yeah i don't want to paint with too wide of a brush because there are some organizations out there who probably don't agree with the way we would we would see things soteriologically who do take a long view and do realize um yeah maybe i shouldn't but new tribes um we would not have a lot of agreement with them soteriologically but they understand you know they'll they'll leave missionaries someplace a long time but but so i want to be careful that i'm fair but at the same time i understand what you're asking because i've often thought um i'm big on having historical heroes and one of my historical heroes was admiral judson seven years in burma before his first convert um the father of modern missions william carey is often referred to as such again about seven years before seeing a convert many mission boards today would have pulled them prior to you know why because they're not producing you know you read stories of people who spent 20 30 40 years of their lives ministering in difficult cultures japan for one with a small handful of fruit to point to from the standpoint of converts but yet they were faithful day in day out serving christ serving him faithfully you know again it's just that's the question the question was required of stewards did they have big numbers or did they be found faithful you know and i i think that it behooves every mission organization regardless of your soteriology to measure the success of missionaries on the field by their faithfulness not by a numerical count because what happens then is they feel pressured into doing things to engender converts you know whether it's watering down the gospel cheapening the gospel or somebody showed some kind of interest so okay well here we had a person respond and they speak in very gray nebulous terms so that it it looks better in the next newsletter that you send home um you know it's it's almost like it fosters almost a a lying culture um you have that situation where places you know they'll say well we've had 18 people come to christ and it says where two or three are gathered so we've planted about six churches and they'll report that you know but again while it's while it's wrong while it's dishonest and i'm not giving them a pass for that at the same time they're pushed into that by the very thing that you've mentioned yes and isn't it interesting that when we look at the scriptures uh jesus christ had a habit of thinning the herd when it got too big by saying something that was true and simultaneously very unpopular or unappealing to the senses of the natural man john 6 they all leave yeah you know and peter are you guys leaving too or or john 8 many believed in him well you are my disciples if you continue you know you're right it was it wasn't the big you know well you made some semblance of whatever so come on you're one of us yeah and it also uh i i have been uh chided very often by friends and acquaintances who view me and my reformed friends and brothers and colleagues as being narrow -minded and judgmental because we do not participate in a lot of the broader ecumenical activities and so on and believe me uh i am not some narrow -minded uh bigot when it comes to fellowship with people outside my uh immediate circles of reform theology in fact i have uh as i've said before i have friends who are arminian uh wesleyan uh methodist pentecostal and many other types of non -christians i'm only kidding i'm only kidding um i get a big laugh at a pastor's lunch and i was but um uh but no i do have a very broad circle of of friends that i have fellowship with in and especially in the past on the show when i knew more of the local pastors uh on long island i would quite often have and i hope that that actually happens here in carlisle where i have more of the local pastors on well i think it's biblical i mean you look at romans 14 who are you to judge another man's servant in other words if if if the blood of christ has purchased that person's salvation i need to be very careful yes how i look at him how i treat him okay we disagree theologically we disagree on some things but at the same time if the blood of my savior purchased his salvation i need to be very very careful there and um but at the same time uh paul could paul could have taken the apostle paul i'm speaking of could have taken advantage of uh maintaining numeric strength uh in opposition to the gentiles and the the the in opposition to rome and the pagan religion culture that surrendered them by saying you know the judaizers want you to be circumcised but you know they still agree with us on jesus christ being god and our savior and messiah why don't we just put those kind of issues on the table for some future meeting but uh we're going to really just welcome them in and we're going to work together with them because they are after all our brothers he didn't have that attitude at all when it came to something that he believed was an encroachment upon the gospel of jesus christ that's the that's the key and i think that's where it calls for much maturity on our part to look at something and say is this a gospel issue if it is yeah galatians 1 you know if anyone bring any other gospel other than the one i've given let him be accursed and that is an issue worth dividing on um but at the same time paul wrote romans 14 and said well some of you want to observe some days and some of you don't let each one be fully persuaded in his own mind because there he didn't see it as being a gospel issue the gospel wasn't at stake and i think that's where the christian maturity and discernment comes in but you're right the tendency to want to compromise even the gospel for the sake of numbers you know that's always there and i think that's one of the reasons why we have to be crystal clear on what the gospel is we need to be reminding ourselves to quote dr jack miller preach the gospel to ourselves every day preach it to our people every day make make sure people are clear on what the gospel is so that when these other issues encroach upon it we recognize it as such you know this may seem like a redundant question since i have a christian talk show and the majority of our listeners are christians and perhaps even seasoned christians and even pastors and so on but i do have listeners that occasionally will pop into the conversation with emailed questions who are muslims who are roman catholics who are members of other religions uh what is the gospel yeah i mean the gospel is not join our club the gospel is not wave our banner the gospel is there is a god and this god is a holy god and he has created us we are responsible to him and every one of us has offended him by our sin we have one of two choices we can either stand before him on our own and face eternal condemnation eternal separation from everything that's good everything is good is god separation from him for all of eternity or if there would just be a substitute one who could stand in our place one who could take our penalty because there is a penalty and this god is just and penalty must be doled out for sin so our only hope is to have a substitute who number one can take our penalty and exhaust it to the full and number two provide us with the very righteousness that we need so that when god looks upon us he sees us no longer as sinful not even as neutral but as righteous and that's the only place you're going to find that substitute is in the person of jesus christ the second person of the trinity very god of very god he who knew no sin became sin was constituted sin so that those who believe in him those who trust in him those who place all their eggs in one basket and that one basket is jesus christ they receive his righteousness and therefore when they stand before him in that gray they will be a great day they'll be accepted not because of any good works that they have done they've done none but simply because of the works of their savior the lord jesus christ the gospel is jesus christ and jesus christ's payment for sin and his provision of righteousness is all we need it's all we ever could need it's all we want is to be able to stand righteous before our creator one day what would you say are the uh indisputable essential core things that one must believe though for the gospel to be genuine like for instance uh the uh sinless perfect life of christ is that not an element in the fact that he is deity he is god and his death his substitutionary death and oh i think it's huge it's huge burial and resurrection and ascension yeah uh i think we need to look at the question how everybody believes in jesus oh i believe in g well the question is what jesus do you believe right do you believe in the jesus of the bible the one who is god the one the one who has existed for all eternity and yet at a point in time poured himself into human flesh the word became flesh and dwelt among us so he is god incarnate god in the flesh he lived a perfectly sinless life he had to if he had sin he ceases to be our perfect substitute so i think the the person of christ the sufficiency i think that's a huge word whether a person articulates that word or not but it's a huge word it's a huge concept the sufficiency of christ because as soon as you add to christ you've taken him away and therefore the essential nature of christ is christ alone solus christus and i'm assuming that when when people evangelize i'm talking about nations and tribes like well you have mentioned before to every tribe david sitton's organization where these people have never heard the gospel prior to these evangelists and missionaries coming there i'm i'm sure that you will have some people who even seem to make some kind of a profession of belief in the great spirit jesus and they may have some kind of understanding of him as being you know some some spiritual being or entity or force but it still may be a totally false or heretical understanding of jesus though don't don't these things still have to be worked out uh in the in the in the profession of the person uh for them to be deemed a true convert absolutely absolutely okay great you've made this profession but let's talk about this let's flesh it out further and i think also that's part of the discipleship process as you're discipling people at times it will be revealed whether their profession was genuine or not one of the biggest problems on the mission field today and i'll say this because of our organization but chris one of the biggest problems on the mission field today is the great commission go into all the world and make disciples a lot of organizations have cheapened that down to where basically would say go into all the world and make converts and therefore they'll go in and i don't know if i shared this with you before but it's a story that i tell virtually everywhere i go um i was in louisville kentucky a year ago and i was talking with a gentleman from an organization i will not mention the name of the organization i don't want to throw them under the bus because honestly the people with this organization have more courage in their little finger than i have my whole body but i was talking with this gentleman and he was telling me a story about a man in northern india who bought a bicycle a drum and a speaker and he would ride into a village and he would beat the drum for a while till he got a big crowd of people and then he would take the speaker microphone out of solar pack and he would preach the gospel so the guys telling me the story and i said well what would happen he said well in some villages they would rush them they would beat knock them down off the bike and they would beat him up thinking oh my goodness i said what would he do they said well he'd get back on his bicycle and he'd ride to the next village you know and again i'm amazed by the courage of this man and he said oh yeah but wait i'll tell you the best part sometimes he'll ride into a village he'll he'll preach the gospel and 10 15 20 people the spirit of god will move and people will be brought to faith and a church is born right there and i said wow i said what does he do then so he gets on his bicycle and he rides to the next village and i'm thinking what happens to that 10 15 20 people a church is born what is a church right who where's the leadership where's the story where's the knowledge of the script do they even have the scriptures they haven't heard the whole counsel of god yeah they have no access to it where's the discipleship going therefore into all the world or ponta ethnae to go to all peoples and make disciples baptizing them and teaching them to observe whatsoever i've commanded you in this what dr sills refers to as this need for speed that we've got to go to the next group and we do have to go to the next group so don't get me wrong but we've got to stay we've got to disciple these people because some of these people aren't even genuine converts but how are they ever going to know how is anybody going to know answer you disciple you teach you explain and in that process it's going to be determined whether these people even have an understanding of what it is they said they embraced in the first place that's the need for discipleship we talk about unreached peoples that's huge but one of the things dr sills emphasizes again is the tragedy of the world is not that there are so many unreached the real tragedy is that there are so many who are undisciplined and which goes back to one of the initial points we were bringing up the need of teachers yes exactly you know i mean there are people who are gifted pioneer church planters i mean they'll go into the bush they'll go into an urban culture they're gifted evangelists they share they got people but if they just move on who's left we need teachers we need teachers who can who can work with these people and raise them up and teach them to observe all the things whatsoever jesus that's part of the great commission part of the great commission is not going and getting people to raise hands or walk an aisle or sign a card or even genuinely say look i truly believe in jesus okay great that's a start it's an important start but it's a start we're told to make disciples and the discipling process comes through a result of teaching and living life on life with them we're going to be going to our final break now and if you'd like to join us on the air we've got just about a half hour left so we would love for you to join us on the air if you have a question at chris arnzen at gmail .com
c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com please include at least your first name city and state and country of residence if you live outside the usa don't go away we'll be right back with dean birch of reaching and teaching international ministries paul wrote to the church at galatia for am i now seeking the approval of man or of god or am i trying to please man if i were still trying to please man i would not be a servant of christ hi i'm mark lucan's pastor of providence baptist church we are reformed baptist church and we hold to the london baptist confession of faith of 1689 we are in nofolk massachusetts we strive to reflect paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how god views what we say and what we do than how men view these things that's not the best recipe for popularity but since that wasn't the apostles priority it must not be ours either we believe by god's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man and to be vessels of christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us and to build up the body of christ in truth and love if you live near nofolk massachusetts or plan to visit our area please come and join us for worship and fellowship you can call us at 508 -528 -5750 that's 508 -528 -5750 or go to our website to email us listen to past sermons worship songs or watch our tv program entitled resting in grace you can find us at providence baptist church ma .org
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chris arnzen at gmail .com and dean there are there are people there are a lot of people who when they hear about somebody who says that they are a quote quote calvinist a reformed christian or sovereign grace believer they will say if they hear about a person that makes those claims and yet also has a heart for missions has a heart for reaching the lost heart for evangelizing they will say well you know it's too bad that they are calvinists but at least they have a blessed contradiction in their approach to ministry because they are perhaps even naively contradicting their own statement of faith by going out there and doing the work of an evangelist and reaching the lost and going overseas because obviously that is that is a contradiction to the very teaching of election because after all if god chooses before the foundation of the world who's going to be saved who needs evangelists and missionaries so how do you react to that you said we have 25 minutes um well a couple things first of all yeah i mean you get to say well it's an obedience issue and we're told to um and therefore we're being obedient but number two i think earlier i alluded to the fact that i think a lot of times um people struggle with deductions of grace whatever terminology you want to use because of caricatures or just simply misunderstanding um as i said earlier with election that uh the basic presupposition of everybody's kind of neutral and god is saying well you're in you're out you're in you're out as opposed to all of humanity rushing in the opposite direction shaking their fists against god that's the starting point and his reaching down and saving some is grace it's you know but again that's a misunderstanding same thing here um it's just a misunderstanding first of all that that as a as believing in the doctrines of grace we wouldn't want to have the joy and the privilege to be part of rescuing his sheep um i mean right there that's enough but historically yeah i mean that's i mentioned my my historical hero as a missionary adoniram judson strong what do you want to use calvus doctrines of grace all of the above william carey we mentioned his name father of modern missions um yeah the uh jonathan edwards another historical hero he said well he was a theologian he wasn't a missionary yeah he was a missionary um when he was fired by his church in northampton he actually served the next couple years reaching out to the indians up northwest of northampton before he accepted the call to princeton which is basically what killed him and david brainerd david brainerd right his almost son -in -law or whatever yeah who was a strong calvinist so history is littered with with calvinists who are missionaries in fact i would say you're going to find have a hard time historically finding more non -calvinists who were missionaries uh you are just uh by my landlord in this building that we are sitting in the parsonage of 19th century presbyterian minister george norcross you were my landlord pointed to you the very area of the room downstairs where his his brother -in -law sheldon jackson wrote up a proposal of some kind that involved the importing of reindeer from siberia to alaska because he was a missionary to the alaska the eskimos and native americans and is in fact one of the time time magazine's top 10 alaskans of history sheldon jackson another calvinist who had this burden for those people yes i think it's historically inaccurate to say that as a calvinist you should not be interested in missions or it's a surprise that you are because again you you're just fitting in the long line historically with with those who were like -minded you know robert moffitt john patton and the list goes on but i think again i mean we can point to people history and if they could point that fine at the end of the day what does the bible say you know and you consider statements like the apostle paul who would be willing to say i endure all things i mean if that doesn't speak of what most missionaries have done um i mean the stories of what missionary people refer to me as a missionary i don't like that term i live in lewisbury pennsylvania i speak english everywhere i go it's my culture i i don't consider myself a missionary i don't i personally have a very i have a problem with using the same term as just my friend who i was just with two weeks ago down in ecuador this man and his wife you know they they went to haiti a month later was the earthquake and they're pulling bodies out of the rubble they were robbed at gun point they buried a three -year -old daughter and yet he stays in another culture live in ecuador now learning a different culture and all that you know what makes him stay and the answer is grace he endures all things for the sake of the elect or to me i mean i'm gonna stop hitting it sorry people punch in the forehead um acts 18 when the apostle paul is evidently you know shaking in his boots about going into corinth and god says to paul don't be afraid paul for i have many people in that city according to what most people would think today that paul would say shoot if he's got many people in that city thank good i don't need to go in there they'll be saved with or without me i'm bailing i'm going someplace else but the fact that god said paul i have many people in that city was what emboldened him to go into corinth and preach the gospel and to basically rescue some of his sheep from perishing so it's it's exactly the opposite you you you point me to a pond and give me a fishing pole and say maybe there are fish in there maybe they'll bite i'm not that excited but you point me to a pond give me a pole and say there's fish in there and they're going to bite because god has seen to it you know let's let's let's throw some worms on those hooks and get it in that water because they're going to bite and if we are assured in the scriptures specifically in the book of revelation that christians in glory worshiping christ will be from out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation that gives the reformed person or the sovereign grace believer the calvinist the zeal to go out there and and say this is god's work he is going to call out a people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation and i am there to be used as a tool in his hands to uh preach the gospel and and the very preaching of the gospel and the evangelism of missionaries is the means that god uses to draw out his elect and save them yeah i think the objection you just touched on something chris i think is so important that is i think the objection is again it's a man -centeredness and that is well if that man is going to believe why would you go anyway or something like that our ultimate reason i mean if you read chapter one of john piper's book let the nations be glad our ultimate reason for missions is not our concern for people that is a reason and it's a big reason but our ultimate reason is we want to see our god glorified missions exist because worship doesn't there are places on this planet where there are people who will be born they will be raised they will die and never once hear the name of jesus that's not good enough we need to take that name there because you know i often say the great commission which is recorded in matthew 28 was first recorded in genesis chapter one when god said be fruitful multiply and fill the earth god's design from the very beginning was to have his image bearers over all of this terrestrial ball worshiping him and as long as our god is not being worshiped in places on this earth we have a reason to go and the reason to go is a god -centered reason it's almost like if you could picture the earth and wherever there are believers wherever there are churches there's a light and you look at the place and there's light light light hey there's darkness there my god deserves light there let's go there and let's preach the gospel to those people i believe god has people there let's go to quote david sitton let's go get him for jesus and when we go and we preach the gospel and people come to faith yes it's wonderful people are safe from their sin they're they're they're going to spend all of eternity in his presence around the throne yes that's all wonderful but even greater still our god is now being worshiped there where previously he wasn't worshiped that's a god -centered motivation for evangelism and missions yes and uh even the the most ardent uh opposer of the doctrines of sovereign grace uh the most strident arminian wesleyan uh whatever term you might want to use or whatever background they may be from if you were to ask that person when you sit around uh your thanksgiving giving dinner table or even when you are just praying normally with your family uh do you give god the credit and prayer for the money that you have and the food on your table and so forth well of course i do well if god is giving you those things why don't you just sit around and wait for them i mean they don't obviously view the the illogic inconsistency behind that accusation they would hurl at us now obviously the the wicked of the world uh i have i have a feeling uh if you ask donald trump the uh the question why are you rich what are you kidding me because i earned it yeah it's not my hard work my skill my skills my gift sound like nebuchadnezzar in chapter four of daniel right this this great babylon which i have built yeah yeah yeah uh so they don't they don't even see the inconsistency in that that yes god does bless us with the money that we have and the food on our table and the shelter overhead but there's a means by which i think we achieve those things i think sometimes we especially as americans we want to have answers for things and we're not content with tension um i don't understand how god can be three yet one but i embrace it because the scriptures teach it i don't understand how jesus could be fully god and fully man unmixed yet inseparable but the scriptures teach it i believe it but yet when it comes to our soteriology a person will i don't understand how man can be responsible and yet god be sovereign and rather than allowing to live with that tension they just throw one out and i'll admit there is a tension there there's a tension when i read acts chapter two that says that these men with wicked hands did what god had ordained from before the foundation of the world would be done did god ordain that it would be done or were they culpable for what they did the answer is yes and we've got to be fine with that and i think because there's some mystery there there's some but i'm not exactly sure how that works they just throw it out and say well it's got to be up to man then and they're not willing to allow for that same tension there that how can man be responsible how can man be culpable for his sin and yet god be sovereign and the answer is he is that's what the bible teaches we must believe it and i want to make sure that uh that the listener walks away today with the core things that you definitely want etched in their hearts and minds today so i'd like to let you just unburden your heart today for a little bit to make sure that those are included in the broadcast before we run out of time before we realize it i mentioned a few minutes ago chris that you know the word that motivates me or us is the word access i think there are two words one is the word access and one is the word redundancy um you know when i say access places where we travel um there's just there's no access there's just no access to being taught there's some places there's no access access to the gospel that's not my role i'm not a pioneer church planter you know we go to quichua indians in northern ecuador our belief is the best people to plant quichua churches are quichuas so let's go and let's equip them so that they can do it but they don't have the access to being equipped so that's what drives me that's what drives us to give them access these men are buy or try vocational they're itinerant farmers they own small businesses they can't pick up and drive two hours hour and a half to keto every day for seminary classes you know they just can't financially they can't logistically so what happens they go untrained or we bring training to them we're bringing access to them um our church has a plurality model where we have got more than one sharing the pastoral duties if i'm not there i'm not going to be there this sunday because i'll be in in haiti um i'll be back next sunday but then the following two i'll be in northern brazil our church functions just fine there's built -in redundancy there i'm redundant may there might say i'm not necessary but we have redundancy here down there there's no one to teach them there's no one to go so those are the things that that drive me and i believe our organization our reaching and teaching was founded by dr david sills he when he returned to the states after serving as a missionary in ecuador and with the ecuadorian seminary down there he would have pastors whom he had met contact him saying hey could you come down and teach us come down and teach us on this issue or that issue and he would go down and he would do issue based training to respond and then he realized wait a minute these men don't know what you quoted earlier the whole council of god and so he stepped back and created this program where we can go three times a year for three years and give them a basic level education in the scriptures a biblical understanding a biblical worldview so that they're equipped to be able to serve the people whom god has given them and to spread the gospel throughout those areas we would travel whether it's in brazil whether it's in ecuador panama wherever we pass these little villages and i would always ask the same question in in ecuador a couple weeks ago is there a church here and man no we passed you another village no all these villages all these people no access every week every lord's day every whatever to hearing the gospel preached and having the privilege of taking what god has taught me or taught us here in the states i've sat under amazing teachers as you know my personal mentor fred zaspel a walking dictionary of theology a dear friend yes he has been a guest in this program oh i mean he where would i be i mean he taught me so much and i did teach but he also gave me exposure to to reading the right books and listening to the right people and you know the education that i have received and i still believe in that you know what god said to abraham you know i will bless you so that you will be a blessing to others and the reasons why god blesses us to bless others and you know i'm not very well equipped financially but i have been well equipped i don't say intellectually it sounds arrogant and i'm not either but i've been exposed to very good teaching and you know silver or gold have i none but what i have i give thee and that is i've had access to teaching during my life so i have the privilege now of taking it to others and again our emphasis second timothy 2 -2 when we teach the teaching does not stop with the people whom we are teaching we're teaching you so that you will take this and turn it over to others who will then turn it over to others and on and on and we see sound teaching we see discipleship and mentoring spreading through these areas and uh this may sound like an odd question because hyper calvinism is probably the greatest thing amongst calvinists that prevented missionary work but i'm gonna still ask the question anyway do you see a problem on the mission field with hyper calvinism uh at all praise god no i haven't i guess that's because of what i opened up the question yeah if god's gonna save him he'll save him like they told like they told carrie um i have not seen it i've not encountered it um i've encountered a number of things you know just even two weeks ago in in ecuador um learning of some churches who have even embraced the doctrines of grace but have also embraced an extreme level of legalism which is extremely frustrating so you so you see a lot of problems like that i mean it's a church and it's it's a church it's gonna have problems but i've not encountered any hyper calvinism thankfully no they've adopted the extreme legalism because of the missionaries and evangelists who are themselves legalists is that what you mean no i have no clue i have no clue all of i was just talking with people and they're saying yeah there's this church in keto itself where you know they're very very legalistic and very this they actually they preach and teach the doctrines of grace but you know chris i remember hearing a couple different people who say to me things like well sometimes people who believe in grace are not always the most gracious and i think that is a struggle that we always have to fight against because the very doctrine that should humble us the most sometimes has a tendency to puff us up and you will sometimes see results or you'll see things like that on the field but not really you know most people when they come to an understanding you know they're just so blown away by the fact that well like my history when i first embraced the doctrines of grace it was a good friend of mine who was a chiropractor he would i pulled a hamstring and i was lying on the table he was trying to loosen up the musculature back there and um i remember just turning to him and looking at him and say well yeah jack if that's true then why me and he looked at me and he said exactly and he walked out of the room you know and and i think sometimes we just have to be careful that we never lose the why me of our salvation just to touch on the because of the fact i always have to remind myself that people listening may not be aware of all these terms that i threw out there but hyper calvinism many people when they hear that term they think it just means somebody who is a believer in the quote quote five points of calvinism they will say that's a hyper calvinist or somebody who is truly theologically reformed in a historic sense people you know but that is not true the hyper calvinists are those that deny the use of means by god to bring about his purposes yeah and by the way i when i was clumsily trying to give the example before of a person um who is thankful to god for the the money that he earns and the food on his table i was not meaning meaning by that that men earn their salvation but what i was trying to give the analogy for is that that in the same way uh evangelists and missionaries are used of god to draw in converts just as the man who goes out to earn his money is a means by which it's our responsibility right right right right not the salvation itself is a supernatural and free gift of god that does not involve the efforts of man at all but but he uses men as the evangelist as the means to bring them in to hear the good news right and i think most people if you press most people are calvinist when they're on their knees yes you know i have good friends who do not agree with me on the doctrines of grace and we're good friends we really are and yet i've said to them things like you know you're you're just you're just having fun with me because i know you really believe no i don't yes you do no i don't and how do you think what makes you think i do and the answer is i've heard you pray for your mother i've heard you pray for your brother i've heard you pray in other words i've heard you say lord please save my mother i said you're actually praying something that your theology doesn't allow him to do yeah people are calvinists on their knees and in fact spurgeon i don't have this quote in front of me but he had a a wonderful quote about how nobody prays like a consistent arminian i thank you that i have received this free will that is so wise that i have made the correct choice to follow you and that kind of thing yeah nobody nobody who is a faithful disciple of christ no matter what their theology is on paper boasts in prayer like that yeah exactly yeah so you're saying the reason you're christian is because you were smart enough yeah that's hard one to admit to and when it boils down to it that's really the only alternative that the rejector of sovereign grace has as to why one person becomes a christian and his neighbor doesn't yeah it has to be if it's not the sovereign choice of god it has to be that you who came to christ were either smarter or more humble or more religious or more sensitive over immorality or there had to be something innate about you that was superior to your neighbor just like in the apostle paul in acts 9 right he there was something in him that all of a sudden he just said you know what i think i'm going to change my mind and believe or maybe not maybe it didn't happen and he uh and uh there are some who falsely accuse or wrongly think that when we have been elected by god before the foundation of the world this unique group of individuals that only god knows before regeneration anyway who they are that they are somehow we are saying that they are somehow superior no we came out of the same lump of sinful clay as romans 9 that's why i said just the if you understand it should make you the most humble person around yeah no question and uh when you um encounter people uh overseas if you could give me a contrast to the opposition faced in different parts of the world to the gospel uh compared to what is the opposition you receive here in a quote quote civilized nation like the united states and i use that term loosely as we murder millions of babies in the womb every year usually the response from what i gather from you know is more of a religious response meaning no i have my religion you know i'm okay because i practice this or i disagree with this because i worship the spirits or because my shaman does his dance or because whatever whereas in the states it's just nobody cares you know you try to talk to people about eternal things things of significance and you know if am i allowed to say this they just blow it off you know that that's i find that more often to be the case here where here it's just the fact of people just don't care the apathy about anything including eternal issues whereas a lot of places where we travel it's not an apathy it's a false belief that you know their religion that they do have is sufficient right and of course um well let me ask you uh would there be as much uh overt pride in the opposition of the the foreigner in the uh un -evangelized area i mean obviously pride is a universal sin of men but what i mean is the lack of recognition that they are sinners even in need of rescuing from from hell or even from their own sin no i don't see that i see more of a you know yeah you know we we do have problems but my religion solves those problems not a i don't need that you know which is more the response you get here you know i mean i've had the privilege of just you know walking onto people's porches there and sitting down and talking with them and you know they're very they're very quick to listen and and you know it's just okay i've heard your religion well this is mine thank you very much have a great day you know not i'll get out of here who needs that kind of stuff how how antiquated you know no i don't really encounter that no i know that it is a no -brainer that reaching and teaching international ministries like any other christian ministry needs financial support i want you to tell our listeners not only how they can do that but also what other ways can they be involved can they participate say somebody says wow you know i want to be in some way involved in either training uh because i have a a background in that or i want to be a missionary i want to be trained myself to be a missionary absolutely well i mean i would first say with i know we're a little short on time go to our website reachingandteaching .org
there are places where we're looking for people to go with us to travel to teach one thing we're big on chris is we're a big local church organization we're big on having local churches partner with us for instance there may be a location in el salvador that we're wanting to open up but we won't open up and start training there until we have partner churches in the states who have stepped up and said hey we will help we will send teachers once a year or maybe twice or maybe all three times per year so we're always looking for churches to partner with us to help open up more training venues financially reaching and teaching .org
there's a place where you can give there's a thing called give online you can give to the organization the organization obviously we do in order to exist as a christian organization it works and not one of us draws a salary but there are still costs and expenses of running an organization so that's necessary each of us who are on staff or cross -cultural missionaries we are supported by the gifts of people just as you know you think of missionaries so there's a give online you can give to the organization you can give to individuals in the organization you know that's all through through the website and again reaching and teaching .org
you know my name dean dot birch they could just email me individually and i'd be very happy to correspond with them that's one of my roles with the organization is not just to lead trips internationally to teach but also to help develop partnerships here in the in the states and things like that as well.
And of course you have a firm promise that every dollar that anybody contributes they will receive ten dollars back, correct?
I'm sorry. Are we in Oklahoma? And also if anybody listening if you can't if you didn't remember everything that dean said you can just email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com
and i will get you dean birch's information and the information for reaching and teaching international industries and ironsharpensironradio .com
where you're probably even listening to the live streaming of this program if not on the leading edge radio networks website but ironsharpensironradio .com
there is a button to click to email me and you can get the information that way.