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#NoDespair2020
All right, well let's jump into it today. If you are a new subscriber, thank you for subscribing. Don't forget to hit the little notifications bell so that you're always updated when I upload a new video.
And please, if you find this content helpful, share it with a friend. I think it could be helpful to a lot more people. Now, this video is going to be about the NASCAR fake hate crime investigation and stuff like that.
And also about how to be a discerning Christian. You know, I think sometimes people make a big deal out of discernment, like it's very difficult. And while it is a spiritual gift, that's something that God gives you, it's something that can be practiced as well and it's really not too difficult to practice it.
And so I want to talk about that in a minute in regards to the NASCAR thing. But before I do, there are two questions that have been popping up pretty consistently from new subscribers. And so maybe you have these questions as well.
I figured I'd address them in a video. The first one is kind of simple. It's kind of funny as well. The question is, AD, what is Big Eva? Because I'm always talking about Big Eva and some people don't know what the heck I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about when I talk about Big Eva is the evangelical business machine. So basically, like the people who write all the books, the people who promote each other's books, the people who speak at conferences and stuff like that, who collect speaking fees for their thoughts and stuff like that, bloggers, you know, the main guys, the main people that you think of when you think of evangelicalism, who are the big players, the movers and shakers?
That's Big Eva. It's like a guild, it really is. People that are in the guild of Big Eva get treated differently than regular Joes in the pew. They have a different standard, a different set of rules, a different set of what's allowable, if you will.
And I don't like Big Eva. I think Big Eva operates in a very kind of mafioso kind of way, in a soy-sipping latte kind of way, of course. I don't like it. I think that the Big Eva machine is really sick.
It's really sick, and it needs lots of reform in order to be helpful for the Christian church at large. So Big Eva, that's who I'm talking about, the people who write the books, the people who do all this stuff.
I don't dislike everyone in Big Eva, but the machine in general is a real force for evil, I think. That being said, here is the second question. This is something that I think was very interesting to think about.
It's something that I think about a lot, and so I'm ready to answer it. I've gotten a few people that have asked me a very similar-sounding question, but I thought this guy put it in a very good way.
Here's what his email to me says. It says, not sure if this is the best way to reach you, but I hope you respond. My name is Redacted. I'll be a junior in college this fall. Just recently discovered your YouTube channel.
I've been really hesitant about this whole social justice movement. Something has just seemed really off, and unbiblical about it all. Your videos have definitely helped me put words into what I've been thinking about it all.
The one thing I've been having trouble with, though, is regarding our witness to nonbelievers. I was looking at 1 Corinthians 6, and it seems to me that Paul is telling us, as Christians, to settle disputes within ourselves rather than in front of nonbelievers.
I think this whole social justice thing is extremely critical. In fact, I sense that it will be made clear who among us has actually never been among us in the first place. However, I can't help shake the feeling that public disagreements among true believers is not good for the world to see.
I'm thinking John 17, where Jesus prays that the church would be one so that the world would see Christ. Now, I assume that your YouTube channel is probably 99 viewed by Christians, but still, the videos are indeed public.
What are your thoughts? Is that not a precise application of 1 Corinthians 6? Let me know, my dude. Grace and peace. This is a good question. This is a very good question, because I've thought about this quite often because of the nature of what I do.
I've said this many times in my channel. I think some people think that I turn on the camera and I just pop off of the mouth. I don't really think about what I'm saying. It's just not the case at all.
I think about this. And I think the person who asked this question, maybe you have this question as well, I don't think this is actually a precise application of 1 Corinthians 6. If you look at 1 Corinthians 6, the ESV standard, the ESV version of the Bible labels this section lawsuits against believers.
And the first couple of verses say this. When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?
And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? And so I think the context here is specifically lawsuits. So legal issues. If you have a legal issue with somebody else, don't sue them in pagan courts.
Instead, try to solve it amongst yourselves. So I think first and foremost, that's the direct application is lawsuits, legal issues, things of that nature. But I do think you can apply this to personal disputes as well.
So if you have a personal dispute with someone, you know, someone said something bad about you or someone called you a dumb stupid head or something like that, then I think you should probably handle that privately.
You shouldn't go on Twitter and say, somebody called me a dumb stupid head. You know what I mean? I think that this is really more about personal disputes as opposed to social issues, big doctrinal issues and things of that nature.
And one of the reasons why I believe this is because of the nature of this verse, but also because we see so many examples of Jesus correcting doctrine. Jesus and Paul correcting people publicly that have very public problems with what they're teaching and they're trying to lead people astray and stuff like that.
And so I don't think it really applies to that kind of a thing. I've actually had this situation happen to me. I've got a personal issue with someone in Big Eva actually. And most people don't know who I have a public issue with or a private issue with, a personal issue with.
Most people don't know the name. In fact, I've never gone on YouTube and said, so-and-so did this. I could easily do that. I could easily blast this guy. I've got the receipts. I've got emails. I've got all kinds of contacts that could make this guy look horrible, but I've done that because that's not what I wanna do.
What I wanna do is figure it out with him personally. And he's refused to talk to me. So I got my pastor involved. I got a few other people that know us involved and it hasn't really yielded any results, but it's a trivial matter.
And I'm willing to sort of take the abuse personally without blasting him publicly. However, if this guy were to get on his blog or whatever and start teaching dangerous doctrines and things of that nature, of course I would blast it publicly because that stuff does need to be corrected.
I think that social issues and doctrine, that's not really what this verse is talking about. It's talking about personal gripes, personal grievances, personal problems with people. We shouldn't put that stuff on blast.
That's what I think this is really more applicable to. So I hope that helps. I thought about this a lot and we will go on from there. So the NASCAR story, by now you've heard it. By now you've heard it.
What you might not know is that I just recently got into NASCAR last year, mostly because of my kids. They like the movie series, Cars. And so we started watching racing. It's been really fun. And we just decided at the beginning of last year that our favorite racer was gonna be Kyle Busch.
And he ended up winning the whole thing last year, which was really exciting. Because most of the time my teams or my sports figures don't win anything. Anyway, this Christmas, my other son got a Kyle Larson car, which is the McDonald's car, if you don't know.
And recently Kyle Larson was caught saying the N-word. But I didn't take it away from him because it's the McDonald's car, who cares? Anyway, earlier this week or over the weekend, it came out that there was a noose left in the garage of the only black driver in NASCAR, Bubba Wallace.
And there was a noose left in his garage. Bubba Wallace has actually just recently started a campaign to get rid of the Confederate flag and he was successful. And so the press wanted you to believe that one of the white NASCAR racers put a noose in his garage to threaten him.
And everyone and their mother was condemning it. Oh, this is so evidence of the problem. This is America. This is the racism that still exists in America and all this kind of stuff. And what I've decided to do is take a Shai Lin tweet, because this is actually not the craziest tweet.
This is actually a pretty tame tweet. And people would say this is probably still a good idea. What you should know is that recently it came out that this was not a hate crime at all. It was phony, it was fake, it was not an issue.
It was just a pull cord from a garage. You know how you pull the garage door down? Well, someone fashioned a noose-looking thing because the cord had broken. And so they wanted you to be able to reach the garage cord.
So it had been there for like a year, right? So it wasn't about Bubba Wallace, it wasn't about racism. It was just a pull cord for the garage, right? Okay. But anyway, before we knew all that, Shai Lin said this.
There was a moment where all the NASCAR racers came together and they were supporting Bubba Wallace. He says, Shai Lin says, this is beautiful. Bubba Wallace, a black NASCAR driver, found a noose in his garage stall yesterday.
His fellow white drivers came out to support him today. Christians have something infinitely greater than racing that unites us. May we lead the way in displaying true unity. And so the idea, not just pushed by Shai Lin, but the idea here is that the church has a lot to learn about racial unity from NASCAR.
NASCAR's way out in front of the church on racial unity. And so we should come together. When someone's the victim of a hate crime, we should come together similarly to how NASCAR came together here. And here's the reality.
Guys, this is important. Christians ought to be more discerning than this. And you might say, well, what's wrong with this? Shai Lin's just saying that this was nice. They all came together. And I'm saying, yeah, but the reality is that we've seen this rodeo so many times.
The day after I heard this story, I said, yeah, probably this is fake. Probably this isn't a hate crime at all. By the way, there is no such thing as a hate crime. I mean, in Christian's eyes, but you know, hey, that's a side issue.
But the reality is if you wanna be discerning in these times, the next time you hear a story that's just a little too on the nose, it just too perfectly fits the narrative, withhold judgment. Withhold judgment.
Because a Christian needs to be thinking a few steps ahead, right? If you wanna be discerning, just say, yeah, that sounds pretty bad, but let me wait until the facts come out before I start doing marches based on this event, right?
Because that's exactly what the zeitgeist is hoping for us to do. Look, a discerning Christian ought to be for black people, white people, Latinos. I mean, they shouldn't be against anybody, obviously.
But a discerning Christian also has to say, well, before we start marching on this, let's figure out the facts because I actually don't know what's happened here. And the reality is that many commentators have noticed this, and I think Christians need to really understand this, is that victimhood has become a currency these days.
Victimhood has become a currency these days. And you get your name searched a lot more in Google, you get a lot more benefits, you get a lot of love and stuff like that when you've become the victim of a quote unquote hate crime.
And so we need to, before we start jumping on the bandwagon, oh, this is so beautiful, what we need to start doing is that, hold on a second. Now, I wanna look into this, but I don't know if I believe this story because you could be using this to your advantage.
The reality is that is something that happens. Jussie Smollett did it. He wanted to renegotiate his deal or he wanted a little more notoriety, so he pretended that a couple of MAGA wearing white guys beat him up and tried to hang him and stuff like that.
It was all phony, he made it up. Now, I'm not saying Bubba Wallace made this up, but let's just be honest, like anyone who saw the picture of this pull string knew that it was probably just a pull string and not a noose.
By the way, the noose was about this big, so it's not actually even a noose. The only way you could hang someone is if they were a midget. So let's take a step back, like you might think, oh, there's really nothing wrong with the Shy Lin tweet.
Actually, there is. Actually, there is because it's putting forward a lie, a narrative that is a lie. This is not beautiful to just say, oh yeah, I guess it's just racism again. No, we have to actually establish the facts of the matter first.
You can support your friend Bubba Wallace, there's nothing wrong with that. But first of all, we don't even know if anything happened here. And by the way, a Christian actually does have to realize that there is no such thing as a hate crime.
There is no such thing as a hate crime. That is not a thing in the scripture. It doesn't matter if you threaten someone because they're black. It doesn't matter if you threaten someone because you don't like their tie, you don't like the way they chew bubble gum, or maybe they chew too loudly.
It doesn't matter. A Christian needs to understand that it's the threat that's the problem, not the specific version of hate. Because any crime is motivated by hate. So it doesn't matter. Like we don't play partial games.
It's not like if it's motivated by hate because of your skin color, that's worse than motivated by hate because I don't like how you chew. It's not like that at all. That's really weird. And it's not a Christian way to look at the world.
You see, if you wanna be discerning, there's two things that you should practice these days. One, patience and love because love requires that you love everybody. So when Bubba Wallace says, I found a noose in my garage, you say, okay, we'll look into that, but we're not gonna accuse anybody of anything until we figure this out.
We're not gonna go online and say, this is America. This is it. This is the worst thing. Everyone's white supremacy. NASCAR has a white supremacy problem. We're not gonna do that because we love NASCAR people too.
We love whites as well as blacks. And so we look into it, we take it seriously, but we don't organize marches and push the narrative before we even know what's what. That's one thing. When you see a story like this, have some patience.
That's the first step to being discerning. The second step to being discerning is to look to the scripture and figure out what's actually going on here. If there was a noose in Bubba Wallace's garage, a little midget-sized noose like this, is that a crime?
Like, should we be celebrating that the FBI was looking into that as a hate crime? No, actually, if you look through the scripture, there is no such crime like that. No such crime like that. Look, people can be as hateful as they want to, and that's a sin.
We can denounce it as a sin, but it shouldn't be investigated as a crime. There should be no punishment attached to it. Hate crimes aren't a thing in the scripture. So if you wanna be discerning, number one, patience.
It's a virtue, by the way. And number two, we need to judge all things according to the law of God and not a pagan law. Look, pagan laws wanna make all kinds of things crimes that aren't crimes. And so if you wanna be a Christian, look, Shilin here puts an update here.
Look at this, look at this. This is the update. This is what I have a problem with here. NASCAR update. The FBI determined it wasn't a hate crime. Sound like a mistake was made. Glad to hear that. And it's still beautiful to see the support Bubba received from the white drivers who thought it was a hate crime.
No, it's not beautiful. It's not. Because look, you can support your friend, but someone needs to be the guy, right? Someone needs to be the guy to stand up and say, by the way, what is a hate crime? That's unjust.
The idea of having a hate crime that's separate from other crimes is unjust. The FBI should not have been investigating this as a crime. Are you crazy? Look, someone's gotta be that guy. You're not gonna make any friends saying this kind of thing, but I've got a word, man.
I don't have a choice. I've got this word from the Lord, right? And so if a man gets locked up or fined because of a hate crime that's actually not a real crime, that's a problem for me. That's a problem for me because I care about justice and I care about the law of God.
And so if you're gonna be a Christian, you're gonna start talking about social issues. Number one, you better have patience. And number two, you better not be giving me your opinion on what the law should be in place of what God says what the law should be.
Look, threats, that should be a crime. Violence, that should be a crime. Stealing, that should be a crime. All of those things should be crimes, but hate, that's not a thing. I know you're not gonna win friends that way, but look, if you wanna be a Christian, you've got requirements on you and you've gotta go with God's standard of justice as opposed to what's popular.
I know it's not popular to be against hate crime legislation, but you have to be if you're gonna be a Christian. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. God bless. By the way, it just occurred to me, if you want to love Bubba Wallace and you wanna love the black community and black people in general, regarding this situation, that actually still requires patience and withholding judgment until you have all the facts because the reality is that it doesn't help Bubba Wallace to play into this fantasy that all the whites are out to get him and there's this white supremacist behind every rock.
It doesn't help Bubba Wallace to placate him in that way. It also doesn't help black people in general to say, oh yeah, I know this one was a hoax, but the narrative is still real because it isn't real.
And every time one of these hoaxes happens, it just becomes more and more obvious that it's not real. And really, there are people living in a fantasy land. Now notice, I didn't say that every racial incident is a fantasy.
I've experienced racism myself, so I know it can be real. But this whole idea of systemic acceptable racism all around the country, it doesn't help black people to buy into that. That's a lie, that's false.
God requires you not to buy into falsehoods. But if you're motivated by love for Bubba Wallace and for blacks, then you especially wouldn't wanna do that because you don't want people living in a fantasy land delusion.
It doesn't help them, it just stokes hatred and it puts them in a very tough spot, in my opinion. So if you don't love Bubba Wallace, don't buy these lies. You gotta have patience and you gotta judge all things by the word of God.
It doesn't help anyone to judge things according to the court of public opinion.