EPIC Show with Allie Stuckey & Jeff Durbin!

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00:04

Jeff, thanks so much for joining me. Oh, it's my pleasure. Absolutely my pleasure. Yeah. So if you could just take a second to tell everyone who may not be aware who you are, what you do, where you come from.

00:18

Well, I'm the pastor at Apologia Church, a pastor at Apologia Church, and our church came out of a drug and alcohol rehab hospital.

00:27

I was the full -time chaplain there for four years at a hospital while I was also pastoring somewhere else.

00:32

Wow. And so many people were coming out of addiction to drugs and alcohol and coming to Christ at that facility that became very, very clear that we needed to care for them, and people were coming from all over the country, actually, to this hospital.

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And so God was doing something really amazing there, and so we took a huge risk and we planted Apologia Church at the hospital, and that was about 10 years ago, and so that's where our church began.

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Wow. As a church, we are involved in a lot of, well, a lot of outreach in different areas and different communities, public debate with atheists, to different outreach to different kind of cultic movements.

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We also have a very significant ministry and outreach in the area of abortion, and so we started

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End Abortion Now, it's just really a banner over a Christian approach, a very vocal, gospel -centered

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Christian approach in the area of abortion. We started that a couple years ago. We now have over 400 churches globally who are under that banner and going out and saving children at the actual abortion clinics, offering help and love and assistance to mothers and fathers who are bringing their children there.

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And we just started in November, actually, bringing the message to local legislatures across the country, and that started in November, and since that time, it's really been having significant growth all across the country with churches, pastors,

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Christian leaders, just Christians, mothers and fathers, children going out and speaking to the legislatures.

02:13

You have so many resources out there. When I first heard about you, which was maybe almost a year ago now, you had been in the game for much longer than before that, much longer than before that, as you just described, and I couldn't figure out, okay, what does this person exactly do?

02:33

Because I feel like there are like three different podcasts with his name on it. He's got a church with his name on it.

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He's got all these ministries with his name on it, and then I just realized that you are a part of a lot of different things, and your message is the same, of course, in all the things that you do, in all the podcasts that you host, in all the ministries that you lead, and that really is the gospel of Christ, and being bold in that, and calling people into a proper theology, which, as we know right now, is extremely important and also, sadly, extremely rare.

03:08

So I want to ask you about that, and when you kind of realized, maybe this was 10 years ago or before that, when you kind of realized your role in engaging the culture and engaging people outside of the church and in the church with a gospel that seems to be increasingly rarely preached properly, at least in the

03:30

United States. That's right, yeah. So it really comes, it's really nothing, there's nothing special about me,

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I mean, what we're doing is not historically interesting in terms of the Christian church historically.

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It really comes down to world view, and I know we hear this word kicked around a lot in our

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Christian communities a lot, but it needs to be understood, and that is that there is, according to Scripture, no neutrality.

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There is no neutrality. Right. Romans chapter 1 says that everyone knows God, the problem isn't a lack of light or evidence for God's existence, we all know the true

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God, but we are holding down that truth because we're all broken, we're all fallen, we're all little rebels against the king, and so we hold that truth down and we exchange

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God for a lie, that's just the pattern of image bearers of God who are in a broken relationship with God, who are fallen, and so none of us are neutral towards God at all, and that is fundamentally the

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Christian message, is that we're all lost, we're all broken, we're all in need of a savior, and with that fallenness comes a hostility, a rebellion, and it comes out in so many different areas of life, and so the fundamental aspect of the

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Christian message is that Jesus is God in the flesh who came to rescue the rebels, to save sinners, and he comes into a world that is opposed to him, and he says things like, whoever's not with me is against me.

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That's a bold claim. Right. Whoever's not with me is against me. I mean, that's one of those claims that we don't hear often in evangelical churches in the

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West today, like preached and proclaimed, like boldly, like whoever's not with me is against me, that's Jesus' claim. Jesus saying things like, if anyone is ashamed of me and my words, of him that will the

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Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory, and Jesus comes with a message that actually is very different than you hear in the common evangelical church in the

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West in the 21st century, where he, when he preaches to crowds of people, thousands of people, he actually turns them away.

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He says some hard things to them, like if you don't come to die, then don't come, and he says things like, you have to hate mother, father, sister, brother, wife, and even your own life, and that's not like a moral evil hatred, it's in terms of loving

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Jesus less than, if you don't love him more than the most close relationships, he says don't even come, and that's of course a very different gospel than is often propagated today in our culture in modern evangelicalism in the

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West, and when you ask the question like, okay, where's this coming from, it's all encompassing because Jesus claimed to have all authority in heaven and on earth, and as a matter of fact, in Matthew 28, that's the last thing of his departure in Matthew 28 that he says, is he says all authority in heaven and all

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Christians say yes to that, well of course he's king over heaven, he has all authority there, no angels are disobeying him there, but there's actually a next part to it where Jesus says, and on earth, all authority and here on earth has been, past tense, given to me, and so that great commission is not simply to go out and save souls for heaven one day, which of course that was what salvation brings, this reconciliation, peace with God, we go of course to heaven, we have eternal life as a gift through faith in Jesus, but he says go and disciple the nations and teach them to obey, and so the

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Christian message historically was all -encompassing, and if you look at Christian history, as Christians went with the good news of the kingdom, of good news of salvation into the world, they would win entire nations, entire continents to Christ, and those people understood the message of Jesus in such a way, is that when

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I come to Jesus to believe in him for salvation, I'm believing in a person who has a work, and this is a person who is

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Lord, I mean, the fundamental Christian confession is that Jesus is king of kings and Lord of lords.

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Now that means something, that means that Jesus has all authority over every aspect of life up into the kings, he has authority over them.

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The promise in the scriptures of salvation to the ends of the earth also was that the father was giving to Jesus the ends of the earth as his possession, and so when someone says, well what's

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Apologia Church doing in all these areas, we're really just trying to communicate with love, with respect and gentleness and compassion, the message of the

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Christian worldview and the good news of the gospel in every area of life. So whether that means in the family, whether that means in the church, or that means even in the state, we believe that what's broken in our culture in the

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West today, say just take our nation like United States of America, we started off a very strong biblical worldview and foundations.

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Not to say that everybody was Christian, it's just to say that it was in the atmosphere, there was an understanding that the biblical worldview was the standard, it was the reference point, it was the principium, it was the starting point of all things.

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So even down to say John Jay, our first Supreme Court Justice, when he was pointing to case law and creating case law for our nation as the

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Supreme Court, as a justice, he was actually explicitly referencing case law from the

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Old Testament itself in terms of pointing to not himself as the standard, but this is what

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God says, God's the reference point. And that's critical because in our day, Allie, and you address these sorts of things all the time, and I love what you're doing,

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I truly do, when we are the reference point as we are today, human beings, we say the basic predominant worldview in our day taught and propagated in the public school system in the

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West is that all of us are cosmic accidents, we come from highly evolved societies of bacteria, we come from the goo to you.

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I mean, we were once fish that evolved in this purposeless cosmos and all of us are just atoms sort of banging around.

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There is no purpose, there is no meaning, there is no ultimate truth, there is nothing good, nothing evil, only blind and pitiless indifference.

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That's what Richard Dawkins says in his book, River Out of Eden. When you take that worldview and we become the reference point, human beings, when we determine what is right and wrong, then there is no absolute truth, there is no absolute right or wrong, it becomes chaos.

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We don't really know anymore if a man is a man or a woman is a woman. We don't really know anymore, or well, we're pretty certain that it's perfectly acceptable to kill an innocent developing unborn human being in the womb because, well, it satisfies my needs.

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Because there's no ultimate truth above me, I'm the reference point, it's my choice. It's nothing to do with God and his claims and his decrees and his choices, his will.

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It's really me, I'm the reference point. So we have gone to a place where we say we don't want God and his ultimate authority, we're the ultimate authorities.

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We say we don't want a theocracy where God is the reference point and his law is the standard, his word is the standard.

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We don't believe in that kind of stuff. We the people, democracy will be the standard, and of course that means that our

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God is Demas. We are the people, we are the gods of our system. And the challenge with us being the gods of our system is if we're the reference point, then there is no ethical standard that's absolute, and it will always change and ebb and flow over time.

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So what we're doing is trying to communicate the lordship of Christ, the beauty of the biblical worldview, and of course the gospel into every area of life from the family to gun control to abortion to taxation, whatever the situation may be, we say

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God's the reference point, we're not. I have about 1 ,600 questions to ask you from all of that because you touched on so many good things.

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I'm gonna back up to the beginning of the answer. Before we get into that, I gotta tell you guys, once again about Bolster Sleep, you guys know how much

11:13

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11:34

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11:40

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11:51

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11:58

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12:04

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Allie. That's A -L -L -I -E for 12 % off your purchase. I have filed all these away in my head, these questions, so we'll see how many

12:25

I can actually recall, but you said something about Jesus turning people away with the kinds of messages that he was giving because they were offensive.

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I'm offended. My fleshly self is offended by the charge that I need to hate my father and mother.

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My fleshly self is offended by the call to come and die, and so in my flesh,

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I want to turn away from that, and what we see a lot today in churches is that because that's offensive in a lot of ways, because that hurts people's feelings or hurts the natural self, they won't say it.

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We hear the term seeker -friendly churches, and so we're just going to talk about the parts of the

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Bible that we think feel good, make you feel loved, accepted, wanted, all of these things, which, you know, that in and of itself is not necessarily bad, but that alone without the call to repentance, without the call to come and die, is not the gospel.

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So can you tell me, how did we get here? Is it just kind of what you were saying of allowing those of us who are in the church to use ourselves as reference points, worshiping the

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God of self rather than the God of scripture, and so everything kind of just submits to what we think?

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How did we get to that point where we're no longer really preaching the gospel in churches? Well, it's difficult to say because there is definitely a theological pedigree that got us to the chaos, the theological chaos that we're in today in the 21st century in the

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West. I think that if you look at it theologically from the foundations, we don't want

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God. There is no God -seeker. Romans chapter 3, there's no one who seeks for God, and we don't like to hear that message today because we like to think more highly of ourselves, but if we don't understand the true nature of our condition, we're not going to understand the glory of God's love and His graciousness in the gospel, and so I think that fundamentally we're appealing to, you said it, the flesh and people.

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We want to entertain. We've abandoned sort of a biblical, of course, but a historical view of the nature of the church itself and the purpose of the church, to call the world to come to salvation, to obedience to Jesus.

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We've lost that, and we want really to say, no, what success looks like is a heck of a lot of people sitting in our pews, so what do we have to do?

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And I won't mention their name at the moment right now to take us off course, but there are well -known sort of popular pastors in our day who have actually said that they've gone out and actually gone to their communities and asked questions like, what do you not like about the church?

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What would you prefer to see in the church? How would you like your church experience to be? And taking notes on that and then developing the church on the basis of what the lost would like to see in the church, and now we have churches that are literally built on entertainment rather than worship of God, and that comes with a very, very significant theological confusion about what the church is.

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The church is supposed to be going into the world to win the world.

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The church is not supposed to be the hot spot of evangelism. The church is supposed to actually be those who have come into a relationship of peace with God, come to actually worship him, to grow in him, to be transformed, to fellowship, to love, and then they're supposed to be sent into the world to go win the world, to go into the public square to win the world.

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And this gets to your question in terms of the offensive message. If you read the book of Acts, that's the ancient record of the church.

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When you read the book of Acts, you don't see the kind of evangelical methodology that we have so popular today in terms of creating the church as the hot spot of evangelism.

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They're going into the public square. They're going and actually being godly troublemakers and preaching the gospel to the degree that the gospel that Jesus preached made people want to kill him.

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The gospel that Paul was preaching, Acts chapter 9, as soon as it comes to Christ, it says that people are coming to Christ, the church is built up, it's being multiplied, and it says some people wanted to kill him.

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So he was going out to actually argue with people about the truthfulness of the Christian message, and then people wanted him dead.

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The church was growing, but they wanted to kill him. People are taking oaths not to even eat until Paul's dead.

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I think many evangelical pastors today would look at what Paul did there in the book of Acts, and they'd say, Paul, I think there's a better way.

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And you see, of course, Peter and John preaching the gospel and trying to engage people with love, with compassion, but with truth.

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It says that they bring them back in, and they're like, didn't we tell you to stop speaking in his name? And Peter's response was, we must obey

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God rather than men. And then they take a beating for Jesus, and then they go out, rejoice, and that they were counted worthy to even suffer for Jesus, and they continue to preach.

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And I see that, Allie, I see that today so much with brave women like you and brave commentators who are engaging in the public square.

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And many Christians are like, you shouldn't be stepping on toes like that. You shouldn't be causing offense like that.

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But what I see there is actually something that more is modeled after the kind of evangelism we see from Jesus and the apostles, where they went into the public square with the truths of God and the gospel, and they engaged in conflict with love, with grace, and compassion, but people hated them for it.

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Now, we can't say that must mean you're failing. No, darkness always flees from the light.

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But I'll just say one last word here. Jesus said, you're the salt and you're the light. Salt was a preservative that stopped things from spoil and decay, and light scatters darkness.

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If we're not doing these things, I don't think we're being faithful as a church. You talk a lot about engaging the culture, obviously something

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I'm passionate about as well, but you talk a lot about justice. And it was actually you I listened to one podcast episode.

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I don't remember where it was from because I've been trying to wrap my mind around the Christian's role in earthly justice and what that looks like.

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And there's a lot of confusion. And I'll say there's even been a lot of confusion on my part about social justice and the difference between biblical justice and what we hear about social justice.

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And if biblical social justice is different than, you know, secular social justice, which we know it is and all of that.

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But I probably would have said that I agree with some Christian leaders that I know you and I both respect that said, you know, justice is not really justice on earth is not really a

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Christian's role. It's kind of, you know, something later. I probably would have. I probably would have agreed with that at one point.

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And then I started thinking about my own hypocrisy that, well, I don't think that in relation to abortion,

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I don't think that in relation to free speech or whatever it is. So there is some hypocrisy, but it was

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I was doing that because I thought that I was doing the right thing in separating myself from secular social justicians that were using

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Jesus's word in the wrong way to say, this is what biblical justice looks like. I thought that I was separating myself from progressive

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Christians. But then I realized, well, no, I'm just kind of being a hypocrite. So can you kind of help me and maybe help the audience navigate what that looks like, how a

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Christian does engage justice in civic life in a way that honors God that isn't like the secular justice left or social justice left, but also isn't just saying, well,

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I'm hands off. I don't care about any of this stuff because, you know, I'm going to heaven one day. That's right.

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Yeah. So it comes it comes down to at the same time, there's a little bit of agnostic and even

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Greek philosophy and worldview that's sort of infected the modern church in terms of thinking of the spiritual we want to escape to the physical doesn't matter.

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There's and that could be a whole discussion in itself. But there is a lot of Greek philosophy that's infected the church in terms of the better is escaping the physical to get to the spiritual.

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Whereas I just want to say this. Jesus was raised in a physical body for a reason. The resurrection is the beginning of the new creation.

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God is concerned with this world and this life very much so. Also, there's a fundamental thing underneath all of what

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I'm going to say. And that's this. Jesus says all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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That was first century all that was before the ascension, which, by the way, we all agree was

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Jesus sitting on his throne at the right hand of power with all authority, putting all of his enemies under his feet.

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That's that is the most quoted verse in the New Testament from the old. Now, I think it needs to be grabbed hold of it says in the

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New Testament from the Old Testament more than any other verse alluded to or quoted is that he must reign.

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Jesus reigns until all of his enemies are put under his feet as a footstool for his feet.

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All authority belongs to Jesus. So that's fundamental here. So when we look at the world around us, we can't say as Christians, God has no concern with this because he's told us he does.

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All authority there and here belongs to him. So any area of life where an image bearer of God is being oppressed or there is evil in the world, we're the salt and we're the light commanded to go win the world.

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Don't forget it's the meek who shall inherit the earth. Let that set for a minute. The meek shall inherit the earth, not the unrighteous, not the wicked, not the people who hate

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God. The meek shall inherit the earth. We're supposed to pray. Jesus teaches us to pray. He says, pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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And the question we have to ask ourselves is just how tightly guarded is the will of God in heaven?

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Pretty tightly guarded. And we have to have that same perspective of here on this earth. I would say this in terms of not having a long discussion here, but the

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Old Testament is replete with examples of messianic prophecy about Jesus and about his work in the world that is not simply about going to heaven one day.

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The promise in Isaiah 2 is that God's going to draw the nations and his Torah, his law is going to go forth from the people of God.

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Isaiah 42 is a promise where it says that the Messiah himself will establish justice on the earth and he won't go faint or weary until he's done so.

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And his law, the coastlands are waiting for his law, for his standards of justice. So there's messianic prophecy through and through the

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Bible that shows that God is concerned, that he is going to establish justice. And here's the question to ask, how does that happen?

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Well, it doesn't happen by dropping law down on top of people. It happens through the proclamation of the good news, the call to repentance and faith, and people's hearts are changed.

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They fall in love with Jesus and they love his law and his standards. So that's the first and foremost.

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But I think it's important for us to recognize that when we see evil in the world around us, it's the call of God that we actually go and we confront that evil.

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You see it from the end of God's revelation. But more specifically,

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I'll just say this. In Isaiah 1, God actually speaks to his people about their worship.

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And he says to them, he says that he doesn't want their worship. And why? He tells them that they need to cease to do evil, learn to do good.

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They need to seek justice, correct oppression, and bring justice to the fatherless to plead the widow's cause.

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That passage is right above the famous passage that I hope all of us know as Christians, if you know the

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Lord, where God says, come, let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins are as scarlet to be white as snow.

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He says he'll cleanse us of all of our sin. But that's after God says, cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless.

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And so the question is, as Christians, does God care? And the answer is, God is unchanging.

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He's immutable. He says he cares over and over and over again and corrects his people for not being concerned with justice.

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But there's a second question that needs to be asked, and that's this, by what standard is something just?

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And I want to say that as Christians, the only certainty we have is when God has spoken. And if God has spoken in an area of justice or injustice, then that's

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God's standard, his principle standard against that injustice. And so when we engage the world, we have to avoid being like even the professing

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Christian liberal social justice warriors who want to say

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God's concerned with justice. But when they point to what that would look like, they're not pointing to scripture, they're actually borrowing capital from the left.

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And I want to say for those on the left that reject the scriptures, they don't really have any coherent appeal to justice in the first place because they don't have a workable worldview by which to decry injustice.

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So I want to say as Christians, we must be concerned with justice because God is just, he always does what is just, and he is concerned with what happens here in this world.

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We're supposed to win the world with the gospel, and as our hearts change, we love

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God's law and his truth. But I'll just say this quickly, Allie, that's one of the most challenging verses for me.

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Isaiah 1, bring justice to the fatherless, correct oppression.

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Now there's explicit command to actually hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter, rescue those who are being led away to death.

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Of course that's there, but God actually tells his people, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless.

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And in the area of abortion, that is the identification of fatherless children, people being abandoned by their fathers.

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So the command of God, and he's unchanging, is for his people to correct oppression and bring justice to the fatherless.

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I wonder where, I think this is a little bit where it gets difficult for a lot of Christians, is kind of where the government is supposed to step in and where we are supposed to advocate for legislation versus where we're supposed to advocate for freedom from government and certain things.

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I would say that maybe there's a lot of people on the left who agree with our definition of justice, but they simply believe that the federal government is the best vehicle by which that justice can come.

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And they have a different, maybe they do have a little bit of a different view of justice. I think a lot of times they see justice as completely equal outcomes guaranteed, no matter what, even if that's forced mediocrity through something like socialism, which is different than what

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I would say the Bible says. But how do we know the balance? How do we strike the balance between pushing for certain legislation that protects the unborn and saying, okay, this is not a place for the federal government.

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This is just a place for us to go in and share the gospel or I don't know, is it both at the same time or how do we discern that?

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Well, first and foremost, the system of government that we have or are supposed to have today did not come to us from a humanist or a secularist or atheistic worldview.

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It was explicitly a Christian worldview in terms of how we view the role of the state and the role of the church.

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As a matter of fact, that terminology that we often use today of separation of church and state, that's not formal, it's not in our documents, it was just something that was understood, it was in the atmosphere.

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Separation of church and state never meant separation of God and state. That idea of separation of church and state actually comes from, lo and behold, the

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Bible itself. And that is that there are two distinct organizations, the church and the state, both are to be under God, but both are not supposed to ultimately try to take over one or the other in sense of ruling one another.

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They are distinct offices, and actually in the Old Testament, you have examples of God actually punishing kings for trying to actually take authority in the church.

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So two distinct offices, in a sense, organizations. That's interesting, I've never actually heard it explained like that.

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Yes, but both were to be under God. And when someone says, well, what is the role of the state?

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Well, Romans 13 says that those are God's deacons. Now remember what that says. A lot of times Christians will quote that, and Allie, they'll quote it to you and I as Christians trying to engage these cultural issues from a biblical worldview or standing on this in some way, they'll say, nope, the role of the government, submit to those, you know, those are

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God's servants, and submit to their authority. Well, think about what Paul is saying. He's in pagan

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Rome at the time. And what does he call the governing authorities in terms of their ordained role before God?

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He says they are God's deacons. The word there in the Greek is deacon, servant. Really?

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Rome? Pagan Rome? Caesar? Paul says, yeah, that's actually how this works, is that that is

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God's ordained organization that is his servant, whose servant?

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Not the servant of some other God, his servant, to do what? To wield the sword of justice.

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So when someone says, what's the role of the state? Well, a biblical and redeemed perspective of the role of the state is that it's supposed to wield the sword of justice.

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It's supposed to, here it is, punish evildoers. So the role of the state is not supposed to be your mommy.

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It's not supposed to be your daddy. It's not supposed to be the thing that's feeding you and caring for you. The role of the state biblically is to punish people who would do evil.

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So people who murder people, the state's supposed to step in and to be that organization or that authority that actually executes justice whenever there's a situation like rape or theft or anything like that.

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It's supposed to be God's servant to wield the sword of justice. Those who are not lawbreakers, the righteous, are not supposed to fear that organization.

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That organization is supposed to protect people in terms of wielding the sword of justice. But you never, ever have in scripture the idea that the state is supposed to take the function or role of the church in terms of caring for the needs of the poor, just taking people's money through coercion and giving it out to other people.

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The state is not supposed to have that function. And I want to just say this just as an aside. Hopefully this will wet people's appetite and get them interested in this.

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In the Old Testament, you have an example where Israel looked at all the kings of the world and they wanted a king like all the other pagan nations had.

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And so what God does is he actually punishes Israel. And he says, no, they can have a king. Give him a king.

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I'm their king, but they didn't want me. So let him have a king. And here's what he's going to do to them. He's going to take their children to war and he's going to tax them at 10 percent.

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That was a punishment from God. 10 percent. The state would actually think, it would have the audacity to think that it was worthy of the tithe, that it could take 10 percent of people's income.

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And God says, that'll be punishment. So actually, God, in that moment there gives us an example.

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It's a punishment upon people when they have a state that believes that it has a right to people's income, even to a 10 percent level.

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And it's a punishment in terms of the state when it becomes, when it thinks it's God, it takes people's children to war.

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And what we have today in, and I'm not saying war is always a bad thing. War is sometimes a necessary thing and the state should be involved in those things.

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But when you have a state that's overblown and it's overstepping its God ordained boundaries of just executing justice, you have a state that ultimately thinks that it's the authority, that it defines ethics, that it ultimately can control land, property.

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And the danger of the state that we have today is it doesn't even look to God's law as authoritative to say, well, what ought we to do?

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The state determines for itself what is right and wrong. And the danger in that, and just think about this philosophically for a second.

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If we, the people, determine what is right and wrong, if the reference point is us in history, we say what you ought to do or what you ought not to do, we say what is good, what is evil, then that means that you can never chastise anybody in history for what they chose to do as a people.

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Why? Because they were the reference point. So if you take the standard we have today, which is not God's word, not the biblical standard, and you say we're the standard and source, then that means that we can no longer challenge the atrocities that took place where there was kidnapping of black people and enslaving them.

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Why? Because that culture and society at that time determined for themselves that we ought to be able to do this. Now, mind you, this is really important.

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The Bible actually says in God's law that the punishment for kidnapping and enslaving is the death penalty.

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So had they been actually looking to God's law in that day, that's the standard they would have appealed to. But of course, we're a fallen culture in society and we don't get everything right.

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There are sinful, evil things that happen. But notice that I can challenge what happened in slavery because I look to God's law.

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This should have been the punishment. Image bearers of God are image bearers of God. Color of skin means nothing.

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If I held to a biblical worldview, I can condemn slavery and those atrocities, but not the secular world today.

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All they can do is look back and say, well, we think we're more enlightened. Was it wrong? Well, not objectively wrong.

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Or how about what happened with the Jews? Hitler and Nazi Germany determined at the time, I know it looks like a person, it's not a person, it's a

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Jew. We can kill them. Well, we don't really have any complaint with that today if you use our system of government and our standards and definitions of right and wrong, because we're the reference point.

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What Hitler did in his culture and society, that was their reference point. There's no chastising them.

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There's nothing objectively wrong about that. And so we need to look to God's standards in government for what is right and what is wrong.

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And yes, God does care. And the funny thing is, is that yes, you're right. Logically, they cannot.

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A moral relativist is the problem with moral relativism. C .S. Lewis talks about this in mere Christianity as well.

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There is a real right and a real wrong, just in the same way that there is a real New York City and one depiction of New York City is going to get closer to the real

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New York City than the other. And yet people will say, no, no, that's not true. There's no objective morality.

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There's no objective standard to which I or you need to strive. Authenticity is our highest value.

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So as long as you're being yourself, that's what they will say today. But when they look at something like slavery or look at something that they don't agree with, they say that is wrong.

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They do purport all of the sudden, out of nowhere, this objective standard. We don't know where it came from.

34:21

We don't know why there's all of a sudden this objective standard. But it does seem like even the staunchest moral relativist believes in an objective truth, in an objective morality, even though they don't know where it came from.

34:35

So what do we as Christians do? I guess it's just preach the gospel, but is there a way that we can fill that gap with those, even the people that we know, that seem to have that cognitive dissonance?

34:48

That's such a good question. It's such a good question, Allie. And I think that there's a reason behind what you just illustrated so perfectly, and that's that though somebody denies him and they say, no,

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I don't want him in my thinking. I don't want him in my knowledge, which is what Romans 1 says. And they exchange God for the lie.

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They can never escape the fact that they're made in the image of God. And they know the

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God that we're talking about. They know his just standards and they know that there is truth.

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And so though they decry it, no, there's no ultimate standard of truth. No, there's no meaning. There's no purpose. They can't actually help being

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God's image in God's world. And so though you have someone like Richard Dawkins that I mentioned a moment ago, that will do just what you said.

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He'll say, no, there is no good. There is no evil. It's only blind and pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins, you just go through his tweets.

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Look at all of his anger towards evil in the world and atrocities. He can't help being the image of God in God's world because it's inescapable.

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And so what I think we need to do is, you said it, is go proclaim the good news, repentance and faith in Jesus. He has lived perfectly, died for sinners and risen again from the dead.

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Come to him for life and peace with God. Receive the gift of eternal life. Yes. But we also need, as we're engaging the world, we need to appeal and touch the image of God in them.

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We need to point to it. We need to get right to it. Ali, it was so perfect. Yesterday, I went to an abortion rally in Phoenix.

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People were just vile, Ali. I mean, I'm telling you, the stuff that they were putting on their shirts, so proud, was so debasing towards them and their humanity.

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And I talked to these three lovely girls yesterday who were at first very aggressive. And after talking to me for a little bit, they actually really calmed down and it became a very loving conversation.

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And Ali, what I did to them is, as I asked them questions about their perspective of taking innocent unborn life, they kept saying something,

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Ali. They kept saying, we need to care for these kids. What if they grow up in poverty? What if they were like,

36:48

I've helped children in these situations and all these different circumstances, and they need to be cared for and loved.

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And so what I said was, okay, please think about what you're saying. One, you're saying, because they'll be poor, kill the poor children.

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And I said, but you don't really believe that. I can see it in you. And they were like, what do you mean?

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I said, because listen to what you're saying. You are in the image of God and you know these children are worthy of our love and our protection and our concern and our compassion.

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So you've spent your life caring for them and loving them. I said, because you can't escape that.

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You're made in the image of God and you know that's what you're supposed to be doing with these children. I said, but you've adopted a perspective that yes, we should care for these children, but kill these children in the womb.

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They don't matter. And I said, do you see the conflict there? And ultimately what I was doing is I was trying to touch their

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God -given conscience, but also the image of God in them saying, you don't really believe what you say you believe.

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And I want you to think about that as an inconsistency that I want you to examine. And so we finally pushed them, pushed them, pushed them to the end of the conversation.

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And I think we're going to drop this today, Allie, so you might be able to see it. At the end of the conversation, I said, so what your argument is, is that we ought to just be able to kill humans in the womb because we want to.

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And they finally just looked at each other and they said, yeah, that's, I guess what we're saying. And I said,

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I just want you to think about that. And I told them that you don't really believe that.

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And I want you to see that as an inconsistency that you've adopted. Perhaps you've adopted a tradition and a cultural argument that you haven't really thought through.

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And I just hope that you start to think it through. So I want to touch the image of God in every single person and show them the folly of unbelief and show them the glory and consistency of Jesus.

38:36

I love how you explained that. I think a lot of times it's easy to get discouraged, especially in the abortion debate, the callousness, like you said, that we see in some of the arguments from the other side, just the total disregard for humanity in life.

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And I think it's easy for us to forget on the pro -life side, on the Christian side, that they are those people that are almost demonizing the unborn and dehumanizing the unborn are made in the image of God.

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And there is that sparking of compassion because of that. And if we can go into that and reveal part of their own selves to them, that is really powerful.

39:14

And I've never heard it put like that. Can I give you one more? Yeah, go. Quick one. What's one of the popular arguments for abortion on the left and in unbelief and rejection of God's standards is they'll say, what if she was raped?

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Now watch what you can hear there. You can hear the image of God coming out there.

39:36

There's this hatred for this wicked, wicked thing like rape, the violation of another person's body, somebody doing something with somebody's body they have no permission to do.

39:46

And they hate that. And they appeal to that because they're borrowing capital from a Christian worldview.

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Because by the way, rape isn't a problem in an atheistic worldview. Adams bumping into each other is morally irrelevant.

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So it's not the atheistic perspective that's giving them that. I mean, if our ancestors were fish, then it doesn't matter.

40:05

There is nothing ultimately wrong. Might be painful, might be uncomfortable, but it's not morally evil, objectively evil.

40:11

So they're borrowing capital in the first place. But here's this image bearer of God arguing that we should be able to kill children and children in the womb because of rape.

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So what do they use as a basis? They appeal to the image of God in you. You ought to hate rape. Isn't it evil?

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And you go as a Christian, dang it. Yeah. Rape is evil. It's a horrible thing.

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It's evil. Yeah. We should punish that. And they go, so shouldn't we be able to have abortions if she was raped?

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And you just have to appeal to the image of God. And then say, well, wait a second. So what you're saying is that we should put children to death for the crimes of their fathers?

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There's an inconsistency there. So kill the children because the father's a criminal. And then you have to ask an even deeper question.

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Hey, what's wrong with rape? And they'll say, what do you mean what's wrong with rape? I've heard this a hundred times.

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What do you mean what's wrong? How could you ask me that question? It's a violation of another person's body. It's taking advantage of another human being in a way that is disgusting and evil.

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It's taking liberty with a person's body that you have no right to take. And I'll say, thank you for that very pro -life argument.

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Because what you're arguing for in abortion is the very thing that is underneath rape.

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And so there's a conflict there, but we have to appeal again to the image of God in them to show them that that's holding their standards.

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They can't even use that as an argument, but coming into our position, stepping into the biblical worldview, we can make sense of that.

41:36

You know what's amazing too, Ali? Yesterday I said to this group of girls, and I believe this is on camera somewhere. I said to them, they said, what if she was raped?

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And I said, well, I believe that we give any rapist the death penalty. The state should give the rapist the death penalty.

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That's how evil it is from my perspective. You know what they said, Ali? They said, oh no, the death penalty, you should never put another human being to death.

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And I said, except for the babies in the womb. And there was just silence.

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It's incredible human's capacity to live in cognitive dissonance, but when you don't have a supreme authority like we've been talking about, that's really the option.

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That's the only option when you are self -referential. I could keep talking for, I don't know, four more hours.

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I feel privileged that I've basically just been able to sit and listen to a live podcast of yours.

42:30

So thank you so much for taking the time. This is an awesome and edifying conversation that I know my audience is going to be really excited to hear.

42:38

I got a lot of suggestions of people saying, please, please interview him.

42:43

And I wanted to and so thank you so much for this. I would love to have you back. If you could tell everyone just where they can find you, the resources that you are a part of and all of that good stuff.

42:55

Sure. ApologiaStudios .com, A -P -O -L -O -G -I -A -Studios .com. That's where all of our radio shows, podcasts,

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TV shows, everything is there. Apologia Studios on YouTube. I mean, there are over a thousand videos.

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I mean, I don't know how many hours of content, engagements on the street, teaching, interviews, radio show, all that stuff is there.

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And then ultimately, EndAbortionNow .com is where people can go to get connected with their church, to go out and save children's lives.

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But more importantly, I think in terms of if you're afraid to start at EndAbortionNow .com, our goal is just to give you free training, free resources, give you everything you need to do this at absolutely no cost to you.

43:35

Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I'm sure we'll talk soon. Thank you,