October 7, 2025 Show with Dr. Joe Boot on “Thinking Christianly: Developing an Undivided Mind”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday. On the seventh day of October 2025,

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I'm thrilled to have a returning guest today. Many of you who listen to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio should recognize the name

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Dr. Joe Boot. He is founder of the Ezra Institute. He's an author and conference speaker, and judging from the responses

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I received over the years, one of the best and most wonderfully received speakers at one of my

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio free biannual pastors luncheons. This was a few luncheons ago in Loisville, Pennsylvania.

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And today we are going to be addressing the theme of Dr. Boot's latest book,

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Think Christianly, Developing an Undivided Mind. And later on, we're going to be joined about midway through the conversation with Dr.

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Michael Thiessen, Dr. Boot's chief of operations in the USA. But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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Joe Boot. Thank you, Chris. Great to be with you again and appreciate the warm introduction.

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It was great to be at that pastor's luncheon a while back to actually meet in person because we've done this over the airwaves quite a few times, and it was a real blessing to meet in the flesh.

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So thanks for having me back on the show. Oh, my pleasure. And tell us about the Ezra Institute.

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So the Ezra Institute was founded in 2009. We are a Christian world and life view and cultural apologetics think tank and training organization.

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We're trying to help believers think and thinkers believe. And we do that through various print and digital resources and through various conferences and in -person training programs as we both teach

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Christians and engage skeptics with the truth of the gospel of the kingdom and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

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Amen. And if anybody wants more details on the Ezra Institute, go to EzraInstitute .com.

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EzraInstitute .com. And before we begin our discussion on our main theme, you just told me moments before we went on the air that you'll be in the

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United States in the near future. And at least one of the places you are flying to from the

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UK is Phoenix, Arizona. Are you going to be speaking at Apologia Church out there? Yes, I will be actually.

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I'm in New York State first for a conference there. People can find out about the conference just outside of Rochester on our website.

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And then I will be in Tennessee and Kentucky for a few days and then up into Canada for our

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Mission of God conference, for our Ezra conference up there. We're dealing with Islam and immigration and then down to Phoenix where I'll be speaking at Apologia Church.

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And I think going on the podcast there as well as joining TPUSA for a podcast interview while I'm in Arizona.

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Oh, that's great that TPUSA is familiar with you. They need all the theologically sound men they can get involved with them.

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And I'm delighted to hear that you are one of them. I'm looking forward to looking forward to meeting with them and discussing some of the key issues of today.

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Amen. Well, as we've already announced, we are discussing the main theme of your or the theme,

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I should say, of your new book, Think Christianly, Developing an Undivided Mind.

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Usually when a Christian author writes a book, he is either just trying to introduce new information to an audience or reaffirm things and give more detail about something that is a generally believed fact or facts, plural.

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But also, very often when authors, especially if they are apologists, write books, they are seeking to correct something that they see the church at large, perhaps even globally, has sadly failed at believing or doing.

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And I have a strong feeling that this book,

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Think Christianly, was written with that in mind, the latter. Am I correct on that? Yes, it is a not just an apologetic work, it is a polemical work.

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In many respects, Chris, it is a sequel to my major work,

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The Mission of God, A Manifesto of Hopeful Society. I know that is a book you are familiar with.

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Yes, it weighs about 400 pounds, this new book. Is it anywhere near as large as that?

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No. So, yeah, I know, Mission of God got a little out of hand and it was about 800 pages.

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But this is about 460 or 470 pages or so, so it is just under 500, so it is a smaller book.

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Still a large book. It is still a significant book, yeah. And so in that respect, it is a sort of a sequel to The Mission of God.

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So for those of your listeners who perhaps have read that or know of that book, although I have written a number of shorter works since then, this book is really, as you said in your comments there, partly continuing and developing themes that I introduced in The Mission of God, but some of which

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I couldn't deal with in detail. And so there is an apologetic emphasis to this book, think

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Christianly, but also a polemical aspect to it. Psalm 86, 11, of course, says,

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Give me an undivided heart. Teach me your way, Yahweh, and I will live by your truth.

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Give me an undivided mind or heart to fear your name. And so at the root of the goal of this book,

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Chris, is to try and deal with the problem of the, well, let's call it the two issues really.

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One is the intellectual disarmament of Christian thinking, of the

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Christian church, the intellectual disarmament of the Christian church by synthesis, essentially by our dualism and our inconsistency.

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So, you know, a bit like a Toyota Prius where most Christians are part humanist, part secular and part

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Christian in their thinking. And so this kind of intellectual schizophrenia is a significant problem.

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And so the book is rooted in the desire to see Christians develop a completely consistent scriptural world and life view.

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It was Cornelius Van Turley who actually defined Christian apologetics as the defense of the

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Christian philosophy of life. And what I'm trying to do in Think Christianly is help thinking

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Christians, believers, understand and explain and be able to defend a distinctly

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Christian philosophy of life and not get lost in the confusion, in the synthesis that's been taking place for a couple of generations of Christianity with humanism, with neopaganism or what we call secularism.

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Now, the theme in and of itself, Think Christianly, and even the subtitle of the book,

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Developing an Undivided Mind, on its face seems like a no brainer.

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And I'm sure that before having picked up your book, every person that identifies as a

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Christian, no matter what orbit of theology they find themselves, they would say, well,

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I obviously agree with that. We have to think Christianly and we should be seeking to have an undivided mind.

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So specifically, how are Christians grossly failing, in your opinion, in regard to those two things?

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Well, let's maybe take up a couple of potential illustrations that might help people to understand what

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I'm driving at here. First of all, one of the things that's repeated several times in Scripture is that the fear of the

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Lord or the reverence for the Lord is the beginning or the principal part of wisdom.

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Paul reminds us that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

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Now, as you said, most Christians would be quite ready, in theory, to acknowledge that Christ is the wisdom of God and we need to be thinking as Christians.

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But the problem is we've got some severe blind spots. And one of the reasons for that is there's been a radical truncating, or let me use a different word, ecclesiasticizing of the

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Bible and of the gospel of the kingdom. By which I mean that we've tended to think,

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Christians have tended to think of the Bible, the Word of God, as a church book. As a book for the institutional life of the church, yes.

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We would say, you know, theologically, sure, Jesus is Lord and he's Lord over his church. And, of course, a kingdom in the future, in some sort of abstract sense,

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Jesus is Lord now up in heaven. And one day in the future, he'll be manifestly king.

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But we have to face the reality that that's for the future. And that the

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Bible doesn't apply, the Word of God doesn't apply to every area of life. I mean, it doesn't apply to things like education or law or politics or the arts or the sciences.

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It's a church book about my spiritual life. And so I need to think Christianly about spiritual things.

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And so that dualism, Chris, that ecclesiasticizing of the

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Bible, of the Word, has actually called forth in large parts, through large parts of the

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Christian community, the secularization of multiple other areas of life. So whilst you're right in saying that many

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Christians listening to this will say, yeah, of course we need to think in terms of the lordship of Jesus.

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But then on Monday morning, off their children go to Caesar to be educated in the local secular state school.

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And when we then get offended, perhaps, when our pastor on Sunday morning challenges us about political life in the nation.

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So what are the problems we're facing in the West? And the reason for the lack of impact, actually,

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Chris, of large swathes of the Christian church on the culture has been that our faith has tended to be privatized and pietized into this upper deck spiritual world.

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Where we think of thinking Christianly is thinking about prayer and Bible study and faithful worship on a

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Sunday. It includes those things, of course. But we haven't tended to think that thinking

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Christianly, that loving God with our minds, with the foundation of the fear of the law, that that actually applies to how we think about political life and the meaning of politics, about law and the role of God's law, about education and how the lordship of Christ impacts curriculum, about the identity and sexuality issues.

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In fact, the research shows in the United States that the vast majority of professing

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Christians do not have a Christian world and life view. The Nehemiah Institute has published a good deal of research on this and found that it's just simply not the case that Christians genuinely think

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Christianly about every area of life. When we do claim to think Christianly, we tend to think about the churchification, the church aspects of our life, but not those things which we tend to deem as secular.

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And this is the old problem that Francis Schaeffer dealt with with the illustration of the double -decker bus, that London bus with an upper deck and a lower deck.

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And he said, well, the tendency is for us to put spiritual, really important things on the upper deck, prayer,

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Bible reading, evangelism, going to church. And we consider that thinking about those things, that's the

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Christian mind. But the lower deck, education, law, politics, the arts, sciences, media, economics and so forth, that's all the lower deck stuff.

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That's the stuff of nature or the secular, the secular world. And we don't have to think in distinctly

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Christian ways about those things. We don't need to be concerned with the transformation of those areas of life.

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And the problem is, is that the driver of the bus is on the lower deck. And then we wonder why our culture is driven off a cliff.

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And the churches stood there watching. Largely, it's because, as Harry Blamire argued, in fact, in his book,

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The Christian Mind, back in the 1960s, the English scholar, he said, there really is no

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Christian mind anymore as such. And that's my experience in Britain. It was certainly my experience in Canada.

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I think the U .S. is doing better, but not a great deal better than Europe and Canada on this issue.

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And I think the urgent need of the time, the urgent need of the hour is the recovery, the true recovery of a

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Christian mind where we've been transformed, as Paul says in Romans 12, by the renewal of our minds.

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The thing that puzzles me is why a certain element, a very prominent and perhaps dominant element of evangelicalism would be angry at your approach and what you are trying to present.

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But at the same time, like, for instance, when you spoke at my pastor's luncheon, that was a very mixed group.

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And in spite of the fact that there were a couple of people during a Q &A that were taking exception to a couple of things you said, the vast majority of people that I spoke with afterwards who were from different backgrounds, they were from amillennial, premillennial, and postmillennial, from Calvinist, Arminian, Dispensationalist, there was a very mixed group.

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And time and time again, pastors were approaching me, either face to face or through the email, just thrilled with what you had to say.

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And it puzzles me why anybody would take exception to your approach, because even a person who is not postmillennial, not theonomic or reconstructionist, when they are in their homes, they're not going to allow anything to be viewed on the television set, typically, if they are strong believers.

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Or even regenerate at all, they're not going to just let any movie or television program be on the

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TV. They're not going to let their kids listen to any kind of music they want, go to any kind of movies they want.

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They're not going to tell their children when they're a voting age, just vote for anybody that you want.

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It doesn't matter what the platform of the party is or anything like that. So why would this be such, in your opinion, from what you've seen and from objections you've received, what is the main argument from your average run -of -the -mill

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Christian? It's still something that puzzles me. Well, you make a good point,

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Chris. I think part of the issue, I think there's a few things going on, but maybe the first and most obvious thing to say is that actually, in our experience as a ministry at Ezra, it's often not that Christians and pastors have a considered hostility to our perspective.

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It's the fact that they haven't actually considered it. This was not dealt with usually at seminary.

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Scriptural world and life view and a cultural apologetic was very often not part of the program.

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During the whole COVID era, one of the things that we heard a lot of TGC pastors saying was that this whole question, for example, of the relationship of church and state, they just said, well, this wasn't on the test at Bible school.

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This wasn't on the test at seminary. And so a lot of the problem actually is, can

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I say kindly, ignorance, actually. They've not heard the arguments laid out.

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And because there's sort of been almost an assumed or background by osmosis, we've taken in, many of us as Christian leaders, we've just taken in a pietistic retreatist and dualistic form of Christianity.

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We've just taken the status quo as the norm. Many haven't actually been presented with a robust biblical world and life view presentation that deals with the foundational paradigm of Scripture as the unfolding of the kingdom of God, of creation, fall, redemption, consummation through the power of Christ and in the consummating power of the

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Holy Spirit. That this is, that the creation and fall and redemption exist in historical continuum, that they are, that the creation still holds,

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God's laws and norms of creation still hold, that the fall was radical in its character and nature and affected all of our thinking, feeling, doing and being.

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And that redemption in and through Christ is equally comprehensive and touches every area that the fall has touched.

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And so when you think about it like that, I mean, that is the teaching of Scripture. I mean, that's the meaning of, of course, total depravity in the reformational evangelical worldview is that creation is in and through Christ, that the fall went to the root of our being, to the heart of man, in his fall away from God, it became an endemic, basic hostility that touched every aspect of his being.

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That's what the total means. It doesn't mean that we're as evil as we possibly could be, but that it's touched every aspect of our being.

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And therefore the redemption that's at work in Christ is equally as comprehensive as the fall and that Christ is reconciling all things to himself.

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You think of that great summary of the gospel in Colossians 1 that I go back to again and again. He is the image of the invisible

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God, the firstborn over all creation, for by him everything was created in heaven and in earth, things visible, invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, et cetera, et cetera.

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And Paul tells us at the end of this incredible statement on Christ that he's a creator of all things, that he's

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Lord over everything, all things, that this gospel has been preached in all creation under heaven.

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And that comprehensiveness of the gospel is obvious biblically, but it's interesting that for a lot of Christians and for a lot of pastors, the dots have just not been joined.

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We've done our biblical theology, we've done some of our language studies, we've done a bit of systematics, do our pastoral theology, get out of seminary, into the church, and we're caring for pastoral needs of people.

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But we haven't grappled with or wrestled with actually the scriptural world and life view through which we need to understand our theology.

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In that sense, scriptural world and life view is pre -theoretical. So we get into theological theory and doctrine, and pastors are often good at talking about Christian doctrines, but then they're flailing and confused and don't know quite where they are when the state tries to seize control of the church.

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During the COVID era, or the state reaches in to control education and tell parents how they're going to educate their children, or the state reaches in to control welfare and all of these sorts of things.

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And then we're looking at the arts industry, all these different areas, and we may be, as you say, sensitive to the issue of, well, there's excessive violence or immorality in this

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TV program, not that my kids watch it, fine. But where is our worldview critique? Where are we helping our teenagers, our young adults, to look at what the culture is presenting academically in the universities or in media and bring a worldview critique to all of that to show how the

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Christian faith brings an answer to it that responds with the true, the good, and the beautiful.

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So I think the first thing, actually, Chris, is not that there's often a considered hostility, but they've never actually heard it presented.

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They've never had the dots drawn, connected for them in this way. And we find that for a lot of people, it's just almost like an aha moment.

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It's sort of, you know, Yahtzee. It's getting into the bathtub and seeing the water displacement and running down the street, you know, like Archimedes, I think it was, you know, saying,

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I've just seen it. You know, the number of times we say that we hear from people, I had an email this week, actually, from a

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Christian leader who said, you know, I just felt like having read this book, I was given a new

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Bible. I felt like my mind was born again. And we hear that kind of thing all of the time when we unpack the meaning of the kingdom of God and of the lordship of Jesus.

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It's not that there's a considered hostility very often. It's just it's not been heard. Now, periodically.

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Occasionally, there is a considered hostility and people have adopted a two kingdoms paradigm for a variety of reasons.

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Maybe we can talk about that in a minute. So that's another issue where sometimes there is a the issues have been considered and there's been a sort of religious decision made to move against the idea of Christ's material authority and lordship in every area of culture and the application of God's word.

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And then sometimes, Chris, the third thing is it's as simple as compromise through fear and intimidation or actually through unfaithfulness where we just don't want to pay the price.

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We don't want to deal with the cost of faithfulness in a culture that has moved increasingly in the

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West against the gospel, against the lordship of Christ. We are offended at the claims of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. We are embarrassed by the law of God. And we want to find a way around.

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We want we want a Talmudic approach. We want a Pharisaic approach. We want to to to replace

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God's word with our traditions, our customs so that we need not pay the price.

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And sadly, that's a reality, too, that sometimes it's as simple as compromise or we feel we're embarrassed by the decisions that we've made.

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And I think for some leaders, especially the older ones who may be of opposed

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Christian and home education and sent their kids off to the state school, maybe their children have lost the faith, abandoned the

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Christian church or they've made decisions where they know there's been compromise and they hear a message like this.

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They feel challenged. Maybe they feel a little embarrassed, a little ashamed, and they push back.

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So all three of those reactions do happen. But, you know, in my experience,

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I would say for the majority of people who are Christians who love the Lord, it's that they have never been taught this.

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They've never really been exposed to this message. And we're going to be going to our first commercial break.

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If you have a question for Dr. Joe Boot, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio continue to exist. That's royaldiadem .com,

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mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Dr. Joe Boot, the founder of the

39:01

Ezra Institute, and we have a question from a listener in Hoshton, Georgia, and this is

39:11

Anthony. Dr. Boot, would it be a wise thing to do to comb over the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, looking at the judicial laws in particular, to help develop a framework of thinking

39:28

Christianly? As all Scripture is profitable, would this be of any benefit, or should a

39:35

Christian just look to the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the New Testament epistles?

39:45

Well, actually, in my book, Think Christianly, I have the only subject that gets two chapters.

39:51

There's 12 chapters. The only subject that gets two chapters is a consideration of the law of God, and in particular,

39:59

I'm interested to challenge the reliance of some on the idea of natural law, sort of abstract principles, abstract juridical principles.

40:12

I critique that in the first chapter that I deal with on law, and in the second chapter on law,

40:18

I look specifically at the importance of the details of God's revealed law, that in God's Word we have concrete revelation.

40:28

God has spoken and revealed himself. He's never left human beings, ever, just with creation to look at, just looking at nature, trying to discern the will and purpose of God.

40:39

Even in the garden, God spoke with our first parents in terms of verbal revelation.

40:48

And so I think the listener is onto something very, very important there. The details of God's law matter.

40:54

In fact, one of the things I do in the book is look at Jesus' treatment of the law, the way in which

41:01

Jesus utilized the details of the law in his own ministry, starting, of course, with the way in which he defeated the temptation of Satan with quotations from Deuteronomy, as well as his debates with the

41:16

Pharisees and the teachers of the law, and, of course, his great statement as the greater

41:22

Moses when he went up onto the mountain, what we call the Sermon on the Mount, when he affirmed the totality of the law in its detail, and that those who teach it, live it, and teach it will be great in the kingdom of heaven.

41:38

So not some past era, but in the kingdom of God. So it's very important that we study in detail the law of God.

41:46

And I've spent a good deal of my time over the years studying and reading the details of God's law.

41:56

And I think this is really important. We can, of course, agree with the reformers that we can discern moral laws, laws that are applicable to the civil sphere, juridical laws, and, of course, ceremonial or restorative laws in the biblical legal collections.

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They don't come as separate lists. The law comes as an integrated garment.

42:28

And so there's important work to do, because biblical law really is a journey into wisdom.

42:35

And when you look at the various ways in which God's law comes to us, some of it is didactic.

42:41

So we have the standing law, the Ten Commandments, written by the very finger of God, the ten words, which echo the ten utterances of creation.

42:54

It's interesting, isn't it, that at creation, God calls all things into being by his word. And the one place in scripture where God actually writes the scripture himself without the human vehicle is the

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Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, where there is no human hand involved.

43:14

So we have the standing law, and then we have case laws, which are moral applications.

43:20

These are moral laws, but they're applications of the standing law to particular, specific, limited cases, which need to be mined in their details for us today.

43:34

For their core principles, the Puritans would have said the general equity of those laws.

43:40

And then the restorative laws, which concern the priesthood, laws of separation and sacrifice and so forth.

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Well, these are all, they're not abolished, they are fulfilled and they're transposed in the

43:54

Lord Jesus Christ. They continue, but in a different form, which is in the intercession of Christ in the heavenly temple, where Christ makes, we're told in Hebrews, he sprinkles his blood on the mercy seat and makes intercession for us.

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So the tabernacle, the instructions of which are given to Moses in the law, is a copy of the heavenly one.

44:18

So even the ceremonial or restorative elements of the law are not abolished, they're transposed, they continue in a different form.

44:29

So the listener is astute. I think this is very important. A detailed study of God's law is necessary and important, and we should be engaged in that as Christians.

44:42

David the Psalmist was so enthralled and in love with the law of God that the longest song, the longest chapter actually in scripture, is a celebration of God's law in Psalm 119.

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And the law of the Lord is perfect, Psalm 19 tells us as well, converting or restoring the soul.

45:04

We should love God's law and we should want to mine its wisdom. So we see the didactic forms of the law, we see the law expressed in wisdom literature as the teaching of a father to a son in the book of Proverbs, and then we have the prophets exegeting the law and calling the people back to obedience to the law.

45:25

So in one sense, all of scripture is God's law, where specifically the

45:31

Torah, the first five books of scripture are the law, and it is then taught and explicated and applied by the wisdom literature and by the prophets.

45:43

And Jesus says, I haven't come to abolish this, I've come to fill it up so that it reaches full measure, to give it its full weight and application.

45:52

And that is what to Ridderbos called the theonomy of the gospel. And so this is central to the gospel.

46:00

Law is central to the gospel, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 1, when he cites the

46:06

Decalogue and condemns anything that is contrary to his gospel.

46:12

So this is critical, and that's why I devote two chapters to it in Think Christianly. Okay, thank you,

46:19

Anthony. We have Maybelline in Tunica or Tunica, Mississippi.

46:25

Sorry for the Yankee pronunciation of your city. I have no idea how to pronounce it correctly.

46:33

Maybelline, I wonder if she was named after the famous Chuck Berry song. Maybelline says, there are many places in both the

46:43

Old and New Testaments that warn against the sin of double -mindedness. Matthew, James, 2

46:51

Corinthians, 1 Kings, 2 Timothy, and 1 John, just to name a handful.

46:58

Can you please give our listeners a more vivid, detailed description of what it means to be double -minded?

47:08

Yeah, well, double -mindedness, we're told in Scripture, produces radical instability.

47:17

The double -minded man, the Scripture says, is unstable in all of his ways.

47:23

It means that we're basically caught between two opinions. And in many respects, this is what was happening to the

47:30

Hebrews after they left Egypt. So often, we're told in Scripture, they were longing for a return to Egypt.

47:41

And it made them so double -minded that at one point, well,

47:49

Moses and Joshua, basically, they have to say to the people, choose you this day whom you will serve.

47:58

Moses said, remember who is on the Lord's side. And it was Joshua who said, as memory serves, as for me and my house, we will serve the

48:08

Lord. And don't remember this, don't forget, this is after God has delivered the people of Israel from Egypt, although they left a mixed multitude, which meant that Egyptians also left with them who believed

48:23

God. But the people left Egypt in terms of the mighty hand of God, the miracles that they'd seen, the crossing of the

48:31

Red Sea, the pillar of fire, the cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night,

48:38

God's miraculous provision of manna in the wilderness. All of these things had happened.

48:43

God had intervened and spoken and revealed himself. And yet, the people are still, well, they're double -minded.

48:54

They're synthetic in their thinking. They're partly still in Egypt. They're partly with God.

49:00

They're not sure still on which side they want to be. Remember when Moses went up onto the mountain to receive the

49:07

Lord, to receive their constitution? When he's delayed up there, he finally comes down off the mountain.

49:13

And what does he find? The people have prevailed upon Aaron, his own brother, to make them a golden calf so that they can engage in the fertility cult worship of Egypt.

49:25

And these were the people who were supposedly believers. And here is Aaron, who's supposed to be the head of the priesthood, giving into the people and fashioning for them a golden calf.

49:36

We see this in the time of, I think it's Jeroboam, when in the northern kingdom, an idol is fashioned and the king says, behold, your

49:50

God that delivered you out of the house of bondage, out of the land of Egypt. And this temptation to synthesis, and that's what we mean by being double -minded.

50:00

When I talk about a synthesis culture, a dualistic culture, it essentially is a double -minded situation.

50:08

Like another example that your very astute listener there might have picked up on is the situation in Ezra and Nehemiah.

50:22

The reason Ezra, and we're called the Ezra Institute precisely for this reason, because Ezra is a scholar.

50:30

Nehemiah is the guy that usually gets the glory and sermons are usually preached about Nehemiah because he'd strap on the sword and take the trowel and rebuild the walls and so on.

50:41

But there would have been no volunteers to work with Nehemiah had it not been for Ezra, the prophet, the scholar, the scribe, who went in amongst the people and he recovered the law of God.

50:54

The law that the kings were supposed to make a copy of for themselves and read every day.

51:00

He had to rediscover it and he had to teach it to the people. In fact, the first recorded sermon, I think in scripture, is

51:08

Ezra setting up a pulpit, a podium, to exegete the law of God before the people and it says the people wept when they heard the law of God.

51:18

And it's only then that they abandoned their syncretism, their

51:24

Yahweh, their living God and approach to life with their pagan wives and the pagan gods that they were including with the worship of Yahweh.

51:37

And I would say this is the issue we're talking about, this double -mindedness which produces instability in the church and when there's instability in the church, there's radical instability in the culture.

51:47

We become unstable in all of our ways because we're not single -minded. We're not wholly devoted to Christ.

51:53

It's Jesus and it's the Bible and secular thought.

51:59

It's this attempt to bring these things together and have the living God and Baal.

52:06

Maybe we can have Moloch as well. Maybe abortion is okay. Maybe we can compromise on the issue of human sexuality.

52:13

Maybe having the king of Babylon, maybe eating his food is okay after all.

52:23

Maybe the king of Sodom can make Abraham rich. And this double -mindedness is the problem of the people of Israel right through the

52:34

Older Testament. God describes himself as a betrayed husband, as a husband who has an unfaithful wife who keeps wandering off because of double -mindedness.

52:51

So although in philosophy and cultural apologetics we talk about synthesis cultures or dualism, which is the attempt really to live in terms of two ultimate principles and try and blend those principles together, to weld them together even though they are in a sort of dialectical tension with one another.

53:18

This is the problem of Israel. It's the problem of the compromised church. And that is, to my mind, what double -mindedness is all about.

53:28

And all it can do is produce instability in church and culture. Okay, great.

53:34

We are going to our midway break right now. And once again, if you would like to submit a question, submit it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

53:42

chrisarnsen at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

53:47

Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages. Don't go away. I'm Dr.

53:58

Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

54:07

Every Christian who's serious about the Deformed Faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the 8 -volume commentary on the

54:15

Theology and Ethics of the Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity by Dr.

54:22

Joseph Camorcraft. It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism. It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.

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Dr. Camorcraft is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, and I urge everyone looking for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.

54:46

For details on the 8 -volume commentary, go to westminstercommentary .com, westminstercommentary .com.

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For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,

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heritagepresbyterianchurch .com. Please tell Dr. Camorcraft and the saints at Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia that Dr.

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Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sends you. Hello, my name is

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Anthony Eugenio and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Quorum, New York and also the host of the reformrookie .com

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website. I want you to know that if you enjoy listening to the Iron Sharpens Iron radio show like I do, you can now find it on the

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Just subscribe on the iTunes app and listen to the Iron Sharpens Iron radio show at any time, day or night.

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Please be sure to also give it a good review and pass it along to anyone who would benefit from the teaching and the many solidly reformed guests that Chris Arnzen has on the show.

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Truth is so hard to come by these days, so don't waste your time with fluff or fake news. Subscribe to the

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podcast and visit our website and the YouTube page. We are dedicated to teaching Christian theology from a

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And finally, if you're looking to worship in a reformed church that holds to the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, please join us at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corum, New York.

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Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Invinio, and thanks for listening. When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the

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Many things that the

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That's L -Y -N -BrookBaptist .org. This is Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church reminding you that by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves.

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Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

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In the film, Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

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I sensed that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

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I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the

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That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

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That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New Hyde Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

01:06:01

God bless you. Welcome back. Before I return to my conversation with Dr.

01:06:08

Joe Boots about his new book, Think Christianly, I just have some very important reminders.

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Go to www .IronTrippinsIronRadio .com, click Support, then click Click to Donate Now. And just keep in mind, folks, as urgently as we do need your financial support, never give your own church, where you're a member, less money than you normally give your church on the

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Support, then click Click to Donate Now. And last but not least, if you're not a member of a solid

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Bible -believing church, no matter where you live in the world, I have helped many people spanning the entire globe in my audience find churches that are theologically sound, and I may be able to help you find one, too.

01:09:01

So if that be the case with you, no matter where you live, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com and put

01:09:08

I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address to send in a question to Dr.

01:09:15

Joe Boot on his book Think Christianly. That's chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

01:09:21

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. We have

01:09:26

Cord, C -O -R -D, in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. And Cord says,

01:09:34

How long into your life as a Christian, or even into your pastoral ministry, did it take before you discovered these basic but very vital principles of thinking

01:09:48

Christianly? Yeah, well,

01:09:54

I think probably the challenge or the problem began to really dawn on me when

01:10:02

I was in my mid -20s, and I was engaged in the work of Christian apologetics, and I was dissatisfied with the lack of answers to the key challenging cultural questions.

01:10:21

Apologetics was still dominated by basically just trying to defend things like the existence of God and developing theodicies, that is, responses to the problem of evil, and a little bit on the text of the

01:10:37

New Testament and its reliability and maybe historical evidences for the resurrection. And that was really the sum total of what really counted as Christian apologetics 25, 30 years ago.

01:10:56

I was dissatisfied with that, and I had been teaching at a

01:11:01

Bible college in England, in northern England, in Lancashire, actually.

01:11:08

And one afternoon, as I say, I was only about 25, 26 at the time, and one afternoon I went out for a walk, and I went into a small bookshop, a secondhand bookshop, which had a little cafe in it in this small village, and I went to the religion section, not expecting to find a great deal that would have been up my alley, as it were, and I stumbled across the skinny spine of this little book that caught my attention.

01:11:38

It simply said, Why I Believe in God. And I took this off the shelf.

01:11:48

It was a very thin book, and it was by a man I'd never heard of before called Cornelius Van Til.

01:11:56

And I opened the pages of that little book as an English young man in northern

01:12:02

England teaching. I was actually teaching on Genesis 1 to 11, so I had grasped the importance of the doctrine of creation and the vital importance of opposing an evolutionary worldview.

01:12:15

But understanding and developing this idea of the total authority of the Word of God and the

01:12:21

Lordship of Jesus Christ for all of life, that journey began there for me. I opened the pages of that little book, and I think

01:12:27

I stood there for a couple of hours and read two -thirds of it. I did buy the book, but I stood there reading most of it in the shop.

01:12:39

I just could not put it down. I was utterly gripped by what

01:12:44

Van Til was saying, and it was almost as though it felt like putting on your favorite shirt or a jacket that actually fits.

01:12:53

Suddenly I'd found something that made sense of my basic Christian commitment, an apologetic that made sense of my theological commitments.

01:13:05

That began for me what has been a 25 -year journey on this, of discovering the full implications of a reformational worldview, the defense of the

01:13:20

Christian philosophy of life, the fullness of the meaning of the creation law word, and the power of the gospel of the kingdom and the lordship of Jesus Christ over every area of life and thought.

01:13:36

I'd done a little bit of the Puritans in seminary, and they'd always appealed to me, but it was really this book,

01:13:44

Why I Believe in God, by Cornelius Van Til, that began the journey for me.

01:13:49

I'm so grateful to God that he led me into that bookshop, because that moment transformed the course of my life.

01:13:58

Does that book still in print by Cornelius Van Til? Yeah, you can still get it, and it's also sandwiched in the pages of Greg Barnson's large work,

01:14:10

Van Til's Apologetic, but I believe you can still get it. You'll see in my book

01:14:16

Think Christianly that I still quote Van Til at various points. I have a chapter on...

01:14:24

The first chapter, by the way, is called Think Christianly About Everything. Chapter two is

01:14:29

Think Christianly About Christ, and then later on I do have a chapter on thinking Christianly about apologetics, about science and evolutionism, about history, about Marxism, race, sexuality, about life, about church in the kingdom of God.

01:14:45

So I range over a number of topics. But that journey emphatically began for me with Cornelius Van Til, and I'm so grateful for him and for his ministry and that the

01:14:57

Lord led me into that little bookshop. Yeah, in fact, you just reminded me of a sermon that your friend

01:15:04

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries just recently preached at the church where I'm a member,

01:15:15

Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, embracing Jesus's view of Scripture, which

01:15:22

I guess could have been renamed Thinking Christianly About the Scriptures. Yeah, indeed.

01:15:28

Well, I want you to, since I know that you have to leave early, I want you to summarize in six minutes or so, since that's about the time frame you said you had to leave.

01:15:39

Please summarize for us what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before we introduce and welcome to the program

01:15:49

Dr. Michael Thiessen. I think that what

01:15:58

I want really for people to go away with is the centrality and the importance from a scriptural standpoint of loving

01:16:06

God with all of our minds. The intellectual disarmament of the

01:16:14

Christian church has been, in my view, the greatest disaster of the 20th and the 21st century.

01:16:23

The collapse of the Christian mind. We've looked to fill it with techniques, with church planting strategies, with, well, to put it mildly,

01:16:37

St. Paul's Trampoline Act, with trying to entertain people and think that the gospel is going to be advanced somehow through some sort of downloadable technique, some sort of special strategy, some sort of winning formula that will advance the

01:16:56

Christian faith in our culture, when actually the answer has been lying in front of us in the Word of God all of this time, to love the

01:17:03

Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, our mind, and our strength. And we need the rearmament of the

01:17:11

Christian mind. Scripture tells us, Paul tells us that if we are believers, then actually we have the mind of Christ.

01:17:21

In him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is an unfathomable depths of knowledge and understanding that are hid in the

01:17:33

Lord Jesus Christ that need development. And the Word of God provides us with not only concrete teaching, but from it, it gives us a world and life view that teaches us about the nature of creation, the nature of law, so that we can actually go to creation and discover there

01:17:56

God's meaning for all of these different things with these scriptures in our hand.

01:18:02

And so I want to remind people that there's three vital senses to the

01:18:08

Word of God as it comes to us in the Bible. The first is the creation

01:18:14

Word of God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God said.

01:18:22

So this is the creation Word. And our understanding of that is deepened as the

01:18:29

Apostle John gloriously opens his gospel with the phrase, In the beginning was the Word, and the

01:18:35

Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were made through him.

01:18:40

So we have the creation Word. And then we have the incarnate

01:18:46

Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.

01:18:53

And then we have the inscripturated Word. As Paul said, all scripture is

01:18:58

God -breathed and is profitable for teaching, for correction, for training in righteousness and so forth.

01:19:05

So we have the three senses of the Word, the creation Word, the incarnate

01:19:10

Word, and the inscripturated Word. And at the center of that, at the epistemic center of that is the

01:19:20

Bible because it's the Bible that tells us of the incarnate Word and is the lens through which we look at the creation

01:19:27

Word. Because of the problem of sin, the inscripturation of the Word of God was necessary, as was, of course, the incarnation of the

01:19:36

Lord Jesus. And so I want to remind people of the unity of God's Word, that we cannot understand anything, as we should in creation, without Christ and the scriptures.

01:19:49

And we need to seek to plumb the depths of a biblical world and life view and begin to seek to apply it faithfully to every area of life, our personal life, yes, our family life, our church life, our vocational life, our professional life, our studies, our pursuit of the arts, our civic culture, the social order in every area of life, to apply the

01:20:17

Word of God so the kingdom of God will be advanced and God's name be glorified.

01:20:25

This only happens, as I said earlier, by the renewal of our minds. And Paul tells us, when he reminds us of the unity, in a sense, of the

01:20:33

Christian life, he says that, in Romans 12, he tells us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

01:20:41

To present your body, he says, this is your spiritual act of worship. And he says, be transformed, be transformed by the renewing of your minds.

01:20:54

And if we're going to see transformation in our own lives, in our church life, sociocultural life, civic life, and so forth, we have to begin with the renewal of the mind in terms of the

01:21:06

Word of God. So that's why I wrote Think Christianly. That's why chapter one says think

01:21:12

Christianly about everything. And chapter two deals with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

01:21:17

So for me, I'm going to leave you in the very capable hands of my colleague, Dr. Michael Thiessen, who will be able to answer questions and talk more about the book and more about our work as an institute and as a ministry and how people might get further resourced and equipped and trained through the

01:21:34

Ezra Institute. So, Chris, thank you very much for allowing me to come on the show and talk a bit about Think Christianly.

01:21:39

I do want to encourage people to buy it. They can get it from Ezra Press. They go onto our website, and it will be available shortly through Amazon as well.

01:21:47

And we trust that it will be a blessing and a resource to God's church as we seek to advance the kingdom of God, the kingdom of his dear son, our

01:21:57

Messiah, the Lord Jesus. And we'll repeat that information later on towards the end of the program.

01:22:03

But thank you so much, Dr. Boot, for squeezing time into your busy schedule and all the way over there in the

01:22:10

U .K., where it's a much later time of day than it is here, for spending this much time with us.

01:22:18

I am truly grateful, and I look forward to your return. Thank you, Chris. Look forward to seeing you again.

01:22:24

God bless. And now, as Dr. Boot said, we are going to be joined by— and I'm so glad he introduced you, because I might have continued to mispronounce your name.

01:22:34

It's Michael Thiessen, not Thiessen? Yes, Chris, it's from the

01:22:40

German von Theissen. So, yeah, we anglicized it a little bit, but kept the silent

01:22:46

H there. So, yeah, Michael Thiessen. And you're the chief of operations in the USA headquarters of the

01:22:54

Ezra Institute? Yeah, so Joe and I have been working together up in Canada for a number of years and been a fellow with the

01:23:02

Institute up there. And now I'm pastoring a church here in Georgetown, Kentucky, called

01:23:08

Royal Spring Chapel, and at the same time administering with our great organization that I'm just so excited to be building here in the

01:23:16

U .S. with Joe. Great. Well, tell us more about this church. So we are—the way we would describe our church is we are

01:23:26

Reformed and Reformational, both trying to capture our theological convictions and then, of course, the

01:23:36

Reformational aspect of what Joe's been trying to explain to people. And I agree with Joe.

01:23:43

I think very often people hear just this well -thought -out biblical worldview that approaches

01:23:53

Scripture with the expectation that Scripture is sufficient to teach us. So just a simple historic understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture, people regularly go, wow, that's helpful.

01:24:07

But if you don't kind of put it in some type of framework as helping them to see how this is developed historically from the

01:24:15

Reformers and into the Dutch theologians and the Puritans, then they might think it's a new thing.

01:24:23

And so we describe ourselves as Reformed and Reformational. We're a small church plant.

01:24:30

We actually rent another church and meet in the afternoons. And I am a Canadian in the

01:24:36

United States to help Americans, Chris, understand that we just cannot go the socialism of Canada.

01:24:45

And so as Joe decided as the founder to move back to England for family reasons and in order to build the institute in the

01:24:55

UK, my wife and I and our family felt very called to come to the United States and be a part of building this great thing because I really believe that the

01:25:05

United States is a standing, one of the last standing bastions where we're seeing a culture war go on for sure.

01:25:15

But we are at least seeing a war. We're at least seeing the church trying to grapple with some of these

01:25:23

Reformational ideas. So, yeah, that's our ministry here in Kentucky, royalspringchapel .com.

01:25:31

And outside of that, I spend my time as a part of my ministry pastoring, helping the

01:25:38

Ezra Institute. Well, I've got to introduce you to my very dear friend,

01:25:43

Dr. Tony Costa, who is not only a dear friend of mine, but he is a mutual dear friend of Dr.

01:25:55

James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. And he is a fellow Canadian. He is still in Canada.

01:26:02

Yes, he's a good guy. Oh, you know him? I know Tony. Oh, great. Well, he went as far,

01:26:10

I don't know if you'd agree with Tony on this, but he went as far as hoping, knowing that it was not going to happen, but he was hoping that Canada would actually become the 51st state of the

01:26:25

United States. Well, you know what? To give your

01:26:31

American listeners a little insight into their neighbors up to the North, unfortunately, there are really two key markers for Canadian culture.

01:26:42

The first marker is I'm not American. And then the second marker is a deep commitment to multiculturalism.

01:26:59

So, unfortunately, I'm with Tony in the sense that, you know, if we could parse out

01:27:05

Toronto and Vancouver and a few of the other alt -lib cities, we'd have a lot of Canadians who would say it would be great to be part of the

01:27:17

United States. But, unfortunately, Canadians have this visceral response that's a little brother syndrome that they want to be treated like the same size of brother at the table, and they're just not.

01:27:35

And then certainly as far as constitutional thinking, they're not.

01:27:42

And so, yes, I think I believe I received a note from a friend of mine today who just said that President Trump just trolled the new prime minister in the

01:27:53

White House today. So this is still a relevant conversation.

01:28:00

And a lot of Canadians are trying to figure out what Trump is doing with the tariffs.

01:28:07

And I personally think he's trying to force some better teamwork because, you know, unfortunately,

01:28:14

Canadians are warming up to the Chinese communist philosophy of governance more than the

01:28:21

American constitutional view. So, yeah, I agree with Tony.

01:28:26

I would love it if there was some land expansion, if the United States became empire building again.

01:28:33

Obviously, neither you or I or any solid Christian I know who is living in the

01:28:40

United States, none of us are delusional enough to think that the

01:28:45

United States is a pristine land of godliness when to this day there are still millions of children being murdered in the womb and all kinds of other atrocities and abominations taking place.

01:29:00

But at the same time, I do love this country for the freedoms that we have, at least at this point.

01:29:09

We have no idea how long the Lord will allow us to cling to many of these liberties and freedoms.

01:29:17

We can only pray that there will be more transformation done for his praise, honor and glory in this nation.

01:29:26

But what we do when we have first -time guests such as yourself on Iron Trap and Zion Radio, we have them briefly give a summary of their salvation story that would include the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which they were raised and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

01:29:45

Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them. And I would love to hear your story.

01:29:52

Oh, that's wonderful. I'm happy to share that, and I want to get to that quickly.

01:29:58

But I do want to just point out, Chris, something you just said about, one of the things

01:30:04

I notice here in America, culturally wise, is that there is this great love of the liberty and freedom.

01:30:10

But the American church is struggling. And it goes to some of the things that Joe's writing in his book.

01:30:16

They're struggling with this sloganization of Christianity and this superficiality.

01:30:22

That's one of the things that Joe and I have always had in harmony as we are trying to teach and lead.

01:30:27

And so what you have is this, you have a church, and then you have a civil mind that understands historically the importance of these things, but has just been so, like,

01:30:46

I call it Kentucky nice or Kentucky polite, where there's an embedded gentleness, there's an embedded respect, there's an embedded love of freedom.

01:30:59

But when you say, how do we get there? You're getting nice -sounding answers, but you're not getting deeply convictional answers from Scripture.

01:31:10

And so that's, again, why we really want to be here in the United States, because the conversations, you can have them.

01:31:16

They're open, and we need to call people to the Lord. But right now, the church has been slipping into this just very veneer attitude towards Scripture.

01:31:30

So the way that got a hold of my heart, I grew up in the

01:31:35

Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, which is a broadly, it's a mixture.

01:31:42

It would kind of be the equivalent of the SBC here in the U .S., so a mixture of Reformed Baptist in amongst broadly

01:31:52

Evangelical Baptist. So I grew up in a faithful Christian home.

01:31:57

My father and mother loved the Lord, and I have the pleasure to continue to look to my father as a wonderful mentor and leader in my life.

01:32:10

I can regularly, as a pastor and as a teacher, just give those anecdotal stories of my father training me to be a

01:32:19

Christ follower. One of the things that happened in my life was that I saw my mother and father serving the

01:32:27

Lord very seriously. And yet a number of circumstances in our life between me being in my early teens to my late teens, where I perceived that the

01:32:43

Lord wasn't blessing my parents financially or with enough stability with what

01:32:52

I thought they deserved. So I started becoming, in grade 9 and 10, in my younger teens, getting very angry with God.

01:33:00

Just watching the injustice in the world, watching men outside of our church just thriving, and watching my father often count the cost for following Christ.

01:33:16

And it just looked very hard. And so from grade 9 to my later teens, my graduating year of high school,

01:33:27

I just went from anger to rebellion to the enjoyment of sin.

01:33:36

And that brought to me a very sincere emptiness, of course.

01:33:44

I found myself in my grade 12 year depressed, aimless, continuing to be angry.

01:33:58

And particularly not finding very much meaning.

01:34:04

So I say all that to say three things happened in my life quite in an amazing turnaround.

01:34:12

My uncle Bob, who fought in the Second World War and was a great— he was my great uncle, so he was my grandfather.

01:34:20

My grandfather and two of my great uncles all fought in the Second World War.

01:34:26

And praise the Lord, they all lived through it. So they came home. And so this is just a man that I had grown up with as a senior citizen in my life who was just salt of the earth.

01:34:38

He was a great preacher. And he just poured into me as a young man often.

01:34:44

Well, my uncle Bob died, and we were sitting in the church.

01:34:51

And two things happened at that service. Number one, we sang the song, It Is Well With My Soul, and I realized

01:34:58

I couldn't sing it. I could not sing the song because it wasn't well with my soul.

01:35:05

And then one of my cousins, who has been a good, solid Bible teacher,

01:35:10

Rick Baker, had been given the task from my great uncle Bob to preach a sermon at his funeral.

01:35:19

And he preached basically directly to me. And that was a wonderful time of calling.

01:35:30

But I was still pretty hardened. And so a few months later, I ended up driving across Canada.

01:35:36

And my goal was to drive across Canada on stolen gas to just go out east and party.

01:35:46

And my car broke down twice, and I ended up paying $7 ,000 in car repairs.

01:35:53

And so we went from the Lord clearly calling me to me continuing in rebellion to a clear moment in my life where I said,

01:36:01

OK, this is the Lord's judgment. We were siphoning gas. I wanted to save $500, and the

01:36:10

Lord has laid me with— literally, on the way out, the water pump broke, and on the way back, something else broke.

01:36:16

And I had a $7 ,000 car bill. And so then the third thing that happened was my parents had moved out of our hometown.

01:36:27

And so I ended up moving up with them for a time. And again, I was really battling and very, very unpleased with the world.

01:36:36

And very simply, the youth pastor, who I would say would be not a great preacher, not a really solid, solid theologian, he got up there and preached three sermons in a row.

01:36:49

And by the end of three weeks, I went from repenting of my sin and dedicating my life to Christ and acknowledging

01:36:58

His Lordship to signing up for Bible college. I went from utter rebellion to,

01:37:05

OK, I want to go study God's word more. So that is how the

01:37:11

Lord got a hold of me and called me back to Christ. So I'm very thankful for it.

01:37:16

Christ is worthy to be praised. And He is the one I trust and love, and He is worthy to be adored.

01:37:24

Now, how did you come to discover Reformed theology and Dr. Joe Boot? OK, so I went to Gordon -Conwell for my master's degree, and I went to Gordon -Conwell to be exposed to more

01:37:41

Reformed theology, right? So at that time, Gordon -Conwell was a mixture of like 60 percent

01:37:46

Presbyterians and 40 percent Baptists with a fairly strong Reformed bend. And so that's really where I would say

01:37:54

I was solidified in seeing

01:38:01

Scripture through the lens of understanding.

01:38:08

Total depravity was such an important, important discovery.

01:38:13

You know, the reality of it is, and again, that everything has been corrupted from sin.

01:38:22

So, of course, I was getting into the Christian classics and whatnot. So that's where I discovered Reformed theology.

01:38:28

Now, Joe and I discovered each other. My apologies, my dogs are barking in the background if that came through.

01:38:37

Joe and I discovered each other because we were pastoring about 40 minutes away from each other.

01:38:43

He was in an urban setting. In Canada. In Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. And I was about 40 minutes north.

01:38:49

And there was about three things in there. Number one, Joe's wife, Jenny, had just gone through a cancer battle, and my second son,

01:38:58

Gabriel, had just gone through a cancer battle. Wow. So I kind of knew of Joe, and I knew that he had gone through something, and he was probably a year past it, and we were just finishing up our son's cancer treatment.

01:39:14

So I wanted to meet with him. And then secondly, I was really exploring

01:39:20

Christian education as a pastor. What is the nature of education? And I found nobody, no other pastor in our area wanted to talk about what is a

01:39:34

Christian perspective of education. I had homeschoolers who had a great, robust, solid theology and philosophy of Christian home education, but I couldn't get any of the clergymen to be serious about it.

01:39:48

And I heard Joe lecturing on it once, and I thought, OK, you know what, this is a guy that I need to talk to.

01:39:54

So that's what happened. We ended up having coffee, walking for an hour. He invited me to come down to the

01:40:00

Institute's property. And over the next three or four years, I became a fellow. I did my doctoral work at TEDS in Chicago.

01:40:08

And the title of my major research was

01:40:15

Responding to Our Hemorrhaging Faith in Canada by Exploring a

01:40:20

Family -Integrated Model of Ministry. And so that just brought me into this, looking at the literature, looking at the academic side of things, and just seeing this big, gaping hole within the church between what pastors believed and what they practiced.

01:40:47

So, yeah, a review of the attractional model, a review of the intergenerational model of ministry, and then a review of the family -integrated model of ministry juxtaposed against,

01:41:01

OK, we've looked at the literature. Now let's talk with pastors. So I did 20 interviews of pastors about what they believed and what they practiced.

01:41:09

And it was astonishing that pastors really did not practice what they preached when it came down to understanding the nature of discipleship and education.

01:41:20

Well, we're going to go to our final break, and when we return, we're going to once again revisit

01:41:26

To Think Christianly, which is actually the title of Joe Boot's book.

01:41:33

And I'd like you to apply it because it is scary here in the

01:41:40

United States how many people, especially young people, are absolutely fascinated with the idea of socialism.

01:41:51

And perhaps you could apply that whole theme of thinking Christianly to the point where would someone adopt socialism if they were thinking

01:42:03

Christianly? We have a mayoral race in New York City.

01:42:09

I'm originally from New York, and it looks like a nearly done deal, unless God has some other plan that we don't know about, through His providence.

01:42:19

It looks like we are going to be seeing the first openly socialist mayor elected in the

01:42:28

United States, and this will be in New York City. So it's a scary thing for a lot of Christians and even just social conservatives.

01:42:38

But if you could perhaps apply that theme to that very issue. And if you'd like to join us,

01:42:46

I would urge you to submit your questions now because we're rapidly running out of time.

01:42:51

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Don't go away.

01:42:57

We're going to be right back. I'm Dr.

01:43:05

Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

01:43:16

Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.

01:43:23

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim

01:43:40

Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island and beyond.

01:43:48

I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have.

01:43:57

For more information on Hope Reformed Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.

01:44:03

That's hopereformedli .net. Or call 631 -696 -5711.

01:44:12

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:44:29

Welcome back. And that was the aforementioned Dr. Tony Costa doing a very nice job promoting

01:44:37

Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island. And as we mentioned, he is a mutual dear friend of my guest for this part of the program,

01:44:46

Michael Thiessen. Did I say it correctly? Yeah, you got it. Who is the chief of operations for the

01:44:57

Ezra Institute's headquarters in the USA. And he is also pastor of Royal Spring Chapel in Georgetown, Kentucky.

01:45:08

And if you have a question, send it in immediately because we're rapidly running out of time. ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

01:45:15

Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. As I was saying before the break,

01:45:20

I'd like you to apply to think Christianly in regard to the love affair that many people seem to have, especially the young, about socialism.

01:45:38

Yeah. And so specifically, Joe has an entire chapter on this.

01:45:43

I believe this is chapter 9 about Marxism. Wow. He's got an entire chapter in the book on think

01:45:50

Christianly. And this has been an ongoing dialogue for us. So I think there's a few dots that we should connect for the listeners about why this is so attractive to young adults.

01:46:04

I think, number one, as Joe mentioned earlier, the intellectual collapse of Christianity has been a major problem.

01:46:13

One thing that I would add to what Joe was saying there is that this intellectual collapse of the

01:46:19

Christian faith is actually rooted in disbelief. Chris, you had asked earlier why so many people were receptive and then why others were not receptive.

01:46:31

That's because we're having a failure of walking by faith alone in the word of God, in Christ alone, and applying the lordship of Christ into many areas.

01:46:46

And in reality, one of the methods or one of the slippery slides we get on that takes us to the side is this rationalism, which is,

01:46:58

I'll believe about some things about God, but I don't actually believe that it's

01:47:05

God's mind and his revelation that needs to help me think. So the idea that we reason because we first acknowledge the creator is such an important thing for people to grasp.

01:47:20

So this whole collapse of intellectual Christianity is just a basic failure of trying to elevate man's word over God's word, and it's a basic failure of making an idol of man.

01:47:34

We like to worship ourselves. We like to think highly of ourselves. So then when we come to the concept of ethics or when we come to the concept of society, we're then grappling with socialism that is attempting systematically to create a society that functions with a premise or with vocabulary that's ripped out of Christianity.

01:48:06

So there's this soft temptation to idolize man. At the same time, then there is this slick system that seems to use

01:48:16

Christian language. So I think that's why young people particularly get so deceived by it, because they just haven't lived long enough to know it doesn't work.

01:48:26

And they're not living by faith. They're idolizing the intellectuals at their university.

01:48:32

I just read one book about economics by Marx, and now

01:48:38

I'm this expert on it. And then you go to a farmer and you say, can we do some farmer math on this?

01:48:44

And eventually they figure out it doesn't work. But it sounds so Christian -ish, and it sounds so romantic, and it bleeds right into the humanist temptation to idolize man.

01:48:58

So, of course, that's not Christian. A utilitarian social ethic that has no claim to a transcendent moral standard is the antithesis of Christianity.

01:49:15

They would be promoting that the most moral acts are those that maximize the most pleasure and minimize the most pain for the most amount of people.

01:49:25

That is just basically a mob rule mentality.

01:49:31

And that is the antithesis to concepts of justice in Scripture. So just going through a few of those ideas, like sphere sovereignty that is found in Scripture, where you can do a deep dive into sphere sovereignty.

01:49:44

And then you can just also have a very basic understanding of it. Does the government rule my family?

01:49:52

No. I don't need the local sheriff to come in and help me to put my children to bed.

01:50:01

If one of my children becomes a criminal, then it's obvious that I now need the state to come in.

01:50:08

And so Scripture, clearly all the way through Scripture, is promoting the importance of the family, at the same time promoting a vision for government.

01:50:19

Then the church is birthed, and it's its own institution. And so we see it embedded in Scripture so that the moment any biblical

01:50:28

Christian says, hey, the most amount—if everybody agrees on this, but it's going to trample multiple families, we go, wait, pause.

01:50:43

The concept of justice in Scripture that we see coming out of Exodus 18, where Jethro is advising

01:50:49

Moses to practice a better court system, really, we see right in that we see the court of appeals.

01:51:00

Right in there, we see regional representation. We see all of these things. And the people walk away satisfied.

01:51:08

That's the goal of justice. Justice is when people have a dispute, they walk away satisfied because of jurisprudence, because of bearing true witness, not false witness.

01:51:19

And if there's a disagreement, then people are heard, they're dealt with, and there's a just decision.

01:51:29

Not what Marxism would say, that we are trying to equalize all things, where the government man, the humanist, the elite that is now propped up because we're worshiping intellectuals, where they need to come in and things like the redistribution of wealth, the idea of price fixing or interventionism in the economy.

01:51:56

All of these things at a very cursory, very top -level reading that might feel nice, but when you get into it and you explore it, they are completely antithetical to the ideas in Scripture that justice is righteousness.

01:52:17

It's making the righteous decision and that I have personal responsibility, not the need for a nanny state to come in and take over.

01:52:28

And the problem then with socialism really, which we all know, is that once we then merge that concept on earth with the true, totally deprived mind of man, it just becomes a one -sided stick to beat whomever is not currently in power or profiting.

01:52:52

So it sounds nice that they're trying to serve everybody. It just ends up being self -serving for the elite, which we've seen time and time again in history.

01:53:00

So I think young adults get sucked in because it appeals to self -idolatry.

01:53:06

It appeals to the idolatry of man, to the elevation of man's word. They're trying to discover wisdom, and so they're getting lulled away to this human idolatry.

01:53:17

And by the way, this is actually where the church goes into a full apostate rationalism when they do this.

01:53:27

We actually see this in denominations throughout the years where the line has been blurred so much depending on man's word that now it's a completely obscure gospel that's being preached, a non -gospel, an apostate gospel.

01:53:43

So they get tempted into that, and then there's this robbery of Christian language like reconciliation and equity and these types of things.

01:53:55

What is that movie, The Princess Bride? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

01:54:04

Yes. Right? Where it's like literally that, you know, hey, you just used a nice word, but I do not think you understand what the

01:54:14

Marxist means by that word when they use that word. Equity always meant equality before the law so that I am not discriminated against impartially.

01:54:25

It never meant until the Marxist mind comes along and socialism comes along where now you're going to rob me to pay someone else's laziness.

01:54:37

Or you're going to deny me in order to promote someone else's incompetency.

01:54:44

So, no, those two worldviews cannot match together, and they are antithetical.

01:54:52

And, you know, I think basically the starting premise is the thing that usually should be cautioning every young adult that these—many of these humanistic—well, not many.

01:55:05

All of these humanistic philosophers are starting with the premise there is no God. So you can't have a

01:55:10

Christian ethic come out of your very first premise there is no God. Now, you already touched on this in what you were saying about the idolatry of man worshiping mankind.

01:55:22

But we have Derek in Pella, Iowa says, doesn't a lot of this boil down to the spoiled brat generations that have adopted an ideology of entitlement?

01:55:42

Yeah, one of the things that—so the answer to that question is yes. But I think one of the things your listeners would be wise to understand is just how pervasive these young adults are being indoctrinated and the strength with which the language is being used.

01:56:07

If you think of the critical theory and just the basic premise of the oppressor matrix, and you've had a young adult being told their entire life that they are the victim, it's very hard to overcome that just because there's so many things you can get out of life by playing the victim.

01:56:35

And so, no, I agree. You've got the—this is rooted in the psychological movement, the psychological gospel where, of course, you've got

01:56:47

Carl Truman's book, which I think evaluates quite well how we've gotten to the point where people are just turned—the definition of happiness or the definition of purpose is my happiness.

01:57:00

And they are just told that time and time again. Chris, I remember the very first time I watched a commercial from Wendy's, and just full disclosure, everybody,

01:57:09

I'm a bit of a Wendy's fan. Their spicy chicken combo, I think, is better than Chick -fil -A's spicy chicken, and your listeners can argue about that.

01:57:20

But I remember the very first time I heard a commercial in high school when Wendy's started the slogan, you deserve it.

01:57:28

And I thought, you don't deserve a Wendy's. If you have money to pay for it, you don't deserve it, but you don't just walk up to the window and deserve it.

01:57:36

And they would be the first to tell you that. Exactly. That's right. Hey, I deserve this.

01:57:41

Well, do you have money to pay for it? No. Okay, then get out. So I just—for someone like your listener who's wondering about that, the way forward is a bold proclamation of the lordship of Christ teaching that generation that Christ gives us our true identity.

01:58:03

So it really is an identity crisis. They're taught upside -down everything when it comes down to just even denying biological sex.

01:58:13

I mean, Chris, you could never have imagined in my—if you had told my 21 -year -old second -year

01:58:20

Bible college self that I would be in my mid -40s and people would actually be denying maleness and femaleness,

01:58:27

I would have said, You're loopy, and if that were to happen, then

01:58:33

I have to be a dispensationalist. We're in the last seven years. You would have never convinced me, but here we are.

01:58:41

And it's because of this very significant rejection of the lord's word, which leads to a true identity crisis.

01:58:52

And so you can go to those young adults and call them to Christ, knowing with so much surety that their finding identity in Christ will transform their life.

01:59:05

And so that's why we're so passionate about calling people to Christ. Amen. And we are out of time, and I want to repeat your websites,

01:59:12

EzraInstitute .com, EzraInstitute .com, and also

01:59:17

RoyalSpringChapel .com, RoyalSpringChapel .com. Thank you for doing such a superb job,

01:59:24

Michael. I look forward to having you back on the program. And I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater