Abolitionism with Derin Stidd

Apologetics Live

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:07

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

00:15

I think that what's fascinating... You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here.

00:21

Yeah. But what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions but you don't do it with your own.

00:28

Because I... That may be the case. And there's that confirmation bias coming up again.

00:37

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

00:52

We're live! All right, Apologetics Live, we're here tonight. We are Anthony Free.

00:58

They bring Pastor Justin in. We're Anthony Free here. He's still doing stuff. I thought he was going to be back this week.

01:05

But in light of the fact, we're going to have something special since he's not here. We'll do something special for Ohio, have a special video to show.

01:15

But so before we get started, I'm Andrew Rappaport, this is Pastor Justin Pierce. We are part of Apologetics Live.

01:23

This is a show where you can come in and ask any question, any challenge you have for us. We're here for that.

01:28

This is our office hours, Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern time. Just go to ApologeticsLive .com.

01:35

You just click on the, well, the duck image. It's the duck icon for StreamYard.

01:42

I don't know why they chose that icon. Click on that, that gets you in here. Just do me a favor, and when you do so, please remember to allow your browser to use your microphone and videos so that we're not scrambling trying to figure out what went wrong.

02:00

We've had that happen. This is the Ministry of Striving Fraternity. Find out more about Striving Fraternity at strivingfraternity .org.

02:08

And in light of, let's bring this up here, in light of, well, I guess in light of Anthony not being here, now,

02:16

I don't know if you've seen this. Justin Peters told me he hasn't seen this yet, and I know he couldn't make it in tonight.

02:22

But this is from Ohio. Now, this is, we're going to talk about issues of morality and culture tonight.

02:31

Oh, yeah. And this should be, like when you talk about brain dead simple legislation, okay?

02:42

Having legislation to say that men should not compete in women's sports.

02:49

That's right. I mean, there shouldn't be a need for legislation like that, but there is. And as we're seeing, men are winning all the women's sports that they couldn't win if they were,

02:59

I mean, now you got a 40, what, six -year -old guy that's going to compete as a woman weightlifter.

03:05

And the only reason he wants to do that is because, well, he wants to be able to burn the U .S. flag. How in the world is he ever going to represent this country?

03:12

All right, so let's play this first clip. This is from Ohio, a woman that is going to present legislation to ban biological men from playing in women's sports.

03:29

So let's give a listen. Oh, yeah. Helps if I hit play.

03:35

Move to amend with amendment 1594. Now just watch.

03:43

The chair has the amendment. The amendment appears to be in order. The representative may proceed. And watch what happens as she reads.

03:48

Is a fairness issue for women to be able to achieve their dreams and athletics in our state. And it's crucial to preserving women's rights and the integrity of women's and girl sports.

03:58

Across our country, female athletes are currently losing scholarships, opportunities, medals, education and training opportunities.

04:07

This amendment will require schools that are part of the OHSAA to designate separate teams for participants of the biological sex.

04:17

No school interscholastic conference or organization that regulates interscholastics shall permit biological males to participate on athletic team or an athletic competition designated only for biological female participants.

04:37

OK, so you look at that. I mean, that was just simply incredible.

04:45

You can't hear what she's saying. Then that was their purpose is to drag her out.

04:52

So you can't hear. They couldn't even hear when you watch the video. He's banging the gavel. Can't hear that over it.

04:58

But I want you to see the other angle on the Democrat that I'm sorry. I don't know any other way of saying this, but to me, it's like this is a third grader.

05:09

I want my way. I want my way. OK, this I don't know how else to say it, but the

05:16

Democrats can't win. It seems on any issue. Without it's like, well, in Texas, if we can't get our way, we're going to we're going to walk out so that there's not enough of a coalition to be able to not coalition, but enough of a quorum to be able to vote.

05:36

OK, you know what? I want you to watch this guy's behavior. He's the guy in the center. And if he doesn't get his way, he doesn't want to hear what this woman has to say.

05:46

He's just complete disrespectful to anybody else's ideas. Watch when the camera's just on him.

05:52

And I don't know. Tell me if you think he's acting like a three year old with a tenor tantrum.

05:58

Yeah, I can't even say the word. Apparently, there's several involved in that.

06:16

I mean, is is that childish or what? Well, but you think if it's if it's designed to disrupt and stop the governmental process, if it's designed to do that,

06:28

I mean, they learned, you know, on the sixth that they can do that same thing. They can they claim it caused turmoil, upset, you know, people and cause problems like that.

06:39

And next thing you know, we can have laws based on fear and tactics like this.

06:46

We mentioned Ohio and Dr. Sefestro comes in as me. Well, it's because he he doesn't want anybody to see his face.

06:53

Yeah, that's weird. He puts himself in here, but then doesn't have his camera on.

06:58

So he's got my face. I don't know why he did that. He's on mute. Yeah. Chris Hough says this is something a five year old does when he doesn't get his way, you know, and he's exactly right.

07:11

Yep. You know, that's the tactics of a bully, of of somebody that that they don't actually have law.

07:21

They know they don't have the position. And that's what you just said. It's that they they know they can't win.

07:28

Yeah. The area of ideas behave this way. OK, that's amazing.

07:34

Anthony added himself in here. I'm kind of hoping that he will get his camera and microphone working, because I'd love to see what he's got to say.

07:46

But, you know, this is this is, you know, a KT says disrespectful.

07:54

But that's a socialist tactic. You got to think about it as a communist socialist tactic. The idea of of intimidating everybody else to silence them.

08:04

I'm going to put Anthony out till he gets his camera working. OK. Oh, he's saying I think

08:09

I think he texted me lots of allergies is what I think he just texted us. Oh, poor guy. Everybody praying for him.

08:15

He's having a lot of allergy problems. Yeah, I guess his non -dairy diet didn't get rid of his allergies, like he says.

08:21

All right. OK, so he says he's just listening, but he came in here.

08:27

All right. I would have loved to have seen what his what he would have had to say about, well, his state representatives, because that was a really bad representation of Ohio.

08:38

Sorry. All right. But let's get to tonight's topic. And Pastor Darren is going to join us later.

08:44

He is as pastor, you know, he's discipling people and that's what he is doing. And so he told me he was going to come in late.

08:51

I did call him last night. We had a very lengthy talk so that we could go over some of the things that since he was going to come in late that I would be discussing.

08:59

So he knows my position. I know his position, anything that he and I would disagree with. We now we know clearly what they are so that we can discuss those.

09:08

I wanted to have that up front. So he's going to come in late and it'd be unfair for him to come in and have anything that would be a disagreement.

09:17

Now, we want to talk about abolitionism. And nobody knows my position on it. So I know, you know, so we have not on this show in a very long time.

09:29

It's been many, many years since we've talked about abolitionism. And there's reasons for that.

09:35

And, you know, I got in. I had met Pastor Darren last year and, you know, he and he'll probably tell the story.

09:43

Actually, I'll let him tell the story. But, you know, he essentially was warned about me being this wicked, evil person that I am.

09:52

Yeah, he's right. Yeah, but maybe not in the way that you would mean it. I mean, you're thinking about the fact that, you know,

09:59

I'm a wicked person like every human being is. But, you know, he ended up getting talking with me.

10:05

He ended up with a very different impression. It's kind of interesting how many people have been told how I am and then they meet me and discuss these issues and go, oh, oh, he's not like I was told.

10:16

Yeah, well, maybe it's that you were told something that you believe, son, that was inaccurate. So here's the thing.

10:23

As we're going to talk about abolitionism, you know, I have had vehement disagreements with a group called

10:31

AHA. It stands for Abolish Human Abortion. You know, and when

10:37

I put this out in the show notes, I said that I, years ago, explained that their practices that they had back then, glad to hear from Pastor Darren that these practices are not continued, that there's been some repentance of them and they don't continue some of the things that I criticized, that I said were cultic.

10:56

Now, the interesting thing is, if they've gone away, if they've moved their position to be where I am, and I haven't changed, then

11:04

I guess they should be saying, hey, you know, we should have listened to Andrew earlier, right? I didn't plan on going into why

11:11

I felt they were a cult. I didn't think that was necessary. But it seems that as soon as I posted this show, lots of people decided to go after me saying that I'm a liar and things like this.

11:23

One person even, you know, because I made the comment that I was an abolitionist prior to AHA's existence.

11:30

And someone was like, oh, nothing happens before Andrew. It's just a simple fact. I remember when

11:37

I started and how I started to think about abolitionism as it applies to the issue of abortion.

11:44

And I'm going to define abolitionism in a moment. But and I'm going to also have,

11:50

I want to give Pastor Darren a time for him to give a better definition as he is more active in the movement of abolitionism, which is going to be different than abolitionists.

12:04

There's some differences there as far as people who are abolitionists but don't participate in AHA, babies are murdered here, end abortion now, or with the ministry that he's involved with,

12:16

SOS. So as we look at these things, I remember back and I couldn't, we just literally two minutes before the show went live, we tried figuring it out.

12:29

But when the movie 180 came out, I used to, prior to the movie coming out, use an argument about abortion regarding Hitler and similar to the argument

12:42

Ray Comfort used. But when 180 came out, anytime I used that argument, it became, oh, you're just Ray Comfort.

12:50

And so I like to get away from things like that. And I was reading a book on the history of John Brown.

12:56

Now, anyone that claims to be an abolitionist that doesn't read abolitionist writings or people like John Brown, people that were in the abolition movement against slavery, well, then you really don't know the history of abolition maybe.

13:14

But when I started reading about John Brown and seeing his argument, John Brown was, as far as we could tell, he was a

13:21

Christian by profession. I mean, we never got to really talk to him. And in the book, at least, it didn't give a profession of faith.

13:29

But everything he did was based in his views of Christianity. And he wanted to bring an end to slavery.

13:37

Now, he took it to a violent means. I think he kidnapped, it was like the great grandson or great, great grandson of George Washington.

13:47

But he actually did. He was instrumental in really ending slavery. And not the way that he thought, by the way.

13:56

It was kind of interesting when you read the history, because when he'd go to these and by force to free the slaves, he thought all the slaves would join him in the fight.

14:04

And as he moved his way through, he'd build a bigger army of not only whites, but blacks that would fight with him and found that many of them wouldn't fight with him.

14:14

And so that was, it discouraged him and took him down a different path.

14:21

Now, what I ended up realizing, my argument when it comes to abortion changed when

14:27

Ray did the 180. I started to, as I was reading different books on abolitionism, started to look at the issue of what is wrong when it comes to slavery.

14:41

Now, Pastor Justin, you know, in my household, I was raised in a

14:47

Jewish home, we would debate as just family activity. There's no, you know, I know that on social media, it's really hard.

14:54

People put so much emotion when they debate something, when they disagree on something. And I just wasn't raised that way.

15:01

There's not emotion when I debate. I mean, sometimes there is, I can't say there isn't ever.

15:07

But there could be things that, you know, I mean, we would sit around the table. I remember having to, being given the task of arguing for slavery.

15:17

You know, my dad would just be like, okay, you're going to argue this, you're going to argue that, you know, pro -Congo. And, you know, and we'd do that in debate class.

15:24

And there wasn't all the emotion in it. You were just honing your skills that, you know, with areas that you need to improve your arguments.

15:37

And so, and I remember when I had to argue for slavery, I couldn't back then. And, you know, I was given some arguments that, you know, okay, that actually, you know, slavery wasn't as bad as you think.

15:47

But there was one, there's one key element that really is the essential element that the abolitionists made against slavery.

15:54

And that's the ownership issue. That it is immoral to argue that one person can own another person.

16:02

And this, when I started to think about it, when it comes to the issue of abortion, realized there is absolutely no difference between saying this is my property and this is my body.

16:14

They are the same argument. It's an ownership issue. There is a difference though. In slavery, it doesn't always end someone's life.

16:22

In abortion, it does. So my argument is that abortion is far worse than slavery.

16:28

Okay. Because of the fact that slavery, I mean, if you ever read, if you read the book, 12 Years a

16:33

Slave, even Solomon says in his autobiography that had he only known his first master, he wouldn't have thought slavery was a bad thing.

16:44

But then he had a different master and realized it was. And so a lot of it comes down to that. Now, and I will, let me give an open thing here that I know there's some folks who disagree with me, maybe even not knowing my position on these issues that are reading, they're following and some that are disagreeing in comments.

17:07

You are welcome to come in. This is an open show. Just go to ApologeticsLive .com and join, go to the duck icon, and we can have a reasonable discussion at least up until Pastor Darren comes in.

17:18

I want to give him some time to go through some issues. And so abolitionism,

17:25

I think actually in Christianity, the way I see it now where I disagree with some of the movement of abolitionism is it is focused for many, not all.

17:37

And I want to be really clear. You know, this is a very varied group.

17:44

When we talk about the abolitionists and the movement, you have a lot of different people in there. So you can't make generalities.

17:51

You can make them when, if there's an organization that's saying, this is what we stand for, then you could do something like that.

17:57

But what I see with a lot of people that claim the name abolitionist, they, for many, not all, and hopefully not most now, because I've kind of moved away from those movements, or they just slandered me.

18:15

So it made it easy to move away. But what ends up happening is

18:22

I think abolitionism is more than just the issue of abortion. I think abolitionism, when you look at it, when it was the issue of slavery, it was a moral issue that had to do with ownership of a person.

18:42

Therefore, it was broader than just the issue of abortion or even back then just slavery.

18:50

So to me, as an abolitionist, I view this as a broader cultural issue than just the abortion issue.

18:58

I think it includes human trafficking. I think it includes any kind of slavery where you have one person owning another and treating them as property.

19:10

I think one of the good thing is with the movement that we see with abolitionism is that we see abolitionism has really brought in, we saw this, it really kind of,

19:23

I think I saw the start really take a lot of movement with Ray Comfort's 180 movie, when he put that out, it got a lot of people going out to abortion clinics, a lot more

19:34

Christians. It used to be the Roman Catholics who went there. And we saw a lot more movement there. And so that's good.

19:41

I do think that part of the issue is we've fought for, in my opinion, when it comes to politics, and I know there's many, many abolitionists that are going to disagree with me on this, and I understand that.

19:52

But I think that we are winning a battle and losing the war. We're winning the battle in abortion for many.

20:02

But the problem is we're losing the cultural war because while we're still fighting the issue of abortion, they're moved on to human trafficking,

20:13

LGBT, and they're taking over the culture. The abolitionists want to make slavery unthinkable.

20:21

We need to make all ownership unthinkable, not just abortion, which it should be.

20:29

I think abortion, as I said, is worse than slavery in the sense because it killed a person.

20:37

However, you look at the human trafficking, and there's many abolitionists who will do this, who do deal with the issue of human trafficking, but not to the same level.

20:50

And so when we speak of abolitionism, there is, and I know someone asked me, will I address the issue of abolitionism versus pro -life, and there is a difference there.

21:00

Now, Pastor Darren was very instrumental when he comes in. Maybe we'll talk about his involvement in what happened at the

21:06

SBC, that convention where they actually, it was brilliant the way

21:12

Bill Askell did that. The way he worded it, I was like, when I heard him speak, I'm like, they are going to put abolitionism in, they are going to resolve that.

21:20

That'll be great. I was surprised that they did. They tried to, the SBC elite tried to get rid of it.

21:28

They tried to water it down. Because what many, when it comes to pro -life, what many abolitionists will see with the pro -life movement is for many, pro -life is like, let's chisel away, chisel away, chisel away.

21:41

Very much what you had with William Wilberforce over in England, where that's it was like 40 years of him trying to just push, push, push, push before you can get it completely outlawed.

21:55

For an abolitionist, it's the idea is no wanting to just get better laws.

22:02

It is basically the idea of making this unthinkable, that this is murder.

22:10

Therefore, it's not, okay, let's lessen this. Let's ease this. That this is murder and we have to treat it as such.

22:19

Therefore, we can't say, well, let's get better legislation for murderers. No, we need to say this needs to be outlawed.

22:27

That's what is really, in my opinion, needs to happen with this.

22:35

This is a thing that you'll see a difference between abolitionists and pro -lifers.

22:42

Now, I will say that for many who are pro -lifers, they have not thought through these issues.

22:50

I think that many of them have not really given enough thought of, they're arguing for just this incremental changes.

23:01

Now, James here is saying, he's saying Wilberforce was not an incrementalist.

23:07

That's a common myth. I'm sorry, I actually read the things that Wilberforce wrote and the laws that England had passed, and it was a 40 -year battle.

23:26

Well, that's the thing. Let me finish this and I'll let you go. He did put, he wanted to outlaw it completely, but one of the things he was able to get into law first was the outlaw of the kidnapping.

23:41

He took that and then moved on. He never stopped. He always had the goal of ending it completely, but he did make incremental steps.

23:51

He did get legislation and proposed legislation that did make some incremental steps, but the thing is the incremental steps are never where he stopped.

24:02

Exactly. Exactly. One thing I want to point out here, KT, Jesus says, the war isn't a culture war as much as a spiritual issue, and she's exactly right.

24:13

There's semantics being argued by James and others that are coming on and trying to have a discussion on the sideline here.

24:21

There's a semantic range that's being discussed here, and we're talking about incrementalism.

24:26

As soon as you say that word, you're automatically cornholed or shoehorned into a certain understanding.

24:34

What Andrew's trying to say is when Wilberforce started this battle, he knew it was going to happen instantly.

24:41

We're talking about, hey, we need to stop abortion right now. How do you do that?

24:48

Do we go in and have a physical fight, a physical battle? Because I'll guarantee you, you start trying that route, you're going to lose.

24:56

The argument is not, do we use a worldly means to win a spiritual battle?

25:02

But we use spiritual means. Yes, we want to use the government. Yes, we want to bring in laws that will end these things.

25:09

But you have to recognize the culture that you're at. And the very first thing that Christians start with is the gospel and prayer.

25:17

And Wilberforce, being a Christian, he recognized that we are fighting a spiritual battle.

25:27

Where did he begin with? He began in prayer. He began going to learn about what the word of God says that we're supposed to be doing first.

25:40

He stood there and then he was willing to fight no matter how long it took. There's people that are saying the pro -life battle.

25:49

Look, I think Andrew's on the same page. The pro -life position is such an incremental position that they don't want to win.

25:58

I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but the way I see it is that they would rather slowly come to the position of winning by attrition in the next 200 years to keep their jobs.

26:11

And maybe I'm wrong on that, but I do see that. And I'm not saying everyone. I wouldn't want to claim that for every single person, but there seems to be that bent of, well, let's not go too quick.

26:23

Yeah. I mean, look, I remember someone saying to me once the reason the

26:29

NRA will never actually push for, they want the gun control arguments to continue because that's what gives them money.

26:39

And there's probably some of that, I think, in the pro -life movement. I mean, I'm not as active with them at the national levels with those groups that you know, like Care Net and those different groups.

26:54

But I'm sure that, hey, if we abolish abortion, they'll lose their jobs.

27:00

They should look forward to something like that. Sam said here, that doesn't make him an incrementalist.

27:07

His letter on the abolition of the slave trade is clear on his thoughts about regulation. But the thing is he did like, see, this is where we get, we talk past.

27:17

Semantic range. It's a semantic range. Yeah. And this is the thing that, you know, at least hear me out before you judge me type of thing.

27:28

And I want to do the same with those who would be disagreeing with me. Wilberforce did pass, you know, bring legislation up that was not a full end to abortion, sorry, to slavery in his time.

27:43

He did make steps to first end, you know, he tried different things, but he ended up realizing he can bring an end to the kidnapping because there was a moral outrage on that issue.

27:56

And so he brought that first. And that is what many would see as incrementalism.

28:01

So some of this is going to be how we define the terms. The issue is, as you said,

28:07

I think this is a spiritual battle. I think, where was it? One of the guys, was it?

28:14

No, I thought it was Sam or James. James, you're right. Said when you were speaking, he said,

28:19

I'm into that. It's a spiritual battle and must be at the forefront of everything we do. And this is the thing that I see.

28:28

When I look at the abolition of slavery, it was more than just a spiritual issue.

28:34

They made it a cultural issue. Yeah. And I think that this is where I see,

28:39

I do see a difference because we are looking to solve this just with the church.

28:44

It often looks like. Now, there's been many movements, good movements to try to get guys elected or bills passed that would end abortion.

28:56

But this has got to be, just like with the slavery, a multi -pronged attack. It is a spiritual issue.

29:04

I do think that there's a lot here that we have where I think the real issue is back in the, well, the

29:12

Scopes Monkey Trial is really where we see this happening, where the church just got embarrassed with the

29:19

Scopes Monkey Trial and said, we're getting out of, at least the fundamentals, said, we're getting out of culture, basically, got out of the schools, got out of the, start their own schools.

29:32

They went into this idea of, we're going to go to a monastery type of behavior.

29:38

And what they did is created a vacuum for the human secularists to just suck on in.

29:45

And so that's what happened. And we gave the church, I think it back then, they made the mistake of giving up on culture and no longer was the church.

29:54

I mean, you think about this years ago, the church is where culture went to for morality. Now, the culture is the one defining morality and that's the problem.

30:04

And this is where, so I do see this as a broader thing than just abortion.

30:11

I see this as an issue where the church has failed in its responsibility.

30:18

Lately, I think it's a lot because they're looking to have the big churches.

30:24

A lot of these are looking to, they just want to try to fill pews and keep their big salaries going.

30:37

And that's a major problem that we have. It's one of the major reasons why at Striving Fraternity, we focus on trying to minister to the smaller churches.

30:46

There's 10 ,000 churches that closed last year. Let that number sink in. The average church size in America is 25.

30:56

When you compare that to these mega churches, it means that there's a lot, far more churches that are under 25 people.

31:04

And they're struggling. And they're not making an impact in the culture. Why? Because those big churches aren't, those big churches are just trying to get along with culture.

31:15

We're seeing that with, you know, some with the SBC convention we've been talking about, right? And the behavior that they've had.

31:21

So when we look at these issues, we have to look at the fact that an abolitionist is going to be one that says, we need to end abortion.

31:34

Not at the third trimester, the second trimester, the first, no, end it, right?

31:42

This is the issue. That's the goal of the abolitionist movement, right? But I would say that for me, it goes beyond just that and saying all slavery, okay?

31:55

Human trafficking of any kind should be fighting that. Now, I know that, you know, years ago when

32:03

Toby was out at the Shepherds Conference protesting, you know, he was trying to argue that, well, abolitionists only focus on abortion because that's legal and human trafficking isn't.

32:14

Well, see, when arguments like that, I go, well, that's, you know, abolitionism, to me, it was like, well, then you really don't understand what abolitionism, the heart of abolitionism is the ownership issue.

32:25

It's the idea that one person can own another person, okay? And so I see those differences.

32:32

Now, because some of the folks who were challenging me on social media today, you know,

32:39

I didn't want to go into this at all, but people have been calling me all kinds of names and liar and things like that, why

32:46

I said that AHA, you know, was a cult back years ago.

32:52

I've been told there has been repentance on some of that stuff. Great. See, and this is the thing that if you see for me,

32:59

I'm trying to be consistent here. I'm not trying to say, well, I have to be right. I'm trying to say, hey, if they moved away from the positions that I criticize them for, then

33:10

I am going to support them more. It's just that simple. But the fact is, is that, you know, when you sit, when they were, there's certain definitions.

33:20

And I remember, I think, wow, I now see with the history, with time, I don't remember who, if it was

33:25

Russell, Russell, he's doing a lot of videos against me. Now, I will say he's right in one sense.

33:33

He, you know, when I said that they were a cult, I know that Emilio Ramos afterwards came on with that.

33:40

James White and Jordan Hall. Now, Jordan Hall had come up with, I think it was a 14 point list of what a cult is.

33:49

And I will agree with Russell Hunter that that list really looked like it was tailored for AHA.

33:57

Okay. So, you know, but when, when he tried, he ended up saying that both

34:04

Jordan and I both came up with our list, you know, looking to make a list that would name

34:11

AHA. The issue I had there is that my list has been documented out there for 10 years before AHA existed.

34:18

So if I'm that good at being a prophet, then someone should be listening to me, not criticizing me.

34:24

I don't think I'm a prophet. I think it was the 14 years of study into cults and world religions that developed it.

34:32

And I didn't have AHA in mind when I developed it. I had more like, you know, the

34:37

Latter -day Saints and all that. John's asking what AHA is. It's Abolish Human Abortion.

34:43

Okay. And so it was a group that early on, they tried to say they weren't an organization, yet they are an organization.

34:53

You had to, you know, early on, at least, you couldn't use their logo without funding, you know, paying for it.

35:00

And there was things like that. They were, so let me go through my five points and why

35:06

I thought back then, and I'm trying to be really clear. Back then, if that's not true today, then they're not a cult today.

35:15

And part of doing this show, and part of the reason why I wanted to have Pastor Darren on is because for years, I have been known for saying that.

35:21

But if it's not true anymore, then I need to correct that record and say that, okay, this doesn't apply to them anymore.

35:31

Okay. And so, you know, so, hey, any of you, you know, that want to get some of these guys that were involved in that early on, if they have, you know, want to call me, you know, get them in touch with me and we'll talk.

35:44

And if they've, if these positions have changed as Pastor Darren has said they have, then, hey, that's what

35:52

I'm doing the show for is to say, I don't think from what I'm hearing, they're not a cult anymore. Okay.

35:58

But the first thing was, is scripture twisting. And so the first thing, or when we look at actually, the first one is going to be authoritarianism really.

36:07

But when you look at authoritarianism, it is when you have one either individual or group of people that they alone can interpret the scriptures and they don't, and no one else has a right view except for them.

36:23

By the way, in case you think, you know, this is, it's on our website, Striving for Eternity. If you look up for cults, get my book,

36:30

What Do They Believe? And it's there. It's been there for years. And so this has been out there.

36:39

So authoritarianism is the first thing you see. You'll see this in like the watchtower. Only the watchtower can be the interpreters of the

36:44

Bible. The Catholic church, only the magisterium can interpret the Bible. And yes,

36:50

I just tipped my hat that I think that the Catholic church is a cult. The, you know, if you look at the

36:56

Latter -day Saints, they have their living prophet. Only they can interpret. That's the idea of their authoritarianism.

37:02

Now, some of the issues I have when it came to the authoritarianism, some of that also comes into play where you have a lack of integrity with language.

37:15

You have leaders who say things and everyone just mimics it. And you had that early on with those guys.

37:22

They were repeating bad arguments. You know, the arguments of child sacrifice, trying to say that abortion is worship.

37:34

It's not. I mean, it's wrong, but arguing that it's a human sacrifice, people don't go have abortions as a human sacrifice.

37:43

But what people do with that is they're trying to give it some biblical underpinnings.

37:48

And that's why what you end up seeing with authoritarianism, what always leads to that is scripture twisting. And that's where I saw that that was, because what you see them doing is twisting the old...

37:58

And I don't know why it is Latter -day Saints, Jehovah Witnesses, Word of Faith, all these groups always want to focus on the

38:06

Old Testament historical narrative and read it as if it's instructional. That's a major problem with cults.

38:13

But part of this lack of integrity in language is the scripture twisting, where what you see them doing is trying to give the scripture something, a meaning it didn't have or give, in this case, abortion, a meaning it doesn't have to make it fit with the

38:28

Old Testament sacrificing of children as an act of worship. They're not the same thing.

38:35

They're both equally as sinful, but they're not the same thing.

38:42

When it comes to exclusivity, that we're the only ones with the truth. Now, this has been something

38:48

I do, and this is why I would say that AHA is not a cult today, this is one that I do know has changed.

38:55

Early on, what they used to do is try to pull people out of solid churches to start new

39:00

AHA churches. Only the AHA church, if you were not part of AHA, one of the issues that happened with Emilio Ramos' church was, even though they go out and go to the abortion clinics, because they don't do it under the name of AHA, they literally were told that, well, you're not doing it right, you're not saved.

39:21

And there's a video, I think it was Robert Roman who the guy said that to.

39:28

And so, I've had that be told to me. We've had that at our church. We've actually had people come in our community that became part of AHA, and they actually came to our church or called us or contacted me and said, are you affiliated with AHA?

39:45

Are you coming out here to the abortion clinics out here with us every time we're out here? Are you funding us?

39:51

Are you supporting us? And if not, I've actually was told at one point in time, we're going to come to your church and we're going to protest you.

39:57

And I told me, so you're welcome to come out here and protest if you want. That's fine. You're not going to bother me a bit.

40:03

Just come right on ahead. And they never showed up, which, you know, that's fine. I'm going to tell you, the thing is, their protesting is actually showing who they really are.

40:16

Let me correct you. It's who they at least were. OK, but there's certain reports that are saying that they still are doing that.

40:24

But, you know, what you're saying is right, though. If the main groups or if the subgroups are repentant of those things and they're not calling people that, then they're not part of the problem.

40:38

Now, here's what you deal with this, who says that never happened. They never called the church to repent of apathy.

40:46

They never wanted people to leave local churches. Like, OK, so they did on video support that.

40:53

Yeah, because there's videos out there. Maybe they've been scrubbed, but that's been told to me. So I'm sorry, but you can say it never happened.

41:02

Never, ever, ever happened. It did. And if you can't be honest with it, that's that's your problem, I guess.

41:07

But don't call me because Sam was they had the church reprint project, didn't they? Didn't they have a church repair project?

41:15

Yeah. And they went through G3, handing out brochures, telling everyone that they had to be part of the church repent project.

41:23

Actually, if I recall right, didn't they go to some of these conferences, telling them that being at the conference was a sin? Yeah, we were at Shepard's conference.

41:29

Yeah. Yeah, you were in sin to be at this conference. Yeah, and actually what they said was that Shepard's conference was their mission field.

41:36

Now, that's right there as the proof. You know, there's a side note now off the topic. Yeah, yeah.

41:41

The proof that they're not, that those that were doing that were not believing in, they were believing in incrementalism and not immediacy.

41:49

Because as I said to the guys that were there, you know, Toby, who was there at Shepard's conference,

41:56

I said, you being here is not ending abortion because we don't make law. So you're trying to gather support.

42:04

And that's fine. I have no problem with it. But don't say that you're doing it under the auspices of ending abortion immediately because these are incremental steps.

42:14

Yeah. Okay. And so when, you know, that was the thing. So when it comes to the idea of the exclusivity, they were saying that they were the, if you were not against abortion and part of them, there were people that were saying, you're not even saved.

42:30

Yeah. Okay. That's the, that becomes the inclusivity now. And that now they, only they have the truth.

42:39

You can't have it outside. That then what they were doing is pulling people into just an

42:45

AHA church. Many people left churches that people I know that were leaving solid churches so that they could start a church only with AHA members.

42:56

And that is that inclusivism where you're separating from it. Then the last aspect was harm.

43:02

Now, when it comes to harm, it could be spiritual, it could be physical, it could be emotional. You know, there was harm being done within that movement when you start getting people to pull relationships, end relationships with family and friends to only be with AHA members.

43:19

Now, this was the early beginnings of it. It has been many years since we've dealt with this.

43:25

And the fact is that it seems now from what Pastor Darren was telling me, many of the guys who are involved in these movements, pastors, they're in churches that are not, you know, it's not just AHA members.

43:41

That's good. So just with that, that would say, okay, they are definitely, even if just that one changed, then they're no longer a cult, okay?

43:53

So if that's the case, then what I had said applied to them years ago does not apply today, okay?

44:03

Now, and look, we've dealt with this when we dealt with the Grace Fellowship Church there in Iowa that, you know, they have, you know, we are, are they cultic or are they cult?

44:14

Looking at their practices. And so you have the same thing there. And so what we end up seeing is that, you know, is it now that we say it's not a cult, is it still cultic?

44:29

And I'm going to say, I don't have enough information of what they've been up to to answer that.

44:36

So I can't answer, okay? And so I'm not going to say that they're even cultic because I don't know their current practices, right?

44:48

Now, someone's saying that there's zero changes in their practice and doctrine. You know, we'll have to see.

44:56

Yeah, we'll have to look for the evidence on that. Pastor Darren has told me that they don't do their

45:03

Church Repent project anymore. That would be a change. I mean, that was the big issue.

45:10

I think there was a comment, someone asked, babies are murdered here. And I think that was the big rift that they kind of had was over that, which

45:17

I never really understood because when you saw the very early edition of Babies Are Murdered Here, the documentary.

45:26

They were running to a church. Yeah, they were in a church and yeah, they were doing what really was the

45:32

Church Repent. So I didn't get it when they came out. Now, what I do know is that there has, and for people saying there's been no changes, there's been no, they haven't repented of anything.

45:43

There's videos of like Russell Hunter and John Speed. So Russell Hunter was with AHA.

45:52

John Speed was with Babies Are Murdered Here and they're getting together. They now work together along with Jeff Durbin and many others.

45:59

So what we see is that I personally, and this is my personal opinion,

46:06

I could be wrong, okay? My personal opinion, what it looked like to me, okay, was it was like a turf war.

46:16

There was everyone working toward abolitionism and then there became this turf war between AHA and Babies Are Murdered Here and which one has the right to, which one should everyone be following and they're fighting each other.

46:29

To me, it looked like a turf war. Maybe it wasn't, maybe, but I'm glad. The one thing

46:34

I'm glad is that's done, right? Yeah, well, it seems to me like you got, it seems to me like you have

46:42

Sam that's really into the church repent, wanting to continue it. He's made multiple comments here.

46:49

I wish he would just come on. He's saying that John Speed changed his understanding. This is the thing that, and this is why

46:57

I say, to me, it seemed like a turf war because before that split, John and Marcus were agreeing with the church repent and then they changed against it.

47:11

There's agreement now, I guess, with a lot of the groups here. The thing is,

47:18

I do think there's, I've said this very often on this program and my rap report podcast.

47:26

There's a lot of people that are focused on platform building, not kingdom building, right?

47:33

They're focused on their organization or their name being known. I could care less. If I wanted to build a platform, if I was focused on building a platform and a name for myself, the last thing that striving for eternity would do is focus on churches that are small, that can't afford us, right?

47:50

Can't even afford to fly us in. We would do like every other big ministry and just focus on the big churches.

47:56

It was really interesting. I was at a conference recently and the organizer,

48:02

I'm like the old guy at this conference and we were commenting about that. He said, the reason he goes,

48:07

I think the reason you're the old guy is because most guys, when they get a name for themselves, they don't do the small things anymore.

48:14

They're too big for the small conferences. He said, most of our speakers are guys that are just getting started and so they'll go anywhere to speak.

48:22

He goes, but because you focus on the small churches, you smoke, you don't care about the size.

48:28

You're with all the young guys who are just trying to get out there. And it was kind of interesting to me.

48:35

So, you know, but the thing we end up seeing is, you know -

48:42

I'm seeing all these people saying, all these people need to be on the show. Well, I'm like, okay, wait a minute. I mean, you publish this all over the place and say, hey, we're going to be on if you want to come and talk, come and talk.

48:53

And, you know, we're trying to say, hey, Sam, jump in here and have a discussion with us. Well, here's the thing. Russell Hunter knows my phone number.

49:01

John Speed knows my phone number. They know our phone number. I mean, I have no problem with them calling me up.

49:08

We could talk, you know. Yeah, I mean, and you got to think about this.

49:15

Yeah, but I mean, the whole point is this, and we're trying to say, look, if there comes this point where we're coming to join together, join hands and join in fellowship on this issue, you know, there still needs to be truth and understanding.

49:34

There still needs to be clarity. Is Callie right? Is there still a position?

49:39

Is there still things going on that we need to say, hey, wait a minute. Let's not just jump in and kumbaya.

49:45

You know, let's be truthful. Let's lay it out in truth. And if it's a problem, then let's deal with it.

49:53

You know, but. And some of it being, you know, when you say, you know, like I know

49:59

Sam here who's accused me of lying, but couldn't name anything I lied about. You know, he is right that I misread profiler from pro -lifer.

50:09

But the thing is, is that there is a difference. Yeah, there's a difference between lying and not agreeing with one another.

50:21

Right. Let's give an example. You and Anthony have differing views. What are you putting up? All of us up.

50:29

Which one did you want? Okay. Callie says, I just linked our episode. Is that with John on church repent?

50:35

There you go. Okay. So, and now you put up Jacob's all of us in here, our abolitionists and have said the claims about the past aren't true.

50:47

The problem with saying that the claims aren't true. There's video. Not just that.

50:53

It's like when you tell me, you know better what was said to me, what was told to my face.

50:58

Yeah, then I do. Then you're not being reasonable. Yeah. I mean, and I don't mean it to be offensive to those.

51:06

You think that I'm wrong with this, but you have to sit there and say, here's the difference.

51:12

I'm willing to say, Hey, things have changed. And my previous view of this group is different than it is now.

51:20

What I said in the past doesn't apply to now. And it's changed. You got to be open -minded too.

51:29

That's based on the evidence. Yeah. This has to be clear based on the evidence to sit there and say, oh, that never happened.

51:39

Yeah. That's disingenuous. You can't go there. No, no, I can't say it's disingenuous because I don't know when they got involved with it.

51:48

They may not know some of the history. They may not be. They may not have seen the videos. They may not have been part of that.

51:54

So it would be disingenuous if they did, right? It'd be disingenuous. Okay. So Sam says,

52:02

I did name what you lied about. AHA is not a cult.

52:08

It was not a cult. Organization. That's not true. Okay. So you can't say that because the thing that he said

52:17

I lied about, he said that I lied saying it was a cult. Why did I say it's a cult? The conclusion is it was a cult.

52:24

The lie then has to be on the things that supported that. Yeah, at the time. You need to prove that I lied about those things.

52:29

At the time, yeah. Yeah. It's begging the question to say, to argue, you said it's a cult when that's the conclusion.

52:37

You're trying to prove your point in that case. So I'm sorry.

52:42

Are they still part of the Church of Repent? Yeah. I mean, are they still protesting churches, calling churches to repent of not doing abolitionism their way?

52:53

Right. There were abolitionist churches. There were churches that were involved in that movement, you know?

53:00

Yeah. And the question comes, what is the great issue of our time?

53:07

Because I've heard that so many times that abortion is the greatest sin issue of our time, okay?

53:14

So all the other things we can throw out the window and not worry about them as a cultural issue, as a sin issue, we have to focus only on this one issue.

53:24

And I think that is wrong. John Burroughs, he said it to me extremely well.

53:30

As we were going up to the abortion clinic, he came up and spent a couple of days with me.

53:36

And I love the dear brother. He's just, I love him dearly with all my heart. And I think he has such a great issue in ministry.

53:43

But he said this one thing. Give me a second. He said this one thing that just blew me away. He said,

53:49

Justin, do you think God could stop all abortion instantly if he wanted to? And I said, absolutely. I think

53:54

God can do anything he wants to do. It's all up to him. He says, why doesn't he stop abortion instantly if it is the only issue that we're supposed to be worried about?

54:02

Because he was dealing with some of this. And he said, that's not the only issue going on, but it should cause us as Christians to find out where God wants us to be at and to be working as hard as we can for that issue.

54:16

And we all know that John, he has done such a wonderful job of being such a strong representative of the anti -abortion stance.

54:27

He's done a wonderful job. So let me put up. So Sam says, yes, church repent happens on a larger scale than ever.

54:35

That's what the SBC resolution was about. Then if that's the case, if what we saw at the

54:41

SBC is what he thinks church repent was, then he has to admit that church repent changed.

54:49

Because church repent was going to Shepherd's conference to G3 and tell people they were sinners because they were not involved with AHA.

54:59

Yeah, exactly. Okay. That's what people were being told. Okay. And so they were saying that G3 was their mission field.

55:09

That's what they were doing. So if they're doing what they went on at SBC, where they're handing out pamphlets to inform people to promote a resolution and work with the

55:21

SBC, that's different than saying that the SBC is not saved and needs to repent.

55:27

That's a totally different message. So this is the point I'm saying that it sounds like it changed from what

55:34

Sam is saying. I'm agreeing with what they're doing today. Then I'm not agreeing when they stand outside churches and say, you're not saved because you're not doing it our way.

55:45

That's an exclusive gospel. And I have not had one, not had two. I've had dozens of people tell me that, that because I'm not part of AHA, I'm not saved.

55:56

And that never happened. I'm sorry, but it is completely unreasonable for you to tell me what

56:02

I experienced never happened. It's okay to say you disagree, but you can't say it never happened.

56:09

So Haley asked that question. Just to clarify, she saw a video of them approaching

56:15

Paul Washer at the G3 conference. And yes, that's who we're talking about.

56:20

It's people that were approaching different brothers and sisters in Christ. And they were trying to come out.

56:27

Is this the only issue? Even Paul Washer, he's very, very gracious in the way he dealt with that.

56:32

But he's like, no, this isn't the only issue that we have to deal with. We have to deal with it in so many different aspects of sin across the board.

56:43

We can't just sit there and say, Andrew, you got the point right a minute ago or earlier when you said that it is not only one thing that we are fighting.

56:54

We're fighting the entire culture war against every sin. Jesus Christ didn't die just for one sin.

57:03

He died for sin. He died because we are sinners. Right? And we stand against all sin everywhere.

57:11

You know, I think what's amazing to me is that so many people want to pick their point where they want to have a platform.

57:20

And they want to argue and fight with everybody else who's not doing it their way. And they want to say, oh, let's go to war against one another.

57:28

Rather than to, you know, the scripture says that we're supposed to hold one another up, esteem others as more important than ourselves, that we're supposed to outdo one another and love and good works to show that our witness for Christ is something that the world can see.

57:46

And other Christians want to emulate. Right? Other Christians should want to emulate what we do, not say, oh, look how wicked and divisive you people are.

57:55

Yeah. No, Sam is saying, nope, it's not a misunderstanding at all. It was just, it wasn't a quote, be involved in AHA unquote.

58:04

It was repent of apathy of abortion and Holocaust. Even if you look at what they handed out at G3, it said the same thing as I'm saying now.

58:11

What they handed out, that's true. But we have to take into account what they were saying as well. Now, I'm going to take a quick break here for one second because I just think this is hilarious because Drew comes in and puts this in.

58:26

Two events happen simultaneously. Drew puts this comment in just now tuning in, just now able to tune in, but just wanted to say it is noticeable on screen that Andrew has been running and losing weight.

58:39

And just as he does that, because my wife always, when we do this show, she bakes and I always have to get everything afterwards, you know, when it's cold.

58:47

And I said, look, I like it when it's hot. She baked like a fresh banana loaf. And I was like, yes,

58:53

I want it when it's warm. So just as he said that, I plan on eating something that's going to add weight. So Drew, this one's for you.

59:00

Okay. Where's mine? Yim, come on. You can't do that to me.

59:11

So banana loaf, that's not good. Well, you know, this would be a good time, you know, because I know

59:18

Pastor Darren is going to come in on top of the hour. And so now would be a good time to explain that, you know, there's a lot of people here who are taking, they're very emotional.

59:30

And I really did not want this show to be emotional. This was supposed to be a show where we could say, hey, where are we today?

59:38

And let's get along. But, you know, one of the things I've always noticed with the

59:44

AHA crowd is they hate me. They just don't know why. You know, some will just say because I'm a liar and a slanderer, but they can't name what those things that I do are.

59:54

You can disagree with me, but you can't tell me what, you know, what's actually happened. Okay, good.

01:00:02

Callie's saying I'm not emotional one bit. You know, see, that's the type of people I like to, you know, disagree with, people that don't take it emotional and all.

01:00:10

But now might be a good time for everybody to just to get a pillow and take a rest, right?

01:00:16

And to do that, the best way I think that we could do that is to get a

01:00:22

MyPillow. And with, you know, one of our supporters here at both on Apologetics Live and the

01:00:32

Wrap Report podcast. Thanks. That's what I was looking for. If you want to get yourself a really good quality pillow, or even better yet, what

01:00:40

I've been loving is the mattress topper that I got. Yeah, that mattress topper is absolutely wonderful.

01:00:46

And folks, if you didn't see last week's show when Pastor Josiah was ripping his bed apart to show his mattress topper, that was kind of funny.

01:00:53

We had to put him on to show him that. But, you know, I really do. I love, I do love the mattress topper.

01:00:59

I get a much better sleep with it. Folks know I travel with my MyPillows because they help me sleep so much.

01:01:07

If you want to get a discount on your MyPillow, support this program as well. You can go to MyPillow .com.

01:01:13

And in the promo, the square that says Radio Listeners, use the promo code

01:01:19

SFE. Or you can call 1 -800 -873 -0176.

01:01:25

And again, use the promo code SFE because that will get them so they know that you came through striving for eternity.

01:01:33

And with that, they end up supporting us through that. Helps them to know to continue supporting us.

01:01:39

And then at the same time, you get a good night's sleep and support a company made here in America.

01:01:48

Now, Pastor Darren is asking me for the link. So let me just get him the link because if we want to get him in, that would be good timing.

01:01:58

And so, you know, here's the thing. And, you know, we'll probably talk about this more. And I do admit, it is kind of hard.

01:02:06

Some of the folks in the chat are writing these really long things, and it does make it hard.

01:02:13

Callie's saying, but do I support a Christian company? That's a good question, Callie, with MyPillow.

01:02:21

She's actually adding to another comment she made. She's like, you know, not everybody's perfectly happy with the

01:02:27

Pillow. So she said she supports the company. Oh, OK. Yeah, I don't know where he's at spiritually.

01:02:34

I do know, I do love, I will admit, I love the fact that when I, you know, when

01:02:39

I, you know, get my, I got my mattress topper, you know, whatever,

01:02:45

I pulled the bag out and I found a scripture verse. At least I like that part. So, you know, what we see is, you know, he does try to hire those that profess to be believers.

01:03:03

But I've been told he's word of faith. I, you know, I just don't know. I've tried to get him on the show, but it hasn't happened yet.

01:03:12

And part of it being is the only thing right now he wants to talk about is Dominion voting machines. And I just don't have as much interest in that.

01:03:19

So, all right. So we got we got Pastor Darren coming in using some

01:03:24

OBS software. His video. I know the software.

01:03:30

Yep. We tried to use that for a while. Yeah. Well, we, I think we use a mess.

01:03:36

Yeah, that was a mess. I could never figure out how to use OBS. It was all over the place. So bear with me.

01:03:44

Can you guys hear me? Yeah, we hear you loud and clear. Yeah. I'm not really sure what's going on with my camera. So hold on a minute here.

01:03:50

Not, I probably doing everybody a favor that you guys can't see me, but figure out how to,

01:03:56

I'm not really sure why it's not letting my camera come through on here. Darren, you have seen my face.

01:04:02

Okay. You would be an improvement. Your listeners are already sympathetic, right? Well, the listeners, that's why

01:04:08

I have a face for radio. Yeah, that's right. I tell people that, hang on, let me adjust something real quick here.

01:04:14

I bet you this will take care of it right here. And he's got the hat, man.

01:04:20

I got the cowboy hat on, man. I should go get my hat. I should get my wife, get me my

01:04:27

Australian hat. Yeah. Yeah. So this is actually my second hat. I had another hat and my kids crumpled it in my back seat.

01:04:36

And it's hard to have nice things when you have kids, man. It's a lot easier if you have one, two, three, even four kids.

01:04:48

I only have eight, only eight. Okay. All right.

01:04:58

That's all I have. This show, I will admit, totally didn't work the way that I had hoped.

01:05:05

Because I tried, as you and I have talked, and I'm going to let folks get your side of things.

01:05:13

When I put it, I kind of said that, as you know, that I've had said, it's been pretty public that in the past I said

01:05:20

AHA was a cult. So I had said they moved from those cultic practices. I think that's a good thing. Man, everyone just came after me, calling me a liar and all kinds of things on social media, saying they're not a cult today.

01:05:33

And it's like, okay, I'm agreeing that they're not a cult today. But we have differing views.

01:05:41

But I didn't tell the story of how you and I met and somehow what you were told before, the warnings you got.

01:05:49

Yeah. I didn't get any warnings. Yeah. What I want to do is I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself, because not everyone in our audience.

01:05:58

You came on for folks who they didn't see you. They may recognize the voice. You came on last week.

01:06:03

We were talking about SBC. And you're the pastor who's an SBC pastor who is arguing against Justin Peters and Jim Osmond to defend the

01:06:12

SBC. So now, folks, you get to see his face. But we didn't really get a good introduction from you.

01:06:17

If you could introduce yourself, I want you to also introduce your church, but also you're now part of Operation Save America.

01:06:27

So your role there. So I'm going to give you some time to introduce all that.

01:06:33

And then kind of give what happened when people found out you're going to be speaking with me, the nasty man

01:06:39

I am. Yeah. I'll introduce myself first. So my name is Darren Stead.

01:06:45

I'm the pastor at Harmony Baptist Church. In Frankfurt, Indiana, I've been here for about three years now.

01:06:51

And I love the ministry. That's what I was doing all day today. So I got some messages today. If you're watching now and I haven't had a chance to respond to your message,

01:06:57

I'm not ignoring you. I've just been doing pastoral ministry all day. So we got some sick people with COVID. So if y 'all could cover our church in prayer,

01:07:04

I'd appreciate that. And so Harmony Baptist Church. I've been a pastor here for about three years.

01:07:10

I am now the assistant national director of Operation Save America, which

01:07:16

Operation Save America is an organization that's been around for several decades now. It started out as Operation Rescue.

01:07:22

So there was a rescue movement in the 80s and 90s. And the rescue movement sort of birthed out of Operation Rescue slash

01:07:29

Operation Save America. And then when the FACE Act happened, which there's a whole story behind that, they sort of transitioned their mission and vision to raising up the church to engage in the battle to end abortion through things like equipping

01:07:44

Christians and pastors, equipping pastors to equip Christians, and then also equipping

01:07:50

Christians to show up to the abortion mills all across the country and plead with moms not to go through with the slaughter of their pre -born children and to bring the gospel to the streets.

01:08:02

So we do a lot of street ministry. We do a lot of street evangelism. And then here recently over the course of the last few years here, we've also gotten far more involved in the political aspect of the fight.

01:08:14

And so, you know, we're working with politicians all over the country and there's a whole coalition. It's Operation Save America, but there's also a whole coalition of people that are working together to help get these bills authored.

01:08:28

I think we have 11 or 12 now, but we're working on up to 22 states that are going to have bills that are drafted by legislators and proposed that seek to completely and totally criminalize abortion without exception or compromise.

01:08:45

And so that's kind of what Operation Save America is all about.

01:08:50

And so recently, this last week, actually, I got installed as the assistant national director, which was a total surprise to me, but I'm blessed to have the opportunity.

01:08:58

The national director is a brother by the name of Jason Storms. I always tell him he's my favorite Arminian. He's one of the only

01:09:07

Arminians I've ever let preach from my pulpit. So he's a big brother. He's a brother I tremendously love and respect.

01:09:14

And then there's another assistant national director named Lucas Childress, who's also just a very good, faithful brother in Arkansas.

01:09:21

And so I'm blessed to have the opportunity to work with those guys. And then Callie's on here. I wanted to say sort of a joke.

01:09:27

I know Callie's one of my best friends. Callie says the black hat is better.

01:09:35

Ah, yeah. He likes the black hat better. This is my new one, man, because my white one got tore up by my kids.

01:09:40

Is this the Callie that I met recently? Yes, yeah, yeah. He met. Yeah, all right. Yeah, I think you guys got to talk a little bit at the conference.

01:09:49

So when Callie says he's not emotional, I just want to speak to that. When Callie says he's not emotional, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, he's not because the brother doesn't have emotions.

01:09:59

We always joke around him. He is one of the most not emotional. Yeah, he is. But the cool thing about that is he's a very gracious, humble guy that doesn't get upset.

01:10:10

So you can talk through... We did this whole series on our podcast, which I won't promote that on your podcast, but we did this whole series where we talked about Psalm singing and stuff like that.

01:10:20

And we disagreed about it, but it was a great conversation. He's just a humble guy. And so as you read guys like Callie on here,

01:10:26

I know there's a little bit of disagreement about different things on here, but he's one guy... I didn't get to read all the comments, but I saw he was coming on here.

01:10:33

He's one guy that I can say, he genuinely wants to have a gracious, good conversation, even though there's some disagreement.

01:10:41

And that was the same kind of conversation with Callie. You and I had our first conversation.

01:10:48

Callie came up. He disagreed with me on some things. And I like the way he approaches things because he thinks through them.

01:10:55

He listens. That was the thing that was impressive to me, is he wanted to first ask me some positions to make sure he was clear on what

01:11:04

I meant by what I say. And then he explains where he disagrees. Yeah, absolutely. Like right out of the gate,

01:11:11

I appreciated the guy. I just was like, okay, here's a guy who's hearing people out.

01:11:17

Yeah. Okay. Agree wholeheartedly. So when you asked me to speak to when you and I met,

01:11:23

I did get some messages coming up to the Cruciform Conference was last year. You and I met at the

01:11:29

Cruciform Conference. I had never met you. I just engaged with some of the stuff that, because whenever I'm going to be speaking at an event with somebody,

01:11:35

I kind of look into what they're doing a little bit, just so that I know who they are and have something to talk to them about when

01:11:40

I introduce myself. And so I had sort of looked into Striving for Eternity, but I didn't know about any of this history that you've been talking about.

01:11:48

I told you this on the call the other day. I've been involved in the abolition movement for about four or five years now.

01:11:54

And so some of this stuff that's happened in the past, I don't know a whole lot about it. I'm just trying to end abortion right now.

01:12:01

And so that's kind of my deal with it. But I did get a lot of messages from just various different people, most of them well -intentioned, but just sending me messages saying, hey,

01:12:13

I saw you're speaking in an event with this guy. He's very anti -abolitionist. He's not, you know, here's some things that sort of happened in the past.

01:12:20

And so my solution with that is, and I do this every time something like that happens.

01:12:26

When we came to the Cruciform Conference, I think you spoke the same night that I spoke during this pre -conference.

01:12:32

You and Justin Peters were there. And when the conference, when that evening of the conference is over, I just made a beeline to come talk to you and wanted to just hear from you.

01:12:41

Okay. So what are your thoughts about, you know, the immediate abolition of abortion, what we're trying to do here?

01:12:49

I know that there's some history. It was a good opportunity to, you know, hear out some of your perspectives on that history.

01:12:58

And it was actually, I made a post on Facebook just saying, hey, this was a great conversation.

01:13:04

We may not have complete agreement, but which actually I think probably at the point that you and I are at now, we're pretty close to that.

01:13:12

After working through some various different things that we've talked about in terms of what we're actually trying to accomplish.

01:13:18

And so it was like, you know, this is... I don't know much that we disagree with. Yeah. I don't know where we would kind of disagree much, but yeah.

01:13:31

So I did, I haven't read, I didn't get to read the comments. I was in the middle of working on some different things here at the church.

01:13:38

And I did listen to about the last 20 minutes before I came on. So I did hear some of the interchange, although I didn't get to read the comments myself.

01:13:45

I think maybe that I can bring some clarity on where the disagreements happening between what you're saying and what some of the people that are listening are saying, because there is this whole thing.

01:13:56

And I don't remember if you and I talked about this or not, but I've talked about this a lot. The concept of church repent is probably, and it's in a certain sense, it's our own fault.

01:14:06

And I know a lot of guys on here can disagree with me about that. I love those guys. I love all the guys that are commenting on here. I know them all personally.

01:14:12

I respect them. They're working hard to end abortion. There may be a few things I say here that they disagree with me about, and there's probably going to be some things

01:14:18

I say here that you might disagree with me about. But when you're talking about church repent, church repent project is probably the most misunderstood thing that the abolition movement is involved with.

01:14:30

And the reason why is because when you talk about church repent, people have a tendency to zero in on one tactic that we use, or I shouldn't say we use, that is used with church repent, which is going outside of conferences and churches and what you would call protesting outside of conferences and churches.

01:14:50

But what I think some of the commenters here are speaking to is that, and maybe the message isn't coming through very clearly, is that when we talk about the church repent project, that project is actually much bigger than those things.

01:15:04

Callie talked about how what we did at Southern Baptist Convention, in a sense, it was a church repent project.

01:15:11

Because all the church repent project is, what we're saying with the church repent project is we're saying, we're looking at the local church, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we're saying 3 ,000 babies are being slaughtered every day.

01:15:27

The LGBTQ plus community is taking over our culture.

01:15:34

You know, fatherlessness is happening on the rise. Public school system is going astray.

01:15:41

All of these different things. And we're looking at the church and we're saying, where is the church? Why is the church not speaking up on the shedding of innocent blood?

01:15:48

Why is the church not speaking up on LGBTQ plus taking over our culture? And so the church repent project is not just about abortion, although I think it may come across that way.

01:15:58

It is largely about abortion because, like you and I talked about the other day on the phone, we very much believe starting in Genesis chapter four and going forward from there, we have the doctrine of blood guiltiness and the doctrine of shedding of innocent blood.

01:16:11

And so we believe that many of the other sins that are permeating our culture, it's not that those sins don't matter, but it's that those sins are a sign of God's judgment on our culture because of things that we see, like in Leviticus 18, we have sexual immorality running rampant and we have the slaughtering of innocent children.

01:16:29

And so the reason that we tend to focus our church repent efforts, and I'm going to come back to the specific difference of opinion here.

01:16:35

The reason we focus our church repent efforts on the shedding of innocent blood and LGBTQ type things is not because those are the only sins that matter, but because those are the sins that we believe is plunging our culture headlong into the judgment of God, which brings about the permeation of some of these other sins.

01:16:54

And so the church repent project is much bigger than just people going outside of churches and preaching or people going to conferences and preaching.

01:17:03

And so some of the people in the message thread here are saying, what we did at the Southern Baptist Convention, that was part of the church repent project.

01:17:09

And it was in a sense, because we're going to the Southern Baptist Convention and we're saying, hey, and the church repent project is supposed to be, and maybe it doesn't come across that way sometimes, but the church repent project is supposed to be come repent with us.

01:17:24

People are killing babies. The culture is being taken over and plunged headlong into, you know, vile sin and so forth.

01:17:35

And we're pleading with you, please come repent with us and let's bring the gospel into the streets.

01:17:42

Let's bring the gospel outside the four walls of the church. Let's bring the gospel to the abortion mill and let's plead with these women not to murder their babies.

01:17:50

And let's plead with homosexuals to repent of their sin and find life in Christ. Let's plead with our magistrates to stop turning a blind eye to the plight of the pre -born and to the state creating fatherlessness and to so on and so forth and fill in the blank with all of those other things.

01:18:09

And so in a lot of sense, and I say this to people a lot, when I find myself in this argument, most

01:18:16

Christians like you guys who are concerned about the things that are happening in the culture and want to see repentance take place and the gospel take root in the culture.

01:18:26

When they get the broader picture of what Church Repent actually is, they generally don't have a big problem with it and they agree with it.

01:18:33

It's this specific tactic of picketing, which you guys would say is protesting outside of churches with signs.

01:18:41

And there are some abolitionists that do that sort of an activity. But broadly, many abolitionists, when they think of the

01:18:51

Church Repent project, it's not primarily about that. It's about what we did at the Southern Baptist Convention.

01:18:57

It's about like when I stand in the pulpit, anytime I stand in the pulpit as a pastor, as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I plead with my own church that I'm the pastor of to stop being apathetic toward the evil that exists in the culture and to bring the gospel outside the four walls of the church and into the community, abolitionists would say, that's part of the

01:19:16

Church Repent project. Me as an elder from within the church doing that. And so I don't know, hopefully,

01:19:22

I hope that that does bring some clarity to some of that debate or that disagreement. And so if I'm not careful,

01:19:29

I'll just talk the whole time. So maybe I'll just be quiet. I was going to say that we're probably,

01:19:36

I'll announce now, we're probably going to go into Anthony time. So for folks who are new to the show, doesn't know what that is.

01:19:43

When I was moving and Anthony Silvestro and Justin came in as hosts and helped out, every time

01:19:50

Anthony ran a show, it went over two hours. And so we call that Anthony time. I have a feeling we're going to do that.

01:19:57

I want to get to, before they scroll off the screen, some questions that came in specifically for you.

01:20:03

And then I have some questions for us to dialogue. But Christopher asked this question for you. Questions for Pastor Darren, or I would just say

01:20:11

Darren Stud. But has OSA blocked the entrances of abortion mills in the past?

01:20:17

Also, do they support that practice at all? Yeah, sure. That's a great question. Well, first thing I'm going to say is it's stig, but you can call me

01:20:25

Darren Stud if you want to. I'm totally good with that. But yeah, sorry. No, I'm just making a joke there.

01:20:32

Yeah, so on that question. I mean, now that we are, both our faces are on here. I mean, we're going to take

01:20:38

Justin out. I mean, just look, blue, blue, team blue or team red. I mean, well, actually just go that way.

01:20:45

And already I'm on the losing side, no matter what, which Christian is going to be going for a blue state or a red state.

01:20:50

You know, just I got the automatic advantage. Hey, all right. No, I'm good looking. Justin and I are both blue, so we both lose, but go ahead.

01:20:59

Okay, so let me answer that question. Has OSA ever been involved in blockading, not just the parking lots, but actually the entrances to abortion clinics?

01:21:08

The answer to that question is yes. So earlier when I talked about the rescue movement, Operation Save America was really birthed out of, and then helped tremendously grow the rescue movement.

01:21:17

It was originally called Operation Rescue, which is why if you look at our Facebook page, it says Operation Rescue, Operation Save America.

01:21:26

And so during the 80s and 90s, this was a practice that, this was one of the things actually that got evangelicals involved in the fight to save babies, was the rescue movement.

01:21:37

And so, yeah, OSA was very heavily involved with that. Most of the older leaders that are in OSA have been arrested, 25, 35, 45 times because they were blockading the front of abortion clinics in hopes of keeping women from murdering their babies.

01:21:51

So then the second question was, do we continue to support that? And that's an interesting question. There are still people that do what they call rescues.

01:21:59

That's what a rescue is. It's when you block the doorway of an abortion clinic. And there are still people that are a part of OSA that still continue to, it's sort of a resurgence of a thing that's happening right now.

01:22:10

And I just had a meeting with some of those guys last week. I love those brothers. And yeah, I mean, I support what they're doing.

01:22:17

Tactically, it's not what I'm going to do because I don't necessarily think that it's the best move from a tactical standpoint.

01:22:24

Because the FACE Act passed when Bill Clinton was the president, which took blockading the doorway of an abortion clinic from being a minor trespass where you'd spend overnight in jail and then you'd be let loose on your own recognizance to now if you block the doorway of an abortion clinic, it's actually a federal crime.

01:22:43

It carries up to a one -year federal prison sentence and up to a $100 ,000 fine. And so people have to look at from a tactical standpoint, some of these men are older men, their children are raised, and they are willing to say that they are willing to potentially make that sacrifice for the sake of rescuing these children.

01:23:04

And my opinion on that is, and I know there's a lot of people who disagree with me on that, but my opinion on that is

01:23:09

I support those men, and I'm certainly not going to say anything negative toward these people that are striving, that are putting themselves at risk to save babies.

01:23:20

It's not what I'm going to do because I do have a bit of a disagreement tactically.

01:23:26

I'm not sure that it's the best tactical move to get pulled out of the battle and be in federal prison for a year and potentially have to pay that fine.

01:23:34

But from a moral standpoint, to answer the question quite plainly, and I do want to be very plain on this,

01:23:40

I support those men and women that are doing that. I would be happy to financially support them.

01:23:46

And I do not think that it's in any way immoral or wrong for Christians to get between babies and people that are trying to kill babies.

01:23:55

As a matter of fact, I think it's very much a moral and ethical thing to do. So I don't have any problems with it. Yeah. And that might be something we disagree.

01:24:03

See, I'm against civil disobedience, right? I would see it more of a Romans 13 thing.

01:24:10

So let me just a couple of things here. Sam says, as a nice silver lining, you fellows, this has been the most active six listeners on Facebook ever, right?

01:24:18

Well, actually, no. It's whatever group you're in that you're seeing six, because we see about 35.

01:24:25

And it's actually, that's half of what we usually have. Oh, I didn't draw a big crowd. I'm sorry.

01:24:30

I know, I thought you were going to draw a big crowd, but you didn't. Well, if you had told everybody there was going to be hats involved.

01:24:35

Yeah, that's true. But then I like what Callie says. Callie goes, due to our view, where is it now?

01:24:44

Callie says, due to our view of Providence, it's not a silver lining. It's all gold. Let me get to,

01:24:53

Chris had another question now. Let me see, Anthony, are you there that you popped yourself back in?

01:24:59

Or Justin, did you put him in? Nope, I didn't. Is that Anthony Silvestro? Anthony Silvestro.

01:25:05

He looks really handsome tonight. My icon, you know. Man, I would love to see him on.

01:25:11

It was great hanging out with him. All you guys, I think, won't come. I had some really good times with Anthony, though. His allergies were bothering him, but let me, here was the other one.

01:25:21

So I'll put Anthony in the backstage. Anthony, you just bring yourself in if you want to come on camera.

01:25:26

So here's another question from Christopher for you. Another question for Pastor Studd. The question is really, which does your wife?

01:25:39

I don't know. That's dangerous for me to answer that question. Are there any abolition bills coming to the floor of any state legislation soon?

01:25:52

That's actually a question I don't know the answer to. I'm very heavily involved in political lobbying in states all over the country.

01:25:59

And I think people would be surprised to discover what happens when we're politically lobbying for bills.

01:26:06

I don't know this particular individual. I appreciate the questions that he's asking, but a lot of times this question, and I don't want to speak to the motives of the person that's asking the question, but oftentimes this question is asked as a way of saying, see, you guys aren't being successful.

01:26:18

You can't even get your bills out of committee and onto the floor. And I think it's important that people know, and I appreciate having the opportunity to say this on this platform, that it is oftentimes the pro -life political establishment that keeps our bills from getting out of committee to the floor.

01:26:33

And so in Texas and Oklahoma, in particular, Texas, there's a lot of amazing things happening in Texas.

01:26:39

But I think there are some opportunities in Oklahoma. And then there are some things that we're working on in Arkansas and Alabama as well that may give us the opportunity to actually push for a vote on one of these bills.

01:26:49

Now, whether or not people are going to have the courage to vote for it, I don't know. But I also want to make sure that you notice that I'm drawing a distinction between what

01:26:58

I would call the pro -life industrial complex or the pro -life establishment, the fundraising arm of the pro -life movement and the average rank -and -file pro -life person.

01:27:10

The average rank -and -file pro -life person, when we present to them what we're trying to do, that we're actually trying to end abortion, we want to criminalize it.

01:27:17

The average pro -life person hears that and they say, well, that's what I thought we were doing all along. Yes, that's absolutely what

01:27:23

I want to do. It is the, oftentimes, it is the pro -life

01:27:28

Republican leadership and pro -life Republican establishment groups that will actually go in and lobby against the legislation that we're trying to pass for a variety of reasons.

01:27:40

I don't want to assume upon their motives, but oftentimes it will be those individuals that you would think would be most in favor of our efforts to actually make abortion illegal in the state.

01:27:51

They are the ones that come in and lobby against what we're doing. One of the things that a lot of times people don't understand is just like,

01:27:57

I'm sure you guys talk about it on your show, because I've heard you talk about it. In the Southern Baptist Convention, there is an elitist establishment that wants to maintain the status quo.

01:28:07

In the gun fight, there's an elitist establishment that wants to maintain the status quo. I'm going to disagree with that. I don't think that the elite

01:28:13

SBC want to keep the status quo. I think they want to go for the left. Okay. Fair enough.

01:28:19

I don't disagree with you on that. When you look at all of these different fights and you look at all of these different things, there's always the elitist group.

01:28:29

When I say maintain that status quo, what I mean primarily is they want to keep themselves in power.

01:28:35

It does become about that. I'm not against fundraising, re -raise money, but when there's millions and millions of dollars and so on and changing of hands and things like that, a lot of times when

01:28:46

I say they're trying to maintain the status quo, they're trying to maintain control. A lot of times, unfortunately, it's the pro -life establishment folks that are keeping us from getting our bills out of committee and to the floor.

01:29:02

I see this question here from Christopher. Fully support abolition bills. Thank you for that clarification. I did not want to assume upon your motives.

01:29:08

I never want to assume that I know what anybody else is thinking, but I do feel that question from a lot of people that are against what we're doing.

01:29:14

Thank you for that clarification. To clarify... Oh, I missed the second half of that. Thank you.

01:29:20

To clarify any new bills being introduced that criminalize abortion. Yes. There was a bill introduced in both

01:29:28

North and South Carolina recently, and another group that we work with called

01:29:33

Action for Life. That's run by a guy named Dennis Sofrate and a guy named Zach Lautenslager.

01:29:39

They are working in 11 new states right now. I can't share the list because we don't want to tip our hand to our political enemies, but there are 11 states right now where we're working with state representatives that have not had bills yet that are going to be...

01:29:52

Where those representatives are seriously thinking about carrying a bill for us. So keep an eye out because there'll be more.

01:29:58

We already have... I think we already have 11 and we have 11 more. I think it's 11 more that we're working in right now.

01:30:05

So some things that I want to go over with you here.

01:30:16

One is, I told folks earlier before you came in, I want you to give a definition of abolitionism.

01:30:25

Also, I don't know, I couldn't find the question, but there was someone that asked the question of...

01:30:33

It wasn't the blood guiltiness, but human sacrifice. I'll try to find it.

01:30:39

You try to find it, put it up. So if you could define abolitionism, and then we'll try to find that question and put it up.

01:30:48

But to explain, to give a little bit of an explanation, a quick explanation of what you would refer to as the doctrine of blood guiltiness or the sacrifice.

01:31:01

Sure. Okay. So defining abolitionism and with everything that's happening right now about people stealing ideas and so forth,

01:31:07

I want to give credit. This is not my definition. The problem is I can't remember the guy's name, whose definition it is, but he's dead.

01:31:15

So I don't think that he's going to worry about it. He was a slavery abolitionist. Are you trying to make sure you don't get accused of plagiarism?

01:31:21

Yeah. I don't want to end up like Ed Litton, man. Someone I just don't know who. I don't want to end up in that camp.

01:31:29

But one of the guys that was a slavery abolitionist in the 1800s had what I think is a great definition.

01:31:35

And he was an abolitionist historian. And basically his definition of abolitionism is that abolitionism is removing the moral stain from a society, right?

01:31:47

So where there's moral decay, there's departure from the truth and power of God's law.

01:31:55

What abolitionism is the idea that we're going to try to confront that with the gospel and call for repentance and sort of set society back right, so to speak, in the culture.

01:32:09

And so we are abortion abolitionists, which means that our primary focus is on abortion.

01:32:15

But that doesn't mean we want to just ignore all of the other evil that's happening in the world.

01:32:20

And this ties in with my definition of the doctrine of blood guiltiness to explain why we focus so much on abortion.

01:32:27

It's not that the dad that's beating his kids, that sin doesn't matter.

01:32:32

Or that, you know, you and I talked the other day about human trafficking as an example. It's not that human trafficking doesn't matter.

01:32:40

As a matter of fact, I have some friends that call themselves abolitionists and they're in the human trafficking fight.

01:32:45

And to that I say, yes and amen. Yes, abolish that. Work to abolish that. But when we're talking, the reason that we focus, we're primarily focused on abortion.

01:32:53

And then at Operation Save America, we also focus on homosexuality, biblical understanding of genders, manhood, womanhood.

01:33:01

The reason that we're focused on these kinds of things is because when we look at, like starting in Genesis chapter four with Cain and Abel, Cain killed his brother

01:33:12

Abel. And when God comes to Cain and he's talking to Cain about what he's done, one of the things

01:33:17

God says to Cain is he says that the blood of your, your brother's blood calls out to me for justice.

01:33:24

You know, and then you carry forward when you look at Leviticus and this is all throughout, you see it, you see it in the

01:33:30

Noahic covenant. You come forward to Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 18, God said, there's pagan nations in the land.

01:33:37

These are not nations that are under special covenant with God. They're just pagan nations that are in the land. And God says, I'm bringing judgment on these nations.

01:33:44

The land is going to vomit them out. Why God? Well, because they're committing all kinds of forms of sexual immorality, including homosexuality, bestiality, you know, and so on and so forth.

01:33:56

And because they're shedding the blood of the innocent by offering their children as sacrifices to idols.

01:34:03

And so God is angry with these nations in Leviticus 18. They're pagan nations.

01:34:09

They're not nations that are under special covenant with God. They're pagan. And yet God is going to bring judgment on them because of their sexual immorality and because of their, their, their shedding of innocent blood, in particular, offering children as sacrifices to idols.

01:34:23

Now you come forward to, it's the book of Ezekiel talks about, and there's another prophet that talks about, you know, that God's going to bring judgment.

01:34:32

This is on the nation of Israel because they parade their sin like Sodom. What was the sin of Sodom? The sin of Sodom is homosexuality.

01:34:38

We see that in the book of Jude. Very clearly, that's the sin that God is talking about there. Then we come forward.

01:34:45

I mean, as you continue to come forward, then you come to the book of Jeremiah, where the rest of the prophets determined that they're going to, that they're going to kill

01:34:54

Jeremiah because they don't like his prophecies. They don't like that he's prophesied judgment on the nation of Israel.

01:35:00

And so they call all of the magistrates to come and bring about this judgment on Jeremiah.

01:35:05

And Jeremiah gives them this warning. He says, you can kill me if you want to, but I'm not guilty of any sin.

01:35:11

And if you kill me, you will bring my innocent blood on yourselves. Not only on yourselves, though, you will bring my innocent blood on this entire community.

01:35:21

Because that's what happens when you shed the blood of the innocent. We see it in the law of God. We see it all through the New Testament.

01:35:27

We see it when Jesus is talking to the Pharisees right before he, right before they crucify him. He talks, he tells them that they are going to bring the innocent blood of all of the prophets, the blood of righteous

01:35:39

Abel, all the way through on their heads. And what do the Pharisees say in the book of Acts when they're telling the apostles not to preach in that name?

01:35:47

They say, don't do this. Don't, you're spreading this message all over the land. What is the message? You're trying to bring this man's blood on our head.

01:35:53

The reason they're doing that because they understand what a serious accusation that that was.

01:35:59

Then we come to the book of Hebrews and the author of Hebrews says, talks about this idea of innocent blood.

01:36:05

But then he says, the blood of the covenant of Christ speaks something better over you.

01:36:11

And so there is, even where there is the shedding of innocent blood, there is hope, there is redeeming power and hope in the gospel.

01:36:19

And so the church has this message of the gospel, has a duty to bring the message of the gospel into conflict with the shed of innocent blood and to call upon the nation to repent of the shedding of innocent blood.

01:36:32

Or as Romans chapter one teaches us, God is going to bring judgment on this nation.

01:36:38

And so it's not he's going to. I mean, I think probably we'd all agree. He already is. It's evident. We're living

01:36:43

Romans one in America right now. If we, I mean, judgment is coming for America and we're coming under the judgment of God, I believe.

01:36:51

And one of the missions of the church should be to call, to call the culture to repentance.

01:36:57

And so we focus so much on abortion, not because we don't care about all of these other sins, but because of how much, because of how much abortion results in the, in the,

01:37:11

I'm really tired. So I can't think of the word. The multiplication, let's just use that word. The multiplication of sin.

01:37:19

Okay. So I, um, first off, Callie says that you sound like CRT, ha ha corporate.

01:37:27

It's giving me a hard time, man. Um, yeah. So, so, and one of the things, and I don't know just, uh, cause

01:37:34

Jacob was, I think this was the same person. I was kind of mocking me on, on Facebook saying that I couldn't have possibly been, you know, been an abolitionist before AHA, which we talked about at the beginning, but, uh, he's saying, look at him using the pesky old

01:37:48

Testament. So I don't know if that's a, another dig at me. Maybe it is, but, um, I want to clarify, cause I said this earlier before you came on.

01:37:54

So, so see with what you, the way you laid that out, I'm going to agree with you, right?

01:38:00

Where I disagree is, and, and, and I don't, I don't know your position on this. So we'll see, uh,

01:38:06

I, where I end up disagreeing is when people try to say that abortion is a child sacrifice in the same way that it was with Moloch, right?

01:38:16

That it's a, that it's an act of worship that I don't believe. I don't believe, I think that's a misuse of scripture because that's trying to,

01:38:23

I think, retrofit it to fit a situation. And there's no need, in my opinion, there's no need to do that because we can look at the fact that abortion is murder.

01:38:34

We can look at the fact that, you know, the, the whole issue that, that I have when it comes to abolition with this slavery, the ownership issue.

01:38:43

Okay. Because when you, when someone says, this is my body, I could do whatever I want with it. They're claiming ownership over another human being.

01:38:50

That's what it comes down to. And actually when I'm outside abortion clinics, that's the, what I actually do, uh, outside abortion clinics is

01:38:58

I, I stand out and I argue cause like almost everyone that I've been to so far, they usually have either, you know, some black guy that's acting as security or they'll have black people who are there to, to usher women in as, as the death squirts.

01:39:12

And I will argue for slavery. I give an argument for slavery. I keep doing it until somebody.

01:39:20

And I just wait till the one person that finally tells me slavery is wrong because you can't own another person.

01:39:27

I just wait for it. And it always happens. Soon as they do, I just say, then explain to me, what's the difference between this is my body and this is my property, right?

01:39:37

There is, there is no difference there. That's the core. It was, you know, so I don't, I don't make the argument of that.

01:39:44

It's a child sacrifice. I would, I think my argument would be a little bit different.

01:39:50

Um, if it, if it is idol worship, which I think that it is out of worship in a certain sense, but maybe not in the sense that you're talking about, because I think the idol that's being worshiped when people murder their children is the idol of self.

01:40:03

So yeah, that's what I hear. Yeah. And I agree with that too. I would totally agree with that.

01:40:08

The, the, the point that, that is trying to be made here is, is to try to take the old

01:40:14

Testament and, and, and things that actually happened in the old Testament that we're dealing with, with, with actual doctrinal issues, we're actually theological and doctrinal issues and make them an analogy for what's going on today.

01:40:27

That doesn't work. And, you know, we have to, we have to go back to an image, an image bearer of God, murdering another image bearer of God and God throughout the old

01:40:38

Testament and new Testament says, this is forbidden and it is a sin. We don't have to,

01:40:44

I agree with what, what Andrew said. We don't have to go back to saying, you know, well, let's just rip this out of context.

01:40:51

No, let's, let's keep, let's keep the Bible whole. And let's use the, let's use that where the scripture says exactly like it's supposed to be used and uplift the entire magnitude of scripture.

01:41:03

Sure. And I mean, a lot of what you just said there, I don't actually, I mean, I don't disagree with, we may have a, there may be a difference of opinion theologically here because I'm a 1689 guy.

01:41:12

And so I believe, I mean, I wholeheartedly embrace. He's off the show. So I wholeheartedly embrace, uh,

01:41:21

I'm not saying the 1689 confession is perfect, but I do agree with the, that doctrinal position.

01:41:28

And so I believe my understanding of the law of God is that there are certain covenant commands that are given under specific covenants that don't carry forward to today because they're for that covenant.

01:41:41

But I also think that there's value in looking at the equity of those commands and looking at how that applies to our culture today.

01:41:50

So I wouldn't be like a classic theonomist. Um, I would be, I mean, I'm a 1689 Federalist.

01:41:56

And so I would say that there is still value in looking at the way God dealt with child sacrifice under the old

01:42:02

Testament system. Just when he talks about the shedding of innocent blood, I would say there's still value in looking at that.

01:42:08

That doesn't necessarily have to mean though, that there's a one -to -one comparison between what exactly was happening there and what exactly is happening here.

01:42:18

That's a good point that I make. Yeah. It's not a one -to -one. Exactly. Let me, I, you know, I've got to find something to, to agree with Sam here.

01:42:25

So Sam put this up earlier when you're giving a definition. He was saying, Hey, five tenets, five components, throw in some five points of Calvinism for good measure.

01:42:33

Just kidding. So I am a little nervous. I see this from Callie. He says,

01:42:38

Darren, we should do an episode on this. I want to give a good explanation. You know, like I hope that at least, you know,

01:42:47

Callie, you'll invite me on. Actually I should. So this is, this is Callie's book that I just got.

01:42:53

It's next on the pile to read the doctrine of Balaam. I've heard a lot of good things of it. And therefore I have not read it yet, but I heard a lot of good things about it.

01:43:01

It is, it's next on the, on the reading pile, but again, it's a good podcast as well, right?

01:43:08

Oh yeah. I would love to have you come on to our podcast. Actually. I think Callie would be cool with that. What's that?

01:43:14

That's the name of the podcast as well, right? Uh, well, no, it's, uh, the name of the book is the doctrine of Balaam and the name of the podcast is resisting

01:43:21

Balaam. Resist. Okay. Resisting Balaam. Okay. So, so you want to hear Darren and Callie, um, it's resisting

01:43:29

Balaam is the podcast that I appreciate. Yeah. And you can, if you just search any podcast app where we're on there and we're also on YouTube.

01:43:37

So thank you. So we have Pastor Josiah here and he had a, uh, he was asking in, in the chat earlier, what was the good news with AHA?

01:43:48

And then he said he had a question for you. So I didn't, let me answer the question you had asked earlier in the chat.

01:43:55

Um, if I didn't make it clear, I mean, there were things that, that I think AHA had done in the past, some positions where, where at least at some level, the, you know, at least some of the guys that were running it and then many members were, were arguing things like, yeah, you had to be part of AHA or supporting

01:44:13

AHA to be saved. That's, you know, Pastor Darren has said that they don't teach anything like that anymore.

01:44:21

Uh, the fact that they, they are not pulling people out of churches to start new AHA churches.

01:44:26

They don't do that anymore. Those are two things that would remove them from being a cult and having two of them removed removes them from even being cultic.

01:44:34

And so that's good news in my mind. That's, that's great news. So now

01:44:40

I know there's a bunch of fields telling me that I've been saying when we said that, that no, they haven't changed at all. Well, it seems like they did, but I will say, and I mean, as you speak from my experience, uh,

01:44:50

I know. Listen, listen, that is such beautiful music.

01:44:56

No, no, no, man. That's beautiful, man. Praise God, man. That's awesome. Children are a blessing.

01:45:01

He's trying to, but he's not there yet. He's not at eight. His quiver is filling up.

01:45:08

Yeah. We have three, uh, four -year -old

01:45:15

Lydia. We have a two -year -old Miriam and we have a one -year -old Noah. Only five more.

01:45:24

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Praise God. They're starting to say that's good.

01:45:30

So I'm sorry. No, you go ahead. We believe in the command to be fruitful and multiply.

01:45:38

So there you go. We're going to give you your perspective on, on AHA.

01:45:45

Yeah. So, I mean, I know several of the guys who were, uh, involved in founding AHA, uh, you know, and a few of them,

01:45:52

I, you know, have good conversations with their guys that I would count as friends. I haven't ever, um, like you and I talked about on the phone the other day, a lot of this stuff that you're talking about was before I ever got involved, um, in this.

01:46:04

But for me, I mean, in my experience, um, you know, I haven't seen, um, you know,

01:46:11

I, I don't, I don't know of any like AHA type churches. What I, what I'm seeing a lot of right now, and I think this is just the grace of God.

01:46:20

I hope, I think awakening the culture that there are many, and like what you saw at the

01:46:25

Southern Baptist Convention, there are many just like Christians. They're just Christians. They're just regular old run -of -the -mill people who love

01:46:34

Jesus, go to church on Sunday morning, you know, uh, and, you know, homeschool their kids, you know, whatever that type of thing that are getting involved in this fight to end abortion.

01:46:44

And that's, that's what I want to see. That's what we're seeing. Um, and so, you know, um,

01:46:50

I know that there were there, I've heard some of those different things you were talking about that people are saying were happening early in the, in the movement and things like that.

01:46:58

But I have seen the abolition movement over the course of the last, uh, three years in particular.

01:47:06

Number one, I've seen the church warm to the abolition movement, and I've seen the abolition movement warm to the church.

01:47:13

Um, and I'm tremendously thankful for both of those realities. So you get a guy like Bill Askell, who's making our motion at the

01:47:20

Southern Baptist Convention. I mean, Bill Askell is a long time Southern Baptist guy. He's part of Founders Ministries.

01:47:27

Um, you know, he's, uh, he's, he's, but he's just a pastor who loves Jesus and loves his flock.

01:47:33

Some of these other guys, Dusty Deaver commented on here earlier, Brett Baggett, you know, um,

01:47:38

I mean, these guys are, I mean, yeah, they're abolitionists. They're trying to end abortion, but they pastor churches that are just like, they're not abolitionist churches, but they're churches where the pastors are raising up and equipping the congregation to engage the culture, uh, regarding blood guiltiness, uh, regarding shedding of innocent blood, regarding the things happening with the pre -born, regarding homosexuality, regarding the sins that are happening in the world.

01:48:04

And so, you know, to me, I count that as a, I count that as a good thing. I don't think that they're abolitionist churches.

01:48:11

I think they're just Christians. They're just churches that, um, that, that, you know, have good faithful pastors that love

01:48:18

Jesus and are discipling their people. And part of that discipleship is teaching them how to bring the gospel outside the four walls of the church.

01:48:25

That's been my experience. That's what I see. Yeah. Now, just before you get to your question, let me, uh,

01:48:31

I may need to ask forgiveness here. KT says, uh, what is this a competition about how many kids people have?

01:48:37

Not everyone gets that blessing. So you're right, KT. So please forgive me if, you know, the, the joking around, uh, caused you any, any pain, um, that you're right.

01:48:49

And I do realize that not everyone can, you know, has that. And sometimes it can be a sensitive issue. So, uh, just ask forgiveness there.

01:48:57

Josiah, you had a question follow up. Well, I, I am familiar with, uh,

01:49:03

AHA. Um, I don't, I'm not as familiar with, with your organization, but, um,

01:49:10

I know that some, I know that some, uh, abolitionists movements, you know, stand outside of abortion clinics and they, they, they try to convince women to, to, to not have abortions, which is an awesome thing.

01:49:26

But, um, does your organization do that and preach the gospel or do you, I mean, do you just try to focus on the, uh, on the trying to stop women from having abortions?

01:49:39

Yeah. So this is actually, um, first of all, thank you so much for that question. That's a great question. This is actually one of the things that whatever else you want to say, the abolition movement got wrong way back when this is one of the things that abolition movement had right from the beginning.

01:49:56

Um, and that is that the gospel, they have always strived to make the gospel front and center.

01:50:01

I'm not saying that there weren't errors and mistakes that made Andrew and I've talked about those, but the desire to bring the gospel front and center in the fight to end abortion has always been high on the priority list.

01:50:15

I know operation save America, the organization I'm part of when we go to the abortion clinic. Yes. We're trying to save babies.

01:50:20

We do want to save babies, but actually we would say our primary purpose in being there is preaching the gospel.

01:50:26

You're going to hear the gospel a hundred times when we come to the abortion clinic, we're going to go over it and over it. So the thing that we're appealing to women when we get there and, and their boyfriends or husbands, you know, we are going to appeal with them.

01:50:37

Please don't go through with this. Don't, don't take the life of your baby today. We're here to help. We'll provide you with resources.

01:50:44

What can we do to help you? And then that's the, you know, if you've ever been to abortion clinic before you get about 12 seconds between the one that, when the woman gets out of the car and when she goes in the door.

01:50:56

So that's the 12 second thing. Please don't do this today. We'll help you. You don't need to go through with this decision.

01:51:03

Then we have preachers, actual, not necessarily pastors, but like a lot of times we'll even raise up young men that want to be pastors doing this or set them up where the waiting room is in the abortion mill.

01:51:15

And their job is to point that megaphone at that waiting room and literally preach the gospel the whole time we're there.

01:51:21

So they're going to make an appeal for women to come away. But that appeal is going to be grounded in repentance.

01:51:28

We don't want to just call you away from the abortion clinic. Right now, this abortion clinic that you're at to murder your baby is the embodiment of your sin.

01:51:35

It's the conclusion of your sin. What we want to call you to is we want to call you to repent of your sin and come find forgiveness and hope in Christ.

01:51:43

And right now, what that looks like for you is coming out of this abortion clinic and letting us share the gospel with you.

01:51:49

And so, um, you know, not taking the life of your baby today. And so the gospel is very much front and center with everything that we do.

01:51:56

And not only at the abortion mills, but it's actually front and center with the political work that we do too. We're having conversations with politicians and so forth.

01:52:04

We are pleading with them, you know, especially, you know, if they profess to be born again, then we're saying, hey, praise

01:52:10

God, you're born again. You're a brother in Christ. Now live consistently with the gospel and do that, which honors

01:52:16

Christ. If they're, uh, if they, if they don't know Christ, then the proclamation of the gospel is front and center in that conversation as we're pleading with them to save the lives of these preborn kids.

01:52:27

And so we are very much a gospel centered organization. And I believe

01:52:32

I, I mean, I think the upper, um, abolished, um, um, the abolition movement,

01:52:38

I should say the abolition movement is a very much a gospel centric movement. Uh, it's one of the, that's one of the things that drew me into abolitionism.

01:52:46

There were a lot of things I didn't like about abolitionism when I first came into it. But the thing that drew me in was the gospel appeal.

01:52:54

And yeah, I mean, it was seeing people get saved and seeing babies get saved sort of at the same time.

01:53:00

And so, yes, I would say, uh, yes, we're trying to save babies, but the primary aim is actually that we're trying to plead with women, not to murder their baby.

01:53:10

So that in a, in a, in a, in route to having a gospel conversation with them so that they can come to know

01:53:16

Christ. You could tell that he's a pastor, you know, a simple yes would have done, but he can't do that, right? I can't do it, man.

01:53:22

That's why we're going to go into Anthony time. Yeah. People are, are, are saying that unless it's like, uh, yay

01:53:28

Anthony time going over the two hour mark. So, um, so let me, let me say, son, even though I know that it may get, you know, you and I talked about this and it may get some of the abolitionists that are watching or listening upset with me even more, but, uh, you know, um, you know, the, the, as I told you,

01:53:49

I was on the board of directors of a crisis pregnancy center and there's very few crisis pregnancy centers

01:53:55

I would be involved with. Um, because of the issues and you say, how can, if you're really, and this is the challenge field, if you're really an abolitionist, how can you be engaged with a crisis pregnancy center for a very simple reason, this crisis pregnancy center really focused more on the gospel.

01:54:13

And, and they, their whole mission was look, women are going to try to go and have an abortion.

01:54:19

Let's use that. Not just their goal was let them come find us before Planned Parenthood so we could share the gospel with them.

01:54:27

And that was their focus. Their focus was get them in and share the gospel. And that, that clinic was kind of unique in that way where their whole focus was using abortion to share the gospel.

01:54:41

Um, now, you know, were they trying to put a stop to abortion? Not the same way an abolitionist would be.

01:54:48

Right. But they weren't, that wasn't really in their mind. That wasn't their mission. Their mission was to get the gospel.

01:54:54

And so, so some of the folks I will have to see comments that they may say that they may get even more upset with me than they've been.

01:55:02

Josiah, you have anything else? Well, as long as you keep the gospel first, I'm all for it.

01:55:09

Uh, I'll be praying for you guys. Yeah. Thank you, Josiah. I appreciate that. I'll put you back. If you have any more, just, uh, just add it.

01:55:17

So if, if I can speak to that thing that you just said, I don't know if that would be okay. Yeah. Sam says, uh, there, there are good ones rare, but they do exist and I agree with them.

01:55:27

There's something else. Yeah. And I know the two of you would agree on that point. Um, so one of the things, uh, so Rusty Thomas, who was the national director before Jason and I just became national director, he's sort of like a, like a father figure to me, somebody who's discipled me and poured a lot into me.

01:55:43

One of the things that he always talks about when he's going places and speaking on this particular issue is he talks about the long -term battle and the short -term battle, right?

01:55:52

The short -term battle is, so the long -term battle is we're trying to change the law, but that doesn't do anything for the babies that are scheduled to be aborted tomorrow.

01:56:01

And so the short term, we have the long -term battle and the short -term battle. The short -term battle is any opportunity we have, we go to the abortion clinics because that's where the women are going to kill their babies.

01:56:11

So the short -term battle is whatever we can do to try to save as many babies as we can at the abortion clinic, that's what we're trying to do.

01:56:20

We want to save those babies, but the long -term battle is we're trying to change the law so that abortion is completely and totally criminalized without exception or compromise.

01:56:31

And so there are two aspects to the fight. Abolitionists have five tenets. So Sam mentioned that earlier.

01:56:37

I'm sure you're familiar with that, but we also have, and most people know abolitionists have five tenets, but abolitionists, one of the other things abolitionists talk about is two modes.

01:56:46

There's two ways that we go about carrying out what we're trying to do. One is agitation. You're very familiar with that.

01:56:53

But the other is actually service. The second mode is service, which is in services that we're trying to provide services to care for the needs of women that are in crisis pregnancy, because that's something that the church should be involved in.

01:57:09

Is that ending abortion in the sense of changing the law?

01:57:15

No, it's not ending abortion in the sense of changing the law. And we should be honest about that, which is one of the problems that a lot of abolitionists have with crisis pregnancy centers is they have churches donating money to them on the premise that they're ending abortion.

01:57:27

We say, no, they're not ending abortion, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing a good thing. As long as the gospel is front and center and they're providing goods and services to try to help women that are in crisis pregnancy, then we're 100 % on board with that and in favor of that.

01:57:43

And that's one of the things that we actually do. I mean, we pull resources and abolitionists have adopted children and Laura Klassen.

01:57:50

I don't know if you know who she is, but she does an amazing job of organizing resources and things like that.

01:57:57

We all love and appreciate her. And so what you're talking about with the crisis pregnancy center hit the nail on the head in the sense that we want to see pregnancy resource centers preach the gospel and be honest about what they're trying to do, which is provide services to women that are in crisis pregnancy, not in abortion, necessarily.

01:58:17

Okay, so let me ask you a question because and this is where when I get a lot of those that would say they're abolitionists disagree with me, this is where I see there's terminology that we disagree on.

01:58:33

Okay, so you just explain the two modes. Yeah. Now, when

01:58:38

I hear those two modes, I'm seeing those as that's incrementalism is the first one.

01:58:45

And so when I was speaking earlier with William Wilberforce and all that, that first mode, what

01:58:52

I would call incrementalism is what he did. Now, a lot of people disagree with me on this, but so I want you to then explain how do you see that not as incrementalism or how do you define then incrementalism that you'd see it different?

01:59:07

Yeah. So I would start with saying I hate the word. I just don't like the word.

01:59:13

It's the word that was here when I got here. So unfortunately, I have to deal with it, but I hate the word.

01:59:19

Look, the reality is there are going to be increments. We have to have increments.

01:59:25

When we go to the abortion mill to save babies, that is a short term fight. We're trying to save as many babies as we can, but there are increments.

01:59:33

If we end abortion in Oklahoma, we still have to end it in Indiana. We still have to end it in Ohio. There are going to be increments.

01:59:41

We're not, as Callie just said there, we are not against increments. We are against unjust laws.

01:59:47

Actually, Callie's typing the very thing that I said. We're against unjust laws that are increments. So what we're against is -

01:59:56

Callie types faster than you speak. Yes, he does. Yeah. Well, what it is, is he thinks faster than I do.

02:00:05

We are against unjust laws that are increments. What we're against is injustice.

02:00:10

And I think really that's the thing that people have to understand. And so,

02:00:16

I mean, to get into specifics, I don't know how much specific you want me to get into, but like, for example, many will say that something like a dismemberment ban is a good increment.

02:00:26

It's a good increment because it's going to save some babies. I would say, no, that's an unjust increment.

02:00:32

Because if you read a 20 -week ban or a dismemberment ban, like the one that passed here in Indiana, if you go read that bill, any

02:00:39

Christian that actually read that bill would not be in favor of it. Because essentially what it says is, it spells out in detail.

02:00:46

This is how you can kill a baby. This is how you can't kill a baby. And we are opposed to legislation that spells out when, where, and how it's okay to kill a baby.

02:00:56

But that doesn't mean that there can't be increments that are useful and beneficial.

02:01:02

In our strategy, there are increments. Okay, so you got to find a bill sponsor. You got to find somebody to draft the bill.

02:01:08

Those are increments. You got to, you know, then you got to have the fight. They're going to assign a committee.

02:01:13

You got to have the fight with the committee. That's an increment. Then you got to get it to the floor and get a vote on the floor. That's an increment.

02:01:19

Once you get the thing passed, then you have to have the enforcement battle. Because just because you pass a bill doesn't necessarily mean that the people that are going to enforce it are going to do it.

02:01:28

That's an increment. So there are increments involved. We have to acknowledge we're human beings.

02:01:34

God only really allows us to live to deal in increments. If he wants to do something without increments, he can do that.

02:01:42

And he does do that sometimes. But there are going to be increments involved in the fight. The real question, which is why

02:01:48

I so hate that word. But again, it's the one that was here when I got here. So I have to deal with it. The real question that we want to ask is what is just and what is unjust?

02:01:56

Don't do unjust things and do just things. That's what we want to do. So just real quick,

02:02:03

I just want to make sure that we're talking as we're talking. You know, like I said before, this is this is semantic range of arguments.

02:02:13

So the point here being the point here being is, is that most, I can't say most,

02:02:19

I'm just going to speak for myself and Andrew, who's over there yawning because we're putting him to sleep after Anthony time.

02:02:24

So he's thinking about my pillow. He's thinking about my pillow. Amen. But think about it.

02:02:30

We're talking about a semantic range because what Andrew and I are sitting here talking about is the exact same thing that you're talking about and whatnot.

02:02:38

We're arguing for the same points and we're saying the same thing. And yet we have people coming in here and saying, if you say incrementalism, you're not

02:02:47

Christian. And I'm not saying you guys are, but there are people that have done that to us in the past. And they've said this and we're trying to say, look, we are all talking about using the same thing.

02:02:57

Yes, there's bad increments. There's this idea that you can murder a baby at so many weeks, but not after this or the heartbeat bill.

02:03:06

That drives me nuts because it's been proven that you can take that ultrasound and just direct it so they can't hear the heartbeat.

02:03:14

And they say, oh, look, you see this clump of cells? And it's been proven that we're not talking about doing things that are unjust.

02:03:23

We're talking about being consistently biblical. We're talking about the scripture telling us exactly what is defined as a life.

02:03:32

And by the way, here's something that I'll throw on a bandwagon here. Stop saying life begins at conception.

02:03:38

Life continues in conception. It doesn't begin at conception. Okay. Stop saying that.

02:03:44

Don't ever say it again because when you say it, you're lying. The Bible says that life continues at conception.

02:03:50

No, it's not that they're lying. Oh, you're misrepresenting it. You see, it's semantics. Here, Andrew's now going to argue with me over semantics.

02:03:58

I mean, Dusty puts it, you know, regularism or regulationism is a better word.

02:04:04

And that may be a better one to use. Maybe. I like that word better. Yeah. I like that word better. We've tried, but incrementalism just sticks.

02:04:13

Yeah, it's there. But rather than fighting, I mean, here's the thing. But the thing is with it,

02:04:19

I think, May, you're trying to is for all the people within the abolitionist movement who criticize me, for example, but don't undertake the time to understand what

02:04:28

I mean by my terminology and then say that I'm wrong when they're arguing the same exact thing

02:04:36

I am, they just are arguing different words. And then they define some of those words different at times.

02:04:42

And then it's like, well, if I hold you to your definition, this is an incrementalism.

02:04:48

Yeah. You know, you have to define the terms. Yeah. Well, and I mean, I think that's and so you talked about that with Callie earlier.

02:04:55

It's one of the things that Callie is very good at is making sure that we're using the same words in the same way when we're having a discussion.

02:05:02

One of the things that we have to do better. You know, one of the things we all have to do better.

02:05:08

And I'll say one of the things we have to make sure we do better as the abolition movement is to define our terms at the beginning of the conversation.

02:05:15

When I say incrementalism and the thing that makes incrementalism so hard for me is because then

02:05:21

I define incrementalism and it's like, well, that really doesn't have anything to do with increments. That's the reason I tend not to use labels.

02:05:27

Yeah. That's the reason I just try to find other ways of saying it where I try to define things without using a label.

02:05:33

That's why, you know, we joke because I had a debate with a Calvinist on the program once or with an anti -Calvinist.

02:05:41

And he's like, he's arguing what I believe. And he's like, well, you're a Calvinist. I said,

02:05:46

I never said that. He went, wait, what? Because I don't know what you mean by it.

02:05:52

And typically purple that accused me of being Calvinist, they don't understand Calvinism. I can agree with it, but, you know, it's like the best sometimes is to avoid the terminology, especially if you know what causes problems.

02:06:08

Right. No, I mean, I agree with that. I mean, you said, you said you mistakenly said you were arguing with a Calvinist.

02:06:13

And I kind of laughed to myself about that because it's not outside the realm of possibility that two Calvinists would argue. Hey, look,

02:06:20

I'm a heretic because I'm a Calvinist. I've been told I'm a heretic because I'm not a

02:06:25

Calvinist. Right. The only thing everyone can agree on is that I'm a heretic. Right. Who wants to actually understand what

02:06:30

I believe? Well, I read your book. I read it actually the day that I got it. I read it that night because remember you were at my church the next day and I recommended it to everybody because you've you hit my definition of Calvinism.

02:06:43

So it's up there on the screen now. I mean, I think it's a great book and I enjoyed it, especially since the only thing that you and I, well, you and I disagree about a few things theologically, one of them being end times theology, and you hardly hit on that in that book.

02:06:56

So we could, you know, I can still pass it out. It's okay to be wrong. I mean, I'm sorry. Nah, you're one of those guys too, hey?

02:07:03

Yes, I are. Very much so. Next week, since you brought up end times, next week's show is going to be

02:07:11

Pastor Jim Osmond and Drew from that, you know, you met him at Cruciform, but he was with a

02:07:19

Matter of Theology podcast. So you got a pre -meal and a post -meal, both made some good arguments for both, and they're going to have a discussion on their arguments.

02:07:28

So that'll be next week. So both of us will be represented next week. Amen. So what you're saying is that you're saying that the heretic is going to give a good argument.

02:07:36

That is so great. Drew is my favorite heretic. I just love him. I'll tell you what, man, he's not, by the way.

02:07:47

I'll tell you this quick story about Drew. I don't know him really well. We're just getting to know each other. But you guys know who

02:07:52

Brendan Scalf is? He's the guy who runs Cruciform Ministries. He's an elder here at Harmony Baptist Church.

02:08:00

And he put me in this... Well, I told him to, so it's kind of my fault. But he put me in this, what do they call it?

02:08:07

Marco Polo thread about being a cowboy. Because this is kind of the thing right now, since I got the hat.

02:08:14

Brendan's been getting a bunch of cowboy hats. He's got cowboy boots now and everything. And man, I'll tell you what,

02:08:20

I got in that thread for the first time. There were 28 messages in there before I even got in it. So...

02:08:25

Now, is that an incremental thing? Something like that. I don't know. Yes, it happened over increments.

02:08:32

Hey, where's your horse at, by the way? I don't have one. See, I'm not a real person. I've got mine right here. I don't know what you're doing.

02:08:37

I think the lady at Boot Barn, I think the terminology she used to describe me was Yankee poser.

02:08:45

So that kind of stung a little bit. But Drew is one of those guys. He's got like 10 cowboy hats and cowboy boots and everything else.

02:08:52

So that'll be a great conversation, because I really tremendously respect both of those guys. Callie's saying they all want to come to Texas.

02:08:59

That's right. So let me, since we're now officially in Anthony time, and I'll put out there folks to be praying for Anthony.

02:09:09

He's here kind of backstage, doesn't want to come on. He's had, he's got a bad summer cold.

02:09:15

I told him it was COVID, but he's like, I already had that. Like, come on. I already had it too. I got it again.

02:09:20

So... Yeah, you can get it more or less. Just for the record. Anthony knows a lot more about... Andrew's got it.

02:09:26

Andrew's got it. Look at him. So here's, they give you about,

02:09:35

I don't know if you guys have this, where you've read a passage multiple times. And just as you're thinking through things, it hits you different.

02:09:44

Like you realize something. So Psalm 101, I've never used this as an argument when it comes to the issue of abortion.

02:09:52

And, but Psalm 102 verse 18 says this, just to give some context,

02:10:01

I'm going to start at verse 15. I'll let you know when I get to 18. But it says, So the nations will fear the name of the

02:10:08

Lord and all the kings of the earth, your glory, for the Lord has built up Zion.

02:10:15

He has appeared in his glory. He has regarded and prayed for the destitute and has despised their prayer.

02:10:23

Now this is verse 18. It has not. Huh? It has not. Yeah, it changes the whole meaning.

02:10:31

Yeah, that word changes the whole meaning. Verse 18. This will be written for the generation to come that a people yet to be created may praise the

02:10:44

Lord. The reason this becomes really important is like I ended up realizing as I thought through this, you know, and Justin kind of referred to this earlier, the fact when you look at, when you study anthropology,

02:10:56

I mean, the biblical anthropology, not secular stuff, you end up with a question of when does, when does a spirit get created, right?

02:11:05

There's three options you have. They were all created previously, that every spirit was created before day six, that they were all created and there's no more souls being created.

02:11:16

They're just in heaven waiting for a body. One option. And some Jewish people believe that,

02:11:24

Mormonism would believe that, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. Then you'd have the argument that for the, that the soul would be created when either at conception, but is created by God.

02:11:44

And this is where it gets interesting because some people would say at creation, or sorry, at conception, and others will say at birth.

02:11:52

And those that hold to that make a room for abortion, okay?

02:11:57

Because they say, well, it's not really human. It doesn't have a soul. Therefore it's at birth.

02:12:04

Now I would end up arguing, I take a third position, which is the position that when God rested from creation, that he rested from all that creation.

02:12:14

And therefore in this, you know, for folks that don't pick up on this, this is what Pastor Justin was referring to, the continuing of life.

02:12:22

Because I would say that God created Adam and Eve with the ability to procreate. And part of that procreation process is the soul being created.

02:12:32

So it's not a creation out of nothing, but it's a creation.

02:12:37

Now when you have that position, that's the argument that all abortion is wrong at conception.

02:12:44

Like you were talking about heartbeat bill. The heartbeat bill, if you want a heartbeat bill, it's

02:12:50

Roe versus Wade, okay? Roe versus Wade argued for heartbeat. Then they tried to expand it, okay?

02:12:58

By the way, you know, Biden is talking about trying to legislate abortion. I would love to see him try because that would expose, that would actually get it knocked out, right?

02:13:10

Because this is the thing people don't realize. Abortion is not legal. It is reading, it's an interpretation of the constitution that is far -fetched.

02:13:22

It's not a law. It's not a law because the legislature hasn't legislated. So why do I come to this? When I look at Psalm 102, 18, this shows, well, first off, it knocks off that first view of creation of man.

02:13:34

Because this clearly says people who have yet to be created, they haven't been created yet.

02:13:40

First one is gone. So now you have the question of, does God continue to create out of nothing, souls, or does he create as part of the procreation process?

02:13:55

And if you take the latter as I do, then the reason abortion is wrong is because of the fact that it starts at conception.

02:14:03

Now, what I thought interesting with this is, I've had to have read this dozens of times and yet never thought of it in light of the fact that this is an argument to prove that Mormonism and things like that are wrong with their view because these are people yet to be created.

02:14:22

Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I don't know if that's the first time you've heard that or if you've ever heard it before.

02:14:33

So you may have to process it. But it was something when I was looking forward to having this discussion,

02:14:39

I haven't been able to discuss this with anyone since I read it in my devotions was like, oh, wow,

02:14:45

I want to interact with someone. So I thought it'd be a good one to interact with here. I have not.

02:14:50

I mean, I'll be honest. You know, that particular topic is not one that I've delved into a whole lot in that sense.

02:14:59

So I appreciate the discussion. I do think that when we talk about life beginning and conception that is problematic, you know,

02:15:09

I think, I mean, a theological argument could be made that life begins in the mind of God, you know, and I've heard people make that argument.

02:15:17

But I think the argument that you made just now was good. A lot of people, when they're talking about life beginning and conception, they're trying to make an argument.

02:15:24

They're trying to make a biological argument against abortion. But I think one of the things that we agree on since we tend toward presuppositionalism is that that's the wrong place to go.

02:15:36

Um, that's not the best argument to make. And instead, we want to appeal to the word of God.

02:15:42

And so I think, I mean, I think the argument that you just made is a strong argument. I'll be honest in saying it's not something I've considered very much.

02:15:48

Although now that you brought it up, my brain's going 150 different directions. So I need to do some more reading. Yeah. One of the struggles with this as I looked it up just before the show, the word for created, there is barah.

02:16:00

So that could be an issue. See, now here's part of the problem I have. I saw a comment that just came up and it referred to an earlier one.

02:16:07

So I had to go find the earlier one. So James says, yeah, Russell already corrected him on a proper understanding of immediatism, but he found it hard to learn from Russell here.

02:16:18

Now, you know, and then, and so right there, I don't know anytime Russell's corrected me on my view of immediatism that I remember.

02:16:27

But see, then you have, you know, James saying, well, Jacob ad hominem, Rappaport knows you're emotional or a cult leader or something.

02:16:35

Why won't you own it? Now I'm muting you. You did this. This is the behavior that is the issue.

02:16:44

Okay. Yeah, we don't need that. This is the behavior of, I mean, the difference, and I've been saying this to James online today, the difference here is, you know,

02:16:54

I'm fair with all sides of people's arguments. I try to understand people and I try to be fair.

02:17:00

You could disagree with my conclusions all you want. When you say I lie about my conclusions, but you can't prove, show a single time that I've actually lied.

02:17:10

Okay, that's a problem on you. You made the claim that I lied, support it.

02:17:15

You can't support it by saying, I disagree with the conclusion. No, I have to show that I lied about the supporting arguments to the conclusion.

02:17:24

But this sort of behavior, James, and, you know, I'm doing this, you know, you're just trying to be mocking and things like that.

02:17:33

But the reality is that, and I could be wrong, I think it was, it might've been James who challenged me that I was, you know, that I was calling people, you know, that because they were faithful brothers and I was saying they were part of a cult.

02:17:47

Well, the reality is, you know, you, in saying things like this, you and Jacob, it's a question of, okay, are you saying you don't think

02:17:57

I'm a faithful brother then? That you could do, because if this is the behavior you have toward me and you say it's wrong, if I do things that you think, you know, that's challenging people that are calling a faithful, that are faithful brothers, you must be saying

02:18:09

I'm not a faithful brother. I mean, we've said throughout the show, you can come on here. Okay, you can come on any

02:18:16

Thursday night. If you guys want, I'm not afraid of challenges. I mean, the one thing that, you know,

02:18:23

I have to do this show so it's live, so anybody can come in and challenge anything. And if I'm wrong,

02:18:29

I admit it. You know, I wish you guys would stop, you know, trying to do the victory all and just, you know, if you're wrong, admit it, or at least hear me out.

02:18:40

Because the reality is that when you guys start saying that you know better what people have said to me in conversations you were never in, you're being unreasonable.

02:18:51

There's no other way to explain that. And I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I'm just trying to point it out.

02:18:56

It's not an ad hominem either, because I'm not throwing out your arguments. I'm pointing out that your behavior is not representing

02:19:05

Christ. Right. The mockery and, you know, misrepresentation, it's not honoring

02:19:12

Christ. Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, reading through some of the conversation, which

02:19:17

I was kind of side eyeing while I was talking to you guys a little bit earlier, you know, there are some guys in this message thread that have some substantial disagreements, or at least believed coming into the conversation, that they had some substantial disagreements with you, that I think probably did a pretty good job.

02:19:33

Guys like Austin, you know, you know, he's a guy who had some substantial disagreements coming into this with you.

02:19:41

I think he made an effort, even though he was very direct, I think he made an effort to address issues rather than personal attacks.

02:19:48

Okay, I haven't seen anything. I didn't see much in Austin, I don't think. I can't,

02:19:54

I'm very bad at - Yeah, it's past. But where's the podcast at now?

02:20:01

I can't find it. It's I'm Striving for Eternity, isn't it? Yeah. You know, guys like Callie, you know, and some of these guys, you know,

02:20:09

I think those are the guys, this is the, that's what we're hoping to do with this. Now I see, now

02:20:14

I can hear myself. Yeah, and you think, those are good quality conversations to have. Yeah, I mean, everybody can want to have.

02:20:21

Yeah, everybody can have disagreements because I'm going to tell you, there's not, I mean, in all honesty, you know,

02:20:27

Andrew and I probably agree more about any, any one doctrine than I've known of anybody. But, you know,

02:20:33

I'm sure we have disagreements on certain things. That doesn't make us enemies. That means that we just happen to see things a little differently, you know.

02:20:41

But the whole point is, is when the world sees vitriol and hate and gossip and slander, and they see these things that are supposed to be coming from supposed brothers in Christ, brothers and sisters in Christ, all it does is give them tools and weapons to say, see, look at you guys, you can't even get yourself straight.

02:21:02

Who are you to talk about us? Yeah, and I'll tell you, that hurts the name, the name of Christ. It hurts, it hurts our witness, our walk.

02:21:10

And instead of, instead of being reasonable and looking reputable, it's just a way to tear each other down.

02:21:17

Yeah, the name I was looking for, I said Austin, I don't know why I said that. Sam Riley was the name that I was looking for.

02:21:23

I know you have had some discussion back and forth. We've had discussions back and forth that, that, yeah,

02:21:28

I mean, I could be wrong. He seemed, and it's, and this is one of the things you always have to take into account when you're, you're reading someone's typing, people read in emotion that may not be there.

02:21:37

I mean, I have this all the time. People think when I disagree with them, I'm all emotional. I just disagree. It's just, it's a logical thing, you know, and I usually am doing it to try to help someone to improve their arguments.

02:21:47

But so many, so few people, and I talked about this earlier in the show, Darren, but so few people are looking to just learn to improve their arguments.

02:21:56

And they, they take every, every correction as a personal attack. I don't know where Sam, where Sam would be at with me now.

02:22:04

We, I mean, I've seen some of the comments and I've, I've agreed with some of the stuff he's, he's said in the second half.

02:22:10

And so I don't know. I think he's a, you know, I mean, I know Sam a little bit where he and I just gotten to know each other a little bit, but I do think, you know, reading through his comments and knowing him, you know,

02:22:20

I think that he's engaging, even though there's some differences of opinion and different views on what happened in history.

02:22:26

I think he's trying to engage in good faith, even though there's disagreements there. Callie, you know, is another guy.

02:22:32

Jacob was on here earlier. He is a guy who kind of has some disagreements, but like differentiating between these are guys that are, even though we disagree, we're having a good faith conversation.

02:22:42

We're trying to work through the issues. That is, those things are valuable. And we should do more of that.

02:22:48

Just like the discussion about incrementalism. That's a valuable discussion. Have you make clarifications there?

02:22:54

You define terms and that helps bring about peace. You know, you guys have said on this, just right here on this episode, things about the heartbeat bill and how you're like a lot of, probably a lot of abolitionists, their minds were blown when you guys were going through some of that stuff.

02:23:10

Well, um, in the past. I mean, I, I think that's the case with some of them, they're still stuck in what

02:23:17

I've said about AHA in the past. Right. I think it was true for them in the past.

02:23:23

I don't think it's true for them. You're the one that enlightened me with this. And I don't think it's true for them today.

02:23:28

Yeah. That's the difference. I will admit that when a view changes, I'll admit that. Yeah. But you're going to still say, oh, well, you said this in the past, so you can never be right.

02:23:37

I mean, that's like, okay, well, that wouldn't be good. That's not fair. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I don't know.

02:23:43

I didn't catch the name of the guy you had up there earlier. Dustin says, Sam Riley attends the church that I pastor.

02:23:49

He's coming from good faith. Yeah. Dusty is a good Dusty Deaver's there. She's one of those guys. He's a pastor in Oklahoma of an

02:23:55

SBC church. Um, and I, I mean, I think Sam, even though there's some disagreement, that's the thing is differentiating between the people that want to have a good faith discussion, which

02:24:05

I think is Sam. He has some disagreements with you. He's been very direct and forthright on those disagreements, which

02:24:12

I know is not something you have a problem with. Um, but he's not, you know, name calling and some of these other things.

02:24:19

Whereas there are some guys out there in the abolition movement. I didn't catch the name of the other guy you put up there. So I don't know if I know him or not, but there are some guys in the abolition movement out there, just like there are in every movement who, once you've said something, they don't like, or you've, you know, they decide they have an extra ground with you forever.

02:24:37

There's no longer any effort to try to resolve the conflict or try to let's debate this and see if you can come to my side or I can come to your side, which

02:24:47

I think would be more valuable for us as abolitionists to engage in those kinds of conversations. And I talked about Kelly a lot cause he's a friend of mine, but that is one of the great things about guys like Kelly.

02:24:56

And he's a major leader in the abolition movement at this point. This is one of the things that we're trying to do. We're trying to have these discussions with people where we say, please state clearly for me where you're at.

02:25:06

Let's define our terms and then let's work together. You know, maybe I can persuade you. Maybe you can persuade me, or maybe like in this case, we don't even disagree with each other.

02:25:15

We're actually pretty much on the same page here. Yeah. And, and, you know, the other guy was

02:25:21

Jacob, but I couldn't find, I don't know me, I'm now realizing maybe he blocked me because I see

02:25:27

James responding to him and I don't see, I don't see it either.

02:25:32

Kelly says this. So let's, let's interact with this a bit. He says, so Kelly is saying, so I still don't think that there has been change in any doctrine nor strategy or tactics referring back to the

02:25:45

AHA. And then he said this, but I don't know what this, you're going to have to, you can explain,

02:25:54

I don't, I don't know if that's, I'm not wild, weird, ridiculous.

02:26:01

Yeah. People have, and still say janky stuff. Um, do you speak to what

02:26:08

Kelly said? The serious thing Kelly said there, um, he is right. There are people that say janky stuff. We talk about that all the time.

02:26:14

The abolition movement is kind of getting to be a bigger movement now, and you have reasonable people and you have unreasonable people just like you do in every movement.

02:26:24

But, um, I think that there's, I think that, and I hope maybe what you guys are seeing with some of this discussion here is there's a little bit of disagreement, but there are more people in this discussion,

02:26:35

I hope today that have been striving to engage in more good faith type conversations.

02:26:40

Um, as far as Kelly's comment that he doesn't think that, um, doctrine or tactics have changed, you know, in the abolition movement,

02:26:49

I'm not sure that I would say, I don't actually know if I disagree with what Kelly's saying there in terms of the five tenants,

02:26:55

I think. So when abolitionists talk about doctrine, they're talking about the five tenants. Abolitionists still wholeheartedly embrace the five tenants.

02:27:03

Yeah. Um, and the, the tactics are, you know, I mean, so there's the two modes, which is agitation and, um, agitation and there's service.

02:27:16

And what I think abolitionists have done to speak to Kelly's point there is I think that abolitionists have actually learned, and some of these people are going to disagree with me about that and that's okay.

02:27:26

I'm saying it in love. I hope they receive it the way that I'm saying it. But I think abolitionists have learned how to, um, how to go about doing the agitation, which

02:27:38

I'm not a big fan of that word either, but it was here when I got here. And that's the idea of that is like spurring the church on to love and good works is the idea of agitation.

02:27:47

And I think the abolitionists have become more effective in the way that they go about doing that than they were when the thing first started.

02:27:57

And so we're still doing that. Like we talked about with church, uh, church repair and the Southern Baptist convention, we're still doing that.

02:28:05

But I think that we have gotten better about the way that we go about doing that. And we're doing it in a more effective way that is more, um, persuasive, uh, more persuasive toward people.

02:28:17

So, and, and this quite, this comment leads into something that I'll say. So, and I don't know who the

02:28:22

Facebook user is. They didn't, if folks, if you go to apologize, live .com, there are instructions. So if you're on Facebook, how to get your name up, but they just say,

02:28:29

AHA is a set of principles and ideas. Adherents apply these differently. We can't judge the principles by the adherents who apply them in bad ways.

02:28:39

And I agree with that, with some of that, the first part of it, I disagree with AHA is not a set of principles and ideas.

02:28:45

It's actually an organization. They, they, they're incorporated. They have a, a, uh, logo that it says in their, in their bylaws that you cannot use it without being part of their organization.

02:28:57

Um, so they are an organization that, so that's not, you know, now when I say some of the tactics that I've, I think have changed

02:29:05

Callie, the, the thing for me is I, I, I mean, I know and Toby would have this video somewhere, but you know, where, where he told me

02:29:13

I'm not saved because I'm not part of AHA. Now, if that's, if that is what

02:29:19

AHA is teaching, I would say it's a cult if they, and this isn't one of their followers. This is the guy that was one of the three guys heading

02:29:25

AHA. So if that's the position, that's a different gospel, right?

02:29:31

That's adding to the gospel. And so I think the thing that I ended up seeing is that's where I see, okay,

02:29:38

I'm seeing there's a change, you know, that that's not the position of the organization anymore.

02:29:45

Yeah. This humble, I want to address the humble Clay's thing. Humble Clay had said, um, I've said it before on the show on Dowley say it again, iron sharpens iron friction part is part of it.

02:29:57

Yep. So as far as, I mean, coming back to some of the stuff that you said about AHA, this is my understanding.

02:30:04

I don't have a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of AHA as a, um, an organization or whatever else you want to call it.

02:30:13

It has been my understanding that AHA is not an organization and that they don't have a any sort of licensing on their logo.

02:30:22

That's been my understanding. Um, I don't know, again, I'm primarily involved with operations save America, which is an organization.

02:30:30

Um, and, um, I don't know. Um, I don't know the inner workings of how all of that stuff works, but the thing that the person that posted the comment said there, that is what,

02:30:42

I mean, that is generally speaking, what people that are heavily involved with AHA tend to say is that, and it's my understanding based on my conversations with Russ, uh,

02:30:52

Russell Hunter, um, that there is no existing organization that is abolished human abortion.

02:30:58

Free the States is an organization, uh, which Russell Hunter is heavily involved with that. I mean, they are because they, they've actually incorporated.

02:31:05

Um, and now they said they incorporated because there was some group called abolish horse abortion.

02:31:11

Okay. Um, and that's why they had to incorporate. And because that group was using their logo, um, uh, you know, you could search,

02:31:20

I've done some extensive searches even on the dark net and yeah, there, there was a group that popped up when, you know, that, that started and, you know, the timeline is right there, but you know, can't figure out who, who started it and they weren't very active.

02:31:38

It, they didn't do much, but, um, that, that was at least the, the, the rationale that they gave, but they are an organization.

02:31:44

They do, they actually have several organizations that were under them. Um, you can't know who's, who, who owns some of them because they're registered agents.

02:31:52

So the, the, the, the person is, is kinda is hidden that way. Um, there was something, oh, here,

02:31:59

Callie, I wanted to just say with this, because Callie said, sometimes people say incorrect things and that would be incorrect.

02:32:05

And, and, and that, you know, this is one of the things when people feel that they're debating. Now he's saying the dark net.

02:32:12

Well, okay. I have to get into some of my, my history for that, that we can't get into publicly.

02:32:18

So, um, we'll just put it this way. There's a time in my life where my job was to catch bad guys.

02:32:24

I'll just leave it at that. The agent, man. So to, to, you know, when we look at it,

02:32:32

I agree with you when, when some of the times that the problem is sometimes they, when people disagree, instead of hearing someone out, they, they dig their heels in.

02:32:41

Yeah. And, and this is the reason I always teach people to ask questions. It keeps us from getting defensive, you know, whether it's sharing the gospel or anything else, ask questions to, for clarity, ask questions to, to get someone to hopefully see that their position isn't tenable.

02:32:58

Um, but you know, the, the issue that I had with, with Toby at the time is he, he, you know, yes, he was in disagreement.

02:33:06

Was he emotional? Yeah. Um, it was kind of funny cause he put, he did one time put the video out and say that I was a raving lunatic and you watch it and I'm laughing.

02:33:16

I'm jovial. I'm smiling. He's stomping his foot on the ground and, and getting angry and he, he kind of lost his composure a bit.

02:33:24

But, but the thing that, that, you know, so at times like that, yes, I can agree that someone may say something that is incorrect at a time like that.

02:33:33

Unfortunately, it wasn't the only time I heard that from him. Yeah. You know, one thing to point out just real quick, if I can, is, is that when we're all having these discussions and conversations, you know, it's very important that we, you know, try to avoid the ad hominem.

02:33:50

You know, you're a liar. You're, you're this and other. I mean, that has, you know, okay.

02:33:55

A liar, call them out. If they truly are lying, that's one thing to call out. If I don't agree with you on a topic and then

02:34:02

I just say, oh, you're a liar. That absolves me from having to have a discussion and argument with you. That's wrong.

02:34:08

Okay. And especially when I'm, I'm dealing with a brother or sister in Christ, that, that is no way to deal with somebody, you know, iron sharpens iron means we have a discussion that is friction that causes, you know, the burr.

02:34:21

It causes the, the, the, the, the whole point is to sharpen the apologetic argument and discussion and understanding the doctrinal theological.

02:34:29

Agitate the conversation. But think about it.

02:34:35

Isn't that what it is though? It's, it's, I mean, that is the whole thing of agitation. Yeah. I agree with you,

02:34:40

Pastor Darren. I don't exactly like that terminology. That's why I don't, but. But think about it.

02:34:47

That doesn't make you a liar because I disagree with your argument. Yeah.

02:34:52

So to use that is to destroy the discussion. Yeah. I do think that,

02:34:58

I mean, I mean, all of these things would be things that we would agree about that there are effective ways to have conversations and ineffective ways.

02:35:05

And I think a lot of times part of the problem with some of the things that we're talking about sort of in this segment of the show is that so much of this discussion is happening on social media, which tends to bring out the worst in people.

02:35:18

People tend to say things and behave in certain ways that they would otherwise not. And one of the,

02:35:25

I mean, well, this is one of the things that I think is good about this kind of a platform because we can at least see each other. Being able to talk to somebody face to face,

02:35:32

I think also helps a little bit as well. But I mean, I agree with you.

02:35:38

I mean, if a person is, is actually lying, they're intentionally misrepresenting the situation. And I think it's okay to say, brother,

02:35:44

I don't think you're being truthful right now. But there is a difference between that and saying, no, I just don't, we don't agree about this topic.

02:35:52

Let's talk and then let's have a discussion and maybe I'll win you to my side. Maybe you'll win me to your side. That is iron sharpening iron.

02:35:59

So, and then you get this from Callie and I'm just trying to picture Callie saying this because he's like this, for folks who haven't met

02:36:06

Callie, he's a really serious kind of guy and just, I don't hear voice inflection with him too much.

02:36:11

And so then he puts this out, the agitator in the laundry is what facilitates the cleaning of the clothes in the machine.

02:36:23

That just cracks me up. I have no doubt. It's like many times on our podcast that we do,

02:36:31

Callie will take, say a joke and it takes me like three minutes to start laughing later because I just didn't,

02:36:38

I didn't catch it. And it's absolutely hilarious usually when he makes a joke, but I don't get that it's a joke at first.

02:36:46

And then I'm like, oh wait a minute, Callie made a joke. And so I can actually imagine him saying that and the way that he would say it was just the way he says everything else.

02:36:57

So let's do this because we want to try to wrap up and there are some things I do want to mention.

02:37:05

Before we wrap up, I'll give you a chance to wrap up there. I do want to give kind of a warning to all Christians because we're sitting here, there's been lots of disagreement.

02:37:15

I'll challenge everybody who's watching or listening to go and go to the

02:37:21

Wrap Report, the podcast that I could actually figure out what the name I gave the last episode.

02:37:29

Because we sit here and discuss this stuff, but I think there's an aspect of our culture that many people have missed.

02:37:39

The episode I did was called National Strategy for Counterterrorism Against Christians.

02:37:46

It's a longer episode than I, it's twice as long as I usually do. There is something that we're sitting here and trying to stop abortion, which is good.

02:38:00

However, while we're doing that, right now we have a government that is laying out a strategy to arrest us and kill us.

02:38:10

And people go, oh, I mean, I've been doing this show, this has been going on for a decade and all the atheists come and go, oh, you're crazy, you're crazy.

02:38:17

Because I'd always say there's a Holocaust coming, it's just not going to be for the Jewish people, it's going to be the Christians.

02:38:23

And the atheists would always criticize me and be like, oh, you're just playing the victim. Well, go listen to that episode.

02:38:30

Because that episode, they've already, they literally put out a document that explains their strategy to deal with what they call violent domestic terrorists.

02:38:41

The problem is the way they define violent domestic terrorists, part of their pillar is they need to get to the person before they get violent.

02:38:53

So how do they do that? Well, they're going to profile, what are they going to look for? There's certain things they say to look for, here's what they look for.

02:38:59

Are you on a platform that wants end -to -end encryption? So that they can't spy on you?

02:39:07

You're a terrorist. Do you think there was fraud in the 2020 election? You're a terrorist.

02:39:14

Do you not believe there was a worldwide pandemic and the vaccines work? You're a terrorist.

02:39:19

These are things they actually say. The whole argument is for white supremacy.

02:39:25

And oh, by the way, they define that as Christian. That's right. OK, and so I go through that whole thing.

02:39:31

If you have not seen this, you know, Biden now has come out and said, when it came to the vaccines, we need to go community by community, neighbor by neighbor, and oftentimes door to door, literally knocking on doors to get people vaccinated.

02:39:51

Yeah. And, you know, folks, if you don't, let me explain some history, because I really want you to go to the

02:39:58

Rapp report and listen to that. You are prepared. So you know what's coming. Because here's the reality.

02:40:05

We have a war coming. It really is. They are not looking just to get along with us and kind of silence us quietly.

02:40:15

They want to silence us permanently. They see us as terrorists. We are the enemy to them.

02:40:22

OK, and so what you end up with is you end up with a government that is looking to get rid of any opposition.

02:40:34

And this is no different. I mean, study the history. Those who are regulars here, you know my background.

02:40:40

You know that I grew up Jewish. You know that I've spent years in Hebrew school studying the Holocaust. But, you know, the night of the long knives, the result of that was that they planned out not one, but actually two competing strategies to deal with the

02:40:54

Jewish problem. But when the night came of Kristallnacht, that was not just happened by chance.

02:41:02

No, they had a whole strategy for that. Well, Biden just released the strategy against us, folks.

02:41:09

The strategy is out there. You know, one of the things I'll say in that podcast, something that, you know,

02:41:16

Darren, I don't know if you're even aware of. Because this isn't a, well, it's somewhat public knowledge.

02:41:23

I'll put it that way. Okay. But when Barack Obama was president, there was a radical change he made.

02:41:29

One of them was the fact that he had, he shifted his focus from terrorists outside our country to domestic terrorists.

02:41:38

And one of the things he did was any organization that was promoting anything in opposition to abortion, you were a terrorist.

02:41:50

Yeah, I'm familiar with that. I know this is just kind of a silly side note, but it kind of ties directly to what you're saying.

02:41:58

When we started an organization at the state level here in Indiana, it took me probably two weeks to find somebody to process credit card payments for us, because my name was on a list somewhere.

02:42:12

I still don't even know what list my name is on, but I was counted as an operational risk. I said, well, does that have something to do with my credit?

02:42:20

He said, no, your credit's fine. I said, well, what is it? They said, for some reason, there's something about you as a person that these credit card companies don't want to process your credit card payments.

02:42:30

I think it's probably my association with Operation Save America, because the federal government has been calling

02:42:37

Operation Save America a terrorist group for a long time now. And so, yeah,

02:42:43

I mean, I think everybody should go check out that episode. And I do think that, I mean, this is something that we, as Christians, we need to be aware of.

02:42:53

And the reality, what it boils down to is this. I mean, if I were to summarize everything you just said, if you are the kind of a

02:42:58

Christian that shows up to church on Sunday morning and keeps your faith kind of in the church, and then you maybe teach your kids the

02:43:06

Bible a little bit at home, a little bit, as long as it's not anything too terribly controversial, then the state doesn't mind your

02:43:14

Christianity. Matter of fact, it's a good thing. That's the kind of Christianity that'll help you keep sedated and help you to do what you're told when you're told to do it.

02:43:22

But if you're the kind of Christian who says, I'm going to live my entire life according what the scripture says,

02:43:28

I'm going to faithfully preach the gospel, and I'm going to stand on the truth, then there may come a time here pretty soon in America where we're going to separate the reals from the fakes.

02:43:39

You know, that's what I think that, you know, some of the stuff that you're talking about here, that's what I think that we're seeing happen.

02:43:45

And one of the things I tell people at our church all the time is that worship in the good time is practice for worship in the bad time. And, you know, we need to be,

02:43:53

I mean, we need to be engaging in the political realm, which is something that I spend a lot of time on. And we could talk more about that, although we're way into Andrew time here.

02:44:02

We also need to be preparing ourselves spiritually. We need to be, and what does that mean? Well, we need to be memorizing scripture because you may not have the scripture.

02:44:11

We need to be spending time in prayer. We need to be getting to know our brothers and sisters in Christ that live in our local community offline in real life and engaging more directly with our in -person physical body, local church in real life, not on social media.

02:44:29

These are some of the things we need to be doing to prepare ourselves for that. And I mean, I agree. Christians need to start talking about this stuff more.

02:44:34

We need to be prepared. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why, and on the same channels that we're doing this show, you know, with my church, we're going through first Peter.

02:44:43

Why? Because we're preparing for persecution. That's why we're memorizing first Peter as a church trying to memorize it.

02:44:48

So that way, when they take away our Bible, we have the Bible in our mind. That's all we're going to have left. Yeah.

02:44:54

This is, it's a repeat of history, folks. This isn't, you know, this government is not trying to, you know, they're really not happy though,

02:45:02

Darren, with Christians that just sit at home and keep their religion within the four walls of a church. They say that now, just like they said that would, with the

02:45:11

Nazis said that would Judaism. Okay. What you get into power with, you stay in power with.

02:45:18

And Barack Obama and Biden got into power going against Christianity with an anti -Christian message.

02:45:26

They cannot escape that. The radical left wants, everything they want to do first requires getting rid of absolute standards of morality.

02:45:36

And that's when I speak of abolition, I'm going to speak to the broader sense of the absolutes of morality.

02:45:43

It's rooted in the nature of God. Okay. One of the things

02:45:49

I wanted to start the show with, I didn't, and I'll probably do this next week or next week, we got to give the time to those guys.

02:45:56

You know, in the post -mail, pre -mail debate, I know that we have Sarah Cleveland.

02:46:04

Oh, I'm drawing a blank on these. That one. Sarah Cleveland is coming on on the 22nd.

02:46:10

That'll be a great discussion. Is she talking about ultrasounds or heartbeat bills or?

02:46:16

Not sure what, Anthony set that one up, so I don't know all the topics yet that we're going to have on that. Sarah Cleveland is an awesome person.

02:46:23

That'll be a great interview for you. I think part of what we're talking about is abolitionism as well there.

02:46:29

So I think, and that's why I said I wanted to have you on before she came on because I wanted to have the discussion with you first because of the past position that I've had with some of the groups and I wanted to first clear the air before we start talking about it with other folks.

02:46:45

And that's really why this show was important to me and I wanted to, I was willing to, you know, regular as you know, I don't like going long.

02:46:51

I don't like going over the two hour mark, but I thought this was important enough and I knew Pastor Darren needed to come late because he was doing things that are more important like his dealing with his church.

02:47:02

That comes before this. And so, and we appreciate the time you've put in, especially since you've been working all day.

02:47:12

But you know, so one of the things I did want to deal with is an argument that came up in one of the groups on Facebook and Justin and Son, we've dealt with before here with this whole idea that it's okay to lie.

02:47:24

You know, if you're in a situation that, you know, like the Nazis come to your door and are you hiding

02:47:30

Jewish people? We've dealt with this argument before, but I wanted to deal with it again because what, you know, in my mind, this gets right back to the same thing of why

02:47:40

I would be against abortion. It's, you know, God's not a murderer and God's not a liar.

02:47:47

It's all rooted. All of our morality is rooted in the nature of God.

02:47:52

And if it's not, then it's subjective. Once you remove God's nature from the, you know, from the standard, then you have a subjective standard.

02:48:04

And now you're in atheist arguments. I'm making atheist arguments for things.

02:48:10

And so, you know, the reason I say lying is always wrong is because God is not a liar.

02:48:16

It's just that simple. Why is abortion always wrong? Because God's not a murderer.

02:48:22

It's just that simple. Yeah, absolutely. I posted this up for you so that you can go ahead and pull it up.

02:48:30

What? It's called being a non -conforming absolutist. That is my position.

02:48:37

That is my position. I'm a non -conforming absolutist from Virginia. I do not conform to the situation.

02:48:42

There's always an absolute standard. There's always an absolute way to do something without sinning.

02:48:50

So, Pastor Darren, let me let you close us out with anything you want to say, you know, on this topic or anything else.

02:48:58

I've seen the comments of some of my haters have dropped off. I don't know if that means they've left or...

02:49:04

They love you now. Yeah, or maybe because I called them out and they stopped.

02:49:10

So, I don't know. I think a couple of things I would say just to close out. Well, the first thing, the most important thing

02:49:15

I want to say is just I want to thank you guys for having me on. I enjoyed being on last week. You know, all of those guys that were disagreeing with me.

02:49:23

I mean, that's a perfect example. I love and respect every single one of those guys. I don't agree with them, but I see where they're coming from and I can respect the position that they're in.

02:49:35

So, this is kind of part of what I'm all about. I mean, I know there's more agreement today than there was in that particular discussion, but man,

02:49:43

I really appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity. Well, only between you and I, there's more agreement this week. Yeah.

02:49:52

Well, yeah, that's true. Yeah. But I really appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to come on and discuss this topic.

02:49:57

I do. So, I want to say that first and foremost. I do want to speak to your listeners and just say, if you're a

02:50:04

Christian and we say this on our show every week as well, you're hearing the conversation we're having right now and you're thinking maybe you should get more involved in the fight to end abortion, reach out.

02:50:15

I mean, you can catch me on social media. You can message our podcast page,

02:50:20

Resisting Bailing. We have a Facebook page on podcast. You can message us on there and you want to get more involved.

02:50:27

You want to know how you can help either legislatively or maybe you're thinking about showing up to the abortion clinic and sharing the gospel with mothers there, offering to provide services and help.

02:50:37

Reach out. Because we want to serve you by equipping you to be able to do that effectively.

02:50:44

That's what Operation Save America is all about. That's what I'm all about. And so, if you're listening right now and that's you,

02:50:50

I want to say and I want to appeal to you if you're a Christian, please do reach out. We do want to see more

02:50:57

Christians at the abortion clinic or involved in politics or at a gospel -centric crisis pregnancy center or there's all kinds of ways that you can plug in and help.

02:51:05

It's not just one way. And so, if you want to use your gifts, talents, and abilities to get involved in this fight, please reach out and I would be happy to serve you in that and equip you in any way that I can.

02:51:16

It's desperately needed. And so, also, the other thing I want to say is

02:51:22

I think this conversation, conversations like this are good and important conversations. The iron is sharpening the iron and we need more of that.

02:51:30

We need to be able to sit down and have conversations with one another where we're not entirely sure that we're going to agree, but we can act in good faith and treat one another with respect and grace as brothers and hopefully come to,

02:51:44

I mean, again, you try to persuade me, I try to persuade you and we work through the conversation.

02:51:50

One of the great things, and I'll close it with this, one of the great things is we're Christians, so we have this thing called the Bible, which is our final standard.

02:51:57

And so, we should be able to sit down and have conversations like this as Christians and go to the word of God and say, what does the word of God say?

02:52:04

And strive to persuade one another in grace and humility. And so, I appreciated that. And I appreciate having the opportunity to come on and I really appreciate you guys in the ministry that you're doing.

02:52:13

Thank you so much. Thank you. And for folks on YouTube, I mean, I see KT is trying to help

02:52:19

Justin here. You know, someone put on Facebook, put, I'm sorry. Oh man, who did that?

02:52:25

Dot Post Mill, okay. I mean, but see, for folks who might be new,

02:52:33

Justin still doesn't know how to use this because he just posted on all the things. Not only was it on YouTube that he tried to be funny and put hashtag

02:52:40

Pre -Mill Truth, but he did it on Facebook as well. And so, you know,

02:52:45

KT is like, hey JP, you know, send the message on Facebook because obviously people don't get it when they only have the story there.

02:52:54

Hey, one other thing. Can I say one other thing here real quick? Whatever you want. Also, I talked about resisting

02:53:03

Balaam. Also, Operation Save America has a Facebook page. If you search it on Facebook, you can, and also check out operationsaveamerica .org.

02:53:12

Don't go to operationsaveamerica .com because there's a bunch of pro aborts that bought that and you'll just find a bunch of nasty stuff about me.

02:53:18

We'll see now you're going to go there, but you know, you'll just find a bunch of nasty stuff about me on there and Jason. But operationsaveamerica .org,

02:53:26

you can find that more there as well. So that's the reason you should always get a .org, the .org, the .com, the, you know.

02:53:32

Yep. That's another one of those things that was that way when I got here. So I just, you know.

02:53:38

Yeah. So yeah, and I was going to, one of the questions I was going to ask you is, could you tell people how to get in touch with you?

02:53:44

So if they're anywhere in, you know, actually anywhere in Indiana, they should go to Harmony.

02:53:50

Yeah. Come visit. Love to have you visit. You know, I mean,

02:53:56

I can't say much more about that. Brandon Scalf, a lot of you guys that are on here know Brandon. I know that I met you,

02:54:02

Andrew, through Brandon. He's a great brother. He's the associate, not associate pastor. He's an elder here. We co -elder the church or co -lead the church.

02:54:08

But man, we would love to have you all come visit us. Be prepared for cowboy hats because apparently that's a thing now.

02:54:15

But we would love for you to come visit us most definitely in Frankfurt. Yeah, I like the hat.

02:54:20

I like the hat. Thank you. Appreciate that. So, and, and, you know,

02:54:26

Darren, you got, you know, some of the folks here that have been commenting and all, you can, you know, if you want, if there's people that contact you, disagree with me, you can, you can give my number.

02:54:38

You know, I'll be happy to talk to them. You know, one of the things, you know, one of the things when I see some of the behavior,

02:54:44

I'm not going to name the name because the, you know, person's not here to defend himself, but, and I think you and I talked about this in person, but yeah, there was a guy who came to a conference, a very big in, in AHA has written tons of articles against me, sees me face to face.

02:55:00

And I wasn't going to shy away. I saw him there and I said, okay, let's work. Let's talk. I said, at some point you, you tell me when let's carve out a couple hours.

02:55:09

Let's sit and talk. And we talked, there was nothing, you know, we start talking. He goes, he ends up saying there's nothing.

02:55:14

He really disagrees with me on when we looked at the view and face to face. He's agreeing with me.

02:55:20

He's saying, I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you do. And literally a week later, he's, he's back on it.

02:55:26

Slamming me on social media saying, you know, all androgynous slanders AHA. It's like, okay, this, this is part of the problem.

02:55:33

Why we can't have good, honest discussion folks. You know, don't be just a keyboard warrior behind.

02:55:38

I mean, I, I'm the same behind the keyboard as I am on the camera, you know, face to face.

02:55:44

Okay. I mean, okay, maybe not. I'm a little bit more terse on keyboard because I hate typing. So I tend to be more terse and people interpret that as Use less words.

02:55:54

It's always interpreted as, you know, you're emotional. I'm angry with people. It always is.

02:56:00

Well, Facebook always brings out the worst in people in a certain way. I mean,

02:56:05

I agree with what you just said though. I mean, and this is one of the things that we heavily focus on. I mean, Callie just had somebody in the podcast.

02:56:12

I couldn't be there cause I was sick with COVID. But he just had somebody from Texas right to life. Come on to the podcast and represent their side of the discussion and try to have a gracious patient dialogue with them.

02:56:24

That's something that we very much believe in. We very much value that we think is important because I don't think that we're ever going to get.

02:56:33

I don't think that we're ever going to persuade the church to get on board with what we're doing or get more Christians engaged in the battle until we can have sit down and have honest conversations where people share their honest criticisms.

02:56:44

And we honestly engage with those criticisms and we share our criticisms and honestly engage those criticisms.

02:56:50

But we got to do more of that because babies are dying every day, 3 ,000 of them.

02:56:56

And our culture is being lost to all the things that we've been talking about over the course of this episode.

02:57:03

3 ,000 babies are dying every day, but we have to worry about the 200 people dying of COVID. Yeah, right.

02:57:09

I mean, there's maybe 300 people dying a day from a car accident, but COVID, okay.

02:57:15

And you got to think the biggest, most important issue that we're dealing with right now in this entire conversation is the gospel, the most central, most important thing that is out there going today, because there is not going to be a cultural shift.

02:57:31

There's not going to be a change in policy or anything else until there's a heart change.

02:57:38

And that is because, guys, all this conversation we've been having, everybody here on the side, we've had wonderful discussion, a lot of arguments, a lot of everything else.

02:57:47

But the point is, are you saved? Are you in Christ? Have you been born again?

02:57:52

Because it doesn't matter if you stand out at every abortion clinic or wherever for the rest of your life.

02:58:00

If you don't know Christ, all you're going to hear is depart from me for I never knew you. That's the most important issue we need to end on there.

02:58:08

Well, that's where I was going to go. I don't know who Facebook user is. I think that they're -

02:58:15

They're probably, they're not regulars here. It says, don't end on a sour note. Good progress made. And so, yeah,

02:58:22

I usually, if we have disagreements to show, I start with the disagreement and then I move to the more important things.

02:58:29

Hey, there's Drew. That's Drew. That's the hairy tick. We talked about you earlier, man.

02:58:34

I don't know if you heard it or not, but - Yeah, Drew says, amen, Justin. Justin will always put up every comment that praises him.

02:58:40

Just so you know. I'll never get him. No, I'm just kidding. Just say something nice about Justin.

02:58:47

I want everybody to pick on him. So here's the thing.

02:58:53

To me, the issue we see here is there's a lot more that we agree on, folks.

02:59:01

We're going to spend eternity together. Those of us, everyone listening or watching that knows Christ, we're spending eternity together.

02:59:09

The choice of, do we want to get along now or then? Do we really want to wait? We don't have to agree on everything to get along.

02:59:18

In fact, most of the people that I'm friends with, I don't agree with theologically.

02:59:24

And it's because of the fact that I like the iron sharpening iron. I like having people with differing views so that as they say things, it makes me think.

02:59:34

If you're afraid of thinking, then I understand. You don't understand why people would avoid it, right? But we got to think through issues.

02:59:42

And the reality is, you know, Pastor Darren and I disagree.

02:59:49

You know, on end times, he'll be corrected in heaven. That's right. You know, he has the chance of being right now, but he wants to wait.

02:59:56

No, he thinks I'm wrong. But the reality is every one of us are wrong somewhere in our theology.

03:00:04

Every one of us, myself included. We don't know where they are. If we knew where they were, then we would either change those views or be intellectually dishonest.

03:00:15

But every one of us is going to stand before the seat of Christ and he is going to correct something in our theology.

03:00:24

And so when we start thinking our theology is perfect, when we start thinking we got it all figured out, then we're thinking too highly of ourselves and don't have a right view of ourselves.

03:00:34

And that's where people get into these fights and things. Look, folks, you know, and someone's saying the echo chamber theology, you know, that's that's a part of the problem.

03:00:44

We need to get out of our echo chambers. We need to get into where we're engaging with people that disagree with us because, you know what?

03:00:49

They may be the one that's right and we might be wrong. OK, one of the things I hope that folks have seen throughout the show is

03:00:57

I've I've made it public. I've changed my position on AHA.

03:01:03

I no longer think they're cult and I don't even think they're cultic. OK, and so this is what you do when you get new information, you engage with it.

03:01:13

You don't just sit and say, well, this is what I always thought of them. This is why I want to have Pastor Darren on before we had Sarah on was so that we can address, hey,

03:01:21

I've been public about an issue. Now that I've got new information, I engage with the new information.

03:01:28

Then I need to be public about my position change, you know.

03:01:33

And so I'm glad and, you know, Pastor Darren and I talked about this privately, but I'm glad that the kind of turf wars that I saw in the early years of abolitionism between AHA and Babies Are Murdered here, it just looked like a turf war.

03:01:49

I'm glad it's over. And this is what I mean by I'm glad that we're moving beyond them. Not that what they've that they didn't offer any value, not that what they did was was not good.

03:01:59

It's that the movement has moved beyond that. And that's good because it's moved in a better position then.

03:02:07

Instead of the fighting that we would do, the reality is, folks, we need to realize we serve a living

03:02:17

God and we are his ambassador. We represent him with everything that we do.

03:02:25

In fact, we represent him with everything we think. That's right. How good of an ambassador are we?

03:02:31

That's the question. That's the question I have to ask myself. And it's a question I challenge each of us to ask ourselves, because that's the one we're going to give an account to.

03:02:41

That's right. Okay. And so I hope this has been informative. First off, I know there's been many who have been very for AHA, very many against AHA in this audience, in tonight's show.

03:02:54

I hope both sides have gotten an education of differing positions.

03:03:00

I hope it's instructive. I hope that people can learn how we can disagree. I hope that this show was something profitable for you in your spiritual life to grow in faith and to be more like Christ.

03:03:13

That's my encouragement. All right. And so just as a way of closing out to remind folks next week,

03:03:20

Drew and Jim Osmond will be debating or discussing, really. It's going to be a kind of a light debate, more discussion between Post Mill and Pre -Mill.

03:03:30

On the 22nd, we'll have Sarah Cleveland in. That's as far out as I know of some topics.

03:03:38

But folks, this is an open show. We didn't have any other guests come in, but we always welcome guests.

03:03:43

You disagree with anything we said this week, come on in next week or the week after, whenever.

03:03:50

Especially we'll do some open Q &As. It's just open. And so this is what the show is for.

03:03:59

We want to help you to basically strengthen and sharpen your apologetics.

03:04:05

That's why we do it. We know we went into Anthony time. We're an hour over, but I want to make sure

03:04:12

Darren got his two hours. Appreciate that. But trust me, Darren and I could keep talking for another three hours.

03:04:20

It's true. We have before. Yeah. Almost missed the flight.

03:04:26

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I remember that. The first time you guys ever came to our church, it was you and Justin Peters was with you.

03:04:34

It was like we started talking. Justin was the one though. He's like, guys, we got to go. Yeah. I'm surprised because he never stops.

03:04:42

Yeah. Well, we had a flight and we were going to miss it. But I hope this has been good for you folks.

03:04:48

And just a reminder, strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. And we'll see you next time.