June 30, 2025 Show with Levi Secord on “Bringing All of Christ to All of Life”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday.

No, wait a minute. What is today? Today's Monday. Today's Monday on this 30th day of June 2025, and I'm very excited to have back on the program a returning guest. I've interviewed him several times, and I believe this is the first time I'm interviewing him solo.

He always had another guest on with him on the previous occasions. Oh, wait a minute. No, we did interview him once alone on the radical leftism of Governor Tim Walz. That was before the presidential election, but his name is Levi Secord, and he is founding pastor of Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota, who has contributed content on numerous occasions to the Front Porch Republic, the Southern Baptist Journal, and Journal of Theology, Christ Over All, and World Opinions.

He has written chapters for several books and hosts the Worldview Minute podcast. Today we're going to be addressing bringing all of Christ to all of life, and we're also going to be announcing a couple of conferences where Pastor Levi Secord is speaking.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Levi Secord.

Thanks for having me, Chris.

And let me ask you once again, am I pronouncing your last name correctly? You actually are.

Most people don't. Mostly I get Secord.

Okay.

It is Secord. I actually have one elder who still calls me Secord, but we're working on it.

Well, tell us something about Christ Bible Church there in Roseville, Minnesota.

Well, we launched in February of 2021 while the world was still largely going mad over COVID and Biden had just become president and all of the turmoil we lived through in the Twin Cities and then also the nation throughout all that time.

The Lord has been incredibly kind to us. We have a thriving and vibrant congregation now, four and a half years later. Last year we hired our first full-time associate pastor, which has been a great blessing to the congregation and he's been a great blessing to me as I have someone rowing with me in the same direction.

And, yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll unpack more of this as we go throughout, but we're.

Well, if anybody wants more information about Christ Bible Church in Roseville, Minnesota, go to ChristBible .net, ChristBible .net, and also now tell our audience about these two conferences where you're speaking and where and when.

Well, our first conference we have, or that I'm speaking at, is September 12th and 13th at Riverview Baptist Church in West St. Paul in Minnesota here, and that church is on the covenantal nature of the universe.

So last year, Riverview, which is our ascending church and Christ Bible Church, put on a conference that we talked about on your radio program, looking at how Christians should think politically. And we're planning on, Lord willing, to continue to do conferences every fall addressing different foundations of the Christian worldview.

And this time we're going to be focusing in on covenant and how that shapes even us as Baptists. How does that shape how we view the world? And so we have Steve Wellum from Southern Seminary coming up to speak again, Andy Naselli from Bethlehem College and Seminary, who also planted the church this year, Christ the King Church in Stillwater.

He's going to be speaking as well as Pastor Alex Tibbitt, who's got his Ph .D. from Southern Seminary. He's the pastor of Riverview Baptist, and then I will be speaking as well.

And the dates again and the location?

That conference is September 12th through 13th at Riverview Baptist Church in West St. Paul. Great. And the second conference is the Central Valley Baptists, which is a Southern Baptist group out in the Modesto area of California on October 3rd and 4th.

And me and Andrew Sandlin will be talking about the topic of Christ or chaos. And we'll be looking at kind of some Kuyperian ideas of severe sovereignty and cultural engagement as Christians.

And you want to give again the dates and location?

Yeah, October 3rd and 4th in Modesto, California, that area. Great.

Well, we will be giving you contact information about both of those locations as well at the end of the program. This is an intriguing theme, I think, that we have today, all of Christ for all of life or bringing all of Christ to all of life.

And that sounds on its surface like something that every single Christian of every denomination and every fellowship and every congregation would say, sure, I agree with that. But that isn't the case, is it?

Oh, it's definitely not the case. And of course, that phrasing of it was popularized by Cannon Press and Doug Wilson out in Moscow, Idaho. And I benefited greatly from Doug's work and his reading, particularly cultural engagement type stuff.

Obviously, as a Baptist, I have some sharp disagreements with him on various issues. But I think what we sometimes miss as we get into turf wars in American evangelicalism that I think fuel a lot of our disagreements is that that thinking didn't originate with Doug.

It's really a Protestant way of looking at life. It's come down specifically through the Dutch Reformed movement of people like Bovinck and Kuyper and Dewey Ward and Schaeffer and then Piercy and others.

So it's just basically the idea that Christ is Lord over absolutely everything and there is no part of the universe that is not his. And this is clearly taught in the New Testament in Colossians 1, 15 through 20, Ephesians 1, 20 through 23, and of course, the Great Commission.

The whole basis of the mission of the church is upon the foundation that Christ has all authority in heaven and on earth. Not some authority, not authority only in heaven, but in heaven and on earth right now.

And if that's not true, the church doesn't exist, the church doesn't have a mission, and anything we do is doomed to fail.

Christ’s Lordship Over All of Life

Now how would bringing all of Christ to all of life differ from merely saying, well, everything that I do, I do it to the praise, honor, and glory of God, and I try my best in everything that I do not to be participating in anything that is sinful, that would displease God.

Now, of course, you believe in both of those things, but is that the fullness of what you're talking about?

I think it gets at, I think if you define that rightly, it's the same thing. But I think the all of Christ for all of life really hits on the tension point of what life in the West is like today, with the rule of secular thought, as you see your other statement, like I'm just going to live my life to the glory of God and not sin, could keep the Christian faith completely privatized.

It's all private, and that it makes no public demand in the public square outside of church and family life, whereas the Bible holds a much larger view of Christ's authority, again, all authority in heaven and earth.

He's the name above every name, not only in the age to come, but also this age, Paul says in Ephesians 1, where he's the ruler of the kings on the earth right now, present tense, Revelation chapter 1.

Joe Boot has done a lot of great work on explaining that verse. And so the all of Christ for all of life captures that it's not just that I should be doing everything for the glory of God, of course you should, but so should everyone else.

So should every sphere of life. So should every molecule, should bend the knee and will eventually bend the knee to Christ. I mean, that's some of the glorious revelations we see in the book of Revelation, is that at some point every creature is going to confess that reality.

We're not there yet, but every creature in heaven and the sea and under the earth is going to, and on the earth, is going to confess Christ as Lord.

Now, I don't know what your position is. You may have told me in a previous interview, I don't know what your position is on the regulative principle of worship, but there are some who would say that every single thing we do is an act of worship, and therefore they broaden the sphere of what is acceptable to do in a worship service.

They think that people who use or believe in and practice the regulative principle of worship, where the Bible has to give a clear command or example for something, specifically the New Testament, for us to include it in a corporate worship service, and therefore they do all kinds of other things in worship services that we wouldn't do, and of course they're not all the same.

Some might burn incense. Some might dance. Some might have a specific time of liturgical dance. Some might have a flag-waving performance, which is apparently popular in a lot of charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

But what's your view on everything as an act of worship?

Well, I think with a lot of things, we often end up talking past each other because we use different definitions for words, right? And so of course there is a broad sense that everything is worship, and so you have whether you eat or drink, to everything for the glory of God, and you have Romans 12, 1 and 2 that offer yourself as a living sacrifice, that this is your spiritual act of worship.

And so there's a sense in which that's true, but in most modern parlance when we're talking, we're using a narrow definition of worship for the corporate gathering of the church. And I do think for the corporate gathering of the church, we need to have some foundation in Scripture as to why we're doing what we're doing, and that needs to be worked out across the covenants in light of what Christ accomplished.

So we don't do everything that Israel did in her worship because, well, Israel was looking forward to Christ, and we have now seen that revelation.

The Secular-Sacred Divide and Pietism in the American Church

So, what is your personal grievance as a pastor and having your view of bringing all of Christ to all of life, what is your grievance of how, in your opinion, many churches, perhaps even most churches, even evangelical, are missing the mark on that?

How much time do you got?

Well, right now we've got an hour and 45 minutes.

Yeah, I mean, so I think most American Christians, and I think this is starting to change, are at heart, have bought into the secular-sacred divide, and are thus just religious secularists, if I can coin a phrase here.

Nancy Peercy does wonderful work outlining this in her book, Total Truth. But secularism, again, divides life into the sacred and the secular, and God's only allowed in the sacred, private spheres of life, and he's not allowed in the public, which is most clearly seen in government and politics.

He's not allowed in those parts of life. And you can buy into that division and still be a Christian, but you just spend most of your life in what Schaeffer calls the upper sphere of the sacred. That upper sphere, if you spend all your time up there, like you're a pastor, and many pastors do this, I know them, I talk to them, and they look at me with shock when I say things like this.

But you can just spend all of your time in the sacred sphere and just then believe that it's inappropriate for pastors or churches or ministries to touch that lower sphere of secular life. God doesn't belong there.

We shouldn't talk about that issue in church. We shouldn't do that. And I think that has been the predominant view in the American church for decades, and I think it's one of the reasons why Moscow's ministry is so appealing.

I think it's also one of the reasons why we're now having some what I would call overcorrections in the other direction with various online personalities, because for so long, the American church has been starved and told you can't talk about that.

And Moeller said something along the lines years ago that whether or not you care about the culture war, the culture war cares about you. We're at a point now where you can't ignore it anymore, and there are still churches who are pretending like you can.

And we normally call that pietism, where you reduce the Christian faith to only a personal, private religious experience. And certainly the Christian faith is not less than that. If you don't have that, you're not a Christian.

But I think the biblical Christian faith is also more than that. It makes demands, again, upon everything, including governors, kings, presidents and senates and judiciaries.

Well, we have a listener named Christopher in Middletown, Pennsylvania. And Christopher says, when you say bring all of Christ to all of life, is there room in your life, in your opinion for others as well, where we enjoy things that are completely nonreligious, things such as sporting activities or even music that does not specifically worship Christ?

It may be just an entertaining song, etc. Or is Christ being in everything, meaning that everything has to be in some way a religious act?

That's actually a wonderful question. I'm really glad he asked that question, because sometimes that's an often misunderstanding of what we're getting at here, that if I'm not consciously thinking of Jesus when I do it, I don't say Jesus's name when I do it, then it's not a religious act or it's not Christian.

And I just would like to point out that this is Christ's world. All of it is religious. All of it is for him, to him, and upheld by him. He holds all things together. Right. So all of it is religious.

But that doesn't mean I'm thinking about consciously praying to God every time I'm out shooting a basketball with my kids. And so I think when you think about these things, like Ecclesiastes, I think is a wonderful book that gets at this, is that man tends to idolize the things of earth and make them the source of his gain, as the preacher puts it.

What gain is there under the sun? There's no gain. It's all vanity. But then when he gets around to giving you the solution in the book, it's kind of a sucker punch because you would think that he would say, well, you should just ignore all the things of earth.

But rather, he said, what you need to do is to receive those good things and enjoy the life of your youth as gifts, gifts from God. So the good things of this earth are not the problem and they're not non-religious, but they're meant to be seen as gifts that point to the gift giver of God.

And so whether that's sports or music that's quote unquote secular, as long as it's not vulgar in encouraging sin and promoting sin, then yeah, I think the Christians can enjoy that as humans are made in God's image and are sub-creators and we produce good works of art that ultimately, whether the author intends it or not, points to God.

And so all of Christ for all of life does not mean I'm walking around like a monk, always saying Jesus's name everywhere I go. It's living as a Christian in God's good world as it is being redeemed by Christ.

Yeah, even Christ forbids vain repetition, and I'm assuming that would mean his name.

As well.

Yeah. And an excellent resource to that end is Joe Rigney's book, The Things of Earth. He offers a really balanced corrective to what he identifies in the book as some abuses of Piper's Christian hedonism, and Piper heartily endorses the book as well.

So Rigney gives a really good explanation as to how do we enjoy the things of earth without turning them into idols or not falling into the other ditch of asceticism and denying the goodness of God's creation.

So I highly recommend that book. It's one of the better Christian books I've ever read.

Authors Who Shaped This View of Christ’s Lordship

Well, this question is an interesting sequel because Doris in West Palm Beach, Florida wants to know who are your favorite authors and in particular, anyone other than Doug Wilson, who's inspired you over this topic?

Well, like I said at the beginning, I think my inspiration for this topic was not Doug, but actually when I said that Church is Schaeferian, I think it's Francis Schaefer. I read Francis Schaefer well before I even knew who Doug Wilson was.

And I just think that Doug has been one of the more vocal proponents of picking up that same ideology. Now, he does it very differently. He has much more satiric bite than Schaefer did. But Francis Schaefer has tremendously shaped my thinking on this, this view of the total lordship of Christ over all of life.

A couple of his students have also been very formational to me on that. So Nancy Piercy's work, Total Truth or any of her books advances. I think Piercy's Total Truth is the best summation of Schaefer's life work, and she puts it in more understandable words than Schaefer often did.

So it's a great place to start. David Wells's work for cultural engagement, Beginning with No Place for Truth. I think there's six or seven books in that series, I've read them all. Fantastic author that has helped me understand where we are in our cultural moment.

If you want theology in a particularly Baptist blend that brings us all together, my doctoral supervisor and professor and friend mentor, Steve Wellam's Systematic Theology that just came out, part one, just came out last year.

I can't remember when part two is coming out, but his Systematic Theology, the first two or three chapters are on how theology leads to worldview formation, and then he's going to work through a Baptist view of all of this.

Steve's also been tremendously beneficial to my thought on this.

Well, praise God. And we're going to our first commercial break. If you have a question of your own, please submit it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence and your country of residence.

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And we are now back with Pastor Levi Secord of Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota, and we are talking about bringing all of Christ to all of life. And if you have a question, give us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And as always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Is there any point in your pastorate when you didn't really have the view of this bringing all of Christ to all of life that you do now?

Was this something that developed in your thinking as a pastor, or was this something that you had discovered by the grace of God before you were a pastor?

Well, I encountered Francis Schaeffer's work in a Christian thought class at the University of Northwestern here in St. Paul in undergrad. So I had the foundation there. I encountered more of that at seminary, at Southern Seminary in Louisville.

And, but I think it really came to a head in my early years of ministry. And I think, I credit Doug for obviously the verbiage here we're borrowing from him and sharpening that the need of the moment really was that.

And so it's definitely deepened. I think it was there before I got into ministry, but ministry really made clear how evident it was really needed. And as the older I got growing up in the church and watching some friends walk away from the faith, whether they were in undergrad or just growing up, the reoccurring theme happened again and again, that in the West, people don't walk away from the Christian faith to join a traditional rival religion.

What they join is the leftist worldview. They abandon the faith for the leftist worldview. That is largely a politicized worldview. And the church has been told not to say anything about that, which just furthers that worldview and furthers that anti-Christ spirit, because we're not allowed to talk about that because of buying into the secular sacred divide.

And that, of course, is a bad shepherd. If there's a wolf out there devouring a bunch of the sheep and you say you're not going to touch it on the principle, you should get out of ministry. That's just my take.

And how have you seen this in specific ways benefit your life and the lives of those in your congregation in ways that they would likely be missing out on those benefits otherwise?

I think that one of the bigger things you see, well, I want to go to two directions with this, is it goes to that first question we were asked, that you don't feel guilty living your life not as a monk.

Again, this was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, the priesthood of all believers and the return of dignity to all vocation. That Luther, even the shoemaker, serves God. Yeah, he does. And we've kind of, we've forgotten that.

You don't have to be, as much as it pains me to say this as a pastor, you don't have to be a pastor or a missionary to serve God in this life. And that was a distinctly Protestant idea. And this buying into the secular idea and buying into a pietistic idea is actually Protestant slouching back towards a Roman Catholic view of life and the world where there is a holy order where you can serve God and then the rest of life kind of matters, but not really.

And I think that has really impacted my people at Christ Bible Church, that they realize that everything they do matters. It has meaning and it has purpose beyond just this life because Christ created this world, Christ upholds this world, Christ died for all things, right?

Colossians 1, he's redeeming everything by the blood of his cross, whether seen or unseen. He's not just redeeming sinners. He has to redeem sinners, but he's redeeming all things. He's reconciling all things to himself.

And I think those are the things we see that your life has meaning beyond that. And then it also then equips them to deal with the challenges that people who've grown up in church their whole life have just never heard the Bible talk about the very things they're wrestling with in their workplace, that they're wrestling with raising their children.

Because we've been, again, trained in secularism to not talk about those things. And so our people were not biblically literate on these issues. And I have said to many people in many settings that I don't think the pietistic brand of Christianity is going to survive the next couple of generations.

And it's not going to because it doesn't equip people to face the real-world challenges that they meet on a day-to-day basis.

Pietism, Personal Piety, and the Whole of Christian Life

Why don't you explain a little bit more about pietism? I know that there are a lot of Reformed and even Lutheran pastors and theologians who bring that subject up critically often. You could tell us more about that in detail.

Yeah, so pietism, again, is that idea that the Christian faith is either completely or mostly or primarily a personal religious experience. Again, we are seeing some people on the more fringe side of Presbyterian thought who are now almost denying any type of personal element to faith in some of the more extreme federal vision camps, which is, again, in my opinion, very much an overcorrection, an overreaction.

But pietism just reduces it. That's it. Like, the majority of the Christian faith is your personal piety, which we need more piety in the American church. We need to be holier. But it's your devotional life, it's your prayer life, and it's going to church on Sunday, Wednesday night, and then maybe doing family devotions.

That's the totality of being a good Christian. Well, if we train people that that's it, but they spend 40 to 60 hours a week not doing those things, we've unintentionally created disjointed living. I mean, how many times have we heard pastors say, well, there's a separation between Sunday and Monday in my parishioner's lives?

And you're like, well, why is that? I want to tell them, because your preaching reinforces that division between Sunday and Monday. And again, I think Schaeffer was prophetic in seeing this. I think Wilson has pressed the point even more.

And I think more and more, I know more and more of the younger Christians in their 20s don't want that type of Christianity anymore. They're starving and craving for instruction, practical instruction in all of life based on the Bible.

And the churches and the ministries that do that, I think, are going to lead this next generation forward. Amen.

And going back to what you said about some of the federal vision elements overcorrecting the personal aspect of our relationship with Christ, and I think that that is a danger, because I can tell you personally that when I finally had my eyes open to the doctrine of limited atonement or definite atonement or particular redemption or substitutionary atonement, that just revolutionized my whole understanding of Christ's death, because it personalized it.

Whereas before that, I viewed Christ dying on the cross for a nameless, faceless sea of humans hoping to save them. Whereas I found out He died for me, and He died to save me, and mission accomplished.

He redeemed me on Calvary. And that just revolutionized that personal aspect. And I understand what you're talking about. That can be abused where everything is personal, as you said, with the pietas.

But I think that, like you said, we can't go too far in either direction.

Amen. We can't lose sight of that. And I feel that—and this is what social media promotes—but so much of the extremism, I hate using that term, but so much of the overreactions we are seeing online are done in response to real problems in the American church, whether it's the pietism or real cultural problems that the church has chosen to ignore.