Pastor Rob Kimsey on Politics – Should Christians Vote and Who For?

Greetings, this is Rob Kimsey, Pastor Rob Kimsey from Laurel Bible Church, just wanted to just really address the current political situation. I've had a lot of people ask recently what should be a Christian's viewpoint on politics.

I'm sure if you are on social media at all you probably have seen some podcasts and some different discussions on this topic. I recently watched one from Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, The Men of the Word.

It was a Q &A with several different pastors. It was, I believe it's Pastor Brad Clausen, it was George Crawford, Mike Riccardi, Abner Chow, and Brad Hamilton. I believe all the men are elders at Grace Community Church.

Just a really, really good talk and Q &A on the topic of politics and whether or not Christians should vote and who we should vote for. So I would commend that to you if you are online. You can find that on YouTube probably if you just search Men of the Word Q &A, it's going to be one that you'll find pop right up.

Someone had asked Pastor Mike Riccardi in particular, the question that was fielded to him is basically should we as Christians abstain from voting and the idea of voting Republican or voting Democrat and if there's no party candidates on either side, would you abstain?

If you're voting for a Democrat, why would you do that as a Christian? If you're voting for a Republican, does it matter if that candidate is a Christian or not? And so there were a wide range of different questions, but Pastor Riccardi had basically sort of addressed the idea of, well, yeah, and I don't think he said it just like this, but basically voting for the Democrat or the Democratic Party or a candidate as a Bible-believing Christian and the problems with that.

So yeah, I'm not sure how if you claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ how you could vote for a candidate in the Democratic Party given that their party really has like three main pillars. Yeah, I would say they they're expressed now.

They're sort of like, yeah, foundational, like this is their ticket issues would be abortion, the transgender issue specifically with puberty blockers and surgery for minors even without parental consent, and then you have the LGBTQ issue.

So abortion, the mutilation of children, and homosexuality, and its various lifestyle choices. Those are all three things that the Bible clearly teaches against that the Lord has called an abomination, and so how could you as a follower of Christ follow a candidate who is supporting that?

Now there's a lot of other issues, of course. You have, yeah, you just think like illegal citizens who are crossing the border is not having a defined border. That's not biblical. Abortion is the big key that I think we talk about the most, especially as Bible-believing Christians, and whether you're pro-life or you're an abolitionist.

I think obviously now we've seen the Republican Party adopt a pro-life position and not abolition, which is not a biblical position. But, you know, you think what would be the other main issue? Well, I think you'd have to address Israel, the nation of Israel, what's going on with that, and clearly the Democratic Party has a history of supporting the Palestinian Authority, and the Republican Party is very pro-Israel and looks at Israel as this democratic nation really fighting for people's freedoms in the middle of the Middle East, where they're really the only free democratic nation.

And so I think Israel needs to be higher on that list. That's not often talked about, but I think for us as a nation, as we are going to support Israel or not support Israel, is going to be a big determiner of the blessing that we receive.

Certainly we are under God's judgment because we see the rampant sin in our culture, especially with the LGBTQ community, but yeah, I mean, you think about that abortion, transgender, LGBTQ, and, you know, essentially, the Democratic Party is not like the liberal party of the 70 or 80s that was talking about social reforms and fiscal responsibilities versus the Republicans.

They have transitioned into sort of like a religious death cult that's very like hive mind, tribal mentality. So if you're a follower of Christ, how could you with a clear conscience vote for anyone in that party?

I don't know. I haven't, in my thinking, according to the Word of God, I can't wrestle that out. However, the question that was posed on the stage at Grace Community Church was more on the idea of if you have a candidate who is not a Christian, that is a Republican, can you vote for him even if he's pro-life?

He's not an abolitionist. And clearly, I mean, we're not, you know, they're not talking in a vacuum, so obviously we have an election going on. And that's why I wanted to make this video, is how do we think about voting as a Christian?

How do we think about the governing authorities? Of course, the big debate of Christian nationalism is, and there's different sides within evangelicalism on how far you go with that. But yeah, I really commend to you watching this Q &A.

It's the Men of the Word Grace Community Church Q &A. You can just search it on YouTube, probably even find it on Facebook. Pastor Riccardi, I thought, gave such a great answer. And he said as a Christian, as a follower of Christ, and I'm paraphrasing, so if you watch it and I'm putting words in Pastor Riccardi's mouth, and I apologize, I don't want to do that, but I just thought his response was so great.

And basically, this is what he said in a paraphrase, is that you have a candidate who may or may not be a Christian, and we're focusing on the Republican Party because I don't think we're gonna have a candidate on the Democrat side who is going to push biblical principles.

George Crawford actually addressed that and said, yeah, if you have a Democrat, he's looking at the person who is going to more solidify and promote biblical principles. So I'm not saying that you can't vote for a Democrat, it just works, like, how do you do that if it's anti-biblical and literally against the teaching that Christ gave, what the Scriptures say about these subjects that they're promoting as progressive good ideas, God calls an abomination.

However, George Crawford made a good point. The candidate is pushing the biblical principle, and so this is what Riccardi was basically honing in on, and I think that question came after Riccardi's response.

But you're thinking about, obviously, Kamala Harris, you're thinking about Donald Trump, and so I don't think any of the men on the stage, certainly I don't, would not promote or suggest in any way that I believe that Donald Trump is a born-again believer.

I don't think he's a follower of Christ. He has promoted the Bible in terms of saying it's a good book, it's the best book. He clearly is aligned with biblical principles, but not fully, especially more recently.

It's even like the Republican pro-life movement is more like the Democrats ten years ago. But so how do you, as a Christian, how would you vote for this person who's been accused of adultery, very likely committed those adulteries, you know, a sort of a savage businessman, even maybe unethical in some ways, but taking advantage of the current laws that are in place, and as far as taxes and being, you know, being a cutthroat businessman doesn't necessarily mean that there's a legal activity.

He's a businessman. And then you think about the position with pro-life and even some of the more concerning statements that he's made recently. Well, again, out of the candidates, what candidate, what policies would promote biblical principles?

What policies would move further along the freedoms that we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America? But what candidate is more against abortion? What candidate is more against not allowing minors, elementary school, junior high, you know, teenagers high school to receive puberty blockers, which are basically sterilization drugs, the same drugs they're giving to the kids are sterilizing drugs that they would give to an adult, or mutilating them, castrating them.

Yeah, just essentially dissecting young girls, taking their body parts off. And then promoting the LGBTQ, really, religion, I would call it more like a cult-like religion, that is against those things, but also promoting freedom, that it's the individual's right to choose.

However, clearly, between the candidates, one is more for abortion, and one is not. One is more pro-Israel, and one is not. And so if we look at the scriptures in total, and I'm not gonna quote a chapter and verse here, I would like to address Romans 13 as we think about the idea of Christian nationalism and being subject.

I think this is a good time to address these issues, given that this vote is going on. But I just want to give a pastoral perspective. And so, yeah, I would agree wholeheartedly with Pastor Riccardi's statement, that out of the candidates, there really isn't an option for the Christian.

One, clearly, is promoting more biblical principles. The person doesn't have to be a born-again follower in Christ in order to promote biblical principles. So what, as a citizen and as a Christian, as a believer, would be more in line with having a clear conscience, so that you're not violating your conscience by voting for this person, even though this person is not a believer, and has an immoral lifestyle in the past, and maybe currently.

We don't know. All we can deduce is what we see on the news and these various clips. Clearly, Kamala Harris is not somebody that would stop abortion. I think even more recently, she said that religious exemptions would not be allowed for abortions.

I'm trying to work that out in my mind, how that would work out. Like, what would a religious exemption even need to be? So, essentially, she's saying if a state, now that it's at the state level to decide, if a state, essentially, if a federal initiative came back where every state was mandated to allow abortion in their state, and that state came to the federal government and said, we as a collective have voted and have decided we don't want to have abortion in our state, because we identify as Christians.

So here is Christian nationalism. So it might be an individual state, and the governor, the representatives of the people, voting according to their constituents, and maybe there's even a vote taking place, and that state decides, because we identify as Christians, we will not allow abortion in our state.

She's essentially saying that the federal government will not allow that religious exemption, and they will be forced to allow abortion in their state. This is getting into an area of really tyranny. And so, yeah, I just want to, I guess, point you to good resources.

So I would point you to Grace Community Church and that Q &A, very insightful, very recent, where you have some elders, some experienced pastors. And so some of you know me personally, and I have been a minister of the Word of God for a number of years, serving in a capacity as a pastoral intern and associate pastor really a lay person, a churchman.

And then more recently, most of you know I was called to be the pastor teacher of Laurel Bible Church, where, praise God, I'm serving here with a co-elder and my brother in Christ, Pastor Justin Peters, who has just been an extremely helpful brother, and really just mentoring and helping and, yeah, co-partnering for the gospel ministry here in Montana.

And so I will just sort of add on that before we get into the Scripture. I do want to look at Romans 13, and I want to read a couple of things that I think are helpful to you, and maybe point you to one more clip.

So, but yeah, just as a sidebar before we read Romans 13, I want to explain a few things from that. I was really shocked when I came to Montana. I grew up in Southern California, really in LA County for the majority of my life.

More recently, before I moved to Montana, I lived in East LA in a city called Downey, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, and went to worship and served at a local congregation in Long Beach, California, under the mentorship of Pastor Seymour Heligar, faithful brother in Christ, who had served in that congregation for ten years.

It was a grace-advanced church, so a church revitalization. I served there for three years under Seymour's mentorship and grew, in my understanding of God's Word, my relationship with Christ, and my relationship with God's people, probably more than any time in my life as a Christian.

And so I've been saved for about 11 years. And, you know, coming from, obviously, LA, Long Beach, California, certainly very, like, transgender, LGBTQ, all of that stuff. People, I think, out here sort of, like, think of, like, June is not a good month.

It's Pride Month, but in California every month is Pride Month, essentially. But, yeah, as I came out here to Montana, I was stunned. I thought in my mind, I'm coming from this blue state, California, I'm going to a red state, a, quote, Republican, conservative state.

And what I found immediately, as I got called out here, was that, well, first of all, the local zoo in Billings, Zoo Montana, had a drag queen story hour in 2022. So some faithful pastors here in the Billings area knew that I was coming from the Master's Seminary, and they asked me to sort of join their group, and they were planning on doing some kind of a response to the community, and just address this as Christian pastors, that this, these drag queens, essentially men cross-dressing, practicing a sexual fetish in front of young children, was being promoted in the community in Billings.

And so Laurel is next door to Billings, and I was just shocked by that. It's like, man, I left drag queen story hour in California. I thought I had left that behind. And no, it is, it is everywhere. This is a spiritual issue ultimately, so this doesn't matter whether you're in a red state or blue state.

And then what I found that also shocked me was that the number one church model in, at least in my area, in Billings and in Laurel, and I think the surrounding communities as well, is seeker-sensitive mega-churches.

Seeker-sensitive emergent church culture churches, yeah, non-denominational or SBC churches, which of course, sadly, we know over the last, you know, 10 years or maybe more, more recently, I'd say 2019 -20, just the social justice stuff, and of course their president, J .D. Greer, said homosexuality is not a sin.

And so yeah, the SBC is huge out here. But yeah, seeker-sensitive emergent church, you have the laser show, the kind of rock style entertainment band worship, fog machine kind of vibe. And I say that in somewhat in hyperbole, but also literally.

Yeah, there's churches that have fog machines, and they have light shows, and the kind of church where the pastor rides up to the pulpit on a Harley and gets off the Harley and then preaches. And I've listened to many of the surrounding churches, certainly in Laurel, and the preaching is topical.

Yeah, when I got here, we had invited the community to come and watch a screening of The Essential Church, and we actually contacted AMC movie theaters, and AMC told us they weren't interested. The way they did that was they asked us to fill out a petition form and to essentially promote the film to let them know there was a need.

So I shared that link with just the church folks here, and we had so many people petition to see it that when I later went on to petition and fill it out, they had locked it because too many people had done it, but then they said there's no interest.

So that was AMC movie theaters. There's a privately owned movie theater in downtown Laurel, and I believe that brother, after talking with him several times, he communicated he's a believer. He was excited about the film.

He knew about Pastor John MacArthur. And so we got this screening of The Essential Church, and it was the only movie theater that I know of in the state of Montana to screen it. And so I had went to about four of the churches in Laurel.

I didn't have anyone respond. I was asking. I basically did a letter. I did a flyer. I went and hand-delivered those either to the pastor or dropped it off with their secretary, and we didn't have one person respond.

So you just get a flavor, like understand when COVID happened, the churches in Montana widely, widely, the seeker-sensitive emergent church culture churches, these big mega churches, do you think that when John MacArthur took the stand to not shut the church down, initially he did close the church.

He wants to be responsible, and you know, you have to believe the governing authorities. But after a month or two, a few months, you start realizing like, hey, the narrative of what they're saying about this isn't actually matching the truth and reality.

And so eventually John MacArthur and Grace Community Church, the elders of Grace Community Church, took the stand that they wouldn't shut down the churches. Well, the churches out here didn't agree with that.

These churches shut down. There's even a TMS church in Billings who disagreed with MacArthur and shut the church down, was promoting the vaccine. Yeah, just really shocking to think like, wow, isn't that brother from TMS, he's a master's man, the master's seminary.

Wouldn't you think, oh yeah, maybe we could look to Grace Community Church, this established five decades, I think it's 55 years now MacArthur's been in ministry. You know, 20 to 40 elders, some of them medical doctors, attorneys, judge, you know, different...you know, these are professional men who aren't playing loose cannon, and they're not cowboys shooting off the hip.

No, there's a lot of thought into that decision. So then to be out here and say, well, I disagree with that, and I'm just gonna do my own thing. You know, you have a church that during...essentially during the...oh, I guess it's doing a thumbs up because I'm doing a thumbs up.

I don't know if you guys can see that on my screen. A little bubble just popped up. I gotta watch out my thumbs up. Well, yeah, you have like 2019 -2020, and you have a master's guy who preaches...who doesn't preach, that I listened to the sermon and said, I'm not preaching today, this isn't a sermon, and he talked about critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, socialism, and Marxism, and he explained those four things, how they started, who their leaders are, what they believe, and then as he landed the plane, hour and five minutes sermon as he landed the plane, he said, this is what as Christians we have to be gracious, and we have to admit where they're right.

Excuse me? We have to admit where Karl Marx was right? We have to admit where the critical race theory ideology is right? There isn't any part of the Marxist, socialist, Marxism movement of Black Lives Matter that was biblical or right, and as a Christian I don't have to be gracious to agree with anything that goes against the Bible, but it's sort of like a warm and fluffy kind of a thing.

Yeah, that's a TMS church. Sad, absolutely tragic. Now in Laurel, you're gonna get the same kind of flavor, not maybe a larger congregation or smaller congregation. So for example, we, as a welcome here, in 2023 we did an event called the Gospel Story Hour at the zoo, and so we rented a pavilion at the zoo, and we did an hour-long worship service.

There was the public reading of Scripture, there was prayer, there was worship songs, and there was a sermon that preached the gospel, and we did all that in an hour, so it's not like an hour-long sermon, a very short public worship service.

At that time, I think I invited the same amount, I think it was four or five churches from Laurel. I know the pastors group that I'm a part of in Billings, I think invited 30 churches. There wasn't one church in 2023 that came.

Wrap your head around that. Not one church. So we did the event again in 2024, and this time having met a couple of the local pastors who are the pastors of these seeker-sensitive churches, I invited nine churches to the 2024 Gospel Story Hour at the zoo, and there wasn't one church in Laurel that participated.

Not one. So we're, you know, we're having a public worship service. It's at the zoo. You can go to the zoo and look at animals after. We're reading the Scripture out loud. We're having a time of prayer.

We're singing worship songs. We're preaching a gospel sermon, gospel-centered. This is not a political message, and we have to understand, honestly, that there is no such thing as a difference between political and spiritual.

Everything is a spiritual matter. So that needs to be clearly said. We don't battle against flesh and blood, right? No, but the principalities of the wicked, demonic forces of the heavenly places. But outside of that, the issue, and this is just pure speculation and conjecture, the issue that I believe was the determining factor of these, you know, you have over 30 churches in Billings.

I have nine in Laurel. Keep in mind, Billings is 130 ,000 people, Laurel's about 8 ,000, so Laurel's very small. So I go to nine churches, either hand it to the pastor, reach out to the pastor, or don't hear back from the pastor, but I still go to their building and give the flyer and a letter inviting them.

I believe it was the title, Gospel Story Hour at the zoo, and that sparked a correlation for them that, oh, it's in response to the Drag Queen Story Hour, and, oh, we don't touch that. We don't touch that.

You know, it was communicated to me that the big church in Billings that is a TMS church, that the pastors communicated that their ministry is about preaching Christ and Him crucified, and they don't get involved in that kind of stuff.

So it's like, well, we're preaching the gospel in a public setting. Wouldn't you want to lock arms with like-minded brothers and go and preach the gospel in the public square? But, oh, no, it's political.

We can't call out homosexuality as a sin. We don't get involved in that. Before we read Romans, I'll give you one more example. There's a congregant here at Laurel Bible Church, and this person has some grandkids in the public school system in Laurel.

And so I got a text on a...I think it was after worship service on a Sunday, and the next day on a Monday there was going to be a public school hearing. The public school district with the board of superintendents was having this hearing because the local public...this is public school for, I believe, junior high and high school.

For sure high school, but I'm not sure what the age was. So for high school, you figure 14 and higher, and if you have a school that has a middle age or the middle school is 12. My son went to a school that was seventh grade to twelfth.

So whether it's seventh through twelfth or ninth through twelfth, you're talking about preteens or teenagers, minors, not adults. And there was about, I think, seven books that the principals unanimously...so every principal that part of the high school system in Laurel signed off on adding these books to their school library.

This is not a public...this is not a public library, this is a school library. And the books ranged in topics from transgenderism, there was self-harm, some cutting, homosexuality. I think every book had critical race theory.

I think every book had an anti-christian. One of them was specifically geared at the Catholic Institute or the Catholic religion, but yeah, every one had gratuitous violence that depicted explicit violence.

Some of the books had gratuitous explicit sexual content, and so these are books that in some cases would depict a sexual encounter between two minors. In one case, it was an adult with a minor who was a girl, and it shows pictures where they're essentially having intercourse.

Really gross pornographic, an adult with a teenager having intercourse. I mean, these are really disgusting books. So you read these articles or you see viral video clips of parents or pastors going to these school board hearings to try to talk out or talk...remove these books from the public school system.

And here it is, I have a congregant ask me if I'll go to this this board hearing because they're gonna be trying to promote these books. It turns out some of the books have already been purchased and are already in the the libraries, and so some of the parents there are saying, hey, this is wrong.

And so I attend this meeting. I didn't plan on speaking, but I felt compelled to to say something at the end of the meeting. It's like a two and a half hour meeting, and all of the principals had signed off on the books, and unanimously every librarian, every single librarian, was promoting the books.

And what was shocking is I was the only pastor from Laurel. There was actually a pastor from Billings who was there to support a group called Moms for Liberty, to pray with them and to try to support them.

He didn't speak. He's from Billings. He's actually a brother in Christ, part of our pastors group in Billings, really faithful brother. There wasn't one other pastor in Laurel. I said, like, how is it that I'm the only one that knows about this?

This was at the end of 2023. I had come in February. I hadn't moved out here full-time until September. And so I'm like, I'm the only pastor in Laurel that knows about this? And what I found out was, no, I wasn't.

I was the only pastor that showed up. I was the only pastor that showed up. And when I talked to one of the the pastors at the the biggest church in Laurel, Seeker Sensitive Church, his response was, well, I don't get into that.

That's not my thing. I'm like, and I'm telling you this as we're talking about politics and whether we should vote, abstain from voting, is it okay to vote for Trump even though he's not a Christian? Should I vote for Harris as a Christian?

Certainly I would say no on that one. So I'm just trying to paint a picture for you to help you to understand that Montana is not a conservative place theologically. So here's an example. You go down downtown Laurel, you see a Trump flag on the person's house.

And next to the same house, next to the Trump flag, is a gay pride flag. And not the traditional gay pride one, the new one now that has like the little triangle in the middle with the blue and the white and the pink, which is the essentially adults for basically promoting relationships with minors.

So it's a sexual orientation now that a man or a woman can be attracted to a person who's not a minor. That's what that stands for. So if you're promoting the gay pride flag, the one that has the triangle on the end, that's adults for basically to have sexual relationship with minors.

Really disgusting stuff. So you have a state that, and I'm in Billings and Laurel, so I won't say the whole state. I don't know that. However, in my area, folks are very politically conservative, but theologically liberal.

And so you have the big Methodist church in town, a female pastor. You have the First Congregational Church in town, a female youth pastor. And I don't know if she's an elder, but they're putting it on their Facebook.

Oh, meet our new pastor. She's great. And then she introduces herself. It's like, oh, it's a woman pastor. I thought they were reformed. Well, that's their version of being reformed, is that well, we can have her teach and preach, but she's not an elder.

It's kind of the same stuff the SBC is doing, a sleight of hand. And yeah, they're not going to get involved in saying books that depict adults having sexual intercourse with kids is wrong, because that's not my thing.

And it's like, well, brothers, whose thing is it? If you're an ordained minister, a preacher of the Word of God, who's going to show up to that book challenge and say, this is an evil against God. It's an evil against children.

This is immoral. It's sinful. It's evil. Who's going to do that? The mayor of the city? The police chief? The fire captain? Not the principal of the school who okayed the books? Like, you're an ordained minister of the Word of God.

You're to stand up and say, you know, we have objective truth, we have objective morality, we have the Word of God. And so the Word of God says this, and it's evil to do this to children. Who's there to advocate for the children and to stand up for the honor and zeal of God's holiness, if not the ordained minister of the Word of God?

I don't think you need to be a pastor to do that. I think you just need to be a Christian. And so, yeah, that was really disheartening and sad. So that kind of gives you an idea of what Laurel, Montana is like and what Billings is like.

And I've been here a short time, but I would, my perception initially, you know, getting here, moving on to my second year, is that Laurel is liberal, it's a liberal town, and even the churches that would say, oh, we're conservative, they won't get involved in anything they deem political.

For example, another one, there's a bill out here called CI -128, and it's gonna promote abortion up to late term and without parental consent. And so I talked about that during the announcement portion of a sermon.

I'm not gonna preach that, it's not part of worship, but I can include that in the announcements. I put some flyers out on the table to help people think through that issue, there's a lot of misinformation.

The Democratic Party is spending millions of dollars to try to get this thing passed, and so they took signatures and they got enough signatures, it's on the ballot, CI -128. There's a letter, an open letter, that pastors are invited to sign.

I've signed it, Laurel Bible Church supports this. So I talked about that, I gave a copy of the letter, I contacted the local sort of leader of the ministerium, which would include all of the evangelical churches and the Catholic Church.

So the churches here have seen no separation between evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholics, and it went on deaf ears, no response. No response. I'm not sure at this point whether any of them have signed the letter.

Certainly I don't think they're gonna be talking about it. Not my thing. That's political. So to talk about a bill that could allow the dismemberment of a child late-term, up to nine months, and allowing the state or the local county to do that with health providers, that don't have to be actually physicians that have any kind of certification, a health provider can be...it's almost like anybody.

It's a really horrible bill to just be silent about it. To just be silent about it. And so the conservative Christians who are promoting the political reform, who show up to the book studies, guess what?

They're congregants at the Seeker Sensitive Church whose pastors won't touch the issue. And I don't know how else to say it. You don't have a pastor, you have an ostrich. You have an ostrich with the head in the sand.

Yeah, I mean, are you a man or not? And so to say, oh, it's a political issue, I can't call out evil in society because I'm supposed to just preach the gospel. Actually, you're disqualified from being a pastor.

The thing that I saw is these men are not willing to make doctrinal distinctions or draw a line in the sand. Last example, and I'll share something from Romans 13, thinking about this idea of what we have potentially after the election with Kamala Harris saying she's not going to permit religious exemptions for local states.

Last year during Easter, I visited with one of the pastors and I looked in their weekly bulletin, and their weekly bulletin had a thing that said Lent Breakfast, celebrating Lent Breakfast. So they're going to celebrate Lent.

This is a Protestant evangelical church, biggest church in town, Seeker Sensitive Church. And I looked on the list and it was the Lutheran Church, it was the Methodist Church with a woman pastor, it was the big SBC Church, it was the Roman Catholic Church.

And so this evangelical church, Protestant church, is partnering with the Roman Catholic Church to celebrate Lent Breakfast, and there was five churches plus the Roman Catholic Church in town, and each one of those places would host the Lent Breakfast.

One of the local churches, I looked up what the pastor was preaching there, and this is the church in town that has a female youth pastor, he preached four sermons on Lent. This is a Protestant evangelical.

Now certainly you understand Lent, if you're a somewhat of a student of the scripture, is a tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Now we could look at, you know, Esther, Kings, you know, you think about the repenting, the fasting that would happen when a nation would turn away from their sin and return, and what would they do?

They would put sackcloth on, they would put ashes on their head, they would turn away from their sin and repent. That is the only thing you could even get close to as an Old Testament argument or a proof passage to celebrate Lent.

And so Lent, this tradition of the Catholic Church, what do you see? The celebrities do this and they take like a piece of charcoal or some ash and they make a little cross on their head. And it's associated with fasting, that you withhold something, not food and water.

It might be that you're gonna fast from Facebook, so you're gonna do a social media fast and you're gonna tell everybody about it by putting this thing on or you post on Facebook or Instagram or whatever your poison is for social media.

And actually, what do we have as a command from our Lord, New Testament, about fasting? The Lord Jesus Christ says, don't let other people know you're doing it. Wash your face. Look clean. Don't walk around looking all, you know, sickly.

Actually, it's a private thing between you and the Lord, and that idea of fasting that Lent has, it ties to repentance. At least that's a form of a penance, you know, denying yourself for a desire you have tied to repentance that you can earn God's grace.

This is the tradition of the Catholic Church. And you have all of the major churches, the biggest SBC Church in town, the biggest assembly in town, these are all seeker-sensitive churches, by the way, SBC or not.

The Lutheran Church, Martin Luther would be rolling over in his grave to see this kind of partnership. And so each week the congregation would go to one of their buildings, and one of those was going to the Roman Catholic Church, and then you would invite the Catholics to come to your congregation and have your congregations mingle, talking about repentance and fasting, an issue of soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.

Disqualified. Absolutely disqualified. Enemies of the gospel. Enemies of the cross to partner in some way that we're being gracious or fun or, oh, it's we're just all brothers in Christ. Absolutely just deplorable.

Enemies of the cross. Yet the biggest congregations in town. And I'm not making this video to pick on anyone. I know folks that watch this or if it gets around, I'm not going to be the most popular guy in town, I understand that.

I'm here in Laurel Bible Church. I'm trying to preach the gospel week in, week out. I'm preaching through the gospel of John. We are doing expository preaching. We are not here to build a large congregation.

I don't want to have a goat farm. I am looking for God's people, and I trust in God's perfect timing that he will send his sheep as I desire to be a faithful shepherd of his people. It's Christ's church.

He is the head of the church. And so we're going to honor Christ. We're going to honor the gospel. We're going to honor the Word of God. And so that gives you a really big kind of broad picture about sort of like what we're up against.

We are in a very dark, dark spiritual place in Laurel and Billings, Montana. Please pray for our congregation. And so I just want to end by pointing us to the Word of God. And how do we think about this?