R.C. Sproul Jr. on "Growing Up With R.C."

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and I had the privilege today of talking with R .C.

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Sproul, Jr. about his book coming out, Growing Up with R .C. Sproul. You can pre -order it on Amazon, and it should be out,

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I think, in early May. I enjoyed the book. I was sent a copy from the publisher, and I thought, you know what, this is actually a really good book, especially if you are a pastor's kid, and I wanna explain that briefly before I get into the actual interview.

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There's a unique relationship that a son and a father have, and especially if you add in the extra layer of your father being a public figure, my dad's a pastor, so I relate to this, there's just, there's something there, and R .C.

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Sproul, Jr., I think, captures some of that. There's a side to his dad that you get to see that you would not get if you just listened to sermons or courses that his dad taught, and so if you like R .C.

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Sproul and wanna know him more, then I think, for that reason alone, it's worth it to get the book.

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Another reason, though, would be, especially if you're a pastor's kid, I think hearing someone relate to maybe some of the struggles that you might have as a pastor's kid, living in maybe the shadow of your dad, who's a public figure, and other people holding you to this standard, and some of those issues that can cause certain struggles,

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I think it's just good to have that relatability, and R .C.

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Sproul, Jr., gives, this is maybe the one thing he gives in the book, as far as advice goes, is find your identity in Christ.

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Now, a little bit about why I decided to do this interview, just because I know I'm gonna get these questions, so let me head them off.

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I was even warned not to do this interview, because R .C. Sproul, Jr. has done a few things in his life that have given him kind of a scandalous, a reputation,

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I should say, of scandal, and I think the last one was a little, over two years ago, almost three years ago, something like that, where there was a drunk driving incident in Indiana, and because of that, there's a stigma there, and does he have the authority or the ability to give anyone spiritual advice?

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You know, you shouldn't have him on your show, maybe. And here's the thing, the book is not a book about spiritual advice, spiritual disciplines, pastoral leadership, pastoral anything, it is a biographical book about his father and his perspective, so it's experience -driven, it's coming from that well of experience that he has, interacting with his dad, and you know, you'll laugh, you'll cry, there's all sorts of heartwarming things, and I mean, it's, but it's not chicken soup for the soul, it's real, and it makes

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R .C. Sproul, Jr., I think, more, or R .C. Sproul, I should say, Sr., more real. If you're just listening to sermons, you're not gonna get this perspective.

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So that's what the book is about. If it was, I would have to think through it a little more and probably say, you know, if it's a book about how to be a good pastor or something, then yeah,

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I mean, the answer, I wouldn't do an interview like this, but that's what the book is actually about. The other thing is,

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R .C. Sproul, Jr., from what I can tell, without knowing him, the only information I have to go off of, is a repentant man.

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If you read the book, within the first page, he's in court, and you know, it's clear that he hates his sin, from what he says, you know, in this public persona he's putting out there, hates his sin, wants to be vulnerable, wants to be open, transparent, accountability.

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He seems like the reaction he has is the kind of reaction you'd expect from a Christian, and that was another reason

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I wanted to do this, because I do believe in forgiveness, and I do believe that, you know, he hasn't sinned against me, personally, but yeah, he sinned against God, and I do believe that that's a story to tell as well.

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And so, you know, I think there's something to be gleaned from that, especially as we look at R .C.

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Sproul, Sr.'s reaction to these scandals. And he talks about that a bit in the interview as well.

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Last thing, I know Tulian Tavitian did the intro. Some people that have not read the book, but saw that the publisher was putting it out there, that Tulian Tavitian had done the intro, were upset, and to be honest with you, this is just my opinion,

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I don't know that that was the best decision. I'll put it this way, it wouldn't be a decision that I would make, but I wasn't the one making the decision.

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So it wasn't mine to make, and it wasn't anyone else's to make. It would seem better to me to have someone, from my perspective, that doesn't have a stigma like Tulian has to kind of help

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R .C. Jr., who does have a little bit of a stigma. So that wasn't a decision that they wanted to make, and I respect their decision.

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I let R .C. Sproul Jr. give his explanation for it. Sounds like he's thought it through, but yeah, it wasn't maybe what

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I would do. So I don't think that ruins the book, if you disagree with their decision.

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I endorse what R .C. Sproul Jr. wrote in this book, and it's good. And that's really all

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I wanted to say before starting the interview. R .C. Sproul Jr. seems like a very nice man from my interview. I enjoyed talking with him.

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Seems like a very intelligent man, like his father, and you can even tell when you're listening, even listening to the speech patterns that R .C.

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Sproul Jr. has. I mean, it sounds sometimes like you're talking to his dad, the way he talks, his inflections in his voice and everything.

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So it's just, he is his dad's son. Even with some of the things that have happened that I know he regrets, he's still his dad's son, and it comes through, it shines through in the book.

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And so I'm very grateful to be able to do this interview, and without further ado, R .C.

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Sproul Jr. All right, well, welcome everyone, once again, to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. And I am blessed today to be joined by R .C. Sproul Jr.,

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who has just written a book. He actually got it in the mail as we were talking before I started recording.

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And it's called Growing Up with R .C. Sproul. So it's about his dad, his relationship with his dad, the power of forgiveness.

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There's a lot of good stuff in here, and I really enjoyed it, especially as a pastor's kid, reading some of the struggles that R .C.

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went through, and some of the same ones that I went through. And so I'm excited to get into this with R .C.

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So R .C., thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. My pleasure, John, happy to be here.

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I wanna sort of get started with just a general question about the book.

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I mean, as general as you get, what made you want to write this book? Well, you know,

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I think the book actually began, ironically, the way the book ends.

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That is, at the end of the book, I tell the story.

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And by the way, the book is principally a collection of conversations that I had with my father.

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And each chapter sort of sets the stage. This is what was going on in my life. And this is what my father said to me, and this is why, and that's sort of how it goes.

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But the last chapter, or one of the last chapters, deals with my last conversation with my father.

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He was in a coma, and I was alone with him in the room there at the hospital.

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And I said to him, I said, you know, Dad, how much it's always meant my whole life to have you be proud of me.

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So what you probably don't know is that as important as it was for me, as happy as it was for me when

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I believed that you were proud of me, my motive was actually for you.

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I wanted you, Dad, to understand that you were a good dad.

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And here you are at Beth's door, and you're about to go on to your reward.

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And I want you to be able to go joyfully knowing that you've been a good dad.

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And I'm concerned that because I'm under this cloud, because of scandal in my life, because I had to resign from Ligonier and Reformation Bible College, that you may be feeling the weight of failure.

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And I want you to know something. I want you to know that you're not a failure. And I'm not telling you that because what

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I mean by that, Dad, is not, well, you did your best, but I'm the one who screwed up. What I mean by that is,

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Dad, your job was not to make sure that I led a well -behaved life.

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Your job as a father was to tell me about the one person who led a perfect life.

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Your job was to point me to Jesus. Your job was to say to me, son, you are going to fail.

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And there's one person who didn't, and you have to cling to him and rest in him, and you will have peace with your heavenly father.

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And that, oh, my earthly father, that is what you told me, and that's what a good father does.

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So I wanted to be able to show the world that glorious truth, that my father was a gospel -driven father.

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We have a kind of propensity in our day in the evangelical, or maybe it's become passe by now.

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I'm a little bit behind the times in general, but all the young people are out there talking about gospel this and gospel that and gospel the other thing.

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And I think it's wonderful as long as it's actually gospely. And I wanted people to see really, well, and I put it this way, too.

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One of my frustrations over the years with how people reacted to my father was there was a propensity or a temptation for people to listen to him and come away puffed up, come away sort of like the

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Gnostics thinking, okay, now I've got the inside dope, I've got the heavy theology, all those other

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Christians over there are wallowing in their milk and I've been given the meat and it just puffs us up and makes us proud.

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And I did an interview recently in which I talked about the bizarre irony that of all evangelicals, it's the

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Reformed evangelicals who affirm total depravity. And yet it's the Reformed evangelicals who clearly have not only won, but retired the pridefulness trophy centuries ago.

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And this is what we do. We are a prideful people. And how bizarre it is that our confession says we're totally depraved, but our attitude says, aren't we something?

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And I talked about how profound a difference there is between saying men are totally depraved and saying

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I am a wretched sinner. And how the Reformed do the first, but not the last.

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And again, when we come to the things that my father taught, people love to be able to zing their

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Arminian friends with a cool argument they got from R .C. Or if they're into apologetics, zing their unbelieving friends.

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And they sort of collect snappy answers to stupid heathens.

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And again, so much pride. But what I wanted people to see was that my father,

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A, was about the gospel. And B, he understood it viscerally.

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He understood it internally. He understood it in his heart. And his desire was for all of us to not just be able to articulate the

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ABCs of how we're justified, but to be able to openly and honestly confess before the living

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God, I am a sinner. And I am desperate for the grace of God in Christ.

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Amen. You talk about your father as being someone whose mission was to tell people about Jesus.

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Yes. That simplicity. And of course, there was, I mean, you also say that he didn't see the world as a closet full of potential illustrations.

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Instead, he saw all of life as the outworking of a worldview. And it struck me that maybe this was one of the secrets to his insight was how he could kind of get under the hood of ideas and tell you where they came from, why they were wrong or right.

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But when you really strip it all down, he wants to tell other people about Jesus. And he did not know how far his ministry would go in the beginning.

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You talk about going to his hometown and touring it and him just showing you kind of where he came from and grew up.

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Would you mind just walking us through a little bit of a biography from your perspective of your dad from the time you can -

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Absolutely. I'm happy to do that. Yeah. My parents, both of them were born and raised in Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, a bedroom community just outside Pittsburgh.

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And both middle -class families, my dad's dad had his own accounting firm and they were both members of the local community church, which was a mainline

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Presbyterian church where my dad's dad was a ruling elder. But while they were there growing up, neither of them ever actually heard the gospel.

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And in fact, my father's conversion happened when he was a freshman in college.

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And he and his best friend also from Pleasant Hills, he and his best friend were about to drive over the border to Ohio where not coincidentally, the drinking age was 18.

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And before they could leave, they had to stop. This is, I'm not saying this to shame my father, but to humanize him.

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They had to stop at the cigarette machine and get cigarettes before they left. And as they went into the lounge where the cigarette machine was, there was the captain of the football team witnessing to a couple other folks.

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And my dad and his best friend sat down and then joined in the conversation and they were introduced to Jesus.

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And my father wrestled for a day or two over what he had heard, knowing that this was not a small thing before finally giving his life to Christ.

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Well, the next time he was home over the weekend, he thought it might be important for him to go tell his pastor.

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And he went and told his pastor what had happened to him. Again, very successful, large community church there.

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And my father's sitting in his office and telling me about his conversion. And the pastor replies, this is back in 1957.

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The pastor replies, if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus, you're a damned fool.

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Wow. Yes. People have no idea. When we talk about mainline churches being liberal, we think it means,

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I don't know, that they want women elders or they're soft on homosexuality or this thing.

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And we think it's something new when the reality is that perspective, that unbelief in the resurrection of Jesus.

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We just had a big brouhaha from the president of Union Theological Seminary talking like this is something new.

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This has been around for hundreds of years and common in America for at least 50 years.

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And that's what my father ran into. his conversion was significant and important and a change.

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Now, I believe and he believes that his parents were believers, even though they were a part of this church.

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And I don't have any quarrel with that. This is what people did. This is what church was at that time frame.

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You couldn't find an evangelical church unless you were somewhere down South. You couldn't find an evangelical reform church unless you were in Grand Rapids or Philadelphia at that time.

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I mean, that's virtually, that's a slight exaggeration, but that's basically where things were, which is, by the way, ought to tell us something about what

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God has done with the reformed faith and even with evangelicalism in the last 50, 60, 70 years.

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I can grumble with the best of them about everything that's wrong in the church, but we gotta remember, not only was,

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I mean, that's where most people went to church. They went to churches where pastors didn't believe in the resurrection back then.

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And so God has been very good to us. So out of that, he gets converted. He used to sit in class in college.

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He was, I forget what his original major was, but he would sit in class and prop up his book in front of him and pretend like he was paying attention while he was reading

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Billy Graham sermons. He got an A in Bible, he got an A in gym, and he got

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Ds or Fs and everything else. Wow. Yes, this is the very smart R .C. Sproul. But he just didn't care.

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He wasn't interested. And then one of his professors in a philosophy class began to talk about St.

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Augustine and Augustine's views on creation. And my dad had like a second rebirth and just got really excited and then changed his major to philosophy and got involved in his studies and took them more seriously.

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From there, he went to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, which again was crawling, overrun with guys who didn't believe in the resurrection.

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But there was one guy there who did, and his name was John Gerstner. John Gerstner mentored my father.

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From there, my father and my mother went to, at Dr. Gerstner's insistence, went to Amsterdam where my father got his doctorate at the

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Free University of Amsterdam studying with G .C. Burkhauer. And from there, when he came back, he started teaching in different colleges and universities, but he really enjoyed teaching

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Sunday school at his local church. And that sort of sparked his whole desire to educate lay people, and that's sort of where Ligonier came.

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Wow. Wow, amazing story. And I know you include some of that in your book.

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And there's some humorous asides in there. I mean, the story about you teaching your dad how to ski,

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I thought was pretty funny. Yeah, if you want to go for it and just share a little bit about that, that was,

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I think - Oh, sure. Well, there's lots of, again, part of the desire is to show my father's charm and his whimsy and how much fun he was.

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One of the things that's just baffled me in the lead up to the release of this book is that there's been some actual people suggesting that somehow

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I'm pulling a Frankie Schaefer, that I'm gonna be skewering the sacred cow that is my father.

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And that is the last thing you'll find in this book. Yeah, I haven't heard that one, but that's not true.

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I read it. Not at all. This is a book honoring my father, and joyfully so. But it does include, again, a lot of fun stories that actually happened, including some debates that he and I had that I lost badly.

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The thing that you mentioned was just simply this, that we were talking, in the context of the book,

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I was talking about his desire to enter into the interests that I had, that he would go and play tennis with me, even though he never had an interest in tennis, and he could beat me, even though he never played.

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But in that particular chapter, I talked about him also wanting to learn how to ski. My sister and I grew up skiing, and eventually he said,

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I should try this. And so I somehow managed to drag him up to the beginning of the beginner's little hill there, and he's all ready to go, and I'm giving him his first lesson.

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I said, now, if you wanna turn to the left, point your right ski in. If you wanna turn to the right, point your left ski in.

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If you wanna stop, point both skis in. And that was the end of the lesson. That was concise and not too terribly helpful.

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But we just had a lot of fun growing up, and people can tell, I think, listening to him talk, that he was a great deal of fun as a person.

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Yeah, well, he was a Renaissance man, it seems like, just good at everything, just about. Yes, in fact, if there's anything negative about my dad in the book at all, it would probably be that I did poke a little fun of his kind of fickleness about his hobbies.

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He would just like skiing, he would get into it. He would go to the ski shop, and he would pick out the best ski jacket, and he would read books on how to ski, and then he would go skiing, and then he would give it up, because now he's taking up the violin, and he'd go and find the best violin teacher, and go get the best kind of rosin, as if there are,

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I don't know, there are different kinds of rosin. But he would do that for six months, and then that would go in the closet, and then he would pick up oil painting, or he would pick up speaking

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French. I mean, it was just one thing after another, and of course, many things he was very, very good at.

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And he just sort of had this insatiable need to pick up new skills as a way to relax.

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And he seems like a competitive person in any sense, yeah. Well, one of those, I don't think this story made it into the book, but one of those strange avocations that he developed very briefly when

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I was very young was monopoly. Really? Yes, he and some other men who were on the staff of the old

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Ligonier Valley Study Center, which is what Ligonier Ministries used to be, they had a weekly meeting where they kept score over time, and they would sit down and set apart this time.

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And I mean, they got so intense. I mean, I remember hearing shouts coming from the room where they're playing, and threats to throw the board against the wall, and all this for monopoly with grown men.

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But yeah, competitiveness was definitely there, but also understand it wasn't ever ugly.

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It wasn't ever a fire -breathing, sort of almost like someone had a psychological problem with losing.

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He just liked to play to win. Yeah, good sportsman. You write about, this is something that affected me a little bit, and I could just relate to it, but you talk about a competition you had with your father where you were arm wrestling, and you write, whatever joy

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I had in beating my father, I guess you had done this for a while, finally he loses to you.

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And you said that this joy you had was soon replaced by a sense of melancholy. You said that you laid there at night, groaning in agony, crying yourself to sleep.

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And in a strange way, I guess I related to this a little bit, and I was hoping you could talk about this, because I think we can transition the conversation into a little bit about your own relationship with your father, and looking at him as this hero that you looked up to.

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And then the moment it dawned on you that he's human, and he's gonna go the way of his father, and his father before him, and that not sitting right with you.

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How did you feel? Well, I don't know that I've got much to say, brother. I think you pretty well covered it.

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I'm sorry. Exactly, right. It was that moment of realizing he's not invincible.

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He's not Superman. He's not gonna live forever. He is getting older. I used to think when he would bow out of competitions, we used to have at the old

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Lincoln Valley Study Center in the summertime, a weekly game of softball. And when

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I was really little, every game he was there at shortstop, and he was fielding everything. And eventually he just sort of backed away.

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And I thought, well, surely it's a question of his humility. He's such a great man that he doesn't want to embarrass the other people with how good he is at softball.

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Instead of realizing it's probably hard on his knees. This is probably not something he's comfortable with.

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Gosh, when I was in my late 30s probably, I have a very close friend who actually was a pitcher in the major leagues.

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Not someone anybody would necessarily know. He was a middle reliever and was only around for three or four years on several different teams.

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But he was a real close friend. And we would go out and he would pitch to me and we would do batting practice.

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And it was a lot of fun. And one day I took my dad and we went out there and my friend was pitching to me.

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My dad was at shortstop and he just went for a ground ball and fell over.

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And it was funny, it took me right back. You're too young to know this. It took me right back to the 1973

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World Series when Willie Mays was playing for the New York Mets.

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And during that World Series, he literally fell to the ground just trying to get under a routine ground ball.

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And he was the greatest baseball player ever as far as I was concerned. But by this time, he was like 42 years old.

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So yeah, he does, my dad did get older. But in the context of that story, that particular chapter,

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I told the story about the arm wrestling. But I think it's the same chapter. I talked about having a debate with my father where I really thought

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I had him, really thought I'd beat him. Just like beating him in arm wrestling. And he just completely, instantly turned the tables on me, destroyed me, dusted off the spot on which

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I had stood and how comforting that was to me. That even if his body is aging, his mind is so unbelievably sharp.

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I enjoyed that. And not just because you were trounced by your father. I just, I related to it.

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Because you know what it is? It seems like pastor's kids have this reputation of living in rebellion. And as a pastor's kid, and going to conferences and being around other pastor's kids,

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I know why that is. And I know before I realized that my father was also aging, it was easier to rebel for some reason.

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I just wanted a challenge. I wanted to find, see if I can one -up him theologically.

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And hey, I knew a theology word that you didn't know, or something like that.

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There's this sort of, the rebellion you talk about having, but it wasn't like a full -fledged rebellion at all.

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It was, you loved your parents. It was just more of a, I don't know, a sense of proving yourself. Yes. Would that be an accurate way to depict it?

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Absolutely, that's very well said. Although it may be a little bit nicer than how I would describe it.

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I agree with you, from my experience, that there was never, ever a situation or a vision where I saw my parents as the enemy.

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I never felt like, hey, your worldview is wrong.

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But it's not just a question, for me, it wasn't just a question of sort of testing my mettle.

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It was sometimes, hey, I wanna do this thing that I know is wrong. And I don't, and so I'm gonna do this, even though you wouldn't like it, but I'm gonna do it in a way that you're not gonna know about it, because I do want you to be at peace with me and not be ashamed of me.

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So there was some of that, but yes, there was always, and I've said this, one of the common questions, and I don't know if you were planning to ask this or not, but one of the common questions

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I've gotten over the years is, did you and your father ever have any significant theological disagreements, things that you disagreed about?

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And I would say, first of all, no, nothing significant. There are finer points of theology that my father and I have disagreed on over the years.

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But when that happened, I've said to my father, I want you to understand that when you and I disagree, and the arguments could get intense, not angry, but intense,

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I would tell him, I want you to understand, I could be wrong, but where I'm disagreeing with you, it's because I'm trying,

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I think I'm being more consistent with the more foundational issue where you and I are in agreement.

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Yeah. I think I'm building the superstructure more faithfully on the foundation that you and I agree about.

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So I'm thinking I'm being loyal to you, not being disloyal to you when I disagree, because I think you're being accidentally disloyal to these foundational things that we believe together.

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I wanted to ask you if you had advice for pastor's kids in particular. The reason I ask as a pastor's kid is, when you're growing up,

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I mean, you even talk about this, living in your father's shadow, he's well -respected, other people sometimes will hold us to a higher standard because there's more expected of us.

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And there's a sense in which, I know I felt this, where I wanted to sort of,

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I get into stupid arguments sometimes with my dad, just to show that I'm not quite in your shadow, like I respect you, but I'm my own person, so I'm gonna disagree with you about the aseity of Christ, or something that's just honestly, it's a secondary issue, tertiary, but it's sort of this wanting to not be in that shadow, in that limelight, having other people hold me to something that I haven't authorized.

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What kind of advice do you have for pastor's kids that might struggle with that? Well, I would encourage them in this way,

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I would say that the first thing you need to do is you need to see your father as a father, before you see him as a pastor.

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The second thing you need to do is learn to fully, deeply own that your identity is in Christ.

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One of two things happens with the pastor's kids, either they buy into this notion that they're supposed to be better, and they think that they are, or they think, they resent being better, the expectation that they'll be better, and they react with the opposite intention and try to rebel.

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But that's no different than anybody else. Maybe that's not sufficiently clear, but if I put it in the context of everybody else, it might help.

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I like to say it this way. We all have inside of us our inner

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Pelagius, that part of us that thinks we're gonna earn

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God's favor. And one of two things will happen when this inner

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Pelagius arises in us and makes us think we're gonna do okay.

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Either we realize we're not gonna do okay, the devil's right there saying, you can do it, then we fail, and he says, look, you failed.

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Or we say, I can't do it, and therefore I'm not gonna try.

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Well, what we're called to do is rest in the finished work of Christ alone.

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This is why, this was so bizarre. When I read what

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Tullian has said, all

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I hear him saying is exactly what the Reformation has said. Things like this, we don't behave well so that God will love us, but rather because God loves us, we strive to behave well.

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That's the gospel. And the PK needs to know that.

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They need to know that their standing has nothing to do with their earthly father.

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It has nothing to do with what their congregation thinks of them. It has nothing to do with the congregation thinks of their father.

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It has everything to do with whether or not they're in Christ. And if they're in Christ, they have everything we need.

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Again, with respect to my father, I used to say this all the time. People worry about me living in my father's shadow, and I tell them, it's okay.

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We both live in Jesus's shadow, which is the only place you can live. Amen. Amen. That was one of the things that I gleaned from the story in your book.

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And man, I just wish every pastor's kid could read this and really find their own -

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I hope so too. That'd be good for sales. But let me say one more thing about that.

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I want us to get past our propensity.

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Well, okay, this is what I wanted to say. That whole getting out of the shadow, that whole idea of our own identity,

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I have looked at it this way. I've looked at my father, and I've talked about this in the book about how Michael Jordan had two sons that both played

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Division I basketball and earned Division I scholarships. And that was great, but nobody could ever rightly expect them to be

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Michael Jordan. There's only one Michael Jordan. Well, I know that I'll never be as smart as my father.

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And I've known it for a long time. I know I'll never be as influential as my father. I've known it for a long time.

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But what I have determined to do, what I've wanted to do, what I've prayed for is, Lord, let me be more vulnerable.

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Let me be more open. Let me, not that I asked for this in advance, but when

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I have scandal in my life, I wanna be the one who says, this is me, who's not covering up, who's not deflecting, who's not hiding, who's saying,

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I didn't claim anything different. All I've ever claimed is I need Jesus.

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And I want people to be able to come to Jesus without thinking

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I need to be as together, as smart, as clean cut, as all those adoring

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R .C. Sproul fans. I want people to be able to say, Jesus died for me, a sinner.

37:19

Amen. Your dad, towards the end of his life, you kind of started our interview with telling the story about when you're at his side there and reassuring him, but he had a, he lacked confidence in one area and he was unsure of himself as a dad.

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That's what you say on page 204 in the book. But he also had this forgiving spirit that you experienced personally.

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And so you already talked about reassuring him in his last hours on this earth.

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But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about his forgiving spirit and then about yourself and how you experienced that with some of the things you just mentioned, scandals in your own life.

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I know that some have told me before I did this interview that, are you sure you wanna do this?

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You're talking to someone who's messed up, essentially. And I've read the book and you are humble, you are repentant as far as I can tell.

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I don't know you personally, but this is the exact response that I think a

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Christian would have in the face of a scandal. So how did your dad deal with those things when they happened in your life?

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Well, one of the stories that's actually in the book was simply this.

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After I was charged with DWI, as my lawyer is talking with the prosecutor,

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I'm hearing this, that any plea deal would not leave room for me to be able to be on probation in any place other than Indiana.

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I had just been married. I had a house in Orlando. And basically what that meant was, if I don't have a place to stay in Indiana, then

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Indiana is gonna provide a very small place for me to stay, a prison cell.

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And so by God's grace and against my counsel, my wife had kept her house up until that point.

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We hadn't been married that long, but she still owned her house here in Indiana, which is where I'm doing this interview from, still living in this house.

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And so I didn't have to go to jail. I was able to serve my probation here in Indiana. And all that to set up the fact that my wife and I are getting in the car to leave, to go to Indiana, to move.

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And we've just said goodbye to my parents. And I said to my wife, it just kills me that my father was counting on me to protect

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Reformation Bible College and to a lesser extent, Ligonier Ministries, to protect the vision when he's gone.

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And now, because I've done this, I can't do that. And my wife, a good wife would have said, oh, honey, it's okay, don't worry about it.

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That's not what my wife is. She's not a good wife. My wife's a great wife.

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And she said to me, sweetheart, you need to go in there and tell your parents that.

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And I'm like, oh dear, you're new to the family. You don't get the dynamic. We're sproles, we don't talk that openly with each other.

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It's all nods and winks and subtleties. I could never say something that direct to my parents.

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And just like she didn't listen to me when I told her to sell her house, she still didn't listen to me.

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And she said, honey, you need to go in there and you need to go tell them. And so after we had already said our goodbyes, we'd gotten in the car, we'd get back out of the car, knock on the door again, go in the house.

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And I told my parents that. And they were, as you would expect, they were profoundly gracious.

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They were, son, do not feel that burden. We're not ashamed of you. You don't need to carry that weight.

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We're glad of where you are. We're proud of who you are. And again, that's what he was like.

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This guy, I mean, if you - That says something, it does.

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It says his priorities are in the right place. He's concerned about his son, not his empire.

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One of the overarching things is theology was not abstract to him. That's one of the messages from this book.

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Theology was not abstract to him. And that means the gospel's not abstract to him. Which means he understands that Jesus saves sinners.

42:34

Absolutely. Amen. Well, I wanted to ask you another question about the forward to your book, because I know this, people have not read the book because it's not out yet, but they saw that Tully and Tavitian was doing the forward to the book.

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And of course, I know you're aware that because of some of the scandal in his own life, this is kind of a controversial thing.

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So I was hoping you could address that really quick, or I wanna give you that opportunity. I'd be happy to.

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And before I do, before I defend that decision, I just wanna encourage people to read the forward.

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The forward may very well be the best thing about the book. I read this thing and was in tears.

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I read it to my wife and we were both in tears. It's a true, beautiful proclamation of the gospel.

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And I feel absolutely vindicated in the decision that I made to have him do this.

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Now, let me answer the specific objections. One of the objections that I've heard is again, that Tullian is guilty of teaching antinomianism, which means anti -lawism, that his messages skewed too far in terms of grace and not enough in terms of law.

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And my response to that is one, Tullian was never disciplined or challenged in any way by his presbytery for what he was teaching along the way.

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Never, not once. Two, what he was teaching is not the source of his sins.

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The source of his sins is his sinful heart, which he would acknowledge as well. Same thing is true for me and the rest of us.

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So I've not seen, and don't know that I ever will, don't think

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I ever will, I've not seen anything that's truly antinomian coming from Tullian's lips or from his pen.

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And I think it was Luther who said something along the lines of, if your proclamation of the gospel doesn't sound antinomian, you're doing it wrong.

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The reality is our standing before God is in Christ alone.

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The reality, the biblical reality is, is that our best works are filthy rags. And there's nothing in anything that I've seen

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Tullian said that says anything other than in response to that and out of that, our calling is to obey him.

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So I don't buy the antinomian thing. The second thing is even stranger to me. The objection is

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Tullian should not be back in ministry. Well, I think that reveals a profoundly low ecclesiology, a low view of the church for this reason, because we think that anytime we're talking about anything that has to do with God, that somehow that's ministry and that you need to be ordained to do that ministry.

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You know, so that, oh, Tullian shouldn't be doing ministry. Well, I didn't ask him to do ministry. I didn't ordain him.

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I didn't ask him to be the pastor of my church. I asked him to write a forward to a book. And who else is the better person to write a forward to a book that is designed to be a celebration of the grace of God than someone who just like me had very public sins and very publicly has a need for the grace of God.

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The world is full of well -behaved, clean cut, reformed people who know how to project that image.

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What the world needs is people who not only can beat their breast and cry out,

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Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner, but who can make those people who beat their breast and cry out,

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Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner, welcome in the church of Jesus Christ. And that's what

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Tullian is. And honestly, that's what I want to be. That is in Tullian's words, how

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I can steward my failures, how I can be like Peter, before Peter fails,

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Jesus tells him, when you return, strengthen the brethren. That's what

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I wanna do in light of my own failures. Well, I appreciate you addressing that. I think that'll be helpful for people.

47:20

Switching gears a little bit here, I have to ask this question because those who listen to this podcast know most of the episodes are regarding the social justice movement in the church, neo -Marxism, these kinds of things.

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I gotta know, from your perspective, what you think your father, R .C.

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Sproul, would have thought of this movement if he were around now looking at the different organizations, and I won't name them, that are starting to promote this.

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Well, it's an incredibly nuanced answer. I know. Every Monday night,

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I teach a Bible study and we show it live on Facebook, and one of the fellows who's actually here in person for this study is a friend of ours who was asking me questions about Abraham Kuyper and about basically this whole

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Reformed idea of the lordship of Christ over all things, that you see this sense of antithesis coming out of Kuyper coming out of Duyverd, and shaping

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Francis Schaeffer and shaping just this whole idea of worldview.

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When I used to have opportunity to speak all the time, I had this habit where every time the word worldview came out of my mouth,

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I would stop and give a 30 -second commercial for Francis Schaeffer and say, you need to understand that you wouldn't know that word if it weren't for this man and what this man did.

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And if you remember in the book, I tell the story about going to the movies with my dad and him breaking down and how powerful that was.

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My father is absolutely in that tradition that says the lordship of Jesus touches everything.

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He would, like a Baptist with slick back hair, if he had been there when

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Kuyper said, there is no square inch of the universe over which Jesus Christ does not declare mine, my father would have shouted, amen, preach it.

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However, as I said to my friend, he was talking about a group up in Toronto who came out of this

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Kuyperian worldview. And I said, well, here's the funny thing. A bunch of these guys who rightly affirm the lordship of Jesus Christ over all things veered politically to the left.

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And they think that socialism is the good thing that Jesus is going to give us.

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And I think they're completely out to lunch. But here's what my father would say about this.

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A Gnostic notion that Jesus came to save souls and that that's the extent of his impact would be absolutely repugnant to him.

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And in that sense, he would agree wholeheartedly with the social justice warriors that, yes, we need to press the crown rights of King Jesus over all things.

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Now, the policy, he would be 180 degrees opposed to the social justice warriors.

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And I would be, we would be the same place he and I both on that particular issue.

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So, do we believe that being concerned for the unborn is a distraction from the gospel?

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No, absolutely not. Do we believe that being concerned for genuine racism is a distraction from the gospel?

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Absolutely not. Right. Do we believe that going to war against perceived microaggressions is a distraction from the gospel?

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Yes, we do. We certainly do. So, I think that, and I would say this too, not that anybody would have asked me, but when

51:36

I read through the, I don't even know what it's called. Is it called the, whatever, the social justice statement?

51:43

Dallas statement, is that what you're? Dallas statement, is that what it's called? Yeah, okay. It's hard to remember the cities.

51:50

Yeah, when I read through the Dallas statement, I felt like there's nothing here at all that I would object to, or that I couldn't say.

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But when this is coming, or whoever might come with this from a dispensational perspective, or a two kingdom perspective, or any other.

52:17

You're talking about pietism essentially, right? Yes, any kind of pietism. Pietist sense, exactly. Could also agree with this, and I would disagree with that.

52:26

Right. So, again, I think that's where my dad would be.

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He would be cautious about, let's put it this way.

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He would agree with the social justice warriors in wanting to press the crown rights of Jesus.

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He would disagree what that looks like. Sure. Yeah, and that was a sense that I got just from listening to his sermons.

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And I mean, of course, I know after, I don't remember if it was MLK 50, it was one of these events.

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Your father had a sermon, I guess, where he had talked about social justice, and that clip went around and went viral.

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So I kind of assume that's probably where he was at, which is good to know. I mean, I respect him, and I think a lot of young reform guys out there respect him that are now currently trying to think through, okay, what do we think about feminism and the anti -white issue and being soft on LGBT and all this stuff?

53:30

How does this play into it? So thank you, thank you for that. Well, I appreciate, we've gone a little over how long

53:39

I told you this interview would go, so I'm sorry about that. Thank you, though, so much for sharing about your father and about the book.

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It's called Growing Up with R .C. Sproul, The Truths I Learned About Grace, Redemption, and the

53:51

Holiness of God. When does it come out? May 14th is the release date. Okay, so if you wanna purchase that, you can purchase it on May 14th.

54:00

Where's the next place? We'll pre -order it now. We'll pre -order it now, there you go. Yep. You want folks to go to amazon .com

54:07

and look? You can go to amazon .com, they can go to ICHTHUS Publications, I -C -H -T -H -U -S

54:13

Publications. Either place, they have the opportunity to pre -order it. All right, perfect.