Interview with Pastor Scott Menez of Riverbend Community Church

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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I'm coming to you today again from the Southeast Regional Conference of the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals.
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This is FIRE.
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If you're interested in finding out more about FIRE, you can go to www.firefellowship.org.
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Sitting across from me today is Scott Maness.
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He is the pastor of Riverbend Community Church here in Ormond Beach.
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Actually not here, we're in Daytona, but just about eight miles from here in Ormond Beach.
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He's been the pastor there for five years and I have invited him to come in and share his story with us today.
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Hello, how are you brother? I'm doing well.
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Thanks for having me, Keith.
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Yes, sir.
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And I thank you for being here and I'm sure our listeners are going to enjoy hearing about you.
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Now, I understand that you are from California.
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I am, guilty as charged.
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I didn't know there were any saved folks in California that weren't associated with John MacArthur.
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There are actually a lot of us out there.
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We're the silent majority for sure, but many wonderful believers out in California.
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Amen.
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Amen.
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Well, the one thing I wanted to ask you because we don't know much about each other, we've only met at this conference.
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Can you tell me how you came to know the Lord and how he saved you? Absolutely.
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I always love to tell my testimony.
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I was just actually a young lad.
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I wasn't very old, probably six, seven years old.
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I remember it like it happened yesterday.
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My parents had this in church.
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We were in a good Bible teaching church, a pastor who taught the word of God and he was particularly doing a series on holiness.
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It's just interesting as a six-year-old that I can remember that.
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I just remember coming home and climbing in bed that Sunday night and after thinking about how this pastor had so clearly articulated the absence of sin in God, holy, perfect, without evil.
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Amen.
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I thought, well, there's no way I'm getting in.
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That became very clear to me.
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The Lord at that point began to plunge faith into my heart and that drove me to my mom My dad had left on a business trip.
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She was sitting on the couch, remember it vividly, walked out and said, Mom, if God is truly holy as the pastor taught and as the Bible teaches, I can't get into heaven.
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But I think that's what the message of the gospel is about, that Jesus died so I can be holy.
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Can you help me? You were like a six-year-old Martin Luther.
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My mom said I was always interested in the things, but it was that night that we saw that God had plunged faith into your heart.
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The next day I was up and down the neighborhood telling people how they could go to heaven and how they could be holy too.
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I came back a little disappointed because the neighbors ran me off their property.
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But that started a life that I wanted to pursue a holy God and just a lifelong relationship with him through Jesus Christ alone.
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That pushed me towards a lot of ministry thinking, even as a young boy.
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That reminds me of a story.
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There was a pastor one time who went to preach at another church.
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When he came back, they said, Well, how did you do? He said, Well, I had two and a half get saved.
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They said, Oh, two and a half, two adults and a child.
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He said, No, two children and an adult because the adult only has half of his life left to give to the Lord, but the two children are going to spend their whole lives serving Christ.
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That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
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I know you went through the neighborhood telling people about Jesus, but when did you know that you were called, that this was going to be your vocational life? This was what God was going to support you through preaching the gospel.
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He truly gripped me, even as a young boy and growing up and sports and all those things.
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I had just a deep interest in the word of God, but had typical teenage years and playing sports and all those struggles that come with those things.
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I was sitting in a chapel.
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My parents put me in a Christian school.
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I was playing sports in this really good Christian school.
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They had a chapel, and there was a man from Russia.
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He was actually a French missionary to Russia.
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His name was D.
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Chalondeau.
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I'll never forget him.
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He spoke extensively of smuggling Bibles behind the Iron Curtain.
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This is late 70s, 79, 70, 80, probably right in that area.
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I was so overcome by this man's desire to put God's word into Russian believers' hands.
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I'll never forget it.
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I know where I was sitting on the end of the aisle of the third row back.
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I can still picture that today, and the Lord just striking me in a sense.
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I remember that day responding, saying, Lord, I will preach your word.
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If that's what you have for me, I will preach your word.
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It was there that day.
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I was a junior in high school.
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I said, okay, Lord, if that's what you want me to do.
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I tried a few other ways, but the Lord kept bringing me back.
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That was the day that the Lord called me into ministry.
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Darrell Bock Now, since you've been at Riverbend, that has been for five years.
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That's a pretty good-sized church.
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How many people are you guys? We're about 700.
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There's probably 1,000 that call us their church, but 700 that attend regularly or so.
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That's what churches like ours call a big church, because we're much smaller, but we're thankful that the gospel is being preached in big churches like that, because we know there's a lot of big churches that it's not happening, so it's wonderful.
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You guys also have a school.
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And you have a seminary.
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Right.
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We have Riverbend Academy.
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It's K-12.
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We can only take about 254, and I think we have 260 this year, so we're really loaded.
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COVID drove people out of the public schools, and some of the things they're teaching in public schools drove them to us.
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We would say probably half of our student body is unsaved.
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Another half is.
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We see that as an outreach for our church.
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It takes a lot of work with our teachers to be ready for that, and so yeah, school's going well there.
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And the seminary as well? Yeah, so the pastor, previous pastor, Roy Hargraves, who plowed so much of the road for what I'm doing, he was the one who preached the doctrines of grace for the first time to that church.
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It had been a very Arminian church, held God captive to the will of man.
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Roy came in and fought some battles for 20 years.
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He was there 25, but fought battles in this area of Florida that was just devoid of a teaching in what I just call true doctrine of salvation, and he taught that.
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And we were looking for a place where we could run.
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We'd been in ministry for 30 years.
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We were looking for somewhere where we could really get involved with missions around the world, just seeing God saved.
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We wanted to be involved with something that could run and not have to fight through some of the difficulties that we'd seen before.
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And so one of the things is they'd already had a goal to be an elder-led church, and they had a goal to have a seminary, but Roy was never able to get to those things.
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Well, those were two areas that I had done, and so we immediately started to train men, and then we immediately started to put together the foundation for a seminary.
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And by God's grace, he brought me Brian Shealy, who's our academic dean, who had helped us plant a church cornerstone seminary out in Vallejo, California.
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He had helped us plant that one.
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He had moved to Tampa to pastor a church for a little while, but that had kind of run its course and he'd become available, and so I knew I needed him to do that.
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So God blessed us with Brian.
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He was the understudy to Dr.
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Thomas at Master's Seminary for many, many years.
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He's excellent in his languages and theologies.
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And so he has come over, he's doing our academic dean.
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He's also my executive pastor as well, so he's a very busy man, but has done a great job and God continues to give us students, and we're doing everything we can to train them to preach Christ and the centrality of Christ and a gospel that's clear in the scriptures and based in the sovereignty of God and not man.
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So yeah, what a joy to do that.
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Well, it's funny, you mentioned Pastor Hargrave, and you know I told you my story already.
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Our podcast listeners will know this, those who've been listening for a long time, several months ago I did five days on how I became a Calvinist, and I told the story.
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And the band from Riverbend, used to be called Canon, they were the ones who helped the man who helped me become a Calvinist, become a Calvinist, interestingly, and just by showing the scriptures.
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It always sounds like it's like a club you're joining, but it's not, it's just helping you see the Bible.
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But I used to carry in my truck five CDs, and it was Roy Hargrave's Tulip, and I've listened to those so many times I could probably preach those messages myself.
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So your church has meant a lot in my life and the history there.
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I think our job now, Keith, was to come to a church that was very steeped in the doctrines of grace, but had a hard time discipling and evangelizing in some ways.
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You know what, we know in our stronger teaching churches, we can sit and listen and be good hearers.
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So that has been our challenge, is moving the church to a truly discipling church.
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Amen.
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And that's your goal.
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That's my goal.
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I heard you say that.
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You're a discipler.
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Well, you think about Jesus Christ, the first real command he gives after resurrection is make disciples.
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That's right.
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And it's just an area that's hard because you have to get involved with people.
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I think guys who aren't shepherds struggle probably a little more because once you get in discipling, you're going to end up doing some counseling, biblical counseling.
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There's issues that come along, but discipling is taking that next man and dumping the things into him that somebody dumped into you, and helping them learn to love Christ like you love him.
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Learning to trust the scriptures like you learn to trust the scriptures.
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And that takes effort because it's easy to hit, well, hit us into the sermon, but to get one-on-one, one-on-three with guys, and we have all kinds of levels.
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We have beginning levels of discipleship, more of a medium where there's a little more people than a larger group discipleship too, and trying to move people along as they grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And it's just a mandate we see from God, and we're intentional in doing it.
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Now, I know this could take us into an hour-long podcast, so I'm going to ask you this.
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What would you say is the area we fail the most as churches in the area of discipleship? Since this is your passion, where do you think, even in our church, a smaller church like ours, where do you think you see, and you've many decades of experience, how long have you been in the ministry? 36 years now.
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36 years now.
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Yeah.
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So almost four decades? Yeah.
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And as a person whose passion is discipleship, where do you think the failures really lie? I can answer that very quickly.
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I believe that we assume our people are more steeped in the scriptures than they are.
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It's an assumption I think all of us, myself included, have failed in through the years, and when you really do sit down with them and have them try to communicate or even regurgitate things, they'll struggle in that, and it's just because they're so confident, they become very confident in you, you're our pastor, we love your teaching, so forth like that, but it's very difficult for them to sit down and be able to walk somebody clearly through the gospel, understand a sovereign God and try to explain that to somebody, the desperate need of a person in depravity.
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Helping them be able to communicate that as they love that person, speak the truth and love to them.
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We tend to in our more teaching churches that we can come across a little difficult, and I think that's what Paul was trying to do with Ephesus, teach the truth and love, and it's just a missing component, and so discipleship's an act of love, and I think that's what we miss in our church, that we really love them enough to say, hey, I want to spend 10 weeks with you.
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We have a program we're starting right now, it's kind of an early step that we've gone back and redone, and it's one guy with three men, and we take three passages each week, and the men do observation, interpretation, and application.
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So Genesis 1.
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Dr.
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Howard Hendricks.
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Yes, we just started, and we come together, and we sit at a table with a cup of coffee, and we begin to say, brothers, what do you see in this text? And the conversations about God and who He is just begin to flow, and the confidence that you see in these men as they begin to talk about this God that they're discovering, not just hearing it from you, they've discovered God on their own, and they want to share it with you.
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And so now you learn to give them confidence so that they can share it with the next person, and the way we built our discipleship program is we take three guys through, then those guys take three guys through, and so forth.
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And then we have other ones.
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We have a DTP, which is called Discipleship Training Program, which is an extensive program.
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It's 14 weeks, and it teaches from justification to what that looks like in the home, at work, and so forth, and that's a little more of a larger group.
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But moving them along, as 2 Corinthians 3.18 says, that we're being transformed, being present continually tense, being transformed into the image of Christ, and availing ourselves to what God is doing in our people's lives.
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And I think that's the hurdle that we have to get over, and it's scary.
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I mean, Keith, it's scary to come to a church of, you know, five, six, seven hundred people when we got here, and go, I want to disciple you.
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Well, half of them got up and left, because they go, hey, we like good sermons and good music, but don't get in our life.
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And so when we begin to realize that, wow, that's the weakness.
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And then we discover there was sin in the church, there were things that should have been dealt with, and so forth, because there was a lack of discipling, of getting into their life.
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Now we see repentance, and healing, and marriages, and stuff, because of discipling.
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So it's just a passion I realized I didn't have in some of my early churches, and just God convicted me about it.
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That is really awesome.
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You said something, and I kind of spoke over you, so I don't know if the audience heard it.
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When you said observation, interpretation, application, Howard Hendricks is a huge influence, and I love the way he teaches.
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You know who I'm talking about? Yeah, absolutely.
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Living by the Book? Everybody's read that, right? Yeah, I didn't quite think of him, or our elders, we really put this package together, this latest one, so much as Howard, but it's just, that's a natural thing.
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Absolutely.
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Pastors, we sit down, and I'm always looking at the next couple of sermons and sections, and just making some quick observations of things I see, and if we can teach our people to do that.
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And you have to watch it pretty soon, they want to get in a gap there, and all kinds of things.
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No, no, no, let's focus on the great things of God, but teaching them to do it, and they're pretty soon, they go, I've never seen God like that, because you taught them some basic, good hermeneutic principles.
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You get your hermeneutic right, you'll see God right.
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And so, that's just our, it's been a motive I've used for a lot of years, and we're just, we're continuing to do that there at Riverbend, and seeing fruit from it.
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Awesome.
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Well, brother, I have been so thankful to get to hear your testimony, to get to hear about how God is working in your church.
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For the last couple minutes, I'm going to ask you, I want you to pretend maybe you're on an elevator, or maybe you've been introduced to somebody, and you know you've only got two or three minutes.
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Take the last two or three minutes, and tell me how you would tell somebody about Jesus in a very short, quick way, because there might be somebody listening who does not know.
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And you might say, who's going to listen to two pastors talk for 30 minutes, and not know about Jesus? But maybe there is, and when you finish, I'm going to close this, and we'll be finished.
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Oh, great.
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Well, I think it starts off with this question that gets asked in all of us pastors, those questions.
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So what do you do? Yes.
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I've been asked that question so many times, golf courses, elevators, wherever.
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And my standard answer is, I have the greatest job in the world.
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And so often, that opens the door for me to answer that question.
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And of course, they want to know what the greatest job is.
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And I usually say something like, I get to tell people how they can be forgiven from their sins.
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And you're going to get a couple of reactions, this is my floor I'm getting off, or they'll ride another floor with you to want to know.
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And so, of course, first and foremost, we have to understand that we are in need of something, we're lost, and we need a Savior.
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And so helping them understand through my person, I usually don't point to them, I go, boy, I want to tell you that, man, I was a sinner, I was really apart from God.
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And I always use myself as the prime example of someone who is separated from God and separated from a holy God who's perfect.
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But yet God made a way for me to get through, I mean, it's through Jesus Christ alone.
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And I really, I love to emphasize the alones, I used to have an email called the five alones, just because I love, you know, the Christ alone, and faith alone, and grace alone, word alone, scriptures alone, of course, and help them understand, there's nothing you add to this.
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And when you know that you're saved, you'll want to serve the Savior.
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And so usually walking through those is usually my mode of witnessing.
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And of course, sometimes it goes really well and quick and, you know, this happens on the airplane all the time.
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And you either have a good conversation for the rest of the flight, or he rolls over and goes to sleep.
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But it is a great opportunity always to tell people that you have the greatest job, because I think we do.
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And I don't think that's just pastors, we all have the gift of giving the gospel out.
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And it is a great, however you want to say that.
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For me, that's what I do for a living, I tell people how they can have their sins forgiven.
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And so what a joy to tell people that and lead them to the Lord Jesus Christ, through his finished work alone.
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Amen.
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Well, Pastor, I thank you for being with us today.
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And I know our listeners have enjoyed learning about you and about your church and hearing that opportunity to hear more about Jesus and his work in your life.
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Again, listeners, I want to thank you for tuning in with us today and tuning in with us every day, Monday through Friday at 630 for Coffee with a Calvinist.
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I also want to let you know and remind you that if you are in the Jacksonville area, Sovereign Grace Family Church is the church where I pastor.
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We have services every Sunday.
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We have Sunday school at 930 and we have worship at 1030.
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And we would love to have you come and join with us.
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If you'd like to know more about our church, it's sgfcjacks.org.
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That's Sovereign Grace Family Church of Jacksonville.
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If you're in the Ormond Beach area, Pastor, tell them how to get a hold of you guys.
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Yeah, we're Riverbend Community Church, we're a 2080 West Granada.
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Find us on the web at riverbendchurch.com.
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And we're right off 95 in Ormond Beach.
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If you just Google that in there, you'll find us.
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And our seminary is christseminary.org.
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And that's Christ Theological Seminary.
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And so all that's on the website.
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We have two services in the morning, Wednesday night services, lots of ministries going on there.
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Love to have you.
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Excellent.
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All right.
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Thank you.
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Well, again, thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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If you enjoyed the program, please take a moment to subscribe and provide us feedback.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this.
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Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.