Social Justice Influence in Churches, Seminaries, and Denominations by Russell Fuller

It's good to be back in Wisconsin. And I've been here a few times.

One time, I was two hours north of Green Bay, where there's more bears than people.

And it was 25 degrees below zero. Now, I was born in Georgia.

We don't understand 25 degrees below zero. So probably the coldest I've ever been is in Wisconsin.

But it's good to be back, especially in May. And so, again, it's a real honor to be with you and to be with Seth and these other brothers that I have the highest respect for, highest regard.

And so, again, it's good to be with you this day. My topic, again, I flipped it, and it's on social justice's influence on churches, seminaries, and denominations.

I'm going to focus particularly on the seminaries and denominations. I want to start by reading a few scriptures.

First, the scripture that really our conference here is based on, Romans 12. Two, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

First John 4 .5, they are from the world, therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them.

We are from God. He who knows God listens to us, and he who is not from God does not listen to us.

By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. And finally,

Colossians 2 .8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the traditions of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.

And that's what we're talking about when we're talking about social justice, critical race theory, these things that are very popular in society, and what they do, of course, is they come into the church, they come into the seminary, they come into denominations.

And so what you see is sort of a mixture that goes on. And so John gave you a thesis,

I'll give you my thesis. Here's the bottom line. You cannot mix scripture with the elementary principles and philosophies of the world.

And even if you go back into biblical days, when Paul was writing the book of Colossians, that's exactly what he was combating.

There was a certain philosophy of the day known as Gnosticism. Gnosticism talked about being a special knowledge.

That's what the word Gnostic means. And yeah, it was good to believe in the word of God, the

Bible, and so forth. But if you really want to be an advanced Christian, you need to have this special knowledge.

And really, this is what's still going on today. I'm not calling these things Gnosticism, though sometimes they'll have some similarities to it.

But what we do is we want to combine the wisdom of this world with the wisdom of scripture.

And these two things simply cannot go together. And we can look all through history, and we can see time and time again when the church is infected with worldly philosophy and so forth and the problems that it brings.

You know, we are influenced by the world. We often, I think, underestimate the world's influence upon us as individuals and as, again, denominations, seminaries and so forth.

We underestimate the power of the world, just like we underestimate the power of our old sinful nature.

We underestimate the power of Satan. These are the great three areas of temptation, how we're tempted, you know.

And we don't really sometimes perceive how the world influences us.

But yet, the world is something that's continually trying to conform us to itself.

And oftentimes it's very successful. And I can speak, you know, in my own heart that the world does affect me.

It affects me very much. And it's something that we have to be on guard at all times. You know, when

I taught at Southern Seminary, one time I was asked to be with a committee to meet with a man who was what's called an

Israeli Consul General. There's a few of those in America. There's about a handful of them.

They live in different places in America and they are part of the

Israeli government. They're really part of the embassy, Israeli embassy and so forth. And he wanted to come to Southern Seminary and talk to us.

And I thought, this never happens. I've never heard of such a thing going on.

But this was about 10 years ago that he came to campus and he says,

I want to talk to some of your professors. I want to talk to some of your people and so forth. And when he started asking questions,

I knew immediately what he was there for. He was very concerned. Israel's been concerned about America for many years now.

And so he started asking questions about something that is known as BDS. It stands for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions Movement.

In Louisville, where Southern Seminary is, there's also the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church USA.

This gentleman wanted to talk to them and they said, don't even come on our property.

We do not want to talk to any official of the Israeli government. They had already done boycott, disinvestment and sanctions.

And now he came to ask the question, are the Southern Baptists about to do this to us? How do your students view

Israel? Those were the questions he really asked. Because Israel, through this particular man, they're trying to determine where is

America going? And they've seen this problem for many years and they knew back at that time that on our university campuses, anti -Semitism was already rife.

I mean, it was already going on. And so they were very concerned. And when he asked me,

I said, you know, I don't see anything in the near future where the

Southern Baptist Convention will be against Israel. But, you know, if he were there today,

I would say I'm not so sure in the near future what's going to happen.

I'm not sure what the Southern Baptist Convention and the direction they would take concerning Israel.

And, you know, there was a recent book put out called Christian Zionism in the 21st Century. And they took a poll of young evangelicals under 30 years of age.

And only one third of them supports Israel. Now, the importance of that is that's a major shift.

If you were to go back to the 80s or so forth, that number would be much, much higher. But there's been a major shift here.

Then they also asked him the questions, how about how many are supporting the Palestinians? And there the number went up to around almost 25 percent, which again, if you were to go back a few years, it wouldn't have been that way.

What's the difference? It's the world. And in particular, what you have is you're having a major shift, not on just this issue, but on many other issues.

And again, I just bring this up to show you because, you know, our campuses right now are on fire, you know, with these protests and these different things.

And where is this coming from? It's coming from social justice.

It's coming from, in particular, the critical race theory, because there's really two groups that are the target of critical race theory,

Christians and Jews. And the Jews really are like the, let's say, the most, to them, the great example of what critical race theory needs to be going after.

They're considered like white oppressors of people of color, that being the Palestinians.

They supposedly stole the land and they oppress the people on the land.

They practice apartheid. They control the world, all these kinds of things, you see. And that's what's being taught at our universities and our

Christian schools, even. This type of stuff is being taught. And so when you see this explosion going on on these college campuses, this is not something that just happens in a vacuum.

It's not just something because of the war that's going on over in Israel right now. Oh, no, no.

The seeds to this have been laid long ago. And once you see this taught at Columbia, at Berkeley, at Yale, and yes, down in Madison, once you start seeing these things taught,

I'm telling you, look at the Christian schools. Because let me tell you, you're going to see the same things taught there.

What's popular at Columbia, I'm telling you, the same professors that are teaching at many of these

Christian schools, they want to be right in line with what's going on in the secular academy.

For instance, Wheaton College in Chicago had a professor who would wear a hijab in class.

And again, that's the head covering of a Muslim. She was supposed to be a Christian lady, and here she is wearing the

Muslim head covering and so forth. They have another professor there called

Gary Burge. For years he's been, again, holding to basically pro -Hamas views and so forth, been teaching there at Wheaton.

And his textbook is taught at other Christian schools like Biola in Los Angeles and so forth.

And so what you're seeing is that even within these Christian schools, you're seeing quite a change in this acceptance of critical race theory.

And again, who are the, let's say the arch -typical villains? Well, it's the

Jews. And it's, to be honest with you, white people. It's certain

Christians who are not being open to some of the issues that are going on in the world today and so forth.

And so you see our Christian colleges are infected with this stuff.

Now when it comes to denominations, when you could first see it in the Southern Baptist Convention, and as a

Southern Baptist, I can speak more about that denomination than the other ones. But yet I do know when the other, almost every major denomination

I know, they haven't been infected on some level with social justice and critical race theory.

And the Southern Baptist Convention, when you first saw it, it was in the year 2019. At the

Southern Baptist Convention, they had what was called Resolution 9. And in Resolution 9, of course, critical race theory was called useful tools so that we can determine what racism is.

And of course, they were saying, now listen, we're not accepting it as an overall philosophy.

We're not doing that. But it's a good way to be able to detect racism that's going on in our denomination and so forth.

But once you accept their definition of racism and so forth, once you start using those useful tools, as they call them, there's a lot of presuppositions that go behind that.

And so you can't just simply say, oh, it's just going to help us to, we don't accept the overall worldview, but yet we accept that it is the useful tool for us, you see, as if the scriptures are not enough, as if the scriptures are not sufficient to tell us what sin is.

What we need is critical race theory to tell us what sin is, you see.

No. But yet the Southern Baptist Convention passed that and celebrated it.

Danny Aiken, for instance, the president at Southeastern Seminary, he came out and said, now look, he goes, we don't accept, again, he does the usual line of, we don't accept all of it.

But he goes, but many things in there, many things in critical race theory is actually consistent with biblical revelation.

It's actually consistent with the word of God. And this is the typical way you do it. What you have to do to make a worldly philosophy, to bring it into the church, you must show how it really hooks together with scripture.

So see what critical race theory is doing here. It's just exactly what scripture is teaching over here and over here and so forth.

You see, this is what they try to do. And so again, it was accepted.

Now, the person pushing it from the platform was a man named Curtis Woods. And at that time, he was a seminary professor at Southern Seminary with me.

And he was the one pushing it. He did his doctorate at Southern Seminary.

It's all about critical race theory. Very positive. He was all for it. And when

Al Mohler hired him, who's the president of Southern Seminary, he knew exactly who he was hiring.

This man, again, was one who wanted to really spread the gospel of critical race theory.

And that was the exact type of person Mohler wanted to hire on his faculty. And so a little later, when

I'd already gotten in enough trouble, been in the dean's office enough, and I was what I would call dead man walking on the campus, meaning my date of departure was going to be soon.

They invited me to a trustee lunch. And I thought, you know,

I'm in enough trouble now. I don't need to go to talk to the trustees and get myself in more trouble.

But then I thought, well, wait a minute. I'm dead man walking. What does it matter?

And therefore, I said, I think I will go. And so I'm sitting there with a trustee and I go, let me ask you as a trustee and as a pastor down in Arkansas, I said, what did you think of the

Southern Baptist Convention this year? And that was again 2019. And he goes, he goes,

I didn't like it. I said, what didn't you like? And he didn't want to answer that question.

So I had to ask more questions. Did you like the panel on racism? No. I said,

OK, did you like Russell Moore's address and so forth? No. I said, what did you think about Resolution 9?

He goes, I didn't like it. I go, well, let me ask you. You know, the guy who was on the stage there pushing

Resolution 9 was Curtis Woods. He teaches here. You do know that, don't you? He goes, yes,

I do. I said, as a trustee, what are you going to do? And immediately he goes into, hey, look,

I've only been a trustee four years. I can't, I later,

I put my finger in his chest and said, listen, do your job.

The other trustees watched it. I went from dead man walking to you can almost bury me now because,

I mean, you know, it was it was. But this is what goes on.

He was afraid. He had fear. He even told me, he goes, there are members of my church that want us to leave the

Southern Baptist Convention. And I remember telling him, that's being a good shepherd.

You know that you've got members who are willing to say this, you see, that's good. But he was, he was afraid, because he knew what would happen to him.

He knew what would happen. He would be blackballed. And if he lost the church he was in, there's no other

Southern Baptist Church, it would be very hard to find another Southern Baptist Church that would hire him.

So he knew the problems that was going to come his way. And he was like, no,

I'm not going to do it. And this is what you see throughout the Southern Baptist Convention. You see,

I wasn't, this is not my notes, but I got to tell you this story. And you're going to say it runs in the family.

What's wrong with the Fullers? My son was invited to a, a group of pastors meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

They shouldn't have invited my son. And he didn't talk to me. I'm telling you, he didn't talk to me beforehand. And so he went, and this was right after Ed Litton's plagiarism went on, if you're familiar with that situation.

And so they go, okay, is there any other comments before we dismiss? And my son raises his hand, he goes, why don't we come up with a resolution about Ed Litton and say that's not good for pastors to plagiarize their sermons.

Now he's doing this in front of a bunch of pastors in Baton Rouge area. And immediately it was like Paul saying, you know,

I'm a Pharisee and the Sanhedrin explodes, you know, it was just like that.

Some of the, very few of the pastors said, yes, that's a good idea. Most of them were like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Let's not do that. Let's not do that. So later on, he went to the

Louisiana Baptist Convention and did the same thing. They didn't even want to debate it. They didn't even want it brought up.

Here's a pastor who is plagiarizing his sermons, who's the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And we can't say that's wrong. You see, we've got problems.

We've got serious problems in the way things are. But of course, most of my experience comes from Southern Seminary, where I taught for 22 years.

And when I first went there, you know, I could still see problems that was going on.

And when I would mention it, I would be told, well, look, you know, there's still some old faculty here, some old liberal faculty.

We're just going to be patient, let them go. There was always excuses made for why there were problems.

But if you sort of go back and do the math, when Moeller became president in 93, and if you basically go out about 10 to 15 years, and the reason why those dates are important was the trustees that brought him in as the president, they had all retired now.

And the new trustees who are now sort of running Southern Seminary, to be quite honest with you, they were basically all handpicked by Al Moeller.

And I learned how this worked because I have a friend, lives in North Carolina, and he is a man of wealth.

Let's just put it that way. I'll just call him a man of wealth. And he got a call one day from one of the presidents of the

Southern Baptist Conventions, of the seminaries. And he asked my friend, he goes, how would you like to be a trustee for me?

And fortunately for that president, he did not hire my guy. Because this guy, he would not tolerate the stuff that's going on, you know.

And he would have been a thorn in his side. When my friend told me this, I went, I get it now.

This is how it works. You see, technically it's not supposed to be this way. The presidents are not supposed to hire their bosses, you see.

That's what's going on. But because the situation is corrupt, these presidents are able to hire their own people, you see.

And so after 10 or 15 years, that's when you see Moeller heading back toward the liberal position.

For if you knew Moeller back in the 80s, he was against the doctrine of inspiration. He thought it was absolute foolishness.

He was for women pastors. I mean, you just go right down all the liberal views. Moeller was there all the way.

But when it came time to become president, they're going to name the next president, he made a quick switch and he became the next president.

He became conservative. All of a sudden, he believed in the inspiration of scriptures. It was amazing, the conversion that he had.

But once he got his, once he got his guys on the trustee board, his bosses basically, then

Moeller starts moving back in the other direction. And so he wrote an article, I think what the year was about 2004, in which he says for the homosexual community, one of their key ideas is the notion of sexual orientation.

You're born gay. You're born with a certain sexual orientation. And so how can you hold somebody accountable?

How can you say they're sinning? If they're born that way, it's just nature, you see.

And he goes, see, that's what he said. He goes, that's a key position of theirs.

And that's really their linchpin teaching. And he was right. But about three years later, guess what?

He's now teaching that. He's now saying that he believes that people are born with a homosexual orientation.

Now, later on, again, when I was in his office in trouble, he asked me, you know, do

I still have confidence in him? And which was a very good question. And my answer was,

I'll tell you when I had real doubts about you, when you accepted sexual orientation.

I said, that's when it began. And I said, let me ask you, is there an orientation for thieves?

And he goes, yes. I said, is there an orientation for adulterers?

Yes. And I go, are you telling me there's an orientation for every sin?

And he had to say, yes. And I looked at him and I said, no, there's something called a sinful nature.

And that sinful nature might express itself in different ways. But we're not born homosexuals.

We're not born adulterers. You see, we're not born thieves.

OK, that's not the way it is. But again, that was he had to say those things, because how can you say on the one hand, how can you say, yeah, these people are born a certain way?

Well, OK, well, what about these people over here? Well, no, they're not. It makes no sense, you see.

But that's when it started. And then he got up before a bunch of homosexual activists and repented that he did not believe in sexual orientation.

Do you know what that means? Those of us who deny sexual orientation, we're in sin. You see, he repented, you see, that he did this.

So I saw the problems coming. But yet there was one problem I didn't see coming.

Apparently, my head was in the sand. I taught Old Testament and, you know, my head was in the sand.

But I was at a was in a faculty meeting and one of the other faculty members gets up and at the very end of the meeting and I could tell

Mueller became very uncomfortable. And he says, have you seen these videos? And he starts talking about these videos.

And he goes, critical race theory is being taught on this campus and different things. And I could tell Mueller wanted, I mean, he wanted that stopped immediately.

But what he was saying, not critical race theory, but he wanted that talk. We got to dismiss now. We got to go.

And I didn't know what that professor was talking about. And so as soon it was over, I'd be lying to that professor.

And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, you don't know about those videos? I go, no. And he goes,

I'll send you the links. So I'm watching the videos and it's of a like four or five of our seminary faculty.

And you can see they're completely taken by the false philosophy, the elementary principles of the world.

And here they are talking about critical race theory and they're accepting this stuff.

And it's not just any faculty members. It's like the number two man at Southern Seminary, Al Moller's right hand man, who's teaching, who's talking about these things.

And as I saw these things, I was just like, wow, I didn't, I didn't even know this stuff.

I've been teaching there by that time, you know, 18 years or so. Okay.

I had no idea. Now, again, this stuff was taught a little bit later. It wasn't like taught when I first came and so forth.

It was being taught later. And then I knew I've got to do something about this.

Students are being corrupted and I could see that. And I couldn't look at those students in the face, you know, and teach them the

Word of God and say, thus says the Lord, look at them in the face and know we're corrupting these guys.

You know, we're teaching them stuff that is going to destroy their faith. And I saw that at Southern Seminary.

I saw that there would be students who would come in when they would first come in, they would be excited about the

Word of God and so forth. But at their end of their time, they weren't excited about the Word of God anymore.

They were more excited about the wisdom of this world. They were more excited about scholars and scholarship and not the

Word of God. Okay. And so I could see it. And I knew

I couldn't just stay quiet. I couldn't just, you know, ignore it.

There's no way that was going to happen. And by the way, just a little aside here, as I was watching those videos on YouTube, you know how when you watch something on YouTube, there's those little other videos on the right.

They're kind of close. Well, I see this guy on this other video and I'm looking at it and he's up against like a wall talking, you know,

I could see that about him, you know. And then I looked at what it said. It says, you know, the stuff going on at Southeastern.

So I actually stopped watching what I was watching at Southern Seminary. What's Southeastern doing?

I click it and it's that man right there. It's John Harris. I've never heard of this guy before and he's not doing podcasts or anything, but he put this one thing, as far as I know, was just one thing at the time on there.

And he's talking about Southeastern Seminary. Well, my wife wanted to go to Costco, so I had to download this and listen to it on the way to Costco.

So I'm on my way to Costco listening to him. I stopped three minutes into his talk.

I stopped it. I told my wife, I said, he's telling the truth. And she's like, how do you know you don't go to Southeastern?

I go, he's describing Southern Seminary. When I heard what he said immediately,

I knew that's it. He is exactly right. And I knew he was a student.

And I'm like, if a student is going to speak out, you know, he put more pressure on me.

Let's just say it that way. He put the pressure on me. It was good pressure. And I'm like, you know, something's got to be said.

And so it came to a head in 2019,

I believe it was when Matt Hall, Matt Hall was the number two man at Southern Seminary.

And Matt Hall was the one who was really teaching critical race theory. He was the one who was really pushing it there.

And if you listen to him, he says this, he goes, when I went to, I think it was Grove City College is where he went to.

He says, I didn't hear any of this. He says, when I went to Southern Seminary, I didn't hear any of this.

But when he went to the University of Kentucky and did his doctorate there, he talks about really what he's saying is

I got infected there. He got infected with critical race theory. And then he says this, I put the dots together.

And what he meant by that was he took critical race theory and he put it together with scripture.

And the way he would say it a lot of times, we're all born sinners. And critical race theory is just showing us how deep our sin goes.

We're all racist. I'm a racist. And of course, that's what he's famous for. If you've ever seen him online,

I'm a racist. I'll tell you the story later on at a church. He wanted to be renewed as an elder at this church.

And again, it's very much a Southern Seminary church. But some of the students were starting to say, hey, wait a minute.

Some of them were having second thoughts about critical race theory. And they were going to go against Matt Hall in being a continuous an elder at this church.

And a lady gets up and says, now let me get to this. She's a white lady.

She goes, let me get this straight. I'm a racist because I'm white. Is that correct, Matt? And he's just, you know, he doesn't know what to say.

And then finally, he goes, well, not all white people are racist. Well, then the question is, why are you?

And so he, by the way, he didn't, he was not renewed as an elder. And finally, he left

Southern Seminary. He's now at Biola, you know, doing the same corruption there as he did at Southern.

This is what happens. A lot of people will go to these secular schools and so forth.

They'll get infected, bring it back to the seminary. And it's that thing that they got infected with.

That's their driving thing that they think. So they got some new knowledge, you see.

And we don't want to be out of step with the world. We want to, you know, we don't want to be these fundamentalists,

Bible thumping fundamentalists and so forth. You know, you don't want to be that way. And what they do is they'll come to a seminary and what they what they're what they're driving thing they want to teach is their heresy.

And so whatever is popular in culture, whatever is popular in the world, I'm telling you, it's taught in these seminaries and so forth.

And so, of course, I had to speak out against Matt Hall being the provost at Southern Seminary.

And I laid it out. I basically what I did is I just quoted. You can go on YouTube and you can see these things that Matt Hall says.

I'm just quoting these things, you know, and said, hey, this is not acceptable.

And this is something that if we're going to go this way as a seminary, you know, it's the it's the way of really destruction spiritually.

When I got done, Al Mohler was furious. I mean, absolutely furious with me for what I said.

And he started to defend critical race theory. And he started talking about how whiteness, which is one of the buzzwords of critical racism.

And he goes, we have a real problem of whiteness in America.

Then he talked about systemic racism, you see. And of course, he believes there's not any institution in America that has not, you know, it's not racist.

You don't even have to have you can have an organization where there's no racist, but it's still racist.

The organization that's systemic racism. You see the whole the whole thing is corrupt and so forth. And so he's talking about all these things.

And then finally, he makes this statement. And I'll never forget this one. Now, remember the context.

The context is he's defending critical race theory, because that's what I went after Matt Hall, his right hand man for.

And he finally says, Marxism has insights.

Marxism has insights, because you see, critical race theory, if you were to look at his mother and father, as it were, you know, look at its lineage, it goes back to Marxism in the sense that in Marxism, there's the good guys and the bad guys.

And in critical race theory, there's the good guys and the bad guys, you see. And if you're born white, you're basically one of the bad guys.

You're black, you're a person of color, you're one of the good guys. I mean, that's the way it's sort of laid out.

It's a system of perpetual conflict. And some of the churches I can tell you in Louisville who've tried this have had nothing but conflict.

That's what happens. By definition, it's going to bring you conflict. I don't care where it's at. It's going to happen that way.

And so to him, critical, you know, in other words, Marxism has insights.

It's very sad. Now, Mueller today, I noticed recently he came out and he's condemning these college things.

And he goes, this is critical race theory. It's really bad and so forth. But guess what? He still has professors there teaching it there.

So on the one hand, he's against it because again, he doesn't want to come out. This is,

I mean, he's not going to come out and say, I believe in critical race theory. He doesn't want to say that publicly.

He's going to say, oh yeah, critical race theory is bad, you see. But on the other hand, he's teaching it.

He's teaching it. I've heard him straight from his mouth and so forth. You can look at the books that are published by people like Jarvis Williams and others who are faculty members there pushing this stuff.

It's undeniable. But yet the deception and the deceit that is done is very,

I mean, when you see it, first you don't even believe it. You can't believe the deceit and the deception. At a seminary?

And the answer is yes, at a seminary. At a denomination? Yes, at a denomination.

And in churches? Yes, indeed, you see. And so it's, I've seen what critical race theory, social justice, and these things have done in, again, churches, seminaries, and so forth.

It is causing, again, great problems.

I've already mentioned some of the reasons of why this happens. Again, we want to be very much like the world, unfortunately.

What happens is people become enamored with scholars and scholarship.

I remember when I would teach at Southern sometimes, especially the PhD students, and I would say, Paul says this, and they would go, oh.

And then I'd turn around and mention some scholar and say, you know, N .T. Wright says it. Oh, really? And I'm like, uh -huh.

Uh -huh. You've been infected. And so what happens is we become much more enamored with man and with human scholarship, where the apostles, the prophets, no, no, no, not so much of them.

And so one of the problems is we become enamored with worldly philosophy and really personalities.

We become enamored with them. And by that, we become corrupted. And again, I saw that time and time again at Southern Seminary.

Another thing is there's always, we want to be novel. We want to be cutting edge.

You know, we want to, and again, so when something new comes down the pike, you know, we want to be there, you see.

We want to be, as it were, ahead of the curve. You know, I was, I was teaching this before anybody else was, you know.

And so we have that. But finally, and most importantly, we want the approval of the world.

We preach a gospel that is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the

Jews. That's not comfortable. That's not comfortable, you see. And so we don't want to be perceived as foolish.

We don't want to be perceived as a stumbling block. And therefore, what we want to do is take the gospel and we can just change it a little bit and the world will listen to us.

And the world will, you know, will be more accepting of us, you see. And so what we want at the end of the day is we want the approval of the world.

But the true church of Jesus Christ has to make a decision. Do we want the approval of God or the approval of man?

That's what it really boils down to at the end of the day. We don't want to be regarded as racist, bigots, or any word that has the word phobia in front of it, you know.

We don't want that. And so we will try to do little compromises, little changes here and there, so that we will not have to take on what the

Bible describes as the reproach of Christ. That's what we need to do.

If we're being praised with the world, we don't have the reproach of Christ, you see.

We need that reproach of Christ. And so that is what we want. At the end of the day, we're either going to desire man's approval or God's approval at the end of the day.

Let me read you just a couple more verses and with that I'll let you go. "...that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God, above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life..."

And that's what we need to do. We need to hold fast to the word of life.

"...so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory, because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain."

And then one more couple of verses talking about Moses here. "...choosing rather to endure ill treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward."