WWUTT 1455 Q&A Women Pastors, The Babylon Bee, Spiritual Dictation, Win Worley

Is the subject of women pastors an essential doctrinal issue? Did the Holy Spirit dictate the letters we write in the New Testament? And who is Wynne Worley and is he sound? The answers to these questions when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible teaching podcast that we may be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky, who is not with me today. I am flying solo. I'm sad. Speaking of sad, so I had this article that I've been working on about women pastors in Southern Baptist churches.

And I teased this out on Twitter about three weeks ago. I said I was going to do an exegesis of 1 Timothy 2, 11 through 3, 7, and that I was going to make the argument that the subject of women as pastors is a fundamental issue.

It is not a second or third tier issue. This is a fundamental issue for the church. Not meaning that if you believe that a woman can be a pastor, that means you're unsaved, although I would be really concerned with your trajectory.

We're not talking about it as it pertains to a doctrine of salvation, but it's still a fundamental doctrine for the church. This comes in the letter that Paul wrote to Timothy. And in 1 Timothy 3, 15, he says that he is writing these things so that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.

One of those instructions Paul gives to Timothy as to how a church is to function in a God honoring way, the pastor must be a man. And that instruction is crystal clear. So this is a fundamental instruction for the church.

If you get this wrong, it is going to affect the entire church. As my pastor, Tom Buck has said, as goes the pulpit, so goes the church. And Charles Spurgeon has said, the pulpit is the Thermopylae of Christendom.

There, the fight will be lost or won. So who a church puts in their pulpit is critical to the life and vitality of that church body. God has said that the person in the pulpit is to be a man, and he is to meet a specific list of qualifications, which we have listed in places like 1 Timothy 3, 1 -7, Titus 1, 5 -9.

May a church test that man according to that list of qualifications. And if he is found faithful, then let him serve, he desires a good thing. Paul says there in 1 Timothy 3, 1. Now there is a certain faction among Southern Baptists.

And I'm gonna say the Southern Baptist Fellowship. I really don't like calling the Southern Baptist Convention a denomination because we're not. We're autonomous churches that are in a fellowship together.

We don't answer to anybody. There's not a hierarchy. So our church, First Baptist Lindale, we govern ourselves. We're a self-governing church. That's what it means to be autonomous. So we don't have to ask anybody's permission to do anything.

We have decided that we have a certain set of values that we share with another group of churches that are part of this fellowship, and that's what makes up the Southern Baptist Convention. This is the largest fellowship of Protestant churches.

So what you see happening in the Southern Baptist Convention is often reflective or it'll either reflect or it'll affect other evangelical churches in America. So whatever's happening in Southern Baptist churches is pretty important for just about anybody in the church to pay attention to.

Well, in fact, even secularists, even the mainstream media pays attention to what happens among Southern Baptists. There will be, when we get to the annual meeting here in about a week and a half, there's gonna be plenty of reporters there covering what it is that we do, because we've got 14 million adherents or something like that.

Now, regular weekly attendance in Southern Baptist churches is not that. I think it's like four and a half million or something. So 14 million who say that they are Southern Baptists or 14 million in the membership rosters, but only about four to five million are attending church on a weekly basis.

And that number has been declining for many years. Anyway, back to the whole thing of there being a certain faction among Southern Baptists. So there's a group within Southern Baptist churches that are drifting left.

They believe that women can be pastors. And there are even Southern Baptist churches on their websites, boasting, we ordain women. In fact, the three largest Southern Baptist churches all have women as pastors.

Saddleback Church just joined those ranks a month ago when they ordained their first three women pastors. You also have Fellowship Church, which is Ed and Lisa Young, and you have Elevation Church in Charlotte, which is Stephen and Holly Furtick, who are pastors of that church.

Last year, I was calling out Church by the Glades, David Hughes and his wife. I can't remember her name, but she is listed as a pastor of that church as well. So it's not the majority of Southern Baptist churches, but it does seem to be the loudest and the biggest.

It's like the elites. They're starting to say that it is good and right for women to be ordained and to position them in the pulpit. This is something that does need to be done. We have to decide what to do with these churches, whether to disfellowship them or what needs to happen, because if something is not done, it's going to drag down the rest of the fellowship along with it.

So that's a big hot button issue that is coming up with the annual meeting here in a week and a half. I've been working on an article about that. So that way you've got one place where you can go and you can see these different churches that claim to be Southern Baptist, but they have women pastors.

I'm doing this as a blog. I'm doing it, there's going to be a podcast. So like a special edition of the podcast, one of the Saturday episodes or something like that. You'll hear the audio version of the blog.

And I'm also doing a video where screenshots of these churches will be shown. So you can see this is, you know, here it is on their website where they've got a woman pastor there. That way somebody's got it as a resource, they're able to look at it.

So I teased this out on Twitter three weeks ago. I've been working on the article that long. I started this whole thing saying like, something really sad happened. And I haven't even gotten to that part yet.

Anyway, so I've been working on this article for three weeks. I was about to publish it yesterday, 11 o 'clock central time. So it was going to hit noon on the East Coast. I was done with this. Finally, all of my sources tagged, everything was ready to publish it.

All I had to do was copy and paste, copy it from the document that I was working on into my blog, WYSIWYG and hit publish. That's all I had to do. And my computer froze up. And very rarely, I rarely have freeze ups.

This is the best laptop I've ever owned. It's got a terabyte of memory. I maybe have a freeze up once a year or something. This happened to be that one freeze up for 2021. My computer locked up. And so, you know, no big deal.

I just restart. Well, when everything came back up, the article was gone. It was a blank page. It had the same amount of spaces, like exactly the same number of lines that the article had when I had typed it out, but it was just white blank space.

No matter what I did, I could not recover the document, the words that were in the document. I've never had that issue before. Never seen anything like that before. Fortunately, I recorded the audio. So I had already read through the script and recorded it and saved it.

But I have to listen to myself and type it all back out again. And it took 28 minutes just to read it out loud. So imagine how long it's taking me to listen to it and type it all out. So hopefully Monday or Tuesday, which is now going to be a week away from the annual meeting.

I was hoping to get it published earlier than that, but praise the Lord it's not totally lost because that was a lot of work. And yeah, so those who have been waiting for me to publish this article, that's part of the hangup.

Give me a few days to type this whole thing all back out and I'll get it on my blog soon. You can go to pastorgabe .com and that's where to find all of my articles. Okay, so earlier this week, I was a guest on the Babylon Bee podcast.

Some of you may have seen that. It published on June the 1st. And Kyle and Ethan who hosts the podcast, they did a segment with me, which they called sin or not sin. So they went through a list of things and had me say whether it was sin or not.

A lot of it was freedom of conscience sort of issues. If you are a paid subscriber to the Babylon Bee podcast, you got to listen to the second half in which they went through stupid things Christians say.

And then they asked me about some of the tweets that I've done as to whether or not I was proud of that tweet, or if I would take it back and say something else instead. I really thought that that portion of the interview was deeper.

The first half was just goofy. So if you went back and listened to it, if you haven't caught the interview, you can just type in Babylon Bee, Pastor Gabe or something like that. It'll come up. I got some questions from that.

Responding to Questions from the Babylon Bee Interview

So these first questions that I have here are all in regards to that interview that I did with the Babylon Bee. This is from Jason in Arkansas. He says, dear Pastor Gabe, in your interview with the Babylon Bee, you said that you should slam the door in the face of a Mormon missionary.

Hang on, let me make sure I'm reading that right. You said that you should slam the door in the... No, I did not say that. I said, don't slam the door in the face of a Mormon missionary. Following the instruction in 2 Timothy 2, verse 25, that the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone.

And we need to treat one another with gentleness and respect. So don't slam the door in somebody's face. However, if you don't want to invite them in, or you don't want to stand on the porch and have a conversation, you're not doing anything wrong if you just politely say, hey, listen, I don't have time to talk today, but thanks for stopping by and then closing the door.

Anyway, so Jason goes on and says, how about Jehovah's Witnesses? Can you slam the door on their face? No, same answer there as well. Treat opponents with gentleness. 1 Timothy 3 .15, in your heart, set apart Christ as holy, always ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within you, but do this with gentleness and respect.

This next comment comes from Z in Tallahassee. He says, Pastor Gabe, I have a question for your sin or not sin segment. Getting the COVID vaccine, sin or not sin. How about getting a vaccine of any kind?

Well, if you want to get the COVID vaccine, go right ahead. There's nothing wrong with that. I have a big problem with people who say that you are sinning if you don't get the COVID vaccine. See, that's sin.

If you tell people, if you bind a person's conscience to something that the Bible does not say is right or wrong, there's nothing in the Bible about getting vaccine. So if you're telling people, if you don't get a vaccine, then you're not obeying the command to love your neighbor.

That's absurd. You're being Pharisaical there. This is the Pharisees who were teaching the doctrines of men and implementing the laws of men, like washing your hands before dinner. Or the Pharisees saying to Jesus in Mark chapter seven, your disciples don't wash their hands.

And Jesus looking at them and saying, well, did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites as it is written, excuse me, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men.

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And so a person does when they're trying to say to others that you have to get vaccinated to be a good Christian, to actually love your neighbors.

And that's sin when you're heaping burdens on a person's conscience that way. So if you are convinced that you need to get the COVID vaccine, then do so. But if you don't want to get the COVID vaccine, you're not doing anything wrong by not getting it.

And same applies to any vaccine, vaccines of any kind. Thank you for your question Z. Next one comes from Stan in Kansas City. Pastor Gabe, in response to the question from the battle on B guys, is it a sin to eat a well done steak?

The answer is yes. Repent, you're welcome. Thank you for that Stan. So yeah, one of the questions that they asked me was eating a well done steak, sin or not sin? I happen to like well done steak. I really do.

A friend from our church here in Lindale had invited me over for steak. This was back in March. And I told him that I wanted my steak medium well. I was even putting a little bit more pink in there than I usually like.

Cause I'll, I typically just say, yeah, give it to me well done. But I decided to go medium well. And he just stared me down. It's like, okay, there's the door, you know. So apparently, yeah, if you're not eating it rare, bleeding, if it's not still mooing, then you're sinning somehow.

Don't eat a well done steak, I suppose. Thank you for catching me on that Stan. I would hate to enter into glory with charred remains of cow in my stomach. This next comment, oh, I just took this off of YouTube.

So this was from a commenter on YouTube on the Babylon Bee interview. And this person said, I love and support Pastor Gabe and I support mostly the Babylon Bee, but this interview was horrible and childish.

Avoid, thumbs down. Come on, man. They're a satire site. You watch the Babylon Bee for satire. You don't watch it for deep probing interviews. I think they have had actually some really good interviews.

Mine just wasn't one of them. If you want to hear the deep stuff, you got to listen to my podcast for that. Not the Babylon Bee, but I appreciate you listening anyway. Continuing on with further questions and you can submit questions to when we understand the text at gmail .com.

Spiritual Dictation and the Inspiration of Scripture

This one is from Callie and she says, hello, Pastor Gabe, I'm a music teacher and I've started making music history videos with a Christian worldview this last year. I use stock, I use photo stock much like you do, but I'm finding it hard to stay away from inappropriate photos during my searching.

Do you have any tips or websites you use to avoid running into this yourself? Thank you so much and thank you for your ministry. Callie, that is a really difficult dilemma and I don't have a good solution for you because this is one of the hardest parts about doing the what videos, is doing the image searches and knowing what I'm going to come up with when I do some of these searches.

Now, I have done some videos that were completely safe, never came across one inappropriate image. It was actually relatively easy to find the images that I need and put the video together. But then there's been other ones where I even think that it's going to be an easy video to do and then it turns out that, oh goodness, what did I click on?

What did I type on or what did I type in that yielded this particular search result? I'll give you an example of this. So there was one video that I did where I mentioned in the video a certain prophet from the Old Testament.

I'm not even going to tell you which prophet it was because I don't want you to repeat this search. I did a search for this prophet's name and it turns out that prophet also happens to be, shares the name with a popular supermodel and this model has done some very inappropriate photos and it doesn't matter that I had my filters on, I still got really inappropriate images.

This was just a casual Google search. So it wasn't through, you know, a certain stock photo site or something like that. And so it was, that turned out to be a really difficult video to make. I didn't think I was going to run into that kind of thing, did not even cross my mind.

But lo and behold, there's this popular supermodel that shares the name of a famous prophet. And so when you type that prophet's name in, that's what you get. There's been other times where, well, you know, the video that I just did not that long ago on bikinis.

Yeah, you can imagine the search results that I got for that one. Now, if you watch that video, all of the images are very tasteful. There's not a single image in that video of a woman in a bikini. So I managed to keep all that tasteful, but of course I'm going to see all of those images while I'm just looking for a picture of a bikini that's not even on anybody.

It's just a, you know, just a picture of a bikini like you would buy from a catalog. I guess it's those catalogs are not appropriate either. Anyway, see, this is even difficult to talk about. So I share your pain, Callie.

I understand. How is it that I'm able to overcome this? Well, there are certain things that I know that I can do to avoid those kinds of images. The stock photo site that I use, I'm not going to tell you what they are because I'm not going to tell you what that site is.

For a couple of reasons. Number one, I'm not advertising for them. And secondly, they're not clean. So just like with a Google search, I can type in the wrong thing on this stock photo site and end up with some things that I didn't mean to come across.

But you can set filters. So you've got your Google filters or whatever search engine you use. And then the stock photo site that you use will also have filters. It should anyway. So you can also activate those filters and kind of screen out some of the more inappropriate images.

I mean, it really seems impossible to avoid it altogether. I could do a search for a broom and come up with something just totally ridiculous and inappropriate. So I'm not sure how much help I have been for you.

I mean, in any of these circumstances, we need to take every thought captive and make it obey Christ. We need to seize our thoughts. We need to not dwell on them, not let them become temptation. When something is before our eyes, we know that we should not look at, we need to quickly get away from it.

Close that screen down, shut the computer down, go do something else if you need to. That our minds would be subject to Christ as we've been talking about this past week on the podcast out of 1 Corinthians 2.

We must have the mind of Christ. And so that means even hating those things that are evil and desiring to dwell upon those things that are pleasing unto the Lord. This next question comes from Henry. He says, hello, Gabe.

The latest Q &A episode, in the latest Q &A episode, you said that Jude was quoting the Holy Spirit when he wrote his letter. This sounds like you believe in the verbal dictation theory of biblical inspiration.

Is this correct? I haven't given the different views a lot of study and I would be interested to hear you discuss them and answer questions like, is there only one valid view that all Christians must hold?

Is this a primary, secondary or tertiary issue, et cetera? Thanks, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I don't know what it was I said. I don't know what the exact quote was regarding what Jude wrote came from the Holy Spirit.

I know that what we read in the book of Jude was divinely inspired. Whether it was absolutely dictated to him, word for word, I don't know. I mean, that quote that he writes down from Enoch has got to come from somewhere.

And as I said, what was it last week, the week before? Yeah, two weeks ago. I don't think that Jude was pulling from some other kind of writing. He is writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Now, there are parts of the Bible that I believe were absolutely dictated. And so what was written down was exactly what God said to write. Thus sayeth the Lord. A prophet is saying exactly what God told them to say.

Moses wrote down what God told him to write. He went into the tent of meeting and talked with God as one speaks to a friend face to face. That's what it says in Exodus 33, 11. So what God told Moses to write is what he wrote.

There are things in scripture that were definitely dictated. Paul's epistles, no, this is not Paul writing down. Well, God told me to say this. And so here, every word of this is dictated by the Holy Spirit.

That's definitely not the case. Romans through Hebrews. Jude is also writing a letter. So he's not having anything dictated to him. But what he writes regarding the quote from Enoch comes from the Holy Spirit, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

He's not going to some sort of historical writing and he's like looking for quotes. I need some quotes that I need to write in here to persuade these Christians that I'm writing to. It's by the Holy Spirit that he wrote what he wrote and we know it came from Enoch because it came from the Spirit of God.

So that was really the point that I was making with that explanation. Not necessarily that Jude wrote word for word what the Holy Spirit told him to write. Last question here. This comes from Vicki in Minnesota.

Wynne Worley, Spiritual Warfare, and Sound Teaching

Pastor Gabe, I have been trying to find out more information about Wynne Worley and if he was a sound pastor. A friend of mine has all of his pamphlets slash books and says that they are all very good and helpful.

One of the titles is Christians Can and Do Have Demons. This one by itself made me uncomfortable let alone his other ones focusing on demons and witchcraft. Do you know anything about these booklets and or Wynne Worley?

Thank you so much for all your teachings. God bless you and your family. I appreciate that Vicki. I did read some Wynne Worley. It was years ago. I mean, I think I was, I may have even been 11 or 12, 13 or something like that.

I may not have read anything of his since then but he wrote a very famous series regarding spiritual warfare back in the 70s. It was called Hosts of Hell and some of that series I read when I was a kid.

He's really wonky. I do not recommend Wynne Worley. There's nothing specifically that I can think of off the top of my head that I would be able to tell you here's why the guy is wrong, but he's Pentecostal.

I mean, he believes in speaking in tongues, the gibberish that gets called speaking in tongues, not really speaking in tongues. He believes that you can bind Satan and the thing that goes along or the joke that goes along with that is if you can bind Satan, then who is it that keeps letting him go?

Anyway, so I don't recommend Wynne Worley stuff. If you are interested in spiritual warfare since that was a Worley's niche, I would recommend instead a teaching series from R .C. Sproul that was called Angels and Demons.

And he also wrote a book called Unseen Realities, Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons. There's also, I've got an old Bible study from John MacArthur. I don't know if this has been reprinted, if there's an updated version of this.

I've got the old one from like back in the 80s, but John MacArthur did a Bible study called God, Satan and Angels. You could look that one up, whether it's still on Amazon or I don't know, maybe somebody has published it in like a PDF somewhere or there could be a reprinting.

Anyway, look that one up. I didn't look it up beforehand, but John MacArthur's book, God, Satan and Angels. That's a Bible study that you could do if you're interested in some of the more supernatural aspects of these beings that we cannot see.

Hey, God bless you guys. Thank you so much for listening to the program. Next week is the Wokeness and the Gospel Conference. I'm gonna be there. Becky is still really trying. Don't know for sure if she's gonna make it or not.

We're trying to line up a babysitter for us because the babysitter would have to watch the kids all day, Friday and Saturday, since that's when we're gonna be gone. It's at Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas.

You can find out more info or register just a week out, but you can still register by going to wokenessandgospel .org. We will have what t-shirts there and some other stuff as well. A few books. I'm hoping my books get printed and they get to me in time and I'm able to have them at the table.

Anyway, so we'll have a booth there. If you're gonna be at the Wokeness and Gospel Conference, we hope to see you there. God bless. We're back to our study on Monday, God willing, in First Corinthians.

This is when we understand the text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web and we thank you for selecting ours, but this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family.

Find a good gospel teaching, Christ-centered church to worship with this weekend and join us again Monday for more Bible study when we understand the text.