Dead Men Walking Podcast Greg Moore, Jason Hamlin, & Greg Withrow Episode 7

Opening Banter and Sound Check

Did you hear Trump's, did you see his meme yesterday on his page? It was like, you investigated me, now it's my turn. But he had this smile on his face, you know, I mean, it's Trump, but it's, you know.

Check. We all know about that. Let's put these headsets on and get a level check real quick here. I don't think I can reach, so I'll just. Will those reach? No. Oh, you wanna what? They will. They will.

I thought you were sitting there, so I looked around here. Okay. Cool. Should be good? Yep. And I'll watch my volume. That's a tight, when I first, when I first got these, I said, oh, this won't be too tight, but it's a tight squeeze of three people.

In this little space. Right. But it's, I mean it. Till I get a different camera. Unless you moved everything, you know, big room.

Are you, test that really quick. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Yeah, see, I like it right there. Stay right up on it if you can. It's not in my headphones for some reason. Oh, you gotta shorten that guy. Gotcha. Can you hear it? Yep, yep. Now? Yep. Now? Good to go.

Hold on.

Oh, this is a new experience, that's for sure. Is it? Yeah. And I'm gonna have you push that up a little. Get right on it. Go ahead and eat it. I washed these. They're all clean. All right. There's no COVID on them.

Okay. Better not be. So let's see. I'm gonna, so you're three. I'm gonna take you up a little bit. Just give me a test. Say your name, say whatever you want. Greg Withrow. Okay. That's my name. Don't wear it out.

Don't wear it out. Don't wear it out. I remember saying that as a kid. Yeah, I said it last week. Okay, I'm gonna turn me down a little bit though because I get, I'm up on that mic. It's funny, I edit it in my sound and it's like, oh, there's Greg.

Yeah. Okay, here was, here's Jason, here's Greg. I'm almost too loud. Well, you get excited and you start.

Yeah. But my excitement usually with a microphone is just like, man, I'm really excited right now. Yeah, no, it's good.

And we can, I'm just doing that to get it going but we'll start in a minute. So sound good in the headphones? Yeah. Not too loud? It's pretty loud. It's pretty loud? Okay, so you are, so we're gonna take you down about, how about now?

A little quieter for you, Greg? Yeah, yeah. And Jay, where are you at? I'm good. You're good?

I think so. Okay. I'm hard of hearing. I sat behind a bass cab. Oh, man. Well, so did you probably. Yeah, 10 years of my life on the road.

Yeah, my hearing's gone. He toured in Japan and Europe and everywhere else. He was a musician on the road. For what? Eight years or? 10 years.

10 years on the road. Yeah, yeah, we toured all over. Lost a lot of my hearing.

Yeah, it was only till about the last year that I was like, maybe I should start wearing, you know, earplugs or something.

It was always just the, you know, you could feel the audience, you know, a little bit more. Yeah, I like that too. If you didn't have the plugs in, you know. But it was, yeah, I mean, probably a bad idea, but.

At the time.

Yeah, okay. One of my best friends was on the road for 30 years. Oh, are you serious? Yeah. Who was that, around here or? All over the world, actually. Steve Camp. Oh, yeah, Steve Camp, yeah. Yeah. I've heard, yeah.

Maybe we should have played the, named that tune with him and give him all Steve Camp. Right, right. I have a thing on here where you can hit a little sound and it gives you a little clip of like a Christian music and we had a game with a few guests before.

I did it with Daniel and Rocky. Okay, how'd they do? Rocky thought he was gonna do really well and he did horrible. All 90s? Yeah. Again, or early 2000s? Yeah, it was mostly 90s. Stuff I grew up with.

I go back to the earliest, second chapter of Axlows. Oh, there we go. Okay, in Stonehill. Yeah. Well, I know some of that, too. I could probably name you the whole collection of Keith Green. That's what I grew up playing on the piano.

I can tell you where I was when he died. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Wow. Man, that book No Compromise was something else. I read that when I was like 13 or 14. Yeah, I interviewed him about six or eight months before he died.

Oh, wow. Geez, save that for the podcast. Yeah. Really? That's awesome. Okay. All right, so I'm gonna give, we'll start here and then I'll give you a little introduction. Maybe we'll do a little banter.

We'll get into your testimony. And then let's just jump into the sovereignty of God and go from there. Are you cool with just kind of going free range? Yeah. I don't really have any, maybe we can define what it is, you know, what we believe it to be.

And I won't let you do most of the talking on that. But, you know, if there's any, I can edit all this in post. So if there's any ums or what was I saying, or, you know, we'll clean it up, make you sound like a professional.

Happens to be all the time. I didn't do that for the first three episodes, but I did it for the rest of them. And the last one we did, oh, I listened to it back. It was like, oh, wow, this is. We sounded smart.

Well, I'm, it's exactly. You know how many people I'm fooling? For that. Fooling so many people for that. There's an app, make me smart. It was funny because I could recognize the wave of when I was saying um.

Oh, are you serious? It looks the same on a, like a wave form. Okay. I go, oh, there's an um, and. And you, and it.

I was like, I'm saying it way too much. Wow, it just happened. I don't know why um ends up just coming out. It's just a placeholder for. And I'm sure you go through that when you're speaking. You know, when you're.

He's probably, he's been doing it a while. He's probably worked all his ums out. I've been doing it for 42 years. Oh, well then you're, yeah, you're totally past that.

My faithful wife has informed me of all the little ticks. Nuances. Over the years. Yeah. That's great. All right, ready? Just give me a, whoops. Just give me 20 seconds of silence here as we go through the intro, okay?

Here we go. Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location. Dead Men Walking starts now. Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dead Men Walking.

I'm your host, Greg Moore, back with my co-host, Jason Hamlin. Jason, how are you, sir? Hello, doing great, doing great. He's gonna stay up on that mic this time so we can hear him. Oh yeah, let's do that.

Well, we've got a special guest in studio with us today. Pastor Greg Withrow. Am I saying that right? Is it Withrow? He is the senior pastor of the Assemblies of Christians in Lambertville, correct? And he's also the director of the Toledo Reform.

I'm sorry, he was the director of the Toledo Reform Theological Conference from 1994 to 2008. And a current board member of FIRE, the Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals. Greg, it's good to have you.

Nice to be here. And thank you so much for stopping by. We were gonna talk about, today on the episode, the sovereignty of God and his providence, what that means to us, where we find it in the Bible, and all those fun things.

But first, just for everyone listening, can you give us a little background on your bio? You know, how the Lord saved you, maybe some journeys that you've been through, and just a little background on the history of you, for the listeners.

Sure. I came to know the Lord in 19, I think, 73. I'm not one of those guys that drove a stake and wrote the date down someplace. Life was overwhelming. I wasn't worried about what month and day it was.

My life, I needed a change. I'd been married, I met my wife. In fact, my wife and I are graduates of Bedford High School. Okay. We met in 1968, and we were 16, got married. When she graduated from high school, we were both 18 years old.

So we're celebrating, this year, 50 years of marriage. Congratulations. In November. And out of high school, got married. Like a lot of young men, began to wonder what I had done, and where my life was going, made a lot of bad choices.

Enough bad choices that my wife was, I had one son born, she was just pregnant with the second. And she was, my oldest son was two and a half, I think. And she was already contacting an attorney, and looking at getting a divorce, to be honest with you.

And I never go over what kind of life I lived. Because, to be honest with you, if you were to say, how bad was your life? Well, it was worse than many, and it was a lot better than some, as well. Sure.

The truth of the matter is, is we're all saved from all of our sins. And all of our sins, no matter what they are, grieve us to God. They're in rebellion against God. And so, I was saved from those. One day, one of the guys at work, had given me the book, Late Great Planet Earth.

I don't even hold to that position anymore, but eschatology, pre-trib, pre-millennial type of eschatology. I had never heard of anything. It had no Bible training, no Bible. It wasn't raised at all, in scripture.

Okay. And I trusted him. He was the only one, where I worked, in a two-owned eye trade, that I actually trusted. And I went home, and I was reading that book. And all of the eschatological issues, that were presented in that book, really didn't faze me.

But the last chapter in the book, was a book on redemption, on salvation. It was on the work of Christ. I was home alone, and I read that last chapter. And I was acutely aware, that I had offended the Holy God.

And I became overwhelmed, with the depth of my sin. I remember going off into the bedroom. The TV was on, Billy Graham was preaching. And I went into the bedroom, and I began to pray. And I began to ask the Lord for forgiveness.

And I was weeping. And right in the midst of it, all I hear Graham in the living room, preaching out of 1 Corinthians 6. And he says, he's saying that not the effeminate, the drunkard, he lists all these people, that will never inherit the kingdom of heaven.

And he stopped. And I was everything but effeminate, you know. And I defended all of those, except that. And I became overwhelmed, that I couldn't be saved. And I just remember, like a child, I got crying.

So loud, that suddenly no air came out anymore. It was just a silent scream. And right in the silence, I heard him finish the next verse. And such were some of you. And I knew I could be saved. I knew I could be forgiven.

40, it's almost 47 years later, the sense of forgiveness, was, it still overwhelms me. That I could be saved. I knew several things, not knowing anything about scripture. I knew that if my wife divorced me, I deserved it.

I lost my kids, I deserved it. She married another man, and there was another man involved in their life, I deserved it. If he took my life, I deserved it. I knew all those things. And I just threw myself in his mercy.

And confessed things to my wife. I left nothing on the table, unconfessed. Laid everything onto her, and then just waited to see what the Lord would do. And our relationship was damaged. Very, very damaged.

I mean, on my part as well as hers. And I asked the Lord to give me a deep love for her. I said, I don't feel that right now. But I want that. Because I knew he wanted me to love her. And, pardon me here.

No, it's okay. But I began to have a love for her. And wait. And my wife is, she's nobody's patsy, as they used to say way back in the day. She's not the kind of woman you want to take advantage of, or blindside.

She's bright. And she's very pretty, my perspective perhaps. But by George, she's still beautiful. And it took a long time before that happened. We had a lot of ups and downs. We'd be walking through a park, holding hands and laughing.

And a song would come on in the background, and it would remind her of who I was. The hand would drop. And I'm thinking, three years, we were up and down on this. I'm thinking, this is never gonna change.

But I knew that's where I had to just stay the line, stay in it. Yeah. You know, I'm not in this, I'm in this for the long haul. I'm with her for as long as I've got breath. And one day, something clicked with her.

And she came up to me and she said, you're no longer my first husband, you're my second husband. Now, when I look at you, I don't remember you being that man anymore. I can't see him in you. Wow. And we started climbing that hill again and moving forward.

Was she saved at that point? Yeah. I call her CJ, her name's Carol Jean. CJ was saved when she was very young, when she was about eight years old. But like a lot of people, she was, her family didn't go to church.

They moved, when she was young, she could walk to church. And then they moved out here. And there was no place to walk. And so I thought your family going, you're kind of stuck. I mean, the thing that attracted me to her, besides she just caught my eye in high school, was that when I met her and went out with her, was that how morally different she was from all the other girls I had gone out with.

And there was just something very different about her. So there wasn't a need for conversion on her part, but she was very ignorant to scripture. She hadn't been instructed in scripture. So she was more than happy to learn.

She didn't wanna learn from me at first. In fact, for a long time, I thought she wasn't reading at all. I was beginning to wonder whether or not she knew the Lord. And then one day she asked me to get her Bible and I grabbed it and it fell down and all of these pages of notes came out.

She wanted, it had to be hers, it couldn't be mine. It's kind of like your children. The Lord doesn't have grandkids. You can raise your kids to know the Lord. You can have them in the church. It doesn't make them, Corey Ten Boom used to say, just because you find a mouse in a cookie jar doesn't make it a cookie.

And so having your kids in church all their life in some ways is a blessing, in other ways it's a curse. And so she needed to have her own relationship with the Lord just like my sons would need to have their own relationships with the Lord.

So I started out out here. I was actually working towards the pastoral ministry at the Temperance Free Methodist Church, which is now Cornerstone out here. And so I started out as a free Methodist, but became aware as I got closer to, they have several different ordinations in the free Methodist congregation that I did not believe in two very key doctrinal positions.

And so I couldn't stay. And I had been teaching a group of about a dozen people out here in a private study, nobody from that church. And they asked me if I would continue teaching them that ended up morphing into the Assembly of Christians in 1978.

1978, okay. I'd started here and then we moved to Toledo for about 27 years and we moved back out here about 15 years ago. Okay. So that's where it began. And we started out as a Baptist church, just a Baptist church.

Kind of a different, not a fundamentalist Baptist church, not a KJV only Baptist church. In fact, way before all of the kind of rock and roll stuff that goes on today, we were, I was in bib overalls and we had a guy named John Vass doing our music.

I know John. Yeah, we know John. Yeah, John used to travel with Bachman Turner and all these guys. I mean, John was my music leader. Okay, okay. So we were rocking the house way back in the day. And, but there can be a real false sense of worship that exists from the excitement.

Sure. That's generated, that's not grounded in the reality of the word of God. Yeah. We began, we would have a communion, for instance, and we'd have 140 people at the table. And we would, we made it a love feast and we had a meal together and John played and we packed the place out.

And then one day I was very convicted about that and I said, we're gonna take communion, but we're not gonna have a meal and the music's gonna be traditional hymns. We're gonna sing hymns on the board.

Worship, Church Discipline, and the Danger of Church Culture

Yeah. And we had 20 people show up. And there was this instant realization of how much of what we were doing was being generated by the atmosphere that we were creating and not a real commitment to the word of God.

Sure. Which is a serious danger. Yeah. It really is, yeah. And I think it permeates the Western church as well. Pretty hardcore. I would agree with that. I really would. I would also say that I don't think the Holy Spirit's an emotion.

Right. A lot of people say, I feel the Holy Spirit and I think you're feeling your emotions. Yeah, I would agree with that entirely. It's not that emotions are disconnected, but it's falsely assumed that if there's emotion in a worship service, I love music, I love to sing.

I'm not a singer in a band or anything else, but I love to sing. Nothing can bring me to tears faster than a well-constructed song, lyrically and musically. And yet, we have people weeping on Sunday that are out committing adultery on Monday morning.

Yeah. And those same, just because you are doesn't mean anything for sure. Right. And so, I mean, the Spirit is an agent of change, not feeling. Now, that doesn't mean it's void of emotion. Right. God ministers to all, the entire man.

And we see those emotions throughout the Bible, the Psalms, right? Yeah. Ecclesiastes. I can hardly talk, I don't think I've ever gotten through a full testimony of my own life without being choked up a little bit because of what God did.

Yeah. Who cares about whether or not you were a former gang member or a drug addict? None of that makes your testimony any greater. God's a much greater Savior than you are a sinner, no matter how hard you sin.

Yeah. And the depth of your sin doesn't make him a greater Savior, he just is what he is perfectly. Period. Yeah. You know? And so, none of that matters in the truest sense. We became Reformed Baptists in 1988, late 1988, early 89.

Okay. In fact, our church in, we started out as a congregational Baptist church, a little bit, half a bubble off, you know, what we'd be considering a Baptist church. And in 1984, I got hooked up with MacArthur.

John MacArthur went to a Shepherd's Conference up in upstate New York, actually, a very small group up there, and learned about multiple eldership, learned about getting away from a congregational rule in the church, came back, began to teach on those things.

In 1984, our church ceased being congregational. We actually took a vote, because our Constitution demanded it. Okay. We took a vote to never vote again. We had 100 vote to never vote again. Found the men that were best suited at the time to be elders, or ordained an elders board, as equipped as they could be at that time in our history, and move forward.

And in 1988, I began to, I was given a book called The Holiness of God by R .C. Sproul. Yeah. And that book totally impressed me. I was blown away by that book. And so, then I was handed Chosen by God by R .C.

So I just read the book. Had I started out with Chosen by God, I might not have read it. Okay. But starting out with The Holiness of God, when people ask me about Reformed Theology, I give them Jerry Bridges' book, Trusting God.

Okay. Which teaches on his sovereignty. Right. Because if you can satisfy that. I think all the other ones kind of fall in line. It has to work, if you want to stay true to scripture. Absolutely. And so, I started reading Chosen by God through that across my office about three or four times.

Because I had been brought up early in the church, to be told, anything connected to Calvinism was a heresy of some kind. And then I had to figure out, after I submitted myself to what I saw in the word of God, and wrestled and wrestled with it, how do I tell the church this?

Because I will not split a church, not my own. I'm not in charge of the church. It's the Lord's church, not mine. So I'm not free to go in and do damage to the body in order to save my own position. And so I had a meeting with our elders board, which was much more mature at that time, well-studied guys by 88, early 89.

And we met, there were five of us, we met to, and I intended to just start the meeting out and say, I've got something I need to tell you guys. And I was hoping they were gonna say, all right, well, let's tell us about it so we could learn together.

And instead, two of our guys had just gotten back from a shepherd's conference in California. And one of the, and two of the other guys had been reading a book by Charles Hodge together and discussing what was in there.

Both, all of those were on reformed soteriology. Everybody came to the meeting the same night to tell everybody else that they were reformed. Wow. And instead of having to sit around and explain everything, we ended up rejoicing and then sitting down and saying, how do we bring this to the body?

How do we do this? Because you can't get up in six gun from the pulpit. You can't say, well, this is what it is. Listen, if I, I've been, even at that time, a decade I'd been pastoring already. If I struggled with it as a man who studies the word of God every day to exposit God's word, how much harder was it going to be for the congregation to turn that corner?

Now we had taught them all along that the word of God was supreme, not our constitute. Everything else can be changed. Your doctrinal statement can be changed. Everything can be changed, but the scriptures cannot.

So if we find it here, we have one obligation, submit to it. And so we decided, we actually did, in essence, what Jerry Bridges does is we started a class that lasted nine months on God's sovereignty.

Awesome. And the last section of that was his sovereignty over our salvation. And when we got to that, you'd already fully agreed because nobody has a problem when you show it, he's sovereign over the weather, he's sovereign over the governments, he's, you know, all these things.

Biblically showing that as well, yeah. So now he's sovereign over absolutely everything he set for, he's not sovereign over my choice for salvation here, how does that work? And we ended up with about three months of answering the standard questions, God's not willing that any should perish type stuff, which is all standard, all the same things I asked myself.

And we eventually adopted the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith and officially became a Reformed Baptist Church. In 88? Yeah, well, it would be 89. 89. Yeah, by the time all that transpired, we were into 1989.

Were you guys in Toledo at that time or Lambertville? We were in Toledo. And then when did you come back to Lambertville, Michigan? 2004. You said, okay, 2004. So yeah, those are the two subjects we're gonna be talking about tonight, you just brought them up, both sovereignty and I would say that meeting was providence.

Providence in Church Life and the Formation of a Reformed Baptist Church

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you had your elders and deacons meeting and everyone kind of came on the same page by the grace of God, you guys were all kind of moving in the same direction. Yeah, we stared at each other for 10 minutes.

Every reason why I came tonight and two of the guys, there was two guys and two guys, they had both been talking together but not the four of them together, so they didn't know and nobody knew where I was coming from.

So and I thoroughly went to that meeting expecting to come home and tell my wife that I'd probably be looking for a job and hopefully maybe finding another pastoral position because that's where my heart's no place else.

How did the church respond? Well, the church, we lost one family and in reality, I always say we lost one, we lost one woman who took her husband and kids with her. Okay. So her husband had come to me when it hit home for him and said, this is the most freeing doctrine I've ever heard in my entire life.

And then the next week came to me and said, we're leaving the church, don't ask me why. Okay, gotcha. I knew exactly where that was coming from. Okay. Everybody else stayed. Wow. Everybody else stayed and we were trying to be as patient, kind, understanding, in essence, when you take membership at the assembly, there are 12 points of doctrine you have to agree with.

Not a one of those are reformed. They're biblical. It's just the doctrine of salvation, not the mechanics of it. Sure. Okay. So you could be a member of the assembly and not be reformed. Right. Okay. And we're perfectly good with that.

But I'm going to preach expositorily what's in the text. Sure. And through that systematic theology. Yeah, if you can live with that and hopefully learn from that, that's a great thing. We've had charismatic members.

We've had members that came out of the prior, out of Presbyterianism. We never made any of them make a change. If you have somebody sign on the dotted line for an entire doctrinal statement, you can only make liars out of them.

Nobody believes everything in a doctrinal statement, probably not even the pastor that's putting it forth unless that's everything he believes and he expects everybody else to get on board. Probably hasn't even read it.

No. That's more true than you know. I mean, quite frankly, you guys may have, you've heard of the Founders Movement within the Southern Baptist Church. Well, the Founders Movement is really a move back to the Reformed Baptist roots of the Southern Baptist Church.

Sure. And a lot of doctrinal statements within the SBC still have a Reformed flavor to them, but they haven't looked at them in 47 years. Right. So they don't know. We go back over our doctrinal positions and our structural positions, positional papers and everything else about every seven years and try to bring everything up.

If there's anything we've come to think differently of or anything we think we need to add or clarify more, because otherwise those just become discarded documents you use to get started. And then everybody that comes along just throws whatever little flavor of whatever they want into the pot.

Sure, kind of the church culture can then overcome this. Just a big pot everybody throws something into. Nobody knows what's in there. Nobody knows how it works, you know. And the guy up front's just doing his thing, whatever that might be, and nobody questions that.

Or if they do, you end up with a splitter, a row of some kind, and you know. So if you're taking membership in the assembly, I'm gonna spend about eight weeks with you, private. We're gonna have a class, about an hour and a half, a class, sometimes two hours.

I'm gonna walk you through all of our documents. What's an elder? What's a deacon? How's the church structure? What do we think about giving our positional papers? Everything you're gonna go through. We have a whole book on church restoration, which is an issue on church discipline.

We consider calling that church restoration. That's the purpose of it, is to restore a believer back to a right relationship with the Lord. They have to read that, understand what that means, agree with that, before you can take membership.

So you know what you're getting into. So you have a knowledgeable member coming into the church. You're stepping into something. You can't step out of membership at the assembly if you're involved in a sin.

You can't commit adultery. And while it's still an unknown, give up your membership just out of the blue. We're not gonna allow that. And you know that when you take membership. So it's all on the table.

Everything's out. Our books are open. Do you wanna come in and look at our books? Look at our books. You wanna sit in on an elders meeting? Unless we're doing something that's private. You're welcome to come in and sit.

Everything always has to be on the table, out front where it can be seen. If you're hiding something, hiding is not the same thing as keeping a confidence. If you're hiding something, you need to stop whatever it is you're doing.

And I think that's biblical. Unfortunately, I think there's not a whole lot of, and I'm using air quotes, church goers that would put up with it. And I'm not trying to sound mean or condescending to the American church, but in my experience, when I go to other churches, there's not a whole lot of discipleship and accountability.

And membership means you meet with the pastor, you have a slice of pizza with him, and he said, you know, you introduce each other and you get a little background and 15 minutes later, you're a member.

And I'm not gonna, you know, this episode isn't to, you know, denigrate that process. But I think the biblical process is one that you're speaking of, to where there is actual accountability. And then from the very beginning, it sounds like there's discipleship starting right from that first meeting.

Not only doctrinally, but, you know, hey, look at if there's sin in your life or something, you need to confess it as the New Testament tells us. What is it, John? And then from there, we can move forward with membership, which I think is the biblical way.

Yeah, we just had a couple that we're looking to take membership that we're living in a house together. And I, before we got into it, I said, listen, here's the deal, that has to change. You cannot take membership here because we'll start a disciplinary step over the fact that you're living together.

We don't accept that here. Right. And, you know, so you've got a choice. You need to separate. We need to talk about walking you through the process of getting married. You can, you do that. We can talk about membership and so forth.

And they ended up leaving the church. Yeah. Okay, well, what am I going to do? What do I want, warm bodies in the pews? Right. Or more money in the coffers? I mean, for, to what end? You know, again, there can be much of a facade.

Does it feel better if the church is full? Right. Of course it does. A no brainer. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a no brainer, but it's a feeling, it's not necessarily the truth. Yeah. I think, in reality, the church is much smaller than we think it is.

I think so too. A friend of mine years ago, when we used to do Twitter reform conferences, Don Kisler was always a part of that. Don, I used to be on the board of his ministry. He had a ministry called Soledad Gloria.

Okay. That was a publishing company of Puritan, out of date Puritan books. My wife loves Puritan stuff. I've got a whole bunch of them at home, believe me. But Don used to go to Protestant churches and do a handout, a test on soteriology, on the gospel.

And 80 of the people that took that test were choosing, it was a multiple choice, and they were choosing a Roman Catholic view of salvation rather than a Protestant view in Protestant churches. Yeah.

That's sad. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's why I'm an expository preacher. I'm in the book of 1 Thessalonians right now. Chapter one, verse one, all the way through. You skip nothing, you bypass nothing. You can't just pick and choose each week the things you wanna light on that are gonna make people happy.

It's whatever's in the text. Yep. Nobody can say to me on a given Sunday, you did that because you're upset with me, you did that because of what's going on in the church, because I am wherever I am. Yeah, if that's the case, they're upset with the Bible, huh?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's probably not, Thessalonians is probably not a four-week sermon series. You could probably stay in there for a while, huh? I'll probably be, from the beginning to end, probably close to a year.

Yeah. Yeah, and I just entered into chapter four. Well, I'm halfway through chapter four. I'm just getting into the eschatological portion of the fourth chapter, which I don't hold to the pre-tribulational position anymore, and neither do I think that text does.

No, I don't either. Yeah, so it's gonna get, we won't have any issues at the assembly, but we live stream, so I may get a few emails. Right. Well, it's so funny. We touched on that a few episodes ago, just talking about post-trib, pre-trib, that kind of stuff, amillennialism.

I'm reading a book on that right now. And the more you dig into the actual word of God, and then even read some of those, the forefathers that came before us, you just realize the majority of Western Christianity is really based in a culture that's maybe 100 to 150 years old, it feels like.

Yeah. And it's a culture. It's not really doctrinal. Right. It's, I don't know if I can call it church culture, but it's this Christianese culture, and you go, what's going on? And I was raised in it.

I'm a little similar to you. I was raised in a, and I'll just touch briefly on it, because I've said it before, but in a more legalist, it was a spirit-believing church, but there was a lot of legalism there.

And it was almost, you look back in the 80s, and I was a kid in the 80s, you're a little older than me, so you might remember it differently, but when I look back on it, there was so much moral deism going on in the culture that I think the church pendulum swung real far into this weird legalistic on a lot of churches.

I mean, I sat down when I was 13 and said, hey, you keep playing Keith Green on the piano, you're going to hell. Yeah. Because that's Christian rock music. And we don't, and I'm just trying to play you put this love in my heart, because I grew up playing piano, and I love the groove of it, that syncopated feel.

And then went into a much more, I don't know what you'd say now, charismatic, and then towards the end, got into that kind of Bethel feel, that new apostolic reformation, signs and wonders, Toronto blessing, that stuff.