Dying with Dignity | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we're going to be talking about what we are trying to do in the church when we care for people's souls.

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A lot of things are said about these things, but it's our position here that really what we're effectively doing is helping people die well, helping people die with dignity and with hope, and that hope being in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. A lot of the things that are said about sanctification and even growth in the Christian life kind of give us the wrong idea.

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So we want to try to define some terms and define things appropriately today and think well about our weakness and our frailty in this life and the hope that Christ has given us in the life that is to come, and to think well together about the faithfulness of God in the midst of our suffering and pain.

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We hope that this conversation is encouraging for you. And then over in the SR podcast today, we're going to get into some theology of the cross and theology of glory conversations.

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We hope that you enjoy that conversation as well. A simple and easy way for you to help support

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Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are

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John Moffitt, who's pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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We have met again today, John, to record a podcast, my brother. I've enjoyed our conversation, just our one -on -one time before we hit record, and I'm looking forward to the conversation we're about to have today.

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Before we get to it, as we always do these days, we want to give some stuff away.

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Yes, we do. Today's book is a great recommendation coming to you from Justin Perdue.

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I've not read this book, so I'm looking forward to getting it into my library. Recovering Eden, the

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Gospel According to Ecclesiastes by Zach Eswine. On YouTube, you can see it on there.

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It's a series, Gospel According to the Old Testament, and our second book by Zach Eswine. This book is going out to our members.

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First of all, it's going out to Ronald DeVestia. He's been a member since last year.

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Thank you, Ronald. Justin's having all kinds of problems with his camera. I'm working on it.

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Congratulations, Zach. We're going to send you an email. We'll ship that book out to you. Then we're also going to give one away on social media today.

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We post every Wednesday morning when the episode comes out. If you go to all of our social media handles, you can find one of them there in the instructions.

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We'll give one of those away. Be patient with us. We're a little bit behind on those giveaways. We've been working on some stuff, which is going to be my transition into what we've been working on.

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We've been announcing this for a long time. We have gone down the road of multiple different avenues of trying to launch an app for our

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Semper Reformanda, and we've had to ditch several. We finally found one. Hopefully, this is four weeks in advance, but it is now live.

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Justin and I were just on it this morning, and it just went live this morning. I've got a username and everything.

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He's got a username at Justin. You can follow him. I got a picture uploaded, all that good stuff. This app is designed for two things.

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One, our Semper Reformanda community to gather together and communicate with each other and continue the conversations like we do on the

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Facebook group, but most importantly, it's where you find your local and online groups so that you can join the weekly discussions about the podcast.

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If you want to learn more about that, you can go to theocast .org. You do have to be a member in order to log in.

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Once you get a membership, you can log in and join the conversation, all kinds of fun stuff going on there. That's it.

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My apologies for blowing my camera up. I was holding up that book by Zach Eswine, trying to let the people see it for those of them that were on the

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YouTubes, and I had to reset my camera, but here I am. That book by Zach Eswine, though, is a really good book on the book of Ecclesiastes, which if anybody's read that book, it's one of my favorites in the

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Bible because it's just so breathtakingly honest, and I think that book by Zach is, too, just about the fact that this life is characterized by pain and weakness and suffering, and yet God and truth remain.

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I would commend the book to anybody who wants to pick it up and read it, and it fits really well with what we're going to talk about today.

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This is my transition to that. We're going to be talking about, effectively today, the care of souls and what it is that we're doing in caring for souls in the church.

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The title of the episode is Dying with Dignity, which really is borrowed from something that John said on a podcast a few months ago about what we're doing in the church as we watch over and care for people, which is this.

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We are helping people die with dignity and hope, and effectively, we're helping people die well, trusting in the

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Lord Jesus, knowing that deliverance has been accomplished for them and that our final deliverance is coming because of Christ.

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This is a conversation in some ways, John, about suffering, in some ways about sanctification, and trying to talk about it in a way that's honest, that squares with our experience.

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Because a lot of times, at least this is my take, the way that growth and sanctification and even healing, to use some of that therapeutic language and stuff, is talked about.

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I think it gives us the wrong idea of what it's going to be like, and so this conversation today is, we hope, kind of a reset.

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I personally think it's encouraging. We do not mean in saying this, in anything that we're about to say, we do not mean to sound fatalistic as though, man, life is going to be terrible and Jesus is going to come back.

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That's not what we're saying, but we're trying to biblically take a balanced posture on what it is the

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Lord is doing in our lives and what we can expect this life to look like between now and when we die or between now and when

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Christ returns. That's right. When we use the word dignity, one of the things that came to mind when

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I first started to give this theology to our church, I was trying to describe to our church, what are we doing every week?

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What are we trying to accomplish? I always want to be careful not to tear other churches down, but a lot of what

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I was seeing presented by other churches was giving such a bad taste in my mouth because I'm like, if that's the end goal, which is big buildings, big programs, big live stream.

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Everything's bigger and better and higher and whatever. And this is probably not what they're doing, but again, my own impression, it sounds like we're drowning out people's problems and it's like, come be a part of this movement and you can forget about your problems.

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Well, that kind of system just chews people up and all of a sudden they look around to the people to the left and the right who are clean and who are all well put together.

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My kids and I just watched this movie called the Mitchells versus the machines in the movie. Like this, it's a dysfunctional family.

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My kids completely just disarray. It was the whole movie's about, and they're comparing themselves to their neighbors who are like all fit and have like perfect tone skin and they all do yoga.

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It's just funny. Like their vacations are perfect and that's how it can feel. You show up to church and it's like, that's exactly what it was.

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You know, at the end of the movie, her neighbor says, Hey, I just wanted to tell you, I'm so impressed with you. I'm now going to follow you.

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That's wow. Thanks. You know, but the point of it is, is that you look around with the people next to you and it's like their, their lives are all put together and mine's not.

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And I'm all disarray and I have all the problems and I can't get myself together. And you see people flailing about to try and preserve their health, to preserve their looks, to preserve their money, to preserve their status and fame.

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I mean, you see people who are always, you know, you can, um, was having this discussion with someone yesterday at lunch about this person who just retired from baseball.

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And it's like, what do they do with their life now? You know, they're 40, their life's like half over and what used to bring them excitement and joy and hope you see often people start flailing about, and this is where drugs come in.

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And this is where all kinds of sexual deviancy has come in. The proverbial midlife crisis, right?

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Right. And I, the church should be able to step in and say, all of this has of no value to our life, our health, our wealth, our fame.

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It will not transfer to the real world, to our new world, to our new home.

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So when we say die with dignity, what we mean is you don't see someone grasping ridiculously to things that absolutely will perish.

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You're not taking them to the grave with you. So you can die in a way where someone watches you and what allows you to do this is your hope, right?

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If your hope is not in what this world provides, but in what is to come, which is what

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Christ provides, then you have that. And so how do you do that though? It's easy to say, well, you know,

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I want to die with dignity, but the question then becomes is how is that accomplished? And is it accomplished alone?

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And we're going to talk about that in today's podcast. Yeah, I mean, some other thoughts maybe of a preliminary nature that before we get into some of the maybe boots on the ground practical considerations, there's language that's used in the church in various streams.

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For example, in the Calvinistic evangelical stream of things, you often hear language about growth or language about maturation in the faith or even language of strength, getting stronger as a

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Christian. And I know we've released an episode, I think it dropped today, about strong disciples only.

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I mean, we talked about some of that stuff and how disciples are often weak and afraid and things of that nature.

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But I think that language of growth and maturation and strength can be misleading because we tend to then think that as I grow, as I mature, as I get stronger, then my spiritual muscles and my spiritual capacity for work is just greater.

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Because I'm a fitness guy, and the way we define fitness is the ability to do work over a domain of time.

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And as your fitness increases, so does your capacity to do things. And things that once were hard are now much easier, and I can do more work over a period of time, or I can bear more load or whatever it is.

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And I think we think like that in the Christian life, and that sometimes can be unhelpful because it's not always going to look like that.

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We're like, oh, well, now that I've grown and now that I'm stronger, I can just do a lot more and handle a lot more than I could five years ago, 10 years ago.

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And it's like, well, maybe, but it depends on how you define that. Or another kind of language that's used a lot in the church, and this is not necessarily all bad, but it can be if left unchecked and undefined, is the therapeutic language, for example, of healing, where people will talk about all the things that have happened to them or even the things that have been brought upon their lives by their own sin, and they are pursuing healing from those things.

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I think when some people use that word healing, what they mean is in their own minds, it's

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I'm going to get to a place tomorrow or a year or 10 years from now, eventually, when

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I have healed from this, when I will look back on that thing or that experience or that season of my life, and it will no longer hurt me or it will no longer affect me like it does today.

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To which I would want to say, I trust that over time, time alone will do some work. God, by His Spirit, will give you wisdom and perspective on your pain.

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Amen. Yet, I trust that there will be things that we look back on for the entirety of our days on earth, and we look back and we say, that still is hurtful, and that still is painful.

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It's still hard for me to think about that, or it's still hard for me to think about the death of my loved one.

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I still remember, and I still grieve, because that's how God made us. We're not made to forget pain, and we're not made to forget sin.

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This is why we constantly are having to look outside of ourselves and outside of our experience to find hope.

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We need to be able to talk in these terms to help each other really live life in this fallen world.

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That's right. We like to poke fun at the prosperity gospel, right? It's an easy target. I think we equate prosperity gospel with money, but I think it exists.

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There's a different kind of prosperity theology. That's right. This is what you're talking about. This can be seen in conservative churches as well, that God is going to prosper.

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Let's change the word because prosper has such a dirty taste in our mouth. I like the word heal, or progress, or even bless, or strengthen, or provide.

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God will provide for whatever it is that you want to put in there, your need, your job, your health, or whatever it is, because of X, Y, Z is done.

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What you hear is your faith, your actions, your discipline, your dedication, your faithfulness.

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Your steadiness, etc. Is related to your health, your job, your anxiety, whatever you want to put in there.

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And this is a great example of dying without dignity, is that enough failure in these prosperities will create absolute disparity because you can only take so many failures.

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There's only so much time that eventually you realize, I am a failure at this game. I cannot accomplish this.

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It cannot be done. Not only that, to Justin's point, to the person who has had a minimal failure, they feel as if they can recover.

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But to the person who's had an epic failure, and I don't mean failure like it's their fault, like their spouse died, their child died, they were hurt, they were molested.

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Justin Perdue Well, an epic loss or just an epic heartbreak. Jimmy Buehler But I mean failure in life, like life failed them, you know what

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I mean? Justin Perdue Well, something was done to them that they will never be able to move on from. Jimmy Buehler Right, so I said this in my sermon a couple weeks ago when

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I said, the resurrection, what it restores for us in final restoration is the loss of what we feel now.

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But you cannot have the restoration of death now. Am I going to walk up to a man who lost,

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I mean, we've had, unfortunately in our church, we've suffered a lot of loss this year. Children and parents and spouses, it's been a difficult year.

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And as a church grows, you're going to experience more and more suffering. Do I walk up to those parents and offer them some kind of solution to restore that pain?

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It cannot be restored. It's a scar that will remain until we reach glory when all will be restored.

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So you don't offer someone restoration. You offer them hope, which then creates a place of dignity where they can look around and go, okay,

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I can suffer now with some dignity where I'm not going to look foolish trying to grasp onto something that just isn't going to work.

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Justin Perdue And I can suffer knowing that I do have an unshakable eternal hope. Jimmy Buehler That's right. Justin Perdue And that unshakable eternal hope may or may not change how

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I feel about this thing right now. You know, as I was listening to you talk a minute ago, just a brief comment before I get to another point that I'd like to raise.

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You were talking about how prosperity gospel, prosperity theology stuff is often easy for us to spot, but there are different kinds of it that exist in the church.

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I think what we're talking about today, whether we use the therapeutic language of healing or whether we use the more maybe

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Calvinistic evangelical language of growth and maturation and the like, I think that it can –

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I'm not saying it has to. I think if it's done well, it's fine. I think it can quickly become a kind of easy listening prosperity theology where we're told if we pursue things the right way in terms of our healing or if we do things the right way in terms of our pursuit of godliness, then we will experience certain levels of healing or growth that will make our life better now.

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And it's like, golly, maybe our lives will be better now. I trust there will be ways that our lives are better, but we don't really realize.

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So this brings me to a few thoughts. I'm very tempted to talk about a theology of glory versus a theology of the cross, and I trust maybe we'll get there.

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Maybe we'll talk about that in SR. It could be a good conversation. Absolutely.

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But let's just talk for a minute maybe about how sanctification even works in this life, right?

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Laying cards out on the table, John and I believe that sanctification is monergistic, and by that we mean that God is the one who does it.

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So justification, our being absolved of guilt, forgiven of sins, and declared righteous is monergistic.

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There's one worker, and that's God. And then even in our sanctification, we participate because we've now been given life, but God is the one who effectively does it.

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He accomplishes our sanctification in conforming us into the image of his Son. And I think it becomes very obvious,

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John, that sanctification is monergistic when we talk about it honestly, because how does it so often occur in our lives and in our experience?

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I would suggest that we are most sanctified by things that we would never have foreseen, that we would never have planned for ourselves, that we would never have signed up for, and that frankly, in our lives as they exist today, we don't like.

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And this to me makes it very clear that God is the author, and God is the one who accomplishes that sanctifying work in us.

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We encounter trials of various kinds, right? And again, we don't pray for trials. We don't foresee or anticipate them the way we—I mean, we're not

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God. We don't see them coming, and if we could change it, we would, right? But he ordains trials so that, like James 1, 2, and 3, we're told, "...to

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count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness."

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Or you have Romans chapter 5, where Paul begins that chapter by saying, "...therefore,

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since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." That's a big deal. But then verse 2, "...through

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him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God."

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So there's that hope piece. "...more than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

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And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

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So we can rejoice in sufferings, we can count it joy when we encounter trials of various kinds, because we know that God is working steadfastness in us.

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And that is a miracle, John, that only God can accomplish. Because logically speaking, at a human level, it's like the kinds of suffering that we're talking about, we're not talking about, okay, there's some adversity and you need to push through it to make you stronger stuff.

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Like this isn't that climb the mountain and be a conqueror trash. We're talking about real hardship and calamity and suffering.

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The human conclusion to that, the human response to that, is that if there is a

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God, I hate him, and we're just going to be driven more deeply into our selfishness and our sin, not, oh, this is going to produce hope and steadfastness and character in me.

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That is the work of God Almighty. And he does it this way. And so I think this is helpful for us to realize that this kind of sanctifying work is of the

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Lord, and we often do not see it as it's happening. We're terrible evaluators of our own growth.

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We need other Christians around us to help us see it. And then I think we can only see it individually as we pan out from our lives and we realize that, okay, yeah,

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I am different than I was 10 years ago. And I am different than I was 15 years ago. God has worked some stuff in me, and praise be to his name.

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Justin Perdue Yeah, and different in that you trust him more. Exactly. It's a perspective change.

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What is wisdom, John? It's effectively God's perspective that we now have to a greater degree.

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We actually have a better perspective on our pain, and we trust the Lord through it.

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And we more readily acknowledge that the secret things belong to the Lord, and I don't fully understand. a lack of assurance or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash Primer. And what you're describing is what

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I see all the time. It's a camouflaged prosperity gospel. You know, it's been rebranded.

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Satan is the father of all lies. He doesn't need you to deny the gospel or deny God or even important theology.

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He just wants to get you discouraged, to get you off your faith and on your faithfulness.

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He's just going to change something slightly. You know, a great example of what you're talking about here, and I would even say Paul himself is debunking this camouflaged prosperity gospel.

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In 2 Corinthians 12, he says, So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelation, a thorn was given in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

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Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

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Now, our situation probably will be very different from Paul. We're not dealing with the issue of conceitedness.

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But if you compare this with James and Romans, the idea is that often

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God will put things in our life, or I should say allow things to be in our lives, so that our weakness drives us to our knees.

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Another way of saying is our weakness drives us to the point where we don't have strength, and our strength has to come from something else.

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That's when he says, God's grace is sufficient for his power is made perfect in weakness.

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This idea that, go back to today's episode that launched four weeks ago about strong disciples only.

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The New Testament just cuts that thing off at the knees and says, no, it's not about strength.

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It's about God's faith, our faith in God's strength.

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If there's anybody's strength that we need to worry about, it's God's. That's right. So, if you feel like this is off, if you're hearing sermons, or you're reading books, or your brain has been trained to think that a strong Christian looks like this, but a weak

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Christian looks like that. It's like, listen, a strong Christian is one who has strongly put their faith in Christ and his sufficiency, and their hope is not in their ability to do something, but in God's ability to do something for them.

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To be clear on all of this, often, Justin, I'm convinced that people want to hear what they want to hear, and they don't actually hear what we're saying.

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Well, it sounds like you guys are just giving up and just letting God do something, and you're not being held responsible for yourselves.

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And that's not what we're saying at all. To some people listening to this too, I trust that some of this might sound like blasphemy, that we are somehow short -selling the

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Holy Spirit. You guys need to be encouraging people towards a victorious and triumphant Christian life.

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We've been delivered from the dominion of sin, and you need to be encouraging people towards growth and maturation.

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It's like, look, I'm not discouraging growth and maturation. I'm just saying, let's talk about it accurately. Actual maturation and real strength is knowing that you don't have it and that God is faithful and He is strong, and that in your weakness,

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His grace is sufficient and His power is displayed. I mean, this is 5 .5

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from our confession. The 1689 London Baptist Confession, chapter 5, paragraph 5 on divine providence talks about these very things, how

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God, in His perfect and wise and holy providence, uses suffering and pain and even our own sin for His good and holy purposes in our lives.

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And what are those? The ones that are outlined in the confession are that we would be humbled so that we might know more and more how much we need

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Christ and how dependent upon God we are. So that's huge. God uses suffering and pain to continue to drive us to Jesus and to continue to remind us of our weakness, brother.

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Justin Perdue Yeah, can I mention another confession that as I was rereading it, I was like, man, I always love seeing things

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I just didn't pay attention to. This is in chapter 17 on Sanctification point one, where it says, yeah, even though many storms and floods rise and beat against them, yet these things will never be able to move the elect from the foundation and rock to which they are anchored by faith.

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That's right. The felt sight of the light and the love of God may be clouded and obscured from them for a time through their own unbelief and the temptations of Satan, yet God is still the same.

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They will certainly be kept by the power of God for salvation, where they will enjoy their purchased possessions or possession, for they are engraved on the palms of his hand.

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Their names have been written in the book of life for all of eternity. The point of it is when you get tossed about, this is

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Paul, and I would say in 2 Corinthians, but when you get tossed about and at times our vision gets clouded, your foundation is in his hand.

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It's engraved there. In other words, you belong to him. One more point, point three, it says this.

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They may fall into grievous sins and continue in them for a time due to the temptation of Satan in the world, the strength of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of means of their perseverance.

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Man, means of grace is so important. In so doing, they incur God's displeasure and grieve his Holy Spirit.

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Their graces and comforts become impaired. Their hearts are hardened and their conscious wounded.

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They hurt and scandalize others and being temporary judgments of themselves. Nevertheless, they will renew their repentance and be preserved through faith in Christ Jesus to the end.

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So, we believe this to be true. It's both and. I often think people linger in sin longer because they're waiting for that moment of freedom and it's like, no, it's just the lifelong struggle and we rest in Christ while we struggle.

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There isn't going to be freedom from sin. Kind of picking back up where I was,

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I agree wholeheartedly. That was a great interjection with chapter 17. Just finishing chapter five, paragraph five, and then

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I want to mention something from 2 Corinthians as well. God uses pain and suffering and even our own sin to discipline us.

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He's a loving Father who disciplines His children, Hebrews 12. But He's humbling us. He's teaching us how much we need

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Him, how dependent we are upon Christ, and He's also teaching us in such a way that we might down the road when we encounter things that are similar, we may have a different perspective than we had this time.

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So, God's doing all those good things through our pain and even our own sin. But think about these words from 2

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Corinthians at the beginning of the letter. You read from chapter 12, which is at the end. This is from chapter one, verses eight and nine.

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At the very beginning, Paul says this, For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia.

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For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

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Amen, bro. That's what we're saying. It's that God will use suffering and trial to the point where in our experience – listen to the words of the

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Apostle – we despaired of life itself. I hate this. We feel like we've received the sentence of death.

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We are perishing, and sometimes I wish I just would because it's so hard. But what is

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God doing? He is teaching us to rely not on ourselves but on Him and upon Jesus who has provided us with atonement for sin and righteousness and who has secured our resurrection.

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Amen. To make a little bit of a shift and change here, this hopefully is an encouragement to the one who might be realizing they find themselves duped by a different form of prosperity gospel, that they're not the failure, that this life is the failure, that we lived in a cursed world.

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Our heart and our bodies have been cursed, and there can be a form of victory as far as we don't have to live in the bondage of sin.

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It doesn't mean our struggle with sin is ever going away, but we don't need to be in bondage to it, according to Paul. We do not do that.

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This is where I'm leading us to, though. But you cannot and should not and do not do this on your own. Many people have also fallen into this.

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I think it's a prosperity gospel that you can succeed in the Christian life by yourself.

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It's you put in the work, and God blesses you. This is so far from the truth, but it's so hard,

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Justin. You and I often get criticized because people say, well, you guys are deemphasizing

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Bible reading. You're deemphasizing spiritual disciplines. Basically, you are telling people that you are deemphasizing the necessity of sanctification.

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Our argument to respond to that, and I'll start with, is that we are not deemphasizing sanctification. I want every single one of my congregants to be the exact image of what

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Paul describes in Ephesians 4, in perfect harmony, in the fullness and wisdom and knowledge of Christ.

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I want every single one of my congregants to be there, and I don't want nothing to be, and myself included,

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I don't want nothing to be in their way. I don't want anything to hinder them, because that's where they're going to find the most hope, the most joy, the most peace, the most ability to long suffer.

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So why would I want to remove something out of their pathway to help them in that sanctification process?

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It's just we have been so trained to individualize, white knuckle, pull up the sting bar, bootstrap sanctification process, and it's just not the case.

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The way in which, and it goes back to the purpose of the church, and I think you can talk about discipleship and evangelism and the ordinary means of grace in this phrase, is to help people die with dignity and hope.

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The only way you can die with dignity and hope is that, first of all, your hope has to be outside of this world and outside of yourself.

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You find yourself on death's door and you're not at that place where you're flailing about trying to hold on to everything because your brothers and sisters around you are holding you up.

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They're speaking Christ to you. We quote this almost every podcast, but I can't help not to, but this is

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Hebrews 3 where it says, consider how to build one another up daily so that you aren't hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

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Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves as such as you are. When the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love.

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The mission, this is what I love to say to someone who's walked in, and I've had to say this a lot lately just with so many people coming into the church, they walk in and their lives have kind of been messed up.

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They've made massive mistakes. They've done things that they regret, and they often feel like they're damaged goods and there's really nothing for them in the church other than show up, tithe, and leave because how can

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God use such damaged goods? I say, well, here's what's great about the gospel is that you don't need a degree.

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You don't need a lot of money. You don't need a different past in order to love, care, support other brothers and sisters in Christ, to give them exactly what they need to rest in Christ, to find hope in Christ.

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As a matter of fact, you can be one of the most effective Christians on the planet by simply learning to love, care, be patient, and carry burdens and allow people to have hope and be there when they die so they die with dignity.

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I'm like, do you think you could do something like that? And the look on their face comes alive because all of a sudden they had nothing because, you know,

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I'm not going to write books and I'm not going to be leading worship. All this kind of stuff that they think what real Christianity is about.

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I'm like, no, real Christianity is about holding the hand of a dear saint who has no hope and giving them hope.

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Real Christianity is trust Christ and love your brothers and sisters and pursue righteousness, flee from sin.

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That's what we're doing together. Well, sin gets in the way of that. It does, and that's what I was getting ready to say. The reason why we discourage people from pursuing sin, there are a number of reasons.

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It dishonors the Lord. It's terrible for their lives. But yeah, it wrecks this because it actually robs people of dignity.

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And it ruins, it absolutely just ruins lives. It ruins marriages and everything else.

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And so because we love people, because we all desire, because we've been born again, we desire to honor

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God with our lives. We've become obedient from the heart, Romans 6 .17. We encourage one another to continue to trust

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Christ and to continue to pursue righteousness. And that's what it looks like to die well with hope and dignity.

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I'm hoping in Jesus. I'm trusting that He has me, that He's provided me with everything that I ever need.

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I was talking about this yesterday with the guy who's on staff with me and then a member of our church, and it's like,

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I am struck more and more all the time, especially in light of difficult circumstances that I find myself in or difficult circumstances that I am just very much aware of in our own congregation.

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There's just some heartbreaking stuff all the time going on. Granted, I know that Christ is my righteousness in my best moments.

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I don't dispute that for a second. But then in my lowest and weakest moments,

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I am really just driven to rock bottom. And it's like, okay, what do

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I have here? What do we have here when I'm hurting, when

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I'm discouraged, when I'm tired, when there just doesn't seem to be a lot of hopeful stuff going on in my life?

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What do we have? It's like, well, I've got Christ, and what do I even mean by that? I'm like, you know,

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I believe there is a God, and I believe He's holy, and I believe I'm not. And I know,

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I believe the Scripture's true and that Christ is coming back and He's going to judge all men. And what do I have on that day if this is where it's all going?

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It's like, well, I'm going to bank on the fact that as I have understood Christ in the gospel, and as Christians have understood

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Christ in the gospel for 2 ,000 years, that Jesus is gentle and gracious and faithful and compassionate toward those who trust in Him.

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And I am going to trust Him, that He's done everything for me that He has promised, and that He looks upon me with favor because I know

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I'm weak and I know I need Him. And at the end of the day, brother, that's the comfort for me.

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And it doesn't necessarily make me feel better. I may still feel the exact same way about my circumstances or about the circumstances that others are going through, but it's like, okay, we do believe that there is hope outside of this life, and there is objective hope in Christ and what

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He has accomplished that stands outside of how I feel, what I think, how I'm doing. And then, yeah,

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I want to help my brothers and sisters continue to trust Him too, and I want to help them flee from sin because it'll ruin their lives, and I want to sit and listen when they're struggling, and I want to hold people's hands as they pass from this life to the next.

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And that's really what we're doing. Justin Perdue That's right. Justin Perdue I agree so wholeheartedly. And it sounds like a short sell to say that we're helping people die with dignity and hope.

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It's like, aren't we doing more than that? It's like, well, at the end of the day, I think that is what we're doing, and we're doing a heck of a lot by doing that.

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Justin Perdue Yeah. Well, as cheesy as this is going to sound, it's not cheesy in my head, but I'm going to say it anyways.

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When it talks about we are the hands and feet of Jesus, I see the church holding those dear precious people as they pass from here to there.

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They're passing with the hope of Christ next to them to the reality of Christ in front of them, and I see that to be a very serious ministry.

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The way I look at pastoral ministry now and theocast is that I don't want people to suffer no needlessly alone, and I want them to walk away with the reality that there is more to this life than more money, more fame, more fitness, more family.

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All of those will fail and have failed. And it seems like we as humans are so stupid and Satan is so smart because the same thing that's been tripping up people from day one is still tripping people up today.

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What got out of in trouble, what more power is still getting people in trouble today. So I have the joy of walking in when someone is in the midst or have destroyed their life and they have no hope to sit down and show them, okay, there's nothing you can do to restore this, but that doesn't mean your life is over because there's so much you can do to help others.

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There's something you can do to have hope. And that's what we're talking about. I love the reality that for every week,

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Justin and I get to preach on Sundays, do a ministry throughout the week and hop on a podcast and know that people are going to hear the power of God and go, well, my life has purpose.

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And we were talking about this before the podcast, I'm overwhelmed that people say theocast has forever changed my life.

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And I'm like, no, the gospel has forever changed your life. We just happened to be how you heard it. It's the message, man.

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It's like Charles Spurgeon said about the Bible where people asked him if he felt the need to defend the Bible because of all the stuff going on in his day, slide into liberal theology, etc.

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And he's basically paraphrased. He's like, defend the Bible. I'd sooner defend a lion because all

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I need to do is basically set the Bible loose and then defend itself. I mean, same is true with this message, right?

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All John and I are aiming to do is set loose this message of the sufficiency of Christ because Jesus will handle it, man.

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I mean, the spirit of Christ will handle the application of this thing. And all we're doing is trying to say stuff that not that many people have said on this continent, sadly, at least, especially not in our world,

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John, in a creative, baptistic world. And so, yeah, we're not saying anything new, and I don't think we're uniquely special in any way, but we're preaching a message that is incredible.

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It's just like, again, quoting old Chuck Spurgeon, he was like, people may preach the gospel better than me, but they will never preach a better gospel, right?

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And it's exactly right, man. It's exactly right. And that's our hope as preachers.

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And yeah, I know you're going to transition us over, but I was going to go ahead. Yeah, go. Yeah. Well, I was going to say this is the point of SR.

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And then I'll just close it out. Yeah. This is the point of SR, Semper Ephraimanda, in that we want to gather people together to learn how to do this, how to care for people, how to love on them, how to help them in our churches and in our community and in our families.

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And one of the ways to do that is to understand this whole entire podcast has been really about the – what you threw it out earlier in my brain is totally not working with me right now.

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Oh, Theology of Cross was Theology of Glory, which we're going to dive into deeper and explain to you how to use the two in encouragement and counseling and pastoring and in the church here in the next conversation with Semper Ephraimanda.

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But if you'd like to be a part of this community where we are helping more people find rest in Christ, helping them die with dignity and hope and supporting the churches, then join our ministry,

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Semper Ephraimanda. And you can download the app and listen to our private podcast feed, join the conversations and join local groups where we meet locally and online to discuss this theology as we try and increase our awareness of Christ and decrease our trust in ourselves.

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Justin, it's all you. Yeah, so in transitioning over to the SR podcast, if you've ever thought that much of what you hear about in the church, even when it comes to your growth in the faith, seems earthbound, it seems to focus on this life and not the one to come, that's very much related to this conversation that we're about to have,

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Theology of Glory versus Theology of the Cross, because I agree that much of the talk that we hear, even about sanctification and growth and maturity and strength and all that, has everything to do with our life now.

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And in reality, we're people who are not hoping in anything for this life. We are living for the life to come that Christ has secured for us.

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So if you're interested in listening in on that conversation, John's already talked about Semper Ephraimanda and what it is.

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You can find any information that you want about this other podcast that we do and the

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SR community that's been created over on our website, theocast .org. So for those of you who are going to make your way over to the

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Semper Ephraimanda podcast, we'll talk with you in just a second. And for those of you who may not, at least yet, be heading over to the

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SR podcast, we're grateful for you. We're glad you tuned into this episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and were encouraged by it.