WWUTT 2660 Q&A Examining Sermon Plagiarism

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible commentary that we may be equipped for every good work in Jesus Christ our Lord. Please tell others about our ministry at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, and greetings, everyone. Welcome to the end of the week episode of When We Understand the Text, when we take questions from the listeners, and you can submit those questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com or go to www .utt .com, click on the voicemail tab, and you can record a voicemail to us using either your phone or your computer, and we would love to hear from you that way.

If you've been listening to the podcast this week, then you'll know that I've had to start a couple of episodes by saying that I don't have much of a voice today, and that's still the case today as well.

Becky and I have both been battling congestion all week long. In fact, she doesn't have a voice at all, and so that's why she's not on the episode with me. Be praying for us as we kind of recover from all of this.

So to preserve my voice, here's what I want to do for this episode. I'm going to play the audio from the video that I made defending Tom Buck against the accusation of sermon plagiarism, and you'll get all the backstory behind that as well.

If you haven't heard about this, you'll get that in the episode. Then at the end, because this is about 40 minutes of audio, so at the conclusion of this, I want to take a moment to respond to some questions that I've received after that video.

People asking things like, what is an unacceptable level of plagiarism? When is it okay for our pastor to take a line from somebody else, and when should we be calling out pastors for this? Because if you know the ministry that I've done over the last several years, there have been occasions where I have called out pastors for plagiarism, Ed Litton being the most notable one since, when was that?

In 2021, in June of that year, when he got caught ripping off entire sermons from J .D. Greer, Tim Keller, and several others. And we called that out. I've called Mark Driscoll out because he's plagiarized like practically entire books.

So those are some pretty extreme cases. Tom is not as extreme as those cases. And surely your pastor has probably said some things in his sermon that was taken from somebody else and didn't give attribution to it.

So when is it okay? And when is it unacceptable? We'll consider some of those things at the very conclusion of that as well. But in the meantime, here is the audio of this video regarding Tom Buck and the accusation that was brought against him of sermon plagiarism.

Biblical Truthfulness and Honest Evidence

Proverbs 12, verses 17 and 18 say, whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence, but a false witness utters deceit. There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

That's what I hope to be able to do here is bring clarity into a situation in which bad evidence has been used to falsely accuse a faithful preacher of the word. Some of you may be aware that on Monday, August the 17th, the website Protestia published an article in which it was said that Pastor Tom Buck of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas had been accused of serial plagiarism in his sermons.

This began with an anonymous packet of information that was mailed to every elder and deacon at First Baptist Lindale, more than 35 people. And this 28 page dossier showed instance after instance of where Tom had ripped off somebody else's work and passed it off as his own.

At least that was the accusation that was being made. Now the elders reviewed the information, they tested Tom, they found some places where they thought, yeah, we think that you should have given better citations here.

And Tom was receptive to that correction and it seemed like everything was done. But then that packet was mailed out to other preachers, men who had been connected with the ministry organization G3 and had probably spoken at some of their conferences.

And then one of those packets made it into the hands of the people at Protestia and this thing has since gone public. I found out about this probably when the rest of you did, when that article was published on Monday, August 17th.

And the moment that I heard about it, I was instantly skeptical because I was with Tom. I know his process, I preached with him. I know exactly how he put sermons together and there's no way I thought that he was guilty of serial plagiarism.

Now, if you've been a viewer or a listener of when we understand the text for a long time, then you know that from 2020 to 23, I was one of the pastors at First Baptist Church in Lindale. Tom and I handled the bulk of the preaching together.

We would plan out sermon series. We would decide which texts were gonna go on which Sundays. He would say, I'm gonna handle these sermons and you do these. He would do about 35 sermons a year and I would preach about 12 to 15 of those Sundays and then the rest would be handled by one of the other pastors on staff or we would have a guest speaker that would come in.

Daryl Harrison was one of those preachers that we had. Votie Bauckham preached there and every Monday, Tom and I would get together and we would talk about the sermon from the day before. We would talk about what was coming up that week.

After I preached, he would give me pointers and he was receptive to some of my suggestions as well. So having worked with Tom and even through some of these very sermons that he was accused of plagiarizing, I was like, there's no way that he is guilty of this and once I reviewed the information myself, well, my suspicions were confirmed.

A lot of this accusation is largely bogus. I agree, there are a few instances in there I think that Tom should have given a better citation and my opinion about Tom has not changed. In fact, I just admire him all the more for the way that he's handled himself in this situation.

I reached out to a couple of the elders at FBC, men that I worked with and I thanked them for having to put up with this and I was behind whatever decision they came to. I talked to a friend of mine who's a member at First Baptist and I am grateful to see brothers and sisters in the Lord continue under the faithful teaching of the word of Christ and be sanctified in his word.

Tom is the most masterful expositor I have ever known and any preacher would do well to learn from him as I have. So as I present this information to you today, I want to begin with an article that was written by Phil Johnson of Grace To You and Grace Community Church.

I think Phil summarizes this saga the best as somebody who was there and examined the information or the accusations rather that had been brought against Tom. The second thing I want to do, I'm going to play some clips for you of Tom's preaching.

Some of those very statements that he made where he is accused of plagiarism so that you will see the way that Tom preached is not at all the way that the accusation is framed. And the third thing that I want to do is give you some personal information, some personal anecdotes that I think will help clear a good man's name.

So let's come to this article first of all, that was written by Phil Johnson. This was published on his blog, Pyromaniacs. It's entitled Haman's Gallows and it was published on Wednesday, August 19th.

Here's what Phil says. I learned about the accusations against Tom Buck when they first surfaced months ago. Tom himself informed me on March 27th and sent me a copy of the packet that someone had mailed anonymously to First Baptist Church of Lindale, Texas where Tom Buck serves as pastor.

Copies were mailed to each of his elders and deacons homes, more than 30 households. Tom wanted my opinion and counsel. On that same day, elders from Tom's church asked if they could discuss the matter with me in a conference call.

So I read and digested the material thoroughly. There was no evidence that Pastor Buck was preaching sermons written by others. On the contrary, the evidence proved definitively that he was doing a thorough study of his own in the biblical text in the preparation of his sermons.

And I know that to be true because like I said, I was with Tom and I knew his process when he would prepare the sermons that he preached. But Phil says, there were also examples of wording taken directly from commentaries without attribution.

That's a practice I do not endorse. And when I've expressed opinions about it, I have candidly referred to it as plagiarism because it technically is. Nevertheless, it's small time, non-criminal, traffic ticket level plagiarism, usually motivated by haste, carelessness, negligence, perhaps even laziness, not by a desire to steal someone else's work.

The preacher who uses words he read in a commentary without attribution is not the moral equivalent of a horse thief. I don't condone or approve the practice, but unless it is being done on a large scale by someone who is using it to avoid his own study of the biblical text, it is ordinarily not a serious enough infraction to disqualify a teaching pastor or ruin his reputation and career.

And these people who had submitted this information anonymously, I find it hard to believe that that wasn't their motivation, that they wanted to ruin a good man and a faithful preacher of Christ. Maybe they thought they had good intentions, but why did they not just pick up the phone and call him?

Why do all of this anonymously if it wasn't to ruin Tom? Phil goes on to say, the packet of evidence against Pastor Buck was pretty weak, and I felt the same way in my judgment. And the fact that it had been assembled and sent anonymously also made the motives and character of the incognito accuser suspect.

I would be loath to join an obviously dishonest, underhanded campaign like that. Nevertheless, I tried to examine the evidence objectively. And to be clear, Phil says, I hate plagiarism. I've been involved in Christian publishing for 50 years, and purposeful theft of another author's work is a transgression that I do not view lightly.

In publishing and in academia, deliberate plagiarism rises to the level of a capital crime. Students or people who publish works where they intentionally try to pass someone else's writing off as their own deserve whatever harsh consequences they receive.

But to reiterate, a pastor using words that he got from a commentary is categorically different because every careful expositor will glean ideas and insights from the best commentaries, and you don't want to front load a sermon with verbal footnotes.

Still, pastors, use your own words. Read commentaries while you're studying a biblical text. Read any and all commentaries that will help you think through the passage you are preaching from. But when you reach the process of preparing your preaching notes, set the commentaries aside.

Using just your own brain and a sheet of paper for taking notes, organize all the good ideas you gleaned from your study into a logical flow reflecting your own thinking. And then write your sermon notes in your own words without leaning on the way someone else phrased the idea.

The principle is simple. Do your own work. Say it in your own words. Don't just parrot the exact words that you read in a commentary. Now, I will say that part of Tom's process, he would write the entire sermon out, and then he would go to his commentaries after he wrote his sermon out.

And he would talk about this even if you had ever attended some of the expository workshops that he led. He would recommend pastors do the same thing. Set your commentaries aside, write the entire sermon out yourself, and then go to your commentaries.

And Tom would say, he said this in front of everybody in the workshops. He would say, if I go to a commentary and I find something that's said there that's worded better than the way that I put it, then I would just carry the commentary note over into my sermon.

Now, I agree with Phil that probably needs an accurate attribution, but I'm just saying as somebody who can defend Tom's process that this was the way that he did things. He was never trying to rip off somebody else's work and passing it off as his own.

And as Phil is going to explain here, Tom has learned from that. He has accepted that correction and is going to attempt to be a little more precise in the way that he gives credit to those sources that he uses.

So Phil goes on to say, and if you think a commentator has stated an idea in words so clear and brilliant that you could not possibly improve on the phrasing or say it differently, then go ahead and quote the commentary, but say whom you are quoting.

I share my concerns about the proper use of commentaries with Tom Buck, and I candidly told him that he needed to adopt more careful methods in his preparation. He agreed and assured me he had already changed his study habits and was eliminating the use of any verbatim quotations without attribution.

When I met with the Lindale elders and deacons, I was likewise completely candid about my concerns and convictions, and I offered to answer their questions regarding how they should handle their pastor's case and how, if at all, they should respond to these anonymous mailings.

The elders were receptive to my counsel, and as far as I know, implemented all the corrective measures that I recommended. Tom asked if I thought that he needed to make a public statement of confession and repentance to his congregation.

I thought that it would be good for him to do that, but it should come from his own heart and his own conscience, not from anyone else's mandate. Tom did make such a statement. It was clear. It was candid.

It was thorough. It was penitent. He described to his congregation what he had done, acknowledged the wrong in it, and outlined what he and the elders had done and would do to address the issue. In all of this, Tom Buck never pushed back, never made excuses, and never tried to argue that he wasn't doing anything that he shouldn't.

He embraced the criticism completely, admitted where he was wrong, and adjusted his approach immediately. The matter was thus settled as it should have been in the context of the local church. And like I said, I even contacted some of my elder friends there and thanked them for the work they had done and that I supported whatever decision they came to.

Anonymous Accusations and Public Scandal

Phil goes on to say it should have been settled until someone started mailing out the accusatory packets some four months later, falsely claiming the Lyndale elders had utterly failed to deal with this public sin biblically.

The cover letter was full of plural first-person pronouns, making it clear that a group, not an individual, were the instigators in this campaign. These letters were sent, it appears, to almost everyone who had ever been on the G3 speakers list.

I received one. It came to my old address and was forwarded by the postal service. The senders remained anonymous, but they fraudulently put return addresses on the packages to make it appear they were coming from someone affiliated with FBC Lyndale.

The envelope even bore a Texas postmark, but I knew immediately that it didn't really come from FBC Lyndale because everyone there knew that I was already aware of the allegations and didn't need another copy of the packet.

The fake return address also made it immediately obvious that whoever sent these packets was not motivated by a love for the truth, exactly what I said, or any other wholesome rationale. The entire charade was purely and simply an ugly, dishonest attempt by some anonymous group of miscreants to discredit Pastor Buck.

The case had already been dealt with by FBC Lyndale, so it didn't need to be broadcast to the wider public, but there is credible testimony that the scheme to make it as public as possible was hatched by someone in leadership at the board level, both in Praise Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia and in G3.

Witnesses with firsthand knowledge say the packets were taken to Texas and mailed from there in an attempt to further conceal their origin. And I agree with Phil that this is completely dishonest. It makes it look like this had come from somebody who was either in the community of Lyndale or was in First Baptist Church Lyndale.

And this was a horrible way to approach this. These guys that Tom had worked with in G3 used to be on the board at G3. Why couldn't they just pick up the phone and call him and talk with him about this?

But now Phil says the whole affair is as public as they wanted it. And it won't go well for those who were building a gallows for Tom Buck. I don't know precisely who or how many men in leadership in those two organizations were involved in the plot to destroy Tom.

I'm not interested in trying to untangle a web of allegations and denials involving people who are willing to scandalize and discredit a fellow minister clandestinely, is that how you pronounce that? The rank dishonesty involved in such a strategy speaks for itself.

It is sufficiently clear that men in leadership at both Praise Mill and G3 were behind it. Indeed, members of both boards were privately informed of the charges and the evidence last week. They did not respond to the Lyndale elders request for a meeting.

More significantly, they did not deny their involvement. The similarities between this episode and the issues that forced Josh Bice to step out of public ministry last year are to start to ignore. One wonders how this itch to discredit or destroy their adversaries by anonymous dirty tricks crept into G3's DNA.

This will be another scandal G3 did not need, and it is one that they probably cannot survive. The organization, frankly, should not survive if anyone on the inside who knew about or participated in this plot remains in leadership.

These are men who have refused to accept Josh Bice's expressions of repentance and want to dictate for him what his repentance should look and sound like. This case shows they are not qualified to make judgments like that.

No one loved and promoted G3 with more enthusiasm than I did when the organization's focus was clear and singular. So it pains me to say this, but frankly, it is time for G3 to dissolve and go away. And it is unfortunate that I feel the same way.

And as somebody who also promoted G3 for a long time, and I made appearances at G3, I had a booth there and loved to meet people there. But it is disappointing to see this kind of behavior coming from their highest positions of leadership.

So that's the article that was presented by Phil. And like I said, I think this kind of summarized everything the best. So you know the details specifically and how it was handled and that Tom's name had been cleared by the elders.

What corrections he needed to make, he made them. And I think, frankly, Tom is just gonna become a better preacher as a result of all of this as well. Let's go to some of Tom's sermons. Let's look at some of these accusations that have been made against Tom and view his preaching clips again, so that I can show you the way that the accusation is framed against him is not accurate.

Distinguishing Common Phrases from Plagiarism

This is the packet of information right here. This is the one that was mailed after the one that was mailed to the elders and deacons that went to First Baptist Lendale, which is why the date up here is June 20 of 26.

The elders and deacons received their copies back in March. Now, as you go down, it's really not edited very well. Right here, you'll notice it says the enclosed report provides comprehensive evidence, but we wish to highlight several features that make this pattern especially concerning.

Number one, it's systematic and habitual. Number two, it involves verbatim reproduction. And then number four, was this written by AI? Did they not edit this properly? I don't know. Anyway, at the very end, they say why they're writing this anonymously.

And they say, we have observed how Pastor Buck engages with those who disagree with him on social media. And we have no desire to become targets of public attack or to be drawn into personal conflict.

And, you know, I think it was David Morrill at Protestia who said that basically they're like, well, we don't want to deal with the backlash from Tom. We want you to do it. When Tom lashes out, he's going to lash out at you and not us, which is just a cowardly way to approach this.

But then they say, our concern is not personal. It is for the integrity of the pulpit at First Baptist Church and for the spiritual health of the congregation. And again, like I said earlier, I don't believe that at all.

It's hard for me to believe that this was not personal. Somebody had it out for Tom. And this is why they did this anonymously and mailed it out to all these people because they believed that Tom's pulpit ministry should end, that he should be ruined.

And when they did not agree with the way that the elders at Lyndale, with what they concluded, then they sent it out to more people and say, nope, we want this to be handled the way that we want it to be handled.

And yet did not want to put their names on any of this. They hid in their bunkers and lobbed grenades or like puppet masters, they sent other people out in front of them. They're like, here, you go fight this battle.

We don't want to do this. So anyway, what follows is this whole packet of information that shows various sermons that Paul or Paul, sorry, Tom, I promoted you there for a moment that Tom had preached.

And let me see, this was how many sermons? This was 17 sermons in 28 pages. Now this first one here, let me bring this up. This is page seven. This is a sermon that Tom preached from Exodus. All of these citations here, none of this is plagiarism.

For example, they point out, Tom said out of the frying pan and into the fire. And he took it from this commentary that says out of the frying pan and into the fire. Oh, come on, give me a break. It's saying we learn from scripture that everyone is born in captivity to sin.

And that's taken from the commentary, which says everyone is born in captivity to sin. I've said that I don't know how many times in how many sermons, because that's what the Bible says. We are born enslaved to sin.

We are set free in Christ. So how is that plagiarism? And then they quoted the same verse, Titus 3 .3, one verse out of many, which says we are disobedient, deceived and enslaved to all kinds of passions and pleasures.

Yeah, I've used that verse again and again to show how we are enslaved to our sin and need to be set free by faith in Jesus Christ. And then furthermore, it's saying here that the New Testament repeatedly declares we're in bondage to sin.

And that's from the commentary over and over again, the New Testament declares that we are in bondage to sin because that's what the New Testament says. So again, I did not even consider any of those things to be plagiarism.

So let's look at a few more particular instances. Now, this was a series that I preached with Tom through when we did Ephesians together in 2022. And here, Tom is presenting some historical information and you'll notice here, the way that the accusation is framed against him is not accurate to the way that Tom presented this.

So you look at the published source, this was taken from Arkandt Hughes on Ephesians, the mystery of the body of Christ, okay? And it says that the published source says, as many as one third of the populations of large cities, such as Rome, Corinth and Ephesus were slaves.

And then Tom said, as many as one third of the populations of large cities, such as Rome, Corinth and Ephesus were slaves. And you go down this, noticing that the time markers, it just appears to be one sentence after another that Tom had just ripped off directly from this commentary.

But let's look at the way that Tom presented this and see if it seems to you like Tom was ripping off somebody else's work and presenting it as his own.

Our problem is we tend to think about slavery solely from the context of American history, where sadly Africans were kidnapped and brought to the US to be bought, sold and traded into slavery as if they were animals.

The Bible has never condoned such a thing. In fact, the Bible outright condemns that in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In Exodus 21 .16 in the Old Testament, in 1 Timothy 1 .10 in the New Testament, kidnapping a person to enslave them is specifically forbidden.

But Paul wasn't addressing that type of slavery in Ephesus. So we need to understand the cultural context which Paul was writing. Slavery was a part of the social and economic fabric of the ancient world.

Now get this, as many as one third of the populations of large cities such as Rome, Corinth and Ephesus were slaves. One out of three people. If the Ephesian church membership reflected that statistic, you would have looked around that room and every third face would have been that of a slave.

Now, did that look like Tom was trying to pass off somebody else's words as his own? You'll notice that he said there, listen to this, and then he reads off the historical information. That's exactly what you would expect to hear from your pastor who's giving you some historical background into a particular passage.

So again, the way the argument is framed, like Tom is ripping off these words and he's passing them off as his own, it's not accurate to what you actually see him do. And you can go on FBC Lendale's website and find all of these sermons.

Tom's not trying to hide anything. He didn't take down dozens of sermons. Oh no, I've been caught. So I'm gonna hide all these sermons. It's all still there. And I was there when he preached this. By the way, I forgot to show this to you when I brought this sermon up.

So here's right before Tom preached. And you'll see, I'm right there. Second row from the front. As the choir is being dismissed and before Tom is coming up to preach, I was sitting right there when Tom preached this.

I remember all of this stuff. And it's one of the reasons why I knew that Tom was not guilty of what he was being accused of. That's my son that's sitting right next to me there too in the red sweater.

Look at him, he's so cute. He's 15 now, he's not that small anymore. Let me do another one here. So here is a funny story. This is out of the same series. This is out of Ephesians chapter five. So first of all, in the document that accuses Tom of plagiarism, you'll see over here the published source on this side.

It says, years ago in the Midwest, the story was told of a farmer and his wife who were lying in bed during a storm. And then Tom says, the story was told of a farmer and his wife who were lying in bed in the middle of a horrible storm, okay?

Here's the story as Tom presented it.

If my hand has a need, it's attached to me. I give it, I nourish it for what it needs. If it's hurt, I take care of it. Just as you're attentive to your physical needs and emotional needs, you gotta love your wife with the same care.

Now that means if you're gonna do that, that you gotta spend time with your wife to be attentive to her needs. We don't do this just out of, well, I'll figure out what I think she needs and I'll give it to her.

It's being attentive to that and that takes time. And that takes care. The story was told of a farmer and his wife who were lying in bed in the middle of a horrible storm and suddenly a tornado lifted the roof right off their house and sucked their bed away with them still in it.

And the wife began to cry. And the farmer said to the wife, don't be afraid, honey. I'm here with you. And she replied, I'm not crying because I'm afraid, but because I'm happy. It's the first time we've been out together in 20 years.

That doesn't build a good marriage. You have to spend good quality time and length of time with your wife.

That was all just very good. But you see what I'm saying there? Tom is telling a joke. This isn't an occasion of plagiarism. You can decide, well, if he got that from Arkent Hughes' commentary, then he should have made a citation.

Okay, maybe so. But how do we know that Arkent Hughes came up with that? What if he also had heard a joke and was just repeating it? I don't see why a citation would be needed there. Certainly he's not guilty of what he's being accused of.

And I don't think the guys that are making these accusations against Tom in this way, I don't think they actually did this work. I don't think they went to the website and pulled up these sermons and watched them to see the way that Tom presented these things.

They probably took audio of Tom's sermon. Maybe they did it this way. They took the audio of the sermons. They dropped it in Word or something like that because I've done this before so that the audio creates a transcript.

And then they take the transcript and feed it into an AI. And then the AI is going to come up with all these instances of plagiarism, which the AI is not going to sense when Tom is telling a joke or an anecdote or giving historical background information or something like that, or just saying like an idiom, like out of the frying pan and into the fire, or saying something that is a common biblical truth.

That's like we're all born enslaved to sin or something to that effect. The AI is not going to sense that. So greater than 60, 70 of this stuff is just it's bogus false accusations and shame on the people who were attempting to discredit Tom in this way.

If they didn't actually do the work to examine all of this and see that all of these accusations were credible, if they did actually feed it into an AI machine who churned all of this out, then aren't they guilty of the very thing they're accusing Tom of doing?

When a Citation Is Ethically Required

Now, let me give you an example of one where I agree Tom should have given a citation there. Let's look at one of the credible accusation, one of the more credible accusations of plagiarism. Now, this one goes back into the Titus series.

This was a series that I preached through with Tom in the summer of 23. Oh yeah, first, let me show you this one. So this right here is an entire sermon. This was the opening sermon in the Titus series when Tom was preaching through Titus one verses one through four.

And out of this entire sermon, they found three instances, three sentences out of, you know, what's probably a 5 ,000 word sermon. They found three sentences that were just near verbatim and then took that as evidence of serial plagiarism that Tom was ripping off commentaries, which he didn't even do word for word here in these instances.

Anyway, it was incredible to me that they even tried to include that. Because I'm like, okay, it's a whole sermon and you're basically affirming there wasn't a sentence in there that was ripped off from somebody else.

I would have expected to see more than that, frankly, that there were more occasions in which Tom had read something in a commentary and had put it in a sermon. It's probably been the case with me before.

Anyway, okay, so here's this one where I think that this is the most credible accusation of plagiarism. And incidentally, the document itself also says that. Look over here where it says, this is verbatim and it's the most egregious instance.

An entire personal illustration about the author's marriage reproduced word for word and presented as Buck's own experience with only the wife's name changed to Jennifer, okay? So here is that segment of that sermon and then we'll talk about it.

Powerful, because where his precious love possession that he died for, it's like you go searching for something you've been looking for for so long and all of a sudden you discover it and you buy it and you bring it home as a precious possession and you take care of it and you put it on display.

Jesus came to this world and he redeemed you. You are his possession and nobody loves you more than Jesus. You may never experience the love you had hoped for from your parents or the love you had hoped for from your children or the love you had hoped for from a spouse or the love you had hoped for from a friend, but I can tell you one person who loved you enough to redeem you and possess you and you are his possession whom he loves and nobody loves you more than him and that's Jesus.

And being a loved people makes us more sensitive to sin. It makes us zealous for good works. It makes us long to love him and to reject what hurts him. I understand this really even in my own marriage because the longer that I'm married, the more I marvel at Jennifer's love for me despite my early coldness and selfishness in our early years of marriage.

And the more that I see how much she has loved me in spite of that and loves me in spite of that, the more conscious I become of my insensitivities and the more eager I am to please her. The more I perceive Jennifer's love for what it truly is, the more I can't stand distance to be between us.

And when I look back at the grace that she's given to me, it so helps me even in my walking as a faithful, obedient husband. And in that same way, when we see how wondrous the love of Christ is for us, we become more and more sensitive to sin in our lives and we long more and more to do what pleases him.

Now, I agree.

That one needed a citation. But I don't think the citation needed to be anything more than Tom saying. You know, I read this in R. Kent Hughes's book, an experience that he had with his wife, and I found that it is true in my marriage as well.

That's all Tom would have needed to say. But I think it's absurd to even take this account and say that Tom is guilty of serial plagiarism and he's constantly ripping off other people's work and trying to pass it off as his own.

And again, this was the instance that is said in the document to be the worst occasion of plagiarism that Tom had committed. I hope that this has been enlightening for you, that you've been able to see that the way that these accusations were framed against Tom just isn't accurate to the way that he preached.

These people at First Baptist Lendale have been deeply blessed by this ministry and shame on anyone who has tried to destroy that. Now, in closing, let me offer to you three stories that I think will further clear this up.