Standing Firm in a Rebellious World — James White on Scripture, Authority, the Cost of Faithfulness

Welcome and the Need to Make Up Time

Well, good morning and welcome back. Even though Pastor Rob has a digital clock in the back, he went 10 minutes under his time, which means I have to make up for that. So, which works really well given that I'm one of the pastors at Apologia Church in Mesa, and if you're familiar with our work at all, you're familiar with my fellow pastor, Jeff Durbin, who wouldn't know how to speak under an hour if his life depended on it.

So, I have been somewhat ruined by that, having been there since 2018 now. So, keeping things under an hour for me is a challenge anyways. So, I do want to introduce myself if you're not familiar with me.

I'm not from this area. My name is James White. I'm the director of Alpha Omega Ministries. You have the entire staff of Alpha Omega Ministries here with you today with Rich Pierce in the back doing all the technical stuff.

And Alpha Omega was founded 43 some odd years ago as a Christian apologetics ministry, and I'm also one of the pastors at Apologia Church. I'm also a professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas with some great men there like Jeff Johnson, Jeff Moore was just there, in fact, just came back.

I was teaching last weekend apologetics there at the seminary, and I had the opportunity of preaching here last year. Came up into this area for the very first time and didn't have quite as nice a pulpit back then.

It's similar in size to John MacArthur's pulpit. I have preached behind that pulpit there at Grace Community Church. And what I was gonna say is interesting is when you'd lean into the pulpit there, it moves because MacArthur's pulpit is on hydraulics.

So you can just lower it right down into the floor for musical stuff and things like that. This moves because we're actually on a moving platform for the baptistry. And there's actually warnings and instructions right there.

I can see it on how to open the door and not open the door to the baptistry and things like that. And so yes, it moves. And so my concern is someone has a switch someplace and the baptistry is already filled and it's gonna be one of those dunking machine type things.

We don't like your sermon, click and you're gone. And so that's the end of that. So anyways, it's good to be with you. I just wanted to add a couple of things since he gave me all the time to do it. It's fascinating when we...

Sometimes people ask, why has the church in Europe basically collapsed on ethical and moral issues and has no voice? And there's a lot of reasons for that. Most of the churches in Europe are state churches.

The state churches make it very difficult for free churches to thrive and things like that. But I think one of the best illustrations is probably the most famous theologian in the United Kingdom today is a man by the name of N .T. Wright.

Now, Tom Wright's a brilliant guy. There's no question about it. He writes big, long books, like this big. Brilliant guy, nice guy, but have you ever... Rob, did you ever hear how he describes your subject?

Okay, he calls inerrancy that silly American doctrine. So everything that was just being said about the consistency... See, it's one thing to refer to scripture as being inspired, breathed out by God.

Now, you need to understand something. Inspiration, that Latin term, really isn't all that accurate because inspiration refers to breathing into something. So a lot of people have the idea that scripture is inspired in the sense that these are human words and God breathes something special into them.

That's not what the original term that Paul used really means. It means breathed out by God. And so N .T. Wright will say that scripture is inspired, but when it comes to what that means in its trustworthiness and its internal consistency, and here's the issue.

We live in a day where the vast majority of people teaching in seminaries and Bible colleges, and I've taught in a lot of them, do not have a grounded acceptance and belief that what is said in Genesis 1 .1 is in any way connected to or consistent with what's said at the end of Revelation chapter 22 and everything in between.

Now, part of the reason for that is I was raised as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, so in the fundamentalist movement and the historic fundamentals were great, but fundamentalism as a movement has obviously taken on characteristics of very narrow-mindedness, fear, and unwillingness to hear what other people have to say or to dialogue with those positions or anything like that.

And so what has happened in essence is you will hear people, and it's like when we hear the fire and brimstone preachers, we don't wanna look like that, and so we tend to back off on speaking as boldly as Jesus did about punishment and eternity and things like that.

And the same way when you have people speaking about the consistency of Scripture and they force a super surface-level consistency on the Bible, instead of going deep and seeing that the harmony of Scripture is found at a deep level, not just some surface-level stuff.

I mean, anybody who reads through the Psalter knows you can read one psalm and it's addressing one situation and the psalmist is experiencing joy and you can turn two psalms over and Eeyore looks like a positive preacher in comparison to the psalmist at that point.

Some of you may not know who Eeyore was, but Eeyore is one of my favorite, one of my favorite, I'm frequently like Eeyore, unfortunately, but anyways, you see that there are differences. You see that Matthew in presenting his gospel has a specific audience that's different than Mark and so they're going to narrate the very same events quite differently.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but when Matthew and Mark are telling the same story, Matthew's the longer gospel, right? Mark's always boom, boom, boom, fast, fast, fast, fast. Guess what the reality is?

When they tell the same story, Mark always gives more detail. Matthew summarizes, we call it telescoping.

Why?

Because Matthew gives all the teachings of Jesus that Mark doesn't because he's reaching a different audience and so there are differences. It's not, the consistency of scripture is not a surface level thing.

It requires us to do some serious work to find that harmony and to rejoice in that harmony and a lot of people are not willing to do it and so many in Europe and in our own country as well, in the vast majority of Bible colleges and seminaries, if you believe what was just said, you're in the minority and I know I'm in the minority.

I'm not one of those people that makes the argument, oh, the vast majority of scholars agree with me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The vast majority of scholarship today is ashamed to say that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and if you're ashamed to say that, you're going to really cut down on what the scriptures actually teach and for all of us, I don't care what your age is, I notice there's some, I am not the oldest person in the room for once, that's nice, thank you very much for those of you who are senior to me, I appreciate that but for those of us who are older, for those of us who are grandparents, my daughter's expecting my sixth grandchild in a couple of weeks, one of the reasons I need to get home and a little boy named Kuyper, we're looking forward to greeting him to the world but I have, as an older person, I have a tremendous desire to make sure that my grandchildren are being given an appropriate foundation upon which to stand.

You know why?

Because older folks like me, we've had it easy. We've had it easy. We've had wild freedom. What did we do with it? Well, some people might say we wasted it but my grandchildren are going to face a considerably more difficult world to live in.

We've been talking about the insanity that had made it through the Colorado legislature and it is moral and ethical and historical and scientific insanity. They're not going to stop there. They're going to keep going and it's going to cost to be Christians in this world and in this society unless God brings massive repentance and revival to our land, which we pray for but it's got to start with somebody and I am convinced it's not going to start with the megachurches, it's going to start with the churches and the communities like this one with our commitment to consistently living the Christian life and communicating the Christian life to others and not being ashamed of saying Jesus Christ rose from the dead and not being ashamed of saying this is the word of God and it is consistent with itself.

It's not a simplistic consistency. It takes work to study. It takes work to recognize where the harmony is but we need to confess it and we need to say to the world what Schaeffer and others have said and that is without a sure word from God all you have is opinion and that opinion changes.

That means law is going to change. Ethics and morality are going to change. If you want to see how this works out in real life, by the way, I think it was the end of 2023. Yeah, I think it was October of 2023.

I know it was snowing so maybe it was early. Maybe it was, anyway, once you get to my age all the years just meld together. Who knows? But my fellow pastor Jeff Durbin and I have done two debates together where we were both on the same side.

It'd be better than being on the opposite side if you're pastors in the same church. But anyway, though there are some little issues we might be able to do that on just in front of it. But we've done two debates up in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah.

The one is the infamous antifreeze debate. Anyone have seen the antifreeze debate?

One, two people.

Well, now see, you guys have lots of things you can go watch when we get done with all this. We debated two atheists and one of the atheists, a brilliant medical doctor that just hates God, poured antifreeze, Fresno antifreeze into a cup and challenged all the Christians there to come drink from the cup because Mark 16 says you can drink poison and not be hurt.

So it became known as the famous antifreeze debate. And then we did a debate within the past two years, let's just put it that way, with a professor up there, a very well-known professor up there at the University of Utah.

Are ethics and morality possible without God? And of course their position was yes, our position was no. You might find it really interesting at how they collapsed into circular reasoning and personal opinion, because that's all they have.

That's all you can have. If you want to see in the cross-examination, and my brother Jeff did most of this, I got to give him credit, he had just found out the day before, his mom was about to die, and we were in the middle of a snowstorm and he was trying to get a flight back to Phoenix.

I would have been rather distracted by that. He was on like a laser beam, tore him up real good during cross-examination, and then got a flight, flew home, and the next day led his mom to the Lord before she died.

So that was a real blessing, a real blessing from the Lord. But look those up on YouTube if you want to see how this stuff, we just don't hide in an echo chamber when we're talking about this stuff. If you don't know who I am, one of the things that I have done for many years is done moderated public debates where we take these issues and, not the debates like you have in political context, but real debates with a moderator, a thesis statement, equal time, cross-examination, the way that debates are supposed to be done.

And we've done 198 of those so far around the world, and looking for just a few more to, there's no prize for 200, by the way, if you're wondering, I'd like to have one, but there isn't any such thing.

But that's what we do in the ministry is we take this stuff out and we don't just hide it. We want to go up to Salt Lake City and debate Mormonism and go around the world and debate Islam and Roman Catholicism and take on all these issues, including the entire range of LGBTQ plus stuff.

In fact, I'll be honest with you, I think there are nations in the world where I've debated this in the past, I wouldn't be allowed to debate it now. That freedom is no longer there. So I'm glad I had the opportunity of doing it then.

How long will those debates be available on YouTube and stuff? I don't know. We've got a little bit of a reprieve right now, but how long is that gonna last?

I have no way of knowing, no way of knowing.

We will find out. And so I'd like to actually, after that very long introduction, sort of start with an experience that I had and then go to Matthew 19 to sort of fill that all out and get into our topic here.

I've told the story before. In 2016, I was teaching a summer apologetics class at Phoenix Seminary and I got a call from CNN and they wanted to know if I would come on the Dr. Drew show. I don't know if you remember Dr. Drew.

He seems to have had somewhat of a worldview change over the past few years that had something to do with politics, I guess, I don't know. But he had a show on CNN and for some reason, they had heard of me and they wanted me to come on via Skype.

Zoom would be how we would do it today. Skype was the thing, I don't think Zoom existed yet. And the topic of the program was going to be transgenderism. And so I was like, well, I'm in the middle of teaching a class and so yeah, that sort of works for me.

Though I realized tactically, this is not the way to do it. You can get talked over by anybody. If you're the guy on the screen, everybody gets to talk over you. You hardly get a word in edgewise. But maybe we can give some type of a testimony.

And move on from there.

So I was on the program, did the thing. I was sort of like, yeah, it's pretty much what I expected and I didn't really think much more of it. And day or two later, they call back and said, we'd like to have you back on.

And I was like, well, I'll tell you what, I'd like to do that, but I would need to be in studio. Well, we don't have money to fly in. And they said, well, my wife works for the airlines. I can fly for free.

Well, we can't put you up. Well, we'll take care, I'll rent a car. I'll get a, I'll stay at Motel 6. This is what, if you can get to the CNN studios in Los Angeles, sure, you can be live on the program.

So I flew over and I drove to the gates of hell known as CNN and fought through the demons and got into the green room where I was informed by the producer. You ready for this? This, I'm not, I'm absolutely telling you the truth here.

The producer told us that we need to keep our responses very brief because studies had shown that their audience, if one person spoke for more than 15 seconds in a row, their audience would tune out to something else.

15 seconds. That was something I kept with me. I'm telling you, well, there's, someday someone's gonna write a multi-volume, the fall of the Western world in the past, and there's gonna be the title pages.

Once their attention span got below 15 seconds, it was pretty much done at that point. Because most truths that are worth knowing take a little bit more than 15 seconds to express and more than 180 characters typed out or whatever else it might be.

And so I was on the show and I don't know if you've seen, there was a really famous incident where Ben Shapiro was on the show talking about the same subject. And he was on with the same guy I was on with, which is this six foot four former army chopper pilot who now thinks he's a chick.

And he was seated next to Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro misgendered him, said something like sir, or he, or something that would be natural for, well, the entirety of human history up until yesterday. And you can watch, it's on YouTube, you can find it, just put Ben Shapiro, Dr. Drew, transgender, it'll pop up like anything.

This guy, who's a foot and a half taller than Ben Shapiro in a dress, puts his massive paw, never seen even an WNBA basketball player with a hand that big on Ben's shoulder and in a nice deep masculine voice says, if you do that again, they will be taking you out of here on a stretcher or something along those lines, threatening Ben Shapiro in a nice masculine, I expect that from a former chopper pilot, I don't expect that from my first grade teacher, Mrs. Miller.

And so he was on the program with me too. All of that to give you the background for one particular statement that came out in all of this. I quoted from Matthew chapter 19. And what I quoted was from verse four, if you wanna look at it.

The Pharisees, verse three says, Pharisees came to Jesus testing him and saying, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? And so when Jesus answers this question, which by the way, was a current argument between the two major schools of the Pharisees, Hamai and Shammai and Hillel, there you go.

Shammai and Hillel. And one said, you can divorce your wife for any reason at all. If she burns the toast, she's gone. If she forgets the Parmesan cheese on the spaghetti, she's gone, anything. And you can just get rid of her.

The other said, no, the law of Moses says there has to be fornication, there has to be real evidence of impurity for divorce to take place. So they're having this argument. And so they wanna get Jesus to take sides in their argument.

Jesus' response is to go to the foundation of what marriage is all about anyways, which is to go back to the creation. And so verse four says, and he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife.

The two should become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. So we all know this text very, very well. And so I quoted it and I said, you'll notice that it says, he who created them from the beginning made them male and female.

This is a creation reality. It can't be escaped by legislative action. And so one of Dr. Drew's sidekicks, I guess I would call them, engaged me on that and I said, well, look, there's all sorts of different religious views on things and religious leaders, that can't really be a guidance for us.

And my response to him was, well, the problem is that this religious leader that I just quoted, prophesied his own death, burial, resurrection, died, was buried, rose again the third day, ascended to heaven as the right hand of the father, is going to judge everyone living and dead.

And when you can pull that off, we'll be worried about your opinion. Until then, his opinion rules. And he just sat there like I had just slapped him across the face. Because in his world, there is no authority that has that final level.

What I just said was, the one who created you said these words. That's it. If you reject that, what are you doing? You are rebelling against God. That's what's going on. That's what's going on here. And so, that's a reality that you and I, as followers of Christ, and I'm assuming if you're here today, you're a follower of Christ.

Now I understand,.

I was told that we have visitors here whose engine died in the parking lot. Is that true? Are you here?

Yes, no, maybe?

Or are you working on it?

No, okay.

They must be probably out working on the engine, but the RV out there. I feel badly about that, being a fellow RV person, that you're stuck here in that way, but hopefully they got to listen to you, and that's better than having to listen to me anyways.

And it's much faster, at least today. But if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, you are called to be his disciple and to confess him as Lord in whatever cultural context God places you. Now, if you don't believe God has a decree that he's working out, a plan that he's working out, that it's just sort of just haphazard and we just sort of do things, we're not gonna get along real well and we're probably not gonna end up with the same message to deliver to the world.

But if you read the New Testament, Jesus says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you.

And law I'm with you always, even at the end of the age. When is he with us? When we're obeying him. And he has told us, he has all authority, and therefore go to all nations. Well, not all nations want to hear that message.

And so we have brothers and sisters in prison in Islamic nations today and communist nations today. And if you want the fastest way to get yourself killed, be a Christian in North Korea, this kind of thing.

So, sometimes that results in, Hebrews chapter 11, people being sawn into and thrown to lions and having short lives. And you and I have lived in a nation all of our lives where we have had complete freedom.

Well, okay, yeah. In first grade, I was sent to the principal for passing out jacked chick tracks on the playground. Most people don't remember jacked chick tracks, which is amazing. How many of you remember jacked, the cartoon tracks?

One, two, okay, a few, all right. If you're wondering, first of all, I didn't get sent to the principal. I was that guy. In high school, I never got a demerit. I was never late for class. I never got a B, okay?

I was the guy, that means I got all straight A's. And I was class valedictorian, and I just, I was, my parents, my parents basically taught me that if I respected them, I would respect my teachers. Different world than what we have today.

So being sent to the principal was a pretty traumatic thing for me. So I walked in, and the principal was sitting behind his desk, and so I walked up to his desk, and I handed him a track too. And so I didn't know what else to do, so that was just how things, and he took it, and he said, I just couldn't force anybody to take one, and I was one of the littlest guys in class at the time, hadn't got that growth spurt yet, and I was just wondering to myself, how could I force anyone to take a track?

Anyway, I don't know really how that works. But anyways, we've had tremendous freedom. We haven't been persecuted. But that time is passing, and the question is, how will we remain faithful when the next bill that builds on 1312 in Colorado comes along?

And fundamentally says, and you could argue that it's already there, and you know that next year, it's gonna be, they're gonna add something more, and something more, and something more. We are in the state of Colorado, and I am standing here criticizing that bill as moral and ethical insanity.

Now I can defend that. We keep trying, we tried. This trip, I was supposed to go from here to Denver. And we tried, and a lot of the people that were fighting it there at the Capitol in Denver tried to get anybody in the legislature, anybody in the churches that were supporting this, to debate.

In front of cameras, equal time. Couldn't find anybody. Why should they? They already own the media. Why should they expose themselves to being refuted in a debate? So we can't get anybody to defend this stuff.

In fact, most of the best debates I've had on, for example, on homosexuality or gay marriage have been outside the United States, where they don't have the media quite totally under their control yet.

Here in the US, it's next to impossible. They know better, they really do. So what are we gonna be facing? And since we are called to teach what Jesus taught, we don't get to edit that. We don't get to change that.

And so here, Jesus teaches a creation ordinance. Here is the creator himself has entered into his own creation. That's one of the greatest scandals of the Christian faith is that the creator entered into his own creation.

And he gives us an inspired interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2. Well, who really believes in Genesis 1 and 2 anymore, right? We know better, science has told us otherwise, right? Not according to Jesus.

And we aren't given the freedom to go, well, I like some other of Jesus's teachings, but this stuff I can do without and I'll get rid of that. That's not our choice. That's not what disciples do. Disciples don't get to edit their master's teachings.

We are called to faithfully present wherever God puts us. God doesn't put most people in the position of being able to, I mean, I've been in some pretty amazing places. What not is 2017, I got to preach.

In the castle church in Wittenberg, in Luther's pulpit. He was buried right down there. And we only know of two evangelicals who have been allowed to do that, myself and Dr. Moeller at Southern Seminary.

He did a lecture on Luther. I'm like, if I'm gonna stand in Luther's pulpit, I'm gonna preach the gospel. And I'll just tell you in passing, how do you get, because our people in our group were all down toward the front, but they left the back of the room open so that tourists could go in and out and see the room and see, it's a beautiful, beautiful church.

And so I thought to myself, if I'm gonna preach in Luther's pulpit, I need to quote Martin Luther. And if I'm gonna quote Martin Luther, I need to quote Martin Luther in German. Now, thankfully, Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, aber mein Wortschatz ist ein bisschen klein.

Ich habe keine Leute mitzusprachen am Hause. So I just said my vocabulary is a little bit small. I don't have anybody at home to really speak German with. And so as a result, when I was visiting Germany, my German would get pretty good, but I don't fly anymore after 2020.

And so I don't get a chance to do that, any kind of stuff. But I did, I quoted Luther a couple of times in the sermon. And what happened was, the people visiting in the back heard that, and they stopped and came in and sat down and listened to the rest of the sermon.

Germans speak better English than most Americans do. So when they heard an American trying to speak German, they are impressed by that, and so they came in and listened. And so I think of those opportunities, I have debated and defended the deity of Christ in, well, the second largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere, in Durban, South Africa, with 3 ,000 Muslims seated on the floor, closer to me than you all are to me.

The only people on chairs were the wimpy Christians. Muslims can sit on the floor for hours on end, because that's how they do things. And I'll never forget those experiences, but most people don't have those opportunities.

And you might say, well, that's just for a special few. Okay, yeah, being a Christian apologist and doing debates on Catholicism and Islam and Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, I'm sorry, and Jehovah's Witnesses, yeah, okay.

But that doesn't mean you're not called to fulfill the Great Commission, right along with me. If you're a grandparent, your grandkids need to know that their grandparents are servants of Jesus Christ, and you need to encourage them to be servants of Jesus Christ.

That's their greatest calling in life. And if you work in a grocery store, you can serve Christ there. You can speak his truth. You don't have to be tripping people up in the bread aisle. Did you know Jesus is the bread of life?

I mean, that would be a little, well, maybe, okay, some of you might do that. All right, all right, well, okay, Wendy would. But yeah, we are called to be faithful in the context that God has placed us.

But what is changing is that faithfulness is becoming more and more challenging. In the early church, I love teaching church history. I started teaching it, that was the first class I taught after I graduated from seminary in 1990.

So I've been teaching it for a while. And one of the things we can learn from the early church was the persecution that was brought against them prior to the peace of the church in 313 AD when that persecution ended.

A new kind of temptation came along at that time, which ended up resulting in the church state that is very different from what the New Testament envisions there, too. But anyway, during that time of persecution, you were required to offer a pinch of incense upon the altar and say, Kaiser Kurios, Caesar is Lord.

And by making that little sacrifice, you were saying your ultimate loyalty is to the Roman state. You could worship any God you wanted to, but your ultimate loyalty had to be to Caesar as Kurios, as Lord.

The Jews had worked out an arrangement with Rome where they didn't have to do that. But it didn't take Rome very long to figure out these Christians were a different lot. And so they were persecuted because what's the Christian confession?

Jesus Kurios, Jesus is Lord. You can't say Jesus and Caesar are both Lord. You have to choose one over the other. And that was the great scandal of Christianity is that most of the religions that day, they'd allow you to worship other gods or to say Caesar is Lord.

There was no emphasis upon the idea that there was one who was Lord over all. That's why Christianity was such a danger to the Roman Empire and why the persecution became so heavy in the 10 years. There was 10 years of, most people think the persecution was the same from the time of Nero all the way to 313.

It wasn't. There were times when there were portions of the empire where there was very little persecution. Other parts where there would be lots of persecution. It would come and go. But Rome tried to destroy the church completely between 303 and 313.

So for 10 years, it was all out warfare. Kill them all. And yet the church survived. And how did they survive? Well, they understood what the claims of Christ are. And we have to understand what the claims of Christ are.

In many ways, we've already offered a pinch of incense on the altar. When at your work, a congratulations card comes across your desk and everybody's signing it to be given to your boss who's a homosexual marrying his partner.

That's someone asking you to offer a pinch of incense. And some Christians struggle this. Well, you know, we're just, Jesus said marriage was defined by God from the beginning between a man and a woman.

You don't have the freedom to rejoice in and to accept the perversion of the created order when Jesus himself made it so plain.

We can't do that.

That's not honoring God. That's not honoring his creation. That's not honoring marriage. That's not honoring the authority of Jesus Christ in scripture. That's not even honoring the people that are rejoicing in their rebellion against God.

Yeah, but I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Oh, there's our new ultimate authority. Mankind's feelings. How many times did Jesus stomp on people's feelings?

Meek and mild.

Meek and mild. Jesus. Would you like to have been a Pharisee in those days?

When Jesus was around?

You ever read Matthew 23? Whoa, whoa to you Pharisees, hypocrites, whitewashed tombs. Yeah, I'm not saying you need to run around and grabbing everybody in the grocery store and calling them Pharisees and whitewashed tombs.

That's what I'm suggesting. There was a time to be saying those things and mankind's feelings and emotions are not the ultimate authority. And we are told that the gospel is offensive to those who are in rebellion against God because it says to you, you're a rebel sinner.

There is punishment coming if you do not turn to Jesus Christ. You're going to die outside of God's favor. And since you've been made in his image, there will be punishment that will come after that. Oh, that's offensive to me.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, our kids are offended when we tell them they can't do everything they want to do. But if you love them, you'll tell them anyways. We know that, but we, our films, our books, our media just bombards us almost every single day with the message that kindness is more important than truth.

Kindness is more important. Now, I'm not obviously defining what the kindness is here, but human emotionalism is more important than transcendent truths, more important than grounding your children in the truths that will allow them to be mature adults and live in this world in the way that God has designed them to be.

And so, no one has ever been more kind and more loving than Jesus. What that means is that we need to read all about Jesus in the New Testament and go, okay, there's my example. There's my standard. I can't let the world determine these things.

We're actually trying to get a debate set up for it. Well, he doesn't want to call it a debate, so a discussion. I said, as long as there's not two comfy chairs and a pot of plant and we can speak the truth, I guess I'll live with it.

But with a progressive deconstructed Christian at a conference we're doing in September in Franklin, Tennessee. And his whole thing is, all the Bible is are disjointed, disconnected stories from our ancestors that we can pick and choose from to create the best world we can make.

That's all it is. Well, you know, if that's all it is, that's not how Jesus viewed scripture. And it was funny, I was very impressed, actually. I asked my hosts here, when I preached here last summer, this is a very dangerous question to ask.

Because most, and most pastors will never ask this type of question. Because most people in your church won't remember what you preached on a month ago, let alone a year ago. Do you remember what you preached on a month ago?

That's, you know, sometimes, I don't remember what I preached on a month ago. But I was stunned to find out that they remembered what I did preach on. And that was Jesus' view of scripture. Now, it didn't surprise me that I'd preached on that because I've preached on it more than once, and it's because it's one of the most important things I think I can talk about.

If you're a Christian, you should view scripture the way your Savior did. Is that really a disputable statement? Is that shocking or stunning to anybody? It shouldn't be. If this is the Son of God, if He rose from the dead, if Colossians 2 .9, for in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form, if that's true, then that has to be your final authority.