Andrew Answers Your Most Difficult Bible Questions

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December 14, 2023

You can ask Andrew anything and he will provide you his best answer to your questions. Hard questions are even welcomed. Just join the live stream to ask your harest questions.

00:07: You know, I've never even met Andrew in person, the one thing I've picked up on is everybody picks on the man.
00:14: And so here's everybody else. No, no. See, I think I think he's an innocent victim of just ruthless people who harshly judge him.
00:26: And he just seems to me so innocent. I don't know. I need to meet him to find out. But yeah, that's just my impression.
00:33: He'll have to tell me whether whether I'm right or not. That's hilarious. Wow. I don't trust I don't trust Chris's opinion on it.
00:39: I mean, this is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.
00:54: Welcome to Apologetics Live. I am your lovable little fuzzball that just everybody loves.
01:02: Even though I guess Israel Wayne says people pick on me. I don't,
01:07: Drew, you don't pick on me, do you? I don't. If I have,
01:17: I don't, I don't recall. Oh, hey, look, right, right from the beginning, we look at this and we got.
01:25: Yep, this is Hap's LOL still hasn't learned how to go to ApologeticsLive .com
01:31: so we could see who's speaking. By the way, Andrew, speaking of picking on you and Hap's, OK, Hap's has a great, great dispensational premillennial teaching on Jeffrey Rice's Facebook page.
01:48: I really think you should check it out. I'm afraid. All right, perfectly the dispensational position.
01:56: Really? OK, so maybe maybe we should get that up and play that. All right.
02:03: Send me a link. All right. So here's what we're going to do, folks. This is the last episode of the year.
02:08: I know some of you are crying. No, you're not. But we're going to take the rest of the year off, spend some time with family.
02:17: And with that, we we were waiting anxiously for this guy that says that Calvinism is dangerous.
02:25: Second week in a row, he hasn't responded. You can hear the crickets in the background.
02:31: Yes, we can hear them. They're there. Actually, hold on. We could if I could play them if you want to hear them.
02:39: But because I'm sure that we have them. Let's see. Where's the crickets?
02:45: Here's the crickets. Here it is. There they are. Knew we had crickets somewhere.
02:51: So but what we did have, we were looking for your hardest questions that you have.
03:01: Facebook user who we think is Haps, who earlier said we pick on you, also says this.
03:07: He says Jeffrey Rice, Andrew wants wants to upload the video ideas on dispensationalism at your church.
03:18: So I think because he put it on Facebook, I think he tagged Jeffrey in there. Yeah, it's just not showing up on here.
03:25: Yeah. All right. Well, here's here's what we got.
03:30: We got we're going to do is I'm going to share with you guys some of some of what I receive as voicemails and emails, we had to do a little bit of editing with it not to change what was said, but to remove some because we don't want to foul language.
03:52: And so but we thought you might appreciate to hear what what I receive when
03:57: I listen to the voicemail driving for eternity. Maybe you won't appreciate it.
04:02: But we also have some fun emails. And I do have some questions that I was challenged with.
04:08: And so we'll start off with those looking for you guys to go to apologetics live dot com to join us and ask your hardest questions.
04:17: As I say each week, I can answer your most difficult questions that you have about God and the
04:24: Bible. And if you doubt that, just come on in. I will admit that I don't know is a perfectly good answer.
04:30: Now we are being we are being reminded by Melissa. If Kofi ends up jumping in here tonight, happy birthday, brother.
04:40: So Kofi's birthday, we were giving him a little bit of a hard time because, or at least
04:46: I was because he's got his eyes on a new, you know, commentary series there, it looks like and he wants to get it in paperback instead of logos.
04:56: And I was like, Yeah, but in logos, you could take it everywhere with you. It doesn't take up shelf space.
05:01: And since he was, he's rearranged his books in his library, because he's got his daughter coming.
05:10: I said, See, you don't have to remove, you don't have to move books around when you have a newborn in the house and the advantage of it.
05:17: And then, you know, Dan Phillips said, Yeah, and you got the search ability. So but Kofi's answer was, but I like a good deal.
05:25: I don't know if he was putting that out on his birthday as ideas for folks like, Hey, if you want to get me something, but you know, it was a lot of you who follow me on Facebook, you know, that yesterday was my son
05:40: Rhett's birthday, he turned two. And just in case you're wondering what to get him, he wears a size,
05:46: John MacArthur study commentary. So I'll just save it for him for one day.
05:54: Yeah, yeah, there you go. That's what size he wears. I got it. So this was this is a legit email, sorry, voicemail that I got.
06:04: So I saw it. And when I looked it up, because you know how the you'll get the transcriptions, the transcription said, my name and number.
06:16: As one of you have a nice hot cup of hot cup, but shut the dot dot dot.
06:28: They didn't do a good job transcribing this one. But what did we hear?
06:33: Well, this is an actual voicemail that I got. I think it was this week, when
06:38: I listened to the voicemails that striving fraternity. These are the kind of love know that love messages
06:44: I get. But my name and number is one of you have a nice hot cup of shut up.
06:52: So yeah, people get angry, man. Now the irony and I was telling this to Drew is the guy calls up does not block his number.
07:04: So I got his phone number. And well, because I kind of have a certain type of background.
07:12: It didn't take me long to not only get his phone number, but his address, his email address, his social media.
07:22: And so I've, I'm not sure do I toy with the idea of sending them a message. So this is a poll for those in the chat.
07:31: I'm not going to go giving out his number, though. That was one thing I was thinking is, you know, give out his number, ask all of you guys to call him and say, you know,
07:38: Andrew call asked us to call you from striving fraternity. Stop picking on Andrew.
07:44: He's a really nice guy. All right, really gentle person. Yeah, don't pick on him.
07:51: So, so yeah, so, but there's some other fun things we could do.
07:58: You know, I could, and this is curious what you guys think is best way.
08:04: Can, should we, should I email him and thank him for the message with a copy of it?
08:11: Obviously with the beep, you know, do I, you're going as Facebook and thank them there, you know, and what should the message, what should the response be?
08:25: I don't know. I'll give my answer and then everyone else can give their answer. And you'll just star the ones that we have, so we can look at them.
08:33: Yeah. Yeah. So my answer would be just let it ride. You know, people are, people are going to hate.
08:41: They're going to say things like that. You know, especially when you have a platform talking about truth and exposing truth and things like that.
08:49: People are, you know, people are going to, they're going to act in the flesh, right? They're going to act sinfully and wickedly in those ways, and they're going to want to shut you up.
09:00: And so I say, let them talk, act like it doesn't bother you.
09:07: Like Melissa said here, pray, pray for them and then, and then, you know, move on.
09:16: Yeah. I usually do that, but you know, it, I don't know, we, maybe we have some fun. I mean, it's, it's nice to, you know, return kindness for things like this.
09:25: And, you know, you know, like, look, so folks may not know this, but like Ray Comfort was being ridiculed incessantly by Richard Dawkins.
09:40: And you know what Ray Comfort's reaction was? He actually had his staff find out where Dawkins would be speaking at, get the hotels and he'd send a fruit basket every time that Dawkins would go somewhere.
09:55: He made sure there was a banana in it because Dawkins would call him the banana man. He would go out of his way to send a fruit basket.
10:03: And Richard Dawkins actually said in front of an audience that Ray Comfort is a very difficult man to hate.
10:12: And so I kind of want to be that, that type of person, if I can. You know, I, I don't know if I am, but we'll see.
10:20: So Melissa is saying, Drew, that she said, Drew, I will make sure to send your son some
10:27: John MacArthur books on eschatology. There you go. You're going to save those for him so that he has a more biblical.
10:36: I don't know about that. I mean, I'd save it for him so he can compare it to the biblical position.
10:45: All right. So, so we got some, some thoughts coming in. So this unrelated to the thing, but Jim says,
10:53: Andrew tried to reach you. I don't know how you tried to reach me. It's pretty easy to reach me by the way.
11:00: Just info at strivingforattorney .com. I'll put that up in a moment, but he says,
11:06: Andrew tried to reach you your podcast with Doreen Virtue at the six minute, 30 minutes is she, she calls
11:16: God a she please go back and listen. I'll listen, but I'm going to assume, and I'm going to put up the way you could contact us.
11:28: There you go. If you want to contact us, it's just info at strivingforattorney .com. I'm going to assume that she probably said he, and it just came out sounding that way.
11:41: That's, that's going to be my assumption. Plus, I mean, it's, it's not unheard of, right? We, we do it when we preach all the time.
11:48: We just misspeak, right? When we mean to say something, but then our mind, for some reason thinks about something else.
11:55: What do you think the worst thing someone could say during a sermon could be?
12:04: I don't know. Well, just, just picture the scene,
12:09: Drew, you just got done preaching a sermon, good size church. You're feeling pretty good about that sermon.
12:18: You think it went well, you were well -studied and prepared and you, you go to the back and, and right away, the first person comes up to you is an eight -year -old boy who says, pastor
12:32: Andrew, why did you say that Judas died on the cross for our sins? What?
12:41: Yes. I went back and listened. I asked him, can you just remove that? Yeah, I actually,
12:49: I mean, these things. And so yeah, I actually made that blasphemous statement.
12:58: Things like that happen. I mean, I've had it where it's, it's written correctly in my notes and I, and I look at it and then
13:05: I just say the wrong thing. Yeah, it happens. Well, Dee, Dee said that,
13:11: I guess she did say it, or no, she's saying if she said it, it was a mistake. And that's, I would, I would agree.
13:17: I, I have had the problem where when I get it wrong,
13:22: I'm consistent. That's the problem. The first time I remember this happening, I don't remember the word, but I replaced one word with another several times, like three times in a sermon.
13:38: And I got done preaching and one of the ladies in our, in the church comes up and says, pastor Andrew, why did you, why did you replace this with that?
13:45: My church knew that I would do my own translation. So sometimes back at that church, we use
13:50: New King James, but there'd be times I would give my own translation. I'd usually say, you know, if you're looking in your
13:56: New King James, you know, I'm, I'm providing my own translation because it was just what I didn't think
14:02: New King James really was good with the, their translation of a text sometimes.
14:07: It's not. And that's according to Dan Wallace too. Yeah. Yeah.
14:13: And, and so it's just a matter of, I, I, they knew I did that. Well, what ended up happening was this lady says, you know,
14:21: I couldn't figure out why you translated this word that way. And so I was looking up my MacArthur study notes and I just couldn't understand.
14:29: And I said, I didn't do that. That wasn't in my notes. Second lady comes up to me, says the same thing.
14:35: I looked up my ESV study Bible and you know, I couldn't figure out why you translated it that way.
14:41: I'm like, did I? I don't, I didn't mean to. If I did, third woman comes up and I'm just like, look, let me, let me go back and re -listen to what
14:49: I said. So the next week I got up and I said, now some of you are wondering why your pastor translated this word that way.
14:58: And I saw a bunch of heads, not up and down. And I went, cause your pastor's an idiot. I mean, that's really,
15:04: I, I, in a sermon and I went back and listened and even edited in the YouTube. So I train,
15:11: I, seven times, seven times that I use the word that I meant to use the word, uh, oh, now
15:20: I'm trying to remember. It was a chaos. I said, Ezekiel or, or Zachariah or something like that.
15:26: Seven times I was getting like every time in the message, I was consistent. I was just consistently wrong, man.
15:36: That one name, you just couldn't get it right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so let's see what we got.
15:44: So Mr. Hanholz here says my snippy side says to go for it.
15:50: My rational side says, let it go. Not worth it. I'm torn. I think I got the answer.
15:56: I should go with Chris's, Chris's, uh, snippy side and then mask the header so that it's coming from Chris Hanholz from voice reason.
16:08: I love that idea, Chris. Thank you. That's my snippy side. It's, it's always better when you do, if you're going to do something snippy or play a practical joke that someone else gets the blame for.
16:19: Right. That would make Chris Hanholz really snippy at you. Okay. Uh, Melissa says
16:25: I would just let it go and pray for him. Well, I've already done that. It's, it's been like a week or two, uh,
16:31: Facebook user, AKA we think haps I'd say appreciate the feedback, brother. That may be.
16:39: Yeah. You know, the, the funny thing is if I was to like, like he probably doesn't realize he, he left the phone number, but if I was to send a letter to the house, thanking him for the feedback, just a handwritten letter.
16:53: Yeah. Handwritten letter with a, or probably with a, with a card with of Andrew's picture going, well, and a gospel track, of course.
17:02: Right. Yeah. Of course. Of course. I mean, it would just, it freaks some people out when certain people do things like that, you know, okay.
17:13: Write a handwritten note, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, um,
17:20: John here and you tagged this one just for the record. You tagged it. This was a question, question for Drew.
17:27: Why are you still post mill? No, he says, are you still post mill? So yeah,
17:32: I think he's really asking, why are you? I, I put, uh, yeah, kind of.
17:39: Yeah. I mean, I get it. I get it. That's adding to what's said.
17:45: I get it. Yeah. No, it's, it's what's really behind the question, John, John, you, you verify whether that was really your puzzlement.
17:54: You're trying to figure out why he still is because I'm still biblical. That is why. Yes. So yeah.
18:03: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Not why I know, but why are,
18:08: I think is what it should be. Why are, because we're, we're all curious. Notice for the listeners, notice what
18:14: Andrew did there, right? I'm stepping in the shoes of Andrew right now. Did there, right.
18:20: He added what something to the text. And then he assumed that was the underlying meaning of the question.
18:28: It's, it's the, it's my question then. Uh, humble clay says I should send him some sushi kind of like Matt Slick did to me.
18:38: Uh, John is saying, thank you, Drew. Very good. I sure hope that, you know,
18:43: John is not being swayed by you and your post mill. So every time I post something, whether it's eschatology based or not, he, he'll, he'll write a comment, you know, he appreciates what was said or something like that.
18:55: And at the very end, he'll go and post mill still wrong. He'll do it every time.
19:02: All right. So we got a question that came in here. Uh, it is from, and I'm not sure how
19:09: I've never seen this spelling of a name. So dot, dot Ron, or I'm going to,
19:15: I'm going to assume that Aaron, it could be Aaron, different spelling. So, all right.
19:21: But the question is just curious, would you consider the churches in revelation as just literal churches or church ages also?
19:30: Well, I would say that they're literal churches and nothing more.
19:36: Uh, the church age theory doesn't actually fit. Um, you, you have people trying to fit it in.
19:42: They look through history and go, okay, this one is, but there's specific people mentioned specific, uh, groups of people, at least.
19:50: Um, there's a specific timeframe, even 10 days mentioned for one of them.
19:57: So, uh, when you look at it and you see that the route that, you know, you look at this, the churches, and they're kind of along the mail route that people would go that, that to travel, to be able to, um, you know, the, if you were, if you were selling
20:16: Merck, like merchant selling products, that's the route that they would go. So it seems that he's writing, you know, to those churches specifically and, you know, pass this along as you go.
20:30: And so I think that, uh, again, I'm, I'm dispensational, which means
20:38: I'm going to interpret the Bible more literally, and I'm not going to try to spiritualize or read something into it.
20:44: That's not there. And so when it's mentions those churches, I assume they're the actual churches in those actual cities.
20:54: I think that some of the reason that people give for trying to make it a church age is more to fit a theological system, uh, trying to say, oh, this is long periods of time.
21:07: Look, all this has been fulfilled already. Things like that. So, um, so yeah.
21:15: Um, so let me go to, should I go to this email that we got?
21:23: Yeah. It's gold. This is, yeah, this is gold. So you guys can appreciate what we get in the ministry.
21:32: Uh, I, I'm toying with the idea of just, I don't do like Matt Slick and save all my hate mail.
21:37: I should maybe, so we could do that. I have a couple, but, uh, this is just more in the entertaining one.
21:44: And, uh, this is an actual email that we got at the ministry today.
21:50: All right. And so here it is. Um, and it's from Shelly Robinson.
21:58: Um, and she's with online safety masters .com.
22:03: Now I'm going to say that I did look at the blog article. She's going reference and there's actually some, some pretty decent tips there.
22:10: Um, it's just the way that they did it, but here it is. Hello, Andrew. My name is
22:16: Shelly. I'm an advocate for black lives matter. Now. Okay.
22:21: The subject is how striving fraternities users can safely support BLM online.
22:28: And I saw the subject and went, huh? Not sure why you refer contact me, but now my advocacy for black lives matter.
22:40: I had to step back for a second and go, did I miss something? Drew? Maybe, maybe
22:46: I came in and did a show when I was so exhausted, so tired that I just didn't know what
22:53: I was saying. Maybe I, you know, like, uh, the, the claim of Doreen virtue said she, instead of he now
23:00: D here is saying what a scam. No, actually it's, it's not, it's not a scam. Uh, I'll explain, but, uh,
23:07: Chris Hunt holds is saying the hate, the hate at mail episodes are entertaining. And so maybe, maybe
23:13: I should, I should try to read some of them. Um, so this is an actual email that, uh, that I got.
23:23: And it's, it's actually, I think they have an actual thing they want from me, but so they claim I, I I'm an advocate for black lives matter.
23:30: My, at that point I stopped and said, so why are you contacting me? Well, here's why
23:36: I came across your site through my numerous BLM searches. And we'd like to thank you for supporting and writing about this cause is right.
23:51: I remember that. I remember that time you supported BLM through, uh,
23:58: YouTube and through blog articles. Uh, but I think it was the supporting of, uh, doing away with them.
24:06: Yeah. Well, I'm pulling up the article so that I can reference it. Um, and this, this one actually wasn't written by me at all, but, uh, so I'll, I'll show it in a moment, but so it goes on.
24:21: Um, I would like to share with you an article on staying safe online.
24:26: I think not many have really thought about while supporting
24:32: BLM. It is about protecting ourselves online as supporters of black rights.
24:39: You can find the article here. There's the article. I really think it would be a great article to share with your readers.
24:48: I suggest you sharing it on this page, strivingforattorney .org slash, and then, then it's a biblical response to black lives matter.
25:00: And that's, so if you, if you want to find it, it's strivingforattorney .org and then we're slash and then where there should be spaces, you just put a dash.
25:10: So it's a biblical response to black lives matter. Thank you for your support, Shelly.
25:16: I'm like, what? So, so yeah, the article that Shelly's referring to was written by Justin Pierce and I could bring that up.
25:29: Let's see. So first off, I didn't even do that one, but I wonder, you know, let's, let's see if the, if it's a supportive article.
25:39: Um, so here's a biblical response to black lives matter by written by Justin Pierce right there.
25:45: Not, not me. Hmm. Uh, let's see. We have much feedback from our podcasts, exposing black lives matters,
25:54: Marxist political agenda, and their anti -Christ satanic beliefs.
26:05: So, oh, I should make this bigger so that, uh, those can, can read it.
26:11: Right. So that is the opening sentence and I'm going, okay, this is a classic case where what they did was they did a search for black lives matter.
26:24: When you do a search for things, striving for trade pops up because we have some good SEO search engine optimization.
26:31: We've been around for a long time. We get a lot, a lot of visitors that helps. And therefore people do a search for black lives matter.
26:39: This is going to show up, but clearly Shelly didn't read this because had she read just the first line, he would have realized that this article is not positive and supportive of black lives matter.
26:58: But Justin goes on, he links both of the shows that we had dealt with the topic.
27:04: He says, most comments were positive yet. Some were negative. We took a lot of time studying the history, philosophy, and social
27:13: Marxist beliefs of the organization's founders. Dr. Silvestro studied the atheistic and evolutionary background of the woke culture within BLM.
27:29: And I'm, I'm literally getting email from that, that Shelly person again.
27:40: Interesting. Maybe we'll pull that up. So, so, so, uh, he says he even compiled an impressive bit of notes and thought that, um, that he taught at a church.
27:53: So, so, so she could have gone there, make no mistake. We strongly and collectively affirm that this movement is satanic.
28:04: And we have a lot of proofs from the leadership's own words and their writings.
28:10: As well as warnings from other strong Christian voices who love the
28:17: Lord, the body of Christ, and the world at large. These godly leaders vehemently plead for biblical
28:25: Christians to open their eyes to the dangers, nature, and anti -Christian beliefs of the cultural
28:32: Marxism in all its many forms. Pastor Vodie Backham, for instance, has a, has powerfully preached about racism and cultural
28:40: Marxism and provides a link to a sermon. I mean, am I mistaken here?
28:46: This doesn't seem to be supportive so far. Yeah. Here's Han Holt says, yeah,
28:52: I don't think that article says what she thinks. Yeah, no,
28:58: I don't think so. So this is the sort of stuff where, you know, I just have to laugh when I see this stuff.
29:04: Cause it's like, ah, I know you're trying to, and what, what, what this person wants is, and this is very common.
29:12: Okay. Striving fraternity has a, like I said, a very large internet presence.
29:19: Um, I used to actually have a tool where I could do comparisons to see how it ranks with other websites.
29:29: So you'd be able to go and check your, you know, the ranking of, of the website, any website.
29:37: Uh, so just to give you an idea, and unfortunately Amazon got rid of this tool, but, and I'm not saying this for bragging.
29:45: Um, it's just a, it's just matter of fact of just the, the way that we write articles and actually
29:50: I'm going to try to pull up so I can speak, give you actual numbers. Um, it's the way that we write articles, the number of people who visit the site, the way that, um, the, the, the length of time that we've been around, all of those things, uh, play into searches and how, how to get found.
30:10: And so the last time that we, we were able to do this to, to look at it.
30:18: Um, and actually what I could do is I can actually show you and that way I can read it and, um, do, do, do, do, do.
30:27: Let's just share this page. Um, and so this was the last time. So this was, uh, two or three years ago,
30:36: I think. Actually, I could tell you what year it was. It was 2021 that we, we did this.
30:45: And so let me share a window and here it is.
30:50: This was our newsletter that we put out and let me make it a bit larger. Well, that's not helpful.
31:00: No, there's the, there's the ranking. So that's what it, what it is. So striving for eternity world ranking in us ranking.
31:08: And so this was at the end of 2021 and our world rank at the time, we were in the top 161 ,000 websites in the world.
31:21: Now there's about, I think at the time that I did this, I don't know if I put this in here. Let me see if I wrote the, the total, but I think it was like five or 8 billion websites.
31:33: Now I didn't write it in there. There were like five or 8 billion websites. Now granted, a lot of those websites are just a page that's put up and, you know, so there's a bunch of junk out there, but to get ranked in anything under, if you're in the top million, you're, you're considered like the tool that Alexa had for their rankings wouldn't even chart it unless you were in the top million.
32:01: So in the U S we ranked 24 ,000. So in the, out of every website in the whole
32:09: United States, the striving fraternity was in the top 20, 24 ,000. How does that compare to some other ministries?
32:16: Well, at the time living waters, Ray comfort, great ministry.
32:22: I was really surprised actually by a lot of these, especially living waters internationally.
32:29: I thought they'd have a much bigger presence than us. They were at the time ranked 605, 604 ,000 in the world.
32:39: We were 161. I, that blew me away. And in the U S they didn't even rank.
32:47: And that, that just really surprised me because I know that they get a lot of people going to their site, but I wonder if more people are going to like their
32:56: YouTube pages instead of, cause they're not writing blogs and things like that. So maybe that's why probably, yeah, that would make sense.
33:03: That that's what I'm kind of thinking. CARM. Well, now I'm going to give the preface that CARM used to at one at, you know, years ago was ranked much higher than us.
33:16: Uh, but they're, they ended up having a data loss, basically a server crashed and it wasn't being backed up.
33:23: And their, their numbers tanked. I think he they've recovered that now, but at the time where we were 161 ,000 in the world, they were 261 in the world.
33:34: And where we were ranked 24 ,000 in the U S they were 109 ,000 in the
33:39: U S now, those are the only two of the ministries that I looked at where we did better than them, both
33:49: U S and world. But these other ones, though, they, they beat us in the
33:55: U in the world rankings, which will make sense. When I tell you the ministries, what surprised me with the, with these is we did better than them in just in the
34:04: U S so answers in Genesis was 34 ,000 in the world.
34:10: Grace to you. This, this really shocked me. They were 48 ,000 in the world, but 72 ,000 in the
34:18: U S. That is pretty shocking. Yeah. That, that tells me that grace to you has a much bigger international presence than American presence.
34:31: I'm just going to, I'm just going to throw this out there. Right. John MacArthur is reaching people all over the world.
34:38: According to that number. That's that's post mill view right there.
34:43: Yeah. We can, yeah. It's very post mill with his pre -millennial view.
34:49: You can, you can hold to the pre -millennial view, but Hey, the post mill is coming out. Ligonier ministry in the
34:56: U S was the closest to us. The Ligonier ministry was 27 ,000 in the
35:02: U S compared to our 24. And then bible .org was 31 ,000 in the
35:08: U S. Mr. Tracy saying, where did you get those numbers? I actually let's see if I can highlight this.
35:15: If it'll highlight, it was the Amazon used to have a tool called Alexa traffic rankings.
35:23: Unfortunately they don't have it anymore. Actually it was January of 2022 that they, that they had gotten rid of this.
35:30: And so this was the last time that I was able to get numbers from that. but you know, we spent a lot of during COVID you know, this was our newsletter and you know, this is basically what this was, was you know, talking about,
35:46: I had said, we, we cannot count on social media to promote Christian materials anymore. Remember this is 2021.
35:52: We were seeing Christians being shut down in 2020. And so I made the effort in 2020 to really make sure that our articles were well -written for SEO so that people would find them.
36:07: This is the advantage of being part of the Christian podcast community is people that are part of the
36:12: Christian podcast community. When people search things because of the power of striving fraternities, internet presence, it helps people to find the podcasts at the
36:23: Christian podcast community. Cause we've tied those two websites together. Actually our web developer didn't want us doing that.
36:29: He said, no, we're doing that. And so but I said here,
36:34: I said with big tech companies, censoring Christians, we have focused on making sure that when people are searching for things on the internet, then they should say they find
36:45: SFE spelling mistake. By the end of, by the end of the year,
36:50: Alexa rankings had SFE ranking higher in the United States than many well -known ministries.
36:56: We also rank higher in the world than some of the same ministries. So then I provided that chart.
37:03: So, you know, all that, and that's not, I mean, I'm not posting that to like some sort of bragging rights.
37:10: It's, I mean, those numbers, the numbers are the numbers. And so it's, it's just a matter that, you know,
37:21: I was saying that to say that we have a lot of people. I get literally emails daily of people that want to blog for us and, or they want to have us tag an article because they know that one of the ways to build
37:39: SEO to get found is if you have a very large site that links to you, that becomes something that ends up helping your
37:51: SEO, the search engines look at that and say, Oh, okay. If others are looking at it, there must be something here.
37:59: And so that's why you, you see, I mean, that's why I get so many of those types of, so I didn't think for D who's thought it was a scam.
38:07: It's, I don't, I didn't think I knew it wasn't a scam. I, what I, what I figured it was is exactly what it is.
38:14: Someone is saying, Hey, can, can, can you tag, can you link to us on your article?
38:21: Now, usually what I get is people that say, Hey, you know, we got some great people that could write articles for you.
38:28: Will you feature them on your website? I was, this was a couple of months ago, maybe two months ago, an atheist blogger.
38:38: And they did the same thing. They searched for atheism and found our site. They didn't look at it whatsoever. And we're like, you know, we have, we have a couple of bloggers and they can write great articles, you know, to help, help you out with your, your site.
38:51: All we ask is that you'd link back to our, you know, let them link back to, to our site. And I'm like, your site's an atheist site.
39:00: Like, okay. Do you know anything about striving for eternity? Even, even in now some people who listen may go, but that sounds so innocent.
39:11: Why not? Well, even in something like that, what fellowship does light have with darkness? It doesn't.
39:18: Yeah. Yeah. Melissa says maybe the black Hebrew Israelites will support you now, Andrew. I don't think so,
39:26: Melissa. Yeah. Um, I think not.
39:33: Um, so yeah, it's a pity that they got rid of that because it was really hard. You know why I originally started using that is if you go to, if you go to a website to purchase something and you want to know if the website's legit, if they're not in the top million,
39:50: I wouldn't buy from them. Cause it means they're not getting the other people will set things up there.
39:55: Cause it's easy to set up a webpage. Oh yeah. Direct it. And they just take your money.
40:00: I almost got scammed the same way. Okay. Because people do, they set up those dummy accounts, those dummy pages and you go to them and they have product and they look, it looks real.
40:14: It has a checkout and everything. It looks absolutely real. Your credit card. If you have it on your phone will auto populate and it will, it will look real until you find out it's a scam because you know, they're selling $150 dress shoes for 20 bucks, right?
40:30: It sounds really good. And then they have fake reviews. Oh, these are great. They have fake pictures.
40:36: Oh, look at how good they look. And people can set it. It's so easy for people to do.
40:41: And they do it all the time in order to scam people and take their money. Yeah, actually, I mean, there's a lot, let's get into this.
40:48: I said my background, right? So for folks that don't know, I have a, I actually have a background in cybersecurity. So for, for many years,
40:57: I used to catch bad guys for a living, shall we say using, using the things like the internet.
41:04: But one of the things that we did, another person that I was working with, we, we knew something was up with somebody and we needed to find out if we could prove that several different accounts were actually the same person.
41:27: Now, how can you do that? Well, do you match the same IP address?
41:33: Well, but how do you get the IP address? Right. I mean, we're talking about different, you know, different accounts.
41:42: And so what, this is so, so what we did was send to their social media, to each account, a message that said we had a personalized,
41:57: I forget if it was like New Year's card or Valentine's day card or something like that.
42:03: Maybe a Christmas card. I forget what it was. Maybe it was Christmas. And it was a personalized and we knew now we could personalize it.
42:12: Why? Because we knew who we were sending it to. And so we, we created a page that had their name.
42:20: It was just like this card that had their, their name. And we wrote something that was made it personal. But once they went to the webpage, we got the
42:29: IP address because they hit the page. And so, because we made these, so we made like three different websites that they didn't realize all went to a site that we had grabbed the domain for and set it up.
42:45: It took less than it took us, you know, maybe, you know, an hour to set it all up.
42:52: And, you know, we just set up three pages done. And all we did was put some personal things in there from their social media so that it would draw them into want to see what the other personal notes were.
43:06: Right. And so as they clicked each one, we were able to prove that all three of those accounts were coming from the same
43:14: IP address. So what the person was doing was just changing like either browsers or, you know, logins or whatever, and, and checking them all out.
43:26: And so we got them pegged. So, and the reason we did is they were scamming people. They were using social media to, to, you know, ask for money.
43:35: Oh, I'm a struggling Christian, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And there was just something with it. And, and it was like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
43:42: And so me and a friend of mine, who's got a background in tech, we, we, you know, we're like, okay, let, let, let's figure this out.
43:51: Let's, let's know for sure whether it's the same person. We've got some downtime, you know, let's just have a little fun.
43:58: It was only an hour. Come on. I mean, we figure we save people money because, you know, there were, there were people that were going to send money.
44:11: But so let's see. So we got some comments here. Oh yeah. Mr. Tracy says he met me at ambassadors
44:18: Academy. Well, shoot me a, a picture. If you and I have a, have a picture together, shoot it to me at info at striving fraternity .com.
44:28: I'll put that up again. So I, so I could see what you look like and, and remember that, but info at striving for eternity .com.
44:39: All right. So we don't have, you know, looking for the really hard questions from folks and no one's coming in with questions, but which we want, but let's see, trying to see what we have as questions.
44:57: So there's two you got marked here. So let's start with the first one from Jim.
45:04: You want to read that one? Yeah. He says here in the Philippines, we are divided in the idea that in Armenian who totally rests,
45:13: I'm guessing wrestles, wrestles against the five points of Calvinism can still be considered saved.
45:20: So in Armenian that is against the five points of Calvinism, can they be saved?
45:28: Yeah, I would say, I would say yes, but both, you know, Calvinism and, and, and anti -Calvinist can be saved.
45:36: And I say anti -Calvinist because I, you know, to be honest with you folks, there's not too many Armenians out there, right?
45:43: They're actually anti -Calvinist. And people wouldn't even the, the free will crowd, they wouldn't call themselves
45:52: Armenian because I think they know enough to know if you stay on that path, it naturally and consistently will lead to universalism or open theism.
46:03: And they don't want to go down that path. So, so they go, well, no, we, we reject
46:08: Armenian ism also, but we're just free will. We believe man has free will, but we reject the five points of Calvinism.
46:16: Yeah. Oh, look, KT is saying, so has Andrew figured out everything about all my social media accounts?
46:25: KT? Well, he will now. Some things just don't get announced so that you got to hide a little so that now she's, okay.
46:37: We should, we should get Mr. Honholz to get in here and tell this story cause he could tell better. But I jokingly, this, this really happened and I would love to go back and figure out which episode this happened on.
46:49: I know how I could probably figure it out. But Chris Honholz would, before he put, he goes to record
46:58: Voice of Reason radio, he would usually put out a tweet and put out a Facebook saying, Hey, we're going to record pray for us.
47:06: So he puts it out and they start recording. And I unknowingly, cause they're recording and I don't hear their recordings supposedly.
47:17: And so, you know, I remember this story. Okay. Yeah. Chris is saying careful.
47:24: He may bug your house. Well, what happened was, is Chris, you know, says at the beginning of their episode, he says something now 20 minutes into their recording.
47:37: I type to Chris. Yes. I know you started recording. I'm looking at the camera that I installed in your house over your right shoulder.
47:46: Well, what did Chris say 20 minutes earlier in the recording? He says to Rich, well,
47:52: I put out a post saying that we're, we're, you know, going to be recording, asking for prayer, you know, but Andrew Rappaport priority knows that cause he's probably installed cameras in my house.
48:03: So I know everything. So he knows everything I'm doing 20 minutes later, richest is trying to say something.
48:10: And all of a sudden, Chris just burst out laughing. Now Chris has to explain to, you know, to his co -host, why is he laughing?
48:21: He's laughing because he just read my response, which now makes it sound like there was a camera over his shoulder.
48:29: I'm not saying whether there was, I'm not saying whether there wasn't, but I'm just saying.
48:39: All right. So D asks the question here. Can you explain your view of the
48:46: Kingsman redeemer view of the genealogy of Luke?
48:54: I mentioned it to my pastor and he said, he'd look into it. So we talked about this when we had
49:00: Ben Zion on talking a while ago. Yeah.
49:06: Yeah. Ben Zion was the Orthodox rabbi who came in and he also contacted the ministry, which is how that started.
49:15: So, so the, the first I saw this was in a, I believe it was, if I remember correctly, it was
49:23: Philip Schaff's history of the church. And he referred to one of the early church fathers that mentioned that there was a
49:35: Kingsman redeemer in the line of Joseph, Joseph, the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus.
49:44: And so I doing original research went back to that. He cited it and I don't remember what it was today, but I went back and looked in the early church fathers, found what he was referencing to.
49:56: And sure enough, you know, in about, I think if I remember correctly, it was about 240 to 270 that it was written that there was a reference to a
50:08: Kingsman redeemer in Joseph. So that's pretty early on. So now was this an early church father who was trying to reconcile these two and was just making it up or guessing?
50:21: That's possible. You know, because people have struggled with these two genealogies and that's why you get the one that says, this is a genealogy of Mary.
50:30: This one's of Joseph, but both say they're from Joseph is the problem. And so if there's a
50:37: Kingsman redeemer in the family, in the family line of Joseph, then you could have both as genealogies of Joseph because one is from the line of the
50:51: Kingsman redeemer and one is the biological line. Now, if you're not familiar with a Kingsman redeemer, let me explain what that is.
50:59: And the clearest you could see is in the book of Ruth. Book of Ruth has this where you have
51:06: Boaz is going to be a Kingsman redeemer. And so the children he would have with Ruth, though biologically through Boaz, the genealogical record would be through her first husband, whose name
51:26: I don't remember offhand. That's how a Kingsman redeemer work. And that's why even if you look in the book of Ruth, there's a closer
51:34: Kingsman and Boaz goes to meet with them and say, and the guy's like, hey, I can get all that land.
51:41: Great. And Boaz says, yes. And you get Ruth to raise children with under her first husband's name.
51:49: And the guy goes, oh no, I don't want to split my inheritance because what he would have to do by, by marrying
51:56: Ruth is take his inheritance and any children he has with Ruth, that's to be split with those children as well, but not under his own name.
52:06: So his lineage is with his children, but not the ones from Ruth. They would, the way the lineage would work, it would be under her first husband.
52:18: So that's the way that it would work. So that's how we would, I would see that you have both lineages going through Joseph.
52:27: I saw you flipping open, I think a Bible. So I was just opening it up just in case you were going to any passages, but you know that back then when we were talking about this very thing, cause
52:40: I had found it intriguing also. I went and looked for some videos or some lectures talking about it.
52:48: And there are several you can find out there on, on YouTube that explain a lot of the different positions of the genealogy of Jesus.
52:58: And this is one of them. And they go into a little more depth than what
53:03: Andrew is able to go to, you know, here on a show, but it is fascinating to, to hear the different perspectives.
53:14: So we see an arm behind you. She's trying to stay out of this show.
53:20: I know she is. All right. So this next question, I don't know why she doesn't come at least show herself on the camera.
53:26: She's so pretty. She should. She just looked at me like I was crazy.
53:33: Okay. So why, why do I keep the camera zoomed in the way I do with blocking this?
53:39: Because my bride wants, there's a garbage can right here. And I have a desk that wraps around.
53:46: And so she actually crawled all the way over to get there.
53:53: She didn't want to be seen. There was one time she's sneaking behind me, but so this next question is by someone who we really should, we really, maybe what we should do is say, he's not allowed to ask the question unless he comes in because he knows how to get in here.
54:11: And we know he's not afraid of being on camera, but Mr. Anthony Silvestro asked this question, is the
54:19: Biden administration partially responsible for the attacks on Israel, given the
54:24: Afghanistan pullout and the weapons that went through the hands of Ukraine and into the hands those in Hamas?
54:33: I would say partially I'd say they are just like, just like Obama was responsible for ISIS, getting all the
54:41: American weapons that they got when we pulled our troops out and then just left everything.
54:47: That's very similar thing to what we did in Afghanistan. This, this is the way that Barack Obama, who is probably the one really running the country right now.
54:58: Probably. Yes. This is, this is the way they end up doing things is to just pull out and leave everything behind, make up an excuse, pull out and our enemies get lots of weapons.
55:14: But I would say not just with the pullout of Afghanistan, but also the releasing of $6 billion to Iran, which freed them up to, and it's like, oh no, they're just spending that money on humanitarian aid.
55:27: Yes. And that freed up $6 billion that they were going to use for, for aid to now give to Hamas.
55:34: And Hezbollah. Yeah. And so I don't think there, I would agree with you,
55:40: Drew. I don't think they're partially responsible. I think the Biden administration is completely responsible for.
55:46: And you see, you also see what, you know, people ask Biden, does he support Israel?
55:51: And he he'll say, yeah, I support Israel, but then he does nothing to support Israel. Yeah. Yeah.
55:58: Well, he's talking tough and then he's releasing now up to he,
56:03: I think he's released 10 billion. Like they, they froze the 6 billion and now he's freed up 10 billion.
56:11: So how does that work? And they're sending aid to Hamas, which what did they do with it?
56:22: I that Hamas has, it was on Al Jazeera network where Hamas, the aid is coming in and Hamas is pushing people away.
56:31: They can't get to the trucks and they're just taking it right, right from the people.
56:37: Oh, Mr. Tracy said he was, Anthony was his team leader at, at ambassador's
56:42: Academy. So there we go. So then that means you definitely should have a picture of you and I together. So, yeah,
56:51: I, I would, I think that you know, I think that I'm not sure what the reference that Anthony had was with Ukraine giving weapons to Hamas.
57:03: Cause I, I don't, I think the weapons from Afghanistan went through either directly to Hamas or through Iran.
57:11: Yeah. Unless, unless Anthony knows something that we don't about it. I'm not, I'm not sure the
57:17: Ukraine tie in with with Hamas. He would have to tell me.
57:24: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting. Okay. Let me, let me give my prediction. I'm not a prophet, but I think that I, I believe that the, the
57:35: Marxist thought that Jewish people would be very similar to American people that mosque could attack.
57:46: Israel was very, very divided at the time. And so I think they thought that mosque could attack and all of the folks that were against Netanyahu would blame him, pull away, not give support.
58:08: And that would be that. I, I really believe that's what the thought was.
58:16: And so what they didn't count on was Israel unifying and, and looking to say, we're going to, we're going to, you know, stand up against this.
58:28: And we're going to be one country and unite around defeating an enemy.
58:36: And that, cause that's what happened. I don't think, I think that surprised the Marxists.
58:42: I mean, they've been trying to say that, you know, after that happened, they're trying to say, oh, Netanyahu's behind the whole thing.
58:47: He's doing this just to get the whole country behind him. Well, I remember
58:53: October 7th, CNN, I mean, every person they had on from Israel was someone who was against Netanyahu and they were trying to create a divide and people were like, now's not the time for this.
59:05: We're one country. We, we, you know, we're united on this. We can have our differences later. And that surprised people.
59:13: What I think what's surprising some people here in America, you can look at the way people are reacting with, you know, the, the president of, you know, in Pennsylvania, the university and Harvard and I forget where the other, but people don't understand what the nation of Israel means to Jewish people.
59:34: And how much this has rallied people. I know many, many liberal, very liberal
59:42: Jewish people. I got a friend of mine. If I would never ever expect him to ever say he would vote for Trump.
59:52: Okay. He hated Trump. Well, I should say hates Trump, but he, he told me if it is
01:00:00: Biden and Trump, he will vote for Trump to get rid of Biden because of Israel.
01:00:09: I mean, universities are losing tons of money because they don't understand what it means to Jewish people, to have the nation of Israel, to have a place to call home, to have something after the
01:00:23: Holocaust, you know, where they would be able to, to flee. If something like that happens again, to know that there's somewhere that would welcome them.
01:00:34: Okay. They didn't have that during Nazi Germany. They, I mean, literally,
01:00:39: I don't know. There there's records, people that came by ship, even to America came all the way to America by ship and America stopped them at sea and sent them back.
01:00:51: And they returned back were captured and killed. I mean, there's, there's all kinds of people that made access to many different countries and the country said, no, we won't take you.
01:01:02: And so that, that still is in the mindset for many Jewish people.
01:01:08: And the idea of having a place that if things get bad, wherever America, Canada, you know,
01:01:16: Cuba, there's a place that they could flee. If there's people trying to do a genocide with Jewish people, which is what the
01:01:25: Harvard presidents couldn't say. Right. I mean, if I was her questions, I would just say, you know,
01:01:31: I'd ask the question because you're saying it's, you know, well, certain contexts, as long as they don't act on it. My question, my follow -up question would be if, if someone uses the wrong pronoun, right.
01:01:43: You know, it doesn't, does the context matter, right. You know, and people forget to eliminate all
01:01:49: Blacks. Does context matter? The answer is no. Yeah. You know, people forget what you're talking about with the
01:01:56: Holocaust, right. That was just two page terms of the history book. Right.
01:02:01: It's not that long ago. My father's generation. Yeah. And, and people act like, like it never happened.
01:02:08: Like it wasn't a big deal. Right. No, it was horrific. And like you said, it was in your father's generation, which is not that long ago.
01:02:19: Yeah. And, and that's the thing when I grew up in Hebrew school, one of the things, and I've shared this here, but there's probably new listeners.
01:02:33: I, one of the big things being a generation after the Holocaust, we were drilled into us how to recognize another
01:02:42: Holocaust, what to notice the signs, because the belief was, is that there would be another
01:02:50: Holocaust and we needed to be able to recognize the signs.
01:02:56: So it was there. And part of that's also the importance of, of a nation of Israel so that we had a place to flee to if we need, if there was another
01:03:06: Holocaust somewhere in the world. And so I, I, I really,
01:03:12: I, my prayer for the next election is that the, if the
01:03:19: Democrats continue down this road where they are trying to support the, you know,
01:03:26: Hamas, then what I anticipate might happen.
01:03:31: I mean, you're already seeing a huge vote shift from black and Hispanic, from Democrat to Republican.
01:03:40: And, you know, the, the, the, the numbers that are always said is that if the Democrats can't,
01:03:46: Democrats lose 18 % of the black vote, they can't win an election. Well, Trump, I think got 12%.
01:03:55: He doubled the amount because it used to be two to five was the most the
01:04:01: Republican could get that's shifting. And if that shifts, if that shifts to 20%, and then you have the
01:04:09: Spanish, if all of these illegal immigrants who are fleeing the ones that are actually fleeing countries to be here for a better life, and they see that Biden and the
01:04:21: Democrats are trying to bring in the very thing they were fleeing from, I think what you're going to end up seeing is a big support for black from blacks, a big support from Hispanics.
01:04:33: And now the largest voting block that Democrats get is the Jewish liberal
01:04:39: Jewish vote. And I think they don't realize that they may lose the possibility that they're going to go down this road and go too far with it to where they're going to, they'll do their polling and realize, oh, we got to get the, the, the
01:04:57: Jewish vote and they're going to try appealing to Jewish people. And I think it may, it'll be too late.
01:05:03: At least that's what I'm hoping. And, and if the Democrats lose those three groups by large enough numbers,
01:05:14: I, I wonder if they'll be able to manufacture enough votes in, in false ballots to be able to overcome it.
01:05:25: Because in, in 2016, what I think happened is they were, they were stealing it. They just didn't think they needed to do too much to get it.
01:05:32: And they were, they did not realize the support that Trump had. They didn't, they weren't going to take any chances in 2020 and they got caught because they were pulling out all the stops.
01:05:44: Well, I think they're going to get caught again. Yeah. Yeah. Which when you look at the way
01:05:51: Joe Biden campaigned in 2020, he campaigned as a guy who either didn't want to win or knew he was going to win because he didn't campaign at all.
01:06:00: But it's interesting that the left continually calls the right and conservatives,
01:06:07: Nazis, while they're the ones that, that are against Israel.
01:06:14: They're, they're the ones that are supporting a group that wants to exterminate Israel. Yeah.
01:06:21: So Melissa says this, uh, my, my grandfather helped hide many and, and it should be hide just in case.
01:06:30: Cause she posted a correction right there before you tell me I'm adding words. My grandfather helped hide many
01:06:37: Jewish people from the Nazis. He was part of the Dutch underground,
01:06:43: Melissa. Thank you for your grandfather. Uh, sorry.
01:06:52: Uh, it, I do get choked up on this. It, it is son that does affect me. Um, I will admit that, um, we actually, uh, it's kind of interesting.
01:07:05: Um, you know, a lot of people celebrate Christmas and whatnot, and I don't have any nostalgia with it.
01:07:11: I don't have, I didn't grow up with Christmas trees and all, but I did grow up with a menorah and I haven't had a menorah in the house since I left for college, but I did this year and, and, and I've been, you know, lighting the candles each night.
01:07:33: And, you know, I think there's, there is that it's, it's, you know, uh, not that I'm worshiping or, you know, it's, it's a remembrance.
01:07:41: Um, so yeah. So Chris Honholds says this, that, uh, there's a long time between now and the election.
01:07:48: I'm not going to hold my breath. I'm not either, Chris. I know they'll, they'll, they're going to look for ways to, they got to do it there.
01:07:54: I mean, there is, uh, they've they're now realizing, right.
01:08:02: They're complaining about the Republicans doing an impeachment inquiry on Biden because the
01:08:11: Democrats changed the rules so that they can impeach Trump. And they don't want the
01:08:17: Republicans to use the rules that they changed. Like somehow that's not fair. Yeah.
01:08:23: And, and nothing's more obvious than when a sitting president has his, his rival, his presidential rival that that's going to be running against him, who is more popular than him brought up on charges and try to put in prison.
01:08:38: Nothing's more obvious, right. And nothing's more illegal also. Yeah. Melissa, Melissa said, my grandfather is my hero.
01:08:47: Well, he's, he's mine too. I, I, I mean, to, to do that, uh, people don't understand.
01:08:56: I don't think we understand in America what a sacrifice that is to, to be willing to do something like that.
01:09:04: Yeah. Cause if you got caught, you died also. Yep. Um, just trying to read to keep up with some of these things.
01:09:15: So, so Jim has a follow -up. Um, he says, follow -up question.
01:09:21: Let me rephrase the question and Armenian who wrestled against what the
01:09:26: Bible teaches, what I believe is five point can still be saved.
01:09:32: Well, I'm saying both sides could be saved, Jim. Um, by the way, uh, I, I should announce
01:09:38: Jim, since you're mentioning it from the Philippines, we have confirmed. We, I will be returning to the
01:09:44: Philippines. Uh, I'll be in Manila. Let me try to pull up the, uh, the dates, but we're, we're going to be, uh, it's right now it's looking like we've added to the roster.
01:10:00: So not just Justin Peters and myself, but I believe now we are including, um, none other than your favorite preacher and mine drew.
01:10:15: And that is Jim. You got it. Nice. Yes. I do love
01:10:22: Jim's preaching. I know it's amazing. It's so good. It's really good. And one day you're going to love his eschatology.
01:10:29: So I, I, you know, I told you if anyone, if anyone's going to move me into that position, it'll be
01:10:35: Jim for good reason. Um, ah, okay.
01:10:41: I got to find, I got to find the email, um, where we, so I could put it up on screen for do, to do, to do.
01:10:58: We had all these emails and I'm trying to find them now. Well, for listeners who don't know about Jim Osman, uh, you need to look up his ministry and look up his, uh, expository preaching ministry.
01:11:10: You can find it on Striving for Eternity, the Christian podcast community. Um, every time now
01:11:18: I love talking with Jim, I love listening to Jim, but every time he's on the show,
01:11:23: I always have a pen and paper because you never know what he's going to, and it could just be the littlest thing, right?
01:11:31: Yeah. I mean, we did a whole, we did a whole discussion because he said a throwaway comment in a sermon.
01:11:37: He said it and it got me like, what?
01:11:45: And, and that, that sparked. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What, what'd you say? Like, I got to think about that.
01:11:53: I have to sit down. I have to think about that. I have to mull that over for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. It really was.
01:12:00: So let me, let me bring this up for Jim. Uh, the calendar, the plan here, see what worked best with his schedule, but here you go.
01:12:12: So we will be going, and I'm going to tell, for listeners,
01:12:18: I'm going to tell you how you can help us with this, but, uh, April, uh, 24th, we,
01:12:23: I will arrive. We will arrive in Manila. Uh, they, they give us no rest by the way.
01:12:30: When I think, I think the last time I was there in 2019, I think
01:12:35: I was there for 10 or 12 days and spoke like 20 or 22 times. Okay.
01:12:41: So they put us to work and that's fine. We told them like, Hey, that's great. We, we get, you know, we'll land.
01:12:49: Last time we landed, we got to our hotel by like one and two in the morning. We were at a radio for an interview at eight in the morning and we had to drive there.
01:12:59: So yeah. So 25th, we got a radio interview. There will be a pre -conference on Friday, the 26th.
01:13:05: We're still working out details of that. Uh, but so far the topics were looking really good. We're probably going to deal with social justice,
01:13:12: Roman Catholicism, possibly. Uh, but the main conference, um, will be, it's going to be titled strange fire.
01:13:22: That'll give some of you guys an idea what we're going to deal with, but we are going to deal with the charismatic movement, the demon slayers, uh, or whatever they call themselves.
01:13:32: Uh, so we're going to have, uh, the topics are going to be, uh, Justin's going to talk about the history of, of, um, history of the charismatic movement.
01:13:42: I'm going to cover whether miracles are for today. Jim is going to deal with hearing the voice of God.
01:13:48: Uh, Jim's other talk is going to be on the, these, uh, the, the recent movements of the demon, demon possessed, the demonizing, the deliverance movements.
01:14:00: Yeah. The whole deliverance movement. Uh, and, and then, um, and then we're going to have, uh, actually
01:14:10: I can look up the, the tiles. Uh, so let's see if I could share this one too.
01:14:17: Oh, you just see my mouse moving. So hold on. Let's let me switch to this one and I'll show you what we're going to be, what the topics are.
01:14:28: Although we, we worded it a bit differently. Jim here is asking what is
01:14:33: RRCC mean and where is it located? Um, so RCC is the reformed, uh, let's see, reformed, no, uh, hold on.
01:14:50: Let me, let me look up Pastor Armand. It's the church. Um, it's, it's the church that is hosting this and he is, um,
01:15:07: I'm just going to pull it up to get the name cause I forget the name. Uh, Rock of Refuge.
01:15:13: That's what it is. Rock of Refuge Christian Church. I always forget that. And it's in, um, it's in, uh,
01:15:21: New Manila in, uh, Quazine City, Q -U -E -Z -O -N
01:15:29: City. Uh, it is a five, it would be a reformed church by the way. And so since you were looking for a reformed church, um, and if I could find the window that I brought up,
01:15:45: I would be able to share this. Um, where did it go? All right.
01:15:54: Well, see, that's what happens when you have so many windows open on your computer. Yeah. I, I wonder if it's that or if it's, oh,
01:16:02: I see what I need to do. It's not recognizing it as a window, but now
01:16:07: I think it will. Yeah. Okay. So there we go. So here's, here's the schedule for the
01:16:13: Manila conference. Um, so the,
01:16:19: Justin would deal with the, the history of the charismatic movement. I'm then going to give a biblical case for cessationism, providing an overview of 1
01:16:28: Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. Jim's topic will be how to know the, actually,
01:16:34: Jim's topic, he, he retitled that, um, that's going to be, uh, the sufficiency of scripture versus private revelation.
01:16:46: Justin's going to do Christian mysticism and tongues. I will then cover the topic of should we expect miracles today?
01:16:54: And then Jim's next topic is retitled as devil's deliverance and demon slayers, the modern day exorcists.
01:17:05: So that is, that is the, uh, what we have there.
01:17:11: And then to get back to what, and the reason I'm sharing this, cause I'm going to have a, an appeal for you guys to really help out how you can help bring this about.
01:17:23: So the plan is you can see, we're going to be there for two weeks. So we land on the 24th.
01:17:28: We got the radio interview, the 25th, the 26th, we got a pre -conference that we're going to do somewhere between three to six sessions there between the three of us.
01:17:39: Then we have the Manila conference on Saturday. Um, they're expecting about 800 people.
01:17:45: Now, last time we were in the sky dome with 1 ,500 people that came. And so, and, and this is a huge thing for, for the folks down in the
01:17:56: Philippines. It makes a major impact. I'm saying that because we've seen, and we hear the testimonies even, even now, and I I'm going to share some with you, but the
01:18:05: Manila conference on the 27th, um, we're going to be preaching at, uh, Rocca Refuge Christian Church.
01:18:12: Now what they're going to do is one of us will be preaching there. The other two will be at two other churches that they're going to work out so that we're all preaching somewhere that on the 28th on Sunday, the 29th, we're going to fly to an
01:18:26: Island of Palawan. Uh, so we'll, and we haven't figured out what we're doing there.
01:18:33: Um, the, the, then we fly back to Manila. We'll have a church camp that Friday and Saturday preaching, uh, the
01:18:43: Lord's day at, you know, again on the fifth, and then we fly to Baha 'u'llah.
01:18:49: And then that next day, Monday, the sixth, we do a con that same conference that we did in Manila in Baha 'u'llah.
01:18:56: And then we fly back to Manila to fly home on the eighth busy schedule.
01:19:04: Um, they will have us working. I mean, we will be doing a lot of preaching. So I'm saying that to say this, um, we do need your help with this.
01:19:14: Okay. Uh, you can help us get there because the church there takes care of the hotels and those flights when we're there, not when we get there.
01:19:28: So we're looking at flights. I priced out the flights. The cheapest flight I can find is $2 ,400 and our ministry has to cover that now.
01:19:39: Understand a person or for everyone that's per person. Yeah.
01:19:44: So, which is not outside last year when it was Justin and I, uh, striving fraternity ended up, uh, ordering the tickets and it was, it was about $4 ,800 for the two of us to go.
01:19:56: So that's actually kind of stayed consistent pre COVID to post COVID. So, which
01:20:02: I was surprised at. So when I priced out the tickets, that's what I can find.
01:20:08: So this is not a cheap thing. And this is something where look, folks, you can have a major impact in the
01:20:17: Philippines by, by helping us get there. Okay. They're, they don't pay us to speak. They just take care of the money they're raising is to take care of the hotel and the flights for us when we're there.
01:20:29: Um, and it's not like we can sell lots of books there because you're, you know, you can only bring so many, you know, pegs and it's, it'd have to go with luggage with us.
01:20:39: So if you can help support it, that would be great. You can go to striving for training .org
01:20:45: slash support. You can give a one -time gift. And, and, you know, I think there's a place you could put a note and just say for the
01:20:52: Philippines trip. Uh, or if you, if there isn't a place to, you know, to leave a note, donate there the one time and then send us an email saying,
01:21:01: Hey, I donated this amount for the Philippines. We need to raise 24, $2 ,500 per person to be able to get over to the
01:21:11: Philippines. So what kind of impact has it had? Well, you got to get back to remember that.
01:21:19: Or is that, or is that a round trip? That's round trip. Oh, okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Yeah.
01:21:25: No, I'm, I'm planning on getting back. My wife is not coming with me. Um, you know,
01:21:31: I mean, I'd love to bring her, but at $2 ,500 ministry can't send her.
01:21:38: So, um, but yeah, what's kind of some of the impact. Well, when we were talking with the
01:21:44: Philippines, there's actually a new church that was just formed because when we were there last time, speaking about the truth of God's word against things like women preachers, that there were a bunch of people who basically had problems in their churches because of women preachers and started a new church with lots of other people that were leaving other churches because of the conference that we had in 2019.
01:22:23: Just think, I mean, a new church formed biblically because of the fact that Justin and I were there.
01:22:36: A really neat story. This is a touching story to me personally. The church
01:22:41: I attend, we had started attending there. My pastor's son is a missionary.
01:22:49: He was a missionary in Cambodia. His wife is from the
01:22:55: Philippines, and so they were coming back stateside, and they were both missionaries in Cambodia.
01:23:03: They come back to America, and my pastor and his wife were picking them up from the airport, and all of a sudden,
01:23:12: I get a text from my pastor's wife, and she says, Andrew, did you preach in the
01:23:18: Philippines? And I responded, yes, and she said, were you preaching there with some guy named
01:23:25: Justin Peters? And I said, yes, and then the next text I got was, our daughter -in -law was at that conference and credits that conference with a lot of her maturity.
01:23:41: She had recently gotten saved but wasn't in a good church, and that conference, and she still has her notes.
01:23:46: She showed me her notes. She still has her notes. That conference is what put her on a trajectory of sound theology, and I mean,
01:23:57: I'm still in touch with a woman who, she worked at a radio station that interviewed us, and we talked about the problems with Bethel and Hillsong, and that's mostly what they were playing on the radio, and he actually left the radio station because of the music they were playing.
01:24:17: She got convinced. She left the church she was attending because a big thing that we dealt with last time was the faith movement, and it's rampant there.
01:24:26: There are so many people that emailed me after I got home from that conference because of the fact that they were asking me where's a good church to go to because we have to leave our church.
01:24:41: I mean, our church just is not biblical, and dozens and dozens of people are reaching out to Justin and I, and I only knew the one of a couple churches, right?
01:24:52: So, Jim, I hope that I will be able to meet you out there so that you now know when we'll be there, where we'll be.
01:25:01: I hope to be able to meet you. Just come up and say, hey, I'm Jim from Apologetics Live. It would be great, and let those in your area know about it because I really want to see this have the impact that it had before.
01:25:16: What was the impact? Well, one of their biggest word of faith leaders ended up—there was a
01:25:26: Twitter going back and forth between Justin and I and one of their largest church pastors out there, and they accused
01:25:35: Justin and I of—because we named names of Filipino pastors that were word of faith and preaching a false gospel, and that had a ripple effect in the
01:25:51: Philippines. And they accused us of not being—that we were naming names publicly when we weren't willing to go to them privately.
01:26:00: But what backfired on them is one of my requests to the
01:26:06: Filipino church that was hosting it was to set up a dinner or at least a meeting with these different pastors that we were going to name, and they all rejected that meeting.
01:26:19: So the reality is I ended up saying, we tried to meet with—because it was actually the son—the guy was like, you're insulting my father on his birthday.
01:26:28: You have no respect. We didn't know it was his birthday, but we didn't plan the conference around your dad's birthday.
01:26:34: Sorry, your dad's not that important. And he starts accusing Justin of—because it was
01:26:39: Justin who named his father—of doing this publicly but not privately. I said, I'm sorry, but we actually did try to meet with your father, and he was unwilling to meet.
01:26:52: Kind of changes the tune there, right? Yeah. When you say, well, we tried to meet with you, we tried to talk with you, you had no interest.
01:27:02: And so then what are we to do? Not to mention, I mean, Scripture isn't against naming names.
01:27:08: Scripture names names, right? John names people. Paul names people. But at least you say, hey, we were trying to do you a courtesy by meeting with you.
01:27:20: And it's not required, but we were trying to do it anyway. Yeah, well, you know why I wanted to do it?
01:27:26: I wanted them to know exactly what we were going to preach about them. I wanted them to hear right from our mouths.
01:27:36: And because my hope was that we could lead them to Christ. Yeah, minister to them, yeah. Because if they get saved, they go back to their church and could say, folks,
01:27:44: I'm stepping down because I'm a false teacher. Right, right. Here's what I learned. That would be great.
01:27:51: Get someone biblical to come in and take over the church. Maybe see a revival there. And so that's sort of the stuff that we're looking for to see happen again.
01:28:04: And so if you guys can help out with that, just go to strivingforeturning .org support.
01:28:11: It would have a huge impact. Look, I'm just going to be open and honest with you guys.
01:28:21: Since COVID, we have not had great years with donations. As the economy is getting harder, our supporters are dropping.
01:28:29: It is difficult. And so we run a tight ship.
01:28:34: I mean, the way we do it, about 76 % of all donations that come in go toward the ministry.
01:28:43: We have speakers that aren't taking salaries. I get a very small salary, but it's not even enough to cover even part of my mortgage payment.
01:28:57: And I told Andrew, he doesn't have to pay me for being here. I just show up out of the kindness of my heart and my love for Andrew.
01:29:07: Yeah. Well, it's a thing where we want the money to go toward ministry.
01:29:13: And that's why we've structured the ministry the way we have. So people have other ways of having an income to make sure that the money donated is going toward ministry.
01:29:22: So if you guys can help out with that, it would be a great blessing. I'm going to end up putting a newsletter out.
01:29:28: I got to do it at the beginning of the year to raise the funds for it because it is tight enough that if we can't raise the money for this trip, then we end up having to say that we can't go to churches here in America that are small and don't have the money to have us come out.
01:29:47: And so we don't want to have to make that call. Okay, I see that there's three stars, but I don't know where they are.
01:29:58: So why don't you put them up, whatever you were starring there. Yeah, sure. So Chris says, when you're talking about coming back from the
01:30:07: Philippines, Andrew says, oh, dang, you mean we have to let Andrew come back? Which is really funny because KT and Jesus immediately said that Chris is getting a little feisty in his first retirement.
01:30:23: Well, Chris, if you're willing to pay for the one -way trip,
01:30:30: I'll take it. I'll get someone else to pay the other one way back. But at least
01:30:37: Chris could say, I tried to get rid of him. It was someone else that brought him back. That's right.
01:30:43: My wife might be one that would want to bring me back. Melissa says,
01:30:48: Andrew, I would like to donate $100. Can I send your ministry a check? Yes, you can. And if you go to the support page, there should be the address, which is on there, but the address is
01:31:01: Striving for Eternity, P .O. Box 361
01:31:08: Langhorn, Pennsylvania, and that's 19047.
01:31:16: So yeah, checks are great because then we don't lose the fees to PayPal or Patreon or anyone else.
01:31:23: And then Brother John says, I'm a graduate of REMA and my family are lifelong friends with the, he means
01:31:32: Hagans, Kenneth Hagan, with the Hagans and Kenneth Copeland to name a few leaders in that movement.
01:31:39: Wow. Yeah. It's good that you got out of that.
01:31:46: Yeah. And for people that don't know, REMA is a charismatic college that was started by Kenneth Hagan.
01:31:56: Yeah. Yeah. A pretty big one too. So yeah.
01:32:01: I mean, if you guys can help out, I mean, I don't, you know, regular listeners, you know,
01:32:08: I don't, I don't ask for money. You know, we mentioned it once in a while, but you know, this is, this is a specific need and it's just, it's a large sum.
01:32:20: And so I know last time that we put an appeal out, I think we, we, we asked for it twice.
01:32:26: I think we, we, I asked in the newsletter, we put out two newsletters and all $4 ,800 came in to send
01:32:36: Justin and I there. This time we're sending three people. And so, I mean, in total, we got the three of us need to raise $7 ,500.
01:32:46: And so, so we can go, we're, we're going to go either way. We've, the three of us have committed, or at least, well, let's put it this way.
01:32:53: Justin and I have committed. Jim still has to work some things out. You know, he's, he's pastoring a church and he's got a, he's been gone for two weeks.
01:33:01: This, this will be Jim's first international speaking trip. So it'll, it'll be, it's a big deal.
01:33:08: We really want to see that happen. But Justin and I have already told the church we're going to come no matter what.
01:33:16: But for Striving Fraternity, if, if we go there and we can't raise the funds, it means we have to say no to some, some churches.
01:33:22: And that's one of the reasons I haven't been booking for next year. There's a bunch of churches that have been asking, and I haven't been booking yet because I got to hold off to see if we have the money to be able to go to these other places next year.
01:33:38: And that's only going to, we're only going to be able to say yes if, if we can raise the funds for that.
01:33:43: So if you, if you can help us make a major impact on the Philippines, I, I can't express how much of an impact it had last time we were there.
01:33:53: On so many different areas, Word of Faith, Women Preachers, the Charismatic Movement, Reform Theology, those things were, were areas that were such an issue down there that it had a, just a big impact all the way across the country.
01:34:14: You know, I mean, all the different islands, there's like, I think, 7 ,000 islands. They're not all, I think only, I think only like 2 ,000 of them are inhabitable, but, but, uh, it's, it's,
01:34:26: I mean, Drew, it's crazy that when I, so we had at the
01:34:31: Sky Dome after the Manila conference last time, they, they had everyone come up, take pictures, and it was three and a half hours of picture taking.
01:34:41: You want to talk about, Justin and I were looking at each other like, Justin's like, Justin and I are going to each other like, man, my, my, my, my cheeks hurt from smiling.
01:34:52: It just, but people would come up and I, I just asked people, hey, you know, how long did, you know, how did you get here?
01:34:58: Like, how long did it take you? Most people were taking multiple modes of transportation.
01:35:04: When I say that, I mean, walking, bus, boat, plane, train.
01:35:14: Actually, I don't think I've ever trained. And probably people taking a plane to get on a bus to get on a boat.
01:35:21: The average I found was that it was, people took three different modes of, of major transportation, right?
01:35:27: So it was like, it was bus, it was either a boat or a plane with a bus and then having a walk.
01:35:36: I mean, walk a large distance. And so people were the,
01:35:41: I think the average was like, like 10 hours to get to this conference. People were traveling, you know, because they don't get this often enough and with solid teachers and people were coming from all, all of the islands.
01:35:54: And in America, you know, if it rains, people don't want to get out on a
01:36:00: Sunday and go to church. Funny you say, so when we're at the
01:36:06: SkyDome, Justin was first up preaching. Toward the beginning of his message, the air conditioning went out.
01:36:14: And this is in the hot season. When I came out,
01:36:19: I was sweating so much. They put a six foot fan. They rolled it up and I'm preaching because they got, they got the big screen
01:36:29: TVs and they're zoomed in my face and I sweat and it's just porn. And so they, they bring in this huge fan, they're blowing it on me.
01:36:38: There was no air conditioning all day in the hot heat of Manila and no one left.
01:36:47: Not even after lunch. I thought everyone was going to vacate after lunch. They stayed.
01:36:54: Okay. I, let me correct that. They all, I was going to say they all stayed all, except for, you're going to love this.
01:37:02: There was a table in the front. They had these VIP seatings. And so they had a table that was like all women.
01:37:10: And in Justin's first message, he mentioned that it's not biblical to have women pastors and that entire table got up and left in between.
01:37:22: They were all female pastors. And so yeah, there was an empty table right in front.
01:37:29: I remember going like, Hey, I thought there were people sitting there at lunch. I was asking someone, I said, what happened to that table?
01:37:35: You know, they probably, they probably went, oh, there's nothing we can learn here. But you know what, let me tell you, here's an interesting thing because people watched the live stream of Manila.
01:37:48: When we last time went from Manila, we did the same conference down in Cebu.
01:37:56: People already heard it. And so one of the questions that we ended up getting in the Q and A that was written in before we started preaching from what
01:38:05: I understand was a question of, if I go to a church with a female pastor, if our church has a female pastor, what do we do to remove her?
01:38:24: We can't remove her, what do we do? So people were already thinking through the fact that they had to make major decisions asking their pastor, their quote unquote pastor, to resign because they're in an unbiblical position or have to leave their church.
01:38:45: You know, that's, that's a big deal. Right. Yeah. Well, well, the first thing is if you have a woman pastor,
01:38:53: I highly doubt that you have elders in the church, right? Because, because ideally, if you, if you need to remove a pastor, it would go through the elders and the elders would make the decision.
01:39:06: They would confront the pastor and so on and so forth. So, but if you have a female pastor, you already have an unbiblical church.
01:39:14: I highly doubt you have biblical elders who are going to be able to do that. So what do you do?
01:39:20: Well, you would confront the person, right, with truth of the scriptures. If they refused, well, then you just, you leave the church and you go find a biblical church.
01:39:32: Yeah. Well, actually, so, so when we got to the Q &A, here, here's the funny thing, and you could probably find the, the video on YouTube and see it, but the question was, where did, you know, if I have, if I have a female pastor, uh, what do, what do
01:39:50: I do? What do we do as a church with the female pastor? And if she doesn't step down, what should we do?
01:39:57: And because we were trying to get, we, we got a lot of questions, we're getting toward the end, and I was trying to be more rapid fire to get those, to answer quickly, and, and I wanted to give
01:40:07: Justin more, more preference and time to answer. So what we're doing is they would, they'd ask,
01:40:13: I would start on one question, then Justin would start, we'd go back and forth. So I was trying to be a little bit quicker as we got toward the end.
01:40:20: So they asked that question, my response was really quick. What, what do you do if a church has a female pastor, and if she doesn't step down, you know, what do we do?
01:40:33: My answer was really simple. Fire her, leave the church. Yeah.
01:40:38: What I didn't realize was there were two tables of women that were pastors in Cebu.
01:40:45: And when I said that, they went, oh, like, were you not listening? Justin and I like talked about this several times in the conference.
01:40:53: This is the Q and A at the end. But yeah, you know, you know, there's a, there's a couple of really good comments here.
01:41:00: Chris on holds, if you have a woman pastor, you have neither a pastor nor a church. And he's paraphrasing
01:41:05: John MacArthur, which leads into Melissa's comment.
01:41:11: If you have a female pastor, you have weak men. Now, John MacArthur has done several sermons on this talking about if you have women in leadership and he's walked through scripture.
01:41:22: So he points it out in scripture where women lead it's because they have weak men who have failed to lead.
01:41:29: And the women leading is a judgment on the men. That is exactly what, you know, it amazes me that people will look at Deborah and they want to use
01:41:39: Deborah as proof that women can be pastors. Read judges. What does Deborah say? Deborah herself says to Barack that you asking me to be in this position is a
01:41:53: God's judgment on you. He recognized it's
01:41:58: God's judgment on him that she would be in that position. Mr. Tracy threw a trump card here.
01:42:05: Yeah. But what if your female pastor is an apostle too? I mean, I guess then it must be biblical.
01:42:14: I love him. Is he self -appointed? I mean, my hands are tied, you know?
01:42:20: Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, I was, so I, I did not know, at least
01:42:27: I don't remember MacArthur saying, uh, you know, you said to hear this one from Chris Honholds here.
01:42:35: Uh, if you have a woman pastor, you have neither a pastor nor a church of paraphrase MacArthur. When I was asked about it, um,
01:42:42: I, I got asked, what do I think about a church that has a woman, female pastor?
01:42:49: And my response was, you know, that's, you know, it's, she's not a pastor and it's not a church.
01:42:58: And someone made a meme of that, put it out there. And everyone said, I was quoting MacArthur. If I was,
01:43:04: I didn't know it. So, um, basically here's the way to look at it.
01:43:10: Right. I heard someone say, uh, if I, they, they were, they were quoting someone, but they couldn't remember who they were quoting.
01:43:19: And they said, they said, I'm probably quoting Spurgeon because Spurgeon said everything's smart. And so it's, you know, if we say something and someone else said it and we don't know it, well,
01:43:29: I mean, it's because they're the smart people and it's just kind of trickling down to all of us at the bottom.
01:43:35: No, I didn't even know. I mean, maybe I did and just didn't realize, but I didn't know
01:43:40: MacArthur had said anything like that. So I didn't know I was quoting anybody to be honest. So I thought
01:43:47: I was just giving a quick snappy snippy answer to, you know, quote Chris Honholtz.
01:43:52: And, you know, and that's the thing, when we look back, we can just, we can just look at the lives of John MacArthur and R .C.
01:44:00: Sproul, right? Two great men, great theologians, brilliant.
01:44:06: One really good theology, one's corrected now. Yeah. But between, if you were to take up, if you were to take all of their teachings, lectures, sermons, writings, if you were to take all of that up, right, we've probably plagiarized without even knowing it.
01:44:29: Unlike the Harvard president who did an Ed Litton and plagiarized her reputation.
01:44:39: And did you hear who she plagiarized? She plagiarized another black woman who is a conservative.
01:44:46: Yeah. And that black woman she, you know, that she plagiarized, I heard her talk about the fact that, you know, in the academic world, it's a big deal to, because it, you know, she's not say you, you get your, you get a accreditation and, you know, a tenure and things like that based on the number of people that cite you.
01:45:08: So the fact that she wasn't cited in a source, that's, it's basically theft.
01:45:15: And that's why it's theft. And that's why it's such a big deal. Yeah. You get, you get kicked out of school for those things.
01:45:21: You lose your scholarships, you get kicked out and you can't come back. And so now it's like, well, what do you do with this
01:45:28: Harvard president who did the very thing that she was also probably kicking other people out for.
01:45:34: For. Yeah. By the way. So Melissa says, as a dispute, I still love
01:45:39: R .C. Sproul. Melissa, don't worry because today R .C. Sproul is dispensational.
01:45:45: You know, Andrew always beats me to that joke. And I know it's coming and I still can't get there quick enough to beat him to it.
01:45:55: Chris Honhold says nobody should ever quote Chris Honholds. That dude is highly suspect.
01:46:02: Just saying he is suspect because he loves Buddy the Elf. And so with that, before I have just triggered
01:46:13: Chris Honholds, if you want to know if Chris loves
01:46:18: Buddy the Elf, all you got to do is ask James White. There we go. I'm just going to say,
01:46:23: Andrew, Chris is going back into a form of law enforcement. OK, yeah, he's he's quit lying to people.
01:46:32: Chris, you retired. You can't tase me, bro. You can't tase me anymore.
01:46:39: You don't have the taser. You had to turn that in when you retired. All right.
01:46:47: Well, with that, you know, I want to thank everyone. This has been a wonderful year.
01:46:53: It's been a I will say it's been a really hard year personally. Drew, you you know, some of what
01:46:58: I've been going through just health wise. I've had to really pull back from a lot of ministry this year, something
01:47:05: I wasn't comfortable doing, but had to. And I'm starting to get ramped up again, but still trying to keep things you know, to not overdo it.
01:47:16: And so definitely accept your prayers. I don't accept
01:47:22: Mr. Honholds, who says, yes, but I kept the pepper spray. I have my own pepper spray, sir.
01:47:28: By the way, the problem with pepper spray is most people don't know how to use it. If you if you spray pepper spray at me,
01:47:35: I am running toward you as fast as I can because it brings the whole cloud of dust to you, too.
01:47:43: What you don't know is is Andrew. He and I to it. So he sprays himself.
01:47:49: So it has no effect. No effect. And I know something about Chris. I can run faster than him.
01:47:56: I will outrun him and bring that to him. And so so yeah, so this has been this has been a rough year.
01:48:04: It's been but it's been a good year. We've we've had some great opportunities at Striving for Trinity to minister the debate that we had that we played here just a few weeks ago, being able to see those students in Texas.
01:48:18: That was a great opportunity. We've been to several churches this year, several conferences, and every month but December, we've been somewhere.
01:48:32: We've been traveling somewhere. And so and it's really because of folks like you that help support us, spread the word about what we're doing, asking us to come to your churches.
01:48:45: You don't know how much it means to us here at Striving for Eternity. Just to know,
01:48:51: I mean, we're just, you know, trying to just serve the Lord. We're not going to ever be a big ministry.
01:48:57: It's just not the way that we're organized and the way we operate. We know that. We know there's a lot far better people, but we appreciate the year and all those that helped us do what we did.
01:49:10: And so as a end of the year, I want to give a big thanks to everyone who supports us, to those who watch and share the show with others.
01:49:20: It's one of the best things you can do to help us is just share these. You know, text this episode to someone.
01:49:28: You know, text a different podcast, my rap report podcast. Go text it out to folks. And, you know, we talked about Israel.
01:49:35: Go listen to the episode I did with Michael Brown on Israel. Very informative, very helpful, really gives a lot of background to what's going on there.
01:49:43: Really helped to educate even Christians on what's really going on.
01:49:51: And so, you know, just sharing that with others is a huge help. I want to thank Drew because Drew has filled in.
01:49:57: He's, you know, with me being out and having to deal with different issues and travel,
01:50:03: Drew has come in with Chris Hough and carried the show for, you know, several weeks when
01:50:09: I couldn't be here. So, you know, I just want to thank you, Chris, for doing a great job in my absence. Well, it's
01:50:16: Drew, but, you know, you can call me Chris, I guess, if you want. Did I call you Chris? I thought I said Drew. See, we talked about this earlier.
01:50:27: We did, yeah. But yeah, I'm happy to do it. You know, it was, it's fun to come on here.
01:50:36: You know, it's fun to be a part of the show. And, you know, it's fun to interact with everyone, but also talk theology and also be able to minister to some people.
01:50:47: And this year, we've had the opportunity to minister to a lot of people. And we've gotten to meet a lot of people that have come on the show and just had some wonderful arguments and some not so wonderful, where it seems a little like a waste of time.
01:51:03: But, you know, at the end of the day, the thing is, is every single person who's come on here, whether they believed or they didn't believe, right, they got the gospel and they got to know that we care about them and that our goal is just to proclaim
01:51:21: Christ and elevate Christ and magnify Christ. And we want them to know Christ. That's right.
01:51:27: Yeah. You know, the, someone I go to church with, he listened to the show that we played the debate and he's the deacon in the church.
01:51:37: And he said to me, pulled me aside and said, you know, I listened to that debate and I really appreciated how you shared the gospel with Bill.
01:51:46: He said, it told me that you're not just doing it and up there for name recognition or popularity or you're, you cared about where he spends eternity.
01:51:56: And I said, yeah. So Chris Han holds here. Let's see. Chris says, Andrew is getting absent -minded in his old age.
01:52:07: You know, whatever your name is, thanks. Melissa, Melissa says it's
01:52:13: Drew's show and Andrew just fills in from time to time. I like that.
01:52:20: But more serious side, Chris says, all joking aside, grateful for Andrew and SFE's efforts to minister to the body of Christ where and if people can help the ministry, they should.
01:52:32: Thank you for that, Chris. All joking aside, I appreciate it, Captain America. So, and if folks don't know why
01:52:40: Chris Han holds as Captain America, just go look at his Facebook and look at pictures and you'll figure it out. But yeah, with that, folks,
01:52:47: I just want to wish everybody a wonderful Merry Christmas and a
01:52:53: Happy New Year. Stay safe. We have a very interesting year coming up with an election here in America that is going to be quite interesting.
01:53:04: I am sure there's going to be many things to discuss, many questions to be answered.
01:53:11: And I will have this year, I'm not sure when yet, but the debate with Michael Brown, that's something else that we'll be asking for support to get to.
01:53:22: But these are the things that we're doing to further the kingdom and try to rightly present
01:53:31: Christ well here on earth, both in our what we say and how we conduct ourselves.
01:53:39: And so with that, I will bid you all a Happy New Year. To end the year, we will see you next year.
01:53:48: And just remember, what is it, Drew? We got to see if you—Strive to make each day an eternal day for the glory of God.
01:53:57: That's pretty close. I can't just say what you say. Okay.
01:54:04: Yeah. You're doing what you accused me of doing earlier, mixing up some words, adding words.
01:54:10: Okay, no. No, I'm taking the same concept. God bless you all.