David Platt on O Holy Night

Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast, my name is John Harris. We are going to talk today about a David Platt sermon that was preached last Sunday from the pulpit of McLean Bible Church in McLean, Virginia.

And this is a listener-generated episode. Someone sent this to me and said, John, would you comment on it? And if I'm sent things, sometimes I have the time to do it. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I can.

Sometimes I can't. I would love to do more. But this was one that it sparked my interest and I thought, you know what, we'll do this. So we're going to talk about it. It's certainly not David Platt's most radical sermon or anything like that, but it illustrates a few things that I thought would be helpful for us.

One is that conservatives and revolutionaries, for lack of a better term, revolutionaries and traditionalists, I guess you could say, they hear things differently sometimes. And I think that David Platt, in this sermon, he's kind of vague, but long story short, David Platt tries to set up this song, O Holy Night, which is what he's preaching.

He's preaching on the song, O Holy Night. He tries to set up the history of this song being from someone, two non-Christians in France, I guess one was Jewish, didn't even believe that Jesus was the Messiah, wrote the music.

And then someone else sounded like, I haven't looked into it yet, sounded like someone who was more of a progressive, I guess, for lack of a better term, in France, revolutionary type, had written this song.

And it was banned by the church when the church found out, and I'm assuming that's the Catholic.

Church.

I'm going off of what David Platt here said. I haven't actually looked into this, but the Catholic church, it sounds like, banned this because they found out this was written by two non-Christians. And then the song, though, became popular with abolitionists in the United States because they latched onto some of the lyrics as representing their cause.

And so that's really where David Platt, he wants to use that as the thing that he then brings into the present and says, well, just like abolitionists use this song and they saw in it the cry for revolutionizing the labor relationships that existed, and that's what Jesus's birth and coming was about in some ways.

We need to do the same thing today, right? That's what he's really trying to get everyone to see, and that, you know, there are all the injustices around him that he would, in his mind, think of as injustice are the things we need to focus on eradicating and disparities we need to eliminate and all that.

The thing is, if you didn't know who David Platt was, I think some of this, you might not, you might not have a big problem with it. People who are conservative might not see the big issue. Now, I would, I think because my ears are so tuned to this kind of stuff, I would still see problems with it.

I would still see, I would still have suspicions. But I think in general, if we didn't know anything about David Platt or the context of the social justice movement and his participation in it, if we didn't know what was happening at McLean Bible Church right now in regards to this, then we may not think about it the same way that we would if we didn't know that.

And so it illustrates to me conservatives, progressives, they're listening with different.

Ears.

Traditionalists, revolutionaries, they're listening to these things differently. The left always claims, I should say many times the left claims, conservatives use dog whistles, racist dog whistles, that kind of thing.

They're trying to show everyone that they're sexist, they're going to get the sexist to come vote for them, but they can't come out and say that, right? You hear this accusation. I think what that is, is projection.

Leftists do this all the time. They do that. They say vague things that their base understands what it means and that they can retreat. And it's kind of the Mott and Bailey. They can just kind of retreat and then say, well, I didn't mean that or, well, you're assuming that.

I think that's kind of what Platt's doing here, in a way. He's assuming some things about injustice that he's expanded on in other sermons, and some of them we've talked about, that he's not stating here, but because we know the context, we know what he's talking about, and the people sitting there at McLean know what he's talking about in the middle of a fight in the church over this issue and a fight in evangelicalism over this issue.

So we're all accustomed now to, when we hear things, we can't just hear them. We bring in sometimes, like when you talk about injustice, let's say, and if you have any history of being on the social justice side, or if you don't clarify what you mean, a lot of assumptions are made.

Sometimes they, in fact, most of the time, I would say they're correct. In this case, I think it is correct. And I'm going to go through the sermon, like I said, we're going to go through some clips of it and just talk about it.

So one last thing I want to say, so let's see, I've said why this is important. Yeah, what it illustrates. And also, secondly, it also illustrates that David Platt, even on a sermon about a Christmas carol, can't help but going a bit woke.

So we're going to talk about that. The third thing I wanted to say, though, this isn't something, an illustration, but just something I want to remind people about is when I play clips and I don't play the whole sermon, there is a danger there.

Everyone needs to understand there is a danger of taking things out of context. And I do get accused of this every so often. John, you're taking things out of context. If that's the case, I will very humbly accept any correction.

But here's the thing. I want you to be specific with me. What did the context provide that I left out or that I'm missing? That's the answer I've never gotten an answer for with anything I put out there.

The fact is, we don't have time to go through sometimes every single, I can't play the whole entire sermon. Sometimes it's beneficial to do that. Other times it's not. And in this case, I took some representative clips and I just want to examine these clips because the sermon is very repetitive and we don't have time to go through the whole thing and you would be bored to tears if we did.

So I just want to take these these few short clips and we'll talk about the sermon. It'll be much shorter and you'll understand more what David Platt's trying to communicate here. But I just wanted to make that caveat.

If someone has an issue, let me know. Be specific. I'm totally fine with that. And this is something I've been especially careful of. People have done that to me where they've tried to take things I've said out of context.

So I know how that is. I'm also, you know, I'm trained in research, so I had to do that for my academic discipline. So I understand how sources can be twisted and used. And I go through great pains to make sure I do not do that.

So that's my priority. And I hope, though, this is helpful for you. So we're going to start, let's see, at the beginning here and I'll just stop it and we'll comment as we go.

Social Justice Readings of O Holy Night

Those were potent lyrics to sing in those days. And I would submit these are potent lyrics to sing today.

I think that's the point of this whole sermon, honestly, that clip is what he's trying to say, that abolitionists had used this sermon to bolster their own argument. And so today we're in a very similar situation.

Now, this is what you have to ask. What's the situation? What are you talking about? What what kind of great injustice is it? Abortion? And you find out, no, it's really not. And I'll play you that clip in a moment.

And he identifies the groups that he considers to be oppressed. And so he's trying to make a parallel here. And I think that's the thing that you that tips us off to the wokeness. Now, I don't want to get lost in a rabbit hole here, but David Platt's whole construction of this, that this is interesting.

He says slaves and people were fighting. I think he I don't think he meant to make a distinct distinction between them. I think David Platt knows slaves are people, but he he's what he's what he's saying is that this was a rallying cry at that point in time when slavery still existed and that it it can be served today to be a rallying cry once again.

Now, I don't think this is the rabbit hole. I don't think that this is 100 percent. I think this is he's leaving things out here. I don't there were probably some radical abolitionists, right, who would use this and maybe some abolitionists, just regular ordinary abolitionists.

But that abolitionism itself was viewed as a very radical thing at that time. It did not. It certainly did not characterize the entire north. Certainly, even many in the South wanted slavery to end, but they were not abolitionists.

They were what we would call progressive emancipationists or gradual emancipationists, probably a better term because of the way the term progressive is now used. And and so there was a lot of there were a lot of songs that they would use to bolster their claims and draw inspiration from.

And many of them did see the north invading the south and subjugating the south as this a prophetic thing. I mean, that's kind of like the battle hymn of the republic written by someone who is a heretic.

Even if you read the lyrics to that song, you realize there's actually false teaching in that song. But it was the whole point was very prophetic, very apocalyptic type language that is then applied to the current situation at that time, which is north invading south and conquering the south.

And that this was it's justified because slaves are being freed. So all the things that came from that, from that consolidation of power, from the denying denying states the ability to leave, which I think some people wish that was possible more today, but it was already tried and it was stomped out.

And so people don't want to try that today as much. I don't see the courage to do that over abortion or other issues, which I kind of wish that courage was there in some ways to nullify or to say we're out of this country if you're going to force us to allow women and doctors to kill their babies.

Right. I mean, these are things that you can't really talk about because of that whole situation and what happened. And I heard it said I remember who said this, but that we didn't have our French revolution, the quote unquote revolutionary war, war for independence was not a revolution.

It was more of a conservative move back to say we want our right read the Declaration of Independence, read the Olive Branch petition. We want our rights as British citizens. That's what we we're fighting because we're denied these things and you're making war on us.

It was a sort of a conservative move to preserve something that had been lost. But the French Revolution, that type of that egalitarian type of ideal that actually happened more in the American Civil War that happened.

You can see it even in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in a way where Lincoln tries to make the United States about the proposition that all men are created equal. He takes the Declaration of Independence, one line from it, really out of context, and then infuses his own meaning and tries to make that that's that's the ideal of the United States.

So we're all just trying to live up to that still, which now you even hear, quote unquote, conservatives making that case, which is that dog don't hunt. It's not a good argument, in my opinion. It's not fair to the historical record, but that's the paradigm we live in now.

That's what our elites pretty much all think that on both sides and many of our people, even the working class people now are even adopting that because it's filtering down. And so David Platt, when he brings this up, he's he's focused on that narrow that group of people that was about very much about immediately abolishing slavery in some ways, by any means necessary.

Many of them thought and he he's using that group and their moral, their treasury of counterfeit virtue, in my mind, many of them did not have many of them would have still been by today's standards, especially, but they would they would have looked down at black people.

They it was very narrow what they were interested in often. And that was the eradication of slavery. There was a moral superiority. Many of them felt for being against that. There was somewhat of an egalitarian spirit at that time.

And to actually care about the real, true conditions of these people, many of them did not. I hate to say that, but it is just the truth. Many of them did not. They you didn't see the kind of humanitarian, charitable work that you would have expected from that group, because this was very much so it was a political thing.

And there was a lot of virtue signaling then like there was today about this. And you got to understand that people don't really change as far as who we are. The same kinds of things recycle over and over and over.

And so I don't want to get into the rabbit hole because this could be very complicated. We are taught a lot of things and there's a lot of onion layers to peel back whenever I get into a discussion of something in history that has is forbidden to talk about by the current intelligentsia.

But David Platt's framing of this is very much in keeping with the way modern academia frames this. And now pop culture frames this whole thing. And I just I'm just telling you, it's not 100 percent accurate.

It's it's not like you have this glorious cause on one side. Pure is the driven snow with virtue. And then on the other side, these evil, horrible people just trying to their whole goal is they want slavery and they want to perpetuate it and they want to keep people from stopping it.

And that's why they're fighting. And that's it's not that complicated. And most things in history aren't or it's not that simple, I should say. And most things in history aren't that simple. There's a lot more nuance.

There's a lot more complication behind that. But because we have this this neo abolitionist interpretation of that conflict, it can be used and both sides now try to use it to bolster their own cause.

Hey, I'm with the abolitionists. Hey, no, I'm with the abolitionists. And and so the left uses it. And now you even see some elements on the right trying to use it, saying, no, because they were Republicans and we're Republican or even in the pro-life movement.

Now, sometimes you'll find people saying, like, I'm I'm just like I'm a John Brown of I want to be like the John Brown of of the pro-life movement or something, which which is a little scary knowing what John Brown did.

But that's that that kind of thing. And by the way, I should make a little note here for everyone listening. I'm not saying that abolitionism as it applies to abortion, I think I wish it was a different term sometimes, but I'm not saying that that's a bad thing.

There should be we should want to abolish abortion. Abortion is black and white in the scripture. No questions asked. A sin murder. OK, and it needs to be there's no gradual anything getting just stop.

Just stop. Don't do it. Right. It's a little different, I think, when you're looking at issues that there scripture has teaching on, but doesn't in black and white tell you this is an absolute capital offense that needs to be it needs to be stopped.

So we would all say, yep, slavery, bad, get rid of it, thankful it's gone, because we want to see people who are self-reliant, independent, taking care of themselves much better. But with a complicated situation in which this developed organically, no body came together and said, hey, let's vote for it.

Let's vote that we have it. It was something that developed over time. And then it was how do we what do we do with this now that we have it and we've inherited this little more complicated, a lot of economic factors involved, a lot of social and political factors involved.

And that that was the situation that the people singing the song would have found themselves in. And they and many of the abolitionists wanted to make this a very simple thing. You bad, we good. And and we are on the side of the gospel.

We are on the side of God's law, of his love. And and so David Platt is making drawing the same thing. He's doing the same thing. He's drawing a distinction, saying we good, you bad. We people who are with me and with McLean, as we as you listen to the sermon, you later find out are against injustice.

They're the good guys. And what they're doing is good. All the things McLean is involved in, very good. Give money, he even says, give money at the end of the year. We need to to keep doing the good things we're doing.

The people that go through the week, though, and they don't think about justice or they don't do justice in our conception of what that is, they're bad. And I submit that this is the same thing the scribes and Pharisees did in a way.

Jesus said, look, you're you may be well-meaning. It may be, you know, I've not going to take care of my parents because I've given my money to Corbin, right, for the Lord. There may be some some good intentions behind this, but what you've done is you subverted the law of God for the sake of your tradition.

And that's what we see, I think, with David Platt. Look at his emphasis as we play this.

Oppression, Justice, and the People Left Out

Many African-American sisters and brothers in our church who have stories of oppression, whether personally or in your parents. Great grandparents and great grandparents and so on who were enslaved. And I think of David Platt when this song was being sung, I think of Native American sisters and brothers who, in your families and tribes, have experienced oppression and poverty.

I think of a variety of sisters and brothers in our church family who immigrated here because of oppression or poverty in your home countries. And many of you are daily burdened by continuing oppression back home where you still have friends and family living there.

I think about conversations I've had with Eliza, who oversees our counseling and care ministry. Some of you are quite frankly burdened by oppression in your home even now.

So these are the people that are oppressed. Now, what did David Platt leave out? That's what I want to encourage you to think about. What's he trying to signal to his congregation? Black people, Native Americans, immigrants, and then people that have personal issues that need counsel, they need counsel for them.

So he doesn't now, I'm not saying he doesn't believe this on some level, but he's not talking about the unborn here. He's not talking about those forced to shut down their businesses or to take the jab or against their will to do that.

And they've lost their jobs, they've lost their businesses, they've lost their livelihood. He's not talking about those who were the victims of last year's looting and everything associated with the BLM protests.

He's not talking about the, I gotta be careful what I say on YouTube, the, let's just say the results supposedly of a certain election. There's a lot of things that he leaves out of this. What about people who live in Appalachia, who are poor as dirt?

And there's a lot of historic things you can point to to say this is why they are the way they are, you know, from, you could even say it's the total war, going back to the Civil War that was committed against many of them, civilians.

We could talk about what happened when the federal government went in and made the Appalachian or the Appalachian National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We could talk about how they were sold on the idea that prisons would bring some kind of economic development and it didn't.

It actually did the opposite, a lack of access to health care. I mean, like there's just a lot of things you could point to, and I'm not saying you have to be exhausted with every single group, but David Platt loves to point to the groups the left specifically would use as their own human shields to get their agenda done, right?

And there is some truth to it, right? There have been injustices that have taken place in the past to various groups. And Native Americans, in my mind, being one of the groups that would be the top of that list.

But especially, it's funny, especially many of the, quote unquote, abolitionists who would have, he's championing as they're the ones that want to break the chains of slavery and so forth. It was the army that got set down there, right, that they would have been so positive about, that then right after that, they go out west, that same army, and they conquer the Native Americans and oftentimes break treaties.

And I mean, history is a lot more complicated than sometimes it's made out to be. And so David Platt's probably not thinking consistently on all of this, but I'm just trying to point out he wants you to give, he wants to err on one side of the political divide.

And the classes that are specifically, the social locations, quote unquote, that are specifically used by the left to bolster their own cause are the ones that he wants to emphasize here. So that's, he doesn't come out and say like he has in other sermons that, look, there's a disparity and look how many people are pulled over who look like this and look how many people are incarcerated who look like this and are on drugs.

And that means that it's, he doesn't say that in this, but the people who have been under that teaching at McLean, they know what he's talking about because he's expanded on it in other sermons. And he continues to just identify those groups as the ones that when he preaches sermons on injustice, those are the groups he brings up.

I find that interesting. I think in my mind, look, abortion would probably still be the number one thing. If I was going to talk about injustice and preach a sermon about it, I would, I don't know how you get away from mentioning that, right?

That that's like the Holocaust is happening. And let's talk about, uh, I don't know, some historic disparity between Jews and Germans or something like that. That could, that's the kind of thing that would have been used in Germany at that time.

Uh, not ignoring or downplaying kind of, uh, this other thing that's horrible. That's actually really happening. And then focusing on stuff that honestly, I mean, look, you want to talk about disparities with African-Americans or something?

Yeah.

But look at the opportunities that exist out there. Look at the, uh, especially since the 1960s, look at the kinds of things that are available to people who are black. If they want to get a degree, the scholarships that are available, uh, the jobs that are available because of diversity requirements and these kinds of things.

I mean, it's just to me to focus on that still. And that's, that's the big thing that we need to be so focused on. And that's the parallel that exists. It's just slavery is like still existing because we have these, uh, these, these kinds of problems with, with these groups of people and these disparities.

It's just to me, it shows kind of where his sympathies lie.

Right.

And so this is, this is more vague stuff. This is more, um, he's not out there like in, you know, waving the social justice flag, but it's subtle stuff that becomes ingrained in your mind. If you listen to enough of it and you start attributing, when you hear like the word injustice or oppression, you start immediately the images in your mind come up of a certain, certain kinds of people.

Right.

And that's on purpose. I will submit.

Jesus Came to Revolutionize Society

A baby who will make slaves brothers, like will totally change the fabric of society.

So totally change the fact that was G. Jesus came to totally change the fabric of society. Is that true? Think about this biblically. Is that what Jesus did? I mean, he used slavery, slave imagery in his parables.

He even talked about, I mean, it's Jesus is, I'm not saying this. He, he talked about beating slaves in his parable parables as a positive thing for disobedience. Uh, this is, you have to make sense of the way Jesus acted on this earth when he was here.

In a Roman time when slavery existed and in some ways was far crueler than the kind of slavery that existed in the United States, the slave trade was horrific, especially in some, and certainly some of the conditions that some slaves endured, uh, in, in America weren't great either, but, um, that being said, look at Roman slavery, Roman slavery, sex, sex slavery was just normalized in that system.

You had gladiators that, uh, would have been slaves. You had, I mean, Roman privilege, I guess, would have been a real thing. You couldn't have been a slave. If you were a Roman citizen, that wouldn't have happened.

There was man capture on the borders. So this all existed in Jesus's time. And what does he do about it? That wasn't his primary purpose to, to stop that particular thing. It wasn't to revolutionize these relationships and these hierarchies.

In fact, what you find is some of the things Jesus says, almost, you could try to make the case. I don't make this, but you could even say that they reinforce it. And the reason someone could try to make that case is because Jesus doesn't challenge those, uh, that relationship.

And instead the effect of his preaching was slaves became better slaves, masters became better masters. And we see the extension of that in Paul's teaching where he gives directions to slaves and masters.

And he's not trying to revolutionize anything. It's look, this is the thing about Christianity. It's reformational. It is reformational, not revolutionary. We, there are, there are, uh, sins that must be stopped.

Things in black and white in the scripture being boom, they're evil. We stop them. We fight against them, but we're not, we, what we don't do is, Hey, look at, at this, um, this disparity that exists, which is what I think David Platt wants people to draw from this, look at, look at this injustice over here, uh, we need to go completely revolutionize everything, change the way we do business and church and everything, uh, diversify our, our elder boards and, you know, that's not the way Christianity does it.

The Christianity is more organic. You, you're not putting people in these positions because of some external quality you put them in because, Hey, they're brothers and sisters in Christ, and it's not based primarily on this racial or identity thing and, um, and, and, and by emphasizing our relationship to Christ, you crush bigotries, but you do it in a reformational way.

That's how it works. You crush bigotries. If you make that your main purpose, that, uh, we are going to be about some justice kind of thing on the forefront, that's our mission. And therefore, even though you're qualified, we're passing over you and hiring this, this, uh, as, as Matt Chandler says, we'll hire your, your black, your African-American six instead of your white seven, uh, because we're about fighting injustice.

Then you actually just create more prejudice by doing that. You create resentment. Uh, you actually lower the standards for the people you're trying to help and they need to try to gain. They need to try to meet standards in order to be successful in the world.

You're not doing them any favors and that's the effect of the social justice movement. And so I would disagree wholeheartedly with this. And I don't know that that's what the song is even saying. Maybe it is, but I, I, I never gathered that like, and I don't think the song comes out and says that, that Jesus came to revolutionize, uh, Jesus.

Yeah.

The effect of Jesus's ministry was to show that, Hey, slaves are brothers too. But that doesn't mean you get rid of the relationship that exists. The labor relationship doesn't deteriorate just because of that.

It may take a long time to come to the understanding that, you know what? It's a lot better that society has people responsible for themselves. We want to encourage that as much as possible. We don't want slavery.

Uh, we want people to be responsible and relying on themselves and, uh, being able to exercise the duties and responsibilities God has given them. And it takes time to get there. And it, and it did in the ancient world.

Um, and, uh, anyway, so that's David's Platt's construction on that. And I just, I want you to hear that. Uh, I want you to, to don't, you know, it's a little thing. He says, Jesus came to revolutionize, but that that's significant.

That's the same language you heard with all the people that talked about the, uh, new left ideas that they wanted to incorporate in Christianity that I write about in social justice goes to church, like Richard Mao and Jim Wallace and Ron Sider.

That's the kind of thing that they set all the time. It wasn't set in Christianity much at that time, not evangelicalism, at least. All right, let's keep going.

Jesus came to transform our lives, to give all of us hope that this weary fallen world with its poverty and captivity and blindness and oppression will not have the last word. Jesus came to give us hope and to revolutionize the way we live and we love in the face of all of these things in this weary world, Christian brother.

All right.

I want to stop there for a second. This is a verse that's commonly used. It's Jesus's quote from Luke four, where Jesus says, uh, the book of Isaiah was handed to him and he opened the book and found the place where it was written.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, and he sent me to proclaim, uh, to release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.

And he closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down in the eyes of all the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them today, the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing and, and then people were like, wait a minute, hold on.

We know where you're from. How can this be? And he said, Hey, no prophets welcome in their hometown. And, uh, then the people of the synagogue were filled with rage and they got up and drove him out of the city.

And that's how that went. And he was able to escape from them. So this is from Luke chapter four. Now this is Jesus, uh, reading though, from Isaiah chapter 61, which, uh, even John MacArthur talks about this being a symbolic of Jubilee of the year of Jubilee, whenever he 70 years, uh, property would go back to the rightful owners, uh, by family and slaves would be freed.

And, um, it's, it's kind of this wonderful thing, but it's, it's this, that's a type and shadow of what's to come in Isaiah 61 when Jesus sets up his kingdom. And so I, he talks about this. Let me read for you.

Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and to free the prisoners, to reclaim the favorable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn.

To grant those who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning. Now he goes on and it's this, it's all very prophetic. It's about the restoration of Israel.

Uh, they will rebuild the ancient ruins. They will raise up the former devastations. He talks about, and listen to this. Strangers will stand and pasture your flocks and foreigners will be your farmers and your vine dressers.

In other words, Hey, a bunch of foreigners and strangers are going to be working for you. Like, you know, it was that, is that part of David Platt's? Uh, you know, this is what we're supposed to be doing.

If we're supposed to be doing all this, fighting all this injustice, should, should we, I don't know. I'm just curious. Should we also try to copy, uh, this passage by, if it's a command for us, do we also need to go out there and find foreigners and strangers to do the work for us?

Is that, I mean, he would freak out. That's, that's against social justice. That's against what I believe, but that's in the same passage. I'm just pointing this out. You will be called priests of the Lord.

You'll be spoken of as ministers of our God. You will eat the wealth of nations and their riches. You will boast in their riches. So let's go take the wealth of the world or let's enjoy the wealth of the world because we're going to have it.

Yeah.

I'm sure that's let's, let's apply that to America, right? Is that what David Platt wants to do? I don't think so. He has to only focus on the first part of this passage or else he gets in real trouble if he tries to then go through the rest of the passage and then say, Oh, this is what we're supposed to do.

I will submit to you. This is what I think about this. This isn't a command that's given to Christians today that they're supposed to go and do these things. Now, some of these things we should be doing.

There's other places in the Bible that talk about this. That's not the point of the passage though. Point of the passage is it is messianic and the Jews would have taken it that way. What that, why else would they be trying to confront him over this?

They wouldn't have had a problem. If Jesus was saying, you got to go and do good things and nice things for people. Uh, that wouldn't have been very controversial, but the fact that he says this and applies it to himself as they knew what he was saying, wait, you're the Messiah, you're the one that's going to bring in this reign.

This isn't something we usher in. This is something that God does. The Lord has appointed me to bring good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, uh, hearted to proclaim liberty of the captives and freedom to prisoners.

This is something the Lord does. And, um, and, and the point of it is to look to God that this is what God is doing. Now, the second thing is, cause David Platt wants to make this about like, oh, this is what we're supposed to be doing.

The second thing I want to say though, is I want to read for you. This is from, uh, John Gill's commentary, uh, to preach the gospel to the poor. John Gill says in Isaiah, it is to the meek, which does, which design the same persons and mean such as are in poor in spirit and are sensible of their spiritual poverty, have low and humble thoughts of themselves and their unrighteousness and seek to Christ for durable riches and true righteousness.