January 6, 2026 Show with Nick White on “I Married and Unregenerate Woman & Didn’t Know It & Neither Did She”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this sixth day of January, 2026.

Happy Insurrection Day, everybody. Today, we are going to have or hear,

I should say, a fascinating story, and the story is going to be told by Nick White, who is pastor of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, and he was an independent fundamentalist

Baptist who came to embrace the doctrines of sovereign grace, and he's going to be addressing the fact that he married an unregenerate woman and didn't know it, and neither did she, and why he baptized his own wife while he was already a pastor.

This is the Chelsea White story, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Nick White.

Thank you so much for having me again, Chris. It's a privilege to be here. And if you could, let our listeners know about First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York.

First Baptist is a historic Baptist church in Hamburg, which is one of the south towns in Buffalo, New York, and we are a

Bible preaching, sovereign grace preaching Baptist church here, and the

Lord is blessing and working here powerfully through the proclamation of his word. We preach

Christ and him crucify, and we seek to advance his kingdom through the means of the proclamation of his good news.

So that's about us in a nutshell. Yes, and if anybody wants to not only know more about First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, which can be found at FBCHamburg .com,

but you can also hear my first interview with Pastor Nick White, in which he gave his personal testimony of one pastor's journey out from independent fundamentalism into the doctrines of sovereign grace.

So just type in Nick White in the search engine at ironsharpensironradio .com,

and that program will come up. And it's great to have

Nick back on the program, and perhaps it would be good for you to explain to our listeners why your lovely wife,

Chelsea, who we are primarily discussing her today, her story of salvation, and her realization that after she had already married a pastor, she did not have confidence she was a truly born -again woman.

Why is she not with us today telling her own story? Yeah, she has personally requested that she would not have to be the one to go on radio to talk and explain her story.

So she volunteered me as her tribute to do that, because she's not much of a public speaker, and she's a lot more comfortable with having me be the one to do all the talking.

It's kind of what she's used to. So that's what we're going to try to do tonight. You know, as I'm looking at you, and our audience can't see you, but we could see each other because we're using

Microsoft Teams, but it just dawned on me that it's a good thing that you have a beard, because if you were to shave off your beard and mustache,

I think you would look about 12 years old. Yes, brother, the beard is there for a reason.

Do you actually add gray to the beard and the hair? No, no, no, that's what children do.

Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away. If you do have a question for my guest today,

Pastor Nick White of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. I only remain anonymous if you are asking a very personal and private question.

Perhaps you are hearing this program today, and you're beginning to realize that perhaps you are not truly born again, or you have some personal question to ask, since we do have a pastor as a guest today.

Well, we will respect your wishes to remain anonymous, but if it's a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

So first of all, let's hear the story of how you and Chelsea met, and if you were dating or courting.

I know that there are differences amongst conservative Christians on the way to romantically approach someone who your heart is telling you, this may be the one that I am going to spend the rest of my life with on this planet.

And there are those who believe in the liberty to date, some who exclusively believe in courting, all that.

But just tell us how you met and how the relationship began and then flourished to the point you got married.

Yeah, we met in a Bible college. We both grew up, as I mentioned on the last radio show, we both grew up in the

Independent Fundamental Baptist world. So we met at Independent Fundamental Baptist Bible College, and yeah,

I asked her to go to a banquet that we had. You could take a date to this banquet that our college would hold every year in the wintertime.

And so she agreed. And which college was that? It's called

Commonwealth Baptist College. It's Independent Fundamental Baptist College in Lexington, Kentucky.

Yeah, so we met there and we got to know each other. And yeah, we fell in love.

And I asked her to be my wife after—oh, she's going to kill me if I can't get this right.

After about a year, I think. And then shortly after that,

I think about seven months later, we were married. And immediately after marriage, we moved after our lease was up in our apartment to Boston to start a church together.

Praise God. And how long after that did you become a pastor? I was a pastor almost immediately after moving to Boston.

We just started that church right away. Oh, you planted the church. Yes, yes.

Great. And so how long were you in Boston before your wife came to realize that there was something not quite right with her faith, something radically wrong with her faith, in fact?

You know, was there any signs to you, any evidences like, wait a minute, there's something not kosher here, for lack of a better term.

Tell us about that. Your whole life as a married couple and, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, we were married two years, really. We were in Boston for about two years before she made known to me her need for Christ.

And honestly, there were no signals. I mean, she knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk.

And especially with our theology at that time, we did not believe that conversion really held the marks of affections that are directed towards God and Christ.

That was kind of foreign to us. Really, it was just, well, if you prayed a prayer and if you say you believed, surely you're saved.

And I mean, she went to Bible college, for goodness sakes. I mean, why on earth would a lost person go to Bible college? That's what

I thought. And so in both of our minds, she was saved, regenerated. Was she raised in a

Christian home? She was raised in a very similar background as me, independent, fundamental

Baptist. So, yeah. So there weren't any signs at that time.

But looking back, I mean, now, yeah, there were definitely signs. And the signs now, looking back, was that there was no fellowship with God whatsoever.

There was not a drive for her to know God, to walk with the Lord, no compunction to open the word of God, to study it, to read it.

There was a lot of carnality and desire. But again, she walked the walk and talked the talk as far as she didn't have a dirty mouth.

She dressed, in fact, very conservatively, dresses only, never any pants.

Very, very conservative in a lot of things. The music we would listen to, very, very starchy, conservative, fundamental music.

So you would not know if you were just looking at those things. So it was a shock to me when she came to me and told me that she needed

Christ. And this absence of a desire to delve into the word of God, to get to know him more deeply and all of that, was that manifest to you when you were trying to encourage her to study with you?

Or how did that manifest itself? Yeah, so I mean, you know,

I wasn't really taught, especially in school, how to how to disciple your wife.

And so for me, I just thought, well, that's probably just you asking her, hey, do you read your

Bible today? And that's it. You know, that's me discipling my wife. And so I would ask her that. And she would she would say no.

Most of the time, it would be rare that she was reading the scripture. And she would tell you this.

I mean, she she did not really have any desire whatsoever to read the word of God or to spend time in prayer.

And when you would talk to her about the things of God, I put it this way.

The lights were off. You could tell she could talk about other things and she would be very, very excited, very engaged.

But then you talk about the things of God and scripture, and it was as if the lights just turned right off and she just kind of disengaged, very cold, very short.

So now when was this on the timeline of you becoming a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace, where you were departing from the mindset, if you will, of independent fundamentalist

Baptists? And in fact, now I have to be very careful here. I have many friends who are independent fundamentalist

Baptists, who I consider my dear brethren. I have known some of them for decades, going back to the 90s when

I worked for WMCA Radio, an affiliate of Salem Media, the largest radio, the largest

Christian radio network in the world. At least they were at one time. And I actually helped a number of independent fundamentalist

Baptist churches launch their own radio program, which

I actually came up with the name for it, the Fundamental Baptist Forum, because of the fact as an airtime salesman, especially in the

New York City area, the vast majority of independent fundamentalist

Baptist churches are very small and they could not afford to sponsor their own program as individual congregations.

So they pooled resources financially and shared the airtime by taking turns hosting the

Fundamentalist Baptist Forum, or should I say, the Fundamental Baptist Forum.

And I became very close with these brethren.

They knew that I was a Calvinist, and the ones that I became very close with, they would let me know their disagreements with me.

And it varied how forceful and how animated the discussions were, because there were some who seemed to be on the brink of believing in the doctrines of sovereign grace and some who were adamantly opposed to it.

But anyway, I think I began to learn more and more about the mindset of independent fundamentalist

Baptists through this program that I helped them create and through my friendships with them.

In fact, I started to regret helping them start the program, not with all of them, but there were some of the brethren who began openly attacking my church where I was a member on the air, not by name, but they were making it very clear geographically what they were talking about.

So it would probably be a good idea, for those of our listeners who are very ignorant of the independent fundamentalist

Baptist experience, who have not heard your testimony, which is on the recording of the first interview we did.

And of course, on top of all that, it is not a monolithic group. There is a spectrum.

In fact, I used to attend some of their business meetings for the

Fundamental Baptist Forum, and there would be animated disagreements amongst them about many things, about whether or not it would be legitimate to have a pastor of a

Bible church participate in the program. Did you have to be pre -mill and pre -trib?

Did you have to believe in only using the King James Bible? You know, there were a number of those things that divided them because some of them were

Bob Jones graduates, which is not a King James only school. So anyway, why don't you tell us something about the mindset of many, we can't say all, but many in the independent fundamentalist

Baptist movement regarding the confidence and the assurance that you are truly born again.

How does one know that as an independent fundamentalist

Baptist and how they would disagree with many in the sovereign grace believing and reformed

Christian world? So we would believe that as long as you prayed a prayer and you are sincere in your prayer to ask

Jesus to come into your heart, or there's many ways that it's put, you hear ABC 123, accept, believe, call, or accept, believe, confess, there'd be a written out prayer,

Lord, I know I'm a sinner, I don't want to go to hell, I want to go to heaven, please save me, come into my heart, forgive me of my sin,

I believe Jesus died for me, please do this, amen. And if you were talking to somebody and they said,

I prayed that prayer, and you asked them, well, did you believe it? Did you, were you sincere when you prayed it?

And if they said yes, you would tell that person, you just made the greatest decision in your life, you are now a born again

Christian, congratulations, welcome to the family of God, break that date and fly a leaf up your

Bible. And that's kind of the way we would do the vandalism. And any time there would be any doubt on conversion, am

I truly in Christ, am I really saved, it would be, well, don't doubt in the night what

God did in the light, go back to your fly leaf of your Bible where you wrote down that date, look at it, ask yourself, did you pray the prayer?

Well, yes. And were you sincere? Well, yes. OK, well, you're in, there's no reason to doubt, that's just the devil talking to you.

And that's kind of, that's at least the world that I grew up in. Now, as you said, and I'm thankful you said this, not everyone is like that.

There are men who do faithfully preach the gospel, they faithfully preach regeneration and conversion.

But essentially, in the world I was in, which if anyone's familiar with Jack Kyle's Sword of the

Lord, that was the circle I was a part of. And it's very, it's very manufacturism kind of focus.

You just throw a sinner on the conveyor belt and you make him a believer by getting him to go through the process of praying the sinner's prayer and doing

X, Y, Z. And so, yeah, that's kind of where we came from.

And essentially, it's a denial of regeneration in a practical sense.

They would say you need to be born again. They would say they believe that. They would put it on signs. They would wave those signs in their tent meetings.

But being born again didn't actually mean being converted, where there was an actual change of affections in life.

And in fact, I even heard it taught, you don't have to love Jesus to be saved. You just have to believe in him.

And that is outrageous. I mean, that's so unbiblical to teach. But at the time, it seemed to make sense.

You can know Jesus, doesn't mean you love him necessarily. You just need to be discipled. And so they would separate those two things, that affections for Christ is something that comes after salvation with time.

You just have to be discipled into that, and you have to condition your own heart for that. So that's why

I say it's a practical denial of regeneration and conversion. Essentially, conversion did nothing for you except stamped your ticket to heaven.

So that's what we believe. Now, the thing that's interesting about that is we know that that is rampant and very, very typical amongst modern evangelicals, and independent fundamentalist

Baptists have a strong dislike, to put it mildly, a revulsion over modern evangelicalism.

They will use that phrase as a demeaning insult to many

Christians that they disagree with, even if the description is not accurate. There are, you know,

Reformed Christians that are just as much committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and who are conservative will be labeled modern evangelicals.

But at the same time, it seems strange that an independent fundamentalist

Baptist church who have very strict codes of behavior—I'm not saying that the strict codes of behavior merit salvation in their minds,

I'm not saying that—but how does a church function with membership when they are teaching that repentance is not a necessary sign and evidence of a genuinely converted heart?

How does somebody who claims to have come to Christ in an altar call but continues in their life as a homosexual or a fornicator or—we could go on and on and on with sins in the lives of false converts—how does a fundamental

Baptist church function by, number one, saying repentance is not necessary for salvation, and, number two, having very strict codes of morality and ethics?

Yeah, so, I mean, it's exactly what you see in the

Gospels when you see the Pharisees and the scribes and this outward, external righteousness, but inward wickedness.

It's whitewashed, tomb -branded Christianity. Maybe this will help shed some light on it.

So the pastor that was my pastor when I was in the IFB and the Bible college

I went to, I worked on staff at that church and for that Bible college that I went to, where I met my wife, and they were also—that church there that hosted our

Bible college was my sending church to go start the church in Boston. My pastor, during Trump's first presidency, got to ride in the

Beast, the limousine with President Trump, and he had recently made a video because everybody was talking about Trump.

Trump in the news was saying that he knows he's not getting to heaven, he doesn't have a chance to, you know, he sees his way of getting to heaven as doing

XYZ works, whatever, ending wars that'll get him in. So that was a big, big conversation.

So recently, the person who was my pastor, that man had a podcast where he talked about his own personal discussion with President Trump about whether or not he was truly a

Christian, and his words were that they were riding in the limousine together and that he asked him if he knew he was going to heaven when he died, and President Trump said, yes, because when

I was a little boy, I prayed the sinner's prayer and asked Jesus into my heart. That's what this pastor is saying

Trump told him. Now, that's interesting because that doesn't seem like it's a part of his own theological history.

He was raised in the heretical church pastored by Norman Vincent Peale.

That was his pastor. And I wouldn't think that Peale would be having invitations like that, but maybe

I'm wrong. I just thought that he was all about avoiding discussion of sin and condemning sinners.

It was all about the power of positive thinking, but I'm not an expert on what

Peale did in his church. Yeah, well, what's telling about all that is that pastor, he went on and he knew the question is this.

Well, if Trump said that he's saved, that he prayed the sinner's prayer, well, then why is he going around telling people that he's not going to heaven?

Why is he going around talking as if he's got to work his way into heaven? And his answer, this is the pastor's answer.

Well, because on Sunday, he's golfing rather than in Sunday school, which is to say, well, he's just not disciple.

He's saved. He's just not been discipled enough. That's their understanding of conversion and Christianity.

And even though he said that he can't even think of one thing that he needs to repent over. Right, right, exactly, exactly.

So it's this kind of idea that you could be an out and out, like you said, a homosexual, you could be a murderer, but as long as you once prayed the sinner's prayer, you will still go to heaven when you die because you did what you were supposed to do.

Now, you can't be a member of the church, though, can you? You can't. You're kidding. You can't.

Well, it depends on the situation. I don't want to say if you're like an out and out murderer, you're just going to be accepted. No, but if you are a known, unrepentant homosexual, you can remain in membership.

Yeah, so that's tricky, and I don't want to broad brush there, but there are some churches that all you need to be a member is just to say that you believe and that you get baptized.

And if you do those things, you'll come into the church and they'll talk to you. I mean, if there's open sin, they'll talk to you about it.

But church discipline is a very rare thing in the kind of churches that I grew up in.

I'm not saying it's not a sin. My friend Keith Foskey, I don't know if you're familiar with him, on his

Your Calvinist podcast, I saw an episode where he was interviewing,

I believe, three independent fundamentalist Baptists. Now, like I said in the beginning,

I know that this is not a monolithic group, but these three men pretty much seem to be in lockstep with each other, not

Keith being a Sovereign Grace -believing Baptist. But when he asked them about repentance, they were all saying that to teach that repentance from sin is a required element of salvation, that's heresy and damning teaching.

You know, the irony of that is that must mean they want me to repent of believing that.

Isn't that ironic? I mean, what else can you conclude? You mean I have to repent of believing that?

I have to repent of believing that I have to repent? But when it came to homosexuality, all three of these guys, when

Keith said, what about homosexuals, unrepentant homosexuals who may come to your church?

Oh, no, that's a horse of a different color. That's a totally different story.

That's a sign that they're unregenerate. So they were putting that sin in a unique category that was beyond anything else.

Yeah. So I'm assuming then there are different ways this would be handled, depending upon the schooling and experience and the mindset of the individual

Independent Fundamentals Baptist, and so on.

Yeah, to speak fairly for them, it would absolutely be addressed if it was an issue of homosexuality.

However, other issues, gossip, slander, divisiveness, other things, lying, fearfulness, they do not get any kind of church disciplinary treatment in many churches.

Again, not all. There are some churches that are faithful in this, but my experience to the majority is that a lot of open sinfulness is oftentimes not handled in a biblical way.

And if it was, sometimes it was just by getting blasted from the pulpit and somebody calling something out from the pulpit, and it makes for a good sermon.

But overall, there was not a whole lot of church discipline that happened in the churches that I've been a part of.

Okay, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we get back, I want you to recap some of what you've already said and remind me of where on the timeline it was when your wife

Chelsea came to the realization that she was not born again.

And once again, if anybody has a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Our guest today on Iron Trip and Zion Radio is Nick White, pastor of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, an independent fundamentalist

Baptist who came to embrace the doctrines of God's sovereign grace, and we are addressing the fact that he married an unregenerate woman and didn't know it, and neither did she, and why he eventually baptized his own wife while he was already a pastor.

This is the Chelsea White story, and once again, if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. So, if you could recap, you have already said that your wife, just as you were, was raised in an independent fundamentalist

Baptist home, and seemed to be committed to that worldview and mindset, and went to an independent fundamentalist

Baptist college where she met you. You two fell in love, and I believe you said you popped the question a year after meeting her and beginning to form a relationship with her, and then seven months after that, you got married.

And there was a point while you were pastoring in Massachusetts where your wife began to realize that she was not born again.

Now, this is an interesting question regarding that, and if you could please fill in any of the missing points that I may have overlooked in that.

Was that sufficient as a summary? Oh, I'm sorry.

I have you on mute still. Did I adequately summarize that?

Yes, yes. Here is the interesting part of this.

Do you believe that your wife, because she finally did receive a new heart from Christ, was that the point where she realized that there was something greatly wrong with her life prior to that, or was she still, in her mind and yours, unregenerate when she came to admit that?

It's kind of a tricky thing because these are invisible things going on in the hearts and minds of people.

Sometimes a person doesn't realize how wicked they are until they're saved. In fact, that's probably the way that God usually works in someone's life.

But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know that for certain.

We know that regeneration obviously precedes faith, and so somewhere along those lines, before she put her faith in Christ, obviously, she got a new heart.

I think it's very possible that she received a new heart when she was made aware of her need for Christ.

But yeah, it's hard to know exactly. So here's what happened. She was Black Friday shopping. She was not sitting in a church service when this happened.

She was driving in the car, and she was just overcome with conviction, with guilt.

She had been battling with that for some time. It was also kind of recent that we had lost a child.

We had lost a baby, and she had to go through that without knowing

Christ. And it was very difficult for her. And yeah, somewhere along the way, as she was out

Black Friday shopping, I guess all of that came to a head, and she stopped what she was doing. She came home in tears.

She said, I need to talk to you. And she just unleashed it all on me. I had not known

Christ. I'd not been saved this whole time. I need to be saved. I need to know him.

And so she prayed. She called on the name of the Lord.

I don't think that her prayer saved her. I don't think the prayer really had much to do with anything that saved her.

I believe it was just her faith in Christ that saved her. But we were doing all we knew to do.

I didn't know all about conversion and regeneration and the order of salvation, how

God works in all of that. All I knew was, well, if you're not saved, then put your faith in Christ.

And shortly after that, yeah, I baptized her. That was the tipping point. That was the catalyst that began to take me out of the theology that we held to, because I had so many unanswered questions after that.

Now, what was going on in your mind when she said that to you? Were you panicked at all?

Were you starting to wonder, who did I marry? How much of what we've experienced and how much of what she said is true and real?

Does she really love me? I mean, you could go on and on and on with, is she going to leave me?

Can I remain a pastor? I mean, that, of course, depends on how long of a period this was going on when she was professing to be an unregenerate person.

But it seems to be that this was almost an immediate response when she returned home from shopping in your story there.

Yeah, I mean, I was just glad that she wasn't going to divorce me. When she came home in tears saying,

I need to talk to you, there was a thousand things that were going through my mind. And so it was kind of relief that she said that she needed

Christ. I didn't know what else there could be to tell me. And so, yeah, I mean, we just prayed together and I spoke to her.

But all the things running through my head was, how could this be? I mean, how you seem so squeaky clean and you don't seem like a lost person.

In my mind, a lost person would be someone they can't help but run to drugs or get in the gutter.

But she goes to church every Sunday. She taught a teen girl Sunday school class when we were in Bible college.

She did all these other things. I mean, she's a sister -in -law to a traveling evangelist, a well -known traveling evangelist in the

IFB. I mean, if anyone was saved, it's got to be her. And she seemed so meek and quiet in her disposition that there didn't seem to be anything off in that regard.

So it was kind of shocking that she's now telling me she's been lost. But at the same time, there was this nagging feeling inside of me that had been reoccurring over the previous years.

As I saw from my own personal experience in the Independent Fundamental Baptist world, that there were people who would come under conviction and then get saved.

And I watched our own Bible college trying to almost cover that up and toss that to the side.

Because if they made the profession when they were younger, truly they were converted. And that bothered me.

It seemed as if there was something wrong there. But at certain points in life, you don't always want to challenge the status quo.

You just want to get along. And to me, it wasn't significant enough. But with my wife's salvation,

I was confronted with this. And this was when you were still under the mindset of Independent Fundamentalist Baptist.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was in the thick of it. Yeah. And what was the response of your church?

Oh, they were thrilled. They were excited. They rallied around her. They were thrilled.

You know, she didn't have to deal with the culture. I mean, we're in a church plant. And everybody who's there is pretty new.

None of them were raised in the IFB. So when I tell them, hey, my wife got saved, they're like, great.

That's awesome. Now, if this would have happened in an IFB church, a long established IFB church, that might have been different.

But in our church, you know, the people there were just were happy for her and celebrated that with her.

And yeah, so it wasn't strange to them. It was a little bit of a shock.

Like, really? She wasn't saved. But yeah, they were excited for her. All right.

We do have an anonymous listener. And the anonymous listener asks, how certain are you—and

I know that you can't know this with infallible certainty—but how certain are you and your wife that she and you were not being overly sensitive to her lack of perfection as a

Christian and have exaggerated the failures and the lack of fruit, as you were expecting, in her life that led you to believe that she was lost?

Obviously, sometimes people, even the most godly of them, can be overly sensitive and aware of their sin and doubt their salvation, even if they are truly born again.

Yeah. Well, I didn't doubt her salvation previously. It's only after the fact, when she came to me and told me that she needed

Christ, that we even were able to notice, yeah, there were some things off as we came along and started to understand what true conversion actually is.

I will say this, though. The Puritans would say that the affections are the pulse of the soul, and you can see whether or not there's life by what you love.

And there was no love for Christ. There was a very formal religion, but there was not a love for Christ in her prior to her conversion.

And it's very possible for us to go to church, to even say amen to preaching, to like the moral teachings of Jesus, and to like the moral external aspects of Christianity, and to like even the comfort of being in a circle that you grew up in and that kind of community while not loving

Jesus. And no man can love Christ apart from the power of the

Holy Spirit. And so, you know, looking back on it, we know she was lost because there was none of that there, and there is now.

And she will tell you that now. She can point that right out to you. Now there is this driving passion to pursue

Christ and know Him, to glorify Him. So there's been a total change in her. I hope that answers their question.

Yeah, I hope so too, Anonymous. And by the way, this is the second time

I've conducted an interview on this issue of someone coming to realize later in life—not that your wife is a senior citizen or anything or even middle -aged—but having been a professing believer for at least a couple of decades or so, being convinced that you're a

Christian, and then coming to the realization that she was not truly born again.

This is the second time I've had an interview like this. The first time was with Paula Webster.

I was actually interviewing Paula herself. She is—or should I say, was—she's in heaven now.

She went home to be with the Lord, perhaps to pray for the Lord. Two years ago. Could have been longer.

She is the wife of my very dear friend

Bill Webster, who is an apologist and author I've had on this program many times.

And she was raised in the Christian Reformed Church, and she was convinced that she was a

Christian just because the attitude in the home—it would have been a different mindset to a degree of independent fundamentalist

Baptists—in that there was a presumption of regeneration for any child of Christian parents.

And you would have to, at some point in your life, be overtly rebellious against God and denying

Him, and perhaps even involve in scandalous sin before parents and a church would say, well,

I guess this person isn't really regenerate. This is not a Christian.

But if they are just living a quiet life of church attendance and so on, going through the motions, they could easily live an entire life under the radar and, tragically, if they were never saved, wake up in eternity finding out that they are in hell.

But Paula had the same, at least the similarity exists, that she became aware she was lost.

I believe in Paula's case, she was in her 40s. And I would love to try to have my webmaster dig up that recording, because that was an interview

I did on the old Iron Trump and Zion Radio when we were broadcasting at a WNYG radio in Babylon, Long Island, and not all of those interviews have been transferred over to the current

Iron Trump and Zion Radio website. So, I'm assuming that this remarkable episode in your life, in your wife's life, had something to do with your questioning the independent fundamentalist

Baptist mindset that you had. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, what is conversion?

And what is regeneration? What does it mean to be saved? What does that produce in somebody?

These are all the questions that I had. And if someone is born again, how do you know that?

And if somebody can think that they're saved and not be saved, what is the sinner's prayer even about?

I had so many questions, because I was also studying Scripture, reading the Bible, coming across passages that were causing me to really be concerned about my theology.

I mean, Hebrews 6, my falling away, not being renewed again to repentance, reading 1 John, no man can commit sin and be in Christ.

What is the saying? It seems to go completely against what I've been taught.

So, I needed to come to a right understanding of conversion and regeneration. And so, I started to search, and that's what sent me on that search.

In fact, the most horrifying text of Scripture that I know of is in Matthew 7, where you have the false converts saying to Christ on the day of judgment,

Lord, did we not perform miracles in your name and cast out demons in your name?

And he says, begone, you workers of unrighteousness,

I never knew you. Quite a frightening concept that you get the idea that these unregenerate people who are actually miracle workers, you get the idea that they were not lying to Jesus on judgment day.

They actually believed that they were servants of his. Right, right.

And actually, I preached that text, Matthew 7, shortly after my wife's conversion, because I became so convinced after a few weeks that I had been preaching the gospel wrong, in that I watered it down, and I had gutted it of its transforming power, and I preached that text to correct course and to make known to the church that we were going to start preaching the gospel correctly and preach conversion and regeneration.

And that night, my sister, who was in her 20s, who also made a profession at a young age, went onto our church's website and watched that live stream with my mom.

And that night, my sister, after hearing that message from Matthew 7, came to know

Christ through the proclamation of the gospel. And so it was like the

Lord was just driving that nail deeper and deeper into the wood to help me come to a fuller, more complete, more well -rounded understanding of what actually happens when somebody gets saved.

We have to get to our midway break right now. And once again, if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Going back to 2005. One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

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Hello, my name is Anthony Uvino and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in New York and also the host of the reformrookie .com

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Chelsea, after already living many years as a

Christian or a professing Christian, and marrying a man who became a pastor who is the guest today,

Nick White, and being the wife of a pastor in Massachusetts, she came to realize that she did not believe she was saved.

And thankfully, she demonstrated the fruits of salvation truly, finally, and Nick baptized her.

And we'll return to that remarkable story in a few moments. But first,

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and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address to send in a question to Pastor Nick White of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, as we continue the discussion of how his wife came to finally realize she needed salvation after years of being a professing

Christian. And so it's interesting, Pastor Nick, that Chelsea, your wife, did come to doubt her regeneration even while under the teaching and mindset of the independent fundamentalist

Baptists. This was not an awakening that came about through hearing solid

Reformed preaching. That's right. Yeah, she simply just heard the gospel in weeks past.

It began to bother her. There were questions that were arising, and she's had seasons of that in the past where she doubted her salvation, but she was always counseled.

Oh yeah, just look back at the time you got saved and you made that profession, you prayed, and don't doubt anymore.

She would do that. She couldn't overcome the weight of the conviction on that night, on that Black Friday night.

So it's a sovereign grace of God that was drawing her, and we call it irresistible grace for a reason, and it overcame her rebellion and converted her.

And so when and how did you—I know we already discussed this aspect of your life in our first interview on your journey out of independent fundamentalist

Baptist ideology into the doctrines of sovereign grace, but how did you discover the doctrines of grace, and are there any particular preachers and teachers and authors that you discovered that you began to listen to and read and so on?

How did this come about? Yeah, I think it's really important to note that I did not come to doctrines of grace by reading

John Calvin. I came to understand the doctrines of grace by preaching verse by verse through the

Gospel of John, and the Gospel of John and the Book of Acts changed my theology, and so it was not a book or a certain preacher that had the greatest influence on that doctrinal change.

Was John 6 and John 10 specifically an enlightening—

Or simply a part of that. But so was John 1 and John 3 and John 5.

I mean, so it was just impossible to avoid. But I will say, aside from that,

I was so eager to have my questions answered about what true salvation is, what true conversion is, that I was desperate enough to reach outside of the fishbowl that I was in, in the fundamental world, and reach into whoever else had something to say about this subject.

And the person that God had providentially introduced me to was John MacArthur, and for the first time

I heard expository preaching on a passage of Scripture that was theological, that was textual, and that was the first time

I ever heard preaching like that, and it changed my life. I knew that's what I needed to do. And so John MacArthur's influence of just his expository faithfulness is what affected me and made me want to do the same in my ministry and my life.

And just by me following that model of expositing the text, I came to learn and believe the doctrines of grace.

Hallelujah. And after John MacArthur, I'm assuming you began a domino kind of effect, where you started looking into other men of God from the

Sovereign Grace and Reformed backgrounds? Yeah, I did a mentorship with Master Seminary for Expository Preaching.

Before Lawson had his fall, I took his Expositors Academy. He was actually a help to me when

I went through the transition out of my last church, because he had gone through something similar. But yeah, there were many other—Paul

Washer, Wody Wachum. I mean, the mainstream guys, a lot of them, they had a massive impact on me.

R .C. Sproul. So yeah, of course, those guys. Now this is off the topic, but have you heard any updates on Stephen Lawson?

I have not. Last I heard, he's still in the

Nashville area in Tennessee. He's still, last I heard, counseled.

He's a broken man, but he's being counseled by his pastors that are there, his elders that are there, and he still seems to show repentance.

But I'm not much aware of anything more than that, right now he's a very broken man.

All right, we have RJ in White Plains, New York, who has a question.

I know that you do not believe in sinless perfectionism, judging by everything that you've already said.

I don't know you personally. But how would you differentiate that heresy from what you are teaching right now, just so our listeners get a better perspective?

Okay. How I differentiate sinless perfectionism from true conversion,

I guess, is what he's talking about—regeneration. Well, yeah, I mean, you read

Romans, and in Romans, Paul makes it very clear, Romans 7, that he still does that which he does not want to do, and he still does not do that which he does want to do.

He still battles the flesh. So we understand that though we are given a new nature, the flesh still remains.

The old man has died, but we still have this wicked body of death that affects us, and that gives

Satan an inroad to tempt us still, and that's why we need sanctification. So I think it's important to understand, because we believe in sovereign grace, we don't just believe that God saves us by sovereign grace, but we also believe he sanctifies us by sovereign grace.

And so we don't believe we have the decisive willpower to break the chains of our heart bound to sin to make ourselves free to believe in and of ourselves.

We need God to do that. But the same is true in our sanctification. God doesn't set us free from sin and salvation so that we do all the working in sanctification, but as we work out our sanctification, it is

God concurrently working that out through us by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that even sovereign grace is acted in our sanctification.

And I say that because if you believe that you can bring about your own regeneration by your own will, well then you can believe that you can achieve your own sanctification by your own will, by your own discipline, and thereby,

I mean, that's what led many who followed that Wesleyan kind of thought, that you can arrive at this position where you no longer sin anymore because you have that decisive willpower in you.

We would deny that, not because we haven't been given a new heart, but because we still have this body flesh, and the flesh still hinders us from walking as we ought to walk entirely, but God still grants sanctifying grace, and we progress in that sanctification, knowing that one day that sanctification will be complete in our glorification.

So I think holding to the belief of sovereign grace while also understanding the indwelling sin in the believer, that that is a reality.

I think it's important to hold both of those realities hand in hand, and that keeps you from the ditch of Arminianism. And I think it would be wise for us not to give the false impression that you and I are involved in some kind of sectarian boasting, where we would be delusional enough to think that these kinds of false conversions never happen in sovereign grace -believing or Reformed churches.

These things happen in every church, no matter how theologically sound they are.

And, I mean, look what happened amongst

Jesus' own 12 apostles. Judas turned out to be a false

Christian, and Jesus said it would have been better for him never to have been born. So it's the only thing that would differentiate what we are discussing between the independent fundamentals mindset—and we know that it's not monolithic, they're not all the same—but a very common mindset amongst independent fundamentals

Baptists, and that mindset amongst the doctrine and theology of the

Reformed, is that one may lend itself more to convincing people that are not regenerate that they are.

Right. Yeah, and we understand that there is such a thing as the visible church and the invisible church, and that in the visible church there are both wheat and tares.

Amen. And so, how has this changed the way you counsel people?

How has it enhanced your preaching and teaching? How has it changed your wife's relationships with her family and so on?

Is her family still in the IBF or IFB, I should say, mindset and so on?

Yeah, her family is still in the IFB, but I will say that they would disagree with what we grew up with originally.

I think that they have come to learn, and I think this is happening in several IFB churches. There's kind of a coming around to what true conversion actually is.

But they still are—King James still are in the IFB, still have altar calls, a lot of that stuff.

And we love them, but they wouldn't be guilty of this. Now, how it's affected me, personally,

I've got to be honest with you. I think there's somewhat of a danger when you come out of easy -believism, and that danger is you become a little too hard on conversion where you're almost cynical when people make profession.

And you cast doubt just as a default kind of position. You cast immediate doubt on somebody when they make a profession.

I think that's a danger when you come out of it because you're so sensitive and you're so scared of misleading someone.

So I think that's definitely something people have to be mindful of when they come out of that. However, reading through, especially men like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, how they handled souls who were seeking, who had questions, was very helpful to me.

Arnold Dalimore's two -volume biography of George Whitefield's life gives record of how Whitefield dealt with people and his evangelism, and he was never one to rush anybody to make a profession.

He relied wholly on the power of the Spirit to do his work through the

Word of God, and he encouraged sinners to turn to Christ, to repent and believe. And I've tried my best to model my ministry and my preaching after that.

When I preach the gospel, I do my best to rely on God and his power to do that work, that it's by the preached

Word that faith is given. And we rest in that and we trust in that, but at the same time, we call sinners to repent.

We reason with sinners and we compel sinners to come. And so, yeah, I mean, it's massively changed the way

I preach the gospel in that now my trust is no longer in my ability to give a sales pitch, but to get conversions and professions.

Now my trust is in the gospel that I preach and the power of God to use it, and that's been so freeing for me because it's no longer my responsibility to make someone a believer.

It's now just sowing the seed and leaving the rest to God. And so it's made me a better and more faithful evangelist because of that.

I'm assuming it makes you a more patient evangelist. Yeah. Because there are denominations within evangelicalism,

I have heard, that become very impatient with missionaries.

They are so numbers -focused. How many souls have you led to Christ in this period of time, etc.,

etc.? And if the board that sent that person out on the field is not impressed with the numeric so -called success of leading souls to Christ, they will yank that person, almost as if that person is in charge of the eternal destinies of the hearers of the gospel.

Right. Yeah, they would have fired William Tyndale. I mean, he went seven years without seeing a convert.

They say he might have had one, but he seemed to have apostatized. And so it's as if they went seven years without one convert.

I mean, yeah, you just can't put that pressure on anybody because that's not in their control.

And I experienced that as a church planner. There was always that pressure to mention in our update letters that we had people saved, and if you didn't meet a certain quota, it's on you.

And it's so freeing to know that what's on me is the obligation and responsibility to preach the gospel, and that's it.

That's where it stops, to pray and to preach. But their conversion is in the hands of God, and that's a great thing for us to know.

And that's why the greatest evangelists and missionaries to ever walk the face of the earth were those who believed in the doctrines of grace, because they were freed by that realization to go and preach the gospel, knowing that they would find success.

And before I forget, I want to promote a book by a 19th century author that my very first pastor,

Mike Gadosh, of Solid Ground Christian Books, brought this largely unknown volume.

It was largely unknown in the 20th century.

I believe that's when he first brought the book back into print, as is the author largely unknown in our day, although he was not in his own day.

Ichabod Spencer wrote a book called A Pastor's Sketches—Conversations with Anxious Souls Concerning the

Way of Salvation. And Solid Ground Christian Books has this two volumes in one.

It's actually two volumes' worth of material, and they combined it into one volume.

And someone whose discernment and opinion I have a very high regard for,

Dr. Conrad Mbewe of Kibwata Baptist Church of Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, who is going to be,

God willing, my next keynote speaker at the Iron Trip and Zion Radio Free Pastors Luncheon this

March. But he says of this book, Dr. Spencer's book should certainly take a well -deserved place among the tools of any physician of souls.

Anyone with the cause of Christ at heart will bemoan the fact that we have too many miscarriages in our evangelistic labor wards.

These sketches found in Spencer's book, together with the concluding lesson, will go a long way to bring back the biblical balance that we so desperately need if the preachers of the new millennium are to prove themselves to be able and true spiritual midwives.

I have no doubt that its reprinting is long overdue. Let's see, we have an anonymous listener who says, have you gotten to know a significant number of independent fundamentalist

Baptist pastors who are secretly and privately exploring the doctrines of grace, perhaps even coming to agree with them, and they are too afraid to make it publicly known to their friends in ministry?

Yes. The answer is yes. There are a lot of them out there. I'm not going to, but all

I would have to do is show you my inbox on Facebook and my Facebook messages. And I've had a lot of people reach out to me since coming out of the

IFB, telling me that they are in the same boat and they are in a tug of war as to whether or not to step away from their churches or to try and seek reformation at their churches.

Yeah, there are a lot of them out there. Let's drag them out of the closet and start naming names.

I'm only kidding. Yeah. Only kidding, folks. Well, I would encourage them that fear is a sin, and the fear of man is a snare, and it's got to come out.

I mean, you're either worth your salt or you're not, and if you believe it's in the Bible, you're going to preach it. I try to leave it at that with many of those men.

It's easy to say that, but when your job and your livelihood and your house, if you live in a parsonage and your family is sustained by that, it's costly.

But the truth is worth the cost, and anybody who is in that situation who would like to talk about what that was like for us,

I'd be happy to walk through that with them, pray through it with them. Yeah, that's not only glorious news, but it's sad news.

The glorious part, meaning that men of God are coming to discover and embrace the truth of God's sovereignty.

The sad part is the fear of being an outcast among those you may have loved and cherished as close friends and colleagues in ministry, the fear of losing them, and not only losing them, becoming a pariah in their eyes, becoming a villain, perhaps, you know, a heretic, an enemy of truth.

So it is quite sad, but obviously we are, as Christians, whether we're pastors or not, we're commanded to fear

God and not men. Right, right. And we have to go to our final break.

Don't go away. We are going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

I'm Dr. Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's Word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune

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In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every

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But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

God's pleasure when he ran. He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God.

I sense that same God -given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners, and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area, or Queens, or Brooklyn, or the

Bronx, in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word, and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

God bless you. Welcome back, folks. Please also never forget that this program is paid for in part by the firm of Buttafuoco &

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United States, please call my very long time dear friend and brother in Christ, Daniel P.

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Please make sure you tell Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, that you heard about his law firm,

Buttafuoco & Associates, from Chris Arnzen of Iron Shrub and Zion Radio. Also, I want to remind all men in ministry leadership, you are invited to the 2026 biannual free

Iron Shrub and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon. This will be held Thursday, March the 5th, 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, and we are featuring for the second time, as I mentioned earlier, as our keynote speaker,

Dr. Conrad Mbewe, pastor of Kibwata Baptist Church of Lusaka, Zambia, Africa.

And not only is your admission free, and your lunch free, and your opportunity to hear and see

Dr. Mbewe preach live and in person free, but everybody who attends will receive one, and perhaps even possibly two, heavy sacks of free brand -new books personally selected by me and donated by generous

Christian publishers all over the United States and the United Kingdom. If you'd like to attend this free

Pastors Luncheon, if you're a man in ministry leadership, send me an email to register at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give me your full name, the name of your church or parachurch organization, and its location, and the number of men who will be joining you when you send in the email, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. We are now back with Nick White, pastor of the

First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, who has been discussing his wife

Chelsea's incredible journey, having been raised as an independent fundamentalist

Baptist just like Nick, and who discovered years into her life as a professing

Christian that she was not truly born again. And thankfully, the

Lord did give her a new heart and saved her, and Nick actually baptized her.

And we praise God for that. Can you share with my listeners,

Nick, what are the most important things that you believe our listeners need to walk away with having this conversation, adding tools to their arsenal as they go about their

Christian lives, seeking to make the good news known to all? Yeah, I think in many cases people need to perhaps subtract some things from their arsenal.

I think sometimes people depend a little bit too much on sealing the deal, being closer with evangelism and having to get something out of that individual.

You can't manufacture the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit. That's God's work.

I think really what matters the most is that you are able to clearly articulate the gospel of Jesus Christ, that you know what the gospel is, and that you know how to preach the gospel to people, and that you know more than just the fact that Jesus died and that he rose again, but that you understand the holiness of God, that you're able to start with the glory of God, and in the light of his holiness show man their sinfulness and how far they've fallen away from God, and then be able to preach

Christ to them, the good news that Jesus Christ is that which saves and does that which they cannot do on their own.

They cannot save themselves, they cannot make themselves righteous, but Christ accomplished their righteousness in his life, and that he laid his life down in the place of sinners, and he grants salvation to all those who believe.

You just get those details of the gospel down, you know the gospel well, so that you can deliver that with clarity to those that are around you, and after that, you're done.

You're done. You might ask some clarifying questions after presenting the gospel, you might ask of what their understanding is of what you said, but you have no further job than just to give the good news of the gospel to those who are lost.

So it's simple, but it doesn't need to go any further than that, and we live in a day and age where it typically evangelism class teaches you to go a lot further than that, and that's stepping out of your lane, and just read the apostles and how they evangelize in the book of Acts.

Look at what they said. They did not resort to any of these gimmicks. They just said, repent and believe what we just told you, and so stick with that, and you'll be in good shape.

Yes, and an excellent booklet that I highly recommend.

I've highly recommended it a number of times on the show. I don't think I could recommend it too often.

It's titled Decisional Regeneration by James Adams, and this is a booklet made available through chapellibrary .org,

chapellibrary .org, and it warns about the mental and emotional manipulation that many folks in ministry are trained to participate in in order to coax a decision out of a lost person, and it really is so dangerous because it is an attempt, even though nobody would consciously admit this, but it's an effort to manufacture something that doesn't exist, and one of the horrific quotes in the booklet is where James Adams is quoting from the aforementioned

Jack Hiles, a hero to many in the fundamentalist world—not all, they do have a division over his

Roman's Road methodology—but Jack Hiles is speaking to ministry students, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the booklet right in front of me, but he says something to the effect, when you are approaching the end of a sermon, never say, my final point is, or in conclusion, because your hearers are going to dig in their heels to resist your call to accept

Christ at the front of the church. You've got to sneak up behind them and catch them when they're unprepared to reject your message.

Now, sneak up behind them? He didn't mean physically sneak up behind them, but he was talking about, like I was just discussing, this is a manipulation of somebody's mind and emotions.

Yeah, it's very dangerous, and that's not biblical. It's damning, so we must be very, very careful with how we evangelize.

What's your final words to our listeners that you most want etched in our hearts and minds today?

Salvation is of the Lord, and that is such a comfort. It's something we know as those who believe in the doctrines of grace, but it is one the greatest comforts an evangelist can have, someone who preaches the gospel, and just remembering your part and understanding that God has a means by which he will save his sheep, and it's through you preaching the gospel to the lost, and he is faithful to do that which he is determined to do from eternity past, and you cannot go wrong in just faithfully proclaiming the gospel of Christ, even when those who hear it reject it.

God is still glorified by your proclamation, so carry on and preach on and trust Christ with the rest.

Anything going on other than, obviously, your weekly services at First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York?

Any special events or anything else that you would like to promote to our listeners?

I have a book coming out pretty soon called The Church Coordinate in Preaching, and it's just about—it's a case for the primacy and the kind of preaching that is necessary in the church today, and it'll be published, we're ruling by March, and it's going to be handed out at a conference

I'm preaching at in Oklahoma City, and so excited about that. You can find it on my page. I'll keep people posted when the pre -order link comes out.

Can you repeat the title of the book? It's called The Church Born in Preaching, and it simply is a study of Acts 2 and Peter's sermon, and how

God commissioned Christ's church through the preached word, and how God uses the word to advance the church.

And find out more at FBC, for First Baptist Church, FBC Hamburg, and that's with a

URG at the end, dot com, FBC Hamburg, dot com.

It's been a joy having you back on the program, Pastor Nick White. Please extend my warm greetings in Christ to Chelsea, your wife, and I thank her for allowing us to discuss something so personal today about her.

And I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I sincerely hope that you all always remember for the rest of your entire lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater