50. Hey Pastor, You Killed My Friend!

Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 50. Hey, pastor, you killed my friend. A kind of fragile despair has crept into the modern mind so that it can no longer safely be challenged.

To question the thoughts or the lifestyle of another person or group has become the moral equivalent of executing violence against them, or so we're told. To say that this or that thing is morally wrong and needs to be repented of is to become culpable for their suicide.

The Accusation That Gospel Preaching Causes Harm

This was the ugly goblet of shame that was recently dumped upon my unsuspecting head. Now, in a private message on Facebook, I was asked the following series of questions by a random user. Do you think my friend deserved all the pain and the abuse that she took?

Are you happy that she's dead? Do you hate my friend? Pastor, did you want transgender people to kill themselves? Is that what you wanted? Now, these questions were obviously shocking to me. Not only did my very existence and biblical beliefs threaten the life of another human being apparently, but the only acceptable recourse that was offered to me is for me to no longer call transgenderism a sin.

And as a Christian, I simply cannot comply here. According to this battered logic, either I will disobey God by turning a blind eye towards sin, or I will become a serial killer with bloodstains all over my hands.

That is the highly polarized perspective that I was invited to chew on. But as I was thinking about this exchange, I realized that this is precisely what persecution is gonna look like in the modern world.

When a Christian shares truth from scripture, even in the most gentle and loving ways, we're not gonna be beaten, beheaded, or thrown into prison, at least not yet. More likely, we will be accused of murdering people with ideas.

We will be endlessly boycotted and battered with criticism, ever hated by people who do not have the love of Christ, and as a result, have an endless supply of fury to spew in our direction. And guess what?

They've got enough for a thousand lifetimes. Now, the Facebook message continued like this. You've made an enemy, and until you stop your vendetta, die, or move away, I guess I'm just gonna have to fight you forever.

As Christians, we need to wrestle with how are we supposed to think when we receive messages such as this. Number one, we have to remember who we are. Before we move on to strategy, we need to remember who we are in Christ.

We are a people who have been ransomed out of the kingdom of darkness and brought into God's marvelous kingdom of dazzling light, Colossians 1 .13. Now, there's gonna be a lot of verses that I'm gonna share in the next few moments.

I'm not gonna read them all to you right now, but they're in the original blog, so I would say consult that if you would like the references. But for now, I'm just gonna read this straight through. Before Jesus rescued us, we were enslaved by our aberrant passions.

We were consumed by all malice and disgusting rebellions. There was nothing at all that was different between us and the most flagrant sinners on earth, which is, in fact, where God himself stepped in.

From that wicked and lowly estate, the Lord Jesus Christ set his electing affections upon us and purchased us out of the thralls of sin to become his slaves of righteousness. Now, as people who belong to him, we declare our allegiance and our adoration, our loyalty and our love by no longer gratifying our former lust, but by killing the flesh so that we can be obedient to him.

That loving and loyal obedience requires that we will go and that we will do and that we will say whatever the Lord Jesus Christ commands, which involves nothing less than discipling the pagan nations to know exactly what Jesus thinks about all things.

Essentially, being a Christian means joining Jesus's campaign to conform the world, the world that we once belonged to, into his beautifying, redemptive vision. That work requires sharing the gospel. Number two, we need to remember what we are called to share.

The Gospel We Are Called to Share

Now, again, there's a lot of scripture references that I'm gonna be throwing at you here, so I'm not gonna read those. I am gonna ask you to go to the blog and check those out, but for now, I'm just gonna share this with you straight.

And you may be like, what am I gonna share? Well, in order to know what we're gonna share, we need to know what the thing is. If we're gonna share the gospel intelligently, then we need to know what the gospel is at an intelligent level.

For that reason, we're gonna briefly sketch what the gospel is, and then afterward, then we're gonna follow that up with some common accusations that the world is gonna level at us. Here's the gospel.

The gospel is God's loving offer of reconciliation and compassion to seedy rebels. It is an offer executed by Christ alone, applied by the Spirit of God alone for the salvation of those He predestined alone.

It is a message that is meant to be communicated by the very people that it saves. It is a message that we are called to become increasingly more and more familiar with and effective at sharing. And it is a message that has certain essential elements embedded down into it that it must be included if it's going to be considered, quote unquote, a gospel message.

Those elements are as follows. Number one, the gospel begins with the bad news, that we deserve death for our rebellion against God, and that we cannot repair the relationship by our own fickle virtue.

The gospel tells us that our sin is the poison that is killing us slowly. It's the toxic venom that will ensure everlasting death and agony forever because we are utterly helpless to rescue ourselves.

Salvation cannot come from us, but it must come from something outside of us, namely God alone, which is why God the Father sent the Lord Jesus Christ to save His people from their sin. Now that rescue plan required Christ perfectly obeying the law that you and I had perfectly transgressed.

It would involve God crediting us with the righteous status of Jesus Christ while pouring out our sin and our rebellion onto Him. Christ would trade places with us, giving us His life and His freedom, taking our misery and our shame down into the grave and bringing us up out again, giving us new life in His resurrection.

For Christ Jesus on the third day rose from the dead, being exalted above all things, securing redemption for all His lowly people and making Christ the author and the perfecter of our salvation and our faith.

Then after ascending into heaven to reign at the right hand of God, He is now pouring out His Spirit onto all whom He chooses so that those will have faith in Christ alone and so that the Spirit will help them declare His gospel alone.

The simple and plain point of the gospel is that it's the message that saves us so that we can begin declaring the message. It's the message that saves us so that we can join the legions declaring it so that more and more people can be ransomed from death to life.

And we know from Scripture that people from every tribe, tongue, and nation are gonna be saved by this gospel, as well as people who are gonna be rescued out of every kind of moral filth, degeneracy, deviancy, and sin.

They're gonna be saved by this gospel. And since Christians are not omniscient, knowing the specific people with whom God has placed His election on, we declare this gospel unreservedly by faith to every creature under heaven.

We understand that the message is hated by the world who would rather cling to their darkness than step into the light of Christ. We know that the world's gonna call us foolish for declaring such a gospel, but let us remember that this is God's appointed means for saving His people, past, present, and future.

And my heart, as we draw to a close on what the gospel is, is that every single person who's listening to this would echo with the Apostle Paul, for if I preach the gospel, I have nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion, for woe is me if I don't preach the gospel.

1 Corinthians 9, 16. These are the essential truths that we must conform to if we're a Christian. And while it is clear that we live in a time of great confusion, brothers and sisters, the Bible has never been confusing at all.

We have a message that we are commanded by the living God to share. That's not confusing. We have a message that the world doesn't wanna hear, so who are we gonna obey? Are we gonna follow the world that hates God and hates us, or are we gonna heed the God who eternally loves us and has saved us with this same message that now He's beckoning us to declare?

The answer is surprisingly simple, while it might not always be easy to obey. With that, I want us to conclude our time in this episode by examining three fallacies that we're going to encounter when sharing the gospel, as well as God's heart for us when we share it.

Why the Gospel Is Not Violence

So fallacy number one, the gospel is not violence. The world would have us believe that differing opinions are like machetes in the hands of a raging lunatic. Only death and destruction are gonna follow.

Well, that, to me, is a very odd perspective, especially considering that culture has made the science a discipline once known for challenging assumptions with real and actual facts. It's new de facto religion.

Yet, if we're not currently swimming in lockstep with every whim and fancy that our deranged elites are putting forward, dragging us down into the murky waters of the ethical septic tank that they've plunged us in, then we are the ones who are perceived as the crazy ones.

C .S. Lewis predicted that such a climate was going to occur when he said, when the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind. That is, in fact, now how we appear.

But it goes much deeper than that, down into the moral culpability. For example, if you disagree with someone, especially when clinging to the truth of the Bible, you're not only gonna be chided as a doolally doldly dunderhead.

I know that's redundant. Just means stupid. But you're also gonna be seen as menacing as one of Morgoth's evil dragons. God forbid that some poor soul in their despair, in their sin, does the unthinkable and takes their own life.

You are gonna then be looked at as the perpetrator who's holding the smoking gun. With that said, it's beyond a tragedy that so many people find suicide a viable alternative to living. That's heart-wrenching and something that all believers may genuinely weep over and pray that the Lord would bring aid to those who are suffering, but accusing a believer of murderer just for sharing their faith in what the Bible says is obviously a very dangerous and a very appalling standard for a society to hold.

And any society that holds that standard, it will not go well. As Christians, we understand that the Bible, that the gospel is not violence, at least not in the way that the world is accusing it. For while the gospel does attack the parts of us which are deader than dead, it also brings never-ending life that replaces our death and can never be taken away from us because it was given to us by Christ.

The gospel damages our sinful flesh and it brings life in the same way that a surgeon's scalpel cuts away the cancer to preserve the patient. Therefore, to withhold the gospel, which is the only cure for the malady of man, would be the only actual violence that we could ever perpetrate against humanity.

And while the vast majority of people are not gonna receive my logic, maybe they were coil at it, in fact, I want you to observe the honest musings of the renowned atheist Penn Jillette who had something to say about this issue.

Jillette says, I've always said that I don't respect people who don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and a hell and people are gonna be going to hell or not getting eternal life and you think that it's really not worth telling them because it's gonna make it socially awkward, how much do you have to hate someone not to proselytize?

How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and then to not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe that the truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you and this, eternal life, is more important than that.

As Christians, we know the truth. The truth has set us free and the only loving thing for us to do, the only loving thing for us to do is to share that truth with those who are perishing. Fallacy number two, unbelievers do not have the spirit.

Why Unbelievers Do Not Have the Spirit

There are many occasions where we fall into a peculiar trap expecting that unbelievers are gonna behave like Christians. They won't. Yet, when they reveal a debauched mind or bloviate as one thoroughly ingratiated in carnality, they at least communicate with authenticity.

They're speaking as they genuinely are and we have to not expect that they're going to somehow magically adopt a veneer of Christendom in order to appease our fragile palate. With that in mind, we must not become aggrieved or aggravated when they accuse us of every kind of villainy.

That's their nature. For out of the heart, the mouth doth truly speak and it is that lost and broken heart of man that ought to inflame our hearts to empathy, not anger. We were once lost. Had it not been for the grace of Almighty God, we would still be lost.

For this reason, we may weep for the ones who hate us without becoming hate-filled in our grief. We may console the ones who condemn us. We can pray for the ones who persecute us. Is that not the very example that Jesus gave us while he was hanging upon the cross?

And who knows? Maybe the Lord will use those good works so that even those who accuse us in the end would give glory to our Father in heaven when they are converted. Fallacy three, love is defined by God.

Love Is Defined by God

In closing, we must remember that the world cannot understand true love because love belongs to God. The Bible even goes as far as to say that God is love, which means that he is not only the one who invented the concept, but it's also central to his identity.

At the very least, this demonstrates that God alone has the right to define what love is and whether or not an action is considered loving by the world matters nothing. Frankly, the world has nothing meaningful to contribute to the discussion of love unless they have borrowed it from the very God that they're in rebellion against.

With that said, we must share the gospel. We must share the gospel with love and grace and tenderness and humility and empathy and with care for those who are perishing. We must share it with wisdom, with conviction, and we must also share it with clarity as the apostle Peter encourages us.

And I'd like for us to end here. Peter says, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and with reverence, and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ Jesus will be put to shame.

1 Peter 3, 15 through 16. Our goal in sharing the gospel is that the nations would be converted. Our goal is that we would not become silent, but that we would be bold, that we would proclaim it, that we would be confident, that we would be loving, that we would be joyful in the way that we share the gospel and not allow the world.

And Gaslight's saying that you preach the gospel, you're the reason that so-and-so died. We cannot accept that. I understand the point. They're trying to shame Christians into being quiet, but Christians have not murdered anyone by simply sharing the gospel.

The gospel is a matter of obedience. Christ Jesus has called us to share. And at the end of the day, we have to ask ourself, who is our Lord? Is it Caesar or is it Christ? And as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast. I hope that you are blessed. I hope that as you continue to share the word of God, that you won't let anybody discourage you, that you won't let anybody tell you that you need to be quiet because this is a life-changing message that has to get out to the nations and God himself will save the ones that are his.

And so next time, God bless you. I hope that you have a wonderful week. See you next time on the podcast.