The Dark Side of Christianity | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we're going to be talking about the darkness and the evil that exists within all of us.

The Christian life is often anything but clean. It's messy. It's hard.

We're not always on this nice, clean, upward trajectory of ongoing improvement.

We're going to talk honestly about that and talk honestly about the fact that it's impossible to navigate the

Christian life in this fallen world until we come to grips with who we really are.

We're excited to have this conversation and we hope that it's helpful to you. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are

John Moffitt, pastor of Community Bible Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Wilmer, Minnesota.

And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Jimmy, you have the cultural update for today, man.

What's going on in your world? No pressure. Yeah. So, we are in the process of planting a church, as the listener may remember from the interview that we did and just various outlets.

And whoever's listening, I mean, this is like probably the easiest thing you've ever done, right? Very easy. Planting a church.

It's like planting a flower. It is. Yeah. You got to pull a lot of weeds. I hope we're talking about church members.

No, no, no, no, no. So, we are in what we're calling the core family phase.

And so, essentially, we've gathered nine core families, 18 adults, that number plus of children.

A lot of those are three to five. Word. That resonates with me.

Yeah. It can be pretty crazy. So, we're getting to the phase also where we're pretty antsy to launch because right now, we're meeting in homes.

I mean, you're like less than 60 days away, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, around there, we're using the language of we're on nobody's timeline but our own because we want to make sure that we have some bases covered, that we know what we're walking into.

So, we're excited. People are excited. People are beginning to ask about the church plants and can

I come in? And we kind of have this policy that the core family phase is not a door because it can just really play with the dynamics of the team, the launch team, if you will.

Not to use that overly used language, but yeah. So, we're excited.

I'm getting antsy. And this might sound strange, but I think that the thing that I'm most antsy for is just to preach and worship with people, take the table with people.

Absolutely. You know, because you miss those things. Yeah, you do. You know, we're ordinary means of grace guys.

So, we understand that. Yeah. And so, yeah, we're getting excited. I remember when I was there, man. I felt like it was six months of organizing.

And I'm a very organized person in general, but the idea of ministering the gospel, loving on people, and then just organization, like the details.

Right. You know, you wish you could just like when you hire somebody to move you, like you could hire a moving company.

You just wish you could hire somebody to just do all the details for you. And you could just worry about loving on people and shepherding them.

Yeah. Those times, I can remember them well too. They're exciting on the one hand. They're very frustrating on the other.

And yeah, there's a lot of anticipation. Church planning is no joke. It's not a joke. We were talking about it before.

I know that my wife and I talk regularly about this, that the Lord's done a lot of good in the last four years, and we'd never want to do these four years again.

And there you have that. So, John, what are we talking about today? Yeah. Before we jump into that. So, all of that to say, for those of you who are listening and care, please pray for Jimmy.

Yeah. Love that. He's about to go through a very hard season of life. That's right. How old are your children again? By the time that you hear this, they'll be about seven, five, and two.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, you can head to ChristCommunityMN .org. Check us out. They're going to give the poor men a donation.

That's right. They are taking seed gifts. Absolutely. Yep. That's right. Faith gifts.

And still looking for a location, if I'm right. We are. We are looking for a location. It's not as easy as perhaps we thought in the first place.

What's the population of Willmar? Willmar itself is 20 ,000. I mean, there's other areas around us.

I couldn't give you an exact number because I don't know how far you want that mile marker to go.

Fifty miles. Yeah. That search for space is real. It is. We're sort of outgrowing our space right now, and we're looking for another place to meet.

And yeah, coming up empty at the present moment. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a good problem. It is a good problem.

It is a great problem. So, we're going to try this again. Yeah. John. Sorry about that. No. Hey, no worries, man. What are we talking about today, bro? So, I don't want to scare everybody away.

Today, I think it's going to be very beneficial. But if you walk with us for at least 15 minutes and let us set the platform a little bit.

So, you're saying we're coming out of the gates hot. We're going to come out of the gates a little hot. Hot and dark. But I would say with every man around this table and for a lot of the listeners who've walked with us for a long time, you're going to appreciate this conversation.

I think so, too. Yeah. Christianity in general is a glorious movement, of course, started by our

Savior, Jesus Christ. But there's a confusion when it comes to this movement.

And a lot of it is what we call the precious moments movement, where everything seems clean and bright.

And the status should be always moving up and forward. And it seems white and pure.

And then those of us who are pastors who then go behind the door and close it.

And people then say, my life is not there. Many who listen and hopefully those of you who are new, you will begin to identify with what we are trying to present, which is a very old concept, a very old theology.

This is nothing new. None of the pastors around this table are going to say, you're not going to believe what we have discovered.

That's right. Unless we've been reading old books and it's rediscovering. Today is more about, and just work with me as we unfold this, but today is more about the dark side of Christianity.

The real side of Christianity. The dark side of the Christian life. This is one of those moments where if I was preaching a sermon,

I would be like, hey, before the parking lot empties, just hang with me for a minute. This conversation will be like that.

Grease stains are real. I would say this isn't because I've experienced this as a pastor, which is true.

I grew up in a pastor's home. I've been a pastor for well over going over 15 years. From my own personal life, the

Christian life is not bright, it's not clean, and it's not pure.

The hope is, the final state is, absolutely. And Christ is. Absolutely.

And our joy is placed in that. So today is more of, I would say, a reality check. If we're all willing, for everyone who's listening to us in your car and your headphones, washing dishes, walking, mowing the lawn, if you were to say and evaluate your life, you would say, okay, yes.

If we're going to be completely honest, and this isn't going to be broadcasted across social media, the

Christian life is very much an uphill climb that is muddy, dirty, and grimy.

And what do we do? How do you evaluate that from the sense of all of these promises, being cleansed, being new?

I think Paul sets us up for this concept of, I hate what I do, and the things that I want to do,

I'm not doing them. Oh, wretched man that I am. And does Paul stop there? No. There is hope, and yet there is reality.

So today's podcast is, how do you marry the two of those and then move forward?

And I mean, before we even jump into the messy piece again, the hope is what allows us to stare the reality in the face and call it what it is.

And say, okay, yeah, we're going to pull back the curtains of our lives, and we're going to talk about it honestly because of Christ.

We actually can have this conversation. I think it's almost impossible to move forward and truly experience rest until you are willing to admit the actual state of that you're in.

I don't know if you guys have ever shared bad news with somebody.

I'm sure you have. But the idea of you wouldn't believe what just happened.

I just want you to know right away that everybody's okay, and then you go on to share about some tragic thing or whatever.

And really, that's what we're trying to talk about today is we want to talk about the dark side of the

Christian life and the Christian heart. And the Christian experience. And the Christian experience. Which most people don't want to talk about.

No, but we're doing it against the backdrop of the hope of the gospel. Amen. That's right.

The good news is here. Everybody's okay to go on the analogy, but here's some tragic reality.

Yeah. So, I'm going to do this at the risk of sounding shameless. The tagline for our church,

Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, is Imperfect People, Perfect Savior. And so, what we're talking about right now is that reality that we are far from perfect, and we're going to be talking about that.

And we can talk about it because we are all looking to and pointing one another to the perfect one who is our righteousness, who is the ground of our assurance.

And so, now let's be real. Yeah. Yeah. So, in the, and this is where I would say, in the podcast, we try and ground ourselves.

Yeah. And reading through a confession, for instance, a lot of some of you that may be drawn to the

Westminster Confession, around this table, we all, our church has confessed the 1689 line of bouts of confession.

And in those confessions, you are faced with some hard realities. Yeah, you are. And the realities in that is that even though Jesus Christ has washed your sins,

He's cleansed you. He has come to live within you. You have been grafted into Christ, right?

This is the glorious, the truth of our baptism. We're grafted into Christ.

He has given us a new heart, a new desire, a new identity. And then you wake up the next morning and say, why am

I still angry? Yeah. Why do I still feel like this? Right. Why am I still sad? Why am I mad?

Why do I yell at my kids? Right. And so, what happens is that leads you to great despair.

So, we evaluate our life and say, I should be this way and I'm not.

Something's either, I'm not saved or something's broken. That's right. Yeah. I don't know what your guys' experience is, but many, many years of my life,

I woke up and went, I have to continue to fake because I am not like everybody else

I see at church. I'm not like them. I'm broken because they show up as if everything is fine.

I show up and go, nothing is fine. Everything is wrong. Has that been your guys' experience?

Yeah, absolutely. I remember having conversations with people and thinking these things of, they're talking like this and they're praying this way and they appear this way on the outside, but something within me feels very off center.

That's right. I'm not feeling the way that they're feeling by what they're saying.

Yeah. By what is said, not by their actions. That's right. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, still to this day, when

I see somebody, and here's just a glimpse into the wickedness of my own heart. When I see somebody doing a pious act, if you will, my first thought is not to rejoice and that the

Spirit of God is moving within them. My first thought is, why don't I do that? Yeah.

Man, I should. To use that word, you said it,

I think, Justin, you said it earlier, the should word. The should word can be so dangerous in the

Christian life. So, there's a darkness. I appreciate men like Luther and even Calvin who understand the darkness of the heart.

I've been around enough. I grew up in a pastor's home. My wife grew up in a pastor's home. Unfortunately, we have seen men who are faithful and men who are not.

We've seen a lot of pain. I remember the first time I read the Lenten Baptist Confession, chapter 5, verse 0 .5.

It made my heart feel so safe because I understood there wasn't something wrong with me.

There was something wrong with this world that Christ would make right. Let me just read this real quick. I think it's helpful.

The most wise, righteous, and gracious God does oftentimes leave for a season his own children.

Please note, he is speaking of regenerate people who belong to him who have been adopted by God.

The Spirit lives within them. So, we're talking about new creation people, his own children to manifold temptations and the corruptions of their own hearts to chastise them for their former sins or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their own hearts that they may be humbled and raise to them a more close and constant dependence for their support upon him.

I exploded with joy to know that my gracious Father at times exposes to me the absolute frailty and deceitfulness of my own flesh so that I will turn in desperation and say,

Father, if without you, I would be deserving and am deserving of hell.

So, those of you who wake up and say, I don't deserve God's love, I'm like, yes, you're right.

It's true. And it's actually worse than you ever imagined. That's right. The mirror is foggy at the moment.

I believe it was John Newton who said, I'm a mystery unto myself, a heap of inconsistency.

Because I don't know about you, but I can go through particular weeks.

You feel pretty good. You feel pretty good. I'm using air quotes.

My sin doesn't feel that bad. And so, you can get really confident in yourself.

That can change on a dime. That can change in a moment.

It winds up a dissonant usual blinker. Yeah, exactly. We as people are so inconsistent.

I've always loved the word fickle. We are like the fickleness of the human heart.

Yeah, bro. You know, I was talking about this the other day with somebody where the language of, it's okay.

God knows your heart. God knows your heart. God knows your heart in that. And I'm like, yeah, that's what terrifies me.

That's what terrifies me is that God knows my heart because I just have a little glimpse of my heart, and I can see the wickedness there.

God sees all the way to the bottom. Yeah, and let's call your wife. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

There you go. Let's get her on. That's right. Well, not only do we love to ground ourselves in the confessions, obviously, we love to ground ourselves in Scripture.

And so, to talk about, like you just alluded to, Jimmy, God sees down to the bottom.

Well, what does God say about our hearts? I mean, think about Genesis chapter 6, where God saw that the thoughts and the inclinations of man's heart was only evil continually.

That describes all of us. Put that on a coffee cup. Right. That's not going to be slapped up on the refrigerator. No. And then just read

Noah's life. And there are no precious moments figurines with those verses on it. No. Absolutely not. Jeremiah 17, 9, right?

The heart is desperately sick. Who can understand it? Yeah. Answer, no one. Romans 3, you know, 9 to 20.

I mean, I think it's probably familiar to many where Paul cites the Psalms and Isaiah, and just to make the point that there is no one who does good.

There's no one who's righteous, no one who seeks after God, right? No, not even one.

Like, not even one, Paul? No, bro. Not even one. James is talking to the believer.

Right. And who is he warning against? He's warning against Satan, who can come in and absolutely deceive you because you're that vulnerable.

You are that vulnerable. You're that easy to deceive. Absolutely. And then, of course, it's already been referenced once today.

Romans 7, Galatians 5, where we are told by the Apostle Paul that the internal war between the

Spirit, our inner man, and the flesh is real to where we find ourselves not doing the things we want to do and then doing the things that we don't want to do.

Which, as you already said, John, it leads him to scream out, to cry out, wretched man that I am, who's going to rescue me?

And thanks be to God for Jesus Christ. We're three pastors sitting around this table right now, and as we've spent time together recently, we're talking about things that we've seen in the church.

Which led to this podcast. Exactly. It led to this podcast. We've talked about even our own hearts. My goodness.

One of the things that I think we're all very convicted about is never, just as pastors, lest anybody ever misunderstand.

We do not have it all together. There are many guys, sadly, in ministry that have built their ministry on a public persona of having it all together.

Strength. The pastor's marriage is always doing well. He's not having a rough season.

If I ask him how he's doing, he's… He's supposed to be on top of his game. He's not stumbling.

He's not struggling. He's certainly not questioning anything. His affections are where they need to be, whatever.

That's right. I remember watching, I think it was some sort of documentary on a large megachurch pastor.

It was from a secular worldview. They were fascinated by the success and the growth of this church and the size of this church, and that's neither here nor there.

That's speaking to the reporter. One of the things that he said, dare

I say, haunts me to this day, because he says, I know that I'm not allowed to have an off day spiritually.

I remember watching that as a young pastor, and it was crushing because I'm like, well,

I had one yesterday or today, and I know

I'm going to have one next week. Well, I know I've had, because we all can buy into the lie, and this is true for the

Christian. This is true for the pastor, that we should have it all together. We should be better by now.

You're the example. Exactly. So, I can't tell you. There have been a number of Sunday mornings in the last several years as I've been the lead pastor of CBC, where my sin and my frailty like becomes incredibly apparent on Sunday morning.

I'm wrestling with my own frame, and I'm wrestling with the wickedness and the corruption that still is in me, and the enemy immediately just jumps all over me.

It's like, how in the world are you fit to now go and preach God's word and shepherd

God's people when you are such a train wreck? Yeah. I've been preaching for a long time in a very different context, and I would say in the last two years, even maybe in the last five years in a church where we do take communion every week, there is a side of me that the only reason

I can climb into the pulpit is knowing that the gospel truth of the table will be ministered to me.

So, I come to the pulpit as a congregant knowing that at the end, we will be feasting on Christ and trusting in that means.

That isn't to say that I don't get into the pulpit prepared, but there is never a moment that the more

I look at Christ and the more the gospel becomes a mirror to my own life, and I look into that mirror and I am so horrified by my sin that I come in and I look down upon those who are sitting down in a chair.

I look at them and go, do we not need Christ today? We have come in desperate need of what only

Jesus can provide to all of us. We are excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called

Faith versus Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

You can get this at theocast .org slash primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

Yeah, guys, I think a lot of what we said, most people are going to be able to recognize that, relate to that.

They see that they struggle with sin. They see the wickedness of their own heart in many respects, some more, some less.

But I guess I'm curious, how do you think the average

Christian, what are some ways that you think the average Christian seeks to deal with this?

This is tough. If you're new to Theocast, this might be episode one. You're going, first of all, this is too heavy.

Lighten up, fellas. Yeah, guys, relax. And I agree. I mean, if you could go have lunch with us, you would laugh.

We have laughed so hard today. And there's a side of it where because the three of us understand our reality, you can't take yourself too seriously.

No, you can't. It's almost like when you're playing junkyard ball, right? You're playing junkyard basketball, and a pro shows up, you're like, nah,

I'm not going to even. I mean, we're going to just laugh and have a good time. Sometimes every 90s

R &B. That's right. Yeah, baby. Absolutely. AC and JoJo. Wow.

You got to give the people what they want. That should be our new intro music. I like our intro music.

Yeah, no, to your question, Jimmy, I would say the hardest part of this whole conversation is you have to admit you're not who you think you are.

You're not who you're presenting yourself to be. You know who you are. I'll take that back. You know who you are. You're just not who you present yourself to be, especially not on Instagram or Facebook.

And you've got to be willing to talk in public like you think in private. But that's like, what's the borderline of dirty laundry?

That's true. I mean, we're not saying throw discretion and discernment out the window and just like relationally throw up all over people.

That's not what we're saying. Is it more a posture than a conversation? A posture than a conversation? I think so.

I think that's fair. Like, I'm wanting to process that on the fly, but I think that's a fair way to put it. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't jump into conversation. Hey, I'm Jimmy. What's your name? What's your worst sin? When are you going to start?

You know, you don't jump into that. However, I think a lot of times,

I myself, I operate in almost this cognitive dissonance where I have this,

I know who I am. I know what I'm presenting to you. I'm wondering what your perception of me is.

And particularly, and my wife may giggle at this if she dares to listen, that when she's there and I'm meeting somebody, it's always, well,

I know who I am. I know who I'm presenting. My wife really knows who I am. So, there's this constant dissonance.

And I know that as Christians, a lot of times, we try to mask that.

We try to cover that up. Or what we try to do is we try to discipline ourselves out of it.

And so, what we say is, okay, I sinned in this way. I sinned XYZ today.

But tomorrow, I'm going to do ABC of the Christian life. And that's going to be a little bit of offset to silence that inner voice, the law working on me.

Yeah. I recently walked into a movie theater with my children to watch a new Marvel movie.

What fascinated me about the experience, I sat back for a moment because we got there early enough. What fascinated me is no one there postured to themselves as somebody.

Like, we're all there to receive new information and experience as recipients.

So, there was never, like, at the person next to me, in front of me, behind me, I never felt like I needed to do anything or to prove to them or to lobby.

We were there to all receive what we had paid for. But when you walk into the church, that is not the case.

There is posturing. There is lobbying. There is presentation. Positioning.

You have to position yourself as acceptable. And what the gospel does, and if you continue to listen to Theocast, what the gospel does, the law absolutely says, stop posturing.

Yeah. Because it crushes you. You are here to observe that you are unworthy. That's right. You are here to observe that there is one who is perfect.

There is one who obeyed. There was one who is worthy, and you were not that one. Exactly. Go ask

Isaiah how posturing in Isaiah 6 went for him. That's right. Put the coal on my lips, please. That's right. Woe is me.

Woe is me. Yeah. And then when you truly hear the law of God read over you, and you sit for a minute.

Properly, by the way. That's right. Properly. Yeah. You would never try to achieve it properly. No. No. It'd be insane.

But honestly, we're not talking, again, this goes to my comment earlier, well, God knows your heart.

Exactly. That's the problem. The law confronts that. Right. It does.

I do know your heart. I mean, that's the sermon on the mount. It is. You have heard it said, do not murder.

And almost everybody, if not everybody, listening to this podcast can say, yeah, good.

I didn't do that. If you've ever been angry at anyone, that is equated to murder. Whether you accept it or not, that's reality.

And all Christ is doing, as we're all saying in that moment, is he is preaching and applying the law to the heart as it was always intended to be preached and applied.

Yeah. I think the weight that Christians feel that has often, I think, shifted or moved,

I think it needs to remain. Otherwise, the gospel doesn't make any sense. When you walk in and you go,

I am an epic failure. Everything I think

I should be, I am not. And I want to say, yes, agree. So am

I. This is why Jesus says that he is absolutely the only way, the truth, and the life.

No one can come to him except through what? No one can come to the Father except through him. Exactly. That's right.

Yeah. And I couldn't agree more about the law. The problem in many cases is that the law has been so relativized and dumbed down that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we can keep it.

And I agree that that first use of the law, if we're talking about how it's been understood historically, theologically, that first use of the law, which is to show us our sin and drive us to the

Savior, that needs to be heralded to the redeemed every single Lord's day so that we do feel the weight of the law and we do understand, like, yeah,

I've got no shot. I am absolutely wrecked, ruined, and bankrupt before a holy

God as I look at his requirements and as I assess my life. Thank God for Jesus.

And then, of course, we can talk about how we live as believers, third use of the law.

And I think a lot of times that confusion between the law and the gospel, certainly, but even that first and that third use, it presents all kinds of bad things in the church and in the life of the

Christian. Yeah. I think this is why, if you've ever had a congregant or a friend come to you and say, man,

I've been reading Deuteronomy, and it is rough. Yeah, it's very rough. I don't understand blood and this and that.

And there's a side of me that goes, are you feeling it's kind of difficult? Like, yeah, there's so much.

Right. And that's not even a fraction of what God requires. I would say that's entry level.

And they would go, that's insane. Right. You need to understand what God requires. Not one human has come one step close to it.

And then Christ comes on the scene, and it wasn't even a thought.

It's like, no, I obey the Father. That's what I do. Yeah. So, where we've gotten is to the place of, we're talking about the total depravity of man.

We're not talking about the utter depravity. And this is important. Yeah. This is very important. That's an important distinction, where the utter depravity of man would say, it's just completely lawless.

It's anarchy. We're as bad as we could ever be. That's right. That's not what we're saying. That is not. Don't hear what we're not saying.

Right. We're talking about total depravity, the theological term, noetic effects of sin.

It's woven throughout all of your soul, all of your mind, all of your personhood. But again, to get to that question, the idea of what do we do?

How have Christians today think of just the modern church scene today, and we'll speak to the

American church, because that's where we are, the ways that we've tried to combat that. And so,

Luther, he talked about the idea of, I went to the monastery. I'm extremely paraphrasing here.

I went to the monastery, but that old rascal, speaking of himself, came with me. Yeah, that's right. And so, no

Protestant today is begging to go to the monastery, but I think what we do is we build these kind of spiritual monasteries.

That's good. Yeah. And the way we do that is we try to spiritually discipline ourselves out.

Sure. And it's not that we do that apart from Christ, but what

I think happens is that Christ is in the background. Christ becomes the taskmaster of complete these disciplines, do these tasks, and you will have kind of the

Christian life that I designed you to have. This is Galatians when Paul says, wait a minute, how did you begin by the

Spirit? Galatians 3. Right. Was it works of the flesh? Because no, it was by preaching of the gospel that bring forth faith.

By the Spirit, yeah. It's by the work of the Spirit, and then later on in Colossians, he says, you're doing all of these works by the flesh to try and control the flesh, and they're not working.

Now listen, to be fair and to be clear, we are not throwing out common sense.

We're also not throwing out, listen, be wise, but it's very clear in Paul and in Christ that there are means by which

God uses to grow and strengthen us and to protect us. Unfortunately, we have transitioned those, as Jimmy said, into disciplines.

If I am quiet, if I do this, if I eat this way, sleep this way, journal this way, read this way, therefore,

I'll be a better Christian. That's right. I even think, to use the language of new creation, oftentimes we think about being a new creation meaning that I'm doing all of that stuff.

Like, oh, I'm a new creation, therefore, that means that my life looks like A, B, C, D, E. Progression.

Progression. It's that continual upward trajectory. It's ongoing improvement, all of that kind of stuff.

It's linear. It's nice. It's clean. It's tidy because I'm a new creation in Christ Jesus, and that is not the presentation of the

New Testament. Another disclaimer that I think we can make because we've talked about this, we're not excusing sin.

We're not excusing ridiculous behavior in all of this. Even with respect to pastors, I mean, we've talked about our own hearts as we've sat around this table.

There are such things as elder qualifications. We're not disputing any of them. No, not at all. And everyone around the mic, the moment

I feel like one of you or myself am disqualified, we should call it out. Absolutely, we should. So, don't misunderstand us in anything that we're saying.

At the same time, we're talking about the fact that the human heart is desperately sick and that we, as we just talked about with total depravity, every aspect of our person has been corrupted and tainted by sin.

Yeah, and I would add to that that we're not seeking to excuse sin at all.

No. Nobody's saying that. But what we are saying is, but we're not surprised by it.

Not at all. No. So, when I have someone before me confessing something,

I mean, I remember confessing sin to somebody, and I just said, I feel like this is weird.

And that person just looked at me and just said, well, sin is weird. And it just kind of brought that weight of lightness where, yeah,

I mean, we were talking about this earlier on John's Porch of, you go in the

Old Testament, man, there's some weird stuff. So, about Noah. Yeah, it's some rough reading.

Okay, the fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, just go read their history. You're going to walk away with a, you're going to need a drink of water.

Right, right. How many people you know that are like, hey, I just sold off my wife? Well, I know.

It's like, oh, we all just want to be like, you know, Father Abraham, and this is not to slam Abraham. But it's like, man, I know many people in my church who have done better than Abraham when it comes to their marriage or whatever.

I've never cheated on my wife, to be clear. Yeah, God be praised. I've never lied about my wife. God be praised. And never is going to call me the father of the faith.

No. Which should be a glory to God and not to Abraham. Amen, bro. Yeah, I think there's a side of it to go, to be clear, and in the past, theocaste has been accused of being antinomian.

Wait, what? For those of you who don't know what that word is, it means anti -law. We're against holiness or against the laws of God.

And I want to explain something to you. There's a difference between acknowledging the frailty of man.

I will tell you this, if tomorrow I could love my wife, love

God, and love my neighbor with all of my heart without fail, I promise you my life would be better if I didn't do that.

That sounds amazing. So please know that that is not a reality that I am trying to get out of.

I do not want to hate my wife or hate my neighbor or hate God. I don't want to run headlong into God.

And here's why. Because Jesus is that much more beautiful than sin.

So this is where I think if we're going to wind the conversation down, this is where I think this has to go in that it all comes down to motivation.

Sure. I, in reality, oftentimes fight the desire to obey

Satan, to obey my desire. Or to obey your flesh. Right. Which is ultimately my flesh.

Right. Right. The temptations to, I'm going to satisfy myself in greed, in lust, in fame, in pride.

And the gospel and the church is designed to say, no, no, no. Jesus is more beautiful, more glorious, more desirable.

And I would say, you know, we had this conversation between the difference. Jimmy and I were joking about the difference between a battle and a war.

The war will not be won until you die. That's right. But the battle, it is a battle.

Every single day you wake up, you will battle to say, I'm either going to pursue the glory and trust in Jesus in the midst of my frailty.

Right. Or I'm going to give in. And I will warn you, if you try and do that on your own outside the church, more than likely you're going to fail.

Apart from the means, yeah, that God has given. I know I was having a conversation with some people after church this past Sunday and thinking about just some of the things that we've brought up.

The reality of sin and just how people have been burned by the church. And a lot of that has to do with things that we're talking about here.

And I made the statement that - The lack of frailty. A lack of honesty. Yeah. You can't be frail.

A lack of an understanding of the fallen human condition and the miseries associated with it.

Yeah. And this kind of facade, you know, that everybody constructs and all the things we've talked about. You can struggle with respectable sins.

Sure. Yeah. But you're right. So we were just talking about these things being burned by the church. We're talking about our church and our hopes for it.

And I was making the statement that because of this, this understanding of the human heart and the fallen human condition and all these things, that I am not surprised.

Like you said just a moment ago, Jimmy, I'm not surprised when people come to me and confess sins, even some things that are pretty heinous.

We've had multiple pastors publicly who have been - Even recently. Yeah. That's true. And I mean, we all as pastors in our respective churches have dealt with things that are -

Heartbreak. Breaking. But my - Sincerely, just because of this theological framework, in those moments when

I'm sitting across the table from somebody and I can see them squirming in their seat, they won't make eye contact with me, and they are convinced that what they are about to say to me is going to absolutely just burn the village down.

That's right. In that moment, this kind of theological framework allows me to lean in to that person and just say, brother, sister,

I'm sorry. This is terrible. This is hard. And sin is real. And yeah,

I'm here. We can talk. Christ is your righteousness. And instead of - The line is long.

Yeah, exactly. We say this all the time. You're talking about, if you only knew how bad

I am, we say, look, with all due respect, take a number and get in line. It's way bad.

You are just like the rest of us. Yeah. And so we're not, our posture in that moment is not to like recoil and push away from the table in horror.

It's to lean in and love and come alongside and have that honest conversation.

And not excusing. Not excusing it at all. It's like - Offering hope. And honestly, in that moment, that person does not need me or you guys to come in from the top turnbuckle and pile it on.

They know it's terrible. They know it's wrong. Well, guys, obviously we're not done here.

No. There's a lot more that we could say in this conversation. And so we're going to do that now. We're going to move over to the members podcast.

And so if you're interested in participating in that conversation and listening in, we would encourage you to go over to theocast .org,

where you can look into becoming a Total Access member, where you'll be able to partake of all of the content that we have there for our members.

And we look forward to seeing you over there. Thank you for listening to Theocast. If you'd like to contact us or find out additional information about our membership, you can do so at theocast .org.