Church, Part 4 of What We Believe, Part 39

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A lot of times what we have is people who refuse to let the Holy Spirit be the Holy Spirit. They want to be the one to do the convicting, and they want to make sure everybody knows, you know, this person, they're not good, they did this.

If you have to say that to other people, and yet you've never gone to that person, the Scripture says you're wrong. Right? If we have a means to go to those people privately, that's what we should do.

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide Biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity Ministries and of the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

I'm joined again by the jolly one, Nathaniel Jolly of Truth Be Known Podcast, one of the other great podcasts at the Christian Podcast Community. Eskimo you, how are you? I'm good. We're warm today. Warm in Alaska is what, like 20, 30 degrees?

No, we have a very warm spring day of 37 today.

And there are many Floridians that are saying, 37, we never see that.

It snowed all day yesterday, so. Oh my, yes.

Well, I am glad that you choose to be a missionary up there and start the church there to do what I'm very thankful God has not called me to do. Oof, brr. I mean, you know, Jim Osmond's always trying to convince me to move to Idaho, and I'm telling him that's too cold.

Alaska, yikes. But today we're going to talk about, we're going to continue our discussion on the topic of the church. We're going to get into several topics today, but we're primarily going to try to focus on the church leadership.

That is going to be the goal. Let me start right off out of the gate with welcoming any of those who are from the 1618 podcast. A 1618 podcast was one of the many, many podcasts at the Christian Podcast Community.

However, they did what's called pod fading. He just had too much going on and wanted to shut down completely, and so he decided to, in agreement with us here, to send his listeners over here. So if this is the first time listening to The Wrap Report, we want to welcome you, let you know that you're going to get some hopefully great content, at least from Nathaniel's side.

Nathaniel is my guest. This is the last week Nathaniel's joining me. We are rotating around with guest hosts, different podcasters from the Christian Podcast Community. We are grateful for his expert analysis of the church as you're working on your doctorate of ministries.

So we're going to have to call you Dr. Jolly soon.

Yeah, you're going to be the doctor of Jolly. Nope, Nathaniel's good. Nathaniel's good.

So let's get into this. So if you want to follow along with us, we're discussing the church, and what we're actually doing is going through the doctrinal statement at Striving for Eternity. So if you want to follow along, obviously not.

If you are driving, if you're driving, just listen, please. No causing accidents. But go to strivingforeturning .org, go to the about button, click on what we believe, scroll down to it says church, open that section, and we are in the paragraph.

Let's see, it's the fifth paragraph there. I'm going to ask Nathaniel if you wouldn't mind reading this paragraph for us that we are going to try to get through today. Why are you laughing when I say try to get through?

You have expectation, you think that we can't do this?

You know, I just know that preaching through Ephesians, I'm close to like 80-plus sermons, and I've been known to preach on one word.

Well, you're 80-plus, and have you made it to chapter 2? Yeah, we're almost done. Almost done, okay. Yeah, well, look, if you want for your congregation to feel better, I wish I remembered who this Puritan preacher was, but a lot of the Puritans decided, they got together and said, let's each take a different book and just preach it for everything, and we'll share it, and that way every book of the Bible will be thoroughly covered.

And there was a guy that took the book of Job and was in the book of Job something like 38 years in the book of Job. You talk about a depressed congregation.

That's one of those things where he started his preaching ministry, and he said, I'm starting in this book, and I'm going to die in this book.

Yeah, I mean, okay, granted, once God starts speaking, the book of Job is wonderful.

It's actually my favorite book. If I was forced to choose a book, it's one of my favorite books.

Interesting, okay. Yeah, I usually, if I'm asked a New Testament book, it's the book of Hebrews because it lifts up Christ so highly, and if it is an Old Testament book, I'd go with Psalms because so much of our theology is written in song there, unlike today where so much of ourselves are written in song, not theology, but the Psalms are just rich in theology, so that would be the one.

If I had to choose a second, and this surprises people, Leviticus because Leviticus and Hebrews go very well together, but Leviticus has the gospel very clearly when you start to read it. People just hate Leviticus, it's seeming so tedious, but when you really dig in and start understanding what's being said, it's like, wow, God is so good to us.

We are so unclean and need him, and I need that constant reminder. So, with that, why don't you start us off with this paragraph in our doctrinal statement.

All right. The one supreme authority for the church is Christ, and church leadership, gifts, order, discipline, and worship are all appointed through his sovereignty as found in the scriptures. The biblically designated officers serving under Christ and over the assembly are elders, also called bishops, pastors, and pastor-teachers, and deacons, both of whom must meet biblical qualifications.

These leaders lead or rule as servants of Christ and have his authority in directing the church. The congregation is to submit to their leadership. Okay.

There's a lot here. Some of it I know we're going to get to later on in future episodes, so we're going to do a cursory view of some of this, but this is part of an ongoing series that we've been doing on what we believe for the purpose of helping people know not just theology, the importance of theology, but also to understand what is in a doctrinal statement, what is not in a doctrinal statement, what kind of things should we look at and see.

And we ended the last episode with this, and that is the one supreme authority for the church is Christ. And that's a good place for us to pick up again, because as you said last week, Nathaniel, this is a huge issue.

In fact, I'm going to say this. If people don't listen to you and Eki on your podcast, Truth Be Known, this one statement, I think, is an underlying argument for your entire podcast. I mean, as I think through the Truth Be Known podcast, what I hear in almost every episode is Christ reigns supreme.

As you guys deal with different issues in the church, you did your series Ten Commandments, but every topic I end up hearing, what you guys end up doing on your podcast is always lifting Christ up and basically saying, Christ is where we get our answers from.

We get our answer from Scripture. And when you talk about the church, you always put it, you and Eki put it into light of what does God call for us to do in the church. This is something where I think in the last episode, you were talking about how this is not some minor point.

This is a major point. And I think that we don't want to just skip over and keep reading, even though we touched on this, because it is this major of a point. If we do not understand this, if you go to a church, you're looking for a church to attend, the question you want to first know is who's the authority in this church?

The supreme authority. In other words, you get into a discussion on something that happens in the church. Who is it that has final say? Is it the pastor? Is it the deacons? Is it the guy that gives all the money?

Or is it the guy who has all the influence and friendly with all the people? Or is it Christ? Now, that sounds like, well, the answer is obviously Christ. How does your church actually function? I mean, most of us know, if we've been in church long enough, there are those churches that the ultimate supreme authority from the church is the guy who gives lots of money, the guy that has lots of influence, the pastor, or a couple of deacons, or that family that just says, we're going to have final say over everything that happens in this church.

And if you don't like it, we'll get rid of you one way or another. That's not biblical. The final say should ultimately, and it should be seen in the church as Christ. In other words, how does that play out?

I think the way that plays out is when there is discussion within the church, people are turning to scripture and saying, what does God say on this topic? When we don't have something clear in scripture, people are turning to the word of God and saying, what principles can we apply from scripture to this situation?

When there's not clear principles that could be applied, we're taking and saying, okay, here's a list of things. Does it cause someone to sin? Does this at least in line with the word of God or does it not?

Starting to look at things, but it's always tied to scripture. It's always tied to saying, what does God want us to do? And say, well, Andrew, sometimes there's just not a big deal. It's what color carpet to have.

And yes, I do know a church that split over the color of carpet. Stupid. But there were people that left because they didn't get their way. And that was really the issue. That some people didn't get their way.

And that is the problem, not the color of carpet. But what you end up seeing is that there are times when as you examine the different issues in the church, maybe it's something like the color of carpet or the type of carpet, whether to have carpet, do we have pews or should we have chairs?

You're not going to see those things in scripture. You may not find principles to use in scripture, but I could tell you one thing is everybody saying to one another, let's humble ourselves and submit to one another as scripture says, because even on those areas where there's, we would say, well, this isn't a big deal.

You still see people who can get prideful and guess what? Then they want to be the head of the church, not Christ. That becomes a problem. And so we're saying that when it comes to the church, Christ is the ultimate and final authority because he's the head of the church.

It's his church. If you want to use the imagery, it's his bride. We are to obey what he wants us to do. And guess what? That may not mean we get to do what we want to do, even as pastors may not get to do what you think is best for the church.

And so, as we say, the one supreme authority is Christ. This has a lot of areas that we can get into. Nathaniel, I'm going to trigger you. Women pastors, why can't we do that? There's plenty of women who preach better than men.

They can lead better than men. Why are you so against women pastors, Nathaniel?

You can be a woman pastor. I don't have any problem with women pastors. I'm pausing for effect. I've listened to your podcast. Satan has plenty of women pastors. In fact, they all belong to him. I really wish you'd speak your mind.

You just can't be a biblical one. You know, it is a hot topic issue, but in all seriousness, well, I'm really not joking about that. I think John MacArthur says better than anyone, a woman pastor is the most obvious sign of God's judgment on a place and rebellion against God in a place.

It has nothing to do with equality. It has nothing to do with ability. There are plenty of women out there who are better speakers than I am, who are smarter than I am, who are more capable than I am, but God has ordained his church to be a certain way, and leadership is reserved for men and qualified men, not just any men, qualified men.

And we're going to get into that, but folks, listen to what Nathaniel said. What did he appeal to? He didn't appeal to his culture, his feelings. He appealed to what God ordained. This is the difference.

Recently, I was at a conference, the Truth Matters conference in Philadelphia. I was speaking. Afterwards, we had a Q &A, had someone come up, read 1 Timothy 2 .12 and following about the women's role in the church and said, well, isn't this teaching that the church is anti-women?

And I explained why it's not, and I explained the text and why it's based in creation and not culture. And a young man came up very upset and was like, well, yes or no, is God against women? It's like, no.

I mean, three times I had to say no to him. Three times he said, you know, is it? And it's like, and I said, just as you said, there's women that preach better than me, can do apologetics better than me, can evangelize better than me, could do a lot of things better than me.

They could lead better than me. I don't dispute that. And it's not what I think that matters. And I said, I could care less in one sense, because as long as I'm not going to that church, it's not affecting me.

But what does God say about it? Well, God's really clear about it. And the comment that got me in a lot of trouble in the Philippines when asked, what do I think about female pastors? I just looked and trying to be quick, because we are short on time, I just said, they said, what do you think about a church with women pastors?

I said, well, she's not a pastor and it's not a church. Next question. And there was a groan from like three tables of female pastors, right? But what am I appealing to? I am not saying I'm better than them.

I'm actually saying there's many that are better than me. I'm not saying that there's something wrong with them or they're second class citizens, not at all. I'm just saying what God says is they can't do that.

So that is when we talk about the ultimate authority, it's not about what we prefer. I mean, personally take scripture aside, if there wasn't scripture saying it, it wouldn't bother me personally because it doesn't really affect me any.

I could learn. But since God has spoken on this, now it matters. If we're going to stand up for truth, then we have to say it's wrong when asked or when we see it, because God is the authority, not us.

It's not our church, it's his.

You know, you're talking about other cultures and I should say this so people don't cut up my, I'm sure none of your listeners would do this, but the nefarious people might try to cut up audio clips. You know, my comment was really geared towards the American culture and context.

If you live here, you know, if you live in our country, the women who put themselves up as pastors, they know what the scripture says. And let's just be real honest. That's one of those scriptures that you don't need an interpretation.

You just need the plain reading of it and it's clear. And so literally a woman has to read that and say in her heart, God, I'm God, and this is what I want to do. And I don't care what you say. And so that's why I make that statement so strongly.

There are places in other parts of the world where they just don't know the Bible and they've not been taught. And so it's not a rebellion in the same kind of way.

Yeah, that's a good point, because what we end up seeing is they'll say, well, this is a cultural issue and they try to find a way to make it cultural. And argue for that. Meanwhile, they read it, they know what it says, but they don't like what it says.

And so when somebody, I don't care what you're dealing with in scripture, when somebody, plain reading the text, decides that's the meaning, I know this is the meaning, I'm giving it a different meaning, because that's what I want it to say, you are the supreme authority.

And when you're doing it as a church, you're claiming to be the supreme authority of the church. And one thing I never want to hear from a pastor, ever, is you bring something, you bring a correction, you bring, hey, you said this, and whatever it is, never want to hear is, well, I told you this is what it means.

That's a problem. Because then that pastor is saying, I'm the authority over this church. What he should do is say, well, I think this means this, and here's why. That's perfectly fine. But if someone shuts down any kind of discussion, because they're the authority, that's a problem.

And we see it a lot. So I think we've made it sufficiently clear that it is extremely important to recognize that Christ is the supreme authority over the church, for all matters. So in the statement here, we give some of them.

So the one supreme authority for the church is Christ, and church leadership, gifts, order, discipline, and worship are all appointed through His sovereignty and found in Scripture. So before we deal with each of these as a cursory review, let me just say, the whole point of this is to say that where do we find the answers to how we should do church worship?

Whether it's the songs we sing, do we do an offering and pass it around? Do we have a time of Scripture reading? Whatever it is. Preaching versus drama. All those things, we look to Scripture. When it comes to leadership, we look to Scripture.

When it comes to the gifts, and we're going to spend more time on the spiritual gifts as we get on in future episodes down further in the statement, but that is going to be from Scripture. What are the church?

What church discipline is? So let's briefly go over each of these. Now, we're going to spend the rest of the time with church leadership, so I'm going to skip that one for now, but we talk about gifts.

Now, when we speak about gifts, Nathaniel, what is it that most people, at least American Christianity, far more if you're an African Christianity, what do most people think of when they think of spiritual gifts?

Oh, yeah. Well, most people are thinking about what we would call the apostolic sign. Gifts.

Is what I would... Things like speaking in tongues?

Yeah, speaking in tongues, healing, signs, wonders, miracles, those sorts of things.

Prophecies, and people look to those things as if that is the proof that we need to vindicate Scripture. We need somehow to have these signs and miracles. Now, mind you, that wasn't commonplace in much of Christianity.

In fact, until a little over 100 years ago, most people didn't focus on that. Most people focused on the Word of God, not the gifts of God. Are those gifts for today? Well, where are we going to look?

To the Word of God. Christ is the authority. But the thing is that there's a lot of other gifts that we end up having to recognize. There's a gift of teaching. There's a gift of administration. There's a gift of mercy and exaltation, giving.

When we look at these different gifts, each of these gifts, and here's the thing when we talk about gifts, the gifts, every one of them, you can find in Scripture commanded for all believers. I say that for this reason.

When we look at the gifts, some people will say, Nathanael, I'm not sure if you ever heard this, but when you encourage someone to go and evangelize, they go, well, I'm not given the gift of evangelism.

My response to that is, good, there is no such gift, because you're commanded to do it anyway. And that's the thing. Even with the gifts, well, I'm not gifted to teach, okay? But yet you're commanded to teach in Matthew 28, 19, and 20.

You're to be discipling. You may not be a gifted teacher, so it doesn't mean you get up and teach Sunday school or preach or something like that, but we are all commanded to do those things. So we have to recognize that, okay?

The other thing to recognize with this is the fact that there is a difference between a gift and a talent. A talent is something you're born with. I was born with a talent for organization. I was way too organized.

My sister hated my organization because her room was nothing like mine. Everything had its proper place and it couldn't be out of place or I would be extremely agitated and upset and had to put it back right away.

That was my OCD. But that was me. I liked to organize things. I did not like to teach. But a spiritual gift you get when you are saved. When I became a Christian, I suddenly recognized that I was good at teaching, and I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.

I mean, others have recognized it, but I started having a desire to teach others. That is what we talk about with spiritual gifts. So there's a difference between a talent and a gift. You're born with a talent.

You may be born just having mercy toward others or having that type of good, strong exhortation in a loving way. You may have that personality, but that's not a spiritual gift. That's a talent. You've just always had it.

When you're saved, there's new things God gives us, and we're to use those in the body of the Church. Let me just say this. We were talking a little bit. I will get into this in greater detail in a future episode when we talk about gifts, but when we talk about the gifts, in light of what we said about Christ, this is what Hebrews 2 says, speaking of gifts.

Starting in verse 1, we really want to focus verse 3 and 4, but it says,. For this reason, we must pay closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away. For if the word spoken through angels prove untenable, and every trespass and disobedient receive a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

That salvation first spoken by the Lord was confirmed to us by those who heard God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will.

Now, a couple things that we see in that passage. One is the purpose of the signs and wonders and various miracles, the gifts of the Spirit that's being spoken of there, that so many people want to look for today.

He makes it clear the purpose of it, to vindicate the spoken word of the Lord, but it was written down. We don't hear it anymore. We see it. It's written. Now that we have that, do we need to have it continuously be confirmed?

No, because you're no longer confirming the writing of the word. You're no longer confirming what was heard. So the purpose of it was to vindicate the word of God as it was heard and written down. Now that we no longer have continuing revelation of Scripture, we have a closed canon, the canon being that measure of what we hold and say is Scripture, is the word of God.

The canon is closed. We no longer are adding books to the Bible. We don't need those anymore. Another thing that we see is that these gifts, the gifts that are given are given of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will.

In other words, you shouldn't be praying for gifts. You got them when you were saved, whether you knew it or not. Now it's a time of investigating your life, looking at the gifts and figuring out what do I do with them?

Which gifts do I have? How do I utilize them? How do you know that? Well, like I said, all the gifts are commanded. Do them all. Find out which one suddenly starts to become more natural to you. That's a gift.

Go to your leadership and ask them, let them evaluate. Look into your life and examine you and see what your gifts may be, and then use it in the church, because that's why God gave you the gifts. He didn't give you gifts for your selfishness.

I know people try to use that in 1 Corinthians 14, or sorry, I think it's 12, 12 through 14, somewhere in there, where he says about the gifts being tongues being used for yourself. No gift is for self.

Self-edification is never praised in the Bible. That's how you know that that passage is sarcasm, because everywhere in the Bible, what do you see? You see that the gifts are meant for others, and self-gratification, self-edification is condemned everywhere in the Bible.

Except for this one passage? It makes more sense to say Paul's being sarcastic, as he is elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, specifically chapter 13, 1 and 2. He uses sarcasm there. How do I know that?

Because he says if you don't have love, but you know all prophecies and all knowledge, you're nothing. If you had all knowledge, you would be God. He's clearly being sarcastic and using exaggeration there.

That's a way of speaking. If you don't see that, you're going to miss the point of the text. So gifts are meant for others, the order of the church. Churches should function a certain way. You should not have chaos in the church.

Now, I know that would never happen in Nathaniel's church. Nathaniel's not going to let chaos occur. But you see this in some of the churches, especially some of the African churches, the churches that are very charismatic churches.

You see people, someone's preaching, but then someone's going to just break out dancing. Not break dancing, but break out and do dancing. You're going to have people just screaming out. And Paul speaks against that.

Everything should be done decently in order. Why? Because I think the same things we have happening today in churches was happening in Paul's day, where people were just trying to get attention for themselves.

I think that was the same thing. Happened in Paul's day. So he says, no, everything should be done within the church decently and in order. In other words, there should be a plan to it. Oh, Andrew, are you saying that we can't let the freedom of the spirit, just let the spirit flow in church?

Well, I'm going to argue, and we'll see if Nathaniel disagrees with me. I'm going to argue that he already explained how he wants the church to function decently and in order. Now, it doesn't mean you have to have lots of liturgy.

There's some who say that must be that way. There could be freedom in that, but it shouldn't be chaos. It shouldn't be a free for all, because scripture has spoken, Christ is the authority. Nathan, you wouldn't allow a free for all in your church, would you?

No, not at all.

Look, I think when people in the West say silly things like, we just want the freedom of the spirit to be able to move, what they mean is we want to be able to act like childish toddlers and do whatever we want with parents who don't reprimand us or discipline us.

That's what they mean. But clearly, you go to start in the Old Testament. I think this is why you've got to know your Bible. Most people that have opinions on these things are people who read their Bible for three minutes on Sunday morning vicariously through the preacher who read a verse to them.

The rest of the week, they don't touch their Bible and they have all kinds of opinions about what they think the Holy Spirit should and shouldn't do and all of that. In the Old Testament, you want to see God doesn't change.

You want to see how seriously God takes worship. Look at the parameters he set up around the temple worship. You didn't do something properly, he would kill you. There were boundaries set. You come into the New Testament, and then you have the Apostle Paul reiterating the fact that, as you've said, he makes the statements about how things should be done orderly.

And then he gives examples. And so one of the ones that we see today, which is really ironic, to be honest, is speaking in tongues. One, we don't do that anymore. Two, the gift of tongues was miraculously being able to speak a real human language that you never had learned previously.

But besides all of that, even then, Paul says, let two or three of you speak at the most. So when you come into church services and you see, again, just forget the fact that what they're doing isn't really biblical tongues, but you've got 100 people speaking gibberish, even that was forbidden when the real gift was active.

And so you see Paul being consistent with God's demand for things being orderly in the church. So the Holy Spirit moves when we're obedient to God's word. And so if we're being obedient in the Sunday morning service or whenever to what God desires, then you can know that the Spirit is working and the Spirit is moving.

And just by the way, Sunday morning service isn't about your freedom to do anything. It's not about your freedom to worship. It's not about your freedom to do anything. We call it worship, so who are we worshiping?

We're certainly not worshiping you, at least I hope not. You know, you're coming to worship a holy God who, you know, for no other reason than His gracious love has brought you into His family through faith in Christ Jesus.

And that's who you're coming to worship. And God says, I want to be worshiped a certain way.

And so that's what we do. Now notice, folks, what Nathaniel just did. Where did he root it back in? The supreme authority of the church is Christ. What has God said on these matters? Not what we think.

And I think you're right that a lot of people use that argument because they want to be the authority in the church. They want to be able to do whatever they want in the church, but make it sound spiritual.

You don't want to get in the way of what the Spirit's doing. Well, the Spirit is not going to work outside of His word. So let's tackle this next one. This will be a little bit longer before we get into qualifications, but discipline.

You know, this is one, I'll just say this. This is not a good time to go to sleep. I mean, if you were going to go to sleep, I would say to grab yourself a good MyPillow. Get yourself a MyPillow with the promo code SFE.

That shows them that you went to them from us, so they continue sponsoring us. We are glad for MyPillow as a sponsor. But now is not a good time to go to sleep. But I'll tell you one other thing is if you want to make sure that you don't fall asleep, I do want to recommend a podcast to listen to other than this one and Nathaniel's, but that is Conversations That Matter.

I don't know if you listened to this one, Nathaniel. You actually should. We were discussing the issue of Christian nationalism before we started recording. He's actually the one I heard where he interviewed some of these guys.

And so that's one of the things I like about what John Harris does on Conversations That Matter is he goes in and now he has good discussions, even with people he doesn't agree with. But he really is recognizing what's going on with the church, the persecution of the church, what we're under.

He just did a recent one on Boko Haram. And most people have all forgotten about that because it's been out of the American news. And yet they're still going after, kidnapping Christian women, raping them, forcing them to marry Muslims.

That's still happening. It's just the American news doesn't talk about it. And that's one of the reasons I like that podcast is because he doesn't just let those things drop. He brings it up in the broader scale of, look, there's persecution, intense persecution that we're seeing.

And we in America have been spared from a lot of that, but not for too long. The way I became aware of his podcast was actually because I did two episodes on this podcast about Al Muller when he made a comment that you can't have your cake and eat it too, criticizing a Canadian politician who is Roman Catholic that didn't want to answer a question on the issue of homosexuality.

And it was at the same time that there was an open letter to Beth Moore asking her to answer on homosexuality. And Al Muller was saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're going to say you're a Catholic, you got to answer that question.

Well, how about the SBC? Having someone that's a well-known speaker in the SBC, Beth Moore, shouldn't she have to answer that? Silence, crickets. Well, I did that episode and I guess that's how I found about John Harris because he did some episodes on Al Muller and everyone thought that we were both working together getting information because there was so much similarity.

And I went, I never heard of the guy. And he's going, I never heard of the guy. So we both started listening to each other and I was like, boy, this guy's got a lot of good stuff. So that podcast won't put you to sleep, much like Truth Be Known won't put you to sleep.

This podcast, well, maybe, but not at this moment because we're going to talk church discipline. So church discipline is one of these things that a lot of people don't understand. There's two main views that I end up seeing in church discipline, Nathaniel.

One is the laissez-faire, anything goes. Just leave people alone. We don't want to judge anyone. And that's really the common thing. Everyone's, we shouldn't judge others. I find that amazing because no one has an issue judging Christians.

The world loves to judge Christians. And even those people that say we shouldn't judge love to judge biblical Christians. I'm sure that if any are listening and have gotten this far after we said women shouldn't be pastors, I'm sure that anyone, there's probably many who judge that right away and would condemn us for judging these women as they judge us.