Dr. James White: Iron Sharpens Iron Pastor's Luncheon 2022

My dear friend, I was about to call you doctor. Buzz Taylor, he's not a doctor, although sometimes he pretends to be.

Buzz Taylor is an old friend of mine, and if you have listened to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio back to 2015 when

I first relaunched the show, the show actually started in 2005 on WNYG Radio on Long Island, New York.

And then when I moved to Pennsylvania, I relaunched it in 2015, and Buzz was a frequent co -host of mine.

You can best remember Buzz's appearances on the show by hearing the snoring in the background.

And sometimes you would hear him go out when I would throw a book at him to wake him up. But he was a great co -host and a great friend, and still remains one to this day.

He's currently living in Massachusetts, drove all the way from Massachusetts to be with us here today.

And he is going to pray for the message that Dr. White will be providing for all of us.

Good afternoon. Chris is very good at putting people to sleep too, though, I have to admit.

So, so, but we used to go to Wendy's and get like four large coffees, and that would usually get me through the program.

So, well, anyway, let's, let's bow for prayer. Now, Lord, we thank you that we've come to the time that we've been anticipating.

And we ask that after we've already enjoyed such fellowship and food, that now our minds would be quieted, our hearts would be open, our minds would be attentive, that we would hear what you have to teach us today.

We ask you to be with our brother, James White, give him clarity of thought as he delivers to us the message that we need.

We ask in Christ's name, amen. I have to thank somebody who for the last several years has enabled me, assisted me in promoting this event.

And I know quite a number of you are here because of the labors of this brother who he does sacrificially.

And that is Dan Courage. I wanna thank my brother, Dan Courage. Let's give him a round of applause, please.

He's the guy that does like the grunt work in the background who's, you know, not given much fame connected with these things.

And he just loves to help. And I really love him and thank

God for his help because I don't know what I'd do without his assistance. Because it's almost a one -man operation doing these things.

Other than the fact that the man who is about to step up here, my friend,

Pastor Doran Ray, the fact that he and the volunteers from this church have opened up this gorgeous facility to me at no charge to Iron Trip and Zion Radio just because they love the word of God, they love the men of God that God has called to open up his word and to shepherd his flock.

And so they're thrilled about these luncheons and the conferences that I organize and the debates.

So I wanna have him give a more formal introduction than we had the opportunity to do during lunch.

Pastor Doran Ray, if you could greet the folks. Thank you all for attending today.

And I did wanna mention this has been a fairly brief partnership with Iron Sharpens Iron and we've appreciated the relationship.

And as much as we've tried to open our doors and be of use to you, it's also been a real shot in the arm for the church.

We've enjoyed this relationship. And I do count Chris a friend. And we have not been friends particularly long.

But I have been friends with him long enough to know that the moment he mentioned Honduras downstairs, we were in for a drug trafficking joke.

So there we are. But it is a pleasure to welcome you here today. I hope you are all comfortable.

Hope you're all well fed. And our group downstairs has just been excellent today and I'm sure they appreciated just being of use to you.

So thank you very much. Well, the man of the hour that you've all been waiting to hear speak and saying to yourself, hopefully quietly, will this

Arnzen guy shut up and let White get up there and speak. Dr. James R. White is a precious brother of mine.

Friendship that began in 1996 when a

Roman Catholic friend of mine who runs a, they call them apostolates, the

National Coalition of Clergy and Laity, he met me at a barbecue that was run by another

Catholic friend of mine, Robert Posh. He used to be an attorney for Doubleday Books. And Robert loved to have parties over his home where he specifically designed them to invite

Catholics and evangelicals over so they can eat, drink, and argue. And Bob and I were usually, in fact, we were always the last two in the living room arguing in the easy chairs over theology.

But Greg Lloyd, who was in attendance, challenged me to get a debater to face off with Dr.

White on the Marian dogmas of Rome. And I know that I've said this to many audiences, but I'm sure there are a lot of people here who have never heard this before.

My very first conversation with James White after he came as a high recommendation from a mutual friend of ours,

William Webster, who is a historian and apologist and theologian and pastor in Washington State.

He has even had some books on Catholicism published by Panner of Truth. But when

I was asking him to be involved in the debate, he said, oh no, you have to have James White do that debate.

So I contacted Dr. White using a phone number that Bill gave me. And I said, as soon as he answered the phone, hello,

James, my name's Chris Arnzen. I work for WMCA Radio here in New York.

And I'm going to be arranging a debate with Roman Catholic apologist, Jerry Matitix.

I was hoping that you would participate. And then after maybe 30 seconds of dead silence, his response was, how did you get this number?

That is true. That is true. That is true. But in spite of that, we have become close friends.

He is a brilliant theologian, written dozens of books. You've got to get a hold of all of them at AOMIN .org,

which is his website for Alpha Omega Ministries. I have arranged debates between Dr.

White and Roman Catholics. In fact, for a decade on Long Island, we had a Roman Catholic debate every year.

I've also arranged debates with him and Muslims and liberal Protestants and anti -Trinitarian cults and even in -house debates.

One of my dearest friends on the planet Earth, Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, New York, had a debate with Dr.

White on infant baptism. And in fact, my friend, Rich Jensen, who is here somewhere, oh, there he is,

Pastor Rich was the moderator of that debate, and that was a great time. But you've got to make yourself familiar with the resources that Dr.

White has if you haven't already. And I'm so delighted that he was able to fit this event into his busy schedule.

I am thanking God for it every moment. And here he is, Dr. James R.

White of Alpha Omega Ministries. Let me, I should have my microphone on, right?

We're good? Yes, yes, no, maybe? Good. Let me start down here real quick. Some of you beforehand, thank you,

Chris, got a chance to look at these. I am not on Jeffrey Rice's payroll, but I happen to realize that I have most of my

Jeffrey Rice rebinds with me with the exception of my Greek Septuagint, two -volume

Septuagint, it's just gorgeous. I got to preach out of that at G3 a couple years ago.

But if you haven't seen Jeffrey's work, look, I saw all of you hungrily heading into the book room, okay, so I know who you are.

I know your secrets. And we all love, you know, I do most of my,

I do most of my study on screen. There's, you know, that's just sort of the way things work today.

But I still love to have a leather Bible in my hand. That's my

Nessie Olin 28th edition over there, so I'll utilize that. But I, you know, if you're talking to folks in your church and they're going, pastor, what would you like to have for Christmas?

You're already too late to get one this year, okay, even if you wanted to. But having a personally bound, and you can put whatever you want on it.

A lot of people put the five solas on it, that type of thing. Mine's in Greek. Who else would do something like that?

And no, I am not a Denver Broncos fan, but it does sort of look that way here. But there are a lot of things you can get that won't have as long -lasting value to you as just a wonderful, wonderful leather

Bible. And so if you're looking for something like that, or if you have a Bible. I was just down in Harrisburg, and by the way,

I'm probably gonna stay down here. I was expecting to be amongst you. This isn't a sermon, it's not a lecture.

We're pastors, and so I just wanted to sort of be rather informal and with you in what

I have to say today. But these, something like this.

I was at Bible Baptist Church in Charlemontown yesterday, where I was baptized.

I went to find out if the baptistry still existed in the old church.

And I saw a teacher walking out of the school, and I asked him, and he said, no, that's pretty much where my classroom is. So it's gone, so I didn't get a chance to do that.

But just the memories that I have, and I remember very clearly the pastor who baptized me,

Cass F. Santos, Jr. Does anyone, you're going like this? Okay, all right, that was,

Pastor Santos was the man who baptized me. And one of the things

I remember was that someone said to me, I remember the songs that were sung.

Up from the grave he arose, they all sang as I was baptized. Never, you never, well,

I hope to never forget something like that. But one of the things that was said to me was, the only thing we could see was the top of your head.

Now that does not make it an infant baptism. I want you to know that. But the

Lord was gracious to me at a very, very young age. I'm very, very thankful for that, obviously.

But this has been a bit of a melancholy trip for me.

And I say that because, as I've been, some of you don't know, but I don't fly right now, and I don't know that I will in the future, especially looking at all the reports about how the flight system's working these days.

Standing in line for three hours to be reaccommodated is not my thing. So my ministry invested in that fine 2018

GMC Sierra out in the parking lot, and a 30 -foot fifth wheel. And that's how I'm getting around the country right now.

I drove from Phoenix all the way to, almost to the G3 Conference in Alexandria. I would not drive into Alexandria.

And as soon as we're done here in Pennsylvania, I'm heading back to Conway, Arkansas, where I'll be teaching early church history at Grace Bible Theologic Seminary next weekend.

And then I get to go home. It'll be a full month on the road, and I'm traveling alone. So pray for traveling mercies, if you would.

That would be very much appreciated. But it's been a melancholy trip, because I drove through Effingham, Illinois.

Anybody ever been to Effingham, Illinois? Okay. That was the midway point in my family's trips when

I was a kid to go out to my grandma's house in Kinsley, Kansas. We lived in Camp Hill in Mechanicsburg.

That's where our midway point was, and that's where we'd always stop. And my dad died in February.

He was 90 years old. He never expected to live past 80, so there were no complaints there. And he lived a good life.

But if it had been a year ago, I would have been on the phone talking to my dad about driving from Camp Hill to Kinsley, Kansas and back again and staying in Effingham, Illinois.

And then, of course, yesterday, visiting my old houses and the old church. My dad designed the sound system for Bible Baptist Church, and he built that, what we call the new building, which was now built,

I think, in 1973. Not new anymore, but he designed the sound system. And I don't mean the way you design a sound system today.

My dad soldered the transistors onto the circuit boards, which he himself etched.

He built the cabinet that it went into. He designed it from the foundations up.

That's what he was able to do. He was chief engineer of WHP Radio and Television in Harrisburg. Most people, you know, anybody know

WHP? Right, yep, okay. We used to walk the towers when I was a kid of the radio station, taking the readings on the antennas out there where they have their antennas.

And so this was our area. We were out here for six years. So it's been a little melancholy for me not to have, well,

I did actually call my sister yesterday, and we had a good old time talking about stuff and recollections, so I can still do that.

But it got me thinking. Chris and I had come up with a brilliant, brilliant topic, didn't we,

Chris? We came up with a whiz -bang topic for me to talk to you about. Problem is, we both forgot what it was.

And it is an amazing thing to be getting older, to walk into Target, and have no idea why you're at Target.

You know you have to get something. You know it's important. You know your wife is gonna look at you with that look if you don't remember to get it.

But while you're staying there in Target, you all of a sudden remember with incredible clarity what some of your matchbox cars looked like 50 years ago.

You know? And it does make you start thinking. I just had my fifth grandchild.

Little Ransom was born 11 .38 p .m. on September 5th, and I pulled out on September 6th, so I was able to route myself past my daughter's home and hold him before I came out here.

You know? Having grandchildren has changed me tremendously.

There are big points in our lives where we mature. Getting married, well, as long as you're actually getting married, not what we call marriage today, but when you're actually married, you discover that a woman is not like a man.

And that changes you greatly to have to live in peace and harmony with one of them because they're not like us, which is why two guys is not a marriage, and never will be, and God will never bless it.

But let's not get into that right now. That's Matthew chapter 19. We can go there elsewhere other times. And then you have kids, and that little child is the most self, that is the most concentrated locus of self -interest ever.

They're all about themselves, and they just suck the selfishness right out of you because you have to. You've got to take care of that thing.

It's yours. That's your responsibility. And so at two o 'clock in the morning when the diaper explodes, you're the one that's got to clean it all up.

And that grows you up a lot. But then when my babies started having babies, all of a sudden,

I realized I was part of something a lot bigger than myself. Now, thankfully, even before that,

I had started taking a real interest in my ancestors, in where I had come from. I had visited

Scotland. I was actually in Loch Ness. I was in Inverness, which is at the mouth of the loch there, so it's

Loch Ness. And that's when I really started wondering about where my people came from. And I was calling, my mom was still alive back then, so I called back and talked to my mom and my dad and tried to figure things out.

I had started to see the importance of seeing that type of thing. But then when you have grandchildren, you realize there's a future.

And what am I gonna leave behind? What am I gonna leave for them? And so what

I wanted to start off with, we all know the song, and by the way,

I would hope that you would help me. I am on a one -man crusade to help the Christian church understand that in this particular hymn, which we all sing, that we need to pronounce a certain word correctly.

And I don't mean that we need to pronounce Logos as Logos. It is Logos. It's Logos in modern

Greek. It's Logos in Erasmian pronunciation of ancient Greek. And at least it's not as bad as the

Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, which they call Logos, which is not possible in any language anywhere.

So just, and I inform them of that every time I go up there. And they still invite me back, which is weird. But anyway, what was

I talking about again? See how this short -term memory works? You know, you go after one little thing. I'm sorry? Yes, yes, there's a hymn.

I was getting there. I was just yanking your chain. There is a line in a hymn that we all know that we mispronounce all the time.

And I want to help you. I want you to help me to correct the whole Christian church. Here I raise my

Evan Eitzer, Evan Eitzer. Now, how does everybody say it?

Here I raise my Evan Eitzer. And I remember once I was old enough to understand the words

I was singing, I did not understand what Scrooge had to do with this song at all. The only

Evan Eitzer that I had ever, ever encountered was that guy in A Christmas Carol.

And on Christmas Eve, my parents would break out this

LP made of vinyl. I remember when I first introduced my daughter to a record and she read what it was made out of and says, what's vinyl?

I was like, oh dear. Vinyl record, and we would listen to this old, scratchy copy of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve.

It was only like 30 minutes long, so it was very condensed, but it was great. But Evan Eitzer Scrooge, I mean, okay, yes, he got it by the end, but why is he in a hymn?

Well, it's not, it is a Hebrew phrase. Evan Eitzer, it means stone of help. Stone of help.

And once I took Hebrew and figured out what the thing was talking about, you recognize that, for example, in Jacob's ladder, what does

Jacob do after he has that encounter with God? Well, he makes a pile of stones. And you encounter this a number of times in the

Old Testament narrative, where the patriarchs and others would place this pile of stones as a memorial.

And it was a memorial of God's helping them, God's breaking into their life.

Well, there are probably numerous local codes that would preclude us from doing that these days, unfortunately, but if you're a pastor, what kind of Evan Eitzer are you going to leave behind?

One of the things, I hope you don't mind, one of the things that, and I'm just talking with you personally right now.

At the age of 10, I made the commitment to never go into the Christian ministry. Age of 10 years old.

Because at that young age, I recognized how many knife wounds my dad had in his back from people in the church.

He had been kicked out of churches by deacons that he had led to the Lord. And at that young age,

I knew, I don't want to go through that. I don't want to go through that. Now, part of that, in hindsight, was the form of ecclesiology of the churches that we were in.

They were fundamentalist churches, and there was very rarely a plurality of elders. It was very often a pastor who was hired by a board of other people, who weren't necessarily even biblically qualified to be elders themselves.

That's problematic. But when you are given the opportunity of ministering the

Word of God in the church, very often, we all know the deep hurts that can come.

You lay your heart on the line. You spend hours in preparation.

You want to, your desire is to deliver the warm, fresh bread of life to your people.

And we're thankful when we see those who come with us with their hearts prepared, and so they're ministered to by the

Word of God, and you see growth, and you see maturity. But every one of you who's ever had to do church discipline knows the heartache of apostasy, the heartache of people that you thought you were seeing such advancement in them, and then all of a sudden.

And I remember once I started heading toward my late 30s, my early 40s,

I sort of came to the realization one day that I now had sort of a role in my mind of people that used to be there when we partook of the supper together, and they're gone.

Not just gone as in transferred membership someplace else. They don't even make a profession of faith.

I can think of things in my ministry, I'm thinking right now of a fairly popular conference we did 18 years ago, and one of our main speakers today, doesn't even name the name of Christ, very much described by Paul as one who loved the world and went after the things of the world and denied the faith.

And you can't forget those faces. You wish you could, but you can't forget those faces.

And so, there are a lot of men who just one day say,

I've had enough, I have given and I've given and I've given, and I've put my heart out there, and it just keeps getting stabbed, and so I'm going into IT, I'm going into real estate,

I'm going into something. And we've all seen it, you're probably sitting there thinking of names right now, because unless you're brand new to the ministry, you know those people.

They're a different group than I know, but you know them. Now getting to my age, there is a new phrase in my mind, finishing well, finishing well, because what

I'm seeing, what I'm seeing are the people who aren't finishing well.

And the scary thing is I know why, I can tell why, I can feel the temptations of why.

And I don't mean moral failures and stuff like that, I mean having preached one message and now preaching a very different message, frequently because of cultural things.

But sometimes it's just because of the pain you've experienced in the ministry. Arthur W. Pink, for example, we've all been blessed and benefited by his works, and yet my understanding is that he pretty much finished his life separated from the church.

Burned out, disliked, out there on the island, basically, so that the pain would stop, because as we all know, it's easy to say,

I love the brethren from your easy chair, but it's a whole lot different when you have to live with them.

You have to walk through the trials with them, you have to do the church discipline for their benefit and everybody else in your fellowship, despite the fact that you'd rather jump off a cliff than go through it again.

And that's one of the reasons you need to have a plurality of elders. I feel for people that are in a situation where they basically feel alone there.

There's only so much that your wife can do. There's only so much that she can enter into. That's one of the big dangers, by the way,

I think, of the pastorate and ministry. I came to realize that when

God absolutely kicked me out of my comfort zone, in,

I forget what year it was, but we called it Black Tuesday, on one Tuesday, over about 65 % of the funding for my ministry disappeared in one day.

And we were so small right then, that wasn't all that much. But, you know,

I started off making $400 a month, and there were many times that our biggest donor at that time had to basically write my paycheck out of his own personal account.

And our biggest donor at that time was named Rich Pierce, who is now the president of Alpha Omega Ministries. And so I had to find another job.

And I was at someone's house witnessing to some Mormon missionaries, and after they left, he said, hey, you know, I've been doing this hospital chaplain gig, and I'm gonna have to leave, and the position's gonna open up, you gotta apply for it.

Look, guys, I am as Scottish as they come. I really am.

I can prove it from Ancestry .com. And you ever seen a

Scottish hug? Sir, you're about to get a Scottish hug, you ready? Is that good?

You feeling as good as I am? There you go. So to walk into someone's sick room and try to start a conversation when you don't know them from Adam, when you're

Scottish, you'd rather run them through with a Claymore. You really would, I mean, that's a better act of love.

I got the job, astonishingly. And yeah, that's how we had insurance and made ends meet for a while.

Toughest work I ever did. Toughest work. If any of you do hospital chaplaincy, my hat is off to you.

Because, well, how many of you have seen my second best -selling book called

Grieving, Our Path Back to Peace? Anybody seen it? A lot of people. It was in the way today. What? It was in the book room today.

It was in the book room today. Well, great. A lot of pastors have just a box of them sitting in their office.

And I've just been, when you have people come up to you and say, your book kept me from committing suicide, it's like, wow, that's astonishing, given how it came about.

I was forced into doing that grieving support at the hospital.

I hadn't done anything like that. And unfortunately, like many in the church,

I had been protected from even being around death, let alone having to discuss its aftermath and things like that.

And in our churches at the time, no one talked about anything like that. And so I had to learn a lot.

But there was one event that took place. This is what all of it's an illustration of. I'm going back to how this can be dangerous in your marriage.

One night, the alarm code went off. And interestingly enough, it's been coming up on 30 years since I did this work.

And if I hear any sound even similar to that alarm code, I break out in a sweat even to this day.

Because I had to go wherever that alarm code was and the nurses would immediately see me and I would get to handle the family and I'd be the go -between person.

And the very first night, very first night I was there, I had no experience, the alarm code goes off.

And it's a woman in the heart monitoring area and I get there and they say, her husband just left.

He went down to get something to eat and she didn't make it. And I had to take this husband into a laundry room, basically, and tell him that his wife had died.

And they weren't believers. They were not believers. That was such a, that was, it's hard to do.

To see, no hope, no hope. But one night, the alarm code goes off and it was

ER. So I headed to the ER. My job when someone was coming to the ER was I stood at the automatic opening doors, watched for the ambulance, and when they start bringing whoever it is in,

I step in front of the sensors to get the doors to open before they get there. And then

I watched for the family. And at least there we had this teeny, tiny little room, family room, but it was tiny.

It's like three seats in it. When I get to the ER, I know something strange is happening.

There are cops everywhere. And they have this look about them.

And if you ever, you know, the head nurse in an ER, the only ones they ever hire as head nurses are chiseled out of granite.

You know what I mean? They have to be absolutely emotionless.

But she looks upset. And so they finally tell me what's going on.

There's a nine -month -old baby coming in and the baby's not breathing.

And so I go to the door. I'm watching. Here comes the ambulance. I'll never forget this. There was a fireman.

Where's my brother that was telling me we were talking about? Steve Camp, where are you? You gotta be in here someplace.

You left, you left me all alone. You didn't wanna hear what I had to say. I'm hurt now.

Anyways, I was gonna say, seemed to remind me of this brother, big guy.

And he's literally up on the rails of the gurney and they're pushing him. And he's leaning over, doing little teeny tiny chest compressions on this beautiful little girl.

And once she got there, we found out she wasn't nine months, she was six months. So this is a six -month -old beautiful little girl.

I figure I'm gonna be here all night because they're going to work forever. Sometimes they bring in an 80 -year -old somebody and they'd work on them for a while, but not all that long.

So I figure we're gonna be here all night. All these cops. And I'm watching.

Here comes mid -50s woman. Looks like death warmed over.

It's grandma. This is the first day that the baby's parents have left the baby with grandma and grandpa.

And they're at the lake. And they've put the baby down on a mattress.

And somehow the baby has rolled off the mattress. The mattress is next to the wall and it's lodged the baby's face into the mattress.

And she's suffocated. Can you imagine that grandmother?

They didn't work on her very long. It was just way too late. And so we went into that ER.

I had to bring her in there. There were cops there because there had to be an investigation. The head nurse is in tears.

The entire ER is a mess. All these cops had come, not for an investigation, but because they heard about it.

They've all got kids and so they're going code three across Glendale to see if there's anything that they could do. All of that to say this, when you go home, how do you communicate how you have been changed to your family, to your wife?

She wasn't there. She didn't see the faces. She didn't cry with the family. That changed me, but it didn't change my wife.

I had a little girl. She was probably at that point, she was probably about three, four. Did I give her a real big hug the next day?

Yes. But did I tell her about what happened? No. She wouldn't be able to understand it. And so there are times we just get changed by doing what we need to do in the ministry, but the best we can do is pray that God will allow us to somehow communicate.

And it may not be with words. It may be over time. How we have been changed to those that are around us.

That was just one of the clearest illustrations I had ever had of that. I suppose, since that's such a downer, and I was supposed to be done two minutes ago.

I'm not sure when I'm supposed to be done, actually, but let me at least try to add a positive thing to that.

There was a man at the hospital, and the nurses said, have you seen such and such?

He was in the CCU. And I was like, no, every time I've come by, he's been out like a light.

And this one nurse, she said, oh, you've got to meet him. You go in and you have to do a blood draw, and you know it hurts him, but when you get done, he says, thank you, honey.

And she said, I sat down with him, and I said to him, you know you're dying.

He was one of the first pacemaker patients in the United States. It had worked pretty well.

He had lived quite a while, and he was in his 90s, and she said, you know you're dying.

He says, oh, I know, honey. And she said, and this is something, I certainly hope that I can say this with absolute confidence like he did.

It's certainly a goal to have. She said, are you afraid? And his response was to look at her and say, honey,

I've talked with the Lord for over 80 years. Why should I be afraid to go see him? Wow, it just so happens in the providence of God that I went into his room because I saw that a relative was there, a younger relative, and so I was talking to her.

And after, I was department fellow in anatomy and physiology at Grand Canyon College, and so I have a biology background, and so it didn't take me long at the hospital to start recognizing the signs of death on the monitors.

And while we were talking, I sort of look over, and I look at her, and I said, I think it's happening.

And right then, the alarm started going off, and the same nurse that I had talked to came in, and she held, she stood on one side of the bed, held his hand on that side, the relative held his hand on this side, and I had my hand on the back of the relative, and with such peace, he entered in the presence of his

Lord. I saw good deaths, that was one of them. I saw a lot of bad deaths.

Wailing and weeping and no hope. It's amazing.

Changed me, has to. You can't be human. And when you sit in that office, and you deal with couples that are tearing themselves and their children apart because of their selfishness, or their lust, or their greed, or their anger, their alcohol, their drugs, whatever secret, hidden sins they are, it takes a piece of you.

And if you don't really have an understanding of the fact that God always intended to take that piece, and he can replace it, he can heal that hurt, he can recharge that battery, his spirit is enough, his truth is enough, you've gotta be absolutely convinced of that, or you will not continue doing what you're doing.

I mean, I hope your desire is to finish well, to stay the course.

And if it is, then you need some evanators. Don't resist when

God brings people into your life to encourage you, to strengthen you, and to add to the gifts he's already given to you.

I'll be honest with you, one of the fears I have is, like my dad,

I can look back over my life and see a lot of folks that I thought were gonna be there in the long run for me, and they weren't.

And so always in the back of my mind is the fear. Do I really open myself up?

I disappeared there. Do I really open myself up to this friendship?

Do I open myself up in such a way that I will risk what could happen because it's happened to me before?

And I think what happened to A .W. Pink is he finally said, enough, no more, I'm not gonna do it anymore.

And I think it's just a matter of faith and trust, to trust

God. You know it could happen, but you know what?

God knows what the future is, and you can trust him to pick you up and put you back together again.

Things go south. What kind of a stone of help do you wanna build in your own ministry for people to look at later on?

I'm not gonna get into this right now, but I lived most of my life without a meaningful eschatology.

I just did. I grew up with one, realized I really couldn't substantiate it, adopted another one just because I had to have something, but I wasn't passionate about it.

And I've only recently become much more passionate in seeing the importance of it. And one of the questions that I had to wrestle with that really struck me because of my experience in life was when a man who's become a friend of mine, though being a friend of his means you're gonna get attacked.

But he asked the question, he said, why don't Christians ever think about their great -grandchildren? Why don't

Christians ever think about their great -grandchildren? And I knew why. I knew the way I had been raised,

I wasn't gonna have great -grandchildren because, well, goodness, some of the first memories

I have eschatologically was the demonstration that Henry Kissinger, his name added up to 666, and therefore it's only a matter of time.

You know? And besides that, Matthew 24, and the budding of the fig tree, and 1948, and 40 years, 1988.

Man, I'm gonna barely have time to get married before this is all gonna be over with anyways.

But I think there is real value in asking yourself the question, when the

Lord finishes using me, and I'll have to admit,

John Piper asks the question, where do you get biblically the idea of retirement from ministry? God will retire you when he's ready to retire you.

And that doesn't necessarily mean to go play golf either. A lot of great men of God in the past, the way they wanted to retire was to be carried out of the pulpit.

And they were, bleeding from the mouth. But, what do

I want to leave behind? I'm not talking about how do

I want to be remembered. They're related, I suppose. But if you're gonna pile that evanator up, as a testimony to God's help of you, what are those rocks gonna be made of?

What's it gonna be pointing to? And we could be heading into an incredibly dark time in our culture.

I don't know. I am not a prophet, nor a son of a prophet. You know, people look to us, and in March of 2020, the four of us elders decided, we don't see it, and we're gonna keep meeting, and we're gonna have the

Lord's Supper, and we're gonna keep worshiping, and we did. We were one of only about three or four churches in our area that continued to do that.

And everybody else looked at us like we were nuts. We weren't trying to be prophets. We just made the best decisions that we could.

And if you made a different decision, I'm not condemning anybody. I'm just simply saying that's what we did. So we all know how quickly we can be faced with absolutely unique challenges that we've never ever, they talk about this in seminary.

There was no class on this, and so we could be entering into literally a period where opening your doors and standing up behind the pulpit will result in you being separated from your wife and children, maybe indefinitely.

And maybe other people in your leadership team as well. All of a sudden makes it a completely different context, doesn't it?

And some of us sit here and we go, I don't know how I'm gonna handle that.

Look, until it happens, you can't, you cannot literally prepare yourself for the look in your wife's eyes when you make the decision to do what you're gonna do that will result in her being alone with the kids.

Now, we would certainly hope that our churches would be right there in a second, right? We need to be building churches that would be.

But you can't literally, before it happens, prepare yourself for what the look in her eyes would be.

I get really nervous when I hear people, oh, I'm gonna stand firm. You've never been there, but that time could be coming.

And we should have been laying the foundation for all of this a long, long time ago. It's tough to make a really good, firm foundation hastily.

But I want my evanescer to be made up of stones of consistency, stones of a central focus on the fact

God has spoken. God has spoken.

And the only hope for this world with our nuclear weapons and our designer viruses and our

DNA experimentation and everything else, it's right here. King of kings,

Lord of lords, all authority given to him. This is the only hope this world has. And if we waffle on this, we are of no use to anybody.

I want stones in my evanescer that say that man stood on the word.

I also want stones in that pillar that would say that he was willing to love and to work with many different kinds of people.

He didn't, even though he stood firm on what he believed, he didn't demand that you cross every

T and dot every I exactly like him. Now, I was not raised with that attitude.

I was raised with the opposite attitude. When I was a kid, I figured if you weren't a

Baptist, you're going to hell. Lutheran, Presbyterian, are you kidding?

Really? I mean, we know all the other religions and Catholics and stuff, really, seriously?

But mid -tribulation rapture, are you sure? I mean, that's where we were.

Okay, I get that. A lot of people flee that and then it's like, anything goes.

So I hope some of those rocks are balanced. Try to be balanced.

Some of you know that I've done debates on the same side as people that I have disagreements with.

So I've debated Michael Brown on the doctrines of grace and tongues and healing, and then we together have defended the

Trinity. Ran over the Unitarians on that one. Y 'all remember that one?

That was enjoyable. And then he and I, just a couple years ago, debated two homosexual pastors.

And I'm going to tell you, I'll just tell you quickly, because I know I've gone way over time, but when we did that, how many of you have seen the debate that Michael Brown and I did with the homosexual pastors?

If you haven't, it could be useful to you in our culture. It may come up, just once in a while, it could come up.

If you watch that, after we gave our opening statements, and Mike and I both do radio programs, we've both had to, you know,

I grew up doing radio, and so we're very time conscious, and we both took 10 minutes, and we were smack dab on 10 minutes.

The other side didn't know what time it was. And then we did the rebuttals, and we sat at our tables and did our rebuttals.

We were finishing each other's sentences. There was no practice. We had not had any, the only thing we did before this debate was pray together, that was it.

Even he and I, when the debate was over, you know, the moderator says goodnight, see ya, so on and so forth.

I sort of put my pen down, and I just look over at him, and he looks over at me, and I said, what happened during the rebuttals?

And he said, I don't know, but that was a God thing. It was the most amazing, you watch it.

We literally had people come up to us after, did you guys memorize that? And we had not done any preparation whatsoever.

It just flowed. It was amazing. And I'm, that doesn't mean that the debates where I've debated, where I've been on the other side of him, that those weren't important subjects, they are.

But you have to understand the difference between that which defines the faith and that which does not, and that for us is a real struggle, it's a real struggle.

Because we have to draw lines today. We see so many people that are unwilling to draw any lines at all.

And I'm convinced that one of the greatest acts of Christian maturity is just finding out where to draw the lines properly and to do it consistently.

And that takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience, and that's one of my biggest weaknesses, is patience.

Not a gift. It's definitely the result of sanctification over time.

And so let me just invite you, along with me, because I'm, hopefully you realize

I'm just thinking out loud here. Think about your evanescer, and what do you want it to be made up of, and what are the things that you've got to get rid of now to be able to actually complete it?

Because there might be stuff, there's stuff in my life, and I can tell you right now, this is pretty easy to identify, if you love it, and it's not eternal, you better get rid of it, right?

If we love the things of the world, what? The love of the Father is not in us. Man, that's a tough verse.

I wish it was in Hebrew someplace so we could complain that it had very advanced syntax and grammar and stuff like, and we just don't really know what it means.

But it's in 1 John, for crying out loud. That's the easiest Greek in the New Testament. That's baby

Greek, that's what we take all of our first year classes through. And it's real simple. If you love the things of the world, the love of the

Father is not in you. Ouch, ouch.

God gives us so many beautiful things, so many wonderful things, and we end up loving them instead of the giver.

And that happens for all of us. What do you got to get rid of, and what do you need to be working on to build your evanescer?

Those are the questions I'll leave you with. So you get free food, and you just get encouraged to think about ministry.

You don't know, none of us knows how much longer we have in the ministry. Not a one of us.

I realize that every time I get in that big old truck of mine because there are a whole lot bigger trucks out there than mine.

And I see stuff on the road going, oh Lord, thank you. I wasn't where that was happening. So I don't have,

I do not have any guarantee I'm gonna get back to my little RV in Gettysburg this afternoon.

I need to because if I don't, Chris Arnzen's gonna be debating on the TR on Tuesday, or the

Saturday. And that will be a mess, okay? Chris will be getting a

KJV -only tattoo by the end of the evening if that happens. Don't get me started telling

Chris Arnzen's stories. I know him way too well,

I really do. But we don't have any guarantee of tomorrow.

So in light of God extending to us great mercy and grace, what are we gonna do?

How are we gonna build our Evan -8, sir? You don't have to make those decisions today.

Make it a matter of prayer. But we need to have those long -term goals and they need to be godly goals. And then always remember, no matter what it's made of, at the end, you know the only reason it'll be there when you're done?

It's one word called grace. It's one word called grace. That's what stone of help means.

God helped me, graciously entered into my life and helped me, that's my goal.

I wanna finish well, pray for me that I will. And I pray that God will use events like this to encourage you in those ways.

And so I thank you for listening. One last time, if you want to come up, like I said,

I am not on Jeffrey Rice's payroll. But if you wanna look at the Bibles, I'll have them there.

I'll open the Stephanus text if you didn't get a chance to look at it. And once again, if you weren't here, the large red text was printed by Robert Estian, his

Latinized name is Stephanus, in 1550. So it's almost 500 years old.

And it is one of the key texts that was used by the King James translators in the translation of the

New Testament of the KJV. It was the last New Testament to be printed without verse numbers.

Stephanus added them. Now there had been a Latin version that had verse numbers. For some reason, it didn't stick. I don't know why. But this was a very, very popular

Greek New Testament for quite some time, right after the time of the Reformation. So it was very important at that point in time.

So I'll have it open to John 1 .1, if you want, the first beginning of John, if you wanna take a look at it.

Please just don't touch the pages, they are really old. But you will notice something.

I'll be honest with you. The pages in that Stephanus look better than some of the pages in my seminary textbooks.

That does not mean I'm over 500 years old. It just means that they actually made good books back then, and we generally don't.

We go cheap. We have too much acid in our paper, and so it yellows and blech, it gets icky.

They did a tremendous job back then. But the other Bibles, feel free to take a look at them. And just write down Jeffrey Rice, post -Tenebrous

Lux, Bible rebinding. He just does a great job. If you're gonna preach out of a Bible, it's fun to, what

I like, you know what I like about a Bible? If I'm actually preaching from one, see, it hangs over your hand.

That way you can hold it, it's right there. And yeah, it smells nice.

Oh, that's a beautiful thing. So thank you very, very much for your attention. Although whether or not

I get a KGV -only tattoo is left to be seen, I am getting my

Alpha and Omega Ministries tattoo removed today. As painful as it may be.

And it's a big one, too, so that's gonna hurt a lot. I just noticed somebody that I did not even know showed up today, even though I was convinced he would be here.

But I have to thank my friend Dave Waterman, who also was a tireless volunteer distributing hundreds and hundreds of flyers for not only this event, but for the debate.

He is a member of the Carlisle Reform Presbyterian Church. And let's give Dave Waterman a round of applause.

Thank you, Dave. I hope that you all, as many of you as you can, at least, attend the debate on Saturday at 4 p .m.

right here on the Texas Receptus issue. And please invite people from your church.

Let's fill all of these seats. And I would like Joel Barrick, Pastor Joel Barrick, to close in prayer.

He is the pastor of Great Hope Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a new friend of mine.

And I would like him to close our evening together. Let's pray.

Father, we come before you so grateful for who you are. Thank you for the opportunity for us to gather like this, the food, the fellowship, the challenge from really a life of ministry.

But I pray that each of us are crying out to you that you would help us to finish strong, that we would put our priorities and our focus on the things that are eternal, that really matter.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.