Phil Johnson Speaks Out: Still Banned From Twitter & How To Fight Back Against Tyranny + Fresh 10

Dead Men Walking

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the Fascinating Subjects in Between, Broadcasting from an

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Undisclosed Location, Dead Men Walking starts now! Well, hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking, a podcast dead in our trespasses but now alive in Christ, Ephesians 2.

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Thanks for coming along. Thanks for listening. We appreciate all of the comments, checking out dmwpodcast .com

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as well. Oddly enough, as a joke, we've been selling a lot of the DeSantis Askall 24 t -shirts, so we have some listeners in Florida that thought that was pretty funny.

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I doubt Pastor Tom would ever run for office. I think what he's doing in his church is much more important than getting down in the mud in politics, but I was very surprised by the response.

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So we love when you visit the site, check us out, support the show. Usually, like I say,

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I do a couple of minutes at the top of the show, but I want to get right into it because we have a very special guest. We're going to talk about a very important theme and subject that has been a theme on this podcast over, geez, the full two and a half years that this podcast has been around, and I think it's an important one, and I think this gentleman is going to have a special insight on it.

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He's the executive director of Grace to You, founder of several popular websites, including the Spurgeon Archive, the

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Hall of Church History, and the Pyromaniacs blog, I love that name, and he's an ordained elder pastor at Grace Community Church and his pastor,

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Phil Johnson. How are you, Phil? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for being here. So for anyone who doesn't know the name, can you just give us a little, expand on that bio, that introduction

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I just gave you, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. By profession, I'm a book editor, actually.

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I started out in Christian publishing back in the 1970s working for Moody Press, and I was there,

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I think, when John MacArthur came and spoke at Moody Bible Institute the first time, and I heard him, and the first time

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I heard him speak, I thought, he should be writing books. His content is so rich, and so I spent the next three years sort of fantasizing about what it would be like to work with a pastor like John MacArthur, and then

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Moody began this series of commentaries, the MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series.

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And at the time, the head of Moody Press was Jerry Jenkins, who wrote Left Behind. And he came to me and said, we'd like to do this, he said, it's a 10 -year project to do commentaries to the whole

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New Testament with John MacArthur. Well, I was listening to John preach through Matthew. He'd been in Matthew for like three years, so I knew there was no way they were going to finish that commentary series in 10 years.

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But I said, yeah, I'm interested. And so that's what thrust me and John MacArthur together, the commentary series.

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And oddly enough, of all of his major book projects, it's the only one I've never really had any editorial involvement in.

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I began working with him on some other books, starting really with his book on worship, the ultimate priority.

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And then I think second major book of his I edited was The Gospel According to Jesus, which has been his best book.

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And after he'd known me and I'd known him and we'd worked together for about a year, he said to me one day, you should quit your job here at Moody Press and come to work for me.

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And I said, OK. And he said, no, no, I'm serious. I said, yeah, I am too. And he said, no, you should talk this over with your wife and pray about it.

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I said, I've done all that. It's like a fulfillment of my dreams. And so literally within weeks, we packed up everything we owned and moved out of Chicago to California.

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And that was exactly 40 years ago right now. So I've been here 40 years.

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Started out just editing books for John MacArthur, working in the radio ministry, answering listeners' questions.

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And over the years, just getting involved in the church, teaching, they promoted me to a teaching elder.

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And so I'm technically one of the pastors at the church. I'm not on staff at the church. I work at Grace to You.

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But so I'm a lay pastor. I shepherd a group of about 500 people in what most people would see as a very large adult

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Sunday school class. It's almost like you can imagine with 500 people, it's like a congregation within the church.

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And so I've it's great. I have pastoral duties in addition to my editing duties and other responsibilities.

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And all of that keeps me very, very busy, but also sane. I think

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I would have gone insane if all I did was edit books. Right. So let me ask you a little a little bit off subject before we get into the main subject.

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What are you mainly doing when you're editing a book? Are you rearranging words?

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Are you just looking for grammar and spelling mistakes? Are you looking for layout or how something could be told better?

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What does that encompass? You know, I'm I'm I'm I'm rearranging words because I start with transcripts of John MacArthur's sermons.

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OK. And so it's in fact, I did a seminar on this just this morning with a group of guys in Florida who wanted to talk about editing and the the bridge between sermons and published material.

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And my comment always is when people ask me about that, it's it's very much like a translation project.

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Spoken English and written published English are like two different languages.

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And so you have to take the content and translate it into another language. And in some cases and the sorts of books that I do, not

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John MacArthur's commentaries where you just go verse by verse through the text, but books that deal with issues.

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And in those cases, sometimes I'll rearrange material and even take stuff out of several different sermons and blend them together in a in a chapter.

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So that but at the end, all of it is material taken from John MacArthur's preaching. But you couldn't line it up with his sermons and follow it because it has been reworded, reorganized and rearranged.

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So it's a very heavy kind of editing. People sometimes say, well, what you're doing is ghostwriting.

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Yeah, not exactly. Right. You know, ghostwriting. Most people think of that as, well, you get a guy to write the book for you and then you just put your name on it.

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It's John MacArthur's content. And he's the one who did all the research, all the study and everything.

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I'm basically just rewording it and reorganizing it so that it works well in published form.

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And it's been a great partnership. I love doing it. Actually, I should say I love having done it.

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It's a real pressure when you're trying to get it done. But when you finish a project, it's it's worth it.

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People who write books and edit books professionally often compare it to childbirth, where there's a lot of pain involved and a lot of months of discomfort.

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But once it's there, the joy is so great. You're glad you did it.

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You know, absolutely. I agree. I think that's with anything in the creative process and also very, very important.

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There have been many great books that I've had, you know, taken years to read because the readability of it or maybe the layout of it wasn't exactly where it needed to be.

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And that can really hinder even if the content is wonderful and and really good. If the layout isn't correct and you're not communicating it the right way in the right order, absolutely can have an effect on the total book.

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So very cool. So let's shift gears here. So I don't know how long ago this was.

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And we've talked about this on the podcast. It feels like almost a year or so. I don't know. You'll have to give me the date.

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But I remember seeing something because I was off Twitter three, four years ago. I didn't.

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I just said I'm done with it. I really wasn't doing a lot on it. We mainly mainly post on Instagram here. About six months ago, we got back on Twitter when

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Elon took over. But I remember in my circles, people sending me, hey, did you hear

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Phil Johnson got kicked off Twitter? And now I'm going to admit my first thought was, OK, he'll he'll go and talk to whoever he needs to.

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He'll be back on. And I really didn't check back into it. And I'm sorry to say that I have to confess.

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I just went out. It'll work itself out. Well, then I just got on Twitter, like I said, with the podcast a few months ago and still see these circulating going.

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Phil Johnson is still not back on Twitter. So for the listeners, can you tell us what was the date and what was the content that got you banned from Twitter?

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Yeah, they kicked me off on October 14th, so it was just 90 days ago, but 90 days. That's like, oh, geez.

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OK, yeah, I wasn't a year, but man, it feels like it because I've been seeing it like every day. Like people are really upset about this.

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No, I get that. It feels like a year to me, although I I have mixed feelings about it.

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I got a lot of time back, you know. Yeah, Twitter. Twitter is time consuming. For me, it was my main voice online.

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I used to write a blog that was that was grueling. I'm nearly 70 years old now. And writing a blog every day just became too much for me.

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So I quit doing that. And then I started with Twitter just casually at first.

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But, you know, you get into these issues and and I worked out a way to use Twitter advantageously.

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And and I've been on Twitter, I think, since around 2011 or so. Wow. I had never

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I'd never gotten in trouble with the Twitter police. They had never warned me, scolded me, banned me or done anything to me for anything that I post, because I'm typically pretty careful.

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And I know the rules and all of that. But, you know, as you know, from even reading, even watching secular news, there were people at Twitter who were policing opinions and silencing the voices of people who they deemed too conservative.

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And a few of the things that they were they were concerned was the whole woke agenda that they were they were concerned to defend.

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But one of the big things was all the gender confusion, gender fluidity and all of that.

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Sure. And so they had banned the word grooming or groomer. Because people were saying, you know, this this.

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Plethora of drag queen storytellers who who've moved in on kindergartens everywhere, you know, that they're really doing is grooming.

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Well, to me, that's self -evident. But there was a news story about a school district.

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So this is a state funded school district or a taxpayer funded school district that hired a crossing guard who was a drag queen to shepherd kindergartners across the street.

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And they were being paid by the school district to do this. And the school district had specifically chosen this drag queen because they wanted to expose kids to this.

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And so I linked to that news article and said, basically, this is taxpayer funded grooming.

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And knowing that the word grooming is, you know, gets a gets a critical eye looking at your posts.

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I spelled it with two asterisks rather than the O's in grooming. And then somebody, a teacher,

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I think, is a secular school teacher, a woman who or maybe you're not supposed to say that these days.

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It appeared to be a woman. I'm not I'm I don't want to make a judgment about this person's gender, but they did a

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TikTok video defending this idea of indoctrinating kindergartners with gender fluidity and gender confusion and all that.

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Sure. And I linked that to the earlier article that I had that I had tweeted about.

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So two tweets that I did where I basically said this is state sponsored grooming. Yeah. And they summarily kicked me off.

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Now, actually, they banned me, which means they didn't delete my old tweets. They're still there.

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If you look at my account, you can find all of my tweets, except for the one that that really got me banned.

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And they sent me a note saying, you know, you're off until you apologize for this. And they said, you can get your account back.

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And here's the sticking point, because people say, well, how come you're not back on? You could easily start a new account or delete the tweet that they that they were offended by.

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And the fact is, that's Twitter's policy. If you delete the tweet that they didn't like, they'll restore your account,

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I think probably automatically. But along with the invitation to delete that tweet, they sent a note saying by deleting the tweet, you acknowledge that you broke

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Twitter's rules about hate speech. So the price was

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I delete that tweet and thereby formally and document the fact that I admit that I used hate speech.

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And I said, I'm not going to do that. And so I wrote to Twitter and said, look, you can delete that and I won't put it back.

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I was fine. If you want to get rid of that tweet, go ahead and delete it and give me my account back.

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But if it means I'm admitting that I used hate speech, I can't delete it. I'm not going to make a confession of guilt where I'm not guilty.

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And they not only didn't answer my appeal, they haven't even acknowledged that I've written to them.

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I've written to them now probably 15 or 20 times over the last 90 days. They've never once acknowledged that they got an email from me.

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They've never responded to me in any way. I think the attitude there is, look, just delete your tweet. You can have your account back.

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And I'm not going to do that. So, yeah, I think I think that's what many in your position who have been have been banned over the years have said the same thing.

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And I think I'm cynical enough to believe that. I think it's written that way on purpose from Twitter, from these progressives and wokes that want you to essentially agree with them and say, yes,

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I, I, I took part in hate speech. Yeah, that's right. They not only want to shut you up, they want to force you to formally agree with their position or acknowledge that this is this is truth.

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And, you know, I'm not going to do that. I just if that costs me my Twitter account, then that's a price

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I'm willing to pay for the sake of of not not agreeing with the worldview that I think is horribly destructive and is being force fed to the

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American people. And too many people have capitulated to it. Well, we're in this this weird time as well.

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I use the word weird. There's probably a better word for it. But where where schools and libraries are inviting children into these drag shows that that have nudity, that have, you know, sexual movements.

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And they go, yeah, you can't call it grooming. Now, I'm a very literal person. I love definitions. I like words.

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What else are we supposed to call that? Isn't that grooming by definition? Yeah, if you want to acclimate them to something.

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It is purposeful indoctrination, and it's often accompanied by policies in the school districts where if your child expresses any kind of gender confusion or, you know, wish like you've got a little boy who says he wishes he was a girl, the school will take over that child's worldview.

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And their policies forbid them to tell the parents that the child is struggling with gender.

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And and they, you know. Yeah. So so just this last election,

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I'm in Michigan, OK? And we passed something called ballot. I'm sorry.

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Proposition two, a constitutional amendment, the most liberal amendment in the United States for both abortion and surgery for minors.

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So it's legal right now in the state of Michigan to kill your baby up into the minute of birth.

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And it's also legal to for a teacher to take a third grader over to sexual reassignment and not tell the parent.

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That's where we're at in Michigan right now. Yeah, that's right. We're not very far behind California in those laws because you guys have grooming closets and everything, everything else out there.

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So I understand what you're saying. Yeah, that's right. All that stuff is in practice in California. I don't think it's a constitutional amendment here yet, but it's being done.

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And the irony of it is I just saw a story last week, I think, about a guy who who had a little, you know, one of those little white, fluffy dogs.

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And he dyed it yellow and made it look like Pikachu. Oh, my

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God. And he got charged with a crime for that. So you can't you can't dye the hair on your dog.

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But you can take a kindergartner and shepherd him through a sex change operation without even consulting his parents on it.

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It's bizarre where it's gone. I remember the first time I saw a drag queen story time,

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I thought, well, that's weird. And that's everybody's got to see that. That's that's bad.

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And yet the next thing I knew, like within months, it was being done everywhere. It's some kind of campaign behind it to make that commonplace.

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And in the minds of many parents who don't have a biblical worldview, it's almost a badge of honor, a desirable thing to take your kids and expose them to that.

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So I fear for the next generation. Yeah. So what do we do then?

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So first of all, I would say anyone listening right now, you know, tag, tweet, comment to anyone you think,

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Elon Musk or anyone else. Go there and say, hey, why is Phil Johnson still in Twitter jail? Get him out of there. He did nothing wrong.

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He stated a fact. He used a word that's in the English language and it's not hate speech. So that's my first thing.

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So what little what little listeners we have, we get about 100000 downloads a month. So why don't some of you guys go over there and do that?

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Let's keep this alive, because honestly, that's the only way you could seem to change anything is with public pressure.

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That'd be the first thing. So as believers, we see this and look at I don't have to tell you.

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I mean, with what happened with you guys out in your church in California during covid, you made national international headlines.

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OK, and you stood up to the tyranny out there. What do believers do when we start to see our privileged platform of we're a

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Christian nation? God bless America. And now in the last, I would say, 10 years and especially in the last five years, we see that privileged status going away very quickly to where we're seeing soft tyranny, some types of persecution, freedoms and religious liberty under attack.

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What's the biblical and practical way to respond to that? Yeah, you know, the truth is in in the course of church history, persecution is far more normal than than the first 200 years of American history, which where you have freedom of conscience and conscience and religious liberty.

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That's the unusual thing in church history. Most genuine believers have lived under the threat of some kind of persecution.

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And I think we see that coming. I wouldn't say that I'm being persecuted for Christ's sake because they kick me off Twitter because I use the word groomer.

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I don't see that as legitimate persecution, certainly not on the scale of what we see happening to the martyrs in Scripture and in church history.

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But I do think that trend is a harbinger of hard times to come for Christians.

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We need to brace ourselves for persecution that is coming. And also refuse to capitulate to to the demands that we we see these things as hate speech or think that to call homosexuality sin is somehow unloving or unkind.

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It's not unloving or unkind to declare the truth of Scripture. And we have a responsibility to do that.

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And in fact, we have a responsibility to do that. Even if the government says you can't, and even if it costs you something to do it, you have to do it anyway.

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We have to speak the truth and refuse to capitulate to the lie. So we have to do that.

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But also realize at the same time, if all the Christians got kicked off Twitter, the cause of Christ is not going to be defeated by that.

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The Gentiles are not going to prevail against the church. So I don't feel like because I got kicked off Twitter now, the the the cause of the gospel is suffering in any way.

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I you know, what's my responsibility? Well, I've always felt that the most important thing

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I do is preaching the gospel. God chose by the foolishness preaching to save those who believe.

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It's not by Twitter. It's not by social media. It's by preaching.

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And I honestly think that one of the problem, one of the reasons we're facing these problems now is because the church over the past century and a half or so has fallen down on her responsibility to preach boldly and with clarity and and and proclaim the gospel unvarnished and unwatered down.

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And because the church hasn't heard a consistently bold and clear articulation of the gospel, that's one of the reasons that all around us, while there's churches on every corner, nevertheless, society is melting down into paganism.

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Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. We're we're we're multiple generations into a a watered watered down and powerless gospel, it feels like, and this will be the result.

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So it sounds like you take the stance, even biblically and theologically, of of of pushing against that a little bit and saying, look, yes,

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I understand that for the most part of church history, persecution is is what it is.

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And I've always said we've had it far too good for far too long in this country. That's why we're kind of soft as a body of body of Christ.

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So what do you say to the pacifist Christian that says, hey, look, maybe we just hold up.

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We do our church thing while we can still do it. What concern of is ours to take these fights to social media and at school boards and in local politics?

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And let's just do our thing over here and just accept the fact that, yeah, we will be persecuted at some point.

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What would be your response to them that says, I don't want to engage at all? Is that a personal conscious issue or is that something you would say?

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No, I think you should reconsider that. Well, I think there are different ways to engage. And so I don't expect everybody to do all the same things.

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Also, one of the more popular ways, I think, unfortunately, for people to engage on these issues nowadays is by public protest, because that's what the word of the world does.

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But I don't see an example of that in Scripture either. I don't see the Christians, you know, making protest signs and doing doing marches down at City Hall and things like that.

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Nevertheless, I do think we should exercise every... Again, I should back up and say

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I don't think that's wrong either, necessarily. I just don't think that that's the most strategic way to get our message out, to be known as people who protest everything.

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But again, I think the most important thing we do is to proclaim the truth. And if holding up and sort of letting, trying to isolate ourselves from the world means that we silence that message so that we don't face conflict, which

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I fear is what the church has been doing for a long time. Just quieting everything that might offend people or omitting that part of the message.

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We just did. That's I think the typical evangelical attitude today.

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We don't want to offend anybody. And yet Scripture acknowledges that the cross is a stumbling block and it looks like foolishness.

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And Paul says, you know, the Greeks demand wisdom and the Jews demand a sign.

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Instead of a sign, he says we give them a stumbling block. Instead of wisdom, we give them foolishness.

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What is he just trying to be antagonistic here? No, he's saying he has to give the gospel faithfully.

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And if they think it's a stumbling block and foolishness, that's not going to deter us from proclaiming it anyway.

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And I don't think the church, I don't think the evangelical movement has had that attitude consistently over the last 200 years or so.

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And that's part of the reason for the dilemma we're in until the church gets some backbone and begins to to declare the truth with conviction, however they do that.

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And I think the primary means is by what we preach. Until that happens,

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I don't think we're going to see revival or a turnaround of any kind in our country. No, I would I would agree with you that we need solid foundational biblical preaching from the pulpit.

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But I also have seen a trend in younger Christians of almost being fearful.

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And I would agree with you as well that many Christians don't want to offend someone else, but they're not too worried about offending

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God, which I've always found a little. I'd be much more worried about that, right, than an offending man.

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But with that being said, I'm seeing a trend, not not in my church necessarily. But when I talk to some non -denominationals and in some more evangelical,

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I would say moderate churches, they have a big fear of bringing children into the world and saying, well, look at all these things that are going on.

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I don't know if I really want them to take part in it. Maybe I maybe I don't have any children.

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And they almost have a very fearful and cynical view of the of the future of the next 10 or 20 or 30 years.

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How do we overcome that? If you're sitting in front of a young couple that just goes, look, Christianity is going to be is under soft tyranny.

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We're going to it's going away. We're not allowed to offend anyone. We have intersectionality. We have wokeism with all these things.

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I don't want to have children or bring my child into something like that, or I'm fearful of what's going to come.

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What do you say to a young couple in the Lord that or a young person or a young man or young woman in the

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Lord that have those feelings and thoughts? Do we just get our hands up or what? No, it's a bad way of thinking, actually.

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And it's it's underlying it as a defeatist attitude, as if, you know, things are going to get worse.

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There's nothing we can do about it. And so let's not have any children. I kind of understand the point of view because it does look like things are getting worse and that it's going to be really hard for the next generation.

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And I've got grandkids whose future I'm concerned about. But if somebody suggested to me, well, you'd be better off without those grandkids,

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I'd say you're crazy. They're the best thing in my life. John MacArthur made this comment recently when his latest great grandchild was born.

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And apparently someone said to him, he didn't tell me who it was, but somebody said to him offhandedly, yeah, it's a shame to see a kid born into the world the way it's going today.

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And John said his response was, what do you mean? My conviction is he was born for just such a time as this.

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God has work for him to do, and I'm glad he's here to do it. And I think we ought to have that kind of confidence in our own offspring and train them to have that attitude as well.

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So we've talked about censorship, we'll start to put bookends on this episode here. Besides that, let's say outside of censorship and kind of like we've seen the clamping down on biblical preaching and things like that.

28:24

What's the biggest thing facing the American church right now, the most dangerous thing facing the

28:30

American church right now that you think is going to be a stumbling block for her? Well, I do think

28:35

I think it has to do with censorship, but it's bigger than that. It's an attempt, I think, by all of society, with the power of media and governments combined, to silence our worldview, basically, to actually portray the

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Christian and biblical worldview as something evil. And it's just a determined effort to make it that way so that, you know, it's already the case that if you think it's a sin to practice homosexuality, then our society in general will label that a hateful idea equal to racism, you know.

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And I think there's a campaign to raise children and bring up children with that perspective.

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That's, I think, my biggest fear about the next generation, that it's going to be dominated by a worldview that is openly hostile to biblical values.

29:34

And we're already well into that direction. So that would be it.

29:39

I'm not good at making predictions, though. You ask, what do I think is the next big thing? People were asking me that like three or four years ago.

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I've always been a bit of a critic. In my blog, I took on various evangelical trends that were hurtful to the church.

29:53

And my views weren't popular when I was writing them. But you can look back on what I wrote for about 15 years and pretty much everything

30:01

I warned about turned out bad. Most of my warnings certainly have a better prophetic record than some of the charismatic prophets.

30:12

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So people occasionally ask me, what do you see on the horizon? And they were asking me that three or four years ago.

30:18

The last thing I would have said would be that the church would be divided and actually impaired by a virus.

30:30

The fears of a virus spreading, that churches would close and stay closed.

30:38

And some of them die because of their response to the threat of a pandemic. I didn't see that coming.

30:43

I would not have predicted it. So I don't have as much confidence in my own ability to see the future as some other people do, because I didn't see that coming.

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And I would say in my lifetime as a Christian, the COVID crisis and the church's response to it was perhaps the worst thing that's happened in the midst of a lot of bad things.

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A lot of bad theological ideas, a lot of bad, you know, church ministry philosophies and things like that that have infected evangelical thinking.

31:18

The worst thing of all was the response to the pandemic. Yeah, it was very, very amazing to me how quickly churches abandoned the gathering, the ecclesiastical gathering of believers and just went,

31:31

OK, we don't have to do that. That's OK if you shut us. I mean, a lot of them just went woefully, just went along with it, said,

31:37

OK, that's fine. And for a year, year and a half streaming online and, you know, obviously your church wasn't one of those.

31:44

But that was very surprising to me. I thought there'd be a little bit more. It is. And if you think about it,

31:49

I don't know why Christians don't see this. But the idea that we foster a fear of death is so antithetical to the gospel.

31:59

The reason Christ came, Scripture says, is that he might rescue people who were in bondage all their lives because of the fear of death.

32:06

That's in Hebrews. And yet here's the church fostering this debilitating fear of death.

32:15

And I think there are a lot of Christians who still have not awakened to the folly of that, looking at a health crisis like the

32:25

COVID thing, which actually turned out to be nowhere near as bad as what was predicted. Yeah, people did die from it.

32:32

I get that. I don't think the whole thing was a hoax or any of that. But it wasn't as bad as predicted or as feared.

32:39

And yet to this day, I know people who profess to be Christians who still live in mortal fear that they might get an infection.

32:48

And so they still abstain from going to church or they'll wrap their head in masks.

32:55

And that don't work. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. They have no scientific proof of working.

33:01

Yeah, a lot of foolishness that we have been force fed. And it seems to me there are signs right now that it might turn out that the most physically deadly and debilitating thing about the whole thing is the vaccination and the side effects from that.

33:17

More people might die from that than died from COVID. Yeah, yeah. The reports are coming out on that.

33:24

Well, I'll make. Yeah. So anyway, why Christians would jump on those kinds of bandwagons?

33:30

It just shows how much the church has a proclivity to imitate what they see people in the world doing.

33:37

And it's to the detriment of the church. If the devil can get us to watch the world and imitate everything they do, then he has a stranglehold on the growth of the church for the moment.

33:50

Yeah. And to kind of mark your point, I actually saw a live stream of a church that was shut down and everyone messed up.

33:59

They had a live stream. And in their worship service, they were singing a like the Hill song. We're no longer a slave to fear while they're all at home wearing masks.

34:08

The church is shut down. And I went, the irony here. So you're exactly right. Why do we cling on to this fear when, in fact, we should have no fear of death?

34:16

Gosh, read, read the, you know, the founders of our faith, read the reformers.

34:22

Oh, my goodness. Some of them said, I don't even want to be on the cross. That's too much of an honor to die the way my

34:29

Messiah died. So I think it goes back a little bit to what I was saying, where I think we've had a little too good for a little too long.

34:34

But COVID did have some positives in the fact that it separated for us, didn't it? It showed us exactly who was the church and who was playing church.

34:43

That's right. And that is a good thing. That is a good side effect. But in fact,

34:49

I think this will be one of the themes, or if not the central theme of our Shepherds Conference this year, that through the pattern of redemptive history, you can trace it.

35:00

And the Lord has never used the clout of a majority to advance the kingdom.

35:07

It's always a small, faithful remnant. Amen. And it's the remnant who count.

35:13

And I want to be part of the remnant. I don't want to be part of the majority opinion all the time.

35:20

Yeah. Do you have the dates and the place for the Shepherds Conference? Do you want to shout that out really quick? It I don't have the numbers in my head, but it's the first week in March starts on a

35:29

Wednesday and ends on on a Saturday. We'll make sure we link it up. OK, as we round this out now,

35:35

I didn't run this by you. We do have a segment here called Fresh 10, where I ask 10 quick questions.

35:40

They're a little more personal. They're not theological or church related to get so the listeners can get to know you a little bit more.

35:47

Do you want to play it with us and run through 10 questions to fill out this episode? Sure, I will.

35:52

Just a disclaimer. You said you ran it by me, but I haven't seen the 10 questions. Oh, no, I haven't ran it by you.

35:59

OK, that's what I said. I surprise everyone with this. James White, we gave it to him. We surprise him.

36:05

Thomas, I'm used to that. I used to do a I used to do a podcast with Todd Freel.

36:11

Oh, yeah. He never told me ahead of time what he was going to talk about. So I'm I'm I'm used to this.

36:16

All right. Here we go. We're going to play Fresh 10 with Pastor Phil Johnson. OK, here we go.

36:31

Question number one, who is your favorite president in history? If you have one.

36:38

Probably Teddy Roosevelt. He was just such a colorful character and and a man's man.

36:45

We need somebody like him today. Conservationist as well, too. Yeah, yeah. Love it. All right.

36:51

Question number two. What do you wish you had? You had known 10 years ago.

36:57

Something that you know now that you wish you would have known 10, 20, 30 years ago earlier in life. Uh.

37:05

Well, there's so many things. See, this is where it's hard when we spring the questions on you and you don't know what they are to single out one thing.

37:22

Well, you said 10, 20, 30 years ago, right? OK, sure. I I wish it had not.

37:28

It took me 11 to 12 years after I became a Christian, before I really came to grips with enough the doctrine of election enough to be comfortable with it.

37:40

But when I saw it and embraced it, it suddenly made everything make sense.

37:46

And I just wish I had been more open to what scripture says about divine election and the sovereignty of God at an earlier age.

37:56

Awesome. Great, great answer. Question number three. What album are you taking with you on the deserted island?

38:06

A lot like classical music. I think it would be the Montreal Symphony led by Charles de

38:13

Troyes recording of Ravel classics. Interesting. Very specific.

38:19

I like that. Favorite board game, if you have one. Question number four. Yeah, it's kind of a joke in our family.

38:26

I refuse to play board games of any kind. Well, there you go. Then, you know, even with my grandkids, my grandkids are like, well, why why won't you play board games?

38:36

And my answer is I don't like waiting for somebody else to take their turn. All right.

38:42

So what's a movie that you can watch over and over again? What's a go to movie if you have one? Question number five.

38:47

I think probably what about Bob? That is good. I'm sailing. Yeah. Yeah.

38:55

I just like the way it lampoons psychology. It's yeah, it's got a really subtle attack on the pseudoscience of psychology.

39:06

All right. Moving right along. We get in the time machine. We get the flux capacitor fluxing.

39:11

Are we going back to visit our great, great, great grandfather or are we going ahead to visit our great, great, great grandkids?

39:18

Which one are you doing? If it's possible? I go back. Oh, you go back. Yeah. OK. Learn about the history of the family, huh?

39:26

Yeah, I don't not necessarily my family. There are some characters I'd like to meet from history.

39:33

Yeah, very true. So I don't know. History fascinates me. Also, I have this conservative bent, so I am maybe more attached to the past than I am to the future.

39:44

So that probably goes into it as well. OK, question number seven. What's the best piece of advice someone has ever given you?

39:55

Don't try to preach without thorough notes. Oh, that's good.

40:00

Listen, I'm pretty as a student. I was as a student. I was taught that, you know, if you can't preach extemporaneously, you shouldn't even try to preach.

40:08

Don't ever take notes into the pulpit because it'll sound like you're reading and all of that sort of stuff. And I found out about a decade too late, that's really bad advice.

40:18

You should do your preparation really well and have notes. There you go. OK, couple left. Question eight.

40:24

You're creative. You're an editor. Are you a morning person or are you a night person? Where do you get the most creative juices flowing morning or night?

40:33

Yeah, I've always been a night person. Yeah, me too. That's diminishing the older I get because now and I'm tired in night.

40:40

But I used to do my best work between nine p .m. and three a .m. That's me.

40:45

Yeah. But then you're then your nights get early and early. Now my nights are starting at like five p .m. instead of nine p .m.

40:52

All right. Two more. Question number nine. What is one thing people would assume about you?

40:58

But it's absolutely not true. I think people who only read what I write probably think that I'm a pretty hard guy to get along with because I do write about things

41:09

I'm critical of a lot and all that. But people who know me, people who work for me and work around me,

41:15

I think they would uniformly say he's really pretty easy guy to to get to know and deal with.

41:22

All right. Last question. And this is perfect since you are an editor. What is one book outside of the Bible that every person should pick up and read at least once in their life?

41:33

There's so many of them, I know. That you could probably I think I'm contractually obliged to say the

41:41

MacArthur Study Bible or the Gospel According to Jesus. All right. Well, whether you're contractually or not, that's a good recommendation.

41:49

That was fresh dead everyone with Pastor Phil Johnson. Oh, we love taking alerted men of the

42:05

Bible and lowering them to our standards and making sitting them through those those intros and outros. I appreciate it.

42:10

Pastor Phil Johnson for doing that. So give us the final word. We're heading out here. We've been talking about censorship.

42:15

We've been talking about soft tyranny and all these different things, the revitalization of the church through a scripture and good preaching and foundational preaching.

42:25

Give us give us the final word here for people listening right now that might be discouraged in these times where they see things shifting, where the culture is going, what do we need to hear for them?

42:36

Yeah, well, I always say don't be discouraged. Things are discouraging, you know, and it's hard to look at what's going on in our culture and not be sad to see such a decline.

42:48

But it is what scripture says. You can trace the decline in Romans chapter one. It's happened over and over again in history.

42:56

And the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. So I always tell people, you know,

43:03

I mean, you read what I write. And again, I'm critical a lot. I see a lot of bad trends that I that I point out and decry.

43:12

And yet I am not a pessimist. I'm I'm I'm a

43:17

Calvinist. And as a Calvinist, I can't be a pessimist because I know that in the end, the truth will win and Christ will triumph over all of his enemies.

43:26

And I look forward to that day and I fully expect it to happen. So I'm the best kind of optimist.

43:34

Absolutely. So we know you're not back on Twitter yet, but throughout the social media, we'll link it up. Where can people find you if they want to read something by you or get in contact with you on social media?

43:44

The the website for Grace to you is GTY .org. My personal website.

43:50

You'll find links to everything I've ever done. I don't keep up my website very well anymore, but the stuff is there.

43:57

A lot of stuff you can read at Romans four five dot org. That's without any punctuation other than the dot

44:04

Romans four five dot org. Perfect. Yeah. And we'll make sure it gets linked up. So when it goes out to all the pod chasers, they can go and click on it and take a look.

44:12

Well, oh, Pastor Phil Johnson, thank you so much for being here, being gracious with your time, talking to us about this very important issue.

44:20

We appreciate you and what you do in your ministry. And I know our listeners just absolutely love this episode.

44:27

So I appreciate you and thank you. Thank you. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Dead Man Walking Podcast.

44:35

As always, go to DMW podcast dot com to find out more about us, support the show or just maybe leave us a comment, a suggestion.

44:43

As always, guys, God bless. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Dead Man Walking Podcast for full video podcast episodes and clips or email us at dead men walking podcast at Gmail dot com.