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Social Justice as a Competing Religion

Welcome, my name is Pastor Jeff and this is Kyle Robinson. We are here to talk today about social justice. And the question that I'm going to ask you, Kyle, is how can a young Christian keep the faith in a social justice world?

That's the issue we have. So as a pastor, I have no righteousness of my own. The only way that I sit here justified before God is because of the blood of Jesus Christ. I'm not more righteous or holy than anybody.

I'm a sinner. In fact, I'm a chief of sinners. But I believe in Jesus Christ. And part of being a follower of Christ is to follow what he says. In 2 Timothy 2 .2, he says, what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

So the point of this video, Kyle, is I want to sit down with you. You're a young man. You're in high school. And I want to ask you about what it's like to be a Christian in a public high school in New Jersey.

I want to ask, what are your experiences? And we can talk about those things. But my goal in this is to disciple you, not with any wisdom that comes from me, but to take the scripture and say, this is what the Bible says about a given issue.

And this is how we can apply that as Christians in this world. So let's go ahead and do that. We'll talk about gender. We'll talk about abortion. We'll talk about race and the Black Lives Matter movement.

We'll talk about government and money and all different kind of topics that all can be summed up under this idea of social justice. So before I give you the first question, which I'm going to ask you what it's like for you, and give me a story about being in a public high school.

Before I do that, what is social justice? Social justice, I think, is a religion that many people are following. It's a religion because people are zealous for it, like someone else might be zealous for God.

It's a cause that people serve that's bigger than themselves and that they can lay themselves down for. And the concept behind social justice is liberating the oppressed. So it's identifying who is being marginalized or oppressed or hurt in society and stepping into the rescue to deliver them from that.

So the point of oppression could be any number of things. It could be someone who's being persecuted because of their race or a heteronormative person persecuting or victimizing an LGBTQ person. Or it could be the male dominance in society and how that holds women beneath a glass ceiling.

Or it could be economic where somebody has more wealth than another person and therefore the poor have oppression because of that. Any number of issues. But these concepts of bringing equity and inclusion and diversity to the society is kind of what social justice is all about.

So that being said, the reason for this video, I want to hear from a high school student.

And I want to know what it's like.

You're a Christian young man in a social justice world. So tell me, what is it like for you?

Abortion, Reproductive Freedom, and the Sanctity of Life

Well, as a Christian in a public high school during a social justice era, it can be difficult for people to stand up and say what they believe because it's not only being followed by the students and posted on social media and popularized and just the norm, but it's also being taught by the teachers.

Like, for example, on abortion, I was in biology class and my teacher was telling us all about the embryo and how doctors can see if an embryo is going to be a baby, if it's going to have a disability or like autism or sickle cell anemia or anything like that.

And she was implying the idea that it is not right for parents knowing this to bring a child into the world and then it should be aborted. And when I said, well, I don't think that's right, and I don't agree with that because I believe the Bible.

And the Bible says, do not commit murder. And I know this is wrong and God values all life. And when you try to step up and say it, you're kind of made a joke of and the teacher just kind of laughs and says, well, you're not very responsible then.

So that's just one example.

And so are you the majority at your high school?

No, I'd say I'm a very slim part of the population. I'm a minority being a Christian high school.

05 All right.

So for an issue, let's say what you brought up, reproductive freedom, they call it. Reproductive justice, even like the just thing in this social justice world. Up is down, down is up. Right is wrong, wrong is right.

Sweet is bitter, bitter is sweet. Isaiah 520, they will say that justice demands that a woman have a right to choose. But why would we say that a baby has a right to live? Well, how do we differentiate between these two opinions?

There's one way to establish that, right? If it's just your opinion, my opinion and somebody else's opinion, that's there's no objective standard, right? So how can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word.

Psalm 119 verse nine, the word of God answers this question. So is the embryo inside of a mother, a human life? Yes, it absolutely is. And how do we know that?

The Bible, the Bible, right?

Psalm 139 says, it's David speaking and he says about God, you knit me together in my mother's womb. He was me while he was in the room, in the womb. So he was being knit together by God, but he was already identified as a person, the personal pronoun me.

God identifies the embryo in the womb as a living human person. In fact, John the Baptist, when he was in the womb, leapt for joy when Mary came into the same room with Jesus in the womb of Mary. So the Bible clearly identifies the baby inside the mother as a living human being.

So we can stand on that.

Yeah.

So in your class, out of, what is there, 30 kids in there?

Around 30, yeah.

How many agreed with you?

I don't know if any did, maybe one or two.

Yeah.

I don't think so.

All right, so here's an irony. So you have the social justice world where the majority oppresses the minority group. Hasn't it flipped at this point that in America, to hold to the teachings of the Bible is now the minority position?

Definitely.

Definitely.

In your school, there's no doubt. All right, so here's what I want to do. Let's take a couple different social justice issues and talk about them one by one. And not just making up stuff as if our opinions matter.

Pastor Jeff's opinion on this does not matter. But God's opinion does, right? So let's go to Exodus chapter 20, and I want to read from the second table of God's law. So God's law, the 10 commandments came on two tables.

And the first four commandments were vertical. They were man relating to God, that you're to have no other God but Him. That's the first commandment. You're not to make any idols. You're not to take the Lord's name in vain.

And you, what's the fourth one? To remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. These are vertical, meaning this relates to how you relate to God. And then the next six, the second table of the law is how we treat one another.

So here's the issue. Someone might say to you, Kyle, well, you're not loving because you have a certain position on sexuality or on race or on gender or on finances. But what is love? That's the question, right?

So if we're to love God and love others, the question is, what does it mean to love? Love has to be in keeping with God's truth. So if you're telling somebody a lie, are you loving them?

No.

No, right. Okay.

Gender, the Nuclear Family, and Biblical Headship

So let's start with gender. The fifth commandment says, I'm sorry, this is the, yeah, the fifth commandment. It says, honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Biblically, gender is prescribed by God. In this verse, you see, honor your father and your mother. And there's a promise that's associated with this. If you honor your parents, your days will be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

So there's a blessing that comes from honoring the parents. And what you have taught here is a reflection of the original created order. In Genesis chapter one, God makes them male and female. This is God's design.

Gender would be a binary. There's a male and there's a female. And in marriage, they come together and children come from this. And this then is the basic nuclear family where you have father, mother, and children.

In the world that we live in, is the nuclear family honored?

I don't think so.

What do you see at your school?

Well, in my school, I just think that a lot of kids are doing the opposite, not really honoring their father and mother, beginning with their worship, other things other than God, and they want to live for themselves.

But also now, especially now in not only the Black Lives Matter movement, where they speak of disrupting the nuclear family, which most people, the high minority are following, also LGBTQ, they want to get away from having a father and a mother, and they want to have a father and a father and a mother and a mother, which goes against the Bible and against God.

Right.

So you just said something interesting. Black Lives Matter, that's ostensibly about race, right?

Yeah.

Well, so you mentioned this before we started this video, and so I Googled it and we looked it up, the mission statement or the statement of belief of Black Lives Matter on blacklivesmatter .com. So their own words, right?

Let me just read from blacklivesmatter .com. We disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure, the requirement, by supporting each other as extended families and villages. Like Hillary Clinton, it takes a village.

And that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. So rather than supporting the nuclear family, the language here is to disrupt the nuclear family.

Then he goes on, or the website goes on to say, we foster a queer affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather the belief that all in the world are heterosexual, unless she or he disclosed otherwise.

So the Black Lives Matter agenda is to disrupt the nuclear family and foster a queer affirming network.

And that goes against Black Lives Matter in itself.

How so?

Where the biggest telltale sign of whether someone's going to be successful or not successful comes from, are they going to have a mother and a father in their own household? Because if one of them's missing, the statistics show there's a very high chance that they're not going to be successful, or they're going to end up in prison, or unemployed, or just stuck in poverty.

Hmm. So are you saying that the narrative that white privilege and the whole racism of society, the societal built-in racism is not what's creating the disparities of outcomes in people's lives?

No, it's not.

Right. You're right about that.

Have you heard of Jordan Peterson?

I've not.

Jordan Peterson, he's a professor in Toronto, and he's done sociological studies on this, trying to trace out the connection between things like if you're raised by your father and mother, and other factors such as height or even appearance.

And all of these factors kind of run through the matrix. He found almost no correlation between race and disparities, but most of the disparities could be just kind of parceled out based on just a few things.

One, if the father is in the home, living in the same home. So there again, we have the nuclear family. Number two, if a person has children inside or outside of wedlock. If you wait to have kids until you're married is one of the biggest predictors of outcomes.

Interesting, isn't it?

Yeah.

All right, let's go on.

That's what the Bible says.

If you do it God's way, that's neat. All right, so then the next thing is the next command, you shall not murder. When George Floyd was murdered by a cop, who do you know that supported that officer?

No one.

I've never met anybody.

Yeah, no one.

Yeah.

When 600 ,000 babies are murdered inside the wombs of their mother, more than maybe 50 of this country supports that murder.

Probably over 70 of my school.

Really?

Yeah.

So this is the rejection of God's law. You shall not murder. Next, you shall not commit adultery. Biblically defined, sexual morality is not immorality, but the moral sexual ethic is one man and one woman in marriage.

LGBTQIA plus rejects that teaching on the face of it. How prevalent is that at your high school?

It's very prevalent. LGBTQ history is now, it needs to be taught in history now. It needs to have at least one full lesson, but now it keeps growing each year. And now there's LGBTQ clubs, and there's GSA, which is Gay Street Alliance, and a lot of new clubs coming in.

And Pride Month is a big thing among high schoolers or teenagers or just young people in the world today. And if you go against what they think, they'll just think that you're a homophobe because you're Christian.

And they'll say, well, God hates gays, so that means you're homophobic and you're just doing this out of hate because they're just too blind to see that it's actually out of love.

Right.

So you don't hate gay people at your school?

No. Yeah.

What would your desire for them be? Would you want to see them come to know Christ?

Yeah, that's just the main goal for everyone that I meet. Just want them to know Christ and know the love of God and just know His grace and everlasting life.

Yeah.

I knew a young man back when I was living in Florida who his parents had been missionaries. And when he came back to the States, he fell into homosexuality and then even into male prostitution and all kinds of just a horrible lifestyle that was destroying him.

Even though he had been raised in a Christian home, he himself had not been born again. There came a point in his life as he progressed through his 20s, he came to believe in Christ for himself. And you know, Jesus Christ completely delivered him from not only the practice of homosexuality, but the desires for homosexual relationships.

He was set free by the power of Jesus Christ. And you know, he's not the only one I know like that.

I know many people like that. Here's the interesting thing.

If there's one person who is, if I'm not lying to you, or if this person isn't lying to me when he tells that story, it completely destroys the narrative, which is that people are born a certain way and nothing can change that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dismantles it.

It completely destroys it, right? So in Ephesians, I'm sorry, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, referring to the subject of homosexuality, it says, such were some of you. Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

So somebody listening to this video might say, well, see right there, the Bible is hateful. It wants to condemn people to hell. If I were judged based on what I've committed in my life, I would go to hell.

I'd be sent to hell because I'm a sinner like anybody else. But look at the rest of this story here. It says, and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.

Amazing. And I noticed in that scripture there, it doesn't just point out homosexuality because a lot of people are under the illusion that Christians are against gay people and the LGBTQ. And we just are homophobic and we think that God hates gay people.

No, God hates sin. And homosexuality is one of those sins. And I'm just as guilty as anyone else in the world. And I deserve hell too. And it's just, if a Christian or anyone witnesses to you and tells you to turn away from this lifestyle and follow Christ, it's not because they hate who you are.

It's because we've been where you were in that same situation. And we just want all people to come to Christ. It's not out of hate. It's out of love. And it's sad to see in the churches even today are trying to compromise the new lifestyle with the Bible.

And when you try to compromise, you're not walking in love anymore.

Right.

You're walking more in fear of society and you're walking in compromise.

Absolutely. That's exactly what it is. Because it says, such were some of you, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. His name has power to set the sinner free.

He is able to do that. And he does it again and again. There's thousands upon thousands of testimonies of people who have been set free from homosexuality. Just like there are thieves who have been delivered.

Read the story of John Welch. He grew up in like a Christian home. But by the time he was a teenager, he was off on his own. He had run away from home. And he became a thief on the border between like Scotland and England.

And he would go back and forth just stealing from homes. But at some point, the Lord drew him back. He came back, repented of his sin, and became one of the most powerful preachers this world has ever seen.

He was a thief, but completely delivered. I mean, one of the things when he was so powerful preaching the gospel, he got kicked out of Scotland. The king who was anti-Christ kicked him out of Scotland.

So within 14 weeks, he learned French and began preaching in French. And there wasn't long before the French king came and attacked the city of Ayr where he was preaching the gospel. And no, that was a, it wasn't called Ayr.

That was the Scottish town. But the king sieged the town. The people built the fortifications around the town. He shot a cannonball over the wall. It hit not just the preacher's house. It went through the wall of the preacher's house into the bed where he was sleeping and split it in two.

But missed him by an inch.

Wow.

He ran out of the house where he was, tried to rally the people. The gunners were scared to get up on the wall. So he himself grabbed the powder keg and ran up to the wall. Another cannonball from the king hit the, he was using his hat to hold it, hit it out of his hand.

And he had a second near-death experience. And then they got on the wall and shot back at that gun and blew up the king's gun on the first hit. And the city was delivered from that siege. That's history.

That's not...

It's amazing.

It's not a fairy tale. He continued to preach the gospel. Eventually made it back to London, preached the gospel on his deathbed. He was allowed to preach in London one more time. And he got out of his deathbed, went to the pulpit, preached, came back and died.

Wow.

Why am I telling this story? It's the power of God to change somebody. This is a thief who was just living on the border of Scotland and England, who was so completely changed by the gospel. He lived this life of power in the Holy Spirit.

It reminds me of the Apostle Paul, whose job was to kill Christians, which is amazing. He was just a Jewish teacher who believed the Old Testament. And when the Christian movement started, his job was to kill Christians and stop them.

And on his way to go capture and kill the Christians that he could find, he was stopped by... He was blinded by a light and a voice called to him and said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, Lord, Lord, who are you?

And the voice was Jesus. And he just turned from...

His name was Saul.

And then Jesus turned his name into Paul and became a new creation in the eyes of God, similar to the story he just told. And just completely did a 180 and wrote most of the New Testament.

And the irony there is, listener, the person who wrote these words is the very Apostle you're talking about. First Corinthians was written by Paul, and he's the one that said, such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the world is going to tell you that it's hateful to try to change a person. And even like counseling to try to help somebody come out of homosexuality, that's called... That's even outlawed in many places.

I think it's outlawed, probably in New Jersey. But you can't outlaw the Bible. The Bible, the word of God overpowers sin and changes the sinner from the inside out. It's a beautiful message. The Lord has the power to change us.

I was a sinner who was dead in my sin, but Christ came into my life, transformed me. When I was in college, I went to Eckerd College down in Florida, and I was a basketball player. And there came a point in my walk with Christ where I started to doubt everything.

And I didn't know because I had these liberal professors that were saying that the Bible was full of myths. Have you heard that at all?

Oh, yeah.

And contradictions?

Many times, yeah.

The Reliability of Scripture and New Birth

So there came a night where I just... Before God, I opened the Bible and I said, Lord, if this is true, show me. And the Bible fell open to Micah chapter five, verse two. And it said, Bethlehem, though you are small among the tribes of Judah, yet out of you will come the one to be ruler of Israel.

And I knew in that instant that the Bible was true because Micah, writing these words hundreds of years before Christ came, just said the birthplace of the coming Messiah, that he would be born in Bethlehem.

And Jesus was born in Bethlehem. And that's how my faith in Jesus Christ was solidified when I was in college. Just completely changed my thinking. So many people doubt the power of the Word of God. They doubt the Bible.

They don't think that it's true. How did you become a believer in Christ?

Well, I was a freshman in high school, and I was raised Catholic and was baptized and confirmed and went to CCD my whole life. And I never really thought much about the Bible. I never doubted that Jesus was real or the Bible was true.

But I also had an image of God being kind of small and like a fairy tale, you know, long, long ago, far, far away kind of thing. Yeah, I think there's a God. I think there's a Jesus, but I'm so small.

I don't know if you can even hear me kind of thing. And I was more focused on just living for myself and just doing what made me feel good and just so focused on myself. I didn't think too much about God.

And my brother said one day, he said, hey, let's go to church. I was like, all right, it's fine, because he said, we're going to go play basketball after, but you got to come to church. That's what he said.

I said, all right, that's fine. And then I came here and Jeff was preaching, and it just opened up my eyes so much because it just hit me like all this stuff I never knew. I was thinking I was going to CCD and thought I was learning about the Bible for the last, since I was in first grade all the way through eighth grade, and I didn't know any of this.

And I went the next two Sundays, and I learned more in just three services than I have my entire life. And not only that, it hit me. This is true. This isn't just some book. This isn't some other religion where you have to earn your way.

It isn't like I have to do all these things to be good enough. And the Bible says you're not good enough, and you can't make on your own, and you're not saved by your own merits or for your own works.

There's nothing I can do so great that I can earn my way and earn God's love. It's you can do nothing. I'm already dead, and you need a Savior. And I was born again when Jeff was preaching. He said, everyone, let's pray.

If you want to be born again and know Jesus, raise your hand. And I just said a prayer with him where he said that, Jesus, without you, I am blind. Without you, I'm deaf. Without you, I'm crippled. Without you, I'm dead.

And it hit me like a wave. I am completely lost, completely dead without you. And everything in the Bible is true.

Yeah, yeah.

In Ephesians chapter 2, it says exactly what you just said. You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

A couple of interesting things there. One, people who are just following their own passions are led by their emotions. What they feel is right. What they think is right. They're led by their own course, but they don't realize they're following the course of the world.

And as we look at social justice, that's the course of the world right now. That's this tsunami wave of opinion that swept over the world. But not only following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the devil.

Behind all of this, there are demonic forces. The devil is orchestrating things. So this is some bad news right here because it starts off by saying you were dead. You were blind and deaf and crippled and dead.

I was all of those things.

Dead and sin.

That's a really bad state.

But.

There's a but.

So do you want to read that?

Is it Ephesians 2 .4? But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

But. Wow.

You can stop right there. But God, just those two words right there that God stepped in. How did he do it? He sent his one and only son, Jesus, into the world to die the death that we deserve, to rise from the dead.

And he does the same kind of thing in your life that you're dead in your sin, but God intervenes. He sends the gospel to you. You hear the good news about Jesus Christ. And then he awakens you. He gives you life that from the inside, you believe your heart leaps forward to Christ because his spirit is at work in you.

It says being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead, made us alive together in Christ. By grace, you have been saved. What does that sentence mean to you?

By grace, you have been saved.

By grace, you have been saved. This is just, there's nothing you can do. And God doesn't need us. He was already living in perfect communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And he's all powerful.

He can do anything he wants. There's nothing he can't do. And we're just little beings. And we just, we're not much of anything, to be honest. And then, but by his grace, for some reason, he does want us.

And we can't do anything on our own. We're nothing compared to God. We already sinned. We already deserve hell. And he'd be just in giving us that. But by his grace, he saves us. He chose to do it on him, not us, all God.

Jesus chose to save us by his grace, not by anything of our own.

Amen.

That's gospel truth right there.

Biblical Headship, Male Authority, and the Role of Women

All right.

Now we're going to wrap this up by bringing it back around to where we started.

Okay.

The last three commandments of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet your neighbor's property or his wife or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

These are the commandments of God. And what I'm saying is that the movement in the world that's called social justice is against all of those commands. So let's just think through. The elements of social justice and why they're against the command of God.

And they bring death. They don't bring life. So we talk about things like gender. Social justice is against the nuclear family. God has prescribed that in the home, the husband would be the head of the wife.

I could have just said a curse word right there to the social justice world. The husband is the head of the wife. Do you believe that?

Yeah.

Aren't you like, aren't you?

What do they call that?

Misogyny?

Yeah, that wouldn't fly too well today.

No, and it's not flying well for the world. But how does that work in the Christian home? Is that working for Christians?

I think it is.

Yeah.

Where the biblical pattern is followed, where the husband takes the lead in the home, right? It doesn't mean domineering. Headship means leadership. And the metaphor of the husband being the head of the wife pictures in Ephesians 5, the way that Christ is the head of the church.

So how is Christ the head of the church? Here's how it is. He lays down his life for her. He washes her with pure water and the word. He loves her so much that he's willing to sacrifice for her. So when I say that in my home, I'm the head of the household.

Yes, it does involve elements of leadership, but it also involves elements of sacrifice. That I need to be the first one to step to the table to apologize when I'm wrong. I need to be the one to exert my energy to do the hardest things that have to get done.

I have to be the one that takes the responsibility to train my children in the scriptures. And my wife also does a great job with that. But the pattern doesn't mean domination. It means that there's a role, a biblically defined role.

And I'll say it even extends beyond the home in a sense. In the church, the only one who should be standing up behind the pulpit, proclaiming the word of God authoritatively are men. You shouldn't have female pastors.

Did you know that?