Christians Are Called To Win The World

Apologia Studios

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Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back to Next Week, guys.

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I can't tell you how really, truly excited I am to have our special guest today. His name is

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Dr. Joe Boot. He is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity, truly one of my favorite people on the planet.

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I love this brother in Christ. We've actually done a conference together. So excited that he's come all the way out from Canada, eh?

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All the way from Canada. And so I want to introduce you to Dr. Boot. I think he's truly one of the most important voices to listen to in our culture today.

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He's the author of one of my favorite books, Mission of God. He also wrote a book called Gospel Culture. And this is

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Dr. Boot on the Zuma Report. And look, do you mind if I, and if this is hurtful in any way, please forgive me.

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God forgive me. But to both of you then, would you look at this man and say that his partnership is unholy, is sinful, is wrong?

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I would. I would say that Christ loves. I would say that, I would say that Christ loves him as he loves all of us because we're all sinners.

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All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, period. And I believe that Jim is right, is that Christ does want to walk with us, but Jesus Christ was a man who was the true man who actually was not married.

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And he didn't think that a sexual relationship was necessary for being truly and fully human.

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It's not just about sex, Jim. It's about love. It's about love. Expressing our sexuality is not necessary to being a fully realized human being.

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Are those who are saying that Jesus was not a fully realized human being? Joe, you're obsessed with sex. I'm not. I grew up with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

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I must say I've interpreted it to be creator who gave us a political man who rose in spirit that I can say

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I'm a Christian. So he wasn't the savior and the son of God and he didn't physically rise from the dead? No.

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So you're not a Christian? Woo! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to Next Week, Dr.

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Joe Boots. Thank you, brother. Thank you so much.

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All right, Joe. Welcome to Next Week, man. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here. All the way from Canada, yes.

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I'm thawing out down here already. Yeah, I know. I was going to say that. You're probably thawing out. So I just am so grateful for the ministry that you have.

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The books that you've written, I think, are some of the most necessary, compelling, important books in our day.

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And I really mean that, Joe. We actually did at Apologia recently a church -wide study through Mission of God.

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We actually refer to it as Apologia Church's Manifesto. Well, I'm on it. Good. So I hope you don't mind me co -opted it and we've just made it our own.

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So let's talk about that because there's so much in gospel culture and Mission of God that runs clear contrary to much of what is thought of in evangelicalism today.

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And so, for example, you and I share a perspective of the world that isn't shared by a lot of Christians today.

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Historically, yes. Dominant in many ways. In terms of Christ's authority over every area of life, every realm,

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Christ has something to say and he must be obeyed. The perspective that you and I have of history, and that's that Jesus is going to win history before his return.

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Every enemy under his feet. And so that actually drives you to a position where you look at all of these different segments of culture and your position is, how are

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Christians going to speak into that? How are Christians going to win that with the power of the gospel?

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So can you just talk about that, summarize that particular position and why that should be relevant to us today?

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Well, I think, first of all, we need to go back to the relevance and significance of the

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Word of God. And I think part of the problem for modern Christians is that we have, to a large degree, separated the work of God, that is the creation that's all around us and culture, cultural history that's all around us, from the

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Word of God. So we talk about, oh, how do we harmonize the

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Word of God, which speaks about the Lordship of Christ, God's sovereignty over all of history, the victory of Christ in history.

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And so what we tend to do as Christians is think, well, the work of God and the

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Word of God are somehow separate. Therefore, this victory and this word must apply to my spiritual life.

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It must apply to a segment, a particular story of reality, maybe an upper story, a spiritual story.

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But it doesn't really, it can't possibly really mean social relationships and societal relationships and cultural issues.

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And what we forget is that the Word of God always works and the works of God always speak.

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So you cannot separate God's work in creation and God's word in Scripture as though they are somehow not related to one another.

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In fact, I would say that the Word of God in creation and in His word is a unity.

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Creation is, if we ask ourselves, what is creation? Creation is the manifestation of the

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Word of God. God spoke and creation was. And Jesus Christ is the

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Word of God. He is the physical, visible, historical, human manifestation of the

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Word of God. And Scripture, the Bible, is the inscripturated Word of God.

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So we have to see those as a unity. And if we don't, what tends to happen is that we really take

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Scripture, abstract it out of the real world. We almost take Christ out of the real world despite His incarnation and resurrection.

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And we then don't see the relevance of His lordship to history, to culture, to family, to education, to arts, to absolutely everything.

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Government, law. Yeah, law, government, everything, politics. We see it at best as being

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His lordship being shunted off into a future state, often in people's minds, quite an ethereal kind of abstract sort of state that doesn't really have much to do with this creation.

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So we have this dichotomy between His work and His word. And we have a dichotomy between creation and recreation.

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This sort of line goes straight down the middle of people's thinking. And so they think that most of life carries on in terms of some neutral, generally secular way of thinking.

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And the Word of God is limited to one very small area of my life. But I think if we recover an understanding of the

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Word of God in Jesus Christ, who called all things into existence, who is manifest in the incarnation, and who is going to wrap up history in the consummation.

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And we see that as a unity. We begin to see the scope and significance of the gospel. Right. So many evangelicals right now,

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Christians watching this show even, might be saying, that all sounded very beautiful and erudite and important, but how does that relate to how

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I live and move in this world? And if I could just speak to this and have you take a shot at it.

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So many Christians today in the West think that, say, the realm of government, that's not something that Christ is ultimately concerned with.

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So these issues that we talk about, like, say, for example, gay mirage or abortion or anything like that.

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Yes, God has something to say there, but He's not necessarily concerned with just statutes being instituted today in the earthly realm.

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Because what Jesus is really concerned with, Joe, is He's concerned with heaven one day. He wants people to pray this prayer so that one day when they die, they can go to heaven or maybe even get raptured and whisked out of here at a particular time to escape the world.

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Jesus isn't so concerned with government, with law, with family in terms of restructuring and reorganizing and recreating the world.

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He's concerned with heaven, the spiritual. Well, that's a very good illustration.

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It's an expression of what we've just talked about, where what we've done is we've taken the

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Scriptures, what Christians are to take, and the Word of God in its totality. Another dichotomy we've driven through the

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Bible is Old and New Testament. So they say, well, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, as though Jesus can be disconnected from the

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Christ, the promised one, the anointed one, the last Adam, the second Adam, as though somehow you can separate

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Jesus off from everything else that's gone before. Whereas, in fact, Jesus is the living Torah.

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He is the true man. He's the last Adam. So you have there a taking of the

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Word of God. And what we do is we ecclesiasticize it, which is a big word. I know you keep your false teeth in when you say it.

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But we say that the Bible is a church book. So when it comes to government and things like sexuality issues and abortion and politics and all of that, well, maybe there's something indirect about being nice to people in the

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Bible, about being nice to our politicians, maybe saying a prayer for them occasionally. But the

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Bible, it must be a book for the church. It's ecclesiasticized. Now, the effect of that is to politicize the church.

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It's actually to politicize the congregation. Because if you never bring people under the

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Word of God in the areas of government and law and politics and education and all these other areas and show the implications of Scripture and a

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Scriptural worldview for those things, actually people in the life of the church, they're left to go their own way on all of those issues.

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And so you then have a radically politicized church and congregation that the pastor then becomes afraid to address those issues from Scripture because, well, the tithes might go down.

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People might leave. They might be offended because they are politicized. And yet the irony is we're the ones who are told, don't bring politics into the church.

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Politics is already in the church. The problem is it's apostate politics. It's humanistic politics.

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So that ecclesiasticizing of the Bible actually calls forth the expansion of the secular realm of this world, this worldly thinking.

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And people's lives are never actually brought then into submission in these other areas to Christ. Christ was absolutely—God is concerned throughout

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Scripture with what is going on in—how can we say that Christ is not concerned with social order and society when he cleanses the leper so that they can enter the temple precinct?

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Go and show yourself to the priest. Go and show yourself to the civil authority that you're cleansed. People often say, don't they, you know, well, you know,

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Jesus said to Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world. But of course what Jesus is saying there is that the power and authority of my kingdom is not something that has its origin in something like the

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Roman Imperium. That's right. It's from beyond history. It's grounded in the person of Christ himself.

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He didn't say my kingdom is not in this world. He said the gospel is the gospel of the kingdom.

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I mean, that's the nature of the gospel. That's right. And if you look at Daniel, if you look at Moses, if you look at Joseph, if you look at all the

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Jonah, if you look at Esther, you can go throughout the Scripture and see these people who are mentioned in Hebrew's hall of fame, of faith.

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These are people who everywhere engage culture. Paul appeals his case all the way to Caesar.

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So you see him with Felix, with Festus, with Agrippa, calling kings to repentance.

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The idea that that wouldn't shape the culture in which we live is absurd. And it's precisely why by the early 300s, emperors are trying to rule in the name of Christ.

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However, imperfectly, they are ruling in the name of Christ Jesus the Lord. That's right.

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That's the implication of the gospel. So you refer to in Mission of God, and I embrace it.

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I love how it's put because I love what it expresses that the ideas you're trying to get forward are from Scripture.

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Of course, they're historic ideas, but it's the new Puritanism. That's how you title it.

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And it's interesting because I want to talk about just that historical way of thinking in terms of Christians say, just in North America, you know,

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Christians came over here and we're setting up a civilization and however imperfect and whatever we think about England and America, we'll leave that aside for now.

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Christians saw, they were forward thinking. They had a perspective that was legacy.

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I did something that will be dropping soon in Apologia Studios where I talk about Arthur Guinness, Guinness the beer in Ireland, signing a 9 ,000 year lease, right?

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The idea of Christians even building churches that took four and 500 years to even build that they knew they weren't going to end up worshiping in this church, but their great, great, great grandkids might forward thinking, long lasting legacy building the kingdom of Christ over all areas.

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And when you look at Christian history, Christians understood that Christ's mandate is to disciple the nations and to teach them to obey.

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So there's something that Jesus has to say that must be obeyed by the nations. They must, that's see, that's the great commission is not to start

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Bible studies in basements and to get a few people saved for heaven one day. It's to win the entire world to Jesus and that they obey.

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Yeah. And Christians thought that way, Joe, before, right? Yeah. Yes, it's occupied till I come.

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And I think the sort of, as Christians, oftentimes what we think about the future, you know, and eschatology, of course, you know, the technical term for, especially when we think about the last things, eschatology is actually about much more than last things.

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It's actually about the meaning of history. It's about the direction of history as a whole.

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And when you enter into periods where Christians are feeling threatened or they see culture moving against them, our tendency is to create theological schemes of, and theories of the future of escape and flight, which doesn't give you a kind of mandate that thinks about multi -generational investment like that.

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When you think about popular eschatologies in the late 20th century, for example, mid through late 20th century in here in North America, it was all about getting out of this world as quickly as possible for another state.

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Well, that doesn't make you think about, I mean, in Canada, for example, during the 19th century, all kinds of millennial type movements arose, having huge conferences and began to really have a deep impact, a negative impact on many of the mainline churches, not just the evangelical, the independent churches.

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Farmers, in some instances, weren't plowing their fields because they thought the end of the world was coming in the next year or so.

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That's right. And so when you have that kind of a mentality, that history doesn't really belong to the

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Lord, that Christ is not going to reign until he's put all his enemies under his feet, the tendency is to build theologies of either retreat from the world or escape from the world.

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And whereas our forebears certainly, and you mentioned the Puritans there, and it's one of the reasons

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I refer to the sort of new Puritanism, we recognize the shortcomings and the failures of the

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Puritans. But they did understand the sovereignty of God, the kingship of Christ, and they wanted to apply that.

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They wanted to apply an understanding of God's covenant into their family lives and their education and government and every other aspect of life.

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They saw these world and life spheres as having significance, and they thought of history as significant, of history as meaningful, of what the church is about in history to disciple, teach, transform the nations as important.

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And we, to a large degree, have lost that, and that's made us weak as a church.

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And actually, you know, if you don't, to a certain extent, belief is power. If you don't really believe in what

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Scripture says, then you become powerless. Right. And so it's or have been and is of a concern to me that the church recover an understanding of our calling that brings creation and recreation back together.

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I often say to believers, look, this creation is the only one there is. It's the only one there's ever going to be.

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Romans 8 says to us that it is going to be released from its bondage to corruption. And it's release from that bondage to corruption is tied to the resurrection of our bodies.

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So this is our home. This world is our home. And people talk about going off to heaven.

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No, the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven. Boom. So that God's dwelling place is with us.

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That's right. So it's this it's this neoplatonism that is and people don't understand it.

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Generally speaking, they don't know they've bought into it. But from the very early centuries of the church,

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Greek philosophy had a deep impact on Christian thinking. Yes, it did. And gave us this kind of dualism.

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And it was interpreted in the medieval church as nature and grace.

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So you've got creation over here and grace is over here. And you just have to kind of add that bit on like you just stick it on the top.

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These are two kind of distinct realms. We tried to take the Greek idea of nature and sort of wed

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Christianity to it. And it was an uncomfortable fit. Yeah. But we've still got a lot of these ideas that have affected us.

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And we need to it's only actually scripture and a robustly scriptural thinking that can release us from some of those blind spots.

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It's interesting. You live in Canada. And I want to talk about some of the things you're doing.

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Very important. I want to make sure people know about this. But you live in a place that it's ahead of us in some respects, right?

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It's ahead of us in terms of falling off the edge of the cliff in some respects. I don't know how much further ahead.

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It feels like in many respects, we're about the same. So much of what we put out in this country in the

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United States is just corrupting the world. We're just shipping out our garbage to Australia and to New Zealand and to Canada and to England.

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But you live in a place in a nation where you guys are a little bit ahead of us.

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And you have so much government control, so much historically away from Canada's foundations and the law of God, or as you would say, the lure of God.

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There's an R in there somewhere. But you're on a television show in Canada.

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And you're talking about a homosexual man who's sitting there. And you're put in a position where you're either going to be faithful to God's word and say what's true or you're not.

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And I think that makes you an enemy in many respects of the culture. And in some respects, we're seeing it as the same.

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So here's my question with that. How important is it for us?

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Ought we to care? When our culture is sliding off the cliff and in the way that you did on that television show, confront the culture with the right terminology, the right definitions, with the gospel itself, calling people to repentance.

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Because what we see from most evangelical leaders and Christian leaders is a dumbing down of the language.

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Don't call people to repentance. Many even in the pro -life movement say explicitly, without apology, that we can't make this about Jesus.

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We can't make it about Scripture. We can't call it murder. We can't call it sin like that.

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We have to take a neutral approach. So we just have to convince people through some other logical form of reasoning, using really more secular thinking that should come along the way of the

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Christians, kind of. Right? How important is it for us to engage in cultural apologetics in a way that's effective and true?

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Well, I think it's critically important. And this is a neglected area, really, of Christian apologetics.

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I find, even today, that a lot of people involved even in apologetics, as such as evangelicals, will tend to avoid these major cultural questions.

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We still think that dealing with sort of subsets of church dogmatics, you know, who was Jesus? Is Jesus the only way to God?

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Does God exist? What about other religions? You know, four or five different questions, and that's enough. But it isn't enough.

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And actually, some of the very early models of Christian apologetics, like Augustine's City of God, were much more civilizational in terms of how do you respond in the face of a collapsing civilization?

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And how do you account for it? And how do you bring to bear the full scope of God's Word? Don't agree with everything

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Augustine has to say in there, but the direction of what he was trying to say is critically important. And we're at that kind of a time now.

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And I think that this myth that if we can just do it in a sensitive enough way that doesn't use

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Christian terminology, doesn't appeal to scripture, doesn't appeal to a scriptural worldview, doesn't offend anyone, and maybe use some sociological argumentation or some scientific arguments and so forth, that somehow this will be perceived as neutral.

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This is a myth. First of all, people aren't stupid. And so they can tell when

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Christians are arguing for something that there is a religious root to things. And the reason for that is simple. There's a religious root to the opposition as well.

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Yes. All of life is religion. Yeah. The totality of life is religion.

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I mean, scripture makes it plain that out of the heart spring the issues of life. So at the root of every human being is the heart in relationship to God and the direction in which our heart is turned, either in covenant obedience, faithfulness to God, worship of the living

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God, or it's turned in terms of apostasy, away from God, in disobedience. That will affect everything that we do.

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It affects our motives. It affects the way we look at everything. So we need to stop pretending that this is about some sort of neutral reason, some kind of autonomous secular realm where we're just trying to look for the common good.

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God defines what the common good is. Yes. Who but the creator of all things and the

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Redeemer, Jesus Christ, whose word and work is one. Who but he can tell us what the common good is?

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What right do we have to define the common good outside of the person of Jesus Christ, who is the root of all creation?

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That's right. Who is the root of all men? We have no right to do such a thing. And it's impossible to do such a thing. Right. As soon as you start talking about something that's now common, you're talking about something that's fundamentally not

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Christian. Because either God in Christ is the creator, the sustainer, the governor of all things, or he isn't.

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And so we will not have success. We've tried that. This strategy has been tried for decades.

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Oh, yeah. It doesn't work. It's complete bust. It doesn't work. And actually, I find that non -believers are much more receptive to integrity and an integral

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Christian position. You know, systematic unbelief has to be confronted with systematic belief.

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That's the only way of dealing with the situation. That's right. And so you're trying to do a lot of that with, of course, the

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Ezra Institute with a lot of your published works. But what's going on right now?

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What can we be praying for and looking forward to with Joe Boot in Canada? What's on the horizon?

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Well, we have had some exciting developments in 2017. By God's grace, we received a very, very large donation to buy our own study center.

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That's a big applause, guys. So we now have 25 acres up on the

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Niagara Escarpment overlooking Lake Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls, really close to the United States with a beautiful mansion on it where we are going to be hosting people for retreat study to think about Christian worldview throughout the year.

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And in 2019, we are launching an International Academy for Cultural Leadership, which will be a two -week accredited program that we want our

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American brothers and sisters to come and join us for it. It will only be about 40 places a year.

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It'll happen at the mansion. It'll be about 12 days. It's the Evan Runner International Academy for Cultural Leadership.

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And so, Jeff, you'll be, I hope, I trust, joining us for that. Yeah. And on faculty with us, you'll be one of the team there.

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And what we're going to be doing is, it's for the first time for us as an institute. You know, we publish our journal.

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We have our online resources. We have our books and publishing. But we've not really had our own opportunity to gather together people for training, for academies, for residentially for a decent chunk of time in the summer.

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Yeah. And so that's the new opportunity that's presenting itself to us, as well as this opportunity for Christians in the vocations, pastors who are trying to think through, how do

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I relate the faith to culture? How is gospel and culture related? And to think that through, to pray that through, to have guided reading, to do some study, to meet with us.

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That's the opportunity that's coming. So if people keep their eye on our website, they're going to see announcements about the launch of these programs.

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Website is? www .ezrainstitute .ca. Perfect. And one last question.

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We want to see the gospel impact every area of life and to ultimately see

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Christ's total victory of the world, right? That's what we're aiming. And so you said something to me years ago when we did actually a video together and you talked about building a culture of Christ.

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So I just want you to end with this. What does a culture of Christ look like? What's that like? Paul tells us there's only two types of worship in the world.

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In Romans 1, there's the worship of the creator. That is Christ. Or there's the worship of the creature. Culture is the public manifestation of the religion of a people, of the worship of a people.

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So through the gospel, when I become a believer, when anybody becomes a believer in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and their hearts are turned towards true worship, it of necessity means the recreation of true culture, which the

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Bible calls the kingdom of God. So gospel culture looks like Jesus Christ reigning and ruling in our hearts, in our lives, in our minds, in every aspect of our being applied to every single area of life.

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And the challenge for the Christian and the joy of being a Christian, that the excitement of being a

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Christian is that we are part of this kingdom. We're part of this gospel culture. And we have the privileges of being invited by God to be co -workers in the reconciliation, the restoration, the restoration of all things, all things to God for from him and through him and to him are all things.

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So the privilege, the joy of the Christian life is working that out. What does it mean to honour the

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Lordship of Christ and have a scriptural, a biblical word direction to my business, to my painting, to my music, to my architecture, to my banking, to my political life, to law, to education?

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In all of these areas, what does it mean now in concrete terms? That's what it means to work out your salvation.

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It's not to sit on a pew, mummified, wait till you get transported to heaven.

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It's to work out your salvation, which is to work out the meaning of the gospel for the totality of your life.

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And I can try and do that. And I'm trying to do that as a scholar in certain areas to help people with that.

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Other people have got to do it in other areas, in the sciences, in all these different areas. What does it mean for Christ to be truly

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Lord of all? Because he is. From him, through him, to him are all things.

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He's created all things, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. All things were created through him and for him.

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In him, they all hold together. If we could just get a grip on Christ, the word, the power of God, it would transform our

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Christian life. Jobu, guys. Dr. Jobu, thank you guys so very much.

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Love you, man. Thank you so very much. All right, guys, stay with us. We'll be right back, guys, after this break.

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And how that area relates to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jubilee authors are expert scholars in their fields, and they're also faithful, godly ministers of the word of God.

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