Pre-Advent Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:29

Well, greetings to you, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weihnachten, whatever other languages might be represented out there.

00:39

It is Christmas Eve, Eve. I'm not sure if there's an actual specific technical term for Eve, Eve, but, and I was thinking about tomorrow evening.

00:50

Oh man, I hope, I hope they don't start doing the firecracker thing.

00:55

They started doing firecrackers last year, fireworks, on Christmas Eve. And my, my cats do not enjoy fire, fireworks, you know, near the house at all.

01:08

I hope they don't do that. You know, so much for silent night. But we have, and I was going to look it up, but I forgot to, we have a tradition and it started with my parents.

01:26

We had, I might have it in the other room. I should look. I probably do have it.

01:33

It's a, for you young people, back in, in our day, we, we had things called record players.

01:45

And you would put a large vinyl disc, not vinyl, as my daughter once said, but vinyl disc on this thing.

01:56

And it would spin at 33 and a third RPM. Now, how'd they come up with 33 and a third?

02:02

I have no earthly idea. I really don't know. Because for that, there'd been smaller ones that's, that turned at 45

02:09

RPM. What's the relationship? I have no earthly idea. But this is how we would listen to things on something called a record player.

02:19

They got really snazzy before the CD showed up and you could record stuff from your records onto cassette tapes, but cassette tapes were infamous for getting eaten in your car stereo.

02:37

And so you, you might put a lot of time into putting one together, but you knew it wasn't really going to last all that long.

02:43

Anyway, we had an old record and like it, when I did this number, I have an old record library right through there.

02:51

It's just one shelf. It's not a lot. But I bet this is in there. I'm going to have to look.

02:58

But we had a recording of Lawrence Olivier doing a act of, in The Christmas Carol.

03:11

Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Now this is from late forties, early fifties.

03:17

And look, I wasn't around until the early sixties.

03:23

Okay. But my parents were, and I worked at a radio station where we played music from the thirties and forties.

03:31

And so one of the things that we would do is play old radio theater stuff, like The Shadow.

03:43

And young people today, if you've never gotten to climb in bed with your mom and dad and your family and cuddle up under the covers and turn the lights off, the only light is the glow of the blue green clock radio that my parents had on the headboard of their bed.

04:11

That analog thing. I don't know how anybody saw it in the dark, but anyway, that was all you could see.

04:19

And listen to The Shadow or these many radio theaters that they had in the thirties and forties.

04:30

It's all you had. There was no television yet. And the imagination, the use of your imagination.

04:40

Yeah. They'd have sound effects. You'd hear somebody's walking and a door would open and all this stuff.

04:51

But the vast majority of what's going on was going on in your head. And when you've got video, when you've got

05:01

CGI, you just sit there and your imagination's turned off.

05:09

You're being overwhelmed with visual, this flood of visual stuff that isn't even real.

05:18

And the imagination's just turned off. I think that's had a real impact on people personally.

05:24

I really do. You just need more and more CGI and more and more stimulation.

05:29

It's an addiction. But anyway, we had this record and if I recall correctly, because I've MP3'd it so we can listen to it on my phone or something, but because I don't have a record player at home,

05:46

I think it was less than half an hour, maybe less than 20 minutes. But I remember listening to that as a kid, we'd turn all the lights off except for the

05:54

Christmas tree lights. And we'd put that thing and halfway through you had to stop, lift the top of the record player open, take the record, flip it over, put the needle back down.

06:10

So you got a little break halfway through. And as a kid, it seemed like it lasted forever.

06:20

And then I MP3'd it and I think it's like, might be 23 minutes, something like that. I mean, it's just not long at all.

06:29

But that was a Christmas Eve tradition and it was very well done.

06:37

I don't know how many versions of a Christmas Carol I have.

06:44

In my video library, Patrick Stewart did one that was pretty good.

06:51

There were some 1950s ones, black and white. There was a Muppet one, not quite the faithful to Dickens' story, but still interesting.

07:05

But none of those can match listening.

07:12

And you are imagining the ghost of Christmas past and you're imagining what it looks like to go out the window and all that stuff.

07:21

And what the children hiding under the robes looked like.

07:27

Your mind got to do all that. And when you watch the video, well, somebody else gets to do that for you.

07:34

And so I don't know if that's available anyplace out there. I'm sure the copyright is off.

07:41

I should post that someplace. I really should. I should post that someplace and say, man, this is great.

07:49

Turn the lights off except for the Christmas tree lights and listen to this with your family. It won't take forever.

07:55

Your kids will probably get bored because there's no CGI going on, unfortunately. But yeah, that's nothing big.

08:07

It's not special food or anything like that. It doesn't last very long, but it's a neat family tradition.

08:13

So whatever your family tradition is, but think about some of those old ways we did things.

08:19

I want to dive into... My son -in -law just sent me...

08:33

Ah, yes. OTR Gold, The Shadow. Old time OTR. Old Time Radio, The Shadow.

08:41

Discover every episode of The Shadow currently available. Yeah, so they're out there and I hope you get the kids together and play some of that stuff.

08:51

It was just great. It really, really was. I'm pretty sure I've provided my daughter with the recording that I was just referring to.

09:03

If not, I can send it easily. I'm sure I have though. That's a whole lot of fun to listen to.

09:08

It really is. I was going to dive into Trollions 9, as I announced.

09:14

I will in just a few moments. I was talking to my wife before she had to go do something with her mom and I came here and we were both just...

09:33

The term disgusted is not nearly strong enough to express the absolute detestation of the

09:46

Biden regime as a whole. With all this information coming out about the diminished president, you can go back to 2019.

09:59

I remember sitting in this studio. I remember doing dividing lines from up in Colorado. I remember one of the

10:05

Democratic presidential debates in the primaries took place while I was driving around.

10:16

I remember I was going in Colorado and I remember driving, thinking to myself, this guy's senile.

10:24

This guy's got diminished capacity. He's non -competent. There's no way that he could ever be the candidate for the plane that he's not functioning properly.

10:36

That was 2019. Stolen elections have consequences.

10:44

All this stuff's coming out about, yeah, well, sometimes he had bad days and we'd have to cancel meetings and couldn't take phone calls, important stuff.

10:57

This nation has been run by nameless, faceless people for the past four years.

11:07

Currently, Biden's just using Air Force One for vacations and going and visiting places just for the fun of it because he can.

11:17

At the same time, the evil, disgusting people who have been running this nation for the past four years are doing everything they can to burn the place down as they're leaving out the back door.

11:31

They really are. I would imagine about every military secret that's ever been a military secret is being pawned off to whoever wants it right now by these people.

11:41

They're traitors. They all are. It's just disgusting. But this commutation of sentences, what this man's doing with a power that we granted to the presidency,

11:53

I mean, it was granted to someone like George Washington, who actually loved this country.

11:59

You give that kind of power to people who hate the country, hate the nation like these people do, and they'll do this kind of stuff.

12:07

The commutations that came out today of all but, I think, three or four of the people on death row from the federal death row, all the rest of them, 34 of them, 36 of them,

12:22

I forgot what the number was, they've had their sentences commuted. No executions.

12:29

And you start looking at what these people have done and realize this man did this, well, not this man, whoever these, again, traitors who have been running him, his puppeteers for the past four years, the term vile is not strong enough.

12:46

The things that these people did, I mean, they're many of them guilty of child rape and murder.

12:55

And one guy took this mom and he had attacked the mom and something had happened to where he had been able to get out.

13:06

And he took her and her one -year -old baby out to a lake and tied cinder blocks to them and dropped them in the lake.

13:16

The baby was never found. Another mom, which one of these guys, he commuted a sentence, shot 11 times while she was trying to protect her children.

13:25

I mean, these are the vilest of the vile. And the fact of the matter is, if this nation had any concept of life, any concept of man being made in the image of God, every single one of these animals would have been put down by now.

13:39

They would have been executed by now. The possibilities of almost any of them ever being executed, even before the commutations, were almost zero.

13:50

But the absolute disdain these people have for the

13:59

United States of America, their hatred of this nation is just, it is disgusting beyond all measure.

14:10

It really is. Um, two other quick things. I have all this stuff written down and so I want to get to it.

14:20

We all saw the horrific video of the attack in Germany. All sorts of conflicting information.

14:27

Have you noticed how fast conflicting information started coming out about who this guy is and what motivations and all the rest of this stuff.

14:39

But at the same time, at the very same time, numerous videos of Muslims marching through Christmas celebrations or Christmas fairs in Germany, in mass, chanting in Arabic, chanting that Germany is a whore and all the rest of this stuff.

15:02

Now again, the German elites have brought this on themselves. The German elites hate

15:09

Germany as much as the American elites hate America. Globalist elites hate nationalism.

15:15

They hate nations. They hate anything like that. I get all that.

15:22

But the reality is that um, Islam hates

15:28

Christmas because they view it as an example of shirk. Shirk is the unforgivable sin.

15:34

It's the worst sin. It's idolatry. And since the founder of Islam did not understand what the

15:43

Old or New Testament teaches, did not have access to the Old and New Testament, even in Arabic translation, really, there is tremendous ignorance and as a result, tremendous animosity toward the celebration of Christ's birth, even though they believe in the virgin birth, interestingly enough.

16:09

They don't believe it in the biblical concept and don't know why, you know, but they do.

16:19

But when I made a comment about this and again encountered the reality that the same people who are angry at the

16:34

Jews who are behind everything tend to be the same people who will make the comment. And I've had this made twice to me.

16:42

Once again, just a couple of days ago, the Crusades did not go far enough. The Crusades did not do enough.

16:51

And so you have a combination of a historical revisionism as to what the

16:57

Crusades were about, the idea that we're just defending Christendom. And there actually wasn't.

17:04

When the first Crusade headed for the Middle East, the

17:10

Muslims were divided. They were fighting amongst themselves and there was no inherent danger at that particular point in time.

17:18

It was not a defensive war. It was an offensive war. Oh, but they had taken over Jerusalem.

17:24

Yeah, 400 years earlier. I know. What you end up hearing is this hatred of Muslims.

17:37

And I knew back in 2006 when

17:43

I started dealing with this stuff and really diving into it and studying

17:49

Arabic and the Quran and reading the Hadith and, you know, all the things we did for a very long period of time there as I was traveling over to the

17:58

United Kingdom. Probably couldn't have any of those debates anymore. Down to South Africa, probably the same thing.

18:06

We knew that this was not how you make yourself uber popular.

18:13

That we clearly were not trying to build a brand.

18:20

And in the back of my mind, I recognized that trying to get, especially my fellow

18:29

Reformed believers, to be in any sense passionate about reaching out to Muslims was a tall order.

18:39

Now look, I realize there are still lots of places in the United States where there are people who've grown up in certain areas, they've never even seen a

18:47

Muslim. Don't even know what one looks like, never talked to one. All right, I get that.

18:54

But, you know, I think of all the missionaries that have gone overseas that had never run into any of these people until they got overseas too.

19:01

And so it doesn't really communicate a lot to me. Anyway, all

19:09

I have to do, all I have to do is say out loud to one of these people, so when was the last time you prayed to be used to reach a

19:22

Muslim with the gospel? I mean, this kind of stuff obviously reflects very badly on Islam, all the violence it takes.

19:33

I mean, the number of videos we've had over the years of Muslims, this guy was a doctor again, and it reminded me.

19:41

If you go, well, he really wasn't a Muslim, he was an ex -Muslim. Okay, how about the two National Health Service doctors that drove the

19:49

Jeep into the doorway of the Glasgow Airport in like 2007 -ish and ignited it, hoping the explosion would send this fireball of flaming liquid all over everybody who's checking in for flights at the

20:12

Glasgow Airport. How about them? They were National Health Service doctors, and they did it because they were convinced that the only way to know for certain that they would go to paradise is if they died in an act of jihad.

20:28

So you can do what you want with this guy. Fact of the matter is that's the theology, and we've done hours and hours and hours of programs talking about what happens when you have a system with a holy

20:43

God, sin, punishment, hell, but no mediator. And that's dealing with Islam.

20:50

And so I ask people, what if someone, and I'm not talking about some type of open theistic thing,

20:59

I'm saying what is the solution here? And the Christian only has one answer to that.

21:06

Well, the Christian is supposed to only have one answer. Now Christians have all sorts of answers, and most of them have to do with violence and killing and the sword and basically saying, well, tell you what, you just ship them all back to their own countries, and then we'll send the missionaries over to convert them over there.

21:34

I saw that a number of times over the past couple of days. So the whole thing demonstrates that the vast majority of Christians, even those who profess a sound form of theology, very rarely end up matching that sound theology with a sound praxis.

22:02

And especially when it comes to this, the greatest, the only weapon that can stop

22:10

Islam is changing the hearts of Muslims. And there's only one way to do that. And people go, oh, you're for open borders.

22:18

No, I'm not. I'm not for open borders. Nations need to have borders so they can have law, so that they can not have anarchy, so that you can have a meaningful taxation system and a meaningful infrastructure.

22:35

You've got to have borders. And that's why people have opened up our borders to make fundamental changes in our country.

22:40

There's everything biblical about having borders. There's borders in the Old Testament. There's no prophetic grousing about borders in the

22:48

Old Testament or anything like that at all. Just stop with all that stuff.

22:55

When you have to start going there, you are making it very, very clear. You have absolutely zero theological argument to make.

23:03

You just don't want to, you just don't like Muslims. And you have a animus in your heart and you're not willing to confess it and deal with it.

23:13

That's all there is to it. Lots of it, lots of it going on out there, lots of it going up. One last thing. Yesterday I was given a card.

23:21

I almost grabbed it and brought it with me, but I was given a Christmas card of a young couple in our church.

23:31

And they're good friends with my daughter and son -in -law. And we've had Thanksgiving with them a few times.

23:37

I would love to have brought it. The sad fact of the matter is I can't because there are so many nasty people online these days that would take anything, including a picture that I would post, and would do horrible things with it.

23:59

There was one of the memes that was posted of me recently.

24:07

You can take a video and you can put somebody's face on it. And it's getting better. I mean, it still looks extremely jerky, but who knows eventually.

24:16

But it was of a baby throwing a fit. And so they put my face on the baby throwing a fit and it's crying and stuff like this.

24:23

And again, it's the stuff that's entertaining to fourth graders, but it shouldn't be to adults, but it is.

24:29

It's adults doing it. And so Isker, who's spoken at some interesting places recently,

24:45

Doug Wilson pointed to that video and asked him, couldn't you join with me in identifying this kind of stuff as noise, not signal?

25:01

It shouldn't be happening. We should move this stuff out of the way.

25:07

And his response was, no, it's a silly meme about an ever more silly person. So Doug couldn't even get him to go, could you admit that this kind of stuff is not helpful?

25:21

No, it's perfectly fine. And there was a guy who went after, again, he's a

25:28

Stone Choir guy. Stone Choir is a cult. Cory Mahler is a cultist. I don't know if you all saw,

25:35

I did post over the weekend that there was a lengthy post from Cory Mahler where he says pastors in scare quotes, like myself,

25:48

Doug Wilson, Jeff Durbin, Joseph Spurgeon, Uri Brito, the CREC, and many others spend their time preaching the gospel of anti -racism,

25:59

Marxism, anti -misogyny, egalitarianism, Marxism, and anti -anti -Semitism, anti -racism,

26:07

Judaizing Marxism. While the West is being invaded by Saracens, churches are being burned, women are being raped and murdered, children are being mown down by vehicles and worse, and those who claim to be

26:17

Christians are being led astray into dozens of different heresies, both old and new. That's the opening paragraph. First of all, very honored to be listed with those people.

26:26

Second of all, very honored to be attacked by a cult leader on the same level as Joseph Smith.

26:34

He really is. Or, as I said in my response, Valentinus in the early church, and the

26:43

Valentinian Gnosticism, which was made to look as much like Christianity as possible, while eviscerating the central message of the gospel and salvation, redemption, things like that, which is what ethnic animos is all about too.

26:58

But notice he puts pastors in scare quotes. Now, this is an excommunicant man.

27:04

He is under no ecclesiastical authority. He has no ecclesiastical authority. He is disqualified from ever doing anything like that.

27:12

He rejects those he once called pastors and their correction. And so I'm very thankful.

27:22

You notice immediately that if you don't buy into their racism, their misogyny, their anti -Semitism, then you're somehow responsible for the

27:35

Saracens invading the West, and you're a Marxist. I mean, the man's not even connected to reality.

27:41

Even using my favorite video of the psychologist

27:50

Frasier Crane looking at his friend there in Cheers and going, what color is the sky in your world?

27:58

That's one of my favorites. It's sort of like you're on a different planet than the rest of us.

28:04

That's way too nice for someone as vile as the Stone Choir folks. But I'm very, very thankful that anybody who has a brain will know very, very well

28:18

I am not in any way, shape, or form associated with, supported by, supportive of anything this movement of racist, misogynist, anti -Semites who are trying to say that unless you agree with us, then you want churches burned and women raped and children being mown down by vehicles.

28:43

These guys, they don't know the gospel. Corey Mullen doesn't know the gospel. I'm sure he could define it for you.

28:50

I'm sure he could give you a definition of justification of my faith, but there's a vast difference between being able to say the words and knowing what it means.

28:58

They don't believe the gospel is the power of God and the salvation to change any of this stuff. Any of this stuff.

29:04

That's the whole thing. So I'm glad this is out there because no one will have any excuse, not that they won't do it anyways, to think for a second that we share anything in common with these type of folks.

29:17

But there was another guy, he was complimenting

29:22

Mahler and this kind of stuff. I only saw this because Namor had responded to it and said, may the

29:34

Lord grant you repentance soon. Um, so that was, that's what allowed me to see it.

29:41

But, uh, there was a guy quote unquote from the South.

29:47

Um, and he jumped in, was supportive of the, of the stone choir stuff.

29:56

And he went after me. He went after Apologia. He said, Apologia students is irrelevant now because all they do is target beta males.

30:07

And then he finished his statement with something along the lines of, you know, in the future, they're just going to be, we just have to put these people off the side because they're an impediment to what we'd want to do in the reformed church.

30:17

So here's a guy promoting stone choir saying we need to be promoting this in the reformed church. So I responded to him.

30:25

Um, and I said, I challenge you. Grow a spine, stand up.

30:32

It's a non -account again, no way of knowing who it is. They get to say this stuff and nobody can pin it to them.

30:42

Um, and I said, stand up. Tell us what church you go to.

30:51

Um, or if you're pastoring, does your church know you hold these views? Uh, do your fellow elders know this?

30:59

Do, if you're not pastoring, do your pastors and elders, they know this is where you're coming from.

31:05

That is so common sense. It's hard for me to believe that I didn't have 99 % support in saying to this anonymous person who chose to attack me and my church and my ministry, lie, slander, and promote, uh, ethnic animus from behind the veil of anonymity.

31:35

I, there's no re, why would anyone respect that? I don't understand that. I, I just don't get it.

31:43

Uh, even though I think it was, uh, Isker, I think it was him. Yes, it was him who wrote a big long thing about how the

31:51

Anons see if you're anonymous, then you can't defeat the Anons because you have to have the, you have to have an argument.

31:59

You can't use your credentials. You see, you just have to have an argument and yet the argument has to win on the basis of the facts.

32:06

And I'm just like, are you seriously kidding me? What's wrong with this man? I mean,

32:12

I haven't said much about this guy before because I'd never even heard of him until recently, but wow.

32:20

Um, okay. And he's speaking at the big powwow in April, um, where they've now, uh, invited

32:28

Calvin Robinson. And I don't know what Calvin Robinson is. He's been

32:35

Anglican. He's been the church of England and he's, he's moved and moved and moved.

32:40

And he's, he's very, very Catholic without submitting to Rome. You know, that may happen eventually.

32:48

Who knows? I don't know. Um, but, but he's now speaking at this thing and I'm, and I'm like, okay, so we're talking about Calvin Robinson, who's going to be speaking with Stephen Wolf and Joel Webben and the

33:08

Ogden group and Isker, um, and A .D. Robles.

33:14

They're all going to be speaking to this thing. Let me just give you a little quote from Calvin Robinson here.

33:19

Okay. Just, just what? Yes. Uh -huh. On that, this quote, quote, and on that note to provide balance,

33:29

I do believe the reformation was a mistake. Reform is important and the church should always reform, but the reformation failed in that task.

33:41

The church wasn't reformed. Instead, it splintered again. The church in England became the church of England and we were separated in many ways from our brethren in Christ.

33:52

I cannot see how this could possibly be a good thing. It has bred a strange anti -Catholic mindset in many of our low church brethren who forget we all profess to be

34:01

Catholic and reform wasn't an attempt to divorce ourselves of Catholicism, but only to help heal wounds of error, rid the church of perceived, perceived superstition and avoid heresy.

34:14

I have no time for Puritans who protest that Rome is the whore of Babylon or Protestants who seem to believe

34:21

Catholics are not Christians. Both are absurdities. The reformers did not intend to create a new church.

34:28

There cannot be a new church. There is one church, the body of Christ. What they did by leaving

34:33

Rome was split the church. Surely this hurts our Lord. End quote. Direct quote from the last major speaker added to the

34:44

April powwow on defeating trash world. Now there's much to be said here especially since Gavin Ortland put out a video over the past couple of days saying of course

34:56

Catholics are Christians and he gives the quotes people like Hodge and others and reformers that of course recognize that there were true

35:04

Christians within Rome. The issue of course is does

35:09

Rome have the gospel? That has to be the issue. That issue is not being addressed and it should be pointed out that especially the reformers, even when the counter -reformation council of Trent met and anathematized justification by faith, there were still even after the council of Trent, there were still

35:40

Roman Catholic bishops and writers who hadn't gotten the message yet and who

35:49

I saw a good friend of mine quoted some people from shortly after Trent who were talking about the imputed righteousness of Christ and things like that.

36:03

So remember, didn't have the internet back then. That kind of information had to spread by horseback and wouldn't move quite as quickly in some areas as others.

36:16

So there were people who the reformers recognized the church hadn't ceased to exist.

36:26

The reformers recognized that God has always had his people and that there are believers in the

36:33

Roman Catholic communion. They had come out of the Roman Catholic communion themselves. They were calling people to do the same thing.

36:39

They wanted reformation to spread in that way. But no, they didn't think they were starting a new church. They were trying to go back to the ancient church and the basis of that was the scriptures.

36:49

We've talked about all this stuff a thousand times before. But the real issue is the gospel.

37:00

So my understanding is that Calvin Robinson holds a very Roman Catholic view of Eucharistic theology.

37:08

And that means if I were asked to be at a conference or on a panel or something like that, that's all

37:19

I could talk about. That's all I'd have. We'd have to talk about sola scriptura.

37:24

We'd have to talk about sola gratia. We'd have to talk about sola fide. We'd have to talk about the finished work of Christ. We'd have to talk about why you call yourself a priest when there are no such things in the

37:33

New Testament. There's one priest, one holder of the Melchizedek priesthood, that's Jesus. We are a kingdom of priests, but we're not sacerdotal priests.

37:42

There is no office of priest in the New Testament. If there is, where are the qualifications for it?

37:50

Show me that. Oh, you don't believe in the sufficiency of scripture. Okay, gotcha. So one of the things that strikes me here is some silly person who wears brightly colored sweaters and has been taken a beating by anonymous people that nobody knows where they're coming from recently has been saying for a while now, this crusade stuff, if you sit there and go, well, it doesn't really,

38:39

I don't necessarily agree with what Pope Urban II did. I don't necessarily agree with indulgences and stuff like that.

38:48

But it was more important to defend Christendom.

38:57

Some guy has been saying, you encourage people to think that way and they are going to see the gospel as a negotiable thing.

39:12

Not as something that's definitional, but as something that's like, yeah, we want to have an accurate understanding.

39:19

But we can't get overly focused on this stuff.

39:26

And I said, when you treat the gospel that way, eventually people are going to go, yeah,

39:32

I guess it doesn't really matter whether you do the Sola Fide thing. And maybe we can just, if we can all cosplay together, then let's not worry about it.

39:44

I mean, I saw a video, one of these Anons, different Anons, I think it was in the thread with the guy that I was calling out, has this video and it must be him.

39:57

And he's got a crusader thing on and a crusader robe, which he bought for $4 .95

40:03

at the Halloween store. And he comes coming into a room and he pulls out a sword and he's cosplaying.

40:15

And it's like, he's living with his parents. He doesn't even keep his room clean. I mean, my gosh, you actually videoed yourself running into your bedroom with your closet door open and it's a mess.

40:27

And you're, oh wow, this is so embarrassing.

40:33

But the point is, he's got the cross on, he's taken up the cross. And as long as he has the cross on, if he dies in,

40:44

I was about to say Jihad, same thing, in crusading, boom, you get to go to heaven, you get your sins forgiven.

40:53

And that's exactly what happened. And that's not the gospel. And that's not

40:59

Christian. And to go, yeah, but we still need to laud these guys. Oh, it's just so, the end result is going to be ecumenism.

41:10

It's going to be a collapse of your commitment to these things. And now you've got

41:16

Calvin Robinson speaking at the Trash World Conference. Huh.

41:23

I wonder if there'll be any discussion about Eucharistic theology and the idea of transubstantiation or anything along those lines, maybe, possibly.

41:39

How about some baptism as bringing about regeneration?

41:45

Justification by faith, possibly, maybe? How about solo scriptural? Oh, maybe not. We'll see.

41:54

We'll see. Anyway, so two things left here, because I've jumped two tracks.

42:06

I got to get back to both of them. The Anon guy that I call out, everybody jumps in to save this guy.

42:19

I am so mean. Nobody, well, okay, a couple of people did say, excuse me.

42:25

A couple of friends that are obviously rational and aren't hyped up on all the

42:32

Christmas candy are like, wait a minute, you attacked him. He didn't even know you were.

42:38

You're literally saying that this entire ministry that has helped to start abortion ministries around the world, tens of thousands of babies saved, needs to be made irrelevant in the

42:58

Reformed church because they're focused on beta males and unruly wives, which was a lie, and you know it was a lie.

43:06

You lie without even thinking about it, but that's perfectly fine because if you're an

43:11

Anon, that's good. That's morally good, but I'm attacked for doxing him, for going, excuse me, if you're going to slander me publicly, how about we have your name?

43:24

Because according to God's law, if you make these accusations against an elder of the congregation, there's responsibility for that.

43:33

You know, if you're claiming to be a Christian, you're going to make accusations. You cannot do that anonymously according to God's law.

43:39

That's sin. Oh, but not on Twitter. Oh no, the mean, terrible, horrible man is me, who was attacked by this guy, never heard of him before in my life, and I go stand up, grow a spine, and tell us who you are.

43:59

Now, someone took the time to do a lot of scrolling that I don't have the time or the energy, and found out this guy's a

44:06

Baptist. So once again, yay Reformed Baptist, who did express interest, evidently he's a welder, who did express interest in the pastorate in 2022.

44:23

Now, I'm not going to pursue it past that. I have said publicly what needs to be said, and that is you're sinning, you're violating

44:31

God's law, but I just want to look at all these other people who jumped on this like I don't know what, jumped to this guy's defense, and go, what are you people thinking?

44:41

You can't defend this biblically, and that may be the whole thing.

44:47

You've all given up even trying to do that. It's just all about clicks, it's all about followers, it's all about platform.

44:53

Biblically? What a boomer brain. If you actually think we're going to defend this from the

45:02

Bible, you've got to be kidding me. Well, yeah, it is. So all of that circled finally back around to the last thing, and that was,

45:11

I got onto this by saying there are just so many people out there. I'd love to show you this

45:18

Christmas card that this couple, they've got a darling little kid in the picture too, little baby.

45:26

I think it was, yeah, it was a year ago, Thanksgiving, they were there together, and she was about to give birth, so probably looking right around a year old now.

45:37

Anyway, they said it was, have a merry white

45:43

Christmas. And there's, I should have brought it because I'll take a picture of it.

45:49

The main picture is mom and dad and the little baby. The little baby is in a kiddie suit.

45:57

Dad has a bow tie on and mom is wearing a coogee. And as soon as I saw the coogee,

46:06

I realized it was the coogee that I gave my oldest granddaughter about two years ago.

46:13

And it's a cashmere coogee, it's a really nice one. And there's a telescope in the front of the picture.

46:22

And they're all looking up like this at something in the sky. And it was the telescope that I gave my son -in -law and daughter years ago.

46:32

I've given them a more functional one since then. But anyway, I mean, it's a nice scope.

46:37

It just was getting older as far as electronics went. Anyhow, and then there's another picture of the family sitting together and they're reading the

46:48

Forgotten Trinity. I mean,

46:54

I'm honored. They're members of Apologia, obviously. So they're honoring one of their pastors with a white

46:59

Christmas. But it just showed such a knowledge of me, the little ones dressed up like a kitten and Forgotten Trinity and the coogees and the bow ties.

47:14

And it was great. It was awesome. I'd like to be able to show it. I really, really would. It's great.

47:20

But I would not want to expose them to all the nasty people who would then put their faces on all sorts of strange memes and attack them and their kid and everything.

47:34

Because that's how vile these people are. That's how vile the people that the Anons out there can get.

47:41

Believe me, I've seen the wild. Okay.

47:49

All right. I said we were going to get to Troleans. We need to get to Troleans. I won't at this right now depart into the fact that Friday and Saturday night,

48:03

I was out in Mesa at the Christmas lights thing at the temple. Had a couple of really good conversations.

48:11

But once again, was deeply impressed by the subjectivism of Mormonism.

48:21

Once you get to facts, literally, I was talking to this one young man, really nice young man. I used one of our folks from Apologia and I said, look, just for the sake of conversation, this brother right here is a

48:35

Jehovah's Witness. He's going door to door 20, 30 hours a week. He's dedicated and he has strong feelings.

48:44

He has a strong testimony that Jesus Christ is Michael the Archangel. Now you and I both agree

48:51

Jesus Christ is not Michael the Archangel. So what would you say to him? I would never tell him he was wrong.

49:02

And he had told me, the young man had told me, he had said he wanted to become a medical doctor. And so I said, okay, let me ask you something.

49:11

What if he wants to take a drug that you know is going to have a negative interaction with another drug he's taking and might kill him?

49:19

Would you tell him no? Is the medical field objective enough, but the spiritual field isn't?

49:28

Yeah, well, you need to pray about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Yeah, it was... Wow. And I've been talking to a few

49:36

Mormons on Twitter and it's a good reminder once again of just, wow, how messy, messy, messy, messy it really is trying to deal with subjective religions.

49:51

All right. So I was, I don't know what made me look at this.

49:58

Oh, I remember what it was. I remember what it was. I looked up Mary in the

50:03

Apostolic Fathers. Was there something you wanted to say? I was just going to comment when you were talking about all the different reactions that you were getting after posting that, hey, you want to say this kind of stuff, then show us who you are.

50:17

Right. You know what amazes me is the amount of accusations of pearl clutching.

50:24

Yes, pearl clutching. And it's like, do you guys read your own words? Do you actually look in the mirror and ever see the

50:34

Saturday night live outfit that you're wearing right now? Nothing? No. No. No, a lot of them aren't even in churches because they couldn't get along with everybody.

50:43

So they don't have to, you know, don't have to see themselves in the light of their reaction with other people.

50:49

So no, it's true. I had looked up Mary in the

50:55

Apostolic Fathers, because some Roman Catholic had made a claim that, you know, from the earliest times, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

51:02

It's like, well, no, that's just not true. And I hadn't closed the tab in accordance.

51:09

And so I had clicked on something and I'm looking at, and I started glancing down the list and I came across Ignatius.

51:18

Ignatius is one of the earliest church writers that we have.

51:26

A fair corpus of his writings. Certain number of genuine letters of all sorts of stuff written in his name later that people frequently quote as if it was

51:36

Ignatius himself, but it wasn't. He was martyred about 107 -108 AD. Arrested, dragged across the

51:44

Roman Empire and killed in the Colosseum in Rome. He even wrote to the

51:50

Romans, and by the way, did not greet their bishop because they didn't have a single bishop. And he knew that because the papacy is a later development that has no apostolic foundation.

51:59

But anyway, he wrote to the Romans and asked them not to do anything that could possibly keep him from being executed.

52:12

He specifically asked them not to do anything that would be interpreted in that way. But he wrote to the

52:19

Troleans and his letter to the Ephesians is just rich with incredible Christology.

52:29

We've talked, we've gone over some stuff before. Years and years ago, when YouTube first started, and I think, what was the longest

52:39

YouTube? 10 minutes. 10 minutes was the longest YouTube video you could have. Back then,

52:45

I was recording these videos and I'd have to finish up at 9 .56 and then you'd record the next video and you'd post that.

52:53

We did this whole series on Ignatius and he's so frequently abused by Roman Catholics as if he was an early adopter of transubstantiation and all the rest.

53:07

Oh, they're still there. Yeah, they're still there. That's actually my channel they're on.

53:13

They're not on Alpha Omega's, but they're on my channel. And they still get views. I mean, if you look up Ignatius, you're going to run into it.

53:21

Anyway, so we have done a lot of stuff with Ignatius and not a whole lot out of the letter to the

53:31

Troleans. But what I read was section nine of Ignatius's letter to the

53:40

Troleans. And this is what it says, I don't like this.

54:10

This is Lightfoot's translation? Really? That's interesting. Let me see what this one has.

54:19

Ah, yeah. Okay. This is the one I've been looking for. I'm going to change it. That's interesting.

54:24

Anyway, let me try it again. Be deaf, therefore, whenever anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David, who was the son of Mary, who really was born, who both ate and drank, who really was persecuted in Pontius Pilate, who really was crucified and died while those in heaven on earth and under the earth looked on, who moreover really was raised from the dead when his father raised him up in the same way his father will likewise also raise up in Christ Jesus us who believe in him, apart from him we have no true life.

54:55

Now, if you think about what we've done when we've been over in Ephesians with Ignatius, where he gives this creedal statement, it has a lot of the same elements.

55:10

We have one physician, a flesh and a spirit of God and of Mary, a true

55:16

God in flesh and early creedal type statements.

55:22

Very similar here. And so, what do you have?

55:27

You have be deaf, therefore. It's an imperative that it means to make dull, but when it's used in conjunction with speaking, it's be deaf.

55:47

Don't listen. Therefore, whenever anyone speaks to you, chorus

55:53

Jesu Christu. Chorus is the same term that's used by John in John chapter 1 when he says, apart from him nothing is made that has been made.

56:03

Chorus is the Greek term. So, he uses the same thing. Chorus Jesu Christu. Don't listen to anyone who speaks to you outside of Jesus Christ.

56:13

Be deaf to them. Do not even hear them. Why? Who was of the family of David?

56:22

Who was the son of Mary? So, he had a genealogy he was of the family of David.

56:34

He was truly the king of Israel. Who was the son of Mary?

56:39

Not just someone who beamed out. See, there's a background to this and the background is

56:46

Gnosticism. The background is proto -Gnosticism, a denial of the physical reality of Jesus Christ.

56:52

You see this throughout Ignatius. You can see that this is what

56:58

Paul was warning about in Colossians, John's warning about in 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and it comes out very clearly in the next chapter.

57:06

The very next section in Troleans says, but if, as some atheists say, and it's

57:16

Otheoi, the ones who deny the gods, but if, as some atheists say, that is unbelievers, he suffered in appearance only.

57:30

While they exist in appearance only, why am I in chains? And why do I want to fight with wild beasts?

57:37

If that is the case, I die for no reason. What is more, I am telling lies about the Lord. So, he's given the background here.

57:45

He defines these atheists as unbelievers and they say he suffered in appearance only.

57:54

The term there is dachain, dachain, seems. You may have heard of the ancient heresy of docetism, that the

58:06

Gnostics would teach that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body, that when he and a disciple are walking by the seashore, the disciple turns around, there's only one set of footprints, and it's not because of the cute little precious moments thing in your bathroom that says that during the hard times of life,

58:25

Jesus picked you up and carried you. Forget that. Forget that.

58:30

Throw it out while you're at it. Put something meaningful in there. Was precious moments contacting us about advertising or something, and I just blew that?

58:43

There we go. All the precious moments anons are coming after us next. What would a precious moment anon look like?

58:52

That's what I'd like. I'd like, what kind of memes would they produce? Anyway, the reason

59:02

Jesus doesn't leave footprints is because he only seemed to have a physical body, you see?

59:07

And so, this is what the early church is dealing with. They're dealing with Gnosticism.

59:13

Gnosticism was a horrifically difficult thing to deal with.

59:19

Think about what the early church was facing. They don't have 2 ,000 years of church history.

59:27

They're pretty much the new kids on the block, and Rome hates them.

59:35

There's lots of reasons for that that are worth looking into. Rome hates them. The Jews hate them.

59:43

Read the book of Acts. They're chasing Paul around trying to get him killed, and they continued that into the next century.

59:52

They don't have any friends anywhere, and so you have external persecution, and then you've got some of the hardest heretics to ever deal with inside the church, and this is a time period where the canon is still being recognized.

01:00:15

It's right after the death of the last apostles. We think we have it hard now.

01:00:24

I don't know how many of us would have survived, but again, the only reason any of us survives is because the

01:00:29

Spirit of God is working within us. But still, why is he emphasizing what he's emphasizing?

01:00:36

He's emphasizing the reality of the physical incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that's when you look at the other texts that Roman Catholics refer to in Ignatius to try to substantiate

01:00:51

Eucharistic stuff. It's all in the context of the heretics do not do the

01:01:00

Eucharist because they don't believe Jesus Christ came in a physical body. It's not about transidentation.

01:01:07

It's not about Aristotle. It's not about accidents in presence, accidents in substance.

01:01:13

It's about Gnosticism, and so he was the son of Mary. He was really born.

01:01:19

He didn't just beam out. He both ate and drank, had a physical body. The Gnostics detested that.

01:01:25

He really was persecuted under Pontius Pilate, so there's a historical reality, a certain person, you can verify his name, who really was crucified and died while those in heaven and on earth and under the earth looked on.

01:01:38

This wasn't done in secret. This was not a secret execution. This was done publicly.

01:01:46

Who, moreover, really was raised from the dead when his father raised him up, so much for the idea.

01:01:52

There are a lot of people who try to accuse Ignatius of being a modalist. It's very obvious that he was not.

01:01:58

He distinguishes between the father and the son, though he calls the son God. In the same way, his father will likewise also raise up in Christ Jesus us who believe in him.

01:02:08

Apart from him, we have no true life. Now, you could preach, if you're a

01:02:13

Puritan, you could preach three hours on almost every one of these phrases, but you have a creedal statement and the emphasis is being placed on the things that demonstrate that Jesus truly existed and entered into physical flesh, just like you have

01:02:32

John 1. We beheld his glory, the glory of the Lord, our hands touched of it, 1 John 1.

01:02:37

Same emphasis you have in John, in Paul, in Colossians, you have in Ignatius in writing to the

01:02:45

Trolians. Aside from pointing to this as one of the many texts in Ignatius that are rich with meaning and rich with biblical foundation as well, the point is this.

01:03:07

Here's a man going to his death. He's going to his death. He's going to be a martyr.

01:03:17

He's already asked Rome, the believers there at Rome, don't get in the way.

01:03:25

Don't try to save me. He knows he has a brief time.

01:03:32

What he writes about is probably the most important things he's thinking about. The consistent theme is the early church's fight for its own survival against heretical teachings that would fundamentally eviscerate the gospel of Jesus Christ.

01:03:54

Now, I know it's really popular today to call everything Gnosticism.

01:04:00

Everybody loves to accuse me, you're a Gnostic. The Eastern Orthodox do that all the time against Protestants and you're an ascetic or you're a

01:04:10

Gnostic or you're a Nestorian or blah, blah, blah. That might be effective for certain people.

01:04:19

My point is this. We're not really dealing with specific

01:04:25

Gnostic religious attacks today, but every generation has to epagonizamai, as Jude puts it, contend earnestly, agonize for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

01:04:44

Every generation is called to do that mainly because we as believers become lazy and easily distracted and things like that.

01:04:55

Here we are again today. People are saying, you need to back down from all this stuff and humble yourselves.

01:05:07

What do you want us to do? We literally have people coming into our churches who are saying that animus, hatred toward people groups is actually something that's good.

01:05:29

We should practice this. You listen to Paul talk about those who persecuted him and yet his willingness to be anathema if they would come to know

01:05:44

Christ. How exactly are you understanding that? What does that mean to you?

01:05:50

When it says that we are to proclaim to all men everywhere repentance repentance unto life, all men everywhere, that includes the

01:06:01

Muslims. That includes Blacks. That includes Asians and people from all sorts of different countries.

01:06:12

These people are coming into our churches and are saying, oh, no, no, no, no. There's a better way.

01:06:19

It's a very white way. It's a very American way. We're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:06:28

Men from every tribe, tongue, people and nation gathering at one table.

01:06:34

There is no Jew. There is no Gentile. There is no Scythian, barbarian, slave, slave owner.

01:06:43

They're all coming to one table. I really wonder, that's probably one of the reasons these people remain anonymous.

01:06:54

What would these people's churches look like? I mean, other than being very white, what would the

01:07:03

Lord's table look like? Who would be invited? Of course,

01:07:10

I'm not really sure that there'd be anybody attending any of the other services without the Lord's Supper that would be of any different ethnic perspective.

01:07:20

But you're fundamentally undercutting what the Lord's Supper itself screams to us, that the ground is leveled for the cross.

01:07:32

If you're worried about Haitian IQs, you're a moron. Because IQs don't mean anything at the cross and IQs don't mean anything at the

01:07:43

Lord's Supper. And if you are actually foolish enough to think that entire races have, you know, there ain't nobody smart over there.

01:07:54

Have you ever met some really dull white people? And most, quote unquote,

01:08:00

IQ tests would seem to indicate that Asians are much more favored by God than white folks are.

01:08:10

It's just all dumb. I've met super intelligent, super expressive people from every kind of ethnic background in the world.

01:08:28

And I've met people who couldn't put two sentences together from every ethnic background in the world.

01:08:37

Have you not read, there are not many of you well -born? Where'd you hear that from?

01:08:42

Oh, that's Paul again. I was just back then. No, it's not. It's not.

01:08:49

The ground's level. You come to the table, everybody partakes the same food, one body, there's your unity.

01:08:59

Not in some, that's one of the reasons that I fight the errors of Rome and Romish religions that disturb and distract from the message of the

01:09:20

Lord's Supper with all of their additions, their unbiblical stuff that has no basis in the text of scripture.

01:09:28

It's a remembrance of Christ. And the point is everybody gets to partake. That means everyone has been given the righteousness of Christ in the exact same way.

01:09:39

There's your unity of the body. Has nothing to do with the color of your skin. Has nothing to do with your traditions.

01:09:45

Has nothing to do with blood and soil. The unity of body is found right there. And you see, there's a lot of care about that.

01:09:55

We're going to have to at some point, I'm aware that the Wolfians, Stephen Wolf himself has produced a thing about natural law.

01:10:04

We're going to, at some point, either before the end of the year or maybe early next year, we're going to look at Van Til's criticisms of natural law and natural theology because he's being attacked horrifically right now.

01:10:24

In fact, that anonymous guy that I mentioned earlier, he was talking about what you see when you saw

01:10:33

Jeff Durbin and Stephen Wolf. I'm sorry,

01:10:39

Jeff Durbin and Corey Mahler, going back and forth, was a traditional

01:10:44

Christian versus a presuppositionalist. So they recognize they're defining traditional

01:10:52

Christian based upon Thomistic categories, natural law, natural theology, which has an anthropology that can not possibly exist in the

01:11:04

Reformed tradition. It can't. You don't have, when you have the idea that man's reason can come to the true conclusions, not just by common grace, but because the clarity of natural law and natural theology, apart from the work of regeneration, apart from the

01:11:27

Spirit, freeing that person from the bonds of sin. That's what

01:11:33

Rome's been about ever since Trent. Rome had to do that at Trent because the

01:11:40

Reformers were undercutting the sacramental system by talking about the all -sufficiency of grace.

01:11:47

They had to do it. It was necessary. Well, they're going back that direction. There is no way that the people going down this road are going to remain.

01:11:57

They'll use it as long as they can use it to get the clicks and to build the platform, but there's no way they're going to be able to maintain this stuff because they're fundamentally cutting themselves off the knees.

01:12:11

We're going to take some time to look at that kind of stuff and listen to what Vantill said, and we'll be very thankful to...

01:12:19

But man, the anti -Vantillian venom that immediately began appearing online too, it's just like, whoa, wow.

01:12:28

This stuff has moved fast. It's moving very, very, very fast. So point is,

01:12:35

Ignatius was dealing with this stuff back then. I'm sure he would rather have let it go.

01:12:43

He probably would have been more popular if he had let it go, but he couldn't because if you love the church, then you are going to seek to protect her from that which will divide her and decimate her and detract from the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

01:13:02

And that's what this is all about, I guess. Boy, there's been a few comments being made.

01:13:20

I'm going to have to catch up on a lot of this stuff. Boy, there's been a lot. Yeah, Jonathan Pritchett. I saw you interacting with this,

01:13:29

Rich. What? Well, sort of.

01:13:36

He's like, you Calvinists need to stop arguing with yourselves over these things.

01:13:42

I'm sort of like, well, why don't you jump in on the side of those of us who are fighting this stuff and realize if you don't think this can come into your churches, you're not looking real close because any young man with one of these things can end up being influenced by this stuff.

01:14:04

You don't have to be reformed at all. Corey Mahler's a excommunicate Lutheran. So that's not the same thing.

01:14:12

And then when I looked at Jonathan's thing, right before those comments that he made was a giveaway of David Allen's new to the

01:14:24

Jew first two -part Romans. I cannot think of a more absurd...

01:14:33

If you want to literally take an exegetical gun out and shoot yourself in the head and promote something that is one of the most absurd things that has ever been suggested before, that came up, that finally discovered by the church in 2017.

01:14:54

That's the thing to do. I just went, oh, never mind. Yes, you wanted to say something?

01:15:00

No, I was just going to say, I reposted that and it did not occur to me what you just said is, hey, you need to look around.

01:15:07

You need to look at the back door of what's sneaking into your church because this isn't just within our realm that this is sneaking in.

01:15:16

The fact is, I don't recall David Duke necessarily being reformed.

01:15:21

Yeah, definitely not. So if we actually go look back, the roots of this kind of thinking is going to be more along the lines of what his quote -unquote tradition...

01:15:34

Well, see, I wouldn't even say that. I wouldn't even say that because, look, in the South, there were lots of good, solid

01:15:40

Presbyterian theologians who were on the wrong side of that subject. There's no question about it.

01:15:46

But it doesn't have anything to do with being reformed. I'm just simply saying... That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I'm just simply saying, if you all outside the reformed world think that you're immune to this,

01:15:58

I think it's... Because see, I did not know until this past summer, this was a revelation to me.

01:16:04

I did not see it coming in. People are like, oh man, you're ahead of the curve. No, I wasn't. I just happened to make some comments on the dividing line and boom, the lights turned on and people started scurrying out from the woodwork to spit at me.

01:16:20

I didn't see it coming. And I would have thought we'd be the last people to have it.

01:16:26

Wrong. So my state... What I'm trying to say, if you listen to this program and you're not reformed, first of all, you're brave for enduring all this stuff.

01:16:37

But secondly, you've got to be listening carefully to what's going on in your own churches. You've got to listen to what's being talked about at the fellowships and in the

01:16:47

Bible studies, because it may not just come out as quickly as you expect, but you've got to be listening.

01:16:54

Because this thing, this stuff, this poison is not limited to the reformed realm, and maybe the only reason you're hearing about the reformed realm is we're fighting back.

01:17:06

And I'll tell you what, if you find it coming into your realms, we'll be happy to share the information we've got with you.

01:17:12

Okay? So the thing that I found positive about, and this is why

01:17:20

I reposted it, I saw him flummoxed. How can this be going on?

01:17:26

Of all the things going on within the reformed community, I don't know what to do with this. He didn't know where to plug it in with this.

01:17:32

There's a lot of misunderstanding within the reformed stuff, and his point was, can we get back to talking about Calvinism?

01:17:39

But the other side of that coin is this stuff reared its ugly head with us, all of a sudden, six months ago, never heard anybody talk like this before in my life, except in my youth, and those people were pagans to the core, angry men.

01:17:58

Are you going to make the entire internet angry right before Christmas again? They already are. Well, you don't have the camera on, so they can't necessarily say it was rich.

01:18:08

Well, it's rich. Using an AI -generated voice. Yes, there you go. But the fact of the matter is, is these guys function in Whisper Campaign.

01:18:18

If you're having a Bible study, these guys aren't the guys teaching it. These are the guys that walk outside following people and go, hey, do you know about this?

01:18:27

Have you thought about that? The next thing you know, they've got a follower, and another follower, and another follower. Have you checked out this webcast?

01:18:34

Next thing you know, they've taken over your Bible study, and they're beginning to take over your church, and you're just now finding out about it.

01:18:40

You're on the back end of the curve, yep. It's true. No two ways about it.

01:18:46

You're right. All right. Boy, I've got some stuff to catch up on on Twitter once I get done here, but that'll be interesting to see.

01:18:54

This will be the last program before the Advent celebration for all of you who celebrate it, which is about 99 % of our audience.

01:19:05

There's 1 % of you sitting there doing your Puritan look at the computer right now, but that's perfectly fine.

01:19:14

I do hope you have a blessed time. I actually, by the way, I have been planning for about three months to do something for my grandkids for Christmas.

01:19:28

We did it yesterday because I kept thinking about, if I try to do this on Christmas Day, they've opened all their presents, and I'm going to try to talk with them for 20 or 25 minutes about economics and tie that into faith, refined as in gold and silver, building upon a foundation of gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw.

01:19:55

I'm going to connect economics into spiritual topics while they've got a bunch of stuff around them.

01:20:04

Nah, it's going to be too distracting. And so we had our service yesterday morning, which for Apologia is very unusual.

01:20:13

It's our tradition to go out to a local park, and we had our service at a really good group of people.

01:20:19

It was really encouraging. Then we went up to Eric and Summer's house, and so we did that early.

01:20:28

It went really well. I don't know if they're going to remember it 10 years from now, but I think they'll remember it 25 years from now.

01:20:37

Or maybe they'll sit around and talk about it at my funeral, because you got to have something to talk about at funerals.

01:20:44

I'm not sure. But it was very enjoyable.

01:20:52

They know Grandpa does weird stuff along those lines. They don't complain too much because each one of them got a $20 bill, a full ounce silver coin, and a one -tenth ounce gold coin.

01:21:10

So Rich, being the guy he is, is sitting there doing the numbers in his head going,

01:21:16

Ooh, they did pretty good. They did well, and there's five of them. So multiply that by five, and that was a big

01:21:26

Christmas. Little teeny things, but a big Christmas. Yeah, just for your own peace of mind, gold's going down right now.

01:21:35

Oh, hey, big deal. What can I say? Don't worry about it.

01:21:41

It'll go back up. Yeah, I tried to get those little gold coins when it was down, but I just had to give up and get them when

01:21:49

I could. But it was enjoyable. It was great. Look, at my age, you're not concerned about what anybody else is getting you.

01:21:59

You're concerned more about what you're going to do for the grandkids. I'm not sure how I'm going to top that next year, but I'll start thinking about it.

01:22:07

That's going to be hard. A point on the Advent. Rob preached on the

01:22:13

Advent yesterday. He went through the five candles, the three purple, the one pink, and the one white, which we will be lighting tomorrow night.

01:22:25

I have never heard the vast majority of this before.

01:22:30

The color stuff, Luke does that. We have the Advent candles up there, and Luke will go through what each candle means, and he'll have somebody else read a responsive thing.

01:22:41

When I preach in St. Charles, I'm always there for that first Sunday in Advent, and so they'll light the candles.

01:22:50

I had a whole lot of fun ribbing the pastor, because I'm pretty certain that the matchbooks in the back of the pulpit were probably the original matchbooks that were there when

01:23:04

I started going. Which has been 24 years now. I will say this.

01:23:11

D .L. and I met up after the service yesterday, and we both remarked, I remember him, because I do remember him.

01:23:18

He never talks to me or wants to go to lunch with me. Yes, well, I'll mention something to him tomorrow night when I see him.

01:23:25

But we both talked about it. I learned so much that after all the places that we've been, this wasn't celebrated.

01:23:35

No, no. A vast majority of more fundamentalistic churches won't do anything like that.

01:23:41

Even in the churches that do do it, they don't necessarily explain it. Yeah. Oh, robbed a thorough start to finish.

01:23:48

It was fantastic. Cool. Excellent. All right. Okay. Well, there you go.

01:23:54

That was a lot of stuff. There's someone here talking about you on Twitter. Oh, it's Carla.

01:24:00

I mean, I know why Rich did that, but it's still... Oh, she can't get in? Canadians, I don't know.

01:24:08

They don't have much money up there, and they can't afford Elon's price tag for verification.

01:24:14

Oh, okay. All right. I was going to vouch for her if that's what it took, because she's really weird.

01:24:25

And whenever I'd pack up for a trip, she'd show up to throw these strange things into the luggage.

01:24:32

It's very, very strange. But maybe we can find a way. Does she understand VPN or anything?

01:24:37

Well, she needs to be verified by X in order to get into the chat, because we don't need bots in there with me spending the show going out, ban, block, all this other stuff.

01:24:50

I understand. I understand. She lives a rough life. All right.

01:24:56

Anyway, folks, I hope you have a wonderful time with your families.

01:25:02

We will be back next week, getting ready for...

01:25:08

Well, actually, I'm preaching Sunday, and I'll be preaching on... It's the last Sunday of the month, so you're always talking about what the future is going to hold and things like that.

01:25:17

But lots of stuff to be doing next year. We'll be letting you know. I'm trying.

01:25:22

I'm still trying. I still want to get hold of my friends. If anybody's listening this long into the show,

01:25:33

West Texas, Amarillo. Hey, I'd even do places in New Mexico.

01:25:44

If we need to go all the way to Tulsa, we can go all the way to Tulsa. But that run up there,

01:25:50

I'd love to set something up for February. So if people want to do biblical reliability,

01:25:57

Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, church history, whatever, let me know.

01:26:05

Hop in Twitter, send an email, do something. Because I want to try to put something together.

01:26:10

And obviously, once I start putting it together... Or call Rich. Yeah, you can do that too. Because we need to put that together for February.

01:26:19

And so that's the timeframe we have. And then in... I'm pretty sure it's first weekend in April.

01:26:26

We'll be in Livingston, Louisiana, Brian Gunter's church there. We've got a debate there. I'd love to set up another one along the way.

01:26:34

We're at 193. And my brain's going.

01:26:41

So we got to get to 200 before I start Dave hunting everything. No, seriously.

01:26:48

No, look. And Dave Hunt admitted this. Dave Hunt never finished a presentation he made at a conference on the subject he started on.

01:26:58

Never, never, ever, ever. He would cover about four or five. Normally he'd written a book on all four or five of them.

01:27:06

And that's going to happen in the not too distant future. So we need to get to 200 so we can go from there.

01:27:11

All right, that's it. Thanks for watching Dividing Line. We will see you next week. Lord willing, God bless.