Breaking the Covenant, Travel Update, Encouragement in the Fight

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We are going to jump into hopefully what will be an encouraging episode for you.

I have promised that I would talk about the trip I just took, give you some updates, and share some observations.

What's happening on the ground across this country with churches? The deck is being reshuffled. The dust hasn't settled.

What's going on? Big picture in American quote -unquote evangelicalism, but also from the ground up.

What's happening? I have some insights, I think, on this. I'm going to share with you also a passage from Joshua 23 and 24 that really just turned the light on for me.

I was just reading it in my devotional time the other day, and I just thought, man, this explains so much related to idolatry, level of sin, breaking

God's covenant. I'll give you some thoughts on that and how it relates to the rest of what

I just talked about. I'll share with you some resources along the way that people have given me. It's some of these places that I've spoken, encouraging things, hopefully, for you.

We'll just kind of see where it goes, but I'm not going to go into the news cycles. I'm going to keep it to observations, general observations that I'm making.

Maybe I'll even make some predictions. I don't know. I'm not sure where all of this is headed, but I want to share with you a social media post that I made on Sunday to get this started because someone asked a question about it, and I thought it was a good question.

This is what I said. The evangelical industrial complex is dying, and vultures are taking scraps from its ruins, but the church is thriving as the

Spirit of God finds true worshippers around this entire world and brings them together.

Happy Lord's Day. God wins. Christ is King. That's what I posted to Facebook and Gab and YouTube on Sunday, the

Lord's Day. There was someone, I don't know where the comment is, and I don't remember which format it was on, but someone asked, can you give me some examples?

I think they were looking for encouragement. Give me some examples. Where's the Lord moving? Where's the Lord working? Is that not a question that some of you have had?

I know I've had it at times, being honest with you here. Where? Lord, what's happening out there?

A lot of negativity, a lot of bad things happening. Where are you working in a positive way?

All things work together for good to those who love you and are called according to your purpose, and I know that. I know that from my life, but it's so discouraging to see what's happening to my country, so discouraging to see what's happening to what

I thought was a stronger church in this country, evangelical church, than it actually is.

I've really come to the realization that more than anything else, what was already there is just being revealed.

Things are being revealed all over the place because we have an option now. It's being pressed upon us.

What will we do? Are we going to stand with the Lord, or are we going to stand with the world?

It's by increments. That's how it's been working. As the world, the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, boastful pride of life, and philosophies based upon that, as the world encroaches upon the church and upon Christians in general, what seems to be happening is many of our evangelical elites seem to want to kind of go halfway, or part of the way, or at least tip their hat to some extent to what the world is doing.

Anything they can find to agree with, they try to find. If there's things they can't agree with, they minimize those things.

They don't talk about them as much. They try to balance it with, here's the ways we agree.

Then they look to their right. They look to those Orthodox believers who are just standing firm.

They're saying, I'm not moving. I'm just not moving. They look at them, and those are the people they generally attack.

Let's attack the people, usually the people that are in our base, the people that probably have paid the bills for many of these ministries.

Let's attack those people who are choosing not to move at all, saying, I'm not compromising with the world. We'll just compromise a little bit, and then kind of offer on the sacrificial altar these people.

They're the real problems, painting the proverbial blood upon the doorpost so the angel of death from the world passes over them and goes attacks the real bigots, the real problems, those horrible fundamentalist

Christians, or Christian nationalists, whatever. Those are the people that you got to be concerned about.

They're the people that are the real dangers to our society. Look, here's the examples we have.

We don't agree with some of these things. These are the kind of people that they just, they hate women.

I'll give you examples of it. They hate women as revealed in church discipline practices, as revealed in the fact that they don't allow, for some evangelical elites, this is already starting to happen.

They don't allow women pastors, or it's fine to say women pastors are wrong because we have scripture that seems to back that up, but what we ought to do is have these women ministries that women can then come, and even to mixed audiences, preach at times, though we don't call them the pastor, this sort of soft, complementarian, really is more egalitarian ideal, or we got to get rid of those patriarchy people.

That's the kind of thing that you see happening. We're not critical race theorists, but man, those people who want to keep those statues, man, those are the real, but you got to go after them.

They're the problems. There's nothing logical or rational about any of this. It's simply a survival mechanism.

That's kind of what I've realized. There's a survival mechanism that's being implemented for evangelical industry elites.

How can we survive the next decade if this is where the pendulum is going, and this is where all the elites in Hollywood and the news media and the big business world, they're all going in this direction?

How will our ministry survive? How about Title IV? I mean, that's a big one right now. If you want to have a chaplaincy program, and you want to train chaplains at your seminary, are you going to go along with the

Biden administration's Title IV requirements? All the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff is going to be brought into your school so you can keep that government money flowing to train people for the chaplaincy?

I'm just going to tell you right now, that's where most seminaries are caving. You probably haven't even heard about it.

I'm sure you will hear about it soon. That's where they're caving. There are certain seminaries that are deciding, no, we're going to take a stand.

We're going to fight this, but they're rare. Southern Evangelical Seminary is one of them. They want to fight it. I could give you tons of examples of this kind of thing, but this is what we see playing out.

It's the same thing that, as I've studied history, I've seen in other contexts.

Germany in the 1930s, same kind of thing. You have the German Christian movement that becomes the state religion eventually, but if you study the movement, incremental steps, it was increments.

It wasn't like all at once, we're going to just replace our crosses with swastikas. No, no, no.

They got there by very incremental steps. We're not changing orthodoxy. We're still orthodox.

We still believe the Bible. We just are reinterpreting certain things. Jesus was

Arian. These are the kinds of things that happened in the 1930s, and they happened in other contexts as well.

You can see similarities, not parallel in every single way, but with the social gospel movement, we're not changing orthodoxy.

Just making a little room here for some Darwinism and some higher criticism, or how about the liberation theology?

When that made its way into evangelicalism, I write about this in my book, Social Justice Goes to Church. We're not changing orthodoxy.

In fact, we're the true Christians because we believe in God's, the heart of God is for the oppressed, is for equality.

That overrides the other instructions and other passages and principles in scripture because you get this broad brush that you're able to just, this is the heart of God.

This is the flow. This is the theme and everything else must fall under it. So anyway, not to harpen that point too much, but this is the context that we live in right now.

And this is why there's so much mistrust between the pews and then the industry, the industry elites.

And it's becoming worse every day. And people are waking up to it at different times.

I think COVID stuff was a big wake up. I think that was because it affected people's daily lives. Why aren't our churches open?

Hey wait, there's all these blogs out there. My pastors are reading that are supporting the idea that our churches should just indefinitely remain closed.

Wait, what's this about? Right? Things like that started causing people to wake up and it's happening more and more and more and every new issue that comes down the pipe about this is going to be another opportunity for that.

So we already know, many of you already know this. I'm summarizing it, putting it in your minds. I want to give you encouragement because the church is still alive and well, whether or not evangelical industrial elites compromise the church is still alive and well, the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Words of our Lord. Jesus said, I will build my church. It's his church.

He's going to build it and it will always survive. You just have to believe that.

You have to trust that, that no scheme of man is going to derail the true church.

Now we have to defend the true church. We are called to defend our faith, to stand up for the

Lord Jesus Christ, and to also defend our churches from attacks from the outside.

And how do we do that? We do that by, first of all, in our personal lives, holiness, following God, pursuing the

Lord in our daily lives, following the commands of Christ and how he wants us to interact.

Oftentimes it's the internal threats that are more of a danger to a church than the external threats.

But we have both in this case. We have enemies within the church. We have enemies outside of the church, both pressuring churches to compromise, to not preach on certain things for pastors, to ignore the actual issues that are really causing people to leave their faith, or I should say children who are growing up in a

Christian context to reject the context in which they grew up. And so we have to be aware of these things.

We have to engage in apologetics. That's important. We have to mark people who are divisive.

We have to just keep to what the scripture has taught us for 2 ,000 years. Solutions are all there, but we have to be vigilant about it.

We can't be passive necessarily about all these things. We can't just trust that sometimes even our pastors who might even be good pastors, with the limited time that they have, are going to be able to necessarily be astute to everything that's attacking their people.

Their people are not agrarian people from 200 years ago that are getting their main social interaction from the church and their main teaching from the sermon.

They're out there on podcasts. They're listening to the news. They're looking at articles.

They're being barraged with information every single day, and it's not something that one pastor can actually keep up with perfectly.

We should all be kind of aware of what's going on out there to some extent, but this is something that's beyond.

It's a human scale issue. Everyone's in their own little niches hearing all sorts of different things, and so the major issues of the day,

I believe the pastors, if there's moral issues involved and the Bible speaks on them, it's time to pipe up about it, to talk about it, to disciple people on it, to use it as application for sermons, but that being said, there's subversive threats that sometimes slip under the radar, and so this is the time for us all to be vigilant about these things and aware.

We're in a wartime posture, and we've been that way since the inception of the church.

No soldier in active duty entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so he can please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.

This is the footing we got to realize we're in. We're in a battle, okay? It doesn't mean there's not time for relaxing and joy and happiness and all that, but we're in a battle, and the encouragement is this.

I've met some people, and I've seen this now across the country. With pastors, but also just with laymen, they know it.

They've realized it, and the last two years has really woken them up to it. They know they're in a battle, and they're treating it that way, and the more and more people treat it that way, the more you're going to actually see change.

You know, someone told me, and I thought this was a great point, that the Southern Baptist Convention will never be able to recover itself until laymen recover their own churches.

It's Rhett Coppel. Rhett Coppel's on Facebook and Gab, and he's probably on Twitter. It was so wise.

I thought, man, that is absolutely true. 100%. If people in the churches would, when their pastor goes off the rails into woke nonsense or whatever it is, people in the churches have the guts to confront that kind of thing, not being a jerk about it, confronting it first, asking good questions, right, but actually confronting it, not just ignoring it, not just quietly leaving, but head -to -head, toe -to -toe.

We're going to wrestle through this kind of thing. SBC wouldn't be taken over. There would be, because there'd be a fighting spirit on the local level, and that would translate to a fighting spirit among the messengers who show up.

They would take ownership of their churches, stewardship of their churches, and then stewardship of their denomination, but the fact is, and like I said,

I think we're coming out of this in some ways, but the fact is there's a lot of people out there who don't even have stewardship over their own lives.

They can't manage themselves. How can a man who can't manage himself or his own household be expected to help hold anyone else accountable?

That's part of the problem that we're experiencing right now, and it's turned into a leadership crisis of epic proportions.

Instead of actual leaders, we have managers and therapists, mostly managers at the highest levels.

That's their experience. It's a professional managerial experience, like they're a CEO of a company. It's not spiritual leadership that's actually being valued, that's being looked for.

That should be more important than managerial experience, but I would submit to you that the one leads to the other, actually.

Someone who's going to manage themselves well in their time and efforts in the scripture is going to be able to manage other things well, too.

I think there's a connection there. If you manage small things, God will make you—if you're faithful in small things, you can be faithful in larger things.

Yeah, personalities come into play, and there's things that are affected by personalities.

We're very personality driven. In fact, I remember being at a NAM training thing once, and it was all about personality, but that's not the determining factor.

Our leaders have been chosen, many of them, based on wrong criteria, wrong thinking.

How do they make me feel? Are they good personality? Are they winsome? That's the big thing. Are they good at managing things?

How about do they know the scripture well? Are they able to correctly apply the scripture to the situations that they will undertake?

Much more important. People are realizing it now. True Christians are realizing that. They're waking up.

They're realizing this is what we've been living in, and we didn't know it, and now we know. We're ready to fight, and we're going to be faithful in the little things, and God will make us faithful in the bigger things.

I want to talk to you about this verse, and then we'll get to some of my experiences here, passages here.

Joshua 23 16. Joshua 23 16 says this, When you transgress the covenant of the

Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the

Lord will burn against you, and you will perish quickly from off the good land which he has given you.

Joshua 24 19 through 20 says this, Then Joshua said to the people, You will not be able to serve the

Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God. He will not forgive your transgression or your sins.

Then Joshua said to the people, You will not be able to serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. Oh, I'm sorry. I think

I posted it here twice for some odd reason. I cut and pasted it into a document so I could read it.

Anyway, all right. That's it. He will not forgive you for transgression for your sins. Why not? Why won't he forgive them transgression for their sins?

Because they were engaged in idolatry. What's transgressing the covenant of the

Lord in Joshua 23? Serving other gods, bowing down to them. I had this thought when

I was reading through this. There's a whole sacrificial system. There's a whole way to deal with sins that people commit.

In the Old Testament, there's a whole way of dealing with these sins. Very specific, very itemized.

These other sins are not in the category of transgressing the covenant of the

Lord. There is a way to deal with them. Guess what? There's not really a way to deal with serving other gods, bowing down to them, idolatry.

It doesn't mean that God doesn't forgive idolatry. It means that if you persist in that, if it becomes, you literally shift paradigms.

You're in one paradigm in which the Lord of heaven is God, the Creator God, Yahweh.

We obey Yahweh. We serve Yahweh. We worship Yahweh. If you switch paradigms, you step outside of that, and you're going to enter into a completely different world, a conception of the world that's false, in which there's a false god that you serve.

Then you have transgressed the covenant. You can operate within this paradigm and sin, and then

God has made a way. There's sacrifices. There's a way to deal with that.

Of course, all of them pointing towards the perfect sacrifice, Jesus Christ. But as soon as you step outside of that, and you start serving other gods, you start acknowledging them.

It's a lordship thing. You start saying, actually, no, it's not the Lord God. It's this, or you syncretize.

It's the Lord God, and it's actually this God. You start sharing in your minds the authority of the true

God with false gods. You've transgressed the covenant. Idolatry is very, very serious, and I realize that.

There are levels of sin. I mean, it would be better to be

Sodom and Gomorrah than some of the places Jesus went, because they saw the miracles of Jesus, rejected him. Yet, Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented.

There's different levels of sin. There are different civil penalties for certain sins, but guess what?

Idolatry tops this list. One of the things I realized as I was reading this is that that's the one sin that the evangelical industrial complex, if you want to call it that, people who write for Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today, they like to harp on that idolatry quite a bit.

Christian nationalism being a great example of that. If you're a Christian, you love your country, you think your country ought to be characterized by Christianity, and that has something to do perhaps with the identity one has as an

American, being tied in some way to a Christian founding, Christian heritage, Christian ideas, then you are in danger of idolatry, or you're committing idolatry because you're valuing your country too much.

You're worshiping your country. This is what they do. They overuse idolatry so much, often for things that aren't necessarily idolatry, but idolatry is serious.

That's actually a very serious charge when that's brought against someone. The breaking of God's covenant,

I think, is kind of in a similar way where we are today. I think that's what's got people that I've met who weren't apprised of what was happening, but now they realize that that's got them so riled up, red -pilled, realizing what's happening.

They can look at the evangelical landscape in the

United States, and their honest assessment is, we've transgressed the covenant of God.

That's what we're doing. It's not so much that the evangelical world is hung up on a certain particular kind of sin.

Those are the symptoms of something bigger underlying it. For instance, a group of people who is really gung -ho about trying to find evangelical leaders who have committed some kind of sexual sin, or tying them to some kind of sexual sin, or finding out about financial indiscretions.

Sometimes things turn up, and there's corruption, etc. If we just root out this corruption, well, okay, you can try to do that.

In fact, you can expose some things. Fortunately, there's a lot of people exposing things that aren't really corruption.

It's like the boy who cried wolf a little bit. When real abuse and real corruption takes place, it's hard for people to believe it because of the false stuff.

But there's legitimate abuse. There's legitimate corruption out there. Is that what's going to fix the evangelical world in America?

Get rid of the corruption. Get rid of the sexual indiscretions. Fire those pastors.

I mean, it's a good start, I suppose. Is the problem from going from the left side of things here, is it that evangelicals are just too racist, sexist, homophobic?

Is that the issue? We just stop that, then you get rid of the problem. In this audience, we know that that's no.

How about, though, coming from the right more? The problem is they're just too woke.

They're just too politically affected by Democrat identity politics.

Too soft on things like abortion. Okay, so I'm in agreement with much of that.

But is that the root issue underlying all of this? Or is there something more fundamental?

Is it actually idolatry? This is what the left has been accusing the right of all along.

It's idolatry, it's idolatry, it's idolatry. You're a different religion. They've been saying that to conservative Christians.

You're a different religion. You support Trump, you're a Christian, you're a different religion. That's the whole insinuation that they're making.

Very serious charge when you accuse someone of idolatry. The right is, for some odd reason,

I don't know what it is, they're not as quite willing to go there.

They tend to look at just the concrete things in front of them.

And so a lot of what's happening in the church is just one word sums it all up. It's just woke. But I submit to you,

I think there is something more fundamental actually going on here. I pointed out social justice is a religion. It's not just a political movement that you're buying into some kind of a religion when you go into this.

But there's a covenant breaking thing going on here, I think, at a fundamental level. And that is a very serious thing.

And someone who is saying that it's not the Lord God, or it's the

Lord God and it's Mr. Sociologist over here, that is our final authority.

That's when we have real issues, and the lordship issue becomes front and center. If Christ isn't 100 %

Lord, and it's Christ plus psychology, Christ plus sociology, if you put those things into that realm of final authority, you attribute to them elements of deity, cannot be questioned, imperfectly human in there.

Fauci, for instance, is just a figure that is good hearted.

We can't question his motives, right? To pick one example, perhaps. If you start doing that, what you're doing is you are setting up another

God. Now, ultimately, in social justice, government becomes or the central, it doesn't have to be government, it's the central authority, whatever that is.

Democracy is the code word for this, among the left, whatever that central authority is, that is supposed to get rid of all the inequities and create this utopia on earth, becomes

God, becomes the one that we cry out to when there's a problem. Instead of God and praying to him, we cry out to the central authority.

They will come and save us. And when the central authority does something wrong, like preventing people from getting treatment for a particular virus that could have saved their lives, but they were prevented, there's no blame put on that central authority.

And you know why that is? Because the central authority cannot be questioned. It's inerrant. It's infallible. You start to see the elements of deity coming out here.

Do you start to see how there's actually an idolatry and a breaking of a covenant?

You take this too far? I submit to you, shifting beneath our feet is a different and a new conception of deity, of God, ultimately.

I mean, what is the thing, the force that makes history move?

Is it providence? Is God's providence in charge, or is it some kind of version of conflict theory?

And the central authority is here to save you. You only have what you have because of white privilege or something like that.

And there's the sin, and it's going to end up being the central authority that's going to correct things and take charge of things and make order out of the chaos.

Let there be light. And there was government with all their scientists and their experts.

I haven't developed this thought fully, but I'm starting to have the thought that Joshua 23 and 24 make a whole lot of sense to me as to why, in relationship to what's happening in the

United States and across the Western world with evangelicalism, financial indiscretions, corruption, surface level things, it's, yeah, important.

There's a way to be forgiven too, of sin. But you step outside of that paradigm and you start saying, it's not

Jesus who's Lord, it's these experts. It's man. You're in a different paradigm at that point.

So, this is what's happening, big picture, I believe, in evangelicalism.

And I want to share with you some of the things that I've seen. Across this country, traveling.

Everywhere I've been, pretty much, trying to think of exceptions, I think there's been a handful, but just about everywhere

I've been, the churches that I've spoken at have been the splits or they are receiving the results of splits from everywhere else.

People are streaming out, sometimes they're not splitting, they're just kind of filtering out progressively, and it's because of compromises happening.

There's compromises at these bigger churches, and so people start to realize it.

They wake up, they see what's happening, and they try to find a solid church, and now they're finding each other. We're in that process.

We haven't completed that process. We're in that process, and we may be in it for a few years. People are finding each other.

They're waking up at different points, realizing some of the things I just talked about, and they're forming new communions.

One of the things that I found interesting is that many of these churches have a wide range of secondary theological beliefs represented.

So, for instance, you could have a church that has people who are paedo -baptists and people who are credo -baptists or people who have all kinds of different eschatological views, things that would have caused a lot of controversy and infighting, and sometimes they still do to some extent, but a lot more going back a decade than they do now, and you know why?

Because I think people have realized, you know what, there's certain things that are more fundamental than that, and we both love

Jesus, and we're true Christians, and we're coming together. We're worshiping God, and we love each other, and we believe

Jesus is Lord. That's bringing people together cross -denominationally.

I find that fascinating. It's fascinating to me. Isn't that not fascinating to you? That those who would probably have never sat together in a church building 10 years ago are now all of a sudden having each other over for dinner.

They're involved in the same ministries, worshiping the same God in the same churches. No one's doing stories about this that I've seen.

This isn't something that's being reported, but it's happening under our feet all over the place. That's kind of significant in my mind, and it's encouraging to some extent, because what

I'm seeing is that there's an adult maturity that contrasts very greatly with much of what you see in the social media world.

A lot of these guys aren't even on social media. There's a great maturity among the people of God who are coming together to say, you know what?

We understand the times, and we know what to do, and the thing to do right now is to stand together on these very important things.

For example, things like the Bible is the Word of God, inerrant, infallible, and the basis for revelation isn't some subjective social location, interpretation, or something like that.

We have an objective revelation from God that we are capable of understanding regardless of social location.

Things like basic justice and what justice is, what sin actually is, not passively guilty of a sin because I happen to so -called, allegedly benefit from some systemic injustice.

The gospel is the true gospel. It's not combined with some kind of social activism.

You must do that to be a true Christian and have the true gospel that, no, actually it's the work of Jesus, not my work.

That's the gospel. I could go on, but these are the kinds of things. Men are men, women are women, and those roles are fundamentally rooted in the created order, not arbitrarily represented in the pages of Scripture.

They're rooted in the created order. These are basic fundamental things that for centuries people would have just taken for granted.

They wouldn't have had any questions about, but now it's being questioned, and they're standing together, and I'm seeing it.

I'm seeing it, and if your community, wherever you live, if you're having trouble finding a church, and you cannot find a church, legitimately so, you cannot find a good church, maybe you need to start one.

I guarantee, I've been in some communities where I know, I'm like, man, if someone just started a church here that was friendly, that was solid, that didn't go along with the

COVID stuff or the woke stuff, that just was, we're going to be biblical.

We're going to be perhaps confessional, but we're historic Christians here, not moving or shifting.

We're planning our boots right in the dirt. Man, you'd have a lot of people come into that church, but guess what?

The people that would come are working day jobs. They're people that they don't have time to go get a seminary education in their minds.

They're not the kind of people that are just going to go start something like that. A lot of Indians, not a lot of chiefs.

Maybe the Lord's calling you to do that. I don't know. I don't know, but in the communities that I've spoken, that I've been at, where I've spoken, oftentimes there's hardly anything else in the area, or there is nothing else in the area.

It's the only game in town. It's the only church that is solid on the issues that are being attacked right now from an idolatrous cult, which is what the social justice movement ultimately ends up being.

So I'm encouraged. I'm encouraged to see this because you're not going to see it reported. You're not going to see it on your social media feed, but it's out there.

I'm just telling you, it's out there. God is preserving his church. He's bringing people together. He's raising up leaders in various communities, unapologetic

Christians, and he's blessing many of these churches, blessing them.

People are coming. They're growing. There's optimism. There's love. That's a big thing. Love for the brothers and sisters in Christ.

That is so encouraging, and it should encourage you. Get involved in the movement that's happening right now.

It is a movement. It really is. I don't even know what to call it. No one's reporting on it, so there is no name for it, but it is a movement, and the dust hasn't settled yet.

It's still going to be a movement probably for the next few years as God reaches people in compromised churches, shows them the truth, and brings them out into good solid fellowships.

That's what I'm seeing across the country. Let me show you some things, just some things to encourage you and just things that people are doing.

These aren't being pumped out from the evangelical industrial complex. Just people are taking it upon themselves to do certain things, like for instance this.

All right, so this was something given to me by David Barrett in Idaho, and it's called

Bradford Christian College, and it's an online college. They're offering bachelor's of arts degrees and courses in mentoring, leading, theology, the

Bible. Anyway, here's the folder for it.

This is a pastor. This is a pastor in Idaho, saw a need. He's trying to meet it.

I've talked to him before about Russell Fuller and his theology classroom. He's just going to teach theology online.

I just had a conversation with him a few weeks ago, and they're on track to have a whole program. Yeah, is it accredited right now?

No. I think, well, I don't want to speak out of turn. I think, if I'm not mistaken,

I think there is a possibility to get some kind of a credit on some of the courses. But anyway, the courses aren't the programs or whatever.

They're not accredited, but he's building it one step at a time, servicing the church, providing something for believers who need a theological education.

This kind of stuff is happening. You know, where do I go to seminary? People are coming up with alternatives.

Here's something Dr. Marlene McMillan gave me. The 31 Blatantly Ignored Causes of Poverty.

Interesting book. I was looking through this this morning, and what you don't find are the causes that everyone today on the social justice side automatically attributes to.

This is the reason for poverty. It's systemic injustice. That must be the reason. There's what, 34 in here,

I think, that she has listed. Let me just read for you a few of them. I thought, wow, this is really basic stuff.

It's mostly from Proverbs, but it's good stuff. Ignorance about money and finances.

Foolishness and stupidity. Believing it is righteous and holy to be poor. Not caring about money.

Focusing on the problem, not the solution. Refusing instruction. It goes on and on. Poor character. Slothful attitudes.

All right, these are all things we don't hear talked about hardly at all. Poverty is just automatically now, oh, someone's impoverished.

The assumption is they're the victim of something. Let me just, okay.

Wanting to govern others when you cannot govern yourself. Proverbs 12, 24. The hand of the diligent shall bear rule, but the slothful shall be under tribute.

That's a cause of poverty. I mean, I'm just like, wow, that's, I mean, that's pretty good. It's very simple, but you're putting out a resource that's actually accessible and helpful for real everyday

Christians out there. You don't see these resources being pumped out by big evangelical organizations, really.

It would actually kind of go against the narrative that many of them are buying into, but this is the kind of thing people, just regular, ordinary people are taking it upon themselves to do.

Here's another one. Pastor Joel Webbin gave this to me. Am I truly saved? A study through 1

John. Forward by Kosti Hinn. And Justin Peters recommends it for those who don't know who they are.

They've really shone a light on the prosperity gospel. And so anyway, you go through this and it's just scripture, application questions.

I mean, it's a little Bible study. This is stuff small -time pastors across this country, they're putting out things like this.

They're producing resources for their people. And I just want to encourage you with that, that it's not, you can find these niches and they're not even all, there's actually,

I don't know that they're all niches now. I'm seeing new publishing companies become more popular.

There's a new kind of industry starting. We have to be careful that it doesn't become co -opted as oftentimes money does.

But there's alternatives to what you're hearing in the formerly known as Big Eva or evangelical industrial complex or the evangelical elites.

There's alternatives to that stuff popping up all over the place. And I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it in real time.

And not many of you are, because you're not traveling. You're not going to these churches. You're wondering where is it in my community? And maybe it isn't in your community yet, but maybe you're the one to start that.

Just a thought. All right. Well, I hope this was encouraging to some of you and it's just commentary.

I know, but many of you wanted to hear about my trip. To close, I do want to mention just some personal things for those who do support what

I'm doing and have followed more personally kind of things that I've, I mentioned on this podcast. We had a great time in Texas.

My wife came with me. Someone actually had her sign my book, which is appropriate. I mean, look, she, she's just as much part of this in the fact that when

I was writing that second book, she was at the time she was working. And so it, you know, it enabled me kind of to make this transition.

I was working too, but I was kind of starting to put more time into writing and stuff. And so she was part of that.

And, and she really, I think was encouraged to see so many of you out there who came out, who had conversations with her.

It was just, it was a blessing. We had just amazing hospitality. It really had a great time with AD.

AD came with his wife and Joel and his family. Just, they were really hospitable.

And then we went up to Idaho. First, first, we, we saw some things in Texas. We drove, we took two days and we drove.

And so she got to see to Dallas. So she got to see my wife, the fixer upper, what do they call that?

The gain, the Magnolia thing. Yeah. You see, I stood outside with some of the other husbands. I walked outside of a shop and I see there was a guy standing there and I was just like, waiting for your wife.

And he's like, yeah, you waiting for your wife? Yeah. And so it was funny.

Got to see the Dr. Pepper plant. I love Dr. Pepper for those who don't know. And we actually went out to the branch

Davidian compound where it used to be in 1993. It was destroyed. That was kind of sobering to, to see all that.

Went to the Fort Worth stockyards for an afternoon and then flew to Idaho, went to the

Sawtooth mountains for two days. I got a bad sunburn walking eight miles in the snow, but tremendous views.

It was off season. So no one was there. Got to see elk outside our window. I mean, it was amazing. It was just amazing. The beauty that God has put in this world.

And then and then started speaking again for the next three days in Idaho. And and that was great too.

David Barrett and his, his wife were just kind to us. We had a great time speaking there.

In fact, he, he set us up to stay with someone who was taught dance lessons.

So we got, I'm, I'm a bad dancer. For those who don't know, I'm really stiff. So he gave us a free dance lesson one night, much to my, my wife really enjoyed that.

And then we went to, to be with Danny Steinmeier at his church and his family was just amazing.

All the kids just, I mean, so well -behaved and so respectful. And the church was just such a blessing, very encouraging.

You can see there's a lot of unity. And we, we ended up going with them on like a little

Jeep trek on that Monday, just to the outskirts of Boise. And that was super pretty in my mind, kind of some desert beauty.

My, my wife thinks it's somewhat beautiful. She's not as big on desert. She likes trees. I've learned this about my wife going to various places.

She really likes her trees. But the landscape, we don't get to see here in New York.

We got plenty of trees here in New York. We don't have the canyons and the rock formations just unparalleled in my mind out

West. So very pretty and just had a really good time. And so I've learned this about Idaho.

Okay. So Texas, Idaho, right? Which is, I'm going to end on this. So Idaho, well, sort of Texas, actually Texas, right?

What, what's unique about Texas, Texas flags everywhere. The people of Texas proud to be from Texas. They have their own genre of country music.

You can hear it on the radio, the red dirt stuff they got, you know, the cowboy thing they got, you know, it's their own style and they, you know, the way they dress and there's, there's just so many

Texas things, you know, their cuisine, there's a Tex -Mex cuisine, there's barbecue, and it's and they smoke it in Mesquite and you go up to Idaho and you're like, okay, what's

I got off the plane. I'm like, all right, I'm ready. Like what's Idaho. And it was like, well, we got potatoes up here, but that's even more in Eastern Idaho.

It wasn't where I was. So this is what I figured out. Here's the, here's what's Idaho. What's Idaho is fry sauce.

Okay. So if you go to like diners or restaurants and you want to get French fries, they have their own unique fry sauce, which is like a combination usually of like ketchup and mayonnaise.

There you go. That's Idaho. There's, I was like, what was there? Isn't there other like unique to Idaho stuff?

Yeah, not really. It's not, they're working folks. They're simple folks.

And they don't have all the flashy stuff that Texas has. So I thought that was the contrast was kind of funny to me.

And I've been to Idaho before, but I didn't really, you know, no, I didn't know what the Idaho culture was.

So I figured out it's, it's, it's, it's kind of similar to the Midwest in my mind a little bit, but it is the

West. It definitely is the West. So I had a good time though. And so did my wife, we're very blessed. We're actually going to be going, hopefully

I'll see some of you in Arizona this weekend. Go to worldviewconversation .com.

If you want to see where I'll be, and then I'll be in San Diego and in California, and then we'll be back again for a little while.

And so looking forward to seeing you out there. God bless. Oh, one last thing,

I should probably mention this too. For those who are curious, some things have changed on the worldviewconversation .com

in the shop there. You can now order Enemies Within the Church, and you can also get

A .D. Robles' book, Social Justice Pharisees, for free. If you get the other books and the

DVD Enemies Within the Church, I just throw it in automatically. And then I've taken some,

I've lowered the price since it's been out for a while of Christianity and social justice. So a few things changed there for those who are curious, who are interested in some of those resources.