Apostasy: a New Testament Consideration

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Took the hour to look at the subject of false faith, apostasy, etc., today on the program in light of the Joshua Harris situation. Not a pleasant topic, but one found right in the fabric of Scripture, and hence one that must be understood Visit the store at https://doctrineandlife.co/

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Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line, coming to you live from very wet, evergreen
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Colorado. We just had a real thundergust, it's still raining, but it went right over top of us.
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When you have a flash of lightning and about a quarter second later, a huge explosion of thunder.
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That's pretty close. That was pretty close. So you may hear some rumblings in the background, and of course, if power goes out, that'll be pretty much the end of everything.
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But greetings and welcome. I'm wearing my Mount Evans shirt because I rode
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Mount Evans on Saturday. I was going to ride it again today. I'm glad I didn't. Instead, I climbed from Summit Lake to the top.
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I guess some people actually call that a trail. I'm not sure when you're using your hands and your feet crawling across rock faces if that actually constitutes a trail, but that's what
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I was doing only a few hours ago, actually. So it was a bit of a challenge, to put that mildly.
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Anyways, so it's certainly beautiful up there. It's a 14 or 14, 270, I think, is the altitude of Mount Evans.
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If you've ever flown into Denver and looked from the airport toward Denver, the mountain that dominates the whole range behind Denver, that's
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Evans. And normally, except for this time of the year, it's just covered in snow.
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There's still a little bit up there. There are a couple of sections of snow, but it frequently is completely covered.
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It's a beautiful, beautiful area. If you get a chance, you ought to come up the little
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Echo Lake Lodge that is up there as you turn, go up Evans. If you're scared of heights while driving, it's a little grippy.
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It still is for me. What's really weird is I'm not scared going up and down on a bike, but more with a car.
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Most people would find that very odd, but most people find me very odd. I have decided to hold off for reasons of mercy, and some of you don't know what's...
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I'm not sure that mercy is allowed in the internet age, but an article,
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Toby Sumter's blog article came out, needs to be discussed, but the timing is very bad for really good reasons.
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I think the internet needs to start learning something from the book of Proverbs about patience.
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If you don't comment about something within 24 hours, everybody starts reading into your silence and all the rest of that stuff.
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I've lived long enough now to see the results of that, and they're rarely good. There are reasons to hold off on addressing those issues, so I will do that, but we will get to it eventually.
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I have a feeling by the time we do, there's going to be a whole lot more developments, so that maybe there'll be full disclosure and full information available at that point in time.
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Anyway, some of you have noticed that I have not addressed a particular subject that has been very much in the news.
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Once again, part of it is I am trying to avoid the temptation, unless there's a need for it, of just immediate knee -jerk responses to whatever the current thing is.
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I'd rather respond in a more in -depth fashion, maybe one that will provide more edification for the body than the knee -jerk reaction type stuff.
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I'm going to take some time here to look at some difficult texts, and then we'll make some application.
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Instead of starting with the application and then going to texts, I thought it'd be best to go with the text and then make application.
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In Matthew 13, we read that on that day,
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Jesus went out of the house and was sitting by the sea, and large crowds began to be gathered to him, so that he got into a boat, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach, basically.
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When I was in Israel last year, they have something called the
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Jesus boat. It's a first century fishing boat that was discovered buried in the shore, but it obviously had to be underwater all that time, or it would have been destroyed.
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It probably was sunk in AD 70, but it's from the first century, so it gives you a really, really good idea of what a fishing boat looked like.
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It was found very near to Capernaum, so it's Sea of Galilee, good idea of what
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Jesus was doing there. He puts out a little distance from the shore, not far, so that more people can hear him.
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And he spoke many things, verse 3, to them in parables.
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And so here's one of the parables that he spoke, and I think we need to understand it.
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Behold, the sower went out to sow. Now, you've undoubtedly heard the parable of the sower, but that is a completely inappropriate title.
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It's not about the sower. The sower is almost irrelevant. This is the parable of the soils, and I think it's vitally important, just simply for the encouragement of believers today, especially today, where we are seeing something that I, if we had a big staff,
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I'd have people go back, like Rush Limbaugh does once in a while, and dig stuff up out of the archives to prove that he had predicted that something was going to happen, and it happened just the way he said it was going to happen.
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But since we don't, and we don't have algo on speed dial,
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I'll just simply say that it's been a number of years now since I said very, very plainly and very, very clearly that we need to be prepared for a tsunami of apostasy, a tsunami of apostasy, specifically in reference to the
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LGBTQ issues, transgender issues, well, that's part of the LGBT, though, logically, that is an incoherent set of letters that are at odds with one another, but anyway, that we should expect to see a tremendous amount of apostasy, and that was said in the context of seeking to warn people against grounding their faith on individuals, on super teachers, on theologians, apologists, whatever, do not ground your faith on the faith of others.
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I realized that God uses people. Last night, and I wish
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I had gotten this guy's contact information, but I was getting to my car, I had spoken on Mormonism in Boulder, and it's a long drive back, there are a lot of storms around to get back here to Evergreen, and I need to get up early in the morning, and so I was trying to get going, and this young fellow runs up to my car,
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I'm sitting in my car, but I hadn't closed the door yet, and he says,
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I know you've got to go, I'm sorry, but I just wanted to let you know that if it weren't for you and Jeff Durbin, I would be a
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Mormon today, and so I talked with him, and thanked him for letting me know, and I said
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I'll let Jeff know, so as soon as I started driving, I called Jeff, and he was very encouraged by that, and so we hear that kind of thing very regularly, but it is both
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Jeff and I's deepest desire that a young man like that, or anyone else, recognize that God may use us in doing something important in that person's life, but their faith cannot in any way be based upon Jeff or myself.
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We are called to be examples, there's great responsibility with teaching, not many teachers, etc, etc, but even in Paul's experience, there are names.
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Demas left the ministry because he loved this present world.
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Man, how would you like to have your name preserved in that fashion?
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I mean, it's one thing when you've got direct opponents of the Christian faith, but what when you have situations like Demas, who was engaged in apostolic ministry, would have seen the work of the
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Spirit of God, and for a period of time, I mean,
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I'm sure he preached, I'm sure he taught, he had access to the Apostle Paul's teachings, and he probably was able to enunciate these things, and at that point in time, when you heard
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Demas teaching or preaching, the temptation would be to try to emulate that particular individual, or to place far too much weight upon that particular individual's faithfulness, rather than the content of the message, the content of the faith.
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And what would be the result of that? Well, was there anyone's faith who was upset, that was upset by the reality of the fact that Demas left?
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It's not like Demas became one of the false teachers. We're going to look a little bit later, 1
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John chapter 2, and there are those who went out from us, and they were denying that Jesus had come in the flesh, and they were full -blown heretics.
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I'm thinking of one man right now that I know, I'm not going to name names right now, that would be distracting, but I can think of a particular individual within the past decade and a half that has become a
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Demas. He has fulfilled the Demas role.
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When I can't see Rich through the window and he types things to me that I have no earthly idea what it means, and maybe because I didn't see it until just now,
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I've just completely lost the context, so I apologize for that. That was like five minutes ago.
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Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, you can't hear the behind the glass when we do it, so we'll do it this way.
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So I can think of an individual, and that individual had a ministry, that individual had great insights, that individual could speak passionately, and today they're not doing it because they love the world.
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It was a money thing. It was a success and business thing. They've gone off into the world. They don't, to my knowledge, do not even make a profession today, and once did and showed meaningful understanding.
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How do you deal with something like that? Well, I think this parable should help us.
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Oh, Rush has people who remember things. Okay, all right, that's true. Well, we have Algo, but I'm sure
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Rush pays money. This parable speaks to that very issue and I think is helpful to us in understanding the situation.
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So, behold, the sower went out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up.
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And again, I'm not going to go into a whole discussion of interpretation of parables. Jesus was the master parable teller and speaker, and people love to listen to him because they had all watched this.
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They had all seen it. Not many of us today have unless you, well, I suppose some of those combines that are doing the seeding, if they're not calibrated just right or if they don't follow the lines of the furrows just right, you'll still have seed that will be wasted, that will go out beside the road on that hard, packed surface that has not been broken up for the reception of the seed.
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And immediately, the birds came and ate them up. And if I recall correctly, I think, if I recall when my office was in Rich's house,
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I think he tried to grow a Tiflon or something once, or maybe a couple of times.
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And you'd have all this seed that you put out there. And the next morning, you had grown a crop of birds because the seeds were exposed.
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And so it was just like bird feet on the ground. It was like, ah, great. And that doesn't really help your lawn very much.
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So I guess we can see the illustration, even if you're a city dweller and don't have much in the way of farming experience or lawn experience or whatever else it might be.
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So you've got some seeds that's wasted because the soil has to be prepared.
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And so the farmer goes out and he tills the soil, he breaks that soil up so that the seed can penetrate.
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And of course, today you've got machines that will put those seeds in there and cover them over so the birds can't get to them and do all that kind of stuff.
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So you have a greater crop for the investment that you make in it. But others fell on the rocky places.
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Now what this is, is you'd have a bag over your shoulder and the sower is just doing this number.
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And the preparation of the soil could not be on the level, of course, that we would have today.
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And so you might have, the farmer may have done due diligence in seeking to turn the soil, but there's some patches that are just not all that good.
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They're rocky. Maybe the plow wasn't able to really get down into it, whatever it might be.
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So others fell on the rocky places where they did not have much soil. And immediately they sprang up because they had no depth of soil.
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And we know why that is. If you've got a real hard underlayer, it's going to be very much warmer.
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It's going to absorb the radiant energy of the sun.
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And you're going to have immediate growth. But because the plant cannot get its roots down into where it can get water and nutrients, things like that, because they had no depth of soil, when the sun had risen, they were scorched.
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And because they had no root, they withered away. So again, something that people had seen, you can see this in farming fields today, where there'll be that yellow patch over there, that doesn't really yield much of anything at all.
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It's not something that's really unusual at all. But others fell among the thorns and the thorns came up and choked them out.
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And so there would be competition. One of my favorite flowers,
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Indian paintbrush, but I understand from reading up on it that it actually feeds off the roots of other plants, which obviously doesn't help them at all.
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So it's an opportunistic type of a plant. And so I have some cactus in my side yard, and I also have a cat's claw.
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And the cat's claw will climb up the cactus. The cactus doesn't appreciate this because the cactus needs at least some sunlight.
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And so it's a constant battle to try to keep the two working. So there's competition there. And so some of the seed falls among the thorns, thorns come up, choke them out because the thorns were much hardier than whatever food product seed was being distributed.
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And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some 100 fold, some 60 and some 30.
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He who has ears let him hear. And so what is the focus of the parable?
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Soils. There's almost nothing said about the sower at all. The issue is the comparison of the soils and what happens.
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The disciples came and said to him, why do you speak in parables? Jesus explains and granted them know that the mystery is the kingdom of God.
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And then he goes through the, you know, this is actually a judgment section.
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And I'll just say this in passing. There's a lot of judgment material that I think we skip over.
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And part of the reason we skip over it is because it's not pleasant. We don't like to upon judgment.
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But there's another reason I've discovered recently. And I'll, hey, learn from my mistakes, right?
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Everybody who says he never admits to errors, has not listened very often. Learn from my mistakes.
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Part of the reason that we ignore much of the judgment language has to do with a subject that I have neglected most of my adult life, mainly because I have seen how emotionally charged and negatively oriented the discussion of this subject is, but it's eschatology.
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And once you start digging through eschatology, the judgment issue really, you know, we just put that all off.
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Judgment? Yeah, someday, great white throne, someday, end of revelation, way down there someplace.
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But once you really start reading the prophets, you start reading the Old Testament, you start seeing how the New Testament uses the
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Old Testament, there's a lot of non -judgment. And there has been judgment that has already taken place in certain contexts.
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And so there's a whole thing. I mean, before Jesus even gets around to interpreting the parable, you will keep on hearing, but will not understand.
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You'll keep on seeing, but will not perceive. The heart of this people has become dull. Who is this people? Hmm. There's all sorts of stuff here.
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So he explains that they are blessed to be able to be given the interpretation of the parable. And verse 17 says, truly
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I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
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So there is a blessing pronounced upon the disciples, not because they're better than anyone else, because they have been graciously chosen.
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Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.
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This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road. So you receive the seed, but there is no soil.
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There is no understanding. There is no preparation. It has no effect.
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And we all encounter people who you proclaim the word of the kingdom.
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You proclaim the word of the king. And they're like, yeah, whatever.
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Hey, just see that baseball game last night. I mean, they're just solely focused upon the things of the world.
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That's all they care about. They are the ones represented by the birds coming along and just eating the seed right off the ground.
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The one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, this is the man who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy.
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Yet he has no firm root in himself, but is only temporary. And when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he falls away.
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So you're starting to see why this particular parable is so helpful for us today to understand when we see apostasy, when we see people falling away, why is that?
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Because the temptation on our part, amazingly, and hey, theology matters.
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This is a theological issue. The temptation is to question
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God's power to keep. The temptation is to become very confused as to God's purposes.
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I would say if you don't understand election, if you don't understand the sovereign purpose of God and saving a particular people, if you don't understand that a certain people is given to Jesus and that he will save them perfectly, then you don't really have a solid foundation for dealing with the issue of apostasy.
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And you're going to end up in one of those groups that is constantly worrying about whether you're going to be one of the people that's going to fall away.
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That's not surprising at all. And so the interpretation that the
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Lord gives is that there is an immediate reception with joy.
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And we look at that and we so want to see people bow the knee to Christ, we so want to see people saved, we so want to see this stuff, that our immediate response when someone reacts to the gospel message with fervor and with joy is, ah, praise
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God, salvation has come to this house. Well, we are to hope that.
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There's nothing wrong with hoping that that is the truth, but there needs to be a maturity on our part to recognize that the proof is in the pudding.
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He who endures the end shall be saved. It's not the enduring of the end that saves you, but if it's true saving faith, it will endure.
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And we hope for the best. We accept the proclamation.
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We cannot look into hearts ourselves, but there always needs to be a recognition of what
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Jesus says here. And if there is no firm root in himself, and I can't tell that, and you can't tell that, there will be temporary believers.
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And when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he falls away. And as it becomes more and more costly to be a
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Christian in our society, tsunami of apostasy. Tsunami of apostasy.
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When you look at the Joel Osteen prosperity gospel,
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God wants you happy and healthy and rich and successful, and as soon as the reality of the world's hatred and persecution comes to bear, affliction takes place, they're not going to stay in that.
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They're not going to keep doing that. This isn't working anymore, so I'm going to try something else. So there you have the rocky soil.
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And the one whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word and the worry of the world and deceitfulness of wealth choke the word and it becomes unfruitful.
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And so there is germination of the seed, but there is the worry of the world.
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Actually, it's the worry of this age is what it is, not the world. Sometimes age and world are synonymous depending on what the context is, but many times they're not.
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There's been a lot of confusion on that too. Anyway, the deceitfulness of riches, the deceitfulness of wealth, and what might that be?
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Well, when you've got lots of money, then you've got lots of food, you can get the best healthcare, you've got the nice house.
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So what does all that tend to do? It tends to focus you upon the now. It tends to make you love the things of this world.
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And if the love of the world is in you, the love of the father is not. And these things choke the word, it becomes unfruitful.
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And then you have the good soil. This is the man who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and brings forth some 100 fold, some 60, some 30.
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So there is a recognition of a necessity of understanding the message, understanding the message of the kingdom.
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Ignorance is not a Christian virtue. There needs to be understanding of what it means, what the kingdom means, who the king is, what my duties are as a citizen of that kingdom, et cetera, et cetera.
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But even then, Jesus wasn't a socialist.
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Some people 100 fold, some 60, some 30, and that's up to God. That's up to the one who prepares the soil.
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Because when you think about it, who prepares the soil? Who is the one in charge of all of that?
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Well, that's God. God's the one who prepares the soil. And so you even have warning here that you will have true believers who will never be super crop producers.
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But the point is this, when you look at the soils, if you count the 100, 60, and 30 as three soils, then you have three soils that do not produce fruit and three soils that do, but at differing amounts.
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And so the key is to recognize that it is the bearing of fruit that is the issue here.
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Same thing I would argue in Matthew, I'm sorry, John chapter 15. I'm the vine with the branches.
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The vine that does not bear fruit is cut off and thrown in the fire. But if you're in Christ, then you will bear fruit.
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And so amongst the soils, there are only three that bear fruit and they bear fruit at different levels.
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So what's the point of the parable? Well, it is a parable that helps us as ministers of the gospel, as people involved in Christ's church, concerned about the health of Christ's church, et cetera, et cetera.
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It helps us to understand what normative Christian ministry is going to look like.
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And that means that we're going to, there are times that we're going to spread the message and it looks like total waste.
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The hard soil along the side, the road, it's gone immediately. The person you taught, the person you just talked to for five minutes, won't even remember who you were tomorrow.
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That doesn't mean that you were unfaithful in sowing the seed. That's what's going to happen to some of it.
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But then how helpful is it in the church to have
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Jesus's own teaching reminding you that, you know what, there are going to be times when you're so excited and you're encouraged by the fact that someone's come into the fellowship and boy, this person's going to be a great addition.
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And they're just willing to do anything. And then six months later, they're gone.
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Or then you've got the person and I've said this many times, when you've been in the ministry for any lengthy period of time, you start talking about people who have left, the
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Demases of the world, the people who've had the deceitfulness of riches come up and choke the work of the word.
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Unfortunately, your mind is filled with faces of people exactly like that.
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May have been 20 years ago. It's sad, but you frequently remember the apostates faster than you remember the others that were faithful.
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And so there are people who will be there for a while.
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And they're there with you in the Lord's Supper. And they're there watching the baptisms and, and they're singing the hymns and they, they might help with outreach and they're at your, your holiday get togethers.
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And now they're not. And sometimes they're there for a long time. I think of one fellow from years ago, 20, you know, 20 years, 20 years, and then gone, then gone.
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We had the warning from the Lord that that's, what's going to happen.
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That's what you're going to be facing. And yet we so often listen to the world more often than we do.
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And we, we judge our success based upon worldly parameters, rather than what
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Jesus laid down for us and said, Hey, this is the way it's going to be. And this is the way it's been in every generation church and every generation.
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So there's Jesus's teaching. And then we are aware of the text in first John chapter two years ago,
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I preached a sermon. I think I may have to preach it again. The blessings of apostasy, there is a blessing to apostasy.
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You don't want the, the, the, the sower does not want the dead stocks of the rocky soil and the weed, the weeded soil.
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He doesn't want to have to pull that stuff, pull that stuff up. He doesn't want that in with the good crop in the same way in first John chapter two, we have an apostle addressing the reality of apostolic ministry toward the end of, uh, well, we don't know when first John was written.
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Um, maybe it was, maybe everything in the new Testament was written before the structure of Jerusalem, but may have even been later than that, but whatever the timeframe is, there is a rise in false teachers, uh, false teachers who are, um, seeking to draw disciples way after themselves and to fundamentally alter the form of the faith.
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They're denying that Jesus Christ came to flesh. Um, they're denying the sons, they don't have the father either.
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Uh, and they're, they're claiming apostolic authority. And it's a challenging period of time. And as a result, some people are leaving what would be called the
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Orthodox church and following these false teachers. And so John addresses this and you know, you know, the text being verse 18, uh, little children, it is the last hour.
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And just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen.
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And by this, we know that it is the last hour. And so won't go into this discussion, but if your definition of antichrist comes more from how
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Lindsay than it does from the new Testament, that'll probably cause you problems. Um, you'll notice that there is a singular usage that antichrist will come.
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And now many antichrists have arisen singular and plural forms used in one verse.
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Um, and whoever this antichrist is, uh, especially the plural form, they went out from us.
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So the antichrists, those who are opposing the message of Christ, the antichrists went out from us, but they were not of us.
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It literally says from us, they went out, but they were not from us.
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It's the exact same Greek phrase for, if they had been from us, they would have abided or remained with us.
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But in order that it might be manifest that they were not all of us.
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This is why they went out. This is why the one out. So John is addressing the reality that must've been a very troubling reality.
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And that is within the faithful fellowship, there had to be questions that were being raised regularly on the part of believers and Christians.
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Cause remember they didn't have 2000 years of Christian history to draw from.
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Um, they, at this point in time, didn't even have a collected new
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Testament still being written. And so this is a very, very challenging period in time.
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And if you see that over in the fellowship of the proto
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Gnostic false teachers, that there are people who used to be teaching in the
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Orthodox church and they've gone over there, it's natural for people to go, well, have
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I missed it? Um, these people were once with us and now they're over there.
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What's going on? And when we see people who were once in our midst, now denying the faith, now bowing the knee to Caesar in whatever different way that might manifest itself.
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The temptation is for us to be very, very unsettled by this.
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No question about it. So we need to understand when
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John says they went out from us, but they were not really of us.
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That what he's saying is that in this period of time, we need to recognize the distinction, the appropriate distinction between what would be called the external church, the visible church, and the true church, the true followers of Christ.
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We cannot always know someone's heart.
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And though someone like an apostle might be given special insight, like Peter was to understand what
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Ananias was doing, that's not the normative experience. And if it was a normative experience,
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I don't think Jesus would have given us Matthew chapter 13 and the parable of the soils because, well, you're going to know who's the true believer and who isn't anyway, so why am
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I bothering with this? You already know that. No, we don't know that. And Jesus knows that we don't know that, and therefore there needs to be some mechanism whereby we can, in some meaningful fashion, deal with the disappointment that comes when we experience apostasy of people around us.
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And so John's message is, yeah, they did go out from us, but they were never really of us, which means absolutely,
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I do not know how you can make heads or tails of this text unless you recognize that there is a reality that every generation of believers in the church must face, and that is sometimes there are people who look like us and talk like us and they were part of the fellowship, and then they leave.
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And leaving can be a religious leaving. It was here. These are antichrists. These are people that are going out and are now opposing
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Christ. They have adopted beliefs that are fundamentally opposed to the truth of who
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Jesus Christ was, what he did, what he accomplished, and we see it.
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We actually see it happening. That's not the same thing as some of the soils where it's worldly concerns, it's wealth, or it's persecution, it's affliction, and this results in their leaving.
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Here it is deception, which is why you have so much warning against deception in the pages of scripture.
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And so he functions on the basis of a church that is made up of professing believers, but a recognition that there can be false professors.
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That's one of the reasons why the anti -lordship, cheap grace movement is such a disgrace, really, is that it doesn't even allow for that, and yet it's fundamental to John's understanding.
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For he says, for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us.
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So endurance. Endurance. I don't know if when
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I was 20 that I could have really appreciated fully the apostle
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John's insight here, because we don't think much about endurance because it seems like it's just so far down the road to where it could be measurable in any way.
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But the older I get, the more I realize that the real proof is consistency over time.
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It's consistency over time. He who endures to the end shall be saved.
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It is not my enduring that saves me, but the faith that Christ grants to his people is an enduring faith.
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And so if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out so that it would be shown that they all are not of us, or they are not completely of us.
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There's different ways of looking at the syntax there, but we'll get into that right now. The point is there needed to be a manifestation.
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That's why I did the sermon, The Blessing of Apostasy, because there needs to be a manifestation.
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If they stay in the church, then you have, well, then you see what we're dealing with in our day, where every time as an apologist
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I make a statement about a clear statement of scripture, you can always find some theologian someplace that calls himself a
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Christian to contradict me. I mean, it doesn't matter how basic an assertion, you can always find someone who calls himself a
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Christian who will say, well, no, not necessarily. It doesn't have to be that way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And that is a challenging thing to have to deal with on a regular basis.
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There's no question about it. And so it's a blessing that in the apostolic context, there was a manifestation.
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They went out from us, so it would be shown, it would be demonstrated that they were not truly of us, because if that demonstration doesn't take place, then there is a fundamental confusion in the proclamation of the
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Christian message, and that's one of the biggest things we deal with today. It would be a great blessing if the false teachers would go out from us and just be open in their apostasy and their rejection of the
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Christian faith. That would be a great blessing. So we pray to that end, when you see the tremendous damage that is done to people by heretics and heresy.
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So here's the point. You all know what the story has been of late.
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I didn't know anything about Joshua Harris. I'd never read any of his books. It's not really my area.
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Purity Culture, whatever that stuff was, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I more heard of that book having its name taken apart and added other names of books to make funny titles of books than anything else.
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Late 1990s, that really was not an issue that I was focused upon at all.
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But I had heard a few years ago that he had apologized for his book.
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Now, I found that interesting. I mean, on one hand, you can be thankful if someone writes a book that becomes popular when they're very young, and they grow, and they mature, and they realize, that wasn't very good.
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Now, my understanding is, I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold like 1 .2 million copies.
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So a lot of folks would find it very hard to come out and say, repudiate something that had been a cash cow like that.
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But then there was the recognition on his part.
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He had been put into a pastoral role, very young and without any training, without any theological foundation.
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And so there was eventually a resignation and an assertion,
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I need to get my theological legs under me. And very shortly after, a relatively short period of time after that, we now have the developments that happened recently.
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He was divorcing his wife and basically says, I'm not a Christian. As he said, by any standard that I know,
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I am not a Christian. And so he apologizes for opposing marriage equality, which is, of course, the complete redefinition of marriage.
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I mean, anyone who uses that language has capitulated 1 ,000 % to the society, capitulated the world.
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I mean, just total surrender when you use that language, marriage equality.
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And then, of course, apologizes for having hurt
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LGBTQ people. In other words, a complete collapse to the current pressures of the society.
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And you got to understand is that today, in the virtue signaling society of the
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West, if you're going to commit an act of apostasy, this is what is required.
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This is your external demonstration that you are bowing the knee to Caesar.
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You're saying Kaiser Kurios, not Jesus Kurios. Caesar is Lord, not
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Jesus is Lord. And the way you do that in Western society now is you do it by embracing what the society demands that you embrace, which would be the rejection of the entirety of God's creational order, which then becomes the basis for his law.
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So it's not just rejection of his law. When it comes to LGBTQ stuff, you are rejecting the entire concept that there is a created order in how mankind is to exist.
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And so this is how you virtue signal. This is how you pledge your allegiance to Caesar.
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This is the pinch. Today's pinch of incense upon the altar is to speak of the
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LGBTQ community. There is no such community. As I said before, each one of those letters is contradictory to the others.
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Transgenderism is at war with lesbianism and with homosexuality.
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And the B is just out there doing its own thing. And then Q, P plus whatever, it is a convenient collection of letters that expresses utter disdain for Western society.
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It's sexual mores derived from the Christian scriptures. That's what it is.
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And so the pinch of incense that you were to offer on the altar, long, long ago to the genius of Caesar and say,
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Kaiser Quiddias, that is now to speak in a celebratory accepting way of LGBTQ issues.
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That's how you offer that offering. And that's what
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Joshua Harris has done. Now, we could talk about what the act of apostasy looked like in the
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New Testament, the denial of the sacrifice of Christ. There's a very specific example of that in Hebrews.
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I think that's what Hebrews 10 is talking about. And that is going back and offering sacrifice, which means you're rejecting what you had said you believed about the finality of the sacrifice of Christ.
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And we could probably draw a connection here. That would be something worthwhile. But the point is that there are a lot of people who have written articles about the
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Joshua Harris apostasy. And for some reason, I have no earthly idea why, there were a bunch of articles that came popping out about blasting the new
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Calvinism in regards to Joshua Harris. I don't even begin to see the relevance, completely missing the point.
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I don't know if Joshua Harris was a new Calvinist or anything else. If he himself admitted that he did not have any theological foundation
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I don't see what the connection would be. I'm afraid that some people jumped on it just because it was an easy thing to jump on.
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You could push your agenda. Everybody's got their agenda, I guess. And so there are people who are doing that.
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No one wants to rejoice at someone's apostasy.
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But at the same time, we do look at scripture and say, it is necessary that this type of thing happen.
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You don't want people continuing in the fellowship who truly don't believe, especially in a leadership position.
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That's dangerous. That's destructive to the church, truly is. And so as we look at this particular situation today and we see the various reactions to it, the theology that you bring to the table is going to determine how you respond to acts of apostasy.
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It seems very clear, just looking at Matthew 13 and 1 John 2, that this is not a reflection upon Christ's ability to save or Christ's ability to preserve
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His people. This is not a failure on His part. From what
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John is saying, if they had been with us they would not have left us and therefore you have a false professor.
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You have the soil that does not produce fruit, that is.
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It may produce a very flowery plant, but it will not produce fruit.
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And you have possibly a Demas situation here.
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We don't know. I don't know the man, speculation. But the point is there are numerous categories laid out in scripture that are descriptive of this kind of thing.
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And sadly, this happens with far more frequency than most people really want to admit.
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It just so happens that since there is 1 .2 million copies of his book floating around, well obviously not all of them are still floating around, but that he's well known and therefore garners more attention.
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But this is a daily reality. And so we have to live with the tension of the fact that you have a perfect Savior who saves perfectly and yet you have false professors who fall away.
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How do you understand that? And if Jesus says, all the
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Father's given me, I lose none of it, then there are certain fundamental conclusions you have to come to.
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And a lot of people just aren't willing to go that far because they don't have the theological root to be able to do so.
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And so when I see people bemoaning this situation, and I learned a lot from this guy, yeah,
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God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. And it does not follow that if, what if the
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Lord had used Demas' teaching to bring people to faith in Christ, and then
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Demas loves the world? What about those people that were saved who heard him preaching and in fact responded to the message he preached?
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You see, if you don't make the distinction between the Savior and his ability to save, the Holy Spirit who makes the application of these things, the
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Father who elects the people, the content of the message itself, you're going to have a real mess on your hands.
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It's going to be really ugly, really, really ugly. But when you allow
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Scripture to be Scripture, and you allow the entirety of Scripture to speak, then you can see a situation like this, understand a situation like this, and not lose your own faith, and in fact recognize, well,
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Jesus told us this is how it was going to be. His disciples told us this is how it's going to be. This is how it's been in every generation.
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We need to recognize the reality of what it is we have been called to struggle with.
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The Lord has not determined that the church is simply going to float through its existence on a bed of ease.
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There is going to be agony, agonizement. We are going to have to contend with the faith, and sometimes that contention of the faith involves the disappointment of seeing people that you thought were believers giving evidence that they actually are not.
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What that should do is cause every single one of us to cast ourselves entirely and completely upon the
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Savior, to never boast of our own accomplishments, to never boast of ourselves over against anyone else, not for the grace of God, there go
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I, to have an appropriate humility in regards to our own self, and then a proper confidence in the promises of Christ and the power of Christ by His Spirit to work within us and to therefore preserve us over time.
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And so hopefully those are some thoughts that will help you as you think through this situation.
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There are still people making comments about it, and I thought it would be helpful in our context to think these things through.
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So Lord willing, sometime next week, well
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I'm home, Lord willing, Monday night, but it's Richard's schedule that's up in the
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Air Institute the week after that, and then halfway through the next week I go to South Africa.
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So we'll do our best to continue to reach out and be in contact with folks and hopefully be a blessing to you here on the
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Dividing Line. So thanks for joining us today. We'll see you whenever the next time will be. God bless.