He Gets Us | Theocast

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He gets us. Alistair Begg. Chaos. Wokeness. That's what it feels like right now.

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Justin and I want to look at the law and the gospel and the call to be compassionate towards sinners in light of the chaos that's happening on the internet and in YouTube.

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We really want to encourage you to listen to the entire podcast because we want to not only address some of the issues, but then talk about what is the call of the believer towards sinners.

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Please stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, you may not have heard of this word. It's called pietism.

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Have you ever felt like the Christian life is a heavy burden versus rest and joy?

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That you wake up worrying about how well you're going to perform instead of thinking about what Christ has done for you.

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It's dread versus joy, really. That's pietism. Pietism causes Christians to look in on themselves and find their hope, not in what

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Christ has done, but what they're doing. We have a little book for you. It's free. We want you to download it.

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We're going to explain the difference between pietism and what we call confessionalism. Reform theology, really.

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How it is that we walk by faith, seeing the joy of Christ, and when Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest, what does that look like?

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You can download it on our website. Just go to theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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That's literally what we're hoping to do today. Conversations about the Christian life in the world and Super Bowl ads from a

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Reformed, covenantal, pastoral perspective. Confessional, too. Yeah, we'll do it.

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Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt.

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I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, just south of Nashville.

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No, Justin and I are not in the same city, and we have been fighting technology, and may God's mercy be upon us.

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I think we may have found a way to continue to record. Thank the Lord for that. Justin, my dear friend, we want to pull the clutter off the gospel today, right?

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And let's reclaim the purpose of the kingdom because it seems like we've lost the purpose of the kingdom in light of fighting wokeness and fighting liberalism.

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We seem to be fighting everything but the thing we're supposed to be fighting. And anyways, before we jump into, and I throw it over to Justin, Justin, we have an app, and that app technically is a community, and it is growing.

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There's over a thousand people in there, and it's awesome. It's a wonderful community. More and more people are sharing thoughts and ideas and helping each other.

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They're praying for each other. I know there was somebody who posted a prayer request for surgery. Anyways, it's just a sweet community.

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You would come over and check it out at theocast .org. All the information is there. Justin, tell the people about something special coming up.

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This is in about two months, but tell them about it. Justin Perdue Two months from right now, I'm not exactly sure when this will release, but April the 19th and 20th in the year of our

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Lord 2024, we, Covenant Baptist Church here in Asheville, are hosting a small conference where we're having our friend

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Chad Bird come in to speak. He's going to be talking effectively about discipleship and how the

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Lord is with us in that. A lot of times I think we think of discipleship as something we do for God or unto

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God, but God is with us, and that's a sweet reality. Chad writes and speaks beautifully on this topic, so he's going to be giving several talks.

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We're going to be doing some panel discussions with our pastors and Chad. Again, that's Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20 here in Asheville.

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I don't even know what else to say other than the registration's open. I could say more, but we're going to get right to it.

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Actually, what I wanted to say is what I appreciate about Chad is that he gets us.

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He gets us at the OCAST. Justin Perdue Oh my gosh, yes, he does. He gets us. We haven't done a transition in a long time.

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Justin Perdue I love it. That was professional. That was grade A top shelf pivot. I trust people can figure out how to register for a conference.

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If you go to covbap .org, you'll easily be able to register. He gets us.

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Chad gets us at the OCAST, and as many people are familiar with the campaign, he gets us the ad campaign.

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We are shamelessly using this because everybody's talking about it.

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We sit here, I don't know what, three days removed from the Super Bowl, and the ad ran during the

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Super Bowl. As is so common, everybody, I don't even mean to sound condescending.

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Justin Perdue Can I make one comment about the Super Bowl? It was so good to see Taylor Swift win. Justin Perdue I'm a football geek.

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Justin Perdue I'm in no way bothered by what you said. I'm just going to skirt around this before I get into the nuts and bolts of how to build a roster in order to win a championship.

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We don't need to do that. Here we go. We're going to stay laser focused on the topic at hand. Justin Perdue My only comment was

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I was surprised how often I had to watch her. I didn't get to watch football. The he gets us ad campaign has been running for a while now.

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Jesus gets us. You've seen several. Jesus was a refugee. Jesus' family hated him too.

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There was an ad that ran during the Super Bowl of different individuals washing the feet of other people.

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It was highly controversial, and as is normally the case, conservative and Christian social media is a firestorm over this thing.

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Very similar to how Alistair Begg made comments regarding counsel he had given someone about attending a transgender or same -sex wedding.

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Again, conservative Christian Twitter was ablaze. Social media was ablaze.

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This is just normal. This is what happens in our day, and that's lamentable. We are leveraging these things, but what

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I want to say first is this is not so much a reactionary podcast for John and for myself.

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We intend this to be evergreen, meaning we hope that this lasts far longer than these respective controversies do because we'll be on to something new in a month.

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Let's just be honest. These will be way in the rearview mirror because there will be something else people are worked up about. Really, what we want to have a conversation about today is mercy, compassion, and how this is not an either -or proposition.

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It's not that we either hold to biblical understandings of the law and the gospel or we're compassionate.

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It's not that we're orthodox in our doctrine or we're merciful.

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These things are not mutually exclusive, and so we want to hold the line of you can be clear on the law and the gospel and alongside that ought to be merciful and compassionate towards sinners in a fallen world.

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We're going to discuss that. How do we as law, gospel, and confessional

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Christians love sinners well in a fallen world to the praise of God's glorious grace, and how can we appropriately think about being salt and light in this world, which is what we are clearly called to be?

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That's the real thrust and ethos of this conversation. The occasion might be the

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Super Bowl ad campaign. The occasion might be Alistair Begg and his comments, but really the conversation is about mercy and compassion towards our fellow man being salt and light in this world, which we are clearly called to be by our

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Savior. Justin Perdue I want to go on record and just say how much

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I appreciate Pastor Alistair Begg and just what he's done to my own heart and thousands of others.

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I really appreciated Gavin Ortlin's video on that. I just felt like he really handled it well in that we got to stop shooting at our own when we disagree with each other.

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I'm just exhausted by it. There comes a moment where I think loving criticism is even fine, but even just loving exhortation towards things can go a whole lot farther than just counseling people so quickly.

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I think it's fascinating when Jesus says the world will know you're my disciples by the love that you have for one another, and that is so absent in modern

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Christianity. It's just heartbreaking, and I think a lot of it's because we don't emphasize the love of God and understand the nature of God's love.

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I think this ad is trying to get at that. I have some helpful exhortations for that.

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The same thing for my brother Alistair. I don't agree with everything he has to say in his position, but he is a good

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Orthodox man who loves Christ and he's done well. These are areas that we can disagree on. These are the areas of Christian freedom that is totally fine.

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This is not a podcast about that today, but I just want to go on and say what Justin and I are trying to do is that we are not compromising, we are not woke, and it's not okay.

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God doesn't leave people in their sin. If that's what the ad is promoting, then we agree.

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God does not leave us in our sin, nor does he promote it, and nor is he okay with it. But to say that God gets us, it's true.

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He is a sympathetic high priest who knows our frailty. It's not wrong to say he understands.

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Justin Perdue God knows. In Psalm 103, he knows our frame. He remembers that we're dust, so he does very much get us.

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We may talk more about Alistair and Christian liberty and some of that later. I think one of the gross, clear, categorical confusions, like collapsing and conflating of categories that's happening in this whole conversation, is that in the minds of many people, to have compassion necessarily means to have compassion on someone who is living an sinful lifestyle.

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It means that we are necessarily condoning their behavior. My head could explode because those two things need not be confused.

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To have compassion and mercy towards a sinner who is living a very overtly sinful life is not the same thing as condoning their sin or condoning their behavior.

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If we don't have the gear in our gearbox where we can make that distinction, we're going to have a hard time loving people in this world who don't agree with us on everything, or who are just loving people who aren't believers and aren't confessing the same faith that we do.

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I do think that this is a worthwhile conversation to have. Like you said,

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John, let's just be really clear. Let's chalk the field and do all the things before we get going too far into this.

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You and I understand that God's law holds all men accountable, and that the law of God is a revelation of His own character.

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It is His standard of holiness and righteousness, and none of us can meet it because we're all corrupt and we're fallen.

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All the law does for any of us is shut our mouth, and we were undone.

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And so, all who remain under the law will receive the righteous judgment of God, because God is good.

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The most significant thing that we could ever say about Jesus is that God the

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Son took on flesh to become a human, to die to fulfill the law's curse in our place, and to live a law -keeping life perfectly so that He could be our righteousness.

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And then He conquered death and conquered the evil one through His triumphant resurrection, and He has set

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God's people free, and all who trust in Him will live with Him in a redeemed earth and a redeemed heaven forever.

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Amen. He saves us. He redeems us. Amen. That is by far the most significant thing we could ever say about Him.

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Having said that, it does not mean that we can't hold out the love, compassion, mercy, and grace of Christ at the same time.

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We can love people, and we can be kind, and we can be winsome. We can be charitable.

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To use Alistair Begg's phrase, I 100 % agree with him. We can go down on the side of mercy and compassion. I agree.

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If I'm going to fall off one side or the other, I'm going to fall off in that direction while maintaining an orthodox understanding of the law and the gospel and of salvation and of God's holiness and everything else.

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We can do that. I think we even suffer to the moment of death because even the

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New Testament writers say, counted a privilege a joy that you were counted worthy to suffer for His sake. Why would you suffer?

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Because you are suffering at the hands of men who are killing you because you're unwilling to compromise the truth.

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But the reason why we die and don't fight back is because we are literally showing them the kind of love that Christ showed us.

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We lay down our life because our Savior laid His life down for us.

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This is the definition of love according to Jesus. No greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.

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Justin, what I think is interesting for me is that when we think about our life, there is something that just overwhelms them.

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When I think about Romans 5 .10, just to read it as a reminder for all of us, for if while we were enemies in the moment of the worst position you could be against the

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Creator of the world, I don't know if you could get in it. He doesn't know you.

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He doesn't care about you. He knows who you are and you're His enemy. I mean, can you get any worse? You cannot get any worse than that.

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You didn't just break His law. He's like, all right, you're a criminal. You went from criminal to enemy.

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It's an unbelievable title. He says, for if while you were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, and then much more shall be reconciled by His life.

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That should resonate with us every time if we are, as Paul says in Corinthians, that we are ambassadors for God.

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We're reconciling people to Him, and we do so by proclaiming the love of God for sinners.

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It's the love of God that saves them. That's what saves them, not His wrath that saves them.

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We are saved from His wrath by His love. There's a lot of popcorn around in my brain.

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We are to be an aroma of Christ. Well, what would that look like?

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St. Francis of Assisi, it's attributed to him. I'm loath to think he'd ever said it.

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Preach the gospel. Use words if necessary. You and I both agree that that's nonsense, that the gospel is inherently a message.

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Amen. I appreciate the essence of what he's getting at. That's where I'm going. The gospel has to be preached.

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Christ has to be preached.

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It is supernatural. It is God's power unto salvation. The Lord uses that message of Christ to bring people to faith in His Son.

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He brings people from death to life and from darkness to light. Amen. We are going to pound the desk and preach that till the day that the

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Lord returns or calls us home. To be the aroma of Christ means that that message is on our lips, but it also means that we live lives of love and compassion and mercy and warmth towards our neighbor in such a way that people might look at us.

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Not only would it win a hearing for the gospel, but it would glorify and honor the Lord. Are we called to live lives of holiness, not engaging in debauchery?

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Absolutely. We should live lives of holiness and obedience and reverence toward the Lord. That should be apparent.

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In our holiness and obedience and reverence toward God, we should be full of tenderness and gentleness and compassion toward our neighbor who are also made in God's image, who are in bondage to the evil one, and who are enslaved to their passions and cravings.

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If we come in from the top turnbuckle, bludgeoning people with law all the time, that's the only tool we have.

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Holiness, reverence, obedience, and law. People need to know how lost they are, and people need to know how wrong they are.

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I am going to argue arrogantly with condescension half the time in the public square to demonstrate how foolish all this is.

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If that's the only tool we've got, I don't know that that's the aroma of Christ.

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I don't think that's an accurate representation of our Savior in terms of how He interacted with people who had no righteousness and who were engaged in very debaucherous lifestyles.

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Jon Moffitt The attitude of the believer, Justin, I think this is part of your eschatology and your view of the law gospel distinction.

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Our view depends on how you end up responding. If you realize that your life is one to be spent, we're here to be as Paul said, poured out as a drink offering for the

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Lord. We're consumable. How do we be consumed? We're consumed as one who loves sinners.

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That's our job. Our job is to love the world, not love the world, but love the people in the world. I think it's interesting how the

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New Testament writers emphasize the power of the Holy Spirit that lives within us and the work of the

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Holy Spirit. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Let the world see your good deeds and glorify the

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Father. Be ready to give an answer. That's right. Be ready to give an answer of the hope that lies within you. We implore you to be reconciled to the

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Lord. I do think it's interesting. I made this comment to you before. I think it's interesting how God uses two pictures when thinking about the advancement of the gospel around the world.

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He uses agriculture, the tilling of the land, planting of the seed, and watering. Paul uses that as well.

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Some plant, some water. God gives the increase. Justin, you don't do that quickly. You don't till the land quickly.

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You don't plant a seed and see the fruit of it immediately. The idea of it is the cultivation of it. I don't want to overplay the illustration, but even the concept of new birth, there's an idea where God is using different people.

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For sure, Paul means it this way. God is using different people at different points, but we're all doing the same thing.

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We're loving people. Some of us might be preparing the for the next person to plant the seed of the gospel.

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We don't know where we're at in that line of bringing someone to faith. Hey guys, real quick.

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Some of you are listening to this, and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions. So where do you go? How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources?

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We have started something called the Theocast Community. We're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there, and you can share it and ask questions.

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You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. All right, so I'm going to give two examples. I hadn't really planned to go here, but in light of what you're saying, hopefully these will be helpful because I agree 100 % with what you're saying.

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I do understand how some people could listen and be like, well, you know, sometimes there's a sense of urgency. Isn't there, brothers? We would say, well, of course there is.

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So not every situation is the same. Let me illustrate. This isn't so much our pattern of life now, but for a period of time after Sundays, we would sometimes take a group of people to a local establishment.

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It was a brewery. It was very family -friendly, good beer, good food, and it was a great place for us because we're a mobile church.

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We don't have our own building. It was a great place for a number of us to go and hang out and be. That's just a part of the culture here in Asheville, North Carolina.

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It's Beer City, USA, so we're there and we're hanging out. Well, I mean, most of the people who are there are pagans.

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Absolutely they are, but we are a warm presence. We're kind. We're, dare

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I say it, we're just kind of normal in the way that we interact with people. Over the course of years, John, let's say over the course of three years,

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I can't tell you how many conversations about the law and the gospel and what the Christian faith is with people who worked at that establishment.

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Bartenders, where they would just be like, hey man, you guys are in here. What do you do? I would tell them, kind of like you and I'll say, all right, you're not going to freak out, are you?

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I'm a pastor of a church. You can tell some of them are like, oh, okay, that's one way to live your life.

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Some of them would respond and be like, really? So you guys are Christians? We'd say, yeah. They'd be like, this one girl, bro,

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I will never forget it. She was just like, you guys are so kind. She was surprised that we were

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Christians and we were kind. Now, having said that, she would ask me, this particular bartender, over the course of a couple of years, three or four different times, very pointed questions about what we believe.

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We had wonderful opportunities to talk about the law and the gospel and how Christ is our righteousness. Whether she ever comes to faith or not, who knows?

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But some seeds were sown. That's one example of a longer game. But what was it?

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It was kindness and warmth and loving her and taking interest in her life and asking her questions that opened that opportunity to have a number of conversations over the course of time.

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Recently, this is another illustration. Our pastors, we took a trip and when we were back stateside, we were taking an

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Uber in Southern California to dinner. Long and short, we get in the car and we're just trying to be kind to our driver and we're asking questions about this or that.

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We could tell he was either Eastern European or whatever, and he starts talking about how he's been through this horrific divorce.

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He's saying very crass and horrible things about his ex and his children and all the things. We're just like, bro, we're sorry.

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That's terrible. Just trying to be compassionate toward him. He brings up God. He says, we know, but God will never give us more than we can handle, or he won't do things that aren't good for us.

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One of our other guys is like, so you believe in God? He starts to say things. I said, hey man, what do you believe about Jesus? Then he's telling us, and it turns out he's a

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Muslim and not a practicing one. He acknowledges that the Quran teaches this, this, this, this, and this, but I'm not really doing that.

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I was like, okay, we got a short period of time in the car. His name was Almir. You can pray for Almir.

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I said, hey man, based on everything that you're saying, do you think it's going to go well for you when you stand before God at the end of all this?

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He's like, only God knows. I said, but bro, are you afraid? Are you not afraid based on everything you're saying?

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He can't answer the question, so then we go in and we're like, hey, we're Christians, and here's what we believe about God, and here's what we believe about Jesus in particular, so we do not have to be afraid at all.

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Here's Christ and what he did. He died for us, and he is our righteousness. He's our representative now, so we can look forward with hope to the day that we stand before him.

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Then we're basically out of the car, and that all took place in 15 minutes. I'm not saying that it always has to take five years.

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You're not saying that either, but kindness, mercy, and compassion can always be there, and then it might just be different in how we engage on the gospel.

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That's right. You're like me, Justin. I like to visit. I go out to lunch a lot with church members and whatever, so I visit the same coffee shops and the same restaurants, and church members always laugh.

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There's a local restaurant named Tito's, and everyone there knows my name. Everyone knows my order. My drink comes out.

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My food comes out. That's right. They see you pull in the parking lot, and they start making it. That's right.

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As a pastor, I don't have opportunities to be around unbelievers. Living good tips and being smiling and asking how their day goes and asking,

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Hey, how's your family been? I never know what God's going to do with that. I'm in the process of writing a little book.

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In my mind, I'm thinking if I could just write about the hope of the gospel or hope for the hopeless, and these people ought to build a relationship with saying,

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Hey, I really care about you. If you get a chance to read this, I think it might be encouraging. I always think, guys, think about the long -term gain.

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God may not give you the opportunity to give the gospel right then, so don't blow it for the next guy. Don't be the Christian jerk. We were recently hanging out with a couple of church members after church on a

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Sunday night, and it's an outdoor scar lounge. I was petting this dog, and the owner comes over, and we start talking.

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He's a cowboy, and then his friend comes. Long story short, I end up talking with this guy. We're talking about shoes, and then we start talking about basketball.

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Before I know it, I'm sharing the gospel, because he finally asked me, What do you do for a living? The guy's been away from his faith for five years.

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It was just one of those things where I was just being nice to a dog, then nice to the guy, and just being friendly.

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You're like, Oh, you're in a cigar lounge. I'm not even going to go there. Justin, there is an essence where I think there is an urgency where we continually preach the gospel and encourage people, but I think it's profound in Scripture how supernatural the love of a believer is to the unbeliever.

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We don't talk about the power of the Spirit. We need to.

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Do you realize that Paul says God's Spirit lives in you? You are his temple.

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That means when you love someone, they are experiencing the love of God through you, and that God can use that to draw them to himself through your actions so you can open up your mouth and give them the living word.

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It might start with love and compassion. This is what I think he gets us and what we're trying to get at.

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I think what Alistair is getting at is that to show compassion is part of the evangelism and is part of the good news of the gospel.

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We need to create space where we can have these conversations to share the good news of Jesus. If we don't create those spaces and all we do is just shut the world off, then you're never going to share the gospel.

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I wholeheartedly agree. You've already referenced 1 Peter 2. Do good works so that effectively it might glorify our

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Father who is in heaven. Matthew 5 .16 says basically the same thing.

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You have Jesus in the gospels. Bless those who persecute you. Love your enemies. You have

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Paul in Romans 12. When we're reviled and the people who do us harm, we're to bless them and not curse them.

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It's very clear that we're to greet sin with kindness. That's from the

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Apostle Paul. There are many other passages that we could reference in terms of how we're to treat. I just want to throw in that we don't always understand 1

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John when he says we love because he first loved us. That's the love of God. We love like God, unconditional, sacrificial, and unending.

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The world doesn't know that kind of love. We love the world that way because he first loved us that way.

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Justin Perdue. Brother, I've said so many times the world is searching for love. We all agree the world's lost.

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At the same time, people are made in God's image. It is obvious that people are craving and searching for love, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, absolution, and freedom.

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They're searching for all of it, and we are the ones who have it. We're the only ones who can offer it because God has given it to us.

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He's poured it into our hearts, and he's given us freedom, and he's redeemed us in Christ. We hold this out to people.

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Amen. I'm referencing a number of verses to illustrate the point. Of course, we live our

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Christian lives in the community of the church, and we are called in a unique way to love each other. Even John 13, like you referenced earlier, is a witness to the world and how we love each other.

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We do love those who are outside. I think we've made that case. In loving people who are outside, like you said, we are an instrument in the

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Lord's hands to save His people. I agree. There's so much we could say here, but I think that's what

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Alistair Begg is trying to make room for. He says, I'm going to go down on the side of mercy and compassion.

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Amen to that. I agree with him. Can I jump in there? I don't think

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Alistair Means let them live in their sin. Of course, he does. He doesn't want to leave them in their sin.

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No one wants to leave anybody in their sin. You have to create a space for it to have these conversations sometimes.

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Exactly. The man has been very clear on his stance on marriage, gender, sexuality, the whole thing.

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He's orthodox in what he believes, and we need to remember that. Now, a brief insertion.

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I think one of the other categorical confusions in the collapsing of categories that happens for people is that we conflate the

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Bible's clear teaching on a moral issue. We think that that necessarily means that there's only one way to view it when it comes to making a wisdom call.

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We've got no category for a distinction between a clear issue of morality as revealed in Scripture and then there being freedom and liberty in Christ to make the best wisdom decision that we can.

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I was talking to you earlier, and I think this is a reasonable illustration, and I know you agree.

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Voting patterns, like voting booths, are a wisdom call by definition. To just be plain, you and I, because I know your church and my church would be similar in this, neither of our churches would ever discipline a person for voting for a

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Democratic candidate. No way. However, if one of our members is advocating for abortion, that's very different.

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The reason I'm saying that is because the Democratic party in our day is clearly pro -abortion, but we would not conflate a vote for a

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Democratic candidate as being pro -abortion. Those are different things, and it's similar here.

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Now, you and I, John, we hold to the same orthodox understandings of marriage, gender, sexuality.

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You and I may differ slightly on the counsel we would give in any various scenario, but you and I agree on this, that it's plain that marriage is between a man and a woman, and it's for a lifetime, particularly when we're talking about Christian marriage.

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Having said that, there are any number of scenarios that our people might face where marriage as a civil institution amongst people who don't claim to be believers, should

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I go, can I go, what do I do with this friend, with this child, with this cousin of what do I do here?

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That's where you and I would say, okay, well, let's talk through this. The moral issue of the marriage piece is plain, but what does compassion, what does love look like, how can we best commend

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Christ and the gospel here? That is a wisdom call that we need to be free to give counsel on.

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You and I might give different counsel, but we're both going to contend for the clarity of the gospel.

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We're going to contend for the necessity of compassion, and we're going to contend for a space for Christian freedom and letting people make decisions without facing the discipline of the church and the chastisement of other

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Christians. That's right, and people might be asking, what do you mean by different? Different meaning that, listen, circumstances can change.

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I have three families in my church right now that are dealing with this, and I tell them all the time, the decision you make today may not be the decision you make tomorrow because the circumstances might change.

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Their attitude, the way they act, all of that might change. Now, listen, sin is sin.

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That's not changing. Someone might go from, you know, this is what

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I'm doing to hostile, and that's where things are kind of like, all right, we may have to rethink about, are you going to involve your children in that?

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And the thing I would just say is this, that to show compassion does not mean that we're condoning behavior.

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To show mercy does not mean that we're condoning sin. That's where we've got to be thoughtful about this.

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Now, again, it's very different if you've got professing believers who are members of the church. Professing believers who are members of the church want to do something that's overtly sinful.

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Well, there's mechanisms for that. We're calling those people, brother, don't do it. Sister, don't go there. And if they do, and they're stubborn in it, it's like, okay, we're going to commence the process of church discipline that will end in probably admonition or maybe suspension from the table or maybe excommunication.

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I mean, that's what happens. But if it's people outside the church, of course, we need to try to bring them back in again.

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That's right. Right. But if it's people outside the church who have never claimed Christ and all that, and then we're trying to determine, okay, well, what does my presence at some event mean for two people who have never claimed faith in Christ?

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I think that's where we've got to start reasoning from. Clearly what they're doing is wrong, yet they have never claimed

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Christ. So what's the best decision for me to make? That's where I think we need to have that freedom where pastors and Christians can talk to each other, we pray, and we trust the

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Lord. Yeah, I'll end with this. I know we didn't plan to go there, but anyway, we did.

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Yeah, no, it's fine. Justin, Paul makes this statement twice. The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh.

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We wrestle not against flesh and blood. When you're looking at an individual, can we just even go,

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I'm going to quote it so you could just hear me. You need to hear these words because I think it's important that we hear it.

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Listen to Ephesians chapter two. He says, and you were dead into trespasses and sins. And once you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.

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Dear believer, when you're talking to an unbeliever, you need to remember Paul is saying it's not the flesh and blood.

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You're not fighting that person. Okay, what you're fighting is the power behind that person is manipulating them.

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First of all, their own fallen flesh. And secondly, there is a real power. This is why Paul says, listen, you're fighting against this chapter two, go to chapter six and read it.

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So it's important that we are going to lay our life down for that person to fight a spiritual war that can only as Paul says in second

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Corinthians chapter six, the truth of the knowledge of Christ and that truth, dear believer, must be spoken in love with compassion, mercy, and humility.

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We lay our life down, speaking the truth, not in anger. Okay. Not in anger.

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We are trying to transform that person's heart by means of words. And at times you're going to have to,

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I mean, I think it's interesting how many people come to Christ while Paul and Peter in prison, just that that's fascinating.

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It's the people in prison who are like, okay, I think I'm going to hear what these guys have to say. I just want to encourage all of us that yes, it is horrific what people are doing to each other on this world and they're guilty for it, but they're also being manipulated by a power and that power cannot be stopped unless it is stopped by the gospel and the gospel must be proclaimed with affection and love.

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We do not preach it out of anger. We preach it out of compassion. That's the point of the podcast. Yeah. I'll just double down and we'll land this plane.

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So yeah, the two most powerful forces at work on nonbelievers, you've outlined them.

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It's the principalities and powers of darkness. I mean, it is Satan and spiritual forces beyond our comprehension.

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One. Two, it is the power of sin, like the corruption of the flesh, right? The curse.

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And those two things, it's why we use the language of bondage and that's why the scripture uses that language.

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I think another podcast for another day, why would you expect people who are in that kind of bondage to live like Christians is beyond me.

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But again, another pod for another day. That said, like you've illustrated,

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John, is there a time and a place to come in and make people look foolish because of arguments that are being made?

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Yes. Is there a place for us to use the law of God and natural law in the light of nature to demonstrate the folly of what's going on in the world?

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Sure. Absolutely. There are places for that. But in terms of our interpersonal relationships with people that we come into contact with, what you said is entirely right.

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We love them. We're compassionate. We live a life of warmth and concern and care in front of them so that we might then have opportunity to give a reason for the hope that's in us.

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We might be able to, with gentleness, demonstrate to them, friend, what you're doing deep down is whack.

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You're in angst. You're riddled with guilt. You're riddled with shame.

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Deep down, you're afraid of this. You're afraid of that. Can I tell you about the Savior and the only answer to all of those things that plague your soul?

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That's what we do. Then it's through the spoken word of Christ for sinners that that supernatural power of God is unleashed and people are set free from bondage.

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That's what we're advocating for. The He Gets Us ad campaign and Alistair Begg's comments and where you may stand on any of those things is immaterial in one sense.

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It's secondary. But living a life like this, we're clear on the law and the gospel.

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We love our neighbor and we herald Christ. That's what we're for here at Theocast.

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You never know what God will do with you. I'll just end with this. You never know what God may do with your persecution as you preach the gospel and love.

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Stephen dies, Paul witnesses it, and then later Paul becomes a believer. You just don't ever know.

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Persecution is a thing that God uses. That's why we continue to use affection and not

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I'll stop there. Hey guys, thanks for listening.

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Join the conversation. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Join the community. Theotheocast .org. We'll see you guys,

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Lord willing, in the presence of our King. I cannot wait. But if he has us,

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Terry, to do the work of the kingdom, we'll be here next week, Lord willing, to encourage you to rest in Christ.

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Please feel free to share it, but we also need your support. It's when you give that it really helps us financially reach more people.

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The next time you consider giving to a ministry, we hope that you would pray about Theocast and partner with us as we share the gospel around the world.