Exposing Public Ministries and People with Jim Osman

Everybody's choosy about something. It might be your favorite snack. Two scoops of Rocky Road, please.

Your style. Those earrings look amazing on you. Or the things you like to do with your best friend.

Woof, woof, woof! You can be choosy when it comes to getting a COVID -19 vaccine, too. If you're thinking about getting an updated vaccine, there's more than one type available.

You can find out more at wedovaccines .com. This message was brought to you by Novavax.

We're all looking for ways to reduce energy usage and keep our homes comfortable this season and every season.

One way is to take advantage of incentives on high -efficiency natural gas heating equipment from National Grid.

If your equipment is getting older, think about making the switch to a newer model, because saving energy means saving money.

Exclusive incentives up to $2 ,000 are available now for energy -saving furnaces, boilers, and more.

Learn more at ngrid .com slash ma -gasheating. Welcome to The Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, all right, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, and this week we're gonna talk about exposing public ministries.

This is something that is always an issue. Maybe a little bit more, we've had an episode, last episode was on really dealing with some apostasy that we've seen with Joshua Harris and others who are claiming they're leaving the faith, but they never had the faith.

I actually, I had someone join me that we have to expose. I mean, we played a sermon from a guy that just, he's become a heretic.

He, you know, if you listened last week, he's now believing in the gifts of tongues and speaking for God.

He's endorsing Beth Moore. So we're gonna have to separate from Jim Osmond because of all this heresy he's now teaching.

He's denying the deity of Christ. Wow, wow, you swung quite wide and far there.

I don't know how you would do that, Andrew. How do you get there? Well, listen, you can't criticize me. Have you come to me alone yet?

No, not yet. So we should probably get off the broadcast and then I should come to you privately and talk with you privately and then seek an audience with your elders.

Is that how this works? Yeah, that's right. Because even though I say this publicly about you, I guess I should first challenge you to come to me privately, right?

Right, so your slander is public. Your slander and your misrepresentation to me is public and out for all the world to see.

But anything that I do to correct that should probably be done privately so no one can see it. That is the way this game works.

And so folks, if you haven't figured out the voice, this is Pastor Jim Osmond. And no, he is not a heretic and was not doing any of the things.

I firmly believe that if he was ever to support Beth Moore or any of the other things

I said, he wouldn't get out the door. His wife would probably kill him first. Yes, for sure.

So there's no fear there. But this is a way of illustrating what we end up seeing,

Pastor Jim. You know, both Justin and I went to the Philippines. We had this as an issue there.

We were exposing people and exposing them by literally just quoting them. And that somehow was slanderous to quote them.

We ended up seeing that a lot of people came to us, not realizing that we actually did attempt before we got out there to meet with people privately, and they refused.

But the thing that we end up seeing is that it was, well, you have to go do this. This is the thing that we end up seeing is the claim that somehow if we quote someone in public for something they actually said, we must go to them privately before saying publicly what they already said publicly.

We had this with one of the other Christian podcast community podcasters, the Theology Gals. They did an episode on why it's time to leave mops, mothers of preschoolers.

And when you listen to that episode, it's horrific to think about who is in the leadership of that ministry and what they're teaching, and what they think the gospel message is, because it's really not the gospel.

And yet, what was the common thing everyone said? Did you go to them privately? Did you talk to them privately first?

You're not following Matthew 18. I had this recently with another person I knew, which was really funny.

She wanted to write an article about someone that's in a public ministry, but said based on listening to Justin and I talk about the

Philippines, said I should try and reach out to this person and their ministry. And actually, the head of the ministry actually said

I'd like to talk on the phone. And she got to speak an hour or so on the phone with her, and basically be able to be kind of strong with her privately before going publicly.

But not everyone has that opportunity. And this is a thing that comes up so often. I would like you and I to deal with this, you being a pastor, being someone who

I know where you stand on this issue. I wanted us to come and talk about this because it's something that you and I see over and over again.

And as you said, the slander against people is often public, and yet they demand the correction be private.

So I first want to engage with this question for us, Jim, is

Matthew 18. This is the text they go to. So the real question is, does

Matthew 18 apply here? And what I first want you to do, because this is probably the third or fourth time

I've dealt with the issue of Matthew 18. What I'd like for you to first do is I want you to explain to folks, in Matthew 18, 15, and down to 20, where it talks about the church discipline passage.

Can you explain the process to folks? And then, does this apply to public ministry? Yeah, in short,

I'll give you the answer to the second question first. It does not apply to those who are in public ministry or public sins.

I do believe that this applies to brothers within the church, even brothers between churches.

You know, this can happen in a local setting. If you have two guys who are, two people who are in different churches and one sins against another, then

I think that these principles can still apply and you can try and work this out even when you have two people in two separate and different churches.

Ideally, it is intended to be applied and worked out in the context of a local church where the

Lord says, if your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private. And if he listens to you, if you want your brother, and I don't think that that necessarily means that he's just sinned against you, your brother doing something against you personally and so that you are the aggrieved party.

I think that this obviously can apply to if you find your brother sinning. If you, you know, you're walking out of a

Walmart one day and you see an elder of your church walking in and he's stumbling and he's drunk and he's with another woman other than his wife and it looks like they are, they've been together and they're hanging all over each other.

You see something, he hasn't necessarily sinned against you by defrauding you in some fashion, but you have seen him sin and now you have an obligation to go to him and to confront him with that.

And to, and the goal of all of that is to obviously assume the best. You go in a spirit of gentleness and meekness, a spirit of prayer and humility like Galatians 6 describes with an effort to try and believe the best and to try and find out what's going on and to confront him.

And if the sin becomes known that, or if he confesses that sin and he confesses up to it, then you've won your brother if there's repentance right there.

But if there is not an acknowledgement of that sin and there's no confession, no repentance, and yet you have every reason to believe that he is indeed living in some sinful way and engaging in some sin, then you have an obligation to take one or two more with you.

And these are witnesses maybe who are not witnesses necessarily to the sin, but they're intended to be witnesses to the encounter and the confrontation.

They're there to establish that, yes, you did go to this person privately. This is your second time.

You did confront them. This person is unrepentant. And that is to establish every word that is said between these two parties engaging in it for the sake of, if this eventually goes before the church, you have people who are trustworthy and accountable and reliable people of their word who can be trusted to be able to testify to the process that has unfolded.

You know, and that second step, when you go with two or three, one or two, two or three witnesses, you may, these are, like I said, not necessarily people who have been privy to the sin and have seen it themselves.

They may even not even be aware of what's going on. They're there, not because they're there to heap shame or guilt or confrontation, but to be witnesses to the encounter before it goes to the entire body.

And verse 17 says, if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a gentle and tax collector.

Meaning not that we cast them out and cast dispersions on them, but that now we have an evangelistic appeal.

We have an evangelistic situation that we're gonna be making to this person. If he's been confronted by one person and then that same person with two or three witnesses, and then the entire church has appealed to him, then we are to put him out and we are to not regard him as a brother who is living in sin, but then to go to him with an evangelistic appeal and seeking to evangelize him, assuming that he might be an apostate.

He might be somebody who has left the fold and he is walking in sin, and now we want to evangelize him.

So that I think is the process that we have spelled out there in Matthew 18. Now, with a public ministry, we have an entirely different situation.

You have people who publicly are slandering the name of Christ or maybe slandering brothers or teaching false doctrine, teaching heresy, leading people astray, destroying families and making shipwreck of the faith.

There's no slow methodical process where I have to go to Beth Moore or Charles Stanley or Morris Sorello or Benny Hinn privately before I can say anything about them publicly, because I would never as a local pastor and a local flock,

I would never have the opportunity to do that, nor do I have the responsibility to do that because I am basically to stand against false doctrine and against heresy.

And I think that our approach to false doctrine heresy is different than our approach to somebody sinning against me in a personal way.

So I hope that kind of spells out why I think that this is different and what Matthew 18 is teaching there.

Yeah, and one of the things I always point out when it comes to Matthew 18 is the fact that when people look at Matthew 18, they so often, when they get to that second step where they bring two or three witnesses, they wanna go and prejudge the witnesses.

They go and, let's first talk about, let me tell you what happened, and then you come as, no. I think what you said is the way we need to address it is the fact that, no, you come, they may not even know what's going on.

That may be the first time they're hearing it. They're there to witness the unrepentance of a person. And sometimes, if you haven't prejudged those witnesses, they witness that the person who's making the accusation is actually the one that's wrong, not the one that they say sinned.

And so that's why you shouldn't do that. If you're honestly looking for truth, then you don't mind doing that.

And like you said, with public ministries, the reason I don't think this applies to public ministries is because this is what they've done in public.

Now, let's get to the one example you gave. So you get that elder in a church who is, you can smell the alcohol on his breath.

He's a little too friendly with a woman. You see that in public. Well, now, how do we deal with that?

Because there's two passages that we should look to when it comes to dealing with an act like that.

Now, I wanna deal with that before we deal with the Beth Mores, because that's really where we wanna hone in on, because that's where we hear this so often.

But when we think about, first off, 1 Timothy 5, when we get there in verse 19, it's gonna give us the instructions on how to confront an elder, because Paul gives us some ways of doing that and some ways not to do that.

And basically, he's gonna tell us that you shouldn't rush into that. If you're gonna confront an elder, according to verse 19, it says, do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses.

Now, if you're there in public, and it's clear, and you can smell it on their breath, I think that this is a little bit different, maybe, than what

Paul's argument would be. I actually think there, in that example, we should really go to the 1

Corinthians 5 passage, because if you read 1 Corinthians 5, that is a sin that was so public.

This is a case that even the pagans wouldn't even do, he says in verse one.

There's sexual immorality, a man who is with his father's wife, and they're all praising their tolerance for this sin.

And Paul is saying, in verse one, it is actually reported there is sexual immorality among you of a kind that's not tolerated even among pagans.

Boy, does this verse and passage fit for the church today, doesn't it? I mean.

Yeah, yeah, we've got that kind of sin going on in all kinds of churches that will not and do not exercise church discipline.

But they wanna tell, if you confront them, correct them, expose them, they're gonna tell you you didn't come to them privately.

And yet, what are they doing publicly? They're doing something even the pagans wouldn't do. They're praising their tolerance for sinful acts.

Now, I used to think it was crazy, 20, 25 years ago, when we would hear about churches that there was one case

I knew of, churches that had deacons, the deacons in a church were swapping wives.

And they were praising the church that was so open. And I'm like, that's insane because even unbelievers don't do it.

But now the unbelievers have gone so far, they've surpassed it. But there are unbelievers who would never be promoting some of the, well, the promoting of homosexuality, promoting of different things we see in churches nowadays being promoted.

And I think that's where this would come in. If you see an elder in a church, even if he's not in your church, an elder from a neighboring church, and he's drunk in Walmart, I think that fits under here.

And what you see in 1 Corinthians 5 is that process was sped up quite a bit to going right to a public exposing because this man's sin was publicly known.

And I think this is a passage we really got to look at when we are dealing with this. Right. Yeah, I think that that's true.

And one of the principles that I think we can glean from Matthew 18 is that the accountability and confrontation for sin should be as private as the sin is and be kept as small as possible.

And that's the principle we have. You go to him privately first, and then you take two or three witnesses, then you tell it to the church, and then you put them out and evangelize them.

There's increasing circles of accountability and knowledge there as each step is taken.

You're going from one to two or three and then the entire church. And I think the principle behind that is that if my wife sins against me,

I don't need to step up in church on the next Sunday morning and let everybody know. And I don't even need to tell everybody about the process that I took in trying to reconcile that with her.

You know, it might be that she and I just sit down and we have a conversation together and it's taken care of. I don't necessarily need to tell the church that.

So I think that our accountability, our confrontation, and our dealing with sin should be kept in as small of circles as we can.

If you have a sin that is public, if an elder sins against the congregation, he's embezzling funds, you don't try and keep that private.

I think this was one thing that gets some churches into hot water sometimes is that they have a sexual sin.

For instance, we saw this with some big churches in recent years where there's a sexual sin committed by somebody in the congregation.

They try and keep law enforcement out of it. They've tried to keep everybody out of the know on that sin that is an enormous sin that has affected a lot of people by somebody in ministry.

And they went the wrong direction with that. When you get higher and higher with people in ministries and larger venues of accountability and areas where they can have influence, you want to have that accountability and that exposure to be larger, as Paul says, so that those who continue in sin, you rebuke in the presence of all so that the rest will be fearful of sinning.

So you have somebody who's in a large position of public ministry and they do something shameful, I don't think that that should be swept under the rug.

But if you have a smaller sin, a smaller situation, a smaller circle, it should be kept privately as possible.

And only the people who are directly affected by it ought to be the ones who are brought into that.

And it needs to be kept as small as you can to deal with the sin in a biblical, God -honoring way. That make sense?

And the reality is the reverse is just as true. You keep it as private as you have to, but public sin is public.

Yeah, you have to rebuke it publicly and you have to deal with it publicly. If all you do is deal with it privately, then you haven't served any purpose in warning others or correcting others or correcting the false doctrine.

Yeah, I don't know how many times I have been called in to counsel pastors in situations.

And I can think of one where an assistant pastor had gone over to a young lady's house, had made sexual advances to her, and the pastor wanted to keep it quiet.

The pastor just said, you got to resign, you can't be a pastor anymore.

And he didn't want to say what it is just to not embarrass the assistant pastor.

And the end result, I said, no, you must, because people have to understand this is not a simple thing you're doing.

It's not just saying he was in sin, we're going to leave it at that, because people need to know. That's what we end up seeing in the 1

Timothy 5, that when you do warn them, okay, you warn them in front of the church so that basically everyone would be afraid, but there would be some fear.

They would realize that there's a purity of the church. And that's the way that it should be. And what ended up happening was he didn't do that, thinking he'd make it easier.

Well, the woman was upset because she was basically being called a liar because the assistant pastor was able to tell his side of the story and the pastor was staying quiet.

And that causes a whole bunch of problems. The other thing that ended up happening is by not exposing it, he's able to go on to another church and do this again.

Yeah, he doesn't learn anything. There's no grace to him. He hasn't learned anything. The process does not benefit the offender because the offender doesn't have to suffer the consequences of what he's doing and see the shame of his shameful behavior.

And so there is no then deterrent to doing it again. And people think they're trying to do good to the person.

Like, well, I won't embarrass him. No, okay, I think what it is, is that people don't want to have to make the difficult decisions and say the difficult things.

And so what they're doing really is they want to avoid what they know they should do in exposing someone.

And it's just easier not to and let them move on. I don't know how many times I've heard of cases where I've had to come in and found out that somebody was, that the sin was known about in previous churches, but they were able to move on and continue to sin because no one wanted to say anything.

And when they sin in public, and I just think about some of the things that Justin and I got accused of when the

Philippines, all we did was quote these people. Now, I'm sorry if quoting them and then quoting scripture and the quoting of scripture shows that the quote that the people make is unbiblical, that's not me slandering them.

That's me quoting scripture and quoting them. Now, if I misquote them, that might be something. If I say this is what they said and they didn't actually say it, that would be something.

But giving an actual quote, and in the case that we did, we had not only the quotes, sometimes we just played the clips of them saying it.

Well, that's not slander. The only thing that exposes is that the people that are accusing

Justin and I and others that do this of slander is because they realize what's being said is wrong, but they don't want to believe it's wrong.

So what's the purpose of this accusation? Let's talk about this briefly. Why is it that people make this accusation?

And I want to deal with this after a break, but the thing that we end up seeing is this is a common behavior from so many false teachers that when someone exposes them, the same exact accusation comes out so often.

Have you gone to them? I want to address that and ask you the question when we come back from this break on why false teachers make this accusation in the first place.

What's up, everyone? This is James Watkins, host of the Five Solas Podcast and founder of Five Solas Ministries.

Be sure to check out our podcast that releases every Thursday on your favorite podcasting app as we discuss

Christian doctrine and dive into the Reformed theological distinctives and their continued relevance for the church and world today.

Grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.

Join us each episode as we discuss the truths of these foundational rallying cries of the Protestant Reformers and how this material helps challenge and direct the current church in its life of worship and witness.

Visit us online at www .fivesolasministries .com. That's www, the number five, solasministries .com

to learn more information about the ministry and to also check out our awesome Five Solas lineup of t -shirts and gospel tracks.

And as always, may all that you do be done to the glory of God. Solely, Dale, Gloria.

All right, now the next commercial really isn't a commercial. I mean, just wanna update you guys with something.

And that is, are you interested in going to Israel? Well, if you are, if you wanna go see the

Holy Lands, you can join Justin Peters and myself. We're trying to plan a trip to Israel in 2021.

It's gonna be put on by Striving for Eternity Ministries. Justin and I will be speaking along with Dr.

Anthony Silvestro and Frank Mullis. We were planning this. It's in the early stages.

So here is something for those of you who are listening right now. If you're listening, as we drop this, we have a survey that will be on the page at Striving for Eternity.

So if you go strivingforeternity .org, on the front page will be a link talking about the trip to Israel.

Here's the thing. There is a survey to fill out. If you fill out the survey, those that fill out the survey are the first people that get invited.

We are limited to 55 people. That is the max. And well, actually 54, because we keep a spot for our guide.

But we have 54 people that are able to go. That is the max. We are cutting it off because we're only gonna do one bus so that everyone gets to spend more time with the different speakers.

And so because of that, we are doing a survey to see who has an interest in going.

We plan to go in March of 2021. All the details are not solidified yet.

We are getting that. But we will have the details at strivingforeternity .org. Go there.

You can find out more about the trip. We have a trip that's similar to it that is happening in 2020.

And you could see some of the places we'd be going. It is a 13 -day trip. It will cost probably about $5 ,000 per person because that covers your flights from New York to Israel, your hotel, the breakfast and dinner, and all of the guides and everything else.

This is a longer trip than most people do. So we get to see a little bit more than most people do. There are some possible extended trips that we'll have as well.

And that's why we need this survey. But when we do open up the trip, only those who fill out the survey get invited first.

And I could tell you that that survey has already gone out. And in the first day, we had over 30 people that already filled it out with 23 people that are very seriously interested in attending.

And so we're gonna go to the people that fill out the survey first. We're gonna have the survey up only for a few weeks.

So please go to strivingforeternity .org if you are interested. This is for March of 2021.

You have plenty of time for those who need to start saving money to put money aside. But this will be a trip that many don't get to do in their lifetime.

It's a once -in -a -lifetime type of trip. And it is gonna be really cool because being that we're gonna do a little bit of an extended trip, we're gonna go to some places most people don't get to go.

So if you're interested in going to Israel in 2021, March 2021, go to strivingforeternity .org

and the details will be there. Now, when that trip is fully planned out, we will have the details at strivingforeternity .org

where you can register once that opens up to everybody else. Because many of the people that fill out the survey, well, life happens and they may not be able to all make it when it actually comes time.

And so even though we may get more than 50 people that fill out the survey, it doesn't mean they're all gonna go.

So we'll have all those details up there. So we want to get you excited about that now. There are some things we're hoping to work out that no other trip there does, but I can't release those details yet because we don't know if that's gonna happen, but working on some really neat things.

So with that, I want to ask you, Jim, the question I started with is, why do you think so many false teachers use this accusation against people that expose them or correct them publicly for what they say and do in public?

Well, it's a very easy way of deflecting criticism because they're playing to usually an ignorant audience that doesn't understand the purpose of Matthew 18.

And most people have never even seen Matthew 18 played out in a church discipline setting or situation.

And so they just read the verse and say, oh yeah, it says if somebody sins, go to him privately.

And that's what he's saying. He's saying, go to him privately. So he must be applying Matthew 18 right. And really that plays on an ignorant populace who hear that.

And it's a very easy way of deflecting the criticism, as I said, because you can just simply say, well, they never came to me privately.

See how sinful they are? They can't even correct me. They can't even correct me correctly. And really,

I think it's easy to deflect the criticism that way because following that type of an approach would be nigh unto impossible with somebody who's in a public ministry, who has said something publicly or taught heresy publicly or has done something that is worth public rebuke.

It would be impossible for people to go to them privately. Yes, and I actually think that with this, it's almost time for us to play a game.

Let's play a game. Now it's time for Name That Fallacy.

Because what we see here, Jim, is actually a logical fallacy called a red herring.

You brought up the point, it's a deflection. The purpose of it is not just to deflect, but it actually changes the topic.

But I think when you see people that do this, they use a red herring. A red herring fallacy is when someone is going to try to deflect from the real topic at hand to change topics, to usually try to get someone else to be on a defensive so that they start defending themselves and the person who's actually wrong or who cannot support their argument doesn't have to anymore.

And that's what I end up seeing. You're right, they deflect. But I'll say this. In one way,

I think it's a brilliant deflection. You think about the parable that Christ gave about the person who, the slave, whose master's going to put him out, and he goes to all the creditors and says, okay, cut your bill in half.

And the Lord says that's shrewd. The world is very shrewd this way. I think this is a very shrewd way of dealing with the deflection because it does two things.

One, it plays the victim. The false teacher actually gets to play the victim and be like, oh, poor me, they're attacking me.

And the other thing is they get to sound like they're the spiritual ones. Look how spiritual I am. I'm the one saying that we should follow

Matthew 18. You're not. And usually what they'll do is they'll say, I'm not going to speak about this, as if they're being more spiritual because they're not going to speak about it because they haven't spoken privately to the person.

Here's the thing I often find when they do that, and I don't know if you've noticed this, Jim, is they say they won't speak about it, but then they'll say,

I won't speak about slanderous people like that. And what are they doing? They're slandering, right?

But they're saying they're not going to do such a thing. And they're actually saying, well,

I won't speak about that because a lot of times, as we know, there's a lot of people with Justin Peters and his ministry, they know what he's saying.

They just don't want to give him any attention. So a lot of these false teachers, I'm not going to say anything about that.

They haven't come to me privately. This wasn't the proper manner. We heard that recently from Beth Moore when people just asked her questions in public, what's your stance on homosexuality?

She didn't want to answer that publicly. And people were like, okay, she's like, well, they didn't come to me in the proper manner so I'm going to block them online.

What, I mean, do you make yourself available? I mean, if she really wanted, she could have said, contacted these ladies and said, hey, you wanted to have some questions answered, let's talk.

Instead, she blocks them saying they didn't come to me in the right manner. She doesn't want to be discussing it privately either.

She doesn't want to be handled privately. She doesn't want to be confronted privately. She doesn't want to have private conversations with any of these folks. Yeah. Instead, she uses her public ministry to state publicly certain things and even slander people publicly, accusing generally speaking, most

Christians of white nationalism, et cetera. She says things publicly that are in error.

She teaches some false doctrines publicly, abuses scripture publicly, and yet she refuses to handle anything that anybody says publicly, but then she will not either submit to a private meeting with them either.

And so it's a way of insulating herself from all criticism and making anybody who criticizes her look as if they are the ones in sin, sinning against poor

Beth. And Beth Moore's not the only one who does this. I mean, like you pointed out, the false teachers typically do this and people who have taught false doctrine typically do this.

This is their way of maintaining distance from their critics and even taking the high road or at least looking like they're taking the high road without ever having to answer for their slanders or their false doctrines.

And that's what it's trying to avoid. They've done wrong. Typically, I think they know they've done wrong, but they just don't want to have to answer for it.

Yeah. A lot of them, I think, think, and I can't say this for all of these public ministries that are in this category, but I do think for some of them, at least, there's going to be an element of this where they think they're too big to have to stoop down to answering the little people and to have to answer this.

Some of them, I do believe, think that because their ministry is so big, they think that's the blessing of God. They use that.

I know one person, one pastor here in New Jersey who has used very worldly means to grow the church bigger.

And now that the church is really big, he actually said to another pastor, you can't criticize what we do at the church because we have grown so much.

Well, my response is, you know what? The Mormon church and the Jehovah Witnesses have grown much bigger than you.

Should we not criticize them? Yeah, Joel Osteen can grow a big church.

It says nothing about the blessing of God. Size is not, there's no necessary correlation between the size of one's ministry and the blessing of God.

Yeah. And I mean, this is just, they think that, well, we've gotten so big, we don't have to be answering to people.

And the reality is every one of us, I know you well enough to know that if someone in your church was to come to you and say, you know,

Pastor Jim, I knew you preach this, but I have a different view of this or I have a different understanding, I think you're wrong.

If they came to you with scripture, I know you well enough to know you'd hear them. You may disagree, but you'd hear them.

Yeah, no, I would sit down and talk with anybody. I'm always open to a discussion like that.

The attitude that you're describing between the public ministry, the public ministry who says they're not coming to me privately as a way of deflecting and the guy who says you can't criticize us because look at the success that we have.

It's the same base attitude. It's that pride. It's the desire to not be accountable to other people.

It's the desire to simply be able to do what you want to do and not have to give any kind of an answer without any kind of accountability for it to anybody else.

It's the same attitude in both cases. And so this comes up with a question that I think we need to address and I would like us to spend a bulk of our time on this because the question we end up having is, well, how do we handle exposing or correcting or criticizing public ministries?

There are plenty of examples of people that don't do it well. We'll discuss some of those.

And then there's ones that do it well and there's, I think, certain things we should think about when we do this.

So let's do that after this break. Can you prove that God is a trinity?

Can you prove that Jesus is God? Can you defend the Christian faith? And what is it that Christians truly believe?

The new book by Andrew Rappaport, What Do We Believe? will answer those questions and more.

Some people just don't understand what the church is today, but this book will go through the history and meaning of the church and what's more important than to understand man's sinfulness and God's salvation.

Get your copy at whatdowebelievebook .com or at the strivingforeternity .org store.

The good news is Striving for Eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

That's right, the art and science of interpreting scripture. The bad news is somebody attending might be really upset to discover

Jeremiah 29 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to strivingforeternity .org

to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. Okay, and that's really what we're dealing with right here is

Bible interpretation. I mean, why is it that we need to expose some public ministries?

Because they're not following the Bible. It's not our opinion. There are some ministries who try to make, well, are they really ministries?

Let's think about that. There's some people that try to make a living off of exposing other people in public and they don't do it the right way.

Now, I'm gonna go back. Jim, I don't know if you remember this. There used to be a guy that had a notebook called the discernment notebook.

Are you ever familiar with that? No, no. Okay, I'm a little bit older than you. So when

I had Phil Johnson on, he remembered this guy very well. This guy used to send out, you'd pay him and he would send out every month a new expose on somebody.

And exposing, what a heretic they are. Big thing is, and the reason Phil Johnson became so aware of him is this guy did an expose on MacArthur saying that he didn't believe that the blood of Christ was necessary for our salvation.

And caused him, for years, just followed him around. Even though he's -

I remember that controversy. Yeah, and he's corrected it, but people still know about it because of this one guy that you'd pay and he'd give you a new article every month.

Now, here's the thing. Are there really that many people that you can expose before you run out? Well, yeah, eventually you run out of people to expose.

I mean, I think initially there's some good things that he probably found in a lot of discernment ministries.

They find some good articles, good things that they expose and it's like it's helpful for the body of Christ.

But then like this guy, well, I gotta keep this going. This is now the way I'm making money.

I gotta keep that train going so I gotta find someone else to expose. And that's what they're looking to do.

They're looking for somebody to correct or expose publicly. And they're looking for someone with a big public ministry because the bigger the ministry, the more attention they get on them.

And you end up seeing that they do things that they don't actually have to be honest. They end up cutting corners. At first, they may have good stuff, but then they cut corners because they gotta produce something.

And the more they gotta produce, the more corners they're gonna cut to the point where they just start making things up and trying to make arguments.

I mean, I could think of the one guy, his name is Josh. I'm not gonna give his

YouTube channel because they don't wanna give him the attention, but you'll know who he is. He recorded a phone call with Justin Peters and was trying to get

Justin to say that MacArthur is a heretic. His argument is, well, MacArthur hangs out with Piper and Piper is hung out with TG Jakes.

Therefore, MacArthur is a heretic. The argument I gave to Josh on this is, well, let me get this straight.

If I use your argument, you and I have gone to dinner and hung out together and I've been with MacArthur.

That makes you a heretic. He's like, no, that's not the way it works. I'm like, oh, amazing how it only works on others, but not when it applies to you.

Funny how that is. It only works with three degrees of separation and not four. Well, not three that include me.

Exactly. These discernment guys are never discerning about themselves. A lot of times, and this is the first question

I ask. When someone asks me if I know about a discernment blogger and the first thing

I want to know about that person is, what church does he go to? Because so many of these guys don't go to any church.

Like this guy, Josh. They want to hold everybody else accountable. They themselves do not want to be accountable to anyone. Yeah, and they can't find a church that agrees with them on everything because they're so busy criticizing everybody that I think if Christ came and stood before them, they would find ways to critique him and say that he's not up to the standard.

Yeah, I agree. Because the standard is one of their own making for the most part. And this is the thing.

This is the wrong way of doing, of going about exposing people. Look, if you have to cut corners, if you have to tell lies, if you have to,

I know one person who was trying to expose a public person and actually put this article together trying to say that he believes in works -based salvation.

But when you see the quotes that they put, they actually put in quotes, this person says this, and I couldn't find that quote from that person anywhere.

And when I confronted the author, he's like, well, that's what he means. I'm like, no, no, no, you said he said this.

Where's this quote from? You added the word, you added words to a quote he did say, but you added words that completely reverse or change the meaning of what he said.

And he's like, well, that's what he meant. Now, that's a thing when people are doing that, they're no longer being honest.

And that's not the way to expose a teacher. If you have to rely on dishonesty or cutting corners or trying to just find something to expose a person, then you are not doing it biblically.

If you have the truth on your side, you do not need to rely on such measures as trying to come up with three degrees of separation or six degrees of separation or however many degrees of separation

I need to make it that you're a heretic or to sit here and try to twist people's words.

If they're actually saying things, when you think about what Justin and I did in the

Philippines or what he does with his clouds without waters thing, he quotes people, he plays clips of people.

He lets them quote themselves. That's the way to do it because what are you doing? You're not misrepresenting what they're saying.

You're letting them say exactly what they said. And if they're wrong, that's all you need to do. Yeah, and you can be honest with the context in a situation like that, because if what they're saying is wrong, then you can give the entire context.

You don't need to do sound bites and snippets and just half sentences and cut off in the middle of a thought, et cetera.

You can give the entire context because it's not, anybody can be made to be a heretic if quoted out of context.

You could do that. You could take a Sunday sermon that I preach, probably pull one out of a lottery, and you could probably go through there and grab a snippet, a half of a sentence and take that and publish it and turn me into a heretic.

Because a lot of times it is the context in which something is said that gives the meaning and you can't take it out of its context and then say, well, that's what he meant.

Like the example that you gave. Well, I actually saw an article about someone that was supposedly supposed to be exposing a public figure.

And one of the quotes was something the guy actually said. But the very next sentence contradicted what the first sentence said.

And the first sentence was a quote of the person he was criticizing. So he's quoting someone else.

And he did say that, but it wasn't original with him. He's quoting someone else. And then went to refute it.

And so this person puts that first sentence in that wasn't actually his. He was saying what someone says and then gives the refutation.

They ignored the refutation and just took the quote. And I mean, you could do that with my sermons all the time because I'll often say, some commentators will say this and some commentators will say this.

And here's why I think this is this. Well, just because I'm saying this is what other commentators say does not mean that's my position.

Right, yeah, exactly. With some of the things you've seen, are there any other things you see with wrong ways that discernment ministries end up doing this discernment that we should be aware of and warned of?

Because there is a rise of discernment ministries, I believe, because I think it's a quick way to build a platform.

And I think that's how a lot of people are using it. And so what I'd like to hear you do kind of give us a warning against discernment ministries.

How can we spot a discernment ministry that we should be leery of? Yeah, I would turn to 2

Timothy 2, verse 24, where Paul says, the Lord's bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness, correcting those who are in opposition.

If perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will.

And I think that in that passage, and if memory serves, that passage was what Phil Johnson preached from at the

Last Shepherds Conference that you and I were at. And he talked about, he applied that to discernment ministries, and Phil did a fantastic job of just dealing with this passage.

I think this was the one. And it is very easy to be quarrelsome, and it's very easy to correct people when they are wrong, but it is difficult to do so in a way that is patient, gentle, desiring repentance rather than clicks, or traffic, or downloads, or memes, or Facebook posts, or social media interaction.

You know, all of those things get into the middle of that desire to correct those who are in opposition that Paul describes there.

He says that the goal of that is that God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth. And so there has to be truth involved in that.

I think one of the things that I look for in trying to find out if a discernment ministry is worth my watching, my gleaning anything from, is to ask, do they seek to advance the truth in this?

Not only understand what the truth is, but to advance the truth. And are they loose with the truth? Are they shoddy with it?

Do they sensationalize things? Do they say things that are just kind of a little edgy? Do they ever point you in a direction of thinking something about a public ministry, or a person, and kind of, like innuendo, kind of lead you down a trail of thinking, well, if he believes this, and he hangs out with this person, then he must be that type of a person, without actually saying it.

Sometimes they'll try and be sensationalistic, and I think we need to stay away from that. Paul's description here of how a

Lord's bond servant is to correct those who are in opposition, I think is what we should look for in discernment ministries.

And if we see somebody who's quarrelsome, it just looks like they're always picking for a fight. You know, the

Monday morning, they've got to post something on Monday morning, they've got to have it up by Friday to get that weekend traffic.

They've always got to have some new blog post that's generating clicks, and likes, and shares on social media.

And the more quarrelsome the headline, the more likely it is to generate that type of interaction, that type of support, especially in today's highly charged, balkanized, almost, political and cultural environment, where no matter what happens, everybody has to take a side, everybody has to become entrenched immediately, and go to battle, and pick up arms, and fight everybody over whatever the smallest little disagreement happens to be.

It's easy to be quarrelsome, and we need to look for people who try to do the discernment ministry in a way that is not quarrelsome.

I think, personally, that Justin Peters nails this as good or better as anybody I've ever met. Well, I would say, and we'll get to the right way to do it,

Justin and Todd Friel are two of the experts in this arena, but - Oh, I think so. Yeah, I'm not surprised.

But here's the thing I would look for. Let me add to what you said, because I think you're exactly right, the guy who's quarrelsome. But there's another thing

I look for, the guy who is not just looking for a fight, but almost gleeful when he finds out someone's done something publicly that he can write an article on, or expose.

And I think of what Paul said in Philippians 3 .18. Here's Paul having to basically expose people.

I mean, in verse 17, he says, "'Brothers, join in imitating me, "'and keep your eyes on those who walk "'according to the example you have in us.'"

But then in verse 18, he had to say this, "'For many of whom I have often told you, "'and now tell you, even with tears, "'walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.'"

This is what I want to see in a discernment blogger. I want to see someone who has tears when someone sins.

When you have that public pastor who's committed adultery, I want to see the guy weeping and praying for that person, not gleeful that he's got an article that he can write.

That's going to be the difference. I mean, having someone that has a concern for that person's soul.

You said this earlier in the show, when you talked about church discipline, and the fact that when we practice church discipline, it's not, okay, hey, you're excommunicated, you're gone.

No, we start evangelism because we care about the soul. We brought it up a second time. We talked about the fact that you do no good to the person who's sinning by not confronting their sin because they don't grow spiritually from that.

The motivation in exposing a false teacher would be for their repentance. I mean,

I know for myself, the reason that I wanted to get together with these false teachers down in the Philippines when we went there and tried to get together with them was for one reason.

If we could sit down with them and expose their sin to them, that they would repent, they could go back to their churches and the whole church maybe could repent and see a revival.

So start at the top, fine. But the reality is that our concern is for their soul. Now, let's talk about the right way to do it.

You mentioned one, I mentioned another. You mentioned Justin Peters, I mentioned Todd Friel. I think those are the two best examples we have if people want to see how discernment could be done right.

And I'll mention with Todd, I did an episode and I'll link it in the show notes.

And I did an episode of The Rap Report with Todd Friel. And on that episode, we went through the issue of discernment.

I had two episodes that were backed back. One with Phil Johnson on that message you referred to.

You referred to the message that he did it at Shepard's Conference.

And what you end up seeing there is the week before that,

I dealt with Judge Knott with Todd Friel. And Todd gave us six things to evaluate when it comes to the rules he uses before exposing or talking about someone.

He's careful with doing that. He doesn't just jump on it. And that's what that episode we dealt with was how to go about exposing these public ministries.

And so that episode, I strongly recommend, if you want to go back, it's episode 50. Go back and look for that.

I'll put the link in the show notes because that will help you in having an idea. You get to hear right from Todd how he goes about the thinking process should

I expose this person publicly or not? That was basically a question I asked him. Now you,

Jim, have worked very closely with Justin Peters and you know his thinking process. You've had a lot of interaction with him over that different times of having to expose people and not.

He's one of the best, I agree with you. And so what should we look for?

How do we properly go about exposing a false teacher or correcting someone who has a public ministry who we don't have access to?

I'll preface it with this. If you have any access to the person privately, go to them privately.

Because once you go publicly, they get defensive. I had an opportunity to speak with Robert Shuler Jr.

He added me on Facebook and we started dialoguing, got a chance to talk to him.

We had extended conversations. When I came out to California, I was hoping to be able to take him out for a cup of coffee and sit down, talk to him face -to -face.

But by that point, I started correcting some of the teaching and the end result was he ended up unfriending me and we never got that cup of coffee.

But I never went public with it. I had an opportunity to go private with it. That's always the best way to do it.

Now if I go private and nobody knows that that conversation happened, fine.

But if I have to make it public and write up an article and expose his false teaching, well,

I could do that. But if I have the opportunity to do it privately, that's going to be received much better.

Yeah. Yeah, Justin has done this too. If he has an opportunity to go privately, he will. There was a period, there was something that David Jeremiah had done or endorsed some while back that Justin was waiting for an opportunity to talk to him.

He had sent David Jeremiah a letter talking to him about the situation, sent him,

I think, a copy of his DVDs. And then Justin was in, oh, is he in San Diego?

I think Justin was in San Diego where David Jeremiah's church is. And he attended the Sunday service and there was a place where you could meet him and greet him afterwards.

And Justin went up and approached him and just tried to gently talk to him about it and express some concern.

And he was quickly ushered away. And Justin did, Justin's not the evangelical

Pope. He can't just call up David Jeremiah and get an audience with him right away. And guys like that are often very unapproachable.

Justin did what he could before he went public with his criticism. And I think that he has done,

I know he has done the same in other situations as well. Justin is not the type of person, and since we're just using him as an example,

Justin is not the type of person that relishes the fight. I have heard him say, and I can testify that this is the truth, that he would prefer to work himself out of a job where there was no false teaching and no false teachers that needed to be refuted.

And he could just hang up his crutches and do something different for a living. And I don't know what he would do for a living other than what he does, but he would be willing to do almost anything other than what he does if he could get away with not having to confront these guys.

So that's the type of not quarrelsome attitude that we're talking about. The gentleness that is modeled in an approach like that.

He doesn't like to have to publicly critique anybody. It's not something he relishes.

And then you contrast that with other discernment and blog ministries that we might be familiar with.

They relish the fight. It's not just the fight that they relish, but it's really the opportunity to come back at their critics and answer the objections and expose it and make it as broad and big and public and nasty as possible.

And they like that. They don't stay away from that. Justin does everything that he can to be as under the radar as he can be in that way.

Just being gentle and not quarrelsome. He does not look forward to having to confront or take a stand on those things.

It's just not something that... You wouldn't call him a wuss, but it's just not... He doesn't enjoy the battle of handling false doctrine.

And that's the thing that you end up seeing. I mean, here you have someone who he's slow to come out publicly with people.

I know that and you know that. Others may not. Slow to engage in the conflict. Yeah. And it's not that he's a pansy.

He's one of the bravest. I mean, he stood up and called Todd Bentley, a false teacher, to his face.

He's gotta be one of the bravest men I've ever met in my life. So he's not afraid of conflict.

He just doesn't enjoy it. And that's the difference. There are people that are in blog ministries that confront public ministries publicly that not only are they brave in the sense that they like to...

Well, as brave as you can be from behind a keyboard, I guess, but they're willing to engage the conflict, but they like it.

They like the conflict itself. It's the fight that they like and not necessarily the truth.

And that's the way it comes across. And maybe some guys are just unable to communicate their love for the truth and their desire to see repentance and their mourning over the sin and the false doctrine of others.

Maybe they're just unable to communicate that in a public forum and we totally misread it. That's entirely possible.

But it certainly seems that from all that they put out publicly, that it's the fight that they like.

And they would be disappointed. They're disappointed when there's nothing worth going after in someone. And that's the thing that we end up seeing is we should be slow to speak publicly about these things because we want to be careful.

Once we say these things publicly and mention people by name publicly, that does damage to...

Well, if we're wrong, that does damage to the ministry God's doing in their life.

And it does damage to the work that God is doing on earth. And some people are less concerned about that and more concerned about building their platform.

And quite frankly, God is not interested in your platform. He doesn't need you or your platform.

He can do it just fine without you. That may shock some of these discernment bloggers, but that's the truth.

We need to be slow to speak with this. And some guys think that the very act of exposing error is itself a contention for the truth.

And that's not necessarily the case. You can expose error. I could get up and publicly mock what

Benny Hinn teaches or what Creflo Dollar teaches or one of these Word of Faith guys teaches, but to get up and publicly mock it or expose it and ridicule it, that's not the same as having a heart for the truth so that people may understand true doctrine.

And that's where Justin shines is you see him doing the seminars where he will take what they say, compare it to scripture, teach through the scriptures, show the true doctrine and the truth because really his passion is for the truth and defending the truth against the attacks of those in error.

And the bad way of doing this, exposing people in public ministry is that they just enjoy exposing people.

It's not even necessarily the truth that they want to contend for. They think that they're contending for the truth by simply exposing other people.

And that is not the case. See, and I do know what Justin would do if all the false teachers stopped teaching falsehood.

I do know what Justin would do because he's an outstanding Bible teacher that he doesn't get to teach on the

Bible that much because everyone has him speak on these false teachers, but he's an outstanding

Bible teacher. So before we get to some closing comments,

I do want to make some announcements for folks. If you have been blessed in any way by Striving for Eternity, the

Christian podcast community, this podcast, would you consider giving a donation to help us out?

We have been notified by our largest donor. He's going to be retiring.

This is a person who really helped us be able to travel the world, to be able to go into churches where they wouldn't be able to afford speakers and do conferences, do seminars, bring people in to be able to teach a small local churches.

The majority of churches in America and around the world are under 25 people.

Most churches are very small. There's a lot of them, but no one will minister to them.

People want to minister to churches of the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands. And we've had donors that allow us to go into smaller churches, be able to reach them and encourage them and help them, even though they may be smaller, but help them grow spiritually and sometimes even in their size.

Here's the thing though. We have our major donor who he donates about a third of our budget.

He is retiring and is going to be cutting his donation at the end of the year. And so if you have been blessed by this ministry in any way, would you consider blessing us back?

Would you consider helping us out? Because we're going to have a shortfall and it means that there's going to be less we could do to go into churches, to be able to go to the

Philippines. When Jess and I went to the Philippines, they, money wasn't even discussed.

We didn't discuss any money because we don't have a speaking fee. We had to pay $2 ,400 each for flights.

We said, okay. We had to travel and they said, we'll take care of all the housing once you get here. Okay. We'd never asked for money.

We didn't ask for travel expense. We did all that because we have donors. And we are asking, we're seeking a hundred people.

That's just a fraction of the listeners that we have here. We're seeking a hundred people that would be willing to stand with us and say, you know what, we'll commit to $25 a month.

And we end up having, even if you say I can only do a small amount, that's fine. If you give just $2 a month, we're going to give you a free book,

What Do We Believe? If you give $5 a month, we're going to give you that plus What Do They Believe? You give $10 a month, we'll give you those two plus On the

Origin of Kinds. If you give $20 a month, we're going to give you those three plus Sharing the

Good News with Mormons. So we're going to, we want to bless you as well. But we hope that you have gotten something out of this ministry, that these podcasts, all the podcasts on the

Christian Podcast Community, that you've found blessings in them, that you've gotten something out of them. The podcasts in the

Christian Podcast Community are being heard in 159 countries around the world.

That's amazing to think about the impact that this ministry is able to have, literally around the world, and the support we're doing with other podcasters, working with them, training them, discipling them, so that they can be better at what they do.

And we do that with your support. Now, we're not a ministry that all the money goes toward paying salaries.

There are some that are like that. Our budget is set where basically about 80 % of the money that comes in goes toward ministry.

Only about 20 % of it goes toward administrative costs. So we're trying to be good stewards of the resources that you donate to us.

So if you'd consider donating, it would be a real help to us because we're going to be running into a time where we really are going to have to make decisions on what to cut.

Ministry -wide. Because we're just not going to be able to do a third of what we used to do.

Unless you come in the next couple of months to help us out. So go to strivingforeternity .org

slash donate today and help us out. That's strivingforeternity slash donate.

And you could donate any amount, monthly, and we're going to seek to give you some gifts for that.

And you can go either on Patreon, you could use PayPal, we have those set up. You could send a check. However you choose to do that.

We are hopeful, we don't know if we could do this, but we are hopeful to raise the funds to send a team of people out to Tokyo for the

Olympics to train up some of the churches in Japan to be able to basically teach them how to evangelize and then do some evangelism before the 2020

Olympics. 2020 Olympics, you're going to have a ton of people coming into Japan. Japan is such a dead place.

I actually know some folks that went out that are trying to work with churches in Japan to try to train them toward evangelism, and they gave up.

I mean, they were like, this place is so spiritually dead, we're just going to come and evangelize during the

Olympics because the churches were, it's so hard to get them motivated. Well, we know some people there, some missionaries that are motivated.

We want to work with them and try to train up the people to be able to use something like the

Olympics to outreach literally around the world because people from around the world come to the

Olympics, and we want to try to send a team to go there and be able to make an impact at the 2020

Olympics, and your donations make that possible. So if you'd consider helping us out, go to strivingforeternity .org

slash donate today. The link is in the show notes as well. If you could help us out, that would be a blessing.

So Pastor Jim, to wrap things up, we've talked about really this whole idea of exposing public ministries, the way the accusation people make of us needing to go privately, the way that they use this to try to play the victim and avoid having to answer things, the way not to expose people, the way to expose people.

Are there any other things that you think we need to address or discuss before we close out?

Man, I don't think so. As far as I can see, I think we've been pretty thorough with everything we've talked about here. We kind of handle it from every angle.

And I want to give a thanks to you. Your church has been a blessing. You know that if I could handle the cold, and I'd move out there, but I want to move somewhere warmer.

But I love the church there in Kootenai, Kootenai Community Church. If you guys are ever in Northern Idaho, please go check out

Kootenai Community Church. I know that, actually, you just recently had Colleen Sharp from Theology Gals was traveling up in that way.

She did stop in. We hosted her and her husband here at our house for dinner. They had dinner with us and then stayed the evening and visited.

Had a delightful time. We had a great time visiting with her. She's a real blessing. Yeah, she really said that she greatly enjoyed the time that she had with you and that it was -

Oh, it was good. That was mutual. She really had gained a lot more respect. She had respect for you before, but really getting to know you and your family got a lot more so.

I think that seems to be the trend that most people have when they meet you. I won't want to say that publicly, but I guess

I just did. Don't say that publicly. I'd have to correct you publicly. Well, Pastor Jim, thanks for coming on.

You're probably the most regular of my guest co -hosts, but I think it's because you and I are like -minded and there's a lot of these issues that we both feel very strongly about.

And it's a blessing to have like -minded brothers that can discuss these things. I appreciate you having me on.

Thank you. And folks, for next week, until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

There could be cash waiting for you at findmassmoney .gov. You might've checked before, but they're always updating names.

So check again. The Mass State Treasury has over $3 billion in unclaimed property.

Maybe it's a long lost bank account, forgotten shares of a stock, or an old paycheck you somehow forgot to pick up.

Some of it might be yours. There's a lot of money that could be yours, but you'll never know until you go.

So go to findmassmoney .gov. That's findmassmoney .gov.

We're all looking for ways to reduce energy usage and keep our homes comfortable this season and every season.

One way is to take advantage of incentives on high efficiency natural gas heating equipment from National Grid.

If your equipment is getting older, think about making the switch to a newer model because saving energy means saving money.

Exclusive incentives up to $2 ,000 are available now for energy saving furnaces, boilers, and more.