Exposing Public Ministries and People with Jim Osman

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Show Introduction and Ministry Promo

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, you know, 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, just 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 get to 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 let's, 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?

Matthew 18 and Church Discipline

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'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 is 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 going to 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.

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 want to go and prejudge the witnesses.

They go and, let's first talk about, let me tell you what happened, and then you come as witness. 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 in 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 want to deal with that before we deal with the Beth Moores because that's really where we want to 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 going to 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 going to tell us that you shouldn't rush into that. If you're going to 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, you know, 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 want to tell, if you confront them, correct them, expose them, they're going to tell you you didn't come to them privately. Yeah. 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, you know, 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 that 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 gonna 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 we were in 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.

You know? And 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.

Why False Teachers Invoke Matthew 18 to Avoid Public Correction

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.

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All right, now the next commercial really isn't a commercial. I mean, just want to update you guys with something and that is, are you interested in going to Israel? Well, if you are, if you want to 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 going to 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 strivingforeternity .org.

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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.

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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.

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So with that, I wanna ask you, Jim, and 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 it's, 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 done, 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 think, I actually think that with this, it's almost time for us to play a game. Let's play a game. 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. It is, 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 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 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 a 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 this, 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 while 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.