Christian Worldview Formation and Maintenance in 2024, then, Me and Stephen Wolfe

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Hello, greetings, and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White. Coming to you, well, I'm running everything on my own here.

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Rich is sort of, I think he's hiding in the computer someplace remotely.

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I almost told him I was gonna turn their computer off because he has family duties to be taking care of.

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I think their little cat, Cowboy, is down to about five lives, personally, given that he took

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Rich's wife out a couple, I don't know, a couple weeks, but a number of days ago, and caused her to fall, and the result of a rather major surgery,

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I would say, shoulder replacements, a major surgery. And yeah, and like all cats, has so far shown absolutely no remorse.

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Because when God made cats, he forgot the remorse part of the brain, because it's just like, especially for orange cats.

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I have an orange, we used to just call them tabbies, but we've had this conversation before. And it doesn't matter what he does.

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He just looks at you like, what, what, me? So yeah, anyway, so he's not here, and I'll tell you, it's been an interesting day, hasn't it?

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Thankfully, when I got up this morning, I happened to run into, I think, two absolutely hilarious videos, very short videos, but just goofing, happy, funny videos.

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That's a good way to start the day, I think. If you're gonna, if stuff's gonna go south the rest of the day, it's nice to start with some laughter.

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I think it's probably better for your blood pressure, and heart rate, and stuff like that. So at least

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I ran into those things from the beginning. But a pretty intense day, news -wise.

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It's amazing, I don't think most people today, even people my age, I don't think spend a lot of time thinking about how different it is to live in our modern period than just a brief period of time ago.

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I remember, gonna go back a little ways here, my family lived in a farmhouse that my dad had repaired enough for us to live in it.

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The guy didn't even wanna rent it to us, but we were so poor, my dad said, "'Let me replace some windows and doors, "'and let us live here.

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"'I'll do the work, and you give us "'a certain number of months rent -free, "'and probably never charge us more than, "'I don't know what he charges.'"

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But anyway, we were in this farmhouse. That's my first place of memory for me, outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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We might've been in the city limits, I don't remember. I was only five left, so how would I know? Anyway, and we had a black and white

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TV. We didn't have color. Well, actually no,

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I'll take that back. My dad built a color TV set for us while we were there. He worked his way through Moody Bible Institute fixing television sets, it was tubes, testing tubes, stuff like that.

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That's how he made a living while going to Moody Bible Institute. Hard worker, that man was.

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Anyways, we had a black and white TV set in the kitchen, and I have clear memory, far clearer memory than I have of yesterday, of Walter Cronkite, and the

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CBS Evening News, and the war in Vietnam, and all the events and everything that would go along with that kind of stuff.

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But even then, the blurry, I mean, what was the resolution on that stuff?

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I mean, in comparison to what we have today, in fact,

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I just happened to see a, not sure how it popped up, but a thing about the life of John Wayne.

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He died in 1979, and I was just struck by the, grainy, really, it's hard to watch.

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I mean, it's, not for me, but I grew up with black and white TV and stuff like that to begin with, but still, you get used to just this high -def stuff.

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I don't even know why we bother with high -def stuff for me, I'm ugly. The studio's cool, and I suppose you'd like to see the high -def on the warp core back there, and my really, really super duper cool,

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I don't even know what you call those things, but they are just really, really cool. Anyway, so maybe you want high -def for all that, or eventually, if the lava lamp started working, which

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I didn't get started early enough for it to be working, maybe you wanna see that, but I don't know why we bother with anything else, but man, everything was just so, hmm.

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And the thing is, if we saw stuff from Vietnam, it was videotaped, and it had been recorded minimally like the day before.

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I mean, you had to get it, you couldn't transmit it back here, so you'd get news days later, and that's just what you expected.

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During World War II, yeah, the same day as the D -Day invasion, everyone knew it was happening, but you didn't start seeing video or movie tape of it for quite some time.

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It had to physically travel to get someplace to be processed and developed.

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All us old folks remember what it was like to take a whole roll of film and just hope that something turned out, or that when you dropped it off to be processed, that it wouldn't be ruined, because I had that happen.

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I did a lot of, starting in like sixth grade, I was developing film and building a little dark room.

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I remember we built a dark room out of the bathroom in my house and taping up the door, and my parents were patient people.

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But anyway, things have changed so much. That this morning,

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I'm chatting with a dear friend of mine back in St. Charles, who

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I regularly insult. I call him the geriatric g -ster.

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He's 73 now, and I think we were talking about vertigo.

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Most conversations with your friends are about things that aren't working anymore. And then all of a sudden he said, oh man,

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Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel. And all

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I do is I turn to Twitter, there it is. I mean, you literally, boom, you've got live, high def video, rockets and explosions, and it's happening right then, right there.

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And it's hard for, I had the thought this morning because the stock market started going insane, and we've got the port strike going on, where the unions that control all that stuff, these people, they don't want automation to continue to come in, because they're gonna lose all their jobs, and they're making more money than most doctors make.

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And this kind of stuff going on, and it's just an overload, and it hits you fast.

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And the tendency, and I mentioned this article last week, the tendency is to go, oh

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Lord, but how am I gonna make it through this? And honestly, for the vast majority of it, it's not how am

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I gonna make it through this, as in living, it's how am

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I gonna make it through this and still be as comfortable as I am. Can we be honest?

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I'll just be honest about that. Maybe for you, it's completely different, but I think for the vast majority of us, it's,

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Lord, I'm scared for my comfort and my ease and my freedoms to just do a wide enough range of things that no one in human history up until the past 100 years could have ever imagined.

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Seriously, we live like kings and queens, and we are scared to death we're going to lose the ability to live like kings and queens.

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I think that's true. And so I just think we get hit with so much stuff so fast.

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I just don't think God designed us to, our minds and our spirits to do that kind of thing.

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It's overwhelming. It's truly, truly overwhelming. When we think of the speed at which information was transmitted throughout the vast majority of human history in comparison to now, we are at warp speed.

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Who even knew what that used to mean? That's never meant anything until 1967, was it?

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I think so. It just comes out so fast. And processing it, if we are not as Christians specifically seeking to cultivate, inculcate, what are the terms ending with eight can

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I come up with? Activate, educate a functional, consistent, truly biblical worldview.

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We will by default follow the culture. We'll follow the next door neighbor.

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We'll follow the people in our school, in our work. We will not necessarily abandon the faith, but we will modify the faith.

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We will twist the faith. We will subsume the claims of the faith to something that we place over that, that will make us more comfortable, make us fit in better, whatever it might be.

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And I know I've run into some people that literally mock the idea of a

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Christian worldview. I don't know how you seriously read

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Colossians chapter one and two and see the claims are there for just the awesome centrality of Christ to all things.

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In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

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Ah, it's just metaphorical. No, Paul's literally warning a local church that he's never been to, that was founded by the natural progression of the gospel out of Ephesus that he of course did found that church.

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But he's warning that church about false teachings and false doctrine.

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So he's got to be very specific. And the way he does that is with a very exalted view of Christ and not exalted as in, well,

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Paul has his view and Mark has his. That's what you get at almost any

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Bible college or seminary anymore. Certainly any state university, state college, that type of thing.

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Is that, you know, this is just a mishmash of contradictory stuff and you pick and choose and you can put together what you want, but don't tell anybody your view is right.

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That's what you get is you've got Paul's view and you got Paul's view in Colossians versus Paul's view someplace else.

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If you think this is sufficient, that's the dividing line. That's what the name of this program is, the dividing line. If you think this is a divine revelation from beginning to end, it is

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God's truth. It's consistent with itself. Then you're in a small minority.

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I keep telling you that, I hate to, and I believe that that will not always be the case. Thanks be to God.

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But right now, in Western culture especially, you believe that stuff, small minority, small minority.

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And that's where we are. So when you consider what scripture says about Christ, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in him, the one in whom all things soonest they can, they hold together.

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See, I don't remember when

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I first encountered this stuff, but it was probably back when

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I just started going to Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church. I was there for 29 and a half years, so. Consistency, consistency.

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You cannot define truth using words that are synonymous with consistency. It's the only way to recognize truth over time, truth across topics, across categories.

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Consistency, consistent means of interpreting God's truth.

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Not having one set of hermeneutics you use for this subject, one set of hermeneutics you use for that subject.

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No, you honor God's word by consistently interpreting it.

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Consistency, this is the issue. And if the divine revelation concerning who

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Jesus is, is true, if there's an empty grave in Jerusalem, if the prophecies 700 years before Christ of the

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Aviad, the father of eternity, the El Gabor, the mighty God who would be born,

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Yahweh with us, Emmanuel, coming up to that time of the year again, less than three months.

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If all of that stuff is true, then if everything sunnestechen holds together,

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Colossians 1, in him, 117, if you're looking for it, in him, and I was doing that off top my brain there, and I don't necessarily trust that anymore, don't want to lead someone, no.

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Where'd it go? Remember that all things were created through him, for him, he is for all things, all him.

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No, I was right. I finally got this,

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I finally got accordance to put the legacy in there, and it formats it interestingly. There's a line between 16 and 17, so I thought that had gone on to the next section.

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Oh, I see why. The legacy standard is interpreting 117 as to be a change over to the next topic with 118 and following.

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Okay, well, that's interesting. I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, but anyways, that's an editorial thing. All things sunnestechen hold together in him.

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That means there is truth that is knowable and consistent across all of creation.

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I would argue that modern science could not have ever come into existence without that assumption.

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I mean, when you realize how important Christian scientists were in formulating the scientific method and things like that, which of course have been hijacked and twisted and turned and made naturalistic materialist,

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I get all that, but the reason you can assume that we can discover truth about the universe around us is because we have a creator who has actually revealed himself, not just a creator who's out there someplace, who knows what he's doing or why, but a creator who has revealed himself.

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And that consistency is the very mark of truth. And so we should be cultivating the

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Christian worldview. And we need to recognize that over time, if we do not renew our commitment to that, over time, it will break down.

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If we are not, I could get into a discussion of entropy here, but just simply on a spiritual level, we will become apathetic.

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We will think that since we've done it in the past, we're doing it now when we've actually sort of given up and again, embraced worldly perspectives and things like that.

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So it's something that we need to be working on all the time. It's something that should be, well, you know,

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I'm glad to see lots and lots of folks getting more committed to physical health and physical fitness.

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And if the Lord's given you that ability, go for it. And by the way, if in the providence of God, you encounter sickness, disease, genetic issues, whatever else it might be, don't let anybody put you on a guilt trip if your body doesn't work as well as somebody else's does because of age or weakness or disease or whatever else it might be.

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You know, leave that between you and the Lord. Do with what he's given you the best you can. And just recognize there are gonna be other people who are gonna look down their noses at you one way or the other.

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But just as that's a good thing to do, it's a far greater thing to be daily disciplining ourselves so as to have the mind of Christ, think

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God's thoughts after him. Think in such a way that is honoring to God. That it's so easy for us to go, well,

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I need to behave in such a way it's honoring God. Yes, of course, definitely.

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But what about thinking in a way that's honoring to God? There's almost a,

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I'm not sure where it comes from to be honest with you. I've seen various theories, but there's almost a resistance to this amongst conservative

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Christians. God can tell me how to act, but he can't really tell me how to think as if the mind is outside the

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Lordship of Christ. But we really should be seeking to please God in all things, including in the way that we think.

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And these days, oh my, with so much coming at us from so many different directions, not only the world outside, but within the church, within theology, the divisions taking place amongst believers, you know, the reality that the

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Reformed movement, which stood together in 2004, 20 years later, is fragmented.

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All of that kind of stuff, when we recognize how many challenges we have to face, do we even ask,

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Lord, may I honor you in the way I think about the world you've placed me in, the time you've placed me in?

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Hey, you know, if you don't have a sovereign God, if you don't believe in God's sovereignty, you don't believe in God's decree, then

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I don't even know how you deal with this stuff. To be honest with you, I don't know how to talk to you about this, but when you read the

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Bible, God's placed you in this place at this time with a certain set of gifts, in a certain context, in a certain fellowship, and you're to honor him in the midst of all that.

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And it should be something that we truly work hard at. And probably spend a whole lot more time on than we do, a lot of things we waste time on.

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Let's just be honest. If you want to waste time and still pretend you're doing Christian stuff, you can find a way to do it.

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You can find a way to do it. But we need to have a goal of that Christian worldview.

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Speaking of which, it has been sad for me, anyway, to see the stuff coming out, let's see if I can find it here.

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I'm glad to see that the SpaceX crew arrived at the International Space Station to retrieve the stranded astronauts.

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I'm not gonna, no, let's not go there. There's too much to be said,

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I think, in that context. But the

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Ortlund thing, where'd it go? Oh, that was, I'm sorry, that was actually in Twitter someplace.

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And I lost it. But Meg Basham was talking about it. And it's very, very interesting to note the people that are coming out and supporting

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Ortlund's statement about supporting

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Kamala Harris. And the problem that I think we're facing today is that here in the

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United States, and I think a lot of people overseas are recognizing this as well. Look, with every presidential election, every four years, it's the most important election of our lifetimes.

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And you know, the boy can only cry wolf so many times. And since we, this is one of the conversations

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I have with my friend back in St. Charles, is I'm going, dude, you're still living in the 80s.

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You're still functioning on the idea that elections are sacrosanct.

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No one would ever play with them. There wouldn't be any voting machine tomfoolery. You wouldn't have people pulling up at three o 'clock in the morning with 100 ,000 ballots all for the same guy.

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This type of stuff just wouldn't happen back then. No one would even think about it. And you know, in the 1980s, you didn't have the public education system so completely dedicated to producing

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Marxist zombies as you have today. Have you seen some of these teachers? I know there's some good teachers out there.

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I get it, but oh my goodness, how can, I'll be honest with you, how can any

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Christian teacher be a part of the NEA? I mean, as a union,

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I mean, don't you have to dye your hair purple to join it? I mean, honestly, just have to hang an

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LGBTQ flag and a transgender flag. I was just, wow, just totally sold out.

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Anyway, I was telling them, this is the next generation coming up and you and I, we're getting old, we're gonna die and they're the ones who are gonna be voting and that's what's, unless there's a major, major, major league change, that's the direction everything's gonna go.

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So it's easy to get, oh, well, we'll get them next time. Elon Musk, interestingly enough,

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Elon Musk has said on Twitter what I've said on this program multiple times.

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I don't think Elon Musk follows me, has never heard of me. I appreciate a lot of stuff that he's done.

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This would be a very, very different election season, let's be honest, if there was not a platform for at least some reporting outside of the mainstream media which is nothing more than the paid arm of the

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Democratic Party, I mean, they should have to register as political activists because that's all they are.

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And I don't even bother arguing with people about that anymore. I figure I'm wasting my time arguing with AI bots at that point.

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I'll make a comment and all of a sudden these people show up that I've never even heard of before, they don't follow me and they're spewing the other side and I just have to realize they probably don't exist.

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There's probably not a human being on the other end of this account. And I know

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Elon's tried to do something about fake accounts but there's only so much can be done. Anyway, this election,

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Elon Musk has said what I've said. If this election goes to the

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Marxists and there's even, you'll get bots that will come after you. Oh, they're not

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Marxists, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yet a video comes out today from here in Arizona of her and Walsh laughing, which seems to be all they can do because they're airheads, laughing and posing in front of a communist banner.

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Now I don't know where this was, it said it was in Arizona. I cannot imagine anyone even jokingly doing something like that until maybe five or six years ago at the earliest.

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I mean, can you imagine that in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s?

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First decade of the 2000s, no, I can't imagine that at all.

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And yet there they are. And every time she opens her mouth and talks about equity, it's Marxism.

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When you say we all need to be at the same place, that's Marxism, that's communism.

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That's not capitalism, that's not freedom, that's not liberty. Freedom and liberty allows you to be blessed by God.

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Yeah, to be blessed by God. You can't pick this up, you cannot read

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God's law without understanding nations, borders, law codes that are to be for generation after generation.

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And private property, you can't do it. So the idea of everybody needs to be at the same place, first, that never happens.

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That didn't happen, that doesn't happen in Chinese communism, that doesn't happen in, that didn't happen in the

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Soviet Union. And see, the Chinese learned from that. They saw what happened in the Soviet Union. They saw that it really doesn't work.

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And so they've created a system and a politically totalitarian, but economically less strident form of communism because they saw what happened and why people rebelled against it, why it broke down.

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You had the elites and they could do whatever they want. And then you had everybody else and they had all the money in the world.

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They just didn't have anything to buy. And that same thing, that's what we're gonna be facing with Kamala Harris, believe you me, given what her daddy did in Jamaica.

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But anyway, we are looking at an existential situation where as Elon Musk said, as I've said, if Harris wins, you don't get to fix it in 2028.

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You don't get to fix it in 2028. She is so radical and the people controlling her are so radical that, don't get me wrong, there'll be an election in 2028, just like there's an election in Russia every few years that doesn't put

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Putin back in office. It just is a show thing. It's like, it doesn't really matter.

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Everybody knows what's gonna happen. And in every communist context like that, everybody knows who's gonna win.

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There's no competition. It's not a real election. And there's a part of me that's saying we still have a chance to stop this.

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But there's a bigger part of me that says, I think it's already too late. I think what happened in 2020, 20 ,000 mules and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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I think it may be too late. We'll see. Please, I want to be proven wrong.

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I really, really do. But the point is this isn't just, oh, it's this candidate versus this candidate.

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On the left, these candidates are not even going to be the ones making decisions. Kamala Harris has no more mental capacity than Joe Biden.

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In fact, before Joe got Alzheimer's, Joe was much brighter, even though he was a plagiarist and a liar his entire life, but it was much brighter than Kamala Harris.

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And this Waltz fellow. Yes, I was born in Minnesota, but we escaped fairly quickly.

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These are sock puppets for a cabal of people who will finish the job if they're given another four years.

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And elections in the future will just be like they are in Russia and things like that.

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It's just a rubber stamp type thing. Mono party, California, that's just how it works.

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Now the issue, the point is, the reason the Christian worldview is relevant here is, back when

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I was young, the difference between the Democrats and Republicans was, in comparison to today, we live in a land that is divided.

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I mean, wow, do we live in a land that is divided? And that can't last.

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I realized that. Someone very wise said that. And so when you look at what's happening in our country, from a

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Christian worldview perspective, the people who are seeking to make permanent their power, which means an overthrow of the

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Constitution, overthrow of the electoral system, and of course, an overthrow of the worldview that was behind the writing of the

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Constitution in the first place. These people, history tells us what they're going to do.

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We used to fight against them. We used to fight wars against them, but we have now been betrayed by traitors at the highest levels who are destroying everything that made this nation what it once was.

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And we know what their view of man is. We know what their view of marriage is. Men and women, they can't even define what a man and woman is.

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Law, it's whatever you want it to be. And you see, the people in this country did not show thanks to God for being a nation of law.

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We just, we inherited it. And the fact of the matter is when kids inherit stuff, it's just given to them.

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Who cares, right? They don't really value it. And so we didn't value being a nation of law.

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And as a result, we will become a nation of slaves. All this taking us back to Ortlin's statement, never

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Trump, this time Harris, always Jesus. And there has never been a time when it is more patently obvious that what is at stake in the election are not individuals, but the entire worldview of the country.

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And that we are talking about giving final approval to and power to a political system that will not only destroy the

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Constitution of United States and has pretty much accomplished most of that already, but is rabidly and religiously opposed to everything

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Jesus said was true, right, just, and honest. Jesus said,

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God made man male and female. The Marxist regime mocks this and wants to put into law that there is no male and female.

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There is no father, mother. There are 148 genders.

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And that if you do not support your child mutilating their body at age 12, the state will come in and take him.

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Harris and Walz believe that and will promote that.

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And if you vote for that, you're an idiot. If you claim to be a Christian and you're gonna vote for the people who will take children away from their parents to transition them, when did you lose your mind?

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When did you become insane? Stop calling yourself a Christian. If you're literally gonna go, oh yeah,

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I think it would, I think Jesus would want the state to take children from their parents to mutilate their bodies.

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I'm sorry, I can't even, I can't even get close. See, again,

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I think back to the political positions that divided the Republicans and the

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Democrats in the 1970s. Look at this. How did we get here?

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It's just like, wow. Remember, I'm an independent.

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I wish, the very fact that we don't have a candidate on the other side that can, without 47 ,000 tons of baggage, enunciate a worldview that is at least somewhat consistent with the

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Christian faith. There's the sign of judgment right there. But despite that, what you have to do, and Bob Gagnon's been saying this, and I think he's exactly right.

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He's been saying, you have to make a positive, you have to use your position as a citizen to make a positive statement against a worldview that would literally say that the insanity of transgenderism will be promoted by the government of this nation, that marriage will continue to be profaned with the approval of the government of this nation, that we will have, as Tim Walz has had, drag queens gyrating in various states of undress in the capital of the state of Minnesota.

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Let's do it in the White House and the Capitol Rotunda. They've already done it at the White House. We're just gonna do it more.

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And of course, in all of this, because it's all the culture of death, all that stuff about mutilating young children, that's just the continuation of mutilating them in the womb, i .e.

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killing them. And so here in the state of Arizona, we have a proposal on the ballot, abortion up to the time of birth, and it's the culture of death, right, left, and center.

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And here you have Ortlund, an ostensible minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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And all these TGC guys are all getting together. Well, we have to, you know, he and Sam Albury get together, and well, we need to be careful not to, you know, someone's conscience, you know.

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I'm sorry. This is what is supposed to inform your conscience. And there's not a one of you that could walk up to me with this in your hand and support the mutilation of children and the murder of children in the womb.

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You can't do it, and you know it. And every one of you wacko progressivists out there who claim, oh, the

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Bible supports us, every time I challenge you to do something about it, you run for the hills.

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And wisely so, because you know, you can never defend that stuff.

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You can never defend that stuff. So we are talking about the existential ending of a nation and a culture, blessed by God, now under God's judgment, and justly so.

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But that doesn't change the fact that as a Christian, I seek to be salt and light.

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How can I be salt and light? I can't be salt and light by running around pouring poison on everybody, which is what you're doing when you're promoting

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LGBTQIA mutilation and everything else, murder of unborn children, the whole nine yards.

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That's not salt and light. It's the exact opposite. Exact opposite of it. Couple other things, lots of other things here.

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Andrew Torba, Andrew Torba, founder of Gab, fellow who's taken a number of shots at me just as I did the same thing at Return, necessarily, because of just how degraded his worldview seems to be.

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And yet many people, including reformed people, seem to think it's necessary and cool to retweet him and promote him and things like that.

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Here's a recent tweet from Andrew Torba. The reason that bold and masculine

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Christian men, notice this has become the divisive, false, absurd, unbiblical, needs to be completely rebuked by any meaningful elder board anywhere, idea is that if you're on their side, if you're on the side of these groups, whether they be the stone choir people or whatever, you're the bold and masculine

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Christian men. So what they're doing is they're going, well, there's all this toxic masculinity stuff, and so we're gonna grab hold of that ourselves, as if masculinity is measured by testosterone rather than godly discipline over time.

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Godly discipline over time. Obviously, Jeff Durbin is not currently listening to The Dividing Line.

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I don't even know where he is. I think he's home now, finally. Oh, by the way, I'll get back to Torba here in a second.

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Point of personal privilege here, Sunday night and this coming

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Sunday, Lord willing, two -part sermon series at Apologia being preached by my son -in -law,

45:58

Eric Yeager, on Baptist covenant theology. And Sunday night was the introduction to covenant theology.

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Unfortunately, it became very clear that Eric has been more influenced by Jeff than by me because he went for an hour and 20 minutes.

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I had preached only an hour just before that, but we'll see what happens on Sunday night.

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But for those of you interested in that, especially if you saw the debate that took place up in Utah that Eric did last year, you might want to look those up and enjoy that.

46:41

I'm watching someone and I'm not sure what they're doing out in the parking lot. It almost looks like they're taking pictures of my truck.

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So excuse me if I become slightly distracted. I don't think they are, but we'll see.

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We'll keep an eye on stuff out there. When you live only an hour and a half from the

47:00

Mexican border, you keep an eye on, on especially a truck of that size.

47:07

Anyway, back to Andrew Torba. As I was saying, he says, the reason the bold and masculine

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Christian men are punished and scorned both from inside the church and by the world is because we are the biggest, we, notice he is the bold, masculine

47:25

Christian man. We are the biggest spiritual threat to the effeminate, limp -wristed

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Zionist worshiping idolaters inside the church and the synagogue of Satan outside of it.

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Now, you just sort of have to chuckle when someone wears a

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T -shirt that says, I am the bold, masculine Christian man that your mother warned you about or something like that.

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But you can always tell when someone's argumentation is based upon bravado and volume rather than content.

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When they draw the lines as we bold and masculine men, and then the effeminate, limp -wristed

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Zionist worshiping idolaters inside the church. I don't know.

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Is this guy a member of a church? Is he a part of a sound biblical church somewhere?

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Because I'd really be interested in knowing. I heard that he was

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Orthodox at one point, but I don't know. I have no idea. Let me just comment about something.

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It is a little bit unfair being the old guy that I am. I've got lots and lots and lots of history to draw from.

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I knew a man. He was one of the elders for a number of years at the

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Phoenix Forum Baptist Church. And he didn't lift weights.

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He didn't work out. He may have weighed 120 pounds at most.

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He walked slowly. He has a very bad physical heart. He would become winded.

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And in fact, when I first visited

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Phoenix Forum in 1989, when Don Fry and this man,

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Dave Crawford was his name, walked in, you come through this little side room and Don sits on one side,

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Dave sat on the other side. I eventually would be the one sitting over there where Dave sat all those years. Doing that would almost wind him because his cardiac function was just that bad.

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And I actually, Don and I were with him the day before he died.

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He knew he was dying. He knew he had only a matter of hours left. We prayed with him by his bedside and he gave testimony of his trust in Jesus Christ, the imputed righteousness of Christ as his sole ground of peace before God and went into the presence of the

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Lord. And yet that weak physical heart that he recognized came from God.

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That was God's providential purpose in his life. He didn't get to do what a lot of other people got to do.

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That physically weak heart was so tender and so committed and so consistent and so godly.

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It was the result of decades of patient endurance.

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And so when someone like an Andrew Torba starts talking about bold and masculine

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Christian men being punished and scorned, I just,

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I look at young men and I go, look, you may think you're gonna have that healthy, perfectly functioning, fast recovering, fast healing body the rest of your life unless you live in this world and look around you.

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And even if you follow sports at all, whatever sport it might be, you know that there are guys who just look like they're gonna win every year, they're gonna have, they create a dynasty.

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And then one wrong move, one tackle,

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Joe Theismann, remember that one? I know, that's an old one, sorry. You know, one popped

53:11

ACL on the basketball court, one torn rotator cuff. For my sport, had a crash at the beginning of this season on the

53:25

Tour of the Basque Country. I was wondering for a while whether we had actually lost some guys, it was so bad.

53:34

Ambulances and helicopters, and oh my goodness. Cycling's a dangerous sport.

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Those guys will come down mountains, 7 % grades, they're doing 70 miles an hour on a tire that's that wide.

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It blows, we all know how quickly that physical strength and power can be gone.

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But a heart disciplined in godliness can't be taken from you, can't be taken from you.

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Brother Dave could not do a lot of things, but he could be godly.

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And he could honor Christ in everything he did, in every word of wisdom, and oh, there is a wisdom that comes from suffering and difficulty and trial and patience that does not come no matter how many

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PRs you set on the bench. It doesn't come from that stuff.

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And he had it, he had it. So young fools like this might call him limp -wristed if they want to.

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They'll learn, they'll learn. If they're believers, they'll learn. They'll figure it out.

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May take a few decades, a few injuries. But you know,

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I just have to wonder if they were actually involved in a local church and going to a hospital once in a while, visiting the sick, if a lot of this stuff wouldn't take care of itself.

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It really makes you wonder. By the way, I don't have a clue what a

55:42

Zionist -worshipping idolater is, but don't have any idea what most that guy's saying anyways.

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I did mention I was going to talk about this. Where did it go? Oh, great. I have so many windows open here that some stuff, there it is.

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It's always the one that gets stuck behind Twitter. Stephen Wolfe, I said on Thursday or Friday last week that I was going to talk about this, so I will.

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It might take me a few minutes to, might go past a little bit here, but anyway. On the 25th,

56:27

Stephen Wolfe typed the following, posted the following.

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The gospel itself cannot ground civil fellowship because civil fellowship is a religious doctrine that requires things such as common language, not supplied by the gospel.

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This really is the most basic concept possible, but I just saw someone claim that having the, quote, imputation of Christ's righteous,

56:57

I think it should be righteousness. I'll make the auto -correct for him. The imputation of Christ's righteousness, end quote, in common is enough.

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That's referring to me, obviously. He loves to subtweet me constantly. Doesn't tag me on it, but he does.

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It's remarkably stupid. Proud to be called remarkably stupid by Stephen Wolfe, just like he called

57:23

Phil Johnson ugly moronic. So it's good to have that kindness being expressed.

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It's remarkably stupid, and it shows how the theology -only crowd is driven in the most absurd conclusions.

57:43

I've had a number of people talking about, I just don't know why you all won't just sit down and talk because he's such a nice guy, and I'm going, do you read his tweets?

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Do you read this stuff? Okay, and so I mentioned this, I said, I wanna talk about this, but won't be able to do it till next

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Tuesday, and that's gonna drive me crazy, and so he followed up, and some other people followed up.

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Here's the problem. The primary reason that Stephen Wolfe and I do not get along at all is because we start at completely different places.

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We start at completely different places. He said in his book, this isn't a theological book, not a theologian.

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Well, he's not. In fact, when it comes to theology, wow, no, he's not. He is a political philosopher.

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That's what he studied. That's what his bailiwick is, is political philosophy, and so when we're talking about, when

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I talk about the unity of the people of God, I'm talking theology, and when he's talking about civil fellowship, he's talking politics.

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Now, I would argue that the best way to deal with political things is in light of God's truth about who mankind is, the nature of sin,

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God's law, issues like this, but so let's try to do it this way.

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If he even tried to be fair to me, and I've never seen him try to be, not once, honestly, I've never, ever once seen it happen, so I'm not expecting it, but if he tried to, then what he would say is,

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I don't argue that the theological basis and ground of the unity of the body of Christ that transcends all language, culture, borders, and everything else is found in the common presence of the spirit of God and in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, so we partake of the same spirit, and Christ's righteousness imputed to us gives us all peace on the same level before the throne of God, so we can have the

01:00:33

Lord's Supper together, and it doesn't matter what language it's in. I've been in services around the world where the supper was officiated in two or three languages.

01:00:47

There are, if I recall correctly, it may have changed since then, but if I recall correctly, there are 28 official languages in South Africa, but we had one table.

01:01:01

We had one Lord's Supper, and the reason that we could do that was not because of political issues.

01:01:10

It wasn't a matter of, what's the terminology he used elsewhere? Where did that one go?

01:01:18

Oh, oh man, did I minimize it? I may have minimized it, but it was about caring about your people more than somebody else's people, that kind of thing.

01:01:34

No, we had one supper because we have one Lord, one gospel, one thing that unites us, and it's not political.

01:01:45

It has political ramifications in the sense it brings peace, and it undercut, for example, the unity of the table undercut

01:01:57

Roman concepts of authority in the Roman Empire.

01:02:03

It was a real challenge to have masters and slaves sitting at the same table on the same level.

01:02:12

That tends to get rid of slavery, which Rome was very dependent upon, well,

01:02:18

Greece even more so. Anyway, he could have acknowledged all that theological stuff, but then he wouldn't have had any reason to take a shot at me and call me remarkably stupid, so he chose not to do that, and so I can look at his and say, okay, we're talking about a political philosopher and on a naturalistic, non -Christian, non -spiritual foundation.

01:02:51

You can make the argument that you need to have a common language and a common set of goals that define your culture if you're going to have a culture, so multiculturalism doesn't work,

01:03:07

I agree, I agree. If you're going to have a political entity with borders where you're unified in seeking to create infrastructure, pass a body of law from one generation to the next that is done peacefully, you don't have to keep recreating it every generation, you bet, no problem, that's not what

01:03:38

I'm talking about. And see, the problem is, if you just want to talk about nationalism, then talk about nationalism. Don't call it

01:03:43

Christian nationalism. Once you put the term Christian in there, you can't avoid the theology anymore.

01:03:51

Just say, this is how we should do nationalism, let's just leave the Christian part out. And so when

01:04:00

I read something like this, the gospel itself cannot ground civil fellowship.

01:04:07

Between whom? I mean, I do believe that when there is a fulfillment,

01:04:18

Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 40, when there is a fulfillment of the nations seeking after God's Torah, and ask of me and I'll give you the nations as your inheritance, and these texts that I've come to believe

01:04:36

God can fulfill and that he will do so in his time to his own honor and glory, that will involve, and this is something he has argued against, that will involve regeneration.

01:04:48

That will involve new creatures. And in a context where the majority of people in a culture are seeking to honor

01:05:00

Christ as Lord because they have a new nature, they've been regenerated, then

01:05:06

I would argue that the gospel at that point can ground civil fellowship because it does provide what will be needed in that context.

01:05:17

And I don't, as much of an advantage as a common language is, it's not required.

01:05:24

Again, maybe he just doesn't travel much, but when

01:05:30

I would go over to Germany and teach there, many of the churches that I was at were bilingual.

01:05:39

Well, trilingual. But the one church would have like two congregations within it, a

01:05:46

German and a Russian. And a lot of the people could speak that and English.

01:05:53

So they still had unity, but it was based upon the theology of the gospel itself.

01:06:02

And so the only true unity that will bring true and lasting peace is unity that will come from bowing the knee to Jesus Christ and that can happen prior to the second coming if the spirit of God works in such a way as to draw his people to himself.

01:06:34

So I'm really sorry that anyone who calls himself a Christian could write this sentence, but I just saw someone claim that having the imputation of Christ's righteousness is common, in common is enough, it's remarkably stupid.

01:06:50

I'm sorry that someone would put something like that out without even seemingly understanding that the imputation of Christ's righteousness is what unifies the people of God, which is of course what

01:07:07

I'm talking about. But that's the difference between approaching things theologically and approaching, even this is theology only crowd, having biblical theology as the central focus versus having it out here someplace, it's an ancillary thing, we'll let them talk about that.

01:07:32

The central focus is natural law, to mystic concepts, and of course, sacralism.

01:07:44

Stephen Wolfe likewise posted, he posted a couple things,

01:07:49

I'll just read these. There's one of them on September 26th where he wrote, my people are

01:07:56

Christians, but you care more about the Israel -Palestinian feud than the

01:08:01

Sudanese, Nigerian, and Congolese Christians being slaughtered right now. I have no idea who that was,

01:08:08

I don't understand that, but it's part of this whole my people thing, how do you define my people?

01:08:17

I define my people at the table, Lord's Supper, there's my people.

01:08:26

So we have Lord's Supper each service, and I get to stand there up front, and when the wine runs out in one tray,

01:08:37

I get to move the tray and get the next one. Those are my, there's the color, language, background, we have

01:08:49

Persians, and blacks, and Asians, and Hispanics, and everybody else, those are my people, because they're looking to that one person,

01:08:59

Jesus Christ, and what he did, there's my people. If you come up with another foundation for that, it's all yours,

01:09:05

I don't want it. Hasta la vista, do your thing. But then, just for the fun of it, again, another subtweet,

01:09:16

I evidently live in a man's mind, rent -free, on September 25th, just opened a nice bottle of Tawny Port, and I have one word for you, sacralism, all in caps.

01:09:30

And that's sort of become a joke amongst the Wolfians, because they mock the reality of the confusion of the spheres of sovereignty between family, church, and state that existed in the medieval period, and that was imbibed by and imported into the

01:09:58

Reformation, the Reformers were sacralists. And that's why Fritz Erba spent seven years in a hole in Bartburg, that's why

01:10:12

Zwingli drowned Baptist from the bridge in Zurich, been there, been right where it happened, yeah, that's why.

01:10:27

And people say, well, see, the Reformers believed that. Yeah, the Reformers had not been challenged, just as they had not been challenged to rethink the perpetual virginity of Mary.

01:10:40

And so the initial Reformers didn't want to touch that one 10 -foot pole, Luther continued to believe it.

01:10:47

Calvin sort of was indifferent about it, but their errors then examined the biblical argumentation.

01:10:57

Jerome's response to Helvidius is full of enough holes to drive 10 semi -trucks through.

01:11:05

Biblically speaking, and so over time, they abandoned those elements of the medieval

01:11:14

Roman formulation that were self -evidently unbiblical, and that was the right thing to do, both in regards to Mary and regards to sacralism.

01:11:25

But Wolfe is a sacralist, it's just as plain as day.

01:11:30

Christian princes don't need regeneration. It's back to what Doug Wilson calls

01:11:37

Christendom 1 .0. And so I see a fundamental difference between Doug's view of quote -unquote

01:11:47

Christendom 2 .0 and what Stephen Wolfe is saying, I really do. And I've seen over the past few days, coming out of Moscow, it seems to me like a course correction, like going, whoa, this is going off the rails here.

01:12:07

Let's hang a, let's try to get this back where it needs to be, and that needs to happen, because yeah, there is some wild stuff going on out there, and we all need to say that is not what we're talking about.

01:12:22

Nope, that is not, not, we ain't talking about memes where you're, you know, mommy was the

01:12:29

Holocaust, it was when the Jews were forced to do manual labor and they thought it was killing them. That thing that Doug talked about, when was that?

01:12:38

Four months ago now, five months ago, something like that? That kind of thing is still out there. It is really out there amongst a bunch of people.

01:12:49

And we've gotta go, no, no, that's, but you'll discourage young men.

01:12:56

We will encourage young men to mature. There's a huge difference, huge difference.

01:13:07

One will lead them to a fulfilled life, and the other will leave them going, why didn't you offend me and stop me from engaging in this kind of foolish behavior?

01:13:20

That seems pretty obvious to me, but evidently not their bales. So, yeah, sacralism, no thank you.

01:13:33

And maybe we do need to revisit Cervetus, because I had even one of our own guys ask me, do you think that was just?

01:13:41

I'm like, no, of course not. I'm not gonna chase the Jehovah's Witnesses down the road with a burning torch and some wood to tie him to it.

01:13:52

I don't think that's the church's role. And what

01:13:58

I am gonna do is I'm going to refute their arguments. And I'm going to do everything

01:14:03

I can to bring them out of that falsehood. And we've done that. We've seen many, many

01:14:10

Jehovah's Witnesses come out of that Watchtower organization over the decades.

01:14:16

Just seems really strange to me that I see very little concern. On the part of a lot of these young, virile men to actually reach these folks, whether it be the heretics we have in our own land or especially the

01:14:31

Saracens, Muslims. That's a whole nother area. Gets us into the subject of Crusaderism and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

01:14:40

Won't go there today. But yes, I wanted to comment about that. And I've even got one from Corey Mailer here where he says, let's see, conclude that he is, rather than merely stupid, actively wicked.

01:15:00

Well, when you've got excommunicated Lutherans coming to the conclusion that you're not merely stupid, you're actively wicked, you're probably doing something right.

01:15:10

And I'll take that from all the Stone Choir guys and I'll pray for your repentance because you definitely need repentance.

01:15:19

All right. I do appreciate your watching the program today and plan is to be back on Thursday and I'll probably be running stuff myself then too, but hopefully we'll make a message.