How to Identify What is the True Religion

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See website for details. On this edition of The Wrap Report, I was a guest on another podcast called

Entrusting the Faith with the host Eric Rutherford. We talked quite a bit about world religions, specifically from my book,

What Do They Believe? So we got into a lot of different topics. It was a good and fun conversation.

I hope that you will enjoy this. Check out their podcast, Entrusting the Faith, and you can continue listening to The Wrap Report.

Please share these episodes. It helps others to know about us. But we're going to talk about world religions coming your way right now on The Wrap Report.

One, two, three! Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

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

How do we equip our families with a biblical worldview?

How do we prepare the next generation for life? How do I grow in my walk with the

Lord and in my marriage? If you wrestle with these questions, you are in the right place to find answers.

Welcome to the Entrusting the Faith podcast. Welcome to the

Entrusting the Faith podcast. I'm your host, Eric Rutherford, and I'm excited today because with me is

Andrew Rappaport. He is the preaching pastor of Grace and Truth Bible Church in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

He's the founder and executive director of Striving for Eternity Ministries and their

Christian podcast community. He is the host of several podcasts. He has written books such as What Do They Believe?

A Systematic Theology of Major Western Religions, as well as What Do We Believe?, which is a systematic theology of the

Christian faith. He's also contributed to other books. Two quick items before we get to our interview.

First, if you go to our website at entrustingthefaith .com, scroll down to the bottom, sign up for our weekly emails so you know who is coming up on the podcast for the week and who you may have missed the previous week.

You'll also get a free resource when you do, and you can find all our other podcasts on our website while you're there.

Feel free to scroll through them, find other interviews. It'll really help you along the way. Second, this episode is just brought to you by my book,

Leading Well at Home, How Husbands and Fathers Can Biblically Lead Their Families. So if you've ever thought, man,

I want to be a godly husband or father, I don't know where to start, or you've heard that you need to do something to equip your family, but you just don't know where to begin.

Well, if this is you or anybody you know, Leading Well at Home will show you how you can love

Jesus Christ, love and serve your wife and children, and take responsibility for discipling your family.

You'll be encouraged and given action steps that you can apply so that you're moving forward. Okay, now let's jump into today's episode.

Man, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. Eric, thank you so much for having me on. Oh, it is my pleasure.

It is my pleasure. Now, one of the things just to kind of start off with, I was fascinated by your book,

What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions.

So for those who are not familiar with it, would you tell us a little bit about it? Sure. What I started to do, this is back in 2001, after 9 -11, at church, people asked me if I would start to do some research and training on Islam, because that kind of came up after September 11th.

And people knew the way that I do study, went through, studied through the Quran, put some together.

Then people were kind of curious with my Jewish background, would I do something there? And I had done research there, so I worked through the

Talmud, systematized Judaism. Then since I was doing that, people said, hey, can you do

Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons? And then I added one more for Roman Catholicism and then did one on Christianity.

So what I do with those six religions is I look at what's their authority, what's their view of specifically

God, but specifically a trinity. Their view of Jesus Christ, specifically a deity, the sinfulness of man, salvation, and end times.

So those six doctrines in those six religions, it's taken from their sources. So the thing that's different with this book,

I'm not trying to refute the religions. I'm trying to explain what they actually believe from their sources, where that becomes really helpful for folks.

If you ever get engaged with a conversation with a Muslim, you're going to hear them explain that you as a

Christian believe in three gods. And a Christian goes, no, no, that's not the case.

I had once in New York City where I had a family, a Muslim family, and they were telling me, and this is a guy, a

PhD professor at a university. And he's telling me that this is what

I believe. And I had 20 evangelists with me. I'm just pulling them all out without it. I'm just, hey, come over, define the trinity, define the trinity.

And they're all defining it the same way. And he's like, okay, I got this wrong. And at the end of that conversation,

I was able to say to him, I said, listen, is there anything that I said in our conversation where I misrepresented

Islam? And he said, no, you accurately, you have a really good understanding of Islam, better than most that I know.

And I said, well, here's the thing. You've constantly misrepresented Christianity. And I understand why you did it because you got your information from the

Quran. But the point is, is you're misrepresenting Christianity. So when you tell me

I'm wrong, am I really going to believe you? No, because you don't understand what you're talking about. But are you going to believe me because I haven't misrepresented?

And he recognized that he needed to study the New Testament more. That's what the book is for.

It's not to try to refute the religions. The purpose of it is so that when you come in contact with someone from this religion, you can accurately know what they believe.

So I spent 14 years of my life studying these world religions, so you don't have to. I love that.

But you're going to the source material, you're understanding what they say about themselves, and you're looking at a few different categories of faith to be able to essentially put it on a grid and say,

Okay, here's what they believe. And here's what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe. And here's what Christianity believes.

And so you basically, you sort of use Christianity as that plumb line of, okay, here's what's biblical.

And then you compare everything up against it to see where they differ. Well, actually,

I don't so much set it up as the plumb line. I try to take, and this is a neat thing with the book,

What Do They Believe? Actually, with both my books, what a lot of people have come back to me with is that they could be used as quick reference guides because each chapter can be read completely independent.

But with What Do They Believe, each section within each chapter, if you're talking to a

Jehovah's Witness and you want to focus just on their view of salvation, you could just go to that section and just read that section, and it's quicker.

So I'm not trying to compare them to Christianity. What I'm trying to do is say this is what, when we look at them, this is what they believe.

Now, the reason I put in the last chapter on Christianity is because of the fact that I want them to see that plumb line to compare after looking at all the others.

And I do have at the end of that book, because I never expected that book to be used as a witnessing tool.

We have a guide that goes along with it, and there is a person who's a missionary in the Muslim world.

And he actually uses that book in the guide to evangelize. And he starts with Chapter 3 on Islam.

And he said the reason he does that is because once they see that, okay, this is accurate on Islam, he goes back to Judaism, Catholicism, then looks at the others, gets to Christianity.

By the time he gets to Christianity, he's built up a good rapport and good working relationship with a person.

And so then he can talk about Christianity. Now, he's in a country where it's illegal to evangelize.

So he does it under the guise of just teaching religion. But because they trust what it says on Islam, they then trust everything else.

And the last, what I ended up doing was putting an epilogue to that book, because so many people use it to evangelize, explaining the uniqueness of Christianity.

Wow, that is fascinating that not only the information, not only you're going to the source material, but with Muslims in that capacity, that they could use it.

It has credibility with them for the way it speaks about their faith.

And so it adds credibility to what you say about Christianity and the others because it's credible to them.

Yeah, because what I did with Islam is very interesting speaking with one

Muslim because I said that I only went to the Quran. Why? Well, because when you get to Hadiths and things like that, there are differences.

And so I want to make sure that I represent what all of Islam would say, not just one sect of Islam.

You could cherry pick if you wanted to. If you're looking to try to cherry pick things, you could cherry pick and make it really look extreme by looking at the extremists of any religious group.

I don't want to do that. I want to say, OK, this is common that anyone that is a Muslim would hold to this.

Yeah, there's going to be other things, but the core is going to hold to this. That's powerful.

That is very powerful in the witness that you are sharing to them, not only for going that extra mile to understand what they hold true.

And then it's almost that reciprocity, right? It's like, OK, if this is, you know, we understand you suddenly have a credible source.

And now what you say about Christianity also is credible. And this is what the Bible says. So I love that.

That's a beautiful way of doing it. But it also sounds like it was pretty labor intensive, too.

Well, it's just the way that my mind works, I think, systematically. So it flows out that way.

And I think that's why the way that I write has, I think that's why the stuff

I do ends up being quick reference type material. The other thing that I've been really amazed with, you know, you write a book and the feedback you get is kind of interesting.

I didn't write it as a quick reference guide, but that's what a lot of people have come back. And they said that two things they love about my book is one, it could be used as a quick reference guide.

It's compact, very articulate. And then the other thing that would really surprise me is that people were saying how even though they don't study different issues, everything is explained well enough that even though they may have never studied this, they can understand the details.

And I think that's really because of my first pastor who trained me that you got to teach at all levels.

So you don't use big words, define them. I use them for those who know them, but then define them for those who don't know them.

And I guess that has really helped folks. And what really it's amazing to see when you see people who will use the books and people from all different ranges, people who study theology to people who don't study theology, and they're all getting a lot out of it.

And that helps me. I love that. It's accessible to pretty much everybody.

Everybody can get something out of it, can use it. It's just a great resource and tool for wherever they're at.

I love that. Just as we are thinking just within our culture, we'll say in the

U .S., do you find there are specific religions that people will run into that we need to be able to answer to or be familiar with?

Are there one or two, especially that we should sort of be listening for?

A lot of that's going to depend where people live. If you live in Utah or Idaho, you're going to run into Mormons.

They're going to be very popular there. There's going to be more of a central location there for them.

Islam is one, no matter where you go, pretty much, you're going to be dealing with more in America. And it's one that a lot of people have a lot more questions with ever since 9 -11.

It's growing here in the United States, and it is one that people aren't as familiar with.

Mormonism, how can I say this? Mormonism would be really good science fiction if it wasn't considered a religion.

It's an interesting science fiction type of religion. But when you start to look at it, it has so much internal, just has a lot of contradictions internally that they have to work around.

But Mormonism is going to grow, I think, a little bit more than Jehovah's Witnesses. People are used to having

Jehovah's Witnesses knock on their door. And so it used to be you had to be more prepared for dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses.

The reality is that Jehovah's Witnesses aren't knocking on doors as much as they used to. Now they just go to airports or different places and set up a booth and just sit there and wait for someone to come up to them.

And they're not going out as much. And if you actually know anything about the

Bible, they don't want to talk to you. Wow. Yeah. So if you enjoy talking to Jehovah's Witnesses like I do, you have to really be coy with it.

You have to just learn how to ask questions without answering things.

You got to learn how to guide a conversation by asking questions. Because once they sense, ooh, you actually understand something, the conversation kind of ends.

Wow. I did not realize the extent that they've gone or sort of the push that they have or the shift,

I guess, is really the methodology that they've taken. Well, one thing that's good to do with that is

I've started doing this recently. A friend of mine encouraged this because he did this and it worked well. One of the first questions

I'll ask with someone that's Jehovah's Witness or Mormon or Muslim, one of the first questions

I'm going to ask is, how much time do you have to talk? And there's a reason I ask that up front.

If they say, oh, I got about an hour. Okay. Because it's interesting, when I talk to Jehovah's Witnesses about five minutes in, they tell me they got to go.

And I go, wait, you said we have about an hour. So it's a way of almost kind of guilting them into keeping with the conversation because they have to admit they're lying otherwise, right?

But it's interesting the response then that you get if they're going to continue for the hour, which they usually don't want to because they – basically, they don't – a lot of times what happens is they get stuck where they don't want to have to continue the conversation because they're told just avoid it.

Because you who know the Bible are just deceived and they don't – you don't want to receive any of this brainwashing that those

Christians got. Which is kind of interesting because when you think about Roman Catholicism, right, they would say that those of us who believe in things like salvation by faith alone, that we're anathema, we're cursed.

We are not Christian according to them. You have Jehovah Witnesses who would say that we're not

Christian because we believe in, by their argument, three gods. You'd have the

Mormons that would say they're restoring the gospel that we've destroyed, and so we're not really

Christian. And so they always separated themselves from biblical Christianity. But if you've noticed, there's been a push in all three of those groups to say we are

Christian. And in fact, that's what the Mormons had a whole commercial thing where they were putting out and saying we are Christian was their whole phrase.

And I'd always go, wait a minute, so you're Christian. So you want to be like us, but yet you say we have a false gospel.

What's wrong here with this picture? So definitely some inconsistency going on there.

Yeah. So what is like something unique about biblical

Christianity? What sets it apart from everything else that people listening can go, okay,

I'm going to hold fast to this. And in comparison, I can clearly identify what is false. Yeah.

And that's probably the most important thing for folks to do is study the truth. Instead of trying to study all the world religions, you really don't have to.

And this is what I always tell people when I do seminars. You don't have to study every world religion. Study the truth because 2

Corinthians 13, 8, you can take anything against the truth. You can't twist the truth. Truth will stand up against anything.

So study the truth. So there's three elements of Christianity that are unique between any world religion.

And I usually tell people there's only two world religions. I'm an open air evangelist. Now, whatever you think of open air preaching,

I'm not that guy. Okay. There's a lot of bad guys that do that. My friend

Greg Kogel says there's only two men he knows who does it well. Ray Comfort on the West Coast and me on the

East Coast. But when I get up and I'll ask people, how many religions do you think there are in the world?

And people will shout out numbers, 700, 1 ,000. And I'll say two. There's the religion, there's divine religion and man -made religion.

And everything fits into those. And so the question is, can we objectively look at man -made religion and divine religion and know which is which?

And I think there is an objective way to look at it. One thing that we have is a core thing is that Christianity is not a system of morality.

You look at any man -made religion, it's a moral system. It's a works -based system. You can have

Mormonism without Joseph Smith. You can have Buddhism without Buddha. You can have

Islam without Muhammad. All those are just the teachings. But you cannot have

Christianity without Christ. See, Christianity is unique to Christ the person because, and this gets to the second point, is that he's fully

God, fully man. Being truly God and truly man, that's unlike any religion.

Why does that then become so important? It becomes so important because in Christianity is the only religion where you have a

God who can be just and merciful. So you think of Islam, they'll say,

Allah most merciful. Well, he is in their view, but is he just? You see, what they'll say is that you don't know whether he's going to forgive you.

You just have to trust in his mercy. But see, justice and mercy are mutually exclusive.

If the law said, Eric, that if you slap me, that I am to slap you back.

Well, I have a choice. I can slap you. That's justice. I cannot slap you. That's mercy.

But if I slap you lightly, it's neither, right? I'm not giving justice and I'm not giving mercy.

So when we look at Christianity, because Jesus is fully God, he can pay the full consequence of sin because he is an eternal being.

By his nature being eternal, he can pay the eternal fine because he's eternal, right?

So that's why this is essential to being based on Christ, not a moral system.

So because of that, not only can he pay that eternal fine, being fully man, he can be a substitute for other people.

And so that's what makes him unique, which makes Christianity unique. Now, when he died on that cross, the full punishment of sin was put upon him and paid for.

Now, because it's paid, he can offer mercy. Only within Christianity do you have a God that can offer both justice and mercy.

So you have the fact that it's based on this particular person, Jesus Christ, being fully

God, fully man. You have a God that is just and merciful. And you have, it is the only religion that is based on divine work and not human work.

Okay. And one of the things I always explain to people is you think about human nature. What do we do?

We praise ourselves, right? If a king goes to war and he loses, he loses the war.

What is he going to write about in the annals? He's going to talk about all the battles he won. He doesn't talk about the war he lost.

He talks about everything he won. So it's very simple. We could objectively look at every religion and just say, does this praise man?

Is it faith plus works as Catholicism would teach? Is it one good deed counts for 10 bad deeds as Islam would teach?

Or is it by doing Torah, doing the law like modern Judaism would teach, rabbinic

Judaism? All of those have an element where, yes, even within Christianity, you hear some people say, well,

God did all he could. He did 99. That last 1 % is up to you. What the

Bible says is no percent is up to us. It's 100 % to God. He does it all. He did it at the cross.

We can't add anything. Anytime we add human effort, we have a man -made religion. So now all I got to do is look at every religion and go, which one has human effort added to it?

Whether it's faith plus works or anything. When we add something to it, it's us. And so when you realize every man -made religion, every religion other than Christianity is based on works.

Christianity is the only religion that says God did it all at the cross. Hmm. That is,

I mean, that is, that is powerful. And that makes it very clear and objective.

Right. So when you're listening to something, you can go, okay, is it, is it

God or is it, is it me doing something to earn God's favor?

Yeah. Wow. And that's something too. We can, I mean, we, even in our churches, we always want to be listening to making sure that, you know, what is being taught is, is in line with scripture.

And that's a good way for us, even in, even in our churches to make sure that, especially if we're looking for a church, if we're, if we're moving, whatever we're doing, that's a good baseline so that we make sure we're, we're hearing that.

Yeah. Unfortunately, churches today, people are moving and looking for a new church. It's hard to, it's getting harder and harder to find a good churches.

So many of the churches want to go the way of the world. It is, it is, is, is there, and I know this is a slight tangent.

If people are out there looking, I know, cause we're, we seem to be in transit or, you know, we're moving all over.

We seem to be moving. What is one thing that if a family is looking like, okay, I need to make sure I'm finding a good church where I'm looking at, or maybe, maybe they just realize,

Hey, maybe I'm at a bad church or a church. That's not preaching a gospel. What's one thing they need to look for.

I think one of the things I generally tell people to look for is expositional preaching. So someone that's going to preach verse by verse through the

Bible, because then they're not going to skip the things that they don't want to preach about. You know, they're going to,

Hey, this is what we're dealing with. This is the next text. This is what I got to address. I mean, when I'm there, there are passages as I had this past week or last week where I've said, you know,

I really, there are passages I wish weren't in the Bible. Cause they just go against my human nature, but that's the next verse

I got to preach. So that's what I'm preaching. And so expositional preaching,

I think is an important one. A strange thing to think about would be look for a church that actually practices church discipline.

Why that one? Because it says that they hold the purity of the church is important. Now that could be abused as well.

There are some churches that try to control people. They use church discipline to try to control people and that can lead to a cultic mentality and that then becomes dangerous.

So you want to find a church that's, if they're practicing church discipline, they're doing it biblically. In other words, they're not looking to be salacious in it, but their goal in it is restoration, not punishment.

Now I appreciate both of those. And I am in one accord with that, with expositional preaching.

But the church discipline is something too that we, like you say, I think sometimes it gets a bad rap, you know, so to speak, in terms of, you know, what, you know, because you think discipline, you think bad things, but ultimately it is viewing

God for who He is, seeing Him in His holiness, and that we are called to be holy.

And it's just coming alongside people and saying, okay, how can we make sure that we're going together towards Christ?

So I think those are two, man, those are awesome. I love those. Let me kind of jump back because I have one other question just on religions.

Archaeology. You know, we hear a bunch of different things. How does archaeology help the biblical worldview?

How does that strengthen the Bible? And do other world religions have archaeology?

Well, yeah, I mean, some of the world religions will have it. Now, if you look at Mormonism, they don't.

I mean, a lot of Mormonism is going to be things that supposedly happened here in the Americas. But an interesting thing with that, my background is computer science.

And many years ago, I wrote a program to actually calculate birth rates and death rates based on the

Book of Mormon. And I proved that the Book of Mormon is mathematically impossible because in the time of Joseph Smith, the number of people that would die in warfare compared to hundreds of years or really thousands of years prior, they wouldn't have the same kind of numbers because there just weren't as many people to go fight.

And so in order to make up the death rate that Joseph Smith has in the

Book of Mormon, you had to have a birth rate that was like 35%, which is like six, seven times the normal birth rate.

So you have some mathematical dilemmas there. Like women have to be giving birth much longer and have lots of twins or triplets or something.

Like everyone's got to have triplets to be able to do this. You know, it just doesn't work.

Now, when we see, you'll see some other, like Islam is based in where you can look at history.

It is kind of interesting, though, when you look at things within the scriptures, when we look at the

Bible, there are some things that they didn't had no archaeological evidence for for many years.

In fact, in Daniel, when Daniel, when the Medo -Persians took over, there's a reference to a king, and they didn't have any reference to this king other than the

Bible for hundreds of years. And then all of a sudden, oh, look, there's a reference to him.

And so that does help. I like what James Boyce once said many, many years ago, is that as we look at the archaeology and we study it, if we were to take a line and put chalk marks every time something supports the

Bible and then erase anything that doesn't support the Bible, what we would see with archaeology is that all we're doing is filling in that line.

We're never erasing anything when it comes to the Bible. You can't always do that with some of the like, you know,

Mormonism is the easy kind of the easy target because they have so much that they say they have.

They claim they have it all locked away. But if it's going to prove what many of us say never happened, then show us this evidence.

It's always, oh, no, it's only for their people. You know, it's only people that already believe in it that can see this evidence.

Well, that's kind of like, you know, confirmation bias. I already believe this, so therefore I'm going to be believing that when

I see it, that's it. There's not the historical evidence for things that we would see in the

Book of Mormon. So archaeology can be helpful, but I wouldn't use archaeology to say, hey, this proves

Christianity is right. Now, there is a difference there. To a Christian, I would say, hey, look, this helps us.

This is one of many things in apologetics that helps us support the Bible to know this is accurate.

To an unbeliever, I wouldn't use it because only because what ends up happening is now you're arguing over evidence with them.

And what you're trying to do is convince them, look, we got more evidence on our side. But then when they get someone who goes, well, hey, look, they just discovered something here.

You don't have that. Therefore, this worldview is right. My starting point is

I have two presuppositions I start with. God exists. He has spoken. And so my starting point is they know

God exists, and he's given us his word as the only self -revelation that we can have. And therefore, since he can't lie,

I'm going to trust that. I like that. I like that God exists and he has spoken.

I like that. As well as the idea of with believers, archaeological evidence sort of is just a reminder.

It just adds to that. It's another layer of I know it's true. And oh, guess what?

This just shows, but it's not. This shows this is some additional evidence, but it's not.

I believe it's true because we have the evidence. So I appreciate that distinction as well.

Now, let's just a slight tangent here, striving for eternity.

For those who are not familiar with it, would you tell us a little bit about striving for eternity? Well, it's a discipleship ministry.

Therefore, it's not an evangelism ministry. So we're not trying to work our way to heaven. It's the idea, you know, although this isn't original with Jonathan Edwards, but he's the most popular person to have said it.

I actually researched it. I forget the guy who he got it from, but he would talk about having eternity stamped on your eyelids.

It's the idea that we get from Colossians 3. It's the idea of having an eternal mindset.

And when we're fixated on eternity and the things that we have in our relationship with God, then the things of this earth, the temporal things, well, they kind of fade away.

It's the whole thing of I'm preaching right now on our midweek through the book of 1 Peter and the first chapter.

What does he do? He wants to talk about suffering. How do you endure suffering? So what does he do? He talks all about the gospel and the future inheritance that we have.

And I keep saying, why is he doing this? Because if our fixation is on when we sit before Christ, as Paul had in Philippians, where he says, you know,

I can't choose between life and death. Death is far better because I get to be with Christ. But hey, it's better for you if I live on earth, right?

He wants to be with Christ. And if that's our mentality, we can't wait to be with Christ, then anything we endure on earth, it's just temporal.

And it's what we're anticipating. If we focus on our earthly trials, we're going to have a hard time going through them.

But if we're fixated on eternity, then we can get through this. And really, I have years of counseling addicts.

I used to work at an addiction recovery center. And I've always said that people that have an addiction have a better understanding of the

Christian life than many Christians who grew up in a Christian home. Because the addict knows what it means to be completely sold out to their drug of choice.

They know what it means to give up everything. I counseled a man who had a $12 million company. And he lost that company.

He lost his wife, lost his kids, all for cocaine. He gave up everything.

He had everything the world had to offer. And I remember saying, but you understand, as he became a Christian, I said, but now you understand what it means to be completely sold out for Christ.

And so that's what we look to do. We try to train people and disciple people. We offer materials to churches.

Our focus is very different. Most parachurch ministries, they want to go to large churches where there's a lot of people and a lot of money.

We get monthly supporters to help us go to small churches because the majority of churches in America have less than 25 people in attendance.

That's the majority. You know who comes to help strengthen those churches? Nobody. And so we go to them.

We come in and do weekend seminars to give the training. Then we try to leave behind materials so that people have this, so the pastor can then continue the study.

And hopefully, you know, gird them up so that they would go out, evangelize, and make disciples.

And so we do a lot of weekend seminars. We do things from Bible interpretation made easy seminar, evangelism seminars.

We do apologetics. A popular thing we've been doing lately with everything in the news is social justice dealing with critical racism theory.

I didn't say critical race theory. I properly defined it as racism. But, you know, social justice, all that stuff.

We do that. We do a seminar called Snatched From the Flames, which is our discernment seminar.

We partner with Justin Peters Ministries and do that together where we focus on, you know, basically looking at how do you have discernment.

So we have a lot of weekend seminars we do. We have our Striving Fraternity Academy that we offer.

We offer that free. That's how we make our money. No, wait. That didn't make sense. Yeah. We offer it for free.

It's on YouTube. And you can take all the courses there. We end up having, you know, the reason we write books is so that people have materials like that that they can teach within a

Sunday school setting. That's why we provide those workbooks with them. So all that we're trying to do is geared toward discipling people.

We actually view ourselves as we want to work ourselves out of a job. Our goal is to get churches discipling.

That's the goal. So if churches are, if every church in America is discipling, we wouldn't be needed and we'd be happy. Okay. But that's our goal is to really come into churches and help them out.

That's what, you know, we do it through a lot of different means. That's the purpose of my podcast. That's the purpose of the

Christian Podcast Community so we can disciple podcasters. It's the reason we do weekend seminars. It's the reason we come out to churches even for a one -day seminar.

It's why we have our academy. It's all with the idea of discipling the smaller churches especially.

Wow. I love that. And that is such a, man, that is such a needed thing in our churches.

Like you say, the small churches, overlooked, really need sometimes just some encouragement, somebody to come alongside them, to resource them.

Because like you say, they don't have the materials. They don't have the resources just to be able to do the job of the church, which is to make disciples.

It's not to have big buildings. It's not to do any of that. It's to go and make disciples. I was blown away as I started looking through your academy.

I really was. And so what kind of responses have you gotten from it or from the podcast?

What have you gotten? Yeah, the Striving Fraternity Academy surprised me the most.

I mean, the way that started was just one of the board of directors said, Andrew, you spent a lot of time discipling people one -on -one.

We need to take what you do and put it in a form where it can be used in a broader sense.

This has been used around the world. We actually didn't realize we're training pastors in China because we would be able to get in.

Now we've kind of been blocked in some areas, but we used to be able to get in and we'd get questions from Chinese pastors.

But we didn't expect this to be used by pastors. I had a pastor in Canada that contacted us and said, you know,

I never learned how to interpret the Bible before. He went through seminary, never learned it in seminary.

A pastor in Chile who never took a systematic theology course.

In America, we go, how do you become a pastor without a systematic theology? But the thing that actually surprised me the most is because we designed this for people in the pews, right?

Adult men and women, not thinking pastors, but we find pastors are gaining from it.

What I didn't expect is the number of people that would contact the ministry saying, you know, we use this for homeschooling and the kids love it.

I have a quirky sense of humor. And so that keeps their attention. But what parents have told me is that because of the way that I define all my terminology, their kids and junior high, high school can all pay attention to it.

And they can follow along because of my quirky humor. They enjoy the classes and they learn from it.

And we've actually talked about redesigning those courses to put reading materials and quizzes and tests in there specifically for homeschoolers.

Because we were blown away with the number of homeschoolers that would buy the syllabus so that their kids can sit, watch the videos and go through it.

But we have classes on how to interpret the Bible. We have about 20 lessons. We have,

I think, like 80 lessons on systematic theology. We have a course on what we're talking about with a systematic introduction of world religions.

That becomes a systematic of those major religions. But then also a quick systematic theology of Christianity is in there.

And then we have an introduction to discipling. How do we disciple? And so we have a book that we offer to churches and we walk through that.

But a lot of it's training people on how to disciple. I'm working on a course on logic to teach logic.

And we're thinking of doing some stuff on creation science and apologetics. So we have a couple more courses we're working on with that.

But all of it's geared toward anybody, no matter your level of spirituality, whether you just got saved or you're a pastor, whether you're a junior high or 80 years old, that anybody should be able to learn from this.

And that's been the response that I was not expecting. I really wasn't expecting how many homeschoolers use the materials.

And I actually went to a conference and I had one young lady come up to me and she was like, oh, you know what, if homeschooling, we went through all of your courses.

And I was like, really? She goes, yeah, me and my siblings. And then she came over to me, came back to the booth later and she introduced me to her sister.

And then came back later with all of her siblings that were at the conference with their mother. And then later with the father.

So I got to meet the whole family. And the parents had gone through the courses too. And it was just, it was really a neat feeling. And they were all telling me how they love the courses.

The one daughter started doing it and they used it with all the other kids because the one daughter was like, this was great. I love this class.

And I was like, I never did this class for homeschooling. That wasn't in my mind.

I would have done it totally different, I think. But I'm really pleasantly surprised that people use it that way.

Oh, I love that. If you're listening at home and you're a homeschooler. So we're a homeschool family for everybody listening.

If this is your first episode with us. So we're big homeschool fans. Whether you homeschool or not, though, families, check this stuff out because it is good information.

It is equipping. It is letting you not only make disciples in your own home, but bolstering your faith so that you can go and do the very thing that Christ has called us to do, which is go and make disciples.

In our communities and around the world. Kind of piggybacking on that.

Why is, because much of what you're talking about, all that you're teaching, it is sound biblical doctrine.

It is in line with scripture. Why is that so important for believers?

Because sometimes I think pop culture interferes with us sometimes. And I think sometimes we get a little too caught up in bumper stickers and T -shirts and we don't hold fast to that doctrine.

So why is that important? Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for getting that passage right out of Matthew 28.

Most people think that the Great Commission is to go and it's to, as you go, make disciples.

The real part of that is make disciples. So thank you for getting that right. Why is it important?

It's really important because the example that many will use, you think of the Secret Service.

And most people are saying, oh, those are the people that protect the president. Actually, that's not what they were originally designed for. The Secret Service, their original mission was to look at counterfeit money.

Now, how do they train people to check and examine counterfeits? Do you study all the counterfeits?

No, you study the truth. Now, one of the things we have to realize is that Satan comes as an angel of light.

Satan doesn't have to be very active in the bar scene or the strip clubs or things like that. The flesh is doing that naturally.

Where Satan wants to focus is just taking the truth. And now let's just add a little bit of error.

And where is he going to add the error? He wants to get the error in the issue of work salvation. That's really where he wants to get because that is the one thing that if you get salvation wrong, it is the difference between eternal heaven or eternal hell.

It's that important. So, there are some key doctrines that if you get wrong, they become a big issue.

Literally, the difference between life and death. And so, that's why we need to study the truth.

Now, are there going to be differences? Well, obviously. I mean, I have people that I know who I would consider brothers and sisters in Christ that are

Lutheran, that are Presbyterian. I'm Baptistic, right? And I can look at those and say, okay, we have differences.

Clearly, if we didn't have differences, we wouldn't have those different denominations. I'm an independent Baptist. There's other

Baptists that I wouldn't agree everything completely with, but I'm going to agree with some things.

So, there's different things that are primary issues. There are things that are secondary issues. And we have to know when we study this, we first need to know what kind of level that these things are.

To know, okay, is this an issue that's secondary? I mean, if someone believes in speaking in tongues and someone doesn't believe in speaking in tongues, is that going to damn someone to hell?

No. Right? Now, if someone says you must speak tongues to be saved, maybe.

Right? Because now, all of a sudden, you're adding to the gospel. It depends how they come to those conclusions.

So, one thing that I tell people, I have a friend of mine, Matt Slick from karm .org. It's one of the largest apologetics ministries online.

Matt and I, I've debated Matt more than anyone else. He's one of my best friends. I've debated him more than anybody else.

And one time we asked someone why they invited us to this conference to debate. And it's because he's

Presbyterian. I'm Baptist. We disagree on a whole lot of things. But it's the way we go about it.

He and I both say when we debate each other, one of us will be the one to say that we are both wrong in our theology.

We don't know where because if we knew where, we would change it. But we know that when we get before the seat of Christ, Christ is going to correct us.

And we're going to be glad he corrected us. We just don't know where those areas are right now. And knowing that there's areas that we're going to be wrong, we don't hold so tightly to it that we start name -calling and things like that.

So, well, actually, he and I do do a lot of name -calling, but everyone realizes it's in jest. I do tend to call him old because, well, he's got 12 years on me.

But the thing that we end up having is we have to recognize that there's areas in our theology we're not going to be 100 % on.

And when we approach it that way, we're going to say, okay, that causes us to come and study. That's the goal of it.

So why is it that I start off with people saying we got to learn how to interpret the Bible?

Very simple, because that's how you're going to start studying all that the Bible to build your theology.

Now, an error people make is that they let their theological system interpret the Bible rather than let their

Bible interpret a theological system. And another error people make is that instead of interpreting the

Bible by the rules of interpretation, they let their experience interpret. Well, I had this experience, so this means that.

No, it has nothing to do with that. You know, Jeremiah 29 11 wasn't written for you.

And people go, what? That's my favorite verse. No, read verse 10. It tells you who it was written for. The people who lived through the 70 -year captivity.

If you're old enough to live through the 70 -year captivity of Babylon, then it was written for you.

Okay. And if you really want, like, but I love that verse. Well, just read seven or eight verses lower to Jeremiah 29 17 18, where he says,

I know the plans I have for your plans of destruction and famine and pestilence. No one wants that on their refrigerator. So we have to read it in context.

You know, who is it written for? Well, is there any, as you're saying, Andrew, that there's nothing we can get from Jeremiah 29 11?

Sure there is. What's the purpose of Jeremiah 29 11? He's saying, those of you who lived through that 70 -year captivity,

I promised you prosperity. You're going to come out of that 70 years and have prosperity. You know what we learned from that?

God is faithful to keep his promises. I need to know that because he promised that he's building a place for me in heaven.

So when I die, I know I'm going there. Why? Because God is faithful to his promises. See, I could take that, even though it doesn't directly apply to me, it applies in areas of God's faithfulness.

And so now I can apply that verse. Now I don't apply it the way many people take that verse and apply it today.

But this is the thing of why it is important to have sound biblical doctrine. Because there are so many wolves in churches.

You don't have wolves in Islam. You don't see all the divisions in Islam like you see within Christianity or Judaism or any of the others.

But you see them all within Christianity. Why? Because the devil only needs to corrupt the truth. He doesn't really need to corrupt error.

It's already error. So that's where the fight is. It's kind of an interesting thing is that when you look at some of those other religions, they have the unity around their doctrine that Christians don't.

Christians are – just go on Facebook, Twitter. You see the fighting that Christians do, okay?

It's a horrible place to display Christianity because, man, people are like, oh, you don't believe this?

Well, then you're a heretic. I mean the word heretic is the most popular word on social media for Christians.

And most people aren't even using it properly. But we need to know what are the key doctrinal issues that are essential.

And there's things that are beliefs, things I'm going to die for. And there's things that are convictions

I feel very strongly about. And then there's things that are preferences. And all these things I'm going to believe are going to be in one of those three areas.

And depending on where they are, I'm going to work with anybody that has the same beliefs that I do.

We come to the scriptures and say salvation is by faith alone and grace alone through Christ alone. Now we can work together on that.

You get someone that doesn't hold to that, I can't work alongside you because you got a different – totally different – you got a man -made religion now.

But then I can – depending what I'm doing, I can work. I've preached in the Presbyterian churches.

And I had once where I was filling in for a pastor for five weeks at his pulpit.

And it was really kind of interesting. He had a guy come in. He was at the church. He just – I was preaching.

Guy comes in. He's visiting. First -time visitor. He walks up to me and the pastor's right there. And he says, hey, listen,

I come from a Baptist background. What would be the difference between how I grew up in this church on say things like baptism?

So I said, well, listen, I'm a Baptist. But let me explain to you Presbyterian baptism. Why? Because I'm there representing that church.

I don't need to convince him of my views. I'm going to – he's visiting that church. I walked away. We went to lunch.

That pastor turns to me and says, Andrew, I wish people in my church understood Presbyterian baptism as well as you, a Baptist, understand it.

But you see, that's the thing. We have to have grace with one another with the areas within Christianity that we disagree.

But if you don't – if you're not sound, if you don't understand the sound biblical theology and doctrines, then as Paul says, you could be tossed with every wave of error that comes in because that's where the errors – we have so much error coming at us.

Okay? Think about the churches that are accepting homosexuality and pressing on other churches to do that.

You have churches that want to redefine the gospel from salvation from our sin to salvation from oppression with a social justice gospel.

Totally different gospel message. But it comes in so slyly. I mean, Eric, which one of us isn't against – is not going to be for justice?

We're both for justice. I mean, don't we want to help the oppressed people? The answer is yes.

But when you start saying that and then you start realizing, but wait, now we look and say, but they're changing the gospel message.

It's not about telling people they can have forgiveness of sin. It's telling people that they can overcome oppression by getting those that have to give to those who have not.

Wait a minute. That's all about me. That's not about God. Total shift of focus. And so it comes in very subtly.

And that's why if you don't start with sound doctrine, you can, without even realizing it, be going down a bad path.

That's huge. Because it is. It is understanding what is true.

And I like that. That primary, that secondary, that tertiary. Making sure we don't get those confused.

Because I think sometimes, as you say, in social media and elsewhere, sometimes people have a tendency to major on the minors.

And it causes untold grief and confusion when really we just need to walk graciously with each other as long as we are majoring on the majors.

And making sure that we are holding to those key points. The other thing I really like, and it's always funny because when

I'm sitting with my kids, if we're in a service or they hear something, and then somebody throws out that context word, they always laugh and they elbow me.

Because one of the things I've always taught them is context is key. Context is key. Don't diverge from the context.

Don't cherry pick those things. And so I love that. Because sometimes, like you say, we can hone in on something that is, we don't want the rest of the promise, like you said in Jeremiah.

We didn't want those 70 years prior. We don't want that. I mean, if the

Lord has that for us, He is sovereign and He will walk us through that. But at least we want to walk into that with our eyes open as best we can.

We had a guy who worked for us in our ministry who I met on the streets. He was in a

Word of Faith church. He had just gotten saved, I think, one to three months prior.

And he was in a Word of Faith church and he saw me doing open air evangelism in New York City. And unfortunately, they would always go grocery shopping and then listen to me for three hours.

And then all the ice cream would be melted in the summer. And I said, you should really listen to the preaching and then go food shopping.

But it was interesting because I didn't know this for years later that he was listening to me on the streets.

People would challenge me. But the Bible says this. And I, oh, what verse is that? And whatever verse they give me, all

I would do is go, well, let's read the context and back up several passages, several verses and start reading in the context.

And when you read the context, that answers most of the questions. It's like, oh, here's the answer. And the whole crowd would see that.

Well, he started doing that in church. And he started going, wait a minute. This guy is preaching this out of this verse.

And I'm reading, I just back up to the beginning of the chapter and read it and go, oh, that's not what that means.

And so he ended up leaving that church and ended up in a charismatic church and then ended up leaving that church and ended up in a reformed

Baptist church. And so, you know, but it was funny because I didn't know this until once he was sharing his testimony.

He goes, yeah, I learned my theology from some street preacher, some guy on the street.

And it's just because every time I'm asked about a verse, what do I do? I back up and read the context.

I love that. But it's so important because if you do that, like you say, it eliminates a whole bunch of issues because God didn't, you know,

God didn't send him in a fortune cookie. He sent him, you know, in a letter and in the context of the writing.

Man. So I realize we've gone way over. I do want to at least ask real quick, because you guys have a bunch of podcasts on your network.

And I'd love for the people listening, because if they're listening to podcasts now, I wanted to make sure that, you know, they have some good listening material as well.

Can you just give us a snippet about what that is and what they can find there? Yeah, sure.

You could go to Christianpodcastcommunity .org. We have about 40 podcasts there. So whatever you want.

We have podcasts for women. We have podcasts about theology, podcasts on homeschooling. Everything's there.

And you can if you go into shows, you can actually limit it to what you want to see. I have a couple.

I have my Andrew Rapfort's Rap Report. That's an hour long show where we deal with biblical interpretations, cultural issues.

I did a very, very important one some time ago on basically the government strategy against countering terrorism, aka

Christians. And we walk through the Biden administration's document that they've put out on how they're going to target people that they see as domestic terrorists.

And when you look through this and you understand what they are saying, they're talking about Christians. That's who they think are domestic terrorists.

And so we sometimes will talk about important issues like that that Christians need to know to prepare.

Then what we'll end up doing is dealing with passages like Jeremiah 2911 and explain why that's not used in proper context.

So we're trying to equip people through that. I have, I'm not doing it currently, but we're going to try to get back to it, is the

Andrew Rapfort's Daily Rap Report. That's a two -minute Monday through Friday podcast. So it's for quick devotional stuff.

But that one is going to give you a lot of information in a short period of time. Actually, much of what we talked about here,

I go through the book. What do they believe in each religion for one week?

And I give essential things for Jehovah's Witnesses, Judaism. I go through the highlights within two minutes of each of those different points.

And so things like that. And that's there for people to binge. I'm going to start trying to get back to that one. I always say that my office hours are on Thursday, 8 to 10 p .m.

That's apologeticslive .com. You can come in and ask any question. I tell people I can answer any question you have about God in the

Bible. If you don't believe me, come into Apologetics Live and give me your best challenge. And if I say, I don't know,

I think that's a perfectly good answer. Don't tell me I didn't answer. I answered. I said, I don't know. That's an answer. But it's a place that anyone can come in, ask any questions.

We usually have a guest in or have a topic we talk about, and then we bring people up when they come in.

And we bring them into the show and let them ask any questions they have. So that's Apologetics Live.

I have a podcast. We have that with all of the Christian podcast community podcasters called Theology Throwdown, where we all just discuss a topic.

I have a podcast for podcasting called So You Want to Be a Podcaster. And one thing we make available, if you want to just get all of the podcasts that are hosted with us at the

Christian podcast community, you can actually search for Christian podcast community. It is a feed on its own, and it has all the podcasts that are hosting with us.

And so you get a lot of different podcasts. If you just want one place, you want to have one place to listen to lots of different podcasts and get a variety, you're going to get about 40 podcasts with all their different.

We have some that do more daily type shows, some that are more monthly shows, but you'll get all of them just on that one feed.

So those are some different podcasts we offer. Awesome. So everybody listening, we're going to make sure that information is in the show notes, so you can check those out.

So if our listeners want to know where these podcasts are, what the other materials, Striving for Eternity, where would you like them to go?

For the podcast, christianpodcastcommunity .org. And for Striving for Eternity, strivingforeternity .org.

If you want it shorter, you could just do sfe .bible, because that'll take you to strivingforeternity .org. And both link to each other.

So if you go to strivingforeternity .org, you can click on podcasts, and that'll take you to the podcast site. If you go to christianpodcastcommunity .org

and you click Striving for Eternity, it gets you to the other. So either way, they're cross -linked. Awesome.

Well, Andrew, that's great stuff. So if you're listening, again, it's going to be in the show notes.

Check it out. Check out the Academy. Check out the podcast. Man, grow in your sound doctrine.

Grow in the knowledge of Christ. So, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today.

This was an awesome conversation. I was blown away. Well, thank you very much for having me.

I'm always amazed. Like, I'll be honest. I wrote What Do They Believe? And I literally created the website

Striving for Eternity because I thought, who's going to buy a book from me? And so I just figured, let me just,

I'll put all the material on the web, and people can use it as they want. And it's amazing to see how it has grown.

If you want to get a copy of What Do They Believe or What Do We Believe, they're available at the website, strivingforeternity .org, in the store.

But I'm just blown away with how it got used, and I'm blown away that there's thousands of copies of people wanting to get books from me.

I don't understand that. I'm just like, who am I, Lord?

But it's very humbling. But being on a show like yours, it just shows,

I'm blown away with the fact that people would be reaching out, wanting to learn more from a guy that just wants to be a small church pastor.

Oh, that's awesome. Well, the information you shared was encouraging, challenging, not only for me.

I know it is for the people listening, and I know we're going to walk away from this, just taking another step in our walk of faith.

So it's been a blast, Andrew. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Wow. Wonderful conversation with Andrew Rappaport.

Three things that jumped out at me. First, I like how we talked about there are really only two religions.

There is divine religion, which is biblical Christianity, and man -made religion, which is everything else.

And it falls into one of those two camps. And so as we talk about world religions, as you talk about different, we'll call them false religions, because that's what they are.

It's two camps. There's biblical Christianity and everything else. Second thing,

I really liked how we talked about we as believers, we need to be fixed on eternity. That the jobs, houses, cars, hobbies of this world, they are just temporal.

They're here for a short while. Christ is eternal. And as we look, as we study, even as we suffer, especially as we suffer, we need to focus on Christ and what

He promises eternally. And then third, man, as believers, we need to equip ourselves biblically.

We need biblical training. We need to study. We need to understand how to read God's Word, ultimately, so that we can understand

God's Word, so that we can make disciples. That we can express grace and truth, ultimately, for God's glory.

So, great conversation with Andrew Rappaport. So, make sure you check out the websites, the strivingforeternity .org,

as well as christianpodcastcommunity .org. Get equipped. Get some information.

And just continue to grow in your faith. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review for us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Doing so will help others to find us. Check out the show notes for resource information.

We encourage you to do that for links and other references. We'd like to hear from you, so you can message us.

Your questions or comments on Facebook, Instagram, and Entrusting the Faith. You can email us at info at entrustingthefaith .com.

If you go to our website, which is www .entrustingthefaith .com, you can sign up to our email list and receive free resources, as well as upcoming podcast episode information.

So, check it out. Lastly, just remember, legacies are built a day at a time. So, start now.

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