Robert Godfrey on Socialism, Criminal Justice Reform, & Two Kingdoms

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Conversations That Matter podcast,

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I'm your host John Harris with a bit of a news round up today. I want to start with a listener generated request to analyze a sermon that was crafted into a podcast for Ligonier.

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It is the Renewing Your Mind podcast and the title of this particular podcast is called

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Statism and Socialism, Statism and Socialism with Robert Godfrey.

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This was given, I believe, last year. I have a video for it at a

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Ligonier, or actually, I'm sorry, earlier this year at a Ligonier event. Or at least it was posted earlier this year and given the references made in the video, it sounds like it's from during the time of the

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Russia -Ukraine debacle when that first kind of started making major headlines.

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So anyway, I want to give you just a montage of some clips from this particular talk and then we'll analyze it a bit.

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This isn't like a hard woke thing. It's nothing like what we've seen from White Horse Inn earlier this week, from so many others that we analyze on this particular podcast.

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It is something though that I thought, you know, it is worth mentioning at least that there are people in evangelicalism who

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I would probably consider to be more on the anti -social justice train if they're on any train, or at least they're not woke.

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They don't give an air of being woke, but they give messages like this or impressions, assumptions, directions that seem to have the inevitable result of leading to a certain kind of passivity or a certain kind of non -engagement in the threats that are actually on the horizon and ever present even now with us in regards to social justice, socialism being of course the sort of core philosophy behind social justice.

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It's certainly part and parcel to it. So I want to offer this example as one of the ways that I think is probably the best word would be unhelpful in handling this particular problem, but it is the way

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I think many Christians who aren't woke, who aren't social justice, tend to approach social justice, socialism, statism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism,

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Marxism, etc. And I don't know if pietist is the word for it. I'm not exactly sure what to call it, but I think many out there would call it pietist, but whatever it is, it's not the most helpful thing.

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Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here are some clips from the particular talk by Dr. Robert Godfrey, statism and socialism.

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People ought not to be characterized by outrage. We ought to be seen as the people who know how to listen, who know how to love, who know how to be concerned, who know how to communicate.

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Now there are times for righteous anger. There are times for disagreement.

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But I think we all need to have a clear and settled foundation of what the

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Bible directs us as Christians to think about the state. We've had monarchies, we've had oligarchies, we've had dictatorships, we've had republics, we've had democracies.

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There's a whole range of forms that the state can take by human choice.

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And part of the good news is Christians have lived under every form of government and served

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Jesus Christ in their hearts. Psalm 82 instructs rulers to rescue the weak and the needy and to deliver them from the hands of the wicked.

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Does that motive function in our lives as we think about the responsibility of government?

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That the Bible calls us as political people to have compassion and to care about the whole community.

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And I think we have to be very serious about that and let God's Word challenge us.

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The state that claims to give all meaning and claims to have all power is a state that has become demonic.

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And we have seen that at various times in the history of mankind. We saw that in the

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Third Reich, didn't we? When Adolf Hitler claimed he could build a kingdom that would last a thousand years and in which the state claimed all authority and all meaning.

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We saw it in the Soviet Union when the Communist Party claimed to have all power and all meaning and to direct all living.

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And this kind of demonizing of the state always happens in places where the true and living

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God is neglected and rejected. Socialism, a word that can mean many different things in different circumstances and to different people.

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R .C. Sproul would have said to us, you know, some words are equivocal and others are equivocal.

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Some words always have a single meaning, other words have multiple meanings. So socialism can sort of mean different things.

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What socialism originally meant in the 19th century when it arose was a philosophy that said the state should own and operate the basic means of production for the good of everybody.

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Now, there were those who supported socialism and said, see how they care for the poor.

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Isn't that a good thing? And there were critics of socialism who said if the state owns everything, it means it's stolen what it owns from the people who originally owned it, and it's nothing but thievery.

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And other people stood back and said socialism in action usually leads to everybody being poor.

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So socialism is a little bit difficult to talk about in eight minutes.

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What we need to know about the history of socialism is that it was usually driven in its origins by a fundamentally godless outlook.

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We live only in this world. We need to get as much of the good of this world as we can because this is the only world we have.

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It's part of the shift in the 19th century in the West from a culture that thought about heaven as well as earth to a culture that increasingly thought only about earth.

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Governments ought to think. We've already said this, haven't we? Governments ought to think about how they can help the weak and the poor.

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But government should not pursue that responsibility by saying they own everything.

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And Christians have stood against that kind of socialism that has not worked either theoretically or practically.

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One sometimes wishes that pragmatists in this world would be more pragmatic. So how should we as Christians think about the various dimensions of the state?

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How should we relate to this reality? Most of us are not going to Washington to serve in the

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Congress or the Senate or the White House. As Christians, it seems to me we ought to think this way.

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This world is important, and we ought to seek to be as faithful, as justice -promoting, as loving in this world as we can be.

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And we ought to use what influence we have that our government would reflect real justice and real love.

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But while we believe that sincerely, while we should work for that earnestly, we have to even more fundamentally remind ourselves, as Hebrews 13 tells us, we have here no continuing city.

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Psalm 87 says, everyone, everyone, everyone who knows the

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Lord God is born again in Zion. That's our city.

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That's the city that will continue. That's the city in which righteousness will dwell.

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That's the city in which we will all love one another as we ought to be loved.

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And until then, until the revelation of that city, let's try to be less outraged and more loving and in that way be a light to the world.

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Thank you. So it's just a little bit, I don't know, for lack of a better term, disappointing when you think you're getting a talk on statism and socialism.

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You would assume, especially at probably an event like Ligonier, that you're going to get some really good information to go back to your congregation or wherever you minister.

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And now you can articulate very clearly why those things are wrong, or that's what

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I would assume at least, or why these things are a threat, what kind of practical things we can do to stand against them.

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Instead, though, what you get in a talk like this is we need to be focused on heaven. Now, would anyone disagree that we should be focused on heaven?

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No, of course not. We should be focused on heaven. But it doesn't give you very practical, a lot of practical things for what to do on this earth.

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I think being focused on heaven is practical for this earth. But there's certainly many other things also that should be implemented that we can use to try to hedge against the threats that are right before us, threats that, by the way, threaten our very faith, because it's an alternative faith.

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That's what social justice is. And socialism certainly would be an iteration of this. And so,

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Dr. Godfrey, and by the way, I'm not overly familiar with his material. I haven't read any of his books.

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He may be a great man and a great theologian, and I'm just going to give that benefit of the doubt there. This particular talk, though, gives the impression, if you walk away from it, that socialism isn't necessarily a good thing, but it is kind of open to interpretation and that in some vague way we should be about the common good.

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And some people think that socialism, the problem, then the root issue that really the only one that Dr.

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Godfrey talks about is that the core foundation of socialism is kind of this atheistic view or this replacing

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God with government view. And that's the problem. So as long as you don't have that, then I would assume socialism in some other conception would be acceptable.

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So you could have some kind of a redistribution scheme, I suppose, as long as there's not the impression given that the government is somehow usurping

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God. I'm just thinking that could be someone who attends the conference that has little information about socialism.

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I think that's what they would take away, that there is some acceptable forms out there. You got to be watch out, though, for that usurpation of God.

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And so as long as you're focused on the eternal realm, that the root issue of socialism, it's too materialistic, too focused on this world.

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It's usurps God. It takes the place of God. And so there are at least a version of it. And so we ought to be careful of that.

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But there really isn't a it's not he doesn't whack it out of the park. He doesn't go after socialism as a scheme to actually steal.

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He doesn't really even define or characterize socialism as a negative system because of that particular mechanism.

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So it's lacking in my mind. It's it's just it's too vague. It's too general.

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And the focus is on Christians just reacting by focusing on heavenly realities.

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And that's that's the main thing. So the other thing is that there's a assumption behind this.

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He opens with it and he closes with it that Christians need to be known for or characterized by some kind of willingness to listen, unwillingness to be angry, that he admits there's a righteous indignation, but he is giving the distinct impression that Christians are too angry right now.

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We got to tone it down a bit. There's something wrong with the way that we're reacting. We're not remembering, I guess, enough heavenly realities or something.

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All right. Can this apply to some people? I'm sure it can. But if anything, in evangelicalism, and I mean,

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I study this, I look at this all the time. I'm looking at what pastors or at least big evil leaders are saying.

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The overwhelming consensus seems to be that we're not going to take really, really hard stands against the tyranny that's right before us, tyranny like the preferred pronouns.

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And I mean, right now we have Edmund Burke in Ireland going to jail because he would refuse to use preferred pronouns.

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A guest on this show going to jail because he's a teacher and he's refusing to do it. This is the kind of thing, though, that's coming to the

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United States. People have been I'm sure it's probably unreported, but I'm sure they've been fired over this because I know so many people in the workforce who are required to use preferred pronouns.

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So they're always trying to remember first names and attempting to sort of navigate this. But we're on the cusp of having this be a real, real issue.

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It's already an issue, but it could be a lot greater than that. Of course, we have the issues with government tyranny in the reaction to the virus.

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And that wasn't ancient history. That was very recently, and it could very well happen again.

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We have what's happening in my state right now with the restrictions on carrying concealed carry, having a concealed carry permit at churches.

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So churches are less safe. That's a real threat we have. I could go on and on about all the different threats that exist out there that I don't want to bore you with that.

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Most of you probably are aware, but I don't think that it's helpful when all these policies are coming from a government impacted by a version of socialism.

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And then you go to a talk like this and you don't really get anything practical. The guy doesn't really define it too well.

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You don't really have anything that you can sink your teeth into and compare what

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Scripture says to what socialism teaches. It's just, I think Christians should be more genteel and less aggressive and focused more on heavenly realities.

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And it's just not suited for the moment we're in. I think something very similar to this could be suited for another moment.

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It's not this moment, though. That's the thing. And there's a difference between peacetime leaders and wartime leaders. One of the things

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I think we need to really realize with evangelicals today, Big Eva, evangelical industrial complex, the elites, is they are not suited for wartime leadership.

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And we're in a war. We've always been in a spiritual war. That's never really changed. But right now, particularly, this is ramping up.

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And guess what? It's coming from the media, Hollywood, the government, and the other elites in other areas.

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It is coming from our elites in social circles at large.

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And they are more than willing to use the arm and the force of the federal government or the state government, as the case may be, to come down on a church.

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And we have got to see the writing on the wall here. We have got to be prepared. Your even local pastors,

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I think, need to be wartime leaders at this point. That was a test.

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It was a test what we went through two years ago. And if you have leaders or pastors who failed the test,

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I would say don't be at a church like that. Unless they understand they failed the test, and they're now correcting that, because we can't afford to have weak leaders at this point.

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There's a principle. I forget the name of it now. It's escaped me. I've talked about it on the program before. But the idea, the concept behind this principle is that people tend to rise in a—and this isn't for churches, but in a business setting—people tend to rise to their level of incompetence.

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In other words, you go to your level of competence, and then one more promotion, and you're—it'll suit it for the job.

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And people tend to stay there. They don't go from there, up or down. They just kind of stay there because they're not well -suited, but they've been at the company so long, right?

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So there's—I mean, I can't remember the name of it. I wish I could. Someone can put it in probably the comments.

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Anyway, I wasn't expecting to talk about this. But I see the similar thing going on in evangelical industrial complex ranks.

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People, the ladder climbers in various ministries and educational institutions, all of that, they tend to rise to a certain level, but it's not a level generally well -suited for them.

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They're just not well -suited. I'm not saying that Godfrey is necessarily—by giving this talk, is displaying that necessarily.

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I don't know enough about him. But it does seem to me, though, we keep getting just impractical advice, impractical things, especially with the whole reaction to the virus.

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We get a lot of people saying things that are true, but they're not relevant.

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They're not actually applicable. And they're going to passages that are true, but it's not the passages that we should be going to.

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We should be going to passages about war. What do we do? We're in a war.

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How do we encourage one another? How do we fight against this? What do we need to know? What are the marching orders?

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Are we ready for the spiritual attack that's upon us that can take physical form in the—and that very well happens with government tyranny.

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So, instead, we're going to passages just about how important the heavenly realm is, how important it is to keep our eyes on Jesus, keep our eyes on God.

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But we don't flesh out exactly often, okay, what does that mean in this scenario? There's a place for David's mighty men.

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There's a place for tough leadership, direct leadership. It's not unchristian.

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It's not ungentlemanly to have a little bit of outrage at times, too. And there's plenty of examples of this in Scripture, is there not?

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Jesus was outraged. Paul was outraged. Of course, in the Old Testament, there's plenty of examples of prophets being outraged, that's for sure, speaking prophetically to even the rulers of their day.

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Isn't that part of what being salt and light is? So, it doesn't mean you're a jerk. It just means that there is a place to be prophetic.

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We should be encouraging people to get into public office, to get on their school board, to gain a place of influence over election integrity.

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Don't you want Christians to be at the helm in these things? Instead, you have, and I don't think I included the section, but you have people like Godfrey saying, like, well, most of us aren't going to be in elected office.

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And, you know, if you do decide to run, I'll vote for you. Ha ha ha. But there's, that's not a big rousing call for encouragement.

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I mean, we had Christianity Today just recently saying, don't run for school board because discipleship needs to happen at home.

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I mean, talk about a false dichotomy. You can do both. You can disciple your kids at home and you can run for school board. Why not?

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So, I'm a little energetic about this because it's just pouring cold water on a fire that should be raging right now.

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And that's the thing I think that discouraged me, discourages me just a little bit. Well, the other thing I wanted to do is follow up a little bit on this anarcho -tyranny stuff

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I talked about. Basically, anarcho -tyranny is the idea that or the situation when the government is punishing law -abiding citizens for things like, oh, no, you carried your pistol permit in an area you weren't supposed to carry, a public area

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New York State has deemed where you can't defend yourself. But yet criminals run all over the street and they're not actually policed the way they should.

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And we're seeing this in a number of major cities. So I wanted to just bring this to your attention.

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There was an article put out by Capstone Report. I thought it was interesting. It says Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and evangelicals pushing pro -criminal policies.

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Now, Bill Lee is the reason the focus on Bill Lee is because of the

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Ezekiel Kelly rampage that just happened. And before we get into it, let me just show you this.

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This is from the Hyphen Report. I'm not familiar with them. Someone sent me this, though, and I thought it was from September 7th, but it's on Ezekiel Kelly.

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Anyways, it goes through kind of the rap sheet and just who this guy was. And I mean, look, it says that Kelly was charged with attempted first degree murder in 2020, aggravated assault, employing a firearm with intent to commit a felony, reckless endangerment.

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A grand jury indicted him on those charges in 2020. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in April 2021 and was sentenced to three years in prison for unknown reasons.

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And without explanation, Kelly was released from prison. Yeah, that's the situation.

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And then he goes on this rampage earlier this week. May 2021,

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Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a criminal justice reform into state law that diverted criminals away from Tennessee state prisons.

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Adam Tamburin wrote in The Tennessean at the time, the governor struck a triumphant tone, saying the new laws would help generations of Tennesseans.

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He predicted it would break cycles of crime and punishment and keep families intact. Instead, it seems to have exponentially exacerbated and extended cycles of crime and no punishment.

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And this stuff was sick. It was live streamed. I saw one of them. I'm not even going to play this.

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I mean, it's amazing. He's posting on social media what he's doing, even

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I mean, not just the videos, but his intentions. It's just it's it's absolutely sick. This guy was an evil man.

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There's no other way to put it. And so it's there seems to be a possible motive here, a racial motive of some kind.

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And yet what happened is and I've gotten word from someone, two people in the Memphis area that the local pastors who were going nuts over the

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George Floyd situation don't have a word to say about this in connection to racism, though it is in greater proximity to them because it's happening in their community.

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Not a word saying that there's any racial element. In fact, a bunch of pastors apparently got together for this

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Christian kind of response to it, and it ended up being I got I got a video of it. It seemed like very

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Pentecostal charismatic, I guess it seemed like it was dominated, but it was it was more of a it was kind of disorganized.

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It was more of a worship service kind of thing, I guess. But it it it's just so different than the reaction that we had in 2020 to things that weren't weren't even they weren't proven.

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It wasn't proven that the shootings and especially the I'm thinking of the situation with Derek Chauvin that that was motivated by racism.

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But everyone just assumed it. And even pastors started preaching series or sermons on racism as if that was somehow pertinent, pertinent.

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And it really wasn't. Actually, they should have been teaching sermons on critical race theory or social justice and how dangerous this stuff is because we're actually ascribing motives we can't prove.

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So that's what happened back then. We know this. And now today we have something that would have hit the Memphis community in a much worse way, much more close to home and much more evidence to imply that this was motivated by some kind of hatred against white people or non -Black people specifically.

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And there's no cry from the local pastors, no assumption that this was racially motivated. It's just interesting.

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Different weights and measures. Well, here's the article from Capstone Report, and it posts a

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Tucker Carlson video. I haven't actually watched that on it, but it summarizes the video basically says this, that, let's see.

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In pursuit of that effort, Bill Lee recently declined to endorse a so -called truth in sentencing bill, which would have required people convicted of violent crimes to serve their sentences,

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Carlson said. As Lee said last year, there are too many people in prison who don't need to be there. OK, what are their names?

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They never give us their names. It would be interesting to read a list of all the names. OK, so this is a trend that's happening, and it's happening also within some quarters of evangelicalism.

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So he says Bill Lee basically is wrong on this. Billy's got an issue. In 2019, it says there's a connection here.

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The ERLC, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention, hosted a Billy spokesman at a criminal justice reform event for the

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Southern Baptist Convention. Isn't that interesting? That's when Russell Moore was at the helm. In 2019, criminal justice reform events featured

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Daniel Darling, an SBC. Well, this is I'm not going to tell you what Capstone says about him, but Capstone doesn't like Daniel Darling, an

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SBC guy now leading the Land Center at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Darling argued for rehabilitation instead of locking up criminals.

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According to Baptist Press, it's easy for us to kind of put out of our mind the incarcerated population, sort of throw away the key, lock them up and don't think about them, whatever.

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Let's see, simply incarcerating a lot of people doesn't actually make us safer. So this is what social justice advocates have been saying for a long time is we have this horrible criminal justice system.

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We're locking all these people up and we shouldn't be. And if there's going to be any kind of punishment, it's going to be a reform punishment.

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We can because people are basically good, right? So we can, unless they're white males, but we can take these people, these criminals, and we can put them through these programs.

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We can rehabilitate them. And that's where the pendulum is swinging. So anyway, he talks about that.

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There was a declaration that was made. Let's see, under Russell Moore, the

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URLC signed the justice declaration. And one of its goals was advocate for a proportional punishment, including alternatives to incarceration.

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I'll read that again. Alternatives to incarceration that protects public safety, fosters accountability and provides opportunities to make amends.

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And people who signed this were Russell Moore, the National Association of Evangelicals, Keith Walter Kim, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, President Daniel Aiken, Nathan Finn from the

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Southern Baptist, let's see, Nathan Finn, now SBC recording secretary. I guess he's been a bunch of things. I actually used to attend a

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Bible study in his house, but he was a professor at Southeastern when I knew him. And it doesn't surprise me he would sign this.

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Provost now at Biola, Matthew Hall signed it. In other words, the signers list contains, according to Capstan Report, woke leaders.

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But criminal justice reform is still a favorite talking point among evangelical elites. And so this is something that I want to get out ahead of a little bit because this might end up being a bigger issue.

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But in fact, there's someone I'm not going to mention, but someone who's influential on Twitter, has connections to Capitol Hill Baptist Church, who's also pushing this kind of thing.

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Not, of course, as popular as some of these guys, but I'm just wondering if this is going to become a bigger trend. You know, we're too incarcerated.

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There's not enough. There's too many people in jail. We need to come up with alternatives. And we need to learn something, though, from Ezekiel Kelly, from Brian Colesby, who killed

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Reagan Tokes in 2017. He had violated his parole actually six times, six robberies.

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Daryl Brooks, of course, who plowed his car through an audience in Wisconsin. And there's others.

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I mean, this is a pernicious issue.

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And there are two ways, I think, of looking at this. One is you return to some sort of a biblical standard—rooted, by the way, in the

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Bible, but exemplified in Western tradition—of short trials, shorter trials.

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I mean, we don't want trials to be short. You have to come up with the truth. That might take time.

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But shorter trials and more severe punishments for capital offenses.

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And make a real deterrent here. That's one way to look at it. So return to more of a biblical standard here.

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There's capital offenses for crimes and harsher, stiffer penalties for crimes that aren't capital offenses.

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That's one way. But the evangelical elites, I don't think they're ever going to trend that way. They're going to trend towards the way the left wants to trend, which really is based on this assumption man's good somehow.

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We can rehabilitate. We can take criminals and we can somehow give them second, third, fourth, fifth chances.

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And not really—I mean, the manpower doesn't exist in some of these situations to even police paroles and that kind of thing.

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So it is a problem, I think, that we have so many people incarcerated. But I think what's the alternative?

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Is that—that's the real question. If we get a worse alternative, a more unbiblical, even more unbiblical alternative, then it's not worth changing the status quo.

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If we can go the other direction and bring in some sanity here. And if it's a capital offense, capital punishment, if it's—and it's provable.

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That's very important. Not a Me Too thing where you don't have witnesses. It's provable. If it's a non -capital offense, if it's stealing, for instance, restitution must be made.

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It must be, you know, harsh. It must be stiff. It must be a real deterrent. That would be a good thing.

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But I don't see that's the way evangelical elites are going to push. And this is at the same time that some of these same people, like I know

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Danny Akin, for instance, signed that bill. But he wants gun reform. He wants, like, red flag laws and that kind of thing.

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So it's like, this is what brings us anarcho -tyranny. And it's not a world that I want to live in.

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I don't think it's a world you want to live in either. So I figured I would let you know about that. Now, let's see.

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Last but not least, I keep wanting to play this for you. For those who took an issue with what

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I said about Two Kingdoms Theology, I want to just play for you. This is Doug Wilson. And what he says, because a lot of people

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I think were reaching out were like, hey, I don't agree with what you said. A lot of them, I think, were more

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Doug Wilson fans. Let me just play for you. This is what Doug Wilson says about Two Kingdoms Theology. Two Kingdoms Theology, specifically that coming out of Escondido, Benjamin Horton, et cetera.

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Do you see this type of pilgrim mindset as contrary to your teaching, or is it reconcilable?

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I would say it's contrary. It's not a first -order error.

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So if it's contrary, I'm holding what I do. I believe that this is an erroneous teaching.

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But it's not a first -order error. It's not heresy. You wouldn't excommunicate over it?

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No. Someone could hold to that theology and come to Christ Church and be a member in good standing and so forth.

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We wouldn't make them the keynote speaker at our conferences. Where do you see it diverging then?

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I believe that Two Kingdoms Theology, as it comes out of Escondido, does not leave nearly enough room for the expressed will of God from Scripture and from creation for our civil order, for the public square.

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All right, so I think that it's a pretty stripped -down operation on the civic side.

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Now, they appeal to the Reformers taught Two Kingdoms, which they did, and the

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Lutherans particularly, and they did. But when you look at the robust engagement of the

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Puritans and the Reformers with the civil sphere, and 95 % of that would give the

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Escondido guys the fantods, it indicates to me that they're understanding it differently.

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So the Escondido breakdown wants to separate the spiritual kingdom as the church and the civil sphere as the other kingdom.

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And you've got two realms. The Reformed in the Reformation saw the two kingdoms as the external side of things and the internal side of things.

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And it wasn't a church -state issue. The external church, the external civil order, the externals of everything was one kingdom, and then the internal invisible state of affairs was the other kingdom.

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I'm much more comfortable with that than I am with a peculiarly American breakdown of church and state, and then on the state side where you have minimal revelation or minimal direction from God on what to do.

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Okay, so I've tried to make this point, but maybe I haven't made it as well as you just heard it made for some of you who are in that orbit.

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And so I wanted you to hear Doug Wilson give this breakdown, which is exactly what

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I agree with. I don't know if we actually differ as much as at one time I thought we might. But so if you're talking about two kingdoms in the way that the

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Westminster Escondido guys talk about it, then you're talking about church -state more often than not. And the state can be secular, and that's secular in the sense, and I should probably even qualify that, secular in the sense that it's not necessarily to be governed by or has to be governed by the law of God.

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And that's a real problem. I think that's in fact, I don't even know if that's what motivated the first podcast that we analyzed in this particular podcast, the

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Godfrey speech. So that's in my opinion, that's what we need to project.

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But the Protestant two -kingdom theology, which would say that there's an inward and an outward, or sometimes invisible -visible, or sometimes you say,

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I usually say temporal and eternal realms. I usually say realm instead of kingdom.

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But that breakdown I think is what we, it's just an assumption. It's assumption,

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I think the biblical authors assume this. I think the reformers though, and those that came from them also kind of assume this.

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And a good example of it would be the invisible versus the visible church. So you have the church you attend, and there's some people are terrorists, they're not actually true

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Christians, but they're attending your church, they're part of the church under the authority of the pastor, but they're not really part of the invisible church, the universal church.

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And so you have that breakdown right there. We have these breakdowns in a lot of areas of our life, and we have to navigate a world in which these two realities exist beside one another.

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That's all that I've been saying really, in my opinion, with the two -kingdom thing. So I think a one -kingdom view tends to flatline things more often than not, and it doesn't see that distinction as much.

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I think the radical two -kingdoms approach from Escondido tends to make a separation between the church and the state that's way too broad.

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And so there is this healthy, I think, two -kingdoms theology, and you don't have to call it that. Some people out there I know consider themselves to be one -kingdom guys, but they make some of these same distinctions.

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So whatever you choose to label it, I think that's the thing you have to pick up on, is that there is a spiritual, and there is a physical or temporal.

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There is an inward, there is an outward. So anyway, don't need to wax long on it, but I figured

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I'd close the show with that because I've been waiting to get to it for a while. More coming next week, God bless.

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I hope this was helpful for you. I wanna just say in closing, last but not least, I want to let you know about Equipping the

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Persecuted, which is a sponsor for this podcast. So if you are looking for a ministry to support that is not woke, that's doing good work for brothers and sisters in Nigeria who are under persecution, then you can donate to Equipping the

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Persecuted. They're building an orphanage right now. They have a lot of information on their website at equippingthepersecuted .org.

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Tell them that I sent you, and you can check out their statement of faith. You can check out their financial integrity.

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They want you to know that your money is actually going to what you think it's going to. You can check out their blog. They have updates.

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In fact, if I click on that right now, they have pictures and updates.

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And I know Judd Saul is getting ready to go back there real soon. And so if you want to partner in that ministry, go check out equippingthepersecuted .org.