A Road Trip DL from Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're still on the road, will be for a while longer. I have decided to risk it and cut the return trip back by a day.

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It's about all I can do, really, and still stay somewhat safe. I already had pretty long days planned as it was.

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Prayers appreciated for that. Traveling alone, and you all have one advantage

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I don't have, I can't do stimulants. I can't do anything like caffeine. And so you can get really tired on those long, lonely roads and start nodding off.

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And yeah, so prayers for safety on the way back. But I'm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and I spoke yesterday at the semi -annual free pastor's luncheon that Chris Arntzen puts this on in memory of his wife.

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His wife was the one that came up with the idea and they had started doing that. She passed away, and so he's kept doing it.

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It's a lot of work for him, it's very difficult. Of course, Chris knows everybody.

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Every time someone would walk up, he'd give me their name and what church they're at. He knows when they move churches, it's amazing.

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I can't remember anybody's name. There's only like one person that I met yesterday that I do remember his name, because I have a feeling we're gonna be doing some work together in the future.

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Pastor Samuel, formerly a member of the Oriental Orthodox Church, now a

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Reformed Baptist pastor. And we just hit it off and started talking and just doing the

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Orthodox stuff. And he's been on Chris's program, and so one of the things

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I'm gonna do on the way home is listen to the programs he's been on with Chris before to sort of get up to speed there.

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Anyway, this is the second time that I've spoken at the conference.

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It's at this really nice church in Loisville, which is like one -eighth the size of Gettysburg, maybe, something like that.

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Just tiny little town out there. And it's outside the actual town, and you're just driving through these rural roads like you do in Pennsylvania.

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It's just so different than being out West. Narrow little roads going up and down hills and around and stuff like that.

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And you just come around this corner. Here's this big, huge church. It's out in the middle of the field. It's a beautiful facility, and they're very kind to allow

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Chris to have some events there. That's where I did the debates. What was that, about a year and a half, two years ago?

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Somewhere around there. Oh, with the TR guy. Anyway, lots of folks come.

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Doug McMasters and his co -pastor came all the way from New Hyde Park Baptist Church on Long Island. I've spoken there, preached there, did at least one

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Muslim debate there, maybe more than one. Doug, old, old friend, looking old, old like me, first met him at Grace to You in Southern California many, many, many, many moons ago with Phil Johnson.

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And then he moved to London. And so some of those debates you saw in London, in Wandsworth, were at his

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Trinity Church there in London. And he moderated a couple of them, too, if you watch those videos.

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And then he moved back to New York and took the church there that I had spoken at before.

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And so there's a lot of connections there with Doug. He drove all the way out, and it was great to see him.

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So it's a neat event, and like I said, the

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Christian publishers, really, he lines tables, the free books the

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Christian publishers send to give to pastors. And pastors come, they leave with a whole huge bag of publications and stuff.

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It's pretty neat. And I remembered that a couple years ago when

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I did this, I had, I didn't remember what

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I talked about specifically, but I remembered that it was sort of, spur of the moment, it was really heavy.

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It wasn't a light type thing. And I couldn't remember what it was. Well, somebody who was there did remember, shockingly enough, and I had spoken on grief, which wrote a rather popular book on the subject, but I rarely talk about it.

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It's, I never learned, as a chaplain, to turn the emotions off.

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That's sort of a, that's a switch I was not built with. And so it is very draining for me to speak on the subject of grief, really, really is.

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And so yesterday, as I was thinking about what

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I was going to share, I don't know why, but it ended up being really, really heavy again.

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And I just spoke of the difficulties of Christian ministry, of the pastorate.

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I started off telling the story about how, when I was 10 years of age, I had made the commitment, having seen how many knife wounds my dad had in his back as a pastor, that I was never going to ministry.

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Those sheep, those sheep are crazy. So that's just, yeah.

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And when you're only 10 years old and you're thinking like that, you've seen, you've already seen some stuff.

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And I had, and of course, Lord had other plans, but, you know, as I mentioned yesterday to the men, you're in the ministry for any period of time, and there is a list of names in your mind, but it's not a list of names, it's a list of faces of people who have left, just left the faith, just shocked you one day and walked up and said,

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I don't believe this anymore. Get somebody else to teach, take all my responsibilities, we're leaving.

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And they, you know, I'm thinking of one guy had been in our church for 20 years, was a deacon, and just, boom, and no matter how hard you try, the longer you're in the ministry, the longer that list becomes.

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That's just, that's part of ministry in a fallen world. And it's fulfillment of Jesus' own teaching.

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I mean, you can't skip the parable of, it's literally the parable of the soils, it's not of the sower, it's the parable of the soils.

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And that was one of the ways that Jesus prepared the disciples for the reality of ministry, that, you know, you have soils where the growth is big and explosive, and, well, this is exciting.

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And especially when you're in difficulties, challenging situations, and you grab onto anything that looks like it's gonna be really positive, and, oh, this guy, well, this is so great, we've been hoping that new leadership would come up, and here's this guy, and then no root, sun rises, dies, gone, never bore fruit, and you can't avoid that.

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That's part of being in the ministry. And so I talked about stuff like that, and then

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I went to Acts chapter 20, and I guess

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I might as well do this now, since I was gonna, I wasn't sure exactly what order we would do things in, but I went to Acts chapter 20, and Paul's final words to the elders at Ephesus.

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I've always found that to be a very special text of scripture, very poignant. So thankful that Luke recorded that for us, because,

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I mean, here's a church, Ephesus, where Paul had invested three years of his life.

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Now, look, I know ministers that have been in churches for 40 years, 50 years, but this is the apostle to the

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Gentiles, this is three years in a life where you're attempting to basically ground the future existence of the

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Christian church and evangelism and everything else, three years is a long time. And I think

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Paul looked at a map, he saw the Lycus River Valley, he saw Asia Minor, he saw all the roads that went to Rome go through Asia Minor, and said, right there, sound, solid church there will naturally spread out and will help to evangelize the world.

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And so, you know, he obviously poured himself, he even says, he talks about going from house to house with all humility and with tears and with trials which came upon me through the plots of the

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Jews. So there was external pressure against him, his

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Jewish opponents, because of his past life as a leader amongst them, made his life very, very difficult, but then by the end of the exhortation, he's talking about the fact that I know after my departure, savage wolves will arise from amongst yourselves, drawing the disciples away after them.

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What a thing to be firmly convinced of, that I know that after I'm gone, even amongst you, the

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Ephesian elders that I invested so much time and effort in, there will be people who arise speaking perverse things, not sparing the flock, savage wolves, and, you know, this is the reality that Paul understood would be the experience of the church.

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And he had experienced defection and apostasy himself, Demas, you know, some of them are named,

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I'm sure there are lots that weren't named, and who had loved the world and went back to the world or became active opposers of the gospel message.

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And yet he, as he says, he did not shrink from declaring to the

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Ephesians anything that was profitable. He specifically says,

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I do not make my life of any account nor dear to myself, so that I may finish my course in the ministry which

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I receive from the Lord Jesus to testify solemnly the gospel of the grace of God. And that's what I said to the men. I said, how is it you keep going?

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You have Paul's attitude. You've been given a ministry. And that's the greatest gift you'll ever receive.

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And that's the highest calling you'll ever receive. And if you view it that way, then you'll have the foundation upon which to continue that ministry even when, and it happens, even when close fellowship, people you have fellowship with, people you've invested in, people you've broken bread and Lord's supper with for years turn on you and you can't help it.

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But feeling I've wasted my time. I've spoken into this person's life over and over in every possible way that I could think to do it.

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And yet here, this is what happens. What happened to Paul too? And he says, it's very, very important in verse 26.

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Therefore, I testify to this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God.

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You can preach on that one for a long time. You can preach on that one for a long time.

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The pressures put upon ministers today to edit the message.

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We live in a day where some of the most fundamental blessings that the

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Lord has given to us in the past, he's not giving to us right now. And one of them I am convinced is the fact that in the church today, rather than a sound mind,

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Greek term, Sophronismos, a disciplined mind, rather than a conviction that thinking clearly and thinking logically consistently is part of the way that you glorify

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Christ. You're thinking God's thoughts after him. You're demonstrating that you do believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

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We live in a society that doesn't think anymore, it emotes, it feels.

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Well, I feel this, or I sense this. And it's pretty much every day on social media, though some days while I'm traveling,

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I don't do any of it, and it actually lowers my blood pressure a good bit. But every day on social media, you will encounter someone who thinks that their emotional experience is actually a valid, logical argument.

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And just because they say, well, I think you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're just supposed to bow down and go, okay, all right, ah, you know, great, great master of reading hearts from afar and all this stuff.

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It's like, okay, so you feel that way, big deal. What am I supposed to do about that?

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And that emoting, I struggle with that. I really, really do.

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And when you know you have people like that in the congregation, you are tempted to shrink back from declaring the whole counsel of God, the whole purpose of God, because there's things that offend overly emotional people, people who do not have their emotions in check, in control, and you just don't wanna deal with it.

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You know, you'd like to have a week where you're not having to explain the same things over and over and over and over again to the same people who just don't get it because they don't feel it.

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I just don't feel it. And so you shrink back, and you don't declare the whole counsel of God.

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And Paul says, hey, that makes you guilty of their blood, because if you don't tell them the whole truth, you've got blood on your hands.

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And he says, I've not shrunk back, I've given you the whole counsel of God. And so that's basically what

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I said to the men, knowing, and many of them said afterwards, I had guys come up to me afterwards, and they said, yeah, you have no idea how timely that was.

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And I'm like, no, I do. Because if you're in ministry,

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I was sort of looking around the room, and when I would say things about, you know, by the way, you do realize we're the last ones to ever know why people really leave the church, right?

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What they tell us, you know, we just sense the

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Lord's leading upon our lives to go somewhere. You find out through your wife what the real reasons were, because, you know, it goes from that person's wife through the lady chain.

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Eventually your wife says, did you hear what I heard? That's just how, they never tell the elders.

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If they even bother to meet with the elders before they leave, you are, no, unless it's a job transfer or something like that.

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If it's actually a problem, they never tell you the real reasons. And I was just watching the room, and they're all like, oh, man.

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Anybody who had been in the ministry for 10, 15, 20 years, let alone 35, 40, were like, yeah, no kidding.

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And yet these are the people you have, you've married them, you've buried them, you've greeted their babies at the hospital, you've provided emergency funding for them, set up meal trains for them.

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Meal trains, not meal trains. Meal trains for them.

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You've gotten their cars fixed. You've counseled their, when they're having marital problems, you've done porn into them.

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And then they just walk off, and you're left sitting there going.

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And again, if you didn't do all that for the right reason, then yeah, you are just left sort of going, well, that was a complete waste of my time.

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But if you did what you did in service to Christ and seeking to glorify His name, nothing you ever do in that context is a waste of time.

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You may not see how in this life it was blessed with great fruit and so on and so forth, but that's because you can't see everything that God sees.

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So a lot of guys were like, man, you spoke directly to me.

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And it's like, yeah, I know. I was speaking directly to myself too. So yeah,

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I've not, I didn't make some commitment to be the heaviest topic speaker at Chris Arntzen's pastor's luncheon, but it's sort of worked out that way.

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And so I'll be preaching at Crystal Church on Sunday. It's Sunday afternoon. Doesn't throw me a curve.

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It's actually earlier in the day than we have service. And then

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I do need to mention this. I apologize that I have not done this before. Well, I may have mentioned it briefly, but I'm going to be at Justified Reformed Baptist Church.

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And let me back the things up here. Here we go.

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So this is 690

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Training Center Road, Woodlawn, Virginia. So Justified Reformed Baptist Church in Woodlawn, Virginia.

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So it's, I don't know, it's about 20 minutes, I think. I think Google said south of the

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KOA I'll be staying at in Wytheville, Virginia. So I went the northern route to get here and I'm going to go the southern route to go back and then back on the same route on the 40 after that.

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And so that'll be seven o 'clock on Monday evening. So Monday, I've got to be out of here uber early because it's a six hour drive down there.

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And so I look forward to greeting you there. Evidently, it's gotten out of Facebook.

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It's a small church. Most of the churches I visit at using roadtripataomin .org.

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That email address are fairly small churches. And that'll be seven o 'clock on Monday.

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The reason I did the loop is, I think I mentioned Pastor Nahum O 'Brien, the missionary to,

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I believe it was Norway. It's one of the Scandinavian countries. Who was diagnosed with cancer, had to come back to the

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United States. He's been undergoing treatment and is pastoring this, again, a very small, very rural

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Baptist church. And when he had seen I was going to be going from Tullahoma to Pennsylvania, he's like, we're sort of along the way there.

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So I made the Northern loop and drove on a lot of roads that aren't a whole lot of fun to drive on and had dinner with he and his wife.

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And then we drove to the churches quite a ways for dinner. Not as the crow flies, but just simply as roads are back here.

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It's very different than out West. And we had to get around the mountain. Oh, okay.

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Anyway, and he said, we are in the middle of King James Onlyville here.

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So would you like to address the King James issue? So we had a really good group show up.

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This was Monday, Monday night. We had a really good group show up, including some

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King James Only guys, which is sort of unusual. We keep trying to get the guys that are really popular around there.

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Tony's something, no. Pastor Zorn and Mitchup, Ketchup, whatever his name is.

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These guys that talk a good talk, but they won't debate for love and money and can never get them to come out and defend their positions in meaningful debate.

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But so I gave a presentation without any fancy slides and stuff like that. And we had a bunch of questions.

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And then toward the end, one of the King James Only guys, we went back and forth for a little while, and it was useful because he just proved everything

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I had just said. I had just said, King James Onlyism starts with its own conclusion.

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It cannot be consistent. It's circular. And as soon as he started talking, he just proved everything

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I was saying. And he literally at one point said, I'm absolutely convinced of this.

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It doesn't matter what you show me. And so I went back to, remember the text that came up in, that wasn't, no, it was not

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February. I think it was after February. Was it April? When I went to Livingston, Louisiana again.

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Yeah, I think it was April. Yeah, it was first, right around the beginning of April, they had a big concert in town.

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That's why I had to stay down in Baton Rouge rather than at Livingston. Anyway, Doug Levesque, nice guy, really nice guy.

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But if you watch the debate, it wasn't much of a debate because he didn't really have a position he could defend.

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And I had raised the issue specifically about Revelation, I believe it's 21, is it 2124?

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Where Eratos made an error in transcribing the commentary that Andreas of Caesarea had written, over half a millennium after the time of Christ in Greek.

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And he had inadvertently completely not wanting to do it, but he did end up inserting a phrase into the text of Revelation that is from Andreas of Caesarea's commentary.

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So no manuscript of Revelation had ever contained it. And it came from the transcription process because Eratos didn't have a single just plain

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Greek manuscript of Revelation to use. He had to borrow this commentary from his friend,

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Johannes Reuchlin, and then extract the Greek text out. He made a lot of mistakes as a result. But this is a situation where the mistake involved the insertion of a phrase that's not to be found anywhere else.

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And so I'm like, look, I wanna know what John wrote, not what

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Andreas of Caesarea over 600 years later thought he should have written, or thought he wrote, or just commented on.

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And so I asked the guy that, and again, just spin in circles.

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Well, you're trying to sow doubt in King James -only -ism?

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You better believe I am. In the Bible, no, because they're not the same thing. But he proved what

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I said, I think it was about, what, about 12 pages into the King James -only controversy? I said, key to understanding the

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King James -only mindset is in their way of thinking, the

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King James Bible alone equals the word of God alone. If you sow doubt in King James -only -ism, for them, you're sowing doubt in the

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Bible. Category errors abound everywhere.

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So yeah, we did that on Monday night. And yeah, the added a little time, well, what it didn't actually add a whole lot of time, because that meant

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Tuesday, I had over eight hours of driving and again, I know you professionals do it, that's dangerous for me to do.

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I made it pretty well, but it leaves me exhausted, and like I said, it's gonna be pretty dangerous.

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But we got here, excuse me. Actually got more sleep last night than I have in a long, long time, but now

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I'm still catching up on stuff like that. So just, that's what's been going on, that's what

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I talked with the men about, hopefully some of those thoughts are useful to you and helpful to you and stuff like that.

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I guess on Sunday, there's gonna be the big memorial service at Arizona State University for Charlie Kirk.

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And I am truly disgusted at all the people trying to grab

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Charlie Kirk for their movement. Oh, I heard he was interested in orthodoxy, oh,

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I understand that actually he was looking at converting to Roman Catholicism, and oh, shut up, it's just ghoulish.

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I mean, the man's not even in the ground yet and you're trying to do all this stuff, oh.

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And of course, it's just as ghoulish, the memes and the mockery.

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But you know, there's been all this pushback. So Kimmel, suspended, maybe off the air permanently, seen lots and lots and lots of, and again,

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I don't know the accuracy of it, none of us do, but it seems like lots and lots of people have lost their jobs, lost their businesses, their positions, and the reason was, they made extremely unwise, disgusting comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.

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I have to wonder what Charlie Kirk would think about that because he spoke against cancel culture, he wasn't trying to push cancel culture out there.

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So I don't know, I'm not sure he'd be overly comfortable with the idea, and look,

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Kimmel was never funny to begin with, the company was losing millions of dollars on his show, so no one can sit here and go, oh, hey, you know, they shouldn't do stuff like that, for those reasons, but, and a lot of other people are like, oh, this is great, man, we're back, and things are going super now, and look at all these people that are, the back is broken of the leftist movement in the

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United States, which it's not, but look at the shift and the vibe and all the rest of that stuff.

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I mean, I guess the Senate voted unanimously because they didn't have Ilhan Omar, what a, how is she in the

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United States Congress, how? I was just watching a clip of her speaking to Somalis, saying,

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I'm a Somali, that's my homeland, and she's always talking up Somalia versus the

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United States, and it's just like, how, aren't there about 47 different rules in the

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House that would say you can't have this type of conflicted representation? I mean, she hates the

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US, it's just, it's vile and disgusting that every time I hear her commenting about anything, but she went after Charlie Kirk, and she can do that because her district is, well, basically not

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American, so she can count on a non -American vote to return her to the halls of Congress to continue denigrating the entire governmental system and make a mockery out of American patriots, patriotism and everything else.

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But yeah, I've seen all that stuff, it's been disgusting, it's been vile, but here's my problem.

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Again, if I wanted clicks, if I wanna get people to like me and that kind of stuff,

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I wouldn't touch this top 10 foot pole, other than just going, yeah, get them. I mean,

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Charlie was great, Christian, so on and so forth. I just have to be honest and a realist.

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The right is not going to be in charge forever, it may not be in charge after the end of the year.

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And when we saw this happening in 2022, 2023, we're like, oh, this is terrible, this shouldn't happen in the

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United States of America, because you have different political views and things like that.

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Well, the pendulum has swung, but there's something you need to know about pendulums.

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It sort of depends on how long the travel the pendulum is, but in general, the general rule is it comes back and it goes whipping by you to the direction, and it may be over there for a long time before it goes whipping back the other direction.

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That's how pendulums work. And some people are convinced that they are seeing a fundamental cultural shift in the

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United States. Look, I would love to see it,

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I really would. I have no vested interest in poo -pooing any true movement of God toward godliness.

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My theology says he will do so eventually one way or the other. But my knowledge of the

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Bible and church history tells me that it's normally connected with national judgment, repentance, and restoration.

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We've skipped the repentance part. We seem to think that without repentance, we can still do the restoration part, right?

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We can go back to where we were, but we don't have to worry about that messy, nasty repentance thing, asking for forgiveness, making things right, restitution.

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That doesn't get people excited and that's, yeah. So when

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I look around and I ask myself, do I see evidence that the spirit is working and there's this longing for godliness, the fruits of repentance,

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I just have to go, I don't see it. I don't think anybody else does either, though they may pretend it for a while.

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And so I'd like to see that, but if it's not there, then all we're getting right now is political stuff.

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And hey, I heard a couple weeks ago, not a couple weeks, a couple days ago, that there had been, was it 18 or 180 ,000?

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Or was it 80 ,000? And then all these inquiries, TPUSA, about starting TPUSA groups on people's campuses.

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And I have a friend who is working to try to get a TPUSA affiliate started at a high school near where he lives, that he's got, he's invested a lot in school board elections and things like that there.

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And again, that's great if it lasts. My question,

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I know if you want to get everybody to like you, you just jump on board and run with it and try to get everybody excited and get clicks.

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We don't make money off clicks anyways, so whatever. But I know that's what you should do, but I'm that realist guy,

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I'm that Scottish guy that goes, well, if it all plays out the way it normally does, the leftists will have power again, sooner rather than later.

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And it seems like it is this pendulum swing, but a pendulum and a clock in it.

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I'm just sitting here thinking, how many people in my audience have never seen a mechanical clock with a pendulum that actually worked?

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We had one in our house, my dad got it as a trade out at the radio station, it's a really nice clock, but you had the weights on it and every about week or so, you'd have to pull the weights up and those weights provided the energy for the clock mechanism to keep going.

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And I had the chimes and it's quite nice, I don't know what ever happened to it, but it was very, very nice.

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And so I just wonder how many people in the audience don't know what a pendulum swing is.

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And the fact that just due to the laws of physics, generally a pendulum is going the same distance this way as this way.

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It's got a center point, swings back and forth. What eventually stops a pendulum is gravity and the inefficiency of the mechanics.

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So in other words, there's friction up there and eventually no matter how small that friction is, it will eventually stop the system.

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But what we're seeing in the United States is we've got a pendulum swing, but there doesn't seem to be anything out here stops it from going any farther.

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I mean, and when it goes left, why does it go left? When you think about if a pendulum was on a center point, it was doing this number, you could get it going high enough to just do this number.

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And that's why a lot of people are saying woke left, woke right, can't tell the difference.

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They sort of seem to meet in the middle somewhere. And it's true. There is that aspect of things.

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Oh, thanks too. But anyway, I'm not sure how in the world

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I got that and I'm starting to feel like I'm wandering like I did in the last program. I think it's because I'm recording this.

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Our internet here is impossible. Totally insufficient bandwidth to do a live video broadcast.

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And I'm sort of wondering if that's not part of what made it difficult on last program and on this program to not chase rabbits and sort of lose your place and stuff like that.

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I wonder if knowing that there's a live audience makes a difference along those lines.

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I don't know. I'm analyzing myself right now. And that's just sort of how I'm thinking about right now.

41:58

But I hope to see

42:04

TPUSA press on and do great things.

42:12

And like I said, last program, you can't replace Charlie Kirk and don't put the pressure on anybody to try.

42:19

Oh man, you want to burn somebody out? You want to ruin some young leader in TPUSA today?

42:25

Tell him to be Charlie Kirk. No, he needs to be whoever he is. If he tries being somebody else, that'll be the end of it for him.

42:34

That'd be an unhappy life. I don't know how long this zeal will last, what it'll be able to accomplish.

42:48

I would love to see it have a big positive impact for a long period of time. That'd be wonderful.

42:56

But this isn't the first time I've seen things like this happen.

43:04

And the movements or companies or ministries or whatever that men have led and then have died,

43:15

I've rarely lived up to what they could have been had that founder continued on with them.

43:24

So I'm not sure who they're going to get. I've heard that his wife is sort of going to be filling in for now and okay, but I can't, that's not a long -term solution.

43:36

I just don't see that happening. But it would be wonderful if two or three or four or five really bright

43:49

Christian nation -loving men would step forward and pick up the banner in essence and run with it.

44:02

I know that Jeff Durbin has been asked to do something for TPUSA and it's been put off for now, but it may be rescheduled and put back on the schedule even before the end of this year.

44:15

Well, we'll see. Because Jeff can do that kind of stuff. You know,

44:21

I said, well, can't you? You know, taking live phone calls on the

44:27

Bible Answer Man broadcast for all those years or Janet Mefford, who was it before Janet Mefford before she sort of jumped off the ship?

44:36

There was another Janet and I forgot the name. I was on her program bunches and bunches of times too.

44:45

Being in situations like that where you're getting these random, got a bank of phone lines there.

44:53

Who knows what's under the next blinking light? Yeah, I do handle that fairly well, but it's normally on a specific topic.

45:06

These things that Charlie did on the campuses could go anywhere.

45:15

Ask the Bible Answer Man any question there is. I don't claim to have that kind of, you can ask me all sorts of stuff that I wouldn't know anything about.

45:23

I'd have to go, I don't know. Never heard of it. Nothing I can do for you on that level.

45:32

But I would struggle with the young people. I would struggle with the young people.

45:41

I struggled enough with my own kids, but they're not kids anymore.

45:48

My oldest will turn 40 in like six months, nine months.

45:56

We're 40 years old. I've got a granddaughter who's just about turned 16. So it was like, you should go on Joe Rogan.

46:08

No, I don't think Joe Rogan would like me. Wes Hough, young, good looking, buff guy.

46:17

Yeah, he far better for that situation. And I'm not saying that my time has passed, so I'm not going to,

46:26

I won't talk to young people or things like that, but there's a lot of terminology that I don't know and I don't want to know.

46:34

I'm holding out hope for the English language. It's not going to turn in, we're not going to lose all punctuation and capital letters.

46:43

We're going backwards and the English language is devolving. Well, that's what socialism

46:49

Wells warned us. You know, new speak. Yeah, I have to ask questions about stuff.

46:56

And the funny thing is I will ask my kids. You know, the first people

47:02

I'll ask, I mean, I can ask Grock now, but normally

47:08

I ask my kids and they're getting old enough to where they have to sort of look it up and talk to someone that's younger than them.

47:16

You know, you're in definitely well into the grandfather years and heading toward the great grandfather years when that type of thing starts happening.

47:24

And so no, it takes a special person to do that kind of campus stuff.

47:34

And, you know, I actually, and I'm not going to, I don't want to, hold on a second here.

47:45

Cause first I was just about to think about here. Yeah, he just reminded me of this fellow.

48:03

So I'll definitely not mention his name now cause I didn't ask him if I could, but he's a young, bright, sharp guy.

48:10

And he was saying, I've been asked to do this public thing in a rather negative context, would this be against me?

48:20

You know, what do you think? And I was like, that sounds like a Charlie Kirk situation. I'd go for it.

48:25

As long as you can have some confidence that you'll actually be able to speak. That you won't be shouted down, silenced.

48:35

Yeah, go for it. Cause as I said to him, as you and I both know, their worldview is inconsistent.

48:40

It can't answer cross -examination. So you can have a lot of confidence going into situations like that.

48:48

But, you know, if all you're going to do is shout it down, out -emoted, something like that, you know, then you question the value of it.

48:57

But yeah, he did remind me. And I've prayed about it, of course.

49:03

But be in prayer for Michael Fallon. Most of you only know

49:10

Michael Fallon through since about 2016 onwards. And, you know,

49:20

Sovereign Nations and his work with James Lindsley and stuff like that. Lindsay and stuff like that.

49:29

But I knew Mike. And if you've watched any of my debates from,

49:37

I don't know, 2000, actually 1999 onward, well, about 2000 onward, you see

49:43

Mike a lot in them, moderating or introducing them. He had put the money out to organize them.

49:52

And his whole company, Sovereign, grew out of him doing cruises for Alpha and Omega Ministries.

50:03

He and his wife invited, I've told the story before, he wanted me to come out, talk about Roman Catholicism.

50:11

He's a former Roman Catholic. And he left this voice message on my answering machine that said, if you'll come out and do a conference at my church on Roman Catholicism, we'll take you on a three -day, two -night

50:27

Caribbean cruise. I never even thought about, I never thought

50:33

I'd go on a cruise in my life. It was not attractive to me at all. I didn't really think about it. So I went home that night and I said, hey, this guy left a message on the phone machine and said, if I come out and speak on Roman Catholicism, Florida, that he would, they'd take us on a three -day, two -night cruise.

50:55

Kelly looked at me and said, we're going on that cruise, whether I have to speak on it or not.

51:01

I said, oh, okay. So when

51:07

I think of all the stuff that Mike and I have done since then, we can all give thanks to Kelly for that one.

51:15

But yeah, he was looking at heart surgery when

51:20

I last talked to him just a matter of days ago. And it looks like he's still in the hospital and things like that.

51:29

So we need to pray for he and Saul, his wife, and the whole team there, Kathy. They do good work and they're good folks.

51:39

And so we need to pray for them. But anyway, yeah, there's a whole young generation coming up and we need to be encouraging them.

51:53

And it really bothers me that people online, you're just attacking young people.

51:59

No, I want to encourage the young people who will be serious.

52:06

Not the flash in the pan, not the young people that are just blown about by whatever wind of cultural change there is.

52:14

The young men who are rooted in the word, serious minded. There's a whole, someday

52:20

I'm just gonna have to do a study. I think I may have done one many years ago. Someday I have to do a whole study on the dividing line of the words that the

52:28

New Testament uses, and Paul especially, such as Sophronismos, sound mind, discipline, self -controlled, act like a man.

52:42

There's just a whole group of words that are not popular in our culture today that would not sell like the prayer of Jabez did.

52:55

Okay, I just dated myself again. But man, it's worthwhile hearing what scripture says about that and living in light of that.

53:06

Those are the young people that I want to encourage, not the ones that are chasing clicks.

53:13

There's plenty of those people and their end will be the shipwreck of the faith.

53:20

It will be. Couple other things I wanted to get to, and looking here, I've only got a few minutes left in the hour, but it's not like anybody cares what time it is right now.

53:35

There's some really interesting stuff going on in Rome. I keep getting sent this stuff.

53:43

And I'm not gonna have a chance to get to today, but there is a Soteriology 101 video that I need to try to remember.

53:56

Got a lot, there's a lot of details. You gotta keep, I keep juggling stuff when you're on the road. I will try to remember to get it downloaded so maybe we can cover it on the return trip.

54:10

Where once again, Leighton Flowers, he writes, that moment when James White realizes that provisionism makes more sense than Calvinism.

54:18

No, Leighton, that was the moment where I was like, am I covering this again? Someone needs to make you, at least we can get

54:32

Grok to do it, I suppose, but I would love someone to make you maybe even a functional one -string banjo because that's all you've got.

54:45

And take the frets off because you got one note, you got one string and one note, And honestly,

54:51

Leighton sometimes is just like, how many times? You know, he may say it different ways, but how many times are we gonna say the same thing over and over again to someone who does not have ears to hear?

55:05

I don't know. I was talking with Jeremiah Nortier. He's gonna be debating

55:11

February 6th and 7th. I'll be one of the debaters. I'll be debating a Unitarian.

55:18

I would like to be debating another Roman Catholic along with that at that time on a

55:23

Marian dogma, but it's really hard to get Roman Catholics to do Marian dogmas seriously. I mean, like I said, you can find,

55:31

I specifically said to Marlon, I said, I want a sane Roman Catholic to debate, not the guys that can prove the perpetual

55:40

Virginia of Mary from the Denny's menu, because there are people like that.

55:46

They're just, and there's no reasoning with them. They're not serious, but Jeremiah is gonna be debating

55:55

Leighton during that debate marathon.

56:02

And I definitely want to be there for that one. I definitely want to be there for that one.

56:08

Why? I don't know, because there won't be anything new. I'm sure

56:14

Jeremiah will do a great job. He, like this other fellow that I just mentioned before, they're the next generation along with Jeff and those people, they're the generation coming after mine.

56:31

But yeah, I can tell you exactly what Leighton Flowers is gonna say. And it won't matter what

56:40

Jeremiah's responses are. That's the problem with all of it. That really, really is.

56:46

So we'll get to that. But one of the things I wanted to mention, I'm seeing a bunch of stuff about Pope Leo and the

56:55

LGBTQ stuff. And I'm gonna have to save this one for the next one.

57:01

I've got something from Defiant Baptist demonstrating that the funny thing is Defiant Baptist tried to accuse me of hypocrisy because I had said a couple of years ago, if your church is soft on the

57:16

Nazis, that yeah, you should leave that church. And so then how can you sit there and say, people shouldn't be telling people to leave the church if they don't talk about Charlie Kirk?

57:29

And the funny thing is he made the comment here it is.

57:38

He says, no, he'll just say that's a massive category error. See, he knows because it is.

57:46

To any rational thinking person, you'd sit here and go, wait a minute, Defiant Baptist, Aaron, this is his real name,

57:53

Aaron, you think there's a connection between saying that you shouldn't remain in a church that has

58:01

Nazi sympathies in it over against somebody saying that if your pastor doesn't preach a sermon or do certain things about Charlie Kirk on Sunday, that you should leave that church.

58:12

If you are so spiritually dull and mentally incompetent to not see that category error, there you go, you just flew my point.

58:24

Thank you very much. And the thing is, he knows it. He knows it. He says, no, he'll just say it's a massive category error.

58:31

Bingo, because you know. If you could refute that, you would, you can't, and you know it.

58:38

He's a problem. But not only that, I have a shirt.

58:45

I wore it to dinner a couple nights ago. I have a shirt, you've seen it, I've worn it on the program a number of times. It's a

58:50

World War II fighter aircraft shirt. And I've been a World War II buff since I was a kid, built models of planes and ships and tanks.

59:01

And guess what? I built models of German aircraft, German tanks. They designed the best tanks during, nobody came close to them.

59:10

I mean, a King Tiger, are you kidding me? We didn't get anywhere near their technology in tanks during the war itself, or even for quite some time afterwards.

59:25

And even when we did, we were just stealing their ideas. But the thought had always been back in my mind somewhere.

59:34

The thought was, someday I'm gonna wear this shirt and some idiot on the internet is gonna go, look, he's got a swastika shirt.

59:44

He must like the Nazi. Now I don't have it on right now, it's in the other room.

59:51

But you know, there's a Japanese zero right on the front. There's the rising sun.

59:57

And they were in the war. The Messerschmitts were fine aircraft.

01:00:07

The Germans developed the first functional jet fighter before we ever did.

01:00:16

But I always thought that some moron is gonna sit out there and go, oh, look at that, it's a swastika.

01:00:23

And I'm just like, okay, yeah. Yeah, there are people like that that just got the

01:00:31

IQ of a wet shoelace and they're gonna make that kind of argument. And lo and behold, Defiant Baptist.

01:00:37

Aaron pulled it off for us, way to go, big Aaron. So real quickly here, there's a lot of stuff going on about Pope Leo.

01:00:52

There have been, there are groups that have been, yeah, here.

01:01:04

Catholic Coalition asks Pope Leo XIV to reject powerful lobby pushing same -sex unions.

01:01:12

Signatories urge the Holy Father to revoke fiduciary supplicants and speak with absolute clarity, leaving no room for doubt or ambiguity.

01:01:23

You know, I have to respect people that are asking for that.

01:01:31

Fiduciary supplicants was a violation of Roman Catholic tradition. And if you think

01:01:36

Roman Catholic tradition is apostolic tradition, then why wouldn't you ask the Pope to do this?

01:01:42

Because obviously Pope Francis erred. Well, wait a minute, Pope Francis erred.

01:01:48

Well, wait a minute, that's, uh -oh, our system has a problem now. You do, exactly, no question about it.

01:01:56

But if Leo's responses, because remember, I commented, it didn't take long for Leo to get chosen.

01:02:05

And when Francis was failing in health, a lot of us said, you know, Francis had a lot of time to put his acolytes, his followers in charge of the

01:02:17

College of Cardinals that would be electing the successor. And Leo came along pretty quickly.

01:02:23

He seemed to be a little bit unknown or maybe a little bit more conservative, but I'm getting the strong feeling that what we're seeing here is, this is the playing out of what

01:02:37

Francis wanted, that you crack the door open with fiduciary supplicants, you put your people in the important places in the

01:02:47

Roman Catholic Magisterium, and then to avoid full -scale fracturing and schism, you sort of freeze it in place to get people used to it, because this is how it happened in the mainstream denominations.

01:03:03

They're following the same playbook. You take some ground, there's pushback, and then you act like, oh, no, that's not what we're really doing, but it was, and you leave it there long enough that they get used to where the new line is, and then you can push forward from there.

01:03:23

Just a little bit. You can't do it real fast. And the more traditional a group is, the slower you gotta do it.

01:03:30

Okay. So I'm sort of wondering if there wasn't backroom communication going on before Francis's death, like with the bishops in Germany who want to do same -sex marriages.

01:03:45

Okay, it's coming. Just, you've just got to be patient.

01:03:51

It can't be done overnight. We will look the other way for now, but it's coming.

01:03:58

Just work with us. It's really making me wonder if that's not what we're seeing here with the way that he met with the

01:04:10

LGBTQ guy, and then there was something here, and I haven't been able to find it yet.

01:04:16

I need to track it down, that Leo said something controversial, maybe even today.

01:04:34

Yeah, okay, here's just part of the quote. This fellow said he said he was also perplexed by Pope Leo's suggestion that it is, quote, highly unlikely, end quote, the church's teaching on sexuality and marriage will change in the near future.

01:04:48

The point is not whether such a change is likely or unlikely. The church is teaching these areas cannot change at all,

01:04:54

Euretta told the NC Register. Well, the Pope should affirm this with absolute clarity, leaving no room for doubt or ambiguity.

01:05:02

Well, you know, part of me feels sorry for these folks. I know that's what you think, and if you think the church's teaching on these things is infallible, irreformable, and apostolic, then yeah, that's the position you'd have to take, but it's none of those things.

01:05:21

And so I guess that is a fascinating statement, that saying it's highly unlikely that the church's teaching will change in the near future.

01:05:39

Can you see anybody at Trent saying that? You know, any of, you know,

01:05:46

Innocent III or something? No, no, no, you couldn't. I'll track that down.

01:05:52

I will, you know, if I have time, try to track down that. Or hey, if any of you out there find that, send it to me.

01:06:00

I'd be happy to not have to invest the time in it. That'd be great.

01:06:06

But fascinating stuff going on. We got to keep our eyes on it. Got to keep our eyes on it. It has an impact on everybody.

01:06:13

All right, well, we went through a bunch of that stuff there, and I do not expect to be able to do anything again until Tuesday at the earliest.

01:06:26

And again, when we're traveling, like it's a nice little park I'm in right now. I like the nice folks, good location, all that stuff.

01:06:34

Only one problem, trees everywhere, which means I can't use Starlink, and the internet connection is extremely slow.

01:06:43

That's why I'm recording this. So you never know. Two or three of the places

01:06:50

I'm hitting on the way back, I've never stayed at before, so I don't know. I have no way of predicting, and to be honest with you, the places

01:06:56

I have stayed at before. Sometimes they all start blending together to be able to predict what's going to be coming, so I don't know.

01:07:06

We'll see. All righty, thank you very much for listening to the program. Pray for traveling mercies on the way home, and we will see you next time.