Episode 108: Preaching Calvinism (Part 1)

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local church. I am your host, Allen Nelson, one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in the metropolis of Perryville, Arkansas.

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Nick, I tell people, if they don't know where Perryville is, we're just outside of Toadstook, so.

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Okay, but now I know exactly where that is. Yeah, that clarifies it.

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I know you've been to the great state of Arkansas. I have, yeah. Only once? One time.

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Yeah. And that was this year, or this past year. Yeah, 2024. When was that, the fall?

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September or something. Yeah, yeah. Van Buren, Lee Creek Baptist Church, Joseph. That's right, yeah, that's right.

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That was a good time. Yeah, it was good. It was good to hear you. And one of the reasons I invited our guest on today,

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Nick White, is because I believe I've heard you twice, is that right? Twice now, said under your preaching, once at a conference in Texas.

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I guess we should plug that again, you know, the Faith and Truth Conference. It's coming up in August in Longview, Texas.

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We preached there last year, and I got to meet you. I had really just basically known about you.

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But I got to meet you, and we got to talk there and meet each other. And I got to sit under your preaching, and you're a very fine expositor.

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And I was encouraged by that, and then got to hear you again in September, encouraged again by that.

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And so Providence has led us now to you coming on. I bet you never thought, in your wildest dreams, there was never a moment you thought, one day

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I'll be on the Rural Church Podcast. It has lived in my head rent -free since the day

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I heard about it. So it's a dream come true, brother. I'm so privileged, honestly, to be here with you, brother.

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Thank you for the opportunity. Well, thanks for coming on. And I know pastors are busy, and so we'll just kind of get to the point here.

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Why don't we start by telling us who you are, Nick White, what relation you have to James White, and then tell us about your ministry.

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Sure. Well, I don't know James White at all. So we've never met.

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I'd like to. I saw he was at your church, or he will be. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

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Yeah, that's neat. Yeah, I've read some of his books, especially on the King James Only controversy. It's really good.

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So I mean, I appreciate him. But no relation there. I'm a pastor of First Baptist Church in Hamburg, New York.

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It's a historic Baptist church. It's been here in Hamburg for over 200 years.

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And yeah, I've been here for about seven months now, six, seven months. Yeah, amen.

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That's good. Things going well for you. Yeah, things are going great. We're very blessed, and these people love the

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Word of God. And so there's not much more that a pastor can ask for than that. Amen.

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Well, what we want to talk about today is I'm probably going to title this for the clickbait, but preaching

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Calvinism or something along those lines. But that's kind of what we want to get into. We want to get into preaching, but also preaching truth.

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I'll just give you a real quick two -minute background of me and then throw it over to you. My first time that I was a pastor, when

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I moved from the ranks of youth pastor to pastor, I was in a little church. Well, actually, it's a bigger church, actually, in DeWitt, Arkansas.

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First Baptist DeWitt. When I came on as youth pastor, I told them where my stance was on Doctrine and Grace because they asked, and I didn't know.

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I was like, well, I didn't know any better is what I'm saying. I was just like, well, I believe that God predestined a people before the foundation of the world to save for the glory of his name.

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I didn't know any better that you're supposed to hide that. I didn't know. In the

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Southern Baptist world that I was in. I just answered openly.

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They called me as youth pastor. Well, then I became pastor, and I made it one year.

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About halfway in, they brought up the C word. They said, you're a Calvinist. I'm like, well, yes.

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I thought we talked about this. Also, I did talk about what do you mean by that word because different people mean different things by that word.

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It was after that that I spent some time, actually, to my shame, being afraid sometimes of preaching because I came in naively like, okay,

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I preach this. I preach the truth, and everybody's going to be transformed. Then I realized, oh, wait, no. They got mad at me.

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My wife and I and our two kids, and she was pregnant with our third. We ended up having to leave, and it was a very, very difficult time in ministering in my life.

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That was, goodness, now 15 years ago. I want to talk about that.

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I want to talk about not being afraid to preach the truth. To preach the sovereignty of God as it is throughout the scriptures.

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That's just a little bit of my background. I don't know where you have landed on this or in your past if you've always just been, hey, it's in the text, preach it, or if you ever have wrestled with being timid and what encouragement you might give to others who are walking through these things.

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Yeah. My background is I grew up in the independent fundamental Baptist world.

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King James only -ism, semi -Arminian, semi -Pelagian theological slant.

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We believed very strongly in a libertine free will. We would affirm the sovereignty of God on paper in that we would just say, yeah,

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God is sovereign. Sometimes we would say that statement, God is so sovereign that he gave man a libertine free will, which is stupid.

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I say God is so sovereign that he's not sovereign. That's the world that we knew.

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I thank God for a lot that I learned. I was taught on the sufficiency and supremacy of scripture.

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I thank God for that. That actually is one of the factors that led me out of that world. It was because I just was going to the text and seeing that a lot of the things we were doing or saying wasn't lining up with scripture.

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I was taught on evangelism very strongly in that world and still today try to beat that drum faithfully.

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But I was always raised under topical kind of preaching.

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I didn't sit under textual preaching until my 20s. I didn't know what expository preaching was.

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For me, a preacher wasn't someone who preached the text. A preacher was someone who would just get up and holler or rant or rave about something or grandstand and theorize.

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So you read a verse and then preach about 45 minutes and that's a sermon. You tell stories and jokes, you get the tear jerker, then you have a good altar call.

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Part of that, like a good sermon is getting the altar call right and how many decisions did

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I get out of that? That's kind of how you gauge efficiency sometimes in that world. It wasn't that you gauge success by your faithfulness to the text.

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I just was totally immersed in that world. I went to school, Bible college in that world. I started a church in that world in Boston, Massachusetts.

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I was preaching at youth conferences and things in that world. In a sense,

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I had a lot to lose, at least in the little pond that I was in, the little pond of the independent fundamental

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Baptist world. My wife was converted when we were two years into our church plant.

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She professed Christ when we met. I met her in Bible college, but two years into our church planting days, she comes home on the night of Black Friday and the

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Lord regenerated her in the car driving from one store to another. She had been dealing with conviction for a long time about whether or not she's truly in Christ.

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There was always that kind of, well, did you mean it when you prayed? Look at the date that was written in your

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Bible, if you're ever unsure, and she would do that. It just kept her in that state of false assurance.

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She comes home one night and she's in tears. She's repenting of sin to me and confessing things and telling me,

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I need salvation. I need Christ. She turned to Christ and I got to baptize her.

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That was an amazing time, but it was also a confusing time because my theology wasn't lining up with what she was saying.

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I'm like, what do you mean you've not been saved? I live with you. You don't act like you're not saved.

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You go to church with me. You cross all the, or you check all the boxes. You're right in line where you should be.

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It didn't make sense. And so at that same time, I had a buddy of mine who was a church planner in Boston, and he was kind of going a direction that was opposite of where I'm at now, which is full blown

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Arminian, losing salvation, even getting some of the charismatic world, deliverance ministry, all these verses that he was bringing my way.

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And I just, I had questions. So I was, long story short, I was in a spiritual depression as a church planner because I was trying to build

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Christ Church with my own hands. And I thought that I was a failure because I couldn't do it.

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And so I was, I was dealing with a lot of, of hardship and trials. My wife's salvation was the tipping point that just,

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I had enough. I started searching for answers and I came across John MacArthur's ministry.

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And that was my true introduction to expository preaching and the doctrines of grace.

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And I started to realize the importance of preaching the text. And so in my church plan,

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I started preaching through the gospel of John and that'll do it. I mean, that'll take you from,

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I mean, it'll fix your theology real quick because you cannot avoid it. John 1, John 3,

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John 5, John 6, John 8, John 10. I mean, it's all over the place. And I started to come to these conclusions and because we were changing some of our beliefs, there was differences between me and my sending church.

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We had to break off from our sending church and we lost a lot of our support and we had to leave that church plant.

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So we merged that church with another local church and then I went to New Hampshire and I spent two years in New Hampshire trying to reform a church and bring them to the doctrines of grace.

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And I'm still working out the finer points of my reformed theology. And when I first got there, it was probably like a four pointer in my mind.

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That's at least what I thought I was. Maybe I just told myself that so I felt better about myself and it wasn't as controversial, but it was about a year in and I'm preaching through the gospel of John.

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Like I decided to do that again at this church and I was confronted with texts and I just realized like either

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I'm going to preach what this text says or I'm going to be a fraud. That was like the only alternative to me.

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And I don't see how there is any other, it's one or the other. Either you're going to just preach what it says or you're going to just, well, you know,

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I'm going to preach through this really quickly. I'm just going to read the verse. I might say a comment or two and then I'll move on.

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And I've seen preachers do that before. And I was at that time reading the two volume biography of George Whitfield by Arnold Dalimore.

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And he was in his younger years dealing with some controversy with Wesley and he had not yet come to a place where he was publicly preaching the doctrines of grace out of fear of entering into a controversy.

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And he had written in his diary, you could read this. He repented of being silent on the sovereignty of God.

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I'm reading this while I'm going through this. So I'm like riding on a horseback with Whitfield through his life.

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And he was like a faithful friend to me. And I'm, I just realized I cannot keep just skirting around this.

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Either I'm going to preach it or I just need to stop preaching because I'm called to preach the text. And so I started preaching.

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I didn't call it Calvinism. I called it, you know, this is God's sovereignty. And yes, there's man's responsibility here.

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And we, but we need to, we need to pay attention to the sovereignty. We're neglecting this. I tried to draw attention to that and everyone would say, amen, because yeah, it's there.

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How can you deny this? Yeah. This is what the text says. The problem is when it goes from what's being said in the pulpit to here's what we're going to adopt as a church.

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That's when the issue always seems to come. So people say, amen, when you say it for the pulpit, but once you say, okay, great.

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Now this is where we're going as a church. Everybody will hold on a second. We're not a Calvinist church.

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And long story short, I ended up having to resign there. It was peaceful.

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I mean, we, there were no, there was no bad blood when I left. Those people are dear people, but it was just, we couldn't, we had a split and we couldn't go the same direction.

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And we prayed, asked the Lord for leading. And I think, you know, for some men, the answer is stay, bear down, deal with it, battle through.

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I know you've been through that. For us, you know, with counsel and prayer, it was the best decision for us just to resign.

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And so it left us in a season of living in an Airbnb for about a year or seven months.

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We lived outside of that for about four more months in my parents' house. We had all of our stuff in a storage unit and all of my friends, all of my preacher counsels, counselors that were in the

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IFB. It didn't go so well. When I made the announcement that I'm leaving, I'm, I'm a

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Calvinist. You know, I believe the doctrines of grace and this is why. And I got all these kinds of texts.

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My youth pastor was texting me. It was a fun time, but, but it was good.

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I mean, God uses those times to steal our spines. We need those times as preachers.

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We need to learn how to stand for the truth. And so I'm thankful for those seasons. I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to pay a small cost for preaching the truth of scripture.

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And that's kind of what led us here. We've searched for the Lord's will. We've been looking for God's will as far as where we would go next.

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And this is the church that he led us to out here in the Buffalo, New York area to Hamburg.

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So that's an amazing story, brother. And there's some similarities. We, we, we live with my parents from October to May.

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Our third child was actually born while we were living with my parents.

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I mean, it's just really difficult season. And yeah,

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I didn't have to go through some of the things that you did as far as like your circle, however, uh, it was actually almost kind of the opposite.

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What happened was I had a former pastor who differed with me theologically, but he was like so gracious and brought us, uh, you know, back into his church and I ended up leading worship there.

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Um, and, and what happened is over that time that I was there,

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I was there from, well, October of 2011 until like June of 2013.

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And the time that I was there, he actually became, um, Calvinist in his soteriology.

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And, uh, so that was, that was like really encouraging, you know? Yeah. And so, um, yeah, that, that, that was great.

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I think I do want to clarify and cause we were kind of freely using the word Calvinism here.

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We don't, we don't necessarily, we do use it at our church some, but we don't, I don't when

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I'm talking about preaching Calvinism, I'm not saying that you have to use that word, right?

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It's not a biblical, it's not a word that is from the text. And so it's not, it's not,

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I don't find it necessary, but, but I do, I do want to push back against those brothers out there who are afraid to preach its truth.

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Like this is who you are, right? Like I'm talking about like kind of the incognito, the closet

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Calvinist, the people that, you know, I, I, let me tell you, I'll say this real quick and then we'll, I'll kick it over to you.

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But I talked to a brother, I want to keep the identity, all this stuff as, uh, um, quiet as I can.

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I don't, you know, he didn't give me permission to share the story, but I'll just kind of share general, but there was this brother who was at a church and, uh, working alongside the pastor and the pastor said that, you know, he was reformed.

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Well, this brother began teaching that and wound up getting him in trouble and the pastor ended up standing before the church and saying, well, we we've got to get rid of him because he's reformed.

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They're like, but you're a reformed, you know? And it's like, uh, how, what, you know?

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So anyway, I'll kick it back over to you. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get as like, what, how do we deal with these?

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But I love what you said, man. Everything you said was, was very encouraging walking through with Whitfield and even the idea of like, basically,

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I don't want to discourage brothers, but dude, it's needs to be said exactly what you said.

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You got to either preach this or do something else.

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Yeah. Go kick it over to you. Yeah. Whitfield's words exactly on that was when he was writing about his repentance, he had, he had said it like this.

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I have been sinfully silent on the doctrines of sovereignty.

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And, and that's exactly what it is. If you know, the text says something, you know it, and you cannot get around it.

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If you know, the text says something and you choose not to preach it because you are afraid of what man is going to do, you are proving man to be your master.

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That is all that is. It is, it is, it's us not preaching for the glory of God.

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It's us not preaching as worship to God. And I know we talked about this prior to our discussion, but I really believe that there is a connection between being a preacher who cannot be bought and a worshiping preacher.

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Meaning if you preach as worship to God, you're preaching to people, but you're preaching for God.

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If you're preaching as worship to God, you will not be bought by those who sit in your congregation.

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You will preach the text. You are going to preach what the text says. If you choose not to, well, then you're no longer preaching for God.

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You've not changed the direction, the trajectory. You're not vertically aimed anymore. You're horizontally aimed in your preaching.

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And that is sin. It's idolatry. It's the fear of man. It is a snare. And so I'm not saying that we need to beat people over the head with tulip and call it all those letters.

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And maybe you might use other terms that are not as pejorative, but you do need to preach the sovereignty of God.

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And you do need to preach the text. And what that will end up looking like is what is called Calvinism, is the doctrines of grace.

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Or I call it big God theology. Because that's, and that's, I think, a pretty common term.

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That's what I like to call it when I talk to people who perhaps are confused about the term Calvinism. There's a lot of mischaracterizations and misunderstandings of Calvinism.

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Sometimes you almost have to just define it when you use it with certain people. Because they have something in their mind.

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You're not evangelistic if you're a Calvinist. They more think of us as hyper -Calvinists rather than Calvinists.

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And the reality is we want people to know that they worship a big God. And I remember, like,

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I had people ask me, you know, why does it matter? Like, why do you feel the need to contend for election?

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You know, that God chooses some and then passes over others in reprobation. Why, like, why do you, why do you feel the need?

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Isn't that a little sadistic? You know, what's the big deal? Why does it matter so much that you're going to fight over these doctrines?

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And, like, I had to think about that. Because at first, that's an emotionally charged argument.

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And those are powerful, even though they're not, they're not arguing from scripture. They're still powerful, nevertheless.

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And I had to think that through. And my answer now is, why does it matter? Well, because God's glory matters.

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Because God's glory matters. And we cannot allow Christians to ever come to the place where they think that their salvation, their sanctification, any aspect of the

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Christian life is because of them. But that it's all of grace. And that it is all

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God's work. It's all God's doing. God is totally sovereign. God needs

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His glory to be given to Him. And we are to give the glory due to His name.

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And preaching Calvinism or the doctrines of grace, at the heart of that is soli deo gloria.

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It is that God is supreme. That God is great. And that God gets all the glory.

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The Lord is our salvation. And that is what is at the heart of this. We want people to know how big our

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God is. And that He's not limited by man and man's will and man's decisions.

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But that God is in the heavens. And He does whatever He pleases. So I would just admonish anybody who struggles with this.

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You know, you need to check whether or not your pulpit ministry is tethered to heaven.

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If you're preaching the word for the glory of God. If you're preaching as worship to God. And I think when you start to see it that way, it will help you when you come to those difficult passages to say, okay, this is not going to check the boxes of the people in the congregation.

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But the text says it. It's true. It's the word of God. And my job as a preacher is to herald this forth to God's people.

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And so I'm going to do my job. And if I please God and displease everybody else,

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I will let the chips fall exactly where God decides. And I'll be satisfied. Because in a thousand years from now, you're not going to be thinking about who you pleased or displeased in the pulpit.

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In a thousand years, you're going to stare in the face of the one who saved your soul. The one that you preach.

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The one you proclaim. And you will have no regrets having preached for his glory and preach the text for what it says.

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Amen. You know, I just want to clarify, unless anybody tried to nitpick us apart, but you said, you know,

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God needs his glory given to him. And certainly you don't mean that God's needy.

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I'm just clarifying. I know you didn't mean that. But I know sometimes when people listen, they're like, well, we just mean

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God deserves his glory and God will have his glory. And this should be our desire.

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But the point that you're making, and I love it. I am in agree that we preach in, of course,

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I didn't come up with this, but we preach to an audience of one. And in many cases, this doesn't mean that we diminish our congregation.

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We need to preach. We're not preaching to an online audience. You know, we're preaching to the people that God has set under us.

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First Peter five, shepherd the flock of God among you. So we preach to them and we do think about where they're at.

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And that would even affect some of my wording and how

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I explain not being afraid, but explaining things in a level and intellectual capacity that my congregation can understand.

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Because honestly, if I just get up there and I want to just use all these $15 theological words and never explain them, well, that's kind of the same thing you may feel.

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You may feel that like, oh, I've done my duty. I've said everything I was supposed to say, but you're not preaching in a way they can understand.

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And so you've really just kind of skirted the issue. So we do think about the congregation. However, amen, brother.

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Amen. We preach. The preacher is worshiping as we preach and preach for the glory and worship of God.

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And I think you're writing those articles right now for Grace and Truth on the sovereign smile of, is it what's called the sovereign smile?

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Yeah. Preaching for a sovereign smile. So that's good.

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All this has been really, really excellent and encouraging so far. And there's some places

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I want to get to. The direction I want to go really is to think about, okay, what does this look like practically?

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And you may offer some more scenarios, but there's two scenarios

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I can think of for a preacher. One is he comes to a church and he has one theological conviction, but by the study of the word of God, similar to what you were saying, by the preaching of the word of God, he comes to another theological conviction.

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So he moves from Arminianism to Calvinism. So there's that scenario.

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Another scenario I think, and I really want to push back on this one, but that is the scenario of the man who is a

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Calvinist, but he won't tell anybody. Otherwise, he wouldn't have even been called to the church.

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So he spends, and I've heard of stories. I'm sure you have too. He spends 10, 20, 30 years at the church and he just never,

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I mean, he's a Calvinist. You could talk to him and he's bold when you talk to him, but not to his people.

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So thinking through those scenarios, I'm kind of trying to ask practically, what is your exhortation to the man who stands in the pulpit and opens the word of God, how he should articulate the truths of the doctrine of grace to the people?

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I know we've kind of hit it, but just kind of trying to get practical here. So I am no expert in this because I had to resign.

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So I haven't successfully done this, I guess, in the terms the world might call it, in bringing a church to be reformed.

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But again, the chips fall exactly where God wants. And yeah, thank you for correcting that. God doesn't need anything.

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And I even thought through while I was speaking on that. So if you need to cut that out of this, by the way, feel free to do that because I do not want to say anything in that regard.

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But I'll say this, and this is kind of getting exactly where we're going. Let's just be men of integrity and truthfulness.

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And I definitely knew what you meant. It's no big deal at all. But I think, and this is going to lead in this discussion, but when we apply a theological change, for example, don't hide that.

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I mean, be wise and think about your people. But there's no need to hide what

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God has done in your life. I mean, would you agree with that? And I know you modeled that, right?

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Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I would say you got to shepherd your people through it, right?

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You don't just like yell at them and tell them, you know, hey, catch up, guys. Come on. It might have taken you if you've changed, or maybe you've been this way the whole time.

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But for a lot of people who do change, it takes them years to come to these conclusions because you want to slowly work through.

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You don't just want to jump from one bandwagon to another theologically. You want to work your way through these issues and ask questions.

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And I tried to do that. I had a lot of questions. I did not want to be a

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Calvinist, but the text gave me no other option. I mean, I had to go with what

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Scripture said. I think someone even said that, like, Scripture didn't give me another option but to be a Calvinist.

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And so, I mean— So you became a Calvinist against your free will? That's right. Yeah. I was predestined to be one.

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I think, you know, you need to take a shepherding approach. So, yes, preach it with passion.

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Yeah, preach for the glory of God with gusto. But don't, again, don't bludgeon them.

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Very good. With the doctrines of grace. You know, you've got to shepherd them. So, as you come to those passages, this is what preaching is supposed to be from a shepherd's perspective.

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Like, you are pastoring these people from the pulpit. And this is a primary means of grace. This—preaching is the main thing.

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I mean, this is one of the main things we do within the walls of our church. So, we need to understand, as we shepherd

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God's people, we come to, like, John 6. And no man can come to me except the Father draw him.

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So, how are you going to tackle that to the congregation? Oh, God's sovereign. And some of you need to deal with it.

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That's foolish. That's a foolish way to handle it. Versus—now, this verse teaches that God is totally sovereign over our salvation.

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That he will be the one to draw us to himself. And that those he draws, he will raise in the last day.

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And I know that there might be a question in your mind. Well, what about free will? You ask the questions they're going to ask.

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That's what Paul does in Romans 9. Paul knows that the people are going to ask, well, does it—how's that?

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No, that doesn't seem fair. How can God be fair and choose who he pleases? Paul knows that.

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And he sees that. He has pastoral foresight. And he addresses that. And he answers those questions.

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Rather than just beating them over the head and say, deal with it. This is what the text says. He works with them through to help them bring them to the theological conclusion that they need to come to.

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So, you need to shepherd the people there. Don't be angry. Sometimes I think, you know, at least when

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I did, when I was preaching through John's gospel, you came to difficult passages. In your mind, you're thinking like, this is like my athanasius moment.

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You know, like I'm, you know, I've got to get up. And I've got to—and if you're not careful, it can make you almost pit yourself against the church.

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You know, you've got to be careful not to come across as an antagonist or an enemy of the people you're preaching to, but as their pastor who wants to help them through these issues so that they can come to these conclusions.

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Because we want them to believe this. We don't want to just make them angry and send them away.

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Now, if that's the result of us being faithful, then so be it. But we want them to come to the conclusions that God is sovereign because there's so much joy.

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And there's so much peace in the Christian life. When we come to that theological conclusion, there's so much they miss out on when they do not believe in the total sovereignty of God.

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So we have that pastoral heart that wants them to—so we want to take them through those issues. I guess that would be my admonition, is pastor them through the doctrines of grace.

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And that's where we're going to end it this time. Join us next week on the Rural Church Podcast.

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Nick White will be back with us, and we're going to continue this conversation on some of the practical ramifications and necessities for preaching the doctrines of grace.

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Thanks for tuning in this week. We'll catch you next week on the Rural Church Podcast.

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If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poimos, the masterpiece of God.