BIG EVA AND THE TRUNCATED GOSPEL COALITION OF PAUL TRIPP | EP 29

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You mentioned a number of the people that Paul called out. He also called out Uriah and Syntyche in Philippians 4 for their divisiveness, and he named them by name.

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Jesus did name names. He named Herod that fox at one point. And throughout the

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Old Testament, you see the same thing. Prophets do call out people. I don't consider myself a prophet, but we're supposed to follow the example of an

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Old Testament and rebuke those who are leading people astray because they've become a danger.

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It's dangerous to follow Paul Tripp's new theology. It absolutely is. It will destroy churches.

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And look at what has happened to the churches that have followed that train wreck, right?

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And welcome to Tearing Down High Places. My name's Average Joe here with the pastors.

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We've got three of them today to talk about Big Eva. What is Big Eva? What do we need to do about it?

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How do we recognize it? Is it an issue at all? So welcome back, Seth Brickley.

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Great to be with you again. Yeah, from Wisconsin. Great to be with you. Nice to have you.

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And Pastor Jeff, how are you, sir? Oh, I'm doing very, very well. We kicked off our study of Genesis again going through on Wednesdays noon.

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So loved it. It's great to be back in the Word. Great. So we'll probably hear some

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Genesis today. That usually happens. Whatever's been in my mind, what I've been studying is what comes out in TDHB.

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It always does. It's great that way. Pastor Tim, welcome, sir. Hey, Average Joe.

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What's up, Seth? Jeff? How's everyone doing? Great. Good. Good. Okay.

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So the topic on the table, guys, is Big Eva. So let me be Average and ask somebody, what the heck is

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Big Eva? Well, Big Eva, the first time I ever heard this terminology was from the 2019

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Spring Shepherds Conference. And this is the infamous Q &A that happened where John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, Lincoln Duncan, Al Mohler, and Mark Dever were all on the stage together.

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And they were there to talk about the issue of social justice because in 2018, that's really when social justice really took off in American evangelicalism.

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And on the stage, Phil Johnson is kind of going through the history of these trends that have overtaken

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American evangelicalism. And he talked about the emergent church. He talked about the seeker -sensitive movement.

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And he's saying, well, now we have social justice, and he called it Big Eva. And so that was the first time

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I heard the terminology. So ever since I heard that, it's become clear to me that there is this big movement that is not faithful to biblical

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Christianity when it comes down to it. It doesn't mean everything they say is wrong, but it really is a mixed bag.

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And Christians really need to be aware of this. Okay. We got to define some terms here because we're going to lose a few folks.

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First, I want to ask this. Is emergent church, seeker -sensitive, and social justice warriors, are they all basically the same group, just changing the names?

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Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Go ahead, Jeff. Okay. I would say that all of them are a thinly veiled expression of liberalism.

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And that will just come in the iterations over the years. So the emerging church comes in the early 2000s, and it's this new liberal approach to scripture.

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It's really postmodern and trying to do things in a way that not necessarily seeker -sensitive, but not faithful to the word of God, calling everything into question, taking a posture of uncertainty about even the things that are clearly explained in scripture.

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That's emergent, emerging church. Wait, say that again. How do you define emergent?

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Because I thought I heard you talking seeker -sensitive, and I know what that is. No, it's quite different. I would say seeker -sensitive is even earlier.

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That's the 80s and 90s with Bill Hybels, and you've got Rick Warren, very seeker -sensitive, trying to make the church attractional, and therefore it waters down and loses the rough edge and the hard teachings of Christ.

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Skipping some verses that people may not resonate with. Right, unlikely to call people to repent, rather just try to make an easy believism route to grow the church.

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So it's seeker -sensitive. It's sensitive to their feelings and emotions and not wanting to offend anyone so as to grow the church.

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It works well with the church growth movement. It's almost gnostic, isn't it? Because it's like there's this hidden knowledge we'll let you know about down the road.

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Yeah, you could say that. The Emergent Church comes in the early 2000s, late 90s, and it's people, who are some names from it?

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Rob Bell, Love Wins. Brian McLaren was the big name.

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McLaren, yep. Blue Light Jazz, that book. Even Mark Driscoll early on was associated with them.

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Then he realized, kind of like lifted the liberal veil of it and made a break from Emergent.

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But what we're talking about here is something a little bit different. It's more of a money kind of thing, an industrial complex where leaders invite one another to their conferences and platform each other and are never willing to say anything negative, even when one of them strays.

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For example, a big book came out in 2002 -ish called Divided by Faith. It really was a

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Marxist misunderstanding. It imported all kinds of ideas of accusing the church of racism just because of the color of people's skin.

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It brought in those critical race theory ideas and brought it into the church. Well, when

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Big Eva, a couple of them jumped on board with that, Tabeti and Uyghur, David Platt in 2018 at Together for the

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Gospel, they began to peddle this stuff. Big Eva circled the wagons, and they protected them, and they all echoed one another's teachings because they have so much wound up in one another's ministries.

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It's the board members of the gospel coalition. It's the leaders of these institutions that are so networked and intertwined that, financially speaking, their empires depend on one another.

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So that's what I take from Big Eva. It's a powerful issue there. PASTOR MIKE CROCKER Yeah, it's celebrity pastors.

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I have a list of names here, and some of these we would consider better than others based on what they've taught and what they've written.

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But on one end, you have people like Andy Stanley and Rick Warren. On the other hand, you have people like Tim Keller, D .A.

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Carson, John Piper, Mark Dever, and then the younger crop that they raised up.

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And I really think that these people are actually chosen to be like the next kind of anointed one in this movement,

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Matt Chandler and David Platt, a couple of the rising stars.

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And they platform these people at these big conferences, and they had T4G. Of course, the Gospel Coalition had some really big conferences.

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So it's these organizations that are just huge. A lot of money, a lot of power, a lot of influence, and these celebrity pastors who have millions of followers.

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PASTOR MIKE CROCKER Wow. You know, you mentioned Mark Driscoll and conferences in the same breath, and I just saw him recently.

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He was at a conference where he was criticizing the people who set up the conference because they had some sort of pole dancer opening up a men's conference, and they called him to repent.

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You know, it was ugly. Did you see that, Jeff? It looks like you saw it.

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PASTOR MIKE CROCKER I did. It was a very interesting debacle. They had this guy. He was formerly a pole dancer, supposedly was saved.

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But as you listen to the interviews later, he never was. He remained Eastern Orthodox, had a very poor understanding of salvation.

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In fact, he would climb a pole with a sword down his throat and then drop himself down the pole and catch himself right before being impaled by the ground through the sword and cutting himself to pieces.

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And he said salvation is every time he performs that stunt, the Lord saves him.

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That's how he thought he was saved. Anyway, Driscoll saw that he took his shirt off and moved around weird on the pole and everything.

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So he was like, that's like a male pole dancer. What are you doing at a men's conference? He called it out rightly.

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And then he got pretty much run through the ringer for saying something.

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PASTOR MIKE CROCKER What's wrong with you people? PASTOR MIKE CROCKER There we go. But let me ask this question.

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Who is more dangerous, you think? Is it the obvious Big Eva compromise like Jeff just mentioned, or maybe like a

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Rick Warren where there's obvious compromise, Andy Stanley, obvious compromise, or is the

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Gospel Coalition more dangerous because they have more credibility? There's more truth.

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And yet packaged within that truth is something that's very bad. One of the worst wolves that there is on the scene is

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Paul Tripp, because he had 30 years of incredible gospel ministry.

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We had his brother come out to Cornerstone, Ted Tripp, and do a family conference. And as far as I know, Ted never went the way of Paul Tripp.

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But when Paul Tripp left 10th Presbyterian and moved to inner city Philadelphia and fell under the sway of Eric Mason, woke church, and that whole doctrine of social justice, he became the worst danger because he was so trustworthy.

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Everybody loved Paul Tripp. He was a great counselor and somebody that we relied upon so well.

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Then he writes an article in 2018 called My Confession. And he says that for all of those years, he had been preaching a truncated gospel.

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I wrote an open letter to him at that time and published it. It was carried on pulpit and pen, which is now bunked.

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And Bible Thumping Wingnut had it. But he never answered that. I sent it certified mail to his office, and he never answered it.

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But ultimately, My Confession, when he said he had been preaching a truncated gospel, he said essentially that 1

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Corinthians 15, 1 to 4, the gospel. I want to remind you of the gospel. He says that that is insufficient because it doesn't include this social justice aspect of the justice work that he says that is part of the gospel.

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Yeah, one thing we've seen is how loosely the word gospel has been used, right?

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Like this is a gospel issue. I mean, how many times have we heard that? And like Jeff said, we have a very tight definition given in Scripture in 1

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Corinthians 15, 1 through 4. And it mirrors what happened 100 years ago with the social gospel.

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Which is a works righteousness Christianity. Seth, was it your question to Jeff when you said, so which is worse?

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Yeah, I mean, to Tim too. I mean, any of you guys, what do you think, Tim? Which one's more dangerous?

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I really, I think it depends on who the audience is. Because the one that's openly wrong, you probably have unbelievers following that anyway, that would probably continue to be unbelievers.

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The danger in someone who is preaching a true gospel for years, and then switching to a false gospel, but saying it's actually better than the one that he was preaching.

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And then leads a lot of big following that trust him. I think that overall does more damage for the kingdom.

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Because people who are already saved and people who are already beginning to follow Christ are now turning away towards a path that they might not come back from.

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So I think that's probably the difference. I think that you've got to have a whole bunch of believers who are not well discipled, who are going to say, this is just the same old bad kind of church

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I left before. Or this is just like the Catholic Church or just like the other heretical church

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I might have belonged to in the past. And they're going to say, I don't want to deal with this when they see this kind of controversy within who they thought were faithful preachers.

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And we still have some, we still have old Paul trip books that are probably still really good. But I don't want to support a ministry that's gone awry.

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Yeah, and he wrote this book called Dangerous Calling that is all about persevering in ministry and being faithful to Christ till the end of your ministry.

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And yet he wrote this in 2012. And then only a handful of years later, he's pushing the social justice gospel.

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And as I was sharing with you guys earlier, the names on the back of this, it's really interesting how,

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I don't know if you can read the names through the screen here. We got Danny Akin, who's the president of Southeastern.

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Put it up again. Yep. I zoomed in on you. You got Danny Akin, who's the president of Southeastern Theological, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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And he is woke and he has led that seminary down a woke path. You have

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Tulian Chevijan, who was unfaithful to his wife. You have

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Josh Harris, who came out affirming the

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LGBTQ agenda. And then lastly, you have James McDonald, who last I heard of him.

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He flamed out of his ministry in Chicago because of gambling and other issues and domineering.

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And then he was charged with, or he was accused of battery and was actually in court.

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So, I mean, it's just very interesting. It's almost like God is, even though like a lot of what's spoken in this book is true.

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It's a huge alarm to say, guys, there's something seriously wrong. And many people are seeing this.

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More people need to see it about this machine. You can call it

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Big Eva. You can call it, I know John Harris calls it the evangelical industrial complex.

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Some have called it the deep state of evangelicalism. I mean, if you want to get, you know, duh -duh -duh.

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But there's a lot of similarities between the federal government bureaucracy and the

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Big Eva bureaucracy where they are, you know, like TGC sponsors a lot of new authors.

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And those new authors are sometimes attached to powerful people in the church or maybe not so powerful, but people that they want to be nice to.

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So there's like this common grace going out. I don't know. What makes you think what was their original goal when they took the leadership position and what changed in their mind?

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Because it's so hard to even think that, you know, someone who's leading a congregation, like you look at people like who were so consistent in the

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Bible, like Paul, who was consistent all the way, you know, all the way to prison and then death. And then, you know, someone like Jeff.

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Oh, I thought you meant Paul Tripp. You missed me. Not Paul Tripp. Paul in the Bible. Paul the apostle.

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You see the apostles who were faithful all the way till the end. And then it's just, it's sad to see like people who are born again

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Christians, then they become leaders. And then they just almost, I almost apostate, but not really.

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There's, I don't even know what to call that. Yeah. And one of my big issues is some of these guys like a

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Joel Olsteen, I mean, he's just an obvious wolf, but Satan is better than that.

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As far as his craftiness, his deceit, he's going to put guys on these platforms who are going to write books, who are going to be credible.

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They're even going to be associated with credible people. And yet through their ministries, Satan is actually going to use these men to actually lead people away from Christ.

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I mean, he is that good at deceiving people. And I guess

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I'm alarmed as a pastor by how many pastors have fallen for this. That's kind of what I'm saying.

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This is kind of alarming. Yeah. And not even, I don't even mean like the pastors who have actually gone down this path.

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I mean, the Bible warns about those people. I'm talking about pastors who your job is to actually call these people out, to call a spade a spade.

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And what we've seen is they're defended. Oh, and then the people who call them out are crazy.

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And that's what we've seen. And it's just disappointing to see that how many true shepherds are really out there.

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Not many, because that gray church is massive. That is my overwhelming experience is the majority of pastors are gray.

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They got both feet in red and blue, trying to accommodate everyone.

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And they don't. They're not faithful to scripture. They're just not. That's why we got to push

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Jeff's book, the Blood Red Church. I mean, that paradigm, that red, gray and blue description of what's going on out there is so helpful.

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And I still see some of the big conservative pastors out there struggling on how to describe the gray church, you know?

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Yeah. Titus 1 .9 says he must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

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And that's really the dividing line, because this is a description of an elder. An elder in a church, a pastor in a church has to be willing to do that last part.

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And that's the hard part. Telling the good and positive things. We do that all day long.

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You know, that's what we did less than an hour ago in the room next door. We were talking about justification by faith, the difference between imputed righteousness and infused righteousness and all of those doctrines of the

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Reformation. That's the first part of Titus 1 .9. But to rebuke those who contradict it means you have to have courage.

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If you're unwilling to rebuke Paul Tripp, you're basically saying that what he's teaching is

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OK. I'm OK if you go to Paul Tripp's church with Eric Mason. That's what you're saying.

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Wow. The problem is you're allowing the sheep to go after the wolf. Joe, didn't you have a clip of some

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Eric Mason for us? And Social Security was created for white people, but we're quote unquote benefiting off of it.

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But there's nothing that's been done in this country comprehensively as a system.

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What the heck is he talking about? You can take your Social Security. That is not a benefit to me whatsoever.

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It's a weapon. And you know what? For 100 years, the church has allowed that to steal money from its people just so that the government can go in and take over charity.

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And charity was never, ever supposed to be the government. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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So Paul Tripp is going to this man's church. Think about that. And think of how many books he has written.

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And again, a lot of good things he has written. And yet, if someone follows him down this path, it's not going to be good.

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That video, that's all about him asking for reparations. There's another one that's really detailed. Go ask for silver and gold items and for clothing.

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Hallelujah. Hallelujah. And then here's some more hallelujahs. Silver. Hallelujah.

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Gold. Hallelujah. Goods. Hallelujah. And livestock. I feel God right there.

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I don't know how stealing money is worshiping God. That is no hallelujah. That is not something

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God wants to be praised for. That is heresy. Yeah, because the Ten Commandments are not negotiable.

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When it says, thou shalt not steal, that doesn't mean that, well, government can come in by the edge of the sword, take money from people and redistribute that to others based on the color of their skin.

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Right. And he's talking about, he's quoting Ezra in that part, but he's really talking about Moses.

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When they left Egypt, they were allowed to plunder the Egyptians. I mean, literally, they were allowed to plunder in a unique situation.

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So they get the plunder? I mean, how do you get there with that? Well, they must consider us to be

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Egyptians. Anybody that they want to take from. Any citizen that pays taxes is an

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Egyptian that needs to be plundered. I mean, it's the worst exegesis ever. It is. Yeah. Now, some people might not be familiar with who

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Paul Tripp is. Can you introduce him? You got any videos? Oh, sure. Well, let me let him self -describe himself.

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They call me a socialist or a Marxist. And I don't disagree. He also, he hurts the conversation.

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There's another clip I noticed. This is just the worst. I really want to address my white brothers and sisters.

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Does God make divisions like that? Does God ever talk about making divisions? Is there something in the

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Bible? Oh, yeah. Division. That's a sin. That's right. Yep.

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He's making divisions. He's engaged in sinful behavior there. But we have so, you know, the great church has so gotten rid of so many sins in their seeker sensitive movement.

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That's not really, that's not sinful. Was that sinful? Anybody? You guys help me out.

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I don't know. I'm just average Joe. Colossians 11. There is no

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Jew or Gentile slave or free barbarian, Scythian. But Christ is in all.

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So the church, what Christ does is he tears down the dividing walls of hostility and makes in himself one new man who by faith are united to him.

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And we consider ourselves brothers. We're not partial. We don't look down on each other or judge one another based on anything, let alone the color of skin.

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It's anti gospel. They say, well, this is only an implication of the gospel. Well, isn't an implication of the gospel in the other direction to bring unity into the body rather than to introduce

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Marxism? But the issue with with trips article is actually deeper than an implication of the gospel, because when you read his article, my confession, he distinguishes between justification by faith, describing that as an incomplete gospel.

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And needed in this justice work, which he himself defines by going to Eric Mason's church.

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Eric Mason is the author of Woke Church. So he's advocating for is social justice.

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It's wickedness. It's it's cultural Marxism. Do you think do you think, Jeff, do you think that years and years of preaching in a secret, sensitive way, skipping over politics in general and then not having a good understanding of actual political history?

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Do you think that if I give Paul Tripp the complete benefit of the doubt, do you think that's that's the source of this confusion?

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Yeah, because there was a misunderstanding when social justice came into the forefront.

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Those like Eric Mason who are saying we need to explore the social implications of the gospel.

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And for Mason, it was also a heretical misunderstanding of justification by faith.

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But what they were saying was there are implications of the gospel that apply to society.

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And that's true. And the pietistic reaction to that was to say, just preach the gospel.

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Yep. And even had a little bit of that from John MacArthur early on before he turned and made a correction that way.

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Paul Tripp would have been part of that group that just preached the gospel. So when he wrote his confession, he was basically acknowledging that what the social justice warriors were saying about justice in the public square.

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The need for justice in the public square was actually right. That's that's the impetus for him to write my confession.

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The problem was he was so untrained in biblical categories of justice. He had spent so little time in the law of God and biblical jurisprudence and gave us the

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Western legal system itself. We need more theonomy. Yeah, you need basically.

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And he wanted nothing. He had no grounding in that. He probably never read

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Bonson or just like rejected all of it outright. Didn't nuance it, but just rejected it.

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And then when he came full into the conversation, he jumped in on the wrong side. He jumped in with a cultural

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Marxist and said, well, this is what we actually need to be doing because he was deceived by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith divided by faith.

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And really, well, there's nothing new about what those guys wrote. They were basically the old red letter

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Christians like, you know, Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo and what all the liberals had been saying.

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John Harris's book outlines how this is what they had been saying for the late 1900s.

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Yeah, it's just the evangelicals weren't even listening to the conversation. And then when they jumped in, they jumped in on the wrong side.

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Yeah, just preach the gospel and they jumped in on the wrong side. So guys, my my definition here of Big Eva, whatever we want to call it, we'll call it

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Big Eva, though. It's the big industry of American evangelicalism, full of worldly compromise.

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And here's my warning. To blindly follow Big Eva may lead one away from Christ or limit one's faithfulness to Christ.

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That's why that's why this is so important. And maybe if you guys are OK, can we talk about the unwritten rules of Big Eva?

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Ooh, what are they? Well, the unwritten rules, it's been called the 11th

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Commandment. The 11th Commandment is thou shall not say anything bad about another person in this club or an institution that they hold dear.

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So that would be an unwritten rule. And if someone does speak out against a specific person or an institution, they'll say things like, you didn't follow

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Matthew 18, you know, where Matthew 18 is really what it's church discipline. It's really a kind of a local church context.

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The Bible does in Galatians Chapter 2, verses 11 through 14, give an example of the

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Apostle Paul confronting the Apostle Peter publicly for his error. And you also see the

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Apostle Paul several times in his letters saying that these specific people have compromised the truth of the

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Word of God. You know, Alexander the coppersmith, Philetus, he even calls out

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Demas. Jesus in his ministry in Matthew 23 calls out the

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Jewish leaders. Now he doesn't name them by name, but everybody knew exactly who he was talking about. If you look at Matthew 23, and he uses very strong language to call these people out.

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And what's interesting is that within this is the greatest sin.

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The greatest sin is to call out these specific people, these specific institutions.

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And the gentleman in the lower right screen here can attest to that. For those in the audience who don't know,

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I'll speak on behalf of Jeff here. Jeff wrote Woke Free Church and called out the leadership of the

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Free Church who were pushing this social justice gospel, platforming speakers, writing articles, recommending certain books.

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And then Jeff lays out factually what they're doing. And instead of listening to Jeff and repenting, they view him as the problem.

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And not too long ago, in fact, gave him the highest possible discipline, permanent excommunication for just doing what he's supposed to do as a pastor,

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Titus 1 .9, to proclaim the truth of God's Word and to rebuke those who contradict sound doctrine.

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Yeah, and they won't even talk at this point. Like I've written emails just saying, Hey, why don't we just talk and see how we can seek reconciliation?

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They don't even answer emails any longer. So yeah, I don't know how reconciliation is possible without talking.

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But you're right. It's the highest ban. It's shunning. I'm basically shunned at this point in the Free Church. You mentioned a number of the people that Paul called out.

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He also called out Uriah and Syntyche in Philippians 4 for their divisiveness. And he named them by name.

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Jesus did name names. He named Herod that fox at one point. And throughout the

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Old Testament, you see the same thing. Prophets do and call out people. I don't consider myself a prophet, but we're supposed to follow the example of an

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Old Testament prophet and rebuke those who are leading people astray because they become a danger.

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It's dangerous to follow Paul Tripp's new theology. It absolutely is. It will destroy churches.

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And look at what has happened to the churches that have followed that train wreck, right?

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David Platt's church. John Piper handed off his church to some young social justice prodigy.

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Jason Mayer, yeah, Jason Mayer. That's in Minneapolis, Jason Mayer.

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He took it one step further than John Piper. John Piper talked about ethnic harmony during his ministry. And at the time,

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I don't think people knew what he was talking about until the last seven or eight years. It was this kind of this diversity, equity, inclusion.

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And I don't even think he even knew kind of the political leftism that he was borrowing it from.

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But Jason Mayer takes it one step further. And all this controversy, all this conflict happens in his church where things just blew up.

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And so now John Piper's church and all the campuses that he had, there was two campuses outside of the downtown campus.

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They're all separate churches now. And I have a friend who actually goes to the North Campus.

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And he says, he actually told me this. He's like, he just started going there. He's been to that church over 20 times.

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And he said he has not heard the name John Piper mentioned once. So I wonder if they're kind of distancing themselves.

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Because I know that the North Campus has taken a stand against social justice, which is good to hear.

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Very controversial. So can one of you guys give me a definition for the

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Synod division? Because sometimes it's not. We got to make arguments. And I think I'm hearing some folks say, well, you're divisive.

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But we're not. It's being used in contexts where we're trying to pull people back to orthodoxy.

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I would always say unity has to rally around something. And that something is truth.

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So unity rallies around truth. And division comes into play when someone compromises some point of the truth.

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Now you have parties, those who support this new false doctrine, and those who support the true.

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And that inevitably results in conflict. So truth really is the rallying point for unity.

33:28

Gotcha. So it's okay. It's not sinful to make a division amongst heretics. Correct.

33:34

Well, let's listen to this from Ephesians 4. Okay. So it's the responsibility of shepherds to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith of the knowledge of the

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Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.

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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

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That's what a church is supposed to do. It's all built, as Jeff said, around the truth.

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And if there is division, sometimes it's necessary if people have compromised, then we need to divide.

34:40

And so security was created for white people. Yeah, division. Your right shoulder, there's a

34:46

Grudem and an Erickson theology book. Yeah. You read Erickson on the order salutis, you have faith preceding regeneration.

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And if you look at Grudem, he has regeneration preceding faith in the order of salutis. So how can you have those books side by side on your own bookshelf?

35:08

No. How can you do that? Well, I think it's because there are areas where we can differ and still retain unity in faith, because by good biblical arguments, there's going to be differences among us.

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So the real question that comes into play in this discussion, when Paul Tripp writes his confession and points the church towards social justice, is this allowable difference?

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Is this just a smaller kind of point of doctrine or practice, praxis, or is this something that's destructive of the faith?

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And it is the latter. Social justice is heretical. It leads, it destroys churches.

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First of all, it divides the body like a pizza and distributes it into different camps. It wrecks churches.

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But even at the level of the gospel itself, Paul Tripp's article would be an example of where the gospel itself is compromised, his article, my confession.

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So it's not just a minor difference of theology, the different positions of when the rapture is going to happen, pre -trib, post -trib, mid -trib.

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This is something that cuts to the gospel itself, especially because it deals with Christian ethics and even defining what's right and wrong.

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Marxism will destroy an entire society. You can't just allow

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Marxism into your church and think that it's all just a minor difference of opinion. You vote

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Democrat, we vote Republican, whatever, no big deal. These things destroy lives and destroy entire nations.

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And if you look in John 17, Jesus' high priestly prayer where He intercedes for us and prays for us, two things that He prays for is unity, that we would be unified, and sanctification, that we would be sanctified, set apart.

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And in sanctification, we grow closer and closer to Jesus. So if we're going to be sanctified, we can't willingly step backwards or step somewhere else apart from the gospel and think that that's being unified.

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We don't want to compromise truth and sanctification just to be unified in something false.

37:21

Amen, that's a false unity. And let me give you guys an example of someone and how

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Big Eva coddles this person and true shepherds see this person as a serious problem and a wolf.

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And that person is N .T. Wright. N .T. Wright has pushed a different understanding of justification, which is called the

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New Perspective on Paul. And he did not start the New Perspective on Paul. It was actually a liberal who started it, but he actually embraced it.

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I think E .P. Sanders was the one who started it. But if the audience is wondering what in the world is the

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New Perspective on Paul? Of course, we know the Roman Catholics get justification wrong where it's justification plus works, right?

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You're not just counted with the righteousness of Christ. You actually have to earn your salvation. Now, the

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New Perspective on Paul, I call it, it's a works righteousness system without the sacraments, maybe.

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So very similar to Roman Catholicism. But in the sense that it's a works righteousness system.

38:31

Now, John Piper wrote a book called The Future of Justification. Jeff, have you read that book? I have not.

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Okay, so he's writing this book concerned about N .T.

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Wright's understanding of justification. But there's something very important to note about this book.

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He never calls N .T. Wright a heretic. Now, John MacArthur...

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Now, typically the pastors who are willing to break the unwritten rules of Big Eva, they're typically ordinary pastors.

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But John MacArthur is one who has regularly broken the unwritten rules of Big Eva, which is why

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I would not call him a Big Eva pastor. I think he's a faithful shepherd. John MacArthur treated

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N .T. Wright as a heretic. Now, there's actually a video on YouTube. Anybody can look it up and see the strong tone he uses against N .T.

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Wright. But of course, John Piper, because he is in Big Eva, has to play by the rules.

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Dr. Piper, in your defense... I'm reading it for the podcasters, the Pajama Hadeen. Dr. Piper, in your defense of the gospel against N .T.

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Wright, have you found federal vision theology of Doug Wilson to be another gospel?

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No. That's easy. Doug Wilson doesn't preach another gospel. Okay? I don't think

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N .T. Wright preaches a false gospel either. I think N .T. Wright preaches a very confusing gospel.

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Further, he says, I must stress again that the doctrine of justification by faith is not what

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Paul means by the gospel. The gospel is not an account of how people get saved.

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Really? 1 Corinthians 15, 1 and 2, Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel by which you are saved.

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N .T. Wright is N .T. wrong. Hmm. Okay?

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And there's many people like that. There's even ordinary pastors, many ordinary pastors who look up to men like John Piper, and they, right in line, follow the rules.

40:46

Is that from the Talmud? Where are they getting those rules? Well, let me compare them here real quick here.

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Let me compare them to a people that we really don't like in the Bible. Okay? Matthew chapter 15, verses 8 and 9 says,

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These people honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. In vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

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And then in Matthew 23, verses 23 and 24, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

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For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and ridiculousness.

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That guy's delightful. Who's that guy you're quoting? Yeah. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others.

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You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. So interesting.

41:42

The Big Eva, this Big Eva leadership, they're very much like the Pharisees in the sense that they have these own unwritten rules.

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If you break the rules, you'll lose your ordination like Jeff Clewer. You'll get fired like Russell Fuller.

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You'll get a permanent ban like Ryan Turnispied in the Missouri Senate Lutheran Church.

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I mean, this is cross -denominational. I always remember that Matthew 23, 23 verse because I got corrected in public one time.

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Someone told me I was reaching into my Catholicism when I said that some sins were worse than others.

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But that's just a funny aside. But listen, we can't tolerate any heresy.

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I mean, it doesn't matter who's around. We can't be worried about seeker sensitive. God closes people's ears when they can't handle stuff.

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We've all read through Genesis in front of our little toddlers and things like that. And there's some bad stuff in there and just whatever.

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You just go with the truth and you plug away. If you're a leader of a church, you got to make a decision on where to lead your people sometimes.

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So if there's two options and you can't unify both sides, you have to pick a side.

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And if I'm going to a church, I want to follow a pastor that knows the truth and isn't afraid to pick a side, whether it's political or theological, whatever the issue is, or if it's in the world,

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I want to know what he thinks about it. And that's okay. And you know what people will say to the pastor, just preach the gospel like you said.

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Don't weigh in on your opinion on it. But they don't say that to worldly people who are also weighing in on the matter, like a mechanic, just stick to fixing cars or whatever it is.

43:24

You know what I mean? I was going to ask if someone wants a key on this. It seems these great churches and the seeker sensitive churches, they're all about justification.

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They don't want to talk about sanctification. Am I getting it right? Is that a big red flag to look for?

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I mean, justification is good. You want to help people be justified and become saved and preach the gospel to save them.

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I rejoice that the gospel is being preached. I don't think that's a bad thing. But you're still missing out.

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You have to be able to disciple people and lead them more towards Christ and following Christ.

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So I think they're both very, very important. Sure. I mean, salvation is the most important thing. So I don't want to say it's a bad thing.

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But who knows if they're really saved if they don't continue going through, continuing in the faith.

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So we want to help people continue in the faith and be sure of salvation, help them work that out, what was put into them.

44:21

One of the seeker sensitive things I noticed Paul Tripp was very involved in was having homosexual people come on a podcast that he was doing, where these homosexuals seem to be promoting that you can be a gay

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Christian. And you can use that adjective. I saw Rosaria Butterfield. You know, guys know who

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Rosaria Butterfield is, right? And she's a former lesbian college professor, but she's a born again

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Christian and an English teacher. And she said that you can't use adjectives that way.

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You can't say gay Christian and say it's still a Christian. It's not a

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Christian. It's a gay Christian, which is not a Christian at all. So you're negating the Christian part.

45:05

And I'm going right back to the truncated gospel. You can't truncate the gospel.

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It's the gospel. There is no other gospel. Is there another gospel? Anybody?

45:18

No. Yeah. Galatians 1, there is no other gospel. And if anyone brings you another gospel, let him be accursed.

45:26

But I'm glad you brought up Rosaria Butterfield, Joe, because when we asked the question, you know, why aren't these big leaders, these big evil leaders repenting?

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Rosaria Butterfield was platformed. She would have been, you know, at least on the female end, a big evil leader.

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And she actually repented because she was giving allowances on the homosexuality issues when she first came to Christianity.

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And she did that for many years. She even wrote books where she made those allowances. And then over the last few years, it has really come out strong against that.

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And she said, I repented. Now it's time for you guys to repent. But very, very few.

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It's hard to find anybody in this Big Eva club who has repented. It's become like these acceptable sins.

46:18

That's really great. I didn't know that about her at all. But I, you know, that is awesome.

46:23

And, you know, look, and we compared Big Eva to the federal government. And we've got other big institutions.

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And, you know, a lot of us like to talk about the doctrine of the lesser magistrate. If I'm a sinner and I need to repent, and I'm never going to be perfect on this life, don't the institutions need to figure out how to repent institutionally, if not individually?

46:46

That's a good point, Joe. Yeah, good. Well, one thing that Rosaria Butterfield mentioned, she wrote an article on TrueScript.

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And she describes the difference between true biblical repentance and course correction.

47:02

Because what we have seen, let me throw out a name here, Al Mohler. Al Mohler is a great example of someone who has never repented and has course corrected.

47:14

You know, he just kind of goes where the wind blows. And he's always been that way. When you really look at, you know, 30 plus years of his ministry as the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, now he's saying he's a

47:27

Christian nationalist, even though Jarvis Williams is still employed at his seminary.

47:35

But maybe he repented, I mean, just because he didn't, are you saying he needs to publicly repent? He's a public guy.

47:42

He's a public figure. Like, well, yes, I might have repented. Nobody saw it. You know what I mean? Well, if you are a public figure and you have promoted a doctrine that is other than the gospel of Jesus Christ or any, like Jeff said, any ethics that are out of line with scripture, you need to repent publicly.

48:02

Otherwise, you're just going to cause confusion. And it takes a lot of humility to say, guys, I was wrong. Would you please forgive me?

48:09

And I need to earn your trust back. I really like his course correction. So I want to give him some grace.

48:15

I was just looking for a way to do that because he really was going the wrong way. He was really in a bad way.

48:22

And he has made a definite course correction. I'm so glad because I love listening to the briefing. So, yeah.

48:30

So if Russell Fuller were hired back on Southern Seminary, then

48:35

I think he had made restitution, right? But they were going to get the ax. Well, Russell Fuller got the ax as well as two other people from Southern Seminary.

48:46

Yeah. They've never been apologized to. So it's great that now he's on the briefing, calling himself a

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Christian nationalist or whatever and taking strong stands. Yeah. He realizes that Big Eva got swamped by our side, by the

49:02

John Harris's and Votie Bottoms, right? And here's the divide. If you have a

49:08

Big Eva person holding the line from 2018, they're still holding on to Sam Albury, Preston Sprinkle, Rebecca McLaughlin, Vaughn, Roberts, and all these guys that preach same -sex attracted

49:24

Christianity. They're holding the line. And they're getting swamped because their side is a loser, right?

49:30

Yeah. Then you have someone like Al Mohler who course corrected and is now against those things like Rosaria Butterfield, which is great to be on the correct side.

49:40

And now they're benefiting and prospering. And guys like Average Joe love to see that. Let's go. That's a great thing.

49:47

But repentance does matter. I think that's Seth's point. Like when we shut down our church for six weeks at the start of COVID, we then repent of that publicly.

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That was our error. And we were wrong. We were confused. We deceived.

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We didn't understand it. But it was our fault that we shut our churches down for six weeks. And next time we won't do that.

50:10

Yeah. That's how you turn back, right? You repent. We're all prone to error. You know, we're human.

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And we do the best we can. But that's all we're calling for. So we love Al Mohler. And we're so glad he's teaching the truth now.

50:23

But I would like him to publicly acknowledge that what happened to Russell Fuller was an injustice.

50:29

So let Russell Fuller's name be vindicated in public, just like it was shamed in public.

50:36

And let me say this. The leadership of the free church needs to do the same thing with you,

50:41

Jeff. Because what happened with the leadership of the free church is at the 2023

50:46

National Conference, they went out and they released an affirmations and denials saying that they weren't woke.

50:54

And yet at the same conference, they're publicly disciplining the very guy who's led the movement against the woke invasion in the evangelical free church.

51:03

And that should have been a huge red flag to everybody at the conference. Like, wait, something's fishy here. Because what they discovered is that their woke push was unattractive politically.

51:16

So what happened in the summer of 2023 at that conference was political maneuvering was taking place where they're switching from, oh, we are woke, like they did a few years earlier, right?

51:27

I mean, Jarvis Williams said, not all black folk are woke, right? And that was something that was embraced.

51:34

And then in the summer of 2023, they're saying, oh, we're not woke. We're not woke.

51:40

It's political maneuvering. It's course correction. We cannot trust men in Christian leadership unless they have repented.

51:48

Because that's the first, this is Christianity 101. We don't know someone has changed until they first repented.

51:55

So this shouldn't need to be stated, but I'm just stating it loud and clear for everyone to hear.

52:01

Repentance must be there for there to be true change in a man or woman or an institution.

52:08

All right, no more briefing for me. Yeah, until he repents. I mean, I don't listen to the briefing anymore because I want to listen to people who

52:17

I trust more. Who are, again, we don't expect people to be perfect. But someone who is a faithful shepherd is going to repent and say, yeah, you know, please.

52:28

What about general media? How about people? How about Christians that put so much trust in the general media or as some people like to call it, the mainstream media.

52:39

And we don't even know if they're Christian or not. I mean, should we be trusting just anybody to deliver us opinion at least?

52:48

If not, because nobody really does news anymore. I think you got to look and see how someone lives their life too.

52:55

The way it see what they're saying matches up with their lifestyle. You can say one thing and do another.

53:01

But for me, I lose trust in someone like that or I lose respect in someone like that.

53:07

So I like to look at someone, see what they say, and then see if their lifestyle matches what they say.

53:14

And then that becomes a trustable person for me that I would want to follow if that is consistent and continues.

53:19

If someone is often saying one thing and then saying another thing and then doing something and then doing another thing, they're unstable.

53:26

And I'm not confident in that person to make a good decision. I think we should commit to making sure that if somebody does publicly repent, that we talk about it on tearing down high places.

53:39

Hey, that's respectable. I respect anyone who is doing the wrong thing, notices it, comes out and says sorry, and then does the right thing and continues to do the right thing.

53:50

I mean, that's Christianity right there. We're all going the wrong way. And then God called us to somewhere different.

53:56

And now we're on the right track because of Jesus. Amen. I mean, I respect people like that.

54:02

Because we can't tear down the heretics if we're not going to lift up the repenters, right? We'll lift you up on tearing down high places.

54:11

We want to lift brothers up. Lift them up. Speaking of lifting up, we better lift up soon.

54:17

Or it's going to be a very long episode. We can always bring Seth back. Let's have Seth give a closing remark if he wants to.

54:26

And then he probably knows what to do now at the end. He probably does. Yeah, I've been practicing the close here.

54:36

But I said this earlier and I'll say this again. We need to understand the people who are listening, watching, they need to understand that this is real.

54:47

We're not just having a good time just making fun of people. We're addressing real problems.

54:55

Tim, Jeff and myself, we are shepherds of the gospel. We're going to have to give account one day based on how we shepherded our local churches.

55:03

And I think we have a responsibility even beyond that if the Lord gives us that platform. And we have a platform here on this podcast where we're talking about, we're warning people to blindly follow

55:14

Big Eva may lead one away from Christ or limit one's faithfulness to Christ.

55:19

So we need to be thoroughly biblical. And as we recognize the errors and see

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Christ fully, the Lord's really going to use us in a powerful way in our lives, whether you're a pastor or whether you're just a layman.

55:35

So that's the encouragement I want to leave everyone with. All right. Amen. Love it.

55:42

Let's do it then. If you see a brother down, lift them up. Lift them up.

55:47

See a high place, tear it down. Nice. I can tell you were practicing the mirrors.