Sept 16, 2026 Show with Dr. James R. White on “Dinesh D’Sousa’s Public Attacks upon the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace: A Reformed Response”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

The Purpose of Iron Sharpens Iron

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 16th day of September, 2026.

I'm thrilled to have back a returning guest who's a dear friend of mine, as well as a first-time guest. The returning guest is Dr. James R. White, world-renowned Reformed Baptist theologian and apologist, co-founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona.

He is a New Testament Greek scholar, a highly seasoned debater, prolific author, conference speaker, host of the Dividing Line webcast, and professor of apologetics and church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, and one of the pastors of Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona.

Today, Dr. White will be addressing Dinesh D'Souza's public attacks upon the doctrines of sovereign grace, a Reformed response. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my dear friend, Dr. James R. White.

Well, it's good to be back with you, Chris. It scares me a little bit that you are doing video. Given your history and your tremendous capacity of dealing with technical issues, there are a lot of things that could go really, really wrong.

Oh, yeah. And what Chris Arnzen does video. But here we are. I mean, I've been I got forced into video. Rich forced me. I didn't want to do it. I'd rather be sitting in a ratty T-shirt, you know, and not caring.

I sort of like to be like Walter Martin used to be. I don't know if you this goes way, way back. But when he when he do stuff, he just be sitting there with his feet up on the table and the top of coffee and, you know.

His toupee is sitting on the desk, you know, the whole nine yards. Yeah.

So that that was the easy day. But now we've got two studios here and all this stuff, then I got to. I've got to wear a decent shirt and all this. It's not nearly as good as it used to be.

Well, that is all because of covid, because covid gave birth to the podcast explosion. And at one time, I was one of the very few reformed Christians hosting a long form interview program, typically with one guest per episode.

And now everybody and his uncle has a podcast and it definitely has competed for donations and viewers. And so people have keep have kept, including Rich Pierce, your president, have kept nagging me. You've got to get on YouTube.

So that will eventually happen. And we actually do have a YouTube channel already. But right now, there's very little on there. And the goal is to get all of the shows eventually on there. But I'm thrilled to have, as I mentioned already, a first time guest.

This first time guest is without question a godsend to me and to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. There was a point in time a number of months ago when Iron Sharpens Iron Radio was in the worst financial state we have ever been in, I think.

And I actually had to borrow money off of a life insurance policy to pay bills. And then, out of the blue, Pastor Brandon Myers of Christ the King Reformed Baptist Church in Niles, Illinois, contacted me and said, I want to sponsor your show for a year.

And the rest is history. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Brandon.

Myers. Well, it's wonderful to be here, Chris, I've been a longtime listener and praise God for your ministry and been a longtime listener of Dr. White's debates and reader of his books as well. So it is a joy to sit with you, brothers, so encouraged by your faith and just an honor to be here.

And it's great to have you on the program. And we'll be giving the websites for both of my guests later on in the broadcast. I just have to read a listener question, which I found absolutely hysterical.

I think it was more of a comment than a question. But it is proof that this person has never listened to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and certainly knows absolutely nothing about James White. He says in the subject line, I doubt that you're an honest theologian.

I don't know if he's talking to me or to you. I would hardly call myself a theologian. But he says, you likely believe that the KJV is flawless. What about 1 John 5, 7 and 9? It is such an outrageous error that it has a name, the Kama Johanim.

There is no Greek to support this Catholic paganism. I can list so many more. Where did this person come from? He doesn't even give his location. But what a bizarre email to receive.

Well, you're the one that puts your email address out there. I cannot imagine the stuff that you get. I mean, you know, the rest of us put our email addresses out there like that. But yeah, the Kama Johanim, I've never heard of that.

My goodness, if someone had just written a book back in 1994 on this topic. Yeah, well, you know, I can't win for losing. Either I'm a boomer and I'm too old to be relevant anymore, or you get stuff like that.

Who cares what you wrote in the 1990s as if theological issues change in 30 years' time? I gotta admit, you know, I'm a gadget guy. I'm a geek guy. This stuff with Dinesh D'Souza is because my primary social media presence is on X.

I hate Facebook. I have to be on it because everybody in Apologia is on Facebook. But X has always been sort of, you know, my go-to type situation. But it still pushes me into this weird, weird world.

It really is strange, and I guess I have to be exposed to it. But man, this experience over the past number of weeks with Dinesh D'Souza and his jihad against Calvinism, listening to how people argue and think now is really discouraging to someone of my generation.

It really is. I can just give an illustration. Separate from Calvinism, this trial of the woman who murdered her three children has demonstrated that a large portion of our population does not value reason, thought, logic, but has replaced all of that with emotion.

We emote rather than think. And that's a large portion of the population. It's a large portion of the female population, naturally. I'll just be honest with you about that. But sadly, now amongst men as well, people who used to recognize that you had a calling to think clearly and to take a stand for things, man, it's gone.

And the same type of thing is relevant to this stuff with Dinesh D'Souza because it's not so much argument about exegesis and stuff. He's not an exegete. He doesn't know Greek, Hebrew, Latin, nothing.

He just said yesterday, he just said, I just finished reading through the Bible for the first time. It's like, yay, good. It's probably best not to be pretending to be a theologian yet, but great. Keep reading.

But the big catch has been emotion. How can you think of God in these ways? And it's like, because God has revealed himself in scripture and we're supposed to obey and submit. And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's you'll never get anywhere doing that. You got to get you got to catch people here in the heart, you know. And so, yeah, I, you know, Brandon looks like he's about the same age as my son-in-law, I think.

So he's he's probably a generation behind me. And I'm just sitting here going, I don't know what you're going to be facing. And I'll be perfectly honest with you, bro. I don't think I'd have the patience.

Call it a personal failure on my part. But I just really struggle trying to reason with people who are controlled by their emotions. You know, I mean, my my parents lived through the Depression. OK, I grew up.

Listen, I grew up dirt poor. Just we had nothing. Zip, zero nada. And they would tell me about how they had less than we had. They were kids, you know. And so, you know, my dad worked three or four jobs at a time just to make ends meet.

And so the idea of victimhood and emotionalism and, oh, just do what you're supposed to do, you know, man up is what I was raised with. And so trying to deal with people who've been raised in the public indoctrination system to view themselves as victims and to be always thinking about emotion, emotion, emotion.

I'm going to leave it to you, Brandon. Sorry, I'm going to I'm going to kick off. And, you know, you guys get to get to take it because I I can't handle it. I just I can't. Now, wouldn't you? Go ahead, Brandon.

Go ahead. I was just going to say, it's very interesting you bring that up because we actually added something a few years ago to our church, our church covenant that is trying to address this. And we will affirm this at our members meetings and walk through it and teach through it in our membership classes.

But there's a section underneath the trust and obey the word of God. And underneath there, we say refusing to be led astray by unbiblical philosophies, false teachers, manmade traditions, and even our own hearts.

So we just have been trying to weave that in there so people understand your heart is deceptive and you have an old man that will easily want to take over that tyranny of the old self. And so we it is a challenge.

I agree entirely with what you said, Dr. White. I think that this day and age, effeminate men are rewarded. And so they've realized that in the marketplace, in corporate America. And the Church of Christ has got to stand out and stand against that boldly and clearly and say, no, we will not be governed by our hearts that often lead us astray.

And they have to be subjected to the word of God, always back to the word of God. It is a challenge. But there's also on the bright side of that, I think people who are seeing that is a problem. We have to address that.

And by the grace of God, you have a number of guys, at least at our church, by the grace of God, who are saying, I want to leave my wife, love her well with integrity. Don't want to get caught up in all this all women are evil kind of a thing like some are doing.

And at the same time, recognize that we have to be able to say this is such a problem, particularly with what we just saw with the Lindsay Clancy trial, as you mentioned, as Exhibit A really of. This is something that people who are professing Christians are even doing.

And so we actually have worked into our membership interview process. Questions like that. Just years ago, D .A. Carson, one of my professors at Trinity, talked about you need to throw curveballs into the membership interview just so people you can see where they're at, engage where they're at.

And we've been thinking about this with the Lindsay Clancy thing just to saying, we need to ask people, hey, tell us just in 30 seconds what you thought about the Lindsay Clancy trial before you join our church.

Just because we're like, what do you believe about all this stuff? And we can talk about race and Black Lives Matter and many other things, too, related to this that sadly have come up. But it's all, I would say, wedded to the same thing, a governance by the heart and by the feelings.

Sadly, it has to be addressed by the true church of Christ. And I hope you don't mind, Chris, if we roll with this for just a second. Because Brandon and I were having a nice conversation before you interrupted us.

Well, tried to. Tried to.

But, you know, what you're talking about right now is a huge topic. Chris and I have talked about it on the program before, all the stuff that's going on, these movements within Reformed Evangelicalism and going off the rails into this wild, insane stuff.

And a lot of people are really questioning, how do we maintain a balance? Because they'll talk about true things, the effeminate man movement. They will talk about, they bring things up that are true.

I mean, the Bible clearly delineates roles. And we see, my goodness, we have justices, plural, but one particular justice on the Supreme Court. I'm sorry, that woman is not capable of being a Supreme Court justice by any stretch of the imagination.

And you're not allowed to say that. And yet you have to say that. And so, and yet there's this swing off into stuff where all women are crazed and need to be silenced and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

And it's like the foundations have given way. The stuff that used to keep people from swinging off into the wildest stuff on earth, it's like all those restraints are gone. And people that, you know, six, seven years ago, we all would have been at the same conference.

We would have been saying the same things. And now things have gone insane. Why is that? Well, I can't give you all the answers, but man, finding balance, that's going to be the challenge for your generation.

Yeah. You know, we've already been convicted of being a bunch of idiots and betrayed everything and all the rest of that stuff. No one's going to listen to a word we have to say anymore. But your generation is going to have, you've got these people coming through the doors of your church.

And I've said a million times, I wish we had, we could design this electronic gadget that when they walk through the doors of church, it just rips the worldview that's been crammed into them for six days out of the week right out of them.

So they can just come to the word of God and everything's good and wonderful. No one's going to ever design that. And that's the big, big, big challenge. Because, you know, when I, when I opened the word of God, when I, you know, I preached the past couple of weeks, not this last weekend, but the two weekends before that.

Jeff Durbin, my fellow elder, was out of town. And so I did John chapter two, going through the gospel of John. And I just have to keep in my mind, the people walking in that are going to be hearing me preaching are bringing such a radically different worldview than what I was raised with.

That I have to somehow communicate with them. And, you know, I'll be honest with you, if it weren't for the spirit of God, there's no way that could ever happen. And in fact, I would argue this is a strong argument for being more and more biblical and biblical in the sense of exegetical in preaching.

Because I'm not smart enough to make, to translate this stuff into the younger generation. But those scriptures are inspired enough and the spirit of God is powerful enough to make that translation. And I just get in the way, you know.

So I think more than ever, we really need to make sure that the sheep are getting Christ's voice as pure and full as possible. Because the way that our nation is just fracturing in so many different directions, the only way the church can stay together is trust that supernatural resource.

Sovereign Grace and Unscriptural Presuppositions

Now, would you say, James, that a lot of the problem when we have fellow evangelicals just erupting with anger and rage and viciousness when it comes to the doctrines of sovereign grace, which have been nicknamed Calvinism and reformed theology and so on.

A lot of it is because they are unconsciously dragging in presuppositions, perhaps even from before they were a Christian. And that's giving the benefit of the doubt that many of these folks really are Christians.

I don't know where Dinesh D'Souza stands. I remember one time he was claiming to be an evangelical Catholic. So I don't know where he stands.

Big follower of R .C. Sproul. Big fan. I want everybody to know, I caught that. I heard that.

And going going back to when I was a new believer and I was at a Bible study being held by Mike Adash, who you know, in the basement of a member's house. And I had no idea what Calvinism was. I never heard it before.

And I hear during a coffee break, my pastor speaking to several men in the church about Calvinism, about predestination, about unconditional election. And I walked up to him and I said, you believe what?

And he explained it again. And I said, that sounds like some kind of weird Hinduism or something, man. This is out of this planet. And even when I was sitting to be interviewed by the elders before I was baptized, I said to them, I love you guys.

I trust you with my life. I want you to be my shepherds. I love this church, but I don't think I'm ever going to believe in this Calvinism stuff. And they said, well, Chris, we can't force you to believe in Calvinism before we will baptize you.

We believe that you are a genuinely repentant believer. We believe that you understand the actual core tenets of the gospel. So we're going to baptize you and we will even welcome you into church membership, but you must vow not to undermine the teachings of this church.

So I agree to that. And an elderly British man who was a member of the church who is now in heaven, Nigel Stone, approached me and he said, I understand you're having difficulty embracing the doctrine of unconditional election.

Read this. He handed me George Whitfield's letter to John Wesleyan election. I didn't know who either of those people were. And George Whitfield utterly annihilated Wesley's arguments with the Bible. That's the only thing that mattered to me, because, you know, the argument that most or many Armenians and anti-Calvinists have is, well, you wouldn't believe in Calvinism unless it was taught to you by a Calvinist preacher.

Well, I didn't know who these guys were. It was the scriptural evidence that Whitfield had that the Lord used to convince me. But going back to my original comment, isn't this a lot of the fact that people are dragging perhaps unconsciously presuppositions about fairness, goodness, righteousness, holiness, sin, and all these things that are not scriptural.

They're dragging it into the Bible, and they're isogeting text in the Bible with these thoughts.

Well, I'm ready to jump in. Brandon, you got to understand, if you want to get an ordinance, you got to strike while the iron is hot.

So I went over everybody. That's why you go ahead.

Yeah. No, look, here's what concerns me in not just reading Dinesh D'Souza. One of the main things that concerns me is we don't know what he believes. Right. Because he won't say. Well, I'm a public figure, so I'm not going to tell you where I go to church.

OK, if you don't want to give the address, all right, fine. But what's your confession of faith? What's your denomination? How is the church aligned? Give us something to hold you accountable to. He won't do it.

Absolutely refuses to do it. And that allows him to just throw everything but the kitchen sink at Calvinism and never even have to think about his own position. That came out in his dialogue with Jon Bignon.

You know, all attack, never have to defend. And that accomplishes absolutely positively nothing. But the point is a lot of people in the comments, the people that are commenting about these things. The thing that concerns me the most is it demonstrates to me beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are not sitting in a context where they are being challenged by the word of God each Lord's Day.

They are not being given the example, because the best way to teach exegesis is to do it, is to illustrate it, is to do it consistently. You know, we just finished a series through Proverbs. Now, a lot of people will do Proverbs and they'll, you know, do four or five or six, something like that.

No, I don't know how many years we were in Proverbs. But it was, that is one of the hardest books, in my opinion, to preach through. And Jeff did it. That's a lot of hard work. And now we're in John, which you'd think would be, you know, easier.

It has its own challenges because everybody thinks they know everything that John means and says already. So it's hard enough to do that. But the point is... Did you freeze? ...a weekly example of how to respect the word of God by handling it consistently week in and week out.

And that's one of the best ways to teach people how to do that for themselves. And very clearly, the vast majority of people on X do not have that privilege. That's not what they're getting. They are getting some kind of deistic, counseling, feel good type of thing.

And the idea that there is a consistent teaching of the word of God that they should actually want to embrace, they should desire to glorify God by embracing what he says about himself. Wow. You try to hold somebody to that and they'll look at you like you're a three-headed monster.

That's one of the things that has really struck me in these types of situations, is what is going on in the pulpits of our churches. Even allegedly, it's scary.

I remember a friend of mine who is now a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace, but he was raised Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, and his father-in-law is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist and a vehement anti-Calvinist.

And before he told his father-in-law that he had become a Calvinist, it took him a long time to work up the courage to tell him. His father-in-law at some family gathering said, So what are you preaching on this Sunday?

And he swallowed hard and said, Romans 9. He said, Oh, wait a minute. I got to give you my notes on that because you got to rip through Romans 9 as fast as you can, like you're tearing off a Band-Aid.

You can't let your listeners just sit there and wallow in that because they're going to come to the wrong conclusions. And he actually put in his sermon note, Esau, I loved Jacob. I'm sorry. Jacob, I loved Esau, I hated.

And he said in his marginal notes, Do not read this out loud. You're talking about an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist that is a hyper-literalist when it comes to the Scripture, and he won't even let the word speak for itself.

But that seems to me what a lot of people, including Dinesh D'Souza, are doing. They cannot let the Bible speak for themselves when they clearly teach the doctrines of sovereign grace.

I was just going to say another challenge with some of this is you do have some of the, you might call it our side, the Calvinist side of things, where years ago on The Dividing Line, Dr. White, you recommended a resource, it was probably a decade ago, honestly, and I was working actually at the time at, let me think, it was at Our Savior Evangelical Free Church.

I grew up in the Free Church tradition around here, so I went to Trinity, but I was on the grounds crew, actually probably more than that, probably 15 years ago, you recommended Al Martin's little book, The Practical Implications of Calvinism.

I do think that there is probably a large swath of those in the Reformed camp who could use a reading and rereading of that in light of some of the back and forth. Recently I was watching Dinesh talk on Larry Taunton, Larry Taunton had him on his show, and Dinesh said that Calvinists are like a beehive, I just stirred the pot and made a swarm.

My experience has been that, yeah, sure, there's some of that on the Calvinist side, but it's also the anti-Calvinist side that is like the beehive. And so I do think that our side could use another fresh reading of The Practical Implications of Calvinism, but at the same time, when it comes to discipleship and the life of the local church, what you just said is exactly right.

There's got to be this sitting under the Word of God, modeling it, showing how to handle text of the Word of God in context, and to Chris's point, not skipping past the hard parts, but reading it and explaining it and then seeking to apply it faithfully, and I do think that, sadly, you have— years ago, Mark Dever said this, he said basically there's a commitment phobia all across America, where committing to a local church, no, can't do that, and many times, and a lot of those guys in the Nine Mark Circles will talk about this, how there's like, church membership is treated more like a Costco or Walmart club card membership as opposed to like a meaningful commitment, where people actually are treating this like closer to a marriage relationship, where you're with the church family, with the people, and committed to that people through thick and thin, and so I think there is a deeper discipline.

And you're frozen, unfortunately.

The come-and-go mentality, and we have that here in the Chicagoland area, people have like snowbird mentality, lead to go around to Florida once in a while, but increasingly wanting to see some saints stick to a local church, sitting under the preaching of the Word of God, so that some of those younger people, like others in my generation, but even the younger ones in Gen Z, can then actually see that model.

That's one of the deserving things, is you don't have a lot of people who have a long track record in the same local church, and that means a lot of times they can throw grenades at Calvinism and throw that verse out of that favorite line that they want to, thinking that they are safe and thinking that they've understood this.

So it's a discipleship issue in the local church that the church has to address, but I think the only solution is that verse by verse, faithful commitment to expository preaching. In your case, one through Proverbs, we're in Exodus right now, and just trying to march through line by line.

That is not the norm, I think, in most evangelical pulpits in the United States today, at least as far as I can tell. And that, I think, is hopefully something that can be recovered by the grace of God increasingly.

We'll have James White pick up where we left off there. If you have a question, submit it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence, if you live outside of the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And once again, that's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Well, folks, we are going to do an ad-less show today. I know that makes a lot of you happy, because for some reason my ads are not working today.

I had to replace all of my ads with music-less commercials because iTunes is now blocking my show because of the musical backgrounds of the commercials. So we're going to skip the commercials. And if you're listening and you're an advertiser, please do not panic.

I'm going to make sure that we add an extra day onto your contract, and this will make up for this day without commercials. But anyway, before Dr. White responds to perhaps what you just recently said, Pastor Myers, since you're a first-time guest, we always have first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised.

You actually just hinted at that before. You were raised in the evangelical free church. Tell us about that and what kind of providential circumstances the Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you, and how you came to embrace the doctrines of grace as well.

Oh, you're on mute. I'm sorry. Go ahead, brother. Yeah, well, by the grace of God, I grew up in a believing home. My mother and father often opened the Bible with us to visit church regularly. And then both their parents, so both my sets and grandparents, also believed and had a very strong connection with the Evangelical Free Church of America, the EFCA.

My grandfather was a pastor, my mom's dad, in the Evangelical Free Church of America. My parents met at Trinity College in Deerfield, which is now defunct. There's now no more. And they met there and settled here in the Chicagoland area.

But we grew up at Our Savior Evangelical Free Church in Wheeling, Illinois. And a medium-sized local church experienced some growth there in the Lord's kindness. But when I was five years old, I was convicted of my sins and repented and trusted in Christ for the forgiveness of my sins.

I was baptized at the age of 13. And again, in God's kindness, my parents showed me a lot of what James Dobson, the late James Dobson, called tough love. There was a lot of tough love there. For me, I was not the easiest child to raise, very stubborn.

My dad always said, be an independent thinker, be an independent thinker. And that kind of came back to bite him later on as I grew up and challenged his authority. But by the grace of God, I would definitely say that when I was five years old, I was convicted of my sin.

I think it was a true conversion, a sound conversion. And in the high school years, I grew up in the government school, went to public high school, this kind of a thing. And I would say I was a little bit more just inconsistent, ashamed of the faith, following some friends that weren't like the worst people in the world, but they were worldly.

They were not converted. They were unregenerate. And it was just the symbol, play sports, hang out with your buddies, do stupid things that a number of high school boys do all across the country with very little interest in Christ.

And yet there was always this conviction by the spirit of that was not right. You should not go and do some of those things. And you should not disrespect your mom and dad. And actually it was in my freshman year of college.

I went to Taylor University in Indiana. And it's a small liberal arts Christian school there in Indiana. And I was actually reading one morning Romans 1, Romans 1, just going through that. And in Romans 1 30, it talked about those who are disobedient to their parents.

And there's all these vices listed there. And that was a verse that I would call, it may be a gospel awakening. It kind of convicted me of, wow, I've been a man worthy of death, a young man who has been defied in my parents' authority.

And so that verse was a wonderful blessing to me where I don't think I was converted there. I think it was more of a gospel awakening of like, wow, I've been living inconsistently. I've been disrespecting my parents' authority and doing other things as well that were just inconsistent with the Christian faith.

And so by the grace of God, that was very helpful for me. Now, at the time, I probably would have identified myself as a, not to be confused, Armenian, you know, more free will, evangelical type, you know, flirting with this kind of egalitarianism.

Oh, yeah, women can preach, they can do the same things as men, da, da, da, da, in my freshman year of college. And, you know, I found myself gradually reading through Ephesians, reading through Romans, but also being challenged by older students at Taylor University to take my faith more seriously.

And I started reading more. Taylor University was actually a very interesting time when I was there because some of the profs, the professors of political science, that's what I studied undergrad, were much more liberal.

You'd be surprised and shocked, actually. They had Obama signs in their yards. I mean, we're talking like, what are we talking about? It's an evangelical Christian school. Come to find out that's pretty common for many in the evangelical higher education world.

So I found myself kind of forced into a little bit of a more conservative place where I started reading more, going back to, you might say, you know, the Advantis, back to the sources, this kind of a thing.

So I started reading through the Scriptures more and started to realize convictionally that I was not an Armenian and that the doctrines of grace, as it were, were biblical and were found in the Word of God.

I had not read anything at the time by John Calvin or anything like that by Charles Spurgeon, though later on I would go and read some of those. But I just started to realize that's actually more of what I believed.

There was a philosophy professor, Dr. Jim Spiegel, who was a Presbyterian, and I listened to him and another professor debate on free will and Calvinism and these kinds of things, and that was very helpful.

He was the ethics bull coach there, Taylor. So by the grace of God, the Lord just got me into His Word more and got me into situations where I needed to think more for myself. And after I graduated from college in 2009, I then started working on the grounds crew at Trinity Evangelical Trinity School as a grounds foreman, just cutting down trees, painting lines, yeah, everything you can imagine out there, mowing lawns, all that stuff.

And I would listen to hours upon hours of many different things, including the dividing line. Dr. White, so blessed by that back in the day, and many, many hours consuming that and consuming other, RTS, Home Theological Seminary had all these lectures they put out, Covenant Theological Seminary had all these lectures they put out as well, with Dr. David Calhoun, a church historian there.

So I listened to all sorts of different theology and church history and was so blessed by going deeper and having that time where I could listen to that for hours upon hours and then reading more as well.

I started reading the Institutes, and the Lord really used that in my life in a powerful way. I continued into free church, and that's where I landed until a few years ago whenever the Lord led me to serve a local Reformed Baptist congregation here in the Chicagoland area.