WWUTT 866 Q&A Cleanliness, Youth Group, and Blasphemy?

Facial Hair, Holiness, and the Most Requested Video Topic

Is cleanliness next to godliness? Does parachurch ministry or attending youth group count as going to church? And what does it mean to take the Lord's name in vain? The answers to these questions, when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a very special edition today because Becky and I are hold up. Is that what you say? Hold up. Held up. We're not being robbed. No. Definitely not. Obviously, I've never used this term before.

We are stuck. We're stuck in St. Louis because of the weather. And I had not recorded any podcast for this week. The intention was we were going to be home by now. We were definitely going to be home by now.

The weather had other intentions for us, I suppose. So praise the Lord. We are safe. Yes. Because we've passed very many cars in ditches on our way back. Yeah. And it was one of the reasons why we knew that we had to stop.

However, while we were on the road, we recorded some videos of us responding to questions that we had received while we were at the G3 conference. People who came by and said hi to us at the booth and a few just asked questions.

And then on a few occasions even, we said, hey, we're going to respond to questions on the way home. Yeah. So do you have any questions for us? These two videos were, well, it was separated into two videos because we had to stop at one point due to

We did.

Due to a very shaky cam. The ice and snow on the road made it like super bumpy.

Yeah. It wasn't a directorial decision.

I kept having to adjust the camera. Because it kept falling down.

It all fell down. So we had to split the Q &A into two videos. What we're going to do over Monday and Tuesday is we're going to do the audio form of those videos in the podcast. That way there's podcast episodes there.

So you're just hearing our Q &A a little earlier in the week. Yeah. And in case you listen to the podcast on the way to work, you can't watch the videos. We wouldn't recommend that. No, please no. So you can hear the audio to our Q &A.

This is a little introduction to part one. And then part two will be tomorrow on Tuesday. So you're just getting our Q &A a little earlier in the week than usual. And we hope you enjoy. God bless. And keep sending in those emails.

When we understand the text? At gmail .com. Hello everyone. So we are on our way back from G3. And currently in Illinois in dead stop traffic. Just about the last time we recorded one of these videos, there was probably an accident of some kind.

There's been a lot of ice around. And so we're hoping that...

And for the past 11 hours, this little stretch right here has been backed up like this.

Yeah, according to our Google map, it's been backed up like this. But we knew this was coming up. So we knew that we could hit some slower traffic where there's not as much noise and respond to a few questions.

But we do... Safely. Yeah, safely. We're going to do that. We certainly hope that everybody is okay. We tried to attend a church this morning in Tennessee. They were not open. Nope. Because of the ice.

And there really wasn't much... We deal with worse weather than this in Junction City, Kansas.

But we also have the tires for that too.

Brand new tires. I put brand new tires on this car before we hit the road. And then every church we passed after that was closed. There was... None of them were open. Yep. I'm going to write a blog about that.

Coming up. Be aware. Be aware of my blogs. Yes. Hrrr. Frank, the full wrath of my blog. So we took some questions from folks that came to our booth at G3 and loved... Boy, this was a treat for us. We just love meeting everyone.

And thank you to those of you also who are very patient. We had a lot of folks around and yet you came back to the booth later. Yeah, we appreciate that. So we're grateful for that. We tried to field a few questions and write them down and said we were going to respond to these questions on the way home.

So we've narrowed it down to 10. I think we've picked 10 questions here we're going to do. So go ahead with the first question. All right.

The Ratio Between Facial Hair and Holiness

Number one. What is the ratio between facial hair and holiness?

The ratio between facial hair and holiness. Yep. Well, as you can see, I have just a little bit of facial hair. I don't have one of those big John Calvin beards or even a bushy enough Charles Spurgeon beard.

The ratio of facial hair to holiness is less about the amount of facial hair you have, but rather how clean it is. So you can have a lot of facial hair, but as long as it's really clear, you're actually displaying through your abundant facial hair, the holiness that you have.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you have more holiness, but just that you show more of it because you have more facial hair. Does that make sense? No. Why? Why? I don't have any. Am I not holy? This hair down here.

I mean, it's kind of coming around your face there. It's touching your face. Your hair is touching your face and there's eyebrows. You know, you got eyebrows. So there's, there's some, it doesn't, I'm just a little holy.

No, no, no. It doesn't mean that I'm more holy than you. It just means that I'm showing more of it because, because of the facial hair.

So if I was able to grow a beard right now, like, you know, how ladies grow a little bit, you know, as they get older, I should just let it grow?

It would just mean you're, you're showing on the outside, the holiness you already have on the inside. As long as it's clean. As long as it's clean, right? It's gotta be clean. You got a guy that's got a great big beard, but he's got like a gnome over here and there's a bird's nest over on this side.

And there's like three meals worth of crumbs that are hanging out in there. There's no holiness there, right? It's really a problem. He's got some, he's got a beautiful beard. Maybe.

So you judge people when they come in with their beard isn't clean? Of course. Yeah. You judge a book by it's covered. You judge a Calvinist by his beard. Okay. Moving on. Number two, number one, most requested what video at G3 cleanliness is next to godliness.

Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness

Yes. So we had asked folks, so here was our question to you, like what's the video that you want us to do next? And the number one most received answer that we got was cleanliness is next to godliness.

Believe it or not, I have over 230 videos and I haven't done cleanliness is next to godliness yet. But hasn't that been on your list though? It has been. Yeah. It has been since probably like the first 20.

Yeah. So it's been on there for a few years and I've just never done that video. That's one that we'll have coming up soon because that was the number one request that we got. And it's good to go with the last question that we had too.

Cleanliness is next to godliness because you have those beards that are clean to display the holiness of God. Yeah. Right. Right.

The Parables, the Kingdom of God, and Why Jesus Spoke in Them

Okay. Moving on along. Number three, were Jesus's parables metaphorical stories given as examples to help people understand his message?

Yes and no. There are elements of the parables that are meant to help us understand because as Jesus said in Matthew 13, to you it's been given to understand the secrets of the kingdom, but to those it has not been given.

So in one sense the parables actually conceal some of the truth and understanding related to the kingdom of God and his promises and even what Christ has fulfilled through his life and his death and his resurrection.

There are those who are not going to understand that and through the parables they won't come to an understanding of it. And you'll know them by their fruit in the sense that they will misinterpret the parables and they'll misapply them and they'll try to draw these life lessons and like fable moralistic stories out of them rather than understanding the truth of the kingdom that Christ was conveying in that message.

So there is a sense in which truth is not known through the parables, at least to those who do not believe. And then there is another sense in which Christ was helping us to understand the truth of the kingdom.

Those who do believe have been given ears to hear and eyes to see that we may know those things that Christ came to fulfill of the law and the prophets, the will of God that he did in his life and his death and his resurrection.

So there are things that we're going to understand by the parables and then there's another sense in which those parables were meant to hide the truth of the kingdom from those who would not believe. That's why you'll have like some Muslim apologists who will say, point to me in the Bible where Jesus said, I am God, worship me.

That's a very common Muslim argument because they're trying to argue for the fact that Jesus never claimed to be God, nor did he ever say to worship him. Now we as Christians, we can go to the Bible and we very clearly see that and we don't even think it's concealed.

There's nothing there that's even remotely obscure about the fact that Jesus is God who was sent by the father to accomplish the will of God and showed who he came from and whose will it was that he did when he died and rose from the dead.

And saying in Luke chapter 16, if you don't believe Moses and the prophets, neither will you be convinced if someone should rise from the dead. So they don't believe the old Testament, therefore they don't believe the word of Christ.

We who are believers see clearly and plainly where Jesus spoke of these things in the manner in which God meant to convey them, not the manner in which we wish that he had said it. Right.

I'm going to pause there for a second because we need to get off. It says make a right turn. Make a right turn.

In a mile. In one mile. Are they trying to get us off the interstate again? Our GPS is trying to direct us off the interstate out of this traffic now. I think we're fine. It is trying to. Yeah. So we're just going to stay on, we're going to stay on 64.

You mean 57? Well we're staying on 57 up to 64. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. All right. So ignoring GPS when it says to turn. Okay. Okay. So number four. I'll go ahead and merge over here though. Question number four. Is youth group or para-church ministry church?

Youth Group, Para-Church Ministry, and the Nature of Church

Is youth group or para-church ministry. Oh yeah. What'd I say? Church. Right. Did I say that? Yeah. You said it right. I think that your cute little voice kind of like raised up there at the end and it like chirped out of church.

Yes. Your blinker is still on. Excellent. I'm going to turn into the snow.

Okay. So is, is youth group or para-church. Now we're driving on snow so we're all going to, hopefully we're not making anybody sick here. Sorry. Maybe I should try to get back over there. Yeah, you should.

Okay. I'm going to get in front of this truck here. If they let you. Oh, oh, oh. They're not going to let you. There is a Subaru in the way. There. There we go. Woo. Okay.

Moving on along. Sliding on along. Number four. Number four. Is youth ministry, or is youth group or para-church ministry church? No. I almost said yes.

So, no it's not because, well youth group, let me, let me back up on that one.

Is para-church ministry one thing? Because you have a, you have a line separating it. Like, it's on a different line. Para-church ministry is on another line. So, I can't tell if para-church ministry is one thing.

No, that's all one sentence. I think that was all one sentence. It's all one sentence. But is para-church ministry one thing?

Para-church ministry is not church.

But para-church, okay, never mind.

But youth group can be church. It just depends on how the youth group is structured. Right. Just don't let youth group be the sort of a thing where you're convincing youth that just because they went to youth group on Wednesday night, that they've now gone to church.

Right. They've fulfilled their church obligation. It's not the same.

It's not the same, right. It's like Bible study and church. Exactly, right. You still go to church even though you went to Bible study. Yes.

It's a Bible study with a youth emphasis on it. At least that's the way that it should be. Yeah. And you can get together and have fun and play games. I'm not even opposed to that either. But just don't let that be, that's not the draw.

You can get together and have fun at another time. But there's going to be a point where things get serious. You're sitting down. You're focused. You've got your Bible out. You've got a notepad out. Whatever else you need to use to take notes, follow an outline, follow a basic flow, retain the information that's being shared.

There should be a teaching portion of it that gets serious. And the intention of this is to help students grow in a knowledge and an understanding of who God is. Right. Now at our church, we don't have a youth group in the sense that youth group is typically known in evangelical circles.

But we have a youth Bible study on Wednesday night. And right now we're going through Romans. And we'll do some fun things. There was one night we brought a board game. It was a Bible-centered board game.

But doing trivia questions and things of that nature. And you didn't win. And I didn't win. Yeah, how about that? I made them ask me the advanced questions all the way through it until it was just... And they were definitely advanced.

It was pulling obscure names out of the Old Testament. I was like, I don't know. Who is the third son of Eber? I've not memorized the genealogies. Now we know how to stump the pastor. Well, yeah. Whenever we would do Stump the Pastor night, there would be a kid that would just stand up and say something like, what's Isaiah 42 -67?

Well, there's not 67 verses in Isaiah 42. That's going to be my first guess at that question. It would be stuff like that. Sorry, I'm shocking the kids when they find out that I don't actually have the entire Bible memorized.

But anyway, what were we saying? Yeah, Paratechurch ministry and youth group. So you can get together and do fun things. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. But there needs to be deliberate Bible study.

And then there needs to be an understanding that the youth have that church on Sunday morning. Is the body of Christ gathered together cross-generational? Yes. To partake in the Lord's Supper, to sing praises to God together, to celebrate in baptism, and to be together to hear the teaching of the Word of God.

Youth group should not ever be a supplement for church. And honestly, I'm going to put this out there to you as well. If you've got youth that are attending youth group on Wednesday night, but they're not coming to church on Sunday morning, depending on the situation, might be a family situation is the reason why they can't get to church on Sunday morning.

Maybe it's something like that. Their parents are unbelievers, something to that degree. But if you've got a student that's coming Wednesday, but they're not coming on Sunday, you may have to consider some church discipline related to that.

And it may have to be something related to their parents, or at least going to the parents and saying, why is your child in youth group on Wednesday, but they're not coming to church on Sunday? Some of those things are going to have to be confronted and addressed.

Since Wednesday night is not church, unless that is the day that your church meets, but it's when we're all gathered together as church, even our teenagers, even our youth should be participating in that service.

Blasphemy, the Image of God, and Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

So what does it mean to commit blasphemy and take the Lord's name in vain? And what is the Lord's name anyway? I'm glad you caught all that. Okay, very good. All right. So in Ephesians chapter two, we are told that you were once dead in your sins and transgressions, in the sins in which you once walked.

Following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

This is who everybody was before we came to Christ and who all unbelievers still are. And in that moment and in that time in which you were in that, everything that you did was blasphemy. Every word that you said was blaspheming God, because as we are clearly told in Scripture, Genesis one, Genesis two, Genesis 127 in particular, we have been made in the image of God.

We were meant to image his holiness and his character. That's what it means that we're made in the image of God. In fact, in our church, we just recently did a Q &A closing out our study of Second Corinthians.

And one of the questions that was asked of our Q &A is, are women made in God's image? And the answer to that is yes, because women are also intended to image the holiness of God. We've been meant to, with our lives, reflect God's holy and righteous character.

Can the animals do that? No, animals cannot do that. It's only mankind that has been meant to do that. That is something that separates us from God. Whenever we talk about being made in the image and likeness of God, oftentimes it's conveyed that God looks like us.

But that's not what that means. For Jesus says in John 4 that God is spirit. So spirit is not a man of flesh and bones, flesh and blood, contrary to what the Mormons would say about that. That God is an exalted man is the way that the Mormons teach that.

Or even the Jehovah's Witnesses who will say that Jesus is the Archangel Michael. God does not have physical form. And so when we're talking about being made in the image of God, it means that it doesn't mean that God looks like us.

It means that we are meant to, with our whole lives, reflect God's holy and perfect righteous character. And anything that we do that is contrary to the holiness of the righteousness of God is blasphemy.

It is taking that which was made in God's image and desecrating it with sin and filth and unrighteousness. This is why Romans 3 says that all have become worthless because though God made us to reflect His holiness, the sinfulness of man which started at Adam and is inherent in all mankind that is descended from Adam, we have become worthless because we exalted ourselves instead of exalting God.

And with every word that we said and every action that we did, we communicated that our ways are higher than God's ways. And what we deserve for that is to be destroyed. The absurdity of blasphemy when you understand the holy righteous character of God and just how absurd sin is that we would claim to know more or better than He who created all things, including time and space itself, then you realize how serious sin is.

When you see the holiness of God and you come to understand it, and we really only know of God's holy character and the extent and the degree of God's holy character through His word and our growing in knowledge and understanding of that word, then we grow more and more into a knowledge and understanding of His character.

When you see the holiness of God, you begin to see more and more clearly just how sin sick we really are and what blasphemy really means. Now, the more direct form of blasphemy or taking the Lord's name in vain, of course, is going to be the way that God's name itself is misused.

Whenever we say O-M-G, even using those letters, not just saying, Oh my God, but saying O-M-G. You know, that doesn't mean that somehow, well, now I see I'm not taking the Lord's name in vain because the G for me actually means gosh.

It doesn't mean God. Well, see, the thing about that is people started using gosh or G's or something like that. Or G-A-W-D. God. Or Lord. Oh my Lord. L-A-W-D. Yeah, L-A-W-D. People were substituting in those things to make it, you know, I'm not really taking the Lord's name in vain.

That's not really what I'm doing here. Or Mickey Mouse saying, or Goofy. They both say. Yeah, Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Yeah, all the Disney characters. Disney is blasphemy. I'm a Southern Baptist, so, you know, we gotta.

Okay. Disney's the devil. Disney's the antichrist. Stop. What was I talking about? Taking the Lord's name in vain. The different ways that people do it. Yeah, the different ways that people take the Lord's name in vain.

There was another illustration I was going to use there. It's like you get sneaky about it. Yeah, right. Because you're toeing the line. Yeah, exactly. You're tiptoeing the line. I'm just, I'm going to get this close.

I'm not really going to go across it. Right. So, your focus and your emphasis is not really glorifying God. It's just how can I curse, but not actually take God's name in vain. Well, understand that Philippians 2 .14 says, To do all things without grumbling or disputing, so that you may be blameless and pure children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation in which we shine like stars in the world.

So, you are not even supposed to be grumbling or complaining about your circumstances. Yeah, I know. I know. So, this traffic has been making me grumble and complain. And my wife will convict me, and she's very loving about it.

She will tell me. She'll even read me like, you read me a quote from Kevin DeYoung or something like that. Yep. On the way to G3. It was on our way down to G3. I think he had just posted something about rejoicing in our circumstances.

Yep. Wasn't it something to that effect? In everything. Which I wasn't doing. And I was even stewing in that. I'm like, I know you're right. It was grumpy. But I'm still upset. So, yes. He's like, let me have this.

I know. I know. He's like, stop. That's my flesh taken over. He can't have it. Second Corinthians 10 .5. Take every thought captive and make it obey Christ. First Corinthians. First Corinthians 10. No, it's Second Corinthians.

I had it right.

Second Corinthians 10 .5. You want me to look it up? No, I got it. I think that's correct. You can find a complete list of videos, books, devotionals, and other resources online at www .utt .com. Thanks for listening!