You're a Bad Christian If... | Theocast

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Hi, this is Jimmy. You're probably intrigued by the title of our podcast today,

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You're a Bad Christian If. Today, we the guys, we discuss a lot of different things that are floating around in the

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Twitter sphere in our culture today. So many things are being said about COVID -19 and racism and the current cultural moment that we are looking at.

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And it can feel so much like if we don't adhere to somebody's certain viewpoint that we are bad

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Christians. And so that's what we discuss in the main portion of our podcast. We even dig back into the cultural moment of a couple years ago, the

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Me Too movement in our members podcast. And so this was a pretty lively conversation that the three of us had.

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We hope that it's beneficial to you. We know that it's going to actually stir up some conversation.

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So please tune in. Thanks for listening. A simple way for you to help support Theocast and join their information is by shopping at Amazon.

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01:32

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the

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Christian life from a reformed perspective. Your hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota.

01:56

Gentlemen, it is so good to see your lovely faces again. JP, I believe you have our pro con for today, so why don't you take it away?

02:05

Happy to take it away, Jimmy. Good to see you too, my man. It is the season of vacation, at least for many people, as we are now in the summer months.

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My pro con has everything to do with that today. My pro is vacations.

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I'm all for them. I think it's good to have diversion from the task, to get away, to be able to unplug as much as that is possible, to spend time with family, with friends, with loved ones.

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All good. I know that the three of us try to take vacations as we are able, some of those with our families, some of those even just getaways with our wives, and those things are great.

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So the con is related to vacations as well, and I am con the week or two leading into vacation and the week or two coming off of vacation, because it feels like no matter how hard I try, at least

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I'll speak personally, no matter how hard I try to get out in front of things and get upstream and be ready to leave town and not have the last week be chaotic and anxiety producing, it just is.

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It's terrible. And I feel like it's a scramble to just be able to leave town. And then when you get back, it's inevitable that you're just buried by an avalanche of things to do.

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And I know for a person like me, who can be very task driven and prone to anxiety anyway, it's like, man,

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I don't know if this is even worth it, trying to get away for a week or two. I mean, I say that, and at the same time,

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I'm excited to be able to try to get away. So there that is. Well, I mean, and just the way that we're all socially connected now, it is truly difficult to actually unplug and get away.

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Very hard. We always like to say nobody needs a vacation more than the man who just had one.

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Which is true. My recommendation is take a two week vacation in the last three days. Yeah, that's right.

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The last three days, don't be on your vacation. Be at home to unwind, to get ready to get off vacation.

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To settle back in. That does help. Well, and certainly over the summer, when things are a little bit more open and loose, it's fine.

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But I do know, man, being a school teacher and you take a trip and you're coming back on a Saturday, church on Sunday, school on Monday, it is rough.

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But, I mean, we can all say. You've got to sing the Conway West, man. Closed on Sunday. Oh, my goodness.

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You're so culturally relevant, John. Hey, I'm just going to say this.

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I'm not taking a vacation this summer, and I'm shocked that you guys are. I mean, it's very inconsiderate.

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John, get off that high horse. It's too tall for you. You're going to hurt yourself. This podcast could be titled,

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John is a good Christian. Everybody else is not. Actually, the title of the podcast today is,

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You're a Bad Christian If. You're a Bad Christian If. That's right. So, tell me more.

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Tell me more, John. Yeah, well, there's a movement and it's not new because of particular issues that are going on today, but I think they're heightened and there's a concentration of possibilities that traps, there are traps that Christians can step in and it seems like I have stepped in every single one of them and I am a bad

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Christian today because I have stepped in all of these traps that are set by me, set by the culture for me.

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And what's really going on here in the conversation we're going to have is a comparative righteousness. I believe this is how something should be done and you're a bad

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Christian if you don't hold this perspective that I'm having. And not only am I going to tell you that you're a bad

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Christian if you don't hold my perspective, but there's also works of righteousness that you must perform in order to make yourself acceptable or dig yourself out of the hole that you find yourself in.

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And I find myself, if I have to live up to the standard that's being presented to me in the news and that's being presented to me by other

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Christians, that I will never be considered a good or right Christian.

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I will be a bad Christian because I can never live up to everyone's expectation.

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And it's on both sides and it doesn't, here's what's sad is that we can't seem to agree on what is the right answer.

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And this is not one particular topic in our culture. It feels like there's a list when it comes to COVID -19, abortion, political parties, racism, every single time

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I turn around, I'm failing somebody to live up to whatever standard

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I need to live up to. And if you don't have the foundation of the gospel that's propping you up, you can live in massive depression thinking,

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I am such a horrible Christian because I cannot live up to these standards. And that's what we're going to talk about today is the gospel and you're a bad

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Christian if, as it relates to the current cultural wars and cultural topics that we're dealing with today.

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So, gentlemen, what is your thoughts on this? You're a bad

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Christian if. Yeah, I mean, I think, John, one of the things that I've noticed, I've worked in various churches, went to Christian college, attended a large, a large evangelical,

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Calvangelical church in college. One of the things that I've noticed is that there's a consistent theme within Christianity in that very few times do we actually argue about the substance of the gospel, what it is and what it is not.

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More so, what we seem to spend so much time focusing on is the implications of the gospel.

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No doubt. And in fact, the implications of the gospel then in turn become the gospel itself.

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And so, here's an example of that in light of where we've been the past few months is the way that your church or the way that your pastor handles the pandemic, the

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COVID -19 pandemic, it sheds light on what they think about the gospel.

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So, if they require their church to wear masks, if they don't require their church to wear masks, if they serve communion digitally, if they don't serve communion digitally,

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I mean, it's all of these things that we kind of set the standard, it's all these if -then statements.

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So, if we believe this about Christ, then we will necessarily behave this way. And we give so much attention to the then.

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Then we will do this. We will act like this. We will say this. We will think like this. We'll read these books. We'll listen to these podcasts.

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We'll watch these documentaries. And the implications of the gospel become like the massive standard setter of the faithfulness of the

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Christian. You're basically talking about a new law. Exactly. Yeah, it's a new law.

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It's absolutely a new law. We say it all the time, but it bears repeating that the implications of the gospel are never the gospel.

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And your observations are entirely right, Jimmy, that we're not dividing over or debating one another with respect to the nature of the gospel itself.

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We're dividing over and we're debating one another with respect to our behavior, with respect to our stances on wisdom issues.

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And we're even debating one another and casting shade on one another based upon how vocal we are or are not, and how active we are in the public sphere in all these various areas.

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John, you've mentioned several of them. Abortion, racism, political parties,

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COVID -19, all of these things. And what we want to do is stand on the clear truth of Scripture.

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I mean, some of these things, like we said this in a podcast recently, that racism is from hell and it's wicked and it's sin, abortion.

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I mean, so murder is sin. I mean, the Bible is very clear about these things. But then when it comes to our role in the public square and when it comes to even public policy and things like that, well -meaning

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Christians who confess the same gospel can disagree on some of those things and could make different judgments when it comes to what's wise and what's prudent.

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And I think a distinction for me, we talk about this a lot in my own church context,

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I know you brothers agree, a distinction that's really important for us to remember when it comes to not only life in the public square, but when it comes to all of these various things, wisdom calls and how active, how vocal will we be, what should we be doing as believers, church members, individual

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Christians can and should be active in all kinds of things in the world, whether that's the political processes, whether that is being active in causes to end injustice, individual

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Christians can be involved in all of those things with people of goodwill, but then the church as an institution is a very different conversation.

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When it comes to the mission of the church broadly, we need to be careful in terms of how we define it. And I'll go ahead and do this and I'm willing to take darts if people were to throw them my direction.

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The mission of the church, biblically defined, is the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments for the salvation of God's elect, and that's what we concern ourselves with doing as pastors and as the church as an institution.

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And so, yeah, encourage your people, encourage our people to be involved in anything that they see fit and like, hey man,

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I'm passionate about this. Great, go for it. We'll fan that flame, but you're doing that as a citizen and as a member of the society, and that's a good thing for you to do, but the church as an institution is a different thing.

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If I were to rephrase kind of what we title it, you're a bad Christian if, to what Justin is saying, it is this,

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God accepts me if, God accepts me if, and then you fill in the blank.

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If the answer to that, you know, if I were to say, Jimmy, and I want you to answer this correctly, God accepts you, why does

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God accept you, if what? Well, only because of Jesus Christ.

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That's right. There's only one answer, always, always one answer to that, but what we're being told today,

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God accepts me if I hold this perspective and I promote this view of abortion, if I oppose it in this way,

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God accepts me if I hold this perspective of racism, if I hold this perspective of COVID -19, and you are being told that God accepts me if I'm Democratic or Libertarian or whatever.

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So, your acceptance before God, and really what we're dealing with is assurance, your assurance before God is now tagged to a cultural issue that you must have on this position.

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Let me go, I'm going to just take us here real quick, guys, just so I want to make a connection as we continue down this conversation.

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Paul is writing to the church in Colossians chapter two, and in the beginning of the chapter, he says to them that he wants to write to reach all the riches of the fullness of understanding of the knowledge and the mystery of Jesus Christ, so everything he's about to write following is so that their assurance would be full of the richest understanding of God's knowledge, and the next thing that he says, he says, therefore,

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I'm sorry, let me back up, oh, sorry, yeah, he says verse eight, see to it that no one takes you captive, when he means by here this captive, you can translate it, be stolen away or have someone rob you, no one take you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition or according to the elemental spirits of the world, and he says, and not according to Christ.

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What should not be stealing you away is anything other but Christ, and what we're dealing with here in this context is the church, individual

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Christians, true, but even now we're being told, there's a prominent Christian, I sent you guys the clip recently, that says if we aren't actively as a church going after abortion, and he says in the clip, and that doesn't mean preaching the gospel, it means more than preaching the gospel, so the church is failing, you as a

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Christian are failing if you aren't actively involved in suppressing abortion.

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That is, again, that is a God accepts me if statement other than in Christ alone.

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Yeah, well, I would maybe even in a nuanced way say that most guys or gals that are saying things like this wouldn't use the word accept, but perhaps they would use the word expect.

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God expects this from you. God expects that you go after abortion in this way, to which my question always is, well, it's easy for a preacher on a screen or a tweet to say

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God wants us to actively go after X, Y, Z, to then,

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I just want to scream in the comment section, well, how much? How do

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I know that I've reached the right amount? How do I know that I've gone after your issue enough?

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Do I need to go march in protest? Do I need to read a book? Do I need to listen to this podcast?

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Do I need to befriend this kind of person? Do I need to be active in my city council for closing down this clinic?

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Like, what's enough? How do I know that I've reached the enoughness of your issue?

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When we think of it, well, that's when guys immediately begin to kind of walk back and they say, well, you have to be willing, or you've got to have it in your heart, and it's like, well, which is it?

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Do I have to be willing or do I actually have to do something? I think that's the problem.

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I think, JP, you mentioned this word of neonomism, adding new laws to the

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Christian faith, is that these laws are never enough, or we can never define them succinctly enough.

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Again, it's the idea of making the implications of the gospel the gospel itself, that most of these guys that I know who are saying things like this would never tie these things to your justification, but really, what often happens is we open the back door into justification by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, and then we let in all sorts of nonsense of these if -then conditional statements.

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I would say, to even narrow down what you're saying,

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Jimmy, is that we're dealing with the doctrine of sin here. Guys, where does racism, abortion, where does all this come from?

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Is it a circumstantial issue where if we fix the circumstance, we fix the problem, or is it a heart issue to where these come from the evilness of our heart?

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So, if we were able to shut down every abortion clinic that was out there, and if we were to stop all cultural racism across the planet, where it doesn't exist anymore, would we have really fixed the problem?

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Because the problem is not in the action. What does Christ say the problem is? Yeah. It's from the hearts of man.

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It's in the heart of man. Here come all these evil things. So, if you tell me that preaching the gospel isn't the solution,

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I'm telling you, you're going to suppress one issue of the heart where another one will pop up.

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Sexual, I mean, sexual deviancy when it comes down to sex trafficking. I mean, the heart is so desperately wicked and evil that if you assume that you can deal with the suppression of sin and that it will solve the problem of the world, but you do it separate from the gospel and the advancement of the gospel, then you're going to be fighting a losing battle, a losing war.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our site called Faith vs.

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And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

19:52

I think, to Jimmy's observation a second ago, in spite of what everybody would say, like Jimmy, you said it, if you really press people when they're heaping all of these requirements on folks, they would be very clear, well, no,

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I'm not saying that you need to be doing these things in order to be justified in the eyes of God.

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I think it's right for us to press back and say, yeah, but everything that you're saying and your posture and your tone in saying it makes it very clear that all of this is a justification project.

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We are putting standards out there that must be met, and if you don't meet them, then there is penance that is required in order for us to then be in right standing in the eyes of one another, and by implication, for us to even be in good favor with the

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Lord. And that's the heart of the problem here, is that these standards are being heaped upon people, as is always the case when we heap standards upon people that the

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Scripture doesn't, nobody can ever define it and answer you how much is enough. I mean, Jimmy, you articulated that really well, and then we have to backpedal and say, well, okay, maybe it's just a heart posture where you're willing to be active in this way, or you're willing to be vocal in this way, and all the rest.

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It is a self -justification project in an attempt to be enough in the eyes of one another, and we think even before God.

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I think the sadness in all of this is that what this ends up producing in the church, I mean, because we're speaking, this is a

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Christian podcast, we're speaking to people, we assume, who are at least interested in the things of God and are maybe even members of churches.

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What this produces in the church is this kind of hierarchical structure where there are some of us who are better than other people, and I think to your point,

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John, the answer and the remedy to all of this is just to continue to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified for wretched sinners such as us.

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The thing is that we all need to be reminded that basically we're all far worse off than we could ever imagine.

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It matters not what your stance is on a particular issue or how vocal or how active you are in ending this or ending that.

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We are all in desperate need of a righteousness that we don't have. We are all in desperate need of atonement that we can never accomplish, and what a wonderful message it is in the current cultural moment to look at people based upon the revelation of God and say, absolution and forgiveness and righteousness are yours by faith in Christ Jesus, apart from anything that you could ever do, because in our culture right now, atonement is being demanded everywhere over every issue, but forgiveness and absolution are nowhere to be found, and what we do every single

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Sunday is we get up there and we offer all of those freely in Christ Jesus, and that's at least as three pastors sitting around these microphones.

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I'm convinced that my people need to hear that on Sunday when they show up. They've been bombarded enough all week long with how they're failing everywhere and they're not doing enough.

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It's like they need Christ on the Lord's day, and I'll stop with that.

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But when we gather, we need Christ. Justin Perdue Yeah, I would just ask you, it's a big statement, and I want to make sure people didn't miss what you said there,

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Justin. When you're saying the culture is requiring atonement for everything, what do you mean by that?

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Give me an example of what you're talking about. Justin Perdue Sure. I mean, so there are all kinds of things that the culture is telling us that we need to repent of because we're wrong and we're guilty, and we need to make atonement, meaning we need to make it right.

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We need to make reparations for things, and we need to undo wrongs committed.

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Then the message is, if you do enough, if you make enough atonement, if you do enough penance, then you will find forgiveness and you will find absolution.

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You'll be absolved of your guilt. But then you do what you think you're supposed to do, or you say what you think you're supposed to say, and the goalpost keeps moving, and you can't ever do enough, so that there is no real forgiveness or absolution or righteousness to be found, and that,

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I think, is just a great illustration of our human predicament, and hence the gospel. Hence the gospel.

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You can't ever do it, and so therefore, you need righteousness and forgiveness and absolution that's provided for you by another.

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We even do this in our marriages to each other. You did this to me, and I'm going to hold this against you until you can fix it, basically.

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That's a straight -up law economy, right? Well, so something that I teach world religions at the school where I work, and the very first day of class, what

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I tell them is, everybody's extremely religious, everybody.

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I mean, this is Romans chapters 1, 2, and 3, that everybody at some point...

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It's Acts 17. That's right. Everybody becomes a law to themselves, and what you're saying,

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Justin, about the goalposts continuing to move, that what we do is we demand, like you said, we demand people's blood, right?

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David Zahl, when we were at the 1517 Conference, he had a wonderful quote in his talk where he basically said, the world is obsessed with religion, just not the confession, forgiveness, and absolution kind.

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That's right. We are. I mean, even in light of the pandemic and racism, and now we have the

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Supreme Court issuing different decrees about abortion and things like that. I mean, we are taking this posture.

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We are taking this posture of, if we don't believe this, or if we don't do this, then we must not believe.

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When we are just heaping law on people, and we are heaping these conditional statements on people, that so much so that it's like American Christianity is hell -bent on destroying people's assurance in Christ.

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Well, let me ask you guys this question, and this is a dangerous question, but which sin will, which one will damn you more, the sin of self -righteousness or the sin of racism, and the answer to that is?

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Yes. Yes. Right. Yes. Right. It is just as wrong to be self -righteous in the eyes of God as it is to be racist.

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And I will tell you this, if you are a Christian, if you believe in Jesus Christ, and you trust in Him alone as your righteousness, you are a bad

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Christian. There are no such thing as good Christians. God says, well done at the end.

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This is Hebrews 11 too. He says that He commends the Old Testament saints at the end of their life.

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He commends them not for their faithfulness. He says He commends them for their faith. And that list of Old Testament, they were a debaucherous lot.

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But, and the point of it is, is that when we start comparing, what we love, we as believers do two things.

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We love to compare our sin, making sure that my sin isn't as bad. My pile isn't as bad as your pile.

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And we love to compare our righteousness, making sure that my righteousness is more than your righteousness.

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And that's all horizontal. What the gospel demands of you and forces you to do is to look vertical because the law points you to Christ.

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And as you look at that, you should be crushed. No one, not anyone, you should consider yourself always to be a bad

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Christian because what it'll do is it'll never allow you the justification of comparing yourself and being critical of another

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Christian. It won't allow you to do it. And that doesn't mean we don't judge each other because obviously we have to be, for the sake of love and concern, there's church discipline.

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So I'm not up here saying, judge not lest you be judged. That's not what I'm saying. But when it comes down to comparative righteousness or when it comes down to what

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I'm going to project you must do and say in order to be accepted by God, if it is not in scripture, and as Paul says, if they are pointing you to the traditions or philosophy of men, you are not to allow that to captivate you.

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Yeah. It's interesting to note as of late where we stand in 2020 because of social media, because of the ways that we are all interconnected,

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I mean, there can't be an article released without everybody having their own say about it and what we should really think about it.

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We are just kind of slaves to the urgent and we are kind of slaves to the most recent trend and fad, and if your church and if you're preaching and if your

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Christianity is constantly tied to the most recent headline, you are going to be exhausted by the end of the week.

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So true. Because there's always going to be something else. There is always going to be the next fad, the next thing that we should collectively hate, and the next thing that we should collectively fight against.

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Eventually, the list is so long that we frustrate people out of the church.

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We exhaust them out of the church because they're never doing enough. Now, people are going to hear me and all sorts of alarm bells are going to go off in their brain because they're going to say, well,

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Jimmy, does that mean that we never talk about issues? That's not at all what it means, but we have to keep the primacy of the gospel, the primacy of what

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Justin talked about, the mission of the church, that we are here on Sunday mornings, on the

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Lord's day, we are gathered to herald Christ, to weary sinners and sufferers, right?

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And to take the long view of the Christian life, that as different things come about in our culture,

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I think we do so in a tone of gentleness and quietness, that we focus on our people, right?

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We focus on the things that are happening in our context, in our church, that we don't always have to have a say into what's happening in the broader culture, but rather we focus on what are the different sins and struggles and idols that are occurring in our church that we need to address, rather than let's constantly become a place where we are saying, if we're going to be faithful Christians, then we must act like this.

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I think there has to be a place where we are a forgiveness outpost.

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That is our job as a church. When people come here, what do I want them to walk away with? Well, I want them to walk away with the truth that they're forgiven in Christ's name.

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That's what I want them to have. Justin Perdue Yeah, I don't want to be misunderstood either in the way that I define the mission of the church, just picking up where you are there,

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Jimmy. We do talk about how we are to live and how we're to interact and how we're to even live broadly in society, and we talk about that underneath the banner of loving our neighbor.

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I mean, we come and we gather. We behold Jesus Christ. We receive him in the word.

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We receive him in the table. We sing of him, and we pray to the Father in his name, and we have our faith confirmed and sustained and all those things, and then we scatter to love one another because Christ gave himself up for us, and we scatter to love our neighbor as ourselves, and so we absolutely are concerned with the good of our fellow man, so don't hear us say that we're not concerned for that stuff.

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But Jimmy, you are exactly right about it. You kind of mentioned the tendency in evangelicalism for there to always be the next big thing that we need to be concerning ourselves with.

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We talk about pietism, this hyper -focus on the interior of my life and how

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I need to be performing and stuff and the stuff I need to be doing. We talk about that at an individual level a lot. Well, I think that there is this kind of corporate reality of a pietistic culture where there's always more to be done, and there's always the next big thing that we need to be focusing on, and it's that proverbial hamster wheel that the church broadly is always on.

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The church broadly is always chasing after not just relevancy, but it's chasing after its own self -justification righteousness project to demonstrate that we're right, and we get it, and we're doing enough, and we're active enough in transforming the culture.

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I think an important thing for us to say in this regular portion of the podcast is as Reformed guys, we hold what's historically been called a two -kingdom view of the world and the universe where there is the redemptive kingdom, our citizenship is in heaven, this redemptive kingdom that God is building through Christ, and then there is the common kingdom in which every human being lives and dwells, and we're active, and we do all kinds of things within it, and it's great for us as citizens and members of the common kingdom to work for the good of our neighbor here, and at the same time, we understand that the work of redemption and the work of, dare

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I say it, transformation is not ours to do. We are not, as David Van Drunen says in his wonderful book,

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Living in God's Two Kingdoms, it is not as though we are all little atoms running around transforming the world and transforming the creation, returning it to its

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Edenic state, that is not what we are called to do, and we're not capable of doing it, and there's great liberation in understanding that we are called to trust

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Christ and then love our neighbor as best as we are able by God's grace, and then we will trust

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God with the work of redemption and the work of restoration and the work of transforming the culture and the world into what is coming, the new heaven and the new earth.

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Everybody's transformation project is good until sinners get involved.

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Well, if you'll notice that in the New Testament, multiple writers call the Christian to live peaceably with those around them, you never hear there to be a call to transform government, transform culture, to abolish culture, to stamp out houses and alcohol and all this stuff that we've tried to do in the past.

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It says to care for those within the church who are hurting, and then we are to demonstrate love to those who are around us, but just to go back, what's happening here is at Theocast, we gather my thoughts here,

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I have like 10 things I want to say, and we're running out of time, and I want to say them all. Save them for the members podcast.

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So we always mention the Christian life should be status forward, and what's happening in this particular circumstance, what you can feel is we are working for acceptance instead of working from acceptance, meaning that I am accepted by Christ through faith alone, therefore

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I work. What I'm being told is I must do this work so that I can be accepted.

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And what happens is that the work is changing all of the time. It depends on who's got the loudest voice at the moment.

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I just want to read to you that the latter part of Colossians here, because I think it summarizes what Justin and Jimmy were just saying.

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It says here, verse 18, let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in details about visions puffed up without reason about his sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows with the growth that is from God.

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So he is saying what you're holding on to, what has your attention is

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Christ. The head of the church is Christ. And as you hold on to this, this is what causes the body to grow through the power of God.

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Paul is not saying all of these other issues in life aren't of any value or if we shouldn't be involved with them.

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This goes back to the two kingdoms. But the primary purpose of the Christian life is to hold desperately on to Christ.

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And the body of believers are to be pushing each other to do that. And as we do that, we do see our lives being transformed into the image of Christ.

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So that is when you go to church or the person who's involved in church, or I would even say a

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Christian, their primary purpose in life is to hold fast onto Jesus Christ.

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That's like to say, just as an illustration, if you show up to a grocery store and they have all these advertisements in the grocery store to come over here and sit and watch the game or come over here and get a massage or come over here and shop for a new pair of shoes, it's like, what do you go to a grocery store for?

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It's called a grocery store because it's for groceries. And yet we have the church, it's supposed to be about Christ, and yet you hear all of this advertisement coming to you saying that you need to be involved in everything else except for Christ, which is opposite of scripture.

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When I prepare my sermons week in and week out, one of the things at the forefront of my brain is that my people for the past six days,

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Monday through Saturday, have spent six days having shackles put on their feet and wrists in terms of the law and their sin weighing down on them, so it is my job in a primary fashion when

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I open up the scriptures and herald Christ to them to remind them and point them to the grace and mercy that we see in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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That what God has demanded of us in his law, right? If the standard of good is perfection, then we are toast.

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What God has demanded of us in his law, he provides freely by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone in the gospel, and a lot of people want to get in our face about that.

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Well, if you only preach the gospel, if you only preach Christ, your people are going to become kind of lulled to sleep.

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They're never going to understand the imperatives of the Christian life. Well, absolutely not. That's nonsense. That is complete and utter nonsense because as we march through the scriptures, do we reach imperatives?

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Yes. Do we preach those imperatives? Yes, but we do so under the cloud and the tent of God's grace being magnified in the gospel.

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My job is to free people every week because what do freed people do best? They love and they serve.

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Freed people love and they serve, and bondage people, what do they do best?

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They hide and they don't love people because they're concerned about their justification.

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They're concerned about their sanctification. They're always looking at their navel. They're always wondering, am

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I good enough? Am I doing it well enough? Am I executing the Christian life right enough? Well, no, you're not.

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That's why on Sundays we proclaim, you're forgiven on account of Christ. So if I can free my people, they will serve and love.

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I know it. I trust it because it's what God has promised. People who are chasing after their justification, their status all the time, are almost always only concerned with themselves.

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It's like, I am concerned with me. I've got to do enough. I've got to demonstrate that I'm doing enough.

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Their gaze is firmly fixed upon themselves, not upon Christ and their neighbor.

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You're exactly right. We are set free by Christ unto love and good works.

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That's the message that we're all heralding, lest anybody ever get confused. One thing that works me up though is in all of the churches across our land.

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We're in the United States of America and I've seen stuff on social media in recent days even, and certainly in recent weeks, where these are like clips of church services and gatherings of believers and all kinds of things are being talked about and celebrated and heralded, and you don't need

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Jesus Christ for a single one of them. That's right. It's like, how in the world have we gotten here where we're gathering as saints on the

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Lord's day even, and we're talking about things that we do not absolutely need

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Jesus for? I would much rather concern myself as a pastor and as a

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Christian with the saints that gather at Covenant Baptist Church. Let's concern ourselves with the things that uniquely we must have

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Christ for. This is his church that's called by his name, and so let's make this about him.

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Then as you said, Jimmy, underneath the banner of Christ in the gospel, we talk a lot about loving neighbor and how we can be good for not just our brothers and sisters in the church, but just good for our fellow man in general.

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That's the way that God works, and people will often uphold examples of Christians who have done great things in the world and in society, and I want to applaud those and uphold those as well.

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We have members of our church who are involved in politics and the judicial system and all kinds of things, who are involved in medicine.

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All of these are common grace, common kingdom pursuits that are worthwhile, and yet when we gather on the

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Lord's day, we gather for Christ because, as you said, Jimmy, we've been bombarded by our sin and by the law all week and even by the fallenness of the world, and we need a haven where we, with all the other sin -sick wretches, can lay at the foot of the cross and confess our sin and repent and trust

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Christ anew. Amen. Just to add to that, Justin, again, this comes back to a big word, your homartiology, your understanding of the doctrine of sin.

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That's right. Look out. Right. Well, if you understand that there is no fixing the human heart on this planet, your hope, what we're being told is to put our hope in a utopia.

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If we can fix all of these issues, racism, COVID -19, abortion, political divides, then the world will be better.

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So, the pressure is on you to perform and fix this. How many thousands of years of history have we observed and no one has got it right yet, and you would assume some culture would have figured it out by now.

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I mean, come on, we're smart people, but the problem is that the problem is not in our actions.

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The problem lies within our heart, and so what we are saying is that Christians offer something that is otherworldly, that is outside of the world and outside of their circumstances and outside of their capacities, their hope is in Christ.

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So, this is going to lead us into our conversation in our members podcast, where this conversation

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I think needs to start happening. I've had so many conversations about race and so many conversations about COVID -19.

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And the same question I ask every single time is that we love to point out the problem. Here's the problem, and it's your fault.

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And I always ask, then what's the solution? How do you fix it? We love pointing out the problems and the solutions vary, but I think there's a clear solution.

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We're going to dive into this a little bit more and be a little bit more pointed probably and open. I have felt you guys holding back a little bit, and we had a conversation as always before our conversation.

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And Jimmy, what's - Well, I mean, I'm just going to bring us in. I mean, I don't want you to give it all away,

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John, but anyway. Well, thank you for listening to this portion of the podcast.

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We're so grateful for your love and support, and we are going to head over into our members podcast now.

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And if you want more information about that, you can head to theocast .org. Becoming a member entitles you to all sorts of awesome things.

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You get different resources. You can access past podcasts, plus you just get to hang out with us just a little bit more.

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And trust me, that is fun. And so we're going to head over into our members podcast. Thank you for listening.

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We hope that this conversation was helpful and beneficial to you. And so thank you for listening.