F4F | Michael Browns Missing Holiness Ingredient

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Rosebro. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. Now, I've invited

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Stephen Kozar back onto the program, onto the channel, and the reason I've done that is because Kozar and I, we actually play off of each other really well, and he pitched an idea to me.

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It turns out that Michael Brown recently preached at Todd White's church?

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I mean, what? Anyway, he talked, he spoke there, gave a sermon, and gave his big stamp of approval, and this is, on the discernment scale of difficulty, this is going to be a good nine, almost ten, as far as, like, understanding how to unpack this.

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We're gonna be listening to a portion, a pretty big swath of Brown's sermon, and I'll kind of set it up this way.

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Have you ever, you know, attended a church where they're always telling you, you know, you got to strive after holiness, you got to lean into it, you got to be intentional, holiness is not an option, and you just look at yourself and you go,

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I know, but man, I'm not measuring up, and you just feel frustrated and burned out in a church like that.

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We're gonna talk about why that is, so let me whirl this up, and Kozar, I gotta unmute you.

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I think I've unmuted you, but you got to turn your microphone on, there we go. Let's see here, there you go, yeah, there we go.

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Glad that you... Welcome back, by the way, Steve. Is that your current painting that you're working on behind you?

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Yeah, I'm almost done. That just looks amazing. Now, it looks like a photograph, because he's ultra -realistic.

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You know, that looks like a Bill Eggleston photograph. Are you familiar with William Eggleston, the photographer?

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I don't think so. All right, that looks like a William Eggleston composition, it really does.

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That's neat. That's a different thing altogether. So, a hilarious little note, sometimes

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I get people saying that my photographs look like a Kozar painting. Well, you know, there's a few that you've posted in the last couple of months that I looked at, and I thought, man, that looks like something

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I'd love to paint. So, I think it's, you know, there's certain universal aspects of the world that it's just a reflection of God's wonder and beauty and majesty.

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You're seeing it, and I see it, and a lot of people see it. I think that's one of the things

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I like about being an artist, is we get a chance, either as an artist or a photographer, you get a chance to take what

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God has given us and show it to people through your art. Yeah, you know, funny enough, there have been a number of requests over the past few months.

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People want me to, like, do instruction online how I do my photography.

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And we're thinking about starting a second YouTube channel, and the name of the channel I've come up with for it, it's called

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The Defiance of Beauty. Because a lot of people don't understand why

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I'm doing this. I've been doing photography since I was in junior high, it's just been a hobby

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I've been plinking away at for decades. But I've done it for myself. But one of the things

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I found is that beauty is objective. There's an objectivity to beauty, that for me, when everything is ugly, suffering, a difficulty in my own life, or my country's going to hell in a hand basket, things like that,

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I find that going out with my camera and hunting for the beauty that's there, that God has put there.

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And then capturing that, and then meaningfully working on my composition to kind of exemplify that in my photography, that there is a sense where when

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I post something that captures that beauty, it stands in defiance to the ugliness and sin of the world.

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And so funny enough, going and finding something beautiful to photograph and putting it on social media

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I see as an act of defiance. Interesting, yeah, I like that. I think that as Christians, especially guys like us who are discernment ministers or whatever you want to call us, it is possible to become so focused on exposing the darkness that you just get out of out of whack.

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Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, if you haven't figured it out, I'll kind of share this with the audience.

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What this program is really about, it's about the gospel. And the gospel is defined as Christ died for our sins.

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Scripture defines the gospel. So I'm always trying to find ways to which when somebody is teaching false doctrine, how can

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I open up the word and then tie it back to what Christ has done for us? Because Paul says,

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I chose to know nothing among you except for Christ and Him crucified. So funny, we didn't plan on starting the program off this way, but keep an eye out.

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Probably sometime before the end of September, there'll be a new YouTube channel called The Defiance of Beauty, and it'll be for the purpose of kind of giving some nuts and bolts as it relates to photography.

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Because I've never taught a photography class, I'm a pastor, but I understand the basics of how to set up a good composition, how to look for color and things like that.

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And not only that, I've been working in Photoshop for decades now. So Photoshop and Lightroom are my thing.

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Hey, we should do some together, actually. That would be really cool. I completely agree. I think it'd be fun.

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As long as you're giving a plug for your non -existent but soon -to -exist YouTube channel. I already have a painting YouTube channel, which some of the viewers might know about, but I teach some of my techniques.

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In fact, this I've filmed the whole process for the first time ever, and I haven't put it all up yet because I have 400 and no, it's actually more now.

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It's about 500 gigabytes of video footage. Wow. Yeah.

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And the idea that I'm going to turn that into a cohesive video frightens me to death. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to have to try to strip it down because it's just too much stuff.

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Right. But I do love teaching that stuff. And I appreciate your ability to use

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Photoshop because I use it just a little bit to do a few things and it's not easy. So that'd be fun.

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And I love talking about composition. In fact, one of my hobbies, I would say, is music theory.

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Okay. That's another form of composing. And when I'm not doing discernment stuff or Bible study stuff or church -related stuff,

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I'm watching videos and I'm learning about composition and about music theory because there are, like for instance, in music theory, there are threes all the time.

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Just like in color, there's the three primaries, there's the three secondaries, there's the triangle. The use of three in composition, both in music and in visual art, is really fascinating.

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And I think it represents the trinity. It's just one of those hidden things. Yeah. Right. This is why

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I said beauty is objective. Yeah. And so the channel itself, because there's a whole lot of photography channels out there that if you're looking for inspiration and things like that, there's probably a dozen photography channels that I watch on a regular basis, and I find them all to be helpful.

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But my goal is to basically take somebody who they want to figure out how photography works, and they're basically starting off in the beginner.

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And one of the things that people have to get past is that when it comes to photography, there's two things that you can do with photography.

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You can either use the document, or you can use it to create artwork. And if you're going to be using your camera to document things, you don't want to be doing hard edits or changing things and color grading and stuff like that.

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But if you're using photography for the purpose of creating artwork, which is totally legitimate, that there's a lot more freedom than you would think that you have, as long as you're not presenting your compositions as, this is what

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I documented the other day. And so the idea is that we can take somebody who is really interested in what are the basics.

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And what I found is there's very few channels that actually explain how to use Lightroom and Photoshop without making you pay for it.

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So I can walk people through the different ways in which you can color grade and work out a composition and what are some of the rules.

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So anyway, that's a totally different thing. But it was your composition.

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And by the way, if you have never looked up Bill, William Eggleston is his name. He's from Memphis and also in Georgia.

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He's a photographer. And he shoots probably one of some of the most ordinary things you could possibly think of.

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But your composition that you have right there, I'm just looking at how you're doing light and color on that. It looks a lot like an

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Eggleston. Yeah, I like doing things that are just obviously beautiful, big panoramic skies and landscapes and farmland.

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And then I also like going to the other extreme and taking more of a gritty real life scene and trying to find the beauty that's there and kind of pull the beauty out of it by just making it into a painting.

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Yeah. I love street photography, but people don't like my street photography as much as they like my landscape.

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So it's kind of funny. Yeah. But anyway. All right. That's not what we're going to hear to talk about it. I enjoy talking a little shop with you.

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Let's plan on some collaborative work between the Defiance of Beauty and your channel, where we can talk about composition and help people to find an artistic expression of their own with the idea that bringing beauty into the world is a good thing.

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I mean, God has created this beauty. All right, so talking about the opposite of beauty. All right.

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So we got a tough sermon to review. And the reason why this is tough, in fact, because of you

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I've had to listen to this thing a few times. And so I blame you for whatever therapy bill that I'm going to end up having to pay for in the near future.

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But all of that being said, we're going to be listening to Dr. Michael Brown.

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And here's the thing. This is not a matter of him teaching wackerdoodle -ism, okay?

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This is not him barking like a dog and clucking like a chicken and calling down, fire, fire, fire, or even prophesying in that sense.

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This is a crack at him actually doing a sermon that, for the most part, is biblically accurate but is off just enough that it's super hard to detect.

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And you spent some time in the charismatic movement, and you've heard sermons like this. When I was in the

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Latter Rain as well as the Nazarene Church, I heard sermons like this. And the basic template is that holiness is not negotiable.

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God demands holiness. And so you've got to be intentional.

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You've got to exert your free will. You need to lean in. You need to be intentional. You've got to, you've got to, you've got to.

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And you hear this, and they're not exactly wrong in what they're saying regarding Scripture.

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But where the failure is is in the proper distinction of law and gospel. And what's interesting as I was listening to the sermon the second time is that Michael Brown, yeah, there we go, proper distinction of law and gospel.

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If you have not read this book, that's a good book to read. C .F .W. Walther's The Proper Distinction of Law and Gospel, well worth the read.

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But Michael Brown here doesn't make a proper distinction between law and gospel, and what was the irony is is that he kept reading biblical texts that talk about the fact that we are new creations in Christ, and not seeing that as like a core foundation to this whole thing, or he just twisted it enough.

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So we're going to listen to this thing, and you've got to put your discernment ears on. Finding the error, it's subtle.

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It's really interesting. And then when we get to a certain point, we'll kind of fast forward to the conclusion, because the one thing that's missing,

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I mean, the gospel in a meaningful way is missing. That's the thing. It's la -la -la, la -la -la, la -la -la -la.

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And a lot of references to hearing things in the Spirit and doing things in the Spirit without really grounding what it is the

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Holy Spirit properly does. So thanks, Steve, this is a tough one, and again,

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I blame you. All right, are you ready? I'm ready.

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All right, let's start this thing off, shall we? Here we go. I'm going to start in John 8 and go through a bunch of scriptures with a simple theme.

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Holiness is non -negotiable. Holiness is non -negotiable.

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Jesus meets us where we are with extraordinary mercy and compassion and grace.

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In the midst of sin and rebellion and hardness of heart and evil and wickedness,

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He meets us where we are. He lays down His life. He dies for the evil, wretched things that we did, but He does not die to empower us to sin.

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He dies to empower us to live holy lives. Okay.

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I have notes on this, and right there I wrote, that's a false dichotomy. Right. I remember years ago

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I reviewed a sermon where somebody said, Jesus did not die for sound doctrine. And I'm thinking, is that sound doctrine to say that?

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It's kind of weird. Okay, now, one of the things that Walther points out, and I think correctly so, when you look at Scripture, what ends up happening is the preaching of the law always precedes the preaching of the gospel.

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The preaching of the law has to, because without the law, you don't really understand what the problem is that the gospel addresses, that the gospel solves.

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So you're going to note, he references the gospel here, but he hasn't preached the gospel, and he preaches the gospel ahead of the law, and so the order is reversed.

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Jesus died for sin and hardness of heart and stuff like that, but he didn't die so that we could live in sin, in talking about empowering and things like that.

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Let me back it up just a little bit, because I think this is an important bit, because the gospel technically makes an appearance here, but only by way of saying, well, that's not what the gospel is, without really meaningfully preaching the gospel.

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So let me back this up. I'll go right there. Here we go. For us to sin, he dies to empower us to live holy lives.

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He dies to empower us to live holy lives. Yeah. What do you think of that sentence?

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That's almost Roman Catholicism in its understanding. It's also something that you can find a lot of Scripture verses that teach that in a way.

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So, and he pulls out those verses, and he kind of grabs them—what do you call that when you pull something out of context?

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You had a funny way of phrasing that. Well, I don't know. I have a lot of Roseboros, and I'm not sure which one that was referring to.

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But I think the important thing to understand is that he's created this false dichotomy, or a choice between two extremes, when in fact there are other options that he doesn't mention.

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And I think that the clear option—and I'm just going to say this right up front—yes, we are saved totally based on the grace of God.

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It's nothing that we do. All of us agree to that. In fact, at 35 minutes in, he does a pretty good explanation of being declared righteous.

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Yeah. And I appreciate that he does that. I really do. Dr. Brown teaches Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and when he does teach it, he teaches it with good clarity, unlike a lot of people.

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But then he says, right after saying that, he'll say something along the lines of, you've got to prove that you're saved by your behavior.

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You've got to show that you really mean it. And our hearts are inclined to want to keep the law in order to show

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God that we've earned his obedience, or that our obedience has earned his favor. Since we're inclined to always veer in that direction, we have to be cautious of veering in that direction.

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Do we do good works in order to prove that we're saved? There's a sense in which you can say that.

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But one of the things I like to point out is that Scripture teaches something quite vital when it comes to our good works, and the way

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I like to describe it is this. This is going to sound like a trick question, but you know, work with me for a second,

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Kozar. What's the reason why cows moo? Because they're cows, and that's how they make sound.

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Right, okay. Well, what's the reason why cats meow? Because they're a cat, and the sound that cats make is a meowing sound.

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Right. What's the reason why Christians do good works? Because that's just what Christians do. That's what

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Christians do. And so, in fact, when you understand that point, then you understand why

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James is making the point that he's making, because James was dealing with these antinomian yahoos, who basically somehow claim that they don't need to do any good works.

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And so James has this statement that he makes, it says, just as the body that is not breathing is dead, dead, so faith without works is dead.

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Faith saves you. Your works don't save you.

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Your works are kind of the evidence, if you would, that faith is alive, for sure. But here's the issue.

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Not to God, okay? Not to God, and really, it's for your neighbor.

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And so my good works are for the sake of my neighbor. Christ says, let your light shine before men so they may see your good works and glorify your

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Father who is in heaven. So we recognize then that Ephesians 2, 8, 9, and 10, for by grace you have been saved through faith.

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It is not your own doing. It is the gift of God so that no one may boast. For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, and then the text goes on to say that we should walk in them.

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Walk. Peripateo, it's kind of a Hebraism that's snuck into the text there, from the

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Hebrew halakh, it means to, you know, how you conduct your life, right? So we are

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God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared in advance that we should do, that we should walk in them.

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That's the idea, and it's perfectly framed out for us in Ephesians 2. So the idea then is that the question regarding your sanctification, do you believe or not?

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That the old is gone, the new has come, that you have an old self that Scripture tells you to mortify.

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So you have to embrace these things by faith. When you pray the prayer that Christ taught us to pray, our

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Father who art in heaven, we're not praying my potential Father who may adopt me someday if I'm a good enough boy.

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Everything in Scripture hinges on salvation by grace through faith, and then faith bearing fruit in repentance and in good works and love towards neighbor.

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This is what you do. So the idea then is that you can say that your neighbor sees your good works and they glorify

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God, but the experience we have, by the way, daily, daily mortifying the sinful flesh, daily, daily, still dealing with all of this, and the existential experience of being a

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Christian feels like you're at war with yourself. This is what Paul describes in Romans 7. And that's the part of the equation that I think he leaves out too much.

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He leaves out the idea that, yes, there is a sanctification process taking place in our lives as Christians.

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But if you're constantly being pounded with that, it actually really does damage to our psyche because we're constantly looking inward and asking, are we holy enough?

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Are we good enough? And if you're honest, and if you really are being sanctified, you would say, no,

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I'm now more aware than ever of how unholy I am. I used to think that I was a pretty good guy, and now that I'm actually closer to God, I'm more aware of my sinful nature.

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And I think he leaves that out. And I think that false dichotomy is there's this group over here who thinks now that you're saved, you can just sin all day long because you're already forgiven, so it doesn't matter.

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That's antinomianism. And we don't teach that. Very few people teach that. I know it's a problem with some people, but it's not the problem.

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It's not the core problem. Making it sound like there's all these people over there, and then there's us holy people over here who take holiness serious.

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And the reality is, I think there's a huge segment of people, and I was one of them, who was always saying, how come

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I'm not as holy as the guy on that stage who's telling stories about how good he is? Yeah, how come

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I don't glow in the dark? How come God doesn't speak conversationally to me? Right. And that's kind of the thing, is that the venue here is important.

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This is Todd White's church. I don't know how else to describe this. And Todd White, he does a really good job of preaching about himself, and how holy he is, and how many hours a day he cries, and weeps to God, and stuff like that.

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And I'm thinking, I got too many things to do. It's like, I don't have time to spend two hours in my prayer closet in the secret place weeping.

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Well, and if you did, you shouldn't be telling us about it, because then it wouldn't be secret anymore, so it'd spill out. Exactly! Christ says, don't do your good works for others so that they would see them, right?

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Anyway. Okay, let's let him talk some more, because he's gonna keep going. Oh yeah, we're way off track.

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Yeah, let's let him talk. He does not save us simply in our sins, but from our sins.

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And in John 8, Jesus is dealing with some of his Jewish listeners, and some are beginning to believe.

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This is in John 8, 31. To the

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Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.

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Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him, we are

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Abraham's descendants, and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?

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Jesus replied, I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.

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Let me just pause there for a moment. One of the great lies about sinful temptation is if you'll just do this one thing, then you'll be satisfied.

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Now, I would note that where he's going with this is not following the sense of the text, because you're gonna note, the

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Jews at this point, they're taking issue with the fact that Christ is using slavery terms and applying it to them.

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And Christ here is pointing to the real issue here, and that is that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and so pointing out that all have sinned, all are enslaved to sin.

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And by doing so, you're gonna note then that Christ is taking the imagery of the Exodus from the

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Old Testament, which is a type in shadow, and revealing for us the reality that this is the story we find ourselves in.

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So the story of the children of Israel enslaved to Pharaoh who wears a headdress that looks like a serpent's head, you know, this is a type in shadow of the story we find ourselves in.

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And that theme then is carried out, I'm gonna pull this up real quick, we're going to go to Romans chapter 6, because the

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Apostle Paul then asks this question, are we to continue in sin so that grace may abound? Who came up with that idea?

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Who's asking these questions? Because you can tell these are real questions that Paul gets. He says, by no means, how can we who died to sin still live in it?

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Do you not know that all of us who've been baptized into Christ, we've been baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the

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Father, we too might walk in newness of life. If we have been united with him like a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

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We know that our old self was crucified with him, in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be, and here's the phrase, enslaved to sin.

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For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

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We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin.

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Once for all the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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And you're going to note that this is talking about in the context of baptism. So what I always like to tell people is that, you know,

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Paul here is teaching us to use our baptisms as a weapon against the temptations of the devil, because when the devil comes knocking on your door and says, hey

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Steve, you want to come out and play? You just say, oh no, I'm baptized. You know, I don't have to listen to you anymore.

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I'm not your slave anymore. Well, and not to go on a tangent, but we're monergists. We see that God is the one who totally saved us.

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And Dr. Brown comes from a viewpoint that says, no, it's our decision to follow God. And he would probably say something very similar, but the focus is always on his decision.

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And so then he's constantly focusing his preaching towards us in our decisions, where we as Lutherans, and Lutherans aren't the only ones, but monergists say it's all

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God. We point back to God saving us. We don't point back to our free will. Right. God did this to me.

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I like to say that the lion of the tribe of Judah hunted me and grabbed me and took me and put his claws in me and then drug me against my will into the kingdom.

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Well, and even when it appears on the outward surface of things, like we did make a decision, we still have to chalk that up to God working in us.

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And I think that's really a simple way for me to understand the whole idea of monergism. Because the church that we go to now,

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I jokingly say, I chose to go to this church that teaches me that I didn't really choose

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God, but he chose me. And I'm okay with that.

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I'm totally okay with not taking any of the credit for my salvation and even my choices that seems to have been something that happened in my head.

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I still give credit to that, totally to God. Now let me give you a couple of texts that back that up so that people just don't accuse you of being unbiblical, which is what they generally do.

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So in the Gospel of John chapter 1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was

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God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him. Without him was not anything made that was made.

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In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, the darkness has not overcome it.

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And in verse 9 it goes on to say, the true light which gives light to everyone was coming into the world, this is

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Christ. He was in the world and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. It's kind of frightening to me that the demons know exactly who

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Jesus is and we don't. So he came to his own, his own people did not receive him.

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And now pay attention to how this plays out, because this text rules particular things out.

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To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, so you can't be born a

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Christian, you're not, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

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So you'll note this passage rules out the idea that you made a decision for Jesus. And there's another one that also really comes into play here in the

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Gospel of John, it's Gospel of John chapter 6, and I think it's verse 30, so I'm going to scroll quickly down here.

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Yeah, so no, it's not 30, it's a little farther down, let me get there, and let's see here, ah yes, here it is.

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So 43, 44. So Jesus answered, do not grumble among yourselves.

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No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

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Notice that no one can come to me. So we're not born of a human decision, not of the will of man, and here he says that the

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Father has to draw. And the Greek verb here is actually crazy. It's the

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Greek verb helkouo, and let me... I gotta scroll down to get to it, and here we go, and this is...

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let me pull this up, hang on a second here, double, triple click, there we go, and let me make that a little bit bigger.

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Okay, so helkouo, that's your verb, the imperfect is helkouo, and here's what the definition is.

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To move an object from one area to another in a pulling motion, to draw with the implication that the object being moved is incapable of propelling itself, or in the case of persons, is unwilling to do so voluntarily.

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The implication is that the exertion on the part of the mover, okay? So I mean, when you take a look at the depth of that verb, so no one can come to me unless the

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Father who sent me helkouos them. That's not how you say it in Greek, but you get the idea. So if you were to move a statue, you're going to helkouo that thing.

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You put some ropes around it, you're going to pull it, because it's incapable of moving. And if God's going to move you, you're not willing to be moved, so God's going to move you anyway.

30:50

So that's an important text in all of this. Yeah, good stuff.

30:56

All right, so let's come back to that, and I think that's where the subtle distinction's probably going to lie, because the purpose behind Michael Brown's sermon is to get people to make decisions.

31:11

It's a form of revivalism that we're witnessing here. So let's keep playing though, because we've barely scratched the surface.

31:17

You're tempted with this, you've never done this, you feel the pull to do this, maybe fall back into an old habit.

31:23

If you'll just do this, you'll be satisfied. That's an outright lie, because sin will never satisfy.

31:30

And sin will create a desire for more sin. And then sin will create a desire for worse sin.

31:38

He's right, by the way. That's true. I have no issues with that. That's well said. And sin will enslave.

31:46

You know, when I started getting high when I was 14 years old, in 1969, raised in a good

31:54

Jewish home... You know, I gotta say this. One of the problems that I have here, rather than going to a biblical text, he goes to his life experience.

32:04

And this is the issue that I have with it. I've been a pastor long enough that I've seen people deal with being tempted to sin in particular ways repeatedly.

32:16

You know, so what happens if your besetting sin is alcoholism, and you get arrested for drunk driving?

32:28

And so they take away your license, you go through all the process, you get your license back, and you have the whiskey plates, and in Minnesota they make you use whiskey plates.

32:39

You always tell who the people who have a conviction because their license plate has the first letter in it is

32:45

W. I didn't know that. Yeah, they call them whiskey plates. So you get yourself cleaned up, you go to AA, and you're clean and sober for two whole years.

32:55

You get your two -year coin, and then what happens if something happens and you go on a bender, and you get arrested again?

33:07

Yeah. There's a strong string of New Testament verses that are really clear about telling us not to sin, reminding us not to sin, hold fast to your faith, and that's all good stuff.

33:24

And I don't know anybody who disagrees with any of that. But it's also true that sometimes we slip up, and we sin.

33:34

Yeah. There isn't a day that goes by where I cannot properly pray, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

33:43

That's a daily prayer. Right. And I always like to point out to people that when the

33:48

Church was combating the Pelagian heresy, which denied the doctrine of original sin, that we are born dead in trespasses and sin, you can spot a

34:00

Pelagian because you would ask a Pelagian this question. All right, when we pray the

34:06

Lord's Prayer, which is a daily prayer, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, we get to the part where we pray, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

34:17

So somebody who has the right understanding of Scripture says, all right, so Christ taught us to pray daily, forgive us our

34:26

Oh, you should pray that prayer daily. Why? Well, not because you've sinned every day, but in order to keep yourself humble.

34:33

Yeah. You always know you're dealing with a Pelagian, because they're trying to sneak in some kind of Christian perfectionism.

34:42

Well, I think we went past it already. At 18 minutes and 40 seconds, when he was quoting

34:48

John 831, if you hold to my teaching, if you abide in my word, is the way the

34:57

ESV translates it, abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

35:03

That verse is often used, and I think the way he used it is an example of it to say, you better follow all the rules to prove you're a disciple.

35:13

You better follow me in 100 % perfection Which is a misuse of that text, by the way.

35:21

Yeah, and the teaching to follow Jesus' teaching is to follow this whole cluster of ideas, one of which is, you're a sinner who needs to daily seek the forgiveness of God and to always be reminded of your forgiveness that is in Christ.

35:39

Yep. Now, I'm going to point this out, okay? When you read, so the three rules for sound biblical exegesis, context, context, context, okay?

35:49

If you were to go back into John 831 and keep reading, would you come to the same conclusion at how

35:57

Brown used this text out of context? The answer is no. In John 8, there is this battle, this verbal battle that keeps escalating between Jesus and the unbelieving

36:12

Jews. So in John 831, Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.

36:22

Now, okay, in this context here, then, who is Jesus saying he is? Because, you know, the

36:30

Jews are people of the word, for sure, of the book, and the book is the word of God, and so Jesus is talking about his words as if they're on par with the

36:41

Bible, with the Tanakh, with the Old Testament. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

36:46

So the unbelieving Jews say, well, we're offspring of Abraham, we've never been enslaved to anyone, how is it you say we'll become free?

36:52

So then watch, Jesus said, truly I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin, and practices sin, funny enough, same word, poieo, we are

37:06

God's workmanship. The one who makes a workmanship, the practice of sinning, okay?

37:13

It's the same concept, is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever, so if the

37:20

Son sets you free, you'll be free indeed. And you'll note, this is where Brown stopped, if the

37:25

Son sets you free, you'll be free indeed, but the Christ discourse continues. I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you.

37:35

I speak of what I have seen with my father, and you have what you've heard from your father. And they say, well, they said,

37:43

Abraham is our father, and Jesus says if you were Abraham's children, you'd be doing the works

37:48

Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me. So you'll note here that the issue really here is that Jesus is claiming to be

37:57

God, and he's saying that these unbelieving Jews are not the children of God, that they are enslaved to sin.

38:06

He's telling them, quite bluntly, you know, my word finds no place in you because you're of your father the devil, that's kind of the gist of what's going on.

38:14

You're not, you claim to be children of Abraham, but you're not doing the things that Abraham did. And then it culminates, and so let's see here, so he goes on, you are of your father the devil, your will is to do your father's desires.

38:28

I'd like to see Joel Osteen preach that. Sorry. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.

38:36

When he lies, he speaks out of his own nature. So note, he's saying to these people, you're actually of the devil, you're enslaved to sin.

38:45

This is Jesus telling them of their condition. So whoever is of God hears the words of God, the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.

38:54

So they answered, are we not right in saying that you're a Samaritan and that you have a demon? Samaritan here is being used as a racial slur, the best way to put it.

39:03

So they're saying that Jesus is a Samaritan and he's demonized, so you note that this thing is escalating, you know, quite vehemently.

39:13

And so Jesus answered, I don't have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me, yet I do not seek my own glory, there's one who seeks it.

39:20

He is the judge, truly, truly, amen, amen, I say to you, anyone who keeps my word, tereo, means guard, to keep it, he will never see death.

39:30

Now at this point, again, the whole point of this passage is who is Jesus claiming he is, and whose power is he saying these unbelieving

39:37

Jews are under? That's the gist of the situation, because these are religious Jews who are ironically wanting to kill

39:44

Jesus, the very God they claim to worship is standing in front of them in human flesh.

39:50

So Jesus says, anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. Now at this point, the Jews feel like they finally got him, alright?

39:57

We told you you were nuts, this proves it. So the Jews said to him, now we know that you have a demon,

40:03

Abraham died. And you remember, Abraham heard the voice of God, and he died, as did the prophets.

40:09

Yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father

40:15

Abraham? And you can hear the subtext of this, who died? And the prophets, who died?

40:21

Who do you make yourself out to be? And that's the gist of this passage. Jesus answered, if I glorify myself, my glory is nothing, it is my father who glorifies me, of whom you say he is our

40:32

God. But you have not known him, I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him,

40:37

I'd be a liar like you, but I do know him, and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day, and he was glad.

40:45

And a little bit of a note here, Jesus just gave information about Abraham that's not found in the

40:50

Old Testament. It's not there, alright? You're going to lurk long and hard looking for the cross -reference here, where does it say in the

40:57

Old Testament that Abraham saw Jesus' day and rejoiced? And so Jesus is giving information about Abraham that would require him to know

41:09

Abraham, and they pick up on that immediately. So the Jews said to him, you're not yet 50 years old and you've seen

41:15

Abraham? And he said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, ego, a, me,

41:22

I, am. He uses the divine name for himself from Exodus 3, so they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the

41:29

So that whole discourse there is the battle between the unbelieving Jews and the

41:35

God they claim to be worshiping, and Jesus revealing and quite bluntly telling these unbelieving

41:42

Jews they are of their father, the devil. They are enslaved to sin, and they're taking issue with his words, and not only that, they're taking issue with who

41:50

Jesus is. So you know, when you put it all back into its context, you can't exactly make it say the things that Brown is saying.

41:58

He's kind of missed the point, and he stopped it at a point where the text itself doesn't reach its conclusion.

42:08

Yeah, and I think what he's doing is he's kind of cherry -picking verses that tell us how it's important for us to live sinless lives, to be holy, to be obedient, and he's just grabbing them, and there's a couple of applause lines in this speech that really bothered me where he says, like at 42 minutes and 42 seconds, he says, sorry to use so much scripture when

42:29

I'm teaching the word, but I'm going to, you know, and then he goes on to quote another verse, but yeah. Yeah, let's keep listening though.

42:36

Let's keep listening, because let's see, let's try to like sit on our hands, and let's make us listen to a bigger swath here before we act, because we're terrible.

42:45

I'm going to have a cookie to keep me from talking. You do that, okay. Long Island, mom and dad happily marry.

42:51

Didn't have needs in this world. I wasn't looking for the meaning of life, but getting caught up in the whole rock scene, seeing

42:58

Jimi Hendrix in concert when I was 13, and then just getting caught up in what was happening, and the 60s counterculture rebellion.

43:05

You know, there's a saying, if you remember the 60s, you weren't there. Ask the older folks to explain that to you later.

43:16

I got caught up in the whole spirit of the age when someone asked me if I wanted to try smoking pot.

43:22

I thought, well, you're not supposed to, so that gives it appeal. You know, proverb says, stolen water is sweet.

43:28

Food eaten in secret is delicious. When you can't have it, you want it. But then I thought, the rock stars do this, why not try?

43:36

If you had told me that one year later, I'd be shooting heroin, that was completely impossible.

43:42

There's no possible way I would ever get to that point, but that's what sin does. It desensitizes you.

43:49

It creates a desire for something more, and then when you get to that point, that doesn't satisfy you anymore, and it has to go deeper, and then you find yourself enslaved.

43:58

And I just want to say this at the outset of this message, if Jesus has set you free, don't mess with that.

44:05

If the Lord has brought you from bondage to freedom, that's a sacred thing. Don't play games with it.

44:12

Don't see how close you can get to the edge without falling off. Yeah, but what if you have not only gone to the edge, but you've fallen off?

44:22

That's kind of my issue. You know, is there good news for those who've messed up? And he alludes to that, and he kind of goes back and forth.

44:30

One of the things that I hear that I find can be confusing is, if you're really a

44:38

Christian, if you're really saved, you won't do any of these bad things. Okay, well then, why don't you just make sure that everybody's a real

44:44

Christian? Instead of telling all these real Christians what they shouldn't be doing, they shouldn't be doing those things.

44:50

Why are we having this conversation? Right, and the issue is with that, and see, so when

44:55

I was a Nazarene and I went to a Christian high school, I mean, this was the steady diet of our chapel services.

45:02

You know, real Christians don't do these things, but the is when you preach law, law, law, law, law, like this without the gospel, your sinful nature sits there and goes, you know, that kind of sounds fun.

45:13

And it's true. And so what ends up happening is, and I saw this with my classmates.

45:21

When we went to our 20 -year high school reunion, yeah,

45:26

I skipped the 30. I skipped 30, but we went to 20. Barb and I went.

45:32

The secret question that everyone was asking under their breath, the people who showed up for the reunion, are you still a

45:39

Christian? That was the question, are you still a Christian? And the people who would say, no,

45:45

I gave that up long ago. There was a couple of people, I remember one gal and a guy who almost gave the same exact kind of reasoning, is they basically said, you know, they told us that real

45:56

Christians don't do these things. I got to college and I went wild and I just figured I wasn't a Christian and just kind of went with it from there.

46:04

And so the idea, when you say real Christians don't do these things, listen, I have seen real

46:11

Christians do the worst things ever, and there is forgiveness for Christians who sin, and really, really, really fall on their faces hard in this sense.

46:25

But when you set it up, real Christians don't do these things, then when you sin in that way, you're done, you're done, because I guess

46:32

I'm just not a Christian. You know, so. All right, let's keep playing.

46:38

Then Jesus says this, now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

46:44

So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

46:52

Yes, we have battles in the flesh. Yes, we are tempted in this world, but Jesus delivers us from bondage to sin, and if we truly know

47:03

Him and truly walk with Him, we will experience freedom. Define that.

47:12

Right. Yeah, what does it mean you will experience freedom? Right. Again, Dr.

47:18

Brown, he will explain penal substitutionary atonement for just a few seconds around the 34 and a half minute mark.

47:27

Yeah, but you're going to know, he already preached the gospel not for the purpose of proclaiming Christ and Him crucified for our sins, but in order to basically say, yeah, but Jesus didn't set us free to empower us to sin.

47:37

Right. You know, rather than actually kind of focusing on what the gospel does proclaim, you know. And this is the gospel message that I largely grew up with from my mid -teens on, and it always left me in the far back part of my mind saying,

47:55

I'm not really that good. I'm not really that godly like I'm supposed to be.

48:01

And I think you go two directions. One is like you just said, people just give up. They're like, well, I guess I'm not a Christian then. Or option two is you're like, well, my church isn't making me good enough because I'm surrounded by other

48:13

Christians who are mediocre like I am. I need to find a more on fire church. Maybe I need to go to Lifestyle Christianity and spend thousands of dollars and sit in these classes because I'll hear real on fire people.

48:25

And you're on this wild goose chase trying to find the right teaching from the right people. Right. And so it creates that multi -tiered

48:33

Christianity. So multi -tiered Christianity, at the top tier, you have your

48:41

A -list, glow -in -the -dark, on fire Christians. And of course, they have figured out the secret, they've experienced breakthrough, and of course, they will tell you how they did it if you buy their book.

48:59

You know, and this goes back a lot further than most people realize. This goes back to the mid to late 1800s, both in the

49:06

UK and in America, the Keswick Movement, the Niagara Bible Conferences. There was this huge ecumenical movement that came out of revivalism.

49:14

They said, we want to have more converts. We want to see the church grow. We want to reach the unsaved, which are all great goals.

49:22

But they said, in order to do that, we need to ditch some of this denominational stuff. We need to ditch some of this heavy theological stuff.

49:29

And we need to figure out how can we get more sanctified. And so they had these series of experts who all had books to sell.

49:37

Back in the 1800s, this was going on. And one of the primary ideas from that holiness movement was the idea that there's this thing called the baptism in the

49:47

Holy Spirit that has to take place. And there were different people who had different versions of what that was.

49:53

But they all agreed, once we get it, we'll be more holy, we'll be able to witness better, we'll live more holy lives, and we'll be more effective for God.

50:00

And one of the branches was the Pentecostal Movement that said, oh, we know what it means to be baptized in the

50:05

Holy Spirit. It's when you speak in tongues. And so the holiness movement is— And the Nazarenes come right out of that stream.

50:14

So Phineas Brzee, who was the guy who started the Nazarene Church in Los Angeles, his teaching was what he called second blessing holiness.

50:23

You have this special baptism of the Holy Spirit, which basically hits the pause button on your sinful nature.

50:33

The problem is it doesn't. Read Romans 7. Yeah. And so you're right. So tier number one are the people who are pulling it off, they've had the special anointing, they've had the second blessing, they've experienced the breakthrough, and then you've got the next group underneath them, the people who are paying money to figure out how to experience the breakthrough, and they are applying themselves vigilantly.

50:57

These are true believers, that the people in the top tier really are glow -in -the -dark

51:03

Christians, and they want to join them on the stage, they want to be in the top tier themselves.

51:09

And they are knocking themselves out and paying good money to figure out how to get to that group.

51:16

And the end of that rope, by the way, but the end of that is is that you're going to end up doing one of, actually, one of three things.

51:25

One, you're going to basically get to the point where you realize that it's a complete scam, and you're going to despair, or you're going to say, all right,

51:36

I'm going to pretend like I can do it too. And you become a faker just like the people in the top tier, because they're all fakers.

51:43

Yep. Delusional. Yeah, delusional. And so you're going to despair, and you either leave the

51:50

Christian faith, or you keep coming to church, but you always get labeled as you're the backslider. You're not really trying that hard at the holiness thing, because we noticed that you had a beer with your hamburger the other night, or strange things like that.

52:07

Or you were watching a series on Netflix that was rated higher than PG, and so you're not really serious, but they keep coming to church for some reason.

52:16

And this is this multi -tiered Christianity, but in biblical Christianity, there is only one tier.

52:23

Everybody's on their knees, and they're all forgiven sinners. And if you want to talk about the tiers in Christianity, then the real work of the

52:32

Holy Spirit is where everybody within the Church believes that others are better than themselves.

52:39

It's a race to the bottom, not to the top. So when you have a setup like lifestyle

52:45

Christianity, where Todd White is prowling around the stage talking about how holy he is, it's the exact opposite direction.

52:57

By the way, he's not... Let's do this, Chris. Go to 28 minutes and 14 seconds, and I think we'll get an idea of why he's saying some of the things he's saying, and this will help to give him kind of the benefit of the doubt.

53:09

Okay, here we go. One of my friends, a worship leader, reached out to a friend of mine a few years ago.

53:17

He was just so grieved. He didn't know what to do. He had met

53:23

God in revival, was saved in revival, learned to lead worship in the midst of revival, and counted God's holy presence over and over and over.

53:30

And he said, I go out, I'm with these worship teams, we go out afterwards to hang out and fellowship, have a meal, and they get stone -cold drunk.

53:42

And this is... Which is sin. Right, we all agree with that. Yeah, drunkenness is a sin.

53:48

It's a misuse of that gift that God has given us. So, okay. Of how free they are. That's not free, that's bound, that's deceived, that's misled.

53:59

Correct, that's true. Yeah. And he said, and then they show their spiritual freedom by dropping the f -bomb.

54:11

Okay, the presenting problem here is some kind of form of antinomianism.

54:16

Yeah, and what's crazy is he's talking about worship leaders, I'm guessing, in the Charismatic Church, because that's his circle of influence.

54:23

I don't think he's talking about Presbyterian worship leaders right now. No, I don't think so. And I don't know, kind of one of the big not -so -secret secrets is that many of these

54:33

Pentecostal megachurches, they hire pagans to lead worship. Yes, it's absolutely true.

54:38

And within the worship leader songwriting, like the people who are known for songwriting,

54:48

I haven't done like an article on this, and actually that might be really interesting, but there is a train wreck after train wreck after train wreck of stories of worship leaders who wrote great songs, and everybody was singing, and they made a lot of money, and then they went off and divorced their wives, or they're now gay, or they've become atheists.

55:06

It's just a scattered trail of debris that they left in their wake. And we just keep doing it, because we like song leaders who are talented, they're good singers, they've got the charisma to go up on stage and lead everybody in worship, because that's what's so important to the modern church.

55:22

And they fit in skinny jeans. They fit in their skinny jeans. And so he's presenting a real problem.

55:28

So I want to give him credit for saying, yes, this is a problem. Yeah. So I don't hold this against him in any way.

55:34

I think what we need to dig even deeper is to say, how about if you just admit that these people were never

55:40

Christians to begin with? How about if we admit that these people were, they never should have been on stage at these churches leading thousands of people in so -called worship?

55:49

Right. And then my question is, is that what does he mean they encountered God in revival?

55:54

What exactly is the cash value of that phrase? I think it proves how utterly meaningless the whole encounter thing is.

56:01

Oh man, you've got to go to this service. You're going to really feel God. Yeah. I was that guy 20 years ago.

56:07

I wish I could feel God. I don't feel God like these other people claim to feel God. So you wind up going to a church that has a really good worship team, because that's what good music does.

56:16

It makes you feel something. Only in the case of these churches, they don't claim it's good musicianship.

56:22

They claim that it's actually the Holy Spirit. Yeah. And it's not. Yeah. All right.

56:28

Let's keep going. Let him go a little bit further on this. Let's see where this goes. All right. You know what it's like?

56:34

It's like someone say, you know, how free I am? Watch. I'm going to go in this prison. I'm going to lock the door behind me. I'm going to put on chains.

56:40

I freely chose that. You show your liberty by being bound. How do we get this mentality?

56:48

I understand the peril of legalism. I understand putting people under pressure to live a certain way.

56:55

I understand the dangers of that. I understand how people can be raised in church, and they haven't encountered the

57:00

Lord for themselves. Now, legalism, you've got to define the term. Legalism is the belief that you are saved by your works, either in total or in part.

57:09

Yeah. You know, whereas Christian sanctification makes it clear that the law tells us what our good works are.

57:18

Well, and I've heard just recently Todd White say the same thing. This isn't legalism. Whenever he talks to his people about the law, it encourages them to keep the law and to be respectful of God's law, which every

57:31

Christian should be doing. Right. But this isn't legalism. It's like they don't have that grasp of law and gospel at all, and it makes it very confusing to listen to them.

57:41

Yeah, indeed. Now, by the way, if you want to see what antinomianism looks like, just look at the ELCA, where the law has no meaning whatsoever, and they're ordaining people who are impenitent and sexually immoral on top of it.

57:56

All kinds of different immoralities, too. Explain what the ELCA is. We call that the denomination that's

58:03

Lutheran in name only. The ELCA is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. And I mean, are you engaged in a polyamorous relationship?

58:13

You can be ordained. That's just nuts. And so God's law has no bearing whatsoever in defining what's good or evil.

58:21

This may be a bit of a tangent, but the background of that is higher critical theory and really bad theology going back many, many decades, and those people don't see

58:33

God's Word as the actual Word of God. They see it as a handful of stories that are nice, but you can take and leave whatever you want.

58:41

But you're going to note that the reason they went that route is because of pietism, because of legalism. That's true.

58:46

That's a really interesting topic. So here's the thing, is that when the only thing you're getting is the flamethrower of the law of God, at some point you're going to look for some way to get some sanity, because God's law is constantly convicting us, and we have the law of God written on our hearts, and so we know when we're doing evil, and I mean, don't believe me, just look at a three -year -old when they sneak into the kitchen at night to steal a cookie.

59:12

They're looking this way and that way, because they know they're doing wrong here. But the thing is, is that when all you get is law, law, law, law, law, law, law, law, at some point you're going to break, and one of the ways in which people and churches break predictably is to chuck the law all together and attack the

59:31

Word of God and deny its authority. Well, and going back to these worship leaders that are living in really abject sin and don't even seem to care at all, they're coming out of the charismatic movement, and when the charismatic movement creates people like that,

59:45

I would say, and this is a broad categorization, obviously it's not applying to everybody, but they don't hold up God's Word as they should.

59:54

They hold up our mystical experiences as the primary place where we find truth.

01:00:01

Yeah, and God's Word disappears, and they preach their visions and their dreams, and people are not hearing

01:00:10

God's Word meaningfully taught in these places. It's a rarity. And it does lead to antinomianism, either from liberal theology or from hyper -charismatic mystical theology.

01:00:19

The end result is this disregard for God's law. Yeah, so stop telling me

01:00:24

I'm sinful because I'm living with, shacking up with my girlfriend. I had goose bumps, ghost bumps, when

01:00:31

I had the worship encounter last week. God wouldn't have given me ghost bumps if he thought that I was sinful.

01:00:36

I just helped some guy make both of his legs the same length. Don't tell me I'm living in sin. Exactly, man, and everyone knows,

01:00:43

I mean, that's some serious Holy Spirit power right there. Sorry, sarcasm off.

01:00:50

Okay, let's keep listening. Standards are thrown on them, and it drives them away. Or when we point the finger at one sin and practice other sin ourselves,

01:00:58

I understand that that's deadly and destroys people's lives. But this idea we hear from Christian leaders that freedom is that I can live loosely, no, freedom is to save you from living loosely.

01:01:12

We don't have freedom to sin, we have freedom from sin. Now in this part, he's technically correct.

01:01:19

I mean, that's Paul's point in Romans 6, and there's a sin called licentiousness, where you turn the gospel into a license to sin.

01:01:29

That's kind of another form of antinomianism. So technically, you sit there and go, this is correct -ish, but there's something missing.

01:01:41

It's like, you know what's missing? It's the gospel here, for real. Let's keep going. Let's just look at some representative

01:01:51

Scripture. Let's go over to 2 Corinthians chapter 6.

01:01:57

Good text. 2 Corinthians 6. Paul begins in verse 14.

01:02:03

2 Corinthians 6, 14. Do not be yoked together with unbelievers, for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?

01:02:14

Now we go into the world to reach the lost. We build relationships with the world to reach the lost. We love on the lost to bring them to Jesus and to be good neighbors and good witnesses, but we don't yoke ourselves together in a sinful way.

01:02:29

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers, for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

01:02:37

We've been made different. We've been called to something different. You know, according to the

01:02:42

Scriptures, when it comes to sin, we come out of the world. When it comes to the gospel, we go into the world.

01:02:49

And we got to turn that upside down in the church today. When it comes to souls, we stay back.

01:02:55

When it comes to sin, we go in. What harmony is there between Christ and Belial, meaning

01:03:01

Christ and the devil? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?

01:03:09

For we are the temple of the living God. Present tense.

01:03:15

We are the temple of the living God. So you're going to note here, even in this section of 2

01:03:20

Corinthians, the admonition assumes that you are a new creation in Christ.

01:03:26

Assumes that you are already holy. Assumes that you have been regenerated.

01:03:33

And so that's an important bit of it. Again, coming back to the reason why Christians do good works is because they are

01:03:39

Christians, not in order to someday qualify to become a Christian. Let's go just a little bit further to 34 minutes and 31 seconds.

01:03:50

Okay, 34... I'm going to back it up just so we can get a little context. I'll go to 30... 34... 15?

01:03:58

Does that sound good? All right, we'll just drop the playhead. We'll keep going. Here we go. Hippie. Years later, my wife

01:04:05

Nancy, she didn't know me then. She saw a picture of me in the old days, started laughing. I said, you're laughing because I look like a woman.

01:04:11

She said, no, I'm laughing because you look like an ugly woman. That's a good line. I don't care who you are.

01:04:17

That is hilarious. Okay, it's a good line. Sorry. But hearing that the night

01:04:28

I really cried out to God to save me and cleanse me, at that very moment,

01:04:35

I was declared righteous in God's sight. At that moment, I hadn't done anything yet. I had not brought forth fruit worthy of repentance yet.

01:04:44

All right, so he's describing forensic justification, and he's correct. When somebody is brought to penitent faith in Christ, they've been raised from the dead, then the old is gone, the new has come, they are forgiven, they are declared righteous, and in God's sight, salvation has arrived, okay?

01:05:03

You is saved. Past tense, present tense, on into the future tense. It's imputed righteousness, it's not your own righteousness, and it can't get any better.

01:05:11

It can't grow, because it's already 100 % righteous. That's what righteousness means, it means...

01:05:17

Yeah, and talking about forensic righteousness, that's absolutely correct, because remember, our sin is imputed to Christ.

01:05:24

What does Isaiah say? God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. So Christ is, our unrighteousness is imputed to Him, and when you are brought to faith in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, the righteousness of God, the diakosunetheu, the righteousness of God, or the righteousness of Christ, is imputed to you.

01:05:46

You don't get no more righteous than that. And this is the issue that he's explaining pretty well, and Todd White explains almost never, if at all.

01:05:56

And I've had comments on my YouTube channel when I've criticized Todd White in some of my videos, where his followers are coming on my channel and saying, there's no such thing as imputed righteousness.

01:06:07

You're either righteous or you're not. This is a Todd White follower. Okay, hang on a second here.

01:06:13

Let's address that Todd White follower. Philippians chapter three. Philippians chapter three.

01:06:19

This is your go -to text on that, by the way. So the Apostle Paul, I don't know if you've noticed when reading your

01:06:26

New Testament that Paul and the Judaizers didn't get along very well. Not well at all. No, not well at all.

01:06:31

And he even calls them names. So here's what Paul says in Philippians three, too. Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh.

01:06:41

He does not consider the circumcision to be a holy thing, he considers it to be just a mutilation of the flesh. And he says, we are the circumcision, who worship by the

01:06:50

Spirit of God, and we glory in Christ Jesus, and watch this, we put no confidence in the flesh.

01:06:57

Okay, this is talking about salvation by works. He says, though I myself, I have reason for confidence in the flesh also.

01:07:03

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Now watch this pedigree, man, okay?

01:07:10

Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the

01:07:16

Torah, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the Church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

01:07:25

It sounds like one of those MasterCard commercials, right? So whatever, but watch this, whatever gain

01:07:31

I had under the Torah, I count as a loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing

01:07:41

Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as scubala.

01:07:49

That's a fresh lawn turd is the best way to think of what's scubala. We talked about the lawn turd thing before,

01:07:54

I remember. Yeah, that's right, yeah. So fresh lawn turd. I count them all, all of His good works under the

01:08:00

Torah, I count them as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ, and watch this, and be found in Him not having a righteousness of my own.

01:08:13

I don't know, it sounds like he's talking about not having a righteousness of his own, which means he got it from somewhere else.

01:08:20

Yes. He says, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith, so the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ Jesus, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

01:08:35

I don't know, that sounds like we're given God's righteousness. That's a great verse. So you'll note the distinction, not having a righteousness of my own, but the righteousness that comes by faith, and it's a righteousness from God.

01:08:49

And going back to the issue of the Pelagian heresy, Pelagius was a guy in the, what was it, the fourth century.

01:08:57

He taught a certain type of theology that was opposed by Augustine.

01:09:04

It really gave us a lot of the fundamentals for the Christian church, for all of church history.

01:09:10

Pelagius said, if you teach people what you just said, Chris, that people are going to just go off and run around and be a bunch of miserable sinners, because now they feel so free that we can't tell them that.

01:09:20

We can't teach that. We can't teach the imputed righteousness. We have to teach them that salvation is something you have to earn, otherwise they won't be good enough.

01:09:28

Right. So in other words, you better put that freedom stuff away. You better put away that you have a righteousness of God, because otherwise you're going to go out and fornical mutilate.

01:09:38

But here's the thing, that tells me a lot about Pelagius, but it tells me nothing about what the Bible says. All right.

01:09:45

And I think from what I understand of him as he was a bishop, that he was probably somebody who was self -disciplined.

01:09:54

He was probably the kind of guy who knew how to control himself better than most. And he looked at the world around him and said, why can't people be more like me and be more committed to Christ and be more holy like I am?

01:10:07

I mean, this sounds exactly like what we see going on at Lifestyle Christianity. It's the same thing.

01:10:14

By the way, I'm going to give you another cross -reference here, Romans 3 .21. So we just read, Paul said, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but the righteousness that is by faith that comes from God.

01:10:24

But watch this, Romans 3 .21, but now the righteousness of God. Okay, same phrase here, the diakosunetheou.

01:10:32

And let me get my Greek to be a little bit smaller so that I can track a little bit easier. Now the righteousness of God has been manifested, apart from the law.

01:10:40

And although the law and the prophets, they bear witness, the righteousness of God that is dia, through faith, in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

01:10:49

So you'll note that even Romans 3 teaches that we receive a righteousness of God, from God, through faith, and it's for all who believe.

01:10:57

For there is no distinction. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, diakaiou, to be declared righteous, diakaiou, by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is

01:11:10

Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation. Here you could say atoning sacrifice by his blood that is received by faith.

01:11:17

So you get the idea here. So the righteousness of God, again, it shows up here, that imputed righteousness.

01:11:24

So, and you'll note then, Paul isn't concerned about, well, if I teach them that they have the righteousness of God, that they're going to go out and fornical mutilate.

01:11:34

No. If you're close with the righteousness...it goes back to that question. I remember when

01:11:39

I first heard about this imputed righteousness and salvation by grace through faith alone, Rosenblatt was the guy teaching it, and it went up to Rosenblatt, and I threw a high inside fastball at his face to try to brush him back, because I wasn't believing it.

01:11:57

I said, Rosenblatt, if what you're saying is true, that I'm totally saved by what Christ has done for me, then you're saying

01:12:02

I can do whatever I want. Kind of the Pelagian answer, right? And of course he looks at me and goes, of course,

01:12:08

Chris. He says, now that Christ has set you free from slavery to sin, death, and the devil, what do you want to do? I don't want to go back and do that sin that caused

01:12:20

Jesus to be nailed to the cross. Uh -uh, no way. Yeah, no. And see, it's the Gospel that makes it so that I don't want to do that, not the law.

01:12:28

The law just kind of sends me spiraling without the Gospel. Okay, let's go to...well,

01:12:34

it's coming up. What minute are we on with him right now? 3450. Yeah, let him go a little bit further.

01:12:43

He's going to do a good description of the penal substitutionary atonement here, and it's just the next minute. Okay, all right, here we go.

01:12:48

I had not demonstrated the reality of my salvation yet. I had not walked it out or done any of the things that I said to the

01:12:56

Lord I'm going to do. I'm going to change. But at that moment, I went literally from death to life, from the kingdom of Satan to the kingdom of God, from bound to free, from declared guilty to declared innocent and righteous, and I was set apart.

01:13:14

Declared righteous, that's kind of an important...he said it. I know. Okay, he said it.

01:13:20

I'm declared righteous. Indeed, covered with the righteousness of Christ. In the

01:13:26

Holy Column, if I was part of a congregation that was being written to, Paul would have written to me, too, as a saint, a holy one.

01:13:33

Yes. At that moment. Yeah, exactly. Saint, by the way. The Greek word for saint is hagios, okay?

01:13:40

The saints, plural, are the hagioi, and the word itself literally means holy, the holy ones, okay?

01:13:48

So if somebody is a believer in Christ, they are a hagios, they are a saint.

01:13:54

That means they are holy. So that's that giant church in Constantinople, Hagia Sophia.

01:14:02

Hagia Sophia, yeah. Saint Sophia. Saint Sophia, correct. Okay, yeah.

01:14:08

By the way, have you heard that album where they recreate the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia? No. Oh, dude.

01:14:15

So, total excursus here. It's worth a lookup. If you have an Apple Music subscription,

01:14:22

I think it's the Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia, if you just type in Hagia Sophia. What they did is that they got permission to pop a balloon inside the

01:14:31

Hagia Sophia, and they had sound equipment set up to record how the echo works, and then they...

01:14:38

Because there's certain musical compositions that were written specifically to be sung in the Hagia Sophia, and oh, man.

01:14:46

And so they've recreated the acoustics in this album, and it is hauntingly awesome.

01:14:53

So, you know, worth a listen, worth a listen. So, yeah. But yeah, so type in Apple Music, Hagia Sophia, and you'll find...

01:15:00

I wrote it down. Yeah, I'll do a little hunting myself, but anyway, that's a whole other thing.

01:15:06

So the are the saints, you are the Holy One. And so you'll note, a saint isn't somebody who's gone to heaven, and they can prove that they've performed two miracles after somebody prayed to them.

01:15:20

No, if you're a believer in Christ, you are a hagioi, you're a haggias, you're a saint. Sorry, so let's keep going here.

01:15:28

And because it was a genuine transformation, it was then lived out. Because I was truly born again, there was the proof of a new life at that moment.

01:15:39

God dealt with me, the stronghold of my life was the needle. And that night,

01:15:45

December 17th of 71, encountering God's goodness after weeks of deep conviction of sin,

01:15:51

I said, Lord, I will never put a needle in my arm again. By God's grace, I was free from that moment on.

01:15:58

And then I hadn't really thought about other things, other drugs, it really wasn't even on my mind, it was the needle, that was the deep thing.

01:16:05

Two days later, I was hanging out with some friends, and they were smoking hash, and I joined in with them.

01:16:12

And then on the bus coming home, I wasn't old enough to drive yet, on the bus coming home, I felt convicted. I said,

01:16:18

OK, Lord, I'll never do any drug again. I realized that was wrong. But listen to me, I was saved at that moment.

01:16:24

Do you understand? I was a born again believer, but brand new, and didn't know any better yet, and as I was getting high that day,

01:16:31

I was still saved. What I'm saying is, don't have this notion that if you commit one sin one time and don't get to repent in time, you go to hell.

01:16:41

If you fall asleep at night... Yeah, it's strange to me when people talk about sin in such piecemeal fashion, and they don't understand that when it comes to sin, we sin against God in thought, word, deed, by the things we do, by the things we don't do.

01:17:00

Sin is much more... It's far deeper of a problem than the holiness preachers like Brown here,

01:17:08

I'm putting him in that category, would give credit to. I'm sorry, but...

01:17:16

So one sin, and that's not people's problem, all right? People's problem is that they wrestle with sins that keep coming back and occurring on a daily basis, or that they struggle with over years, all right?

01:17:32

And they're going to take on all kinds of different forms, from sexual immorality, to different ways of stealing, to sin of slandering and gossip.

01:17:44

By the way, I always like pointing out in the book of Romans chapter 1, gossips are farther down the sin slope than homosexuals.

01:17:52

So it's true, it's absolutely true. And so the people wrestle with all kinds of sins, it's not a one -off thing.

01:18:02

And so my concern here is that they're not preaching the law to its fullest extent to really show the depth and the magnitude of the problem that we have.

01:18:14

So that's an issue. Can you pull up that meme I sent you earlier today? I can hunt that down, hold on one...

01:18:22

Because what he's saying right now for the next half a minute, it seems to me to be in direct conflict with what he wrote about in his

01:18:30

Hyper Grace book, which they turned into his meme. So yeah, here, Steve, here's one of the memes.

01:18:36

That one I want to respond to as well, but look at... Okay, hang on a second here, hang on a second here, you sent me two memes, here's the other one.

01:18:44

I don't know if this is really a meme, but this is one of those quote things. Simply stated, there is not a single verse anywhere in the

01:18:50

Bible that pronounces us already forgiven for our future sins, meaning sins we have not yet committed.

01:18:57

Not one verse, nowhere, not even a hint of such a concept. So which

01:19:04

Dr. Michael Brown is it? The guy who wrote that, or the guy who we just heard a second ago? Well, here, play him for the next 30 seconds or so, you'll hear what he says.

01:19:11

All right, will do, hold on a second here, here we go. You confess every sin you committed that day and died in your sleep that you go to hell.

01:19:19

You live under that conception, it will burden you down and it will break you down, especially if you have a sensitive conscience, you'll feel like you got to get saved a hundred times a day.

01:19:29

Well, when I was in Nazarene, I had to get born again, again, again. Let's keep going. God does not write your name in the

01:19:36

Lamb's book of life in pencil. All right, it's...

01:19:45

So, what's going on here? I don't understand why he would say that, which

01:19:51

I think is a good thing to say, but at the same time, he wrote a book about hyper -grace, saying that you're not, there's no place in the

01:19:57

Bible that says your sins are forgiven in the future. Yeah, so yeah, we got a problem here.

01:20:05

So Steve, I want to point something out. I'm going to come back to this quote real quick, because I want to take issue with it.

01:20:12

He said, simply stated, this is a quote from Brown, and you're right that he's kind of being inconsistent here, it seems like he's contradicting what he wrote earlier in this hyper -grace book.

01:20:22

Simply stated, there is not a single verse anywhere in the Bible that pronounces us already forgiven for our future sins, meaning sins we have not yet committed.

01:20:30

Not one verse, nowhere, not even a hint of such a concept. That's a strange quote, by the way.

01:20:36

I would counter him and basically go along these lines. Colossians 2, verse 8, so I'm putting this in for the sake of context.

01:20:46

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

01:20:56

For in him the whole fullness of the deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority.

01:21:03

In him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by the putting off of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism by which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead.

01:21:18

And here we go, and you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,

01:21:25

God has made alive together with him by having forgiven us all our trespasses.

01:21:32

Now I would note here, so Steve, got a question for you, all right?

01:21:38

If Christ has forgiven you of all of your trespasses, is that going to include trespasses in the future or just trespasses in the past?

01:21:49

I think that I'm covered. I think I can rest in what

01:21:55

Christ has done for me. Yes, I think you can. So having forgiven us all our trespasses, and by the way, here's how he did it, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

01:22:08

I keep coming back to this passage. I mean, that whole record of debt section of your book has been torn out, nailed to the cross, which means that all of your sins, from the sin of Adam, which is imputed to you at your conception, to the sin that you commit when you're taking your last breath, all have been, all of those sins, the whole record of debt has been canceled.

01:22:30

So I would say that's going to do, all means all there, and that's past, present, and future. And you'll note

01:22:35

Paul wrote this, how long ago? Christ did this on the cross, how long ago?

01:22:44

You were still in the future when Christ died on the cross, by the way. So I had to say that, because it was bugging me, that quote that you gave me, it's awful.

01:22:55

So all right, let's come back to Michael Brown, shall we? All right, let's go. He will not force us to stay in his house.

01:23:01

We could get up and walk out, we could refuse his grace and walk out and deny him.

01:23:06

God forbid we do, but there are many warnings in the New Testament about that. But I'm saying this to say,

01:23:12

I rest deeply secure in the love and goodness of God. I never, ever think for a split second about the possibility of backsliding.

01:23:21

I love the Lord and He's promised to keep me. And after almost 50 years in Jesus now, my trust is not put in Mike Brown, my trust is put in Jesus the

01:23:31

Lord, Jesus the Savior, the one who said He would keep us till the end. The one who said that He's the good shepherd and no one could snatch us out of His hand.

01:23:41

That's who I put my trust in. At the same time, I absolutely take every one of these words seriously.

01:23:49

I understand God's grace, I understand God's goodness, I understand God's mercy, all the more than I don't play games with it.

01:23:58

To say it again, we were bought with a price. Okay, there's the gospel.

01:24:03

Yes, we were bought with a price. Touch no unclean thing and I will receive you.

01:24:12

How often do we hear that preached? Yeah, preach it out of context. Now what if I've touched an unclean thing?

01:24:20

You know, Christ won't receive me. Yeah, this is not good what he does right here. It's weird. Okay, let's keep going.

01:24:26

It's Old Testament. Paul is quoting that Old Testament verse in the New Testament. In the

01:24:31

Spirit, I will be a father to you and you will be my sons and daughters, says the

01:24:37

Lord Almighty. Therefore, some of your translations may not have it, but it's there. Therefore, next verse, chapter 7, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us, as believers, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.

01:24:59

Wow. Yeah, that's what Christians do, you know. And so, you know, we don't want to take away from the exhortations of Scripture.

01:25:06

Again, Christians do good works, they mortify their sinful flesh, and you know, they bear fruit in keeping with repentance because they are

01:25:13

Christians. This is true. It's just that there's other things that he's been saying that just seems to take out the foundation of that, chip away at it.

01:25:23

Well, and he's going to get in the next two, three minutes here. Titus 2 .11

01:25:29

teaches us to say no to ungodliness. Indeed. And he's going to say it's not just what happened on the cross, it's empowerment to stop sinning.

01:25:38

That's the point he keeps making over and over again. You know, and it's sort of true, you know, but again,

01:25:45

I look at it like, okay, if I was a drug addict, and I would, I can see that that would be a really obvious sin that's doing great damage.

01:25:54

And as a new Christian, just like Dr. Brown talks about, it would make sense that that's something you would leave behind.

01:26:01

But if you're growing in your faith, it doesn't mean you have no more sin, it means that now you're uncovering new sins that are much more subtle.

01:26:08

And that's, I think, the part that he's missing out. He's making it sound like you're going to just stop sinning.

01:26:13

You're going to sin almost hardly ever at all anymore. And he does mention at 41 minutes and 47 seconds, when we fall short, he does mention when we fall short.

01:26:24

So I just find this, and I used to be in this audience of this type of a church,

01:26:30

I was confused by saying that you're going to have all of this holiness in your life. And then they would, every once in a while, throw in this disclaimer that, well, you know, when we fall short, we can still get forgiven and get back on the horse again.

01:26:46

Yeah. So a good way to put this is that this kind of preaching has a high view of man, a high, high view.

01:26:57

And so anthropologically, we're dealing with a low view of sin. Although he recognizes that sin is deadly, he does not recognize the depth and the magnitude of just how deep that the thing runs.

01:27:11

So Paul says, you know, nothing good dwells within me that's within my sinful flesh.

01:27:17

And the passions of our sinful nature are running contrary to the new man that we are in Christ, you know, as Paul says, to keep us from doing what we want to do.

01:27:29

Well, you know, I've got a quote in one of my Todd White videos I'd made about a year ago where, and I think there's more than one video where I used this quote, but Todd White says, there is no such thing as a sinful nature.

01:27:41

It's just not there. And then I'd use verses that prove him wrong, but he doesn't believe in that.

01:27:46

And he gets that from Kenneth Copeland and Dan Mohler and people like that. And I, I, I'm sure that Dr.

01:27:52

Brown doesn't teach that. I just, I really wish that Dr.

01:27:58

Brown would do his homework and be more, what's the word?

01:28:04

More discerning about who he associates with and who he promotes, because he's promoting the daylights out of Todd White.

01:28:10

Yeah. And he shouldn't be. Todd White is a deceiver extraordinaire. He's just pulling people's legs. Well, you know what? We haven't even brought up the issue of if this holiness thing is so important, like Todd White claims and Dr.

01:28:20

Brown is claiming here, and Todd White does a much worse job of explaining it. Dr. Brown's doing a much better job of explaining holiness, even though we don't agree with everything.

01:28:28

It's still much clearer. Yep. He doesn't direct this holiness talk to Todd White doing the fake leg lengthening trick.

01:28:38

No, in fact, I would argue by him showing up there, he's giving a stamp of approval to Todd White and the fake leg lengthening trick.

01:28:45

You know, and the way he gets out of that is he always says, well, I don't have time to look at all the videos that people send me. I don't have time. Yeah, I don't have time, don't have time.

01:28:51

Now, I'm going to fast forward here. We're, and I'm going to switch, I'm going to go to the end of this, and the end of this is on Todd White's Facebook account from August 16th of 2020 at 557

01:29:04

PM. It was the Lifestyle Christianity Church Encounter Service, and that was the name of the service that Brown was preaching at, and here's the thing.

01:29:16

Proper distinction of law and gospel means that you preach the law to convict people of their sin. You preach the gospel to assure them of the forgiveness and mercy that is won by Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of our sins, and you'll note that this produces within us godly sorrow for where we have transgressed

01:29:39

God's holy law, and also then strengthens our faith and our confidence that we are forgiven in Christ.

01:29:45

In fact, a good way to think about it, when it comes to repentance, the two kind of come together. Sorrow for sin and confidence in the forgiveness of sins for Christ's sake.

01:29:56

See Psalm 51, the psalm that David wrote after the Bathsheba affair, you'll kind of see that.

01:30:02

True godly sorrow, and then confidence in the forgiveness of sins. But what ends up happening when you don't make a proper distinction of law and gospel is the gospel is kind of misapplied or misappropriated and never really clearly proclaimed, and then what ends up happening is that the law presents the problem, and so the solution is you gotta.

01:30:26

You gotta try harder. You gotta be more intentional. You gotta. I'm sorry to mess you up here, but go to 43 minutes in the previous video, because what he's gonna say there is exactly the problem that you just mentioned.

01:30:39

Okay, 43 minutes, and then we'll go to the end. Yeah. Hang on a second. So I'm gonna give it a little bit of context.

01:30:44

Here we go. 1 Thessalonians 4. Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please

01:30:53

God as, in fact, you are living. Let me stop there and say, just because you're saved does not mean you're automatically pleasing

01:31:01

God. Just because I'm born again does not mean I'm automatically pleasing God. We are to live a certain way that pleases

01:31:08

Him, and Ephesians 4 tells us not to grieve the Spirit. We can grieve

01:31:13

God. We can displease God. Yes. And he said, we gave you instructions.

01:31:19

Live like this in order to please Him. What was that text again?

01:31:25

Yeah, it's Ephesians 4. Ephesians 4. Great chapter, but it's really all about fellowship in the church and loving one another.

01:31:33

Yeah, I just feel like he's not... In fact, the subtitle in the

01:31:38

ESV is Unity in the Body of Christ. Okay, hang on a second here. Let's pull up Ephesians 4, because I just...

01:31:48

my context radar is going off. Ephesians 4, let's see here.

01:31:55

All right, so what verse am I starting at? Well, I'm trying to find the verse where it says don't grieve the

01:32:01

Holy Spirit. I was using a different Bible, so I'm looking at it with the paragraphs are arranged differently.

01:32:08

I don't remember where it was. All right, okay. So Ephesians 4, 17.

01:32:16

Now, I say this in testifying, Lord, you must no longer walk. Again, peripateo is Hebraism.

01:32:22

Your Hebrew would have been halakh, how you conduct your life as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.

01:32:29

They're darkened and they're understated. They're alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.

01:32:36

They have become callous, have given themselves up to sensuality, that's what they do, greedy to practice every kind of impurity, but that is not the way you learn

01:32:45

Christ, assuming that you've heard about Him and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self.

01:32:51

So we do this because we are Christians. We still have an old self to deal with, so you get a note, you still have a sinful nature, and the admonition of scripture is, take it off, wake up daily and take that thing off, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

01:33:17

Okay? So you get the idea here. Yeah, he took verse 30. Is it verse 30?

01:33:24

Let me go to it here. So, do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were sealed for the day of resemption.

01:33:31

Let all bitterness, wrath, and anger, and clamor, and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

01:33:37

So interesting that what he does here is he talks about grieving the Holy Spirit, which you can do, but he doesn't give us the rest of the text that explains how one goes about doing that.

01:33:50

Okay? That's kind of fascinating. Okay. All right, so again, this is subtle.

01:33:57

We're not trying to split hairs. The reality is that he's off by just degrees.

01:34:03

Yes, and saying that just because you're saved doesn't mean you're pleasing to God is... Yeah, again,

01:34:09

I've been declared righteous, he already said that. If I'm declared righteous, then I am pleasing to God because I'm covered in the righteousness of Christ.

01:34:16

He just doesn't make that clear, and I think that actually really hurts people when that isn't made clear.

01:34:23

Okay, so do you want me to keep going a little bit here? No, that's enough, because we've been talking forever here. All right, yeah, well, that's what we do.

01:34:30

I want to set up what you're going to show here, because the service is really long. You can see there it's two hours and 41 minutes.

01:34:38

It starts off with a ton of music. They sing and sing and sing. Todd comes on stage, and instead of speaking right away, he sings with them, and he sways back and forth, and they got their eyes closed.

01:34:48

It just goes on and on and on, and Dr. Michael Brown, he tries to kind of get the crowd going at the end.

01:34:56

After he's kind of done with the talking part, he stands on stage, and he's kind of pacing back and forth, and he's telling everyone to muster up some of this spiritual whatever it is, and he doesn't really get very far.

01:35:09

So eventually, Todd White comes on, and Todd White's like, I know how to whip this crowd into a frenzy.

01:35:14

Here, give me the mic, and he just works them into a lather, just yelling about all the stuff that he wants

01:35:22

God to do, and God do this, and God do that, and bring a revival, and change the country, and change everything, and do all this stuff.

01:35:29

It's emotionally manipulative. Rather than saying, let's pray. God, be merciful to me, a sinner, and please,

01:35:37

Holy Spirit, work in me to produce the fruit of the Spirit within me. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.

01:35:43

There's this idea that you can't just say stuff like that. You have to do it with intensity and passion. You've got to do it repeatedly, and you've got to get more and more passionate and more intense.

01:35:52

Well, you've got to be on fire. That's what they call it. Okay, so let's get some gasoline. Hit the play head, and we'll do some samples of this along the way.

01:36:00

So here we go. We've got to push the pedal to the metal. We've got to go after God with desperation for revival like never before.

01:36:10

And... We've got to. We've got to. With desperation. Are you desperate enough? I'm not.

01:36:17

Let's just be honest, people. All right. We've got to take the gospel to the streets. We've got to take the message to the world.

01:36:26

And that's one of the benefits with all the hardship, and pain, and even death that the has brought, and upheaval in many lives, and even here, sitting every other row, and these little things we have to deal with.

01:36:38

It's also awakened the church that we can't just go on with church as normal. And the goal is not, when the virus crisis is over, go back to normal.

01:36:46

We don't want to go back to normal, because normal wasn't doing it. Normal wasn't cutting it.

01:36:55

So this is time to be great commissioned believers. Preach the gospel. Live the gospel.

01:37:01

Yeah, I can't live the gospel. The gospel is a Christ died for our sins.

01:37:07

Yeah. The church wasn't doing it. I don't know. I've been hearing the gospel preached at my church. I've been getting

01:37:12

Word and Sacrament. I've had my sins forgiven. Yeah. To say to the

01:37:18

Church of Christ, you haven't been doing it, but we're going to do it now, because we're better than the church has ever been before.

01:37:25

I know he doesn't mean it that way, but it really comes across that way. It really comes across as, we're the super Christians now.

01:37:32

We've got it figured out. Everyone else has been wrong up until this point. And you've got to make a decision to become a super Christian.

01:37:38

Yeah, and you've got to muster it up. Muster it, man. Muster it. Okay, let's go. Disciples make disciples.

01:37:44

It's our moment for that. It's our moment for that. Our moment. What does that mean?

01:37:52

All right, let's keep going. It's our moment to cry out to God for a fresh revival in the church, and to pray that that will become an awakening in society.

01:38:02

Crying out for fresh revival is not the same as repenting of your sins. This is a strange ending.

01:38:10

Well, and this is one of the things that confused me for decades. It was when people like Dr.

01:38:16

Brown here would say, God wants this revival to happen. He really, really wants it. He wants it so bad, but he's not doing it.

01:38:23

No, not until you get your act together, man. You've got to be desperate enough. God's going, no, you're not desperate enough for revival yet.

01:38:31

And so you think, well, I'm desperate. He's desperate. Oh, wait, maybe Becky's not desperate enough.

01:38:37

Come on, Becky. Get more desperate. Get more desperate, would you, Becky? Because God's got his arms crossed.

01:38:43

To me, underlying all of this is this inherent, well, it's an implication that the

01:38:49

Bible is not enough and the church is not enough. And it makes people very dissatisfied. So he preaches the law.

01:38:56

The gospel is only used to say what it's not really, what it isn't. He recognizes that we're declared righteous because scripture says that, but then that doesn't show up in his understanding of sanctification.

01:39:08

And now the solution, after he's preached all this law, is we've got to whip people up. You've got to make the decision.

01:39:14

You've got to, you've got to, you've got to. Yeah, and there's another 30 minutes here, or 25 minutes before this ends. Oh, I know.

01:39:20

So I'm going to drop the playhead, and we'll drop it at various places to see how this progresses, because at some point,

01:39:28

Todd White goes into a screech mode. So now we're singing.

01:39:37

Notice how he was swaying back and forth there a little bit. All right,

01:39:57

I'm going to fast forward a little bit more. Let's see how he's doing here, because he's still trying to... He's not very good at whipping them up.

01:40:04

I would say there's some mediocre whipping. He was much better in the 90s. Got it, yeah. And so the

01:40:10

Lord has compassion on those who fear him. It says he remembers our frame.

01:40:17

He knows we're dust. And as far as the east is from the west, so far as he removed our sins from us.

01:40:28

All right, so we've got something like the gospel here. All right. I've had times as a believer where I just felt stuck, and there was flesh in my life, and I knew it was wrong, and I cried out,

01:40:40

God, demonstrate the power of the resurrection in my life. Shouldn't you be praying,

01:40:46

God, have mercy on me? What does he mean by praying, God, demonstrate the power of the resurrection in my life?

01:40:52

This is the encounter gospel. If I can't demonstrate the resurrection power by producing miracles for people, then the

01:41:01

Word of God is not sufficient. Just giving people the gospel message is not enough. This is going to create despair, man, or bonafide wackerdoodle people are going to think that they're pulling this off.

01:41:11

However, if you're the lead guitarist, this is the best part of being in the band. You get to just play these really beautiful licks while the people are swaying back and forth.

01:41:19

This is what I used to do. I was the lead guitar guy. You turn the delay way up, you get that nice echoey sound. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:25

It's really ethereal. This is just another religion, and it's up to me to just make it happen, and I'm stuck, and I don't know what to do, and I can't get out.

01:41:34

It's kind of like that sound that was created originally by The Edge from U2. Oh, The Edge. He's the guy that really created that sound for sure.

01:41:42

Yeah, and then what was the name of that band 10, 15 years ago that really kind of picked up on that? The British band,

01:41:48

Delirious. Yeah, and there was some others as well. Yeah, there was a bunch. Demonstrate the power, the death and resurrection of Jesus in me.

01:41:58

Demonstrate that this is a living faith and a living God. Demonstrate, demonstrate. How about forgive, forgive?

01:42:06

That's the thing that's missing here. Just another religion. It's a relationship.

01:42:13

Okay, I'm going to fast forward here. Todd White now, he takes the stage because Michael Brown wasn't good at his frothy, foamy thing.

01:42:21

He did the best he could, Chris. He's getting old. He doesn't fit in skinny jeans, and it doesn't work out like that.

01:42:26

So let's see what Todd White does. What about America? And he said, well, in Africa right now, the harvest is ripe.

01:42:34

And I said, the harvest is equally ripe in America. Our hearts have just become hard towards it.

01:42:42

So I'd love to know that there are other people that feel in their heart towards America.

01:42:52

America, America. Okay, I'm not sure how we got to that. Let me fast forward a little bit more. Here we go. Let revival break out.

01:43:04

Why aren't they repenting of their sins? They did that once, Chris. They made their decision. Now it's time to make it happen.

01:43:14

Oh, man. And then now the lights, the stage lights, that's an expensive rig, man.

01:43:26

It is. I hate to say it. I've been to concerts for secular bands who were touring the country who had less expensive kits than that.

01:43:38

So I'm pretty sure that the whole megachurch movement is keeping the Guitar Center alive.

01:43:44

Hey, you know, I have a whole playlist of videos on my YouTube channel, and it's behind the scenes videos for people who are like the techie guys in churches.

01:43:53

There's a channel where a guy goes and interviews behind the scenes at Elevation Church or behind the scenes at Bethel, and they show you their incredible mixing boards and their lights.

01:44:03

It's a multi -million dollar business. And there are entire consulting firms in these major cities all over the country.

01:44:10

And their job is to keep these churches supplied with the best high tech stagecraft available to make the

01:44:18

Holy Spirit show up, basically. Wow. And everybody afterwards is going to go, oh, man, couldn't you feel the anointing and it was a manufactured anointing.

01:44:51

It was. I know it sounds really harsh, but I was the guy in the band. I did this stuff.

01:44:57

And it feels great until you think about what's actually taking place. What's really taking place is a music band is doing what they do.

01:45:05

They're pumping you up. They're increasing in intensity. And then there's a guy yelling on stage. It's manipulation.

01:45:11

This is not the Holy Spirit. I agree. I agree. I think we kind of made the point.

01:45:17

So we got la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. And some of it was pretty legitimate law from Michael Brown.

01:45:24

And there were a lot of things we could even say amen to, and we did. But the solution wasn't a crucified and risen

01:45:31

Savior, repenting and trusting in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, bearing fruit in keeping with repentance.

01:45:36

At the end, it was praying for encounter and decreeing and declaring revival. And are you desperate enough?

01:45:44

Yeah. Um, I'll never be desperate. If God is waiting on me to be desperate enough, then

01:45:50

I'm going to die before God moves, because I'll never be desperate enough. This is where we need to have a

01:45:56

Christ -centered theology. Yeah. And I know that Todd White and Dr. Michael Brown would never say this.

01:46:03

They probably don't even have the thought in their mind, but they don't have a Christ -centered theology, because they're constantly referring to themselves and mustering up themselves.

01:46:11

And then the people listening to them are being told all the stuff you're supposed to do. And it's so freeing when we just tell people, hey,

01:46:20

Christ did it all. Right. The thing is, is that Christ was desperate enough.

01:46:26

Yes. And Christ was committed enough. He leaned in enough. He's the one who sacrificed so that we don't.

01:46:37

Right. He surrendered it all. He literally surrendered as much as can be. So, it really bothers me when

01:46:44

I hear people say, you need to be completely surrendered. I'm like, okay, what if you're 99 % surrendered? Does that tie the hands of God?

01:46:51

Yeah, well, me, but is 15 % okay? The thing is, is that because we are holy, because we are forgiven, because we are covered in the righteousness of Christ, we are already holy.

01:47:06

Now, then, we offer ourselves as living sacrifices, not for our salvation, but for our neighbor's sake.

01:47:11

Yes. Because we are forgiven. That's Romans 12. But you don't get to Romans 12 without going through 1 through 11 first, which so beautifully and richly and multifacetedly lays out that we are forgiven, that we are saved, that this is all done as a result of what

01:47:30

Christ has done. So, what I found is, is that the gospel only shows up anecdotally and misapplied, and almost kind of held up like...

01:47:41

I hate to say it, like it was a carrot that you can't ever get a hold of, you know? Right. And so, the solution is, you just gotta...

01:47:51

That's not a solution, that's a solution for despair. Yep, that's a burden. Yep. Well, I gotta tell you,

01:47:57

Steve, I blame you for this episode of Fighting for the Faith, but it's a necessary conversation to have, because people who attend these types of churches, they know something's wrong, but they can't quite put their finger on it, and the difficulty is figuring out what the thing is that it's missing.

01:48:14

The answer to the thing that's missing is the gospel! Christ died for our sins, and then real call to really repent, and to really believe that Jesus has died for your sins here.

01:48:25

It's as simple as that. Yeah, and you sit there and go, oh yeah. At times, when

01:48:30

I used to do the podcast, I would point out that in churches like this, it's as if they have

01:48:36

Jesus hogtied in the back room, and they pull Him out every now and then, see, we've got

01:48:41

Him, here He is, and they shove Him back in there, and they don't proclaim Him in a meaningful way.

01:48:48

It's very odd to me how this all works, but... Hopefully, this has cleared up at least something of what is going on.

01:48:56

I know this is a pretty complex subject, and there's a lot of layers to it, and there's a lot of history in theology, and specifically,

01:49:03

I mean, history of the church. Ideas come from someplace, and until you understand those ideas, and there's some good and bad in a lot of ideas, it's not like we're saying everything is completely bad.

01:49:13

I think we've made that clear, but if you don't have clarity, and you're not Christ -centered and gospel -centered, that lack of specific clarity does lead you completely away from that solid gospel message.

01:49:27

Right, and I don't think it's a coincidence that God the Holy Spirit had the Apostle Paul pen the words in one of his pastoral epistles, that a pastor is one who is to study and show himself approved as a workman who need not blush with embarrassment, who can rightly divide the word of truth.

01:49:44

That's how that works out, to rightly cut the word of truth. And so in rightly dividing it, that requires you to understand how the law works, how the gospel works, how they work together, what one accomplishes, and what one is incapable of accomplishing, and vice versa.

01:50:02

But when you muddle law and gospel, and you always poke and prod and cajole and try to provoke somebody to the point of making decisions and trying harder, you are necessarily working in the category of law, not the gospel, and that's not the solution.

01:50:20

You're not the solution to your problem. Christ is. So, all right, well, very good.

01:50:27

Hey, I'll end it. Steve, thank you for your time. Sure, thanks for having me again. This is really fun. I really appreciate your friendship, and I've been ending my videos for a while now by saying, read your

01:50:37

Bible, go to church, be free. Exactly. And I think people have been appreciating that, because it's good to try to summarize what it is we're trying to do, and for me,

01:50:47

I think that summarizes it pretty well. Yeah, all right, well, very good. I kind of stole that from you somewhere anyway, so.

01:50:53

Yeah, I steal things from me too sometimes, if I forgot it and I said it.

01:51:00

All right, let me sign off with everybody here. I'm going to mute you so we don't get any cookie crunching sounds real quick, but let me pull this up, and we'll hide that.

01:51:10

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01:51:21

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01:51:32

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01:51:43

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01:51:50

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01:51:58

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