Current Events Today on A Brief Skype DL

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:39

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're going to try to do something via Skype today. And I realize, trust me, that you're not supposed to put a bright window in the background.

00:51

I understand that. It just so happens that I'm using my iPad. And the only place where all the angles meet up, and I don't have to hold it and do the

01:01

Blair Witch Project type thing, is where it's sitting right now. So nobody needs to see me anyways.

01:07

I can just sort of disappear into the bright. It's a shame you can't see through the window. Actually, beautiful mountains back there, which you cannot see on this at all for some reason.

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But there's a beautiful mountain range back there. And it's just all white, unfortunately, from the perspective that we can see right here.

01:26

But we wanted to sneak something in. And it is going to be sort of snuck in, because I feel great.

01:35

I don't ever look great, but I feel great. It's just that my sinuses have gone insane.

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So I'm going to cough and sputter and probably not sound really good, but I feel fine. So for some of you, that's a real bummer.

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But anyway, I am up in Nevada. And we've got a wedding coming up this weekend.

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And we're setting up for it right now. And that's why I am where I am. But a number of you know that on Tuesday evening, we had an interesting discussion in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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And I think there are a few people who are wondering why I would engage in that particular discussion.

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Because obviously, I don't accept every invitation and challenge to debate.

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I mean, I think we probably get multiple hundreds of challenges to debate every year.

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And I pick and choose what we did. And that wasn't obviously a debate. There was no moderator.

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There was no thesis. There was a subject, the subject of modalism in the

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Trinity. So why did I do that? Well, Salt Lake City is one of the most unusual spiritual places in the world.

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And it's not all that surprising when you think about it in light of the nature of Mormonism.

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But especially over the past number of years, past number of decades, Mormonism has been changing.

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I remember very clearly standing at the, that was the south gate of the

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Mormon temple. This was back when the conference took place in the tabernacle before they built the big meeting building on the north side of North Temple.

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And so everybody had to walk through one of three gates. Well, there actually was an underground passage you could take from the office building, but only apostles could do that.

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And even then, sometimes the apostles walked through there. I remember very clearly seeing a guy coming once.

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I passed out a tract to an apostle once. And then once I saw a guy coming, and I could tell from a long ways away he was wearing a rush limbaugh tie, because I was wearing a rush limbaugh tie.

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And in fact, my son was with me, and he was about 10 or 11, somewhere around there.

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And he had one of those 14 inch junior rush limbaugh ties. And so it's funny, those things are so bright.

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They're sort of like a coochie sweater. They're so bright, I could tell what it was before I could even see the guy's face.

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Well, it turned out that it was Senator, who's the senator that's retiring right now from Utah?

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We have a studio audience, and so I'm going to pull upon their collected wisdom. Who is the guy that just announced that he's rich?

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Orrin Hatch, James. Orrin Hatch. I knew it was Orrin something, but I was going to say Orrin Hyde. I was going to do one of the

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Mormon apostles or something. Orrin Hatch, that's right. Lo and behold, I pass out this tract into this very well -dressed man wearing a rush limbaugh tie.

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Who was it? It was Orrin Hatch. And so we've been coming up here for a very, very long time.

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In fact, my son, Josh, I'll go ahead and tell the story for a particular reason, given what's going on this weekend.

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But that first day that he went up there to pass out tracts with us, he was standing a little bit ahead of me.

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I was keeping an eye on him. He was a little guy at that point in time. And so I was keeping an eye on him.

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And I see this guy come up to him. And I had showed him how to pass out tracts and how not to get in somebody's way, but make sure that they didn't have to really go out of their way to get the tracts from you.

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And don't just stand there and show it to him or something like that, because they're not going to take it. But there's a way to actually distribute more tracts.

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And so he did it right, tried to hand this guy a tract. And the guy takes it, and he stops, and so I'm sort of watching.

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And he looks at who wrote it, and he folds it up, and he starts reaching for my son.

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So I start moving. He reaches, and he pulls. He's wearing a white shirt, just like a little teeny more missionary.

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And he pulls the front of the pocket open and stuffs that tract in his pocket right as I get there and then just blows by him.

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And I remember Josh turned around, and he looks at me. His eyes are real big, like, did

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I do something wrong? And I'm like, congratulations, son. You've gotten your first major rejection out of the way.

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The second one will be easier than that, the third one. By the fourth, fifth one, you won't even notice it anymore. It's just sort of how that goes.

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But anyways, we used to come up to Salt Lake City all the time. I mean, for 18 years, twice a year, first weekend in April, first weekend in October, we came up to Salt Lake City.

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That's a lot of trips to Salt Lake City. At first, we drove it all the time.

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And in fact, the first few times, we drove up overnight and then passed out tracts all day and then drove home.

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That was just dumb dangerous. I mean, that was just, you're obviously, like, 21 years old when you do something like that.

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And once you get to be about 23, the body's like, ah, that's not a good thing, you know? And so we started staying overnight and started doing it better.

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And then by the end, we were flying the last few times we did it. But anyway,

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I remember this guy very, very clearly. It was at the

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South Gate, which is the busiest gate. And he was a

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Mormon. And we were having a conversation. He was saying, he says, this church is changing. This church is changing.

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And I'm sort of like, well, how is it changing? He says, let me tell you something. Within 20 years, there's gonna be a cross.

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And he was pointing up at the Salt Lake Temple, up at the spires. There's gonna be a cross on top of that steeple up there.

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And I was like, I sort of doubt that. But it was, it has been very interesting to see just how much the

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Mormon church is changing. And many people are leaving the Mormon church as a result.

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But unfortunately, similar to what happened in 1974, 1975, with the failed prophecy with Jehovah's Witnesses, the vast majority of the over one million people that left

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Jehovah's Witnesses in the following years ended up as the spiritually abused.

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They never joined another church. They remained convinced of what they had been told by the

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Watchtower Society, that all of Christendom was wrong. But that left them with no place to go.

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And when you leave because you're, not because you've heard the truth, but because you've just gotten burned by a religion, those folks can end up in all sorts of different movements.

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And today, in Salt Lake City, there is a little bit of everything.

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It is an amazing, amazing place. And so for a number of years, we've been trying to help encourage and support

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Christian works up there. And the work that we've known the longest is

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Christ Presbyterian Church out in Magna. It was originally in Salt Lake. Jason Wallace is the pastor.

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If you look back at the old, old, old debates that we did on Mormonism in Salt Lake City, Jason was almost always the moderator of the debate.

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He's the one that put all the time into setting it up. And he's just been faithfully ministering up there for a very, very long time.

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And so we've wanted to come up and be an encouragement to him and to the work up there.

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And that's really one of the reasons why I came up was to do exactly that.

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I see the sun is catching up with me here. I'll soon have a glow, which is sort of natural for me anyways.

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I may have to move it eventually to try to avoid that. But anyway, so that's the whole reason.

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Sean McCraney, for a long time, did a program pretty much coming from a

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Calvary Chapel background as a former Mormon. And built up an audience, but then started, notice, just say it and look what happens.

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I did that with my mind. No, I didn't do that with my mind. Anyway, that does help some.

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The actual part that's still hitting me is still hitting me, but that's okay, that's good enough. Anybody gets back there near those curtains, it's gonna be right in the middle of the camera shot.

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So wave if you go there. Anyway, see, there comes the cop.

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Anyway, Sean started getting into some really interesting stuff.

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And if you listened to the program, you saw not only the

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Trinitarian issues regarding modalism, but when we started trying to dig a little bit deeper, what you ended up hearing was full preterism, hyper -preterism or full preterism.

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The idea that Christ returned in AD 70, the resurrection took place, we're in the eternal state, and there is no church, there are no ordinances, there's no coming of Christ to look forward to.

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And I was unaware, to be perfectly honest with you, of the fact that this perspective included, for example, denying that Jesus continues to have his resurrected body.

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And I'll be honest with you, I'm not exactly sure. I've been told by those who know that has something to do with how this system holds together their exegesis of 1

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Corinthians 15 or something, but you saw a lot of that stuff coming up during the question and answer period.

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So I appreciate the very kind comments that I have gotten from folks about the dialogue.

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A lot of folks didn't understand what Sean was saying, and I didn't understand a number of things that Sean was saying, to be very honest with you.

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But the most common statement, the most common thing I've heard is someone saying, how are you so patient in frustrating situations like that?

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And I was mentioning to someone just recently that the very first debate that I did,

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August of 1990, Long Beach, California, Jerry Matitix was my opponent.

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As soon as he started going ad hominem, started, in essence, engaging in cheap debating tricks, which

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Jerry has done for a very, very long time. I did not know how

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I would necessarily respond to that. The only thing I had done, even slightly like a debate, before that debate in August of 90, was the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald as a senior in high school.

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We did the trial that never got to take place, and I was the prosecuting attorney.

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And the next nine people on the honor roll, so I was number one, and then two through 10 were on the defense.

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So it was sort of a, I don't know, you get senioritis, you get bored, and it was something to do.

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And that was the closest to a type of debate, forensic -type situation

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I'd ever been in. And so I remember, after my opening statement, when

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Jerry launched into his stuff, I remember a strange calm coming over me.

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And I remember thinking to myself, if someone has to start misrepresenting what

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I've said, then I'm winning. And I don't wanna get in the way of the truth that obviously is being presented.

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And so most people, when that happens, they get angry or upset or emotional or agitated, start speaking faster.

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When that happens to me, I get more calm and more focused. It's just the way

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God wired me. It's just the way it is. It drives a lot of people absolutely insane, but it's just the way that I work.

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And obviously, in hindsight, I now look back and I see, man, that's really, really important.

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I think anybody with self -discipline can learn to do that. But people say,

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I just don't know how you can be so patient. And see, I wouldn't think of myself. As I look back at my conversation with Sean McCraney, that's not one of them that I would go, yeah,

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I really had to be very patient. What I had to be was very focused in trying to figure out exactly how to respond to such scatteredness.

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And I said to him at some point, I said, Sean, you're a walking, the chair here is about to fall apart.

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You are a walking contradiction. And he embraced that. And that's part of his sort of postmodern, artistic anarchist type thing.

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But as I pointed out, Sean, that's not a good thing. That's not a sound biblical thing. So the real challenge in that conversation, other than, look,

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I had the opportunity of making a strong biblical presentation on the existence of the son as a divine person in eternity past.

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That was vitally important to do. But the rest of it was just trying to reason with Sean and trying to help his audience.

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And so, I don't consider it a matter of having been patient or anything like that.

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It wasn't, I didn't view it in that way. I had an opportunity. There's a real need in Salt Lake City.

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For some reason, a lot of Mormons, for example, watch that program. And so my hope would be that in some way, shape or form, the

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Lord would use that. And some people have asked, would you do something like that again?

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Yeah, I would. Some people tried to drag up the issue of Calvinism.

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I think it would be worthwhile to present the truth of what scripture says concerning God's sovereignty and things like that.

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So who knows what the future might hold. But it was an opportunity. It was an unusual opportunity.

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I wasn't the first one to do it. Matt Slick has been up there. That one didn't end real well. I'm sure Matt would say that.

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Rob Bowman's been up there. But for some reason,

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I can talk with folks in a way that sometimes is more helpful than somebody else.

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And vice versa. There are certain people that I have a hard time talking with. So anyway, it was what it was, and it's available.

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And we'll see what the Lord does with it. I do wanna comment.

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Honestly, I only heard about this yesterday. I have not even turned a television on.

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I drove from Salt Lake here to Gardnerville, Nevada.

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And that's an eight -hour drive. And there's some beautiful mountains along the way, but that's about all there is along that way.

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There are some very, very, very, very, very small little cities until you get to Reno, which is at least a little bit more than a bump on the map.

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Long salt flats, which were rather interesting to drive across. But I have only heard and read a little bit about what happened in Florida and the shooting at the high school.

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And having done this program, remembering very clearly, doing a program,

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I believe it was on September 12th or September 13th of 2001 after the

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World Trade Center attacks and the discussion we had at that time,

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I've lost track of how many times we have addressed a topic relating to a mass shooting, a bombing, a terrorist activity, just heinous activities of mankind.

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And the farther we get down the road into secularism, the more the response is almost inhuman.

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And when I say inhuman, there was a day when the first thought across anyone's mind, pretty much anywhere in the world, at an activity of this would have been to be astounded at the evil that could prompt such behavior.

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An absolute astonishment at evil. There would have been commentary as to how we can respond properly to such wickedness, to such evil, to such sin.

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That of course is only present in a small amount of the commentary on this subject, unfortunately today.

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Instead, the secular world looks at something like this.

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And instead of considering the creator, instead of considering the heart of man, what you have is a ridiculous psychological analysis while I'm actually starting to reflect off the camera now.

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All right, all right, all right. Oh, that's even worse. There we go. Oh, that's even worse than that.

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Okay, we're doing the Blair Witch Project now. Okay, we gotta get out of the sun because it's coming right through the window.

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But I've got to keep an eye on the studio audience because they're a little bit of a rowdy group, so. But that's, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

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Oh, that's not gonna work, is it? No, I don't wanna do the nasal shot either. That's no fun either.

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So I'm just gonna, there we go. Is there a, you're looking at a music stand?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do that. And I think

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I've destroyed the pastor's chair. I hate to, it's, well, I realize it's been like that, yeah.

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Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. Oh, there's one right there I could have grabbed. I didn't even think about that. Now this is perfect.

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It's perfect. And we can go like this and like that.

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Eh, it's good enough. Can't, I'm gonna have to look up at the, you know, check on the, check on the miscreants in the other room there, but there we go.

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There, I can see them a little better now. All right, what was I saying? Oh, yes, we were talking about, well, there's a window back there.

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Oh, well, at least the sun's not coming through quite so badly. What we're, what

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I'm hearing, at least the few things that I've seen has been a tremendous, you know, obviously we all need to be put in a bubble and the idea of protecting ourselves is just simply immediately dismissed and responsibility, things like that.

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We don't even have to think about anything like that. We're all looking to the government to save us from evil men.

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But we don't, we can't talk about evil men. We live in a day when that which is good is called evil.

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I now left my phone over there, but I'll grab it here in a second because the next story

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I think that I wanna cover illustrates the fact that we are calling that which is evil good and good evil.

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But I just wanna submit that a culture that cannot speak with clarity concerning what is evil, what is good, what is virtuous and have a meaningful foundation for that.

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The same type of culture that no longer knows what a man is or a woman is, that culture is under the judgment of God.

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And it is a rare thing any longer for Americans to think like Americans once thought.

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And what I mean by that is during the Civil War, there is a tremendous amount of discussion about the national sins that had brought this tremendous calamity upon us.

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And even into the last century, there would be open discussion and it was not rebuked.

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It was not considered insanity. There would be open discussion about national repentance.

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When the pandemic of flu struck, when World War I strikes, when national tragedies take place, it was considered absolutely appropriate to speak of such things as repentance, of a national repentance, of the people as a whole repenting of the nation's sins.

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That is so rare today. You might still hear it in some quarters, but in the real national dialogue and amongst national leaders, you don't hear it.

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And so the biblical response to such things cannot be brought to bear by the vast majority of those who have bought into a secular worldview or have created a

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Christianized secularism in essence, where everything, God doesn't have a plan that he's working out.

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There is no such thing as a meaningful application of God's law to societies or anything along those lines.

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And as a result, I hear a lot of partially

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Christian responses, but I don't hear a lot of fully Christian responses.

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We obviously mourn for the loss of life. We obviously, any one of us who has children cannot hardly even conceive of what it must be like for this type of massive loss of life.

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But that must be joined to an understanding that we have to have a message for our society.

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And it can't just be, well, our hearts break with you. Okay, yes. I'm sure there are

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Christians who lost loved ones in this event, no question about it.

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And you stand beside them, but it keeps happening. And many people are really confused as to why it keeps happening.

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And I would simply suggest that until we can talk about the evil of man's heart, until we can talk about the restraint that God exercises by his spirit as a blessing upon a nation that seeks that blessing, and this nation is not seeking that blessing, then we are only gonna have a partial response and not a full response when things like this take place.

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If we want to have the blessing of God's protection and restraint against the evil of men, that is a blessing that can be only requested by a repentant people.

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And the sad fact of the matter is, I know evangelical seminaries today that in their teaching their men and how they're to preach and how they're evangelized, one of the words they are told not to utilize is the word repent.

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It doesn't seem to resonate with the modern man.

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Well, since the modern man is nothing but an animal, since the modern man has no creator, since the modern man is his own law,

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I mean, seriously, may I suggest this last story, and hold on just one second here.

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This is just an amazing story that I saw this morning and I wanted to address it, it's stunning.

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It was found on the LifeSite News website.

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Ohio government authorities forced parents to give up legal custody of their daughter after the mother and father said they opposed the girl's decision to identify as a boy and transition to being male.

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The Hamilton County Job and Family Services took legal custody of the teenage girl, 17, who according to court records suffers from gender dysphoria.

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Suffers? Hmm, I understand how someone could suffer from gender dysphoria because it is a mental problem.

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I mean, but haven't we gotten to the point now where you're not supposed to say that? You don't suffer from it, it's not a disease, it's not a sickness, it's just who you are.

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And don't we vote as women of the year, former men's gold medal winners from the 1974

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Olympics? I didn't hear anybody saying that that guy is suffering.

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But anyway, the teen is currently living with her maternal grandparents. The girl's name, the names of her parents are under court seal.

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The minor was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria after being hospitalized in 2016.

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Doctors decided that because she wants to identify as a male, she should be given testosterone and sex change drugs.

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But the girl's parents objected, arguing they did not think that such treatment was in their daughter's best interest. A juvenile court judge will determine if parental rights for the minor should be entirely stripped.

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At stake are parental rights and who will make medical decisions as the legal guardian for the youngster is a decision expected by Friday.

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Pro -transgender doctors pressured the court in closing arguments, saying a ruling must come quickly, claiming the girl needed opposite sex hormones or else she may kill herself.

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Medical witnesses said the parents' rejection of their daughter's decision to identify as a male has made her suicidal.

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They termed the girl's circumstances a life or death situation. Now, the fact of the matter is that every study that has been done has demonstrated beyond all question that people who try to quote -unquote transition, first of all, it can't be done.

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It's not possible. You can mutilate a body and every study has indicated much increased cancer rates and lack of health when you try to take a body that is genetically female and make it male or vice versa.

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That is a given. That's not even arguable. You may not be able to say it any longer, but it's not arguable.

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That's a fact. But even with that, the suicide rate amongst those who have gone through everything, they've done the hormones, they've done the operations, they've done everything that modern science can do, the suicide rate amongst those people skyrockets for one obvious reason.

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It doesn't work. And so here you have, there is a reason why the secular left has focused upon the universities and the judicial branch, the legal profession.

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You all know about the law school in Canada that has basically been, its graduates can no longer practice law because it's a

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Christian law school. You see, once you have the judiciary fully committed to a secular worldview, then it doesn't matter if you have a constitution.

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It doesn't matter what your legislatures do because any law that is passed by a legislature, a

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Congress, a Senate, a Parliament, whatever, any law is subject to the interpretation of the judiciary.

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So as long as you control the judges, you control the society. And that is why the left was so just outrageously upset at Hillary Clinton's loss in the

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United States was because there was an open seat. And once you have that magical five, and they have 4 .5

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right now with Kennedy, but all they needed to do was to have Hillary Clinton put yet another leftist socialist ideologue as Obama had done on the court, and it's done.

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It doesn't, no longer is there anything even semi relevant to the phrase constitutional because what the constitution meant, what the authors intended is irrelevant to these people.

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The constitution is a living document, you see. And since it's a living document, then we can make it say whatever we want it to say.

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And so once you have a society that has so elevated human autonomy, then that's what this is.

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You need to understand that this young lady who wants to identify as a male and is saying she's suicidal, that is rebellion.

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That is a 17 -year -old doing what the two -year -old does when they don't get to eat their chocolate chip cookie before they eat their meat.

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When they lay there on the floor, wailing and screaming and gnashing their teeth, this 17 -year -old's doing the exact same thing, but now they're old enough to try to kill themselves.

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It is rebellion with a capital R, and it is not the parents doing the right thing and saying, we don't think you should mutilate our daughter's body.

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You know, maybe she someday might want to have children. So that testosterone thing and mutilating the body, maybe not a good idea.

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They are the ones who have her best interest in mind. These quote -unquote doctors do not have her best interest in mind.

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And they should recognize it's not the parents that have made her suicidal. It is the society and the absolute rebellion of that society in telling her that it's okay for her to think that she's a male, rather than saying, honey, you're a female.

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That's how God made you. You're not gonna find happiness in anything other than recognizing the gifts and the beauty of what

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God has made you. Oh no, we can't tell anybody that. And so we're gonna blame the parents and say the parents are suicidal.

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And so are making her suicidal. So therefore we're gonna take away parental rights. If this stands, if this stands, then will the next one be a 14 -year -old and then a 12 -year -old and then a 10 -year -old?

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And it will not just be transgenderism, but homosexuality will then be, are you properly instructing your children in the proper way of viewing the world?

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And therefore, if you teach your children that all of the evidence we have points to an intelligent designer and to the creation of the world, then you lose your parental rights and they get shipped off to a state correctional educational institution?

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Already happening in Europe in places. It's happened before. But this is one of the reasons why in the modern context, you no longer have an emphasis upon history.

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Because if young people really understood that a very short period of time ago, very short period of time ago, all of this was already here.

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It was in East Germany. It was in the Soviet Union. The whole concept of socialism, why don't we just take all the socialists and ship them down to Venezuela just for a while.

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Let them try to eat for a few weeks. It might cure them, but no, they don't care. This has always, this has been around.

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And I said to a friend of mine, and he said, his response to me is interesting. I said to a friend of mine, I said, sometime when you're in Berlin, you're gonna have to go visit the

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Stasi prison. And his response was, I've seen Auschwitz and I've seen all these places and I didn't get a chance to respond to him and say, yeah, those things are important to see too.

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But what you need to understand about the Stasi prison in East Germany, they basically, the guards basically walked away and just let everybody out.

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When East Germany just sort of, it collapsed, but it sort of did it with a whimper.

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It was just sort of like, well, I guess the wall's falling down and so I guess we just need to walk away.

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And it wasn't just a, there wasn't a violent revolution or something. It just sort of happened overnight.

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And so a lot of people that had been in there just walk out and they can tell all the stories. And it was the psychological torture of the

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Stasi prison that I was referring to. It was the fact that what they wanted to do, well, it was 1984.

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It's what it was. There was, what was that, room 102 or 107, I forget what the number was, down at the end of the hall in 1984.

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That's what it was. You were kept in isolation. And when you took the tour, not only were these dark, just dreary cells, but when you were brought out of your cell, along the walls, they would have literally traffic lights so that when you were brought, the only person you would see would be your guard and then your counselor.

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The individual who was meant to break you was meant to make you think as the state wanted you to think.

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And so they recognized that if for even a moment you would see another prisoner, it could undo week's worth of their torture of your mind.

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And so they actually had lights so that you would know, oh, there's another prisoner being moved, so I have to stay in this corridor.

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And then the light would change and then you could go through just to make sure that the only people you saw was that guard and then that one person that became your connection to the world who was in fact your torturer.

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That was back in, well, that obviously ended in the 80s. You realize the kind of technology we have now in comparison to what they had back then?

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It's frightening to even think about it. It's frightening to even think about it. And we have people teaching in our universities who are telling everybody, socialism has never really been tried completely.

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Well, how many people did communism and socialism kill in the last century, like 120 million?

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So if it's done completely, does that become 240 million? A lot of you saw this sort of viral video that the guy from, he used to live in Russia under the

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USSR made of these two communists, these two 19 year old communists somewhere in the

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United States, just glibly repeating all the idiotic lies that have ever been told.

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And him going, you don't have any idea what you're talking about. These are people who not only don't know history, but the history that they've been told is a lie, just a royal lie.

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And so this is what we're seeing in our society and we're seeing the results of it.

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We are seeing the results of it. So we can't talk, sadly, about the real solutions for what's going on.

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We can't, when we call for our society to repent, when we call for, how can you talk to our society today about national repentance?

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How can it even be understood in light of the abandonment of the

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Christian worldview and the fact that even the Christian church in our day rarely functions upon a distinctly

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Christian worldview. I mean, when we start talking about things like God's sovereignty and God's holiness and the justice of God and things like that, how many

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Christians get incredibly uncomfortable because they don't really have a formed

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Christian worldview. They have a secular worldview that's been religionized. It's had a layer of religion sort of slathered on top of it.

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And so if the church is in that state, then is it much of a surprise that the church then cannot proclaim to the world what the world really needs to hear in regards to the nature of man's evil, evil, sin, wickedness, and how we are to live in light of that.

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I mean, when you have the idea that all your fellow men are just wonderful, wonderful people, if they would just have the proper job or the proper education and stuff like that, the

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Christian worldview says, when you encounter a wonderful, wonderful man, thank God for his common grace that has restrained the evil that is inherent in the heart of even that wonderful, wonderful man.

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That's so depressing. Look at history, people. Well, it's true. It's the way it is, but we can't talk about that.

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And as is always said at this point in time, we say, well, the change needs to start with the church.

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Change needs to start with us. But there are times when Brother Piper says things that we all sort of go, eh.

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But a lot of times that people go, eh, at what John Piper says. It's when he says something that is radically

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Christian, but likewise radically opposed to the secular worldview.

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That's really when people go, where'd you get that? And I've disagreed with him on certain things, but a lot of times that people go, eh, it's because it exposes the fact that even as Christians, their worldview is pretty much a secular worldview with some religiosity slathered on it.

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Christianity doesn't work that way. Eventually that Christian frosting is gonna fall off and it's not really gonna taste very good when you bite into it either.

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So just some thoughts on what has taken place there in that situation.

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And again, I have not seen a, I have not turned a television on since, oh, since I saw, what was that thing?

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In the Winter Olympics, to be honest with you, the one thing

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I really enjoy watching, what is that thing where you ski and then shoot? Whatever that's called, skiing and shooting.

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I don't know what it is, but I am just so massively impressed by anybody who can ski, ski, ski, ski, stop, sit down, control your breath and shoot at targets.

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And it's like 12 degrees outside, you know? I mean, salute those folks.

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And so I did turn the TV on just long enough when I got to Salt Lake to see a little bit of coverage of the

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Winter Olympics, that's all I saw. I didn't even see who won, which is sort of a bummer. You start watching it and then you don't even know who won.

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But I've not seen any of the reports or anything else.

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I don't know what the updates were today or anything like that. It's just that it's another one of those situations where I can tell you what's being said.

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And until there's a change in our society, until God is merciful to us or brings judgment so that we can then again start talking about seeking his face and seeking his blessing.

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I know the text, I know the text, but the problem is it says if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, will confess their sins, will call upon me, then

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I will turn, I will heal their land. That's a specific promise to people who bore the covenant name of Israel.

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Now I think you can extend that promise out to if God blesses a people, to where they would nationally repent of their sins,

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God will bless them and heal their land. But I see no evidence whatsoever of a national repentance going on around me.

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I don't see it. What I do see is more and more open, clear rebellion taking place.

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And so our prayer, as remember what I said, that's sort of funny thing to say.

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Again, we're talking 17, almost 17 years ago, but I have no reason to change what

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I said 17 years ago after the attacks of 9 -11. When we say

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God bless America as Christians, the only way we can really say that meaningfully is to say

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God bless America with heartfelt soul shattering repentance.

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And that's not just true of America. That's true of any Western society that is currently running with hands over ears, eyes closed toward destruction and away from the very foundations that made these cultures great.

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Yes, there are people who are funneling money into foundations to help push us toward destruction.

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All of that is true, but we will not see a change until there is a revival of true godliness and an understanding of who we are as creatures of God in light of his law.

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So with that, Rich, I have covered what I wanted to cover briefly today and have managed to do so without coughing and hacking completely all over everybody.

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And so I figure it's best to quit while you're ahead at that point. And I am gonna need my voice a little bit more.

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My plan right now is Lord willing to get back to Phoenix early enough on Tuesday.

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I will be driving to Phoenix on Tuesday to get there early enough to try to do a program.

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Obviously a lot of things could get in the way, anything from a road closure to mechanical issues or whatever else, but we'll try to do something and we'll try to get back to the church history series and some other things that I have queued up there that just because I was using the iPad and wasn't in the office, what

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I would normally do with this last 10 or 12 minutes would be to go ahead and jump over to do that. Problem is my notes are on what

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I'm using to connect up. So I appreciate Rich staying late at the office to do this.

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Hopefully these comments have been useful to you and hopefully the dialogue with Sean McCraney on Tuesday evening was likewise a blessing to you.

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And the Lord willing, certainly appreciate prayers for safe travel, the Lord willing, we'll see you next

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Tuesday on the Divine Line. Thanks and God bless. God bless. God bless.