NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - The Problem Of Biblical Illiteracy
Aired: 2021-06-23
Duration: 01:07:32


=== Biblical Illiteracy in America (02:34) ===

[00:00:00]  Hi, this is Pastor Joel with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:03]  This is another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:00:05]  Today we're going to be discussing the problem of biblical illiteracy, especially here in churches in America, and what you as a Christian can do about it.
[00:00:15]  I'm pleased to have as a special guest Dave Jenkins, and now you're listening to Theology Applied.
[00:00:22]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:00:26]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:00:32]  All right, Dave Jenkins, could you go ahead and just Take a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners.
[00:00:37]  Tell them about you, about your ministry, and whatever else you'd like to share.
[00:00:41]  Yeah, well, the first and most important thing is I was saved by the grace of God at the age of five.
[00:00:47]  I was sitting on my mother's lap, and I just, we got in like a little rear end bumper, nothing major, nobody got hurt.
[00:00:53]  But I just recognized at that moment that I needed Jesus.
[00:00:57]  Now, I didn't have all the theological categories at the age of five, I really didn't have that.
[00:01:03]  Start studying theology until I was 13.
[00:01:06]  And at 13, I just started devouring.
[00:01:09]  I just had an overwhelming hunger for theology and the Bible and just started consuming it.
[00:01:14]  That took me, you know, all to go on mission trips and all sorts of things starting Servants of Grace, writing, doing youth ministry, and starting Servants of Grace at the age of 19, fresh out of high school.
[00:01:30]  I'd had an email list and was writing for people in high school, and that was growing.
[00:01:37]  And then when I started online, it kind of just took off.
[00:01:40]  This is.
[00:01:41]  2000.
[00:01:41]  So before blogs and before podcasts were a thing, here I was going at it.
[00:01:47]  And then in 2001, I got asked to start speaking on an internet radio station and started preaching expository verse by verse sermons through there.
[00:01:56]  I was 21 at the time and kept doing that.
[00:01:59]  And God kept blessing it.
[00:02:01]  That ministry, I married my beautiful wife at the age of 26.
[00:02:06]  She's Sarah.
[00:02:07]  Outside of my salvation, she is the best gift.
[00:02:09]  I could spend this whole interview talking about her.
[00:02:12]  She is an immense blessing.
[00:02:13]  I wouldn't be able to do what I do.
[00:02:16]  So, you asked me before we recorded, what do I do?
[00:02:18]  The simple answer to that $50 million question that I get asked a lot is I am an author, a writer, editor, podcaster, speaker.
[00:02:28]  You know, Service of Grace, I work at Service of Grace.
[00:02:31]  I'm full time with them, I'm the executive director.

=== Seeking Truth Beyond Pragmatism (15:44) ===

[00:02:34]  We have a magazine, Theology for Life.
[00:02:37]  We have many podcasts.
[00:02:39]  The one your listeners might know is Eclipping You in Grace.
[00:02:42]  I've had a number of guys, Michael Horton and many others, Doreen Virtue.
[00:02:48]  Uh, Elisa Childers, uh, on and on it goes, but uh, I've been blessed to do that now for uh, let's see, almost in August, it'll be 21 years.
[00:02:59]  So, uh, by God's grace, I'm just gonna keep going on and keep my hand to the plow.
[00:03:03]  And you know, until they shut me down and tell me I can't do it anymore, well, then I'll go do something else.
[00:03:09]  I'll go, uh, you know, wherever they put me to say I can't do that, I'll go out on the street.
[00:03:14]  And I've done street work too, so I'm not afraid to go on the street and preach Jesus.
[00:03:19]  And they put me in prison, great.
[00:03:21]  Another opportunity to preach the gospel and raise up future leaders for God's glory.
[00:03:27]  Amen.
[00:03:28]  That's great.
[00:03:29]  Yeah, we need bold men who are willing to fight for the truth of the gospel.
[00:03:34]  We also need bold men willing to fight for the truth of the gospel and not necessarily in vocational ministry, but in other fields, other vocations, like starting a solid social media and tech platform that Christians can use that won't get shut down or kicked off of Amazon and Apple and everything else.
[00:03:54]  So, Good luck with that.
[00:03:55]  If there's any nerdy Christian guy listening to this podcast, set your heart to that task and get it done for us.
[00:04:02]  We need somebody to come through.
[00:04:04]  So, all that being said, let's go ahead and just hop right into our topic.
[00:04:08]  Thank you for coming on the show.
[00:04:09]  Thanks for taking some time to introduce yourself.
[00:04:11]  Again, the topic is biblical illiteracy, and I've got your book that you sent me.
[00:04:17]  The name of the book is The Word Explored, and you have as a subtitle, The Problem of Biblical Illiteracy and What to Do About It.
[00:04:25]  So, my first question would be this Could you just take a moment and define Biblical illiteracy, or you could do the opposite and define biblical literacy, and then talk about the problem that you see in the church in America today and why you felt the need to write a book like this.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, yeah, great question.
[00:04:43]  Well, first, some stats, right?
[00:04:46]  How large is this problem?
[00:04:47]  We're talking about biblical illiteracy.
[00:04:50]  Now, George Barna has dedicated his life to studying and researching the trends in the church.
[00:04:59]  His Research is eye opening about American Christianity.
[00:05:02]  He says fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels.
[00:05:06]  Many Christians cannot even identify two or three of the disciples.
[00:05:10]  60% of Americans cannot name five of the Ten Commandments.
[00:05:14]  Several further surveys believe 82% believe that God helps those who help themselves.
[00:05:19]  81% among born again Christians believe that the Bible teaches the primary purpose in life is to take care of one's family.
[00:05:28]  People, 12% of adults believe that Joan of Arc was in the Bible.
[00:05:31]  Wow.
[00:05:33]  50% of graduating seniors, high school seniors, believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.
[00:05:40]  So we got problems on creation, salvation, the Bible, marriage.
[00:05:44]  I mean, it goes on and on, right?
[00:05:47]  Biblical, defining large terms, biblical illiteracy has to do with not knowing even the most basic facts about the Bible, not knowing every detail.
[00:05:58]  We're not talking about knowing every detail, every jot and tittle about the Bible.
[00:06:04]  Biblical literacy has to do with knowing the basics of the Bible, such as key facts, ideas, and even stories.
[00:06:12]  So that's pretty important.
[00:06:14]  The other part of this question where do we get this problem?
[00:06:18]  I think that as I've thought about this quite a bit, how do we get here?
[00:06:25]  I think the reason it goes back to the seeker sensitive movement that started in the 70s to the 90s, it's continuing to go on today.
[00:06:33]  That was a good movement.
[00:06:34]  And I say a good movement because it had a good emphasis.
[00:06:37]  And that it wanted to reach lost people.
[00:06:40]  Luke 19 10 says that Jesus came to seek and save the lost.
[00:06:43]  That's a good thing.
[00:06:44]  So we should be preaching the gospel to the lost.
[00:06:48]  And unfortunately, it had many ramifications and it also had devastating consequences.
[00:06:54]  And much of the pragmatism of our day can be traced back to that.
[00:06:57]  But the problem became that so many people in that seeker sense of movement were getting saved in churches with this approach to ministry, but they weren't being discipled.
[00:07:10]  And so people left the church because they didn't know what they believed and why it mattered.
[00:07:16]  And so people left the church.
[00:07:17]  Then the emerging church happened in the 90s.
[00:07:21]  And in response to the Seeker Sensitive Movement, that conversation started as discipleship, but it quickly imploded because guys like Brian McLaren and many others, Brian McLaren specifically said, let's put a five year moratorium on the conversation about homosexuality.
[00:07:41]  Of course, he took Steve Chalk's view.
[00:07:44]  And then, you know, Steve Chalk was a British pastor, and he popularized Steve Chalk's view about cosmic child penal substitutionary atonement, is cosmic child abuse.
[00:07:59]  So, this problem with this emerging church movement was that it was a conversation that quickly became divorced from God's word as they had denied essential doctrines that define and give shape to biblical orthodoxy.
[00:08:14]  You might wonder why I bring up those two examples.
[00:08:16]  Well, I bring them up because of what they show.
[00:08:19]  You know, a desire to reach people in evangelism and to disciple each other.
[00:08:23]  Those are two biblical ideas that are absolutely critical to the mission of the church.
[00:08:28]  Well, the problem is that the seeker sensitive movement focused on evangelism apart from discipleship, and the emerging church divorced itself from biblical Christianity.
[00:08:37]  So, as we draw this together about biblical literacy, what we see is that far too often the church we swing from One theological trend to another, rather than grounding our lives and our ministries in God's word.
[00:08:50]  And God's word is absolutely the fountain for the Christian life.
[00:08:55]  God uses his word in the life of the Christian to teach them the truth because God, the Holy Spirit, indwells the Christian and empowers them to make disciples who make disciples from the word.
[00:09:08]  You asked one other question about the book.
[00:09:10]  Maybe I could just say a little bit about the approach of the book.
[00:09:13]  Yeah.
[00:09:15]  So there's really three things that God loves, and that He loves His Word, He loves His church, and He loves His people.
[00:09:22]  You know, we know that Jesus bled and died for, you know, the people of God, those who can repent and believe in Christ.
[00:09:30]  And the church is the only, there's a hashtag on Twitter, you know, the church is essential.
[00:09:37]  The church is the only absolutely essential institution because it's the only institution that Jesus bled and died for and rose for.
[00:09:45]  That's Ephesians 5.
[00:09:46]  You know, and God delights over His Word.
[00:09:50]  All 66 books that constitute the Word of God.
[00:09:53]  And so these three things, what they do is if we understand that these three things that God loves, then what we come to understand is that we don't need to have a checklist approach to spiritual growth and to reading the Bible.
[00:10:08]  It takes us well past the objection of that daily Bible reading is legalism, right?
[00:10:16]  And it shows us that God delights in these things and we should delight in them because as Christians, we're.
[00:10:22]  You know, and dwelt by the Spirit and God, we'll talk about this here in a minute, but, you know, these are this God takes His word into our lives and He's seeking to teach us and to carry it further into our lives so that, you know, we'll be growing character, godly character, and then we'll be useful servants of Christ, you know, for His glory.
[00:10:42]  So, yep, that's great.
[00:10:44]  Thank you.
[00:10:45]  Great answer.
[00:10:46]  You're right.
[00:10:47]  I like what you said that, you know, the pendulum, it just, we overcompensate.
[00:10:51]  We go from one, you know, and then overswing to the other.
[00:10:54]  And so I like how you, you know, Kind of used as a description, as an example of that, a case study, the seeker sensitive church and then swinging over, overcompensating to the emergent church.
[00:11:06]  And we give way to all these things programs, pragmatism, strategies, schemes, plots, all these kinds of things.
[00:11:16]  Because I think part of it is because we don't actually believe not just in the inerrancy of God's word, the authority of God's word, but really we don't believe in the sufficiency of God's word.
[00:11:25]  We don't think it's enough.
[00:11:27]  We don't think that faithful, expository preaching of the Word of God will actually do what God says it'll do.
[00:11:34]  We don't believe that if we're faithful to send out God's word, that we don't trust his promise when he says it will not return void.
[00:11:44]  And so we try to do things in our own strength and our own devices.
[00:11:49]  Real quick about the seeker sensitive movement, I'm just curious who would you say is kind of, for lack of a better phrase, the head of the snake?
[00:11:55]  I always think of Robert Schuller as somebody who comes to mind, but you said it started kind of in the 70s.
[00:12:03]  Who are some of the people that you would attribute to as the founders or the fathers of the seeker sensitive movement?
[00:12:09]  Yeah, I think of Bill Hybles.
[00:12:12]  Yeah, one example.
[00:12:14]  I wasn't alive at that time.
[00:12:15]  So, you know, I was born in the very first part of 81.
[00:12:20]  And so I wasn't alive in the 70s.
[00:12:22]  But I think of Bill Hybles and, you know, Willow Creek and those kind of things.
[00:12:27]  And it's interesting as we even bring that up.
[00:12:29]  I mean, even they did this false discipleship study in their church.
[00:12:34]  And what they concluded was yeah, the seeker sensitive movement was essentially a failure by their own admission.
[00:12:41]  And they hadn't discipled the people in their church.
[00:12:44]  You know, and that's, you know, that's, we have huge problems.
[00:12:47]  I know you talk about, you know, deconversion and de churched in this.
[00:12:52]  And this is, this goes right to those, to the heart of those, you know, kind of issues, you know, where if you're not going to disciple people with the word, you know, and trust the spirit, like you were saying, to do what the spirit does, then, boy, you're always going to be going after some attractional ministry, some pragmatic approach.
[00:13:14]  Uh, to kind of compensate, you're always going to try to have some sort of light show or whatever it is to you know have attract people.
[00:13:23]  Um, and you know, that's always the wrong thing.
[00:13:26]  And the second half, in fact, chapters five and six, I'm arguing, I'm encouraging pastors even to ground their ministries, follow the example of Calvin.
[00:13:36]  You know, he left Geneva, he came back, and he preached that same text.
[00:13:40]  Do that, you know, pastor, do that, ground your ministry.
[00:13:44]  Biblical counselor, do that same thing.
[00:13:47]  If you're a writer, do that same thing.
[00:13:49]  If you're a podcast, do that same thing.
[00:13:50]  Whatever it is that you do, ground your ministry, ground your life, ground it in scripture, trust the scripture.
[00:13:58]  Amen.
[00:13:59]  Another thing that I couldn't help but think is you were just talking about the problem of biblical illiteracy and how we maybe got off the rails with the secret sensitive movement, the emergent church.
[00:14:09]  I would argue that some of that, even some of the roots of that, could be tracked back all the way back to the second Great Awakening.
[00:14:16]  And I put Great Awakening in Terms of the second in quotation marks, because I don't really think that it was genuine, it didn't have the marks of a genuine revival like the first great awakening.
[00:14:27]  It was no George Whitefield.
[00:14:29]  It was, you know, there was that, it just wasn't the case.
[00:14:33]  And that's where I think you start to see like a lot of things, like that's where, you know, the modern concept of an altar call came from.
[00:14:39]  They called it the anxious bench, you know, that they would put on the front row.
[00:14:43]  And I'm preaching to you now.
[00:14:45]  And it was this big emphasis on rhetoric and pathos and passions and style.
[00:14:52]  You know, and even that, we could track back even further to Rome and the Catholic Church, where there was, you know, the word, the pulpit is off to the side, the center is the table, the Lord's Supper, which is paramount.
[00:15:05]  But we would say it's the preaching of the word that takes the center of the stage.
[00:15:10]  And maybe you can confirm this.
[00:15:13]  I think it was Martin Lloyd Jones who took the pulpit in his church and nailed it to the stage in the center so that it couldn't be moved, so that there was always going to be front and center the Word of God.
[00:15:28]  And Rome, Catholic priests were being trained in a big part of their training was their hand motions and physical gestures, right?
[00:15:38]  This massive emphasis on robes and tassels and show and the way that the building was decorated.
[00:15:45]  And even You know, even the phrase that we have, hocus pocus, you know, like this kind of wizardry, witchcraft, you know, spell kind of thing, hocus pocus, that actually comes from Latin, a word that I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce, but a phrase that the priest with the Roman Catholic Church would say over the Lord's Supper that was supposed to, you know, be the official blessing that would cause the elements to transubstantiate,
[00:16:14]  to turn into the literal body of Christ, the literal.
[00:16:17]  Blood of Christ, which we as Protestants would reject.
[00:16:20]  But there was this phrase that the priests would use, and the people that's where we get hocus pocus from.
[00:16:25]  The people viewed it as almost like they were going to be entertained.
[00:16:30]  It was a magic show.
[00:16:30]  It wasn't about the word exposited because most of the people didn't even speak Latin.
[00:16:36]  It wasn't even in their language.
[00:16:37]  So it wasn't expositing the word so that people can get the sense.
[00:16:41]  I think of Nehemiah and Ezra, they preached the law of God so that the people would get the sense.
[00:16:51]  And you're doing it in a whole other language that most of the common people don't even speak.
[00:16:57]  And you're emphasizing and putting more of your focus on hand gestures and what color tassels you have on your robe that day.
[00:17:04]  And the people are walking out and talking about hocus pocus.
[00:17:07]  They're not talking about Christ and Him crucified.
[00:17:10]  And so we have this kind of modern, more recent epidemic in the American church today of biblical illiteracy that you kind of tracked back to the 70s.
[00:17:22]  But we could.
[00:17:23]  We could track it back in America to the second great awakening, and then we could track it back globally even further than that.
[00:17:31]  And I would definitely point the finger at Roman Catholicism for much of that.
[00:17:36]  So, without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into some of the content of your book.
[00:17:42]  I just want to say amen to that, man.
[00:17:44]  That was great.
[00:17:45]  That was awesome.
[00:17:46]  Anytime we point the finger at Rome, you got to get a Protestant to say amen.
[00:17:50]  Amen.
[00:17:51]  No, I mean, amen to all you said.
[00:17:52]  I mean, that's awesome.
[00:17:54]  Thanks, Dave.
[00:17:55]  I appreciate it.
[00:17:56]  So, hopping into one of the chapters of your book that I thought was really interesting.
[00:18:00]  I told you before we recorded, I haven't read the book in its entirety yet, but one of the things that caught my eye was memorizing and meditating on the word.
[00:18:09]  And I think that's so important.
[00:18:10]  I'm always encouraging my congregation and the members of my previous congregation when I was a pastor in California for several years.

=== Chewing and Digesting Scripture (14:55) ===

[00:18:19]  I always tried to emphasize meditating on the word.
[00:18:23]  I think of Psalm one, On Your Law, I meditate day and night.
[00:18:27]  And previously, the verse prior, what David says is, I delight.
[00:18:30]  And the law of God.
[00:18:31]  So it's not just this begrudging, obligatory thing that I'm meditating day and night.
[00:18:36]  I force myself to think about your word.
[00:18:38]  It's because I love your word.
[00:18:39]  I love your law.
[00:18:41]  I'm thinking about it, meditating on it.
[00:18:42]  But what I'm always encouraging Christians to do as a pastor is not just memorizing.
[00:18:48]  So I like how you've got to memorize, it's got to be in your brain to meditate on it.
[00:18:53]  You can't think about something that's not in your mind to begin with.
[00:18:56]  So the tactic of the discipline of memorizing the word, committing it to memory, but then to meditate on the word.
[00:19:03]  Is to go a step further.
[00:19:05]  And I think there's a lot of Christians who, well, we're struggling just to get up in the morning and read the word.
[00:19:11]  But we need to read the word daily.
[00:19:14]  And then we need to commit to memory the word.
[00:19:17]  But then we need to go a step further, like Psalm 1, the blessed man who delights in the law of God, he meditates on the word.
[00:19:23]  And to meditate upon the word, in my assessment, Christian meditation, if there were such a thing, and I would argue there is, Christian meditation is the opposite of Eastern or mantra meditation where we seek to empty the mind of all rational thought.
[00:19:36]  But Christian meditation fills the mind and Feast the mind, even we could say, on substance, namely the Word of God.
[00:19:44]  And so you're not just reading the Word or memorizing the Word, but you're actually beginning to chew and digest and turn over and think about the Word of God.
[00:19:52]  And I can't help but think you're thinking about the implications and applications of God's Word.
[00:19:58]  And I noticed the very next chapter in your book was talking about applying the Word.
[00:20:02]  So I want to give you a moment and just talk about memorizing and meditation and applying the Word of God.
[00:20:08]  No, amen to what you said.
[00:20:09]  I mean, you could just, uh, Take the show.
[00:20:12]  Gotta take the phone, brother.
[00:20:15]  I'm just joking.
[00:20:16]  So I think of like memorizing and meditating like an ATM.
[00:20:20]  You go to the ATM and you deposit money in the account.
[00:20:23]  And then when you want to take it out, you enter your PIN and you take that out.
[00:20:27]  Scripture memory is exactly the same thing.
[00:20:29]  You got to put scripture in to get scripture out.
[00:20:32]  Jesus says in Luke 6 45 that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
[00:20:37]  And so you have to input the scripture and the spirit takes the word.
[00:20:42]  And so we're inputting scripture into our minds so scripture can come out.
[00:20:46]  I'm even reminded just talking about that off the top of my head here about what Charles Spurgeon said to John Bunyan if you cut him, he'll bleed, but lean.
[00:20:54]  And that's what we're kind of talking about.
[00:20:55]  We're inputting scripture so that when we're faced with a temptation, when we're faced with whatever, even a season of prosperity, we should be quoting our scripture to ourselves, preaching the gospel to ourselves and those from the word, not just preaching the gospel, but preaching the gospel from the word.
[00:21:15]  Have that and very important thing because you know, we can get into a false pre preaching the wrong gospel to ourselves and then we don't have any hope.
[00:21:23]  And we know that the gospel is in the word, so just kind of spelling that out.
[00:21:28]  But you know, we even see you know, Jesus memorizing scripture, you know, in Matthew 4 1 through 11, you know, in his encounter with Satan there in the wilderness, and he quoted it accurately.
[00:21:39]  You know, even Satan was misquoting scripture.
[00:21:43]  So, as Christians, we ought to memorize scripture so that it's available for the Holy Spirit to use in our lives.
[00:21:51]  In the midst of prosperity, seasons of, you know, that things seem to be going well.
[00:21:55]  That's what I mean by prosperity.
[00:21:57]  And when seasons are hard, you know, or when you're facing temptation or a challenge.
[00:22:03]  One of the best reasons for memorizing the scripture is that it fuels biblical meditation, which you so beautifully just talked about.
[00:22:10]  Thank you.
[00:22:11]  And when we memorize, you know, a verse of scripture, we can meditate it on any day, any time.
[00:22:16]  Psalm 119, 97 says, Oh, how I love your law.
[00:22:20]  It's my meditation all the day.
[00:22:22]  So, biblical meditation invites Christians into the world of God and His Word.
[00:22:29]  That's where real refreshment and joy begins.
[00:22:31]  And the more we engage in biblical meditation, the more we'll see the Word giving off its heat to us, illuminating its truth to us through the Spirit, whose Word provides insight and understanding, resulting in a passion for obedience to God by His grace.
[00:22:46]  So, like you just said so well, biblical meditation isn't where we empty our minds or anything like that, it's where we fill our minds.
[00:22:53]  With God's truth, and where our hearts and minds are inflamed with a passion for God.
[00:22:58]  So that's great.
[00:22:59]  Yeah, I love that.
[00:23:00]  So, going so now, kind of to the next step.
[00:23:03]  So, we've got to read the word, we've got to memorize the word, we've got to meditate upon the word, and then we need to apply the word.
[00:23:11]  And I think that kind of brings us back to the beginning of our conversation, talking about where the church in America kind of got off the rails with the devices of man being emphasized over the clear prescription of God in his word, getting away from the regular principle of worship, away from sticking to the script.
[00:23:34]  And I think part of that, and then eventually what happens is it's.
[00:23:38]  It's almost like there's a pattern.
[00:23:40]  It's almost like an equation or a formula, a progression of denial of Scripture that it begins with, I think, a lack of an unbelief in the sufficiency of Scripture.
[00:23:53]  So, I mean, that's really what you have with the seeker friendly movement and the emergent church.
[00:23:57]  The Scripture is not sufficient, or at least that's what you have with the seeker friendly movement.
[00:24:02]  The Scripture is not sufficient for what?
[00:24:03]  For our main goal of seeking the lost.
[00:24:06]  The Scripture can't do that.
[00:24:08]  And so we've got to do something else.
[00:24:10]  We've got to add something.
[00:24:11]  We've got to emphasize something over here and maybe take some of our focus away from the word.
[00:24:16]  And then, but then what happens is you first, and you may not even call it this, but it is in practice.
[00:24:22]  You can tell by your actions and how much emphasis you're giving to programs and how much emphasis you're giving to style and these other things that are not word centric.
[00:24:31]  In your actions, you can tell this person, this group, this ministry, this pastor does not believe in the sufficiency of God's word.
[00:24:38]  And then, lo and behold, Give him a few years, maybe a decade, and all of a sudden he starts to deny the inerrancy of God's word.
[00:24:46]  So it's like it's, you know, it starts with a lack of belief in the sufficiency of the word, and then there's this kind of lack of belief in the inerrancy, the infallibility, the authority, the perfection, the beauty of God's word.
[00:24:59]  And so, all that said, you know, we want to be Christians who don't merely salute the inerrancy of Scripture, but in our lives, in our actions, in our practice, we.
[00:25:12]  We exemplify our belief in not only the inerrancy but also the sufficiency of scripture, which gets to application.
[00:25:18]  How do we, if we believe the word is not just true but that it's enough, that it's sufficient, we're going to be constantly looking for ways in every realm of human society, in every area of our life, um, to apply the word of God.
[00:25:34]  And so, could you speak to that application for a moment?
[00:25:38]  Yeah, well, I just want to say amen to that, and what you're saying is so important because.
[00:25:42]  You know, what is often misunderstood today about the sufficiency of scripture is we think, oh, it's for some part of your life or some part of your ministry.
[00:25:51]  No, no, no.
[00:25:52]  The sufficiency of scripture is for every part of our life, for every phase of our life.
[00:25:57]  It's for our life and godliness.
[00:26:00]  And that means it's for everything in our lives.
[00:26:05]  And what you said is so good.
[00:26:08]  But to the question, you know, application, and here's a dirty word in American evangelicalism.
[00:26:14]  He is dirty like this, uh, in air quotes because it really shouldn't, but it's a matter of obedience to God.
[00:26:21]  Um, you know, we need to understand that the Holy Spirit desires to carry forth the word you hear and study and memorize and meditate and apply.
[00:26:32]  And just one other thing, one of the things with the approach of the book is not just to, and you hit it so well earlier, is not just how this isn't really so much of a how book, there's tons of those out there.
[00:26:44]  This is more of a why book.
[00:26:46]  Why do I read?
[00:26:47]  Why do I memorize?
[00:26:49]  Why do I meditate?
[00:26:50]  Why do I study?
[00:26:51]  Why do I apply?
[00:26:52]  Why do I do the life?
[00:26:54]  So I'm getting at the motivations.
[00:26:57]  So, and I think that's important when we're talking about application for the things that you said.
[00:27:03]  But in James 1 22 through 25, do you mind if I read that?
[00:27:08]  Yeah, go for it.
[00:27:09]  Yeah.
[00:27:09]  Okay.
[00:27:10]  But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
[00:27:13]  For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.
[00:27:21]  For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.
[00:27:25]  But the one who looks into the Perfect law, the law of liberty and perseverance, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
[00:27:34]  Now we know that very basically that the Holy Spirit is at work in the life of the Christian to help them see and to know Jesus.
[00:27:41]  In fact, Jesus says this in John 14, 26.
[00:27:45]  He says, But the helper of the Holy Spirit and the Father will send in my name.
[00:27:48]  He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said.
[00:27:52]  In John 16, 7 through 8, Jesus says, Nevertheless, I tell you the truth.
[00:27:57]  It's to your advantage that I go away.
[00:27:59]  For if I do not go away, the helper will not come to you.
[00:28:03]  But if I go, I will send him to you.
[00:28:04]  And where he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness.
[00:28:09]  So, according to our text, James 1 22, we might know the truth powerfully and personally.
[00:28:15]  It can be plain as day, as you might see yourself in the mirror as you're getting ready in the morning.
[00:28:20]  But James says, if the word's not being driven down deep into the soil bed of your heart, we're like a man who looks in a mirror and then forgets immediately what we saw.
[00:28:31]  When we do that, we go away thinking, ah, I'm good.
[00:28:34]  I might even sing this song.
[00:28:36]  It is well with my soul.
[00:28:37]  But the truth is, we've missed how the word of God has eminent practical value for our lives.
[00:28:43]  You know, James is saying that believing the right things, it should lead to practice.
[00:28:47]  You know, faith should lead to actions.
[00:28:49]  Those who are generally wise are those who show it through evidence.
[00:28:53]  To those who know the right things and don't do them, it's sin, James 4 17 says.
[00:28:59]  So back to James 1 12. 23 through 24, he develops this in a meaningful and a powerful way.
[00:29:08]  He's not saying, oh, just look at the word and then look away.
[00:29:11]  Keep looking at the word.
[00:29:13]  Let it show you your faults that it shows you.
[00:29:18]  And James 1 24 says, for he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he's like.
[00:29:23]  That doesn't make sense to us, but that's what James is saying.
[00:29:27]  He's saying, when we look in the mirror of God's word, the Holy Spirit comes alongside and brings it to bear in our lives.
[00:29:33]  He brings conviction.
[00:29:35]  And that should result, it results, excuse me, in conviction and confession of sin.
[00:29:40]  And that's a good thing for us.
[00:29:43]  We're so distracted today.
[00:29:44]  You know, we have a 24 7 news cycle that's coming at us.
[00:29:51]  I mentioned what Jesus says about, you know, out of the abundance, the heart, the mouth speaks.
[00:29:56]  We're being discipled.
[00:29:57]  We're inputting that kind of thing.
[00:30:00]  We're being discipled by our culture, right?
[00:30:03]  They're telling us this is what it means to be an American citizen and So much more.
[00:30:09]  And they're discipling us about Carl F. H. Henry, who was a 20th century American theologian.
[00:30:16]  And he was absolutely brilliant.
[00:30:18]  He not only talked about what a biblical worldview is, but he called it a biblical life view.
[00:30:22]  So it's not only what shapes us, it's how we see the world.
[00:30:26]  And that's what the scripture is to do it's to ground our lives so that we have a biblical worldview so that then we can see the world through the lens of scripture.
[00:30:36]  And that's what we need.
[00:30:38]  We need to input scripture into our minds.
[00:30:42]  And into our hearts.
[00:30:43]  That's what the spirit wants to do.
[00:30:45]  And you might be watching or listening to this and you wonder, well, I feel dry inside.
[00:30:51]  Well, the reason that you feel so dry inside and it seems like you're not making any progress is you got to get back to the word.
[00:30:59]  You got to open that word and you got to read the word and study the word and start at five to 10 minutes a day.
[00:31:05]  That's what I'm talking about.
[00:31:08]  But back to the application aspect.
[00:31:11]  Sorry, I got a little off of that.
[00:31:13]  No, no, no.
[00:31:14]  That's good.
[00:31:14]  What do you say?
[00:31:15]  What do you tell a preacher?
[00:31:17]  Hey, go preach.
[00:31:19]  He'll preach.
[00:31:23]  I see that in you too, brother.
[00:31:25]  You know, meditating on the word, your heart is warned and purified by the grace of God.
[00:31:30]  You know, it feels us like a car at a gas station, encouraging us into passionate action for the glory of God.
[00:31:36]  In Psalm 119, 15, he says, I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.
[00:31:43]  You know, King David says he discerned through biblical meditation the ways of God and how to be a doer of the word.
[00:31:49]  So as you meditate on the word, ask those questions of the biblical text, you know, because you believe the word.
[00:31:55]  And the more questions you ask and you answer about a verse, You're going to gain more understanding and at heart level understanding about how it applies to your life, the life of others.
[00:32:05]  And as you do this, you're going to see that the Bible is not just a book, you know, as if it was a book of fairy tales and myths, but it's got a gift to help you see the connection between the scriptures, our world, and the lives of others.
[00:32:19]  And then you'll start to see what John Stott wrote about in Between Two Worlds, that great book on preaching, or what Augustine of Hippo talked about in The City of God.
[00:32:29]  Understanding that the kingdom of God is both here in the now and yet also in the future.
[00:32:35]  And the kingdom is here now because of the finished and sufficient work of Christ.
[00:32:39]  And through local churches, God is building his kingdom through his people.
[00:32:44]  And yet, in the kingdom is yet future where he'll glorify the precious possession of his bride, the apple of his eye, his people.
[00:32:51]  And then they'll be entirely clothed and like Jesus.
[00:32:56]  Amen.
[00:32:56]  Yeah, I can't help but think when it comes to.
[00:33:00]  Application of the Word of God and the sufficiency of the Word of God and meditating, you know, making the tree go down deep, right?
[00:33:08]  I think that the blessed man, again, Psalm chapter one, you know, blessed is the man who, you know, delights in the law of God and meditates on it day and night.

=== Jesus' Lordship Over All Things (08:21) ===

[00:33:15]  He's like a tree rooted by streams of water.
[00:33:18]  And I love how it says it bears fruit in season.
[00:33:21]  Its leaves are always green, right?
[00:33:22]  So it's kind of like an evergreen tree.
[00:33:24]  So it's never lifeless, it's never dying, it's never even threatened or close to death.
[00:33:30]  So it's always vibrant.
[00:33:32]  Verdant, healthy, alive, green, filled with life.
[00:33:36]  But then it says, you know, it's by streams of water, meaning it's not dependent on precipitation, on the rainfall.
[00:33:47]  If it's not raining, there's a stream nearby.
[00:33:49]  And I can't help but think, you know, the stream is the Word of God.
[00:33:53]  And so the tree, the blessed man, he's like a tree.
[00:33:55]  And he's not just gleaning life, spiritual life from his leaves and branches, he's drinking from the root.
[00:34:04]  It's not just The water and the rain and then the weather that may be there and then may not be there, but this stream that's constant, that's always present, and he's drinking deep, deep down his roots.
[00:34:17]  He's planted by the stream, by this water, and his leaves are always green, so he's not dry, he's not on the verge of death.
[00:34:25]  And yet, the text goes on and says, and he bears his fruit in season, meaning that even a spiritually mature, healthy Christian who's planted daily by streams of water in the Word.
[00:34:38]  Reading the word, memorizing the word, meditating on the word, and seeking to obey, be a doer of the word.
[00:34:44]  I love that you shared the text in James.
[00:34:46]  He's applying the word.
[00:34:48]  Even in his obedience, there are seasons of fruitfulness.
[00:34:52]  So a healthy tree doesn't bear fruit 365 days a year.
[00:34:57]  And that doesn't mean that, you know, when it's out of season, that it's dead.
[00:35:02]  No, it could still be vibrant and lively, but even good trees, healthy trees, bear fruit in season.
[00:35:10]  And so, you know, so all that.
[00:35:12]  So we want to be healthy trees.
[00:35:13]  We want to be the blessed man who's delighting in the law of God, meditating on the law of God, applying the law of God, living it out.
[00:35:19]  And I can't help but think at times that, um, You know, some of it, I think, comes from this notion that I think it's appropriate to use this word.
[00:35:28]  I hate this notion.
[00:35:30]  I really do hate it in the biblical sense.
[00:35:32]  And I think by God's grace, hopefully it's a righteous indignation, a righteous hatred.
[00:35:37]  But Jesus is Lord of my heart.
[00:35:40]  I hate that.
[00:35:42]  No, Jesus is just, he's just, King Jesus is just not content with the sovereign domain and boundaries of your precious.
[00:35:54]  Little heart.
[00:35:55]  Jesus, he's Lord of all.
[00:35:58]  And I think part of the problem is we've somehow taken this massive collection of 66 books, you know, a couple thousand pages, depending on what translation you have and size print, but it's a large book, this Bible that we have, and we've relegated it.
[00:36:12]  We've quarantined the relevancy of Scripture to all.
[00:36:19]  Come on, brother.
[00:36:19]  And the church, right?
[00:36:21]  So the Bible has a lot to say about your marriage and it's got a lot to say about your parenting.
[00:36:25]  So we're going to do conferences on marriage and parenting every.
[00:36:29]  Two weeks, it seems like, you know, and it's got a lot to say about your church, you know, and, you know, for all those guys who are in ministry and aspiring towards ministry and want to multiply churches, planting churches, and all that, you know, the Bible's got a lot to say about that.
[00:36:42]  But that's it, you know, and so Jesus is Lord of my heart, and he might even extend in his lordship to my home, and he's Lord of the church, because, you know, Ephesians 5, like you quoted earlier, you know, Christ is the head of the church.
[00:36:54]  But I can't wait for someone to get in there and say, you know what, Christ is head of the church, but according to other texts in Ephesians and Colossians, wouldn't you know it, Christ is actually Lord of all.
[00:37:04]  He's actually head of all.
[00:37:06]  Christ, actually, you know, we're fond of saying, you know, Christ, not Caesar, is head of the church.
[00:37:11]  Well, actually, Christ and not Caesar is also head of the state.
[00:37:15]  According to Romans 13, the state, the civil magistrate, is God's deacon.
[00:37:20]  He works for God.
[00:37:22]  And it falls under Christ's lordship, his domain, his jurisdiction.
[00:37:27]  And so I think part of the reason why we don't apply the scripture in every realm of life is because we actually, in our heart of hearts, we've been taught by pastors.
[00:37:38]  In Christian leaders, that the Bible wasn't written to every realm of life.
[00:37:41]  It was written to your heart, it was written to your home, and it was written to your church.
[00:37:46]  But we pretend as though the Bible has nothing to say about the civil realm or about the marketplace or about vocation or about all these other things.
[00:37:55]  I think of Francis Schaefer, I like him, his seven mountains.
[00:37:58]  And we think that the Bible doesn't have anything to say about these things.
[00:38:01]  And I think the reason why is it's all tied intrinsically to Jesus' lordship.
[00:38:06]  And the last thing I'll say is I remember R.C. Sproul telling a story one time in one of his teachings where he said that he was.
[00:38:13]  Meeting with an old friend.
[00:38:14]  They had gone to seminary together, and this old friend, he was so grieved.
[00:38:19]  They had dinner together and were catching up.
[00:38:21]  The guy was in town visiting, and he said, You know, I don't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture anymore.
[00:38:27]  I just got to come clean.
[00:38:28]  I got to tell you, RC, I know that you're big on inerrancy, and I know it's going to disappoint you.
[00:38:32]  I don't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.
[00:38:33]  I don't believe that the Bible is the infallible, authoritative word of God.
[00:38:37]  But don't worry, RC.
[00:38:39]  You'll be pleased to hear this.
[00:38:41]  I still believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
[00:38:43]  Jesus is Lord.
[00:38:44]  There's one thing I'll never let go of.
[00:38:45]  Jesus is Lord.
[00:38:46]  And RC, you know, without skipping a beat, his brilliant mind and his charming demeanor, he responded and said, Well, can I ask you, friend, if Jesus is Lord, how is it that he exercises his Lordship in your life?
[00:39:02]  What is the agency of his Lordship?
[00:39:06]  And the answer is the Bible.
[00:39:08]  And so I think my point is when we limit the relevancy of Scripture and we say Scripture doesn't really speak to Blank, this area or that.
[00:39:17]  What we're actually doing is we're relegating, we're confining, quarantine the lordship of Jesus because the scripture is the agency of Christ's lordship.
[00:39:27]  That's the big issue.
[00:39:29]  So it's Christ's lordship.
[00:39:30]  How far does it go, right?
[00:39:31]  Like Simba and Mephasa standing on Pride Rock, you know, and what about that dark, shadowy place?
[00:39:37]  There is no dark, shadowy place.
[00:39:39]  When Christ is standing here, he's like, all of it.
[00:39:42]  It's all mine.
[00:39:45]  Agency that you extend your dominion, that you speak and exercise your lordship over all these things.
[00:39:51]  My word, my word claims it all, speaks to it all, it's relevant to it all, it applies to it all.
[00:39:58]  And oh, if we could get Christians to stop saying, and more importantly, to stop believing, Jesus is the Lord of my precious little heart.
[00:40:06]  No, Jesus is Lord of all.
[00:40:08]  And because he's Lord of all, his word speaks to all.
[00:40:13]  Would you agree with that?
[00:40:14]  No, brother, I agree.
[00:40:16]  And just kind of taking your point in another Kind of in a similar vein, you know, we have a big problem today in the church because we're telling pastors and seminarians to care about only mostly about your witness.
[00:40:32]  And our witness is important, but where does the Bible start?
[00:40:37]  We've forgotten that.
[00:40:38]  Like to your point, it starts with our character and then, you know, our witness.
[00:40:43]  Our character and our witness are not, you know, I'm not separating them, they're held in tension in the Bible.
[00:40:49]  And just to the point, you have, we have to have.
[00:40:52]  Mature disciples in our church, we have to teach them how to get in the word, to feed on the word, to delight in the word.
[00:41:01]  And then they'll be, I think, every Christian, because they're indwelled by the Spirit, if they're born again, they desire to be useful to Christ.
[00:41:10]  But we have to stop talking first about our witness and first about our character, and then we can help them to be useful because they'll be godly.
[00:41:18]  You know, our godliness in the Bible is the fuel for our.
[00:41:22]  Usefulness in ministry.
[00:41:24]  And that's just another example to your point about, you know, we have problems with the Lordship of Christ, you know, and I resonate with you when, like Abraham, you basically essentially quoted Abraham Kuyper.

=== Fear of God Fuels Witness (04:22) ===

[00:41:36]  I said, yeah.
[00:41:37]  There's not one square inch where God would say, mine, mine, mine, mine.
[00:41:43]  You know, and if I can go here just a minute for a minute to your point about the state, you know, today we saw that Biden said that.
[00:41:53]  You know, he said that, oh, well, you know, the CDC came out and said that they could, you know, we could do, you know, if you're vaccinated or whatever.
[00:42:03]  And I don't care what you think about that, okay?
[00:42:05]  That's not the point.
[00:42:07]  But you don't have to wear a mask.
[00:42:10]  Okay.
[00:42:10]  Well, let's back up here.
[00:42:13]  He says that's the rule.
[00:42:14]  But let's back up here.
[00:42:16]  How do you have, first off, the president doesn't have the right to make any rule, any law, period, under the Constitution.
[00:42:25]  You cited Romans 13.
[00:42:27]  That's the law of the land.
[00:42:29]  That's what we have to obey.
[00:42:30]  They've never passed any law through the law of the land, through the Congress and the Senate.
[00:42:37]  So he has no basis on which he can make that statement, okay, as a private citizen.
[00:42:43]  I'm not excusing, giving, saying he doesn't have the freedom of speech like I do.
[00:42:47]  But the problem is, is they think they have freedom of speech without accountability.
[00:42:53]  And that's what we're being told today you just say whatever you want to say.
[00:42:59]  They can say whatever they want to say, you know, the left and the socialists and the Marxists and all that.
[00:43:04]  Say whatever you want to say.
[00:43:07]  And when we say, oh, it's the most loving thing, you're a matter of loving God.
[00:43:11]  If you wear your mask and you get vaccinated, and it just.
[00:43:15]  How do I say this delicately?
[00:43:18]  It does something to me.
[00:43:21]  It does something to me.
[00:43:23]  It raises my, it makes me want to, you know, get a brown bag and, you know, you know.
[00:43:32]  That's frustrating.
[00:43:34]  Barf in the brown bag, you know.
[00:43:37]  Yeah.
[00:43:38]  It's funny.
[00:43:38]  Like every time, you know, my wife, God bless her, you know, she really, she has grown so much in her fear of God, which.
[00:43:48]  Ultimately, that's the antidote for the fear of man.
[00:43:51]  Some people, you might be listening to this and saying, man, it's just so hard to take a stand because I'm afraid.
[00:43:57]  What will people think?
[00:43:58]  What will people say?
[00:43:59]  And the fear of man, the only antidote to the fear of man is to fear something, or in this case, someone even more.
[00:44:08]  So it's not to stop caring about what.
[00:44:09]  Because some people say, what our pagan culture, a self help kind of culture, would posit as the solution, the antidote to the fear of man, is the fear of you, right?
[00:44:22]  Have a greater fear, right?
[00:44:23]  A greater sense of esteem and care more about what you think about you than what others think about you.
[00:44:31]  And so, how do you get over the opinions of others so that you're not a slave to people pleasing and the opinions of man?
[00:44:37]  Well, you need to care more about what you know at the end of the day, what really matters is what you think of you.
[00:44:41]  Well, that doesn't work, right?
[00:44:44]  Because you are just not important enough.
[00:44:47]  And you know that deep down inside, you know that you are not significant enough, wise enough, smart enough, valuable enough to outweigh the opinions of.
[00:44:57]  You know, 7.8 billion other people on the planet.
[00:45:00]  There's only one being in the universe that if you put him on the scale next to the entire world population, he outweighs them all by a landslide, and that's the Lord.
[00:45:09]  And so we get rid of this, you know, fear of man by ultimately fearing God.
[00:45:12]  And I think part of the reason why we have Christians today and even pastors sadly bowing the knee to the fear of man is because they don't fear God, because they never preach the fear of God.
[00:45:21]  They preach the love of God.
[00:45:23]  But one of my concerns is that the love of God has been lost on a generation that has not been taught.
[00:45:28]  The fear of God, and so we need to fear God.
[00:45:30]  Uh, and my wife, God bless her, she's grown in that immensely to where she fears God more than man, and so she'll join me in what I was going to say, which is we'll step into HEB, you know, we'll step into a restaurant or whatever, and we don't wear the mask, you know.
[00:45:44]  And we're coming from California, and so we're in Texas, so we feel like we're, you know, we're splashing in the shallow end, you know.
[00:45:50]  After being in California, it's a lot easier here.
[00:45:53]  Our governor, Greg Abbott, God bless him, you know, he repealed, you know, rescinded uh, mask orders and things like that.

=== Submitting to Civil Magistrates (15:45) ===

[00:45:59]  But my point is.
[00:46:00]  You know, we'll go into HEB and there'll be a couple hundred people in those, you know, super sized HEBs that we have here in Texas.
[00:46:08]  Everything's bigger in Texas, including the people.
[00:46:11]  And so we'll go into HEB and pass by a couple hundred people while we're grocery shopping, and we'll be the only people that we see in the store without a mask, you know.
[00:46:20]  And it's, but it's to your point that, you know, just Christians, it's back to that witness character thing that you mentioned.
[00:46:27]  I'm so glad you brought that up.
[00:46:28]  It's like, well, I want to be a good witness.
[00:46:29]  I want to be a good witness.
[00:46:31]  And yeah, but like, Witness for who?
[00:46:34]  Witness for what?
[00:46:35]  Like, what's the message, right?
[00:46:37]  Like when you say good witness, the witness is not so much the person as it is the message that they're witnessing to.
[00:46:45]  What are you witnessing to?
[00:46:46]  Not just who are you witnessing to, in terms of who are you trying to exemplify Christ to, preach Christ to, but what Christ, which Christ are you trying to preach?
[00:47:00]  Are you trying to exemplify?
[00:47:01]  Are you trying to live out?
[00:47:03]  And so, you know, Christians, I always think, you know, I always say, like, we don't want to throw any unnecessary punches, but we also don't want to pull any punches.
[00:47:10]  Either.
[00:47:10]  And so if a Christian says, hey, I'm not going to do this because, not because I'm being rebellious, but I don't want to do this because it's not lawful.
[00:47:19]  And this is, you know, it's not even a law, period.
[00:47:22]  And even if it was, it's not a lawful law.
[00:47:25]  And even within the law of the land and the civil magistrate, you know, you read Romans 13, and I always just kind of want to, like, you know, grab Christians by the collar and shake them up and remind them, okay, you know, Paul is writing to a context, he's writing to subjects of a monarchy.
[00:47:41]  But in God's incredible providence and grace, we're not subjects in a monarchy.
[00:47:45]  We are citizens of a democratic republic.
[00:47:49]  And our highest civil magistrate is not a human by design, but rather a document.
[00:47:54]  And it's not a living document that changes as different people are appointed to the Supreme Court and find some kind of new interpretation.
[00:48:01]  No, it's set.
[00:48:04]  And so ultimately, when a Christian resists and practices civil disobedience towards a president or a governor or whatever it may be, If that governor or president is not in line with the constitution, then ultimately what the Christian is doing is submitting to the higher civil magistrate, namely the constitution, by rebelling against someone who is a rebellious civil magistrate, lesser civil magistrate, namely a president or a governor or a congress member.
[00:48:31]  And so it's just so since we're going, that to say we got to know the scripture, we also need to know the civil realm.
[00:48:38]  I think Christians have been so turned off by politics.
[00:48:43]  And how often have you heard, you know, keep the politics out of the pulpit, keep the politics?
[00:48:47]  And so it's like we don't think the Bible speaks to this.
[00:48:49]  And then we also just, we're bored with this.
[00:48:51]  We don't like this.
[00:48:52]  And so Christians, man, we've got such, we're sitting on a treasure trove of the scripture and all that it says, especially in the civil realm right now.
[00:49:02]  And man, if there was ever a time, 2020, 2021, and it's like we're impotent.
[00:49:08]  You know, it's like we're sitting on this mountain of resources.
[00:49:14]  And we think the scripture has nothing to say.
[00:49:16]  We think that Christ, you know, he's not really head of the state and doesn't care to be head of the state and doesn't.
[00:49:21]  You know, and I'm not speaking of a theocracy, but I'm just saying, like, I want America to be Christian, right?
[00:49:27]  And what I mean by that is not like Israel, Old Testament Israel, one to one ratio, but I, what are we doing in the Great Commission?
[00:49:34]  We're trying to make disciples, disciple the nations.
[00:49:36]  I want America to love Jesus.
[00:49:38]  And if people in America love Jesus, some of those people are going to run for political office.
[00:49:43]  And if they run for, then we're going to have Christian, you know, legislators.
[00:49:46]  And so then what should they legislate?
[00:49:48]  Things that honor God's word, you know?
[00:49:50]  And you can call that whatever you want to call it.
[00:49:52]  I don't think it's nationalism, but I, you know, I'm, I'm a Christian and I'm a patriot.
[00:49:57]  And so I want that kind of nation.
[00:49:59]  So, yeah, I mean, it's such a good point because, you know, if every square inch belongs to Christ, then every vocation belongs to Christ.
[00:50:08]  Right.
[00:50:09]  And we spend most of our lives doing that work, whatever that work is.
[00:50:13]  And it has, you know, it has dignity and value.
[00:50:16]  It benefits society.
[00:50:17]  You know, people say today Christians are anti intellectual, right?
[00:50:22]  But Christians started the first hospitals.
[00:50:24]  That's right.
[00:50:24]  We started the first education institutions and on and on we go.
[00:50:28]  And just to your point, if we're going to vote out Trump, just to use that example, according to what we've said, Biden should be impeached.
[00:50:37]  Now we know that he won't.
[00:50:39]  And that's a travesty.
[00:50:41]  It really is.
[00:50:43]  But we have to be willing to stand up.
[00:50:46]  And we have to be willing to say, as Christians, okay, what is Romans 13 actually said to our discussion here?
[00:50:52]  It's talking about obeying the law of the land.
[00:50:55]  And the law of the land is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in America.
[00:51:00]  It's not.
[00:51:01]  What the president, whatever the president and his executive order, uh, floating out in the wind says, it's just not so.
[00:51:08]  We have to stand, or or some health mandate, or whatever, we have to stand up and know that we stand on the constitution and the bill of rights.
[00:51:16]  And as a Christian, we're not saying that the I'm not saying by extension that the bill of rights and the constitution are on par with the Bible, that would be heresy.
[00:51:26]  I'm saying, but but we have the law of the land, and the law of the land is the constitution, the bill of rights, and we so we stand on.
[00:51:34]  You know, we stand on the word of God, you know, totally in every area and every phase.
[00:51:40]  And so we understand then that from scripture that when God says the rule of the law is, and by the way, that defines our, it defines how the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are supposed to even be, you know, exercised and executed in our country, which, I mean, that brings up a whole other topic about a whole host of things.
[00:52:04]  It brings up that issue of the law being used lawfully.
[00:52:07]  Yeah.
[00:52:07]  You can have a right law, but not execute it, not legislate lawfully.
[00:52:12]  Go ahead.
[00:52:12]  And they're not.
[00:52:14]  And they're not, just to wrap that up.
[00:52:16]  No, you're right.
[00:52:17]  And I do want to say, just as a disclaimer for anyone who's listening so the Constitution being the highest, the law of our land, the highest civil magistrate.
[00:52:25]  But I know that Dave and I would both agree that you might be thinking, well, what about Christians in China?
[00:52:32]  What if the law of the land is the one child policy?
[00:52:37]  Well, then you supersede to the highest law of any land.
[00:52:42]  Which is the law of God.
[00:52:44]  And that's kind of my point back to the Lordship of Christ, universal Lordship of Christ over all things.
[00:52:49]  That, you know, the Bible, I do believe that it calls us to obey the law of the land, but even then, it's to submit to, you know, human officials and lesser civil magistrates and, you know, rulers in the land.
[00:53:04]  But even then, only so far as they are not forbidding us.
[00:53:12]  From doing something that God commands or commanding us to do something that God forbids.
[00:53:18]  You know, because the law of the land, you know, with Nebuchadnezzar and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego, was to bow down that 90 foot tall idol statue to worship it when the trumpet and the musical instruments begin to sound.
[00:53:31]  Or in the case of Daniel, I mean, it was an official decree.
[00:53:34]  It was signed by the signet ring of the king, Daniel chapter 6.
[00:53:40]  But Daniel continued to pray three times a day with his windows open to heaven, as was his custom.
[00:53:46]  Because that law of the land was in contradiction to the highest law.
[00:53:51]  And so we're just saying, Dave and I are saying that even the irony is that even in the human law of our lands, the highest law is not Joe Biden.
[00:54:00]  It's also not Trump.
[00:54:03]  It's the Constitution.
[00:54:04]  And we're folding even on that.
[00:54:06]  So at this point, our allegiance to Christ doesn't even require us.
[00:54:11]  I keep thinking of Hebrews 11, Hebrews 11, right?
[00:54:13]  You have not resisted yet to the point of shedding your blood.
[00:54:16]  You know, like in America, like it's, I mean, martyrdom in America.
[00:54:21]  Is kind of its weak sauce right now.
[00:54:24]  Now it seems to be ramping up, you know, and so I don't want to make light of it.
[00:54:27]  I think persecution may be coming.
[00:54:30]  But my point is, right now, man, we've got it easy.
[00:54:32]  We still have something that we can appeal to in human courts and all these.
[00:54:37]  And I'm not saying we're going to win because things seem to be corrupt.
[00:54:40]  But I'm seeing, even at a human level, we still have.
[00:54:44]  I think, I personally feel like outside of scripture, I think the Constitution of the United States of America is one of the best documents ever written.
[00:54:51]  And so we still have a beautiful nation in terms of its foundation, in terms of its roots.
[00:54:58]  We have a wonderful law that is wonderful because it models the law of God, and we still have all these avenues of appeal and all at that level.
[00:55:07]  And even if our law of the land was like communist China or something like that, and the highest civil magistrate was some human official instead of a document that led according to his own will and fancy and whatever he wanted and was completely oppressing people and doing things completely contrary to God's law, even then we would resist.
[00:55:29]  Lawfully, because we would say, hey, this is contradicting the law of God.
[00:55:35]  And I always go back to Romans 13 and think, you know, like Paul, what he's assuming in that text, because he says, Would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
[00:55:44]  You know, the one who bears the sword and does not bear it for nothing.
[00:55:48]  It's a frightening thing.
[00:55:49]  Would you like to live your life fear free?
[00:55:51]  Have no fear of the one who rules over you?
[00:55:53]  Then do, and notice he says, Then do what is good.
[00:55:57]  And I think a lot of Christians these days are interpreting it as though Romans 13 said, Then do what he says.
[00:56:02]  Right?
[00:56:02]  Would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
[00:56:04]  Then do what he says.
[00:56:05]  That's not what the text said.
[00:56:06]  The text says, Would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
[00:56:09]  Then do what is good.
[00:56:09]  Okay?
[00:56:11]  What does Paul mean when he says good?
[00:56:13]  Do that which is truly good.
[00:56:15]  According to what standard?
[00:56:16]  God's.
[00:56:17]  And so Paul is assuming, and Paul, you know, coming from a context where in many cases, you know, the human officials and civil magistrates were contradicting the word of God.
[00:56:28]  But he's even saying in his context that if you follow, if you do that which is good, Then, in many cases, it'll go well for you.
[00:56:39]  Because even pagans and even God hating civil magistrates can't help but borrow from the Christian worldview because it's the only thing that works.
[00:56:50]  And when Christians, I mean, what are the values and the virtues of Christians?
[00:56:54]  We're hardworking.
[00:56:55]  We want to be honest and have integrity.
[00:56:57]  We want to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and count others as more significant than ourselves.
[00:57:02]  You know what I mean?
[00:57:04]  And so, even if you have an unregenerate pagan.
[00:57:07]  God hating civil magistrate, even if that's the case, if you do what is good, not just what he thinks is good, the civil magistrate or what he says, but what God says is good, even in places like communist China, there are many times where things will go well for you.
[00:57:24]  And then there are other times, of course, where you will be persecuted and obedience to God will mean pain and suffering to yourself.
[00:57:33]  But even that is for your eternal good, your eternal benefit.
[00:57:36]  And so, anyways, I. All that being said, any final thoughts on that?
[00:57:40]  And then I've got one more question for you before we close.
[00:57:42]  Yeah, one last thought.
[00:57:44]  You mentioned R.C. Sprawl, and he had that famous phrase, quorum deo.
[00:57:47]  And that means before the face of God.
[00:57:49]  And maybe you're watching this and you're wondering, okay, what does this have to do with me?
[00:57:53]  How do I even face this in the midst of whatever?
[00:57:56]  Yeah, you need to understand that all of your life is before the face of God.
[00:57:59]  He not only sees you, he knows you because of Christ.
[00:58:02]  He comes after you, he seeks you.
[00:58:05]  If you're a Christian, he knows your thoughts, he knows the length of your days, he knows everything about you.
[00:58:10]  From the top of your head to the bottom of your toes and everything in between your cells, your DNA, and everything.
[00:58:17]  That might be, that's like a pretty scary thought, but actually it's the most comforting thing because this is your sovereign God.
[00:58:24]  He's the one who, you know, by the Holy Spirit, he indwells you and he empowers you to this end.
[00:58:30]  You're not an animated or Christian of God.
[00:58:32]  You're a friend of God.
[00:58:34]  And this thought should steal your resolve that you are his and he is yours.
[00:58:40]  So no matter what that they do to you, no matter if they come for your house or your job or whatever or your social media and shut you down, good.
[00:58:50]  I still belong to God no matter what.
[00:58:53]  Like I said at the beginning, if they come and take away, My laptop and my everything, or my house, or whatever.
[00:59:00]  And that's great.
[00:59:02]  Send me to prison.
[00:59:02]  Great.
[00:59:03]  They can't kill me.
[00:59:05]  They can kill me.
[00:59:05]  But guess where that takes me?
[00:59:07]  I go immediately into the presence of God because I belong to Christ.
[00:59:11]  And so let that thought actually, as we close, put a wrap on this conversation, let that thought actually encourage your heart right now and steal your resolve to stand up, to speak without being afraid and with being unashamed.
[00:59:28]  Of Christ, who has won the day, won your heart.
[00:59:33]  He's going to win the last day.
[00:59:36]  And Satan's a liar, and Christ will triumph.
[00:59:40]  Amen.
[00:59:40]  Yeah, if God is for us, then who can be against us?
[00:59:43]  What can man after man who can kill you, but then can do no more to you?
[00:59:48]  But do not fear man who, after destroying the body, can do nothing else, but rather fear God who has the power to destroy both the body, but then also the soul in hell.
[00:59:58]  God is really the only.
[01:00:00]  Person in the universe worthy of our fear, and um, and and that's you know, again, that that fear is a for the Christian, it's not a fear of judgment.
[01:00:10]  I always say, like, the pagan should fear God, um, and and fear his judgment, but ironically, that's one of the signs of somebody who is unregenerate is that they typically don't.
[01:00:21]  They have there is no fear of God before their eyes, Romans chapter three, and so the non Christian is the one who should, in objective terms, fear God's judgment.
[01:00:30]  The Christian no longer has a fear of judgment.
[01:00:33]  For judgment has to do with punishment.
[01:00:35]  We've been delivered from that.
[01:00:36]  Christ has set us free from that fear of death and fear of judgment.
[01:00:40]  Hebrews speaks of, but we should always, even in heaven for eternity, fear God.
[01:00:45]  There's a difference in fearing God's judgment versus fearing God Himself.
[01:00:48]  And so we have a reverence and awe for God as the Creator in heaven and earth.
[01:00:53]  And unfortunately, we just, I think we have a lot of Christians who are living, all of us, and we all fall prey to this, including myself at times, but we often act as though man.
[01:01:07]  We attribute far more esteem and far more power and importance and significance to people than we really should.
[01:01:15]  And I think part of this is because people really can kill us in this life.
[01:01:18]  Jesus says that man can kill you, but after that can do no more.
[01:01:21]  And I think part of this is we just value our own lives too much.
[01:01:25]  But Jesus said, if you're not willing to lose your life for my sake, then you'll never really find it.
[01:01:30]  And so I think getting rid of the idolatry of ourselves and our own life, this life here and now, and seeing Christ and his lordship and the application of scripture.
[01:01:41]  To all things and fearing God more than fearing man.

=== The Need for Biblical Counselors (03:40) ===

[01:01:44]  Those are the kinds of things that I think the church needs in this hour.
[01:01:48]  So, that said, that would be my answer to the question I was about to ask, but let's hear your answer and maybe you'll echo that.
[01:01:55]  But my last question is just what do you think at a pastoral level?
[01:01:59]  For myself, I'm a local pastor, I've got a lot of pastor friends.
[01:02:03]  What's something that pastors can do for their congregations and their preaching and their discipleship and shepherding ministry to help alleviate the problem of biblical illiteracy?
[01:02:14]  Yeah, there's six things I have.
[01:02:16]  I'll just run through them.
[01:02:17]  And then, if you want me to elaborate on any of those, I will.
[01:02:20]  Okay.
[01:02:20]  Sound good?
[01:02:21]  Okay.
[01:02:21]  So, first thing, provide opportunities for small groups centered on the word, prayer, and fellowship.
[01:02:26]  Second, provide opportunities and a time for people to ask questions and encourage people in your local church to ask questions.
[01:02:33]  Third, preach expository sermons where the point of the sermon is the point of the text and point people responsibility from that text to Jesus.
[01:02:41]  Fourth, encourage biblical counseling and training in your local church and get people that are interested in that certified through the Association of Biblical Counselors, also known as ACBC.
[01:02:52]  Fifth, encourage people.
[01:02:53]  Personal daily Bible reading, provide classes on the importance of personal daily Bible reading, study, meditation, memorizing scripture application, provide classes and teaching on the importance of doing life with one another and how to listen to a sermon.
[01:03:09]  Six, and lastly, encourage the reading of solid Christian resources from the pulpit.
[01:03:14]  And that one I think is so important because, you know, we just said that the pulpit should be central.
[01:03:20]  There's actually a chapter in my book where I make that case.
[01:03:23]  That we need to have the pulpit be central.
[01:03:26]  And so, if that's the case, then the pastor from the pulpit commending resources is absolutely critical because it sets the tone for the whole church on what they value and so much more.
[01:03:40]  So, there's a lot of good answers.
[01:03:42]  Yeah, no, that's great.
[01:03:43]  And if we have more time, I would ask you to elaborate.
[01:03:46]  But I think just an overview of those six things is super helpful.
[01:03:49]  That's a great answer.
[01:03:50]  And maybe one of these days I'll have you back on to talk about, especially what you've mentioned a few times throughout our episode today.
[01:03:58]  Just biblical counseling.
[01:03:59]  There are many Christians, I think, who are like, well, yeah, I go to counseling for this, I go to counseling for that, and I always, who's your counselor?
[01:04:06]  And, oh, don't worry, Pastor, it's a Christian counselor.
[01:04:09]  And I'm like, uh oh.
[01:04:12]  Sadly, there's a dynamic difference between a Christian counselor and a biblical counselor.
[01:04:16]  It actually changes the dynamic of how you counsel.
[01:04:20]  And some Christian counselors could be great, they could be functioning as biblical counselors, but sadly, there are many who are Christian counselors, and all that actually means is that.
[01:04:29]  They themselves are a professing Christian who counsels in the way that Freud or anybody other pagan would.
[01:04:37]  So they're Christians giving pagan counsel, right?
[01:04:40]  Christian counselor.
[01:04:41]  But a biblical counselor is, especially if they've been certified, like you said, then you can count on them to be someone who is a Christian giving Christian counsel.
[01:04:51]  Not just a Christian counselor, but a Christian counselor giving Christian counsel, aka a biblical counselor.
[01:04:56]  So maybe we could talk about that sometime in the future.
[01:04:58]  But I'll give you the final word anything you want to leave our listeners with?
[01:05:03]  Yeah, I just want to say, you know, you might be listening and wondering, what do I do with all this?
[01:05:07]  And in the book, I'm just trying to get you to delight in the God who's given us a book and the 66 books that constitute the Word of God.
[01:05:15]  And my encouragement is, as you read the book, if you get it, open your Bible.
[01:05:21]  There's over 110 Bible verses in a 110 page book.

=== Counted Among the Faithful (02:07) ===

[01:05:25]  So there's, you know, there you go.
[01:05:27]  For every page, there's at least one scripture or more.
[01:05:31]  Read it along, open your Bible.
[01:05:33]  That's, you know, in Acts 17 11, the Berean.
[01:05:36]  Paul's commended the Bereans for studying the scriptures, searching to see if what he said was from the Bible.
[01:05:42]  So I'm doing the same thing.
[01:05:44]  In Thessalonians, the Thessalonians were commended by Paul for how they received the word.
[01:05:50]  So that's what I would just commend to you.
[01:05:51]  Be a Berean, get in the word, study it, read it, delight in it, get past the idea that it's legalism.
[01:06:01]  And I said this on the For the Gospel podcast.
[01:06:04]  I said, if that's what legalism is, sign me up because that's the.
[01:06:10]  That's legalism, and then I'm a legalist, and I'm happy to wear that label, but it's not.
[01:06:14]  So, delight in the Bible, get in the Word, love God, love His church, love His people.
[01:06:21]  And then you'll find that you're going to be growing in godly character.
[01:06:26]  You'll have a desire to engage in evangelism and discipleship, to be useful to your neighbor, to be useful in your city, in your community, in a world.
[01:06:38]  And we need you.
[01:06:39]  We need to stand up and be counted.
[01:06:42]  And I need you.
[01:06:44]  I need you to.
[01:06:46]  I need you and you need me in our local churches.
[01:06:48]  And 50 times in the New Testament, we're told that.
[01:06:51]  So, man, we just got to get on it and get with it.
[01:06:55]  You know, stand up and be counted.
[01:06:58]  Amen.
[01:06:58]  Dave, thanks so much for coming on the show.
[01:07:01]  It's a pleasure being with you.
[01:07:02]  Thank you so much, Joel, for the invitation.
[01:07:04]  I appreciate it.
[01:07:06]  As a special thank you for your gift of any amount, we'll be happy to send you a free digital book from our store.
[01:07:11]  To access this offer, visit rightresponseministries.comslash offer.
[01:07:16]  We highly recommend Pastor Joel's book, Am I Truly Saved?
[01:07:20]  If you or someone you know has wrestled with doubts about the love of God, this would be a great resource.
[01:07:26]  As a reminder, to get this offer, go to rightresponseministries.comslash offer.
[01:07:30]  And thank you for your generous support.