NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - The Spirit Of The Age vs. The Spirit Of God
Aired: 2022-05-10
Duration: 56:54


=== Spirit of Age vs God (02:50) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
[00:00:03]  If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five star review?
[00:00:09]  This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content gets out to as many people as possible.
[00:00:17]  Thanks.
[00:00:18]  Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another episode of our show called Theology Applied.
[00:00:25]  In this episode, I was privileged to have as a special guest Phil Johnson, the director of Grace to You.
[00:00:30]  He's also a lay elder at Grace Community Church alongside Pastor John MacArthur in Southern California.
[00:00:37]  Our topic for discussion was courage, the need for courage, and specifically the distinction between the spirit of this age and the spirit of God.
[00:00:49]  These two entities, if you will, are directly compared and contrasted in the scripture very clearly.
[00:00:56]  There is the spirit of this age on the one hand, and there is the spirit of God on the other.
[00:01:03]  Understanding the distinction and having the ability to discern between the two.
[00:01:08]  In our crazy world and our crazy time is of the utmost importance.
[00:01:13]  You'll enjoy this episode of Theology Applied as we discuss these important things.
[00:01:17]  Thanks for tuning in.
[00:01:19]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:01:22]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:01:29]  All right.
[00:01:30]  Welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:01:32]  I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:01:35]  And today I am privileged to have as a special guest Phil Johnson from Grace to You.
[00:01:40]  Phil, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:01:42]  Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:01:43]  Absolutely.
[00:01:44]  So we kind of went back and forth, email, talking about, well, what should we discuss?
[00:01:48]  And what we landed on that I think would be really helpful for a lot of our listeners is a talk that you've done probably multiple times, I'm assuming, but the distinction, the direct comparing and contrasting between the spirit of this age and the spirit of God.
[00:02:05]  So I'm going to let you go ahead and just set the framework for us.
[00:02:08]  So the difference between the spirit of this age and the spirit of God.
[00:02:12]  Yeah.
[00:02:13]  In fact, this is a contrast the Apostle Paul makes in his epistle to the Corinthians, first Corinthians.
[00:02:17]  Epistle to the Corinthians, where he says, Now we are not of the spirit of this world, but the spirit which is of God.
[00:02:26]  And a large part of that epistle, and in fact, I would say a large part of the corpus of the Apostle Paul's writings, is admonishing people not to be trying to appease or reflect or parrot or mirror or make friends with the spirit of this age, the world.
[00:02:49]  James says the same thing.

=== Desires That Gratify Flesh (12:59) ===

[00:02:51]  Friendship with the world is enmity with God.
[00:02:53]  And the Apostle John says the same thing love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.
[00:02:58]  So, this is a theme that runs through the New Testament.
[00:03:01]  And even Jesus himself said, Don't be surprised if the world hates you.
[00:03:07]  And all of that sort of adds up to say, you know, we are not supposed to be seeking favor and approval and admiration from the world.
[00:03:16]  We have a message to proclaim, and we should do it in a way that is Kind and gentle, and all of those things.
[00:03:24]  But if the world hates us, that doesn't mean we've failed to deliver the message correctly, or even worse, that we need to adapt our message in order to make it more suitable to the ears of the world.
[00:03:38]  Absolutely.
[00:03:38]  One of the things that I always think of when we use the word world is it's helpful to understand that the New Testament authors use that word in multiple different facets, especially John.
[00:03:48]  John uses the word world in at least four different ways, and you might have a couple others that you're aware of, but I always encourage our listeners that.
[00:03:55]  We love the cosmos.
[00:03:57]  We love the world as it represents the created order, that nature is not a curse itself.
[00:04:02]  It is under a curse because of sin, but we do love God's created world, the cosmos.
[00:04:06]  We love people, the world, in so much as it represents individual people created in the image of God, totally depraved, but God image bearing people, creatures.
[00:04:17]  And so we love them, we want their best, but we despise the world insofar as it represents a demonic system underneath the authority of God.
[00:04:27]  Of ultimately, God is sovereign even over Satan, but underneath the domain of Satan, where he actually takes people captive.
[00:04:34]  That's one of the things I hear all the time.
[00:04:35]  People quote Ephesians, our battle's not with flesh and blood, but principalities, spiritual powers, and that's true.
[00:04:42]  But Paul says in his letter to Timothy that Satan, who our battle is ultimately against, takes people captive.
[00:04:51]  So we need to, with gentleness, rebuke our opponents, not knowing if God might grant them repentance.
[00:04:55]  And after coming to the truth, After being held captive by Satan to do his will.
[00:05:01]  So we're battling with not flesh and blood, but with Satan.
[00:05:04]  But Satan does enroll flesh and blood in his ranks underneath this demonic system.
[00:05:09]  What do you think about that?
[00:05:11]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:05:12]  The distinction you make is perfect.
[00:05:14]  It's not the people of the world that we're not supposed to love.
[00:05:18]  I mean, scripture says God so loved the world that he gave his only son.
[00:05:21]  It's talking about people in that context.
[00:05:23]  Right.
[00:05:24]  But when it says don't love the world, the context makes it equally clear that that's talking about the world system.
[00:05:31]  Of which Satan is the ruler.
[00:05:33]  Scripture refers to him as the God of this age and the ruler of this world.
[00:05:39]  So it's talking about the domain of Satan, which is the system that more or less rules this world, the politics of this world, the likes and dislikes of general society.
[00:05:54]  All of those are part of the world system that we're not supposed to fall in love with or imitate.
[00:06:00]  Right.
[00:06:01]  So, John, in 1 John, I remember I. Preached through 1 John and later turned it into a book that Justin Peters and Doris and Kosti, him, wrote the forward for.
[00:06:10]  About really the whole book is just about the assurance of salvation.
[00:06:14]  It's called Am I Truly Saved?
[00:06:15]  And as I was working through this word world and working about, you know, trying to work out a biblical definition of worldliness, I feel like John kind of boils it down to, you know, the three temptations that we see all the way back in the garden it's the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life.
[00:06:34]  I feel like those are the virtues, the screaming.
[00:06:38]  Dogmas and values of the spirit of this age, and that worldly system that is synonymous with a demonic system that stands opposed to God and His truth and His glory.
[00:06:51]  And so it seems like, if I'm right about that, it seems like these things the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life would be indefinite, right?
[00:07:00]  Whether we're all the way back with Babylon, or whether we're in the Roman Empire, or whether we're in America in 2022, it seems like these would be constants.
[00:07:10]  And yet, even though those may be the underlining principles, it does seem as though each culture and each political system and each nation and each time period have maybe particular virtues and values that stand against God's truth that rise to the top.
[00:07:28]  So, my question is: is the spirit of this age fluctuate?
[00:07:35]  Can we say the spirit of this age in America is different than the spirit of the age in Brazil 50 years ago?
[00:07:42]  Do you see what I'm asking?
[00:07:44]  Yeah, no, it doesn't fluctuate and it doesn't change.
[00:07:47]  And I think that scripture is trying to be comprehensive there when it says the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life.
[00:07:54]  You're right.
[00:07:54]  That goes all the way back to the garden.
[00:07:56]  And even the language of scripture there says that Eve saw the fruit that it was good for food, that it was pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desired to make one wise.
[00:08:05]  So it appeals to all three of those evil desires her pride that it was desired to make her wise, the lust of the flesh, it looked like good food, and the lust of the eyes, it was pleasant, you know, had a pleasant appearance.
[00:08:21]  And it's the same three temptations that.
[00:08:23]  Satan tempted Christ with in the wilderness.
[00:08:26]  That's right.
[00:08:27]  The better Adam, the final Adam.
[00:08:29]  Yeah.
[00:08:30]  So that really, I mean, the Apostle John actually says all that is in the world is, and he gives those three categories.
[00:08:39]  And notice all three of them deal with illicit desires, lust of the flesh.
[00:08:44]  That's a desire for something that cannot be righteously obtained, but it gratifies the flesh.
[00:08:50]  Lust of the eyes, same thing.
[00:08:51]  Desire for something that can't be righteously obtained, but it gratifies the eyes.
[00:08:57]  And the pride of life is a desire for status and stature and the appraise and approval of men that can't be righteously obtained.
[00:09:08]  And yet it pleases the ego.
[00:09:10]  So all three categories have to do with illicit desire, which I think is important.
[00:09:17]  All sin begins with evil desire.
[00:09:20]  Yes.
[00:09:21]  And it's interesting that that is precisely what the 10th commandment forbids coveting of any kind.
[00:09:27]  Coveting, by definition, is a.
[00:09:29]  A desire for something that you cannot righteously obtain.
[00:09:33]  And that's important to know.
[00:09:34]  It's what Jesus was saying when he said, if you so much as look on a woman to lust after her, you've already committed adultery in your heart.
[00:09:40]  You've broken the law.
[00:09:41]  You've broken the command of God merely by desiring something that you can't righteously have.
[00:09:48]  And that's why I've been pretty steadfast against the idea that is being promoted among evangelicals today that it's okay to be same sex attracted, to have a desire for a homosexual union.
[00:10:01]  That's okay as long as you don't act on it.
[00:10:03]  To me, that view pretty much goes exactly contrary to what Jesus was teaching when he said, if you look on a woman to lust after her, you've committed adultery already.
[00:10:15]  Right.
[00:10:16]  Yeah.
[00:10:16]  Because it's an illicit desire, it's a lust that cannot be righteously gratified.
[00:10:22]  Right.
[00:10:22]  No, you're absolutely right.
[00:10:23]  That gets into the issue of concupiscence.
[00:10:26]  Is that the right pronunciation of that word?
[00:10:28]  Yeah, it is.
[00:10:29]  It's interesting you'd say that because a good friend of mine who's a pastor emailed me just two days ago and said, How do you pronounce this word?
[00:10:37]  And I didn't know there was any option.
[00:10:39]  I always thought it's concupiscence.
[00:10:41]  But I asked a fellow pastor on staff of our church, how do you pronounce it?
[00:10:45]  And he gave a totally different pronunciation.
[00:10:47]  So I looked it up with the Oxford English Dictionary that pronounces words, and it is concupiscence.
[00:10:54]  Okay, great.
[00:10:55]  Great.
[00:10:56]  There we go.
[00:10:56]  We've got the authority on it.
[00:10:58]  So yeah, but you're right with Revoice and Greg Johnson and some of those guys, this idea that I can, as long as I don't act on my desires, and then you get some of the.
[00:11:08]  Ridiculous, you know, perversion of, well, you can, you know, maybe you can act on them a little bit.
[00:11:13]  You can cuddle with your guy that you're attracted to just as long as you don't go too far.
[00:11:18]  And it's just, it's perversion.
[00:11:20]  It's absolutely sin.
[00:11:22]  And I, you know, I think with that, there are desires.
[00:11:26]  So one thing that I would say, you said the deepest thing is our desires.
[00:11:29]  And one thing that I've always said, and maybe you're welcome to push back on this, but I feel like that the, you know, there's actions at the top, right?
[00:11:37]  So our actions often flow out of our, Our feelings are influenced by our thought processes.
[00:11:42]  Every idea, we take every thought captive.
[00:11:44]  And that thought process is even deeper than just a thought that just pops into your head, ideologies, ways of thinking.
[00:11:51]  And then thoughts shaped by desires.
[00:11:53]  But then desires are often shaped by, it seems like the core is our beliefs.
[00:11:58]  And I think there are some, I think two things, at least one of two things can happen.
[00:12:01]  We can have desires that are not inherently sinful in and of themselves, but we're seeking to gratify these desires in sinful ways rather than finding significance or value in God.
[00:12:15]  Or a satisfaction in God, pleasure and comfort in God.
[00:12:19]  In his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore.
[00:12:21]  In his presence, there's fullness of joy.
[00:12:24]  And so there's a way of going about desires that are, we could say maybe they're ordered desires, but we're seeking to fulfill them in sinful ways.
[00:12:32]  But then there's a whole other category of desires that the desire itself is inherently sinful.
[00:12:37]  It is a misordered desire.
[00:12:39]  So I think of Putin, just to be a little bit controversial.
[00:12:42]  I think of Putin.
[00:12:43]  I'm not a fan of him.
[00:12:44]  I think he's a warlord.
[00:12:45]  But At least he's a nationalist with all the globalism that we have these days.
[00:12:50]  And God affirms the goodness of sovereign nations, the right to protect their borders, free trade, free markets, those kinds of things.
[00:12:57]  And so I look at Putin and I see him as like a man who is sinning in what I would say, sinning in the right direction.
[00:13:04]  I saw Trump as somebody with plenty of sin, but sinning in the right direction.
[00:13:08]  But then there's a whole other group of men that seem to become very popular in our day and age the men of empathy, the men that are effeminate and.
[00:13:18]  It seems like it's not only sin, but it's sin in the wrong direction.
[00:13:22]  It's a misordered desire.
[00:13:24]  Do you hear what I'm getting at?
[00:13:25]  Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:13:27]  Yeah, I think I understand what you mean.
[00:13:28]  I don't know that I'd call it sin in the right direction because any sin is taking you in the wrong direction, obviously.
[00:13:33]  I know you know that.
[00:13:35]  But the distinction you make is a legitimate one.
[00:13:38]  Just think about the temptation of Jesus again.
[00:13:40]  He'd fasted for 40 days, and Satan wanted him to turn stones into bread.
[00:13:46]  It is not sinful to desire bread.
[00:13:48]  We pray.
[00:13:49]  Give us our daily bread, right?
[00:13:51]  So the sin in doing that would not have been that he's eating bread.
[00:13:56]  The sin would have been that he's gratifying that desire in a wrong way.
[00:14:01]  And that's true.
[00:14:04]  A lot of our legitimate desires can become sin if they become idols or if we gratify them in the wrong way and all that.
[00:14:13]  We all understand that.
[00:14:14]  But then there are certain things that even to desire that thing is.
[00:14:20]  Evil in and of itself.
[00:14:21]  It's not a legitimate desire.
[00:14:24]  And of course, that applies to any kind of lust that involves fornication or sexual sin.
[00:14:31]  It would apply to the coveting of something that belongs to your neighbor, a whole host of things that just the desire itself would be evil.
[00:14:40]  But it's also possible to let a good desire be fulfilled in a sinful way.
[00:14:46]  And you see that in the temptation of Christ.
[00:14:48]  Right.
[00:14:49]  Yep.
[00:14:49]  You're right.
[00:14:49]  That's a great example.
[00:14:51]  I keep thinking, as you speak of coveting, I keep thinking of Thomas Sowell.
[00:14:55]  One of his famous quotes was, Once upon a time, envy was one of the seven deadly sins.
[00:15:01]  And now it goes by its new name, social justice.
[00:15:04]  That's exactly right.
[00:15:06]  The heart of coveting behind it is envying.
[00:15:08]  And it's an indictment, an accusation of the living God, ultimately saying that God got it wrong, that God gave something to my neighbor that rightfully belongs to me.
[00:15:18]  And I keep thinking of David, where he says, The lines have fallen from me in pleasant places.
[00:15:24]  It's one thing to salute the sovereignty of God in theory, but it's another to delight in what God has chosen to sovereignly provide in his providence.
[00:15:33]  So, we can, it's one thing to salute the attribute of sovereignty.
[00:15:37]  It's another to actually delight in God's sovereignty by having gratitude for what in his sovereignty he has chosen to do.
[00:15:46]  And so, yeah, I think that's good.

=== Leaving Acts 29 After Woke Church (02:54) ===

[00:15:50]  So, with the spirit of this age, so here's one thing.
[00:15:54]  I was in Acts 29 for a while and I left after Eric Mason wrote his book, Woke Church.
[00:15:59]  So, that was around towards the end of 2018.
[00:16:02]  And I went the Reformed Baptist route, 1689, probably very similar to Vody Bockham.
[00:16:06]  I'd have a lot in common with the Apologia guys, Jeff Durbin, James White, now is with them.
[00:16:11]  And so that's where I landed.
[00:16:13]  And I'm grateful for the ways that God has continued to lead me and what I see as being biblical truth, what I believe is faithful to his word.
[00:16:21]  But when I was in the process of leaving Acts 29, a lot of guys were leaving.
[00:16:24]  A lot of guys were really getting sick of the woke stuff that was kind of happening in that context.
[00:16:29]  And I remember that, you know, some of the guys who were holding down the fort and they were staying, they were accusing, and I found it ironic.
[00:16:37]  And so I'm curious your take, but they were accusing the The guys who were leaving, myself included, of buying into the spirit of this age.
[00:16:45]  You're buying into the spirit.
[00:16:46]  And what they meant by, and I was so confused.
[00:16:48]  I was like, what do you mean?
[00:16:50]  And they said, the spirit of this age, loving Trump or wanting white fragility.
[00:17:01]  They look at all the pushback from conservatives, some of them Christians, some of them just political conservatives, and they would say, that's the spirit.
[00:17:11]  Of the age, egalitarianism, because I'm thinking spirit of the age, I'm thinking egalitarianism, androgyny, social justice, envy, covetousness, all you know, effeminacy.
[00:17:22]  But they're like, no, the spirit of this age is everything that embodies conservatives.
[00:17:29]  And I was so confused.
[00:17:31]  How would you respond to that?
[00:17:33]  Well, I would say it can actually go both ways.
[00:17:36]  Okay.
[00:17:37]  If you think about the secular political realm, I think obviously, right now, at the moment in which we live, the American left is far more prone to actually give approval and encouragement to evil things, such as abortion and the whole LGBTQ agenda and all of that.
[00:17:59]  But the American right has its own issues as well.
[00:18:02]  And the secular political right is really not going to take a stand against the LGBTQ agenda or any of that, at least not as a block.
[00:18:15]  It's always been an issue for me.
[00:18:17]  When I first became a Christian, I was just 17 years old.
[00:18:20]  Up to that point, politics was my biggest interest.
[00:18:24]  And I was a conservative in an era, this was in the 1960s and early 70s, in an era when it was not popular for students to be conservative.
[00:18:34]  Even then, to be cool, you kind of had to be a leftist and a radical.
[00:18:39]  And it was not all that different from what it is today students rioting and.

=== Debunking Humility as Uncertainty (15:13) ===

[00:18:45]  And the news media, you know, lending all its support to every leftist cause.
[00:18:48]  And I was a conservative, but not saved and didn't know anything about the gospel, didn't understand it anyway.
[00:18:56]  I'd grown up in a liberal church where, you know, some of the words of scripture were familiar to me, but I didn't know the gospel and stumbled across the gospel when I picked up my Bible at random one night to read and it opened, you know, randomly to the, I just flopped it open.
[00:19:12]  I treated my Bible like a fortune cookie, you know, whatever my eyes would light on, I would try to get some kind of.
[00:19:20]  You know, meaning out of the message, and usually just a verse or two.
[00:19:24]  But it opened to the first page of 1 Corinthians, and I thought, I've never read a whole book of scripture.
[00:19:31]  Maybe I will.
[00:19:32]  And so I counted the pages, and it was more pages than I hoped, but I thought, well, I'll give it a try.
[00:19:37]  I'm going to go.
[00:19:39]  By the time I got to chapter three, it absolutely devastated my worldview, which up to that point was I think God likes me because I'm conservative.
[00:19:48]  I think God likes me because I'm interested in the more sophisticated things of this world.
[00:19:56]  Whereas all my fellow students were out rioting and promoting leftist causes and rock music and drugs and all that, I was into.
[00:20:06]  Classical music and conservative politics, and all the nice things.
[00:20:10]  And yet, that whole first three or four chapters of 1 Corinthians are all about the wisdom of this world and how God hates it.
[00:20:20]  You know, the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, Paul says.
[00:20:24]  And he says, If anyone among you seems to be wise, let him become a fool that he may be wise.
[00:20:31]  And God hates the wisdom of this world.
[00:20:33]  He's chosen that which is foolish to confound the wise.
[00:20:35]  He says it over and over and over.
[00:20:38]  And I remember thinking, That makes no sense to me.
[00:20:43]  If God said he hated the foolishness of this world, I would agree and understand perfectly.
[00:20:50]  But why would he say he hates the wisdom of this world?
[00:20:54]  And by the time I got through chapter three, I realized the very best things about me are the things God hates.
[00:21:01]  And came out of those first three chapters realizing I needed to be saved, I had no hope before God.
[00:21:09]  So it was a good thing.
[00:21:10]  For me, but in my mind, in those days, and still I think this is to a large degree true when scripture speaks of the wisdom of this world and the rulers of this world, and all this talking about the political system that governs this world.
[00:21:26]  And I think Christians today, a lot of Christians, actually have the false hope that salvation for our culture lies in politics, that if we don't throw our collective weight together in a voting block and vote in a bunch of conservative legislators.
[00:21:46]  That's the only hope to save our society.
[00:21:49]  And the truth is, that wouldn't save our society.
[00:21:53]  Because you must be born again.
[00:21:55]  Yeah, it's still the wisdom of this world.
[00:21:56]  And the very best you can do as a worldly person without salvation is still filthy rags in God's eyes.
[00:22:09]  So, yeah, back to your original question.
[00:22:15]  Yeah, I would say the dominant.
[00:22:18]  The spirit of the age today is a sort of left leaning postmodern notion that you can't really know anything for sure.
[00:22:28]  That's what dominates the world, and that is the spirit of the age today.
[00:22:32]  And it's radically different from the spirit of God, which starts with things you can absolutely know because it's truth revealed by God, and that's scripture.
[00:22:42]  So our worldview starts with scripture.
[00:22:44]  You made reference earlier to the fact that.
[00:22:47]  Satan holds people captive.
[00:22:50]  And the way Paul describes the warfare that we are called to wage is in 1 Corinthians 10, he says, you know, the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly.
[00:23:04]  And he's not only talking there about, you know, military hardware, he's talking about fleshly ideas, worldly politics, all those things.
[00:23:14]  That's not going to solve it.
[00:23:15]  But the weapons of our warfare are spiritual and powerful for the tearing down of the strongholds.
[00:23:22]  That Satan has people held captive in.
[00:23:24]  He's talking about biblical truth there.
[00:23:27]  And that's this is the spiritual war.
[00:23:30]  It's not like a lot of charismatics think a mystical war against demons for real estate territory.
[00:23:40]  It's a war against the powers of evil over the truth.
[00:23:43]  And the weapon that we have, the primary weapon, the only offensive weapon that's listed in that array of armor in Ephesians 6 is the word of God, truth.
[00:23:55]  And so if we're going to fight the devil and liberate people from the strongholds he holds them in, It's the truth of the word that will do it.
[00:24:03]  It's not political clout.
[00:24:04]  It's not, you know, human warfare.
[00:24:09]  It's not, you know, sarcasm on Twitter, although some of us have dipped into that.
[00:24:18]  But what actually has power to make a difference in our culture is the truth of God's word.
[00:24:24]  And we have to proclaim that.
[00:24:26]  And it goes absolutely contrary to the spirit of the age, which, like I said, right now, the spirit of the age is postmodern and that the The hallmark of postmodernity is the notion that nobody really knows anything for sure.
[00:24:40]  There may be objective truth out there.
[00:24:42]  There may be truth that's ultimate truth, but we can't know it for sure.
[00:24:47]  We don't have the means to know it.
[00:24:49]  Which is an objective claim, ironically.
[00:24:51]  Yes, it is.
[00:24:53]  Objective truth cannot be known, it cannot be ascertained, or it doesn't even exist.
[00:24:58]  Right.
[00:24:59]  I don't think there's an objective statement about that.
[00:25:02]  Most people who are informed.
[00:25:04]  Postmodernists wouldn't say that objective truth doesn't exist because they don't know enough to say that.
[00:25:11]  So they'll say, if it exists, we can't know it for sure, which is in practical terms the same thing.
[00:25:17]  It is to say, nobody has truth, and therefore, your opinion is as good as mine and vice versa.
[00:25:25]  And nobody should ever tell another person that they're wrong because you don't know any more than they do whether what they believe is right or wrong.
[00:25:33]  That is the spirit that dominates the world today.
[00:25:36]  And it's hostile to the very idea of truth.
[00:25:39]  And especially hostile to the very idea of revealed truth, where God has told us this is true, and that's how we know it.
[00:25:47]  Right.
[00:25:47]  And that's like the foundation of Christianity.
[00:25:50]  Yep.
[00:25:51]  Amen.
[00:25:51]  Yeah.
[00:25:51]  So a lot of that plays into, you know, so relativism, but a lot of that plays into some of the things that we've been facing as of late, like, you know, standpoint epistemology, or as Vodi Bakum calls it, you know, the ethnic Gnosticism, you know, this idea that everybody has different lived experiences.
[00:26:08]  And so you can't know these things unless you've gone through certain experiences and, And so, then, even, you know, that taking that and trying to impose that godless ideology within the Christian faith and upon the Bible as a hermeneutic, saying that, you know, like instead of Hebrew and Greek scholars, we need, you know, a black guy and we need an Asian woman and we need, you know, and, you know, to tell us what the Bible means.
[00:26:32]  And of course, we're in a world of hurt very quickly.
[00:26:37]  So, one of the big characteristics that you drew was one of the big contrasts was, all right, spirit of this age.
[00:26:44]  Relativism.
[00:26:45]  It's this uncertainty.
[00:26:47]  But ironically, it is an arrogant uncertainty.
[00:26:50]  You would think that uncertainty would make you humble, but it doesn't.
[00:26:53]  Because the most humble thing you can do is say, God wrote a book and I submit my life to it.
[00:26:59]  Go ahead.
[00:27:00]  Sorry.
[00:27:01]  Well, there's nothing more arrogant than uncertainty.
[00:27:04]  And that's what Paul is saying in Romans 1 when he says, Look, that which may be known about God is manifest in them.
[00:27:10]  God has built into the human mind and the human soul an innate knowledge that he exists.
[00:27:17]  And the only way to be a skeptic is to suppress that knowledge.
[00:27:23]  And it's an arrogant thing to do because you're suppressing knowledge of God that came from God and saying, No, I know better.
[00:27:33]  I know better.
[00:27:33]  So it's inherently arrogant.
[00:27:35]  And it manifests, no surprise that it manifests itself in all kinds of arrogance.
[00:27:41]  Right.
[00:27:42]  And it seems like, you know, you've obviously been in ministry longer than I have.
[00:27:45]  So maybe you can shed some light on this.
[00:27:47]  But just in my, you know, last.
[00:27:50]  Seven, eight years in pastoral ministry, it seems like one of the themes that has been at place.
[00:27:57]  And I can't say it's rising today, but I remember it even when I was in youth group, you know, when I was a teenager.
[00:28:02]  But it seemed like in the church, youth pastors, senior pastors, everybody was adopting this new fad, which was basically truncating humility and making humility synonymous with uncertainty.
[00:28:16]  If I could word it as simply as possible, I would say humility has become uncertainty.
[00:28:22]  Synonymous with uncertainty.
[00:28:23]  And so you would hear pastors praised for saying, you know, I don't really know.
[00:28:30]  I just don't.
[00:28:31]  And they would be applauded, whereas I would be like, well, but the Bible says study to show yourself approved, rightly divine.
[00:28:37]  And that's not to say that a pastor or any creature, finite creature, is omniscient.
[00:28:41]  And every pastor, there is, I would say, a sliding bar.
[00:28:44]  So just full disclosure where I'm at with eldership, you know, he must be apt to teach.
[00:28:49]  There's a minimum bottom line, no matter what church you're in across the world, any period of time.
[00:28:54]  However, that said, there are some churches where there might be a man who really is qualified to be an elder in this church somewhere, right?
[00:29:02]  Maybe it's a younger church, a church plant.
[00:29:05]  He may not necessarily be the right guy for the pick in a church that's been around for 40 years with really seasoned saints, you know.
[00:29:14]  And that's not because he's not able to teach, but as a church matures, you want a pastor who has matured along with them and stayed a few steps ahead of them so he continues, like 1 Peter 5, to be an example to the flock.
[00:29:26]  I don't know how to be an example.
[00:29:29]  If the flock is all ahead of me in sanctification.
[00:29:32]  So, all that being said, there's this minimum bottom line you must be able to teach, but no matter who the pastor is, whether it's you, whether it's me, whether it's somebody else, we're going to be weaker on one theological point and stronger on another.
[00:29:47]  But we would never say, or we should never say, that our lack of knowledge is somehow a virtue.
[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:56]  How old are you?
[00:29:57]  Can I ask?
[00:29:58]  I'm 35.
[00:29:58]  All right, so 15 years ago, you were just 20 or so.
[00:30:05]  In fact, it made me go back almost 20 years ago when the emerging church movement was at its peak.
[00:30:11]  This was one of their favorite themes this notion that humility, the essence of humility is basically skepticism, doubt, uncertainty, all of those things.
[00:30:22]  They called it epistemological humility.
[00:30:25]  Epistemological humility.
[00:30:28]  I, at the time, was writing a blog.
[00:30:30]  Which is still online.
[00:30:31]  So you could do a Google search for epistemological humility in my name.
[00:30:36]  And you'll find I wrote quite a bit about this at the time, sort of debunking the idea that the essence of humility is either uncertainty or a constant shifting of your opinions.
[00:30:50]  That's the other idea that if you're not willing to change your mind about anything, then you're just not humble.
[00:30:58]  I had made the comment, I'm a Spurgeon aficionado, and I'd made the comment that one of the remarkable things about Spurgeon.
[00:31:06]  Ministry, a lifetime of ministry.
[00:31:08]  He became pastor of the most important Baptist church in England at age 19 and began to preach his first recorded sermon.
[00:31:20]  His first published sermon is on theology proper.
[00:31:25]  I forget the title of it, but I think about the immutability of God.
[00:31:29]  I think that may be the title, The Immutability of God.
[00:31:32]  And he branched out from there, building sermons on theology and really covered the basics of.
[00:31:40]  Christianity in his early years.
[00:31:41]  And one of the remarkable things about him is that I don't know of a single time where he had taken a position on some debatable theological point of view and later changed his mind.
[00:31:55]  He wasn't a man prone to change his mind.
[00:31:58]  And the reason for that was because he didn't preach on anything until he had thoroughly studied it and settled his mind.
[00:32:05]  And so he wasn't a sort of changeable, vacillating kind of preacher.
[00:32:10]  He When he preached on an issue, it was because he was certain about it.
[00:32:14]  He was settled in his heart and he didn't make any dramatic shifts in his theology for the entirety of his ministry.
[00:32:21]  And I was writing about that, and a whole lot of young guys wrote in and said, Well, that's terrible.
[00:32:26]  That's arrogant because it just shows he's not humble at all.
[00:32:30]  I mean, their idea was if you're humble, you have to keep changing your mind.
[00:32:35]  No.
[00:32:36]  And it's just an upside down view of what humility entails.
[00:32:41]  Right.
[00:32:41]  No, I completely agree.
[00:32:42]  And I can say that from the other side, as what I would say is a Bad example, and the Lord has been merciful despite my failure.
[00:32:49]  But I started off as a vineyard church planter, then moved to Acts 29.
[00:32:54]  The vineyard was egalitarian, and I believe it still is.
[00:32:57]  I don't really follow much, but the gifts of the Spirit, you know.
[00:33:01]  And so I walked into all these things cessationism, complementarianism, which even that now I would describe myself as somebody who's patriarchal, because I think even complementarianism in many cases, or at least would take a long time to explain what I mean when I say complementarian.
[00:33:18]  I don't think it's just Role, but I think it's not just male and female roles, he assigned them, but male and female natures, he designed them.
[00:33:24]  That the difference between men and women goes all the way down, and so you know.
[00:33:27]  But all these things I came into later cessationism, complementarianism, Calvinism, and so I did change my mind.
[00:33:34]  Um, and I would say that it hurt the church every time we shifted.
[00:33:41]  The Lord honored that because it was, you know, change in the right direction is what the Bible would call repentance, you know.
[00:33:48]  So I was repenting, um, but.
[00:33:51]  But that it wasn't ideal.
[00:33:53]  You know, Lord willing, you know, you would have come to that ahead of time.

=== When Steadfastness Becomes Stubbornness (06:23) ===

[00:33:58]  And I should clarify because I don't mean that I think it's wrong to change your mind.
[00:34:02]  I've changed my mind on a number of things.
[00:34:04]  I just think it's remarkable that Spurgeon never did that because he didn't put anything in print or on the record until he had thoroughly studied it.
[00:34:12]  I think all of us would look back on our lives and say, it would have been better if I'd done that.
[00:34:17]  Yes.
[00:34:18]  That's exactly what I'm saying.
[00:34:19]  There are videos, you know, recordings of sermons that, you know, I.
[00:34:22]  I don't have out there anymore because I'm like, yeah, I don't stand by that anymore.
[00:34:27]  You know, and there's probably some stuff out there that I wish wasn't out there.
[00:34:30]  And it's shameful because it's, man, I should have known better or at least should have done what Spurgeon did and just not teach that until I really, really had studied the issue more.
[00:34:40]  So I agree with you.
[00:34:41]  I think that that's admirable.
[00:34:42]  And it just goes to the point of, you know, yeah, that this whole idea of uncertainty being synonymous with humility is a sham.
[00:34:50]  It does make me think, you know, a little bit of one of my friends is Jared Longshore.
[00:34:55]  And I know that he, you know, that he disappointed a lot of Baptists with the transition that he made.
[00:34:59]  But I remember, you know, one tweet that went out there was basically kind of demonizing the change inherently.
[00:35:07]  And I don't know this man's thoughts and those kinds of things.
[00:35:09]  And you may know what I'm talking about, but I won't be any more specific than that.
[00:35:13]  But the point was, you know, we shouldn't applaud somebody changing, you know, in their doctrine.
[00:35:18]  To me, I would just want to say, because I am a Baptist, but I would want to say as a Baptist, I don't applaud you because you've now embraced a position that is not biblical.
[00:35:28]  That's why I don't applaud you.
[00:35:29]  That's why this isn't praiseworthy, because I think that that's an unbiblical position.
[00:35:33]  And I think that it's still within the banner of orthodoxy.
[00:35:36]  You're still a brother in Christ.
[00:35:37]  We wish you well.
[00:35:38]  We love you, all these kinds of things.
[00:35:40]  But you would better serve the people of God by holding to things that, of course, I believe as a Baptist are biblical.
[00:35:46]  But what I don't want to do is just take change itself and somehow demonize change, because If any Presbyterian became a Baptist, I would be applauding that change.
[00:35:57]  And so it's not change is not the problem.
[00:35:59]  The question is are we changing or conforming more into the image of Christ or further away?
[00:36:05]  Are we being renewed by the transforming of transforming is a change.
[00:36:09]  Is our mind being transformed more into Christ's likeness and sound biblical doctrine or which are we changing for the better or the worse?
[00:36:17]  So, yeah, agreed.
[00:36:19]  And change is only a problem if you start to think of change itself as a virtue.
[00:36:25]  I have a friend, had a friend.
[00:36:28]  He really no longer is in touch with me, but he would make these major worldview changes, an entire paradigm shift every three or four years.
[00:36:39]  And he went from being an Arminian to a Calvinist to a hyper Calvinist to a very soft Calvinist to an ecumenist to an Eastern Orthodox.
[00:36:52]  Wow.
[00:36:53]  And he's made all of those changes, maybe, you know.
[00:37:00]  With as little sometimes as two years in between.
[00:37:03]  And he wrote an article after one of his major changes saying this very thing that he believes changing your mind is the very essence of humility.
[00:37:13]  That was like the title of his article.
[00:37:15]  Yeah, that's all right.
[00:37:16]  And I challenged him on that.
[00:37:17]  And, you know, he basically doubled down and he believed that.
[00:37:22]  And I think there are people who are afflicted with a sort of wanderlust when it comes to theological positions where they.
[00:37:31]  They change all the time.
[00:37:33]  And my advice to people like that is if you're going to do it, just don't think that that's humility, especially if, and as it usually happens, the guy who comes to a fresh position then spends the next year excoriating everybody who believes what he believed last year.
[00:37:50]  Like all of a sudden now, he goes from premillennialism to postmillennialism, and within days, he's an expert on eschatology and he wants to debate everybody.
[00:38:02]  Right, that sort of thing really irritates me, you know.
[00:38:05]  Yeah, no matter which direction you're changing, if you just changed your position, you don't need to go around picking fights with her.
[00:38:12]  But it seems like the sort of people who are afflicted with the problem we're talking about, uh, that's what they always do.
[00:38:21]  They it's almost as if they love the argument more than they love the truth.
[00:38:25]  Yeah, that's a really good point.
[00:38:26]  So, we can't change is not inherently bad, it's not inherently good.
[00:38:29]  If you're changing the right direction, the Bible calls that repentance, it's good.
[00:38:32]  If you're changing the wrong direction, the Bible calls that compromise, sin, it's bad.
[00:38:37]  So Change in and of itself is not a virtue because change signifies ignorance and ignorance means humility.
[00:38:44]  We can't do that, but we also shouldn't praise change just for the sake of change.
[00:38:49]  Right.
[00:38:50]  Remember, scripture says, be steadfast, immovable.
[00:38:54]  So there is a sense in which steadfastness is virtuous, unless you're being stubborn about something you're wrong in.
[00:39:04]  So it is kind of hard to pin down, isn't it?
[00:39:07]  There are people I'd love to see change their opinions.
[00:39:09]  But yeah, if they do, I don't want them crowing about how humble they are because they changed.
[00:39:16]  Right.
[00:39:17]  Good point.
[00:39:18]  So, any other thoughts on the spirit of this age?
[00:39:21]  Spirit of God.
[00:39:21]  The big one that it seems like we've been hitting is relativism versus steadfast, unmovable, unshakable, absolute truth.
[00:39:29]  Yeah, and I would say there's also an important distinction to be made between worldliness and heavenly mindedness.
[00:39:34]  Scripture commands us to set our affections on things that are above.
[00:39:40]  And yet that viewpoint is scorned by most evangelicals today who will tell you if you're heavenly minded at all, then you're no earthly good.
[00:39:50]  You've heard that saying, I'm sure.
[00:39:52]  Yeah.
[00:39:53]  But scripture commands us to set our affections on things above.
[00:39:56]  And I find that if there's a besetting sin that evangelicals have shown for the past 50 years, it's this tendency to adopt and embrace and adapt pretty much everything that's a worldly fad.
[00:40:14]  Whatever's popular in the world right now is going to be popular soon in the church.
[00:40:19]  The church always lags behind.

=== The Church Lagging Behind Culture (07:02) ===

[00:40:21]  And so it's kind of embarrassing, but they do it.
[00:40:24]  I mean, you go to any kind of large Christian gathering.
[00:40:27]  The national religious broadcasters, or used to be Christian booksellers, were the worst.
[00:40:33]  And I've been to their convention in a while, so I don't know if it's still quite this bad.
[00:40:36]  But you'd have displays of people who would take every logo from a secular company, every pop tune from popular music, or whatever, and try to change it in a way that it had some kind of Christian message.
[00:40:55]  It's just, it's cheesy and it's laughable in the eyes of the world.
[00:40:59]  It doesn't win the world's admiration, but The opposite.
[00:41:03]  It makes the world think that we are shallow, and it is a shallow approach.
[00:41:08]  It's interesting.
[00:41:09]  I was just listening this morning to, I don't want to give a commercial for another podcast, but I have to say, the Just Thinking podcast, those guys, they do these long form podcasts.
[00:41:20]  I think their most recent one is like three hours long.
[00:41:23]  And in the first hour, they're talking about this very thing.
[00:41:27]  And Daryl Harrison is eloquent with it, talking about how sad it is that.
[00:41:34]  Christians are addicted to borrowing fads from the world.
[00:41:38]  He's much more eloquent than I am about it.
[00:41:40]  So just encourage you to listen, have them listen to that.
[00:41:44]  Yeah, no, Daryl and Virgil are great.
[00:41:46]  We've had them on our show before and they were super helpful these last few years in processing these kinds of things.
[00:41:52]  But you're right.
[00:41:53]  That's another thing that I felt with Acts 29 they transitioned away from Driscoll and tried to rebrand because Acts 29 was kind of always about branding.
[00:42:04]  At first, I didn't really know what was going on and it sounded good.
[00:42:06]  You know, they.
[00:42:07]  They really tried to emphasize, you know, five theological distinctives, right?
[00:42:12]  And one of them was humility, you know, and I think diversity was one of them, you know, and then another was something to do with the Holy Spirit that was just vague enough to where you could be a cessationist and be in Acts 29, but it was very much in line with the, you know, the Chandler Baptist, Baptist, Baptist kind of thing and kind of put trying to push the movement a little bit more towards the continuationist position.
[00:42:33]  But the humility one really stood out to me because.
[00:42:38]  As I engaged more in the movement as a local Acts 29 pastor and began to make more relationships and then began to see what was happening at the international level and our conferences and these kinds of things.
[00:42:49]  I'll never forget when they had this panel with Brandon Washington.
[00:42:53]  It was Brandon Washington.
[00:42:54]  The BDN Obaya was actually the plenary.
[00:42:56]  He was a guest speaker that year, but it was Brandon Washington, Leonce Crump, Eric Mason.
[00:43:03]  And we're supposed to be, now we are characterized as a movement of humility.
[00:43:06]  You could tell it was just, Driscoll just got drugged through the mud, and some of that's his own doing, and some of it, you know, maybe wasn't.
[00:43:15]  But either way, you know, Driscoll, we don't want to be associated with him.
[00:43:18]  Being tied to Driscoll is a bad look for us.
[00:43:20]  We need to rebrand.
[00:43:22]  We need to pivot.
[00:43:22]  We need to draw a big gap as we can get away from Driscoll.
[00:43:27]  And one of the things that, you know, Christianity today did their rise and fall of Mars Hill, which I would just say, all right, somebody needs to do that, but Christianity today is not qualified for the job.
[00:43:37]  A bunch of egalitarians, you know, telling, you know, So, I, you know, somebody should do that because I think there would be a lot of helpful things in that diagnosis to see, you know, what went wrong.
[00:43:45]  But the point is, you know, Driscoll got labeled as toxic masculinity and all these kinds of things.
[00:43:51]  And so then it's like we're going this other direction.
[00:43:53]  But what I realized is there really, even though we were shifting and rebranding, there was still one constant theme.
[00:43:58]  And the constant theme was, I believe, the fear of man.
[00:44:02]  The constant theme, it was the spirit of this age, in my opinion.
[00:44:05]  That doesn't mean there aren't good Acts 29 pastors, and that doesn't mean that, you know, they're all heretics by any stretch.
[00:44:10]  But I feel like The overarching culture by some of the key leaders.
[00:44:15]  It could go from black to white, from Driscoll to whatever the opposite of Driscoll is.
[00:44:22]  Start differences, but really still the same thing, which is exactly precisely what you were saying earlier.
[00:44:27]  It could be pro Trump, pro Biden, and yet still the spirit of this age for different reasons and in different ways.
[00:44:33]  But one of the common themes is the fear of man.
[00:44:37]  I want to look good in the eyes of the world.
[00:44:39]  So the boastful pride of life.
[00:44:42]  You have any thoughts on that?
[00:44:44]  Yeah.
[00:44:45]  And, you know, you said that the new virtues that were touted were humility and diversity, probably inclusion as well.
[00:44:55]  These are classic postmodern values.
[00:44:57]  They're not biblical values.
[00:44:59]  You don't see the word diversity in Scripture.
[00:45:02]  There are principles associated with the idea of diversity that we learn from Scripture.
[00:45:07]  I mean, God made the human race to be diverse, and all of that is good, but diversity itself, Is not a particular virtue in the sense that the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, these are what Scripture calls virtue.
[00:45:31]  And they don't really go with any of the postmodern values, which are inclusion, diversity, and epistemological humility.
[00:45:41]  And those things sort of blend together to say you just cannot challenge anyone else's.
[00:45:46]  View that other guy's opinion is every bit as good as and valid as mine, and therefore I'm not supposed to tell anybody they're wrong, we're just all supposed to get along.
[00:45:56]  And the one exception to that is anybody who is too certain about anything, you can tell that guy he's wrong, exactly.
[00:46:02]  And that's why I started experiencing problems with even some of the local other actual pastors in my area, was because these things were popping up, and the critical race theory thing was popping up.
[00:46:11]  And of course, it's always under the banner of racial reconciliation, right?
[00:46:14]  So, the left, they learn, you know, so they, oh, woke is a bad word now.
[00:46:18]  So, they'll stop using it.
[00:46:19]  And that's why you have to have discernment, you know, because people, you know, the word shibboleth, you know, like who can actually pronounce it right?
[00:46:27]  So, it's sometimes good.
[00:46:28]  I think it was J.I. Packer who, with, you know, the word inerrancy, it's good to have, because some guys are saying, well, maybe we just say infallibility because some people are getting hung up on inerrancy.
[00:46:36]  It's like, no, I think inerrancy is a good word.
[00:46:38]  Sometimes it's good to have that shibboleth word that the liberals can't pronounce, you know, and it helps us to spot them and, You know, and so like now, you know, certain guys, oh, well, not critical race theory.
[00:46:48]  I just think we need to have a panel every single year about racial reconciliation.
[00:46:52]  Oh, you mean critical race theory?
[00:46:55]  Because that's the way that they do it.
[00:46:56]  They don't do that, we're reconciled in Christ, who is put to death, a hostility.
[00:47:00]  It's not biblical reconciliation, it's the world's tactics.
[00:47:04]  And they just learned that this particular term, I can't use it anymore because it'll oust me as the progressive that I actually am.
[00:47:12]  So, all that being said, you're absolutely right.
[00:47:13]  I started having problems because I was pushing back and I was doing it charitably.
[00:47:18]  But I was doing it with a degree of certainty.
[00:47:20]  No, this is correct.
[00:47:22]  This is incorrect.

=== Future Plans for Grace Church (09:29) ===

[00:47:24]  And that was just absolutely not tolerated.
[00:47:27]  So, yeah.
[00:47:28]  Right.
[00:47:28]  So, diversity of skin color is desirable, but diversity of thought is not.
[00:47:34]  And so, in an environment like that, you see this not just in the evangelical movement, but in a much wider way in the world at large, that you're expected to fall in line with what is politically correct and Currently dominant, and if you don't, you will be canceled.
[00:47:52]  And it's begun to change so quickly that it's hard to keep up with.
[00:47:56]  Five years ago, no one would have ever expected that the Disney Corporation would come out in opposition to a law that says, you know, people who are devoted to the LGBTQ thing shouldn't be indoctrinating my children.
[00:48:15]  And yet now, that's, you know, it's changed so quickly.
[00:48:19]  When Obama ran for president in his first term, He said he was opposed to gay marriage.
[00:48:24]  Right.
[00:48:25]  You say that today, you're permanently canceled.
[00:48:27]  Right.
[00:48:28]  Yep, you're right.
[00:48:29]  Well, okay.
[00:48:30]  Well, let's go ahead and land the plane.
[00:48:32]  I think that's really helpful with the spirit of this age versus the spirit of God.
[00:48:37]  And we want to be about the spirit of God and not give way to the spirit of this age.
[00:48:42]  You gave me permission in your email to ask you about this.
[00:48:45]  So obviously, you're not sanctioned and you don't know, have a crystal ball or anything like that.
[00:48:49]  But what do you suspect, just speaking from your personal knowledge?
[00:48:54]  Where do you think Grace Community Church is heading?
[00:48:56]  John MacArthur, I mean, maybe he'll live for another 40 years, but it's not likely.
[00:49:00]  What do you think the plan is going to be?
[00:49:02]  Yeah, John's in his mid 80s right now.
[00:49:04]  His father lived to be 90 and preached, at least taught a Sunday school class within a month before he died.
[00:49:12]  Wow.
[00:49:13]  And John is in better health than his father was.
[00:49:15]  So, you know, it's conceivable he could still be preaching at Grace Church another decade, and I hope that happens.
[00:49:23]  So, We'll see.
[00:49:27]  I would not even hazard a guess what's going to happen at Grace Church.
[00:49:30]  They're obviously going to have to do a search for a new pastor, and that will be the responsibility of the elders.
[00:49:36]  I don't think there can be a hardcore succession plan with a successor to John MacArthur put in place as long as he's still there.
[00:49:47]  Nobody wants to see him move from the scene.
[00:49:49]  I hope he stays as long as he can.
[00:49:52]  Right.
[00:49:52]  Do you think John will speak into that when it comes time, or do you think he'll just completely leave it to the elders?
[00:49:59]  What do you think he might express?
[00:50:00]  You know, he might express his opinion, but he wouldn't.
[00:50:03]  I don't think he would.
[00:50:05]  It'd have to be some extraordinary circumstances for him to actually choose a successor.
[00:50:10]  You know, he'd have to be fatally ill and know that he has only a month to live or something like that.
[00:50:16]  I don't think he wants to intrude in that.
[00:50:18]  It is the role of the elders to make that choice.
[00:50:22]  And Grace to You, Grace to You is a separate organization.
[00:50:25]  That's where I'm at.
[00:50:27]  Grace to You, we produce the radio ministry and other media for John MacArthur.
[00:50:32]  And we have talked about this at length.
[00:50:36]  In fact, it's written in our purpose statement that Grace to You exists to expand the scope of John's teaching ministry.
[00:50:44]  And we plan to continue airing his sermons long after I'm dead.
[00:50:51]  Right.
[00:50:52]  Well, Ligonier is doing that every day with R.C. Scroll and still very successful with it.
[00:50:57]  J. Myrna McGee has been dead more than 25 years, and his ministry is larger now than it was when he was alive.
[00:51:03]  Wow.
[00:51:04]  And the reason that's possible, you think about McGee and John MacArthur, they're totally different theologically, but what they do have in common is both of them just.
[00:51:15]  Open the scriptures and teach.
[00:51:16]  They're not exegeting current events.
[00:51:18]  They're not talking about what's popular this year or whatever.
[00:51:23]  We commonly air sermons that John preached in the early 1970s on Grace to You today.
[00:51:30]  So that was, what, 40 years, 50 years ago, 50 years.
[00:51:35]  So we'll air sermons that are 50 years old right now.
[00:51:40]  And so there's no reason we can't be airing the sermons John's preaching right now, 50 years from now.
[00:51:45]  I won't be around to see it, but.
[00:51:48]  I think Grace to You will continue to broadcast John MacArthur's teaching until no one wants to hear it anymore.
[00:51:56]  And it's hard for me to foresee that because his teaching is so clear and easy to follow and so thoroughly biblical.
[00:52:03]  And it's not time bound, it's not bound to any zip code.
[00:52:07]  He's not preaching to any particular demographic.
[00:52:10]  He's just explaining what the scriptures say.
[00:52:13]  And it translates into any language and any time zone.
[00:52:16]  And I think it should translate easily into any era.
[00:52:19]  We still read Spurgeon and benefit from him.
[00:52:23]  And I wish somebody had recorded his voice.
[00:52:25]  They could have, and nobody did.
[00:52:27]  Oh, yeah.
[00:52:28]  But we've got enough of John on record that, in fact, we have a stash of sermons that have never been broadcast on the radio.
[00:52:37]  So we could do fresh material for probably 20 more years and never air the same sermon twice.
[00:52:44]  Wow.
[00:52:45]  That's really cool.
[00:52:46]  So we just plan to continue doing that.
[00:52:48]  For us at Grace to You, it's, as I said, I hope to see it.
[00:52:54]  Two generations at least after I'm dead.
[00:52:56]  Yeah.
[00:52:56]  So that's great.
[00:52:57]  So, with Grace to You being completely separate, because I, you know, it was helpful just corresponding with you through email because I just imagine, I don't know, I just, I don't know what I imagine, but I just imagine, you know, Grace to You and Grace Community being maybe closer tied than they are.
[00:53:11]  And I know they are tied with John MacArthur.
[00:53:13]  But so all that being said, my point is whenever John MacArthur, Lord does take him home, would Grace to You have to stay in that location?
[00:53:23]  Do you think there's any, Is there any talk or any potential of Grace to You one day down the line, 10 years from now, being maybe?
[00:53:31]  Yeah, sure.
[00:53:31]  There's casual talk about it, obviously.
[00:53:34]  We don't have a plan to move or anything.
[00:53:36]  And we are tied to Grace Church in one sense.
[00:53:39]  Organizationally, we're separate.
[00:53:41]  We've always had a separate budget.
[00:53:43]  Grace to You has always been self supporting.
[00:53:44]  We don't depend on income from the church.
[00:53:48]  And so we could conceivably move to any place in the world that we wanted to.
[00:53:55]  Right.
[00:53:56]  And There may be someday tax benefits in doing that and cost of living benefits to do it.
[00:54:03]  We don't have a plan to do it, but we have discussed the possibility.
[00:54:06]  As long as John's here, though, we want to stay close to Grace Church.
[00:54:09]  One of the requirements to be employed at Grace to You is you have to be a Grace Church member.
[00:54:13]  Okay.
[00:54:14]  So, we don't want to move away from the church.
[00:54:19]  Gotcha.
[00:54:19]  As long as John's there, at least.
[00:54:21]  Right.
[00:54:21]  And you're an elder at the church, right?
[00:54:25]  Yes.
[00:54:25]  Yeah.
[00:54:26]  Okay.
[00:54:27]  Well, I'll stop trying to get.
[00:54:28]  I'm a lay elder.
[00:54:30]  What?
[00:54:30]  Yeah.
[00:54:31]  It's confusing to people because I pastor an adult fellowship group, a Sunday school class, but I'm technically a lay elder.
[00:54:38]  I don't get paid by the church.
[00:54:40]  Right.
[00:54:41]  So, I'm a layman who serves as an elder, and I haven't been necessarily the most diligent of all the elders, but I do teach a fairly large fellowship group that meets every Sunday.
[00:54:56]  Great.
[00:54:57]  All right.
[00:54:57]  Well, I'll stop picking your brain about that, but I appreciate you opening up and sharing a little bit about the future of grace.
[00:55:03]  So, thanks so much for coming on the show.
[00:55:05]  Is there any final thoughts you want to leave us with?
[00:55:08]  No, thanks for having me.
[00:55:10]  Just to say, people have asked a lot, it seems, lately.
[00:55:15]  What do you think the crying need for evangelical Christians today is?
[00:55:20]  And my answer consistently has been courage.
[00:55:24]  I think courage.
[00:55:24]  I just spoke on it at Shepherd's Conference.
[00:55:26]  They assigned me a passage from Joshua chapter one, where in the span of four verses, Joshua is told by God three times, Be strong and courageous.
[00:55:37]  And I think courage is one of the things that is lacking among ministers today, pastors.
[00:55:43]  They are too afraid of what the world thinks.
[00:55:46]  And, uh, Too afraid to go against what's politically correct.
[00:55:52]  And let's face it, these days you can pay a very high price just for expressing the wrong opinion.
[00:55:58]  That's right.
[00:55:59]  We've seen people, well known people, get canceled on Twitter, evangelicals.
[00:56:04]  Justin Peters is no longer on Twitter because just the opposition to a couple of benign things that he said, actually.
[00:56:12]  But that happens a lot.
[00:56:15]  You have to have a lot of courage to.
[00:56:19]  To say what you need to say if you're a person in ministry today.
[00:56:22]  And so that would be my way to sum all of this up.
[00:56:26]  If we're going to honor the Spirit of the Lord and not the Spirit of this world, it's going to take a great deal of courage to do that.
[00:56:32]  Amen.
[00:56:33]  All right.
[00:56:33]  Well, thanks for coming on the show, Phil.
[00:56:35]  I really appreciate it.
[00:56:36]  Thank you.
[00:56:37]  Thanks so much for listening.
[00:56:38]  But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor, take a moment, and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
[00:56:46]  This is undoubtedly the best way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible.
[00:56:53]  Thanks so much.