Joel and Michael Belch argue Christian chaos stems from conflating distinct domains like the gospel with politics, contrasting lazy ideological "master keys" with Aristotle's categorical thinking. They assert grace elevates natural roles—father, citizen, neighbor—without erasing them, critiquing complementarians for inconsistently applying biblical categories while demanding absolute male authority. The hosts analyze Abraham Kuyper's spheres of sovereignty to claim civil magistrates must prioritize domestic citizens over foreign leaders like Zelensky, labeling Democratic foreign aid as "pseudo-compassion" that harms Appalachia. Ultimately, they conclude the state's primary duty is fostering gospel proclamation within its own borders rather than managing immigration or global conflicts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Debating Christian Categories00:10:38
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There are a lot of debates going on in the Christian world right now.
Many of these, whether about politics, culture, Or even doctrine seems to spiral out of control because people are talking past each other.
Often, the problem isn't the facts, it's the categories.
When we confuse what belongs to the individual versus the group, the gospel versus ethics, or the church versus the state, we end up with chaos instead of clarity.
In today's episode, we'll explore how thinking in proper categories can transform not only how we engage with the world, but also how we honor God in the process.
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Tune in now as we discuss this important topic.
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And mid year, Lord willing, we'll be able to do a little bit more.
But today's topic, as you already saw in the cold open, is categories.
And our very own Michael Belch has outlined this episode for us.
So, why don't you kick us off?
Well, Joel, this is actually a topic that I'm doing because of feedback from listeners and people that we know who said, you guys mention the idea of thinking in categories all the time.
And it's true, we do.
We mention this all the time.
I mean, probably every other episode we're talking about, well, that's the category.
That's not the proper category.
And this is not really a new idea.
It's just kind of lost to a lot of Christians.
But the idea of having categories for thinking, the funny thing to me about it is all of us do this naturally in every part of life, right?
So, for instance, if you think about, if you come into your house and your kid is dumping water all over your couch, you're going to be very upset.
And preach the gospel.
But if your kid says, actually, you know, I was lighting the candle for Christmas and the candle fell on the couch and the couch was on fire.
And so, what I did then was I dumped a bucket of water on it to keep the house from burning down.
All of a sudden, you're going to be happy with the day.
Well, or you're going to correct your child and say, Why did you put water on the fire instead of preaching the gospel?
Joel's anticipating where this episode is going.
I mean, the fire is a symbol of the fire of hell and the wrath of God.
The only antidote is preaching the gospel.
Joel Barry gets in and says, Why can't we?
The answer is the gospel.
Yeah.
So, my point is, we all. already actually thinking categories.
In fact, that's the only way that you can get through life.
You think about categories for an individual.
A father might be kind and gracious with his children, but if that man's a police officer, he's going to be very gruff and firm and aggressive with a criminal.
And so the idea of thinking in categories, number one, is not new.
Number two, everybody actually already does this.
Where we are a little bit perplexed is that it seems to be a lost art for Christians to think about categories of life and living and What is the gospel?
What is the law?
What is, you know, the rest of life?
How much does the law of nature and reason, all of these things, how do they play in?
And sadly, for a lot of Christians, there's one category when it comes to how we should live, and that is simply, you know, what does the gospel say about this?
What does the gospel say about this?
So, what I thought we would do first of all, and I'm curious what you guys' opinion on this is why do you think, and I have some thoughts here, but why is it important?
To thinking categories, right?
Why is it important to have different categories for thinking, but then also for how to behave as we go through life?
I'm thinking theological categories.
I'm thinking as we seek to relate with the world.
Why is it so important that we get this topic right, would you say?
Well, part of it is it may have been Pat Buchanan who said this.
I can't remember, but it's a quote that's been circulating around.
It's an old quote, but it's been circulating around recently.
The idea of, you know, the town's on fire.
Or, I'm sorry, the town is flooded.
There's a flood, and you show up with fire extinguishers.
So, I think one reason that it's helpful to be able to categorize properly is so that you actually have efficient and effective solutions to problems.
Because you have to, in order to have the proper solution, you first have to be able to categorize the problem.
What category does this particular problem fit into?
That way, you can begin looking for proper solutions within.
That category.
And if not, then I think one of the problems is that you're going to be incredibly ineffective in dealing with whatever kind of chaos, whatever problematic issue is going on at any given moment.
You're not going to be able to deal with it properly.
Yeah.
People will, I think, a great example of this is David Platt, who kind of takes this idea that when we talk about immigration and other cultures and other religions coming, that that's the great commission coming to our doorstep.
Like, praise God, we don't even have to go to them.
They're arriving here, and you're blackpilling.
The nations are coming to us, and you're blackpilling.
But he takes a theological concept, evangelism, the gospel, reaching individuals with it, and then a political, national issue of immigration.
And in taking them, crashing them together, and conflating them, he proposes a solution that is ridiculous and not just ridiculous, like, well, that's silly, but destructive.
If you don't properly parse out this belongs to this domain, this is where God has this, this is where this applies.
You can go on and propose ideas and thoughts and pontificate all you want, things that are genuinely not just ridiculous and you'll look silly, which is bad enough, but things that are actually just would decimate you, your church, your people.
And so it's not just thinking in categories to avoid being a bad logician, like thinking logically or having bad reason.
You need to think in those categories so you don't make terrible, terrible mistakes.
The irony here is that in the name of kind of this mission, God bringing the mission field to the doorstep.
Many Christian churches and many Christians are pulling back on a missions emphasis right now because they're saying, wait, we have done not irreparable, but serious harm to our nation, to our culture, to the Christian worldview that used to exist in our culture.
And because of some of this category.
Irreparable for this generation.
Irreparable for this generation, certainly.
I would agree.
For this generation, there's certain things we'll never get out of our lifetime.
Yeah, I would agree.
And so if you don't have the proper categories, you end up, I think, Wes, the way that you, and we'll talk about this a little bit later.
little bit later on, but when you clash and collide and overlap categories, sometimes it can sound very good, right?
Like the idea of global missions on the doorstep and political, cultural, sociological considerations of what is a nation, things like that.
Like it can sound very good.
And so I would say that one of the reasons why it's important to have categories is because they protect you from things that sound like a good idea.
It drives me crazy that we in the modern church are so committed to reinventing everything.
Right.
And so we come up with a lot of things that sound like really good ideas.
And part of what would protect us from that is finding out what older saints said about this topic.
But another thing that would protect us from some of these ideas that sound good, but that are really terrible, is having proper categories.
Yep.
This kind of plays into for those of you who were able to watch our live stream that we did last Wednesday, our first week coming back in the new year.
This is going to be two Wednesdays ago or three Wednesdays ago now.
Oh, you're right.
You're right.
Yep.
So that was two weeks ago.
So time flies when you're having fun.
But one of the things that we talked about was ideology.
And categories is kind of almost in some sense the antithesis to ideology, steamrolls everything into it's my optic.
It's, it's, and I talked about how, you know, when you get into now, this is speculation at some level, you know, you can't necessarily prove inward motives.
But I think because I've been ideological, particularly, I think younger men, it appeals to younger men.
And so I know that at least in my own personal life, I can speak for myself and some of my own motives and incentives for.
Multiple Facets of Solutions00:13:11
Why an ideological approach to life was appealing.
Well, one reason is because it's easier.
It's lazy.
It's easy.
Thinking in categories in a multifaceted way requires a higher degree of thinking, it involves more complexities.
And so, ideology versus thinking in categories, in some ways, seems like two bookends, you know, like the two far, you know, the antithesis of one another.
And so, with ideology, we talked about whether it's this motive, I think, of having a master key, right?
Because sitting down and reading Bob Inc. Systematics and reading Calvin's Institutes and then reading political philosophy.
Learning Latin, if you're really going to get into it, you probably should learn Latin or something as well.
Right, or learning Latin, exactly.
And reading Aristotle and reading all this kind of stuff is really, really hard.
It's not easy.
It's way easier to be able to say, to find one thing.
And then fit everything into that one myoptic rubric, right?
So, what are all the world's problems?
The Jews.
You know, like, I figured it out, you know.
And then it also becomes not only the master key for unlocking every door and solving every problem.
And most of the time, let's be honest, it doesn't solve any problem.
It's just explanatory power for having this secret gnosis of, I know the problem and you've solved it.
Well, no, I haven't solved it.
I just know what the problem is.
And so, me and my friends, you know, we're smarter than everybody.
We figured it out.
So, not only on the one hand is it ineffective often, but it's also far too simplistic.
And I really do think that there's an apathy, a lethargy that's involved because reading Mein Kampf is edgy, right?
But take the edginess and take whatever courage, or even if it's fake courage, or maybe it's genuine.
I think there are genuine reasons why somebody could read Mein Kampf.
And I think there's plenty of bad reasons that somebody could read it.
But here's the one bottom line that I'm getting at reading Mein Kampf, and that being your full curriculum, is a lot easier than reading Aquinas, Aristotle, Bob Inc., you know, all these.
That's just a lot more work.
And so I think Christians are particularly susceptible to this.
And you can do it as a reformed Christian, right?
So Calvinism is the master key that unlocks every door, or being J-pilled, you know.
Or post millennialism, right?
If we just had the right eschatology.
Now, I've been there and I think there is a lot of truth.
I think dispensationalism did a number on the church, especially here in America.
I think 150 years, dispensationalism, I've been fond of saying, dispensationalism is a hell of a drug.
And I think it did a number on the American church, but it's not the only problem.
So I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to steamroll in the other direction and say all problems are equal.
Some are more significant.
There are some problems that are uniquely pernicious and they actually infect and spread and actually cause all these other problems that stem.
Output transcript Out from this source, this core problem.
And I think that, you know, dispensationalism would be an example of having a defeatist mentality, dispensational premillennialism, not historic, but that is a pernicious problem.
A revivalism, man centered Arminian theology.
Yeah, I think that that is not just one problem, but a source problem that spreads out and has many other problems that stem from it.
And I also think Judaism is, I would absolutely classify that as a source problem, a root problem that stems out and has multiple.
Different expressions that come from that.
Not that they come exclusively from that, but feminism would be an example.
Feminism doesn't exclusively derive from Judaism, but there is a line there.
There is a correlation.
And that should be something that we, as the kids say, notice and something that we're able to address without being unhinged, but also with courage and integrity and all these kinds of things.
So, not being ideological.
I think ideology, in many ways, is the opposite of what we're focusing on today in terms of.
Categorical thinking in multiple different categories, the opposite is being ideological, and that seems to be Christians seem to especially fall prey to that.
I was gonna say, one of the forms sometimes the ideology can take is a certain area, your expertise, then you'll get that to cover over.
So, the Young Restless Reform movement we said the theologian is the king, and then he gets to be expert, he gets to be expert in the home and on marriage and parenting because he's an expert on the Bible, so he has all the knowledge for that, and he's an expert on politics because.
He has the Bible.
And so that expertise in that little area got to kind of stretch and cover everything like that.
And then it's like, well, we got to ask the theologian about this.
We got to ask the theologian about that.
And no one in that would think, well, like my ideology is theology, but it was conveniently used as kind of this, I know this.
So now all of these things are also my domain of expertise.
When really thinking categorically, if you can exegete, if you've studied, if you've gone to seminary, that's awesome.
And you're a great theologian.
None of that means you are necessarily qualified to give good counsel and parenting advice.
or to speak informedly on political matters?
I think part of the trap that Christians run into is that in very broad strokes, there are very cut and dry categories.
What is the problem with the world?
The problem with the world is sin.
What is the solution to sin?
The solution to sin is the gospel, right?
And yes, that's 100% right in very broad strokes.
But what we, I think this is one of the lessons that I wanted to bring up.
Within broad categories, what's the problem with the world?
Sin.
What's the solution to the gospel?
There are subcategories.
That we have missed.
Okay, well, does that mean that the gospel solves, you know, a bad traffic flow that's causing me to lose my temper on the way to work?
Well, no, like that takes social planning and civic engineering.
It could solve my temper, but not the traffic.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so one of the things that we have forgotten is that there are categories within what the gospel is doing.
One of the very last things that Jesus says.
The end of Revelation is I make all things new.
But the grammar there is actually progressive.
I am making all things new.
So how is he doing that?
Well, obviously by the gospel, right?
Like, that is the power of God for salvation.
That's what transforms hearts.
But that doesn't mean that the gospel teaches us how to be good stewards of our land or any of those other things.
And so, my point is within broad categories of Christians, we have subcategories.
And I think that just speaking from personal history and looking back at my own life and what I was taught, sometimes we are not told there are subcategories that are very, very important to keep straight within big, huge kind of meta categories.
So.
Aristotle's four causes, just a quick plug, very helpful because you talked about traffic and flow.
Like, why did the World Trade Center collapse?
Gravity?
Well, no, a plane ran into them.
Well, the plane was the cause.
Well, no gravity.
There's material, his four causes material, formal, efficient, final.
Parsing out what is the final root cause underneath this?
What's the efficient cause, the material cause, et cetera?
And the question that you're trying to ask or answer, the solution that you're trying to find, might depend on which one of those answers you pin down.
Exactly.
You might not need to know the final cause of it.
You might need to know the efficient cause of it.
Well, it was the fact that the steel wasn't strong enough or whatever.
I'm not going to go into conspiracy theories right now.
But you would even focus on different types of causes in order to solve different kinds of problems.
Right.
And you're reductionistic if all you can fall back to is the final cause.
Like, why did this person not convert to Christianity?
Right.
Well, just in eternity past, God passed over them or actively elected.
Like, okay, but there's actually efficient causes that God ordained.
To why this individual did this or responded in that way.
And reducing it all to that is, again, a flattening of the different ways and means in which people work, change, act, respond, et cetera.
And it's still a true answer.
Yes, exactly.
But it's not the exhaustive truth.
The way I would say it is it's not the exhaustive truth, but it is the ultimate truth.
And I think that that's kind of where Christians are at right now answering every complexity, every question with the ultimate truth.
But then, Convincing ourselves that the ultimate truth is synonymous with the exhaustive truth, when that's simply not the case.
Like, I mean, even just take what you already did, but salvation as an example.
The ultimate truth is like, what's the difference between the person who converts to Christ and the reprobate who never does and spends eternity in the conscience, torments, the wrath of God forever?
Well, the difference is the good and perfect pleasure of the Lord.
Because he chose one and not the other.
For Jacob I loved and Esau I hated.
That is a true answer.
That's a true answer.
And within the realm of the truth, that's the ultimately true answer.
But it's not the exhaustive.
There are other true things that you can say.
And here's the beauty of categorical thinking if we say that there's a particular question and somebody offers a solution, they offer an answer, and we say it's correct, it's right, it's true, then if anybody gives any other answer, That contradicts, or not even contradicts, but that is separate other than the answer that's already been provided that we've already labeled and decided is true,
then any other answer outside of that answer that's already been offered would have to be a false answer.
But what categories allow is for multiple things to be true at once without embracing relativism.
Relativism is the idea that you can have multiple true statements that are contradictory.
We're not advocating for that.
But what we're saying is that there can be multiple true answers.
That are distinct from one another.
They are separate answers, but they're not contradicting answers.
So, again, using the example of salvation, why is this guy saved and this other guy lives his whole life and never comes to saving faith in Jesus?
Well, one, because of the purpose and election of God.
Two, that's the ultimate end, the ultimate answer in God's election.
Two, in terms of not just the ends of grace, but now speaking about the means of grace, because this person heard the gospel preached to him, this other person never heard the gospel.
Okay, and then you can go even further and say, Within the means of grace, and say, this person had Christian parents.
This person did not.
This person was born in a Christian nation, in a Western nation where the gospel was more prevalent.
This person was not.
This person had access to books and the internet.
And this person was born in an impoverished place where the gospel had never gone.
And all of those are true answers.
So it's not like, well, the only answer is the purpose and election of God.
And all these other answers are therefore false.
Now, the other ones, the purpose and election of God being the true, the ultimately true answer, Does not relegate these other answers as being false answers.
It only relegates other answers as being false answers if they are contradicting answers.
But if they come alongside in their own separate category, then not only is it permissible, but it then becomes actually even helpful for understanding multiple facets of a particular question and solving a problem.
Like you've probably heard the language where people say we have a multiple pronged solution.
Or a threefold solution or a twofold solution.
We're going to come at this in several different ways.
Well, that makes no sense if the multiple different solutions are at war with one another, if they're contradicting one another.
Then just go with the one that works.
But it does make sense if there's actually within this problem, there are multiple facets of the problem and therefore multiple facets of the solution, like poverty.
Well, education absolutely helps, but also just laws and legislation absolutely helps.
Another one, again, the ultimate solution is a regenerate heart that wants to work hard, doing your work as unto the Lord and not just man pleasing and these kinds of things, and then being a wise steward of your money.
Defining Roles in Politics00:16:53
Then, also for those who are already regenerate, generosity and those kinds of things.
So, all those are right answers.
It's not just generosity, and it's also not just better laws, and it's not just You know, it's multiple different solutions.
And it's not that, it doesn't mean we're embracing relativism so long as these multiple answers don't contradict one another.
We're just not embracing relativism, we're embracing categories.
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Okay, welcome back.
Well, what I want to do is I want to give one or two charts here.
I'm trying to think of ways that I can help people have some principles when it comes to categories.
So, Nate, let's take a look at the first chart.
The first chart here is the categories of roles, right?
And so this is just an example of a man.
A man and he.
He's one man but he has different roles.
Let's say he is a father and his job is that he's a judge, but at the same time he's a citizen of the nation that he's in and he's a neighbor.
He lives in a neighborhood, he's got people around him, people that God puts in front of him.
Well, as a father, he's called to discipline with love right and he has a kind of action responsibility that God has given him within the category of father right.
As a judge, he has a slightly different kind of role and responsibility.
He's to give impartial justice.
As a citizen, he doesn't make all the laws and he still votes and participates in civic life.
So he's supposed to support just laws, vote wisely.
And then as a neighbor, maybe he would have the role of showing compassion to individuals in need.
Now, where this gets a little bit interesting is let's say that he chooses to exercise, let's say someone crashes into his car.
Joel, this happened not too, well, a little while ago for you, but someone just crashes into his car at night, or, you know, no one was in the car.
No one was in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's say this particular man is out playing with his kids in the front yard and someone comes by and careens into the side of his car.
All right.
Now, this man, what role is he wearing there?
Well, he's not on the bench.
He's not going to sentence the man at this point.
It's also not his child.
He's not going to discipline the man or give him a spanking or, you know, give him a stern talking to or something like that.
He's just a bad man, but just, for the sake of accuracy, the woman.
Fair enough.
And in my case, it was a woman.
Go ahead.
Continue.
No, actually here, he's probably a neighbor, right?
And so it's within what's that?
I just said based.
I based myself right there.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
He probably, he now has some leeway.
How do I treat this person that just ran into my car?
Well, you could call the police, get the insurance involved.
That's fine.
You could say, look, this is someone who I just want to work something out privately with.
You could extend a measure of compassion or a measure of strictness.
The point is he might find disciplinary, quote unquote, disciplinary actions in his different roles.
And because those are different categories, he's going to live and act differently within all of those roles.
I think people have a hard time with this when it comes to, well, a Christian, if he's in politics at all, he has to be a Christian.
He's got to be compassionate, kind, loving.
He's got to he does have to be a Christian.
He does have to be a Christian, but I'm saying they're defining his role.
I know what you mean.
Yeah.
As a Christian in politics, merely as maybe they would say a father or a neighbor at best.
A neighbor, yeah.
And we forget that individuals or organizations can have different roles because they're occupying a different category in different situations.
One of the best, amen, well done.
One of the best examples that I always think of is when some of the Roman centurions came to Jesus and by God's grace, he had given them saving faith.
And they came to Jesus, they wanted to be his followers, his disciples, and they asked him, Essentially, what they're asking is Is the gospel exhaustive enough?
Is the Christian faith wide enough in its breadth to include us also?
Are we beyond the saving grace of God?
Or is there a place for us within your kingdom?
And the answer that Jesus gives makes it, you know, people have read this passage a million times.
So nobody really balks at it within the Christian world.
If people slowed down and thought about it for a second and they behaved consistently with all their myoptic views on everything else, then they really would have to admit that it's jarring.
It's shocking.
It's a bit surprising because what I think a lot of Christians, especially American Christians today, would expect Jesus to say, you know, when they say, Can we be your disciples?
How can we follow you?
They would expect Jesus to answer by saying, You can, but there's an ultimatum, and the ultimatum is that you have to get a new job.
You can be my disciples, but you cannot work for Rome.
You cannot be Roman centurions.
You can't be soldiers.
But that's not what Jesus says, actually.
And this matters because that's a question that people ask all the time today can I serve in the military and be a Christian?
Well, not if you're a gay pacifist, but if you're a biblical historic Christian, then absolutely you can serve in the military because pacifism isn't Christian, it's not biblical.
And it's like, well, yeah, but what about the American military in the year of our Lord, 2025, when there's so much corruption?
Okay, but what about Rome?
These guys were Roman centurions and they come to Jesus and Jesus, you know, they say, what must we do to follow you?
And a lot of us, if we were being honest, we would say, well, we kind of expect Jesus to say, you got to quit your job.
But he doesn't.
Instead, he says, don't extort people and be content with your wages.
And that's it.
That's his full answer.
He doesn't go any further than that.
He doesn't say, oh, and also, you can't flog anyone.
He also doesn't say when you're out on the battlefield, you can't kill your opponent.
Right.
You can't, oh, you can't fight anymore.
You can't do this anymore.
You can't, or you can't work for, you know, for Rome because they employ Pilate, you know, and Caesar and these guys and they're, and they're terrible, you know, and they're about to crucify me and all these, like, he doesn't say any of that.
Instead, he sticks to the main and plain and he says, don't rob people and be content with your wages.
And then, yeah.
Follow me while being Roman centurions.
And so, yeah, so these kinds of things I think are important in understanding.
So, what does the Christian politician do?
Well, yeah, he's got to be a Christian, but he has to be a Christian politician.
He doesn't need to be a husband to the state within his role in the state.
He doesn't need to be a father.
He doesn't need to be a neighbor.
His job is not to make sure that the sojourner is.
Is at the expense of his own citizens, you know, with tax funded policies to make sure that the sojourner has a $150,000 down payment for his home as an illegal immigrant in the state of California, you know, meanwhile also defunding the fire department so that, you know, half of the state burns to the ground.
Like, no, that's not, that's actually not what he needs to do.
What he needs to do is execute justice.
But then what he needs to do in his home when he comes home and he hangs up his hat at the end of the day, what he needs to do with his wife and kids is a little bit different.
He does not need to behave with his three year old child in the same manner that he does in his vocation.
Yep.
Grace doesn't destroy those natural categories.
So, those four you mentioned the father, judge, citizen, and neighbor those are all kind of properties of man as man, man as a father, man as occupation.
And grace doesn't come in, sweep them all away, and just give him a new spiritual designation as Christian.
Rather, grace elevates those natural roles so he's a good Christian citizen, a good Christian father.
But those categories still remain.
He's still the father, he's still the judge, he's still all of those things.
And grace is what actually just enables him to be the best version of those things instead of taking them, sweeping them all away, and just making him this blob that's now Christian, that just does Christian things, does Christian politics, what have you.
And that works with our various vocations, all within one individual.
It also works at a corporate level with various nations.
So, what happens when an American is converted?
Well, instead of being an American, he becomes a Christian.
No, he becomes an American Christian.
Just like you can have a Sudanese Christian and a Chinese Christian, a Canadian Christian.
And so nationality still remains.
Gender still remains.
Ethnicity, in addition to, which is separate from nationality, but that also still remains.
Vocation still remains.
And Paul talks about this even in, I think, 1 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 7.
Now, the specific case study in view in this particular text has to do with marriage and singleness.
But the principle, I think, absolutely, it's by way of implication, applies further.
Paul says that.
That each man should remain in whatever station, as some translations say, they use the word station.
He should remain in whatever station of life he was in when the Lord called him.
Meaning that if he's single, if he can, if he has the gift of celibacy, if he's not burning with passion, because Paul offers all the qualifications later, but if he can, not that he has the gift of singleness, which is not a gift, but really it's a curse and suffering, but he has the gift of celibacy that makes singleness tolerable, bearable.
Then in that case, if the Lord called him as he was a single man, then he should seek to remain.
Single.
If he's married, even married to an unbeliever, this is where he gets into being unequally yoked.
If you're a Christian and you're single and yet you don't have the gift of celibacy and you're pursuing marriage, then you better not be pursuing an unbeliever.
But if God saves you and you were already married and God, for whatever reason and his providence, saves you but not your spouse, well, if your spouse is content to remain with you, to be at peace with you, then you should also remain in the marriage, even though your spouse is an unbeliever.
If they refuse to be with you because of this change of heart and you're now a new man, Then you should allow them to go.
You don't send them away, but if they leave you, you allow them to go in order to remain at peace at all costs.
But that principle, my point is, I think it goes further.
I think you can stretch that without being far fetched at all in a responsible way and apply that also to vocation.
I think you can also apply it to ethnicity.
If God called you and you were an Ethiopian, well, you're still an Ethiopian, you're just now a Christian Ethiopian.
And that has implications and changes and all these wonderful, glorious things.
But grace does not destroy nature or replace nature or eradicate it, but rather elevates and restores.
And that's across the whole board.
And the funny thing right now that I'm noticing with the complementarian, neoconservative, classical liberal types, Babylon B is a great example.
But one of the things that I'm noticing is they want to keep their complementarian card while being as egalitarian as you absolutely possibly can be, except for a woman preaching on the Lord's Day.
Two hours on Sunday.
Yeah, for two hours.
That's the one spot they hold back on.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It might be 35 minutes on Sunday.
Yeah.
You're talking about the whole service, but even that, maybe a grandpa will be leading worship for the hour and a half, right?
Yeah, the 35 minutes.
She'll be doing the announcements, maybe running through some of the quasi liturgy and.
I mean, doing some of the Bible reading before the pastor comes on.
She won't preach and she won't be an elder.
Now, she'll be, she will be, she'll actually have a higher status than the elders.
We call them the shadow elders, right?
Like when you get done with an elders meeting and all the men are in agreement, you've prayed about it, you've sought the Lord, you hashed it out, you're all in agreement, and you go home and it was a Monday night elders meeting, and on Wednesday you start getting.
The, you know, like clockwork, you start getting the phone calls from each of the elders, and they're like, you know what?
I've been thinking about it more.
I've prayed about it more.
I don't know if I agree with this.
And in those moments, sometimes it's good to just say, you know what?
Go ahead and let's put the decision maker on the phone.
Could you hand the phone to your wife?
It's your wife.
Yeah, let's get the person in the household who wears the pants.
We call that the shadow elders, aka the wives of elders who often run churches more than the husbands.
And this is in complementarian churches.
It's prevalent, prevalent.
So, anyways, all that being said, I can.
Cannot harp on complementarians enough.
Any chance to uh.
If I can shame you out of the complementarian position, by the grace of God, for the good of your soul and his glory, into a biblical patriarchy position uh, then yes, I will lay the shame and sarcasm on as thick as I possibly can.
That said, the quintessential go to verse is going to be, you know, Galatians three right, Galatians three.
I believe it's verse 27, 28.
Yeah, that says you know uh, there's neither, you know uh.
Therefore, for anyone who's put on Christ, there's now neither male or female, Jew or Greek, you know, or Jew or Gentile, and also slave or free.
Now we look at that, and, you know, again, I got to, you know, for those of you who are just listening, I'm doing air quotes as intensely as my fingers will allow me to do.
But for the complementarian, you know, conservative, you know, Bible based churches out there that are absolutely liberal by any church Christian standard here in America just 60 years ago, you think you're conservative.
You're not.
You're not.
The women, The women would have been aghast.
The women of the 1940s here in the average American church, they would have walked into your conservative, complimentary church and they would have been incredibly offended.
Where are the head coverings?
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14, I believe it's verse 35, explicitly, it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
She's up there doing the announcements.
Where are the armed guards?
It's to take people away.
Where are the armed guards?
Ma'am, sir, this woman has lost her clothes.
Please take her away.
And so, like, everybody would have been right.
You do not understand how liberal we are.
You do not understand how liberal we are.
You think you're conservative, that's cute.
You are liberal.
Now, all that being said, the complementarian conservative, AKA, let's be honest, liberal churches today, they will point to Galatians and they'll say, well, you know, being in Christ Jesus doesn't change your gender.
There is still male and female.
Authority and Temporal Life00:08:10
What that's referencing, we're all one in Christ Jesus, one baptism, one spirit, one Lord.
What that's referencing is our standing at the foot of the cross.
It means that in the eternal sense, right, that a wife now is still the weaker vessel and the husband is still the head of his wife.
And yet at the same time, speaking in categories, the wife is also a co heir in grace.
She's a joint heir with her.
She doesn't, there's not salvation for men and then some kind of sub salvation for women.
So she still gets a full salvation.
The same as her husband's co heirs in grace.
That's one category, the eternal category, the level of the soul.
But in temporal, earthly categories, She's still a weaker vessel.
He's still head, and all these other things of Ephesians 5, right?
Galatians 3 does not eradicate Ephesians 5.
And the complementarian, neocon, you know, guy can do all of that categorical, exegetical thinking, but he won't finish the verse.
Galatians 3 28 doesn't just talk about there's neither male nor female.
There, he's able to have categories and say there is neither male nor female.
It's a true verse.
It's the Bible.
It means something.
It's not lying, right?
That seemingly contradicts, but it actually doesn't contradict if we put Each in their proper categories.
And he can do that because he's complementary and he doesn't think women should preach on the Lord's Day.
So he can do it with gender.
He can't do it with ethnicity or nationality, Jew or Greek.
And he also can't do it with slavery.
Yeah.
Right?
Slave or free.
But it's the same hermeneutic applied to all three of those examples in these multiple different categories eternal category, level of the soul, slave, right?
I mean, whether you've got Lee, Robert E. Lee, Taking the Lord's Supper with slaves.
Praise God.
And viewing it joint heirs in Christ.
Yep.
I'm going to worship with them before the throne of God for eternity.
Brothers.
Brothers in Christ.
Absolutely.
And then on Monday morning, he's master, they're slaves.
And he's going to go to Ephesians chapter.
In this case, it would be chapter six or still chapter five.
Chapter six now.
Yes, yeah.
Wait, isn't that?
I mean, it's Galatians gives the principle in the category.
Of the eternal, the level of the soul.
But then Ephesians 5 and 6 actually gives the same three things mentioned in Galatians, but now in a separate category.
So, how do we, in a temporal plane, how do we behave?
Husband, behave like this.
Wife, behave like that.
Master, like this.
Slave, like that.
Parent, father, mother, like this.
Son, like that.
And so, all that being said, with the Galatians 3 and like, ethnicity still exists.
There's neither Jew nor Greek.
Yeah, that's right.
At the foot of the cross, as it pertains to eternal salvation and the innate dignity and value of the human soul that has been saved by the blood of Jesus, there's no difference than a regenerate soul in Ethiopia and an eternal regenerate soul in Canada.
Praise God.
That's wonderful.
In this temporal life, there is a difference between those two nations and those two peoples that make up those nations.
And to ignore that, Well, you ignore it at the risk of your own detriment.
And the West has been, right?
Mess around and find out.
We've been finding out real hard for a few decades now.
West, do you have any further thoughts on that?
I was going to say so much of the resistance to it, because what you just did, it's not complicated.
It's not hard.
Most conservatives wouldn't go so far as transgenderism.
But if you take, there's neither male nor female in it, you would have no problem with a surgery to change that.
So they all knowingly reject that.
But when you get to those conclusions, again, about ethnicity and about slavery and all of that, They don't like.
I've been taking Stephen Wolf's formal logic class, which is really good.
He's on Patreon.
You should take it.
But he talks about if you don't like a conclusion.
Did you just plug someone else's Patreon?
I didn't give the link or the URL, so it's not a good thing.
I'll be respectful.
Dr. Stephen Wolf, we will be sending you an invoice, expecting a mail.
Go ahead.
Absolutely.
Any signups from this day on.
But he talks about if the premise is solid, but you don't like the conclusion, you don't get to walk back and be like, yeah, but I really don't like what that leads to because it leads to the continuing categories Greek and Jew of ethnicity and slave and free.
And so I think you have a lot of evangelicals and they know it and they'll do it with one of the three.
Right, Jim.
But they really don't like it.
But those other two end up leading to something.
Let's be honest.
They barely do it with gender.
True.
They only do it with one out of three categories slave free, Jew, Greek.
So it's ethnicity.
And then the other, I would say, is a measure of like economic status.
So it's ethnicity, it's economic status, because this would also apply to employer employee, right?
So as an employer, it's like, well, this is your brother in Christ.
Why are you going in there on a Monday morning and telling, how do you have the audacity to tell him?
A dress code.
You're going to tell him what he has to wear 40 hours a week and then go in there and also send him an email where you dictate his schedule?
Yes, because I'm still employer.
He's still employee.
Brothers in Christ, if I'm a Christian, he's a Christian in the eternal sense, in the innate dignity of our souls before God.
But on Monday morning, I'm boss.
He's not.
And you can apply that to husband and wife.
Well, you're going to, as a husband, Tell your wife what to wear?
Well, every woman's being told to wear 40 hours a week when she goes to her boss babe job.
McDonald's tells women what to wear.
The only person in this whole world that it's shocking and just absurd that if he tells a woman what to wear, the only person that we balk at is a husband.
Yes, a husband actually does have that authority.
The same way that that male employer has the authority with his employee, so too a male husband.
Could also say to his wife, he shouldn't be domineering.
He shouldn't be a jerk about it.
I think there's a way of being overly particular that's unhelpful and unbearable.
But in grace and in kindness, if he says to his wife, you know what, sweetheart, I'd like to see you wear more dresses.
We've got young daughters, and our whole world has just taken away femininity from women.
And I would like for you to model that.
And I think that dresses are more conducive to modeling femininity.
Than pants.
So I'm not making a hard, fast rule against pants, but I'd like to see more dresses.
Now, here's the thing I'll get a little crazy here.
He could make a hard, fast rule against pants.
He actually does have that authority.
And so, and all these different things.
People, my point is the average evangelical today, it's on paper, he'll keep his complimentarian card and say, yeah, men should be elders and husbands are the head of the home.
But in practice, The husband basically has zero authority, and the elders have less authority than the shadow elders.
We've already covered that, the wives.
And then on paper, over here, with slave and free, with that one, the example that Paul gives, that one he says, Oh, well, that doesn't happen anymore because the gospel involves slavery.
But so on paper, that one he's going to say, That one, no way.
But then in practice, that one he actually gives the most credence to, with it's just no longer slave or free, but you actually have employer and employee, and employers, he's fine with them having.
The same kind of power that you would expect from a king, some kind of model.
60 hours a week of just you will be using people to dress as a man.
Dictating every moment of your schedule, this exact dress code down to the color of your socks.
And that he won't blink an eye.
He'll say, Yeah, that totally makes sense.
You know, it's Amazon, right?
Like husband, but Jeff Bezos.
Now we're talking about.
Compassion Beyond Borders00:13:30
Right.
Because now I've found a man that I respect.
Do I, as an evangelical complimentarian pastor, respect the God given dignity and authority given to the men in my church as husbands and fathers?
You bet I don't.
Do I respect.
The limitless, virtually limitless, monarchal power given to Jeff Bezos over every single employee he has, even to the level, which there's been articles about this, where they can't even go to the bathroom, right?
There's like, yeah, I support that.
So, anyways, that's enough said.
I just, you've got to be able to open your eyes and see that, because I'm not talking right now, I'm not talking about LGBT friendly churches.
I'm not talking about churches where, The pastor is a woman.
I'm talking about John MacArthur churches.
That's what I'm talking about.
I am talking about Bible churches.
I'm talking about Reformed Baptist churches.
I'm talking about PCA churches.
I'm talking about OPC churches.
Never forget, Amy Bird happened in the OPC.
Like Carl Truman, there is no Amy Bird without Carl Truman.
So I'm talking about your conservatives.
Who can serve nothing?
Conservatives are simply enshrining the battles won by progressives last week.
And so, yeah, you got to learn how to think in categories and also stop being effeminate.
Okay, that's all I got.
Let's go to our last commercial break.
We'll come back, we'll give it to Michael for some concluding thoughts.
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All right, welcome back.
What I want to do is I want to show one chart.
It's going to be common to a lot of people, perhaps, but if not, then it'll be super helpful just to start you thinking about some proper categories.
So this is just.
Spheres of sovereignty, as kind of outlined and articulated by some of what Abraham Kuyper said.
But then, what I want to do after I explain this chart is I want to tackle one particular issue that people have a lot of difficulty with.
So, here are some categories that are really helpful to think about there's the individual, there's the family, there's the church, and then there's the government.
I mean, like the civil magistrate government.
So, individuals are responsible for their own personal holiness, charity, forgiveness, personal holiness, etc.
The family nurtures children, but notice here the family is also.
Primarily in charge of the health and education of their children.
And we could go on a long thing about that, but we've done that before.
But again, the education and the health of children is not welfare.
It's not food stamps.
It's not even public school.
Although I'm not opposed to the idea of a community having a school that they help fund together on local levels.
I mean, the civic education is important, but ultimately it's the father's and the family's responsibility to provide and oversee the education of their children.
Church, preaching the gospel, spiritual discipline, the keys of the kingdom, training, instruction in godliness and righteousness.
And then the government who has a role and responsibility of establishing just laws, protecting the innocent, punishing the evil, promoting what is good, and bearing the sword against what is evil.
This is pretty standard.
So if you have heard this before, it won't be necessarily new.
But if you haven't thought about thinking in categories before, this is a really good place to get started.
What I want to do is I want to ask you guys about a situation, not a situation, but one that a lot of Christians are thinking about a lot right now.
And it's the relationship. of the nation or the civil government and the individual Christian.
And one of the problems that we run into when we think about categories is that there are some categories that are in opposition to each other.
But what, and we alluded to it already, one of the things that Christians do is they think that the term Christian is in opposition to some things like magistrate or governor or things like that.
Really, if you want to talk about what's opposite, In opposition to the category of Christian.
It's actually non Christian.
It's child of God, child of Satan, right?
And so the idea of a Christian, you said it earlier, Wes, it informs, it helps an individual who is a Christian understand what the role and purpose of each of those categories is.
So here's the situation or kind of the category error that I think gets made a lot that I want some feedback on here.
We would say, And when we look at America's history, this has happened.
And I would say in some ways, rightfully so.
We would say the distinctions of a Christian are that he is kind, compassionate, merciful to the needy.
You know, it's even the heart of God all through the prophets.
He wants to establish justice for the fatherless.
He wants to rescue the oppressed.
And so we would say on an individual level, a Christian man ought to have a degree of compassion, kindness, generosity.
Mercy, all of these things.
What I hear from Christians is the idea that if a Christian is supposed to be some of those things, at least a lot of the time, why isn't a Christian nation or a Christian government supposed to be compassionate, kind, et cetera, in the same way towards, you know, you've got a country in the Caribbean who's in our backyard that a hurricane comes through and devastates?
Well, shouldn't a Christian nation have a sense of, come, you know, come here?
We will take care of you.
We will provide for you.
I think there's a disconnect or a difficulty that some people have when they look at some of the Christian virtues that an individual man or woman ought to have.
And then they say, but it sounds like you guys are saying America just for America and screw the rest of the world.
So this is one that I think a lot of people really struggle with.
What are the categories here?
What are the right ways to think about the categories here?
What does it mean to be a Christian nation in relation to other nations?
That's kind of, at least in my plan, that was what we would spend a couple minutes closing out, trying to parse out here.
Yeah, that's a good one.
You go, Wes.
I've got thoughts.
I think one of the big ones is the tiers of responsibility.
So, working down, you would say, like, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Man's first and greatest allegiance is always to God, not even family, not even wife, not even nation.
Nothing comes over and above.
So, your first responsibility is to God.
And then you have those natural responsibilities of the family, having to provide, having to protect.
And then the spiritual ones as it relates to your local church body, the church universal, et cetera.
So, if you go down the list, so we think family, and then we expand that out.
You could say tribe or even state.
I'd have more of an allegiance here in Texas than I would to.
To Illinois.
And you get that out and you get to the level of a nation.
So, be you in the United States, which is very large, be you in Japan, Switzerland, what have you.
That's a category of responsibility that you have a duty to, and that ranks above the universal neighbor that would be outside of that.
So, if you think of the family as the nation, as the family writ large, as Stephen Wolfe would say, it's kind of a gathered family.
Your responsibility to that is first.
And so, all right, hurricane strikes, there's damage, there's needs, there's things that have to be done.
It is totally permissible, not required, but permissible to send aid, to send workers to come in and do your best.
Now, it is not required because there could be situations where the duty to that family and that nation, you just have bigger needs at home.
Right now, Los Angeles is on fire.
If you were a Christian magistrate in California, which praise God, hopefully that happens someday, it would be a dereliction if your duty, if a tsunami hit Hawaii, Los Angeles is burning and you're taking supplies and you're taking food and you're taking water and you're shipping them off.
You'd have taken the higher responsibility and subsumed it under a lower one for those that are farther from you.
So, that would be one thing I would say is what is your primary responsibilities?
And these have to be completed before you can actually start going down the list, being more generous, looking out beyond the horizon.
Who can I help?
Who needs me?
What can I give them, et cetera?
But what's important about that is my contention is that what Wes just articulated is a Christian way of thinking about it, right?
This is not, when we say a nation ought to be Christian, well, yes, it ought to have.
Christian priorities, right?
Like Augustine talked about the Ordo Moris.
That is a Christian conception of ranking priorities.
And so to the person who wants to say a Christian nation must be compassionate to the hurricane, the nation that was hit by the hurricane over and above its own citizens, that's, it's unchristian actually to do that.
And that is, I think, in Wes's example, what people have a hard time with and what they maybe overlook.
Is there's different requirements for different levels of organization to act in a Christianly way.
Right.
I mean, that literally just happened and is in no small part one of the reasons, maybe not the exclusive reason, but one of the reasons why Kamala just lost an election is because Appalachia was underwater and FEMA had already spent all their money on Ukraine.
Yeah.
That literally just happened.
And so.
And so it's not saying that a father, a familial father in the home, should be compassionate.
But when we get into the other role of a civil father, when it comes to the state, that compassion has no place.
No, it's actually saying that compassion is part of the job.
It's different, it's going to be dispersed in different ways, executed in different ways.
But his pseudo compassion to the foreigner on the other side of the world.
When that comes at the expense of genuine compassion that he's firstly obligated to his own citizens, then it's not that we're saying that the civil magistrate is not supposed to be compassionate and therefore shouldn't help Ukraine.
No, what we're saying is that all the help and billions of dollars that we've given to Ukraine is actually not compassionate.
It's actually hating our own citizens.
Gavin Newsom, his compassion.
To the illegal immigrants is now being viewed rightly for what it actually is hatred towards his actual residents.
So in Appalachia, at the federal level, our compassion to Ukraine meant drowning Appalachians.
And at the state level, Newsom, New Salemi, his compassion to Mexico is now being rightfully viewed for what it actually is hatred towards Californians as.
So, Appalachia was drowning, and now California is burning.
And it's a perfect picture of, first and foremost, of course, Democrats.
It's what they do.
If they can't drown their own citizens, they burn them.
That is what Democrats do they kill their own citizens.
They kill them in the womb, or they try to pass bills for euthanasia so they can kill them when they're elderly.
Or if they can't kill them at all, then they cut off their fruitfulness so that they can kill their posterity.
Right?
So, with transgenderism and gender reassignment surgeries, Democrats.
Kill people.
That's what they do.
So the point is, it's not that we're saying the civil magistrate shouldn't be compassionate.
What we're saying is that all your billions to Israel and all your billions to Ukraine and all your billions to illegal immigrants coming up through Mexico, we're not saying that, oh, you're a civil magistrate, you shouldn't be compassionate.
We're saying, no, you should be compassionate.
And what you're doing as a pseudo compassion is actually the opposite of true compassion it is hatred.
Fruit of the Spirit00:05:13
Toward the proper object that you've been ordained and positioned by God to be compassionate towards.
So I can do the same thing to give a biblical example.
You can do the same thing with Jesus.
I remember, you know, people when I, you know, when I started getting a little red pill back in the day and preaching sermons about Jesus.
And one of the things that I talked about was I was talking about the attributes of God and I was talking about how that relates to us, obviously different, but as it relates to like the fruit of the Spirit.
And I was saying, you know, the fruit of the Spirit, it's not like a toolkit.
It's not like where you take one out at a time and then you swap it out for something else.
It's not as though faithfulness is like a hammer, you know, and goodness is like a drill bit, you know.
And depending on what job I have, I'll take love or I'll take joy or I'll take peace, you know, until the job gets done.
That's not how the fruit of the Spirit works.
Fruit of the Spirit simply means the fruit, meaning the evidence or manifestations, the visible outward manifestations of the Spirit who is invisible, right?
The invisible God.
God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are most pure spirits without spirit and one divine essence, but without body parts and passions.
God is invisible.
John chapter 4, God is invisible.
He is God is a spirit.
Those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
So the Holy Spirit is a spirit.
You can't see him, but what you can see of the Holy Spirit, what you can see is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the manifestations.
So it's not nine different tools as an exhaustive list in a toolkit where you take one out at a time.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness.
Gentleness, faithfulness, and self control.
No, these are all, think of it like this if we actually use literal fruit for a second, right?
So, bananas and oranges and apples, the fruit of the Spirit would not be nine different fruit bananas, oranges, apples, pineapple, whatever, you know, five more.
No, instead, it would be four different characteristics of one fruit.
So, the fruit of the Spirit, if we're likening the Spirit himself to an apple, it would be the fruit of an apple, which is a fruit, but the fruit of an apple, the characteristics of this particular fruit is it's crunchy, it's crisp, it's sweet, it's tart, it's, you know, all the nine different characters.
That's what the fruit of the Spirit is like.
And Jesus, as the God man in his incarnation, in his earthly ministry, perfectly modeled all the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Now, that being said, because Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit, there was no lack and full measure, full of the Holy Spirit, then the full fruit, evidence, visibility, manifestations, outward manifestations of the fruit of the Spirit were always present in the life of Jesus.
Therefore, here's the concluding thought there was never a time that Jesus wasn't being gentle, there was always love.
Always joy, always peace, always faithfulness, always and always gentleness, which means in John chapter 2 at the temple, when Jesus is fashioning a whip out of cords to begin whipping people and driving out the money changers and flipping over their tables and releasing all the pigeons and the doves and all these kinds of things, Jesus is modeling for us in that moment gentleness, perfect gentleness.
Now, here's how it gets to our topic today.
Well, that doesn't look like gentleness.
It looks like harshness.
No, it looks like harshness to the people in the temple, the religious rulers of the day, the Jewish rulers, who were extorting financially, robbing, and ripping off the people, particularly not just Jewish citizens, but all these Gentiles who had come from the other side of the earth in order to worship the triune God because they were Christians in the Old Testament sense.
They were Christians.
Who loved God, the triune God, wanted to worship him, but they knew that in order to worship him, they couldn't come fully into the temple, but they could come to the outer courts.
But here's what they were doing it's like a Chuck E. Cheese.
You had to buy temple currency, and they had changed the currency exchange, the rates, so high to where people would already, the amount of time off of work, I mean, travel took forever, forever.
The amount of money they lost from not being able to work, the amount of money they had to spend just to make the trip, and now they finally come, they're at the bottom of their purse, they've got very little left.
And they're doing like a dollar gets you a quarter, basically.
Like, oh, so you want to buy pigeons to make, you know, to make, or doves to make a dove offering, or you want to buy a goat or a lamb to make a burnt offering, or you want to buy grain for a grain offering, or whatever it is.
Well, you're Gentile dirty money.
It's no good here.
Although, of course, it was good because they were more than happy to take it and they wanted to take even more of it.
It's no good here.
You have to buy holy money, a temple currency.
And what's the current exchange rate?
Well, it basically comes out to about all of your money is worth about a quarter of what it would be anywhere else.
And these are people who just traveled across land and sea to worship God.
And these are the Jewish religious rulers of the day, classic.
This is what they're doing.
Obligation to Leaders00:03:58
So is Jesus putting gentleness aside back into the toolkit to take out the sledgehammer of some other fruit of the spirit, courage or zeal or whatever?
No.
Jesus is modeling.
All the fruit of the Spirit because he's full of the Spirit.
All the manifestations are there.
And he's modeling them all in full measure and simultaneously, including gentleness.
Who is he being gentle to?
The Gentile believers.
He's being gentle to them.
So, too, all the way back, the civil magistrate, when he says no, when he says no to Zelensky, when Zelensky comes for the 151st time to the United States to stand before our Congress and ask for his next check of another $50 billion, if our civil magistrates tell him no, it is not at the expense of compassion.
It is in the full service of compassion that they would be able to look that man, an actor, a literal actor, He's doing a great job.
You got to give it to Zelensky.
It's just not good for America.
But they need to be able, our leaders need to be able to look him in the eye and say, I'm sorry, we cannot drown any more Appalachians for you.
I'm sorry, we can't do it.
And then, likewise, when the champion, the true winner of every American election for the last 70 years, Bibi, comes to town and he starts to insult those loved ones who lost their lives in 9 11 by saying, Well, a tragedy in Israel.
Is like 20 times a tragedy in America.
Our tragedies are real tragedies because we're real people and you're just the guy.
We need to be able, our leaders, civil leaders, not at the expense of compassion to Israel, but in the name of compassion to Americans, our American leaders need to be able to look him in the eye and say, You're done.
No more APAC handlers.
No more dual citizenship in our Congress.
Get off of our land.
Get out of our country and stop taking our money.
We love Americans.
Israel can fend for itself.
That's not the absence of compassion in the name of courage.
That's both compassion and courage.
Jesus modeled it for us.
A father can do it, the same principle in the home.
A civil father can do it in the state.
It's not hard, but it does require a little bit of categorical thinking.
The only thing I would add on to that is to go along with it is for the Christian who thinks, The U.S. government should pass laws so that many immigrants come here so that we can have the gospel on our doorstep.
The irony is they're actually getting something right.
One of the purposes of the state is to provide a conducive environment for the church to flourish.
However, what I would say to those Christians is in every other law, the government is making it more and more impossible for the church to flourish.
And so this goes to first principles, order of priority.
the government of the United States or the government of Texas or whatever group you want to look at ought to be, first of all, passing laws that prioritize the proclamation of the gospel by the church of that nation to the people of that nation.
If that's going swimmingly and they want to say, okay, how could we exert our political pressure to create stability in another country so that missionaries can go there and not be killed?
Fantastic, right?
But the idea that We should pass laws so that the nations come here.
Well, we've missed the idea that the government before God has an obligation to privilege Christianity for the American church to American people, first of all.