June 2, 2018 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Trials dark on every hand, and we cannot understand all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed promised land.
But he guides us with his eye, and we'll follow till we die.
For we'll understand it better by and by.
By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home, we will tell the story, how we've overcome, and we'll understand it better by and by.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are a few things in life as wonderful as a good gospel song.
And I'd like to welcome you to tonight's live broadcast.
It is Saturday evening, June the 2nd.
I'm your host, James Edwards, and we've got an unusual show for you tonight, but it is a show that we felt led to bring this evening.
And matters of faith are something that we talk about just about every show that we air.
We talk about, of course, our history and our culture.
We talk about contemporary politics.
This is a political talk show.
But we can't separate our politics from our faith.
And as Christians, that is something that we sprinkle in quite heavily on any given show.
And we certainly had a great Easter program with Pastor John Weaver just a few weeks ago.
Many of you have heard me talk over the years about my personal testimony.
I wrote an article about my journey from my formative years in the church to a political activist.
I was not more than 10 years old.
I came to know Christ very early in life.
And I was not even a young man.
I was still a boy.
And I remember that day.
I was sharing it with Sam Bushman.
I remember that day very, very vividly.
I still remember it as if it had just happened.
I was sitting in the den of my parents' home in a brown cushioned chair.
And my pastor was there with me and my father and my grandfather.
And I remember that moment.
And I remember even as a boy how I felt absolutely changed.
And to this day, I can still recall that feeling.
And of course, my pastor was there for me for that.
My pastor has been there with me for any significant moment in my life.
I've told you this before in previous shows that Pastor has set in with us for, that anytime a family member passed away, he preached the funeral.
He was there with us at the hospital.
He was there with us at any hour.
He introduced my wife and I, and he officiated our wedding.
He led me to the Lord.
He was with me when I ran for office in 2002.
He was with me at the hospitals when my children were born.
He has been there with me for good times and hard times and every time in between, again, some of the most monumental moments in my life.
He was one of the constants along with my parents.
I think he's the only other person I can say was there for just about all of those things.
And he's with us again today.
And I wish it were under better circumstances, but I want to tell you, I love this man very much.
He has known me since I was in diapers.
He has known me since I was a baby.
And he's known my family since even before that.
And he is one of the greatest men I've ever known.
And I'm honored to have him here tonight.
Pastor, thanks for coming in and talking with us this evening.
Well, James, it's awful good to be here.
It's always good to see you.
Talk about it.
I know James.
I have to tell this every time I talk about how long I've known James.
I've known him since he was poo.
And he's the delight to my heart.
He's a wonderful family.
James is a really good guy.
And I always, always enjoy spending time with James.
I wish we were here today under better circumstances, James.
Well, I do, Pastor.
We've had some great shows.
We've had you on for some Christmas installments, obviously some Easter installments.
In fact, one of the times you were on with us for Easter, I thought was just such a wonderful and powerful show.
I think we replayed it for about three straight Easters.
I just said, okay, this hour we're actually going to go to the can.
We're going to do it.
But anyway, yes.
So we have about three minutes before our first break.
So it's not really enough time to sink our teeth into this.
But I wanted to give you an extended introduction before we let the audience know exactly why you're here.
And I want to thank you again for agreeing to come on tonight and talking about the issue at hand.
But the issue at hand is one that has been apparently evolving for about six weeks or so, if I understand correctly.
But I guess push came to shove or it came to a head earlier this week.
And that's when you gave me a phone call.
I believe it was on Tuesday, and you shared with me what now we'll share with the audience.
Well, I learned several weeks ago, this has really been going on a long time before I learned about it.
I learned several weeks ago that there are some pastors from out of state who have decided that James is a racist.
And we're not going to wade into whether or not James is a racist.
He is not a racist.
You folks that listen to the program, most of you people that listen to the program know that he's not.
I've asked people to demonstrate to me that James is racist, and they have a tendency to want to say, well, this news outlet says this about him, and this political group says this about him.
And the question I always ask is, tell me what James says.
And they can't ever come up with anything.
And I'm not even going to get into the accusations that they make, but none of them ever hold water.
But this group has decided that James is such an embarrassment to Southern Baptists that he has to go.
And they called me and asked me if I would dismiss him from our church or see that our church dismissed him from our church.
And I talked with them briefly.
And I told them there's no basis for dismissing James from our church.
Well, as a result of that, my understanding is that these folks intend to bring a motion to the Southern Baptist Convention next month that our church be removed from the Southern Baptist Convention because we harbor this racist in our church.
Be real honest with you.
This just really grieves my heart.
I don't believe Southern Baptists would do that in the first place.
If they believed James was a racist, they might.
But there are a number of issues that come into this, and we'll dig into that in the next segment.
Many of you are not Southern Baptists, and many of Southern Baptists really don't understand how the relationship between a local church is, the relationship with them and the local county association and then the state convention and then the Southern Baptist Convention, how those relationships operate.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more in the next segment.
But all of these entities are independent from each other.
We work together voluntarily.
My church and other churches across the Southern Baptist Convention voluntarily send amount of money that we choose to send to the county organization and to the state organization.
And the state organization passes money on to the Southern Baptist Convention.
And each one of these agencies cooperate with each other.
And it's all voluntary.
Nobody has authority over anybody else.
Well, we're coming up on our first break, Pastor.
We're going to just leave you right there, ladies and gentlemen, at the cliffhanger.
But I think, as you well know, the request was made that Pastor dismiss me or expel me as a member of our church.
And when he said that he couldn't do that, that there weren't grounds for that, he was informed that, well, then a motion would be taken to dismiss our entire church from the convention.
We'll be right back with more.
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Temptations hidden snares often take us unawares.
And our hearts are made to bleed for a thoughtless word or deed.
And we wonder why the test when we try to do our best.
But we'll understand it better by and by and by when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered, we will tell the story how we've overcome.
And we'll understand it better by and by.
Sing now.
Well, that music right there, that'll perk up an otherwise unpleasant program, or at least a great program dealing with an unpleasant topic.
But it's a shame.
And it doesn't, of course, ever really make a difference.
But we always like to be very upfront.
And as our listeners know, this is a program that celebrates Western culture and it celebrates our people.
And it's a show that we take value and pride in the way that God made us and our history and our heritage and our heroes, on and on and on.
And we don't mince words about that at all.
We talk about these differences.
But we've also been equally consistent in that there is no hatred for anyone.
We offer criticisms.
We offer political commentary.
But we would never say that a person is wrong or evil for celebrating their culture and heritage.
And so too will we not be led or made to feel that we have done something wrong for doing the same.
And that leads us up to where we are today.
And again, we're continuing the conversation with my pastor, a man who has known me my entire life.
And that is something that we talked about this week.
It would appear as though the people who know me best don't know me as well as people who have never picked up the phone to talk to me at all, people who are basing their entire opinion on me on some pretty shaky sources.
And I guess I hope, Pastor, you'll let the audience know that part of the conversation as well.
But continuing where we left off, you're talking with a representative from the, I guess, one of the local associations of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he's let it be known now that since our church will not expel me as a member, voluntarily expel me as a member, that a motion will be presented to disfellowship our entire church from the Southern Baptist Convention.
Well, pardon me, the issue at hand is supposed to be that James is such an abhorrent racist that he must be dealt with.
Typically, church discipline is left to the church.
To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a church that has been disfellowship from the Southern Baptist Convention.
I know local associations have done that with churches that they felt were beyond the brink.
But to the best of my knowledge, it hasn't happened on a Southern Baptist level.
And they're basically, my understanding is, again, I've not seen a motion, but my understanding is that the grievance is basically based on two things.
Number one, that James is an abhorrent racist.
And, of course, that is not true.
The folks that listen to this program know that.
Folks that spoke with me about James being such a racist said, well, that he talks about white pride.
Well, I think whatever race you come from, you need to be proud of that race.
Of course, we don't ever condemn anybody for black pride or Latino pride or whatever.
We don't hear folks talk about much about white pride.
In fact, just to say that you're proud you're white by many is considered to be a racist statement.
I don't see anything racist about it.
I know there are people that are ashamed of their race.
They're ashamed of their heritage.
And I think that's a very sad thing.
Whatever race you are, whatever heritage you have, you need to find the best in it and be happy and proud of it.
And that does not make James a racist.
But if we're going to begin to deal with people who have opinions that differ with the Southern Baptist Convention, we are really going to open a Pandora's box.
The folks that are critical about Southern Baptists.
All of my life, my parents were Southern Baptists.
I grew up Southern Baptist.
Somebody asked me one time and said, if you weren't Southern Baptists, what would you be?
I said, I'd be ashamed.
But all kidding aside, I cannot remember a time when if the convention did something that folks in the local church weren't happy with, that the local pastor, the rank and file in the church felt free to say, I'm not happy.
I don't think that was right.
I'm not happy about that.
And you guys that are old-timers like me remember the Elliott controversy way back in the, I believe it was in the late 50s, early 60s.
But that's gone on.
Today, we have churches that are very critical of things.
We recently had a church in the Southern Baptist Convention that was so displeased that they temporarily withheld their cooperative program money.
Are we going to deal with that, Pastor?
Are we going to say you can't be critical of the church?
You can't say that you disagree with the Southern Baptist Convention.
And the reason we're talking about this, of course, just to quickly interject, is that that was also a complaint that they made that I have publicly offered criticism of church leaders and the convention itself.
You're exactly right, James.
That was one of the complaints that they had that he had publicly criticized.
In fact, if you remember back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was so much dissent about what was going on in the convention that we changed our leadership.
We took a huge shift from liberal theology to conservative theology.
We took a shift from liberal to conservative.
There are folks in the church today that think we need to take a political shift back to the right.
And I don't want to get into that debate today, but these people are vocal and they say so.
And I think that is a good thing that we're able to say those sort of things.
They say we're not happy about it.
Are we going to deal with a church that a member of the church is complaining about it?
You know, Southern Baptists have taken a step to condemn the Confederate flag.
Now, whether you agree with that or not, let's just say, suppose you go to a church next Sunday morning, and in the parking lot, you see a pickup truck that's got a rebel flag sticker on it.
Are you going to find out who that member is and kick him out of your church?
And if the church isn't willing to kick him out of that church, you're going to kick that church out of the Southern Baptist Convention because he's got a Confederate flag on his pickup truck.
We've condemned the Confederate flag, and yet here we have a church member who has a Confederate flag on his bumper.
When we say we, we mean the convention.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I said the convention.
I'm speaking using a royal we, third person.
But anyhow, are we going to do that?
Suppose there was a church that had a staff member working with the children in their church that was a pedophile, and the pastor knew it was a pedophile.
And yet, the pastor didn't bring that to light and didn't dismiss that staff member.
Are we going to kick that church?
I mean, we have condemned pedophilia.
It's a terrible thing.
Are we going to deal with that church and boot them out of the convention?
Are we going to do that with anybody that disagrees with us?
I mean, we could do a litany of things.
In fact, I got a couple other things I want to mention: of hypothetical things of, are we going to kick churches out that don't fall in line with what the Southern Baptist Convention has said?
This is where we stand.
We're talking about opening up a Pandora's box that we can't close.
I think there's some folks that would like that box open.
They would like to begin to have this politics of personal destruction, where if you disagree with me, we're going to do as much as we possibly can to do as much harm to you as we possibly can.
This is a blight on our land, not just on our convention, this is a blight on our land.
That if we find someone that disagrees with us, we absolutely, I said we, there are many that believe that if they find someone that disagrees with them politically or socially or morally, we must destroy that person.
We have to do everything we can to bring wreck and ruin to their lives.
Do we want this politics of personal destruction to come into our beloved Southern Baptist Convention?
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Each week, the Political Cesspool, known worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program, hits the airwaves to bring you the other side of the news and to report on events which are vital to your welfare, but are hushed up or distorted by the mainstream media.
However, to continue doing this, we need your support.
Go online at www.thepoliticalcesspool.org and make a safe and secure donation.
If you prefer not to make an online donation, you can send us a check or money order to the address on the website.
No matter which way you choose, the political cesspool needs your support.
go online to www.thepoliticalcesspool.org and make a donation today.
Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Guy at 1-866-986-6397.
Ladies and gentlemen, today is June the 2nd, and this convention that we're talking about, this vote that we're talking about, is going to take place in 10 days.
One way or another, it's going to be presented to the floor.
We think it is.
Now, obviously, it hasn't happened yet.
They have told us that this is their intention.
Obviously, God is in control, and anything could happen.
But I thought it would be important for us to make mention of this, share it with our beloved audience, and our audience is a good and a decent audience.
And we wanted to be open about this so that if and when it does come in 10 days' time, that we're not reacting to it after the fact.
We wanted to say our piece.
And hopefully, in saying this, if anybody at the Southern Baptist Convention would care to listen to this, perhaps it will in some ways influence what may or may not occur.
But I want to say this.
I'll be 38 years old.
This is June.
Convention's coming up in 10 days.
In 20 days, 20 days from today, I'll turn 38 years old.
And you are getting to listen to a man who has known me for that entire time, my whole life.
And I want to publicly thank my pastor for doing what I think was the right thing, but sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do.
The easiest thing for him to do would have been what so many people would have done and just say, well, we don't need a controversy here.
You want him gone?
He's gone.
But I want to thank my pastor publicly for his honor and his integrity and his willingness to come on, not just to say he will not expel me in private, but to come on the radio and talk about it tonight.
The honor, the integrity is absolutely encouraging.
And in talking to my pastor earlier this week, when he first shared with me what had happened and how he responded to the Inquisition, it really brought tears to my eyes.
And I appreciate him for standing with me as I would stand with him and with any of you.
But loyalty is something that is a rare commodity in this age of weak men.
But, Pastor, by all means, please continue making your points and sharing with the audience what you feel is the most important things they need to know and the most important takeaways you have from this experience thus far.
I want to tell you, one of the reasons I love to come on James' program is because I love the flattery that he pushes my way.
But I wish just a small portion of what James said about me was true.
Having said that, I want to get back to the idea of are we as a Southern Baptist Convention going to begin to ferret out every church member of the, I don't know how many members Southern Baptists have, 40 million or something.
I think they claim 15 million is on the rolls, however many that is.
15 million.
Are we going to track these folks?
And when we find somebody that is not in compliance, are we going to say to that church, you'd either deal with him or we'll deal with you?
And that's basically what's going on here.
And I'm sure some will say, oh, but James' sins are so grievous.
Well, the next thing is, are we going to set up a scale of what is most grievous and what is not?
What's the worst among sins that we must deal with?
It is interesting, though, how what is and is not a sin seems to evolve and how some certain truths about what is acceptable and even the definitions of certain words evolve.
I think, again, if we're talking about a hatred of other people, obviously that is a sin, to hate someone.
But we're talking about beliefs.
You talked about growing up in the Southern Baptist Church yourself and your parents being Southern Baptists.
And you think about the founders of the Southern Baptist Church, even going back, though, to my grandparents' time, I don't think the beliefs that I hold, which are ardent and heartfelt, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong in holding these beliefs, but I think you'd really have to stretch to say what I believe and what they are accusing me of is, in fact, a sin at all, obviously.
Well, what they are accusing you of, James, I would say a sin.
If you were what they accused you of, I would have down with you and say, oh, James.
Okay, no, no, no.
Yes.
No, that's fair.
That's fair.
I guess that goes back to definition.
You see, part of the problem is when I talked with the folks, they wanted to say to me, well, this news age, well, I said that earlier.
These people say this about James.
You even said they were actually quoting the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Well, they did quote them.
We know the love affair between you and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But I want to get back to, show me James's words.
And they showed me some things that they talked about the fact that you talk about white pride.
And again, I don't see a real problem with that.
In fact, the gentleman that I talked to on the phone, I asked him if I'd understood that he was white.
We were talking about race, so I asked him, are you right?
And he said yes.
And I said, are you ashamed of it?
And he said, well, no, no, I'm not ashamed of it.
And I said, are you proud to be white?
And I don't think he ever answered me.
I can't remember.
I didn't record the program.
I think, I mean, our conversation, I've seen he wrote a summary of it later, and I think he may have recorded it.
But anyhow, the bottom line is never presented anything to me that showed that you are a racist.
So that's a non-issue to me.
The bigger issue here is, are we going to start tracking down aberrant church members and say if the church doesn't deal with this church member, what are we going to do?
Are there churches in the Southern Baptist Convention who embrace homosexuality, active homosexuality, unrepentant homosexuals?
The Southern Baptist Convention has taken a strong stand against homosexuality.
So are we going to do that?
I mean, I can name some churches if you want.
If the politically correct police want to go after these churches, we can.
Are we going to pick and choose which stances the Southern Baptist Convention takes that we're going to enforce on these churches?
I can't imagine anywhere near a majority of Southern Baptists, much less to say the delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention next month, want to begin to police churches.
It's just beyond the pale.
My hope would be that we would keep an open dialogue.
If someone wants to call me and talk to me about something I may have overlooked and need to look into, I'll welcome that call.
By the way, that's not an invitation for everybody in the country to call me.
But if you have a serious concern about what's going on in the church, and by the way, let me say this.
My church is not, there's a time I had a good strong church.
I was always very active in my local association, attended state and national conventions, very involved in all those things.
We've always given to the cooperative program, and we support our local association.
These days, my church is just a little house church now and a very small church.
From the attention that we've drawn, you'd think we're running 20,000 on Sunday morning.
And it's just a very small handful of us.
But that issue aside, the biggest issue here is, are we going to start enforcing Southern?
We go back and look at the resolutions and the stands that Southern Baptists have taken over the years, and we find a church member that isn't adhering to that.
And so we're going to go after that church, and we're going to dismiss them from the Southern Baptist Convention.
Pastor, if you're listening, you better be careful.
They're coming after you.
What is the old thing they said about the acts that were taken against the Jews in Nazi Germany?
They said first they came for this group and that wasn't me, so I just pushed it aside, and then they came for the Jews, and they came for these people.
It wasn't me, so I pushed that aside.
And then one day they came for me.
Well, you talked about this, and we talked about this earlier this week.
Appeasement never works, and you're certainly engaging on a slippery slope here.
And this is the, I guess, the equivalent of the death penalty as far as the SBC is concerned.
This is their form of a beheading, and to behead an entire church over this, it seems a little rash.
Well, James, in their defense, let me say this about Southern Baptists.
We are not a top-down organization.
I love the structure of the way the structure was meant to work.
We are bottom-up.
The Southern Baptist Convention and the State Baptist Convention and the local county association, they only have one form of discipline, and that's to withdraw fellowship, to remove those people from the organization.
It's sometimes called the death penalty.
But there's nothing in between.
You can't sanction them.
You can't fine them.
You can't do any of those things that a top-down organization does.
A top-down organization might send a group in to take over running aspects of the church and all that sort of stuff.
Southern Baptists don't do that.
And this gets back again to the autonomy of the local Southern Baptist church.
We are self-ruled.
Our cooperation with Southern Baptists, State Baptists, local Baptists is all on a voluntary basis.
And that sets Southern Baptists apart from other denominations.
We're going to spend one more segment on this with Pastor, and again, I want to thank him for coming in this evening to address this with you.
And I wanted to be very careful in how I presented it.
And you can't be more careful than having a first-hand accounting, whether than me tell you what I heard from him, what he heard from someone else.
We'll be right back.
Stay tuned, everybody.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are back with the final segment tonight with my pastor.
We've still got two more hours to come tonight.
Pastor's just with us for the first segment.
I appreciate him sharing with you what has transpired over recent weeks, but what is now we are now making public because the convention is 10 days away and the die is cast, and it appears as though this motion to disfellowship our congregation from the convention is going to go to the floor.
And what happens after that?
Well, a lot of things could happen after that.
It could pass, it could fail, it could get tabled.
We just don't know.
But I do want to say this before I toss it back to Pastor to wrap this up.
I want to make clear that no one in the Southern Baptist Convention, and Pastor told me the man who is bringing forth this motion, and it's a man whose name I've never heard before.
I have no idea who he is.
And honestly, he obviously has no idea who I am.
Now, as a public figure with 14 years of radio, I guess my enemies have the benefit of going through 14 years of archives and articles and selectively choosing snippets of things with or without context to use in their case against me.
But they have never called me.
They've never contacted me in any way.
Matthew 18, 15 through 17 says, if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you.
That every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.
And if he refuses to listen to even the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
So there's four stages there for bringing charge against your brother.
And it would seem as though my critics in the convention bypass steps one to three and jumped straight to four.
Now, they did call the pastor, and the church did deal with it.
They said, we're not going to take action.
We don't believe that he has committed a sin against God or the church.
And so that's interesting.
And I wanted to get that out there while we're still here.
I have not been contacted.
I would like to be contacted.
I would like to be able to speak.
I would like to be able to face my accusers, but I don't even know who they are.
Pastor, that being said, and I don't want to take time away from you.
I could have said that after the fact, but I know you want to have a final word on all of this.
Well, let me mention this, James.
As far as our little church is concerned, I mentioned this to them, and very frankly, they found it laughable.
Very small group of people.
They know you.
In fact, at one time, you worked with some of them.
Well, that's right.
I worked professionally with some of them before, and also even for the church, teaching vacation Bible school when it was a bigger congregation, being in the choir.
I mean, this is all very important.
This group that we have now, you worked in the same company that's right.
Years ago.
Yeah, several years ago.
And I said, you know, we're being asked to dismiss James from the church.
And we spent a, oh, gosh, James, I guess we spent a grand total of five minutes on this in the church on a Sunday morning.
The folks just said, I sent after church, people asked me a little bit more about it and talked about it.
But these people know you.
And I guess the charge would be that if we know you and we refuse to deal with you, we must be racist as well.
And that, again, is a ludicrous.
I mean, we don't have any black members right now.
we've had black members, the charge of racism is just ludicrous.
And I really don't want to spend much time on that because it is ludicrous.
And of course, I wrote about that in my book years ago.
They want you to spend time spinning your wheels talking about it because they know they've neutralized you and debating if you are or not and what the word means and what it doesn't mean.
And their definition outranks your definition.
And so what would you like to see happen?
Well, what I would really like to see is for this just to go away.
And I don't see why it can't.
The charges are false.
The action is unwarranted, but also it is dangerous that we're going to suddenly, I mean, or if this passes, maybe we need to set up a committee to check on church, check on members of Southern Baptist churches to see if they're in compliance with everything Southern Baptist.
It's just a slippery slope.
We need to be careful we don't go down a road that's going to lead us to the wrong path.
But if it does go to the last full measure, and if we are, in fact, disfellowshipped, your response to that would be?
Well, to quote Ronald Reagan about the Democratic Party, they asked him why he left the Democratic Party, and he said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party.
They left me.
I love Southern Baptists.
I think Southern Baptists is the greatest mission organization the world has ever seen, has been, still is today.
I have his deep, close personal friends, Southern Baptist missionaries.
I have personally my own income given sacrificially not only tithe every week, but at Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong and all of those mission organizations, our church has supported those.
This whole process is very grieving to me.
I don't wish anybody any harm.
And the folks that have brought these charges, my heart's desire is that God will bless them and that God will use them in the kingdom.
I advise the gentleman that called me as a pastor.
I advised him that he would spend his time more wisely tending his flock instead of trying to tend my flock.
I shouldn't laugh about that.
It's not a laughing matter, but thank you.
But he assured me that he didn't want to do this, but for some reason he was compelled to do this.
And he was gracious in our conversation.
Probably was more gracious than me.
Well, I want to say something.
I want to share with the audience, if you don't mind me sharing this from our personal conversation.
I never expect anybody to defend me.
Now, I would have expected it out of you or of Eddie Miller or Sam Bushman, who certainly has for years and years our owner and one of my best friends in life.
And there are some men.
There are great men in my life that I know would defend me, but I never expect it.
And I never want people to have to bear a cross on account of my work, which I believe in and that I will never apologize for.
But as I was thanking you for doing that, you said you didn't do it because you love me.
You said you loved me, but that's not why you did it.
You did it because it was the right thing to do.
And I think that's an example that all men should take, should tuck away in their heart and remember going forward when something unpleasant reaches them, even in a situation when they may have something to lose.
Because I know you said you will not capitulate.
Well, I do love you, James.
But if these charges have been brought against a cantankerous church member, you pastors listening out there, you know what I'm talking about.
If they're brought against a cantankerous church member, I still would have defended because it's the right thing to do.
But my heart's desire is to see our convention get away from this kind of stuff, get our focus back on missions, quit trying to be politically correct.
One of the things we need to do is quit trying to please the world.
If you think the world is a friend of grace, you're sadly mistaken.
And if the news organizations and the liberal political organizations want to talk about how wonderful we are, we're really in a little bit of trouble.
My understanding is if you preach the gospel, it is going to offend many.
And we need to quit worrying about whether the world is offended at what Southern Baptists do.
We need to get back to not seeing if we can get all of our political ducks in a row and we can meet the political standards of the day.
We need to get our mind and our heart and our spirit back on kingdom work to have convention leaders discussing who ought to be president and who shouldn't.
How did we ever get there?
We've always shied away from that.
I mean, I have my personal political convictions.
I don't bring that in the pulpit.
I might talk about it to my friends privately.
James is telling me that our time is running out.
And I didn't ask James permission to do this, but I want to close with a word of prayer.
By all means.
I want to make sure, understand, I'm not trying to, for a show to close in prayer.
I hope you'll join me as we talk to the Father and lay our hearts before him.
Father, you know my heart.
And that really kind of scares me.
You know the best about me and the worst about me.
And you know the best and the worst about these folks.
And Father, you're able to tune hearts.
You do it.
That's what you do.
And Father, I pray that not that their heart would be in tune with mine, nor mine with theirs, but that both our hearts would be in tune with you.
Father, you do the work that needs to be done not only in our lives, but in our churches, in our convention.
Father, I pray that in all things the name of the Savior will be lifted up and glorified.
To God be the glory and to God alone.
In Jesus' dear name, amen.
Thank you, Pastor.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being the man that you've been throughout my whole life.
Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who do know who I am, a big reason I am the man that I am today is a result of my upbringing.
And this man has had as big a role in it as anybody outside of the people that I lived under.
My parents is what I'm trying to say.
Man, we'll be back.
We'll continue with the second hour right after this.