Questions & Answers 2022-Part 2

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22-23b Q&A 2022_Part 2

 

Q&A 2022 – Part 2

Pastor Mike Fabarez

 

Pastor Mike: Once a year as I said, we give our service to questions and answers and have the pastors come forward. Please come down here, guys, with the microphones. If you have a question about the Bible, the Christian life, Christian doctrine, you waive down one of these guys with the microphone and we’re going to jump right into it here. I just ask the question be your question. I ask that it be a sincere question and I ask that it would be something at least related somehow to the Bible or the Christian life, Christian doctrine, walking in this world as a disciple. So you track them down. We got three guys right here. Look at this. Three pastors. We’re over-pastored here. It’s awesome. I love it. So raise your hand. Let’s get it started. Don’t be shy. And pastors, you force someone to ask a question if they won’t. All right, here we go. Let’s do it.

 

Question: I engage with a lot of Roman Catholics at church and also in my community. And usually I take them to Scripture. I’ll show them that we’re saved through grace alone through faith alone and Christ alone. And usually they’ll tend to agree with me with what the Bible says, but then they’ll say, but Rome doesn’t exactly teach that. And I have church history on my side and early church fathers on my side. I typically respond with, well, if we look at church history, not in a biased fashion, we see the early church fathers believed all sorts of things, things that I can affirm, things that the Roman Catholic can affirm, and that we need to filter what they say through Scripture like any other believer. So my question is just how would you respond to that? And also when they bring up apostolic succession?

 

Pastor Mike: Yeah, well, I think you’re dealing with it well. If I had a Catholic who said that, if would say so if you want to share with your secularized neighbor that they should become a Catholic and you share the Christian faith with them and they said, “Yeah, that’s all good. I believe a lot of that. But I also, you know, I believe a lot of other things, too, because I got CNN on my side. I got NPR on my side. You know, I got the polls on my side. So I’m kind of believe that, too.” You’d say, okay, well, you’ve got to decide where you’re going to get your information. Right? And that’s the problem with any two-source religion. And that is, yeah, they’re going to say, well, we believe the Bible, but we also have this as our authority. And Rome sets itself up as that. And I say Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, they’ve set themselves up, but they’ve codified that. They’ve said that we are the authority, we are the authority, the Bible is the authority. And they split their authority into two parts, into the Magisterium, the decisions that they’ve made, and tradition, things that have happened in the past. Well, again, how do we know if that tradition is right? Well, they say, well, because of apostolic succession. Right? We’ve got the pontiff. He represents Christ. He’s the vicar of Christ on earth. And then you say, well, what about even when you had two popes, you had a pope and an antipope? You had, you know, a lot of rescinded, you know, papal bulls and speaking ex-cathedra for the church. So at some point, we have to have a source of truth. You have to have an arbiter of truth, and you have to have something that is going to be the end of what’s going to end all discussions about doctrine. And that’s why the Reformation was so wildly successful because they said we’re going to go back to Scripture alone. Now, they’re going to say, “Well, there’s a lot of that. You got Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. You guys are just a mess.” And we’re going, “Yeah, but we’re not a mess in the sense that all of us would agree that the Scripture teaches about salvation what Scripture teaches about salvation.” You’ve always got cults. You’ve got a lot of people who say a lot of crazy things about a lot of things, but the Church as a Protestant movement with all the denominations in it, and I know they hate that. They think Catholics are all unified. Even though I can’t find a single Catholic, it seems, who believes everything in the catechism of the Catholic Church. And yet they’re saying, well, we have a unified body of doctrine. Well, I’m saying the Protestants have a unified body of doctrine, it’s called the Bible. And there may be some groups that believe differently about baptism or about how to do the Lord’s Supper or whatever. But this is our source of truth. So I just think in every situation you’ve got to ask “who says.” Right? You’re going to say there’s a purgatory. I going to say “who says.” And they’re going to say, “Well, the church says, tradition says.” Right? Or Mary. Mary was sinless. Well, “who says.” Okay. And I’m going to say, well, the Scripture doesn’t say that. Matter of fact the Scripture says Mary needed a savior. She said that in the Magnificat and in Luke 1. If she’s this co-redemptrix as so many in Rome would say, there’s not a single mention of her outside of the gospel. None of it makes any sense. So I’m going to go back to what the reformers have said and say, we believe that Scripture is our sole basis of truth. And, you know, what I find is a lot of people when you argue about specific details, they will say, “Well, I don’t believe that.” And I said, “Well, yeah, but your church believes this.” And at some point when you can separate them enough with logic from the Scripture from their church, then you’re going to say, well, at some point when we break all these tentacles of your belief with a doctrine that is codified as Rome’s official doctrine, at some point you’ve got to ask yourself, then why are you still there? At some point you should agree with the truth of the Scripture and unmoor yourself. And they say tradition. This is my background and my culture. Okay? I have a culture, right? My culture is the United States of America. But I have to break with that and say no, but I’m a Bible-believing Christian, and that comes first. That’s hard. There are a lot of books on our little shelf of books in our bookstore from former Catholics that I think may be helpful there to take that discussion further. All right.

 

Question: Hi, Pastor Mike. I have two questions. How do you deal with Christians who say they’re homosexuals but they’re celibate, they’re not going to act on those desires? And then, too, I have family members who are practicing those kinds of behaviors. And how do you handle that with compassion but yet be firm about that sin? So how do you balance that without alienating them?

 

Pastor Mike: Yeah, I don’t know that you can. I mean, if that’s the goal, to not alienate them, I don’t know that I can help you. All I can tell you is that we would never deal with other sins in the way that Matthew Vines and all these people in the middle try to say, “Well, we’re going to identify ourselves as homosexuals, but say we’re homosexual celibate Christians.” And I’m going to say, well, that has nothing to do with what we see in Scripture when it talks about us being identified with our sin prior to conversion. Right? But when we become Christians we’re washed or redeemed. Right? “Such were some of you.” That is my old identity. It’s not my identity now. And I’m not going to say, “Hi. My name is Mike Fabarez. I’m a thief.” Right? “Hi. My name is Mike Fabarez. I’m an alcoholic.” That’s not the way we approach the Christian life. That’s who I was. Do I struggle with desires in these areas? I might. But I’m ashamed of those things. I’m ashamed even to speak of those things. I repent of those things. I condemn those things as against what God’s rule says. So there is, you know, obviously it’s easy for us to open the Bible and say you should not be a thief, right? You should not be a pedophile. You should not be a homosexual. You should not be a, you know, a transvestite. Or that’s the old word, sorry, you should not be transgender. You should not be gender fluid. We can say that. But then they say, “Well, I’m a Christian. I want you to affirm and accept me because I have all of those things and I identify that way, but I’m going to choose not to do it.” And I’m saying I don’t think there’s any room in Scripture for seeing it that way. The old man who I was, look how often Paul uses that, that’s gone. Right? I’m a new man. Do I struggle as a new man in Christ? Yes, but I’m not identifying with my old man. And so these are things that because they’ve become so cherished in modern society, as they were in Sodom and Gomorrah, we applaud this behavior. Right? I can get all kinds of likes online if I come out today as the homosexual pastor of Compass Bible Church in South Orange County. Right? And I can get a lot of people applauding me. And because of that, you have all of this happening in our culture where they’re saying, “Well, can’t we somehow in the Church kind of ride on that popularity of these things?” Right? Think about today the transgenderism and gender fluidity of our kids. And it’s all, if you look at it, scatter plotted it’s happening right in the cultural elite centers of the world, of our country, in New York and L.A. and Chicago and in the Northwest. It’s like we’re trying to blame this on biology, right? It’s part of some evolutionary biology, but it’s all part of an ideal in people’s minds that this is the cool and right thing to do. Teens today will be applauded for jumping on this bandwagon. So I’m saying the Church can’t go there. And we’re going to say, listen, this is wrong, just like every other sin is wrong and we’re not going to identify ourselves with a sin as a Christian, even if that was a struggle that I had or still have, I’m going to say I’m going to continue to put to death whatever remains fleshly in me, to quote Colossians Chapter 3 verse 5. So that’s a hard thing in our day. I get it. And to say, well, this is the position, now I want to have this position. You don’t have this position, but I don’t want to alienate you. I can’t help you other than to say be nice. Right? I can be as nice as I want to about saying what I just said. But if I said it in a room full of pro-LGBTQ+ people I’m going to be attacked in every way. Right? So I don’t think we can win this if we’re going to say, well, I want to somehow do this so that they will like me. I want to do this so they will accept me. I want to do this so that they won’t attack me. They are a hostile crowd that is now saying to us in culture, you had better affirm this. And we’re saying as Christians, we can’t affirm it and we won’t affirm it within our church, even if there’s a segment of our church that struggles with these temptations any more than you struggling with temptations to be an adulterer or a pedophile or a thief or a liar or a foul-mouth person. Right? You may struggle with that. We’re not here starting small groups to say, all right, all the people who struggle with vulgarity, we’re going to have a Bible study for you. Right? We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to identify with those things. We’re going to confess them, repent of them, and do our best to continue to put down desires that are out of step, they’re condemned in Scripture as wrong. There’s just no way around that. And again, that may be the thing that puts us all in jail, or at least pastors, particularly me, in jail one day when we become like Canada or Europe or places where this is becoming a problem, a political and legal problem, but so be it. The church has struggled with this from the beginning. When Paul was saying what he was saying in Romans Chapter 1 about homosexuality, Rome, I mean, this was rampant in Rome, right? We were ramping up into a kind of promiscuity and homosexuality that was over the top. Nero was marrying teenagers in Rome. And that was going to happen in the sixties of the first century. So it’s not like, hey, well, that was just the ethic of the day. Like Paul was writing the New Testament in America in the 1950s. No, he wasn’t. He’s writing the New Testament in a time like ours. So we got to know that we’re always called to be countercultural and it offended a lot of people. And like Jesus said, when people said we’re offended by that, or someone told him, “You’re offending the disciples or the Pharisees when you say that.” Oh, well. And I don’t mean to be cavalier and I do love you, but I love you enough to tell you the truth. And I’m not going to be coerced by the culture that you have behind you to say, “Well, okay, can we carve out some way to have a mitigating position?” Matthew Vines is a classic example of a guy within evangelicalism when he said, “We’re going to find a mitigating position. We can still say we’re homosexual, we’re just not practicing or we’re celibate. We just kind of restrain that. But I still want to be identified as this.” We talked about a book last night Carl Trueman wrote called “Strange New World.” It was a condensed version of his book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.” And I think I put it on the back of the worksheet a couple of times. But we are in a day when we’re trying to say what’s most important about you is being authentic to whatever you feel. And that expression of that authenticity is so sacrosanct. It’s so important to people that now we have people converted to Christ saying, “Yeah, but that’s my real identity. So I want to have that identity within the Church.” And I’m saying, no, you can’t, because it’s not biblical. You forsake that, you repent of it, right? When you battle with the feelings, you don’t come to church and say, “Where’s my group for people that have this?” You say, “We’re all fighting our temptations and they’re all common to people,” right? I mean, we could build groups and we’d only probably have about 12 of them because there are only so many temptations in categories that we all deal with. But we’re fighting those and every day we’re trying to spur one another on to love and good deeds. And we forsake who we were because in Christ we’re a new person in Christ. And one day, all my desires that are contrary to God’s truth are going to be stripped away, Romans Chapter 8, when I have a body that is glorified with every impulse of my body knowing and wanting exactly what Christ wants. I’m going to look back at my old desires and go, “Man, I not only hated those, I fought them during my Christian life and now praise God they’re gone because my flesh has been redeemed.” And that’s coming, quoting Romans Chapter 8. Hard question, but a good, good question.

 

Question: My question is how would you explain to a non-Christian why we can trust the revelations that John had that produced the book of Revelation and why we can’t trust, let’s say, Joseph Smith’s vision of Christ?

 

Pastor Mike: Well, because John was there as an apostle in John Chapters 14 through 16 when Jesus said, I’m going to tell you many things that you “cannot handle right now.” I’m going to tell you these things. And they became these writing apostles who built us a New Testament revelation. Joseph Smith, though he likes to point at John 10 and other places and say, “Well, you know, I was kind of looked to in this text somewhere as this, you know, this new prophet, to keep the sheep of another fold.” Listen, the Bible’s very clear about the apostles being authorized to do what they did. All the Johnny-come-lately prophets, including Mohammed and Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy and anybody else who wants to claim that status does not have biblical authority from Christ to do that. We do. The apostles and prophets built the foundation for the Church, and then we just reiterate that information to the world. So if John had that authority because Christ granted him that authority, Joseph Smith does not have that authority because Christ did not grant him that authority. Any more than I can go in the back green room and say, “Well, I got authority there because Christ just appeared to me. So I’m here now saying that.” John was an apostle and that’s a different ballgame and it’s a different set of credentials than Joseph Smith claims to have. And Joseph Smith, if you really are the prophet, which he’s not, here’s the thing about believing John. When Christ is showing us his connection to all the prophets and he goes all the way back to Abraham, he says, “Abraham rejoiced to see my day.” All of that is like us… It’d be like me saying, for the last five weeks I have gotten up here and made very specific prophecies. And for the last five weeks they’ve all come true, very specific, whatever they might be and I couldn’t possibly have made that up. And you go, “Wow, Pastor Mike, every Sunday he gives us a brand-new prophecy. And it’s amazing. And it comes true exactly as he said.” And if today I said, “Well, your house is going to Tuesday night, it’s going to explode and, you know, or a meteor is going to fall out of the sky and destroy your house. So, you know, I just want to tell you, I wouldn’t go to sleep in your house on Tuesday night.” I think you’d say, “Wow, I’m not going to do that because Pastor Mike has got a batting average here that’s batting a thousand.” And I’m saying when Christ looks at the people that he’s authorizing, both in the past, he’s affirming and confirming, and those in the future, these guys are batting a thousand. And then John comes in after coming to the Upper Room Discourse and being told he was going to be one of these guys who was going to write Scripture, and he does. And I’m thinking, well, that hasn’t come true yet. It’s not Tuesday yet, but I believe what he says, because he’s been authorized as a part of a cadre of people, the apostles and prophets, who are able to pin things that have already come true. And if someone else came to you in the patio and goes, “Well, I think your house is going to flood on Monday.” You’d go, “Well, who are you? Pastor Mike’s been batting a thousand with his prophecies. You’re just some guy at the donut table. I don’t even know who you are.” Right? You should be skeptical of the people who come without the connection of the track record. The hub is Christ himself who made this promise to the Apostles.

 

Question: There are a lot of people who will say because you don’t know me or know the experiences I’ve been through you can’t really speak truth to me. How do you respond to those people?

 

Pastor Mike: Yeah, I say truth has hard edges. It doesn’t as Ben Shapiro says, it doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t really care about your experience. If we’re all on a ship and the ship is sinking and I come to your cabin and I bang on the door and I say, “Hey, get to the lifeboats because the ship is sinking.” And you respond, “Yeah, well, how in the world can you disrupt my backgammon time? You don’t know me. You don’t know why I’m here on this trip. You don’t know how I feel right now. I got a call from my girlfriend. I just got dumped. You can’t be telling me to go to the lifeboats. I don’t want to go to the lifeboats. You know, you need to get to know me first before you tell me to get to the lifeboats.” I’m just saying, well if the facts are the ship is sinking, it really doesn’t matter if I know you. Right? John the Baptist didn’t go out and say, “Well, I really need to get to know all those Pharisees before I tell them they’re a brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” And then, in reality, I don’t need to know you. I don’t need to know anything about you. But again, to quote Carl Trueman’s book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” we are so in our minds sacrosanct about the identity of our selves, that all that matters is our own experience. And really out of existentialism and all of the things that have kind of moved out of this, I quoted last week the Enlightenment, there has been this increasing autonomy, this increasing sense of experiential knowledge that becomes the most important thing. And therefore, I can’t even listen to you telling me the ship is going to sink unless I get you to know me. Right? And do I think relationships in evangelism are important? Yeah, I think you should do that. It’s helpful, but it’s not necessary. And it doesn’t in any way change the way the truth is either true or not true. And if Christ is coming back and he says you need to trust in Jesus Christ, “he’s the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him,” or to quote Acts 4:12, “There’s no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” If that’s true, and there’s a day coming, we don’t know the day or the hour, we don’t “know the times or the seasons,” to quote Acts 1, if Christ is coming back and you better be saved by trusting in his name, I really don’t need to know any of you to say that to you and have it be true. Is it helpful if we go to dinner? Yeah. Some of you here I’ve never been to dinner with you and I’ve been your preacher for a long time and you learn things from me. Some of you I don’t even know your name. I don’t know your middle name. I don’t know your favorite color. But we’ve had, I hope, a good exchange of truth that’s impacted your life that’s not based on our personal relationship. Does it help in a church? Do you listen better to the preacher if you have some great relationship with him? Yeah, perhaps you do. And in small churches some people like that. And that’s a good thing. Fine. But you don’t need that. You don’t need that not only when there’s preaching from the word about truth and you don’t need it in evangelism. It’s just another example, the symptomatic example, of the really this overweening sense of importance of me and my feelings. What matters is, is the ship sinking and is there a lifeboat and is it buoyant? Right? And those are the hard facts. And when Jesus looked at a guy like John the Baptist who wasn’t sitting there building relationships in bridged relational evangelism, and he’s out there crying as a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way for the Lord. Jesus turns and says, “This is the greatest prophet that has ever been born of women.” That’s a huge resumé builder. And Jesus thinks he’s the best. And he wasn’t a relational evangelist guy. And I’m not saying we don’t want to do that. Of course, in our relationships we do that. It’s helpful. My point is it’s not necessary and it’s even hailed by Christ himself who died for us, who is our mechanism of salvation. And he’s saying, John the Baptist, amazing evangelist, I mean, the best ever. And I’m going, well, what kind of evangelist was he? Well, you can read about him and say, well, I guess I don’t need to coddle your feelings or your self-expression or even build a big relationship before I can even start to talk about Christianity with you. That may seem harsh but it’s true. And I’m trying to answer the questions biblically.

 

Question: I asked you a question yesterday, thanks for answering it. I got a different one for you. Deuteronomy 23:3. “No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord. Even to the 10th generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the Lord forever.” Now, if you look at the genealogy of Christ, there are five women listed. One of them is Ruth, who was a Moabite woman. I’m just wondering how that’s reconciled.

 

Pastor Mike: Read the next verse.

 

Question: “Because they did not meet you with bread and with water on the way, when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you.

 

Pastor Mike: Right. Here is this seduction that had to be overcome in the culture that they had done in influencing the Israelites. And he said, “We’re not…” How many generations? Not ten. Not going to have them a part of this thing. So this was a very practical situation. It’s like your kid goes out and starts smoking pot because he hangs out with Johnny down the street and you go, “You aren’t dealing with that kid for the next ten years. I don’t even want you to see him.” Because you’re so livid over the fact, and justly so, that this kid is a bad influence on your kid. You start quoting First Corinthians 15. “Bad company corrupts good morals.” You go, you’re severing that. That’s what happened historically in Israel. You look at the genealogy of Christ and you say, okay, but is it that God isn’t in his redemptive grace doing good things among that nation? Of course he is. And of course he will. And even in the genealogy itself, having people in the genealogy who were just like out of left field was the whole point, look at God’s redemptive work. I preached a message about when I forget what I called it, something like the Grace of Inclusion or something like that, you know, or the Gracious Inclusion of an Exclusive God. The point is, if God’s terms are very exclusive, I just quoted “the way, truth, life. No man comes to the Father except through him.” And yet the way he shows the variety of people who he is drawing to himself, the genealogy of Christ even, I think helps us in that regard. And I address some of that in the sermon I preached in Luke when we went through his genealogy. But yeah, I think the practical matter for them at the time when this was a prohibition was not ceremonial, it was social, it was the social intercourse between the nations. So he had a reason for it and I made you read it. That’s the reason that he prohibited them.

 

Question: So I have a question. For the young single adults here, I’m talking about the members at Alliance, not to call anyone out, but… How would you recommend and some general best practices of how to go about navigating dating with other young single adults and in particular maybe some advice of how to be respectful of other people’s emotions? Because I think we want to be careful about being too intentional to the point you offend people. All right. So thank you for answering the question.

 

Pastor Mike: Yeah. Well, you need to first of all decide whether or not if you read First Corinthians Chapter 7, you’re called to romantic relationships and marriage. Right? And if you’re content not being married, as Jesus said, if you can accept this, accept it, giving this conversation in Matthew 19 about marriage being permanent. And so here’s a permanent covenant relationship that is supposed to reflect God’s permanent covenant relationship with his people. It’s a serious thing. And the apostle’s minds were blown when he was talking about it and he said, listen, “Some people are eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom. Some do it for men. Some do it for the sake of the kingdom.” And they were like, wow, this is amazing. This is like marriage is like the ultimate ball and chain, right? That’s kind of how the apostles applied it when they heard his words. And he says, “Well, you know, if you can accept it, you ought to accept it.” So that’s a small group of us, right? I say us, not me, but it’s a small group of Christians who can say I’m content being single. And there are some people in this church and I’ve heard it said as recently as last week, right? I’m content being a single person and I’m absolutely content with it. I don’t need romance, I don’t need sex, I don’t need marriage. I just don’t need it. Great. Praise God. The Bible says now you can, according to First Corinthians 7, give your wholehearted, focused devotion to Christ. Right? I can’t do that. I got a house to deal with and stuff I would never buy for that house if I were single that breaks and I got to fix it because I’m married and I got a family. So that debt distracts me from my role. And yet God says that’s a service and a gift that God gives me and I ought to do it and that’s a good thing. So if I know I’m called to marriage and you’re sitting there saying, “Yes, I am frustrated as a single person and that’s in a biblical sense, in a fine sense, that I want to be married,” right? Then you need a date, right? And so the singles in this church or any other church, they need to start asking people out on social engagements to go meet one-on-one with people of the opposite sex and have social conversations. That’s called a date. When you put it on your Google calendar and say, I’m going to this place at this time, it’s a date. And so nothing wrong with that. And here’s what you should do not to offend people. If someone says, I don’t like this date, don’t ask me out on another one. And they say that in a variety of different ways. Sometimes it’s got to be subtle and not hurt feelings. Then you need to listen to them, right? You’re not going to be a creeper by trying to force your romantic feelings on anyone. So I’m just saying this: you have to be intentional and you have to listen well and you have to respond to what’s being said. If a gal’s going, I didn’t like that Starbucks coffee with you. It wasn’t the coffee, it was you. And some way or another they’re going to say I’m not interested in going any further. But all I’m saying to both the guys and the girls, regardless of who you are, you should be dating. You should be, especially in that age group, you should be getting together more often and trying to see if there’s someone here that might become my life partner. And that’s important. So get active, get more involved in dating, right? And that needs to happen with an intentionality. Because we know, just like if I knew you were called to work like you’re a man and you’re supposed to provide for your family and I said, “How’s the job hunt coming?” And you go, “Well, you know, I’m just kind of waiting for God to supply one for me a job somewhere. I’ll hopefully get one.” But I say, “Yeah, but have you been out there trying to get one?” “Well, you know, I trust the Lord.” I’m going to go, “Well, you’re going to be broke,” right? What you need to do is to trust the Lord and work. And that means you go and get your resume out. You need to work full-time at trying to get a job. And I’m saying single, you need to be full-time with your social capital, right? You need to be trying to find a wife or a husband and there’s nothing wrong with that. And I think we need to work at that more. I think Christians so often kind of over-romanticize, and I say that in a spiritual sense, this dating thing. And I’m saying just start dating, would you please? All of you start dating. If you’re called to marry, start dating. And if you don’t like it, just somehow make that diplomatically clear. And then, you know what? Listen, if they don’t want to date you again, just listen and move on. Just thinking, move on, because here’s the reason, right? It doesn’t help, right? It takes two to have a romantic relationship. And I’m not going to force, you know, my affections on somebody who is not interested. “Well, if they just really knew, if they could just see the wonderful side that my mom sees in me, they would love me,” right? You just need to listen and then respond and then move on. Move on. I know it’s hard. You’ve already done all this in your imagination, in your heart, “because I could just see us together. She’s perfect for me. I just want…” Stop. Right? Go on a date. See how it goes. See if you can get a second date. If you can’t, move on. “Well, then I’d be like, it could be that I could be dating a bunch of people in this group by the time I find a wife.” Yep. That may be how it is. Just like a lot of interviews you go to get a job and it may take the fifth, sixth or 15th interview before you get a job. But you’re called to get a job. And if you know that you’re not content being single, then you need to go and find a mate. “Well, shouldn’t you know me really well before you tell me all that?” (audience laughing) I’m just saying. I’m trying to answer questions succinctly and matter of factly here. That’s kind of my thing.

 

Question: Well, my question is in regards to rapture theology. So pre-tribulation theology didn’t originate until John Nelson Darby began to teach it in the 1830s, whereas explicitly in Scripture in Mark 13, it says “after the tribulation,” then the “Son of Man will gather his elect.” Second Thessalonians it says now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, “Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come until after “the lawless one is revealed.” So my question is, where is it explicitly stated in Scripture that there’s a pre-trib rapture and that we will be snatched away prior to the tribulation?

 

Pastor Mike: Well, number one, Darby wasn’t the first, he was the first to systematize it. But there are a lot, not only pre-millennialism, but pre-rap and pre-tribulational hints and references. We don’t have the extensive systematizing of pre-tribulationism before Darby, I understand. But it doesn’t mean that this was absent. All these passages were there. People grapple with these texts. Here’s why. In the New Testament, you cannot understand a thing about the Olivet Discourse or the book of Revelation without the Old Testament promises that put all this together. You can’t read Revelation without reading Daniel. You can’t understand the great tribulations Jesus said that are coming on the earth, that there’s never been a tribulation like it and there never will be. Right? You can’t find out what that is unless you’re reading in light of Jeremiah, the Time of Jacob’s Trouble, the time of Israel’s trouble unless you’re reading Daniel Chapter 9, understanding there’s a 70th week of this chronology that has not been played out yet. The passage that you quoted is a great example of the series of events that are all part of the Day of the Lord that the Bible talks about. For instance, “This day will not come unless this man of lawlessness is revealed.” Right? That he’s going to destroy “with the breath of his mouth.” Here they are in Thessalonica saying we’ve missed it. They’re being unsettled, much like the words that Paul used to the Galatians about being unsettled regarding circumcision. Someone’s unsettling your mind saying you’ve already missed the Day of the Lord. You’ve already missed it. And he’s saying this, it’s like this, if I said to you, I send you out to the front of the house and I’m your dad and you’re going to catch the school bus. And you’re out there and I said, “Get out there, have breakfast, get out and wait for the school bus.” And you’re out there now panicked. You’re saying, “Dad, I’ve missed the school bus. I’ve missed the school bus. I’ve missed the school bus.” But I’ve told you, I’ve told you twice or three times. Do you know what? Do you know what happens after you get on the bus and go away on the bus? Do you know what happens next? The trash truck comes by and then about 30 minutes later, the mail truck comes by and drops off the mail and they’re gone. And you’re out there telling me…, you’re trying to argue with me. “We’ve missed the bus. We’ve missed the bus.” And I said, “Haven’t I told you, you haven’t missed the bus. If you missed the bus you would have seen the mail truck. You would have seen the garbage truck. And so you haven’t missed it.” The point about the king of the South, to use the terminology from Daniel 11 or the horn who becomes that world leader or the beast, right? Or the Antichrist who’s First John’s terminology. This is someone that rises to a place of prominence that the Bible puts and situates within a time that is promised in Daniel 9 for your people, Daniel’s people and your holy city for Israel and Jerusalem. Which is where all the attention in the book of Revelation goes after Chapter 6. From Chapters 6 to 19, the focus is without any reference to the “Ekklesia” or the church. The focus is on the Jewish people being brought into the time that Romans 11 talks about when the times of Gentiles are fulfilled. And you have this period of time where God turns his attention, starting with 144,000 Jews from the 12 tribes of Israel. And God then is doing what he promised to do in Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Daniel in gathering his people together and what Jesus talked about in the Olivet Discourse. So much of what’s going on, not only in Mark, but in Matthew, Matthew 24, is talking about that period of time. The Bible is not only speaking to us of the Church. When Jesus talked and they’re talking about the temple and he’s talking about when you see the abomination that makes desolate that was spoken about by Daniel the prophet, all of these things he’s put forward in a future apocalyptic and eschatological calendar. Those things are for Israel, for Jerusalem, for his people, for the fulfilling of his promise to save all of Israel when the Time of Jacob’s Trouble is playing itself out and God’s tribulation comes on the planet. Everything for the one new man that Paul talked about, that God is teaching us in the book of Ephesians, for instance, is something different. And that’s where I make a harder distinction between the Church and Israel than you probably do. And I’m saying it wasn’t Darby who came up with this. The distinctions in that were really established from the very beginning, even in the teaching in the second century, thinking about the difference between Israel’s plan and the plan for the Church. And the question is how distinct are those programs? And I’m saying they’re distinct enough that God is going to take the Church up and have us meet him in the air, which is distinct from Zachariah 14, when his feet come down and touch the Mount of Olives. And when that happens and it splits open after the Battle of Armageddon in Revelation 19, I’m saying it makes sense that that 70th week of Daniel that is now characterized by Israel is a distinction between what the Church is doing and when the Church program ends from Acts Chapter 2 until the Rapture, and when the man of lawlessness makes a covenant with the people, breaks it halfway through in three and a half years, and then comes back and saves his people. He meets his people in the air, the elect. They not only gather the elect to the earth, but they gather. Look how carefully in the Olivet Discourse, both in Mark and in Matthew, you have the angels sent out to gather people for judgment. Right? That’s not how it happens when Christ meets us in the air as a Church. The Jew Gentile one new thing that God did in this economy we call the Church is taking us home. Right? Well, then he brings judgment to the people, he gathers us. Then at the end, Christ comes back. By the way, one is imminent. We don’t know what it’s going to happen. The other one, we’ve got all the biblical calendars telling us when he’s going to come and he comes at the end of that seven-year period. And then ALL the nations are gathered, Matthew 25, and there is a judgment of the nations. I’m just saying in my study, I’m agreeing, whether I agree with Darby or Calvin or disagree with whoever it is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m convinced by Scripture that I’m not pinning anything on Darby, I’m pinning it on the fact that in my study of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Revelation and Matthew 24 and the Olivet Discourse, I’m saying I think everything that was said in First Thessalonians, it comports with the idea that there is another seven years that’s coming, that the Church is not a part of, that God is going to play out his fulfillment of his promises and taking the stick of Ephraim and the stick of Judah, putting them together, bringing them to a place where then he’s going to usher them into a literal thousand-year millennial kingdom. They repeat six times in Revelation Chapter 20. So that’s my view. And I think, you know, at least in my mind, it fits together, it makes sense. In yours it may not be because someone said, “Well, Darby came up with this, and if your pastor believes that, that’s ridiculous.” And I’m saying, well, I’m not pinning any of this on Darby or Shaeffer or anyone else. I’m just saying I’m at this point convinced in my eschatology and harmonizing all of these passages. And to say, well, you know, they didn’t really say the Trinitarian formula the way I believe it until the fourth century. If we were living in the fifth century and someone said, “You believe that they are co-equal in essence but different in persons, you believe that Trinity stuff.” And you’d go, “Well, yeah, I believe it.” They’d say, “You know, that hadn’t been around but for a hundred years.” Well it has been around from the beginning. It’s just it wasn’t solidified and systematized in a way that all of us speak the same language about the Trinitarian formula until the fourth century. So was there no Trinity before that? Was it a new teaching? It wasn’t a new teaching. It was just a teaching that was then defended and systematized and discussed. And I just think before people dismissed out of hand a pre-tribulational, pre-millennial eschatology because, you know, I heard Darby came up with this. I’m just saying to me that’s not all that persuasive. To me I’m going to say, is it biblical? And then I think let’s dig in the passages of Scripture. And here’s the problem, the difference, it’s not a huge problem but… The problem I have is I cannot read the Old Testament the same way someone says I don’t believe in pre-millennial, pre-tribulational eschatology. I’m going to say you got a ton of passages you’re going to struggle within the Old Testament to read them in a normal sense, in a literal sense. And I do think this and I would say this having studied at both, you know, a-millennial places and pre-millennial places, I’m going to say I do think and I’ve taken 900-level hermeneutics classes at a-mil places. I’m going to say I think it’s the most consistently literal reading of Old Testament prophecy. No discussion of eschatology should be solely based on New Testament text-proof texting. You’ve got to look at the whole picture and say, “What does the Old Testament say about our New Testament eschatology?” Because they all had it. Right? There was nobody there in the synagogues the first century that didn’t have the Old Testament foundation. So we can disagree on that. And you and I can disagree about eschatology and we’ll high-five and you’re welcome at this church and it’s all cool. But I would say don’t demean people for believing in that because you think they don’t know what they’re talking about because Darby came up with this. That’s just an out-of-hand dismissal of a theology I think we need to grapple with in the Scriptures. But good question.

 

Question: I wanted to ask about the psalms in Scripture where the psalmist seems to desire and invoke judgment on God’s enemies. So how do we make sense of that? Or when are those expressions appropriate when we compare other verses where we should clearly desire salvation of God’s enemies?

 

Pastor Mike: Well, I think the overarching desire of godly people is that injustice and violence and oppression would end. Okay. There are two ways that can end. The enemies and the oppressors can be destroyed. The unjust people and the rapists and the murderers and the pedophiles can be destroyed or they can come to repentance. So I know in Scripture my overarching desire is for those things to stop. And I think I’m a godly person in groaning over the injustice that is allowed because God’s got a timetable and he’s playing that all out. The whole promise of Scripture is this season between Genesis 3 and Revelation 19 is going to be over. And though there are two chapters at the beginning and two chapters at the end that we go, well, everything was really nice then. That’s the point. We’re heading there. So God is going to end injustice. How will he end it? Well, you should want it to end one of two ways. And God is always saying, hey, the hopeful, optimistic, you know, day when you’re not there grinding your teeth because someone, you know, raped your daughter is for you to pray for their repentance. And you should. You should pray for your enemies. And I’m saying, well, some days I pray like the psalmist. God, you’re a just God. I prefer a little of that justice to be meted out right now. And other days I pray like an evangelist. I’d love to have them come to Christ. Maybe I could share the gospel. Maybe someone can impact that person. So I know this. The ebb and flow of my feelings over all of this, I think reflect God in the sense that he is a… I’m creating in his image, intellect, emotion and will. And I’m not saying all my emotions are godly, but I’m saying sometimes that sense of like vengeance is a reflection of God. “Vengeance is mine.” So he has that. It’s like I just don’t have the tools to do it. I mean, I do, but I’m not going to do it. I have some tools that’ll do a lot of it, but I’m just saying I’m not supposed to. I don’t take vengeance into my own hands because I don’t know the plan of God and I don’t know whether or not there’s repentance for that enemy. So the psalmist, we call them the imprecatory psalms. There’s a set of psalms where you see very strong emotions of the psalmist praying for the very thing I said some days I pray strongly that God would bring his justice on those people. Why? Because the overarching godly desire ultimately up here is I want it to stop. Right? But then I don’t know how it’s going to stop. Right? It’s going to stop through judgment one day on them or it’s going to stop through repentance and God’s grace. I’m saying the emotion that we see in the Psalms, I think God put those there to remind us. I mean, those aren’t bad feelings. It’s just that you have been told that it’s not your job. Now, remember, David was… so many of the psalms written by David, some of them dedicated to David. He was the commander in chief of the army. Right? It’s like going down to Pendleton, the Marine base, and they’re going off to war to put down a nation that is unjustly attacking us or ancillary attacking us in some ancillary way. You would say, “Go get them.” Right? Why? Because they are according to Romans 13, they’re an arm of a sanctioned government. Right? And we believe in this. The Bible teaches it. And you can listen to a sermon I preached on Romans 13 called “Wars and Bombs” or something like that. I don’t know the title, obviously, but you can look it up in Roman 13. The idea of that is God has appointed them, designated them, as an arm of God’s vengeance. Now I can’t take vengeance personally, but God has mechanisms like the government to take vengeance on wrongdoers. They don’t bear the sword for nothing. They’re God’s ministers to punish wrongdoers. So I know this: not only in a civil sense, that there are penalties upon people who they can invoke at the Santa Ana courthouse that I can’t invoke. And the Army can go out and kill people sanctioned by God justly. And it should be according to just war theory. And you ought to do that because it’s righteous and right. But we are saying to them, if I’m the chaplain there in the Marine Corps, “Get them.” Right? Now remember who’s writing a lot of the psalms? I say all that to say David is the commander in chief of the armies of Israel, and God is often using David’s sword, which was so bloodied that God didn’t want him with the reputation of shedding so much blood to be the one who builds the temple. So he has his son, Solomon. Solomon. Does that sound familiar? Shalom. Peace. The son of peace who’s the prosperity guy with the silver spoon in his mouth, he’s going to build the temple, moving it from a tabernacle to a temple. David is a man of war. So a lot of David’s statements are almost like what you would hear at the barracks at San Mateo. Right? They’re getting ready to do the bidding of God. And that is a little different kind of prayer than we should be praying in church here in Aliso Viejo. I want their prayer as they go out to kill people and drop bombs on people to be a little different. And I’m just saying, you’ve got to at least keep in mind the authorship of some of these passages. And yet I feel the way that the psalmist do often. And I think that’s just a reminder that God is saying these are appropriate feelings, but you need to be angry, that’s a command, by the way, in Ephesians, but not sin. So I need to know what my role is, right? “Be angry and not sin.” If I’m part of an army in David’s day taking out an enemy I should say to not sin is to make sure I don’t overkill my enemy. So for me as a citizen, it’s not to kill them at all. And I’m praying that I might be a tool of conversion for them. Does that help a little bit? Great.

 

Question: We spoke briefly about this the other week. So it has to do with more of a current event. It seems every time I turn on my YouTube, I am seeing Rick Warren, Rick Warren, about female pastors. I am now in sort of a close relationship with one being the boosters with high school. So I’m like, wow, okay. God wants me to learn about this. And so this one, I saw something about the SBC. Now I really don’t know what the SBC is other than Albert Mohler. I’m like, okay, well, I don’t know what that’s all about, but I’m like, whoa. All right. So I’m confused about that. But I did see he rebuked some decision they had to form a committee to figure out this thing. And I’m like, well, isn’t that in the Bible? So I’m really confused and I’m just wondering because I know I’m going to be asked by certain people that I’m sort of in an explosive relationship with, and I won’t name names or anything like that, but it’s just a matter of time. So I’m wondering what Albert Mohler is going to say? I don’t even know what the SBC is. I’m sorry if I’m naive. What I don’t know. I’m confused. What’s going on?

 

Pastor Mike: Right. SBC stands for the Southern Baptist Convention. It is the largest evangelical denomination in our country. There are a ton of churches. And one of the problems with the Southern Baptist Convention is that their governance philosophy is that every church gets to decide for themselves the function and polity of their churches. Now the Southern Baptist Convention can disfellowship a church for being off the rails, but they don’t have control like an Episcopal church or a Lutheran church or a church with some hierarchical structure. It’s almost like it’s an association of like-minded churches. And you think, well, if it’s an association and you don’t have authority over me then what if I don’t have a like mind about this issue? Well, then they can decide if it’s a big enough issue and then take some action. I’m not a Southern Baptist, but, you know, they came to Anaheim here and had this debate and Rick Warren stood up and talked about, I mean, very subtly and, you know, dealt with the issue that he’s dealing with. He got up on stage and obviously ordained these female pastors. And the discussion they’re having in the Southern Baptist Convention is, well, we’re recognizing the gift that a woman has of being a pastor, and they can be on our staff as a pastor, but, you know, we’re still not saying that they can be the senior pastor or the lead pastor of the church. That’s where a lot of the Southern Baptists, not a lot, that’s where a contingent of the Southern Baptists are. And it is dividing the Southern Baptist Convention. Yeah. What Mohler got up and talked about, he was here the week before you might remember and we had lunch before he went up there and he was like, “Ah, whatever.” I won’t tell you all he said. But he goes up there and there’s some angst when the response from the leadership is, well, we’re going to have a committee formed to decide what the word pastor means. Right? And that’s where Mohler’s like if we can’t define simple words like that, what are we doing? We can’t be a confessional church if we can’t take a statement from the Baptist Faith and Message, which is their doctrinal statement and say, you know, we don’t even know what that means. So that was a bit of a rebuke by Dr. Mohler about kind of why… I don’t get it. It’s clear. It’s here. And, you know, and Rick, his whole approach was, “I’m not going to defend myself. Jesus didn’t defend himself. And I’ve done a lot of great things. Look what I’ve done. And this my last time and, you know, last words before I get hung.” And, you know, it was all chatty and fun. And Rick is that way. Right? But, you know, I think Rick has done something that is unbiblical. I think it’s very clear in Scripture that the office of pastor and I don’t care what you say about it like, “It’s just a gift. But, you know, we have, you know, Tina and Linda and Susan on the staff and they are all called pastors.” Well, that’s a role in the Church and that’s what they’re trying to be. “Well, is it a role, is it an office, is it a gift? Is it, you know, what are we doing?” And I’m saying, listen, every mother has a pastoral gift. Right? Think about it. If pastor is a shepherd then of course every, I mean, unless you’re a completely inept woman, you have the ability to shepherd. That’s your whole job in your home is to shepherd those young lives. Right? And we have women here who can shepherd at a much larger place. We’re not saying… We’re not going to give you the name pastor because pastor is a gender-exclusive office. Right? And I don’t care if you can say, well, there is that role. It’s like all of you are teachers, right? Roman says all of you are equipped to teach. I get that. But we’re not going to say, hey, I’m a teacher at the church. We wouldn’t say, here’s someone at our church. She doesn’t meet the requirements, which is you have to be a male. That’s just how God set it up. Just like I can’t bear children no matter what Congress says. Right? I cannot be a mother. Right? Men are not mothers. I know that’s such a news flash for our world and I’ll get arrested for it one day. But listen, that’s what God said. I can’t nurse babies. I can’t have children come out of my body. I can’t have them formed in my body. So God says, okay, women, this: here are some certain things that are exclusive. To most things human beings in church and every other way we share, we share all kinds of different things. But here he says, I want the leadership of the church and the head leader in the home to be a male. Right? And that’s part of the whole issue of Genesis 3 and what went wrong there. But here’s the point. Right? You cannot fudge, I think, on this issue because you’ve come to a realization, which I think you didn’t come to you in a vacuum. You come to a realization to change your view on this topic and have women pastors on your website because this is where we are as a culture and there’s a ton of pressure to do that. I preached sermons after all of that where you felt some of that bleeding through if you’re in the know about all that’s going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, we cannot capitulate to the pressure of the culture on anything, right? On anything. We have to be able to say if it’s wrong in Scripture and clear, then it’s wrong. If it’s right in Scripture and it’s clear then it’s right. Right? We can have debates about eschatology, but you couldn’t be more clear about these issues. And once you’re going to say, well, these are cultural issues that Paul had, or, as they often say, the modern Christian feminist, quote unquote, is going to say, well, Paul was a woman hater. This is a Paul thing, right? It’s not a Paul thing. Right? This is a biblical thing. Paul is writing as an apostle who’s teaching us what God thinks. That’s what the Bible teaches. Not to mention that the rest of Scripture says that as Paul defers to the Corinthians, just as the law says, women are not to be teaching in the church, in the synagogues, and that’s just how it’s supposed to be. And that’s the way it’s going to be here as long as I’m here until I get hit in the head and don’t know theology. I’m just thinking this is what we do and nothing should change. We should really be asking the question it’s time to defend yourself. What has changed in your thinking? Right? How has this changed in your mind? I’m not here to blast anybody. I’m just saying we have to just be deferring, first question, to one rule of faith, which is God’s word. And he’s clear about the issue. Just like there cannot be a pastor who’s a recent convert. “Well, I became a Christian yesterday. I want to be a pastor.” Well, the smartest guy in our church. No, no, no, no. It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest guy in our church or not, right? That’s what the Bible says. And if you’re a female the Bible says you cannot be a pastor of the church. Right? It’s supposed to be led by males. “That doesn’t sound good. Go say that on CNN and you’re going to get roasted.” Oh, well, I’m also going to be roasted if I say Jesus is the only way. Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims, you’ve got to trust in Christ. I’m just saying, when did we think we were going to have a copacetic relationship with the world? We’re not. And so I’m just saying, I can’t start kind of squeezing the Church’s doctrine into the mold of what the world’s asking for. So the role of elder, the role of pastor, elder, pastor, overseer, they’re all “episkopus” “poimen” and “presbuteros,” those Greek words are all used synonymously in Scripture. They are representing the gift of an office within the Church, and its a role in the Church. And that is exclusively defined in Scripture as a male role. So I can’t change that. Just like I’m not going to have a baby and none of the men in here are going to have babies. That’s an exclusive role that God has made. And we’re stuck with that. And it’s fine. I mean. Unless you’re, you know, not happy to follow what God has said, it should be fine with all of us. “But women…” I get it. Women are gifted and they’re smarter than us and more godly than us. I get all of that. But God said this is the gender that needs to be the pastors in the church. Well, that was a fun question.

 

I appreciate last week’s discussion with the Enlightenment. I’m a big history buff, so that was pretty solid there. So on that note, say you’re having a philosophical debate with somebody. They’re a philosophy major, let’s just put it that way. And they’re open-minded to being convinced. So they’ve dabbled a little bit with the Bible. They don’t really buy into it. They’re like, “Prove it to me. Did he really exist? It’s not just some people saying stuff.” So you point to Tacitus along with some other references. They look at them, and they go, “Okay, I can at least acknowledge that he exists. Now prove to me that he is who he says he is.” How would you go about that?

 

Pastor Mike: Yeah, well, number one, I don’t like the footing of saying, hey, prove to me, prove to me, prove to me. I want you to be convinced, intellectually convinced. Right? But there is a kind of an adversarial logic that people have. It’s like my wife going, you know, “If I flip that switch the light’s going to come on? Prove it to me, prove it to me before I touch that thing.” Right? And I’m not saying try Jesus and you’ll see that it works. And that’s where you might go in the illustration I’m just coming up with off the cuff. But there is a sense in which you’ve got to approach this with an even-mindedness and an evenhandedness that says, okay, let’s just at least consider the claims and let’s think of what the claims are. Right? And I think the historicity of the Scripture itself is a place that we’re always going to end up going. We’ve got to go to the fact, as Francis Shaeffer did so well in saying, first of all, does it make sense as a presupposition that there is a God that exists and then has he revealed himself? And I think those are the issues where most people intuitively are going to, as some people have rightly said, there are some things that you can’t not know and one of those things is that there is a God. And then has he revealed himself? If the Bible is his word and not just because Tacitus mentions Jesus or because Josephus, you know, affirms what New Testament teaching says and mentions John the Baptist, that doesn’t really matter. The point is, can we take this at its claim and then evaluate it honestly. Which is going to lead us to things like, “Well, the thing I don’t like about the Bible is it’s filled with miraculous events like the resurrection of Christ.” Well you’ve got to then put that against some kind of tests. Simon Greenleaf historically, as an attorney, I think did that well and chose this process of thinking and this is old-school stuff. But he then says, okay, we come to a conclusion that he did rise from the dead, and then you take guys like C.S. Lewis who said, well, if he did rise from the dead, that leaves me no option but to believe what he taught. And since I already understand the veracity of the Scriptures that then give us that information, then I’m stuck at some point being logically consistent, being a Bible-believing evangelical. So to talk philosophy, here’s what I would do. I mean, I don’t know if we have it in our bookstore, but I would for a guy like you, I would get the complete works of Francis Schaeffer. And if they don’t have that, start with “The God Who Is There” and his second “He Is There and He Is not Silent.” Those two books are good primers to start with understanding philosophy and why those truths are kind of hard in our day. And so and if you do like philosophy and I did mention the “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” Carl Trueman does a great job enlisting the philosophies that have made us the modern culture that we are. But Francis Schaeffer, I thought, was before his time in trying to understand that this can logically be consistent. This is a sequitur in logic. This is something that does follow. You just need to start by evaluating these things with honesty. And I think some people don’t come to the debate honestly. They come with crossed arms. “Well, prove to me.” Right? And you’re saying, you know, light is a wave and a particle, well prove that to me. It’s like, okay, some things that we’re going to assert you need to start with the body of assertion. This is something as a corpus, as a thing that hangs together. Christianity hangs together as the result of reading what the Bible says. Now, does this make sense? Is that a reliable source? How do we match that with all the things that the Bible says it will match with according to Romans Chapter 1. It’ll match with creation. It’ll match with your conscience, Romans Chapter 2. And then Scripture will then make that clear. Is every last passage about an Ammonite something that I can go and say, “Well, there’s no reference of that in the historical, you know, the London Museum?” And I’m saying, well, okay, but this is it. When I see that there’s enough things in the text that convince me beyond a reasonable doubt that these things are true then I’m going to accept that the body of information that was given to me through the apostles and prophets, that this is reasonable and I embrace it. I become a Bible-living person. Then when I find something that I don’t quite understand, I drill down to see if I can understand it. And thankfully, that’s why there is a body of intellectual Christians, because they think it is tenable, it makes sense. It all hangs together. So Schaeffer. Great. He’s a guy that I think before his time has made this clear. And I did quote Nancy Percy a couple of weeks ago, who I think if for other people who are listening in on this conversation and think, “Well, I’ve tried Schaeffer. It’s too hard. Nancy Pearcey, who was part of the L’Abri Institue there in Switzerland, who learned under Francis Schaefer has popularized a lot of his teachings and it’s been really well done. Medallion Book of the Year in Christian books. Her first one, which I forget the name of off the top of my head, but Nancy Pearcey, she’s a great writer who intersects with a lot of what Schaeffer said and did it a couple of decades later, which was helpful. Her book is called “Total Truth.” Yeah. Thank you. All right.

 

Pastor Mike: Hey, we’re out of time, but that was fun and we’ll do it next year, Lord willing. All right. Let me pray for you. Thank you. God, we thank you very much for our church, for their appetite for your truth, for your word, for even the questions that reflect our ambassadorship that we’re trying to represent you in the world. We’re trying to even deal with fellow Christians who are struggling with points of doctrine that don’t understand why we’re not with the times and then our evangelistic conversations. God, we want to think clearly. We want to be able to, as Peter wrote through the inspiration and the God-breath process of your Spirit, that we ought to be ready to answer anyone who asks us to give a hope, a reason for the hope that’s within us. And so we want to be continually studying your word and digging deeper so that we might be able to represent you well in our generation. God help us, please, to think just more consistently and even more intently on the truth that you have delivered to us. Thanks for this church and thanks for our time. God, I pray you bless our week particularly that week for our students out in Arizona. Just pray that will be a great week.

 

in Jesus name. Amen.