The very last segment of biblical
evangelism from the pulpit to the streets. Some of you were
not here for it and some folks are new tonight, so I'll give
you a quick recap that out of my concern as one who does street
evangelism and things we see going on out in the streets under
biblical evangelism, which is very abusive and unbiblical.
I came up and after also meeting Jeff Rose, seeing a man of God,
a reformer, who's a great street preacher and praise God for him. God, I have to give him all the
glory if this honors him, is that he put on my heart to have
a conference under biblical evangelism from the pulpit to the street.
And the cool thing about this, too, is I was trying to figure
out how can I put together in a vast contrast of bringing Dr. Edward Delcourt to show us How
if we're going to preach from the word, we have an objective
standard. And so I brought Dr. Delcourt up again by God's grace
and his wife, Tia, and he demonstrated how we can trust the word of
God in one of the messages. And in the second one, how did
we get it? How did we get the canon of scripture? So we demonstrated
to us very well that we can trust the word of God, because if we're
Christians, we have an objective standard, the word of God, and
we've got to be confident in it. I figure, OK, we get that
we got our standard and especially for the younger Christians, they
see that we have a truth to go forth and preach and proclaim
the gospel. And of course, Jeff Rose is a
reformed street preacher and he understands the gospel and
he goes out there. Unlike many so-called street
preachers who really abuse people and call them names and belittle
them and make ad hominem attacks rather than preaching the gospel.
And we have to get strong sometimes to point out sin. And we have
to exhort people to repent and come to the gospel because the
gospel is not God loves you and have a wonderful plan for you.
The gospel is that we're at enmity with God because of our first
parents, Adam and Eve sinning in the garden, which Adam becomes
our federal head and we have to We've inherited the same nature,
whether we think that's fair or not. This is the way God has
ordained things. And because of that, we're sinners
in need of salvation. So we need to be strong with
people that. The message is not God loves
you and has a wonderful plan, the message is God commands all
men to repent. It's not so much as an offer
as it is a command to repent and believe and trust on the
Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. With that said, we
had several messages from Jeff Rose, I gave him some hard assignments,
but hopefully some of you that didn't make it, once I get them
online in DVDs, you'll see, you must have 80 or 100 hours in
those four sermons he did. A lot, a lot of information and
very blessed brother. I mean, it was, I get emotional
just thinking about it. And then Dr. Delcor again brought
a wonderful message after those two, to undergird our objective
standard on Friday. At the end of Sunday, I mean,
Saturday, just before we had a Q&A panel, he brought one. How do we share our faith with
Islam and other world faiths and other cultic groups? And
great presentation to help us understand how to do that without
abusing people and attacking a character, but rather bringing
the truth, opposing the error. Because Jesus said in John 14
6, I'm the way, the truth and life, and nobody comes to the
Father but through me. You know, that's either true
or it's not. And we here as Christians know that's true. With that said,
tonight is a special occasion. And Dr. Downing, Pastor Downing,
who probably has more degrees than it is hot in here, but we
really thank him for coming up and participating. And tonight
he'll be in the panel with Four of us, Pastor Tippins, who also
gave a wonderful message, sorry about that, I didn't want to
forget you, brother, on how we share our faith in practical
ways. He got off on a pretty fiery sermon himself. What I want to deal tonight with
is dealing with a lot of the street preachers out there who
are Pelagian in nature. And a lot of people don't understand
that language. It's the name of Pelagius who debated with
Augustine whether we have free will and so on and so forth. He denied original sin. And of
course, Augustine didn't. Of course, Paul didn't. He knows. He was inspired by
the Holy Spirit. What we want to do tonight is
focus, if we had a title, is the vicarious atonement of Christ,
the substitutionary atonement of Christ versus the Pelagian
view of the atonement, which is really no atonement at all. And it's great damage. And like
I like to say, once theology reflects in their methodology
and vice versa, and we see the abuse of many street preachers
and evangelists. And some of us are ignorant of
things. I think some of these men might be saved, but they're
ignorant because their mentors are not well educated in the
scriptures. And ultimately, we don't know if they're saved.
So we don't know the heart and we can't judge their heart or
the motive, but we can judge doctrine and practice. We must
refute the error and proclaim Christ, because if anything,
these guys are going to make us lose our rights on the streets
sooner than they already will be taken away the way the world's
going. But. So that's what we want to
focus on tonight. So I'm going to start a discussion.
I'm going to ask the men to come up and we'll start a discussion
and a dialogue on that. And then after that, we'll take
questions from the audience. So with that said, I want to
ask Dr. Downey to come up, Brother Jeff Rose, our evangelist, Dr. Edward DelCore and Pastor Tippins. You know, God has been very gracious
to me to bring such wonderful men of God who are solid in the
truth to come along and help me be a better Christian and
to be able to put good, good literature, good materials, good
videos in people's hands so we are ready to give an answer for
our faith. If you would have heard Jeff's
hour and a half message today, you would understand that we're
called to be Christians every day and moment of our life, not
just on Sunday or anything else. You guys really missed the good
sermon there. It was definitely a shell shocker, but I'm just
rejoicing. This is really a kind of a dream
come true to have this right now. But in light of this Pelagian
view of the denying denial of original sin is is really devastating
because it denies the very atonement of Christ, because if we are
born morally upright and think that we can become saints on
our own quote unquote, free will, or we decide to be sinners. You
know, this is contrary to the Holy Scriptures. Why do we need
a saver if we can just save ourselves? And with this excellent panel
that we have here tonight, I think we're going to get these answers,
these questions answered with very clear, very much clear clarity,
if you will, for lack of a better statement. And I'm going to ask
Pastor Downing to open up, maybe give us a little history, but
we don't have three hours to keep a little short. No, because
down he's kind of a walking and he's kind of a walking encyclopedia.
But he knows this topic very well, who has even wrote many
books in a booklet on why we do not use the invitational system.
And that's kind of a sidebar to this. It does get into some
Phineas and Charles Finney, the one who kind of put the altar
call on the map in the 18th century. But with that said, I'll let
Pastor Downing give us a succinct history on this position of the
two, the biblical one and the anti-biblical one. Let me start
out with something that might be obtuse, but the name Pelagius. Pelagius was a name that was
given to him We use the term today in science. Have you heard
the term Pelagic? Pelagic fishes like the large
tunas that are out in the deep sea. Well, Pelagius from the
Latin means from the deep sea. And Pelagius was a British monk
who grew up in Britain and in a monastery, lived a very protected
life evidently, so he was not that well acquainted with the
sinfulness of the human heart. And he would come in conflict
with Augustine or Augustine, who of course was a whoremonger
until the age of 40 and had a very dramatic conversion. But he was
from Britain, which was the edge of the world. So he was from
the deep sea, that is Britain off the coast of Europe. And
so he took the name Pelagius. And we use theological terms.
Some of them are Latin, some are Greek. But we have the term
Pelagianism. And sometimes people think that
all we do is fight about words. We do. Salvation by grace through
faith. Just words. But they embody the
truth and reality of the gospel. Pelagius came to Rome. It was,
I think, toward the end of the fourth century. And he preached
a Christian perfectionism. That is, the perfectibility of
human nature. And in its raw or absolute form,
it is salvation by works that human nature, sinful fallen human
nature, is perfectible. He taught that Adam was merely
a bad example and that we all come into the world just like
Adam. So there is no original sin. That is Adam's sin imputed or
put to our account. And there was no Christian perfectionism
after Pelagius until Wesley. And he had a modified Christian
perfectionism. And now Christian perfectionism
permeates almost every aspect of evangelical Christianity. I'm a Baptist. But the average
Baptist is simply an immersed Wesleyan semi-perfectionist today
through dispensational theology, the carnal Christian heresy,
and a host of other things. All of this now permeates. So we'll go back to Pelagius.
He taught Christian perfectionism. Adam was only a bad example.
So he taught an extreme free will position. It's easy to use
the term Arminianism. They said, well, this person's
an Arminian or that person's an Arminian. These are sort of
the code words. No, there are very few Arminians.
I've met a few, not many. I met a Freewill Baptist who
was an Arminian. I spoke in his college. He was
a college president. He said, now, my brother, you
and I are different. You're a Calvinist. I'm an Arminian.
But we do agree on one thing. When a man is converted, he lives
a holy, godly life. That's Arminianism. Arminianism
believes that the will has been affected by the fall. Arminianism
is not extreme free will doctrine. That is Pelagianism. Arminianism,
named after Jacobus Arminius, James Herbenson, a Dutchman,
a strong Calvinistic preacher who changed and became the head
of the Remonstrants, those who opposed the Reformation. He was
dead before Arminianism became a name. Calvin was dead 50 years
before Calvinism became a name. We'll deal with that in a moment.
back to places so are many of them teaches that the will was
affected by the fall, but under preaching the Holy Spirit brings
the will back to a neutral position where it can either choose or
reject. So what we're dealing with today in modern evangelism
is not really classical or evangelical Arminianism. It's outright Pelagianism,
a denial of original sin, the belief in an age of accountability. David in the Psalms believed
in an age of accountability. They go forth as soon as they
are born from the womb, speaking lies. Man is born a sinner. He doesn't become a sinner by
sinning. He is born a sinner. He's born
in sin. He said, I was born in sin and
sin did my mother conceive me. What we are dealing with today
is Pelagian doctrine, which is in reality, although not admitted,
salvation by human ability. It affects evangelism. It affects
apologetics. I'm glad I had enough sense to
weigh the evidence and make the right decision. Nothing about
the necessity of the regenerating grace of God. If I can quote
the father of neo-evangelicalism. His name escapes me. Carl Barth?
No. Back, back. He was the editor of Christianity
Today magazine years ago. He said, reformed theologians
believe that regeneration precedes conversion. Evangelical theologians
believe that regeneration is conditioned on repentance and
faith. Now, if regeneration is conditioned
on repentance and faith, then faith is nothing more, nor can
it be anything more than mere human trust. And if saving faith
is mere human trust, we have outright Pelagianism. That's
inescapable when it comes to that. And I'll just make a short
statement. Turn it over. I'm talked out at this point.
I've already preached several hours today. My voice is gone. And Brother Ted was helping me
sing back there. He's got a beautiful voice doing
the two old men are doing the best they can when it comes to
the atonement. We have two essential views of
the atonement. But what I want to do is define
the word atonement. Who gave us the word atonement?
It was invented, I believe, by William Tyndale when he made
his translation of the first English New Testament. He came
to the Greek word reconciliation, and he knew that the common Englishman
would not understand that. He wrote for the common man.
He mastered at least seven different languages. Without being too
abrupt, I will just say that God didn't use an ignorant, blustering
fundamentalist to give us the English New Testament. He used
a man that was a master of many languages. He always blesses
those who are well prepared, and ignorance is not a good qualification
for theology. He looked at the word reconciliation,
and he said, Jesus Christ is the at-one-ment between God and
man. And he took the word at-one-ment,
and he made it the atonement. So there's only one atonement,
and that is the true, actual, vicarious nature of our Lord's
suffering and death, and His sinless life. And this paid the
penalty of sin. fulfill the requirements and
demands of the law, so we have in the person and work of the
Lord Jesus Christ an absolute perfect righteousness that mirrors
the demands of the law and has fulfilled its penalty for believing
sinners. The Pelagian or Arminian view
of the atonement is simply that Christ died for sin. And although it's not admitted,
Christ died as an individual. Christ died as the last Adam,
the second man. By his perfectly sinless life,
he kept the demands of the law. The demands of the law must be
kept. By his passive obedience, which culminated in his suffering
and death, he paid the penalty of the law. His active obedience
and his passive obedience are imputed to us in the reception
of saving faith to his redemptive work. That is a full and actual
atonement. To say that Jesus died for sin
in a general sense and not seeing his position as the last Adam
and the second man is to destroy the nature and work of the atonement. To say that Jesus died for sin
in general, but no one sin in particular, is to say that the
atonement was simply God making man at the best, savable, but
actually procuring the salvation of no one at all, unless their
works and human ability are added to it. That is just a survey
of our subject. I'll call you Dr. Delcourt in this setting. Seems
rather appropriate. Just not Elder. Okay. What do you have to say on that?
I mean, we see and you've been actually face to face with some
of these guys on this, because there's all many names like Reuben
Israel and others. You've seen what they the damage
that they've done out. And when you and James Wyatt
and a lot of you guys used to go to the Mormon pageants and
these things to reach them, you guys have the knowledge to understand
how to communicate with them and talk to them. And they come
one year, several years back with their signs and their circus
acts, you know, holding up Mormon garments saying you guys should
be called morons, not Mormons. And this is the kind of stuff
that this Pelagian view I mean, again, the method, the theology
is reflected in the methodology. And you also recently, Brother
Delcor was in Dearborn, Michigan, when they have the yearly Muslim
festival. And those guys showed up there
just calling people names and terrible things. And the reason
why I brought that up, because I think it's very important,
because he's seen it firsthand. I've seen some of it. He's seen
some of the really worst stuff. And how not to evangelize. And also, he sees the results. He sees the manifestation of
what this theology does in men. And then I would also like your
view also on the two positions and how detrimental as he just
shared the foundations. Yeah, I think, well, it's very
important for Christians to not only make a distinction, but
be firm on what they believe themselves. Because one view
does deny, I would say categorically, does deny the definiteness of
the atonement. It says, as Dr. Downey said,
it does. It says man is savable. Jesus actually doesn't save.
He's more of a junior savior because man does his part and
Christ does his part. And then Christ is hoping that
man will accept him. He's begging man, please accept
me. And then man just rejects him
and they go to hell. And Jesus just his plan was thwarted. What is Jesus going to do? His
plan keeps getting thwarted over and over every time someone rejects
him. And this is the result of plagiarist doctrine. This is
a result of not defining your belief on what Christ did. And
as we would say, the death of Christ was definite. Who did
Christ die for? Now, if you ask that question
to the majority of church, you will get an answer for the majority
of the church. Whom did Christ die for? He died
for everyone. Now, think about it. He died
for everyone. Now, that is the majority answer
that you would find. I know this because I was in
an altar call ministry for over seven years in the in the 90s.
And the drop of water. And the common or the answer
is Christ died for everyone. There's so many theological problems
with that. Number one, it's plagiarist doctrine,
of course, but number one, it implies it teaches fundamentally
universalism, because if Christ died for every single person.
What in the world would someone go to hell for? If Christ took
away 100 percent of the sin, then that would include the rejection
of him was taken away. If Christ paid for all of your
sins, it doesn't matter if you reject Him or not, because that
sin was paid off. And what it does in evangelism,
it gives people a false sense of security. When you say, God
loves you, Mr. Unbeliever. God has a plan for
you, Mr. Nonbeliever. What that does,
it gives that person a false sense of security. If I tell
the Muslim that, That God loves you and Jesus died for you. Why
should he accept the cross work? God loves them. And if God loves
you, nothing bad is going to happen to you. But what we see
on the street is and in the church is this fundamental universal
doctrine that says Christ died for every single person, which
is if he really did die. and not potentially died. If
he really did die, then no one should be in hell. And if I teach
about hell, I'm teaching false doctrine. But of course, we have
to judge all these things in light of of the text. Now, I've
seen the damage plagiarist doctrine can cause. I've seen it in churches.
I've seen it on the streets. And even if there was no direct
impact, it doesn't matter because it's controverting the word of
God. And what I like us to do is go through some of the passages
and answer the question, whom did Christ die for? Now, scripture
is just chock full of biblical evidence. To support what we
call substitutionary tone, it's interesting, even Armenians,
even non reformed believers will use those terms, but substitutionary
tone is a decidedly reformed phrase. Because it says Christ
literally substituted Himself on your behalf. That's Reformed. It's not non-reformed. Because
a non-reformed person would say there's still sins that you can
die and if you don't accept Him, you'll be paying for that sin
that was never extinguished, that was never paid for. So they
believe that all the sins, 99% of the sins were paid for, but
not the sin of rejecting Him. So, what I want to do here is
go over some of the passages, because we can talk about it,
but I like to go over some of the passages and really answer
that question, who did Christ die for? Because if I'm wrong,
I want to know what truth is. I always ask the Muslim that.
Do you want to know if what you're teaching is true? Do you want
to know if what you're teaching is true? In other words, if it
was wrong, would you want to know? It's amazing they say no. If it's wrong, would you want
to know? Well, I would ask that to Christians. If it is wrong,
do you want to know? Of course. So we need to allow the Scriptures
to speak and answer the question. Is Christ just a beggar on the
cross? Just begging people to accept
Him? Or is He a powerful Savior who comes and saves the sins
of his people. I'd like also to go over some
of the passages that they use. Like in John 1.29, he's a lamb
that takes away the sins of the world. In 1 Timothy 2.4, it says
he wants the world to be saved. And of course, the hallmark passage
that is used, in fact, I see it on banners around different
churches, is 2 Peter 3.9. does not wish for anyone to perish,
but for all to come to eternal life. When we began the discussion,
I would like to speak to the term world, and I would like
to speak to the term world in the context of John 3, 16. And
if you want to follow along, that's fine. If you have a Greek
New Testament, that's even better. I'll give you a literal translation
of John 3.16. For so loved God the world, the
verb is in the emphatic position, for so loved God the world, so
as his son, I mean his only begotten one he gave, that's restrictive,
attributive, it's a form of emphasis, in order that every single one
without exception, it's not whosoever as being indefinite, it's pah,
ha, pish, juon, eis, altan. In the Greek, it's every single
one without exception constantly exercising faith in Him should
not perish, but have everlasting life. And pischuenes is a technical
term in New Testament Greek. It was current in profane or
just in the koines spoken by the people. It meant utter, unreserved
commitment to. And so when the first men went
out, the apostles went out to preach, and they said, Believe
in or believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.
There was no easy believism. There was no decisionism. They
were calling for total commitment, the response of the whole man
to the whole Christ. But the term world is what I
want to comment upon. Let's put it in the context.
I'm not escaping the issue. This is something that In a proof
text Christianity, very dangerous. We always look at the context.
Who was our Lord talking to? He was talking to Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a Jew. He was a Pharisee. He was a member
of the Sanhedrin. He was in this conversation all
through John chapter three. He tells him about being born
on from above. And Nicodemus doesn't understand
it at all. And he says, are you not? The teacher of Israel and these
things you do not know that's straight from the Greek New Testament
The teacher hardly das galas to Israel Kite out and these
things you do not know Nicodemus was steeped in his Pharisee tradition
Judaism not the Bible Judaism taught that God was not interested
in quote the cosmos the world and the Gentiles as well as the
Jew. God had one thought about the
world. He was saving the Jews, delivering
the Jews. They were his people. His only
thought toward the world was judgment. Note our Lord's answer. Nicodemus doesn't understand.
Our Lord said, Going to the Old Testament, as Moses lifted up
the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be
lifted up. Now he's reached a point of contact
with Nicodemus. In order that every single one,
believing in him, should not perish but have eternal life
for, so loved God upon Cosmo, the world. What a shock to Nicodemus
that God love goes out to the Gentiles as well as the Jews. He was shocked at this. God sent
his son and the emphasis of John 3 16 is a personal, intense and
persevering faith. For God sent not his son into
the world to condemn the world. He's getting against his Judaism
and his tradition, but that the world through him might be saved.
Salvation has gone out. to the Gentiles. So, that's just
an opening comment on the term world in a redemptive context. Yeah, it's interesting. John 3.16 is probably the basis
of why people distort the love of God and why people believe
that God is somehow is limited to one kind of love, yet we're
not limited. Humans are not limited, but yet
God is limited because he can only love man one kind of way.
And this this salvific kind of way, and that's it. But yet we're
not limited. So people limit God's love. And I think John
316 is one of those passages upon which that notion comes
from. You know, it's interesting dealing
with John 316 that Anyone, I think, that takes John
3, 16 out of its context, of course, is going to get any interpretation
they want. Same with second Peter three nine. As Dr. Downey exited
to that verse, it's a beautiful passage in the Greek, actually
from 14 to 17. It's a beautiful passage in the
Greek. And also we have a part of it's not just to believe it's
the believing ones. Literally, it's a participle
there. And the question is, what is the object of all? It's the participle, the ones
doing the action, the believing ones. And also this God love
the world so much. How distorted when that is, when
people take John 316 distorts God's love, because the actual
word in John 316 translated so much. Hutos literally means to
this extent or in this manner. God love the cosmos in this manner. that all the believing one, everyone
believing, who's that? It's us. Everyone believing shall
have eternal life and shall not perish. But in 17, which everyone
negates to read, they don't read 15, they don't read 17 or 18,
and hence they only wrench out John 3, 16. In 17, we have something
very interesting. And also, as rightly pointed
out, Jesus frequently presented correctives to his audience.
He taught in such a way to correct false notions. And in fact, that's
why many authors use the word world, because a common Jew thought
that salvation was to whom? The Jews. So to correct that,
you'll see authors use the word cosmos to show not just Jews,
Jews and Gentiles. And in fact, the term cosmos
is probably used about a dozen times. It can mean the world
system. It can mean the world of believers.
It can mean the world of non-believers. It can mean the earth. It all depends on a context.
And here in John 3, 16, it's interesting. He starts out in
15 with the serpent and Moses lifted up the serpent. Well,
who was the healing for? Was it to a particular people?
Yes, to the Jews, the ones that that got bitten by the snake.
They were to look upon the very thing that bit them. They would
have never chosen that as their source of healing. We've never
would have chosen God's son for our source of healing. It was
very particular. And then the same phrases use
that whoever believes in him shall not perish. And in 17,
For God did not send the world or into the world to judge the
world. But that here we have an adversative
conjunction, not for the purpose of X, but for the result of Y
or the fulfillment of Y. But that the world might be saved,
and we don't want to look at that might there grammatically
as some kind of possibility. It follows a subjunctive tense.
I might go to or I will go to the printer that I may or my
might make some copies. It's just Greek grammar. So we
have a adversative conjunction. He sent the sun into the world,
not to judge the world, but in order that or but that the world
might be saved through him. So if you can take world to mean
every single person, you have to deal with 17 that says he's
going to save the world. Again, if you hold to your position
of an Armenian or a plagiarist position, you cannot escape You
cannot escape a doctrine of universalistic theology, as people like Carlton
Pearson and others actually teach, because they take these things
literally. I don't have to. I can allow the text to read
for itself. I don't have to read in the view,
because when folks start reading into the text, then again, you
can make any doctrine you want happen. So I think John 16 is
a is a beautiful promise for the believers, a corrective Nicodemus
and a beautiful promise of security for the believers. Some real quick. Some of this Greek grammar and
stuff can be heavy for some people. But they need to really understand
that we can't just flippantly go through and take what a pastor
says or whatever, because we can go back, even if you're not
a scholar, you can go back and look, get your own lexicon and
get your English Bible and go through these things to see if
what these men are saying is so, because it's important. And
some of this thing is a little technical and it might be going
over some people's heads. But hopefully this will drive
you into more depth study. And I hope the audience and those
who will hear it later on needs to understand as well that when
we talk about the sovereignty of God and salvation, I have
a microphone. Sorry about that. That we believe in the sovereignty
of God, but also the responsibility of man, the Bible teaches both. And I think we need to realize
that we must, we're commanded to go out and preach the gospel
and we're to plea with people to repent and believe. And I
heard it was said it was on a program, an apologist radio show a while
back, and there was a panel of people. It was actually on Raleigh
Zacharias' program, but he wasn't there. There was a few people.
This was several months ago, and I wish I would have wrote
down the date and got the tape because I heard somebody say
on that panel that God is desperate for people to come to him. And
that's contrary, because that is heresy. Actually, it's very
heretical. God is not desperate for nothing. God is in complete
control. There's no maverick molecules
floating out there and nothing of us sinful, wicked people can
thwart the Almighty's plan. So I don't want anybody to get
any. you know, misdirection on some of these things, try to
give him a few things in layman's terms. But we are to proclaim
the gospel to all people and we need to tell people to repent
and believe. But we don't want to give them this guy that God
loves you. As I said earlier in the introduction, that he
has a wonderful plan because this is it's a serious matter. And unfortunately, because of
the altar call and all these things, The church is loaded
with unconverted people. The churches are loaded with
unconverted people. And they're wondering why there's
so many hypocrites. I mean, even our best day, we're probably
hypocrites to some degree when you understand the holiness of
God. As we look at Isaiah six and Isaiah was undone as he looked
up to the glory of God and seeing Christ and Isaiah six and said,
you know, I'm a man of unclean lips living amongst a people
of unclean lips. And that's one of the things
the Pelagians can't handle. Oh, the Bible, that's contrary,
that you can be a sinner and a saint at the same time. But
if they were really converted and they grow and grow and they
see the depths of the depravity of man's heart and the holiness
and righteousness of God, they couldn't make statements like
that. What say ye, Dr. Downing? I wanted to give a comment
just on the original languages. The Old Testament in Hebrew and
Aramaic and then the Greek translation, the Septuagint, which is the
version our Lord used and the common people used, and then
the Greek New Testament. In the providence of God, God
used Alexander the Great to give the most expressive language
ever known to man and spread it throughout that part of the
Eastern world to prepare the world for the Greek New Testament. And I've heard preachers get
up into the pulp and say, if the King James were good enough
for Paul, it's good enough for me. And my answer is, if the
Greek was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me. And
we've given you some little idea of the Greek. There was a time
when ministers were well-educated, because they were the teachers.
They were the most well-educated man in the community. And that's
no longer true. learning is deprecated, it's
put down, it's denigrated in our society with the idea that
people are sort of casual. And we have today not a dynamic,
well, we have dynamic versions, that is paraphrases. And some
people are NIV positive. Yes, that is true. But I borrowed
that from Brother Tim the other night. I borrowed that from Brother
Delcour. But you see, and I've read the
NIV, I've read the whole thing, and I compare it with my Greek
New Testament. God had a reason in giving the
Bible and the languages he did. The New Testament is more important
than the Old Testament, because the New Testament, in God's progressive
revelation, has the issue of finality and the truth of the
gospel. The Old Testament points ahead
and prepares for this. So we have these great expressive
languages. If God had given us the Bible
in English, what would we say about John 3.16? We would have
had no way. Syntax. Syntaxis means to to
bring and to put together the relationship of words one to
another. Not even word studies will help
us at times. The relationship of words to
another. One man even stated that the
theology of the New Testament is contained in its prepositions.
But these things are important. Ante, you're familiar with anti? Auntie means face-to-face with
or instead of. It's one of the great Greek prepositions
for substitution. Christ died auntie our sins.
We've limited it in the English as to against, you see. But the
fullness of these languages, if all you have, this is going
to be a very terrible statement to make, but it's true. So we're not talking about having
fellowship or hugging one another. We're talking about truth. If
all you have is a knowledge of your English Bible, you have
a second hand knowledge of the word of God. God could have given us what
he gave us, so we are working through a version of a translation. And some of these are very good,
but they can never come to the level of the original. And oftentimes
most of the cults. Most of the cults. Apply the
rules of English grammar to the Greek New Testament. Kai theos
ein halagos. And the word was God. John 1.1.
Theos does not have the definite article. It's unorthodox. It
lacks the article, and the absence of the article stresses character
or quality. In the beginning was the word,
and the word was with God, and the word as to his essence was
deity. It's an argument for deity. The
Russellites say the word was a god. The Campbellites, Church
of Christ Church people, in Acts 2.38 say that repent and be baptized. Repentance plus baptism equals
salvation. But they fail to take into account
the aorist imperative verb, and then in the third person, let,
which is a much lesser verb. It's not a compound verb in the
original. And upon that, they base their
entire theology. the revised version of 1901,
which for most practical purposes is a very good version. In Romans
1, 17, for therein is a righteousness of God revealed. No, it's the
very righteousness of the gospel that God requires. It's the only
righteousness. To emphasize the character and
quality, the Greek leaves out the article. To emphasize the
same thing, the English must put the article in. whole theology
depends on this. That's why we need to have a
firm grasp of the Word of God. We're not simply playing the
the academics here to snow you in that way. If you want to know
the ad fontes, that was the cry of the terrible to say this.
That was a cry of the enlightenment of the of the Renaissance back
to the originals back to the sources. But that brought about
the Reformation. especially the Northern Renaissance,
not the Italian Renaissance, but the Northern Renaissance.
Christianity came out of the Dark Ages into the Reformation
with Erasmus' Greek New Testament in its hand. And Luther had that,
and it changed the world. Just a thought. open this up now for questions
from the audience, and Brother Stephen Lewis is going to be
our mediator. So just put up your hand when
you're ready for a question and ask Stephen, and he'll come to
you. And please speak directly into the mic so that the audio
and video will pick it up. This question is for Dr. Dolly.
Could you clarify for some of us who are not so up on Greek
about the different kinds of Greek. For instance, my husband
studied Homeric Greek. And I hand him a Bible and he's
kind of puzzled. And yet he attends a Greek Orthodox
church. I can understand that. Homer lived about 600 BC. Classical Greek is different
than the Koine. Koine means common. It is different
than the language of the street, the language of the marketplace.
It was a different Greek. There are places they have particles,
little connecting words, as, for, but, whatever, the small
connecting words. They could put five particles
together between words, and they had a system of accents that
their emotions could be put into writing. There's never been a
language to equal that. The real phase of the Koine started
about 300 B.C., so you have at about 250 to 240 B.C., you have
the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. And then at the zenith
of the koine is the Greek New Testament. It goes to about 300
A.D. and by 185 to 200 A.D., established
institutional Christianity went from the Greek to the Latin and
lost much, by the way. But I had a Greek lady attend
our church, and I opened the text. Every preacher in the Bible,
Old and New Testament, opened the text of scripts, I opened
the text. And after church, she came to me and she says, you
butchered the Greek. You can't even speak Greek. And I said,
you and I have not spoken to a 2000 year old Greek. I said,
you speak modern Greek. Modern Greek has two prepositions,
proper prepositions. New Testament Greek has 18 proper
prepositions and 42 improper prepositions also used as adverbs. That's the answer that I gave
her. So maybe that was a little academic, but I started out in
a fundamental Bible college that decried any use of the languages,
and I started on my own. And for the last 40 years, I've
been a Greek teacher and written a Hebrew textbook and a Greek
textbook, but I started on my own, and then I went to school
to polish things off. Today's Greek is not like Biblical
Greek. It just doesn't come up to the
standard at all. It might be a help, but it doesn't
come up to the standard. The Koine Greek, and this is
our Greek expert here. My Greek teacher's gone tonight,
wasn't able to make it back. I mean, I taught him, but he's
our Greek teacher in our seminary. But he's a good man. He's sharp.
We're publishing our next edition of our textbook. But the Greek language at that point
was expressive, and it had its idiomatic expressions. It was
the language of the marketplace, like you and I speak English.
We could correct each other's grammar. That's the same as the
koiné. Did Jesus use incorrect grammar?
Yes, he did. He refers to the Holy Spirit
in the masculine. And the word spirit, pneuma,
is neuter. We should never say the spirit
itself, for the Holy Spirit's a person, the spirit himself.
And when he said the Holy Spirit, the comforter, he uses the term
ekenos, that one, masculine, not neuter. Oh, this is it's
oh, it's a world that is just glorious. I feast myself in it
whenever I can. The word order things we can't
we don't have in English. We start out in Greek and Hebrew,
both with the word order. If there's either a culminated
emphasis that something will end up looking away, looking
unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, looking away. is the preposition, looking away,
and I would say looking away from everything else, unto the
author and finisher of faith, Jesus. That's a culminating emphasis
in the New Testament. It's just, it pours out of the
text. English does not have the devices
to do that. And we are left with a version
of a translation. But we must go back at times
to the original, especially in those points of doctrine that
are controverted. That's what that's what we're
doing. Learning Greek is a relatively easy matter. If you can speak
Spanish, you can learn Greek because it's an inflected language,
a root word with various endings on it that glues the language
together. Same as Spanish. Sadness is I didn't keep up with
my Spanish. I Just want to piggyback on something
he said, um You know since we're talking about the plagiarist
doctrine as it as it's relevant to what dr Danny was saying about
how expressive and how concrete the language is Most are meaning
all Armenians and plagians See faith as not a work They see
you're saved by faith as the very ground of your salvation.
Well, the problem there is to have faith that the verb to have
faith is something that you do. So, in English, that's a work. Anything you do as an ergo, anything
you do that requires energy, mentally or physically, is a
work. In the New Testament, every single place where faith is described
as the means of justification or salvation, we're saved upon
faith, by faith, through faith, all these prepositions
that denote faith and either justification or salvation, not
one time grammatically, do you have a construction where faith
is the cause of your justification? Which would be diah, followed
by the accusative. Diapistin never occurred. It's always diapistin.
It was fired through faith. Instrumental, but never caused
it. And that is the basis of modern evangelism. I don't want to interfere. I've
preached so many hours today. Finney really preached, and this
is modern Pelagian, justification because of faith. Diapisteos
is by or through faith. Diapistin, which is accusative,
is because of faith. And never ever is it because
of faith. There's the importance of being
astute and very, very accurate Acrobose. Walk circumspectly. Acrobose. Acrobat. We need to
be acrobose in our doctrine. This is to anybody who wants
to answer. It'll be nice if all you can
answer this. We're talking about the issue
of Arminianism and how it basically, like Edward was saying, that What I'm hearing is that there's
something that we can do, that there's enough good in us to
do something to get it started. We believe in Jesus, but we have
to do something to participate in it. And so I'm wondering,
how does this all relate to, I don't know if I'm sidestepping
the issue here, but how does this all relate to infant baptism? Because, you know, when you're dealing
with the issue of like when somebody, what happens to a child when
it's aborted? You know, was this God send that
child to hell or what? Or, you know, what do you do
when, you know, when you have Presbyterians who believe very
strongly in infant baptism and the promise going to them? Because
I was born as a Roman Catholic and I was baptized as a baby.
And they gave me a false assurance that I was OK. I got baptized
as a child, as a baby. I did my first confession. I confessed my sins to the priest.
I had my first communion. I went to catechism for 12 years. I got confirmed. That was until
I became born again. Then I understood. that I was
dead, I understood that I had a false assurance and I wanted
to be baptized because I knew I was born again and so therefore
I understood, you know, about what baptism was about. And so
I'm just wondering, should we be really concerned about Presbyterians
or is it just something to where it's not really that serious,
it's just You know, so I still have a lot of... Brother G, you
threw about 20 questions in there. I want to start off by saying
this, because you're going to open kind of a big can of worms
here with that. The one thing when it comes to, you know, do
we know if babies, if they die, they go to heaven and stuff.
Ultimately, the scriptures are silent on that. So what people
need to understand on that one, I will say, I think is biblical,
is that we trust in the Lord. We give that to a holy, righteous,
perfect God. Because from conception, there
is no kind of age of accountability. Right at conception, we're sinners.
So if there's a baby who dies in the womb or there's one who
dies thereafter, ultimately we leave him in the hands of God
because he does everything perfect and righteous. And there might
be different opinions, but I think, you know, it's kind of dreaded
that old Campbellite saying, but it's kind of true. One is
that where the Bible's silent, we're silent. Where the Bible
speaks, we speak. But I think there's some truth
to that in the fact that The Bible is not, it's very cloudy
on, you know, there's a passage, you know, in 1st or 2nd Samuel
about, you know, he won't, you know, David says the sun will
not come to me, but I will go to him. And I know I want to
give this over to Downing, but I think we definitely got to
understand we have to leave them in the hands of God, a holy,
righteous and perfect, just God, because we ultimately don't know
that, I don't think. I'm just relaxed today. It's
been a long day of preaching. First of all, infant baptism
among the Protestants is presumptive regeneration. And it brings the
covenant child into the pale of the church. And if he grows
up and shows nothing to the contrary, we may safely assume that he's
regenerated. I'm going to say something rather
controversial here, but I have historical basis for it. It was
Charles Hodge who brought the Presbyterian Church of the United
States, there was only one in the 1850s and 60s, to accept
Roman Catholic baptism. That's something for you to think
about. So when our Presbyterian brethren, and I love them very
dearly, get up on the pulpit and say salvation is by grace
through faith, they don't mean what I mean. I'm a Baptist, so
I have a New Testament perspective where they would have an Old
Testament perspective. David in Psalm 139 speaks about
being formed in the womb and knit together in the womb. He
was a personality at that time, and he knew it. He was a person
at that time, and that's in the hands of God. Spurgeon, of course,
was not inspired. He was inspiring. We hope we
are too. But he maintained that the elect
would outnumber the non-elect, or God would be the loser. And
so he inserted in the 1689 Confession that all that die in infancy
are elect. And he did that out of his own
thinking and had it added to the 1689 Confession. I would like to believe that
that's true. We know one thing. God is just, number one. And
number two, it's all by grace. It's all by grace. Infant to baptism is usually
presumptive to regeneration. And it bothers me in that I've talked
to people who said, I was sprinkled in infancy. Of course, I'm a
Christian, both Protestant and Catholic, both. And the situation
is, what's the difference between that, except it was unconscious
and non-voluntary, somebody did it to you and for you, and walking
forward making a decision. It's an isolated religious ritual. The Bible says nothing about
either. The promises unto you and to your children, and to
all that are far off, even as many as the Lord our God shall
call. Just for what to go back to the
very beginning and then briefly comment on something, because
I think there's a consequence when we deal with this theology.
And you hear it sometimes even in our church. We have. What's
the big deal? We just need to deal with, you
know, let's just talk about the gospel. Let's grow. Let's do
things as a family. This is not where we are. We're
not all academic. You're right. But the pastor should be. And
in my upbringing, you know, coming up, I didn't really sit under
pastors who were scholars or even could read English much.
But, you know, in that regard, they regurgitated the same thing
that their mom had told them and that their grandma had told
them and that their grandpa. So their mama called and daddy
sent pastors. Mama said, oh, look at my little
preacher. And when he turned 18, daddy sent him on out, you know, and
and it was a tragedy because what I found, if it had not been
for my home, And my grandparents teaching me the word of God and
teaching me doctrine, teaching me theology, I would have nothing.
I would have the same old minutia and fodder that that all these
other guys are talking about. And when I think of the consequence,
when we talk about these things, a mentor told me the summer of
July of 2002, it sat at breakfast and I've shared the story with
some of you. He said that the problem with the Church of America and
I could probably put that at the Church of the world. is that
everybody has a love affair with their salvation. And I didn't
get it, I'm like, yeah, whatever, you know, let me eat my grits,
I mean, and and so as I as I grew a little bit in the next few
years, I began to see that and as God put me in a pastoral position
and and started to really begin to shepherd people instead of
just teach stuff and preach and try to get decisions as I began
to start studying the word of God for the first time on my
own. It became very evident that the the the end of the rainbow
was not a pot of gold was a pot of garbage. And so what happens
is, is that affected my joy. And if God is not the complete
sovereign perfecter of my faith and the author of my faith, and
if he's not the one who sufficiently provided and purposed and sustained
my my salvation before I was born, then it is on my shoulders. And so at that point, then psychologically
and emotionally and spiritually, I will do everything in my power
to come up with any way to placate that feeling of helplessness
and despair. And here's what I suggest, that
people who are from Armenian or Pelagian camps, of which I
used to be and didn't know, didn't know what it was. They are helpless
and they are on the brink of depression at every moment of
their life. Because when it's when it's all
said and done, their joy is not on the faithfulness of God. Their
joy is on their ability to grasp it. And their hope is not in
the worship of of the father, I mean, is in the sufficiency
of the father and thus worship him. Their hope is on, Lord,
I hope that I can come to you in worship good enough that I
might please you. And as Dr. Downing was speaking. And he was going through even
the Greek of John 3, 16, and I looked over here in my little
brand new Bible that Tim just gave me that's got Greek and
English, so it makes me look like a scholar. And and I'm looking
at that, I'm thinking, you know, it's not the first time I've
known this, I've studied this, I've seen this and I preach this
by God's grace correctly. But all I wanted to do was just
get off this bench and go outside and just fall on my face and
worship God. Because that's the result of
salvation. That's the result of grace. Otherwise,
I've got to get up off this bench and stop wasting time talking
and get my life right and get you to get yours right. You see
the difference? So I think it affects us immensely in the church
when we when we try to come to a place to where we appease the
populace. And say that church is what we
do with our lives for the glory of Oh, gosh, the glory of man
and the glory of of more morality rather than and the glory of
salvation. And the glory of baptism and the glory of decisions and
the glory of numbers versus the glory of Christ, who is our sufficient
and effectual savior. Hey, before you ask that question,
Jeff, because you haven't said anything. Do you want to reply
to any of these things we've been talking about before we
go to the next question? OK, you didn't speak. You only preach
for an hour and a half this morning. I didn't sound like it sounded
like close your mouth sister. How do we humbly rectify the
pastoral plagiarism taught or remiss in the seminary. and somehow
proselytized in the churches going on. You know, that's a really good
question. Don't you know her? You can probably attest to that. That's really a question because,
you know, for a lot of pastors, that's where it starts in the
seminary. And as my friend, my friend James
White said, He told me that so many people email him and ask
him, you know, can you recommend a good seminary? And to be honest,
it's very difficult to recommend a good seminary. Very, very difficult
because you're required to learn what they're teaching. You're
required. And naturally, these people first going to Bible college,
they already have a traditional Armenian view going in and the
seminary just confirms it. No Armenian person is going to
go to Westminster. You know, they're just not. It's
a reformed seminary. But other than like a Westminster
or maybe a couple others of the thousands of seminaries. I don't
know what the solution is, because that's what's coming out of our
seminaries. And hence, that's what now is coming out of our
churches. And I think the worst part is, I can say this, many,
particularly in the charismatic arena, most of those pastors,
many of them, have not even been to seminary. Not that you have
to go to seminary to get a good education. I mean, I went because
I think it can open the door for more jobs for me. But a lot
of what I did was just self-study. I really couldn't find a seminary
locally. I live in Los Angeles. I mean, you know, all we have
is Scientology buildings like language. It's just self-taught,
but it's very difficult. And I don't know what the solution
is because it's coming right from the sources. And I think
pastors should read over and over first Timothy three and
look at the qualifications as a pastor. They should look and
read Timothy when Paul is so passionate About make sure you
handle the word of God or the tomato cutting straight, accurately,
accurately cut straight, precise. And today we get ridiculed for
demanding precision and doctrine. We get attacked for it. That's
the state of the church, you know. Make sure you keep that up there. Can I give you a little history,
if I can? The Bible school movement began
in the late 1800s, and most of the seminaries—Princeton was
an exception—but most of the seminaries were infiltrated by
German rationalism. It affected the Department of
the Old Testament. Most of the Old Testament scholars
were German rationalists. and it gutted the seminaries.
In opposition to this, especially in the late 1800s and throughout
the 20th century, the Bible school movement came up, and that's
the study of the English Bible. So anybody that studied or knew
the languages or used the languages was suspect. And so people got
up and bragged on their ignorance. I know a little Hebrew runs a
delicatessen down the corner. But I brought I brought I wrote
an article for our paper. We have a theological quarterly,
the perspective. And I used First Timothy. I just had to check it out. First
Timothy, chapter four and verse 15 study. Give thyself to reading
that thy profiting. may appear to all, but the word
prophet is procope there, thy progress, thy progress. There should be progression in
the ministry. When a man gets his theological
degree, if he does go to, if he goes to a Bible school, he
gets, as I did, I got a three-year diploma, but I did get my graduate
degrees in education, became a school teacher to make a living
and so, and then back to the theology. So it's all been just
self-self-teaching. Even if you go to a school, you
have to teach yourself, you have to apply yourself. There's to
be progression in the ministry. How many pastors do you know
who progress in the ministry? Who read and educate themselves? John Gill mastered Greek, Hebrew,
and Latin by the age of 12 because he was homeschooled. Good advertisement
for homeschoolers. Many of these men, some of the
greatest of men, were self-educated and self-taught. And they became
the great men of their generation. But there's to be progression,
procopane. It means to cut before, copto,
tonsil, ectome, and so forth. It means to cut before, to progress
in that way. And the man who does his work
and gets out of Bible school or seminary, he's only beginning. But I've known men that every
three or four years, they go to another church. And I asked
the man who I went to school with. I met him several years
later and I said, why are you moving again? He said, I preached
everything they gave me in school. Wow. He hadn't learned a thing.
Preaches maybe 150, 200 times a year. There's a world that
there's a whole world in the word of God. And a man should
educate himself in church history. He should educate himself in
the languages. He'll never be certain, the preacher
will never be certain, that he's standing true to the word of
God unless he has some working knowledge of the languages. He'll
never have that certainty that he's giving the major thrust
and the emphasis God gives in his word. I'm quoting George
Ricker Berry in his Interlinear in the introduction to it. I
quoted that in my Greek textbook. He'll never be certain of that,
but once he has this thing, he has that God-given authority.
That's what a man needs, and he needs to progress. He needs
to read, I don't recommend too much philosophy, but history
and the languages and doctrine and theology, because it's a
very exact science, and it all derives from the Word of God.
How can the pastor, preacher, be an astute student of the word
of God and say, but I have no knowledge of the original? If
he were a scientist, he'd be laughed out of the lecture room.
We have a scientist here tonight with a PhD in chemistry, my associate. And he knows, he's worked with
scientists. And this is the way it is. Theology
is a science. Everything comes from the Word
of God. There shouldn't be anything that we know better than we know
our Bibles. I will quote a Lutheran. Can
I do that here? Sure. John Michael Ruhm was a teacher
of homiletics at Capital University, a Presbyterian seminary in Ohio
about the turn of the century. He said, a man who enters the
ministry without any knowledge of Hebrew may find a stopgap
in some of the paraphrases and versions, but a pastor without
a knowledge of his Greek New Testament will have difficulty
proving his right to exist. And the Lutherans have put out
some great preachers and great biblical scholars. Wow. Can I before you go to the next
question back to our group? Yeah. Forty two miles down the
road. Worth every mile of it. Lord have mercy. I'm self-taught
now. I got your books. I just copy. Yes. Well, I got your proper
duty and my Baptist catechism. My Greek workbook. I'm doing
pretty good. Praise the Lord. What I wanted
to going back to Gerard's can of worms over there earlier.
Could you succinctly maybe even down core or downing the difference
in pedo baptism infant baptism from a Presbyterian. Catholic,
or let me do it this way, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian. Because
obviously the Catholic believes when they do the baby, the infant
baptism, that removes original sin. And obviously the Presbyterians
don't believe that, but I'm not really sure, recalling on the
Lutherans, because theirs is kind of a little tricky there
in their consubstantiation. Could you kind of give us a little
distinction from those three infant baptisms? You're the Baptist, you should
know. I can give you the true New Testament view. In the Reformation,
I'm a Baptist, so I'm not, you know, I like the word reform.
By this way, I would mean Calvinism as being a good Calvinistic Baptist. The dark side of the Reformation
was the New Testament is there. I have some of my friends say
why we are reforming the church. What are you doing? And my answer
is, I'm a member of a New Testament church. It does not need to be
reformed. I'm a Baptist. And all I'm saying is the New
Testament is there. I'm a member of a New Testament
church. We try to conform to the word of God. The reformers
inherited infant baptism. And they changed it. There's
a high church view, which is baptismal regeneration, Anglicanism,
and some Lutherans believe baptismal regeneration. Then there's a
lower, more evangelical view that it sort of brings them,
and they call it within the pale of the church. It's something
that gives children hope in making them covenant children. In my
view, it completely obliterates the gospel. If, indeed, we change
the mode of baptism from immersion to sprinkling,
and we change the subject of baptism from believers to anyone
else, we've completely destroyed the biblical doctrine of baptism
because believers' baptism by immersion is clearly taught in
the New Testament. What is believers' baptism? This is evangelism because when
Philip preached unto him Christ, he got to baptism. Okay, good
enough. Baptism is symbolic of the believer's
union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. Baptism only has meaning to the
believer. It's symbolic of his union with
Christ Union in his death means the reigning power of sin has
been broken, Romans chapter 6. Union in his resurrection life
means that the Holy Spirit is the dynamic of the life, and
that means the necessity of a converted life. Unless you understand union
with Christ, you can't understand believers' baptism. If that's
changed as to the mode of baptism or to the subjects of baptism,
then we've completely obliterated the truth and the reality of
the believers' union with Christ. Think about that necessary relation.
All truth is unity in the Word of God. All truth. You modify
anything, all truth is out of step. So we're speaking about
evangelism I want Brother Dalkor, my Greek expert here, to deal
with some of these key passages. 2 Peter 3, verse 9. I'm ready
for it. I'm just anticipating this. That's
what we were going to do. We've gotten on these other things,
but what we're doing when we say this is all truth fits together. And it's all important, isn't
it? My confidence and assurance is that of John Gill on his deathbed. He said, you've written these
works and you've preached for what, 52 years was his ministry
and so forth. He said, my reliance is on the
eternal redemptive grace of God. in Jesus Christ. And there it
is. I want to know that it's not
baptism, not church membership, not an isolated religious experience
of walking the aisle. I want to have that firmness,
nor a carnal security that is based in a prayer a physical
movement in a building and an isolated religious experience.
The Bible has nothing to do with that. That's modern evangelism
that we're speaking about. I want to know that I'm standing
before God in the imputed righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ wrought
out in His active and passive obedience and that by the grace
of the Holy Spirit, my Christian experience is reflective of the
moral character of God. Be ye holy, for I am holy, saith
the Lord." What is God doing in salvation? Everything. He
is redeeming his image in man. There's no salvation for animals,
no salvation for the fallen angels. Salvation is peculiar to mankind
because man was is the image bearer of God. He's made in the
image and likeness of what is God doing? He's redeeming his
image in man. What is our redemptive predestination
to be conformed to the image of his son that he might be the
firstborn among many brothers? What is the work of the Holy
Spirit? to conform us to Christ, 2 Corinthians 3, verses 17 and
18. When we look in the mirror, I
don't want to draw this out, when we look in the mirror, what
do we see? The Greek says we see Christ.
Well, we know that's not true, but it is. Does any man here
carry a mirror? You don't carry a mirror with
you? We're not as effeminate as the first generation In the
British Museum, they have men's mirrors. They're pentagon-shaped,
and they're made out of polished brass. And men would walk around
and look in that mirror. And etched on that mirror was
the forehead, the nose, the mouth, and the chin of their god. And
they would walk around, and they would try to conform to their
god. And the Holy Spirit's work is
to conform us to the image of Christ, and that necessitates
a converted life. It'll be complete. at our glorious
resurrection, but in our Christian experience, no place for the
carnal Christian, no place for the easy belief of evangelism,
true conversion that is life transforming. I made my decision
at age 10 to live as a carnal Christian until age 20. God absolutely
revolutionized my life and truly converted me. I'm speaking from
experience. I was one of the casualties of
modern evangelism. Good way to put it. This is awesome.
This is life. This is death. This is eternal
life, as opposed to eternal death. So, let's go to the other scriptures. I was going to say real quick,
I heard a guy on the radio one time say, Paul's conversion on
Acts 9, he says, Paul accepted Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus.
I about fell out of my chair and I said, what do you mean
accepted him? You know, Jesus had kind of, boom, chosen. And
I remember asking, the Greeks said he was arrested in Acts
9. Chosen vessel. And that's why
God gives all the glory and salvation and mankind in this whole paradigm
we're talking about of salvation and grace. Speaking about street preaching,
talking about evangelism. If God's grace is free and sovereign,
we can be the most compassionate, patient, thorough preachers and
evangelists possible, away with all this abuse and so forth. You see, when they're dealing
with the free will of man, they have to be abusive. They have
to fight and argue. And if you can't get them saved,
at least make them mad. That's a terrible thing. You
don't see that with our Lord. I'm going to make this as quickly
as I can. Give me to drink. John 4. to drink. Now that was
an amazing thing for a Jewish man to ask of a Samaritan woman,
because number one, they wouldn't talk to a woman. Number two,
they certainly wouldn't talk to a Samaritan woman. And number
three, he wouldn't drink out of her pot. But he knew what he was doing.
And if you look through that whole chapter, which I'm not
going to preach on, I've got a good alliterated outline for
it. So kind. They talked about religion. Our fathers worshiped on this
mountain. You have nothing to draw with the well. They talked
about everything. The Lord brought it back. The
Lord brought it back. And this is something that is,
to me, it's utterly amazing. He said, if you knew who was
talking to you, you'd have asked of him. He would have given you
living water. She thought it was spring water, not the stagnant
well water. Spring water. She was on a physical
level. He was on a spiritual level.
He's bringing her up, bringing her up. You'll thirst again,
but whoso drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never,
ever thirst. Double negative. Never, ever
thirst. She said, Sir, give me this water that I thirst not,
neither come hither to draw. Now, whatever he was talking
about was miraculous. And she believed it. She looked
into his face and she believed him. What a transparent personality. Without guile, our Lord had as
a personal evangelist. She wanted what he had. And do
you know what he said after that? I have a card I want you to sign. I want you to repeat this prayer. Evangelism hadn't even taken
place yet. He said, Go call your husband
and come hither. She's a good looking woman. Any
woman that could be married five times and a man is willing to
live with her. She was still a good looking woman and everybody
in town knew it. And all the women hated her.
And she's the one woman that God would save and send her back
that the men would listen to. That's in the marginal reading. Go call thy husband and come
hither. She said, I have no husband. He said, I know. You've had five
husbands. The man you're shacked up with
now is not your husband. When you said, I didn't have
a husband, you were speaking the truth. He didn't get up and
cuss her out and tell her she looked like a whore and she was
going to split hell wide open. Look how compassionate he was.
And what did she say when she went to the men of the city?
Come see a man that told me all things that ever I did. He didn't
tell her all things that ever she did, but that was her subjective
experience of conviction of sin. It opened her entire life, and
nothing was left apart from it. And how kind and gracious our
Lord was to sinful people. We've got another question over
here from Jill. I'm hoping so many folks will
kind of keep some of the questions related to the biblical evangelism,
because we've kind of been going all over. But go ahead and ask
your question. Actually, you started talking
about it was talking about all the plagianism. Talking about all this Pelagianism,
not only is it like a leaven in the negative sense in the
preaching world, but just in the church. What I personally
notice is just a lot of contentiousness when they come up against the
truth. What I'm learning is the truth,
you know, and there's contentiousness. And what I would like to know
from you all, and I'd like to hear from you, Jeff, on this
on the street preaching level is what is our response not to
feed into the contentiousness? But I think you've kind of touched
on it. Dr. Downey about just the love. But
what is our response to shed light, to bring light to the
truth without feeding into that contentious debate that is just
reigning in all across the internet, people bickering back and forth,
and it's wearisome. It takes your joy away. If you're not grounded in Christ,
and I find sometimes that contentiousness pulls me out of my joy temporarily. And I have to kind of get back
centered in Christ. But how would you all handle
it from where you're sitting up there? And Jeff, I'd like
to hear from you on the streets. When you deal with those kind
of street preachers that bring really reproach upon the gospel and
the atonement of Jesus Christ? And what's your response to that? Let me say something real quick
before Jeff answers, but I do really want you to answer that
because you have a lot of experience. One thing I've learned as we've
been ministering in San Quentin for a couple of years, and there's
a lot of opposition of different beliefs and stuff. And because
of my mindset and the apologetics and different stuff, oftentimes
I'll have a tendency to deal with some of the negative too
much. And what I've learned, and I think Jeff might echo this,
I would think in some sense, is that you just have to preach
the truth. You just have to preach the truth
because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
And Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice, they follow me. And
it's hard sometimes when you're so apologetically minded because
you want to say, oh, what about this, that and the other thing
and this group and that group? And in there, we have to be more
careful because there's all kinds of volunteers. And it's trained
me a little bit on that. And I still have a long ways
to go because what I've been used to of 17 plus years as a
Christian. But what I realized, you have
to just preach the truth. And there's going to be so many
people, even quote unquote, Christians that come against you and say,
you're not doing it right. You're talking this or that. And so
you just kind of humbly For lack of a better word, equal, because
we understand by the grace of God for one for the grace of
God, there go we. So we have to preach the truth
and humbly take the dirt. And I think even Jonathan Edwards
had said when there was so much lies and opposition against him,
he was thrown out of church. One church, if I remember, I'm
trying to recall, but he wasn't going to go back and say anything.
God will settle the matter. And he trusted the Lord as he
preached the truth and stood on truth. That's one of the best
ways. And I'm preaching and almost
feel like a hypocrite because I have a hard time not always
critiquing the false doctrines. But I got to stay focused on
just preaching the truth because that's really going to be the
outcome in the end, because the truth will set you free and then
you will be free indeed. What say you, Jeff? When you
look around at modern evangelicalism today, you'll even find if you
sit down and talk to a Presbyterian or a Reformed Baptist, you'll
even find a majority of the churches in America have a dispensational
view of the gospel. I mean, you could sit down and
talk to someone that goes out into the streets. One of the
greatest tragedies I believe today is that street preaching
is becoming fashionable. and it's becoming something that
people are getting involved in almost to find a certain affirmation
between God and man. They've been looking for something
and now they have found a way somehow to satisfy that inward
desire that they've always had to be looked at as being spiritual. But you talk to a lot of people
today in the church, even the Reformed churches, they will
say that the Gospel is about being saved from hell. You know,
one of John MacArthur's famous things. What is the gospel? It's
about Jesus saving us from hell. But that's just the beginning.
You know, Christ satisfied the wrath of God. But being saved
from hell is only one portion. That's just the beginning of
the gospel. What happens after that? Once you're saved from
hell, do you just go on and just live like a heathen and wait
for the rapture? Live this protective Christianity, this monasticism,
this gnostic, You know, what is the gospel? And we need to
return to the gospel. We need to return to the scriptures
and see what the gospel actually is. And obviously, we've got
a different hermeneutic there, from a dispensationalist perspective
to a covenant perspective. But when we get out on the streets,
a lot of our work today, because a reformed evangelism ministry
like Jeremiah Cry Ministries is really a cleanup crew. You
know, we're out there. We come into some of these battlegrounds
that have been riddled with plagian doctrine and abuse, and people
are just pickled. You know, they're just wiped
out from it. And then you come in there, you know, and you start
exalting Christ, and they think you're with the last bunch that
came strolling through there and stunk up the whole place.
And now you've got to come in there and you've got to somehow
clean up all this mess and all the abuse and all the tragedy
that's taken place in this area. What's been the best thing for
me personally, obviously I'm no expert, you know, I've just
probably been doing it for seven years, but my, the greatest burden
for me is to see Christ as King, you know, high and lifted up
and exalted in the proclamation that God's sovereignty, you know,
in the proclamation of the gospel. And I look down through church
history, and this is why, for me, church history has just been
phenomenal in instruction. The guys that don't want to duplicate
this guy or don't want to duplicate this guy, don't want to duplicate
Wesley. Do you want to duplicate Whitefield? What I found in a
majority of the men that God used were Calvinist. And it was
a blessing upon their proclamation. And when I went out as an Arminian,
prior to becoming Reformed or a Calvinist, I realized the great
dissatisfaction in my evangelism. Because one, if he's an Arminian,
has to become almost pragmatic. to feel good about himself. Otherwise,
you go home depressed and suicidal because people aren't making
as many decisions as you like or no one came to Christ today.
It's your fault. Their blood is on your hands.
But when we understand the sovereignty of God and that God is in control
and then it pleases God to save people by the proclamation of
his word, that it's his responsibility And we're part of God's redemptive
work. We're not trying to squeeze God into our agenda, the four
spiritual laws. But we're proclaiming we have
the freedom, the freedom to exalt Christ. And we have the freedom
to preach. And that kind of freedom is so
liberating when you're out there because you're not constrained
with all this other responsibility that it's up to you to get people
through the church door. It's up to the Lord. God is in
control. And the abuse, I follow in one
scripture, don't answer a fool according to his folly. If he's
acting like a fool, I don't go out and argue with plagians.
I very rarely ever see them. Where I go and preach is in usually
different areas. I've been in Scotland. I didn't
hardly see any of them there. But I don't get a lot of harassment.
Most harassment comes from false converts on the street. Majority
of heckling and harassment and abuse comes from the lovey-dovey
group. You know, the tree-hugger Christianities
that come up there, you know, and just want to destroy you
and tell you that you're doing it all wrong. You don't know
what you're doing. You're not being loving. And that took a long
time to get over that hill for me emotionally. You know, because
of the behavior. You know, you want to get down
and just slug it out. You know, because these guys are... You
know, you're interrupting the proclamation of the Gospel. Can't
you just wait until I'm done? You have to come up right in
the middle. I've got the largest crowd out here. People are listening.
We're having great dialogue. And you come up, strolling up
in the middle, declare to everybody that you're a Christian and what
I'm doing is wrong. Absolute and utter blasphemy.
Cowardness. Can't you wait until I'm done?
Sit down and talk to me over here. We can talk about these
things. We can decide these things. We can look at the Word of God
and see if I have failed where I've erred. I'd be willing to
repent and change my ways if you could show me the Word of
God where I've failed or where I've erred. But I see the Scripture
being pretty simple when it comes to public proclamation from Genesis
all the way to Revelation. It's a pretty easy thing to understand. That God has called us to go
into the world, proclaim the Herobic Gospel to all people. And that's what we do, but we
must do it correctly as seen in Scripture. We must understand
that man by nature is wicked and is an enemy of God, and he's
dead in his sin and he's depraved, radically depraved. And only
if God awakens that man will he be awakened and brought to
life. I think our biggest problem is that we think man's okay.
Our humanistic views from being so inundated and indoctrinated
with John Dewey over the last 70 or 80 years. Really, it's
been, you know, the pulpits lead the nations. I mean, you've got
people preaching humanism behind the pulpits. You know, the whole
American contemporary Christianity movement, these megachurches
out there preaching humanism, treating man as though he's a
victim instead of a criminal against God. And when we step
out there and we proclaim man who he is, you're an enemy against
God. You're dead in your sin. God
is holy and righteous and he commands you to obey him, whether
you want to or not. God doesn't offer man counseling
or good advice. He commands them to repent. Whether
they can or they can't, it's God's command and it stands.
Do and live. Amen, brother. Kind of brought
me back to this morning's sermon. We've got a question over there. A quick question. In regards
to the age of technology that we're in, in regards to the younger
generation who is growing up with social media, with growing
up in this computer age where this is all that they know. And
as you may have seen, obviously it evolved from nothing to where
it is today. A couple questions in regards
to that. Is there such thing as social social media evangelism? Those that are on Facebook checking
their whatever. And then you have this person
that attacks a verse or attacks something that you've posted
that is Christian or what it may be. Qualify that if you can. And also a word of wisdom in
regards towards the youth, those that are learning and growing
and are studying and then feel, again, as this regurgitation
of something that they've heard and thrown it in the face of
somebody else because So and so who studied already knows
it more than I do, so I'm going to use what they have said. So
if you could just speak on that in regards to this age that we're
in and how it applies to evangelism primarily. I want to say something
on the first thing on the social networks that we have here. Obviously,
it's consuming a lot of people's time. And I think there's a lot
of people on Facebook who Do use that for the glory of God,
but you have to be very disciplined because you could easily get
on there and you start looking down there. Oh, look at that.
What? You know, it could become like a gossip line. I mean, you
have to be very careful, but it could be very well used for
the gospel. You know, I've made friends on
there myself of old people that are unsaved and they get to see
all the gospel videos I put up all the time. I don't spend much
time. I'm just posting videos or something coming up or a verse
or something. that hits me. But I think you've got to be
so careful because of all these social medias and the YouTube
age. People are consumed. That's why
I always go back to, you know, Ephesians 5, 16, redeem the time
for the days are evil because it's so important. We've got
such a short time on this side of eternity. We've got to really
use our time wisely. And I have to beat myself up
on that, you know, in other areas of my life. Even ministry can
take up our our time, where it takes us away from our fellowship
and intimacy with God and the study of his word and growing
in the grace of knowledge. And, you know, I'm preaching
to myself, let me tell you, as I preach to you, because we're
all susceptible to these things. But in the social media, I just
would exhort all you and anybody here who listens to this is that
you've got to use it very disciplinely, very carefully, because it'll
consume your time. You could all of a sudden, one
time, even email. Let me just say this real quick, and then
I'll let you guys go on that. Well, let me check my email before
I go to bed real quick. And I need to get to rest. Next
thing you know, you're on there 20, 30 minutes, answering a few,
you come out. 20, 35 minutes. I'd rather have
been reading my Bible for 30 minutes before I went to bed than staying
on that stupid email for 30 minutes, you know? Because we get carried
away. So be cautious and use much discipline
around those. I mean, that's my advice from
some experience and stuff. What do you guys say on some
of those issues? I think social media could be
a very long a very special tool in that. You know, it could be
a friend or enemy. It could be an enemy in the sense,
yes, it can consume your time and distract you from other things.
However, I've used, I interact with many different blogs. I
post different articles. See, for me, though, I have canned
answers. So I can just, with the thing of the button, I can
answer most emails that I get. And I get a ton of emails. But,
you know, I can dialogue with some guy in Switzerland, which
I did a couple weeks ago, about the Trinity. I can now dialogue
and he can't misquote me because he has me in writing and he has
the passages he can check out. I can dialogue with someone around
the world on the deity of Christ and I can evangelize in that
sense. You know, you do got to be wise
when you do it. But I have used it as a, I think
it's an awesome tool if it's used correctly. And I've gotten
things out that I could not get out if I just spoke somewhere
locally, where now it's worldwide and they can't misquote me because
it's in writing. So I think that's the benefit.
For those of you who know my family, I think we have wires
coming out of the top of our heads. So we're a very wired
family. I'll put it this way, everything
we say, whether it be online, whether it be in public, whether
it be at the supermarket, it must be for the glory of God.
And it must also reflect our humility in Christ. It must reflect
the regeneration that God has authored in our hearts through
his Holy Spirit. And it must be sound because when you print
it, it's permanent. And not only have you printed
this out this morning during your sermon, I put out on Twitter
a quote that you did, and within less than three seconds, over
600 people had already retweeted it. So 20,000 people saw it in less
than half a minute. You see what I'm saying? And
then they share it, and then they share it, and they share it,
and that's how fast it goes. So if I misquoted you, you're in
trouble. And that's the point with social media. Now, here's
the thing. I started in an evangelistic
ministry years ago doing street preaching and things like that.
But in nineteen ninety five, I started working as a volunteer
with Christianity Today online. And they place me as a as a as
a moderator for at the time it was called moderation discussion
boards. So it's basically like email that was live, sort of
like a Craigslist. You post and you talk and then
somebody else post another one and you sort of have to read
them. And they gave me because I was willing to do anything.
That gave me the moderation of the homosexuality, the Christian
homosexuality discussion board. And I'm thinking here I am, this
little redneck from Georgia. Oh, this will be cool. I can have
some good conversation about God's view of marriage and sexuality.
No, this is 10,000 posted an hour. And here I am supposed
to be on three hours a night just keeping the thing civil.
I mean, you know, oh, you threaten to kill somebody, I'll hide in
your post. And the next day, you know, it's terrible. And
I'm like, is this three hours up yet? It's only been 20 minutes.
I'm ready to jump out the window, but it's only one story. So I
just hurt myself. And the point is, is what I've
learned with social media is I agree with Brother Eddie here
is that I have friends now in the gospel who I speak with on
a monthly basis now on the phone in Uganda. There's a small church,
a small home church in Africa now that listen to my sermons
every week. And there's about 50 people there in that village
that hear my sermons and then their teacher will translate
them for the you know. And so there's there's there's
friends that I made there. There's a guy who's sort of an undercover
evangelist in Uzbekistan that I'm friends with. And there are
there are ways and opportunities to stay in touch with people.
But just like Tim, and he says this a lot, he said, you know,
let me say something real quick or let me check something real
quick. A lot of little real quicks can be a long, long time. So
like Ray Kroc, you know, he started or he took over the McDonald's
franchise and his idea was a lot of little nickel hamburgers makes
a million dollars. And so we have to be very careful.
The same thing is true with what you're engaging. Back to your
question, Jill, in the context of how we engage. I never answer
an attack. If I did that, then I would be
about the business of responding in an apologetic to defend my
position rather than proclaiming the truth. Not that I won't do
that with someone who would like to talk, but I always take that
that conversation private. and always schedule it and I
maintain it according to some order so that I can see some
progress. And if it's no, there's no progression.
I'll just delete it. I'll delete it straight off the
page. I'll delete it straight because I don't want the fodder to go
because even if I'm not arguing, everybody else is arguing and
you got 10,000 people reading it and their grandma's reading
it. And then, and the next thing you know, nobody's reading the
Bible. They're arguing about whether or not you're spelling
a word correctly or that you're, you know, so we have to be careful.
And how we use that, and that's another reason that we shouldn't
put polarizing things on the on the on the web as a Christian,
especially someone who is wanting to be evangelistic, put things
that are encouraging, put things that are true that may be polarizing
themselves. But the word of God causes an
argument. Let the word of God hold the argument, not our commentary. And as a pastor preacher, you
know, that's most of my problem in the church when I call this
because I say the wrong commentary around the right passage. Or
I preach the wrong thing at the right thing at the wrong time.
Or I chuck a spear at one guy sitting in the front row because
he made me mad right before service and everybody else feels it.
You see? So we have to be careful with
that. Is that where you're going with that question? OK. And remember, you're not Amish.
You know, you're not a Mennonite or an Anabaptist. You know, we're
not rabbit hole Christians who don't run from the world and
hide out, you know, then sneak over the wall and preach and
then run back. You know, it's OK. I mean, it's
OK to use modern technology to get the gospel out. You know,
the whole idea that, you know, you go to an Anabaptist, you
ask me, have you ever read this really great book? Well, we don't read
any other books. We just read the Bible. You know,
which it sounds so pietistic, you know, but in reality, you
know, we're reformed. You know, we're to go into all
the world to proclaim the gospel, you know, and it's OK to use
these mediums to reach the lost. Why not? I would bet if any of
these guys from the past were here today, they're going to
want to hit the greatest amount of people that they possibly
can with the Word of God. Obviously, if you're taking your
time, you're doing, using your things for those means, absolutely. And I'll answer 100 emails if
it means that those emails are productive for the glory of God.
But obviously, for gospel and time wasting, absolutely not. But we can't be afraid as Christians. To use these tools today to glorify
God, not to run and hide from them under the banner of piety.
And having canned answers like what Dr. Alcor said, if you don't
have that, you can at least have some good links that you can
send to people. Yeah, let me say something real
quick before you go to the next question, but we will take them.
Wait, you got to get the mic so we can get on the audio. It's
good. Hey, I've had you on videotape
before, so I like what you say now. Get on there. I was going
to say that Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the
Castle of Wittenberg. That was his email. Sorry. He
had tweeted that if he were allowed to. That's what I'm trying to
say. That's what he did. You better run. That's too many
characters for a tweet. There was a question back there
too, brother. Yeah. Okay, I'll ask my question real
quick. Having 45 years experience with
Berkeley when I went there, I have a question on how to respond
to an evangelist whose style is John the Baptist. As you walk
by, they're accusing you, and they don't even know your religious
history or... Or your heart. Or my heart. I
had been called a whore so many times, I can't count anymore.
And I've debated to myself whether it was advisable to stand there
and debate about this to this person or just let go because
I figured it was better to let it go because it was better for
my witness at that point. But how does one respond to that
sort of thing? I think the best thing to do,
I'll take that real quick, is you need to pray for that individual,
because that brings to mind, as I had went out and for a lot
of years tried to reform some of these guys, when I say reform,
bring them to some understanding. Even when I look way back at
some of the video footage of myself, I kind of cringe at some
of my older preaching and even some of my newer preaching. But
we want to be God honoring, but in that situation, you know,
You're not going to get anywhere arguing with them unless you
know your word and the person seems peaceful. But usually when
they're coming at that, you're not going to be able to reason
with them because they're coming out to the shot. In fact, let
me give you a good, good example. You just can't. And this is a
Pelagian response, really. I was out with some of these
guys and as he's sitting on the corner with the sign, a lady
walks by with her stroller, you know, and her husband was a little
bit further back and This person probably didn't know it. And,
you know, she's wearing a low top. You know, she's probably
a pagan. So she's going to dress whatever. And she was revealing,
you know, she was an attractive woman, had a baby in the carriage.
And she walks up right by him and he's standing there. He goes,
woman, you need to put some clothes on. You look like a whore. And
her husband heard that coming right before. He was lucky. I
thought he was going to be decked right there. And I've seen that
many times by some of these guys. And that is far from preaching.
That is wicked and evil. to sit there and say something
like that, because if they understand it's only by the grace of God,
they would say, hey, ma'am, have you heard the good news that
Christ died for sinners? You must repent and believe. I'm getting a little emotional
here. There are gospel opportunities
that are just wasted because People are not spiritual, and
they're emphasizing the wrong things. Let me say something
real quick while I grasp my breath. I get emotional about this because
it breaks my heart to see somebody treat somebody like that, who
calls himself a Christian. Forgive me, but it really is
ugly. I know I'm looking pretty ugly
right now, but this is my heart. For people to act like that is
wicked. To call somebody something like that, Lord, have mercy on these three
preachers who hear me. Repent and share the gospel because
you're a wretched sinner saved by grace if God has saved you. The question is, how do you handle
this? the scripture and someone I feel
is misusing it, he who says souls, I'm not sure if I'm quoting it
right, but the scripture says if you say souls, you're wise. I feel on occasion that from
these brethren, that if I'm not bringing
someone new constantly on a Sunday, then I'm not evangelizing. You know, I'm, I'm a housewife
and I homeschool my children. And I minister to my neighbors. I write cards. phone calls and
so forth and so. I feel. I am made to feel that
I've not constantly bring someone to church. And that versus constantly
be preached from the pulpit. I feel like. I'm not ministering
the gospel. How would you advise. Thanks
a lot for that question. Basically, you're in the home. You're raising your children
up in the admonition of the Lord. You're homeschooling your kids
in doctrine. The Word of God. They are souls, aren't they? You're a helpmate to your husband.
And you know, the greatest tragedy... I'm sure Mr. Downey could cover
this 100 times better than I can. But the greatest tragedy is the
whole idea of separating the secular and the holy. There's
Roman Catholicism or Arminianism, and I think this is why the Reformation
was so powerful. Because people finally got the
Word of God in their own language, and they realized that God wanted
to be involved in all areas of our lives. That the maintenance
man was just as spiritual as the pope. It leveled the playing
ground to realize that what God has called you to do. And the
gifts and talents and ability he has given you to raise your
children is on an equal standard. with the preachers or the evangelists
or anything else. The problem is, is that we've
separated those things. And we say that the guy out on
the street corner who's sharing his faith is holy, and the guy
at the factory from Monday through Friday is at a secular job. not realizing that we are to
do all things unto the glory of God. And we are to enjoy God. We are to worship him and give
him glory in all that we do. And God is involved in all areas
of our lives. And we've got to remember that
this is the greatest tragedy today of fashionable street preaching. That everybody believes somehow
that going out in street preaching makes them something. special,
or more spiritual. And it doesn't. And they become
almost like a cigarette addict. And they jones, and they need
to go out and get their fix. And they're mean and rude to
everybody until they get out there, get their fix, and they
can come back and be nice to everybody. Because they see evangelism,
or they see an outreach, or they see the pulpit as a means of
spirituality, a hierarchy. And it's not. Because God is involved in all
arenas and facets of life, in all dimensions. He receives our
worship. And if you're at home raising
your children up for the glory of God, you are doing what God's
called you to do. Whether you drag someone into
church is besides the point. Church is for equipping the people
of God. It's not an evangelism outreach. It's for the people
of God to come and get equipped. I mean, I understand where you're
standing, because I was there before myself. You didn't give a tract
to someone today. You know, you feel guilty, you just go home
and flagellate yourself, you know, or you want to do penance.
Really, a lot of the evangelism that we see today is nothing
more than penance. People going out, trying to rid their sin
by doing something and trying to be affirmed by God and man,
making themselves feel special. They skip prayer, listen to a
couple Paul Washer videos, a little Lecrae, and out they go. Instead
of getting on their face before God, shutting themselves in,
having their hearts crushed and broken, coming under the reality
that they're nothing. God's everything. And their motive
is to glorify God. Not to go out and do something. So they could come back and feel
stimulated and buzzed up from the little experience out on
the street and feel good about themselves until it wears off
again. And then condemn everybody else because you're not doing
spiritual things. You're just doing worldly things,
secular things. You got to drag someone into
church because non-spirituals need treading out on the street
or behind the pulpit, which is nonsense. It's ridiculous. So
I encourage you to move forward in the things of God. God has
called you to be a woman of God. Treat the home as the absolute
most valuable thing there is. My wife loves her home. She loves
raising our kids to the glory of God. She doesn't look at a
home as a prison like the feminists want you to believe. It's a place where she can give
glory to God, where the most evangelization occurs right there
to our own children. I think we should wind this down. OK, hold on.
Yeah, we're going to wind it down a little bit. We'll go ahead and ask your question.
I want to say something real quick for you do. I would say
that I'm real quick. Those microwaves when they came
in back in the 70s. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up.
But before I say this real quick, you know, I look back as the
comment I made earlier and I got emotional. I apologize for that.
But this is my heart. You know, I look back at some
of the stuff I did and it makes me want to vomit in evangelism,
you know. So, you know, I asked God to
forgive me for some things. And I've not always been the
greatest example. And, you know, forgive me, Lord,
and viewers for that. But it does break my heart to
see how people treat people in the name of Christ. And it's
an abomination. And Jeff, very important that
he brought that up. these Pelagian mavericks, they
don't come under a local church. They don't come under the authority
of an elder of a church because it should be done in and through
the church. Street evangelist. You know, there was some unique
case with Whitfield and those guys who kind of broke away from
the Church of England, want to go out there and preach the truth
because the people needed it. And, you know, they were dealing
with the monarchy and the whole mess. It's very important that
people are in a good Bible-believing church under the eldership. You know, a lot of these Pelagian
street preachers, they cry, obey Jesus. You can't obey Jesus until
you've been converted in a proper way. Not only that, they always
say, believe the Bible, obey the Bible. Hebrews 13 says to
be under the eldership of a pastor. And other passages, they don't
even obey the Bible. They're being hypocrites. They
go out there and tell everybody, obey Jesus. You got to be born
again. What do they even mean by born again? That's a miracle
of God. You can't be born again as a Pelagian and decide to be
a saint. This is crazy. Their theology is haywire. But
Jeff wanted to bring that up, and I'm glad they got to be under
local church. I mean, anybody else want to
speak on that? Because that is a very important,
important. Jeff, I think you should talk
about that a little bit because you've experienced it. He'll
be real quick, though. I'll be really quick. Well, I
mean, rebellion against authority. It is really the plaque of the
church today, not wanting to come under authority. I mean,
really, it's a hard issue. And, you know, for I can't really
count, I think it was six years where we were a parachurch ministry.
We don't really call ourselves a parachurch ministry, but that's
what we were. You know, we were kind of running along the side
of the church as if the church needed our help in reality and
truth. The gates of hell should not
prevail against the church, Jesus said. So why do they need a parachurch
to help the church out? So in reality, it was a repentance
for me because I come into the reality of the word of God saying
that I need to come under the submission of a local church,
because given human nature, we can go astray. We can get goofy
and loony out there, especially when you're out there proclaiming
the gospel, which appeals to the flesh if you're not careful.
And you can you can take it to a whole new level, especially
if people begin to like to watch you preach or learn from you
or whatever it may be. You can wander off. But if I
do anything creepy or weird out there, I have authority over
me in the local church to correct me. And I submit to that correction. I tell my elders, if I'm out
there doing something weird, you look at the ministry and
we're going off. Correct me. I mean, I don't have to tell
them to do that. They will do that because they understand
the whole role of local church evangelism. They realize that
evangelism is not fragmented. It's not me out here, this wandering
saint syndrome, divine orphans. but it's part of the local church
being sent from the local church. When you're out there proclaiming
the Word of God, yes, you represent Christ, but you represent the
local body of believers as well. You're accountable to someone.
When I go home at night, I'm accountable for what I've said,
what I've done to God, obviously. Yes, but I'm accountable to men
in the church as well, asking me what went on. Tell me what
happened. And it keeps me from wandering
off, doing my own thing. It keeps me sober. It keeps me
in line. Because you know what? These men know more than I do.
They're smarter than I am. And it's okay to say that. I'm
okay with that. There are men a lot smarter and
more gifted than me. Thank God that I have some people
to go to. Thank God that I have a local
church that cares enough about my soul, as it says here in Hebrews,
that they would care enough to watch over my spiritual health,
and most importantly, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen to that. Do you have anything to say on
that? Oh, wait. Do you have anything to add on that? It'd be good
just to note that, and I won't go through all the text, but,
you know, Jesus, everywhere He speaks, I do nothing of my own
will. I subject myself to the Father.
As I hear, I judge my judgment is just because I seek not my
own will, but the will of him who sent me. So subjection to
authority in all relationships, in and out of the church, the
marriage church. Around is the picture of the
gospel and is here's this is going to really make people angry,
is proof of your regeneration. So when you're rebellious, you'll
know it. And if you think you're right,
you're lost. So, that's the way I put it. There we go. Amen. Is the mic on? Yeah. This is
for Dr. Downey. Make sure you keep the
mic up to your mouth, brother. It's kind of a statement and
then at the end it's a question and maybe kind of a summarization.
So, if I summarize this right, apologism
and Arminianism believe belief is a form, would you not say,
of works, which denies part or all the work of Christ, and therefore
it would deny justification by faith alone. So, therefore, that
would always lead. So, is there a possibility? I'm
going to ask this question. Possibly they're truly not saved,
though they could be blind and ignorant of that, of the fact
of that. There are many professing Christians
Many professing Christians. Our Lord said, the stony ground
hearers. And there was no easy believism
in the New Testament. We have the people who gawked
at the Lord's miracles. Our Lord didn't commit himself.
The Greek words bestow their evil. They believed him. He didn't
believe them. And this every writer in the
New Testament calls people salvation into question. Interesting, brought
a message on that a while back. But every writer, including our
Lord, very much Paul said, examine yourselves, whether you be in
the faith. And it comes it comes down to biblical truth. It comes
down to the necessity of a converted life. And the whole carnal Christian
idea or the mere decisionist idea that a person can have an
isolated religious experience and be a true believer is simply
unbiblical. And then, too, as you said, Justification
is by faith or through faith, never because of faith. But people
don't know that we live in a doctrineless age when the average professing
Christian is not taught in church, not properly instructed from
the Word of God, probably has a study Bible. Throw away your
study Bibles and study your Bible. uh... that uh... and so they
don't know and and if it's collision or armenian philosophy they're
going to believe that my faith saved me it's it's my human trust
and because i trust in christ therefore i'm saying i'm dealing
with the situation not uh... connected to my church at all
but i'm dealing with the situation aware a good man told me he says
easy-believer has destroyed my family There's immorality, there's
drug abuse, there is open wickedness and drunkenness, but we know
we're saved. Saved from what? Salvation in
the Bible is salvation from the reigning power of sin, a present
tense salvation, and it is that salvation on the Day of Judgment
that will save you from hell. And that's just a rare commodity
today. But there's the issue. All truth
is unity. And today it's just fragmented
pieces here and there. And people want to believe that. What reason do we have to believe
that we're saved? Can I find it in the Word of
God? Very, very, very subtle. How
much time do we have left? I'm not going to take it, by
the way. But I certainly want to hear Dr. Delcore give us something
on 2 Timothy chapter 3 and 2 Peter chapter 3 verse 9 and 2 Timothy
chapter 2 and verse 4. Now, before we go to Dr. Delcore,
real quick. Am I on? Is the audio working? When Delcor was here last year,
he came twice, and I did a little conference with him about the
prologue of John. When he came into the pulpit,
as Jeff did today while he was here, he did a sermon on the
preservation of the saints. And this is talking still to
you, Troy, is justification by faith is a one-time act, and
that's when one is truly saved. And then you have the sanctification
and then glorification. He did a sermon on, we titled
it Assurance of the Believer. You can get it on my website.
I think he has it posted on his as well. Basically, he wanted
the title Preservation of the Saints or Perseverance of the
Saints, as we see it in the London Baptist and that confession. Within that, the logical conclusion
of God being sovereign and preserving your salvation is he's the one
that wrought your salvation. So as he demonstrated from John
6 and John 10 through the Greek and grammar that the double negatives,
no, never can you ever be snatched from God's hands. Never could
you lose your salvation. And as he talked about, there's
many professors. I like to say there's many professors,
but very few possessors because of the altar call and the easy
believitism. There's all kinds of people who
profess the faith who do not possess the faith. And ultimately,
we don't know somebody's heart. Kentridge of motive or eternal
destiny, but usually know them by the fruits. But true justification
is just that in the Pelagians and the other scenes were in
this arena, they think you can lose your salvation and people
don't understand this simple thing. If you think you can lose
your salvation, then you're depending on something of yourself to keep
that salvation. Thus, a works gospel, which is
no gospel. The problem with Christian perfectionism,
and in other words, the higher life, deeper life, you know,
the fuller life, abundant life, whatever it is, is that they
base their assurance of salvation on their sanctification. You
have to be sanctified to be saved. And that's true. God does sanctify
us. But if you lose your sanctification,
you lose your justification. That's the mistake they make.
And they make justification dependent on sanctification. They're both
together. You cannot separate righteousness
imputed from righteousness imparted. But sanctification is the manifestation
of our justification. And again, that necessitates
a converted life according to biblical principles. We better
wrap this up. But what I wanted to say is on
for those here and you could get. PastorJamesTippman.com,
for those who want to look up some of his stuff later on. Dr. DelCore's ministry, the Department
of Christian Defense is ChristianDefense.org, or .com, I think both. Mine is
JesusIsCreator.org. Dr. Downing's is SovereignGraceBaptistChurchOfSiliconValley.org, but it's the acronym. It's hard
for me to say that without saying the full name. And Jeff can be
reached at JeremiahCry.com. If you're looking in, then also
want to say real quick, I wish I had a bunch to give out, but
I don't. This great video, Go Stand and Speak, which is a documentary
that Eric Holmberg and the Apologetics Group, most people know him from
Amazing Grace, the History and Theology of Calvinism and a lot
of other videos. Jeff Rose is a part of this and
many other wonderful street preachers. And you hear the history of street
preaching in here. And then Pat did this one from Go Stand and
Speak. Street Preacher a Day in the
Life and this one happened to focus on Jeff's ministry, Jeremiah
Cry and His Family. So these are really good videos
that you can go to Jeremiah Cry and Get or GoStandSpeak.com. Usually I give out all this stuff,
but I don't have any. The cases I was hoping to get
didn't have and I had just a few of him. few of his that I've
handed out to a few people. But these are videos you need
to get. This one's really great on understanding the history
of and it's apologetics because it's called Go Stand Speak. And
the subtitle is The Forgotten Power of the Public Proclamation
of the Gospel. And one thing you'll find in
here, you always hear that old thing. Well, a Frank sound.