Islamic Inroads In America

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:42 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Erick Stakelbeck, Correspondent and Terrorism Analyst, CBN News

“Therefore I love Your commandments above gold, yes, above fine gold. Therefore I esteem right all Your precepts concerning everything, I hate every false way” (Psalm 119:126-128).

Islam is making deep inroads in America.  You’ve no doubt heard the debate over the planned construction of a $100 million 13-story Islamic mosque and community center two blocks from where the September 11, 2001 attack took place when Islamic terrorists commandeered passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers.

Well, did you know that ten more mega-mosques are being planned all across America, from rural towns in Middle America to big towns on the East and West Coasts?

So what’s the problem?  Isn’t this an opportunity for Christians to show their love and tolerance for another religion as American Muslims exercise their freedom of religion?  Shouldn’t Christians see this as an opportunity to share the good news of Jesus Christ with Muslims rather than fearing others who believe something different from we do?   Or, is there a more insidious side to this that Christians need to understand and do something about?

Erick Stakelbeck, television correspondent and terrorism analyst for CBN News and host of the Stakelbeck on Terror program on Christian Broadcasting Network will join us this weekend on The Christian Worldview to discuss how Christians should respond to the growing Islamic influence in America.

Spiritual Disciplines: What’s Biblical, What’s Not

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:51 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Ken Silva, Pastor and Editor, Apprising Ministries

TRANSCRIPT

“This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success” (Joshua 1:8).

Last week we discussed the importance of discipline in the Christian life as it relates to becoming more like Jesus Christ (Romans 8:28).  We looked at some obvious examples where 21st Century American Christians lack discipline: studying God’s Word, physical health, the restraint of lust and the tongue.  We then talked about some practical ways to “discipline [ourselves] for the purpose of godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7).

This week on The Christian Worldview, Ken Silva, pastor of Connecticut River Baptist Church in New Hampshire and editor of Apprising Ministries, one of the most visited “religious” blogs on the Internet, will join us to shed light on certain “spiritual disciplines” or “spiritual formations” — such as “contemplative or centering prayer” — which are unbiblical, rooted in mysticism, and lead one towards an experiential, subjective faith.

Ken will go beyond helping us steer clear of the practices and proponents of these seductive teachings; he will also give us a biblical framework for understanding what the Bible means when it calls us to be disciplined for the purpose of godliness in such things as prayer, meditation, worship, fasting, and much more.

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  August 21, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic: Spiritual Disciplines:  What’s Biblical, What’s Not
Guest:  Ken Silva

DAVID WHEATON: Spiritual Disciplines:  What’s Biblical, What’s Not.  Ken Silva joins us today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

I am so glad you joined up on The Christian Worldview today as we talk about spiritual disciplines.  As we discussed last week in the program, the importance of discipline in the Christian life as it relates to becoming more like Christ from Romans 8:28.  We talked about the verse in 1 Timothy 4:7, Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  James 4:8, Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.  In other words, we need to exercise discipline in our Christian lives for the purpose of becoming more like Christ, for the purpose of becoming more holy, more godly.

This week on the program we want to take a part 2 and take it one step further and get very specific with what types of spiritual disciplines should we be practicing in our lives and is there a point in which we can go too far and practice these disciplines in an unbiblical manner?

Ken Silva is a Pastor at Connecticut River Baptist Church in New Hampshire.  He is also the editor of Apprising Ministries.  Their website is apprising.org.  It is one of the most visited religious blogs on the Internet and he joins us today on The Christian Worldview to talk about spiritual discipline.  Ken, welcome to The Christian Worldview.

KEN SILVA:  It is great to be here David, thank you.

DAVID:  You have written extensively about this and that is why I wanted to have you on the program.  You have lots of different posts on your site, apprising.org, about the issue of spiritual disciplines.  Let’s just start out generally speaking.   I read those verses about drawing near to God and He will draw near to you.  This is the point of discipline so we can draw closer to God.  This is a command that we are to draw near to God.  We are to discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness.  How does one actually draw near to God and discipline themselves for the purpose of godliness?

KEN:  I think that is what is wrapped up in the reformation principle, sola scriptura, which is the Scripture alone is where we approach God, where we know we are experiencing Him.  So through His word or one of the means of grace is where we would grow closer to Him.

DAVID:  You are saying studying or reading the word.  Is that all?

KEN:  I think that is a good place to start.  In my church we have a little saying that I developed when I used to be a head football coach at a local secular high school.  One of the players that I lead to Christ, I taught him something pretty simple.  I told him every day to pray, read the Bible and do what it says.  Within that simple little formula is the means of grace of approaching God and saying, I want to grow close to you God.  We know that in Acts 2:42-47 we see that the early church devoted themselves to the Apostle’s teaching which we now have in Scripture.  As we come to God, we know that by spending time in His word, we are going to grow closer to Him.  Praying as well, which is communing with God as you said in one of your pieces, a relationship with God, spending time with Him.

DAVID:  These spiritual disciplines you talked about, praying, reading the word, fasting and even worship draws us near to God as well.  These spiritual disciplines are often called “spiritual formations.”  They can be turned into something beyond what the Bible intends.  Many Christians listening may not have heard about some of these things.  How are they turned into something beyond what the Bible intends and where do these things come from?

KEN:  I think that is a great question and a good place to approach this is to back up a step and say why are we having this discussion right now?  Why is the church having discussions about spiritual disciplines because obviously fasting, reading Scripture, praying was all part of the Hebrew, the Jewish way of approaching God.  What happened is in 1978, we bring in a fellow by the name of Richard Foster.  Richard Foster is a Quaker; he is a mystic to begin with.  He comes up with what he calls spiritual disciplines and he comes up with a bunch of different ones, adding things like solitude and silence, which we will get to in a minute.  In his book, Celebration of Discipline, this whole situation begins.  Even J.I. Packer in the 25th anniversary of Celebration of Discipline said, “it is a great thing, Richard Foster developed spiritual disciplines.”

I think that is where we have a problem because spiritual discipline, as you said, is important.  We are told to discipline ourselves.  However, as we are going to get to, you go beyond this when you start setting it up as a means of grace.  Certain things like journaling, for instance, may or not be good depending on how someone looks at it but it isn’t in Scripture.  You aren’t going to find God or one of the Apostles telling us we need to be doing journaling.  That is when we start to have a need for discussion.  That is the way I put it.

DAVID:  You are listening to Ken Silva this morning on The Christian Worldview, the Pastor of Connecticut River Baptist Church in New Hampshire.  He is also the editor and blogger at apprising.org.  It is Apprising Ministries.  We are talking about spiritual disciplines: what’s biblical, what’s not.  What we are going to do a little later in the next segment is to talk about some of the basic spiritual disciplines that everyone knows about, prayer, study, fasting, worship, confession, these kinds of things and then we are going to do a comparison between what is biblical, how we should approach those spiritual disciplines biblically and then how are some of these mystical folks taking them beyond what the word intends, beyond what God intends and where that leads.  We are going to do that in the next segment but before we get there, tell us some of the leaders who are proponents of the unbiblical spiritual disciplines.  You mentioned Richard Foster who is the guru with his landmark books, The Celebration of Discipline, but beyond Richard Foster and I think a lot of these names will be very familiar to an evangelical audience who is mainly the audience listening today because these books and these people have become very popular within the evangelical movement.

KEN:  It is good to look at how it got that way.  What happened was, one of the things that Apprising Ministries covers is a thing called the Emerging Church.  One of the reasons I started covering that was when God gave us the website, which we never imagined having.  The started Apprising Ministries as simply an outreach for me to do local apologetics and discernment work here in New Hampshire where we are based.  We had someone give us a website and suddenly working with Ingrid Schleuter and I am on the national radar somehow.

As we came on we thought there is something that I have to cover and the emerging church, being that I am a former Roman Catholic, I was raised Roman Catholic and had converted to Christianity, I looked at the Emerging Church and I noticed that they were bringing in Roman Catholic mysticism.  If you remember an article in 2004, Christianity Today put it out, called The Emergent Mystique.  In that, we are introduced to Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.  In that piece, Brian McLaren says that Richard Foster and Dallas Willard are key mentors for the Emergent Church.  That is very important because the Emergent Church was aimed at the young people.  It came into vogue through youth groups and what they call alternative youth services and it was something different.  What was different about it was the practice of mysticism.  They don’t call it that, but that is really what it is.  It is the old Roman Catholic mystics.  They take Teresa Vavala, her disciple, St. John of the Cross those kind of people and take their counter-reformation spirituality and start to practice it.  They got that from Richard Foster and essentially his spiritual twin Dallas Willard.  There are two names to look at.  The other names that would become popular came on the Emerging Church side.  Brian McLaren and as they get larger they get involved in some evangelical places.  They get in Willow Creek, which is Bill Hybels’ group.  Bill Hybels has been teaching this stuff since 1985 and a lot of people don’t know that.  Also, Rick Warren; if you go on Saddleback website, you will find books by Foster and Willard, Del Calhoun, John Ortberg.  These are people who are taking this Roman Catholic mysticism, repackaging it in evangelical terms and sprayed with Christian terminology.  That is the way that Dr. Walter Martin, the late apologetic guy who did the King of the Cults, he talks a lot about how the cults would likely spray Christian terms over things and that is where we get contemplative prayer, which is essentially meditation in an altered state of consciousness, although the Christian doing it, doesn’t say it is.  We really have to define terms because spiritual disciplines in and of themselves are not bad.  What is happening is that they are being abused and that is the key.

DAVID:  Ken Silva joins us today on The Christian Worldview as we talk about spiritual disciplines:  what’s biblical, what’s not.  I can imagine that list of folks you gave me, Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson and a lot of the Emergent Church folks like McLaren and Rick Warren, I would imagine that they are not all on the same page.  I would imagine Rick Warren would pick and choose some of the things he might think would be helpful where folks like Richard Foster and Dallas Willard are much more involved in it.  It seems to me that within the evangelical churches you might get youth pastors or the regular pastors who see the benefit of some of these more unbiblical, spiritual disciplines.  They wouldn’t think that they are that way but they would appropriate just some of the things in the church as evangelicals always do and say what works over in the Emergent Church, why is that attracting so many young people and pull a few things from there.  I am sure you are not equating Rick Warren with Richard Foster, but you see how they cross the line and take in a portion of these unspiritual disciplines.

KEN:  Correct.  In fact, in his book, The Purpose Driven Church, which comes before The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren specifically says that the leaders of the Spiritual Formation Movement and that is what Warren calls it, are Dallas Willard and Richard Foster.  He is well aware of their work.  You are correct and that is what that alternative service thing I was telling you about.  When the Emergent Church starts, it starts about 1997.  It wasn’t always around.  In 1997, Leadership Network, which is what launched the Purpose Driven, Seeker Driven Movement, they launch another movement out of the Young Leaders Network and out of that comes the Emergent Church.  That is people like Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones become involved really early on in there too.  So you have, McLaren, Jones and Pagitt later become Emergent Village.

Those guys are the far end of this.  However, they were used in youth groups and you hit a very key point.  Youth pastors and young adult pastors and especially worship leaders are generally the ones that bring some of these practices in.  They say, we see so and so doing it and it seems to be working for them.  We will bring in a modified version of it but it opens the door and that is the tough part.

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DAVID:  I am joined by Ken Silva today.  He is the Pastor of Connecticut River Baptist Church in New Hampshire and also the Editor of Apprising Ministries, great website, apprising.org.  As we talk about spiritual disciplines:  what’s biblical, what’s not; spiritual disciplines from a standpoint of prayer, study, fasting, meditation and worship, these things the Bible calls us to so that we can draw closer to God and discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness.  The point of today’s show is to day that there a lot of spiritual disciplines but they can be taken too far, beyond what the Bible intends and get into something that is actually displeasing to God.

What I want to do is to start out by reading a lengthy quote by Dr. Gary Gilley.  He wrote this column that was reposted on your website.  He is the Pastor of Southern View Chapel.  He said he wanted to begin this section of his post by relaying an experience that Richard Foster, who wrote the book Celebration of Discipline, who is very much into these spiritual formations, spiritual disciplines and what we would say would be an unbiblical manner shares in Celebration of Discipline, his book.  “Having come to the conclusion that there must be  “more spiritual resources” than I was experiencing, he prayed, “Lord is there more you want to bring into my life?  I want to be conquered and ruled by you.  Is there anything blocking the flow of your power?  Reveal it to me.”  God seemed to answer this prayer through a growing impression that something in his path was impeding the flow of life.  So he set aside blocks of time on three consecutive dates to listen to God in absolute silence through the use of journaling, a process by where God is supposed to reveal His mind to the silent participant.  After the third day, Richard Foster took his list to a friend who volunteered to serve as his confessor, who prayed for healing for all the sorrows and hurts of Foster’s past as presumably revealed by God.  It was following this experience of journaling an experience not taught in the Bible but common in the occult world that it seemed to him that he was “released to explore” what were for me new and uncharted regions of the spirit.  Following that event, Richard Foster said I began to move into several of the disciplines described in this book that I had never experienced before.”

Ken, I would like to talk about the disciplines he describes in his book, Celebration of Disciplines.  He breaks them into three categories, inward, outward and corporate.  What I would like to you to do is go through them one by one.  First I will read the discipline, you tell us what the biblical intent for that discipline is and then contrast it with what it has been turned into by these folks like Richard Foster, Dallas Willard who turn regular spiritual disciplines into something that is unbiblical.

Let’s start out with the inward disciplines he lists as prayer, study and fasting.  Why don’t you start out with prayer because that is the center point of many of these spiritual disciplines.  What is the biblical intent and how has it turned into something unbiblical?

KEN:The biblical intent is obviously for us to commune with God.  It is for His Spirit to work through us because prayer is also praying according to God’s will.  You remember the Bible tells us in 1 John 5, if we pray anything according to His will, He hears it.  If He hears us, we know we have what we have asked for.  What people forget sometimes, it isn’t so much what we are talking about, it is God praying through us.  Prayer, in the sense that Foster is doing, if you look at the fruit of what it produced; remember he uses prayer.  He talks about in the beginning, I ask God to reveal this to me because is there something blocking the flow of whatever.  He prays, but what is the result that he gets?  That is the problem.  It is not prayer itself, it is what Foster gets from it , the subjective thing he gets from it.

DAVID:  What about these different types of prayer they are doing, called contemplative or centering prayer?  They pray in certain postures, prayer wheels, what exactly are those?

KEN:  Contemplative prayer is also known as centering prayer; the words are interchangeable.  That is what Foster calls the real work of the Christian.  He doesn’t talk about it as much in Celebration of Discipline, he talks about it more in his book, Prayer, Home of the Heart.  There he says contemplative prayer or centering prayer is going on an inward journey.  As we go on an inward journey, that is where the terms silence and solitude come in.  We are going to be in seclusion somewhere in silence, in what mystics like Foster call wordless prayer.

I will back up one quick step and tell you again, Richard Foster is not a Christian, he is a Quaker.  There is a difference between that; Quakers have never been Evangelicals because they are mystics.  George Fox, who founded it, specifically rejected sola scriptura and he started the whole Quaker movement upon literally what God “spoke to him.”  He heard an audible voice that tells George Fox, teach this book and everything will be ok.  That is the same thing Rob Bell heard and that is the same thing that Victor Paul Wierwille of The Way International heard.  Hearing voices isn’t necessarily a good thing.

That is the problem, we start with a wrong kind of  prayer.   If you remember in Luke 11, Jesus is praying and the Disciples see that and say Lord teach us to pray.  If wordless, centering contemplative prayer was so important, don’t you think that is a great place for Jesus to tell them?  He doesn’t say that.  What He says is, when you pray, “say.”  They are words and He gives us an outline of things to say.  Not that we repeat that verbatim, although that is ok, but we also get the foundation of prayer there.

DAVID:  Isn’t there a repetition of one word they use when they do this kind of prayer?

KEN:  That is a good point.  Contemplative, centering prayer begins with a guy named John Main and it is called mantra meditation.  John Main is an apostate Roman Catholic Monk who discovers through working with a Hindu Master, meditation.  Using a mantra which is a word or a phrase like Jesus Christ, God, Son and Savior or Jesus or God to center yourself.  Again, the same thing with contemplative prayer, we are not thinking.  We are in a maze of post-modern words that don’t mean the same thing that you and I would think they would mean.  The only way I can equate it David, is to say that if you and I were to talk to a Mormon missionary and if we were to ask them if they believe in the Trinity, they would nod their head and say sure, but their trinity is a different one.   There are three separate Gods who decided to work together for one purpose.  That is not the Trinity.  Neither is contemplative prayer, thinking about your prayer, which is what you and I might think it might be.  It is not, it is emptying the mind through this mantra so every time you start drifting in your prayer you are doing meditation at this point.  You are not doing meditation like the puritans are talking about where we are going to go out and think very deeply and chew on the word and think about it and let it permeate our being.

It is absolutely biblical to do that.  Those people are not doing that at this point.  They are doing a type of meditation that is really transcendental meditation.  You will her people like Foster and Willard and these contemplatives talk about “transformation.”  That is simply a Christian phrase from the Bible.  Obviously we are transformed, God is transforming us more and more in the likeness of Christ but He is doing it through the means of grace and reading the Bible and praying and fasting and those types of things.

When we are talking about silence and solitude in this manner; I live on the edge of town.  I live in a great place.  I can walk out my door and go right into the woods.  It is awesome.  So I could be in solitude, by myself and be silent, listen to the birds and talk to God.  I do that all the time but I don’t empty my mind through a mantra and get myself into an altered state of consciousness.  That is what these people are doing and that is terribly dangerous.

DAVID:  It is good that you nuanced that because these things do take a lot of nuance.  Someone might be listening and say that sounds like a good thing to empty your mind and be quiet before God but it leads down a wrong road and does something that God never intends.  Again, you are listening to Pastor Ken Silva today here on The Christian Worldview.  The website is apprising.org.

We talked about inward disciplines of prayer, let’s do quickly one more on study because that is a spiritual discipline to study the word.  What does God want us to do regarding study and what do some of these unbiblical spiritual disciplines lead to?

KEN:  Great question.  Again, one quick thing; each of these things can easily be a program in and of themselves, so let the listener understand I am doing the best I can to do a simple overview for discussion.  I am not here to argue with anybody.

As far as that situation we introduce a term called lectio divina which is an old Roman Catholic practice of repeating a verse of Scripture over and over again, getting it into your mind and meditating on it in a bad way and finding out what “God is saying to you.”  We have had years of Bibles studies of people sitting in a room going what does that verse mean to you, what does that verse mean to you?  Proper biblical study is what does that mean?  The grammatical, historical hermeneutic, what does it mean?   To Foster, he is not interested in that because if he is, he is going to have all these Roman Catholic things thrown out because the reformation wasn’t about do we like Roman Catholic people.  It had nothing to do with that.   It had to do with the gospel and it had to do with how do we experience God and how do we know what God says?  Do we listen to some magisterian tell us this?  No, we listen to the Scripture.  God wants us to study Scripture because in 2 Peter 1 this verse is often misunderstood.  No Scripture is a private interpretation and that means we look for what God has to say.
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DAVID:  We talked about some of the inward disciplines that Richard Foster, the guru of the spiritual formation movement, he has an organization called Renovare that promotes.  We talked about the inward disciplines of prayer, study and we will skip over fasting now for the sake of time.  He goes into the outward disciplines, which are simplicity, solitude where he brings up the issue of journaling (I want you to comment on that), submission and service.  Why don’t you pick two of those and tell us what the biblical call for us in these areas is and what it has turned into unbiblically.

KEN:  One of the things we are dealing with here is you talk about Foster with the outward disciplines and inward disciplines.  My question is where are those listed in Scripture?  Where do we find the list of these disciplines?  The answer is, we don’t.  That is what makes them difficult because once you look at some of these things, they may or may not be good things.  In Ephesians 2:10 The Christian is saved to good works in Christ that God has prepared before that we would do.  He decides what works we are going to do.  What happens when we deal with this subject, we have to go back and look at the fruit that is produced.  Remember Jesus said we will recognize false teachers by their fruit.  He didn’t say we might, He said we will.  Well we will if we know what the Scripture says.

The problem with things like journaling and the other disciplines you mentioned, is we don’t have a biblical command anywhere in Scripture to journal.  When someone comes along like Richard Foster and says that you have to do journaling.   Willard talks about it also in his book, Celebration of Discipline.  He talks about the list and he lists a whole bunch of them and a lot of them are taken from practices of old Roman Catholics.  They were called acerlights and the lived in cells next to a church.  They have romanticized some of these things and brought them in.

The issue is, would journaling in and of itself be wrong?  No, but it is wrong if you start to think that if I do this then God is obligated to do something.  The means of grace is that God has promised, for instance, if we study His word, if we pray, if we fast in the correct sense, He will bless that.  That is in Scripture.  We can find that.  I can’t find service.  What exactly is that?  Does that mean the Christian doesn’t serve?  Of course not.  This is where the devil comes in and that is who is behind this.  He comes in and twists everything.

What Satan does David, and I have studied this for years, is he gets you locked up in a maze and a matrix of terminology so that two Christians are talking about two different things using the same words.  It has been a tactic he has used in the cults for years and it goes all the way back to Genesis 3 where Satan said to Eve, did God really say this?  The idea was to confuse her as to what He did say.

That is the tactic he is using in the evangelical community right now because young people are hungry for more of God.  That is a good thing.  I have a real heart for young people especially from coaching football for years.  I had a group that I took all the way from 7th grade through graduation and I worked with those kids and I watched them grow up and become young men.  I am still close to a lot of those guys.  It was a wonderful time in my life.  I was blessed that I could talk about Jesus right in the huddle and the school had no problem with that.  It was awesome.  I look at those kids and say what am I going to teach them?  I am not going to teach them things that are going to hurt them.  I am going to teach them how to be Christians.

The young man whose name is Ryan, I talk about leading to Christ, he probably has more wisdom than most elders twice his age; he is 21 now because he did a simple thing.  He prays, he reads the Bible and he does what it says.  He doesn’t do any of these contemplative practices and this guy is working with youth groups in his community.  He does sound for them and also teaches in a number of different churches simply because he met God within the means of grace.  That is what we want young people to do.

DAVID:  I think you also brought up a good point in that answer.  You said the intent of the unbiblical spiritual disciplines that go beyond what the Bible wants or intends, there actually is a good intention there.  They want to grow closer to God; they want to discipline themselves for the purpose of godliness but isn’t that just the way Satan operates?  He takes what God says and then he twists it and then it takes a critical thinking, biblical mind to understand that this is not what God intends because this is where it goes.  I think that was a good point.

Let’s go to Pennsylvania and Andy welcome to The Christian Worldview.   What is your question or comment for Ken Silva with regard to spiritual disciplines?

ANDY:  Thank you for taking my call.  I would like to know the dangers of emptying your mind with a discipline called Holo pono pono, a Hawaiian mantra.

DAVID:  Have you heard of that Ken?

KEN:  I have not heard of that specific Hawaiian version but it is the same idea of centering prayer where you are emptying your mind and you are going to “fill it” with whatever they think they’re getting.  The danger of that is Jesus clearly told us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.  If you are shutting your mind down to quiet what the mystics call the monkey mind because the mind is always thinking and it is going from topic to topic, if you are doing that, you are silencing a gift God gave you.  What it does, it shuts down critical reasoning skills.  David, you brought up a great point.  If you analyze these things logically, you can see through it.  But if you don’t and you try to look at these things with your heart and say what is the harm in emptying my mind and going down inside myself, I get a peaceful, easy feeling.  Yes, but what other things do you get from that?  Look at the fruit of this contemplative movement and it takes you right back to ecumenism and that the Roman Catholic Church is simply another version of the Christian church and it is not according to the reformers.

DAVID:  Let’s go next to Lubbock, Texas and Derek welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What is your question or comment for Ken Silva about some of these spiritual disciplines?

DEREK:  Thank you for taking my call.  I have a friend of mine who is orthodox.  They have a lot of fasting times and I am wondering if that is biblical?  He always mentions that it goes back to centuries ago.

KEN:  Fasting in and of itself is not wrong at all.  It is a means of grace.  It is something we set aside time and you can fast more than just food.  You can fast things that we might want to do.  You can say, Lord today I am not going to take a drive like I like to do, I am going to spend the time with You.  That is absolutely biblical and it is a good thing when you feel led to do that.

The problem comes in when you think you are going to put God as some obligation.  This is what pietism does.  What people don’t remember is that right after the reformation, late 1600s and early 1700s, the whole pietistic movement starts outside of Lutherans.  It is the same thing where people were hungry for more of just the intellectual discourse on what God’s word said which is what a lot of the Reformers were dealing with at the time.  People wanted more and they came up with a rebirth of pietism.  It has already been done.  What it does, it leads to people saying they are holier than others because I spend x amount of time in discipline and you don’t.  That is what it does.  I am going to call it exactly what it is; it is a neo-gnosticism.  It is a new version of, ‘well I am Richard Foster and David and Ken you really need to come to me to find out the real way to seek God and you need to do these disciplines.’ Do you see what it is?  We have to get these special gurus and that is what I call them.

In fact, some of my writing is pretty blunt and I am doing it for a reason.  We are on the playing field of ideas and I am using the imagery of what I learned coaching football.  Some guys on the football defense play middle linebacker, inside linebacker.   If you try to run the ball through the middle of the field, you run into these guys.  They are not real pleasant to run into.  That is my position, that is what I do.  I know the people I write about read what I write.  For whatever reason God blessed Apprising to the point where if I write about Doug Pagitt, he will call me or he will write an e-mail to me.  I know these guys.  So I write to get right to the point with them.  The point is, these guys are not doing something new, they are simply taking what Roman Catholic mystics like Thomas Keaton in the 70s and Thomas Merton in the 60s, they already taught this garbage and their fruit is they remained a slave to an organization that anathematized the gospel itself according to R.C. Sproul.

DAVID:   Christ rebuked the Pharisees for teaching a false gospel and false ways, He rebuked them sharply so I think there is room for that in this particular issue of unbiblical spiritual disciplines.

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DAVID:  We are speaking about spiritual disciplines today on The Christian Worldview, what’s biblical and what’s not.  We are looking at things like prayer and fasting and study and worship and some of the other things we do to draw near to God.  There is good intent there, that is not bad, that is good, but we need to make sure we are doing it in a way that is pleasing to God, that is honoring to Him, that doesn’t take us down a wrong path towards a mystical or subjective experience.  Ken, before I get back to more phone callers, let me just read a quote.  I believe this is from Richard Foster’s book, Celebration of Discipline, where Robert Weber, a professor of theology at Wheaton College summed up Foster’s impact.  He said, “Over the last two decades my own personal spiritual pilgrimage has taken me away from the propositional and rationalistic mindset that proclaim an intellectualized, proof-oriented faith toward a Christianity of practice and experience.”

That pretty much sums up what all this is about.  It goes towards this experiential, subjective faith.  Let me ask you the question, how should the subjective or experiential or emotional aspect operate within our faith.  We know it shouldn’t drive it completely like that professor is saying but how should it operate within our faith?

KEN:  A good example would be how I felt called initially into ministry.  I am reading 2 Timothy 4 and that is the Spirit of God through the Apostle Paul writing to a Pastor named Timothy and one of the things he tells him in verse 5 is do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.  I read that and go ok, that is what God wanted Timothy to do and then I began to feel subjectively, ‘I think God is calling me.’  As I began to study the Bible and pray and do what it says, 22 plus years later I am talking to David Wheaton on The Christian Worldview about the importance of making sure what we do is biblically based.  In other words, I experienced God there David except I did it through sola scriptura by looking at what the Scripture meant initially.  While if God called other people to ministry, I am sure He is going to call people too, and He called me.

The subjective problem you hit on, Robert Weber was the guy who starts a movement called the Ancient Future Faith.  That is what he goes on to do.  He is one of the guys who underlies what the Emerging Church later would be and guys like Rob Bell.  The most popular name in youth groups right now would Rob Bell.  Rob Bell is an Evangelical if I am a Mormon.  We are using the same Christian terms but they don’t mean the same thing.  This is Rob Bell from his sermon, I will say it again and again and again.  This is October of last year.  He says, “It is interesting how many traditions” (he is talking about religious traditions say Islam, Muslims, the Hindus and the Buddhists).  This is Bell again, “when you read the great enlightened ones meditation, centering prayer, reflection, in every tradition you find the mystics, the great ones always have a period of time of meditation.”  Most young people aren’t going to stop and realize what he just told you.  What he just told us was “the great enlightened ones” are who?  They mystics.  Where are these mystics?  In all traditions.  That is where they get the idea that God is working in other religions.  God isn’t working with the Sufi-Muslims.  God is not working with Hindus.  They are outside of relationship with Christ.  It doesn’t mean He isn’t drawing people from there.  These guys are masters at kicking out the expositors.  We don’t need the R.C. Sprouls and the Steven Lawsons.  Yes we do, they are great teachers.  I use their teachings myself.  Lawson has a great book about the foundation of grace, which I use a lot in my work.

They want to get rid of those guys – why?  So their subjective feelings can take over.  What do the subjective feelings always lead these guys to?  Social causes.  Are social causes in and of themselves wrong?  No, but we want to make sure what we are involved with is what God has called us to be involved with.

DAVID:  That is a great point Ken. Let’s go to Greensboro, North Carolina and Fail welcome to The Christian Worldview.   What is your question or comment for Ken Silva with regard to spiritual disciplines?

FAIL:  Hi Ken, my name is Fail like the Lord will never fail you.  My question is I hear about fasting and personally I don’t understand how abstaining from food or any other thing in your life makes you hear from God.  I don’t understand the connection.  Then I go back to the verse in the Bible where Jesus tells the Disciples, if you want to rebuke this type of demons, you have to fast and pray.  Then Jesus goes on and rebukes and the demon comes out but he didn’t fast.

KEN:  It is not so much that fasting makes us hear from God.  Sometimes not having food in the body does have a physiological beneficial effect.  That is just natural in the body itself.  Also, you are setting time aside for extra prayer when you are fasting as well so it is times of seeking God and God has promised to meet us when we approach Him through a means of grace like this.

DAVID:  People listening today may not have heard about these spiritual disciplines before or go in an unbiblical direction.  What are some of the obvious signs that they are coming into a person’s church?

KEN:  You are going to be hearing names like Thomas Merton, Theresa Vavala, Julian of Norwich, you will start hearing them talk in glowing terms of Richard Foster and other mystics because they are all mystics.  They are all people who are subjective as opposed to objective in their faith.  That is the main thing, you are going to see them talk about the “great mystics” or the great religious traditions or the inner Masters, I think that is what Foster calls them.

DAVID:  Ken I appreciate your time on the program today.  I want to thank you for all you are doing for explaining these things clearly to us.  It does take a sharp, biblical mind and we appreciate your lending your time and expertise to this important issue.  God Bless you Ken.

We do live in a changing and challenging Christian world that takes spiritual discernment to discern where these spiritual disciplines go, whether in a positive sense or an unbiblical sense but there is one thing you can count on, Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

How to Discipline Yourself for the Purpose of Godliness

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TRANSCRIPT

“…discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7).

“Discipline is what moderns need the most but want the least.”  So starts the Introduction to ““The Disciplined Life”, our Book Club selection for the past two months of June and July.

Let’s face it: knowing what to do in our Christian walk is usually not the problem; having the discipline to do the right thing is.  Whether it’s restraining our fleshly desires against moral impurity, indulgence, or gluttony, or prioritizing the important things in life over the urgent, discipline is the key character quality of those who represent Christ best.

Tune in this weekend to The Christian Worldview to find out why discipline is so important to the Christian life and how you can start developing it in greater measure to the glory of God.

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:      August 14, 2010
Host:      David Wheaton
Topic:     How to Discipline Yourself for the Purpose of Godliness

DAVID WHEATON: How to Discipline Yourself for the Purpose of Godliness.  That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and the only way to the Father in heaven and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

I hope you are ready for our topic today, How to Discipline Yourself for the Purpose of Godliness.  This is our book club selection for the months of June and July.   Here we are in the middle of August discussing.  We typically read a book for two months and then toward the end of that two-month period, we discuss the book or have the author on.  In this case, our book was called The Disciplined Life by Richard Taylor.  The copy I have was from 1962.  I really hope that you got a chance to read this book and you read all the book club selections.  We don’t do a lot of them over the year.  We just do about five or six books a year.  This little book is barely over 100 pages.  I think I read it a long time ago.  I saw some of my notes in there and I don’t even know when it was.  In re-reading portions of it, it is very powerful, very convicting and very practical.  If you are one of the people who read this book, we would like to hear from you today on The Christian Worldview.  I would like to know what you think about the book.  It is written from a Christian perspective but it is about how to discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  That is our topic for the day.

I don’t remember who said this, but I know my mother has said this to me several times in my life, “life is tons of discipline.”   I think the particular character quality of discipline is one that is not mentioned in the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.  It is not mentioned there but as I have read this book and have been doing some study on this topic of discipline it is the bedrock character quality that is so needed to grow into godliness or to be sanctified.  If you aren’t disciplined for the purpose of godliness, you won’t be sanctified in your Christian life.  I know we all look at ourselves and think I should be doing more, I could be this in my Christian walk, but I am not.  One of the hardest things to do in life is to change.  To change ourselves is one of the most overwhelming and difficult tasks that any of us face.  It is really hard to change habits that are engrained for a long period of time.

I am going to start out by reading a passage from 1 Timothy where this phrase “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness,” that is the verse of the week 1 Timothy 4:7.  I am going to read the verses surrounding that passage because it is Paul speaking to a younger man in the faith, Timothy.  Paul is telling Timothy all these different things to do in his Christian walk.  Here he is giving him all these admonitions, do this, stay away from that.  If Timothy didn’t have the discipline to be able to actually do the right things and restrain him from doing the wrong things, all these commands of Paul would be worthless.  It is the same thing in our lives today.  We see Scripture, we read all these passages of Scripture where it says do this positive thing and go evangelize, disciple, live your life in a holy manner and help the poor and serve at your church, all these positive commands to do the right thing.  Then there is the negative things, stay away from this, avoid immorality, don’t lie, all these different things we are to restrain our flesh from doing but if we don’t have discipline, we can’t do any of them.  That is why this particular topic of discipline is so important.

Here is the passage from 1 Timothy 4:6-16 ,In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following.  But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women.  On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.  It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance.  For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.  Prescribe and teach these things.  Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love faith and purity show yourself an example of those who believe.  Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.  Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you, which was bestowed on you through prophetic utterance with the laying on of hands by the presbytery.  Take pains with these things; be absorbed in them, so that your progress will be evident to all.  Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you.

Basically, Paul is giving the marching orders to Timothy saying that you need to grow up in your faith.  You need to read the word.  You need to be helping others around you but you are going to need to be very disciplined to do so.  That is really the goal of the show today, to try to figure out each of us today can be more disciplined, not just for the sake of discipline, but for the purpose of godliness so we can become more like Christ.  That is really the ultimate goal for the Christian.  Once you are saved, once you have come to a point of repentance of your sin, you put your faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior and have committed to follow Him as Lord, once you are regenerated, then the goal of the Christian life is, like it says in Romans 8, to become conformed to the image of Christ.  We are to become more like him.  To do that, we are going to need to develop disciplines in our life so we can become more like Christ.

There is an interesting little quote at the beginning of the book, it says this about Christians, “Christians too often get an emotional experience of sanctification which is totally unrelated in their thinking to any form of rugged, self-denial.  They are not apt to obtain genuine holiness of heart unless they see clearly in advance that holiness both implies and demands discipline in all of its forms and facets and at all levels of daily living.”  That is why it is so hard to be disciplined because it takes a lot of effort both mentally and physically.  It takes a rugged self-denial.  You have to say no to your flesh and that is very hard to do.  The flesh is very strong.  Changing your life habits is a very difficult thing to do, but God does not leave us without the power to be disciplined unto godliness as we will see in the program today.

We are not talking about discipline today in terms of discipline as in punishment for doing wrong just in case anyone was confused about that.  This is about ordering your life a certain way or doing what you ought to do or being driven by the mind or the will over the emotions.  This is what we are talking about today.  In a positive sense, this is to pursue the right actions in life.  Looking at it negatively, to restrain yourself from wrong or unproductive desires.  This is about whipping yourself into shape through the power of the Spirit so that you can pursue godliness in your life.

Another quote from the book that I thought was good on this particular topic of discipline and why it is so difficult says, “In truth we may say that the finest display of such discipline is not the spectacular achievement, but the permanent adjustment of living pattern.”  Again that is about how to change your life.  That is really what we are all after in the Christian life.  We are after becoming more conformed to Christ, changing our habits and patterns so we can be more godly.  This is a very important topic.

As I thought about this issue of discipline as it relates to Christians, I think there are many areas that we are undisciplined.  I just picked four general areas.  There are more than this for sure, but these are the four most obvious ones that came to my mind.  Then we are going to ask the question, how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness?

The first area that Christians lack discipline is in their daily interaction with God.  In other words, basic, fundamental things that we need to do to draw near to God.  It is a relationship after all.  Any relationship gets closer when you spend time together and when you communicate.  If our most important relationship is with God, we need to draw near to Him to communicate.  He has written His words to us.  He is communicating down to us already.  It is up to us now to draw near to Him and have close interaction and communication with Him through reading the word daily, prayer, hearing the word preached, just basic things like that.  If we are not doing those things, if we are not disciplined enough to do those things, it leads to weak, undiscerning believers in churches.  There won’t be evangelism, there won’t be discipleship, there won’t be personal sanctification, and there won’t be service towards those in the church and those outside the church.  This is so fundamental and I think this first area of lack of discipline for Christians has so many ramifications from not being in the word, not having your mind renewed daily like Romans 12:2 says, not being controlled by the Spirit that I couldn’t possibly think of them all, but the ramifications are incredibly profound.  That is the first area and I think it is the most important area; there are too many Christians out there and I have fallen into this in my Christian walk where you get busy and the workday starts over the word.  You get into the day and your mind hasn’t been renewed.  We are like sheep and sheep need to be led around.  If sheep aren’t reminded by the shepherd, which way they are supposed to go, they quickly forget and they get lost.  I have seen this in my own life where you do the urgent things of the day and not the really, really important thing of the day which is interacting with God through His word, through prayer, through hearing the word preached.

I know I have said this before but there is really no excuse for not growing in your Christian walk.  We have so many resources in American.  There are five Bibles in every home and all kinds of Christian study books to help you study the word.  On radio, there are many, many good pastors who preach every day, 26-minute sermons on the radio every day.  It is not too much to ask to discipline ourselves to say I need to interact with God today.  That is really the first one that I think is highly important that I see in my own life and lots of other Christian lives.  If we were much more disciplined in this area, this would make a big difference.

There are three more so I will give those to you after the break and then we will ask the question, how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness?

(break)

DAVID:  We are talking about how do discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness, a very important topic today here on The Christian Worldview.  One thing I totally overlooked and was reminded of here is the fact that as I read the fruit of the Spirit, I said, I don’t think that discipline is mentioned.  Let me just read it again and see what I overlooked.  But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and here is the last one, self-control.  There you have it right there; the last fruit of the Spirit, self-control, is basically the same thing as discipline.  It makes it into the big list.  Interestingly in the book, The Disciplined Life by Richard Taylor, this is what he says, “In a general sense, self-discipline is the ability to regulate conduct by principle and judgment rather than impulse, desire, high pressure or social custom.  It is basically the ability to subordinate.”  In other words, it is self-control, control over self-powered by the Holy Spirit.  That is what discipline is.

Before I give you the next three areas where I think many Christians lack discipline, I want to emphasize one thing about discipline.  Discipline itself is not godliness.  In other words, if you are a disciplined person that doesn’t make you godly.  There are lots of unregenerate folks out there who are really quite disciplined, who really pull themselves up by the bootstraps and are very disciplined in certain aspects of their life, not in all areas, but in certain areas.  I think a perfect example of this is Tiger Woods.  For so many years, we saw Tiger Woods as this incredibly disciplined golfer.  Up at five in the morning, out at the practice range at six, play his round and he was successful.  After he finished playing a round he would be back out there hitting balls on the practice range.  He was incredibly disciplined about this golf and his fitness and his diet and everything else.  Then, of course, we find out about another area of his life that is completely without self-control, not subjugated to the teachings of Scripture with the marital infidelity.

Discipline in and of itself does not mean you are going to be godly.  Waking up at six and going through your perfectly organized schedule all day doesn’t make you godly.  It says discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  It doesn’t say discipline is godliness, it says discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  You need to be disciplined to be godly.  It is a step on the way to godliness.  I think that is an important distinction to make.

The first major area where Christians lack discipline on godliness is daily interaction with God through reading the word, prayer, hearing the word preached.  We do lots of other things, but we often don’t discipline ourselves to do this most fundamental thing.  It is like getting dressed in the morning.  You have to put the word on to draw near to God to be able to know what He wants you to do and to be able to have the Spirit strengthen you to be able to do it.  It is so fundamental but there is a lot of lack of discipline in that area.   Sometimes when I speak to students about that, it is one of the things I talk about in University of Destruction, what is the game plan for being successful on campus?  It is about raising your spiritual GPA and the first one is interaction with God.  I always feel that this is so basic to say that we need to interact with God daily and they have probably heard that a million times in their life, but it doesn’t matter if you are not doing it.  If you are not disciplining yourself to do it, you are not doing it.  It needs to be done.

Number two is the area of health.  Whether it is eating, exercise or sleep, I think this is a major area where Christians do not exercise discipline.  From an eating standpoint, the Bible talks about gluttony.  You go into any church today and I know there are sometime pre-existing conditions that pre-dispose someone to be overweight and I am not talking about those kinds of things.  For Christians who eat too much and weigh more than they need and gain all kinds of weight, it just shows a complete lack of discipline to be totally honest, it really does.  I have felt it in my own life too.  I don’t have that pre-disposition to be overweight, but I can easily gain ten pounds if I am not disciplined in what I eat.  I just know that I have to exhibit some self-control and restrain the flesh.  I would love to have a gigantic dish of Hagen Das after dinner every night, but just a little bit is enough.  It starts with a little bit of restraint there.  I think this is a bigger area than many Christians want to admit, the issue of gluttony and eating too much and being grossly overweight is something that we really don’t talk about.  I think it is a significant that Christians lack discipline unto godliness.

The Bible talks about disciplining your body and all these types of things.  It is a clear sign as is exercise; it goes together.  The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and we should take care of that temple well.  It is not the most important thing.  Godliness is more important than physical exercise, but it is not to say it isn’t important as well.  It has some importance.

I think another one to do with health is sleep.  If we are not disciplined about sleep, when we get to bed, when we wake up, getting enough sleep so that we can be recharged and rested, I know if I don’t get enough sleep or am tired, you are so much less disciplined because of the fact that you are just tired.  Look at what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ was about to be betrayed in Matthew 28, Jesus said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death.  Remain here and keep watch with Me.”  He is telling them to do something positive, keep watch, stay awake, be alert.  He went a little beyond them and fell on His face and said, “ My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me, yet not as I will but as You will.  He came to the disciples and found them sleeping and said to Peter, “So you men could not keep watch for me for one hour?  Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation.  The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”  When you are tired, you get overcome by any of your basic human desires.  It is interesting how much discipline Christ is showing here .  He was just as tired as the disciples.  He had been up just as long as they had, all day into the middle of the night and they were falling asleep which Christ Himself is becoming stronger, more alert, praying and watchful.  This issue of health is a major area where Christians lack discipline.

Number three is the tongue.  Whether it is gossip, backbiting or slander, Christians, and I include myself in all of these, do not have good enough discipline or self control over their tongue.  This leads to disunity amongst the body, it leads to conflicts and it leads to all sorts of things.  You have read James 3, So also the tongue is a small part of the body yet it boasts of great things.  See how great a forest is set aflame by a small fire and the tongue is a fire, the very world of inequity.  The tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body and sets on fire the very course of our life and is set on fire by hell.  With it we bless our Lord and Father and with it we curse men who have been made in the likeness of God.  From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing my brethren.  These things ought not to be this way.  That is from James 3 and that is exactly the case.  We know from working in Christian circles and being in churches the amount of backbiting, the gossiping, the abusive words are not very different  from the world.  It may be done in a nicer way, but not very much different from the world.  A major area where Christians lack discipline is over their own tongue.

Number four is in the moral realm.  We have our interaction with God; not disciplined there.   Number two, our health, not disciplined enough there.  Number three, our tongue and number four, the moral area.  This has to do with issues of moral impurity or sexual immorality, pornography or any of these things.  If we are not disciplined and self-controlled and restrained in these areas, this leads directly to divorce, broken marriages, broken relationships, guilt, regret and spiritual impotence.  We look at the example of King David in Scripture from 2 Samuel 11.  This is supposedly a man after God’s own heart, the disciplined leader of the army of Israel yet in a moment in time showed a stunning lack of discipline.  2 Samuel 11:1, Then it happened in the spring, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, and they destroyed the sons of Ammon and besieged Rabbah.  But David stayed at Jerusalem.   Even in the first verse here it says, this is the time when all the kings go to battle every year, why isn’t David with them?  Why is he staying home and sending someone else to do his work?  There might be other reasons for that but I think that is one potential interpretation that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.  He wasn’t fulfilling his duty.

2 Samuel 11:2-3, Now when evening came David arose from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful in appearance.  So David sent and inquired about the woman.  And one said, “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”  We all know the rest of the story about how David lost his kingdom for a time and almost lost it for good.

Those are the four areas I see and I am sure there are more.  The question is what should Christians do to discipline themselves for the purpose of godliness?  How do we do it?

(break)

DAVID:  The listener question for today is how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness?  We know we are supposed to be disciplined.  It is one of the fruits of the Spirit, self-control; we know that.  We know discipline in and of itself doesn’t make us godly.  It is the path to godliness, the purpose; we discipline ourselves so we can be godly.  We know all that.  We know the major areas where Christians often exhibit a lack of discipline whether it is their daily interaction with God, their health, the tongue and the moral aspect.  There are more, I am sure but how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness?  This is a difficult thing to do.  Like it said in the book and we know in our own life, change is hard.  How do we become more disciplined?  It is like the New Year’s resolution.  People make them but they can’t keep them because they don’t have discipline.

I am going to go into a couple of things I wrote down that I think are important.  I thought a lot about this because there are certain things in my life that I look at and I know I want to change.  There is one thing recently.  I came from being a professional athlete and I was exercising all the time, six days a week.  To be honest, I got a little tired of it.  After so many years of doing it, you get tired of it.  I always had something I was training for so there was always a motivation.  I need to get ready for this particular tournament.  Now that I am not doing that full time any more and am working more in radio and writing and speaking, exercise has become something I have had to discipline myself to do.  I often go a couple of days without working out and I know I feel so much better when I do, but it is hard to make yourself do it.  My life has been so different the last nine or ten years as opposed as to what it was back in the days when I grew up playing tennis.  I have gone from this active, athletic lifestyle to one that is necessarily a little more sedentary.   When you are writing, preparing speeches and doing a radio program, you spend time at a desk.  That has been an area in my life that I have had to look at and say, how can I change.  It has been very difficult.  Even though I am relatively active, I know I could do better in this area.  There are other areas as well that I won’t go into.

The first thing I wrote down to answer the question of how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness starts with honestly examining ourselves against Scripture to see what needs to improve.  If you don’t know what needs to be changed, then you are not going to change.  You have to have some understanding that things aren’t as good as they should be in our lives.  I have heard a pastor that I respect say that the Christian life should start from a point of dissatisfaction.  We can be more like Christ.  To answer the question, the first point is to examine ourselves against Scripture to see what we need to be more disciplined in.

2 Timothy 2:15 says Be diligent to present yourself and approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.   We need to workman like about how we evaluate ourselves and what we need to change.  The first step in increasing our discipline for the purpose of godliness is identifying what needs to change.  What do we need to be more disciplined in?

I will go to one of our listeners in Tucson and Jamal welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What do you think are areas that Christians need to be more disciplined in and if so how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness?

JAMAL:  I believe our time is a big subject.  It is one of the biggest organizational tools we have on earth.  It talks about fasting.  Jesus fasts a lot throughout His ministry.  I think fasting will allow us to control our flesh desires and allow us to reflect back on the Spirit.  Like you said, we have to ground ourselves in the word so that fasting and pouring the word back into us is like we are taking away the power of our flesh and giving the word back the power in our lives.

DAVID:  Jamal, that is a great call and that is something I did not think of for the purposes of this show.  Time is a big issue where Christians are undisciplined.  I would say that is category number five.  Your point about fasting is critical as well.  This is certainly a forgotten discipline.  You see all over Scripture these times of fasting.  Not necessarily forty days, but just regular fasting has the effect of putting the fleshly desires in subjugation,  subordinating them to the spirit and the mind.  We have this natural desire every day to eat.  When we suppress that and say that no I am not going to eat, maybe fast for a meal or a full day or two days, this really puts the flesh in a position of not being in control.  Great point Jamal, thanks for that.

Let’s go next to Macon, Georgia and Jackie how do we increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness? Or what others areas do you see in our Christian walk that we are undisciplined?

JACKIE:  First of all, I was going to say disciple means the disciplined one.  I think it is important when it says we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.  I agree with the fasting and prayer but also more Scripture.  I desire to be more and more like Jesus so I would like to spend more and more time in the word so God can change me in the areas where I need more change.  I think also we are to be accountable to one another.  I have friends who say, Jackie, what about this in your life.  I really appreciate that because they are telling me things that sometimes I don’t see in my own life.  I think having prayer partners and people in our church that we can be accountable to and say how are you doing with the Lord this week.  I think that is important.

DAVID:  I think that is an interesting point about an accountability partner.  Two things on that; one is an accountability partner doesn’t necessarily help us restrain our flesh.  We are all experts on putting on one front and doing another on the inside.  It is not a fail-safe thing.  Too often Christians think of an accountability partner as the all-encompassing solution to something going wrong in their life; it is not.  On the other hand, you are right.  An accountability partner or someone you are close to can be very helpful.  Here is what I have often noticed.  Sometimes as Christians we are a little afraid, fearful of not necessarily confronting someone else, but just bringing something out in another’s life that may need to change because we will get the do not judge lest you be judged thrown back at us.  I think that has become a major hindrance to being involved in each other’s life.

JACKIE:  That is true because we have a lot of people in our churches that don’t even have Christ in their lives so a lot of times they are doing a lot of things that are wrong.  I think we should approach them, but never approach them unless God has shown us that is what we are to do.  First do a lot of praying and encourage them by being with them and saying, how are you doing with the Lord?  How do you feel like your walk is with the Lord?  Encourage them and hopefully they will come to know Christ.  If they are already a Christian and are doing a lot of things wrong, it is the Holy Spirit that is going to impress them to do what is right but if you have a brother or sister in Christ that loves them and is praying for them and encouraging them in love, that is a good thing.

DAVID:   Thank you for the call.  It is a good point.  I think if it is done with the right attitude and motive and the right tone, if someone responds to the wrong way, sometimes we can’t help that but we should certainly do it in a gentle way with means of restoration and correction.  Again the verse that has been brought up a couple times today from Romans 12:2, And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.  It is always interesting in this particular passage, the renewing of your mind.  One of the biggest things in being more disciplined for the purpose of godliness is that we feed the mind and the spirit.  We prioritize the mind and the spirit far more than the emotions.  I don’t feel like it is not an adult like response.  It is not a mature Christian response to not wanting to do something.  We go way too much on our emotions.  When we go on our emotions, that is what children do.  Being disciplined is like the difference between a child and an adult.  Children do what they want and go on their desires.   An adult should (most adults don’t in today’s culture) act in the basis of responsibility and duty, doing what they ought, not just what they want.

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DAVID:   We are talking today about how to discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  We are asking the question, how to increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness.  The first one I mentioned was to honestly examine ourselves against Scripture to see what needs to improve.  The second one is to start with simple, achievable things to develop more discipline.  In other words, simple things like going to bed on time to get more sleep, to be a little more orderly in your life, to have a better diet, to eat less, to be a little more punctual.  Just simple, basic things in how we order our life.  Start with achievable things and the basic things.  Try to make small gains in those other areas we mentioned.  We talked about interaction with God daily.  Don’t try to start reading an hour a day.  It is not going to happen that is too much of a life change too quickly.  Can you read one chapter of proverbs a day?  That will take you less than five minutes before you go to bed or before you wake up in the morning.  That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.  Can we hear one message from a pastor during the week between church?  You go to church on Sunday, sometime maybe on Wednesday, download a message or listen to the radio.  Pick a sound, biblical teacher and listen to one message a week.  That is not too much to ask.

Start small because when you have little, small successes and you start getting those engrained in your habits, then there is going to be a desire for more.   Just the opposite happens, when we get more undisciplined it is easier to be more undisciplined.  Have you ever noticed that?  It is when you get 10 or 15 pounds overweight, it is easy to say well one more ice cream bar is no big deal, I am already overweight.  It works both ways.  The momentum starts to gain going both directions.

Let’s go next to Cincinnati, Ohio and Terrance what do you have to say on this issue of discipline?

TERRANCE:   Actually, the funny part is you just said it.  I was just going to say small, early wins.  I think that all the things you mentioned are great for getting that balance in your life, especially your Christian life. I think that if someone hasn’t gotten all of those things in place, just trying to do too much, too fast wouldn’t be as effective or as long-lasting.  You summed it up in the last segment.

DAVID:  I must have read your mind, but thank you for the call Terrance.  I think it is true.  There are some practical things that we need to do here.  The whole expression, “let go and let God” that is not only unbiblical, it just doesn’t work.  There is a major aspect to needing the power of the Holy Spirit inside of us.  That is the reason why believers can change and often unbelievers can’t change.  That is the critical difference.  When you are saved, when you repent of your sin and come to Christ in faith, as a seal, God gives you His Holy Spirit to help you live a victorious, Christian life over sin and temptation, the flesh and the devil.  If you don’t have the Holy Spirit, it is really, really hard, if not impossible to change.  When you do have that Spirit, you can change.  Doing some of the small, little gains first is important.  Little small successes lead to more.

The third point on how to increase our discipline for the purpose of godliness is to understand yourself and operate from your mind and will over your emotions.  I already talked about this from Romans 12:2, feed the spirit, feed the mind.  The emotions are there but there to follow the mind and the will.  They are not to lead.  When you understand yourselves you are going to understand particular areas of your life that you need to show more discipline in.  Then you are going to be driven by your mind and your spirit and not so much your emotions.

The fourth way to increase your discipline for the purpose of godliness is to realize you can win the battle because of the Spirit within.  I already mentioned this.  Philippians 2 says So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

In other words, work out your salvation.  You do have responsibility, you do have duties to do, but it is God through His Spirit who is working inside of you both to give you the will and the ability to work for His good pleasure.  Feed the Spirit, feed the mind; that is how you are going to be able to have the will  to be able to change and to be more disciplined.

Those are my four points.  Let’s go to Augie in Tampa, Florida.  What is your comment on this issue of discipline?

AUGIE:  I feel that the way to increase your discipline would be if you were to walk in love, like God want us to walk in love, regardless of whether you are receiving love or not.  If you are walking in love, you will want to speak right to people and you will watch your tongue whether they are being mean to you or not.  When you are walking in love, you will watch your tongue.

DAVID:  It is a good point.  I think that is more of our motivation, the love motivation.  Why do we want to be more self-disciplined?  It is not just to be disciplined so we can think better about ourselves, it is really about becoming more godly and becoming more holy so we can interact with others in love.  Having the restraint to respond in love when those around us don’t.

Clifton, New Jersey and Joe welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What is your comment on discipline?

JOE:  I just wanted to say that discipline has a purposeful end.  I was in the Marine Corp and everything we did according to discipline had a purposeful end.   In other words, if we are to discipline our bodies with something we are eating it is to glorify God in our bodies.  The same thing, we are going to learn Scripture, practice Scripture and read Scripture we are doing that to have an end as to witness someone, to debate worldviews and just be more intelligible in the things of Christ.

DAVID:  Joe, that is a great point and that is what our verse of the day actually says, Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.  What higher purpose is that?  When you are godly, you will evangelize, you will disciple, and you will live a life of Christian service.  Discipline itself is not godliness but a regenerated person who is under control of the Spirit needs discipline to not only obey God, but to restrain his or her flesh.

You know we do live in a changing and challenging world everyone, a world where it is tough to be disciplined, but there is one thing you can trust in and can count on to do so, Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments

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TRANSCRIPT

“You shall appoint for yourself judges and officers in all your towns which the LORD your God is giving you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment” (Deuteronomy 16:18).

In November of 2008, the people of California voted to approve Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would establish marriage in that state to be only between one man and one woman.  This past Wednesday, after almost two years of legal challenges by same-sex marriage proponents, one federal judge (a homosexual appointed by President Bush) overturned the will and votes of seven million Californians by deciding the proposition was unconstitutional.

Shortly after this landmark decision, President Obama’s second appointee to the US Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, was confirmed by the US Senate for a lifetime seat on America’s highest court.  Not surprisingly, both of President Obama’s appointments to the Supreme Court are Constitutional deconstructionists.

We will ask two questions on The Christian Worldview this weekend: How will same-sex marriage impact this country and what happens to a country when its’ judges make unrighteous judgments?

Additional Resources:
Why the Proposition 8 Decision Matters (Al Mohler)
Judge being gay a nonissue during Prop. 8 trial

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  August 7, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic: When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments

DAVID WHEATON: When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments.  We will talk about the landmark verdict with Proposition 8 in California today here on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and the only way to the Father in heaven and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments.  That is certainly the case in what took place this last Wednesday out in California.  Remember back to the election in November, 2008.  The people of California voted to approve Proposition 8.  I know some of these things can get confusing.  There are so many different same sex marriages going on around the country, seemingly at the same time and it can get a little confusing in the courts.  You don’t know whether it is a law or whether it is not a law and what is changing.  It is hard to keep track of it all.

This particular case is really important.  Proposition 8 was a ballot initiative where the people of California back in November, 2008 were going to vote to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman in the state constitution of California.  Pro-traditional advocates put this initiative on the ballot and the people of California voted in favor of the proposition.  Marriage between one man and one woman as defined that way, was to be put into the state constitution of California.

Immediately after this happened, the other side, the side that supports same sex marriage erupted.  Even though the will of the people had been voted upon, they erupted.  There was vandalism and immediately legal challenges to not allow this past ballot measure to go through and they sued.  Interestingly enough, two very well known lawyers took the side of the same sex marriage advocates to say this Proposition 8, even though it passed by the people, was unconstitutional because it was discriminatory.  They weren’t going to let it actually let it go into law into the state constitution of California.  The two lawyers were Ted Olson and David Boyce.  If you think you have heard those names before, they were actually opponents in the legal challenge back in the year 2000 in the Bush vs. Gore presidential conflict when it went down to a recount.  Boyce represented Gore and Olson represented Bush.  Now they are on the same side trying to overturn this ballot issue, Proposition 8, out in California.

They won this week, on Wednesday, in a truly historic, landmark ruling.  The U.S. District Judge, a federal judge, a homosexual, appointed by George Herbert Walker Bush, President George W. Bush’s father, who was President between 1992 and 1996.  I want to read some of his comments, but before I do, I thought what I would do today in the program is actually read a couple passages of Scripture first to give some context.  In other words, you are going to be hearing some of the things, the reasoning, that this Judge Walker makes in his ruling declaring that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, discriminatory and the reason he believes it so.  In other words, one judge overruled the votes of 7 million people in California.  So 7 million people voted to pass this proposition and almost two years later, one judge overturns it.

I want to read a couple passages of Scripture to give context to this and then I will read his comments.  You can compare and contrast for yourself what kind of human reasoning this whole debate of same sex marriage has come down to.  The fact that it is not biblically informed, it is not truthfully informed any more, it is completely conformed by human reasoning.

Let’s start in Genesis 1:1,  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  God is the creator; God is the authority.  Genesis 1:26-28, Then God said, “let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”  God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

This is from Genesis 1, God is the authority, God is the creator.  He created two different genders, male and female and told them to propagate the earth through marriage, through procreation.  This is God’s intent from the very beginning.

Now let’s skip over in to Exodus 18:13-23.  This has to do with judges.  When Moses was leading the Jews out of Egypt they were somewhere in the wilderness and every day Moses was serving as judge over the people.  When they had a dispute amongst themselves, they would come to Moses and say, judge for us; tell us who is right and wrong in this particular case.  At this particular time, Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, was visiting him.  Jethro saw this and said, this is crazy, you are going to wear yourself out doing this.  You can’t do this because you are going to be exhausted trying to spend every day of your life judging between the people.  You need to hire some good men amongst you to be judges.  Here is the basis for having righteous judges and not those who make unrighteous judges making unrighteous judgments over the people.

It goes through the story of how Jethro was there and Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “The thing you are doing is not good.  You will surely wear out, both yourself and these people who are with you, for the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.  Now listen to me: I shall give you counsel, and God be with you.  You be the people’s representative before God, and you bring the disputes to God, then teach them the statutes and the laws, and make known to them the way in which they are to walk and the work they are to do.”
In other words, teach the people how to live according to righteousness.  Furthermore, you shall select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain; and you shall place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens.  Let them judge the people at all times; and let it be that every major dispute they will bring to you, but every minor dispute they themselves will judge.  In other words, it is almost like our country now, where we have the Supreme Court that would be like Moses back then, the highest court in the land.  For all the more minor ones, appoint righteous judges, those who love truth.

I want you to keep Genesis 1 in mind about God’s intent for creating male and female and the propagation of human kind.  Then keep Exodus 18 in mind for the importance of righteous judges.  Finally, let’s look at Romans 1 and look at how a society corrupts itself.  When God abandons a nation, what are some of the symptoms of that?  Romans 1:20, For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.  In other words, there is no excuse for not believing in God, as creator.  You just look at creation and immediately the response would be, someone created this.  Romans 1:21,  For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.  As I talk about this issue of Proposition 8 today, I want you to remember that verse and how these foolish hearts, very highly educated by the way, but with foolish hearts and dark hearts.  Romans 1:22-25, Professing to be wise, they become fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.  Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.  For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

In other words, they think it is more important to worship themselves and do what they want to do and disregard what God says is true.  Look at the result of this rejection of God, of believing the lie and having their foolish hearts be darkened.  Romans 1:26-27, For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their own desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.  And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filed with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of  God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Genesis 1, Exodus 18 and Romans 1, I want you to keep them in mind, keep the parameters of God’s creation, His intention for the gender, the male and female to propagate, the appointment of righteous judges.  In Romans 1 the wise people becoming foolish and promoting what is perverse.  Those are the things that need to be kept in mind as you hear what this judge said as to why he declared Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional.  Then the lies and the human reasoning and the arguments that are so readily accepted regarding this issue of same sex marriage and homosexuality in our culture today as in how would it hurt your marriage?  Or marriage is religious union with no place in secular government.  Or heterosexual marriage is in terrible shape, why don’t you focus on that?  Or why should two people who love each other be denied basic civil rights?  Or Jesus never said homosexuality was wrong.  All you have to do is read any of these articles regarding this case and read down into the listener comments and you will see some of these same illogical, faulty, human reasoning arguments.  We will answer every single one of those today on The Christian Worldview and answer the question, why will same sex marriage actually be the ruining force of this country?

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DAVID:  In the first segment, I read three different passages from Genesis, Exodus and Romans establishing  God’s intent for creating man and woman,  God’s intent for having righteous judges over the land, otherwise injustice and lies are propagated.  Romans 1 tells us what happens when man “believes the lie.”  Smart people become fools when they all believe the lie and it is all based on human reasoning.

I want you to contrast that to some of the things that have been said by Judge Walker.  By the way, he is a homosexual judge out in San Francisco.  You can see the article on TheChristianWorldview.com, The Biggest Open Secret according to SFGate.com is in the landmark trial over same sex marriage being heard in San Francisco is that the Federal Judge who will decide the case, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, is himself gay.  He was appointed by President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1989 and has never taken pains to disguise or advertise his orientation.  So just keep that in mind as well as you read his comments.

I will play a combination of his comments and also play some of the comments of the lawyer, David Boyce, who was trying to overturn this Proposition 8, working in concert trying to convince the judge that this proposition on the California state ballot was unconstitutional.  First fore Judge Walker’s comments in his decision, he wrote the following.  “The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding of gender rather than a change in marriage.  The exclusions of gays from marriage exist as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage.  That time has passed.”

You just heard what it says in Genesis 1.  This is exactly the opposite of what Scripture says, exactly the opposite.  There is not truth in that paragraph at all.  Now it may be his truth based on his own human reasoning, what he learned in college, I have no idea, but there is no basis in truth in that paragraph at all.  This is the person deciding on a landmark case, which will probably be the historic case that decides because now if states vote on whether they want to have traditional one man, one woman marriage defined in their constitution, this is the precedent case to have it overturned because it is going to be discriminatory.  You can’t enshrine discrimination into a state constitution.

Judge Walker went on to say, “Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts without reason a private, moral view that same sex couples are inferior to opposite sex couples.”  In other words, if you opposed same sex marriage this is your own private, moral view.   His view apparently is not private and moral, it is the correct view.  Again, you have to ask the obvious question, on what basis does he make this particular decision and ruling and why is he right?   Why is his moral view right?

Other comments that the judge made, “Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.”  That is his opinion, human reasoning.  “Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well adjusted.  Having both a male and a female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well adjusted.”  Back to Genesis 1, male and female propagation of humankind, he is saying something in complete contrast to that.  God’s intention is man, wife, raise children.  That is the ideal.   To say that it does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well adjusted is a flat out lie.

Going on he also said, “The gender of a child’s parent is not a factor in the child’s adjustment.  The sexual orientation of an individual does not determine whether that child can be a good parent.  Same sex couples are identical to opposite sex couples and the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions.”  In other words, a marriage is just as good with two men or two women as with one man and one woman.  Again, this is just flat out untrue, lie, rejecting what God has specifically stated in His word.

The last thing I will quote from him is this, “Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage.  Marriage under law is a union of equals.”  In other words, it may have been that way for all 6000 years of recorded human history but now we are so enlightened that we no better now.  All those people beforehand who thought marriage was just to between one man and one woman, they were just a bunch of regressive discriminators and bigots because they thought it should be that way.  That is basically what the judge is saying.

It wasn’t just the judge.  It was the lawyer, David Boyce who brought this case, along with Ted Olson before the State of California.  Listen to what he has to say in his human reasoning.  These are supposed to be smart people.  Romans 1 says, these people profess to be wise but they are fools and their foolish hearts are darkened.   Listen to the human reasoning in these sound bites from David Boyce, the lawyer advocating to have this Proposition 8 overturned in California.

DAVID BOYCE:  We said we would prove that depriving gay and lesbian couples of the right to marry seriously harmed them and harmed the children they were raising.  We said we would prove that depriving gay and lesbian couples of the right to marry had no redeeming social value, no contribution to heterosexual marriage, no legitimate state interest.  We proved all three of those things.  We proved them not only from our experts, who were the leading experts in the world but on cross-examination we proved it out of the mouths of the defendants own witnesses.

That is David Boyce, the lawyer in this particular case fighting for same sex marriage.  Depriving homosexuals, or gays and lesbians, to be able to marry.  Let’s be clear here; they are not deprived on being able to marry, just like heterosexuals are not deprived on whom they want to marry.  It is just that the law is you have to marry someone of age and of the opposite sex.  So homosexuals can marry, it is just they want to marry someone outside of our current societal standards and what history has said and what our laws say.  Do you understand the important point that needs to be made?  In other words, those who practice or call themselves homosexual  have a right to marry only in certain states, it has to be someone of a certain age and of the opposite sex.  Just like those who call themselves heterosexuals, we don’t have the right to marry unless someone is of the right age and of the opposite sex.  Everyone is limited in who they can marry.  This isn’t discriminatory towards homosexuals.  It is just that they want to be able to marry someone beyond that particular parameter.  Of course, that opens the door for marrying whoever you want, if three people want to be married, if you want to marry your sister, your daughter.  If you allow it to go beyond the one man, one woman relationship, there is no basis at all anymore for saying that marriage is to be between one man and one woman.

He went on to say, another fact of human reasoning, it is just all over the place, unbiblical human reasoning David Boyce talking about how actually gay marriage will actually strengthen all marriage.  You try to figure this out.

DAVID BOYCE:  Their witnesses ended up admitting that they had no evidence that permitting gay and lesbian marriage in any way harms the institution of marriage.  Indeed, on the contrary, as our witnesses demonstrated, permitting marriage equality strengthens all marriage and strengthens the stability of that relationship for everybody in this country.  The judge found those facts today.

Here is Albert Mohler and what he had to say in response to this huge, landmark decision.

ALBERT MOHLER:  Defenders of marriage as a heterosexual institution should resist the temptation to minimize the significance of this decision in California.  Even as the verdict is vigorously appealed, yesterday’s ruling is a huge win for the homosexual community and a significant step towards the full normalization of homosexuality within the culture.  Thousands of cases make their way through the federal courts each year.  Some are important, but only a few have lasting, legal significance.  Whatever happens on appeal, the decision handed down yesterday by Judge Vaughn Walker will reverberate for decades to come.  Yesterday a very important gavel fell on marriage.  The central institution of human civilization suffered a direct hit and its future hangs in the balance.

I will take it one step further and say that this particular issue, even more than abortion, will be the direct contributing factor to the downfall of this country.  Yes the economy is in bad shape.  Yes there are other things going wrong in the country, but when the fundamental unit of society, the family, is torn apart and something else is promoted that is inherently perverse by government, that is when God abandons a nation.

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DAVID:  When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments; that is the topic for the day here on The Christian Worldview.  We are talking about the after effects of this decision this past week in California, Proposition 8, where this one federal judge overturned the votes of 7 million Californians back in November, 2008, when they voted to have marriage defined as one man and one woman in the state constitution of California.  He overturned that and it will likely next go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  The pro-traditional marriage people will take it there.  It is a very liberal court and the judge’s decision will likely be upheld in that court and it will end up going to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Once again it comes down to worldview.  Everyone has a worldview and each person in that court, though they are not elected or nominated to that court, based on political affiliation, Republicans or Democrats, everyone comes with their own worldview.

By the way, just one day after this ruling, President Obama was able to get his second nominee to the Supreme Court through, that is Elana Kagan.  She is a very, very liberal justice of the court.  Here is something that I think is quite interesting.  There is not one protestant on the Supreme Court anymore.  This country was largely founded upon people who were, generally speaking, Protestants but there is not one Protestant on the highest court in the country.  I believe there are six Catholics and three Jews or seven Catholics and two Jews, but not one Protestant there bringing that particular type of worldview to court decisions.  That will come down and we will see how it turns out.  I am probably thinking it will be adjudicated next year or the year after.  I think it is very unclear what the decision will be.  I think it will be likely that the judge that made this decision will be upheld and they won’t be able to put it in the state constitution of California.  It is just my prediction.  I could be wrong on that, I don’t know the future.

Let’s be clear about one other thing.  When we talk about this type of issue as Christians, we are talking about the agenda here.  We are not talking about the people who are promoting this agenda.  In other words, I can’t stand the agenda because I know what it will do to the country, but the people themselves who promote the agenda, my prayer for them is that they can come to repentance in faith.  I don’t hate them at all.  I hate what they are trying to do, the agenda they are trying to push on this country.  I, as a citizen of this country, love this country, love the founding values of this country and this is going to change all that.  Again, we can really reject, refute and push back against the agenda and at the same time, knowing that the people there, their foolish hearts are darkened.  They are dead in their trespasses in sins.  What do you expect them to do?  They rebel against God because that is what is in their hearts, that is what you do.  Remember yourself before you came to a saving faith in Jesus Christ.  Your heart rebelled against God and didn’t want His precepts, His laws.  You rejected them.   Don’t be surprised when the sinful, fallen world acts like a sinful, fallen world.

We can separate the fact that push back, refute, dismiss and take down their faulty human reasoning arguments of their agenda and at the same time, still have it in our heart to not allow hate or anything else to go in our heart because they are sinners in need of saving faith just like everyone is a sinner in need of saving faith in Christ.

I want to give our listeners a chance to refute some of these human reasoning arguments that are constantly made and propagated and easily swallowed by our population.  How will gay marriage hurt your marriage?  What is the matter with you?  This is the “do what you want as long as it is not hurting anyone” morality argument.  How do you refute that one?  Or how about number two, marriage is a religious union with no place in secular government.  This is the “I don’t understand our country and the purpose of government” argument.  All of our 200 years of history where they have been trying to promote the family and have a stable society through that, marriage has not place.  We should just have civil unions.  Or number three, heterosexual marriage is in such terrible shambles, why are you focused on gay marriage?  Number four human reasoning argument is why should two people who love each other and are in a long-term, committed relationship be denied basic civil rights?  Have you ever heard that one before?  Number five, Jesus never said homosexuality or same sex marriage is wrong.  He never talked about it, so therefore it is not wrong.

How would you answer any one of those questions.  You can pick one or two for yourself and tell me how you would answer those particular questions from a biblical standpoint, from a non-reasoning standpoint.

Let me just answer that question I brought up earlier about why will same sex marriage ruin the country?  I think there are at least five reasons that this is a very bad sign for the country.  Let me play you a sound bite to give you some context from a message that John MacArthur gave on when God abandons a nation.

JOHN MACARTHUR:  So look at a society.  When you see a society that is pornographic, that is into sexual immorality, fornication, adultery as a way of life, as a dominant way of life, which is not only in existence but approved and exalted in every way in the media, you know the wrath of abandonment is in operation.  Then when a society also exalts homosexuality, lesbianism and male homosexuality or sodomy, you know that it is even sinking deeper.

So why will same sex marriage lead to the abandonment or maybe the country has already been abandoned; we don’t know.  America wasn’t perfect before this ruling, but this is a deeper form of depravity that society as a whole and government in particular is now going to be promoting if and when same sex marriage becomes the law of the land.  I think there are five reasons for this.  There are probably more than this, but I picked five.

Number one reason why same sex marriage will ruin the country is because it undermines the fundamental unit of our country, which is a biblical family with a father, a mother and children.  In other words, it legalizes and promotes other unions that do in fact, contrary to what the judge and David Boyce say, go away from the ideal child-rearing situation and thus harms society.  When you don’t have a mother and a father raising children in a home, that is a less than desired situation for how we should raise good children who then become good citizens.  You might say, what about all the broken homes and single parent homes?  That is not ideal either.  Anyone who is divorced would know that.  I am a single mom, and it would be great to have a wonderful father in my child’s life or vice versa.  It is the same for heterosexual marriage as well.  It is best to have a father and mother in the home as it says in Genesis 1.  That is why divorce is so bad as well because it breaks apart the intended one mother, one father situation for children.

The second reason why same sex marriage will ruin the country is because legalizing homosexuality normalizes what is inherently perverse and sinful.  You have often heard people say that you can’t legislate morality.  That is a completely false statement.  Laws against rape, theft and murder completely legislate morality.  Almost all laws legislate morality.  Just imagine for a second if rape weren’t illegal, if you didn’t legislate morality on that.  Do you think there would be more rapes if it weren’t against the law?   Governments codify what is moral all the time; they put it in laws all the time.  Our country once believed that homosexuality was wrong.  It was even in state law in Texas and probably many other states as well.  Now our government believes it is good and right.  Let’s not be confused here.  Government used to say that the ideal was marriage was between one man and one woman.  Now it says something different that homosexuality is just as good and right.  This has far-reaching effects on education, what will be taught in the schools, what will be described in the media, what will be shown in entertainment and what happens in our culture.  In other words, it is ok to be engaged in homosexual acts.  That is the fact of the result of when government puts this into law.  People will accept it; if it is not against the law, then it is ok.  The New York Times said themselves this past week, there are times when legal opinions help lead public opinions.  In other words, what is legal helps lead what the public does.  Very true.

Number three reason why same sex marriage will ruin the country.  It opens the door for other perverse unions like polygamy, brother-sister marriage, and a father daughter marriage.  Why should they be discriminated against?  Everyone says, oh that is ridiculous, it is not coming to that.  Who would have ever thought that in this country we would actually be debating this particular thing where two men could marry each other.  That doesn’t work; you can’t produce anything from that.  How did we ever get to this point?   On what basis could you say that one man couldn’t marry two women or two men couldn’t marry two women after this particular case?  There is no basis if it is just a matter of loving each other and you can’t be discriminatory, that opens the door for everything else.

Number four, it  paves the way for the persecution and criminalization for those who don’t accept homosexuality.  If you are a discriminator against these types of unions or this particular agenda, like these graduation programs recently where these students weren’t allowed to graduate because they didn’t affirm homosexuality’s being normative in their counseling programs.

There are four reasons.  The fifth is like John MacArthur said, it could result in God’s outright judgment upon this nation like Sodom and Gomorra.  Who knows?  God is patient but you just never know.

(break)

DAVID:  Here is the topic for the day if you just joined us; When Judges Make Unrighteous Judgments.  If you missed the first segment with the whole basis for why all this decision on Proposition 8 in California is totally based on a lie and human reasoning, go back and hear the first segment from Genesis 1, from Exodus 18 and from Romans 1.  Lets go quickly now to our callers as they refute some of the common, typical human reasoning arguments that go along with this issue of same sex marriage.  That is really the reason I am doing the program.  Yes we know homosexuality is wrong.  It is clear in the Bible but Christians need to be able to think critically and understand why these arguments are wrong.  Otherwise they sound good and they get accepted and they get into the church and that is how the church and Christian’s minds get changed.

Let’s go to Tim in Memphis, Tennessee.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview, what is your question or comment on this issue?

TIM:  Thank you David.  My comment is concerning Jesus never spoke about homosexual marriage but the fact is that He did speak about it although indirectly in Matthew 19.  I tuned in late so you may have already mentioned this, but Jesus said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be united firmly to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”  He didn’t say or if you have homosexual feelings, you can find a man to marry.  He left no room for that kind of ambiguity.  Now I say this as a person who has struggled with homosexual feelings my whole life but I am also a Christian.  What I think is going on here is really a slap in the face to God.  It is saying God, we are going to legislate You out of our social rules.  We are going to ignore You.  We are going to declare Your law is not binding upon us anymore.  That is the danger.  That is saying, God get out of our country.

DAVID:  You made an excellent point.  Christ does talk about it but even if He didn’t, the point of that argument is not a good one.  I have heard someone else say that Jesus never talked about same sex marriage therefore it must be right.  This is a complete misunderstanding of the inspiration of Scripture in that Jesus’ words in Scripture are no more inspired and no more the words of God than any of the other texts of Scripture.  It is an illogical argument because all of Scripture is God-breathed, whether Paul says something about homosexuality or the Old Testament or Genesis 1, it is all Scripture.  It is all authoritative in our lives.

That was my fifth point.  Let me just read one before we get to another caller.  Human reasoning argument number one, how will it hurt your marriage?  No one is saying it is going to hurt my marriage.  I am not saying that.  No one I know is saying it is going to hurt my marriage, that is why I am against it.  What I am saying is that it will hurt people; it will hurt children and thus will hurt our society.  Society is just made up of citizens and my family lives in this country.  We are going to have to partake in the educational system possibly, the media, the entertainment and it becomes normative.  It does actually indirectly affect my family.  We must live in this culture.

The second human reasoning argument is marriage is a religious union with no place in secular government.  That is a terrible argument.  Government has right and encourages in law in the tax codes what produces a stable and good society.  Think about pornography for a second, that is a moral issue.  Why doesn’t the government allow rampant pornography all day on TV in the network television shows?  Because they know that doesn’t enhance and create a better and stable society.  So it is the same issue with marriage.  They certainly have an interest in promoting unions, marriages that are going to produce a better and more stable society.

We have covered three of the five; how will it hurt your marriage?  Marriage is a religious union with no place in secular government.  There shouldn’t be marriage, just civil unions, people will say.

Number five, Tim brought up, Jesus never said homosexuality is wrong.  Well He did talk about what marriage should be and plus His words aren’t to be prioritized above any other inspired words of Scripture.

Let’s go to Nancy in Madison, New Jersey.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview, go ahead.

NANCY:  I think we are missing the bigger issue.  While I agree with absolutely everything you say and my argument will always stand on Scripture, if this judge had given an opinion to support the law, it would have been just as wrong.  The people voted and it should have been upheld because the people voted.   I think our founding fathers understood we would all not be Christian.  That is why we were given the vote state by state.

DAVID:  I think in some ways, this seems to be a democratic process that took place in California.  The people of California voted on a particular issue.  It seems to me that we have a representative republic. This should have been an issue that was decided by our representatives.  That is the way the founders intended it.  In some ways, maybe this should have never happened but since it did, for one judge to overturn 7 million citizens is truly breathtaking.  That is why democracies always fail because the people can be corrupt and make bad decisions or in this particular case, get one judge who disagrees and makes his own human reasoned argument and that is that.  It is over.

The third human reason argument is heterosexual marriage is in terrible shape.  Why don’t you focus on that?  This is such a stupid argument.  Bad examples among us are not the standard.  It is like Ted Haggard, focus on his marriage, the NAE guy who got into all the trouble with his marriage and homosexuality and he is the President of the National Association of Evangelicals.  He is not the standard for marriage.  Yes, he can focus on his own marriage and we would like to strengthen heterosexual marriage too.  There is no basis for saying that we shouldn’t focus on these other types of agendas that are coming our way now.

The fourth thing is why should two people who love each other be denied basic civil rights?  This is the you are a racist and a discriminator argument.  Homosexual behavior is not the same as race.  Homosexual behavior is a choice that people act upon.  Even if they could prove that you were born with homosexual attraction, that wouldn’t make acting on it right.  What if I said I was born with strong attractions to married women?  Would it be right if I acted on it?  Of course not.  Our sinful tendencies don’t legitimize us doing them.

These are typical false reasoned arguments.  This whole issue proves the point that we need to elect righteous judges in this country.  That is why Christians need to take seriously the privilege to vote whether it is for President or for judges.  It also helps us to focus on having good marriages ourselves and raising strong families ourselves.  It is an opportunity to have a strong witness for Christ in this declining culture.  There is the hope.  Do that rather than focus on the bad examples.

Christian, we live in a changing and challenging world, but there is one thing we can always count on and trust in, Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

What The Great Commission Means For You

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:48 — 8.7MB)

TRANSCRIPT

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Last week on The Christian Worldview Radio Program, we focused on how Christians should THINK in the midst of all the bad news with regards to the direction of our government, the debasement of our culture, and the denigration of Christianity in the public square.

To maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of the bad news, you must “set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2).  When we focus on God and His Word, His promises, His Son, we will have a peace in the midst of earthly trials that passes all understanding.

But God calls His followers not just to THINK, but to DO something in the midst of this sinful, fallen world.  In some of Jesus’ last words to His disciples on earth, He commands them to take part in God’s redemptive plan — to make disciples, to baptize them, to teach them His commands.

This is known as the Great Commission.  This weekend on The Christian Worldview, we will discuss how every Christian should be taking part in it.

Additional Resources:
Make Disciples – by Dick Johnson

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  July 31, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic:  What the Great Commission Means For You and For Me

DAVID WHEATON: What the Great Commission Means For You and For Me.  That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

What the Great Commission means for you; why am I bringing this up?  Last week on The Christian Worldview we focused on how Christians should think in the midst of all the bad news going on around us.  We talked about how the government is becoming much more socialistic, interventionist in nature in our lives taking away freedoms that we have enjoyed in this country for a long time, taking over health care, the financial sectors, all different kinds of things we have discussed in the past on this program.  I won’t go into all of them today but if you have listened to the program at all you know some of the things that are going on in our government that is very troubling for Christians.

Not only the direction of government, but the debasement of our culture as well.  We look around us and think that the culture whether it is the media, the entertainment industry or the educational system or wherever, the culture of immorality is being promoted in this society now.  It is depressing and discouraging for Christians because we have to live here and we are sinners too, but we are trying to raise our sons and daughters a different way, we are trying to live different lives, yet it is everywhere.   The culture of pornography and everything comes at us like a giant wave.

If it is not the direction of government, if it is not the debasement of our culture, then it is just the very denigration of Christian freedoms themselves and the church’s seemingly weakness in the midst of this.  Just this week there were a couple different stories that came out.  You probably heard about this story from Augusta State University and there was a similar one at Eastern Michigan University as well.  The Alliance Defense Fund, which is a non-profit organization that takes up legal cases when Christians have their constitutional rights infringed upon.  This is from Salem Communications, “Christian student told she must accept homosexuality to graduate.  Jennifer Keaton is suing Augusta State University.  The remediation plan according to court documents included attending three workshops on diversity, a monthly two age reflection on what she has learned from research into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender counseling issues and increased exposure to gay populations.  The latter action came with a suggestion that she attend Augusta’s Gay Pride parade.”

In other words, you have this girl who is in the counseling program at Augusta State University and she is not going to be allowed to graduate because of her Christian beliefs on homosexuality because that is not acceptable any more.  She is either going to be kicked out or go to “remediation.”  She must learn a few things because she is living back in the 1500s or something.  These kinds of things are popping up more and more I am noticing all the time.  As the secularists in this country get greater in number, they want their worldview to be prominent.  If you don’t agree with them, you are out.

So when Christians see the direction of the government, the debasement of our culture and with stories like this, the denigration of Christian freedoms in America, they get depressed.  It happens to me as well too.  We know what a great country this country has been, not perfect, we all know that.  No country has ever been perfect.  As long as there is sin nature in the country, it is never going to be perfect.  We have been a very good nation relatively speaking.  The propagation of the gospel and Christian freedoms has been the closest government to what the Bible would want in a society.  Of course, a theocracy where Christ rules is the best.  In exchange for that, this has been an amazing American experiment.  We see this experiment starting to fail before our eyes and it is depressing and discouraging for Christians.

Last week we talked about how to maintain a biblical perspective, how to think in the midst of all of this bad news.  In other words, we said that you must first of all expect it because sinful people do sinful things.  We shouldn’t be surprised.  We should be really surprised when sinful people actually follow the word of God.  It is just unlikely and that should surprise us, not what is going on today.   So don’t be shocked and surprised.

Number two; make sure you are seeking those things above.  It says in Colossians 3, set your mind on the things above.  Dial it in to things of God, not on things that are on earth.  We focus on God; we focus on getting into His word.  When we read His promises, when we focus on His Son Jesus Christ, we will have a peace even in the midst of the difficult earthly trials.  It is a peace that passes all understanding.  We shouldn’t have a lot of peace when all of this is going on against us, when there is persecution against us but God does give us His peace through His Spirit, His word and trusting in the promises He gives us in Scripture.

Maintaining a biblical perspective in the midst of a sinful world goes beyond just thinking.  God calls His followers to not just think a certain way, it is good to do that, but he also calls us to do something in the midst of this sinful, fallen world.  In some of Christ’s last words to His disciples on earth, He commands them, not just suggests or encourages them; He actually commands them to take part in God’s overarching redemptive plan for mankind.  This is what is known as The Great Commission.  In some ways the Great Commission, found at the end of Matthew 28, has become the great omission for Christians today.  We get so focused on other things like social justice and creation care.  I saw an article from Christianity Today that said creation care needs to be a top priority for Christians.  I am thinking what really needs to be the top priority is The Great Commission.

One of the reasons I am doing this particular topic is that recently I have heard three different messages from pastors on this particular topic.  After you have heard it three times you think, maybe I should be thinking more critically about this and how this applies to my own life and maybe we should do a radio topic on it.  Dick Johnson, our Sunday School teacher at the church I go to in Minneapolis, gave a message on this particular topic a couple of weeks ago.  I heard one of R.C. Sproul’s broadcasts one day on this topic.  We were recently on a little road trip and we heard a Steve Lawson message on this topic of The Great Commission so while putting this all together, God has something in here that He wants me to know.  That is why I am doing it.  It has been so much in my consciousness recently.

You think about the fact that the final words of anyone are really important and usually quite profound.  If someone is on their deathbed, they may gather their family around and say some of the most profound, important and meaningful things that they have said in their whole lives.  It is the same thing with Christ here as He gives The Great Commission.  This is the marching order for believers.   In other words, He is giving us the mission He wants for us now that He is leaving the earth.  This is really important if you think about it.  He is on a mountain in Galilee.  He has already been crucified.  He has His disciples gathered around Him and He is going to be ascending into Heaven just days later.  This is the final speech, if you will.  Here is what I want you to do because I am leaving.  If you look at the context of this, this is profoundly important for us to be able to understand, not just what He wants us to think, but what He wants us to do.  I want you to think biblically but now I want you to live accordingly.  What does that mean?

Here is what He says in the very last verses of the Gospel of Matthew.  They are up in this mountain in Galilee.  It is after the crucifixion and shortly before the ascension.  Here is what He says in Matthew 28:16-20, But the eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had designated.  And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some were doubtful.  And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been give to Me in heaven and on earth.  Go there fore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

That right there is The Great Commission.  You probably have heard about it before, but if you didn’t know what it was, it is found in Matthew 28:16-20.  The question I have for today is why has this Great Commission become the great omission amongst us?  I include myself in this.  Why isn’t this the burning mission and purpose of our lives?   Instead of getting distracted by all these other things that can take place in our lives but this should be on the frontal lobe of our brain all the time, The Great Commission, the last words of Christ.  Why has the Great Commission become the great omission and what are some ways that Joe Average, individual Christian can pursue The Great Commission?   I say it that way because often we look to the big names, the celebrity Christians, if you will, those who have big churches and have big programs and are on radio and TV to do The Great Commission and we sit back and watch.  My question is what are some practical ways you and I can pursue this Great Commission?

The topic is What does the Great Commission mean for you and think there are six things I want to go over.  Verse 17 says, when they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some were doubtful.  Christ tells us in advance here what is going to be the response to pursuing The Great Commission.  Even before He tells us what it is, He tells us what the response is going to be.  They worshiped Him; some were doubtful.  In other words, when you go after and pursue The Great Commission and spread the good news of Jesus Christ, some are going to believe and some are going to doubt.  There is not going to be 100% universal acceptance and agreement and belief in worship in what you are saying.  Some believe, some doubt, it is always the case when we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

(break)

DAVID:  What does The Great Commission mean for you and me?  I think there are six things that I pulled out of this.  There are probably many more applications but I picked out six for purposes of today’s program.  Honestly as I was thinking about this during the break, I can’t really think of a more important topic than to know how we should be applying The Great Commission.  Christ is leaving the earth and here is what I want you to do.  We should listen very, very closely to this and then figure out ways that we can act on it.  We can talk about politics, we can talk about the culture, we can talk about the denigration of Christian freedoms, we can talk about all of these things but  it seems to me that there is nothing more important than understanding the mission statement if you will, that Jesus Christ is giving to His followers before He leaves the earth.

The first thing I think it means is that when you pursue The Great Commission, some are going to believe and some are going to doubt.  That is number one, so don’t have unrealistic expectations.

Number two comes from verses 18 and 19 in Matthew 28.  And Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been give to Me in heaven and on earth.  Go there fore . . .  Now the “all authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth,” when I was thinking about that, I thought, who says that?  All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.  In other words, I am the King of the universe.  This goes back to the C.S. Lewis statement that the person who is making the claim that all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth; you are either a complete lunatic to be dismissed or you are a liar.  If you are not one of those two and it is actually true, then you are Lord and this changes everything.  You can’t read this sentence and say, Jesus said all authority has been given to me on heaven and on earth and that is nice so now I am going to go on with my life.  You can’t do that because if He is who He says that He is, that He is the creator of life, He is the sustainer of life, He is the Savior of the world, He is the judge of the world.  If this is true that He has all authority, then the other things that He says about Himself are true as well and that should affect our lives immediately knowing that we need to be right with the King of the universe.  Otherwise, He is going to be our judge some day.  It is like the verse that says every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.  We are all going to bow.  We can either bow willingly now while we are alive on earth or we will bow unwillingly someday when He stands over us as judge.

That is an amazing statement that all authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.  The next verse,  go make disciples of all the nations.  This is easily confused for, well that is for those professional Christians.  That is for those foreign missionaries.  They are supposed to go over and evangelize and prosthelytize people way over there in the deep parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, thousands of miles away.  I think that is actually what it is partly about.  We saw Paul and Peter and the Apostles going around the area of  the Mediterranean back in the first century and that is what they were doing.  They were taking the gospel to the lands, but this is also the word and all three messages I heard said the same thing, go  really means as you go or as you are going, in other words, in the course of your life.  This has application to you and me as well.  If you are a believer, this is for you.  Not to go necessarily to some place overseas, although it may, but it certainly means as you are going in the daily course of your life; as you are going off to work, as you are going off to school, as you are in your home, as you go.

Then it goes into the third point, what does The Great Commission mean for you and me?  It means that we are at first to make disciples of all the nations.  This is the first of the three parts of The Great Commission, to make disciples of all the nations.  If you know Scripture, you will know that He is not saying that He expects us to be the one that actually makes the disciples.  God makes the disciples and He uses us, His own disciples to make others.  In other words, we have the privilege of doing so.  Success is not our duty.  He is responsible for the conversions.  We are responsible for following the orders.  We know this because in Acts 13 when Paul and Barnabus were in Antioch it says, for so the Lord has commanded us.  I have places you as a light for the gentiles that you may bring salvation to the end of the earth.  When the gentiles heard the gospel, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord and as many as had been appointed to eternal life, believed.  So don’t put pressure on yourselves to make disciples of all the nations, I have to convert 1000 people.  No, just be faithful to be used by God to go and let Him make the disciples.  A small variation there but an important one.

Those are the first three points.  Some are going to doubt and some are going to believe.  Number two, realize that Jesus is King and Lord of the universe and this is a command for every Christian, The Great Commission.  Number three, as we go and make disciples, we need to know how do we actually do that?  How do we actually communicate the gospel in a correct way so people will want to come to Christ?  This is the key question here.  How do we make disciples?

I think it is pretty simple.  We tell them the gospel or the good news but that has become a general statement nowadays.  It is a cliché; tell them the gospel.  What exactly is the gospel?  How can we clearly communicate it to someone?  One thing that I have been thinking about recently that I think communicates the gospel really well  and this is not a new concept, but I really like the framework of the creation, fall, redemption, and restoration framework for Scripture.  In other words, you have the original creation back in Genesis where God establishes His authority.  He is the Creator of heaven and earth, verse 1.  It establishes His perfection and the perfection of creation.  We see His relationship with Adam and Eve in the garden before the fall.  So there is this perfect created order and this was God’s original intention for mankind.

This is a good way to understand Scripture; creation, fall and right now all God is doing in the world is about redeeming people out of this sinful world and to Himself and eventually some day there will be restoration of the heavens and the earth.  So the creation part of it is good because it gives people an idea or understanding of why they are here.  They don’t just see themselves as some sort of generic, random molecule floating around.  No, God actually created you for a purpose.  He wants to relate to you.  So communicating that first is good.  Some people like to communicate right that you are a sinner and I don’t have any problem with that.  There are different strokes for different folks.  I don’t disagree with that but I think talking about creation and why you were created and the purpose for which God created you and the intended purpose of creation that it was created to be perfect and for God to relate to mankind and to be in fellowship with Him and to serve Him.  This gives answers that big question in life, why am I here?

You look in Psalm 139 and it says, For Thou didst form my inward parts.  Thou didst weave me in my mother’s womb.  I will give thanks to Thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are Thy works and my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from Thee when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.  Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance and in Thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me when as yet there were not one of them.

What this shows for someone who doesn’t know Christ is that God formed me, he created me in my mother’s womb, specifically?  I am not just a random accident and the product of the evolutionary food chain?  The creation aspect of this framework gives someone purpose and understanding that they are individually created in the likeness of God.  You see in Genesis 1 towards the end that God created everything in six days and He made man in His image and everything was very good.  That is the creation aspect.

Then you go on to the next part of that framework, the fall.  This begins to get into the reason that we need the gospel.  This shows the bad news that man was given a choice, a test in the garden and he fell.  Therefore, that curse, that tendency has been passed on to every single human being since then.  That is the explanation for why there are bad things, why do people kill each other, why is there greed, why is there corruption, why is there violence?  This explains it; the fall.  People fell.  God gave them free will and man chose badly and continues to choose sinfully to this day and there will be consequences for those choices.  We can’t offend the just Judge of the universe and not be judged ourselves.

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DAVID:  From clarity to certainty to conviction, that is really what we are after today as we talk about what The Great Commission means for you and for me.  We try to be clear about what it is, clarity; to become so clear in that belief that we are certain about it and therefore we live with conviction that it should be our mission.  We shouldn’t keep it to ourselves and shuffle around in our lives and not strive with all our effort to fulfill The Great Commission.   This is really a part two from last week.  Last week was how to think in the world in the midst of all the bad news.  This week is about what to do in the world in the midst of a sinful, fallen world.

The listener question for today is this; why has The Great Commission from Matthew 28 become the great omission and what are some practical ways that Joe Average individual Christian can pursue The Great Commission?  I say that because some times, as I said earlier, we look to the professional Christians to do this kind of thing.  What are some practical ways, we as individual Christians can pursue it?

I have gone over three things, what this means for you and me to apply or pursue the Great Commission.  Number one, it means that some are going to believe and some are going to doubt.  We are not going to be universally accepted or successful in this.  The whole world is not going to be converted.  The idea that Christians are going to take dominion and the whole world is going to be converted is nowhere in Scripture at least while Christ is not ruling on this earth.

Number two, The Great Commission means that it is for everyone, not just for missionaries going overseas.   Number three, it means that we are to make disciples of all the nations.  How do we do that?   I was explaining the creation, fall, redemption and restoration framework for understanding.  This is a good way to actually understand the world and try to explain this to someone is really quite easy.  You can tell someone your testimony that is fine.   You can sit down and go over the plan of salvation, maybe the four spiritual laws.  That is very good too.  You can give them a tract, you can give them a book.  People have different personalities.  Those are all fine.  Pray for different opportunities to do so.

I think it is helpful to understand this creation, fall, redemption, restoration framework because it gives people an idea of the greater purpose of life.  You get the creation part that God created me individually.  He wants humans to relate to Him.  I get that.  Then there is the fall part where we have willfully disobeyed and rebelled and therefore we stand in judgment under God.  Acts 17, Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is declaring to all people everywhere that they should repent because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man who He hap appointed having furnished proof to all men by raising Christ from the dead.

In other words, man has fallen, man is sinful, God is calling you to repent because He has fixed a day when He is going to judge the world in righteousness.  There is the bad news.  Creation, fall, which is the bad news and then you have redemption, which is the good news.  This is the news that this is what God is doing in the world right now.  That is what His story is, God’s redemptive plan on calling sinners out of the world unto Himself.  This is the good news that God is buying back.  That is what redemption means.  You buy back something.  He is buying back the sinners who were in the slave market of sin.  He is paying the purchase price to Himself for their sin.  He is settling the sentence by the sacrifice of His own Son, paying the price that sinners deserve to pay for their own sin.  It is that sway, that incredible swap from 2 Corinthians 5 in that Christ takes our sin on His shoulders and pays the price for it and He gives us His righteousness so we may be right with God.  He pays for our sins and deals with the offenses we have against God.  At the same time He also gives us His righteousness so we can live a perfect life in eternity with Him in heaven.  That is the redemptive plan.   It is not based on our works of course.  Titus 3, He saved us not on the basis of deeds we have done in righteousness but according to His mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior so that being justified by His grace, we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

We don’t bring anything to the table.  God’s terms are I save you, you bring nothing.  If you bring something, you corrupt the gift and then it is not true salvation.

That is what it means to make disciples.  Tell them about creation; tell them about the fall; tell them about the good news that Jesus Christ is redeeming people out of the world.

The question is why has The Great Commission become the great omission and what are some practical ways we can apply this in our own lives?

Let’s go to Earl in Columbus, Ohio.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What does The Great Commission mean for you and for me?

EARL:  In today’s society it has been so ingrained that Christians are weird; Christians are odd.  So many shy away from The Great Commission because they are afraid of being ostracized or condemned themselves by society.  The thing that gets me is when I go out there and I find myself embarrassed when one of my coworkers who I assumed was not a Christian teaches me a few things.   An example would be the first time I heard that if suddenly Christianity were to become illegal and in today’s society I don’t know how far we are from that, if you were accused of a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you.  For me the fear is even beginning a conversation.  What I have found helpful is when someone who I don’t know, haven’t spoken to before, I tell them I celebrate March 16.  They say, what is March 16 and I say, Saint John Day 3:16, For God so loved the world, something like that, simple.  I actually had a lady in our office come up and ask me one day if I was a Christian and I said yes, why do you ask?  I drive a company van and she took it in for an oil change and the radio was set to a Christian station.  Sometimes the little things we do have such a great impact on people.

DAVID:  You are right.  Let me just give one comment to that.  As I said earlier in that verse from Acts, as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.  In other words, God is the one who is making the disciples.  Just being faithful with the opportunities and saying a word or testimony or anything you can do is helpful if God is working in that person’s heart.  I had an e-mail correspondence this week with a Jewish friend of mine and he wrote me a letter about the difficulty of a health issue in his family and he was very open about thinking about faith.  I e-mailed him back and I knew that there has been some trust developed over the years and I talked about some of these things.  I didn’t lay out the four steps of the plan of salvation but it was enough to prick his conscience for sure.  Interesting, he e-mailed me back and I could tell from his e-mail that he had a little bit of a joke saying I will think about the faith as he is doing whatever.  I knew God is working on is heart but he is not quite there yet.  He is not quite ready as a Jewish man who is a very intelligent guy.  He has been to one of the best schools and so forth but  he thinks faith is something you believe in and there is no basis for it.  Even if it is not true, you just believe it, just faith.  He is not quite there yet.

The point is that God is certainly working on his heart.  I couldn’t believe the e-mail when it came in and the things he was saying.  Just trust in the fact that God is working on people’s hearts despite the fact that sometimes we don’t think so.

Let’s go next to Hickory, North Carolina and Dawn.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What do you think are the practical ways we can apply The Great Commission to our lives?

DAWN:  After what I have been through the last two years, one of the older preachers that I have had the precious opportunity to sit under said he had heard another older preacher say to him, that made it stick, was live it and if necessary, use words.

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DAVID:   Today we are talking about what The Great Commission means for you.  You heard Dawn from North Carolina talking about the fact that there is a saying that says, live your Christian lives and use words, if necessary.  There is some truth to that from a standpoint that our walk has to match our talk and vice versa.  In other words, you can’t just have one or the other.  The gospel was spread through communication, by the testimonies and words of the Apostles and Christ Himself.  It isn’t just living the life and people are going to come up to you and ask you.  It may happen, I am not saying it won’t but you have to live a sanctified walk and then there has to be talk as well.  It is life and lips.  It is walk and talk.  It is both.

Let’s go next to Katy in Hudson, Wisconsin.  Katy, welcome to The Christian Worldview. Why do you think The Great Commission has become the great omission?

KATY:  I don’t know the whole answer as to why Christians don’t evangelize as much but I don’t know if it has to go along with the whole seeker sensitive movement or just the watered down gospel that we have been preaching in our churches.  What I wanted to touch on, early in my Christian walk my brother taught me to memorize 1 Peter 3:15 which tells us always be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within us.  There are so many apologetic websites and books out there that are just wonderful that give us some insights to other faiths that are out there.  They are not a substitute for a regular Bible reading but to equip ourselves.  In the summertime, there are a lot of people of other faiths that come to my door.  Right by my door I have tracts, I have my testimony so when they come to try to persuade me to look at their faith, I am ready to equip them with what I believe.

DAVID:  That is great Katy.  You are exactly right.  There is no excuse for not being settled in your faith and knowing what the gospel is and knowing how to share your faith and to pursue The Great Commission.  We have so many resources in this country.  It is not a lack of resources.  It is wading through the ones that are not worth it or are just downright bad.  That is the hard part.  It is not a lack of resources.  It is a lack of discipline or motivation on our part that we don’t think it is important enough to fulfill The Great Commission so we don’t know what to say when we get into a situation with a co-worker or a friend.  We don’t know how to share the gospel.  That is really bad.  It is not for a lack of resources.  There are so many resources that it is just bubbling over in a sense.  Finding the good ones that are doctrinally sound is probably the hardest part.

Let’s go to Tampa, Florida and Ralph.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What is your comment on this issue of The Great Commission?

RALPH:  I am not a great speaker but my problem is it says in the Scriptures that you have to be in the world, not of the world.  That is number one.  Number two is we tend to shy away from intruding in on other people’s faiths.   I think that what we ought to do is to learn how to have a passion.  If we could have a passion for talking to someone, that would help.

DAVID:   That is a great point Ralph.  If you feel a fear of talking to people, and I do myself, especially to those who have known you the longest and are your friends, unsaved friends.  Those are often the hardest ones to talk to because they know you really well, you have established a relationship with them over a long period of time and yet they have been able to co-exist with you in some sense and not share the same faith.  That could be difficult because there is a fear.  Everything we do is based on the motivation of love or fear.  There is a fear within us that we could lose this relationship.  We are going to offend someone we have known for a long time.  I think the main thing is to start praying for that person’s heart, that God will start working in that person’s heart because it is like the parable of the soils.  It is all about the heart that God plows up.  He uses us to communicate the gospel and it is a great privilege.  Again, we are not responsible for converting anyone.  We are just responsible to obey God in pursuing The Great Commission.

I have gone over three points and I want to quickly go over the last three.  We have gone over that you are not going to be universally successful; some are going  to believe and some are going to doubt.  That is number one.  Number two, this is a non-optional command.  It is not just for foreign missionaries.  Number three, to make disciples.  That is what we spent most of the show going over today; creation, fall, redemption and restoration.   I love that framework.

Number four, says baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Notice how baptism does not come before the conversion part.  This is something that is so easily confused; if you are baptized, you are saved.  Sprinkling a baby really only gets them wet.  They don’t have a conscious will to understand they are a sinner in need of repentance.  Baptism is a non-optional command.  After someone is saved, we should be encouraging them to be baptized right away to identify with Christ.

Number five, teach them to observe all that I commanded you.  This is also important as well that we are not just evangelists.  That is wonderful to be an evangelist and encourage someone to be baptized, but this is where it gets hard.  We need to teach them to observe all that I command you.  In other words we need to be disciplers.  Being an evangelist is not enough.  He wants to invest our lives into people.   You can’t leave the Christian babies in the Christian cribs so to speak.  They will just stay there.  They will never grow in their faith.  So we need to invest the time and effort into people’s lives.  This is the hard part because this takes our time and our energy and you can get hurt doing this.  People you have invested your lives into, all of a sudden go off and all of that work you have put into them is seemingly for naught or they hurt you in some way later.  This is the hard part.

I want to conclude with Psalm 118:4-6, Oh let those who fear the Lord say, His lovingkindness is everlasting.  From my distress I called upon the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me in a large place.  The Lord is for me; I will not fear; What can man do to me?

As we think about The Great Commission, as we think about living in this changing and challenging world, there is one thing we can always count on and trust in, Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

Maintaining a Biblical Perspective In, Above, and Beyond the Bad News

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TRANSCRIPT

“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” — Jesus Christ (John 16:33)

Watch the news, listen to talk radio, read the internet and you can come away borderline depressed at the situation in the world, America, and the church.  Whether it is economic recession, government intrusion into our lives, or the general moral decay and continuing loss of religious freedom in our society, the tendency can be for Christians to hang their heads and ask, “What can I do about all this and is there any good news?”

Unfortunately, most churches seem blissfully unaware or impotent to help their congregants and instead focus on soft, trendy, and feel-good themes.  On the other side, certain ministries seem to revel in the bad news giving short shrift to the good news and hope found in Scripture.

This weekend on The Christian Worldview, we will take a realistic look at some of the most troubling things Christians are facing but also look to Scripture for answers on how we should think and what we should do about it.

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The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  July 24, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic: Maintaining a Biblical Perspective In, Above and Beyond the News

DAVID WHEATON: Maintaining a Biblical Perspective In, Above and Beyond the News.  That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

So glad you joined me today on The Christian Worldview.  We are going to talk about maintaining a biblical perspective in and above and beyond the bad news.  If you watch the news, if you listen to too much conservative talk radio, if you read those e-mails coming in to your inbox all the time, you can come away borderline depressed at the state of the situation in the world and here in America and even in the church.  Whether it is the economic recession, whether it is the increasing government intrusion into our lives or just a general moral decay of the culture or the impending continuing loss of religious freedom in our society, the tendency is for Christians to hang their heads.  I know I feel it myself.  We ask what can I do about all of this?  This is unbelievable what is going on right now.  Is there really any good news that I should be focusing on at the same time in the midst of this bad news?  Unfortunately a lot of churches and many Christians seem blissfully unaware of what is going on.  They don’t seem to want to be engaged in pushing back against it.  Instead they focus on real soft or trendy of feel-good themes in the church.  You get six days of bad news out in society and then when they come to church, they don’t want that seventh day to be bad news as well.  You want it to be all about the good news.  I understand that but too many Christians seem to be ignorant as to what is going on and when they do get some bad news, they have no idea how to process it at all.

This weekend on The Christian Worldview our goal is to maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of the bad news that is going on around us.  We are going to look to Scripture to see if we should even be looking at the bad news.  Should we be turning away from it?  Should we be focusing only on the positive things?  We will talk about that today.

The reason I bring this up is because two weeks ago, you will remember the interview I did with Jay Richards on apocalyptic economics and the road to revelation.  Now it is a dramatic title of course but the point of the show was to talk about the economic situation going on in America and around the world and how everything is being set up for an even greater recession or depression.  It is a whole changing economic dynamic around the world.  When I went to church the next day, there is a man in our Sunday School class who came up to me after class and had a fairly serious look on his face and said, David I listen to your program regularly and appreciate it but I just can’t take all the bad news any more. He had heard Jay Richards talking about the economic situation and what is coming and how it is leading to the road of revelation.  He said, I hear you, I understand, I agree with you but you have got to give me some good news.  You have to tell me what to do.

I took that and said thank you for that.  That is a good admonition because this is the challenge always as a talk radio host or anyone who is speaking to other people whether you are a pastor or whatever you do, the challenge for me that I sense all the times is to avoid one of two extremes.  The first one is to rant or just pedal the bad news.  By the way there is an audience for that.  There are ministries that just focus on the bad news.  Some people can feed on that.   When there is worse new, that is good news for them because it proves everything is going down to the gutter.  Everything is blowing apart.  It is all gone.  There is an audience for that and then just throw one verse in at the end.  You have a 60 minute radio show and you spend 58 minutes ranting and pedaling the bad news and then one minute saying, keep your eyes looking up; Christ is coming again.  There is no balance there at all.

The other extreme is to ignore reality.  On the complete other side is where you don’t even look at the bad news.  You turn away because it is so distasteful and I have felt that too.  You often see it when you are watching some program on TV where children are starving in Africa or some animal is suffering, you don’t want to watch it.  It is often our reaction with the bad news going on in society.  The other thought is that we just want to focus on the positive.  You have heard a lot of radio stations do this.  You hear their little tagline or slogan will be, ‘uplifting, positive radio.’  As if there is just no way that we can focus on anything that is based in reality.

Those are the two extremes that I really try to avoid.  I am not saying that I do it exactly right all the time, but this is the challenge that I find.  It is like you have to be able to be adult enough, mature enough to be able to look at the bad news and say, I need to be informed to know what is going on but I also have to be able to know how to process it so I don’t get into some depression about the state of events in the world.  On the other hand, I don’t run around with this sugarcoated, cotton candy, positivism that is totally unrealistic.

That is the goal, which is our slogan, to think biblically about what is going on so we can live accordingly.  I think Christians should be able to process the bad news around them and have a biblical perspective about it and not get discouraged or get unrealistically optimistic.

As I thought about this topic today and I think it is an important one because there are several things going on right now that I think Christians look at, including myself, and think wow, there is a lot of bad news going on right now.  If you focus too much on it, it gets you down; it gets you discouraged.  I thought about what are the three things that I think touch a nerve with Christians that get them feeling depressed?  The three things are these.  The first one is the direction of government, the direction of the American government specifically.  I have two articles here and I am just going to read brief portions of them.  One is by a man named Wayne Allyn Root.  I believe he was the Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate in the 2008 general election.  He wrote this article called, Overwhelm the System.  I am just going to read the first paragraph regarding what he writes about President Obama.  He says, “Barack Obama is no fool.  He is not incompetent.  To the contrary, he is brilliant.  He knows exactly what he is doing.  He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic chaos and social chaos, thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.  Barack Obama is my college classmate from Columbia University class of 83.  As Glen Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward and Piven (we have talked about this before; two professors who taught at Columbia University).  They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands, add up the clues below.” (He talks about universal health care, cap and trade, making Puerto Rico a state, legalizing 12 million illegal immigrants, the stimulus programs, the bailouts, raising taxes on small business owners.  He talks about all those things and how it stresses the government so much. )

He goes on to say, “Taken individually those things are alarming, taken as a whole it is a brilliant Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist, Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government.  Why not?  They have no responsibility to pay for bigger government.”

In other words, you stress the economy so bad that the only person who can save the country is government because they have the most money; they have the most services to help people.  You get more than 50% of the people not even paying taxes to the government and you have a permanent voting block for yourself.

This is what Wayne Allyn Root says is going on in this country.  You hear that and you think this is really a bad state of affairs.  I don’t want America to go like this.  Look at what a great country this has been.  I don’t want it to go that way.  Now you might think that Wayne Allyn Root is some sort of ultra-conservative, a devil behind every tree and he is a racist because he doesn’t like President Obama.  You would be incorrect.

Just to add one more little column to this.  I got the recent Grace Partner letter from Grace to You, which is a letter John MacArthur sends to his supporters through the mail every month.  John MacArthur, as you know, is not someone who peddles very much at all in politics.  He rarely talks about political things.  He focuses on preaching the word of God, one verse at a time.  Here is his letter from July.  He says, “You don’t have to be a trained economist to realize that these are extremely tough times.  Financial uncertainty permeates our culture from Wall Street to Main Street and it effects every one of us in some way or another.”  He talks about wages being tight, unemployment is soaring, students are graduating with advanced degrees from the best colleges having trouble getting jobs, relentless news of foreclosures, people have lost discretionary income, anxiety is high, taxes are high, too that is because the federal government is accumulating debt.  He talks about national governments worldwide are similarly mired in debt.  He talks about the oilrig disaster.  He talks about the size of the U.S. government and the massive web of government regulations have grown exponentially since September 11, 2001.  While Washington is steadily taking control of business industry our courts and legislators are putting more limitations on individual freedoms.  We have seen the erosion of religious freedom and aggressive attempts to stifle God and His word in the public arena.  There is no end in sight for most of those trends.

This isn’t just fringe people who are involved in politics saying things are bad.  This is someone like John MacArthur who normally doesn’t even touch on some of these things.  He is saying that things are really difficult right now.  I am going to read you some of the rest of his story when we come back from the break.  He set up this letter by saying that there is a lot of bad news and he is not ignoring it.  I think this first point about the direction of government is one of the narratives, the stories in our lives that make Christians feel very negative.  We heard this before the election . . .

Barack Obama:  We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Who says that?  Who says we are going to fundamentally transform America.  You think, we may want a little change, but do we want the nation fundamentally transformed?  Do we want June to be declared by the President of the United States the national celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual, Bi-gender Month with the highest office of the land celebrating this?  It has fostered hopelessness and helplessness in believers to see the direction of the government.  When we come back I will give you the second and third things that have depressed Christians.  Then we are going to get on how to maintain a biblical perspective in, above and beyond the bad news.
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DAVID:  Striving to be biblically correct, not politically correct.   Welcome back to The Christian Worldview radio program.  Our Website is TheChristianWorldview.com.  In the first segment I talked about the first of the three things that really gets Christians down.  The first one is the direction of the American government right now.  We see everything changing.  President Obama said that he is going to fundamentally transform the United States of America and that is what he is doing.  There is no question about it.  It is going on a quicker path than it has ever gone on.  As a matter of fact, I think this particular sound bite was the one when the man at church talked to us and said, you have got to give me some good news, you have to tell me what to do about all of this.  When you hear a sound bite like this from the President after so much change has happened so quickly, you start to wonder if it is really going to end.

President Obama:  One of the interesting things that has happened over the last 18 months as President is for some reason people keep on being surprised when I do what I said I was going to do.  So I say I am going to reform our health care system and people think well gosh that’s not smart politics, maybe we should hold off.  Or I say we are going to move forward on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and somehow people say, why are you doing that?  I am not sure that is good politics.  I am doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it is the right thing to do.  People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step up because I am calling their bluff.  We will see how much of the political arguments they are making right now are real and how much of it was just politics.  All right?  Thank you very much everybody.

DAVID:  So there is the President throwing down the gauntlet and saying, if you think there is a lot of change now, overhaul of the financial regulation bill that just passed that overhauls the way we do business in this country, the health care, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, you name it, that is nothing.  Just wait until next year.  Christians hear that and are getting further and further depressed by this seemingly bad news because he has the most unbiblical worldview of any President we have ever had, at least that I know about.  That is the first thing, the direction of the government.

The second thing is the depravity that is going on within our culture.  That is the second thing that gets Christians depressed.  I pick these three because they can depress me, so I figure if they are depressing me and I am a normal Christian and I have talked to other people about some of these things, I can tell they are depressed by these things.  We look at what is on television.  We can hardly watch a show on television during prime time because there is so much junk in the program.  How do you take your kids to the movies?  It is like walking through a minefield.  The music industry now, the educational system, talk about promoting a humanistic worldview.  This is all the public education system does.  The promotion of immorality within our culture, whether it is heterosexual, whether it is homosexual; biblical morality and moral purity and marriage are way out and way over.  The promotion of same-sex marriage, living together before you are married, having children out of wedlock, there is just no stigma.  Some news story out of the National Security Department this week says the computers are being used for sending child porn.  You think, what is going on in our culture?  You look at Wall Street and the immoral practices there that partially led to this financial meltdown we had.  You think the corporate people are all corrupt from within.   It is like this huge, gigantic tsunami that is coming at your, a huge wave, that is pushing and promoting these anti-Christian, non-Christian values and you are thinking I have to duck under this to avoid it.  It is an affront to your very being.  You are exasperated about trying to raise your kids in what can only be described as a cesspool culture.  Then the worse thing is all of a sudden when they are teenagers or they are in their 20s, unfortunately and sadly, some of them go down this cultural path and it is very depressing.

So if it is not the direction of our American government, it is not the depravity of the culture, it is number three, the denigration of Christianity in the church itself.  I don’t know if you have been hearing some of this change in verbiage, the change in language being used by President Obama and Hilary Clinton about the freedom of worship versus the freedom of religion.  We have the freedom of religion enshrined in our Constitution, the very First Amendment.  Now they don’t talk things in terms of having freedom of religion in America, which means we have the freedom to practice our religion, everything from worshipping and going to church to evangelizing and gathering together for Bible studies or whatever.  If you will notice he is not using freedom of religion any more, he is talking about we have the freedom of worship.  What is the difference?  That is a huge difference.  Freedom of worship means you can do what you want to do in your church, you can worship, but keep it to yourself.  Don’t go out and proselytize and share it with anybody beyond you.  You have the freedom to worship individually but the freedom of religion goes way beyond the freedom of worship.

The freedom of speech and association cases on college campuses where now more and more the noose is tightening.  If an organization is going to be officially recognized by the University, it can’t have a “non-discrimination policy” in hiring.  So if you are a Christian organization and you want to hire Christians because you are a Christian organization that is discriminatory.  If you are a student in college and you oppose the changing of the definition of marriage, you are homophobic and racist and you are a hater.  The fact that you want to keep marriage the way it has been for all of history, you are behind the times.  Society is becoming more and more secular and thus more and more hostile to Christians.   The church seems to be a little bit impotent and weak to do anything about this.

Then all of a sudden you have encountered these things, the direction of government, the depravity of culture and the denigration of Christianity in the church within our society and you wonder if anyone really thinks like me any more; does anyone think any of this is wrong?  You feel isolated and you think you are alone.  You don’t know if there is anyone else who thinks like you and maybe you think your worldview is passé.  Then you get depressed and you get discouraged.  That is the bad news.

We took a realistic look out there and there are some bad things going on.  The question I want to spend the rest of the program on and get your comment on is this, how do we maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of the bad news, above the bad news and beyond the bad news?  What do you do as far as encountering the bad news?  Do you watch it; do you turn away?  When you do get the bad news of what is going on in the world, what do you do about it?  What do you remind yourself of so you don’t get depressed?

I have three things here that I think are critically important that we as Christians need to do.  I am going to touch on the first one briefly before the break.  The first thing to do to maintain a biblical perspective amidst the bad news is to understand that we live in a very sinful and evil world.   Sometimes we think we live in America and it is a beautiful day outside, there is no violence right outside our home and it is a nice place to live.  We get this sense that the world is a really nice place and it can be but I don’t think we should think in some world where there is going to be a lot of bad news.  We have a lot of sin nature in the world including ourselves, so we shouldn’t be shocked by the bad news or ignore it.  We should expect sinners to be sinful in this sinful world and we shouldn’t be shocked.

(break)

DAVID:  We are talking today about maintaining a biblical perspective in, above and beyond the bad news.  We spent a little less than half of the program talking about some of the bad news.  We are going to spend a little more than half talking about how to maintain this biblical perspective in it.

Before the break, we started to answer the question about how to maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of this bad news.  The first point I gave is to understand that we live in a very sinful, evil world.  Our expectations should not be too high for how good the world should be.

I am going to read this verse from John 16:33 and this really says it all.  This is Jesus Christ talking and He said this, These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace.  In the world you have tribulation but take courage, I have overcome the world.  That is exactly the case.  In Christ you can have peace because you know you are  in a right relationship with your Creator through His Son, Jesus Christ.  Your sins have been forgiven.  You have hope for this life from a standpoint of having peace in this life and hope for the next life to have eternal life with Him.  You can have peace with Christ, but He says in the world you will have tribulation.  Expect it.  This is the way it is.  There is sin and evil in the world.  You will have tribulation in the world but take courage, I have overcome the world.

I don’t really need to read too many other verses, although I have a lot of them and I will read some of them but that says it all.  Expect that this is a very sinful world.  Why are we surprised or discouraged by what is going on in the world?  You look at the situation in Revelation and we don’t see a time when Christians are going to be taking “dominion” or winning back the culture or the world is going to be one to Christ.  We don’t see that.  Until the return of Christ when He comes to rule and reign, yes, but during this particular age, there is no evidence in Scripture that there is going to be something we can be really encouraged about the direction of mankind in the world.

Be realistic.  America has been uniquely great, one of the only examples of a great nation because there are so many Christians in the founding back then.  We have it far better than the first century.  Think about the little freedom they had then, the Totalitarian government, the harsh persecution of Christians, the pluralistic culture.  Compare then to now and you think we are living in Nirvana compared to what it was in the first century, yet the early Christians lived with great passion, purpose and joy.  They were actually thankful for their trials.  James 1:2-4, Consider is all joy my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.  And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

This is saying that not only should you not be discouraged and depressed with bad news or trials you are encountering in your culture or your government.  You should be thankful for them.  You should consider it joy to encounter these trials  because you know it is going to perfect your faith if you respond to it the right way.

There is nothing wrong with weeping over bad news.  Christ wept when he saw the people and the sinfulness of the crowd and the culture and what had happened.  He wept.  There is nothing wrong with feeling badly about it.   It is not a wrong response to feel angst.  I think that is normal actually.  It is ok to feel badly about what is going on but then we need to quickly do something else.  That is number two and three.

Before we get to those, let’s go to our callers.  Alex welcome to The Christian Worldview.  How do you maintain a biblical perspective in, above and beyond the bad news?

ALEX:   First of all, awesome program, really good program.  I think overall I would have to say a couple of things.  Number one, we are told to be joyful.  Now that being said, it is hard to appreciate the beauty of the stream when you are knee deep in alligators.  I think the only thing that is going to get me through this is a consistent look in the word.  Keep reading, keep reading.  I am an end times prophecy guy so I am constantly thinking, this is all going to a purpose and God is in control and not the world.  Greater is He in me than he is in the world and I like the scriptures you quoted.  A lot of times I look up into the clouds and I have an active imagination, I am an artist in the Twin Cities and I imagine Christ coming down and watching Him come through the clouds.

DAVID:  You aren’t going to imagine it too much because that is exactly how it is going to happen.  You bring up excellent points about understanding the end times and I will get into that a little bit.  You can see things setting themselves up for this world system.  They are talking about world currencies, global government and that is what Revelation says.  This is not something that should shock us.  As a matter of fact, we should realize that God is sovereign and He is working His plan all through this.

Let’s go next to Muskegon, Michigan and Ruth how do you maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of all the bad news?

RUTH:  I think that some of the Old Testament stories are so encouraging.  The example of when Gideon went and God only wanted 300 men to go against 50,000 and they had such victory and power.  When I read back some of the Scripture in prayer, there is such power.  One example in Ephesians 3, Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask of think according to the power at work with us.  To Him be glory throughout all generations forever and ever.  I think that is just powerful when we listen to programs like yours and get encouraged that other people all through the United States have the same goals.

DAVID:  Ruth, I appreciate your call and I appreciate your comment on the program as well.  That is by God’s grace and I think that is one of the purposes of church and fellowship, to encourage and comfort one another in the Lord.  That is why it is important.  I know that I want to be someone who is realistic about what is going on, is informed myself and informs you about what is going on and I want to have a biblical perspective.  I don’t want to fall into one of those two extremes of just being a peddler of bad news and ranting about how everything is going down hill.  I don’t want to do that every week.  I know occasionally I can slip over to that side.  Or the other side, I am not someone who is sugary, everything is getting better and you can see everything collapsing around us and think it is a great day outside.  I don’t tend to go to that side; I tend to go to the other side, but I want to be balanced in the way I present things.

I am hearing a common theme here in how to maintain a biblical perspective and that is to go to the word.  I think that is a very important answer.

Let’s go next to Columbus, Mississippi and Don how do you maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of all this bad news?

DON:  I am a first time caller and I want to tell you it is nice to hear a channel that is speaking about Christ and have open comments like that.  You have to monitor what is going on.  You cannot not watch it.  You have to see what is going on.  I always call on the Lord and the Lord being part of our spirit and this is hell on earth.  The world is given up to the devil.  It is just more predominant nowadays.  It is more in your face.  It is unbelievable.  The more you watch TV, the more you turn channels and monitor everything that is going on.  I just call on the Lord.  That is the only way to get by.

DAVID:   You look around and say this is unbelievable, yet you also have to think that there are other times in history that have been far worse.  It is just that we are used to a certain type of life in America, certain freedoms.  It has been a largely Christian nation.  All of a sudden things are changing and changing so rapidly, it is shocking.  Your comment at the beginning that you have to watch the news, I am glad you think that way but a lot of Christians don’t.  They just avoid it because it is unpleasant.  If I don’t watch it, then it is not there.

My first point about how to maintain a biblical perspective in the midst of bad news was to understand that we live in a very sinful, evil world and not overestimate what the world should be like.  It is like the verse from John 16:33, Christ says that in the world you have tribulation.  It is going to be there, expect it, don’t be surprised, don’t be discouraged.  Consider is all joy when you face various trials but take courage, Christ said, I have overcome the world.

Number two is to set your mind on things above the bad news in the world, not things on the earth.  This is such a key passage of Scripture.  In the midst of all the bad news it says in Colossians 3:1-4, If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.  For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.   When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.

In other words, if you are looking at the news of the world and you are getting depressed and you can’t pull out of it, your mind is not set on things above.  You are setting your mind too much on the things on the earth.

(break)

DAVID:  We set up the show by saying there is a lot of bad news going on.  Christians get depressed about things like the direction of the government, the depravity of the culture, the denigration of Christianity in the church and we spent nearly half of the program talking about that.  We have been spending the second half saying, ok there is a lot of bad news but how do we deal with it?  How do we respond to it?  How do we process it?

The first point was to understand that we live in a very sinful, evil world.  We should not be shocked by the crazy things that go on that are so much of an affront  from a biblical perspective.  My friend, talk show host Todd Friel likes to say, the pagans are being pagans again.  When you are unregenerate, you live according to your own lust of your flesh and indulging desires of your mind in the flesh and are by nature children of wrath.

Ephesians 2, this is the way it is so don’t be shocked but immediately when you see it, go to point 2 which is to set your mind as Colossians 3 says, set your mind on things above not on the things that are on earth.  Our minds should not be focused or set primarily on political change because we know it is worthwhile but it ultimately is not the answer to things.  Our minds shouldn’t be primarily set on cultural change either because that is getting the cart before the horse.  Our minds need to be set on spiritual things, set on things above not filled with everything going on here on earth.

Truly if your are listening to conservative talk radio all day and they are ranting about the President and how things are going downhill, listen to a little bit of it but you can’t take that in as your complete diet as a Christian.  When I listen a little too much over and over again, it confirms on where things are going but if you focus too much on things of the earth, you get depressed.  Set your mind on things above, on serving God, on knowing Him better, on being more sanctified and holy, on helping your family, on serving in your church, on sharing your faith, on praying to God for help.  There are lots of things to focus and set our minds on things above.

Then what happens is you change, your family changes, your church changes, culture changes and then government changes if we get it in the right order and the right priority.  As it says in James, we are commanded to be thankful in all things for we have a lot to be thankful for.  A thankful person isn’t a depressed person.  It says in 1 Thessalonians 5:18, in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.  When you are thinking of things you can be thankful for, even in our country we have things to be thankful for.  We have a lot of freedom left in this country, freedom to worship, and freedom to evangelize.  We are not being killed.  I see these articles coming in where Christians are being killed in the Muslim parts of the world for purportedly denigrating the prophet Muhammad according to the executioners.  We are not facing that yet.  We still have a lot of freedoms; we still have a lot of things that we are able to do.  We have lots of things to be thankful for and we should even be thankful for our trials.  Anxiety and depression come from setting your mind on things on the earth not on things above.

Matthew 6, don’t be anxious for anything.  Let your requests be known to God and set your mind on things above.  Paul in the Roman prison, he wasn’t depressed.  He knew the end was coming but he wasn’t depressed.  What did he say?  But for me to live as Christ and to die is gain.  The key point of the day is to set your mind on things above.

The third one is this, to know what will happen beyond the world.  That is what one of our previous callers was talking about and that goes back to 1 Thessalonians 4 where we see what is coming in the future.  I believe this refers to the rapture of the church, some people would interpret it differently, but let’s just agree that Christ is returning as the caller mentioned, in the clouds.  1 Thessalonians 4:14-18, For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.  For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, and remain until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first.  Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord.  Therefore comfort one another with these words.

It says something similar in Luke 21:26-28 about the return of the Lord.  This is our hope and our comfort.  Yes we are required to live here as long as we are alive in this sinful world, but Christ said we can overcome the world by setting our mind on things above and also having that hope; knowing what is to come in the future.

We need to be constantly reminding ourselves of these things.  We can’t just think it once this morning and let it go.  Our minds will naturally drift down to the common denominator of being depressed and discouraged about what is going on.  That is why we need to be in the word on a daily basis.  Romans 12 says you need to be in the word daily so that your mind can be renewed.  Renewed means it needs to be new again.  Renewed, otherwise it gives in and collapses due to the weight of bad news around us.  There are lots of things for us to do as Christians.  We can, in any type of society fulfill our Christian responsibilities to God and any type of government situation.

Let’s go to Mobile, Alabama and Richard how do you maintain a biblical perspective in, above and beyond the bad news?

RICHARD:  As you have said, by focusing on the things above.  We can focus on the adversity in our lives and they will consume us like a pit bull around our neck or we can look beyond adversities to the miraculous things God is doing in our lives.  I believe God allows adversity in our lives to draw us closer to Him.  Anything that moves a person closer to God is good.  I use Scripture threads to help me at times like this.  A thread where you tie verses together such as 2 Corinthians 5:20 where you are called to ambassadors to Christ.  Most people when things get critical, they are ambassadors for crisis and not of Christ.  I always have to mindful that man plans his way but the Lord directs His steps because He knows everything we need to step on to teach us what we need to know to equip us for the good works He has prepared beforehand for us to walk in.  Those good works are to glorify Him and point others to Him and that is why we can exalt in our tribulations according to Romans 5:3 knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance.

DAVID:  Great comments about knowing what is going on, setting your mind on things above, not on things on earth and then knowing what is going to happen beyond the world.  You know Christian we do live in a changing and challenging world, that is for sure, but there is one thing you should set your mind on Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

How God Restores Shattered Lives

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:49 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Frank Pastore, author, Shattered

TRANSCRIPT

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come” 2 Corinthians 5:17.

No doubt you know someone who grew up in a “dysfunctional” family.  Maybe you did yourself.  Of course “dysfunctional” really just means “lots of sin” whether in the form of multiple divorces, re-marriages, children out of wedlock, abusive words and relationships, lying, deceit, and you name what else.

Of course sin is present in every family and if allowed to run its destructive course, everything is turned upside down from the way God intended the family to function.

Frank Pastore, former Major League Baseball pitcher, current radio talk show host in Los Angeles, and our guest this weekend on The Christian Worldview, grew up in a highly dysfunctional family.  In his new book Shattered: Struck Down, But Not Destroyed, Frank tells his captivating story of family, marriage, and baseball, and how God amazingly rescued him from bringing the dysfunction of his past into his own family.

If you have ever felt hopelessly mired in your own family’s dysfunction, or know someone who is, please tune in to The Christian Worldview this weekend to find out how God can restore even the most “shattered” lives.

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The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  July 17, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic:  How God Restores Shattered Lives
Guest:  Frank Pastore

DAVID WHEATON: How God Restores Shattered Lives.  That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly.  And to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life and that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

Today in the program you are going to be encouraged especially if you have come from what is called a dysfunctional family background.  Our guest is Frank Pastore.  He is the author of a brand new book entitled, Shattered.  He is the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles.  Frank was also a pitcher in major league baseball, most notably for the Cincinnati Reds.  Let me welcome my friend, Frank Pastore to The Christian Worldview.

FRANK PASTORE:  David, I want to say I am so proud of you.  I remember meeting you years ago when you were starting in radio and of course, taking your wonderful tennis talents and all of that accomplishment and have poured all of that into radio.  I continue to hear great things about you and The Christian Worldview and I love the name of your show.  I love The Christian Worldview because at the end of the day, that is what it is all about.  It is my pleasure to be here David.  How are you doing?

DAVID:  I am doing great and anything nice you say about me, I am going to have to deflect that and say it is by God’s grace.  I know you think the same thing about your own live as well.  I think we have so many similarities in our lives with one very big notable difference which we will get into today.  But there are so many similarities, the background in professional sports, the things we came to understand about Christ through professional sports.  I am looking forward to talking to you about those things today.  The one big thing we have that is different about our lives is our family backgrounds.  I grew up in a “good family.”  You use the word dysfunctional family in your book a lot.  That word is thrown around a lot.  Could you define what dysfunctional actually means and tell us a memory or two about how your childhood exemplifies that?

FRANK:  Lucky you, count your blessings on being from a “good family.”  I didn’t grow up with that.  I thought it was at the time.  So many kids think that their family is ok and that is how you cope with it and how you understand it.  I came to the place where I realized that my family was indeed dysfunctional.  I didn’t find out until I was an adult that many of the things that my mom had told me regarding how she met my dad and they got married and had kids and all that stuff was all a lie.  It was all a lie.  I was told that they had met and that they dated and then they got married and she got pregnant and all of that but that is not what happened.

I wondered why it was, David, when I was growing up that I never saw my parents kiss.  They never showed any romantic interest in one another.  They slept in separate bedrooms my entire life.  We moved constantly and they never had any friends.  My mom didn’t have any girlfriends that she would talk with on the phone.  I just thought that was normal.  You always think your family is normal but that is not the case.

What I found out David, and this is one of the shatterings that happened and I think a lot of people can realize this, that the story she had told was not true.  She was on her failing fourth or fifth marriage.  She was raising a little ten-year-old girl in the mid-50s in Los Angeles.  She was shacking up with a guy and got pregnant and chose not to have another abortion; she had several.  She decided ok, I am going to have the baby.  I will hook him into making alimony payments and then I will divorce him.  That is my dad.  He was 43 and she was 40 when I was born.  My older sister moved out when she got pregnant at 15.  I never really knew her.  I only have talked with her five or six times my whole life.

I grew up an only child in a very cold and sterile emotional environment.  I was always the new kid in school.  I had horrible diet and hygiene habits.  My mom never told me to brush my teeth.  I am nine years old and I go to the dentist for the first time.  I had 21 cavities.  It was really messed up.

I learned all of this later on and it is like, what can you believe?   There are so many lies here.  She stole money from me.  I don’t want to bash too much, but the idea is I can identify with people who come from a dysfunctional family.  I came from one.

My father and I were not close but we played catch all the time.  He was a high school dropout, an Italian ghetto ironworker, the guy who walks on the high steel.  He had never been married and got hooked into marrying my mom.  They stayed together for me.  I was the wishbone that was being pulled in two directions; do baseball because that is what dad wants and do well in school because that is what mom wants.  They were both trying to live their lives through me.  I grew up with this tension and this cold passive aggressive hostility in my house.  I poured myself into baseball because that was the one thing I did pretty well.  I couldn’t hit and I couldn’t run.  I literally was the last kid picked in 7th and 8th grade P.E.  I couldn’t play basketball, I couldn’t run, tennis are you kidding me?   All I could do was throw hard and thank goodness there is a sport where they will pay you to throw things hard.

In this environment, I grow up as an atheist.  My mom hated religion.  She grew up as a Southern Baptist in Birmingham, Alabama as one of the girls in a family of twelve.  She had earned early on, the nickname of Rebel just because she rebelled against everything.  I had an open hostility towards Christianity and towards all religion.  It was all something to mock and make fun of and it was silly.  Life is a pain and then you die.  The point of life is to get rich and famous and then you are happy.

Of course, my game plan from being a fat little nine-year-old kid on was ok; I am going to be a major league baseball player.  Out of high school, I signed with the Cincinnati Reds and started my career.  By the way, in high school, here is what is interesting, I was getting recruited to come to the local Catholic boys high school to play baseball.  Mom found out that tuition was cheaper if you were Catholic so she said we are going to get religion, we are going to be Catholic.  We will meet the people; we will lie to the people and convince them that we are Catholic.  So we met with the priest, she and I, about a dozen times and she would laugh about how effectively she had deceived and lied to him saying that she believed in things that I knew she didn’t, so we got the tuition break.  She told me don’t blow it or else they will kick you out, which they wouldn’t have.  So I kept my mouth shut in school, going along with it and going to mass and mocking it inside of me and talking about how silly it was with her.

One day in a religion class, I remember asking a sincere question of the priest.  I asked the standard questions, why do you believe in God?  How do you trust the Bible?  What about all the denominations?   What about hell?  I threw all that out there and I am about 14 or 15 years old.  I remember the answer I was given and it was basically this is not about facts, it is not about evidence, it is about having faith.  I translated that faith for these religious people means trying to believe what you know isn’t real.  It is not about evidence; it is about faking it.  I get it and I know how to play this game and I did.

DAVID:  From what I heard you say and all the things that were going wrong in your family with your parents, the lifestyle and the lies, dysfunctional to me is what I am hearing you say is that there are a lot of sin present in the family.  So when I say I come from a good family, I specifically said I didn’t come from a perfect family because there is no such thing as a perfect family.  There is sin in every family.  So when you say dysfunctional family, it just means that there is a whole lot of sin going on that manifests itself in a lot of different situations.

FRANK:  Right, there is a lack of health, big time.  You typically have a mom and dad that love each other, that love their children.  Of course there is sin and problems but they go through is together.  I didn’t have that.  I had a mom and dad who were at each other constantly.  The fact is that I was the barter chip.  The way I coped with all of that was to block off all of my emotions completely, to not even go there because that was a hurtful place.  Thank God that is a defense mechanism that children are given when they go through trauma, physical abuse or emotionally.  They can block that off.  Of course, that was a problem I had to deal with later on.

DAVID:  Where do you think most unbelieving families are today in this spectrum from being a really godly, God-fearing, Bible following traditional family on one end of the spectrum all the way down to a highly sinful, dysfunctional family.  You said you thought you grew up in a normal family.  You looked at other families and thought they had everything together but do you think the really did?  Do you think that more families actually have the type of sin that your family had in it?

FRANK:  Just look at the sociological research that is being done on the family right now.  There is no guesswork here.  We have the ongoing breakdown of the traditional family.  When young people are polled, the majority still say they want to have a life partner forever but they really don’t have an expectation of having just one.  They think they will be married several times.  Twenty somethings are putting off marriage and shacking up, living together.  You are going to have even more fatherless families and more breakdown in the couples that are committed to one another, therefore more unhealthy children will have that expectation and the cycle continues.  That is going on.  We especially as Christians, people of the Book, for whom the living God is alive, we need to break that.  Of course, my book is about that.  My book is about how the generational chains of bondage and sin can be broken.  I should not be married to the same woman for 32 years with two great kids and I am happily in love and I love my wife and I love my family.  That shouldn’t have happened.  I should be even more screwed up than I am.  I think it gives people hope that when you get your life right with Christ and you start understanding that His strategy and His plan for you is a lot better than what the world offers, you can break those chains and I have broken them in my family.  I dedicated the book to my grandson Michael because I wanted those generational chains of bondage to be snapped and they have been.  Michael is growing up in a completely different family than I did and my kids grew up in a different family than I did.  There is hope in Christ for those who come from a “bad family background” to break that so that they don’t have to repeat is and continue the cycle.

DAVID:  That is exactly why I have you on the program today because your story is so compelling in that regard.  The topic is How God Restores Shattered Lives and that is why this book is so great.  The book is Shattered.  Our guest today on The Christian Worldview is Frank Pastore.  He is the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles.  He is a former major league pitcher as well.

Let me ask you this Frank.  Do you think there are any positives that resulted from growing up in this dysfunctional family?

FRANK:  Yes, overwhelmingly there is one that just jumps out immediately.  Here I was literally the last kid picked in 7th and 8th grade P.E.  I was not at all physically talented.  You would not call me an athlete at all.  Because I could throw stuff hard, I poured myself into that.  My dad and I would play catch every day.  He was my Little League coach.  With all this trauma, this pain and dysfunction going on in my family, I poured myself, more than any other kid that I knew, into baseball.  I spent hours throwing a ball against the block wall in the backyard in the many houses that I had.  In fact one of the stories that the athletic director of the high school, who has now passed away, shared at some banquet we were at, he remembers being on campus and hearing this click, click, click.  He came outside and saw me at 7 a.m. throwing a baseball against the gym wall.  I did this almost every day of school.  He said he had never seen such dedication in a young athlete.  Is there a good thing out of this?  Yes, I poured myself, as my escape route, into baseball and I think that is what helped make me into a major league baseball player.

(break)

DAVID:  Our topic today is how God Restores Shattered Lives and our guest is Frank Pastore.  He is the author of the book, Shattered:  Struck Down But Not Destroyed.  Frank is also the host of the Frank Pastore Show on KKLA in Los Angeles every weekday from 3 – 6 p.m. pacific time.  His website if FrankPastore.com.

I don’t want to go into the whole story of how your married your wife Gina because I don’t want to give it away.  It is a great part of the book.  You were twenty years old, she was sixteen and she was underage.  You eloped and there was the whole story of her dad and getting out of town.  It is just unbelievable.  Looking back at that, you did end up eloping.  You went off from California to Nashville and you were married there against the approval of Gina’s father at the time.  You have been married 32 years to Gina.  Do you look back, because your father was already intending to give you approval to marry her after she would graduate from high school, a couple of years later.  Do you wish in retrospect that you would have waited until the time when her parents would have approved?

FRANK:  Gina and I have talked about this a lot and it is somewhat awkward because here we are in Christian radio in L.A., doing your show and Focus on the Family and we have this story that I don’t want anyone to repeat this.  It was both of our dysfunction.  Thank God, literally, thank God that it worked out because all the statistics would say this thing is going to crash and burn and here we are married 32 years.  This is the “don’t try this at home” kind of thing.  Look what God is able to do even in the midst of this.  Of course, that is part of the story of Shattered.

DAVID:  Again, Frank Pastore today on The Christian Worldview.  His website is FrankPastore.com. with his brand new book Shattered.  The title of the book, Shattered, has to do primarily with what happened when you were pitching in the major league but also lots of other moments that were shattered throughout your life.  We will talk about some of those, but tell us about the major league turning point.  You were doing well pitching for the Reds in the big leagues.  I think you were six or seven years in and all of a sudden, what happened?

FRANK:  Let me set it up this way for everyone listening.  What is your dream?  If you are a singer, to play at The Metropolitan Opera.  If you are a writer, to win the Pulitzer.  If you are an artist, have your work hung in a museum somewhere.  For a baseball player, your dream is to pitch in the major leagues.  I had done that for six years.  The strategy I had for a meaningful life to get rich and famous so you were happy was to get to the major leagues and then buy all the stuff that society tells you will make you happy.

Here I am in the major leagues.  It is June 4, 1984.  I am beating Fernando Valenzuela, who is great, in Dodger Stadium.  I am very mediocre, so this is a big deal.  This is way before ESPN and Sports Center so it is the one game a week on Monday night that the whole country would watch.  The Reds are beating the Dodgers.  I am beating Fernando.  I throw a down and away fastball to Steve Sacks, their second baseman, he hits a line drive directly at my face.  I flinch and I put my elbow in the way of this careening line drive and there is a shattering.  I grab my elbow and I can move pieces around of it like an Oreo in a baggie.  David, I knew instantly that my world was shattered.  From the time I had been that little 9-year-old fat kid that could throw lemons farther than anyone else in the lemon grove, I had been treated special because I could throw so hard.  Now I knew I would never be able to throw as hard, as well as I had.

What do you do when your dream is shattered as an atheist?  I had nowhere to go.  There is no God to complain to.  There is not belief that good can come out of evil.  What am I going to do?  I signed out of high school.  I had no college.  At that moment, I thought what in the world am I going to do with the rest of my life?  I am only 27 years old.  If you are a singer, think of having an injury to your throat or an artist, a painter and you go blind.  What are your going to do?  For a major league athlete, what are you going to do when as a pitcher you shatter your elbow?

It was at that moment that I come off the field and I had been hanging out with the Christians, not by choice by the way.  My wife Gina, on our very first road trip back in 1979, had found out that things happen on road trips and she didn’t want her brand new young husband partaking, so she basically said, you are going to hang out with these people and not these people on the roster.  It ends up that the people I am supposed to hang out with are the Christians.  These are people I had made fun of my whole life and I have to hang out with them.  The reason is, they have the reputation of not doing coke and cheating on their wives.  That is who Gina wanted me to hang out with.  They have this interesting habit, if anyone listening knows any Christians they may do this as well, but Christians have this habit of when something goes bad in your life, like having a bad game, of which I had many, they would want to come over and console you and “share” with you, which is of course, believe everything I believe and you will be happy.  I learned how to shut them up.  I learned that if you simply asked questions, since most religious people, especially Christians, can’t answer them, you can shut them up.  So whenever the Christian would come over after a bad game and try to console me I would fire these questions on them.  They would go back and get re-enforcements and come back and gang up on me in something they called fellowship.  This little dance went on for five years until that injury.  I walk off the field and go up in the training room and they come in and want to pray for me.  At this point in my life, I had had it.  These stupid, naïve, gullible religious people need to take a science class and realize that life is a pain and then you die.  Our relatives our ferns, frogs and slime not this Creator God and get over it.  There is a reason it is called the dark ages and the enlightenment.  Get out of the dark and into the light and realize there is no God.

I had had it.  I made a decision that I am going to save these people from religion.  I am not going to allow them to be in the dark.  Long story short and I tell the story in Shattered, we get together and they challenge me to disprove the Bible.  I thought, this won’t take long.  So they give me three books to read, Evidence Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and some other stuff.  I didn’t know Christians wrote those, David.  I had never met an intelligent Christian in my life.  I thought it was an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp.

Here I am reading this C.S. Lewis guy and it is like, I have never heard this.  Mom never told me about this.  I never got this at the Catholic high school.  I never knew that there was as Lee Strobel would say, a case for faith or a case for Christ.  I never heard this stuff.  So in Pittsburgh, of all places, showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor because we hated the Pirates, I realized that I have lived as a secular atheist for 27 years, this injury has happened and maybe there is a God.  If this happened, if there really is a Christ, if He rose from the dead and had redeemed fallen humanity and our sin has separated us from God, if all of that is true, that changes everything.  My life is not over.  There is more to me than what I do and who I am.  There is more to live for and I want to be a Christian.

I made that prayer literally in the stall of the bathroom.  If flush my previous life away and I come out and Tommy Hume, who is our chapel leader for the Reds and our bullpen ace, had been watching me read these books along with four or five other Christians on the team.  I walk over to Hume and I go, Hume I am a Christian.  He went, praise Jesus, he is Pentecostal you know and I said shhhh.  I shushed him because just moments ago, I was on the outside looking in and I knew what the Christians looked like to everybody else on the team.  They couldn’t answer questions, sort of bumper sticker theology, not in the real world, sort of goody-goodies.  That is not what I had signed up for.  I had lived as an atheist and it doesn’t make any sense.  It is bankrupt and if Christ is real, then everything is different.  That is what I signed up for.  I said, Hume, let’s get back together with the guys at the hotel.  He is thinking, we can teach him all the words to the songs now and it is like, no.

We are going to get back to the hotel and I was already a player rep, so I was comfortable talking to the guys.  I lock the hotel room door, five guys are in there and I basically said this.  This is the big point of Shattered that I want every Christian to listen to.  I told the guys, look for five years we have been hanging out together and I have been asking you great questions, not obscure, bizarre questions, but just why do you believe in God?  Why do you believe in the resurrection?  Does it change your life?  Is there life after death?  I was asking great questions and you have been giving me really lame answers saying it is all about faith and that doesn’t cut it.  You are in rebellion.  In 1 Peter 3:15, you are commanded in Scripture to be able to give to every man a reason for the hope that is within you.  You couldn’t even answer your own question.   I asked you why you believe and you couldn’t answer it.   I could have gone to Hell because you don’t know why you believe.  It wasn’t like I was in rebellion, I really knew God was there and I wanted to live out in sin, I didn’t think it was real.  I thought it was some kind of fable or fiction and I could have gone to Hell.  When I asked this, you should have said this.  David, I taught my first class of apologetics about two hours old in the Lord.

DAVID:  Let me just defend your Christian teammates.  We are speaking with Frank Pastore here on The Christian Worldview today about his book Shattered.  This is a perfect time to do it with the major league All Star break coming this past week.  You rebuffed attempts by these Christian friends who wanted to “share” with you and have fellowship with you and so forth.  These guys were trying.  They at least had it in them to try to share what they knew to be the truth, the Good News of Jesus Christ with you.  Weren’t they doing what they should have been doing?  I know they could have done it better and been stronger apologetically or is there a much different way that you think they should have been approaching the whole thing with you, intellectually or something rather than saying, hey this is what we believe is the truth and God loves you and He can restore a shattered life.  What should they have been doing?

(break)

DAVID:  We are speaking with Frank Pastore today about how God restores shattered lives.  He is talking about his book, Shattered.  At the end of the last segment, I asked Frank about his Christian teammates on the Cincinnati Reds who had been trying to witness to him for years.

Weren’t they doing what they should have been doing?  I know they could have done it better and been stronger apologetically or is there a much different way that you think they should have been approaching the whole thing with you, intellectually or something rather than saying, hey this is what we believe is the truth and God loves you and He can restore a shattered life.  What should they have been doing?

FRANK:  Here it is and everyone listening this applies in your life.  They did something wonderful for me, they loved me.  They were there.  They kept coming back.  I liked these guys.  They had great marriages.  They loved their wives.  They loved their kids.  They had something I didn’t.  There was a sense of stability and reality in their lives that I didn’t have.

When I started asking these apologetic questions, they should have gone to their local Christian bookstore and got me a book earlier.   So everyone listening, you don’t have to have everyone else’s answers, but you better have your answer on why you believe.  If your kids or someone at work says why do you believe in God?  Why do you believe the Bible?  Why do you believe the resurrection?  What about Hell?  Is there life after death?  You better have your answer and if not, go get it.  Then if you run into someone who asks questions that you don’t have an answer for, go to a Christian bookstore.  Get a Christian book.  Ask the person behind the counter, hey I need a book on apologetics.  It doesn’t mean I am sorry, it is giving an answer.  I need an answer.

I just wish I had gotten it sooner rather than later but these guys loved me.  When the disciples asked Jesus, how are they going to know You sent us?  It wasn’t, you are going to have an answer to all their questions.  It is by you love for one another.  They loved each other and they loved me enough to care about me.  We talk about this.  I have had these guys on my show and we talk about it.  I compliment them and say you kept coming back, you loved me, you modeled for me and I am in heaven because of you guys because you loved me.  But I wish you had given me a resource to answer some of the questions I was asking.

Thank God now David, we have a bunch of stuff out there that is available and I know a lot of it is available through TheChristianWorldview.com.

DAVID:  We are certainly not short on materials that give good evidence to having a well-reasoned faith.  Of course there is faith to it.  We can’t see or touch or hold it in our hands and do a scientific experiment on God or creation but the evidence is beyond reasonable for anyone to go out and see.

Again Frank Pastore joins us today on The Christian Worldview.  FrankPastore.com.  Let me just read a short paragraph from pages 124-125 in your book Shattered.  It says this, “I began to realize in a way that I couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate that I may have had all the external signs of success, but there was something wrong.  Something was missing.  There was a hole in my life that more wasn’t filling.  I tried to fool myself that the next good game, the next sports car, the next winning season or the next big contract would do the job but they never did.  I began to lose faith that baseball would ever make me happy and fulfilled.”

I am not going to ask the question about you.  We know why you felt that way because God was acting on your heart and showing you that these things were unfulfilling in your life, I want to ask you about your encounter with Pete Rose.  He was the player-manager of the Reds.  He let you go from the Reds and you had quite a contentious encounter.  He was criticizing you for being a Christian.  Pete Rose was going after all those things in his life and his life ended up being shattered as well, but he didn’t get it.  Tell us about that encounter and what it told you about that quote I just read.

FRANK:  There are two guys in the country that I know of that are vying for the position of the most evangelized man in America.  One of those is Pete Rose and the other is Dennis Praeger.  Pete was the perfect icon for what the world has to offer.  He was releasing me out of a guaranteed contract and I tell the story in Shattered but there was an interesting exchange that I share in the book about the moment he is releasing me, I realize that God has something different planned for my life.  They are making a rational decision.  I am not that good anymore.  I just wish they had told me the truth early on and not sent my luggage up to Cincinnati with my kids.  Pete says, aren’t you going to hit me?  Aren’t you going to get angry?  I said, no and he says, that is what is up with you Christians.  You have lost your passion, you have lost your drive.  You have to think about number one.  You have to be out for yourself.  No one else is going to be out for you.  He started repeating all the things I believed as an atheist.  I said, Pete that is not the case.  He asked me, why are there retarded children?  That is a great question; I remember asking that.  If God is so good, why would He allow retarded children?

I realized at that moment that here is a man that I feel sad for.  He is living what the world offers and he believes it.  Now we know in hindsight what has happened in his personal life and it had become a mess.  I just feel sad.  There are so many people like Pete and like I was who are doing the best that they can with what they think is true and real.  They think religion and Christianity is silly, naïve, and false.  If that is the case, then you should be a fighting, mating machine.  That is exactly what we teach our kids.  Why should we be shocked when they act it out in college.

For me, the Pete Rose thing is a perfect illustration on, ok that is our culture.  Look at what is going around the world today, especially in our country.  There is this value system that is out there that is not just politically and socially wrong, it is destroying lives.  There are so many people running so fast on the little wheel on the rat cage that they never stop and ponder, what is this all about?  In professional sports, David as you know, you can reach a pinnacle of success in your 20s, early on and you realize that this isn’t it.  I want to challenge people with this question.  How is your plan right now, regardless of your circumstances, for having a meaningful and fulfilled life going?  If you are empty, if it isn’t going well, I strongly recommend you check out the claims of Scripture, the Bible, Christianity and all that stuff.  Don’t judge Christianity by Christians.  That is the number one mistake.  Judge it by Christ and just see what He says.  If it were true, would it make a difference?   I have found that it has.

I just want to encourage people to pursue what is true and what is real.  Base it on evidence.  This isn’t about fairy tales this is about facts.  It really happened.  If it did, it will radically change your life.  You can take the broken pieces of your dreams and your life and God will put it back together again in a way you never say coming.  There is no way, if you had talked to me at 25, you are going to be a Christian, no way.  You are going to be happily married for 30 years, no way.  You are going to have two great kids and a great family, no way.  You are going to go to seminary.  You are going to do a Christian radio show.  You are going to be on the David Wheaton show, no way.  Only in hindsight can we see what God was up to.  He took all these little broken pieces from my life and professionally and my family and put them back together in such a way that I now realize that the Lord is exactly right.  In our weakness, He has made strong.

So for those listening, whatever has happened in your life relationally with your marriage, your family, your kids, drugs, booze, addictions, whatever it is, God can take those broken pieces right now and put them together in a way you never can see coming and it can be beautiful.  Those broken little colored pieces of glass in to a beautiful mosaic is all about His plan not our plan.  He loves and He is there.  He is patient.  He is a gentleman and He is not going to force Himself into your life but when life happens, where do you go?  When your dreams get shattered, where do you go?  For me, I thought all of this was silly and false and I was challenged to disprove it.  I examined it and realized based on the evidence that this happened and I invited Christ into my life to become the Lord of my life.  I know that sounds like a bumper sticker but there is reality to that.  He calls the shots and it has radically changed my life.

DAVID:   It is how God has restored a shattered life.  Frank Pastore’s life and all our lives are shattered to some extent.  We may not have had the extreme background that you had, but we are all born sinners and to some extent, the shattered parts of our lives are caused by ourselves.  We sin and we fall into sin and you are right, when we examine the claims of Christ, He said, I am the way, the truth, the life; no one comes to the Father buy by Me.  That demands a response.  To not even look into it to see if that claim is true or not is going through life willfully ignoring what God has presented for you.

How did the “dysfunction” or the sinful upbringing in the family that you had rear its head for you as an adult.  It wasn’t like you grew up in this dysfunctional family and you found Christ and it was all behind you and it was all past.  You never had any trouble with it again.  A lot of people will experience that and say my dysfunctional family from my childhood still follows me and affects me to this day.  How were you able to overcome that?

(break)

DAVID:  Sin in one’s family often rears itself later in life.  I asked Frank how the dysfunction or the sin in his family during his youth has reared itself in his adult life and how God has helped him overcome it.

FRANK:  It happened as a result of what happened in ministry, my professional shattering, if you will.  I was at Biola University and a series of events happened where that dream, too was shattered.  I was ticked off at God; just what are You doing here?   I am the innocent one in this and yet I am the one that is out.  I will let people read that in Shattered.  For anyone who has been on church staff or worked for a non-profit, in corporate America in a job and you end up losing that dream, getting fired or whatever and that dream ending, I can relate.  I have been there.

So here is what happened.  My wife, Gina, invited some friends over who were very concerned about me going through all this process because I basically split off and separated again relationally from a lot of people as a result of the pain.  That is just exactly how I dealt with it as a child.  They loved me, like the Reds on the team, these people who loved me came around me and the question that really rocked my world at that point was, Frank how are you feeling?  I gave the typical male answer out of my to-do list, my accomplishments and what I was busy doing and the said, no how are you feeling?  You answered what you are doing, what are you feeling?  I said, I don’t even know how to answer that.

Long story, and I tell it in Shattered, but I end up going to Christian counseling.  In counseling and I share a couple of the stories in Shattered where the dots get connected for me, David.  I realize that I have split off from my emotions in dealing with what was happening with me professionally and the pain of what had happened with my career at Biola and my baseball career and all that.  I had cut that off just as I had as a child.  So when my counselor, Dr. G asked me how are you feeling, that is like asking how tall is purple?  I have no idea how to answer that question.  She goes, well maybe this will help.  She went over to her desk and brought back this sheet that you give children at the doctor when you ask them how much does it hurt.  It is these little emoticons with faces of pain.  That little sheet became by little box of crayons that I could start coloring with emotionally meaning before that I had been blocked off, I had been in my head but not in my heart.  I hadn’t connected the two because of all of the pain of my childhood.

DAVID:  Last question for you Frank and I so appreciate you coming on the program today.  The book is Shattered.  Tell me about your relationship with your mom today.

FRANK:  Mom died and I am so glad you brought this up.  This is important.  One of the things that Focus on the Family was worried about because they did the book, was this doesn’t end with a happy little pink bow on the top.  This ends rather awkward and uncomfortable.  Let me share this and it is ok that you asked that question in fact I am thrilled you did.  Here is the deal.  My mother was so toxic to my children.  She wasn’t interested in having a relationship with Frankie or Christina, my son and daughter, or with me.  One example, was when my father died.  She didn’t want to go to the funeral because she said she didn’t have shoes to wear.  We came over to visit and to gather some of my father’s things and she had not seen my son for probably three or four years.  He was probably 13 or 14 at the time.  The first words out of her mouth were, so well you are tall and handsome, are you going to become a bum like your father?  That was the first thing she said.  There are worse things in the book.  Mom got to the place where she was so toxic that we just had to break off the relationship.  We tried, Gina and I tried, three separate times to try to have a relationship because as Christians we are going to do the right thing.  The Lord says, heal this and we will all be a happy family like the Walton family and it didn’t.  We came to the decision that it was probably best that she is not a part of our lives right now.  This was after trying three times and getting Christian input from leadership on laying it out and what do you think and you are right, it is toxic.  So she died and one of the things I say in the book is that in an interesting way she had died in the years beforehand.  I am ok with broken pieces of my life.  I am at peace with the pieces.  Sometimes it doesn’t turn out well and you just have to trust the Lord in that.

At the very same time that my mom and I and our family with my mother ended up completely estranged, my dad ends up coming to Christ on his deathbed with my aunt.  Here I am, this Christian apologist guy and I tried to have these conversations with my dad and got nowhere.  He is in the hospital dealing with a stroke of which he eventually died from and she said that he prayed with her to receive Christ.  He had a stroke and all he could say was to mumble a couple of things but when she asked him Frank would you like to know you are going to Heaven?   Would you like to receive Christ in your life to forgive you for your sins?  Squeeze your hand yes.  She did the prayer with him and he did yes with his hand again, closed his eyes and prayed with her.  When he opened his eyes after praying, he said in perfect clarity, “Go tell Frankie” and died within a few hours.  It was like, Lord thank you for that.  It is not all lost.  He redeemed that and it was the kindness of the Lord.

When you asked about Mom, it just didn’t end well, it was severed.  Some people have relationships that are toxic.  You have done everything you can, what the Lord has asked you to do to try to forgive and redeem and move on and they are not interested.  Sometimes those relationships are toxic where you just have to leave it there.

DAVID:  At some point, you did what you were called to do to try to help her but at  some point you realize that you can’t have that sin come back into your life or your children’s lives.   You did your best; you did what God called you to do.  At some point decisions are made by people and there has to be a parting of the ways as opposed to letting that dysfunction come back into your life.

Frank Pastore thank you so much for this book, Shattered.  I am so glad you were able to come on The Christian Worldview today.  Even more so, I am encouraged by your life story.  I had no idea until I read your  book and I am so encouraged by how God does in fact, restore shattered lives.  God Bless you and all you do to serve Him.

FRANK:   Right back at you.  I am so very proud with what God is doing through The Christian Worldview and your radio program and your outreach and your ministry.  You know what, God gets the glory.  It is not about you and me, it is about our great God that we serve.  Hopefully we can demonstrate to the world our love for Him.  I go back to what I said about the disciples asking Jesus, how are they going to know You sent us?  It is by your love for one another.  Let’s just become better lovers.  David, thank you.

DAVID:  Friend, if you have had a shattered life there is one thing you can count on to restore you, Jesus Christ and His Word are the same yesterday, today and forever.  Until next time on The Christian Worldview, this is David Wheaton encouraging you to think biblically and live accordingly.

Apocalyptic Economics and the Road to Revelation

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:49 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Jay Richards, author, Money, Greed, and God

TRANCRIPT (PDF)

“Know well the condition of your flocks, and pay attention to your herds; for riches are not forever, nor does a crown endure to all generations” (Proverbs 27:23).

Watching the news for the last couple years, one would conclude that the world’s financial system is hanging by a thread.  Many people are asking: Is America headed toward a “double-dip” recession?  What does our enormous and growing debt mean for the future?  Is our government doing the right thing with stimulus spending?  And, what should we be doing as individuals to withstand this financial and economic turbulence?

In the midst of the cacophony of conflicting voices, Jay Richards is one of the very few that brings a biblical worldview to bear on the critical economic issues of our day.  He is the author of Money, Greed, and God and will join us this weekend on The Christian Worldview to offer clarity and insight on the above questions and many more.

NEED TO READ ARTICLES:

• Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse
• Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History
• Jay Richard’s Articles on “The American”

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  July 10, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic:  Apocalyptic Economics and the Road to Revelation
Guest:  Jay Richards, author, Money, Greed, and God

DAVID WHEATON: Apocalyptic Economics and the Road to Revelation.  Jay Richards from the Discovery Institute joins us today here on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly, and to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life; that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College, The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

I am so glad you joined us this weekend on The Christian Worldview.  I don’t think there could be a better timing for the topic we have, Apocalyptic Economics and the Road to Revelation.  It is a little bit of a dramatic topic, but I think if you look around at the world economic situation, it is probably getting close to accurate.  I was looking in the book of Revelation yesterday and in Revelation 13 we read about a global leader over the entire world called the Anti-Christ.  We read about a global economic tyranny taking place where people can only engage in economic trade if they have the mark of this global leader.  No mention of America anywhere in Revelation 13 by the way.  If you look at Revelation 6:3 it talks about the third seal judgment, that there is hyperinflation, things cost way more than they typically cost.  There is scarcity of resources in the world.  Of course we have the great encouragement that Christ brings it all to an end when He returns to conquer and rule in Revelation 19.

This is the tribulation picture of what is coming forward in the world and whether you are a-mil or pre-mil or post-mil, you believe that this is a literal happenstance, that these things will take place on earth.  People disagree with when but this is where the world is heading; it is the road to Revelation.

We don’t know if this is a long way off or a short way off, but Jay Richards today, who is Senior Fellow at The Discovery Institute and has written the great book we had for our book club selection, Money, Greed, and God; Why Capitalism is the Solution and not the Problem.  He joins us this morning from Seattle.  It is early out there; Jay thanks so much for coming on the program today.

JAY RICHARDS:  Great to be with you David.

DAVID:  I appreciate you getting up early.  This is a timely topic.  We actually have had this scheduled for many weeks now and as I have been preparing this week for this program with you, it seems we are getting calls from all over the place now warning that we are headed for a double-dip recession.  I just want to read you a couple of things before I ask you the first question.  This from CNBC; The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the great depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at GuppyTraders.com told CNBC.  Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.  There was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the depression in 1929 and then with the recovery in 1930, we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded the fall in the market.  In the current Dow situation, we see an exact repeat of that environment.

Now one more, I sent you this column.  You probably read it in the Wall Street Journal by Art Laffer, Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse.  This was a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal.  He says this, “In addition to the end of the Bush tax cuts, which come at the end of 2010, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 when the tax cuts sunset into this year, 2010.  In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has.  When we pass the tax boundary of January 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe double-dip recession.  The economy will collapse in 2011.”  That is Art Laffer in a publication as noteworthy as the Wall Street Journal.

My first question for you, Jay Richards, is do you think this scenario is likely and will a full-blown depression like the 1930s be the result?

JAY:  I would say that the fact that it is Laffer saying this; I don’t want to say it is likely because I don’t want to be a part of the cause of something like this by speaking overly pessimistically but I think it is a serious concern.  Laffer, for those listeners who don’t know who he is, he is the one in the 1980s that developed the so-called Laffer Curve which showed that there is an optimum amount of tax that the government could take out and if the government had too high of an income tax or various kind of taxes, the revenues actually go down or they flatten because people are disincentivized, they are discouraged from doing positive economic things.  He argued that if taxes get above that threshold, the government could actually reduce tax rates and increase revenues because it would encourage people to put their money back into the system and get taxed.  This was the theory in which Ronald Reagan cut taxes and then actually increased government revenues in the 1980s contrary to what a lot of economists said.

So Laffer has a really good track record with making these kinds of predictions.  His point frankly, which I had not even thought of until I read his piece a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, was that we have some positive indications this year of and increase in various types of economic activity but absolutely everyone knows about all these tax hikes or the dissolution of various tax breaks that started in 2002 and 2003.  We know those are going to start in January 1, 2011 so what that means is that everyone who can buy or sell or take a bonus in 2010 is going to do that.  Even if they would have done that in 2011 they are going to go ahead and do it in 2010 when the tax rates aren’t as high.  What that means is that we have an artificial bubble, an illusion if you will, that makes us think there is all this positive economic activity.  In fact what is happening is people are front-loading economic activity because they are anticipating really bad tax climate coming in about six months.  That is not a positive story.

DAVID:  And could lead to a double-dip recession and possibly even a depression.  This is not to be said lightly, this is a major deal.  We are going through a difficult time economically with debt and everything else.  To say it could get worse, contrary to what the President said, this is the summer of recovery, the facts and people who follow it closely say it doesn’t match up.

We will link this article by Art Laffer, and we have another one by Americans for Tax Relief, on the TheChristianWorldview.com.  You can go there and read these for yourself.

I want to get to stimulus because I have a lot to cover with you Jay.  Again, Jay Richards joins up this morning on The Christian Worldview.  He is a Senior Fellow at The Discovery Institute; Discovery.org is their website.  He is also a Contributing Editor at The American Enterprise Institute.  He blogs at Blog.American.com.  Of course, you know him at the author of Money, Greed and God.  He has been on the program for that a couple of times.

I would like you to explain Keynesian economics to us Jay because I am trying to figure out under what conditions does the economic theory that John Maynard Keynes developed 120 years ago, under what conditions does the Keynesian theory of stimulus spending ever work?  Why do the leftists just live by it when there is no evidence or fact that it actually does what it is intended to do?

JAY:  Keynes is considered in many ways the greatest economist of the earlier mid-20th Century.  To sort of boil it down, the assumption of Keynesian economics is that when you have a depression or you have a recession, what you have is a demand problem.   People aren’t buying enough basically.  So the government can put money into the economy that encourages people to spend money and that will get the whole cycle started off again.  If you listen to the arguments, you can get lulled in to complacency in thinking that this sounds plausible.  You don’t realize that they tend to be talking in a circle because it violates our common sense.  We know as individuals or families that if we are having economic problems; we don’t get out of economic problems by spending more money.  There might be some type of temporary fix.  If you can get some credit cards and some nice line of credit, you might have a temporary boost because you can buy things and go on vacations but you know there is going to be a price to pay.

In the same way, it is possible that sometimes if the government does certain kinds of activities and puts money into the system temporarily by borrowing it from the future or borrowing it from the market, they can do some things.  We know that common sense tells us that just as in the case of the individual, there is going to be a price to pay.  Any money that the government spends, it has to get from somewhere.  The government can’t create wealth.  The government can print money, but every time the government prints a dollar, that just makes all the rest of the dollars worth slightly less.  The government can either borrow money from the future or sell a bunch of bonds and put that money into the economy.  Every one of those dollars is in a dollar that a private investor can’t borrow.  They can’t literally create wealth, so what we really have unfortunately is a shell game and almost all politicians are encouraged to do this.

Every politician, of course, has to stand for re-election or if you in the second term as the President, you want your fellow Congressmen and Senators to be re-elected.  You have an incentive to do something that will help the economy in the short run, but to ignore the long-term costs because you will already be dead or out of office.  That is the problem and that is why politicians always turn to these Keynesian solutions.  They hope it will create a short-term boost enough to help them politically but they don’t have to worry about the long run.   In fact, Keynes himself said, when economists said what about the long run?  Keynes said, In the long run we are all dead.  Imagine that as an economic policy for the nation and you see how we got ourselves into this debt hole in the first place.

DAVID:  It is great having a nihilist running our economic system today.  We are speaking with Jay Richards today on The Christian Worldview.  What we are doing is talking about the economic situation.  We are going to do it in three different areas; the American situation, the world situation and finally into the Christian response and actually see if we are on the road to Revelation and what events or factors would cause us to head to that situation.

You mentioned all this stimulus, printing of money, borrowing and so we are going into debt levels that are previously unimaginable and unforeseen.  Keynes said, we are going to all die in the end, but that is a little short sided because we know people will be living on after us.  What are the ramifications of the debt we are incurring?  What happens when we go into such great debt to China or print all this money?  Haven’t we always passed debt down to the next generation?  Are there really consequences for this?

JAY:  The other side of the equation is that our economy can grow.  In theory, let’s say your economy grows by 4% a year.  You could borrow 3% and your growth would outstrip your borrowing.  You could do that, just as you could do privately.  If you spend 3% of your income and go into debt every year, but you get 10% richer every year, you are never going to be swamped by the debt.  Unfortunately, we are not doing that.  We are borrowing far more quickly than the economy is actually growing.  In fact, we are borrowing so much that it is depressing economic growth.

There are just a couple of things ultimately that have to happen.  If we just follow out the trajectory of the big three entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, between 2030 and 2050, the entire federal budget will be consumed by those three program.  They are completely unsustainable.  What is likely to happen is the government will inflate the currency.

DAVID:  Here is verse from Proverbs 27:23, Know well the condition of your flocks and pay attention to your herds for riches are not forever nor does a crown endure to all generations.  There is lots of application in there for us personally and for us as a country.  The Bible is true then as it is today.

We are talking with Jay Richard today, who is a Senior Fellow of The Discovery Institute and also a contributing editor at the American Enterprise Institute. It is very difficult to figure out what is going on economically, not just because you get conflicting voices in the media, but probably because economics in and of itself can be a little complicated.  One thing affects the other, the domino type of thing.  If this happen, then that will affect this, and if that happens that will affect that and it goes around.  Jay writes excellent pieces on economics and many other things at Blog.American.com.

Jay, I want to play a sound bite from the President that he gave at the G20.  I will ask you where he is going with these kinds of statements; what can we expect?  Here is President Obama at the G20 Summit in Canada recently.

President Obama:  “One of the interesting things that has happened over the last eighteen months as President is for some reason, people keep on being surprised when I do what I said I was going to do.  I say I am going to reform our Health Care System and people think, gosh that is not smart politics, maybe we should hold off.  Or I say we are going to move forward on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and somehow people say why are you doing that?  I am not sure that is good politics.  I am doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it is the right thing to do.  People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step up because I am calling their bluff.  We will see how much of the political arguments they are making right now are real and how much of it was just politics.  All right?  Thank you very much everybody.”

DAVID:  Jay, it is an amazing sound bite to hear the sitting President of the United States speak like that.  In as sense, I am doing what I said I was going to do, so get over it.  Then what I want to ask you about is the second part of the sound bite where he said, basically “you ain’t seen nothing yet”, wait until next year.  I am going to call their bluff.  What does he mean there?  What can we expect?

JAY:  First it is quite clear by now that unlike President Clinton, President Obama is an ideologue and if anything he either doesn’t care politically about the long term or what I think, he is thinking strategically rather than practically and he is willing to suffer short term political losses in order to increase the government’s power for the long run.  That is what we did with the health care act.

What I think what he is talking about when he said, I am going to call those people’s bluffs, they are talking about deficits, what he is saying is that I am planning on raising taxes across the board.  They are going to be painful, as he said, and that is the way we are going to solve the deficit.  In other words, he is going to say, look if you are really concerned about the deficit, you are going to have to support my calls for a tax increase.  It implies one, it is either the only way to decrease the deficit or even that it is one way to decrease the deficit that is to raise taxes.

The problem is that there are some circumstances where raising taxes are going to increase revenues.  Let’s say the tax rate is 0% and you raise it to 5%, it is likely obviously, the government is going to increase its revenues.  There is a point beyond which it is actually counter-productive.  You raise taxes above a certain level, as Art Laffer showed back in the 80s, people either quit working or they move their money out of taxable categories and can actually stagnate or reduce government revenues. If anything, we are already way past the bad side of the Laffer curve in which the government already has too high of a tax rate.  Increasing taxes is unlikely to significantly increase government revenues so what we see is actually a tax increase that leads to greater deficits because it greatly suppresses economic growth.  That is what I am afraid we are likely to see.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Barack Obama understands basic economic principles, so he is not going to see this.  It sounds like during one of the worst economic times we have had in a quarter century, he is going to push for massive tax increases across the board.  In fact, there are so many of them on tap for January 1, 2011 that I can’t even keep all of them straight.

DAVID:  As you were talking about this, I was reading something literally about LeBron James signing with Miami instead of staying with Cleveland.  One of the reasons he may have signed was because there is no state tax in Florida where he is not going to be playing.  He has a $100 million contract.  If he had gone to New York, he would have had to pay $12 million in taxes on his contract.  It maybe even affects where NBA players play.  It is pretty interesting how you just talked about with Art Laffer how people go where their money can be most protected.

I want to play a sound bite from a former Senator from Minnesota who is running for Governor, his name is Mark Dayton.  He is from a very wealthy family here in Minnesota.  They owned a huge department store chain.  He was our Senator and now he is running for Governor.  He is very left in his political view.  I saw this particular commercial.  I am going to play the audio of you Jay.  I actually recorded it because it was so astounding what he was saying in this commercial.  It is the typical, I am going to tax those rich people and give it to the poor.  He was just so blatant about it; you just can’t even believe that anyone would fall for this.  Let me play the audio.  Here is Mark Dayton running for Governor of Minnesota in his recent 30-second commercial.

Mark Dayton will close the tax loopholes for the rich.  “The richest Minnesotans can avoid paying their fair share of taxes and that will change when I am Governor.”  Same old story.  It is nothing new.  It would be great to see that happen.  “I am going to take that money and I am going to invest it in our schools and make better quality education for our young people, for college students and their families who can’t afford the tuition.  I am going to make the richest people in Minnesota pay their fair share of taxes, so you pay less taxes.”  Isn’t it time we had a government as good as our people?  That is what we need.  Governor for a better Minnesota.

DAVID:  I am going to make the richest Minnesotans pay their fair share of taxes and give it to you guys so you don’t have to pay so much.  Just make me feel a little better this morning in that Christians listening to that wouldn’t think, that is good, those rich people have too much and they can take that money and they can do things and they can help the poor and invest in education.  Just tell me, do you think Christians can actually be deceived and buy into that?

JAY:  Absolutely, I see it all the time.  It is frankly depressing because that political is an exercise in envy.  It is literally to the appeal of the envy of listeners.  No politician ever says, vote for me and I am going to raise taxes on you.  Politicians don’t ever do that.  What they might say in sort of class warfare rhetoric, vote for me and I am going to tax people that are richer than you more and give that money to you or to something else that you care about.

In any society, you are always going to have some people who are richer than others no matter how prosperous the society is.  The richest 1% will always be1% of the voting public, so a politician can always say, I am going to highly tax that 1% or 5% and he can count on reaching 95 – 99% of his listening audience.

Think how perverse this is that politicians basically say, I am going to treat richer than you differently and I am going to take from them and give to you or to things you care about.  It is blatant envy.  It is an appeal to sin, that citizens should be treated differently simply based upon their income.  I wish that Christians would immediately realize that when they hear that, rather than thinking, oh this is great because this money will be distributed and help the poor and I am concerned about the poor.  This is what we think about.  We don’t realize that there is a really basic moral point that it is blatantly an appeal to envy.

DAVID:  What do you see as the one of two biggest flaws in Christian’s thinking when it comes to taxation?

JAY:  We have probably discussed the first one, but there is this assumption that the government taking money and giving it to someone else is an act of charity.  So we tend to think of progressive income tax since we are supposed to help the poor, I can give the poor directly, through a ministry or I can have the government do it.  In fact it is a complete fallacy because the government takes money coercively and redistributes it.  It actually takes away an intrinsic aspect of charity, which is that it is voluntary, and freely given rather than coerced.  When the government takes our money for these purposes, it robs us of the opportunity for virtue.  The other is that we don’t realize that you can increase taxes so high that you can actually decrease revenues and economic activity.

DAVID:  Sometimes we forget that more taxes equals less liberty.

President Obama:  I have said since I took office that my administration will not rest until every American who is able and ready and willing to work can find a job and a job that pays a decent wage and had decent benefits to support a family.  We are not there yet.  We have a long way to go, but what is absolutely clear is we are moving in the right direction.  We are headed in the right direction and that is the surest way out of this storm is to go forward not to go backwards.

DAVID:  Moving in the right direction?  Welcome back to The Christian Worldview radio program.  Jay Richard joins us this morning on the program as we talk about apocalyptic economics and the road to Revelation.  Jay, what did you think about that sound bite from President Obama talking about the fact that he is not going to rest until everyone has a job with a decent wage?  This sounds vaguely socialistic to me that the government is going to be responsible for putting people to work.

JAY:  Absolutely, it is very strange.  There is no doubt that government policy can affect people’s livelihoods and their employment opportunities but it is mostly indirectly.  The government establishes and maintains the rule of law.  There are sort of the preconditions in which you can have market activity that itself creates wealth but the government doesn’t itself create jobs directly except for government jobs.  Unfortunately we have seen a lot of growth in the federal government just since President Obama has taken office.  It has been staggering not only in the numbers of people but also in pay.  We keep seeing these stories every couple of weeks about how much higher government employees’ income is compared to the average person in the private sector.

When you have the President basically promising people good jobs with good wages and benefits and vacations, it is a very strange thing.  Except for government jobs, which of course take money from the private sector, the government can’t do that.  It is the private sector and businesses that actually create jobs.  It is really frightening.

David, you putting these sound bites together, it is amazing how clear President Obama has been in the last few months about what he is planning to do.  I don’t think any of us are going to be able to say a year from now, well I really didn’t realize just how radical this guy was.  He is basically saying it.  He says it usually in a calm, reassuring tone, but he is telling us what he is planning to do.  He is planning a massive increase in taxes and huge confiscation of power by the federal government.  I am inclined to believe that he is telling us the truth.

DAVID:  If you are shocked by his policies, his worldview, I think you were woefully uninformed during the election.  I am not surprised by anything that he is doing although it is shocking that it is just one thing after the other.  You think, this guy does not have any sort of reticence to do whatever he was taught by his Communist mentor when he was younger, when he went off to the liberal colleges he attended.  He is merely a product of a pretty full and comprehensive, socialistic, Marxist worldview being impressed upon him his whole life.  The scary thing to me is the fact that actually more than 50% of the electorate actually put him in office.  The American people, either they are ignorant about him or they actually think like him.

JAY:  I do think it is probably the former rather than the latter.  I don’t think that many people were paying attention quite frankly.  People were upset for various reasons after eight years of President Bush.  A lot of those things would have happened under any President that President Bush got the blame for.  President Obama seemed to represent change.  He used that language.  He seemed to be a positive figure.  I remember the language he used about a post-partisan presidency in which he brought the various sides together.  That is how he spoke.

It is like you, you look at his actual background, his studies, the things he has written and the fact that he sat and listened to sermons by Jeremiah Wright for twenty years.   That is all I needed to know to say look no one with a sort of moderate sensibility would have been able to sit for twenty years and listen to this wild guy preach the radical message he had.  Even your average liberal Christian wouldn’t have been able to stand for it.  That alone told us that there is something radical about this guy, but that is not how he sounded on the campaign trail.  Tens of millions of Americans decided not to pay attention to the details of his background but listen to the nice words he said on the campaign trail.

DAVID:  It felt good; I think that is what it came down to.  It was a feel good moment in American history and they went for it.  I think the very interesting thing will be what happens in the mid-term elections in 2010 but even more, whether he will be reelected in 2012.  I can maybe give the country a bit of a pass for being uninformed, they are too focused on sports or whatever it is, but in 2012 if he is reelected doing what he has already done and now having a very clear picture of who he is, that is really very bad news for the country.

I want to ask our listeners, do you really think that our economic situation is apocalyptic like I say?  We are heading towards this road to Revelation with a global economic system ruled by a very few number of people where there is going to be scarcity and significant economic turbulence.  You have seen nothing yet right now.

Jay you have heard about the appointment, the recess appointment, it wasn’t passed through the Senate.  President Obama made the appointment without having it go through Senate confirmation of a new Director or Medicare and Medicaid.  His name is Donald Berwick.  I want to play you a little audio of Donald Berwick and get your comment on what type of worldview, from an economic standpoint, is going to be the new Director of Medicare and Medicaid.   Here is Donald Berwick.

Donald Berwick:  Please don’t put your faith in market forces.  It is a popular idea that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can do.  I do not agree.  I find little evidence anywhere that market forces bluntly used that is just consumer choice among an array of products with competitors fighting it out, leads to the health care system that you want and need.

DAVID:  All of the people the President surrounds himself with are completely anti free market, free enterprise, and private enterprise system and here is another example.  What is this going to mean for our health care and Medicare and Medicaid system?

JAY:  It is deeply troubling.  Berwick has quite clearly said, look I am a socialist.  I think economic planners can do things better than the free market.  To say that he has never seen any evidence of this, what was the 20th Century?  The 20th Century was a competition between free market economies in the West like the United States and planned economies.  Whenever you take the kind of market signals that you have in a market that tell us how much a thing is supposed to cost and what is going to be produced and you try to get a government agent to plan, they can’t do it.  It is just like somebody in Washington, DC can’t tell you exactly how much a gallon gas needs to be in Alabama at any particular moment because market forces are going to determine what the actual price is.  They don’t have access to the information.

The second thing is the Berwick apparently doesn’t even understand the health care system we have.  We don’t have a free market health care system.  We don’t have people slugging it out in competition in the free market.  That is why we almost never know how much we pay when we go to the doctor or have a medical service or buy a prescription.  We have had third party payer health care since World War II.  What we need is a free market health care system.  If we did that, we would have just as much competition and competitive pricing as we have in every other part of the market whether it is food or consumer products.  You think about a stereo now, when I was in high school, stereos cost $2000.  Now you can buy them for about $50 and the sound is better.  That is because we have had a free market for that.  The reason we have the problems we have in health care is the result of a lack of a free market not too much of it.  So Berwick is one, seems to be a socialist in his thinking and two, doesn’t even know the kind of health care system we have had all these years.

DAVID:  Let’s go to Richmond, Virginia and Johnny.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview, what is your question or comment for Jay Richards on the economic situation?

JOHNNY:  I just had a question.  What sources or sites can you tell Christians to go to so that they can be more informed about this?  I am a big believer in time makes more converts than reason some times.  I know time will tell.  That is from Thomas Payne.  Just to help other Christian brothers and sisters become more aware of what is going on.

DAVID:  Good question. I think this is a good one Jay because whether you watch Fox of MSNBC, there are two different pictures.  Then you go on the Internet and there are two different pictures conflicting.  There are domino effects in economic policies and so forth.  Where can people go?  I know one site is Blog.America.com.  What can you recommend?

JAY:  I would also recommend the Acton Institute.  I was at the Acton Institute for three years full time.  Acton is the only organization in the world that specifically deals with the integration of the Judea-Christian moral tradition and free-market economics.  There are a lot of libertarian economic sights that defend free markets but they certainly don’t do it from a Christian perspective.  In fact, some of the folks quite frankly in the free market movement are quite hostile to Christianity.  You might get good economic advice, but you get bad moral advice from some economic websites.  If you go to Acton.org you are almost assured of getting good commentary that is theologically serious and economically informed on these things.  I am quite frankly convinces, which is why I wrote the book Money, Greed and God, that most of the things Christians need to know about economics they can get just by thinking really hard about some basic issues even if they never have a course in economics.

DAVID:  Let me ask you about Glen Beck.  I watch Glen Beck occasionally.  He has a gigantic television program.  It is at 5 p.m. eastern every day.  The ratings are so high for it, it is literally competing with the prime time, Bill O’Reilly programs on Fox, dominating everything else.  What do you think about the type of content that is on his program?  Some people call him sensational and a fear-monger.  What do you think about Glen Beck?

JAY:  I basically agree with him.  Glen sometimes says things and I think, oh it wasn’t quite nuanced enough.   I wish he had said it this way, even though I think the point is basically right.  He is doing something that a lot of people don’t do.  He basically calls it as he sees it.  He says what a lot of other people are thinking, which is why I think he is so popular.  He also quite clearly is doing research.  He has an incredible research team and you can tell that he is learning as he is going on and he is sharing that knowledge with other people and I think it is infectious.

DAVID:  I have to say that I have learned a lot about progressivism, the history of America through watching his programs.  He does back it up well with facts.  He plays the sound bites.  The words come out of their mouths and so it is hard to refute and say it is just opinion-based journalism.

Let’s go to Valentine, Nebraska and Lori.  What is your question or comment for Jay Richards on the economic situation?

LORI:  I hear a lot of people talking but I don’t see any action.  Churches are locked at night.  Why aren’t churches opening up their doors, showing the love of God to people instead of sitting around in a coffee shop or a Bible study complaining about socialism?

DAVID:  Lori, fair question.  Jay, what can churches and Christians do more to mitigate the great dependence that we are all getting on government?

JAY:  I think we need to face the fact that the church has been complicit in this.  Private charity, unfortunately, was quite vibrant in the beginning of the 20th Century and as the government entered the sector, the church more or less pulled out of it.  Many of us do have the attitude that I gave at the office.  Now in fairness, there are lots and lots of very good Christian ministries that are doing the kinds of things the caller spoke of.  The truth of the matter is we need to be doing more.  Just as much as we spend time complaining about these things, the church ought to be stepping forward.  Every church is in as different situation.  In some cases you have a soup kitchen, in some cases you have educational programs or you have voluntary health care with the physicians that are in the church.  These kinds of things, these entrepreneurial charity acts need to be happening quite visibly in the church so that people can actually see us walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

DAVID:  Let’s go next to Paducah, Kentucky and Wayne welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What is your question or comment on economics for Jay Richards?

WAYNE:  I am enjoying your program.  I really appreciate it.  I wanted to ask Jay, in this current environment with all that is going on, what are you doing with your retirement funds and investable money?

DAVID:  Great question Wayne, I had that one myself.  What are you doing Jay with your investments or the money you have? What are you doing also to protect yourself against this possible collapse economically in the future?

JAY:  Ironically, while it is always smart to save, at the moment my fear and we don’t know when it is going to happen, but my fear is hyperinflation.  It is the only plausible way I can see the government getting out of this.  You inflate the money and then the debt is worth less so it is easier for the government to pay off.  If you own a house or you have a mortgage with a fixed rate of interest, that is actually probably a good thing because that is not going to change, if we get 100% inflation or something like that.  If you just sit on a lot of cash and you get hyperinflation then it ends up not being worth a lot.  Certainly I think precious metals make sense.  It is unfortunate when we put money in precious metals because it is just a sump for wealth.  It doesn’t create new wealth but it certainly is a hedge of protection.

Generally I encourage Christians to do what you would always do, be prudent and wise in your investments.  We still need to work hard, we need to save and we need to be producing because that is always the other side of the equation.  Humans haven’t quit producing and creating new wealth.  We are still doing that as well.  I think our only hope if this isn’t going to be disaster is that we are able to create more wealth than we consume or borrow.   The day you have hyperinflation, cash ends up not being a very good investment unfortunately.

DAVID:  Let’s go to WestPoint, Mississippi and Norman, welcome to The Christian Worldview. What is your question or comment on economics for Jay Richards?

NORMAN:  I just had a comment.  I think we have really taken our eyes off the ball looking at this properly.  This country has been headed in this direction for over thirty years.  If you look back to 1981 with the S&L crisis, we didn’t fix it; we just patched it up and went back to humming along.  We have been doing this periodically as we go along.  What has happened if you look at 2006, 2007 and 2008, people out in small town recognize that we had a serious problem because they were feeling it?  It was people in government and people on Wall Street who did not recognize that we had a problem and we were about to collapse in 2008.  I think that set up the situation where Barack Obama could be elected.  I blame the Republican Party because they were in power when this thing happened.

DAVID:  We are running out of time.  It is a good point.  We tend to say, look at all these policies that Obama is doing, what about the Republicans Jay Richards?

JAY:  I would say in general, the Republicans have been less bad but that is not exactly serious praise.  Both parties have been complicit.  Certainly in the sub-prime mortgage mess, politicians in both parties thought it was a good idea to subsidize the buying of houses, to degrade eligibility standards all in the name of helping poor people afford housing.  What we did over a period of about two decades is we have created a highly risky and unstable mortgage market that was all around the world and that effectively triggered the financial crisis that we are now suffering under.  It happened when there was a Republican President in the White House but remember we have had both parties doing this.  The best we can say is that the Republicans have been less bad on these points.

DAVID:  Less bad, I like that.  Last question really quick.  The title of the show is Apocalyptic Economics and the Road to Revelation.  What factors need to break apart for us to go into this global economy, global leader, scarcity, and this kind of thing?

JAY:  David, I think that as always, we need to be hopeful and working hard as Christians.  We never know for sure when the Lord is going to return, so we should not be in despair.  I think we should be doing now, what we do every day, which is to watch and be careful and be hopeful and prayerful.

DAVID:  Jay Richards, thank you again for coming on The Christian Worldview program and all of God’s best to you and your family and with the great work you do with the Discovery Institute.  Again you can read him at Blog.American.com.  Jay’s words were good, we do live in a changing and challenging world everyone, but there is one thing you can count on, Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

God Bless, Rather, God Save America

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:45 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Dr. Michael Youssef, founder, Leading the Way Ministries

TRANSCRIPT

“[If] My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land”  (2 Chronicles 7:14).

234 years ago, on July 4th, 1776, the fledgling American colonies declared their independence from monarchy rule in England.  Over time, the United States, with its Christian foundations, grew into the most free and prosperous nation history has ever known.  One could truly say, “God blessed America.”

But is that what Christians should be calling on God to do now — bless America — or, in light of current conditions such as compromising churches and worldly Christians, unbiblical political leadership, and a hedonistic culture, should we rather be calling on God to save America?  On what basis does God bless or curse a nation and how can the above passage from the Old Testament apply to America in 2010?

Dr. Michael Youssef, pastor and founder of the worldwide ministry, Leading the Way, will join us this Independence Day weekend on The Christian Worldview to tell us how he grew up in a socialistic dictatorship in Egypt, and how he, now an American citizen, is deeply concerned for this nation.  He is calling on Bible-believing Christians to join together in the “God Save America” daily prayer covenant from July 4th to November 2nd of this year.  Please consider joining in.

The Christian Worldview Transcript
Date:  July 3, 2010
Host:    David Wheaton
Topic:  God Bless, Rather, God Save America
Guest:  Dr. Michael Youssef, founder, Leading the Way Ministries

DAVID WHEATON: God Bless, Rather, God Save America.  That is the topic for today on The Christian Worldview where the mission is to think biblically about all matters of life and faith so that we can then live accordingly, and to share the Good News that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, the Way, the Truth and the Life; that His Word is both relevant and our basis for living in this modern world.  I am David Wheaton, the host of The Christian Worldview.  Our official website is TheChristianWorldview.com.

Our National Presenting Sponsor is Summit Ministries, the very best in Christian worldview resources, conferences and curricula.  Their website is Summit.org.  We are also supported by two other national sponsors, The Masters College and The S. Lewis Johnson Institute and of course, listeners like you.

So glad you joined us this weekend on The Christian Worldview.  It is Independence Weekend and I hope you and your family have a wonderful one celebrating the Declaration of Independence.  I think it actually occurred on July 2, 1776 but it was publicized a couple of days later on July 4 and that is the day we celebrate it.  In the 234 years of this country, we have had the most prosperous and free nation that has ever existed.  One could truly say, God bless America but is that what Christians should be calling on God to do now, to bless America?  Or in light of what is going on in this country and within the church, should we be calling on God to save America?

Our guest today on The Christian Worldview is Dr. Michael Youssef.  He is the Pastor and founder of the worldwide ministry, Leading the Way.  He is going to join us today to talk about his prayer covenant that he is putting forward, starting tomorrow on Independence Day about God Save America.  Here is Dr. Michael Youssef.

DAVID:  Dr. Youssef, you have had a pretty unusual background.  You were born in Egypt; you lived in Lebanon and in Australia before coming to the United States.  In 1984, you became an American citizen.  You have this God Save America covenant to pray for this country starting on July 4, that is tomorrow, through election day, November 2 of this year.  Some might see from the outside that you are somewhat an unusual person to be spearheading this prayer covenant for America having so spent so much of your life outside of America.  What inspired you to do this that you are seeing going on in America right now that you are calling for this prayer for this extended period of time right now in America’s history?

DR. MICHAEL YOUSSEF:  Those of my listeners and viewers of radio and television through the years know that I am an evangelist by nature.  I focus on teaching and Bible preaching and I really have not been involved in issues although I deeply love this country.  I am one of those immigrants who came to this country from a dictatorship and for the last 35 years I have been in the United States.  It was a longing of my heart since I was a boy growing up under the dictatorship of Mr. Nasser and I saw what socialism has done to a country that used to be the breadbasket of the region; now it is a basket case.  I have begun to sense the same deja vu all over again as it were.

I began to pray earnestly.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and I just pray to the Lord.  I am in my 60s now so I am not a young man anymore and I was crying to the Lord on behalf of America.  My love for America as an immigrant is not one of those people who want to change it.  I love the fact that America was founded on biblical principles and men and women who really knew God and trusted God, they knelt as they signed the Constitution.  I love this country the way it is.  We don’t want to change it.  We don’t want to radicalize it because it was that biblical foundation that made America to be the platform for gospel preaching around the world.  There is not doubt about it that the ministry and the mission and the services that are given to the world from America are unprecedented in the whole world.

I began to be concerned, specifically about the preaching of the gospel.  What would happen when we lose our freedom?  As I began to pray, the Lord says, call other people to pray with you.  I began to really ask what does that mean, how?  I am calling for 100,000 people to sign a covenant with me by going to GodSaveOurCountry.com and sign the covenant and pray daily for the United States all the way until November 2.  We will have resources available for everyone who signs up.  We will be sending a weekly way of how to pray and an encouragement.  Someone will say, how can I pray for America?  We will be very specific; we will give you information on how to pray.  This is our ministry, our labor of love, to everyone who would sign up to say, yes, I will daily pray for this country so that God somehow in his mercy will deliver us from the direction in which we seem to be going.

I personally believe that all of our problems, our economic problems, I am not an economist, political problems, I am not a politician, but all of our problems stem from one core and that is spiritual problems.  We have lost our way.  The churches have ceased to preach the gospel.  One pastor after another is embracing universalism, denying the truth of the gospel.  The people in the pews are confused.  When they are confused, they have no discernment as to who to vote for.

I am praying for a spiritual awakening that will come to God’s people as they look into the future and become as alarmed as I am.

DAVID:  Dr. Michael Youssef joins us today this Independence Day weekend here on The Christian Worldview radio program.  He is the founder of Leading the Way Ministries.  Their website is LeadingTheWay.org.  You can also find out about this prayer covenant that Michael Youssef is putting forward at LeadingTheWay.org.  In the covenant, Dr. Youssef, you say you are asking for 100,000 Bible believing Americans to join you in praying for our nation from July 4 to November 2, 2010.  You say we will be thanking God for the rich Christian history of America, offering prayers of repentance for individual and national sin, petitioning God for His blessing on America, praying to God for wisdom and discernment for elected officials and asking God for boldness and strength to share truth with friends and neighbors.  That is off the website for the covenant to pray for America, God Save America.

You set an endpoint of election day.  Is this prayer that people are going to be praying for America, is this mainly about political change in America for our leaders or this Obama administration or does it go beyond that?

DR. YOUSSEF:  I think it is much deeper than that.  We are praying about the core problem and that is a spiritual awakening.  Of course, what is happening in Congress and the administration and the direction that the whole leadership in Washington is taking us is the wrong one.  Make no mistake about it, and I have experienced it first hand, you cannot have socialism without authoritarianism.  With Authoritarianism you are going to get loss of freedoms.  All the freedoms that the Constitution, The Bill of Rights and all the freedoms that we have been privileged to have will slowly but surely be dismantled because that is socialism.  It is like a plant that only grows when there is no freedom.

That is my biggest concern that if God is going to give us a spiritual revival, awaken us from our sleep as it were and we rise up and see that we are going in the wrong direction, we need to go back to God.  As we go back to God, God will restore these freedoms to us.  God is the one who gave us those freedoms.  The founding fathers in all of their deliberation as you see it and read it, were convinced that God is the author of freedom, not them.  They were just conduits.  Now we are seeing the government as the “big daddy.”  They are the ones who are going to dispense freedom.  They are the ones who are going to dispense money.  They are the ones who are going to dispense everything.  We are in a very dangerous point in the history of this nation.

DAVID:  You have experience with socialism growing up over in Egypt with a dictatorship type government, Dr. Youssef.  I am going to read a short quote that I read actually in a reader comment to an article that I saw on the internet.  I think it is actually been circulated some, so maybe you have heard this as well.  It goes like this, “The danger to America is not President Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.  It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama Presidency than to restore the necessary common sense in good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their President.  The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama who is a mere symptom of what ails us.  Blaming him should not blind anyone to the vast confederacies of people that made him their prince.  The republic can survive a Barack Obama who is after all merely (and he uses a derogatory term for the President which I won’t use). It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President.”

Dr. Youssef, basically what is being said here is President Barack Obama and his unbiblical values that I think every Bible believing Christian recognizes from everything to do with the homosexual agenda to the way he treats our enemies, to the way he treats Israel, to all the different policies, the socialistic economic policies that are unbiblical and against freedom, those kind of things, everyone would see that but are we pointing to the wrong person?  In other words, shouldn’t we be praying more for the fact that the American people, that there can be revival amongst the American people because whom they elect is merely a representation of who they are?

DR. YOUSSEF:  I couldn’t agree more.  I was speaking to several hundred of the men of my church.  This was months ago and I said to them that I had no beef with President Obama.  I really don’t, I pray for the man.  My biggest worry and concern is the people who have elected him.  I said this months ago and it is amazing because when you realize the fact that as goes the pulpit, so goes the pew.  So as goes the pew, goes society.  For so many years we have watered down, modified, changed the gospel and look at the statistics from the pew research and everywhere else, only 60% of so-called Evangelicals believe that Jesus is the only way which is the very tenant of the Christian faith.  That means 40% of so-called Evangelicals don’t believe the gospel.  If they don’t believe the gospel, they aren’t going to vote for people who have discernment and understanding and share biblical values because they don’t know them themselves.  That is why my cry is not against the government or against this group or that group.  I am saying to my fellow Christians, those knees who have not yet bowed down to Bail, to go to the Lord and cry to Him on behalf of America.  If God wakes us up, we are the ones who are going to make or break.  We are the ones who are going to vote with discernment and that is why my focus is the American people.

(break)

DAVID:  We are talking today about God Bless, Rather God Save America.  With everything Christians see going on in this country right now from politics to culture within the church, should we really calling on God to bless America or should we really be calling on God to Save America at this point?  I am speaking with Dr. Michael Youssef; he is the founder of Leading the Way Ministries.

Dr. Youssef you talked about the problems, not necessarily within the administration and there are some because of their unbiblical worldview, but the problems with the general population of America.  Let’s drill down more specifically into the Christian culture, for lack of a better word, in America.  You talked about the pulpits that the full council of God isn’t being preached by our pastors.  You talked about churches and there is a reticence to adhere to strong and sound doctrine in scripture.  Churches are becoming weaker.  We talk about individual Christians and their own lives.  Their own lives aren’t much different than the world from the standpoint of divorce or the way they live their lives.  There is a great need for sanctification.  There is a great need for Christians to share their faith.  When we look at some of these things and we see the problems inherent in American Christianity, what can be done, we talk about prayer, but what else can be done to turn this around from a Christian standpoint within the Christian community in America?

DR. YOUSSEF:  I tell people and I make no bones about it in all of our radio and television programming, I tell them openly that if you in one of those churches that absolutely does not uphold, proclaim, defend and stand for the gospel and the proclamation of the gospel, you need to run as fast as you can.  The problem is so many people sitting in the pews know in their hearts that these preachers have departed from the truth yet they just sit there and they keep on supporting those churches.  I used to belong to a mainline, I was ordained in one of the mainline denominations, the best know mainline; I was an Episcopalian.  Twenty years ago, I saw the writing on the wall and I began to take a stand within the denomination and I said, thus says the Lord.  Well I was called every name in the book by my fellow clergy, but that is ok.  That is the price of the gospel; that is the price we are supposed to pay for standing for the truth.  Ultimately I was defrocked because of preaching of the gospel.  However, the church that I started with 28 people now has 4000 – 5000 people because God honored His proclamation of the word.  I want to be very careful, but a lot of preachers are so worried about losing members that they themselves compromise the truth.  Don’t worry about losing members.  God is the one who is going to bless you.  God is the one who is going to honor your proclamation of the gospel.

It is both for the preacher who knows he is compromising and to the layman who is sitting in the pew that knows that the preacher is compromising, there has to be a stand.  They need to take a stand and either get out of that church or make a change in that church and the other needs to repent.

DAVID:  Again, Dr. Michael Youssef, you are listening today here on The Christian Worldview.  He is the founding pastor of the Church of the Apostles that is in Atlanta, GA.  Their website is LeadingTheWay.org.  What is going to be the evidence that this prayer covenant, and for lack of a better word, worked?  How are we going to know that God heard our prayer and we see some change in this country?

DR. YOUSSEF:  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.  I did this in obedience.  I didn’t want to do it.  As a matter of fact, when I was praying and the Lord began to lay that on my heart, I said, Lord there are other people who are better known, other people who can do a better job and I really was reluctant to do this.  The Lord says, I choose unlikely people just go and do what I ask you to do, so I am really doing this in obedience.  In the past whenever God’s people have come to Him and cried to Him in genuine faith and trusting in Him, believing that the God who said, call upon Me, will answer us, they always knew and the evidence was there.  I certainly don’t want to put God in a box as to who we are going to see this but I know that we will.  I just believe that but I don’t know how.  I can’t say, well we are going to have x number of this or this is going to happen.  I don’t want to presume on the Lord.  I am coming to Him with others in obedience believing He is going to make the changes that in His sovereign plan will bring about.

DAVID:  It is going to be interesting because as we know, when the people of God get together to earnestly pray, God hears and He answers and it will be interesting to see how He answers this prayer of tens of thousands of Bible believing Americans for the God Save America Covenant to pray for this country.  By the way, I titled this program God Bless, Rather God Save America.  We are so quick to say God bless America, but you wonder when God looks at America right now, yes there are many good things that this country does and has stood for in the past, you wonder how God can bless a country where so much of the country goes against and rejects His word, God Himself in so many ways.  That is why I say instead of praying for God to bless America; we need to pray for God to save America.

DR. YOUSSEF:  That is exactly right.  That is why I did not even have the burden to pray for God to bless America and I will tell you very simply, because God has blessed America for 240 years.  You know what happened?  We focused on the blessing, not the Blesser.  That is really our downfall; our blessing has been our downfall. Right now, we are in such spiritual disarray that we need to cry to Him that He may save us.  I am talking about saving us generally and if it pleases Him, that He would save us as a Republic.

DAVID:  I want to read something from your website, LeadingTheWay.org about what Leading The Way is about.  It is a worldwide ministry that leads the way for people living in spiritual darkness to discover the light of Christ through the creative use of media and on the ground ministry teams.  TV and radio programs are broadcast in twenty languages and are available in more than 200 countries.  Skipping further down . . . A new television satellite network called The Kingdom Sat, our new 24/7 satellite television channel that launched in March 2009.  The first Christian television channel permitted on an Arabic satellite platform, that is Nile Sat reaching into 120 million homes in 66 countries in Arabic.

You are clearly reaching out into the Arabic, the Muslim world.  With you background, being born and raised in Egypt, spending time in Lebanon, talk about, from our experience Dr. Youssef, how you think the general Muslim world, more of the moderate type Muslims, view America right now and this President.  What is your sense of how they see America?

DR. YOUSSEF:  There is a report recently that is an interview with the Foreign Minister of Egypt, who is considered to be a moderate Muslim, a part of the establishment, saying that when he met with Obama one on one, Obama assured him that he is a Muslim and that he will take care of Israel once he takes care of the economic problems.  Now this was circulating around.  It has been in some reputable interviews given to Arab television.  Now that is how some moderate Muslims want to see Obama, one of them, therefore he is going to be on their side. The radical Muslims, of course, would never accept that because they couldn’t even accept Anwar Sadat, one of them, who is considered to be a devout Muslim, because he shook the hands of an Israeli Prime Minister.

It is a hodge podge and mish mash in the Arab world.  The fundamentalists will never accept anybody who is less than fundamentalist and the moderates are really trying to say hey, he is one of us.  Therefore, America is not very far from becoming very Islamic friendly.  You take for example just a few weeks ago in Dearborn, Michigan; about four young men evangelists who were sharing Christ in and Islamic Festival in Dearborn were arrested and put in prison.  This is like having a sharia law in Dearborn, not the First Amendment.

Then in England recently, an evangelist was arrested because he was witnessing to a Muslim in the street.  They find those things in the Arab world, places like Egypt where 15% of the population are Christians, yet they are not allowed to talk about their faith outside the walls of the churches.  This is coming to America, coming to England; it really should alarm every freedom-loving person around.

For me, I had a choice.  I could curse the darkness and talk about the danger of fundamentalist Islam or I can go and take the light of Christ and I felt that God has positioned me in such a privileged place to be able to take the gospel into the bedroom and living rooms of every Muslim in the Arab world and in Europe.  So we launched the satellite channels, Kingdom Sat, where 24 hours a day we are proclaiming the gospel.  We were invited as the first Christian satellite channel.  We were broadcasting on a European platform, but now SAT, which is an Arab satellite platform, invited us to broadcast, which is much better.  Of course we have a much wider audience, literally everybody.  Take example Kuwait, 97% have dishes.  The gulf countries, 98% have dishes.  Even a poor country like Morocco, 60% of the people have satellite dishes.  We are reaching a vast majority of people and of course, the response has been phenomenal.  People are responding, we never heard this, we never understood this and we are proclaiming Christ and Christ alone.  I am not attacking their religion, I don’t have to.  I am lifting Christ and Christ Himself is drawing people to Himself.

(break)

DAVID:  Today on the program we have been speaking with Dr. Michael Youssef.  Most of you know who Dr. Youssef is; he is the founder and the pastor of Leading the Way Ministries.  They are a worldwide, international ministry as you head there in the last answer before the break, they are on satellite TV over in the Arab world.  We are talking about the topic, God Bless America or should we be calling on God to Save America?

My question today is this.  Here is the verse from 2 Chronicles that we often read, 2 Chronicles 7:14, If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.  That is what God said to Solomon right at the dedication of the temple.  There are more verses surrounding it that I will read in the last segment, but that is the key verse that most people know about.  We see it come through in e-mail chains and so forth that our country needs to repent.  The question for you today is, is this verse applicable to America in the year 2010 or was that just for Israel?  Number two, on what basis does God bless or curse a nation?  Is it the leaders, is it the people, is it the state of the churches?  In other words, what do we have to do as a country to know go from God save us, to God you can bless us.  How does that work?

DAVID:  What is your sense of what is going on in the Middle East right now from a standpoint of Israel and her neighbors and what do you think could take place in the near future?  What is your sense from your connections over there?

DR. YOUSSEF:  I am, of course, deeply concerned about how the American administration is throwing Israel under the bus right now.  Israel is the only democracy in a sea of dictatorships.  When I went to Israel for the first time, I was absolutely amazed at how much freedom the Arabs who live in Israel have.  Anybody with my background, who heard all the rhetoric from the Arab countries, goes there and become mesmerized.  The Arabs are freer in Israel than in any Arab country.  They are treated better than they are treated in most Arab countries.  Certainly they are treated far, far, far better than the Christians are treated in Arab countries.  Israel is the small democracy in the sea of dictatorships facing so many enemies.   There are so many people who hate Israel that we need to be standing with Israel, supporting it and encouraging them.  They feel discouraged right now.  I have been to Israel a couple months ago and I am going back in three months time.  In my heart I have no hatred toward anyone; I love everyone.  Wherever the gospel is going to be preached, I am going to go.  The truth is, Israel is in a very dangerous situation right now.

DAVID:  The covenant to pray for America, the God Save America Covenant, you can find out more about that and how you can sign up by going to LeadingTheWay.org or GodSaveOurCountry.com.  By the way, Dr. Youssef’s regular personal website where he blogs is MichaelYoussef.com.

Dr. Youssef, last question for you.  We have talked about the America today.  We have talked about the perception that the Muslim world has towards America with your background living in a Muslim country and your experience over there.  So Christians are often faced with the challenge as to how to think about this.  We think they are the enemy.  They are trying to destroy us and therefore, we need to wipe them off the face of the map so we can have our peace and security.  On the other side, we think about the great commission and God’s call to Christians to go out and evangelize and disciple the world.  What is the balance there?  We see documents come out from the evangelical community.  You probably remember A Common Word Between Us and You, which was between Christians in the West and Islamic leaders and so forth.  Do these kinds of efforts to reach out to Islam helpful?

DR. YOUSSEF:  No. That is a false statement, by the way, as far as I am concerned as an evangelical Christian, a Bible believing Christian.  It is a false statement.   It really doesn’t have a lot of truth.  There aren’t many knowledgeable Christians about Islam on that list.  They are mostly liberal evangelicals, but I want to get into that.

The truth is, I have many Muslim friends and I do not compromise my faith just to keep them as my friends.  I sit with them and I say this is what I believe, they tell me that is what they believe and we agree to disagree and that is fine.  There is no problem with that.  I would not try to water down my faith in order to meet them half way.  They don’t respect that, by the way and they told me so many times.  They said we don’t respect Christians who try to appease us.  In the long run, it is not very helpful.

You said something that is very interesting.  I meet people who say to me, let’s nuke them.  But you know what, if we wipe the Muslims from the face of the earth, let me tell you something, we are not going to live in safety and security.  They are not our problem.  Our problem is God.  Our security is in God and once we depart from Him that is where our insecurity comes in.  We got bombed on September 11 because we are slowly but surely moving away from the Lord.  Until we get it back in repentance and faith and be secure in Him and in Him alone, we will not know true security.  That is basically my rock bottom conviction.

DAVID:  I would agree with that Dr. Youssef.  I really appreciate your taking the time to come on The Christian Worldview today.  We are very much behind the God Save America Covenant to pray for this country starting tomorrow, Independence Day and going through November 2.  Again, you can go to LeadingTheWay.org or GodSaveOurCountry.com to sign up for that covenant.  I am going to be taking part in that Dr. Youssef.  We so appreciate your concern for this country, not just the political side of it but the pastors, the churches, the individual Christians that we all need a spirit of revival for God to have mercy on this land and to have a sense of revival in this country.  Thank you so much Dr. Youssef and God bless you.

That was Dr. Michael Youssef of Leading the Way Ministries talking about God Bless, Rather God Save America and his God Save America Prayer Covenant.  I am going to ask all of our listeners today who were listening to Dr. Youssef to take part in this.  I think this is a very important thing that we as Christians can be involved in.  It starts July 4, Independence Day and runs through election day, November 2.  As you heard, it is not just political; this is mainly about the spiritual health of this nation.  This should not be beyond the pale for Christians to be getting down on their knees every day remembering our country and our people in prayer.  You can commit to doing it yourself if you want to or perhaps you want to sign the covenant form on their website.  It is at LeadingTheWay.org or GodSaveOurCountry.com.  You just go there and put your name down to sign up.  It would be great to have a whole lot of The Christian Worldview listeners take part in this.  That would be a real message not only to Dr. Michael Youssef and encourage them, but also a great message to God, that we are penitent and do want to change our wicked ways.

Let’s get one quick caller before the break.  Let’s go to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Seth welcome to The Christian Worldview.  What is your question regarding Michael Youssef’s comments on God Save America.

SETH:  I was just going to comment on the statement you were making.  God does need to save America but He does not condemn.  I feel that he doesn’t condemn our country; it is our actions and the things that we do that condemn ourselves.  God punishes us for that and I am totally behind you.  God does need to save our country.  We are a great country and our actions now have just turned to corruption.  You are exactly right.  I totally agree with you and Dr. Youssef that we need revival to turn this country around.

DAVID:  Seth I appreciate the call and it is clear that God does bring judgment upon nations.  It is all over scripture from Moab to Edam to Israel itself when they were sent off into Babylon.  There has been a lot of judgment.  I would like to know on what basis does he judge.  Is it the political leadership; is it the people?   All nations are sinful to some extent.  Is it comparative?

(break)

DAVID:  We have been speaking today about God bless America or God save America?  What should Christians be crying out to God to do at this point?  Pastor Michael Youssef has a prayer covenant starting tomorrow, July 4 through November 2, the commitment to pray for this country every day.

I thought some of the interesting things he said were the core problem we have is spiritual, so goes the pulpit, so goes the pew.  So goes the pew, so goes the people was a great comment I thought.  He said, we have been focused on the blessings not the Blesser.  That was an interesting point and very apt and well put.  Finally he said, when we get back to repentance and faith, we will be under the blessing of God.

Let’s get back to our phone calls and Tim in Stoneypoint, North Carolina.  Welcome to The Christian Worldview Tim, what is your comment on the interview with Dr. Michael Youssef?

TIM:  To answer your question, two things.  One, 2 Chronicles 7:14 in context applies to Jewish people at the time it was given.  It does not apply to America today, to do so is an exegetical error.  Two, as far as blessing and cursing, Genesis 12:1-3, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you.  So how a nation treats Israel, the Jewish people, is how God blesses or curses a nation.

DAVID:  That is a good point.  I think you are absolutely correct Tim and I appreciate your call on the issue of 2 Chronicles that verse.  I would like to read the whole passage if I have time.  Once again, God is talking to Solomon here at the dedication of the temple about the Jewish nation, If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.  This is directly applicable to Israel but let me put a “but” in there, I do believe there is general application there to all nations afterwards that if a nation with its political leadership, its people, its churches are humble and pray and seek God’s face and they turn from their sin, I believe there is general application here that there will be more of God’s blessing on the land rather than His judgment.  That just makes sense.  We see it all throughout Scripture, when there is obedience it brings blessing and disobedience brings judgment and punishment by God.  There are natural consequences that go along with breaking God’s laws.  So I agree Tim, it is meant for Israel and it is a difficult question to understand on what basis does God bless any nation aside from Israel because they are His chosen nation, but any other nation because all the nations are sinful including Israel.

Is it just a comparative scale that America has been more humble and has prayed more and been more Christian than the rest so we get more blessing because of that?  I think it actually does have something to do with that.  You look at the Christian founding of this country and the principles and values and what has been going on in this country in our past.  Relatively speaking, it was more of a God-fearing nation than any other nation.  That is perhaps why this nation has been so obviously blessed both with prosperity and also with freedom as well.

Let’s go to Rapid City, South Dakota and Lucille what is your question or comment regarding the interview with Dr. Michael Youssef?

LUCILLE:  Thank you for taking my call.  Your question, how can God bless any nation?  It is the same as it has always been.  God wants obedience; He wants people to admit that He is.  He wants people to recognize that He exists and He wants people to recognize who He is.  It is obedience that God blesses any nation.  In Deuteronomy 28 that is what He told the people; He gave them conditions on which He would bless them or curse them.  It was obedience to Him and He gave us the commandment by which to live.  I am a teacher of Bible prophecy and I believe that this nation, this wonderful nation of The United States of America has taken God out of our schools, out of our courtrooms, out of the public domain.  We have taken God out of every element of the public, so the Bible is no longer allowed in the schools.  The Bible is God’s word.  It gives us exactly what God wants from us.  God is God.  He has the right to demand obedience and we have ignored that to our own peril.  If we want God to bless us, we need to come back into obedience.  We need to admit that He is.  He have to admit that He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross to cover the sins of all mankind and we need to come back to what He has asked in the first place from all nations and that is to obey Him because of who He is.

DAVID:  That really is the bottom line of the bottom line Lucille and I appreciate that very good phone call.  It is a great admonition for all of us.  It starts with us as Christians individually.  We need to make sure our lives are right before God.  We need to be on that road of sanctification by being in the word and humbling ourselves before God by being penitent in our own hearts.  It doesn’t start by pointing fingers at someone else, it starts by pointing fingers at ourselves, seeing where we are, not letting the culture make us like it.  Sanctifying ourselves, humbling ourselves and then as we go into our churches, it moves out into the churches.  When we get out of our churches, it goes out into our spheres of influence.

Let me give you one little snippet of something that is representative of the scary point where our country is at this point.  There are lots of things we could say about what is going on in our church and out country, but I don’t know if many of you knew that in the month of June, our President, the leader of this nation, had a Presidential Proclamation announcing June as the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Pride Month.  He says, I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.  On another gay website, they said themselves, Let’s acknowledge his statement for what it is, a recognition from the highest office in the nation that gay Americans should be proud.  When you have the leader of the country normalizing and legitimizing what the Bible and God inherently calls sin, we have problems.  We, as Dr. Michael Youssef, need to get on our knees and pray for this country starting today through election day, commit to do it.  GodSaveOurCountry.com.

We do live in a changing and challenging America.  One in which sin is called good and good is sometimes called evil, but there is one thing Christian we can always trust in; Jesus Christ and His Word are the same yesterday, today and forever.

How To Integrate Your Faith at Your Workplace

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:50 — 8.7MB)

Guest: Lee Truax, President, Christian Business Men’s Connection

“Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve” (Colossians 3:23-24).

You’ve heard of the “Sunday-only Christian”, the person who thinks that faith is for church on Sundays and not for life in the real world during the week, specifically in the workplace.  Or you might have heard a professing Christian say, “I’m not able to bring my faith into my secular work environment” or “There’s constant pressure to compromise my biblical values at work.”

But what is God’s call for the Christian businessperson?  Is it possible to be an ambassador for Christ at work, and if so, how can that be pursued?

This weekend on The Christian Worldview, Lee Truax, president of Christian Business Men’s Connection (CBMC), will explain what it means to integrate your faith in the workplace.  If you want to be a stronger and more effective Christian at work, this program is for you.

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