Putman Plumbing makes a living by servicing their clients' needs. They make their life by how they service their clients, from the first phone call to when they leave your home when the job is done. Putman Plumbing is dedicated to providing top-of-the-line quality work. Call Putman Plumbing. That's with a P, as in your preferred plumber. Putman Plumbing. How can we make you smile? Welcome to the Frederick Faith Debate on Frederick's News Radio 930 WFMD. I'm Troy Skinner, joined this week by Dave Grieber, the author of The Lost Commandment, Have We Missed What Jesus Really Wants? And Jonathan Schweitzer, senior pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapel. Our sponsor is Putman Plumbing and Heating. How can we make you smile? I encourage you to visit us online. WFMD.com, keyword faith. Go to the audio vault. You can listen to this show. I don't know, give us a couple of days to put it up on the podcast and you can listen to it over and over, share it with friends. You can have a listening party. Use it as a lullaby to go to sleep at night. All sorts of good things. Just don't drive to it. Well, I don't know. Dave's voice is kind of soothing. He'll be able to help you go to sleep. Jonathan will keep you up with nightmares, I'm sure. If you were listening last week, you kind of caught the introduction of what this is all about. And if you missed it and you're having a hard time catching up, then go check out the Audio Vault and listen to last week's show on podcast. But Dave's book, The Lost Commandment, he started writing it about five years ago. And it just got finally published and put out, and you can go buy it now on Amazon or other places, I guess, too. Everywhere, yeah. Available at the store near you. And you're now in, what, your fourth or fifth printing? It's like, you know, New York Times bestseller. No, no, no. No? Not yet. OK, well. Yeah, way not yet. Anyway, Dave lives in Frederick. and goes to a local church, and he's not the pastor of the church, but obviously he's a pretty thoughtful layperson in the Christian church. Apparently he's on the speaking staff, though, at the church. That's true, yes. I'm not sure, what does that mean, on the speaking staff? It means they let me get up and preach on Sundays. Oh, that's dangerous, huh? Yes, it is. But they don't pay him for it. Oh, right, right. Bonus for them. Didn't expect it. Hence the reason why I wrote the book. You can get a little bit of money for this stuff. Hey, 10 bucks is 10 bucks, right? That's right. So he's sitting in, I don't think a pews at your church, but he's sitting in the congregation. Yeah. and listening to a sermon about love or something, and it hits him that, you know, wait a minute, this thing about, you know, Jesus tells his disciples to love each other like he loved them. And he calls it a new commandment. Yeah, I give you this new commandment. What does that mean, this new commandment? So he starts plowing through his Bible, trying to make sense of it, and was gnawing at him. So he did a bunch of research, couldn't find any materials to help him navigate through what this whole new commandment was all about. So since it seems like nobody in 2,000 years of Christian history has written a book about this, he thought, OK, well, I don't know if you thought, somebody thought and convinced Dave, probably kicking and screaming, you should write a book about this. And so now he has. Again, it's called The Lost Commandment. And I think you should have called it Raiders of the Lost Commandment. Now it's more fun, you know? It would be on the New York Times bestseller. We'll see if we can sell the movie rights. At the end of last week's show, we were talking about George Barna, the Barna Group Research, talking about how Christians don't maybe love each other, or at least you taking a connection of his research and seeing that as evidence that Christians don't love each other. The Barna Group has research that shows that half Christians don't like to share the gospel with other people, or aren't there... I think you said 47% of Christians only consider sharing the gospel as an important part of what it means to be a Christian. So now, a couple of things I want to ask, because I'm pretty familiar with George Barna. I think his research is pretty good. He's the best at what he does, for sure. But I'm not sure how George and his Barna Group folks define Christian. And I'm not saying this devil's advocate. I don't know how they define Christian, how stern they are. Because an awful lot of people claim to be Christian, and that might be the 53% that don't share the gospel. The 47% that do might actually be the authentic real deal. I mean, do you have any sense of that? I think that in the statistics, he used the label that people use to describe themselves. So I think according to his research, something like 85 or 90 percent of Americans describe themselves as Christians. And for the sake of this survey, I believe that he stuck with that description. Well, then the fact that 47 percent say they do shocks me. In fact, that seems to be, of Barna's material, that seems to have been some of what's been most important about it. Barna for years did all this stuff about how you could grow the church and all these statistics, but then towards the end he started to ask the question, well, maybe I could survey people and find out whether or not they're really acting like Christians. Maybe the problem why the church isn't growing It's because people really aren't acting like Christians. And so, you know, he began to get a little bit more specific, like asking these kind of questions. You had a couple others that were really interesting. What were those? Yeah, I did. Let me just point out, though, I misspoke when I said I was talking about the Barna study, because I cite both Barna and Gallup. And these are actually Gallup figures from a 2003 survey. The survey is called, How Are American Christians Living Their Faith? It's available on the web. George, I gave you a plug you didn't deserve. Yeah. So, we talked about the evangelism thing. Another way in which American attitudes suggest that this commandment is lost is that only 55% of Christians say that the statement, God's grace enables me to forgive people who have hurt me, applies completely to them. How many? 55%. So 45% of the Christians do not think that God's grace enables them to forgive people who have hurt them. Wow, so there's 45% of people that walk around as Christians out there that are willing to not forgive somebody in their life. Meaning like to hold unforgiveness towards that person. That is pretty significant. Yes, I think so too. Troy, are you one of those? I need to know, man, after all these years. Only with regards to you, my friend. Love means I don't have to say I'm sorry. That was from last week. But there are other examples in the New Testament where that is explicitly stated, that you need to forgive others, because by the standard you treat others, if you don't forgive others, you won't be forgiven. So that might not be, does that really tie into what you're talking about with this lost commandment from Jesus? Yeah, what does forgiveness have to do with love? I think that forgiveness is one aspect of love. Yeah, I mean, come on, if somebody doesn't forgive me, I'm not going to feel loved. When you think that for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to die for us, I mean the whole point, God's love was expressed in giving Jesus to die on the cross so that forgiveness would be possible. Forgiveness is totally linked into love. And I think God now expects us, those of us who have accepted that forgiveness, to in turn forgive others. So what about This is the big question. I'm going to go for the big hairy question about forgiveness. If Hitler would have asked for forgiveness, should you forgive him? What about Madoff? If Madoff asked for forgiveness, is he worthy of forgiveness? I mean, surely there's some people out there that are just beyond forgiveness, right? I mean, you would agree with that? No, I wouldn't agree with that. I think that if Jesus can forgive the very people who nailed Him to the cross and look down from the cross on the soldiers who nailed His feet and hands to the cross and say, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do, that if He can tell the Apostle Peter that we're supposed to forgive 70 times 7, if that is the kind of forgiveness that the Lord has forgiven us… Yeah, but He was just one guy. Right? Madoff. He destroyed thousands of people's lives, and Hitler destroyed hundreds of thousands of people's lives. I mean, I know Jesus, you know, is supposed to be the Son of God, okay, it's a big deal, but it's just one guy at the end of the day. Well, at the end of the day, he was distinctly not just one guy. Let me ask you, Dan, I guess you've got a list of some of those sorts of stats. I know that Jonathan was going to have you kind of run through some of those. Are there any other big key stats from either Gallup or Barna that... Yeah, it seemed like you had one or two. While we're kind of on that subject, because we'll forget to come back to it. So there are a couple that we want to share. There are two more I mentioned in the book. One is that only 44% of Christians say that the statement, God calls me to be involved in the lives of the poor and suffering, completely applies to them. Only 47%? Only 44%. 44%. Right. Wow. What are the rest of them doing? Just hanging out with their nice, rich friends? Well, I think the question is, what are the rest of us doing? because i think that there's a temptation to we all have to say well you know where were in the other half well but i think it's always got a problem with this but certainly not me i mean okay well his wife's good at it that's it but uh... the uh... and then i read that i am that's for sure yet yet my wife's good attitude So the outcome of all of these attitudes that result in unloving conduct is that Christians have a pretty bad reputation, generally, in the world. Whereas, Jesus said, right after giving this commandment at John 13, 34, Jesus said, in this way all men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. In this way, I would put parenthetically, it's not in the verse. You have to ask the question, is that how we're known? Are we known as a loving people? And the answer seems to be no. And this is a Barna Group survey said that few Christian adults have positive views of Christians. Only a small percentage of non-Christians, quote, strongly believe that the labels respect, love, hope, and trust describe Christianity. So you have a broad cross-section of society concluding that Christians are unloving, and as a result we're seeing an exodus from the church, particularly in the younger generations. You have books being written, like Dave Kinnaman's book, who's with Barna, called Un-Christian, reflecting their additional surveys about what people think about Christians, and they don't think too much of us. Okay, I got two thoughts about this. One is that I find that your approach to grappling with this question that moves in on saying, okay, well, let's clearly define what it means to love like Jesus, what the Bible says to love like Jesus, and let's do a good job at that. Let's teach it well. Let's teach it, you know, not just at a shallow level, but at a deep level. And on that sense, I'm really pleased with the nature of your approach to it. You're not just saying we need to have different kinds of churches, but you're saying the message of what we're teaching in terms of how people become disciples is very important. The second thing, though, is something that, I have to be honest, I really personally have struggled with. I feel like there is a, what we're told in Thessalonians, that for people who don't love the truth, God is going to send them a powerful delusion that will lead them astray and show, you know, make it absolutely clear that they were not lovers of the truth. And when I look at Hollywood, I look at the news media, the obvious biases that are out there, I look at the music industry, you know, what could be defined as culture in the United States for the last 60 to 70 years, I get the sense that there's been a concerted effort in all of those avenues to paint Christians out as being narrow-minded, mean, unloving, this kind of thing. And at some level I feel like, okay, well maybe we're just become that way because the world keeps telling us that that's the way that we are you know like like how how much is it true that that that maybe there's a silent majority out there that don't fit any of these statistics but because people in the world have been so uh... so conditioned to think christian bad evil crusade uh... which which hunt uh... uh... Uncomfortable with with anything about sex you know sexually repressed you know Trying to always you know make people do things that because the world is trying to paint us with that that at the end of the day The world thinks that's the way that we really are when possibly We're really not that way You're wondering whether it's a PR problem Absolutely Well, let me put it this way. Certainly the enemy of our souls is in the business of deception and has been from the beginning. That's why Christ was killed at the end of the day, because Christ had a PR problem. Let me say this. On the surface, maybe you could say it's a PR problem, but what I'm really saying is not it's a PR problem, but that it's a sin problem. that when people have rejected the message of the gospel and embraced something other, then they're living in a certain deception that even if they see somebody that's loving, i.e. Jesus Christ, they would still mislabel it and hate it at some level. Which Christ said, if they hated me, they're going to hate you. And so my point is not that it's a PR problem, but that possibly there's a genuine issue that even if we start doing everything in your book, which, you know, I was telling you beforehand, I'm going to buy a bunch of copies and I'm going to pass it out to every pastor and congregation that I can because I feel like it's quality. It's a message that's absolutely necessary and seems to embody the message of discipleship, what it means to follow Christ very effectively, especially in this current cultural environment that we're in. But all that being the case, I mean, we could do all those things right, and the world is not going to love us, at least not according to Christ, because Christ said, if they hated me, they're going to hate you. No students above his master. We can't love better than Christ loved. And if they hated him, then at some level, we should expect that that's going to be the case. So what do you say to that? Well, you said several things. For one, your point that Christians are unfairly portrayed in the media at times, caricatured, I think that you're right. I think that we are unfairly portrayed at times. But not all the time, and I would agree that it's not all the time. Fortunately, not all the time. You made the point that these negative messages may actually influence the church negatively. But the culture of this negativity toward Christians may influence the church. Yeah, that we almost turn into being like man-pleasers. We're just trying to please people because they think there's certain things about us, so we stop really being the church. Yeah. The scripture that came to mind as you said that was in Romans 12, where we're told to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, and to not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, and then we'll be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will. So there is a need to be vigilant about not being wrongly influenced by the world's perceptions of us or of right and wrong. But I think that the problem is a deep problem, because I think that there is, unfortunately, too much truth underlying this, that we could be more loving and should be more loving, and I think that if we were living more according to the commandment that I'm talking about, then Jesus' words would come true, that we would be known as his disciples by our love. And I think it would be difficult for us to say, and this saddens me because I am the church, I am in the church, so are you, but I don't think that we're known for our love, and I think that that's what we're supposed to be known for. Like, for example, this is what I feel like happens. We've talked on the show that we already had you on, and maybe it might have been today, a little bit about the fact that there's a whole portion of the body of Christ that has denied the divinity of Jesus Christ and denied the miracles of the Old and New Testaments, and they're of the opinion that what it means to love is some of the things that you talk about in your book, but there's a whole section of what you talk about in your book having to do with mission, even having to do with humility towards God in terms of obeying His commands that they would totally reject because it assumes that Jesus Christ is the only way, the truth, and life. And the difficulty that I have is that that portion of the body of Christ I'm just reading a book by John Meacham, the editor of Newsweek Magazine, called American Gospel, and he argues persuasively that the inheritors of the Jeffersonian-type religion that we found in the founding fathers, the Washington, George Washington-type religion, the deism, is most naturally found today in the context of what we would call liberal Christianity. People that are not so concerned about whether Jesus was really the Son of God, but they're all about good works. And so those people would say, if I come with a message where I'm going to preach the gospel and say Jesus is the only way, while I'm giving food to somebody, that somehow I'm not being loving. And so then, bam, I get stamped with it. Or if I'm willing to draw a line having to do with righteousness, whether it's about sex outside of marriage, or homosexuality, or for that matter, something like gambling, or even lying, or whatever it is. If I might actually draw an issue about obeying God's commands, whatever those commands are, then I've become judgmental and no longer loving. And so, at the end of the day, it can feel like we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. That there's no way to look loving because they have so, again, there's a PR problem, but it's beyond just a PR problem. It's a sin problem. It's a perception problem that we can't get past the fact that the world has defined love as being tolerant. And tolerance means that I can never say that Buddhism is wrong, that Islam is not the way to salvation, that even Judaism, for that matter, is going to miss salvation in eternal life. And that being the case, it's like, how do we get past that? The big question underlying all of that is the way that we regard the Bible. And one of the striking things about Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, which is my alma mater, but one of the striking things about Jefferson's approach to the Bible was that he actually managed to feel comfortable physically cutting out portions of his Bible. And while they don't cut things out, they just interpret it. And so whether we physically cut them out or whether we just simply dismiss them in some way, I think it's important. It was an important aspect of Christ's love that he affirmed the importance and the inerrancy of the Bible. He was the Word made flesh and he dwelt among us. He repeatedly affirmed the importance of the Old Testament Scriptures. So that was an aspect of his love that is included in the Lost Commandment, in my view. And you actually spent whole sections of the book dealing with what does it mean to be submitted to God's commands and what he calls us to do. You don't in any way write those off. Jonathan Switzer, senior pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapel. Dave Grieber is the author of The Lost Commandment, Have We Missed What Jesus Really Wants? I'm Troy Skinner, you're listening to the Frederick Faith Debate on Frederick's News Radio 930 WFMD. And it occurs to me, if we get ourselves into some trouble, and I'm speaking as a Christian now, we're a panel of nothing but Christians, evangelical conservative Christians, if you want to put a steeper label on it. So, the collective we. We get ourselves in trouble, I think, when we start What was the word that Jonathan, the phrase, the turn of phrase that Jonathan a moment ago said something about, do we have a hard time looking like we're loving or have people see us that we're actually engaged in love? How we can't get past... People don't see that we're loving or whatever. The world's definition of love. Yeah, and I think we get ourselves in trouble when we worry about that. We shouldn't worry about whether the world perceives what we're doing as loving. We need to worry about... Loving. The standard is God's to set. I want to ask you a question about that, but let me let you finish. I don't know that Jesus ran around wondering or worrying about whether or not people were recognizing that what he was doing was loving. He just went about the business of loving. Okay, but I would agree with you. We shouldn't worry about it. But I think it's also true that Christ never denied the fact that there were many that saw his love and totally rejected it. My point being is that We don't worry about it, but for us to be naive to the fact that there are many who will actively pervert what we're trying to do and actively – I don't know if pervert's the right word, but they will actively try to make it look like something else. We don't worry about it, but it's true. It's gonna happen and we need to be aware of it Otherwise, we're gonna we're gonna get hurt and wonder, you know, how what in the world happened? Well, we need to not be naive about it That's going on out in the world and we need to address it Yeah, and if those who are in Christ are gonna expect those outside of Christ to truly recognize, you know what love truly truly at its absolute best and utmost is they're not going to. So we're expecting them to recognize something that they can't recognize. And it occurs to me, I don't want to be nitpicky about the title, but I'm wondering, lost commandment maybe isn't exactly what we're talking about. It's more of a forgotten commandment or an ignored commandment. I mean, it hasn't been lost. It's been in the New Testament. In fact, that's how you describe it in the book pretty effectively. Well, I think that something that is lost in plain sight is as lost as anything that is out of your house. I mean, a library book that is misshelved can be as lost as though that library book were left by someone in a distant city. If you can't find it, if you don't use it, if you don't access it, if you don't know it's there, then to you, it's lost. Now, there may be some for whom this is not lost, and I don't mean to suggest that everybody has missed it, but I'm here to confess that I'm one of them, and I'm here to report, and if you start to watch, you'll see. You're going to be hard-pressed to find a sermon or a book that centers its teaching on this. You will find no problem locating sermons and books that center their teaching on the Golden Rule. Now, if we were to do an archive search on sermons preached at Crossroads Valley Chapel, would this be true? I went through First John at one point, and I specifically remember falling on this particular passage. And I was a priest through John one time, and John hits these issues with a precision and a piercing, piercing to the hearts of issues that I felt like warranted spending some time on them. And it's part of the reason I think I'm so excited about the book, because it puts the focus back where it needs to be. If I'm just loving people how I want to be loved, Well, you know, I'd like people to give me money, and I'd like people to never give me a hard time about what I do, you know, to act like I'm not sinful. I'd like people to think that I'm the greatest in the world. And if we all walked around like that, loving people how I want others to do things to me, the bottom line is that it would be a pretty ugly world at the end of the day. We need a standard. And obviously your senior pastor, R. Dallas Green, hasn't taken great offense to this, because he's endorsing your book. Yes, no he's not. But he could have taken it back, like, wait a minute. Yeah, I preach about this, don't I? Let me give you a brief example. My publisher, Kriegel, gave me seven years' worth of their publications on sermon outlines. Two outlines, it was 104 outlines per year, seven years, whatever that adds up to. Each of these books has a scripture index, and I went through them one by one, looking for John 13, 34, John 15, 12. Not one, not one single reference. not one out of seven hundred twenty eight if i didn't have to write and that's right we have such a big list and audience that they probably gonna hear that that's the case and uh... they'll be changing that and we're gonna wrap up this episode i would like to if we can uh... get back again for next week's show by the way happy new year a little bit belated right uh... yes happy new year should settle uh... earlier in the show but yes happy New Year. New Year. Yes. But I do want to- It may be a good one. I want to talk about what Jonathan brought up in this show about defining what it means to love like Jesus. And we kind of started to do that and then we didn't. And I'd like to come back and maybe do that next year. Which is really the meat of what the book's about. Exactly. That's the whole point. Yeah, let's get after it. Anyway, Jonathan Switzer, Senior Pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapel, Dave Grieber, author of The Lost Commandment. I'm Troy Skinner, thanking our sponsor, Putman Plumbing and Heating. How can we make you smile? Visit us online, wfmd.com, keyword faith. Thanks for listening. God bless. Putman Plumbing makes a living by servicing their clients' needs. They make their life by how they service their clients, from the first phone call to when they leave your home when the job is done. Putman Plumbing is dedicated to providing top-of-the-line quality work. Call Putman Plumbing. That's with a P, as in your preferred plumber. Putman Plumbing. How can we make you smile?