And if you have more than one question, that's fine, too, given the size of the audience tonight. And we may open it up. We'll see how things go. We may open it up, even if you want to ask verbally. So we'll see how all this goes with the questions that we have. You know, we might. There are cards here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We do have some down there, but we do have some old questions there. Yes. All right. So, yeah. So, I mean, you know how this works. Of course, you know, these are questions that are on your hearts and minds related to the Bible, theology, ministry, any of those, you know, we try to stay away from, you know, what's your favorite hobby, you know, things of that nature. That's probably not the best use of our time, but try to get some questions, hopefully, that maybe you've been thinking about and just things that maybe have not come up in what we've been doing verse by verse on the Lord's Day. So I certainly think there's precedent biblically, certainly when you look at Jesus and his ministry. Jesus is very frequently taking the time to answer questions that are posed to him by various people that he comes across. And, you know, those questions vary. Sometimes those are sincere questions that are posed to our Lord. Sometimes, of course, there is a bit of nefarious intent behind those questions, but I don't think we'll have anything like that tonight. So anyway, that's kind of the foundation. And we wanna do these from time to time to give you an opportunity, just things that you're thinking about to make sure that we're not just answering questions that no one's asking, right? All right, so I see Brother Lowell has got a few cards here, and so. We only have a few questions, and then I'm discarding some of them for you. Okay, well, that makes things exciting. Okay. All right, so we'll let Brother Lowell go away with the first question here. Okay, this is my question, it's blank, because it's so profound it hasn't been put to ink yet, so we'll see what happens. Okay, okay. Okay. How is God Jesus' father if Jesus is God? Okay, well that is where we get into the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. And this is something that is obviously beyond what we can really grasp on a human level. But the word Trinity, incidentally, you don't find the word Trinity anywhere in the Bible. That is a term that was devised by the early church to describe the nature of God. Because what you're dealing with when you look at the biblical data is that you have three persons that are called God. You have the Father, you have the Son, and you have the Holy Spirit. But you also have a very clear biblical testimony to the fact that there is only one God. Okay, so that's where it blows our minds. I mean, you know, how can he be both one and three? And so What the church, the early church, used this term trinity because you have the threeness and you have the oneness, the unity, you have both of those brought together in a single term. And the way that the early church articulated it is to say that there is one God who exists eternally in three persons. And those persons are co-equal, they're co-eternal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the building blocks for that biblically, again, you have these very clear biblical statements that there is only one God. You go to the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Here, O Israel, in Deuteronomy 6, the Lord your God is one Lord. There is one mediator between God and man. There's one God. So you have these clear biblical statements that there is one God. But at the same time, you have to reckon with the fact that you have a Father, Son and Holy Spirit that are all described as God. You do have some passages where all three persons are brought together. Perhaps one of the strongest ones is in Matthew chapter 28 in the account of the Great Commission. When Jesus commissions his disciples to go to make disciples from all the nations and he says baptizing them. in the name, and you notice it's not names, plural, it's name, singular, in the name, singular, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So you have, even in that single passage, an idea that you have three persons there, but there is this profound unity and that there is only one God. So that's an excellent question. That's the question that Christians have wrestled with throughout the centuries. And what the early church really tried to do is to hammer out that language in such a way to do justice to the biblical teaching. But there has always been a recognition that this is something that is far beyond our human comprehension. Because it is so difficult to really put our minds around, that's where you've tended to have heresies. on this front down through the centuries in the church. So you have either there is the effort to press into the three to the exclusion of the one, that probably is more rare. Usually it's an effort to press into the one to the exclusion of the three, right? But we have to maintain that biblical tension because if you sacrifice either one of those, you're going to end up in very dangerous waters biblically. Obviously, there is much more that I could say beyond just that short answer, but that's the basic rationale for why we can say that both the Father and the Son, and of course ultimately also the Holy Spirit, are all called God in the scriptures, but there is also a distinction between the persons. This one is a profound, all it says on it, Pastor, and you'll probably have to interpret this, is it says James. I think that was my daughter. She's asking questions about her brother. Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not able to read her mind right now. Okay. That one is so big. Yeah. It's profound. Okay. Good question here. Is America modern day Babylon? No. Yeah. There is some interpretive dispute over the identity of the great whore Babylon in Revelation chapter 17. I'm not, and I, you know, maybe there's someone out there that's taking this view. I'm not aware of anybody who teaches that that is America. Maybe somebody might correct me. Maybe you've heard somebody on TV or there's been some book written. I'm not aware of anybody who's advocated that teaching. Basically, when you look at that passage in Revelation 17, there's two predominant views in terms of the identity of Babylon. There are some Bible scholars who believe that Babylon there is Rome. And this is based, particularly even in 1 Peter, you find Peter using that term Babylon as a code word for Rome. And you do have the description in Revelation chapter 17 of Babylon being on seven mountains. And that was a description sometimes of Rome. So there is, some have advocated that view. I personally think it's more likely that Babylon in Revelation chapter 17 is literal rebuilt Babylon. Even when you look at the Old Testament references to the city of Babylon, and yes, it is true that certainly Babylon was conquered by the Medo-Persian Empire. They were pretty well destroyed and annihilated. But even the language that's used in the Old Testament to describe the destruction of Babylon, I think we're still waiting for the full fulfillment of all those passages. You have, for instance, passages that tell us that the stones of the city of Babylon will never again be used as building materials. So it seems to me that the language is so extensive that we have yet to see the literal fulfillment of it in its entirety. So I think the most natural way to take Revelation 17 is to take it as a reference to literal Babylon. Now, of course, it opens the door when you think about America, what role will America play in the end times? That's difficult to say. We just, obviously, when you're thinking about the biblical data, biblical authors were not aware of the continents of North and South America. We don't have any biblical passages that we could point to to say that this is America in the end times. Does that mean that America is simply not a major player in the tribulation period? I don't know. That remains an open question. We just don't have any biblical data that would cause us to be dogmatic one way or the other. My inclination is to think that a country like the United States, because of the abundance of Bible-believing Christianity that we have in this country, and yes, for all the flaws that we have, we do have to acknowledge that the United States is the major workhorse for world evangelization. It is hard to imagine what Christianity would be like in the world were it not for the United States. And yes, I know that as preachers, we get up, we rail against the United States all the time, but we should thank God for this country. This world would be vastly different if this country was not here. So we should praise the Lord. Think about institutions. The two, well, three Christian colleges that I attended at some point or another, those institutions don't exist in other countries. You would just be hard pressed to find anything like what we have with publishing houses, with institutions of higher learning, with all different kinds of parachurch ministry. So there is much good that has come out of the United States. So my personal inclination is to think that probably when the rapture of the church occurs, that the United States is no longer going to be a major player on the world scene because of the removal of that strong Christian influence in this country. Again, I'm hypothesizing, and all of this, of course, is dependent on kind of this assumption, if we're assuming that the rapture is going to take place within our lifetimes or relatively close to that span, then I think that would be a reasonable assumption. But of course, we can't be dogmatic. No man knows the day or the hour, right? it's hard to say with any level of firmness exactly what role, if any, the United States will play in biblical prophecy. But to give you the very short answer, I would say no. I don't believe that the United States is Babylon. OK. Thank you, sir. How should we or do we, how do we relate or how should we relate slash respond to the contemporary movement today? personally and as a church. And I think that contemporary movement is probably an expansion of the idea that we talk about CCM all the time, but really it's a lot bigger than music. Contemporary Christian shenanigans. Okay, so maybe repeat the question just so I get it in my head here. How should we relate and respond to the contemporary movement today personally and as a church? Yeah, and that's where you get into, I mean, even that word contemporary is kind of a loaded term. The word contemporary, if you look it up in a dictionary or a thesaurus, I mean, you would find synonyms such as modern. And, I mean, obviously we recognize that there are blessings that come in the modern era, right? We praise the Lord that we're in a building that is climate controlled this evening, that we have a system of amplification You know, a voice like mine might be able to carry without this amplification, but not everyone's can, so we praise the Lord for these advantages of modern technology, even this, you know, the PowerPoint that we have up here. There's lots of things about the modern world that have been advantageous to us. I think probably the gist of the question is getting at ways in which the church is trying to accommodate itself to the modern culture. And what, of course, happens as the church does that is that the church becomes less churchy as a result, and it becomes more worldly. Of course, the goal tends to be the opposite, right? I mean, the intended goal with these contemporary movements tends to be this idea that, well, if we if we follow the patterns of the world, if we use the same style of entertainment as the world, if we use the music of the world, if we try to appeal to people on that basis, that then we will draw people in and we will see conversions, right? That's the rationale that's given. But I think that that rationale is naive. You have these biblical warnings about worldliness that are extremely strong. James chapter four, for example, James calling his readers adulterers and adulteresses and that's a common metaphor in the scriptures for spiritual unfaithfulness to Jehovah. So James uses that strong language and he says that friendship with the world is enmity with God. And really, I think I've brought this out before, that idea of friendship there, that's probably more than what we commonly think of. You know, we kind of have a very casual idea of friendship. Your Facebook friends, some of them you may not even know in real life, right? That's just where the world is now. Friendship there, if I could put it a little bit bluntly, it's shacking up, basically. You're wanting to claim allegiance to Jehovah, but you're shacking up with the world. That's the basic idea. And what the scripture says is that you can't do that. There's an inconsistency there. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. So you can't, those are mutually exclusive, right? So I think that if you're just generally wanting a perspective on what should our response be, yes, there should be this response of this antithesis in our hearts that we loathe the things in this world that are in conflict with the principles of God's world. or of God's word. You know, that's a very broad question. That may be a bit hard for me to, I don't know, to really succinctly give you a definitive answer. Because when we think about contemporary movement, I mean, that has a lot of different tentacles to it, right? I do think that when you look at the biblical descriptions of the world, worldliness, that What tends, I think what has happened in the new evangelical scene is that there has been kind of this effort to try to define world in very narrow types of terms, right? And to say, well, you know, this doesn't really have anything to do with, you know, entertainment choices. This doesn't have anything to do with our appearance, with our deportment, with our mannerisms, with these certain lifestyle habits, with, You think about things like smoking, drinking, things of that nature. I think that the new evangelical impulse has been to say that, really, worldliness has nothing to do with that. And I think that would be highly unfortunate. When you look at what John describes, all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, those things manifest themselves in very concrete ways in the culture, in the advertising industry, Hollywood, in television, in music. So, I think there is a sense in which we need to be very, very rightly concerned that the church maintains its purity in the midst of that kind of pressure that is coming to us from the culture. But, boy, that's a big question. And, you know, maybe if we open it up later, if you want to ask a follow-up on a more specific issue, I'd be happy to try to tackle that. expand with the thoughts that I'm wondering about, and then throw it back to you. I'm sorry I didn't use the microphone the first couple times, so those questions may not even be on the tape. A preacher I used to listen to preaching when I carried mail down the street, a well-known preacher, a good preacher, and one time he made the comment, he said, if you attain to a level of righteousness that's higher than someone else's, talking about amongst Christians, He said, they will call you a legalist every time. And we talk about, and we wonder about, as American Christians, we wonder about persecution. And I'm just wondering if some of the greatest persecution is gonna come right from the professing church, the liberal professing church. We watched last night that thing that you, the video that you showed us in the men's prayer breakfast a couple of months ago or so, whenever that was, And Bodie Bachum, who has passed away, he's with the Lord now, but a very outspoken man, very sound in the scriptures. And he was being interviewed on CNN, and the other woman that was being interviewed was a new evangelical speaker. And so they got debating on scriptures and that, and clearly she's off the wall. She just really perverted scriptures, and he didn't mind telling her that she did it. He called it sleight of hand. I think the sense that where that question's coming from when we talk about the contemporary Christian movement is we're sensing that fundamental churches like our own, they're starting to be a growing, from Christians, looking down. You guys are a bunch of, you're just a bunch of legalists, you're a bunch of, you know, you are missing it. You're all stuck on your little fine little rule. They see us as a bunch of rules, you know, they'll focus on the King James Bible or how we dress or whatever. And that's not what we're about. That's not who we are. But that's what they're gonna say. And so it's, in light of that, do you have a sense of that coming at us from the liberal, the more liberal churches toward the liberal church? Yeah, it's, okay, when you think about some of these cultural types of things, It's remarkable to me, okay, so I saw this, there was a report on, it was CBS, ABC, one of those mainline news networks, and there was a report that they did, very short, a four to five minute report talking about non-denominational churches. And it struck me as a bit unusual. They show this church that it's in the St. Louis area. It's got about 600 people, which I'm thinking, OK, there are churches a lot larger than that. I mean, that's a good-sized church. But they're a little bit out of touch in that regard, thinking that that's a huge church. Well, there are churches that have thousands of people in this country. And, you know, the pastor, you know, he had a certain cadence to him. You know, he has the reverse ball cap that he preaches in and, you know, very casual type of feel. And, you know, they were presenting, I mean, this was like a few months ago. And they're presenting this as if this is the wave of the future that, you know, that, you know, the hymnals are out, you know, the organs are out, you know, this is what's in. And I just thought that that was extremely naive because that has been the contemporary church for the past 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know, CBS, of course, or whatever news network that was, I can't remember off the top of my head. But, I mean, the secular world has lost touch of that. I mean, they have no idea what's really going on in the church. Those elites that are in these news agencies, they don't really understand Christians. They don't make any effort to understand Christians. So it's not surprising to me that they really wouldn't have a good pulse of what's going on in the Christian world. But I mean, that's nothing new. When you think about the music issue, that train left the station a long time ago for most churches. For most churches, the style of music is not even up for debate. It's not even an issue where you would be able to raise any objection to it because it is just ingrained. These young people that have grown up, even people from my generation, there are some that have never picked up a hymn book, that have never sung out of a hymn book, that have never heard traditional hymns. I mean, all their life has been doing the praise choruses. You don't have the single song leader. You've got the worship team. You've got the praise band. That is the norm, even in fundamental churches, sad to say. I've thought about recently, you know, we do this ministry over at Accolade in the nursing home. And, you know, those people there, I mean, they, most of them grew up with the hymns and, you know, we've got the little hymn books over there. So they're, I mean, they're in tune with that and they like the fact that we come over there and that we do the traditional sacred music. But it has dawned on me that it's probably not gonna be that long in the future when residents of that facility are gonna be the people that grew up on the praise music, that grew up on the contemporary music. And what are we gonna do? I mean, it's a bit perplexing to me because they're gonna pick up that hymn book. They're not gonna know any of those songs. It's something that, I mean, it's not a, something that's gonna be an issue in the immediate future, but it is something that at least is on my radar screen. I think that the design of all of this, the frustration that we have from where we sit, I mean, we are in such a small minority at this point in terms of the culture of this church. Even this department, you know, the suit and tie. Yeah, I know. The Kingdom of God is not in those things, okay? It's not... You know, I have pastor friends that dress differently on the Lord's Day. That's fine, you know. But the things we do, I mean, it's just, it's so incredibly rare. And I think that the design of all of this has been to just get these things even off the table from any debate, that this is just the norm, right? It's the norm that we're gonna have the praise team. It's the norm that we're gonna dress down, that we're gonna be casual. there's not even gonna be the thought of entertaining anything different. I think that you are, incidentally. If you look carefully in conservative, even in conservative evangelical circles, I think you're starting to see a bit of a reaction against that. Admittedly, it's not to the level near the strength of any of these things that are casual, contemporary. But there is, I'm seeing a little bit of a burgeoning reaction against some of these things that are taking place. I think there's an appreciation, maybe a growing appreciation for the fact that when you go to church, that there should be something that's, shall we say, transcendent from the culture around you. you should come here to have an encounter with the living God. And when you come into these doors, if everything that you're experiencing is totally on par with everything in the culture, I mean, it sounds like the culture, it acts like the culture, it dresses like the culture, then what's the difference? I mean, this could just be a social club, right? So I think there is starting to be a little bit of an understanding of that. There is a little bit of a reaction. One of the more significant authors that has written in this area is a man by the name of Scott Anuel, who is interesting. He was teaching in a Southern Baptist seminary, but before that, he actually received training from Bob Jones. And he has written actually extensively on the topic of music and advocating for a traditional sacred music approach. And I think there is starting to be a little bit more interest in getting back to a more conservative approach. But admittedly, we're dealing with a, I mean, this is an uphill battle, okay? We're very, I mean, we're kind of looking down at the peak of this giant mountain to overcome the influence. And really, what we have to understand is when we think about contemporary movement, a lot of the roots of that are in Pentecostalism. And when you look at Pentecostalism, when you look at the charismatic movement, there is an emphasis, instead of focusing on God, on focusing on the character of God, on what God has done for us, there is a focus on me, right? My emotions, my feelings. And what you find is that in Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, The emphasis of worship services has been on trying to get people into a sort of mood, a sort of emotional state. The focus is subjective. And I think what desperately needs to be recovered is moving away from trying to structure our worship services to cause a certain feeling or a certain mood and instead structure our worship services to focus on the living God. So yes, there is a little bit of a drift in that direction that is encouraging, but we've got a long way to go. And you mentioned the term legalism. That tends to be sort of the trump card, right? And that all that has to happen is that you can look at something that you don't like and you just throw that card down, boom, legalism, and that ends the discussion. Well, just because you've got a name for something doesn't mean that you've come up with a reasoned argument against it. So I think we have to be very careful in using that term. There is a sort of legalism, I think, that can get into our types of circles, where everything becomes about externals, where there are extra-biblical traditions that are elevated above the scriptures. But simply having a desire for holiness, wanting to bring our lives into conformity with the scriptures, and using high personal standards to attain that. That's not legalism, okay? So I think we have to be careful in our use of terms. Obviously, there's a lot more I could say, but I don't know if that... It is a broad subject. It is, it is, yes. It really is. Thank you. Okay, if God cares so much about bodies, why would he not give us bodies temporarily in heaven while we wait for the resurrection? I don't see why not. I think he does. There does seem to be some biblical language that would suggest that. And it's hard to kind of quantify the biblical evidence in this regard, but it does seem to me that when you look at a passage, for example, such as Luke chapter 16, you've got the rich man and Lazarus. What is portrayed there between the rich man and Lazarus is what happens immediately after they die. And this is before the resurrection. But you notice in that passage that the rich man that he talks about being tormented in the flame. He talks about the Lazarus coming and dipping the tip of his finger in water and cooling his tongue. This is before the resurrection incidentally. Now it's obvious that the resurrection obviously is going to add a completely new dimension to our experience of everlasting life. So certainly whatever this temporary body is, it doesn't compare to the complete overhaul of our physical bodies that is going to happen at the rapture. But I do think that there seems to be an indication that there's some kind of temporary, I don't know if body is the term you want to use, but Luke 16 certainly uses those types of descriptions, and it uses them of what we call the intermediate state. There is a book that gets into some of this that I would recommend. It is a book by an author named Randy Alcorn. He's written a book called Heaven, It's an extensive book. It's a little under 500 pages if I recall correctly. It is an excellent book. Now he admits in that book that some of what he does in that book is a bit speculative because there are some aspects of our experience in eternity that the Bible just doesn't go into explicit detail about. So some of that he's hypothesizing a little bit, but I think he has some good reasons to make those hypotheses, if I could put it that way. But he also, of course, engages with the biblical texts, and I think he does so helpfully. So that's a book that I would recommend. He does, in that book, discuss the intermediate state, and he presents that same position, that there does seem to be some kind of temporary body, quote-unquote, Even the moment we die, when we go to be with the Lord, that there's some kind of body experience that we have in heaven, even before our physical bodies that are in the ground, before they're, you know, they're raised from the dead and they're completely made new at the rapture of the church. But that's, That's just kind of the position I would deduce from the very limited biblical data that we have. Again, that's what theologians call the intermediate state. So we use that term to talk about the time when the person dies and the soul goes to either heaven or hell at that moment. But we're talking about that state before the resurrection. So what happens to that soul before the resurrection, but after the person dies. That's what we call the intermediate state. And I do think there's some evidence that suggests that that intermediate state has bodily components to it, even if it's not the full experience of our resurrection bodies at the rapture of the church. Things to think about. Okay, what is the difference between the gift of evangelism, Ephesians 4, 11, and doing the work of an evangelist, 2 Timothy 4 or 5. I'm not sure that there is a difference. That is a common position. It is commonly held, and this is the argument that I've heard put forth a lot, it has been said that Timothy was a pastor and he was told to do the work of an evangelist. That to me is not crystal clear in Scripture. I don't see any specific indication that Timothy was not an evangelist. It may well be that that role that Timothy had when he went to the churches of Ephesus and he was serving as Paul's apostolic representative, it could well be that the biblical term for that task is evangelist. Now, the problem that we're dealing with in the New Testament is that that term evangelist does not occur with a tremendous level of frequency. You have only a handful of references. You have the 2 Timothy chapter 4, do the work of an evangelist. You have Ephesians 4.11, you know, he gave some apostles and prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers. And you also have Philip in the book of Acts called an evangelist. Unfortunately, Those few passages of the New Testament give us very little to go from in terms of formulating a biblical office of the evangelist and what that looks like. Now that hasn't stopped some people from having very, very dogmatic opinions about what the evangelist is and what the evangelist is supposed to do. And if you look at, in our movement especially, I mean you would find some people that say that the evangelist should be a church planter. You find some people that think the evangelist should be the guy that goes around to different churches and holds week-long meetings. There are differences of opinions. Some people would just equate the evangelist with the missionary. There's a wide variety of opinions about what the evangelist is and does. The term itself, when you think of the evangelist, it comes from the idea of the evangel, which is the gospel, the good news. So I think we can conclude that the evangelist is somebody who has an unusual level of proficiency at delivering the gospel. But beyond that, it is very hard to be dogmatic about exactly what the evangelist's role is in the New Testament. So I actually think, my personal inclination is to think that 2 Timothy 4 probably lends some credence to the idea that Timothy was an evangelist. You know, is that a position that I'm going to die a martyr's death over? Probably not. And is it just Paul's way of encouraging him to do that work? Yeah, and I mean, you know, and then there's the question, you know, well, what does that even mean? I mean, is that referring to, you know, personal evangelism, you know, or is there something else? Is that simply a description of his office? I'd probably lean, just my personal inclination, I think it's probably leaning toward a personal office that Timothy, or at least a giftedness of the evangelist that Timothy had, But certainly, obviously, regardless, I mean, we would acknowledge that, you know, there is an obligation to share the gospel and so forth. So there's an application there. But I do, I think the common conventional wisdom that Timothy is told to do the work of an evangelist, but he's not actually an evangelist, I think that could be called into question. I'm just not certain that that's so. In fact, I lean heavily against that position. Okay, what would happen if Jesus never came to die on the cross? We'd still be in our sins. There would be no way to pay the penalty for our sins. So, yeah, what Jesus accomplished on the cross was absolutely essential for us to be forgiven of our sins. There had to be a sacrifice. God is holy, and we talked about this in the Bible doctrine series, that God is holy, God is just, and God cannot compromise His standards of justice. There are some more progressive, quote-unquote, Christians. Christians is the word probably that should be in quotes, right? But that have made the argument that, well, you know, couldn't God just, couldn't He just forgive us of our sins without the cross, right? Couldn't He just kind of say, you know, I forgive you, you know, look the other way after we sin? And the answer is no, because God is holy, He's just, and His standards of justice must be satisfied. And there are only two ways that they can be satisfied. They can either be satisfied by the sinner paying the debt himself. And that would mean, of course, the sinner himself being subjected to the wrath of God in the lake of fire. Or it means that there must be a perfect sacrifice that suffers and dies in the sinner's place. That's the idea, of course, propitiation. That's the term used in 1 John. He is the propitiation for our sins. So he turns away God's wrath and he is the one who enables God's favor to be poured upon us because he took the wrath of God upon himself. So yes, it's our forgiveness of sins, our ability to have eternal life, absolutely contingent upon Jesus dying on the cross. There was simply no other way that we could be saved. Do we have any others? Question. A couple floating around up here. We're gonna interpret this blank card here. Okay, in Jude, he talks about contending for the faith. And the study Bible I looked at at home before I came, he probably had a lot of things in mind, but he definitely saw a great need to contend, to fight for things. A preacher of the past, usually came around to these issues. He would tie it in with contending for the faith and the issues that were before him that troubled him were charismatics, Calvinists, Bible translations, ecumenicism, contemporary Christian music. So twofold question. Do you have any feelings or sense from your studies of what Jude had in mind in his day, and then especially on the practical level, What would be the word to us today? What do you see as the main issues that we're contending for, that we need to fight for as believers? And this is really within the bounds of the church. I mean, that's where the fighting goes on. It's the false prophets, it's the whatever. Please, please go ahead. Right, so that expression, contend for the faith. So, I mean, you can turn to Jude, incidentally. Probably the most helpful way to answer the question is to go to the book of Jude, because I think if we go there, we see very specifically what Jude has in mind. When you look at the little book of Jude in the New Testament, You have verse 3 beloved when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation It was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith Which was once delivered unto the Saints So, you know Jude's initial intention was probably a little bit kinder gentler, right? I Let's talk about this wonderful common salvation we have in Christ. But obviously, under the leading of the Holy Spirit, he is impressed to assume this more combative stance. And why is that? Well, look at verse 4. For there are certain men crept in, unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. So the impetus for this is false teachers. That is why Jude has this burden to call on his readers to contend for the faith. And you have the implication here of turning the grace of God into lasciviousness. So there is this loose licentiousness, this idea that the grace of God becomes a license to do whatever I want. This is the Roman six, right? We're continuing in sin so that grace can abound, all right? So I would argue that is the primary heresy at which Jude is directing his theological weapons at this point. This idea that we can live loosely and this can be, this is acceptable because after all, God has forgiven us, we have the grace of God in Christ, so we can act any way we want to. It simply doesn't matter. You know, you do find some more specifics that arise. You know, you have in verse 7, even as Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication. and going after strange flesh or strut forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. So fornication, sexual immorality, this is, of course, been a classic expression of this kind of licentiousness. And it, one of the main ways that it is manifesting itself in the contemporary church. So you asked about, you know, how do we bring this over to the contemporary church? Well, one of the major movements that has gained a foothold in Christianity today is something that is called Side B Christianity. You say, what in the world is that? Well, what has been advocated is this openness toward a certain variety of homosexuality within the church. Now, what you're seeing is these evangelical leaders that will acknowledge, okay, the Bible is crystal clear that you can't have, a formal sexual relationship between two men and two women. But what you're finding is that many evangelicals are starting to open the door further to relationships that appear to be romantic, if you could put it in that term, that, you know, you've got kind of these deep commitments and so forth that of lives and communication and so forth, and there's a level of intimacy there, but it falls short of the sexual relationship. And that's why it's termed with this kind of buzzword, side B, right? Because it's not the side A where you have the full-on sexual behaviors of homosexuality. But there's a conference incidentally called Revoice, and it's kind of, I think it's kind of petered out in its influence in the last couple of years. But its revoice was a conference, incidentally it was held by a PCA church initially, a church that was in the Presbyterian Church America denomination. I think that denomination has kind of tried to distance itself from that, but the idea was that we have these people coming to this conference that call themselves gay Christians. It's very dangerous. The appeal that we are given in the New Testament is that we are to flee fornication. We run away from it. We go in the exact opposite direction. And what the side B Christianity does is instead of running from it, we're kind of cozying up to it, right? We're seeing how close to the line we can get without actually going over it. That's probably an example that would come to my mind immediately, that would be a very practical application of Jude's epistle to us today. And I think that this is where a lot of the battle lines are drawn in the contemporary evangelical world. Yes, there's going to continue to be doctrinal controversies. I mean, you have those in every generation. But some of the most devastating dangers come with these sorts of lifestyle things. where there is this danger of having a very loose view of our sanctification and really opening the door to things that are completely abominable in the sight of God. So, I don't know if that answers your question. Maybe that gets at some of what you're asking about. Yeah, well, and then the, what about us sitting here, actually? What do you see as issues that we probably need to be looking out for and contending for? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, one of the things that has been interesting to me in ministry is, I mean, I try to, as a minister, I try to keep apprised of the things that are taking place in the broader evangelical world. Something that I found quite noteworthy is that in a congregation such as this, a lot of those things take a considerable amount of time to peter down to the average congregation. You know, a congregation like this, I mean, a lot of you are probably not following the evangelical trends with the same intensity that I might be. And I don't know that I'm following it with tremendous intensity either. You know, I'm tied up, you know, the statement John MacArthur made, Sunday is always coming. So that's usually what I'm focused on. You know, the next Lord's Day is there. I've got the next message to prepare. So I'm not necessarily always caught up in all the different trends. It, in some sense, is a little bit hard to say how much of what's going on out there would affect what's happening in here. I mean, some of the danger we face in the modern world is there's this interconnectedness, and there is this abundance of information. So if you want to find just about any doctrinal view, if you want to find any sort of weird lifestyle aberration, where you've got a Christian minister that's wanting to advocate for that and try to make the scriptures fit that particular aberration, you can find it, right? It's out there somewhere. So I think that heresies and lifestyle aberrations, it is often, I think it's very hard to gauge where those could creep into a congregation like this. Because what we're facing in the modern age is all these dangers coming at us from so many different directions. Let me mention one that I think might be particularly poignant, especially for an area of the country such as this. And obviously, we're in deep red country here in Ford County, right? elected offices, there's not even a Democrat that appears on the ballot. So in this kind of environment, I think one particular danger is the danger that we're facing from the extreme Christian right. And you're starting to see the Candace Owens type of viewpoint, the anti-Semitism, the types of people that are being platformed by Tucker Carlson these days. I think there is a danger with that element of quote, and I'm gonna put it in quotes, Christianity, right? Because there's, I think what is happening is that there has been, you know, the, and really, yes, when you look at the culture, when you look at the entertainment world, it is still the progressives that have a strong foothold, right? There's no question about that. But there is starting to be, in reaction against that, you're starting to have this overreaction that is coming from the right. And in that overreaction, there's this anti-Semitic strain. There is kind of a white superiority type of strain. That's the type of thing that I think could be dangerous for an environment such as the one that we live in. I could envision people coming into a church like ours because they know, hey, Grace Baptist Church, they're not woke. They're not promoting the LGBTQ movement. They're opposing all these things. And I could envision somebody coming into a congregation like this who holds to these unhealthy, very extreme types of views. So if I were to put us on guard about a potential danger, that's probably the one that I would put us on guard for. I don't think anybody in this room is probably going to be tempted by the side B Christianity. And looking out of this audience, it doesn't strike me as something that is probably going to appeal to many of you. I don't think the anti-Semitic stuff probably appeals to anybody in here either. Again, I'm just thinking in terms of the danger that we could face with somebody that would come into these doors. I think it's more likely going to be the danger coming from the right than it is the left, at least where we're at in the culture right now. But again, we always have to be on guard because Satan could attack us in a direction that we're not even anticipating. So I think that we have to be vigilant. We have to be well grounded in the scriptures. and prepared to deal with the error from wherever it comes from. Because again, when you've got the internet and you've got social media, of course, now AI, there is the potential for dangers to come from all different sorts of directions. And, you know, even viewpoints that you might think, well, you know, that's so rare that somebody would hold that. Well, there's probably an online community of people that hold that view. Some of the things that could be dangerous are things that seem harmless, but they're things that people elevate to a certain degree to where it becomes very, very unhealthy. So, I mean, to use an example that's somewhat ridiculous. I mean, there has been, in the last few years, there's been a resurgence of interest in the flat earth view. And yeah, I mean, on a certain level, I mean, okay, you know, if you wanna just close your eyes to all the findings that have ever been made from telescopes, you know, have at it. Be my guest, right? Fine, but what happens, though, is that people, you know, I've seen street preachers that wear those shirts, right, you know, promoting the flat earth, and that's their big crusade, and so the danger is not so much in the view itself, it's in the fact that that particular issue has been raised to a level of extreme importance to where people So this becomes this all-consuming passion that we're going to promote this view. And that's where it becomes very destructive and dangerous to churches. So do we have a statement in our statement of faith that says that the earth is not flat? No, we don't. But we have to be on guard. If somebody came into this congregation and that was going to be the drum that they're going to beat all the time, and they're going to make that a point of obsession, that could become something that's very contentious. Yeah, dangers can come from a wide variety of directions. I think we just need to be alert. It's 710, so maybe we oughta pull the reins on it. I think that's fine, unless somebody has a... Why don't we do that? Yeah. I have one other question, but it might go till 810, so... Okay, that's fine, that's fine. So we'll sing our last song. All right, sounds good. Let's do that. Thank you for the submissions of questions. This was good.