and I'll see you next time.
Don't get down when you're seeing the worst
Cause the last will be the first
What a day I'm telling you
All things will be new
Living up in a down world
Yeah we're living, yeah we're living
Living up in a down world
Oh
This is Jimmy and NadaNet today
We have our special guest back by popular demand
Pastor Brian Manning. Hello.
Welcome to Living Up in a Down World.
Hey Pastor Jimmy, thank you for having me back for round two.
I'm excited to talk about some big things today.
So what y'all don't know is that
Pastor Brian and I just did the best show we ever did
and I didn't hit the record button.
Let's just tell them the real truth.
We did 30 minutes worth of knock down drag out.
I hope we can...
We got a preview of the show and we can just tell you in advance
it's going to be great.
So you stay with us today.
Welcome to Living Up in a Down World.
Hey, do go to our website, livingupinadoworld.com.
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Everything is there and all of our...
All 61, today we're on episode 62.
All those episodes are on there.
You can listen to them by title
and pick them as you would and we would love
to have you as a guest on the website.
Check it out. Welcome Pastor Brian.
I'm ready to talk about big things.
Let's get into it.
There is a lot of low hanging fruit out there
and what I mean by that is there is so much
happening in this world right now
that there's so much to choose from.
When we were talking about,
what do you want to talk about today?
You wrote me this morning.
What do you have in mind?
And I'm like, what do I not have in mind?
There is so much happening in the world.
We want to address some of those things.
Obviously not all of them.
But one of the things I want to bring up
is what is happening right now prophetically.
It appears that things are lining up
in terms of what's happening with Russia,
what's happening with North Korea, China.
The world seeming to turn its back on Israel.
There are a lot of things
prophetically lining up.
It is possible.
I've heard some very well respected
men, pastors, prophets
in this world today
that I'm saying are not the kooky type.
They are not flaky.
They are solid.
They are saying we are at a point
right now where the church
could be raptured at any point.
There are other things that need to line up
in terms of setting up the tribulation,
setting up the Gog and Magog invasion of Israel.
There are a lot of things happening.
That's Ezekiel 38.
But Ezekiel 37, the coming together
of the dry bones, that's already happened
in 1948 when Israel
was reestablished as a nation.
We are not going to go deep into eschatology today.
I'm saying this is just
setting things up
because these are both the best and worst
of times. How does that hit you?
I am actually
excited in a weird way
by the totality
of all that we are seeing happen right now
because A, it's right
on time with God's plan.
There is nothing happening, first of all.
If you are a believer in Jesus, there is nothing
happening that is outside of
God's awareness and outside of
what he planned and knew was going
to happen all along.
He loves us and he is going to take care of his people,
number one. Secondly,
when you look prophetically
at what we are told in Scripture
is going to happen, if you look in
the book of Malachi in chapter 3 and chapter
4, it talks
about how, yes, there is
going to be an apostasy,
there is going to be a falling away, there is going to be
turbulent times and difficult times,
but before Jesus returns, it also
talks about that there is going to be one
of the greatest revivals
that the world has ever seen.
It is going to happen in the midst of the darkest
darkness that we have ever seen
in the world. And that is what gives
me hope and encouragement is that when it
gets bad, when things get dark,
Jesus shows up,
God shows up, and he shows up through
his people, through the Holy Spirit
in his people, for those
who will be faithful and who will hold
on and continue to
do the things that he is calling them to do
in the midst of the darkness.
I so agree with that. In fact,
you reminded me of something historically
speaking that the first great
awakening that happened actually
gave way to the American Revolution.
It was a setup
for the American Revolution. And by the way,
only 50% of the pastors
or less were actually in favor of
that. It was a nation
at that time. We were divided.
The colonies were divided,
the states were divided. They were at
war with one another, they were debating
morality and issues,
and sometimes people have these ideas that these
great revivals were times
of great unity and great,
we are all one singing kumbaya
around the fire. That is not
how it happened. It was messy,
it was sloppy. There were horrible
things going on. Slavery was
entrenched at that time, and
a lot of terrible things were happening,
and yet in the midst of that, God showed
up and began to move in miraculous ways.
The second great awakening,
what did that give rise to?
That is what brought us through
the Civil War and out of
slavery. There you go.
Now you had another great awakening
again in wartime.
See, it is so interesting because I think
we have these ideas that when we talk about
spiritual awakening and revival,
we are talking about wonderful altar calls.
Wow, what a great day at
church. The worship team sounded so anointing,
and Pastor Brian was just off the rails
preaching. He is on fire.
Let's go eat. Let's go have lunch.
Let's go over to Backwoods Barbecue and have
some barbecue at AJ's place.
We just have this
laxadaisical,
nonchalant,
indifferent approach to what is
going on, and we miss the fact
that it is actually in times of
great upheaval, great
division and disunity,
great debates over morality
and issues. When God shows
up the most, why? Because we are
sin abounds, grace abounds,
all the more. I think
we are set up, just as you were
saying, out of Malachi, Malachi if
you are Italian, right, out of Malachi,
that we are set up for one of
the next great awakenings right now.
Well, I believe that. It talks about
in Malachi 3, the refiner's
fire, and that is where
the church is right now. We have really
been there probably for the last two or
three decades. There was a
period through the 1980s where
you were seeing
the power and
the healing and the
moves of God in big ways,
but what happened was, a lot
of the church did not steward it very well,
and instead they marketed
it, and they tried to make money off of
it, and they made it about themselves,
and about growing big churches
rather than making it about drawing people
into the presence of God. What
we have seen in the church is a bit of a
wilderness that we have been in over the last
20 or 30 years, but it is
in the wilderness that God prepares
His people for what He wants to do
next, and I believe that the church is
poised to come out of the wilderness, and I think
we are going to see God move in big ways.
Absolutely agree.
I think another piece of that was
we got excited about making converts,
and we missed what Jesus told us to do.
He did not tell us to make converts.
He told us to make disciples.
And what happened was, we dropped the ball
on discipleship. So then
you have a whole generation of Christians
who can get excited
over the presence of God and great worship
and great preaching, get all stirred up at a conference,
but when the winds of adversity
grow, they do not have roots
that go down deep enough to support
their pain and support what is coming
against them. Yeah, and that is what we need.
We need foundations. We need deep
roots of discipleship,
because it is to
obey what God is calling us to do.
It is not going to be easy. There is
going to be difficulty involved. He said,
in this world you will have trouble.
And some of that trouble is
brought intentionally by God upon us
to grow our roots,
to refine us, to prepare us. So camp on that for a minute.
Let's riff on that, because
a lot of people have this idea that
God is just this big, benevolent
grandfather sitting in an old, big old
rocking chair, just waiting for
his kids to come sit on his lap. And I have
heard people use those
metaphors, or something like those
metaphors, to where it is just this
sloppy agape, as
Pastor Alan Jackson says. Wow.
Sloppy agape,
just sit around the fire saying kumbaya,
because it is just all about love, brother.
It is just all about, just love
each other. Yeah.
Well, and the love of God isn't to be
taken lightly. The Bible says that God
is love. He doesn't have it. He is love.
And love is defined by him.
That is part of where we have gone wrong
in our conception of love,
is we have tried to redefine the idea of
love outside of who God is
and what He says it is.
And so we slap the love label
on things that aren't really
loving. We are calling
love things that are actually destroying
people, things that are tearing them
down. And we are saying it is loving
because we are making them
feel good in the moment. We are telling them
something that tickles their ears or what they
may want to hear or that is comfortable
in the moment. But ultimately,
it destroys them. It doesn't
help them, and that is not love.
Man, you nailed that, brother, because
we think that love means
being silent towards
someone's sin because we don't want to impose
our beliefs upon them. So we are going
to love them by not saying anything.
And that is what you said. That is
the opposite of love.
Love means you speak.
Love means you speak the truth.
And you speak the truth in love, but you speak
the truth because of love. And I think
that is where we miss it. It is easy to quote
that scripture, speak the truth in love, brother.
Speak the truth in love. You know, gel cap
it with love so it goes down okay.
Soften it, dumb it down.
But it is really not just that.
It is speaking the truth because you love.
My dad had no
problems speaking the truth to me.
Sometimes it was with
a belt, and sometimes it was with
a boot. And he never abused
me, never once. But you know what?
He got my attention. And I knew
I was loved by my father.
And I am all the better for it.
And by the way, I earned every one I got.
I earned it. Absolutely.
And so he was just in that sense.
And I understood that.
The scripture even says he, like
a father, God disciplines
those whom he loves. Absolutely.
But yet we think that if something
not so comfortable is happening
or if something is inconveniencing
us, that we are either A, being
persecuted by the devil,
or being persecuted by others. By the way, the Bible
does say that those who desire to live
Godly in Christ Jesus will be
persecuted. So if you are
living Godly in Christ Jesus, expect
it. And I am not talking about some
keyboard warrior out there making a bad
comment on their social media link.
I am talking about real deal, in your
face, persecution.
Absolutely. Well you know, I was
a youth pastor for a long time. And I
know you were too. And I have
yet to meet a young
person who grew up,
who had parents who
didn't discipline them,
and didn't teach them righteousness,
and hold them accountable,
who then grew up and said,
that was awesome.
In fact, I have met
many young people who are now in their
20s and in their 30s,
one of their biggest regrets is
the fact that their parents just let them
do whatever they wanted. And
they wandered off into all kinds
of error and sin
and painful experiences that they are
now reaping the consequences
for, for the rest of their lives.
And they go, man, I wish my mom or my dad
had disciplined me,
had shown me what was
going to harm me. And if we know that
instinctively as mothers and
fathers and about when we think
about our kids, why would we think that
God would treat us any differently?
That comes from Him.
Let's take that back into what's happening
in our culture right now.
Is that things look bad
out there. It looks like
God may be judging
America right now.
And we don't like to talk about that in the contemporary
church. We don't want to talk about God
being wrathful or
just. You need to read your whole Bible,
not just the Old Testament.
You need to read the whole Bible. It's all through
the New Testament as well. That God's
just. That there is a wrath against
wickedness. And He will not
strive with man. I was looking at the latest
statistic.
63 million abortions
since 1973.
Roe v Wade. Oh my gosh.
63 million abortions.
I was telling Annette last night,
literally with tears in my eyes. I got really
choked up about it. About how
ambivalent I have been about that.
I've gone on with my life
knowing that this stuff's
happening. But
either it just wasn't
in my realm
at that moment. It wasn't right in front of
me. And I was
really feeling sorrow, godly sorrow
last night. And repentant
that I haven't stood
for 63
million children who have been murdered.
And it was getting on
me. Not in a condemnation way.
By the way, this is not a bad thing.
This was godly conviction.
This was where I was feeling the weight and gravity
of how dark
our sin is. And I told
Annette last night. Now I think you would agree
if we have done
everything right as a nation.
Man, we preached God in the school classrooms.
We kept prayer in schools.
We've
taught kids the Lord's Prayer all through
K through 12. And we've
got godly
school boards. And
we've kept secularism out. We've kept
Marxism out. Which we need to talk a little bit about
Marxism and Trans-Maoism. We'll talk
a little bit about that. But if we
did everything right, except
63 million
babies murdered on our
watch, that's still enough
to be judged for. And how
can we think?
How can we even imagine
that God will not judge
our nation for those murders?
When we get all incensed about
Hitler and 6 million
Jewish people, which is horrific
and terrible, other
atrocities in other nations like Africa
and others that were even more
than that have been lost
to sickness, terrorism,
all these things, we'll judge
them, but we don't look at
ourselves as a nation because we've grown silent
about this. Well, I think
a sin
that's as great as the sin
of 63 million murders
is the church's
indifference towards it.
To turn
a blind eye,
to turn up the volume of our worship,
to drown out the news and
the cries. Tell that story about
the train headed
to Auschwitz. Yeah, so
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in that time when he was
trying to wake the church up to
saying, hey, we're getting embroiled
in something evil here, and
we're becoming complicit in it.
We're not standing
up and being the voice of truth and
righteousness to stop evil.
And as one
pastor says, evil never stops
itself. Evil
is only ever stopped by
God's people and the presence
of God, a greater power.
And so, you know,
while the church may not have been directly
participating in the murder
of Jews and the people that were being
rounded up, they were being
silent in the face of it.
And there's one story
anecdotally that was told of
a church that was near the train tracks
where the trains would pass by that were full
of the Jews being taken to the concentration
camps and all those other people that
the Nazis had begun to round up.
And you could literally hear the cries
coming out of the trains as it was passing by
the church, and you could hear it in the church.
And so, rather than
addressing it, the pastor's direction
at the time was, you know, let's sing louder
so we don't hear this.
Yeah. And what a
we, I got incensed when
I read that story. And I'd heard
that story a long time ago, but recently it came
back up and I remembered it. And
it went all over me. I had a
visceral reaction to that story.
That how insensitive
can we be? And yet,
I'm beginning to see that we're doing that
in America today.
We have a responsibility as those
who carry light and life
and the truth and the very
presence of God. If we fail
to share that,
to declare it accurately and
openly, regardless of
the cost of speaking truth,
then we've abandoned
the faith. We're complicit.
We don't really believe what we say
we believe. It's an easy believe
that we've embraced, as you've talked about
before. Yeah.
I was commenting on a friend's post
and he was talking about lordship
and about holiness. And I said
we have
wherever we have embraced easy
believe-ism, it gives way to
easy leave-ism. Yep.
Because there's no skin in the game.
If we just make these easy
onramps to come to Jesus, oh yeah, just come
and get your sins forgiven
and go live happily ever after in heaven
without challenging people.
This also means, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
to quote him again,
Jesus bids a man
come and die.
And we've got to get to a place
where we actually let people
know this, that
salvation is a free gift,
but the price that was paid for
it was a life. That's right.
And that your expectation,
albeit free,
your expectation is to come
and die too. You have to die to your sin,
die to your carnality,
die to your primal drive,
your flesh. And
literally you can't be born again
unless you're dead. That's right.
How are you born again unless you're coming
out of, you have to be birthed
from something. It just,
it's a prerequisite.
What did Jesus say? He said,
a servant is not greater than his master.
If the master had to
lead in this way, and we're
going to follow him, then we're
following him in the way that he modeled
for us, which was death to self.
Wow. Nailed it.
So,
so this last
Sunday, Annette and I were
blessed to travel to Nashville,
Murfreesboro actually,
World Outreach Church, with Pastor
Allen Jackson. We were able
to sit at the feet of
Eric Metaxas talking about
Letter to the American Church and his newest
book,
Religionless
Christianity. It's a hard, he even said
it's a bad title, but it's a quote.
It's actually a term that Dietrich Bonhoeffer
used. That's why he used it as the title,
knowing it was not the best title in the world,
but he wanted it to convey what the
book is about. And
we had to hear Kaylee McAnally talking
about the abortion issue.
She's really pro-life, all in pro-life.
That's her big thing.
We got to hear last week
on Thursday night, you and Naomi got
to be a part of that. We heard Abby Johnson
speaking about the
issue of pro-life and
just the decimating statistics
of all of that.
So, I'll just have to say, we've come out
of a few days of some heavy weight, heavy
lifting, so to speak. And
you had the privilege,
and our church was blessed, to hear you
preach on Sunday. And
you stayed right in that lane
when you talked about these
guardrails and the narrow
road and the wide road or gates,
whichever translation you used.
Talk a little bit about that, because
that factors right into where we're going today.
Well, there was a man who came
up to Jesus in the book of Luke
and said, Lord,
will only a few be saved.
And Jesus' response
to that wasn't, hey, hey,
don't worry, I got you covered.
I'm about
to go die on the cross, and once I
do, you guys are all
off the hook. That's not what he said.
He said, there's a narrow road
and it's difficult to travel,
and there are few who will choose
to travel on it.
And he said, conversely,
there's a wide road that's broad and
it's easy, and many will
travel on it. He said, but it
leads to destruction and eternal
judgment. And he said,
so, strive.
He literally said the word strive. Strive
to travel down the narrow
path. He said, make every
effort to find yourself
on this narrow road.
And what's narrow about it? Well, first
of all, it begins with Jesus is
the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody
comes to the Father except through him.
But Pastor Brian, what about,
you know, what about Muslims?
What about Baha'i faith? What about
Buddhism? Which, you know, Buddhism is a peaceful
philosophy
slash religion. I mean, what about
them? I mean, aren't there many
rivers that lead to the one large
Great Lake? Well, the message
of Jesus is there's nothing we can do to make
our peace with God.
God had to come and make peace with us, and the
difference between Jesus, Christianity,
and every other attempt
to connect with God in every
religion ever is that
he came to us. We didn't come to him.
He did for us what we could not do
for ourselves. There's no
one righteous, not a single one,
the Bible says, that our greatest
attempt at being good is like
filthy rags before a holy God.
But God wasn't content to leave us in
that place decimated by sin.
He came to do for us what we
couldn't do for ourselves, and he died for our
sins, and he rose from the dead.
And he sent us the Holy Spirit that if we will
follow him and we will become disciples,
if we will choose his narrow way,
it's narrow because it's his
way, not anybody else's. There you go.
You just nailed it. You know, he's
the one who's calling the shots here.
And that's really the sticking
point for every human in all of
history is to decide if they can
submit their heart to the understanding
that God is in charge, not me.
It's not my life. My life belongs
to him. It started with him
knitting me together in my mother's wound.
And if I'm going to follow him, he
has ownership, lordship over
my life. But that's not a
scary thing. That's not a sad thing.
That's the greatest news in the world
because the Bible says he is a God who
loves us. He's our Father.
He knows what makes us and fixes
us. He also knows what breaks us
and his heart for us is good.
It's beautiful, brother.
Man, so much about what
you just said I could riff on because I'm like
there, no there, no that
one. I mean, it was so
full just bringing the Gospel
into this. There are
people who have struggled, particularly people who
have not embraced Christianity
or they see it as a philosophy
as opposed to a long list of philosophies
and world views. And they
would say things like, well, you know
the problem with Jesus is that
he made himself exclusive.
That he is the only way.
And I'm like, the truth hurts.
I mean, actually
the truth doesn't hurt. The truth
heals. That's a good truth.
And the fact that
he says that if you will become a follower
of him, if you will embrace him
and you will heed his words
you will become what is called a disciple,
a learner, a student.
One of the things that we as the Church,
again, here's a broad stroke,
one of the things we as the Church have done
poorly since
the 80's, 70's, 80's,
90's and we had the Charismatic renewal come
through in the 70's, the Jesus movement.
And all these people
were getting saved. This whole generation
got really impacted by the Gospel.
And what happened out of that
was that we got so excited
about conversions.
And my background is Baptist,
Southern Baptist. So it was
all about evangelism. Get people
saved. Get them saved. Get them saved.
Get them saved. Get them to church. Get them saved.
Get them to training union.
Get them to the potluck dinner.
Get them to the... It was come to church,
come to church, come to church, come to Sunday school.
Got to grow our Sunday school classes.
And that was what it was all about.
And listen, that was good. I mean, it was...
It trained me. It was good
for me. I did all of that.
But the thing that we didn't
do well, and I'm just going to...
I'm talking about Southern Baptist, but I would
go broader now and say, is that
we got so focused
on conversions, people accepting
Christ, getting born again
and baptized, that
we missed the discipleship
component, which is the
very thing that makes people
resilient, and it's
called the fruit of repentance.
It's actually the sign
that you are truly a follower of Jesus. Let me give you
this quote. Bonhoeffer knew
that God demanded everything
of us, and when one doesn't
live out of one's faith,
or when one doesn't live out of...
Let me say it again.
When one doesn't live out one's
faith, it only proves that
one had no faith to begin
with. Wow.
That's heavy. Well, you nailed
it, and the truth is we
needed what happened through the Jesus movement.
We needed what happened in the 70s, because we were
coming out of a period in the church
of a lot of legalism, a lot
of lifeless religion that was
devoid of relationship with God,
that was outwardly pious.
It was kind of like where Jesus would
admonish Pharisees. He said, hey, you
clean the outside of things,
but the inside is like
dead men's bones.
We had become that way a lot as a church.
It looked good, had a nice veneer
on it, but inwardly, we lack
this relationship with God. It was
driven by the fact that we had lost
sight of how much God loves us.
That He's daddy, He's
father, that He meets us out in
the middle of the road when we're even
trying to come back to Him and wraps
His arms around us and kills the fatted calf
and puts His robe on us because He
loves us so much. That is a needed
truth, and it rescued us out of the
ditch of legalism.
That was a ditch we needed to get out of
to be on that narrow road that Jesus talks
about. The problem was, and what you're
driving at now is that we ran over into
the other ditch on the other side.
We overcorrected. We overcorrected as we often do.
We fell into the ditch
now of what the Bible
calls lawlessness and
sin, and really just a
license that Scripture and God
doesn't give that
makes us feel as though
we will just be excused
for whatever we currently are,
however we currently think,
whatever we currently want to do because
God's grace just covers it all, and He
just loves us so much. Does He love us?
Yes, He is love.
But He's also empowered us, and He's
called us to travel down this narrow road
to follow Jesus and to obey Him.
And the guardrail that gets us
out of that ditch of sin and
lawlessness and license and cheap grace
is what the Bible calls the fear of the
Lord. And the fear of the Lord is
really learning
to cling to God and depend
on Him over and above anything and
anyone else. It's to recognize our great need
for Him. You know, in Matthew chapter
5 and verse 3, in the Sermon on
the Mount, Jesus said, blessed are those who
are poor in spirit who
recognize their great need
for God. Theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. And that's what the fear of the
Lord is at the end of the day. It's when you have
the sober recognition of,
man, I don't want to take one
step away from the one
who saves my life and who
makes me whole. I'm terrified
to be away from God. I'm not scared of
God. And that is
the greatest, or the essence of
humility, which is the sermon you preached a few
weeks ago. Kind of, these
really tag along with each other. I could
see this thread going through
each of these. And so this idea
of humility will re-recognize
who God is. You see Isaiah
standing before the throne. And
he's overwhelmed. I mean, because he's
seeing God high and lifted up. He's
seeing the glory.
And the word glory has
many facets to it. One of them
is God's manifested presence. And so
he's beholding the presence of
God. He's seeing it.
He's overwhelmed. And his first word
out of his mouth is, whoa.
Whoa is me.
I am undone, for I'm a
man. I'm a man of unclean
lips. And I live among a people
of unclean. He recognized, and
really that's the essence of humility, is
to recognize in comparison
to a holy God,
we're a hot mess.
And we need help. And we need saving.
And that's the thing is he
wants to bring that to us
to save us.
To literally change
everything about our lives.
And
he's given us a gift to
participate in that process. And that
gift is a word that we've
shied away from in the church. It's called repentance.
It was the message of Jesus. It
says the gospel of Jesus Christ began
with him preaching, repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
You want to know what Jesus
was saying? That's what he was saying. He's saying
turn around. Change the way you think.
Make God's ways your
ways. Learn to love what he loves and hate
what he hates. That's repentance.
That word repentance is so powerful. Turn
around. Change your mind.
Another one is realign your thoughts with his.
Which is again changing your mind. But it's
not just changing your mind. It's changing your mind
to his. It's embracing
this thing called the mind of Christ where we say
I want to align with,
I want to agree with what
God, whatever God says is sin
I'm going to agree with that.
Whatever God says is off limits. I want to
agree with that. And that's
where you realign yourself with
him. And you turn.
And when you do he's right there.
He didn't leave you.
He didn't walk away from you. We walked away from
him. But when we turn around he's right there.
And Peter's first sermon
he preached when the Holy Spirit came.
The people were saying what must we do to be saved?
He says repent and be baptized
every one of you. But then
he makes a great promise from the way he says
that times of refreshing may
come from the presence of the Lord.
Repentance has become a dirty word and there's no need
for it to be. It is literally
the door. It is the door
to the narrow way that brings
you into the presence of God. And God's saying
hey I want to refresh you. It's beautiful.
I want to bless you with my
presence and here's the access and the entrance
into that. And what happens
is because people think in terms of
okay so I got to die to myself.
I got to carry my cross.
This sounds like I'm going to be dragging
my faith around like a ball and chain.
Like this is just something
heavy lifting all the time and
I'm going to go around in sackcloth
and ashes. I'm going to be sullen.
But that's actually
the opposite. I've
never been more free in my
life when I have learned
the value of restraint of my
flesh. That frees
me. That's right. It's because we move
past chasing elusive happiness
and we experience something much
deeper that the Bible calls joy.
Joy that emanates
from your heart and your soul
that's irregardless of your circumstances
and there is no replacement
for true joy. That expresses
itself. I just thought about myself. I walked out
on the back porch last night
and we live across this beautiful
cross up on the hill across the highway
from where we live. We live out in the country and it's
actually a wedding venue that
has this massive cross. It's lit up at night
so when I walk out on my back patio
to let Chevy go do his business at night
before we go to bed I always
walk out and stand
out there and just look up at that cross.
Man, it's had some crazy
beautiful views. Full moon coming up behind
it a few nights ago last week
or I see fog up on the hill because
it's pretty high and it's just
a stunning view. I walk
out and here's how
it plays out for me. I
always say good evening Holy
Spirit. Good evening
Lord Jesus. Good
evening Abba Father.
All three of those descriptors
Holy, Lord and
Abba are very meaningful to me. They're
very powerful to me and I'm very
intentional when I use those, that
terminology
and those descriptors.
What I'm realizing is that
I know that I'm walking in
joy and holiness
and purity when I'm smiling
and nobody's looking.
I mean think about it.
We usually smile because somebody smiled
at us or we're smiling at somebody.
We're trying to convey something. Whether
it's walking through a grocery store and just nodding
and smiling at somebody or talking
to who's checking you out. How's your day going?
Hey, what are you most thankful for? You know, whatever you're
doing, which I did a few of those
on the trip as well. Good
responses. Awesome. Great opportunities
for God conversations. But anyway, it's another
story. But I'm finding
that I am smiling
and there's nobody around.
Nobody's looking. And I, it's
almost weird to me a little bit like,
why are you smiling?
It's because my buckets are overflowing
with the joy of the Lord. Why?
Because I've crucified the flesh
and I'm growing. This is always
an ongoing thing, by the way.
There are setbacks. There are moments. There are like
moments where you pull what
Pastor Duane Sherriff calls a big piece of stupid.
You know, you just pull these
and go, where did that come from?
I got mad if they got driving or whatever.
But I'm finding that
part of the outflow of that in just
a natural way is when I catch
myself smiling for no reason
whatsoever and nobody's
around. That's amazing. It sounds
simple, but that's
joy that's overflowing.
It's just coming out of you and you can't even help it.
Well, real freedom at the end
of the day usually means freedom
from ourselves. You know,
we're often our own worst enemy.
No doubt. And whether it's
through our own thoughts and
motives and desires and things
like that. And when God, we begin to
allow God to reshape those things in us
and that deep
joy begins to emerge out of our hearts, you
can't help but smile. I love that.
So let's connect this now to culture
because I went to a
conference called Culture in
Christianity and it was all about
engaging culture. And
then you're preaching sermons that talk about
the holiness of God, the
fear of the Lord, guardrails on our
lives, the narrow road. I mean, these
are heavy, heavy topics. And yet
what does that
have to do with real life? What does that
have to do with the culture we live in
or the politics that's
happening all around us and what's happening
in the world today? What do any of those things have
to do with anything in life? Should
we just keep this in the church? Everything
to do with all of it. Wait, I thought this was
just for Sunday morning. Oh my gosh.
Well, that's where we've gone wrong, isn't
it? I mean, it's
confusing and it doesn't even compute
in people's brains and hearts
to try to live a,
it really becomes a double life of
I've got my life of faith that's
relegated to a
couple isolated times during the week
and then I've got my job
and my family and I've
got my politics
and all these things happening in the world.
It's like we've been sold this lie
that those all have to be separate arenas
and yet our faith
and truth and our relationship
with God is meant to inform our
response to all of those areas
and in fact we are
mandated with a responsibility
to bear light and to
bear truth and to be salt
in every arena of life.
And if we don't do that,
then we are failing
in the very mission for which
we've been sent as believers.
From the very foundation
of our nation, they always
look to God, they call it in providence
or the God of nature, nature's God.
They were referred to in
the Declaration of Independence.
I love this statement from Benjamin
Franklin because in
order to say that we have a right
to speak into culture
and a call, we need to go back to
our original documents, our founding documents
and say, in the original
documents, we're talking about the doctrines of
these things. In our original
documents, was
the idea that this
nation was founded on
biblical principles and biblical values.
And a lot of revisionist
historians and secular historians
are trying, they're not trying, they're
writing God out of history.
So the students being
taught in federally and state-funded
schools are not being taught
the actual original documents
that when you go back into the documents and look
at the handwritten notes,
they're saying things like Benjamin Franklin
was a deist and an agnostic, he wasn't
a Christian, which is not true by the way.
In fact, let me read this to you, this is from Benjamin
Franklin who by the way was one of
the framers of the Constitution of the United
States of America. He said this
as he was aging, he wrote to
a friend, the longer I live,
the more convincing proofs
I see of this truth that
God governs in the affairs of
men. That doesn't sound like a deist to me.
Or an agnostic.
And if a sparrow cannot
fall to the ground without his notice,
is it probable that an empire can
rise without his aid?
We have been assured, sir, in the
sacred writings, i.e.
the Bible, that except
the Lord build, they labor
in vain that build it.
That's Benjamin Franklin
saying, giving credit
where credit's due, and saying,
understanding that even the older he
gets, he realizes more and more how God
governs the affairs of men.
The reason I bring that up is because
we're living in a day now
where people are,
secular culture is saying, you keep
your religion in your church.
You stay in your lane over there.
And yet there are pastors
beginning to stand up and realize
that we've been sold
a bill of goods. We bought a lie
started in 1954
when Lyndon B. Johnson, as
a legislature before he was president,
drafted a bill that said
that anyone that had a non-profit
organization, aka
churches and non-profit organizations,
could not endorse
political candidates.
And that got extrapolated and
expanded to say you can't even talk about
politics, which isn't what it said.
But it got interpreted
that way. So much so
that a whole generation of preachers,
pastors, and leaders came up
through the church being told
in school, I was told this,
do not talk about politics
in the pulpit. You will risk your
501c3 status. You could lose
all your benefits. You could lose
all your tax exemptions.
You'll get in trouble. The ACLU
will come after you. I mean we were scared.
And so
all of us graduating from these seminaries
and schools, getting our masters,
degrees, and ministry
came out
emasculated.
We came out anemic.
Well, what we've
done without realizing it is
we've actually abdicated
positions of leadership
and authority in
every sphere of
government, politics,
and even
corporations within our nation
over time. I mean, if you look at
things like our university systems,
the vast majority of them,
the Ivy League ones now that
where crazy stuff is happening, they were
founded by pastors. Exactly.
To proclaim the gospel.
To equip young people
to be missionaries to take the
gospel around the world. And yet now
those have become the very places
where Christianity
is most rejected.
I mean, whether it's our hospital systems
that were created out of a
desire, a Christian biblical
desire to care for the
hurting and the sick,
now have become, you know, for-profit
corporations. Greed and lust.
Greed. Power. Our government
was founded by a group of
people who left a place
that had
prohibited them from the free
practice of serving God and speaking
truth. And they said, we want to go to a place
where we can establish things the
right way, where we can openly worship
and openly serve God and speak
truth to one another and
lead based on these principles.
That's why this whole experiment began.
So now what happens is
when we as pastors, you,
me, others in our sphere of
influence and other friends who are
pastors and leaders, when we
start speaking out
into culture, it sounds
foreign. And yet
historically through the church, especially
in America, pastors
were always speaking out
into culture. In fact, those
that framed the original documents,
whether it was the Mayflower Compact, whether it was
the Connecticut
Constitution, whether it was
the Declaration of Independence Bill, all of them,
all of the topics
in those were preached
in churches before they were ever drafted
into documents. And the
drafters of those, many of them were
pastors, many of them were deacons,
many of them, all of them
attended church for the most part.
And when they drafted that, it all
came out of the sermons that had been
preached prior to that. But you won't read
that in your history books in the public school.
You won't get the truth.
Pastors were often governors
and mayors and statesmen
and senators. William Bradford, one of the
first ones, first colonists,
was a governor. That's right. And
he led his, his,
this became the state
of Rhode Island, but he led his
with, he would preach
on Sundays and he would govern
throughout the week. And he didn't see
a difference between being a governor and a preacher.
I mean, a pastor. But what's
happened today is pastors have been
scared and they've been threatened.
And by the way, in the last 70 years
since that bill came out in 1954,
do you know how many lawsuits
have been brought against churches
for preaching politics in the pulpit?
Two, right? Two. Guess how many? One.
Zero.
In other words, this isn't going to happen.
It's an empty threat. It's an empty threat.
And there are lawyers
standing by to protect pastors
right now. I know this for a fact,
that if they are to stand and speak
into what's going on in culture and they were ever
to be threatened by ACLU or anybody
else, there's a
large army of attorneys
ready to go to war.
We do not have to be afraid.
And we need to re-embrace our
calling to be culture shapers,
difference makers, and world changers.
You know, and I think an important
statement to make too is that in doing
this, this does not
mean that we are here as the
church to prop up a man or a woman.
Exactly. You know what I mean?
This isn't about a political candidate at all.
This isn't about saying,
Donald Trump is great, or we like
Joe Biden, or it's all about
Robert Kennedy. You name the
person who is out there right now. There is
a lot of fallible, broken
people who are attempting to
step into positions of
leadership, and none of them have the capacity
to do things God's way
fully. None of them do.
And none of them are the hope of our future
or the hope of our salvation. Only Jesus
is. But we have a responsibility
as God's people
to speak openly
and loudly about truth,
about righteousness, about what is evil,
and what is good, and demand it from
our leaders, regardless of who
they are, and refuse to
put people in power to whatever
say we have in it, who are
going to openly do things that
God says are evil and wrong.
The Church has always been the conscious
of the state. Always.
You go back in the history of the Old Testament,
the prophets spoke to kings.
They counseled kings.
They brought God's Word to kings.
They returned nations
to the Scriptures.
And so, we think
now, for example,
you and I are supposed to be
experts on the first century history,
culture, everything about what was
going on, but in the 21st
century, we're expected to be quiet
and not know anything, not engage,
not do anything. I mean, the hypocrisy
of that. No, you stay in your lane,
pastor. You preach your
sermons on Sunday. In fact,
Adolf Hitler told,
I can't remember
his name, but he was a contemporary of
Bonhoeffer. He was a pastor who
was, he thought he was a friend of Hitler.
Hitler had met with him and said,
look, when I rise to be chancellor,
churches are going to be safe.
We know he was a liar, a narcissist, a
liar, psychopath.
The churches are going to be safe, but y'all
stay over there. Mind your business.
And we're not going to touch you.
And so, it started with an N.
It was no Mueller or no Hewler
or something like that.
He was saying,
so he kept his head down, whereas Bonhoeffer
was speaking up, and they were friends.
And
after
Hitler came to power,
this guy, this pastor,
tried to meet with him. It took him 12 months
to get a meeting with him. When he finally got a
meeting, you got it there? Martin Niemoller.
There it is, Niemoller. Got it. Thank you.
So, when Niemoller finally got
an audience with Hitler,
he brought him into the room. When he entered
the room, there were men waiting
there, these cronies of
the Nazi regime of Hitler.
They were waiting for him, and they had
pads with things written down on it.
They had recorded his phone calls.
He didn't even know it. This is
back in the 30s.
They were recording his phone calls and
said, on this day, you said this
about the Nazi,
about the Reich, the Third Reich.
You said this. You chuckled when you
said this. And they so
disarmed him before he even walked in
to talk to Hitler about what was going on,
that he was... And then
Hitler ran it on him for 30 minutes.
Oh my gosh. And then
one of the things Hitler said to him, he said,
I made the Third
Reich. He said,
you go make your sermons.
I mean, that was it. He was saying, you have
no part in this. And he
left berated. Then he got arrested,
and then he served in a concentration
camp for eight
years for this.
Because when he came out of that meeting,
he realized he had been lied to.
He realized he had
bought the lie, and he flipped
and he started speaking against and speaking
into culture. And then he spent
eight years in prison for it.
He survived. Coming out,
he wrote a really well-known poem
that basically says this.
You may remember this. I'll just give you the gist of it.
He said,
they came after the Socialists,
but I was not a Socialist,
so I said nothing.
They came after the Communists, but I was not
a Communist, so I said nothing.
They came after the Jews,
but I'm not a Jew, so I said nothing.
And then they came after us.
And there was no one left to speak up
for me.
It's a famous poem
by him. But anyway, all that to say
is this idea that
preachers, pastors
shouldn't speak into culture,
and yet what we see is preachers and
pastors to actually shape the
foundations of our nation as we
know it. Greatest nations ever
been here, which now is being
undermined by Marxists and Neo and
Trans Maoism,
where they're trying to destroy three things.
Faith, family,
and freedom. And the truth is
none of this means that
we need to stand up and be belligerent
and angry and abusive or
violent or any of that stuff.
None of that stuff is going to produce the righteousness
of God. Exactly. Agreed.
But what we do need to do is be bold
and courageous
and open and truthful
and open our mouths and
speak. And things
that should not be permitted,
we need to say these things should not be
permitted. For example,
we need to show up at a school board meeting.
Not to be violent,
not to be rate,
not to
be belligerent, but to
show up to say we are concerned
about what we're seeing, what we're
hearing. We love you.
That'll never change.
But we need to speak into what's
happening here.
I think we've lost sight
of the authority that we carry
as believers
who have the Holy Spirit of the
Living God on the inside of us.
I think it's in 2 Thessalonians
chapter 2. It
refers to the Holy Spirit.
One of His functions and roles within us
is as the Restrainer.
And the Bible says that
the presence of God through the Holy Spirit
in His people literally
restrains evil by
God's power. Just the fact
that we are here and that
we are standing and not leaning,
that we are
our allegiance is
firmly with Jesus and we're not afraid to say
it. Just that fact alone,
the presence of God
inside us will restrain
and hold back evil. And so, a lot
of times we just need to be present.
We just need to show up and we just
need to realize we do have a place in
these arenas and we do have
authority that we carry that extends
beyond the natural.
Extends beyond what would even make sense
logically. That when we pray and when we
speak truth and when we show up,
the Spirit in us will restrain
things from happening.
Interestingly, we talked about the End Times earlier.
One of the things that's going to happen
when the Church is raptured is the Restrainer
is going to be removed and that is
what is going to allow for the Antichrist
to finally come on the scene.
He can't do it until the Restrainer is removed.
And there are different thoughts
on who the Restrainer is. Is the
Strainer of the Holy Spirit or is
the Restrainer of the Church when the Church is
raptured? See, there are various
I think it's both because they are one
and the same. Yes, they are. Right? Yeah, exactly.
You can't really separate the two.
Two weeks ago, I love what you said there,
the word that I would say is
the word jurisdiction. That's good.
And so I met this guy, his name is Bill Jack.
He is a prolific
he founded an
organization that teaches apologetics
to gap year
students and young people and
sends them off to school before they get
obliterated by the secular humanists
that are running our schools. Wow.
And ripping away, ripping
to shred people's faith. So they
do these camps all over
and they go to public
state colleges.
They rent a room and they do these camps
like for a week and they just
fill them full of
who they are, what they need to know,
how to defend their faith.
And his name is Bill Jack.
He was in our church two weeks ago.
His daughter attends here.
She is one of our Bridgers. And
he lives in Colorado. So he shows up
and he made a beeline to me after church.
And he is like,
Pastor, this is rare.
I can't believe I came to church
and you are talking about these things. This is what I
do. And he said, you don't know
how rare this is. How many churches
I go to and no pastors ever
address what is going on culturally.
Never speak truth to power.
They are afraid to say anything.
He said, this is what I do.
I train and equip the next generation
to go out there and stand their ground, stand
firm. And he gave me the word. He said,
let me give you a word that may help you think
this or frame or reframe
what you are thinking. He said,
it is the word jurisdiction.
So I did a little study on that word
and the idea of jurisdiction
is that it is a conferred
space.
It is a conferred realm.
It is a conferred place
of authority. Where you
have authority, not in
yourself, but it has been conferred to you.
It has been delegated, maybe a better
word. It is delegated authority.
When you think about what Jesus did during
the Great Commission, what He did before
He sent the disciples out two by two
to give them authority,
exousia, over
demons and spirits
and all that.
Jesus was constantly taking
His exousia,
His jurisdiction and giving it to
us and saying, now go.
It is the idea of being an ambassador.
Exactly. Diplomatic
immunity, right?
They speak on behalf of the
government that they represent.
Bingo. When He said that word to me, it
went off in my chest like a bomb.
I was like, that is thunder in my soul
right there. Jurisdiction,
I have been mulling that over.
Sitting here over the weekend,
Eric Metaxas,
Pastor Alan Jackson,
Chad Rubino,
Kaylee McAnally, Kurt Cameron,
hearing all these speakers,
the word that kept pinging
is jurisdiction. We have
insulated our jurisdiction.
It is time to take it back.
But again, not through violence, not
through belligerence, through wisdom.
Through wisdom and through
confidence in who we are in Christ.
Not in who we are ourselves.
We don't go in beating our chests.
We go in, we suit up, we show
up and the Holy Spirit
goes before us
and massages atmospheres
and changes
atmospheres when we walk in a room.
You know what Jesus told his disciples
when he sent them out? He said,
don't worry about what you are going to say
when you go. He said the Holy Spirit
will give you what to say
when you are there. The key is
that you have to show up and you have to be
willing, you have to be ready and you have to
position your heart in such a way
that God can cooperate
with you and speak through you.
I love that.
What if, we have in our
church on a given Sunday, we are between
600 and 650. That's our pretty
average attendance. But in a
given month, you are looking more at like 800
people that come through
at various times because everybody
comes at the same time. If we all showed up at the same time
we couldn't keep, we didn't have room for everybody.
But think about the power
of that in a community.
Of 800 people
who decided to together
wake up
and to stand.
I don't care how large a community you have,
that's powerful.
We are a small community. That's close to
that's not quite 10 percent.
But that's 8 percent
of our community
give or take.
The power of that showing up to
a meeting, whether it's a school
board meeting, whether it's
a city
council meeting, whether it's
some kind of meeting in terms of the community.
Not to protest,
but I will say we
do need to resist.
We are representing
the kingdom that we are
a part of. Yes. Exactly.
In these arenas. If we don't do it
who will? And we are reclaiming
ground and territory.
I said this in a sermon two weeks ago.
Ground lost is difficult
to regain. It's hard
to get back. But it's doable. I believe
that. And so though we
have capitulated territory
over the years and we bought
lies, particularly
1954's law about
jurisdiction. Now we
need to regain that ground.
We need to reestablish our jurisdiction
and be unapologetic.
Not be belligerent, but be
firm. Absolutely. This is who we are.
We have the original documents. We've got
the receipts. We don't have to be ashamed.
And the
stakes that are at play here go beyond
what policies
are being enacted and
what things are being brought into law.
Are those things important? Absolutely.
But what's at stake even above and
beyond that is just
the ability
for truth to reign
in the land and for our children
and our children's children to
live in a place
where they're going to
have the greatest opportunity to know
who Jesus is.
Wow. What you just said
really resonates because the
reason why we need to be doing this
is not for us. It's for
the next generation.
I think about the reason why we
have been given, the reason
why hundreds of kids can show
up on college campuses and pitch
tents and protest
and hatred against Israel as
vile as that feels
to me, as demonic
as that is and satanic as that is
because it is. But the reason
they can do that is because
people laid down their lives,
sacrificed their temporary
comfort so that a
generation after them could walk
in freedom and have
the freedom to speak even if it's wrong.
Even if it's wrong. Even if it's bad.
I've been hit on social
media a lot lately. I'm getting crushed.
We sent that reel out.
It's gotten over a thousand views, that one
of me going there.
And I've had some really ugly stuff
come up because we sponsored it. So
it went out broader than our typical
band of people. And I've
gotten a lot of hits back. And
every one of them is a reminder
for me to pray for that person by name. So hey,
do your worst. Say what you need to say.
You're just getting on a prayer list.
I'm praying for those individuals.
Now I have your name. Now I have a target.
So you just exposed yourself
by... You can't make us not love you.
Exactly. I love you. You can't do anything
about it. But what that's telling
me is that
I said, do you think I should
delete these comments? Because some of them are bad.
They're ugly.
Like really ridiculous.
And Annette said, no.
Because what we're talking about
right now, they have a right to say that.
And I said, you're absolutely
right. I'm going to leave them be. I'm not going to
answer them because I don't want to just...
The Bible says if you speak to a fool,
you become a fool. So you become as
a fool. So I'm not going to do that. But I will
pray for them. And by leaving those comments
up there, it helps...
It's a reminder to me that
not everybody thinks the way I do.
Not everybody believes that Jesus is who He says He is.
And I have to have
compassion, not empathy, but compassion
for that. And so you know what?
They know not what they're saying.
And now I've got their name and I can pray
for them and there's nothing they can do about it.
So...
If nobody has a
bad word to say about anything we're doing,
I don't know that we're doing much. Exactly.
If you're moving the needle,
you'll know if you're over the target.
Yeah. Man, brother, we could
solve the rest of the world's problems, but hey,
we got to get going. I got a lunch date
soon. Oh my gosh, I really do
have to get going. Hey, bro. Thank you again for
letting me join you today. Thank you for being here today.
For our friends, thank you for writing into
our website. Thank you for supporting us through
Value for Value on the Fountain app, sending
in Satoshis. And just such a blessing
to hear from you, getting those boosts.
But also we have several that support us on an
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Living Up in a Down World.
And subscribe.
Hit that subscribe button. Let us know you're
out there. Love hearing from you.
Pastor Brian, thank you so much, bro.
Thank you and have a happy Tuesday, everybody.
God bless. We're out.
Thank you.