Steve Dacey joins me live from Dream City Church to talk about the importance of the church in America, and why it is so important for us to be bold and courageous in the spiritual battle that we re in. We talk about demons, angels, the afterlife, heaven, hell, and more.
00:00:41.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, turning point USA.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are gonna fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:58.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:34.000And um I believe it's really made a big impact here locally.
00:01:38.000Every day I have people come up to me and they say, you know, I'm running for school board, I'm getting involved, I'm a better Christian, better father, I'm a better student.
00:01:46.000And this is exactly what the Bible tells us to do.
00:01:49.000In the scriptures, it tells us in Jeremiah 29:7, which is what we originally said when we started this together with the Barnett's.
00:01:55.000Seek the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
00:02:00.000We are called to care about our city, to call about our state, to care about our nation.
00:02:05.000And everybody, this church and what Dream City has done has been a leader to other churches in the valley.
00:02:11.000You know that before we do this, I want to just praise and single out other pastors come from across the valley for a round table beforehand.
00:02:22.000And they're here to get resources filled up in any possible way.
00:02:28.000Because if we're serious about saving America, it must start with the church.
00:02:31.000And we're gonna talk about that tonight.
00:02:33.000And so I want to make sure I give you an appropriate trigger warning for tonight.
00:02:36.000If you put Steve and I in a room together, it starts to get a little bit uh, let's just say aggressive, but it's always rooted in the truth.
00:02:44.000Because look, we could spend our entire time here together tonight doing a victory lap, everything's great, we won in November, and praise the Lord we did.
00:02:52.000But let's be honest, the American church is nowhere nowhere near as bold or courageous or strong as it should be.
00:03:01.000In fact, I think he's one of the most equipped voices in the country to talk about this.
00:03:06.000You can see him on the blaze, his podcast is awesome.
00:03:09.000We're really gonna sit to talk about some, let's say, some love in truth, some truth in love, I should say, some hard truths about how the church needs to fight harder and fight stronger in the spiritual battle that we're in.
00:03:21.000Give it up, everybody, for Steve Dace, everybody.
00:04:06.000I'm on After Glenn Beck, which, if you're Gen X or older, is a little bit like if you were doing the show after Cheers or Seinfeld on NBC.
00:04:16.000Like you're gonna have to really be terrible at this not to hold some form of that audience, right?
00:04:20.000So I I get to kind of you know, gravy train off of Glenn.
00:04:24.000Um, but um there is literally nothing in my background that would indicate I would ever be here whatsoever.
00:04:32.000Uh I'm a kid born to a 15-year-old mom.
00:04:34.000Uh my mom found out she was pregnant uh at 14 from her high school senior boyfriend uh over Thanksgiving break in 1972, and several of her friends had already had abortions, and she had contemplated doing the exact same thing.
00:04:49.000Um, My paternal father's family were very prominent Democrats in Des Moines at the time.
00:04:55.000My uncle was on the city, or my great uncle was on the city council.
00:04:58.000My grandfather was a very powerful district court judge, and they tried to bribe my mom and my grandmother with $500, which was the cost of an abortion at the time, to abort me.
00:05:11.000They pressured them everything they could to get my mom to murder her baby, but she just couldn't bring herself to do it.
00:05:17.000And so on July 28, 1973, at age 15, she had me.
00:05:23.000Um she took that $500, actually, her and my grandmother did, and moved out to California where they didn't start their life all over again.
00:05:34.000And I wish I could tell you things were great.
00:05:37.000She met a Navy shoreman while she was out there.
00:05:40.000He came from a very dysfunctional family as well.
00:05:43.000His dad was an alcoholic, very abusive.
00:05:45.000He modeled a lot of that to us as well.
00:05:48.000So, you know, my biological didn't bother.
00:05:51.000My my stepdad um thought that he could uh emulate Robert uh, you know, uh Duvall's great Santini as a model of fatherhood.
00:06:00.000So I didn't come into this with a lot of great masculine role models or anything at all.
00:06:05.000Um I was a good student and a decent athlete growing up, but then after I went to college, and like a lot of young men of this era, I was aimless, um, overexposed to pornography, aimless, um, uh just no purpose, nothing going on whatsoever.
00:06:20.000Um, and then I met a girl, and she's my wife now, and that gave me my first real direction, this idea that I've I've got to do more than work in the mail room here for the rest of my life.
00:06:33.000And and that'll but that only took me so far, right?
00:06:36.000And and then sooner or later I was at a promise keepers eventually almost over 20 years ago in Kansas City, an event that the day they announced it at the church we were going to, I thought, whatever else is happening on September 18th, 2003, I need to be there.
00:06:51.000And then the day before the event, I felt like I don't care what is going on at that event.
00:06:55.000I shan't, I I should not go, I can't go.
00:06:57.000It's the worst place in the world, I shouldn't go.
00:07:00.000And it was at this event that uh the Lord converted me.
00:07:03.000Uh and my wife would tell you that she's on her, she's on her second marriage now.
00:07:11.000It just so happens the guy had the same exact first and last name both times, you know, and and my wife and I basically met in the in the AOL dial-up chat room version of Tinder.
00:07:24.000Okay, we we did we did not think we were gonna be born-again believers with like minivans who homeschooled our kids.
00:07:58.000Nobody's hair is blue, so we must be doing something right, okay.
00:08:04.000I I love that story for a variety of reasons, and I just also want to pause.
00:08:08.000Think about how many Steve Daceas are aborted every single year in our country.
00:08:12.000It's just there's a heaviness to that.
00:08:14.000And also, it should be hopeful that for every life that we're able to save from abortion, it could be somebody that impacts millions of other people.
00:08:22.000Every life is precious in the eyes of God.
00:08:24.000Secondly, Steve, I love that story because it shows the American dream is still alive.
00:09:42.000Um, I had moved on, I'd moved my way up to sports reporter at the Des Moines Register, and now I'm doing a local talk show, but there had never been a sports show in Des Moines, so it's not exactly Bill and Seven Figures, okay?
00:09:54.000And my wife wants to be a stay-at-home mom with the daughter, so we're on one income, and we live in this crummy two-bedroom apartment, and the second apartment is where I had my prolonged adolescence.
00:10:04.000All right, it's it's where I kept my porn collection.
00:10:07.000Uh it's it's where I kept my video games and all that kind of stuff.
00:10:10.000Well, that was the only place we had left to bring a crib to put a crib for our baby.
00:10:15.000And I remember shortly after we brought Anastasia home, I I go into that bedroom and I see her there, and and I went from very athletic and in high school, I'm now like 400 pounds.
00:10:25.000I mean, I've I've essentially got every malady of aimless young men of this era.
00:10:37.000And I remember looking at Anastasia, and I just had this feeling of dread, like, this kid is screwed with me as a dad.
00:10:44.000And and I I remember thinking, this is the one I think I have found the one thing Hillary Clinton is right about.
00:10:50.000It is going to take a village to raise this kid, okay?
00:10:54.000And and I can see and look back on it now and see that was the wooing process.
00:10:58.000That was the Holy Spirit calling me, trying to get my attention.
00:11:01.000And you know, when I went to that Promise Keepers, this said about two years, it took two years from that moment to get to that promise keepers.
00:11:08.000And I remember being there and walking in the arena, and these guys are holding hands and singing songs, and I'm like, Nope.
00:12:00.000And I remember thinking, man, altar calls are only for really bad Pentecostal television, okay?
00:12:06.000Which is funny now, because I go to a Pentecostal church, and my Pentecostal minister is in the audience with me here, so God has a sense of humor, okay.
00:12:14.000And and I remember thinking I need to get up and answer this call.
00:12:19.000And and I, and then I thought, no, I'm not gonna do this.
00:12:23.000I'm not gonna prove God you were right about me.
00:12:26.000And so I set my size back then, size 50 genes, back down into that, well, more like squeezed, back into that seat.
00:12:34.000And the next thing I know, I am I've gone from the upper deck of Kemper Arena in Kansas City, I'm on the concrete floor, sobbing.
00:12:42.000Just years and years of tears of sins that I have committed that have been committed against me.
00:13:20.000Can you call me when you get back from Phoenix?
00:13:22.000Because I've got to pick my life up again, you know, at age 50, and I don't know what I'm gonna do.
00:13:27.000Do you have those kinds of men around you, men?
00:13:30.000Because I can promise you, your chances that you're gonna reach the finish line and hear, well done, good and faithful servant, decrease and diminish if you do not.
00:14:42.000And instead, I'd rather have most pastors.
00:14:44.000I'd rather have my sweater vests, my pleated khakis, my Hawaiian shirts, and I'd rather be really comfortable in my pottery barn church where I've where I've got an evangelical monasticism in the middle of this suburb that I don't intersect with at all.
00:14:58.000And if you approach my campus at two o'clock on a Tuesday, nothing is happening except somebody on a riding lawnmower mowing the lawn.
00:15:06.000And that's why get in a church that engages the men, that organizes the men.
00:15:12.000Men need structure, men need a mission, men need to be challenged, right?
00:15:18.000Most one of the reasons why we need women in our lives, you guys give us direction.
00:15:23.000You guys give us a purpose, we need competition.
00:15:26.000And the church, because the family has fallen apart, frankly, the church is gonna have to provide a lot of that structure for the next generation of men.
00:15:34.000Everything was done in the last generation of church growth inc, which I would send to the lake of fire if I could.
00:15:41.000Everything was done in the last generation of church growth ink to reach Karen.
00:15:45.000Every Christian music network has it has a composite of Karen, whose biggest struggle every day is will I will I get to my drop the kids off from school in time to reach my Pilates appointment?
00:15:57.000And that's why the music has to be uplifting and hope-filled.
00:17:40.000Number one, when and why did that change?
00:17:43.000Because the church used to be really good at this.
00:17:45.000And then number two, why is it that the evangelical church seems so hostily uninterested in picking up the one trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk?
00:17:55.000You guys understand right now, this is the greatest growth opportunity ever for the Catholic church With young men.
00:18:40.000Well, you know, it's it's interesting.
00:18:42.000I was um I was on uh America Family Radio with the American Family Association earlier this week, and and I said on their network, I said, when Don Wildman founded this ministry, he understood that he was downstream from the church, and that ultimately the church did the job of basic discipleship and catechesis, and then people needed specific marching orders of where they were called now to take their gifts and what they had learned and go impact the world for Christ with it.
00:19:10.000And they went to parachurch organizations like the American Family Association.
00:19:14.000What's happened in the last generation now since Don passed away, and Tim has taken over, is the American Family Association is now doing the Bible teaching that the church used to do.
00:19:24.000I will tell you the number one piece of feedback I get on my show, other than why are you like this?
00:19:29.000Okay, the other number one piece of feedback I get is why don't I hear more like this in my church?
00:19:35.000Why am I getting more of this from a podcast than uh from you than I'm getting from my church?
00:19:40.000And and ultimately, we have made two uh Faustian bargains in the last generation.
00:19:47.000Number one, the American pastorate is more full of Esau's than Jacob's.
00:19:53.000Instead of troubled, flawed men who are actively though, wrestling with God, they have a call on their life, they have a purpose, they have a plan, they're not perfect, they can fall away.
00:20:01.000Jacob's name literally means schemer, by the way.
00:21:00.000So on one hand, the church has become heavily corporatized, and and then what happened in the counterculture made it convenient and incentivized it.
00:21:10.000Feminism was the greatest thing that ever happened to boys who can shave.
00:21:14.000You mean I can get sex with women with no requirements, no responsibilities whatsoever?
00:21:18.000And then the woman's not stigmatized anymore either for acting out immorally, but now that's a asserting her femininity.
00:21:25.000The Babylon Bee ran a headline the other day.
00:21:28.000You might get mad at me for saying this, I'm gonna warn you.
00:21:30.000Um, but the Babylon B ran a headline the other day about Nancy Mace.
00:21:34.000All right, who wanted to who okay, okay, good, all right, all right.
00:21:38.000And and and who's just an absolutely craven politician who's actually now showing nude pictures of herself in the Congress.
00:21:45.000And and and the headline was Nancy Mace vows to keep showing naked pictures of herself until she finally stops the exploitation of women.
00:21:53.000All right, I mean, this is what feminism has wrought.
00:21:56.000Men who want to be sons of Adam, you know, we always we always read the story about Eve being tempted and succumbing.
00:22:01.000You ever wondered what's Adam doing the whole time?
00:22:04.000Just sitting there with his hands in his proverbial pockets, I got nothing, nothing, nothing's going on.
00:22:08.000And notice later, by the way, after the fall, God does not call Eve Eve forth in the garden, does he?
00:23:06.000And so feminism and all the isms and social pathologies of the last generation gave us a let's get out of jail free card.
00:23:13.000And then what the church has done internally in the last generation with its theology is we have taken the the two greatest commandments that Jesus summarized, the Ten Commandments, right?
00:23:24.000Moses comes down the mountain with two stone tablets.
00:23:26.000The first is the vertical relationship between us and God, the second, the horizontal relationship between one another.
00:23:41.000Well, it's the next five commandments.
00:23:43.000What the last generation of the evangelical church has done is said, Love your neighbor as you love yourself is actually the greatest commandment.
00:23:50.000People are now in the place of primacy where God is.
00:24:04.000I will sit here and theo nerd out with you all night long, okay?
00:24:08.000But Jesus did not die for a theology, he died for people.
00:24:11.000There is nothing more important in the kingdom of God, all right, that he has given us in his creation other than us.
00:24:18.000People are important, but they're not God.
00:24:21.000And so we have made offending our neighbor worse than offending God.
00:24:26.000So we will inject all forms of cowardice, all forms of heterodoxy, if not flat out heresy, into the church because I might drive somebody away.
00:24:35.000God has placed their entire salvation.
00:24:37.000Jesus went to the cross, he did it all, pronounced it finished.
00:24:40.000But by golly, if you don't put the right frosting on Jesus' cake, people won't get saved.
00:25:19.000And ultimately, we have to make that first commandment great again.
00:25:23.000Love the Lord your God while your heart, soul, strength, and mind.
00:25:26.000And then you will understand what it means to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
00:25:30.000Now, Charlie, I will tell you this though.
00:25:32.000I am concerned there is an emerging movement in the church that is reaching the young men that agrees with everything I just said, but I am fearful that without proper guidance, they will actually fall into the opposite heresy in our time, which is they will stop loving their neighbor as they love themselves.
00:25:49.000And they will turn people into ideological constructs.
00:25:52.000Listen, I was born white trash to a 15-year-old mom.
00:25:56.000I met my wife in the Tinder version of America online.
00:26:00.000There was nothing in my background at all that would have indicated I'd be here doing this tonight, having this discussion with you.
00:26:07.000So we still need to give the Lord's grace room to work.
00:26:50.000It's because it actually comes down to a first principle question.
00:26:54.000They have a different definition of what a church is.
00:26:57.000And therefore, also, secondly, the other first Principle error, a category error is we have a different definition of what a pastor is.
00:27:04.000So if you can't answer those two questions, then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh sequence, you're gonna be completely off chart, of course.
00:28:39.000There is a priest named Hilkiah who one day is cleaning out the temple, and they've got all the pagan relics they've allowed to infest God's house, the starry hosts, all the baal worship, all the Asherah poles, all of the disgusting filth is in there.
00:28:52.000And one day he stumbles upon this dusty scroll and he picks it up.
00:29:00.000It's the Torah, it's the law, and it ends in Deuteronomy with Moses saying, I've set before you blessing and cursing, choose life so that you may live in the land.
00:29:12.000And Josiah now does not just reset the festivals and the law, but Josiah is the final king of Israel that goes to the high places and tears down the idols to Asherah and the sex cult that bedeviled the Jewish people for hundreds of years.
00:29:55.000And you will be amazed at the transformation that takes place.
00:29:59.000The the greatest weapon of mass destruction in any spiritual cultural war is a man of God with the courage to open up that book and tell people what it actually says, come what may.
00:30:10.000And ultimately, and ultimately, that is what is lacking the most.
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00:31:31.000What is your message to somebody in this audience that is currently attending a weak or a woke church?
00:31:38.000What is the threshold for which they should leave and go to a church like Dream City or go to one, you know, a much better church that is biblically grounded.
00:31:47.000Talk about your experience because the objections that we'll receive are this.
00:32:10.000The one excuse that I do have a little bit of a tenderness for, and I want you to just go into it and you could obliterate it is Charlie, I have a relationship with the pastor, and I'm making progress, and I think I can, you know, get this towards a better conclusion.
00:32:26.000I say, okay, after five years through COVID and Floyd Apalooza and the 2024 election, you're still, you know, we're not there yet.
00:32:37.000We're gonna post this on podcasting streaming.
00:32:40.000Millions of people listen to this, and yet still there is a stubbornness in our audience that does not want to leave weak or woke churches.
00:33:01.000I I have actually tried to keep it fairly subtle for you guys tonight, since he's the main event and I'm just the undercard.
00:33:06.000All right, but um, this is me on the down low, okay?
00:33:10.000And so I actually thought that a softer church would be good.
00:33:14.000I was always concerned with our kids, that the fact that dad's job was the culture war would make the faith almost overbearing to them.
00:33:22.000All right, and so I thought maybe I needed to actually downplay some of the formalities and of our liturgies so that the kids had room to breathe and work out their own salvation.
00:33:43.000And in the middle of that message, my church made me feel like, as you know, I helped lead the fight in my state for passing one of the very first heartbeat bills in America in America.
00:33:56.000And I mean, I I got to sign the proclamation of my state legislature the day that passed our legislature.
00:34:03.000And and and that's one of the bills that was used to overturn Roe.
00:34:07.000And I'm and my pastor's making me feel like I'm some kind of a freak show because I devoted, you know, the my faith and ministry to this cause.
00:34:15.000And then he basically apologized for the overturning of Roe.
00:34:19.000Hey, we're a pro-life church, but then he said, but we understand not everybody here agrees.
00:34:23.000And I thought, why are there people in this room who think child sacrifice is okay?
00:34:27.000Why are they why are they not made uncomfortable by feeling like this?
00:35:08.000And with all due respect, my show's not as big as Charlie's, but it's a pretty big audience.
00:35:12.000I've got a lot of connections in the evangelical world, and I kind of think if we're inviting a speaker and I've never heard of him, who is this?
00:35:19.000So I called up a buddy of mine who's the pastor of apologetics for Jack Graham's church in Dallas.
00:35:42.000He goes, he is absolutely sent by the enemy to disarm our churches.
00:35:46.000He's gonna gain enough of a beach head, and then once he's got enough influence, just like Rob Belly told me, that's when he's gonna write his love wins and show he was a heretic all along.
00:35:56.000So I go to our pastor, and he's like, yeah, but you know, my daughter handles that, and she thinks new voices would be good.
00:36:03.000It was just very clear that the number one doctrine of this church was non-confrontationalism on every front.
00:36:09.000And at that point, I'm I'm kind of the Holy Spirit's working on me, and I go home one day, and um at this point our daughters are grown, now moved out on their own, so it's just me, my wife, and my son, and he's 16, and I call them together and say, hey, you know, I know you guys are ultimately gonna say, you believe in me, it'll be my decision, but I want your input, all right?
00:36:28.000I'm thinking it might be time to change churches.
00:36:52.000And um, the next weekend, I thought I would check out Pastor Jesse's church because one of my one of my uh good buddies from my original men's group when we all got saved together at that promise keepers goes to his church.
00:37:07.000And he had told me a few months ago that Pastor Jesse wanted to know why in the world is Steve Dace of all people going to a weak church, and I felt really convicted by that.
00:37:16.000I don't think I've ever said that to Jesse actually.
00:37:19.000And so on my own, unannounced, I went in there to check it out before I took the family, and I really just thought I could just sense, I'm like, wow.
00:37:31.000What is the difference between we're doing church and I can really feel like the spirit is moving here?
00:37:50.000If if the trainee brigade showed up in the parking lot while service was going on and began doing drag queen story time hour in the parking lot of your church, would the pastor of your church stop service right away to assemble the elders, go out there to confront them and remove them from the premises?
00:38:46.000You know, now that I'm 50, I have a lot of sayings that I'm repeating over and over again that aren't as cool as I originally thought they were, but one of them is this.
00:38:54.000No one can rise above their own worldview.
00:38:57.000And I I just think he came out of a model and is invested in a model from another era.
00:39:05.000You know, between Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers, and Jerry Falwell Sr., essentially the men who formed the original religious right, Billy Graham, James Robson, between those people and what we have now, and and churches like this that we're at tonight, we had Bill Heibels and Rick Warren.
00:39:28.000And that, and they were essentially the the bishops and the popes of American evangelicalism.
00:39:33.000And, you know, the culture runs, the world runs on the principle of headship, that God's economy runs on headship.
00:39:40.000As great as this ministry is, it would be broken if you found out tomorrow that the head of the ministry had been keeping a great moral failing from you all these years.
00:39:49.000Look at what's happened to Gateway Church in Dallas with Robert Morris, for example.
00:39:54.000That's why studies show that if mom takes the kids to church every Sunday and dad never goes, it's a flip of a coin where the kids will go when they're adults.
00:40:01.000But if dad goes, regardless of what mom does, the kids will almost always go to church when they grow up.
00:40:10.000And so ultimately the team takes on the identity of its coach.
00:40:14.000And the most influential voices in evangelicalism in the last generation were guys who wore Hawaiian shirts in January and sweater vests in July.
00:40:44.000There's never been anything about Christianity even alluded to ever in this sports podcast.
00:40:49.000But yet the the uniform of the hipster uniform of the American youth pastor has crossed over into the mainstream that even the unchurched know what that knows that uniform and knows what it looks like.
00:41:35.000And hey, if you've got donuts and juice at your church, that doesn't mean you're a bunch of sellouts, but is that what you're actually known for?
00:43:37.000One of the coolest things I ever saw in my life is after getting saved, I went to a promise keepers a few years later in my hometown of Des Moines.
00:43:46.000And there and Chris Tomlin and his band were the music.
00:44:04.000And as we're all singing along to the chorus, they all took their took their instruments, they set them down.
00:44:11.000He put his microphone away, and they walked off the stage so they didn't take any applause.
00:44:16.000Because it would be kind of ironic to sing a song called Famous One, that only Jesus is famous, and then take a standing ovation for that at the end.
00:45:24.000Even the icky parts, those are the those are the most fun ones.
00:45:27.000Open the book up, go all the way through it, and tell people exactly what it says.
00:45:35.000If you want to make sense of the change and the chaos happening around us, you're going to need God's help.
00:45:40.000That's why Alan Jackson Ministries, a friend of mine, created the Culture and Christianity podcast, the Culture and Christianity Conference, and their weeknight news show, Alan Jackson now.
00:45:52.000Millions of people also listen to Pastor Alan Jackson's powerful sermons each week.
00:45:56.000I do, on radio, television, satellite, and online.
00:45:59.000In today's world, there's desperate need for truth.
00:46:02.000An Alan Jackson Ministries feels a sense of urgency to deliver God's truth and a biblical perspective to anyone who will listen.
00:46:55.000Steve, uh, while we get the questions going here, how can people follow you, listen you, the that are uh moved by what you're saying tonight?
00:47:38.000I'm talking Elijah and Mount Carmel like mockery.
00:47:42.000Like when Elijah says to the prophets of Baal while they're cutting themselves and getting nothing, and he says, Well, maybe your god's on the maybe your fake demon gods on the toilet, so he can't respond.
00:48:08.000He wanted the people to see what they worshiping has no power.
00:48:12.000It's not worth your fear and reverence, only God is.
00:48:15.000And so, in that spirit, I think it's time once and for all to take Pride Month down.
00:48:20.000And so my little effort to do that, to pull Pride Month's pants down, but not in the way that they would like, is with a new book called Richie Meets the Rainbow.
00:48:38.000The dad, when when his kid comes home and says, Dad, why is my blue-haired teacher trying to trans me and show me rainbows with only six colors?
00:48:49.000He takes out the Bible, shares the actual story of the rainbow with his son, but then he gives an action step and he says to his son, I am going to become a very familiar presence at the local school board meetings here on out.
00:49:02.000So we make the dad the hero at the end of this.
00:49:05.000And so if you want to get more information about that, you can go to Richie Meets the Rainbow with R-I-C-H-I-E, Richie Meets the Rainbow.com.
00:49:22.000Hey, um, I just got newly activated and saved a few years ago, and I just became familiar with the book of Enoch.
00:49:28.000And I'm wondering if you guys consider that Canon that was taken out by, I don't know, conspiracy theory stuff, because I read it's in the Ethiopian Bible, but not here.
00:49:46.000So my understanding is it's not canonical for the re not the reasons some of the other books are not.
00:49:50.000In this case, it's not necessarily that they thought the church fathers thought the teaching or the Protestant church fathers at the Reformation thought the ch that the book was heretical, necessary, necessarily, but it's auth, it's authentic the authorship could not be authenticized.
00:50:03.000And that was the big issue with Enoch and Well, yeah, but also it's not I don't know.
00:50:13.000No, I know I first and second Maccabees.
00:50:15.000But let me say No, no, no, it's not, I don't think it is.
00:50:18.000So for those that don't know, the book of Enoch, we we only have it because of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is only about a 60-year discovery.
00:50:25.000There is some mysticism in the book of Enoch that's in who the sons of God are in Genesis that has some great tension with normative Trinitarian Christian theology.
00:50:33.000Here's the one thing that we will say.
00:50:35.000Enoch, interestingly enough, in the Bible, here's a fun trivia question.
00:50:38.000Only two people to go to heaven besides Jesus, Elijah and Enoch.
00:50:43.000The more interesting question that we need to ask is the term Enoch, who exactly was he in the first couple books of Genesis, uh, who were the Nephilim.
00:50:52.000You guys could go, you know, into like let's just say dangerously deep rabbit holes on that.
00:50:57.000That is what we call an open hand theological issue, not a closed hand theological issue, right?
00:51:02.000If you think the Nephilim are like an alien race that came down to the earth, great, you might be right.
00:51:06.000They built the Aztec temples, couldn't care less.
00:51:08.000Most important question is who is Jesus Christ, right?
00:51:11.000So it it you guys can kind of go in those different circles, but it's also not canonical for the reason that we as so this is a really important point.
00:51:19.000That we as Christians and we as non-Catholics have an identical Tanakh, TNK, Torah, the Philemon and Khadetchem, of the of the Jews.
00:51:28.000The Jews do not believe the book of Enoch is canonical.
00:51:31.000So in about AD 80, right after the life of Christ, there was a huge meeting of rabbis where they established what we consider to be the Old Testament.
00:51:38.000So if you go to a Jew in Jerusalem, they will have an identical Old Testament as we have.
00:51:43.000The Catholics do not have an identical Old Testament.
00:51:46.000They have first and second Maccabees, they have the wisdom of Ben Sarah, they have other books that I think are um like let's just say uh the extended edition.
00:51:55.000Um, there's wisdom in those books, but they're not canonical for a lot of different reasons.
00:51:59.000So we actually draw what we think is divine as to what Jesus was taught was divine when Jesus walked on the earth.
00:52:07.000And when Jesus walked on earth, the book of Enoch was not central doctrinal uh theology of normative Judaism as the time.
00:52:16.000And in fact, you the point you made there about the rabbinical uh conclave that was held in 80 AD, uh, that reminded me, a lot of the Jewish um spiritual ecosystem at the time Christ arrived, was very similar to the world that we have today.
00:52:32.000All right, there was a lot, remember, God had not spoken for 400 years.
00:52:36.000So we get the we get the Dead Sea Scrolls because this sect called the Ascends go out on the Dead Sea to they're going, they're out there to copy the Old Testament, and essentially they think Messiah is coming, so they're out there to wait for him and copy the scriptures while they're awaiting him.
00:52:48.000There was just as there's great fascination in eschatology in our day, there was great uh fascination at the time of Christ in the time leading up to it with messianic prophecy, and would it be fulfilled, when God would speak again.
00:53:01.000There were all kinds of people claiming to be Messiah that were false messiahs.
00:53:05.000Um there was a lot of mysticism that came out of this period, and so one of the reasons why, just like we had a council in Nicaea to correct some of the Gnosticism and Arianism that happened in the first couple centuries of the church, one of the reasons that the rabbis had this conclave in 80 AD is be around there is because they also were very concerned at the amount of error that was cropping up within Judaism at this time as well.
00:53:27.000I you know, there's a great podcast out there called haunted cosmos by guys who are hard that are both pastors that get into this stuff biblically, and it's very fascinating.
00:54:10.000So there should be a there, just like you have just like heart disease is the number one killer in our culture, and so there's an inordinate amount of medical care predisposed and targeted towards what's going on in terms of your cardiac health.
00:54:22.000The amount of time you spend in the Bible should also focus and have an inverted ratio towards the heart of the gospel rather than some of these other issues, which I'm not saying are not important, but should never be a substitute for the heart of the gospel.
00:54:35.000And last thing, so the Dead Sea Scrolls, all the attention goes to the book of Enoch.
00:54:39.000The most amazing discovery in the Dead Sea Scrolls is an exact copy of Isaiah, word for word, syllable for syllable, going back thousands of years.
00:54:50.000Basically saying, because one of the ways that they tried to refute Jesus Christ was like, oh, all these prophecies you say that he fulfilled was actually just like after editing of Isaiah.
00:55:02.000It wasn't like virgin birth and that he came out of shrewd of dry ground.
00:55:08.000The Dead Sea Scrolls had a perfect intact copy of Isaiah, identical to our Isaiah, going back thousands of years, shifting the window so much that even like the Bible skeptics were like, whoa.
00:55:20.000The fact that Isaiah was like word for word in the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that the Bible, of course, is true, but the Bible skeptics set back their argument generations.
00:55:37.000Uh my name is Micah, and uh, you mentioned multiple times that we were in the last generation.
00:55:42.000I was just hoping they could tell me what that means more.
00:55:46.000Oh, um, well, I don't know if we're in the last generation eschatologically or not.
00:55:53.000And the church has throughout the centuries from the very first century thought that it was in the last generation.
00:56:00.000I do believe as as a culture, to me, the minimum stakes, if if if the current spiritual war were um were played for stakes, the minimum stakes we're playing for is what's left of Western civilization.
00:56:16.000And if Western civilization is defeated and goes away, what will what will replace it?
00:56:20.000Well, what came before it were the dark ages.
00:56:23.000Now the new dark ages will not be like the old ones.
00:56:25.000You're not gonna have you know rat droppings cause black plagues.
00:57:00.000All right, it is it is countries that were greatly influenced by the Christian church and adopted those traditions into their customs to the point that it influenced their way of life, right down to the way that they adjudicated their laws, right?
00:57:14.000And and that's you know, and and that's where America comes from.
00:57:18.000America really is the last outpost left of Western civilization.
00:57:53.000You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.
00:57:59.000But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.
00:58:08.000That is not what Bitcoin was built for.
00:58:14.000They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys, you control your assets.
00:58:20.000No one can touch your crypto, not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.
00:58:27.000This is how it was intended by the original creators of bitcoin, peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
00:58:36.000So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.
00:58:50.000Um, I would love to know your thoughts on the idea of corporate social responsibility.
00:58:55.000So do large-scale companies that affect lots of people's lives have um an obligation to weigh in on social and political issues, or would everyone just be better off if they just stuck to selling.
00:59:06.000I mean, I don't know if they could agree with us or not.
00:59:29.000Someone will always rule, something will always be worshipped.
00:59:33.000So in the last generation, secularism was introduced to disarm us.
00:59:37.000And to make us think, yeah, our schools could just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, basic skills, and get the Christianity out of there.
00:59:43.000That was all done to remove us so that the new religion could take its place.
00:59:52.000About two percent of France is evangelical.
00:59:54.000The old Catholic cathedrals are now either strip malls, vacant or mosques, because someone will always rule and something will always be worshipped, right?
01:00:02.000So that applies to the corporate sector as well.
01:00:05.000All right, and and this is where, you know, listen, I don't want to be smirch rush, his brother's a good friend of mine, none of us would have our jobs without him.
01:00:14.000But this is where my Christian faith has changed me as a conservative, and I frankly sound more like JD Vance now than I sounded when I was a rush baby 30 years ago.
01:00:22.000Because Rush used to say the only job of a corporation is to produce a profit for its investors.
01:00:28.000And I was like, yeah, because I believed that there were moral neutral spaces.
01:01:29.000And so we're now in a we're in a cold civil war, and just as it was either going to be the West or the Soviet Union, it will be our worldview or theirs.
01:02:03.000So make up your mind and fight accordingly.
01:02:05.000And I'll add to that the only disagreement I have is that there's actually two uh allied ideologies that are trying to squeeze the West.
01:02:12.000And one of my I just stumbled into this, I guess, because I think the church is so neutered, and I think Steve will agree.
01:02:18.000The the theological um misunderstanding fear around Islam with Christians is so scary.
01:02:28.000Like, okay, 9-11 happened, and everyone talked about Islam for like a decade, and now for the last decade, we're like, oh, we can get along with Islam.
01:02:37.000There is an Islamic takeover of the West that is happening simultaneously with a secular, and I call it the Great Squeeze, the red green alliance, the Marxists and the Islamists and the Muhammadans are coming together to simultaneously choke out Christendom or Western civilization.
01:02:53.000And we've gotten really good at criticizing secularism.
01:03:45.000You won't go, and you just kind of say, but we're not gonna, we're not gonna allow the Westerners, the native Britons, any voice.
01:03:52.000So we understand that it's like a peace treaty between two different competing forces, no different than Hitler and Mussolini or Hitler in Imperial Japan.
01:04:00.000So all that to say, we have to become more equipped, and everybody, it is so glaring.
01:04:05.000This is it is actually easier to make the theological argument against Islam to the church than even the secular one.
01:04:24.00050 plus Islamic countries and Christians aren't moving there, but they're all moving to our countries.
01:04:29.000They don't believe in separation of mosque and state, they don't believe in private property life like we do, or freedom of speech or blasphemy laws, anyway.
01:05:26.000Just to add to that, just as we have denominations, so does hell.
01:05:30.000So just as we have denominations and have vehement arguments, because sometimes you'll hear conservatives say things like, well, you're holding up your queers for Palestine sign.
01:05:40.000Have you ever tried being a queer in Palestine?
01:05:43.000As if we like got them in some like cosmic hypocrisy they never understood or didn't know, right?
01:05:49.000What the they're part of the the same axis?
01:05:52.000All right, hell has denominations too.
01:05:55.000So that's why the picture from Boulder, Colorado over the weekend, with the bare chested Egyptian illegal alien, bragging about the scorched march from his Molotov cocktails on the sidewalk.
01:06:04.000Did you guys see what was over his shoulder?
01:06:42.000So, no, we will grant you your you're made in the image of God too.
01:06:46.000We will grant you your God-given rights, the accommodations that you would not grant us, but you cannot use your God-given rights in order to spread and influence our institutions for a false God.
01:08:06.000So he said, I wouldn't recommend you do this, but I took my Bible and I went out in the woods, and I said, Lord, I need to hear a word from you.
01:08:12.000If you have truly called me into the ministry, I'm gonna open up this Bible, and when I look down, it better speak to me.
01:08:19.000And he randomly opened his Bible, and we looked down, and it was a verse in Ezekiel where the prophet says, Though they are a wicked and stiff-necked people, they will know that a prophet was among them.
01:08:30.000And he said, Wow, that told me right away.
01:09:05.000Nefarious part two, or are you in a candlelight pinner with Lindsay Graham?
01:09:10.000You know, I'm actually wearing a suit coat that a tailor at Jack Hibbs Church had customized for me years a few years ago with the nefarious uh movie stuff in it.
01:09:21.000So we are working on the sequel as we speak.
01:09:25.000Um, so apparently, you know, I've got more trips to the ER in the in the in the next few years.
01:09:30.000So tell them really quick about the movie and the spiritual warfare associated.
01:09:34.000Oh, I mean, everything I mean, people nearly died, murdered.
01:09:38.000Um, the movie, the devil did not want that movie to come out and did everything he could.
01:09:44.000Because whenever we talk about spiritual warfare, we always talk about the ominous part.
01:09:48.000Let me share a quick story with you guys about how it's waged on the other side and how we win.
01:09:53.000So we got done making the movie and finding an editor who could do a Christian horror film was not an easy thing to find.
01:10:00.000And our first editor bombed, and the assembly and the and the first rough cut he sent us, they didn't want to show me as the producer because they thought this movie is terrible.
01:10:08.000And so one day in the middle of my show, I get an email during commercial break from a guy named Brian Jeremiah Smith.
01:10:14.000He says, You don't know me, I'm a believer, never miss an episode of your show.
01:10:17.000I've been waiting for this movie nefarious.
01:10:20.000I just got laid off at Netflix as their top editor.
01:10:24.000Uh, because um I'm the only editor in the whole company, didn't take the jab.
01:10:28.000And they were gonna fire me, but then the Supreme Court just said they couldn't do that.
01:10:31.000And so now they don't know what to do with me, so they put me on indefinite paid leave.
01:10:34.000I'm sure it's too late to help you with your movie.
01:11:30.000What's the biggest challenge you're seeing, and what are you doing to face that and overcome it?
01:11:35.000Real quick, the hardest challenge is knowing what information is even true to comment on.
01:11:40.000When I first got into this, just as one example, when I first got into this business, I mean, I went to the Gospel Coalition website every day as a as a must-read to get prepared.
01:11:49.000Now I wouldn't have my dog uh defecate on it.
01:11:54.000So, I mean, knowing what is actually I have to do so much of my own homework and verification of information Now, to even know what is true that I'm commenting on.
01:12:04.000That's the biggest challenge that I have right now.
01:12:06.000Yeah, the biggest challenge that I have is I just hate seeing some of the uh petulant infighting.
01:12:11.000My new thing is that if you have more than like two hours screen time on your social media apps, like there's something wrong.
01:12:19.000Go for a walk and go by a lake, you know, get a girlfriend.
01:12:24.000Like, there's just like chronically online is very bad.
01:12:28.000And I think it creates a willingness to try to have a more provocative take and be over the top in a way that I think is somewhat destructive to the movement.
01:12:36.000And uh we're gonna keep our eye on that.