00:00:55.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:02.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:48.000Okay, this is my fifth Christian-themed book.
00:01:51.000The last one was Jesus is Risen, and it covered the book of Acts and six of the Apostle Paul's epistles.
00:02:00.000This book covers the remaining seven of his epistles: the prison epistles and the pastoral epistles.
00:02:06.000He wrote the prison epistles when he was imprisoned, house arrest in Rome, and the pastorals he wrote to his colleagues and fellow evangelists, Timothy and Titus.
00:02:15.000But the purpose of this book, as in the last one, is to draw people closer to the Bible, to reach people who are either unchurched or skeptics or who are beginning Christians, who can profit from someone who is not a theologian or a trained biblical scholar, but someone who experienced skepticism and hopefully can relate to them in a way a pastor or theologian can't.
00:02:41.000So we go through the chapters and verses of all these books.
00:02:44.000Literally, I mean, we literally, I'm using literally correctly, go through every chapter and every verse of these seven books of the Bible and either paraphrase the verses or use them directly verbatim.
00:02:58.000And then we intersperse commentary, our own insights.
00:03:02.000And this book is different because my daughter Kristen added, primarily, wrote some prayers throughout the book to make it an interactive experience with readers.
00:03:13.000We hope will lead them to coming closer to God and closer to the Bible.
00:03:19.000So what books in particular then are you focusing on?
00:03:22.000You say it says here that you explore the divinely inspired wonders of Paul's last letters.
00:03:27.000Which books, just for our audience and for my own sake as well, are the last letters?
00:03:33.000And I try to do this in chronological order as opposed to canonical order, where they appear in the Bible, although it's pretty close.
00:03:40.000Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, and 2 Timothy.
00:04:30.000I don't consider them any more or less profound than the other books.
00:04:32.000Well, actually, I might if you press me, because I think Paul is the guy who is the premier evangelist who laid down doctrine more than any other New Testament writer.
00:04:44.000But the interesting thing to me, and there's many in the pastorals, is how personal Paul is and how it shows how human he is.
00:04:54.000The Bible isn't some book of abstract theological principles.
00:04:57.000It is a story of God's redemption for mankind.
00:05:04.000And Paul experiences these struggles and he delegates, this is interesting, he delegates very important tasks to his understudies, Timothy and Titus and others, of course.
00:05:16.000But it shows, it's a model for us that we shouldn't be afraid to delegate important tasks to some of our people who work for us.
00:05:23.000And I don't know about you, but sometimes I've had issues with that.
00:05:29.000And he really, by doing this, it's not just analogous to a secular situation, but when he delegates, what he's really admitting is that God is in charge, that the Holy Spirit working through Timothy and Titus are the ones who are the one who really makes things happen.
00:05:49.000And we are merely the agents of God working through the power of the Holy Spirit.
00:05:54.000But these stories, Timothy has troubles, and Paul encourages him.
00:05:59.000He encourages him to stay true to the gospel.
00:06:02.000And he lays down instructions for Christian living.
00:06:09.000And it just shows how vulnerable, but yet courageous Paul is and what a loving relationship he had with these people.
00:06:17.000Yeah, so for some of our newer listeners that are new to the faith, tell us just more broadly about Paul.
00:06:22.000One of the most extraordinary stories in the entire Bible, someone that you would be considered the least likely to become kind of the first theologian, if you were to kind of rank it.
00:06:33.000And the person that had one of the reasons that I think his testimony is so compelling and his writings are so authentic is because he had no reason to articulate this.
00:07:00.000He was fiercely defensive against those who fell from the faith and the Jewish faith.
00:07:08.000He was particularly personal, personally offended and outraged by his fellow Jews leaving the faith.
00:07:16.000Not even, it really isn't leaving the faith.
00:07:18.000It's just accepting Christ as the promised Messiah in the Old Testament.
00:07:22.000But for accepting Christ and becoming Christians, he was so outraged that he was on a mission to murder them and imprison them.
00:07:31.000And he was on his way on the Damascus road for the very purpose of bringing Christians to justice, people who had violated the Jewish laws and who'd become apostate.
00:07:45.000And so on his way, he was encountered by Christ in a kind of a spiritual way.
00:07:52.000Christ blinded him and said, why are you persecuting me, Paul?
00:07:57.000Now, notice Christ didn't say, why are you persecuting the church?
00:09:15.000I mean, Romans is a very difficult book in more ways than one because he's almost, he writes in a very, it's a different style than what most people are used to in the 21st century.
00:09:28.000Yeah, and even, I think it's Peter in one of his epistles talks about Paul being difficult to read sometimes in his writings, which I find is interesting.
00:09:42.000But it's also interesting that Peter and the other apostles affirm Paul's apostleship.
00:09:51.000And what they also do is affirm that his writings are scripture.
00:09:56.000Paul didn't know, of course, I don't think, that the letters he's writing to the churches are ultimately going to be incorporated into the biblical canon and become the word of God.
00:10:07.000They were the word of God and he was talking, God was talking through him.
00:10:10.000And so, but he does, there is a difficulty sometimes in understanding what he means.
00:10:16.000And that's why studying the Bible, and I think AIDS like this book is designed to help people get into it and overcome any intimidation they have.
00:10:24.000Some people are purists and they say, ah, let the Bible speak for itself.
00:10:29.000It's blasphemy to even write a book about the Bible.
00:10:36.000You throw out all of Henry's commentary and Spurgeon and even Aquinas.
00:10:41.000I mean, there's a phenomenal commentary throughout the years of the scriptures.
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00:12:18.000But, but, um, and disparagingly, of course.
00:12:21.000But Paul, this is so interesting and is so relevant to our modern times where truth, the very nature of truth, is being attacked.
00:12:31.000Jesus Christ is truth and is the foundation for all that is true.
00:12:37.000And to the extent that the modern political left or the anti-religious left can undermine the very concept of truth and distort language and postmodern culture, whatever, it undermines everything.
00:12:50.000It introduces moral and intellectual chaos.
00:12:53.000Paul was imprisoned for telling the truth, for explaining that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
00:13:21.000It's not just external forces, the Gentiles attacking the church, these licentious people in Corinthians, who, by the way, I used to read the Bible and think, how terrible.
00:13:31.000Who could possibly accept such a decadent culture?
00:13:34.000I think the United States has probably surpassed ancient Corinth.
00:13:37.000Yeah, you read Romans 1, you say, boy, that feels like the New York Times.
00:13:44.000And so Paul, so you got those external attacks on Christianity and the church.
00:13:50.000The early church, which is struggling, to get off the ground, Paul, as you say, plants these churches in the Mediterranean basin all around.
00:13:57.000And they don't just grow automatically.
00:14:18.000He planted those churches and he had to come back and refurbish those churches and undergird them against these attacks.
00:14:24.000So these internal attacks were actually probably more threatening to the church and to the survival of the church in its incipiency than external threats.
00:14:35.000Because if you are in the church and you undermine doctrine, you undermine what is the very gospel, that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
00:14:45.000And you introduce doubt and you say, Jesus is not fully, Jesus wasn't actually a man, as the Gnostics.
00:14:55.000So God couldn't have become material because he couldn't have become evil.
00:14:59.000They don't understand at all that the dual nature of Christ.
00:15:04.000God sent his Son to acquire human form so that we could become, so that he could die for us and redeem us, those of us with faith in Jesus Christ, for eternal life with him.
00:15:18.000But he's fully human and fully divine.
00:15:21.000Some of these early heresies would negate one or the other of those, either saying, no, he wasn't really God.
00:15:27.000They had modalism or Gnosticism, right?
00:15:34.000And not to offend any modern readers, but a lot of people still feel that way.
00:15:40.000Like Jehovah's Witnesses, I think, teach that Christ was not fully divine or not divine at all.
00:15:45.000I may be wrong, but whether Jehovah's Witnesses do that or not, some cults or some religions do teach that and they purport to be Christian.
00:15:55.000Well, that's not Orthodox Christianity.
00:16:34.000And then these books become, these epistles become part of scripture, as I said earlier, and they lay out what the Christian doctrine really is, which is fascinating.
00:16:42.000So they serve the dual purpose at the time, undergirding the church and in perpetuity throughout all history.
00:16:49.000David, I want you to talk about how Paul laid out a blueprint for waging spiritual warfare against the forces of darkness, something that is very important in America today.
00:17:01.000Tell us what Paul had to say about that.
00:17:03.000You know, it is so relevant, especially in view of recent right off the press's news story about this new series, cartoon series called, I think it's Demon.
00:17:22.000Where Satan has sexual relations with a lady and she produces the Antichrist.
00:17:32.000And a lot of parents are up in arms about this and outraged that it's on Disney because kids might stumble onto it and they already have in different ways from the promos and all that.
00:17:46.000And the reason they're upset is not because they're fuddy duddies and purists and scolds.
00:17:53.000It's because this culture has become so evil.
00:17:56.000And secularism, evil has been championed through the glorification of abortion and everything else and the confusion of gender roles against God's created order.
00:18:07.000And so this is just another way of introducing propaganda, secularist, anti-Christian, anti-God propaganda, and indoctrinating children and trivializing the very idea of demonics and spiritual evil.
00:18:25.000We know as believing Christians, and primarily because Paul wrote about it, that there are spiritual forces, forces of darkness that underlie the evil forces that go on in the material world.
00:18:37.000And we need to, what Paul is saying is, and he talks about, he talks about military metaphors to describe this.
00:18:48.000He's saying, listen, people, spiritual warfare is not just about ghosts and goblins and all these phantasmagorical things.
00:19:03.000And by the way, Charlie, I didn't used to believe Satan existed.
00:19:07.000I didn't become a Christian until I was in my 30s and kicking and screaming.
00:19:11.000And one of the things that is most affirming for me, for my belief, ironically, is the prevalence of evil in this world.
00:19:21.000I don't think you can explain it any other way than the biblical worldview.
00:19:25.000I don't think you can explain what the left is doing in this country without resorting to spiritual explanations because it doesn't make sense why they would actively promote things we know objectively to be evil.
00:19:41.000They are promoting ideas that are literally destroying this country right before our eyes.
00:19:47.000They're destroying our energy sector on the lie about the environment, which, by the way, is modern idolatry.
00:19:54.000And they're so there, you can't talk to the left anymore because they don't tell the truth about anything.
00:20:00.000They are blinded, and I think they're spiritually blind.
00:20:03.000I know this isn't a political interview, but it's all interconnected.
00:20:07.000Trust me, I'm fine to go there if you want to.
00:20:10.000And I, well, but I think, you know, part of what they do is try to convince everybody that evil doesn't really exist.
00:20:20.000And now, now, what the left is doing is so distorting the language that we are the evil ones because we are resisting evil.
00:20:28.000Well, you just can't even, and people that say we ought to reach across the aisle, we ought to try to work with these people, as Russ said, and I've said, you can't, you can't make a bargain with these evil forces.
00:20:40.000I'm not saying leftist people are evil.
00:20:43.000What they do, what they're promoting is evil.
00:20:46.000There is no question about some of them unwittingly, others wittingly, but it's destroying everything this country stands for.
00:20:53.000It's destroying the education system, the rest.
00:20:56.000I could go through, as you probably do every day, 10 existential threats in the United States.
00:21:01.000Paul, in this book, he's saying you have to be prepared.
00:21:10.000So you will empower yourself to be able to resist these evil forces because you need it.
00:21:17.000We need to be able to fight spiritual evil with spiritual good, with the God of the Bible, with the Holy Spirit, with Jesus Christ.
00:21:24.000And that's really, I think, the essential message of the spiritual aspect, spiritual warfare aspect of these letters.
00:21:32.000Yeah, so as Paul writes this, and some people, I think, cherry-pick parts of Paul.
00:21:40.000They just cherry-pick parts of the Bible to confirm their own kind of secular view.
00:21:45.000Some people would say, well, Charlie, in Romans 13, it says we must obey the government no matter what.
00:21:50.000And it obviously doesn't come with any sort of, in my personal opinion, civic understanding of actually who the rulers are in America, which is the people are the rulers.
00:22:47.000I'm just gratified that you said that because I have said that myself.
00:22:51.000I don't even know if I've said it out loud, but I've said it in my mind.
00:22:55.000Well, it's so, but can you talk more broadly here about the cultural implications?
00:23:00.000Because we have a political audience and a religious audience.
00:23:02.000Where does Paul talk about the need to, let's just say, fight evil?
00:23:06.000Can you give some examples of how Paul gives us the spiritual equipment to be able to fight this treachery and this deceit?
00:23:16.000And how does it apply to the times we're living in today?
00:23:19.000Well, one thing he says is, I don't know if this is directly responsive, but one thing he says is that one thing the Bible says is we don't, God doesn't promise us freedom from suffering or struggling.
00:23:34.000In fact, it promises that we will struggle.
00:23:37.000But what we need to remember is keep the long view in mind and keep our eyes on God because God created man to enjoy eternal life with him, and we fell.
00:23:51.000And the only way we could be redeemed is for him to send his son, as I said.
00:23:55.000And then those who have faith with him will be joined with him for eternal life.
00:24:00.000But you have to keep your mind on that hope and that assurance.
00:24:04.000And that hope, by the way, as I mentioned in the book, it's not original for, and Kristen mentions in the book, it's not original for me to say this.
00:24:17.000The hope actually means your assurance, your certainty that it will happen.
00:24:22.000You're looking to that future, and that gives you peace and it gives you an inner joy, not some bliss, mindless bliss, but a joy ultimately that will allow you to withstand the struggles that we go through.
00:24:36.000So I think we have to keep that long view in mind and know that no matter what happens, and this is hard for me to deal with myself.
00:24:43.000I mean, I'm a hypocrite on this because I don't practice what I preach because I get very upset with what the left is doing in the here and now.
00:24:52.000And I probably don't keep my mind focused enough on the spiritual truths about that.
00:24:58.000I mean, I do, of course, but I'm still upset about what they're doing.
00:25:02.000And I'm not sure there's really a conflict of that.
00:25:04.000But I just, I really believe that Paul wants us to understand that we always can lean on Jesus.
00:25:11.000And by the way, we do this throughout the day.
00:25:14.000It helps us to practice the spiritual disciplines, to become closer to Christ.
00:25:19.000Because just being converted and born-again Christian doesn't mean we're sin-free.
00:25:24.000It means we've overcome the power of sin, and we've overcome sin for purposes of judicial purposes.
00:25:32.000We are declared righteous, but we will still sin.
00:25:34.000And when we do sin, we have to go back to God and ask for redemption.
00:25:39.000Not so we'll save our salvation, preserve our salvation, but because it'll enhance our spiritual walk.
00:26:43.000Otherwise, there'd be no reason to have additional books in the Bible if the gospels told the whole story or if the Old Testament did.
00:26:50.000It's all one integrated story, Old Testament, New Testament.
00:26:54.000We need the whole thing to understand the glory, the majesty of God's plan for creation and human beings.
00:27:01.000Jesus Christ himself said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
00:27:06.000There is no other way to the Father except through me.
00:27:09.000Meaning, you have to put your saving faith in Christ for eternal life.
00:27:14.000Paul is very explicit throughout and writes that.
00:27:17.000And so these people who are works-based and faith plus works, I think are wrong.
00:27:22.000I think the gospels and Paul's writings and the other New Testament writers are consistent that salvation is by faith alone in Jesus Christ.
00:27:33.000Otherwise, the finished work on the cross is we're making a mockery of Christ's work on the cross.
00:27:39.000Why would a God, why would the God become a human being?
00:27:44.000And like it'd be worse than a human being becoming an ant.
00:27:48.000Why would he do that if he didn't need to do it?
00:27:50.000If human beings could pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, why would God become man?
00:27:56.000It's this robust, incomprehensible love that led him to condescend.
00:28:07.000And we know that actually in a discourse between Jesus and I think Nicodemus in John 2 or 3, obviously the most famous verse, for God so loved the world.
00:28:18.000So the book is Resurrected Jesus, the Resurrected Jesus, the Church in the New Testament, David Limbaugh.
00:28:25.000And it's a very important book for anyone that might be new to faith or someone that even is, you know, maybe you're the expert and you know all this stuff already.
00:28:34.000And it's also a series in other books as well.
00:28:38.000This is kind of a genre you're creating, right?
00:28:40.000Yeah, the first was Jesus on Trial, the apologetics and faith journey.
00:28:44.000Second was the Emmaus Code, Jesus in the Old Testament, how he's prophesied and all that blows people away when they read about that.
00:28:50.000And then the true Jesus, which is a compendium of the gospels in chronological order.
00:28:55.000Jesus is risen, the last one, which was the first, the book of Acts and Paul's first six epistles.
00:29:01.000This one, the resurrected Jesus, the final seven epistles of Paul.
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00:31:42.000Well, there's two different ways that I understand it.
00:31:45.000One is that James was not talking about justification in the same way.
00:31:52.000It was another use of the term where I think he was actually talking about sanctification, meaning becoming holier once you're a believer.
00:32:00.000The other explanation is that what James is really saying, without a demonstration of the fruit of the Holy Spirit, without a demonstration of good works, it is a pretty good indication that you were not saved in the first place.
00:32:15.000And so I think the thrust of the New Testament writers overwhelmingly is that it's faith alone is what leads to salvation, faith alone in Christ.
00:32:25.000Yeah, there are some things, faith plus baptism and all that kind of thing.
00:33:24.000And I used to think, why did he do that?
00:33:26.000Well, now I think I've come to understand the reason he did is to demonstrate just how we really are sinners and we're hopeless without him.
00:33:34.000For example, you know, instinctively, you know, unless you're dishonest with yourself, that we have evil thoughts as human beings.
00:33:45.000And when Jesus said, you're looking at a girl and lusting after her in your heart, you have committed adultery or rape or whatever, adultery probably.