DAILY TRUTH - How The American Church Fell Apart ｜ Billy Graham, Dispensationalism, & Premillennialism
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Summary
In this episode, Pastor Ken teaches on the need to speed up the time to the return of Jesus, and how to prepare your family for the coming of the Great Commission. The Great Commission is a mandate that was given to the church in the second half of the 19th century by the First Millennial Church, which was founded in order to prepare the church for the second coming of Christ.
Transcript
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Part of the problem is that everything has been conflated. And this is due to theological,
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what I would call theological minimalism. Most of the problems that we're dealing with today,
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as they stem from the church, and they do, it's due to the church's
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laziness, theological laziness. What we determined was this. We determined that
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doctrine divides. That became the mantra. And we didn't want to be divided. And so what we thought
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was, well, what if we could just somehow limit and narrow the doctrines that actually matter
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enough to hold? And we'll do all this in the name of the Great Commission, right? Because
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dispensationalism and premillennialism have done a great number on the church over these past 150
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years. And so in light of that, we began thinking, well, we're really just working towards the
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imminent and relatively soon return of Christ. And if there's anything that we can do, as it
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pertains to us, as Christ's people, to speed up the clock, as it were, it would be to evangelize
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the nations, that we would go to the four corners of the earth, that all would hear the preaching
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of the gospel, and that that would usher in the return of Christ. And one of the great inhibitors
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to evangelizing the nations, fulfilling this mandate to global missions, is the fact that
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the church is so divided. And one of the main reasons that we're so divided is because we can't
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agree on doctrine. You got some guys wanting to dunk babies. You got other guys who don't want
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to dunk babies. They do the same thing in their baby dedications. They just remove the water. It's
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really kind of semantics, but still it's a big deal, you know? And then you've got some people
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that are holding to the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit being active today and others who are
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cessationists, and they don't believe in the Holy Spirit at all, right? That would be the way to
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straw man it. You know, they believe in God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Bible.
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They've replaced the Spirit, you know, and that would be kind of the rhetoric that's used.
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And so, you know, so you're divided on all these different issues, and we could list doctrine after
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doctrine after doctrine after doctrine where Christians fall in different places. So how do
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we speed up the return of Christ if you're a dispensational, and hear me, I'm not speaking
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of the historic premillennial position, but a relatively novel dispensational premillennialism,
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then you typically believe that Christ's return will be relatively soon and that it is destined
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by God and his sovereignty that things will get progressively worse until Christ returns.
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And there's really nothing that you can do about that. That is God's design. It is his will. Things
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will get worse. In fact, at some level to work towards things improving is to work against God
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himself. And so if you think things are going to get worse and worse, then really the best thing
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you can do for your children and your children's children is to make sure that they don't have to
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be here. And sadly, many dispensational premillennials, they did precisely that. They
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forewent having children. They read things like Matthew 24 and the Olivet Discourse and
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thought that that wasn't something that Jesus was speaking that would be actually fulfilled in 80-70.
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This generation will not pass away. But instead of taking Jesus in a literal sense, this actual
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generation within 40 years, these things will come to pass. They took it as more of an analytical
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and metaphorical sense that this type of generation, there will always be these kinds of people.
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And so what Jesus is saying will take place within a span of 40 years actually might take
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place within a span of 2000 years. And what is one of the things that Jesus warns of? Woe to those
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women who are with child in those days right things will be terrible and they were they were
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in 80 70 quite terrible but if your perspective is that this is still the times that we live in
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then then it's just a small hip jump and a skip you know over to hey it might be best for us not
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to have children at all and especially if you begin to shift your hermeneutics even more and
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think that the Great Commission has somehow not come alongside the cultural mandate, but rather
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replaced the cultural mandate. Well, we're not going to have children. We'll have spiritual
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children by doing the work of an evangelist. And I could go on and on and on and on and on to talk
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about how we arrived in our current cultural moment. But this is, make no mistake, how we
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arrived. The theology of the church does actually impact culture and politics, and this is
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undeniable. But in all of this, the point, the main point that I want to make is theological
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minimalism. If you have a great goal and you think things are going to get worse, the best thing that
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we can do is either forego having children or make sure the children we do have don't have to
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live through this great tribulation that's coming. And well, the only thing that we can do towards
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that end is speed up the clock. As much as it depends on us, ensure that Jesus returns more
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quickly, that he doesn't tarry any longer. And as far as we can tell from the scripture, the best
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way, the only way that we can speed up the clock is making sure the gospel gets out. And it'd be a
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lot easier for us to finance and resource the global mission mandate, preaching the gospel
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around the world if we didn't disagree so much? And how can we stop disagreeing? Well, instead of
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having 200 different doctrines, what if we narrowed it down to four or five? This is Billy Graham.
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This is his entire ministry, summed up in a nutshell.
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And then what happens because of theological minimalism is we begin to believe that the
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Bible is inerrant. We don't begin. We continue to believe in the inerrancy. That is the authority
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of Scripture. And to be fair, we also believe not only the authority of Scripture, but the
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sufficiency of Scripture. But it begins to beg this implicit question, what precisely is the
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Scripture sufficient for? And the answer becomes salvation and salvation only. So the Bible is
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still authoritative. The Bible is also still sufficient. But the Bible is no longer sufficient
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for life and godliness, but it is only sufficient for those things which are eternal. The Bible
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is not sufficient. It's not that it's not authoritative. It just doesn't address. It's
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not relevant. It's not sufficient for economics or for politics or for culture or for science or
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for medicine or any of these things. These are things that God has left as a blank canvas.
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And there is an implicit neutrality when it comes to these things. They're not inherently righteous
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or inherently wicked. And we just use the reason of man and common sense and the best that we can
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do. Preach the scripture for salvation, pastor, but stay out of everything else. Don't let these
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other things come into the pulpit. Don't address these things in your preaching because the Bible
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doesn't speak to them. These are things that people need to make those decisions on their own.
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And so then we begin making those decisions on their own.
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And now we don't know the difference between a boy and a girl.