The NXR Podcast - October 18, 2023


DAILY TRUTH - How The American Church Fell Apart ｜ Billy Graham, Dispensationalism, & Premillennialism


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

178.80795

Word count

1,377

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:27.920 Part of the problem is that everything has been conflated. And this is due to theological,
00:00:32.920 what I would call theological minimalism. Most of the problems that we're dealing with today,
00:00:38.180 as they stem from the church, and they do, it's due to the church's
00:00:42.780 laziness, theological laziness. What we determined was this. We determined that
00:00:49.120 doctrine divides. That became the mantra. And we didn't want to be divided. And so what we thought
00:00:55.080 was, well, what if we could just somehow limit and narrow the doctrines that actually matter
00:01:00.580 enough to hold? And we'll do all this in the name of the Great Commission, right? Because
00:01:06.000 dispensationalism and premillennialism have done a great number on the church over these past 150
00:01:11.960 years. And so in light of that, we began thinking, well, we're really just working towards the
00:01:17.540 imminent and relatively soon return of Christ. And if there's anything that we can do, as it
00:01:24.060 pertains to us, as Christ's people, to speed up the clock, as it were, it would be to evangelize
00:01:30.040 the nations, that we would go to the four corners of the earth, that all would hear the preaching
00:01:34.780 of the gospel, and that that would usher in the return of Christ. And one of the great inhibitors
00:01:39.760 to evangelizing the nations, fulfilling this mandate to global missions, is the fact that
00:01:45.860 the church is so divided. And one of the main reasons that we're so divided is because we can't
00:01:51.040 agree on doctrine. You got some guys wanting to dunk babies. You got other guys who don't want
00:01:57.000 to dunk babies. They do the same thing in their baby dedications. They just remove the water. It's
00:02:02.040 really kind of semantics, but still it's a big deal, you know? And then you've got some people
00:02:07.200 that are holding to the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit being active today and others who are
00:02:11.940 cessationists, and they don't believe in the Holy Spirit at all, right? That would be the way to
00:02:16.300 straw man it. You know, they believe in God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Bible.
00:02:21.860 They've replaced the Spirit, you know, and that would be kind of the rhetoric that's used.
00:02:25.920 And so, you know, so you're divided on all these different issues, and we could list doctrine after
00:02:30.820 doctrine after doctrine after doctrine where Christians fall in different places. So how do
00:02:35.600 we speed up the return of Christ if you're a dispensational, and hear me, I'm not speaking
00:02:39.980 of the historic premillennial position, but a relatively novel dispensational premillennialism,
00:02:46.200 then you typically believe that Christ's return will be relatively soon and that it is destined
00:02:51.140 by God and his sovereignty that things will get progressively worse until Christ returns.
00:02:55.920 And there's really nothing that you can do about that. That is God's design. It is his will. Things
00:03:01.360 will get worse. In fact, at some level to work towards things improving is to work against God
00:03:07.180 himself. And so if you think things are going to get worse and worse, then really the best thing
00:03:13.160 you can do for your children and your children's children is to make sure that they don't have to
00:03:17.100 be here. And sadly, many dispensational premillennials, they did precisely that. They
00:03:23.280 forewent having children. They read things like Matthew 24 and the Olivet Discourse and
00:03:28.800 thought that that wasn't something that Jesus was speaking that would be actually fulfilled in 80-70.
00:03:34.600 This generation will not pass away. But instead of taking Jesus in a literal sense, this actual
00:03:40.820 generation within 40 years, these things will come to pass. They took it as more of an analytical
00:03:46.740 and metaphorical sense that this type of generation, there will always be these kinds of people.
00:03:52.540 And so what Jesus is saying will take place within a span of 40 years actually might take
00:03:57.240 place within a span of 2000 years. And what is one of the things that Jesus warns of? Woe to those
00:04:03.300 women who are with child in those days right things will be terrible and they were they were
00:04:11.340 in 80 70 quite terrible but if your perspective is that this is still the times that we live in
00:04:16.960 then then it's just a small hip jump and a skip you know over to hey it might be best for us not
00:04:23.560 to have children at all and especially if you begin to shift your hermeneutics even more and
00:04:28.560 think that the Great Commission has somehow not come alongside the cultural mandate, but rather
00:04:33.920 replaced the cultural mandate. Well, we're not going to have children. We'll have spiritual
00:04:38.560 children by doing the work of an evangelist. And I could go on and on and on and on and on to talk
00:04:46.360 about how we arrived in our current cultural moment. But this is, make no mistake, how we
00:04:52.060 arrived. The theology of the church does actually impact culture and politics, and this is
00:05:01.600 undeniable. But in all of this, the point, the main point that I want to make is theological
00:05:08.000 minimalism. If you have a great goal and you think things are going to get worse, the best thing that
00:05:12.840 we can do is either forego having children or make sure the children we do have don't have to
00:05:17.280 live through this great tribulation that's coming. And well, the only thing that we can do towards
00:05:22.120 that end is speed up the clock. As much as it depends on us, ensure that Jesus returns more
00:05:28.700 quickly, that he doesn't tarry any longer. And as far as we can tell from the scripture, the best
00:05:34.040 way, the only way that we can speed up the clock is making sure the gospel gets out. And it'd be a
00:05:39.120 lot easier for us to finance and resource the global mission mandate, preaching the gospel
00:05:46.720 around the world if we didn't disagree so much? And how can we stop disagreeing? Well, instead of
00:05:51.760 having 200 different doctrines, what if we narrowed it down to four or five? This is Billy Graham.
00:06:00.680 This is his entire ministry, summed up in a nutshell.
00:06:05.520 And then what happens because of theological minimalism is we begin to believe that the
00:06:10.220 Bible is inerrant. We don't begin. We continue to believe in the inerrancy. That is the authority
00:06:15.940 of Scripture. And to be fair, we also believe not only the authority of Scripture, but the
00:06:20.540 sufficiency of Scripture. But it begins to beg this implicit question, what precisely is the
00:06:26.560 Scripture sufficient for? And the answer becomes salvation and salvation only. So the Bible is
00:06:34.600 still authoritative. The Bible is also still sufficient. But the Bible is no longer sufficient
00:06:38.920 for life and godliness, but it is only sufficient for those things which are eternal. The Bible
00:06:45.600 is not sufficient. It's not that it's not authoritative. It just doesn't address. It's
00:06:50.900 not relevant. It's not sufficient for economics or for politics or for culture or for science or
00:06:56.840 for medicine or any of these things. These are things that God has left as a blank canvas.
00:07:02.160 And there is an implicit neutrality when it comes to these things. They're not inherently righteous
00:07:06.860 or inherently wicked. And we just use the reason of man and common sense and the best that we can
00:07:12.240 do. Preach the scripture for salvation, pastor, but stay out of everything else. Don't let these
00:07:18.200 other things come into the pulpit. Don't address these things in your preaching because the Bible
00:07:23.260 doesn't speak to them. These are things that people need to make those decisions on their own.
00:07:30.160 And so then we begin making those decisions on their own. 0.93
00:07:33.380 And now we don't know the difference between a boy and a girl.
00:07:35.780 that's how it works theological minimalism