The NXR Podcast - March 25, 2020


QUESTIONS - Is Love For God More Important Than Having Good Theology？

Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Jesus Christ Pastor Joel Michael
THEOLOGY APPLIED - Politics Primer for Christians

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

166.03

Word count

1,693

Sentence count

84

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Pastor Joel answers a question from Shannon in San Diego on the importance of theology in the Christian faith and how it relates to passion and love for God. Questions is a show dedicated to you, the listeners. We are taking your questions that you send in to us on our website, social media platforms, and all of our social media outlets. We compile them all together, and then we try to get to them on this particular podcast.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 hey everyone and welcome to questions i'm sitting here with pastor joel today how you doing i'm
00:00:09.220 doing great excited to be here awesome so questions is a show dedicated to you we are taking your
00:00:15.180 questions that you send in to us on our website at right response ministries.com and all of our
00:00:20.340 social media platforms on facebook and twitter and instagram and youtube we compile them all
00:00:25.660 together. And then we try to get to them on this particular podcast. So we're excited to
00:00:30.360 answer your questions. And today we have a question from Shannon in San Diego. She says this,
00:00:38.340 Pastor Joel, what would you say to someone who affirms the importance of passion and love for God,
00:00:43.920 but neglects the importance of theology? What would you say to Shannon today?
00:00:48.200 Great question. Ultimately, I think that just arises from the average person in the American
00:00:54.140 evangelical church today because I think we've been poorly discipled. I think that not all,
00:01:00.300 we have heroes in the faith, but many of those who are professing Christians, and many of them
00:01:07.360 are true, genuine Christians of the generation that preceded us, they had an aversion towards
00:01:14.580 doctrine. They really just, they bought into the lie that if we want unity in the church, 0.91
00:01:21.720 then it's going to have to come at the expense of doctrine. That's really unity is going to have to
00:01:28.560 come at the expense of truth. Now they recognize we can't throw out all truth or we lose the
00:01:32.920 Christian faith altogether. And so ultimately what happened is within the realm of theological
00:01:38.560 triage, right? They decided, well, primary doctrinal truths, right? Cardinal truth, like
00:01:45.380 the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, you know, salvation being by grace alone, through faith
00:01:51.640 alone, and Christ alone. These are truths that we can't compromise, that we can't get rid of,
00:01:56.680 but there are a lot of other doctrines, more secondary and tertiary doctrines that just,
00:02:03.200 they cause quarrels, they cause division. So one of the reigning mantras in the church for
00:02:08.460 several decades now has been doctrine divides. And so there's been kind of a swerving away from
00:02:16.200 doctrine. And those who get excited about doctrine are often condemned and accused by
00:02:22.260 professing Christians as being divisive, caring more about knowledge than love. And so I would
00:02:30.400 say, Shannon, that that's a false dichotomy. Really, it has its roots in a Gnostic heresy
00:02:37.860 that wants to somehow divorce and sever the mind from the heart. The reality is that we cannot
00:02:47.380 love what or who we do not know. So I say in our church all the time, and this is really the heart
00:02:55.280 of this ministry, Right Response Ministries, is that in order to have a right that is a proper
00:03:02.380 and appropriate response to who God is and what He has done, we have to know who God is. We have
00:03:08.660 to know what He's done. So I've said this time and time again, that a right knowledge of God
00:03:15.320 is an absolute prerequisite for rightly loving God. I'll say it again. A right knowledge of God
00:03:22.160 is an absolute prerequisite for rightly loving God, right? I could possess some of the fringe
00:03:28.740 attributes that appear to be like love for someone who's a stranger or an acquaintance. I can possess
00:03:33.920 an intrigue, an infatuation, an interest, but I'll never possess a genuine, rich, and robust
00:03:41.400 love for a person that I do not possess a genuine, rich, and robust knowledge about. So again, I say
00:03:49.620 that a right knowledge of God is an absolute prerequisite for rightly loving God. And when we
00:03:56.120 speak of right knowledge of God, we're speaking ultimately of doctrine. We're speaking of theology.
00:04:00.400 And I think there's three primary categories. There's a million different topics that we could
00:04:06.480 discuss, but all of them pretty much fall into three big headlines, if you will. So the first
00:04:12.580 is that we have to have a right knowledge. We have to have right theology about who God is.
00:04:17.200 Secondly, we have to have right theology, right knowledge about what God has done.
00:04:21.820 And then lastly, we have to have a right theology, a right knowledge of what God requires.
00:04:27.240 And this is where we get into man's response to God, a right response.
00:04:32.020 So in terms of who God is, starting with the first category, and I'll go briefly and finish
00:04:36.240 up here.
00:04:36.700 But at this point, we're speaking of the character of God.
00:04:39.660 We're speaking of the nature of God.
00:04:41.000 See, we cannot worship God for who we wish he was.
00:04:43.940 we cannot attribute to God those characteristics that you and I might personally prefer. But rather,
00:04:50.720 if we're to truly love God, we must be true worshipers of God. And if you'll remember,
00:04:55.540 what does Jesus say about those who are true worshipers of God? Well, in the Gospel of John
00:04:59.460 chapter 4, he's speaking with the Samaritan woman by the well, and he says that the true
00:05:05.020 worshipers of God, they worship him in spirit, and in that context, spirit is actually referring to
00:05:10.980 zeal. They worship him with zeal, with passion, which has to do with your question, Shannon.
00:05:17.420 The true worshipers of God worship him in spirit, in zeal, in passion, but they also worship him
00:05:23.780 in truth. There is both passion and doctrine. There's zeal and wisdom, knowledge. So in order
00:05:34.760 to truly love God, we have to truly worship God. And in order to be a true worshiper of God,
00:05:39.360 we have to have both spirit and truth. We have to have zeal and passion for God, but a zeal and
00:05:46.260 passion that come from a foundation of rightly knowing who God is. So that's the first category,
00:05:53.600 a right knowledge of the character of God. Who is God? Secondly, what has God done? So we must know
00:05:59.720 both the character of God, but also the work of God. We need to understand God's work in creation,
00:06:04.960 but we also need to understand God's work in salvation. What is the merciful work of God
00:06:10.880 on behalf of wretched sinners like you and I through the personal work of his son, Jesus Christ?
00:06:18.440 We'll never properly love God unless we understand what God has done for us through Jesus.
00:06:24.300 Our love for God ultimately is simply a response to God's love for us. We get this from 1 John
00:06:30.620 chapter 419. We love because he first loved us. But how has he loved us? What is the depth of his
00:06:40.320 love, the width of his love, the length of his love, the height of his love? How has God so loved me
00:06:47.460 through his son Jesus Christ? Even while we are yet sinners, Christ died for us. So we have to
00:06:54.740 understand God's work in creation, but also even more importantly than that, we have to understand
00:06:59.480 his work in salvation. We have to know who God is, but also what God has done. The character of God,
00:07:05.700 but also the work of God. And then lastly, this third category is that we must rightly know the
00:07:12.140 requirements of God. We must know his precepts, his commandments, his rules and statutes.
00:07:20.000 I've used this illustration time and time again in our church where, Michael, you're a member,
00:07:24.360 And so I hope I don't bore you to death, but I think it's helpful.
00:07:28.320 So I'll use it now.
00:07:30.140 If you're married, Shannon, then you know that if your spouse has frequently and clearly
00:07:36.120 communicated to you the ways in which they feel most loved by you, and assuming that
00:07:41.720 these ways are ethical and moral, there's nothing sinful about them.
00:07:46.360 If you pay little to no regard for what they've said, and you just deliberately choose to
00:07:51.680 go on loving your spouse on your own terms and in your own ways that are outside of or even
00:07:57.860 contradictory to the ways that your spouse has said they feel most loved, then eventually you
00:08:04.440 have to begin to beg the question, do you actually love your spouse? Well, so it is with God. So it is
00:08:10.700 with God. If God has, in fact, on the pages of scripture, gone to great lengths to communicate
00:08:16.760 to us in his commandments what he requires obey me like this worship me like this ultimately what
00:08:25.620 we're saying is love me like this if God has said love me like this and you and I don't have
00:08:34.960 diligent study so that we might possess a right knowledge of how God requires us to love him
00:08:42.840 and then we go on loving him in our own ways at worst this is arrogance but even at the very best
00:08:51.000 this is ignorance it's apathy we haven't done the hard work to diligently come to know God by
00:08:57.860 studying his word so that we might properly respond in love for God so my point in all of
00:09:04.180 this is that your question comes I believe from the American evangelical church that in many ways
00:09:10.420 tragically has been poorly discipled by people who hate doctrine and who have created a false
00:09:16.080 dichotomy between the head and the heart, between knowledge of God and love for God. But the reality
00:09:21.500 is that these two things can never be divorced. You cannot love a person that you do not know.
00:09:27.600 Wow. Well, thank you for answering that, Pastor Joel. And thank you, Shannon, for sending us
00:09:32.160 in that question. Please write us at rightresponseministries.com and on all of our
00:09:37.980 social media platforms. We'd love to get to one of your questions in future episodes. We'll see
00:09:42.820 you next time on questions. As a special thank you for your gift of any amount, we'll be happy
00:09:48.340 to send you a free digital book from our store. To access this offer, visit rightresponseministries.com
00:09:54.680 slash offer. We highly recommend Pastor Joel's book, Am I Truly Saved? If you or someone you
00:10:00.600 know has wrestled with doubts about the love of God, this would be a great resource. As a reminder
00:10:05.940 to get this offer, go to rightresponseministries.com slash offer. And thank you for your generous
00:10:11.420 support.