00:01:07.340So Dave is a good friend of mine and was a part of our church for a little bit as they were transitioning him and his wife.
00:01:15.300And so I'm going to let him share a little bit of that story with just his journey into Reformed theology, his journey into Presbyterianism.
00:01:24.060And so anyways, all that being said, a friend of mine, and I'm honored to have you on the show.
00:01:29.520So Dave, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe give us, our listeners, your testimony.
00:01:37.580So I kind of grew up moving all over the place.
00:01:40.320My parents were in the military, so I lived all over.
00:01:43.560My parents were fairly devout Christians.
00:01:46.640But one of the things was, is we would just go to basically any church.
00:01:50.460I mean, for a while we went to an Anglican church.
00:01:52.500a big part of the background though and the the critical piece of it was I grew up charismatic
00:01:58.420and so a little bit of background as well like I had to insert this because Colossians 2.8 is a
00:02:09.520is a key verse for this company C2.8 I actually worked at that store and none of this world in
00:02:17.320the mall and their their key verse there is Colossians 2.8 see to it that no one takes a
00:02:21.300captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on the ways of the world rather than
00:02:24.940on Christ. And so I grew up in a very Christian background. But I would argue that even in
00:02:32.380being raised in that I ended up not being Christian. I wasn't a Christian until about
00:02:40.740five or six years ago. And my parents would pursue these churches that were very, very
00:02:48.180focused on word of faith and specifically like speaking in tongues and healings.
00:02:56.480And that really affected me in a lot of ways, specifically because I was looking for this
00:03:01.300miraculous experience to kind of prove that Christ was real, that God was there, and that
00:03:08.480that was really the only way that I could ultimately verify to myself that this was
00:03:13.880actually true and so i set myself up kind of as a standard and had some bizarre bizarre encounters
00:03:21.200i don't know how far you want me to get into that but uh in the charismatic church because i was i
00:03:26.880was a leader that's always interesting yeah um yeah yeah so there's i don't know how familiar
00:03:33.460you are with todd bentley yeah he was uh he was a big part of uh one of the visiting guys who would
00:03:42.140show up very often. And I remember very specifically, he took us the youth leaders out to I think it was Panera, we went back up to the youth room. And he started telling us about all kinds of interesting stuff. One of those things is that he was raising dead people. I was like, Alright, cool. Do you have any videos of that? And he's like, Oh, no, I don't want to be a stumbling block. And I was like, Well, you're telling me about it. So where's the testimony?
00:04:07.280right um and and so that was a very unique experience then he went further and this is
00:04:15.220where it gets kind of weird he started talking about being caught up into the third heaven
00:04:18.460and visiting with jesus and jesus invites him into a bed and proceeds to rub him with oil
00:04:26.100and it was a very very bizarre situation and i was like i even then i was like uh i gotta go to
00:04:35.140the bathroom and I got up walked out and I just didn't come back and I stayed in the church for
00:04:42.020quite a while and then we moved and that was a big part of my background and what undid me was
00:04:46.880I actually went to a concert and at that concert I started feeling the same feelings I would feel
00:04:54.720when the the worship music was going and people were speaking in tongues and people are getting
00:04:59.220and slain in the spirit and I was like well if I can feel the same real feeling and it's all about
00:05:05.720my feelings like how is this any different like I'm not missing out on anything by not being in
00:05:10.260the church and so I wandered off for a long time uh and I actually uh by the grace of God I met my
00:05:19.360wife and we started working through some things together and and uh we both came to faith
00:05:28.160Ultimately, we were both baptized through a Wesleyan church, Skyline.
00:05:34.680And then ultimately, we came to start reading scripture.
00:05:39.940And as I started reading scripture, I was like, wait a second.
00:05:42.980Like, I wasn't trusting in Christ alone for my salvation.
00:05:51.240I wasn't a really repentant person, and I was missing being led by men in the church who would come alongside me, help me through scripture, who had been through a lot of the things that I had, rather than being devoted completely to just a kind of life coaching.
00:06:12.140it was more about pointing out, like, here's what's in scripture. I read through Matthew
00:06:16.580Henry's commentary along with the yearly Bible reading plan. And I was like, yeah, there's just
00:06:21.560no, no way that I could refuse this. I mean, this is, and that's kind of how I came to reform
00:06:28.600theology after coming to faith. So that was a real big part of it was just reading the word of God,
00:06:35.060which is the most effective means. Yep. That's great. Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned Todd
00:06:41.180Bentley, I remember at the time I was, I guess I would have still been in my last few years.
00:06:49.080Undergrad, I was in Dallas, Texas, going to Dallas Baptist University at the time.
00:09:08.200I mean, one of the things that I pick out of your testimony is that, yeah, God used men in your life at a certain point.
00:09:14.460But it sounds like initially the man that God used was somebody that you actually didn't have a personal relationship with, namely the late great Puritan Matthew Henry.
00:09:24.120And I think it's it's beautiful, but it's also tragic because that's my testimony.
00:09:31.180That's so many people's testimony. For me, it wasn't Matthew Henry, but so many guys in our generation, you hear their testimony and it's like like they just they needed a spiritual father to to exegete the scripture for them and to teach them the word.
00:09:46.440And because local churches had such an absence of biblically grounded, you know, theologically sound men who are willing to come alongside young men and disciple them, we have, I mean, we literally today we have tens of thousands, if not more people with a testimony very similar to yours and mine, which is that they were discipled by somebody who's either dead, you know, or somebody that they never even personally met like R.C. Sproul or John Piper.
00:10:16.440you know that uh that we have this kind of testimony it's the word of god uh doing the
00:10:21.380work of god but but it's the it's the word of god being you know like john macarthur you know um
00:10:26.460the the word of god the truth of god being unleashed one verse at a time as a man is is
00:10:32.680exegeting the word interpreting and and shedding light on its meaning that's how god saves that's
00:10:39.220how god nourishes that's how god develops us disciples us grows us and ultimately we love to
00:10:45.800see that happen in the local church with men who are physically present there. They can have a
00:10:49.880personal relationship with individuals, younger men in the church. And sadly, it seems like
00:10:57.200there's an entire generation of young men who were discipled on YouTube because they didn't
00:11:02.660have a man like that, you know, who's actually literally present in their local church because
00:11:07.280there's been such an absence. And so it's sad. I think that's one of the things that, you know,
00:11:12.020we probably want to discuss on this episode as we're the title that we've kind of crafted for it
00:11:17.240is a candid conversation of the state of the American evangelical church and I think that's
00:11:23.980kind of starts to get get to our subject at hand a little bit that we just right now it seems like
00:11:29.740we're still recovering from a generation that uh that their mantra was doctrine divides right and
00:11:36.600so they just they didn't want to get they didn't want to get technical they didn't want to get
00:11:39.700specific. Ambiguity was massive. Everything was vague and everything was theologically
00:11:49.680very shallow. We only want to center on the things that are essentials. Let's not go any
00:11:55.620deeper than that because we're just going to start driving all these fault lines and fracturing and
00:12:00.640dividing the church. And so out of, I don't know, a desire, an incentive to somehow quench
00:12:09.180division in the church the the church our previous generation uh our parents generation it seems like
00:12:15.700they just had an aversion towards doctrine and then you know young guys like you and i had all
00:12:21.080these questions that were never answered and some rebelled and left the church and some such as
00:12:28.560yourself maybe rebelled but in god's mercy were brought back to the church and god did a lot of
00:12:34.440that through social media and through online ministries. And I'm grateful for that. So,
00:12:40.700all right, well, let me get to another question here. A little bit more about your personal
00:12:46.000testimony that this is kind of where I started to develop a friendship with you and kind of came
00:12:52.580into your story. But I was somewhat involved in a season and you and your wife, Natalie,
00:12:59.340in your life when you guys were in the process of leaving a church that you had thoroughly been
00:13:06.600involved in for quite some time. And I know that you loved that church. I know that it was very
00:13:11.340difficult for the two of you to make that decision ultimately to leave. And so I was just wondering
00:13:16.460maybe kind of again, I think, because I think that this could be used as a case study
00:13:21.720for the larger church within maybe the Reformed camp
00:13:47.660It's not a denomination, but sometimes it gets bandied around
00:13:51.280And like kind of it's like a semi denomination, but not really the way some people use the term.
00:13:57.200But we saw a lot of changes happening over a period of two years where things started getting brought in intersectionality, critical race theory specifically and specifically like ways that things were being handled as far as conversations about race.
00:14:19.420And you see that we're starting to bring in these lenses as adaptive tools, but they're completely outside the scope of scripture because they take an inherently unbiblical premise of multiple races.
00:14:34.940There's only one race, which already we're on dangerous ground there, but it permeates into everything else.
00:14:45.000The way you do homeless ministry, the way that you do how you handle a woman who's about to have an abortion.
00:14:52.380Like, how do you handle that situation?
00:14:54.380And usually it's just in that view, it's just hopefully give them some counseling later.
00:15:01.540right there's there's a sense of relational emphasis rather than on a this is the truth
00:15:11.660like please turn from what you're doing repent um and there that really came to a boiling head
00:15:18.100because the the real danger to a lot of that is is when you start to find things like uh the
00:15:26.280calvin's institutes and you start reading through it and you're like wait a second
00:15:30.820Like, so what are your views on, on how, how do we apply the law as Christians?
00:15:55.960And so that's, that's the part where things started to kind of come undone, because you're starting to see these biblically faithful families are like, we're putting the emphasis in the wrong area, like, we need to feed the sheep. And we also need to draw in sheep, we don't want to build up goats.
00:16:12.020And the real danger is when you're not practicing that rightly, you can slip very quickly into some dangerous terrain.
00:16:20.740And ultimately, that was a big part of why we left is just a really poor handling of a lot of the conversations that are coming out right now.
00:16:33.000Yeah. And none of them are actually conversations, as I know you would agree.
00:16:37.160it's basically it's a think tank session with a bunch of people who already hold the same view
00:16:43.040it's an echo chamber anytime there's actually a conversation where you know I think of you know
00:16:49.400there was like that historic panel I forget which conference it was but it was like Chandler was on
00:16:54.300it Keller was on it I think Piper was on it a few few big dogs and then there was Votie Bauckham
00:17:00.380and and Votie just kept getting shut down they were talking about racial reconciliation and
00:17:06.820oppression and those kinds of things. And Votie disagreed and he was being completely respectful
00:17:12.080and thoughtful. And, uh, and you can just tell like, they, like they, they wouldn't engage his
00:17:17.780arguments. It was just, uh, you know, it was logical fallacies, ad hominem, you know, like
00:17:22.700you're not being sensitive and just shutting him down. And it's funny. It's like, uh, what Votie
00:17:27.320was attempting to do was actually have one of those conversations. We keep hearing people talk
00:17:31.660about, right. Everybody talks about that. We're going to have a conversation on race. We're going
00:17:34.820to have a conversation on this conversation on that. And Bodhi was, you know, I guess he just,
00:17:39.280you know, took them at their word that they actually wouldn't have a conversation. And so
00:17:42.300he was just sharing his point of view. And, and he was just so quickly dismissed. The irony for me
00:17:48.020is it's, it's funny that what he was pushing back on what he was disagreeing with, it all had to do
00:17:55.000with ultimately, you know, like race and, you know, intersectionality and dividing the world
00:18:03.340up into you know groups of oppressors and oppressed and it had a lot to do with the black
00:18:08.640community and black people being oppressed and so the irony to me is that you had a bunch of white
00:18:14.060men telling the one black guy on the stage to shut up because he's disagreeing with them over whether
00:18:20.940or not he's oppressed yeah it's just i mean it was just it was silly so but yeah man i i go ahead
00:18:29.220go ahead oh i was just gonna say i just recently like i've been finishing my uh undergrad recently
00:18:36.100and i actually came across some stuff that really brings out where that that view comes from that a
00:18:42.980a black person is actually a white person and it's this uh there's a guy named noam chomsky
00:18:48.900and he's a linguist it's all about internalizing so they flip the external internal and it's
00:18:54.740basically that internally you've now this thing that was external to you so you've internalized
00:19:01.220it and so now it doesn't matter what you are it's now what you identify as so there's like right
00:19:05.940that's split but noam chomsky is the guy who came up with that i didn't realize that until a couple
00:19:11.140weeks ago i was like oh wow right well that gets into the you know the whole like um skin folk and
00:19:18.100but not kin folk that's the idea you know like black voices the idea that um you know black
00:19:24.100voices doesn't it doesn't it's not as simple as just meaning that you're black and you have a
00:19:29.420voice you can be black and not have a black voice you can have a black exterior like what you're
00:19:35.460speaking so you can have black skin in terms of your ethnicity but not a black voice because
00:19:40.800you've been so oppressed uh that you've been ultimately you've accepted your oppression and
00:19:46.400and so now your voice is actually you're an uncle tom your voice is actually just a voice of of the
00:19:52.540oppressor it's a voice that's been uh it's been suppressed so long and it's been captured now
00:19:58.640it's like almost like a stockholm syndrome that you now are just a puppet for the white man for
00:20:03.920the master you know and uh and speaking on his behalf so although you're you're skin folk you
00:20:09.960are black exterior in the exterior you're not kinfolk um you're not actually uh black because
00:20:17.100you're not uh ultimately you're not you're not in line with the narrative you know some other
00:20:21.760pushback, you know, because people are like, we need to elevate black voices. And it's like,
00:20:24.720I love black voices. I like Virgil Walker. I like Daryl Harrison. I like Votie Bauckham. I like
00:20:29.960Candace Owens. I like Larry Elder. I like Thomas Sowell. Like I love black voices. I got a lot of
00:20:35.160black voices that I listen to. They're fantastic. And the problem is that they'll say, yeah, but
00:20:40.220those aren't black voices, even though they're black men and women, they're not actually black
00:20:44.960voices. And one of the lines you'll hear people say is like consensus matters. I've heard people
00:20:49.080say that like consensus uh matters meaning that but at the end of the day like like get get outside
00:20:55.120of you know just uh the category of ethnicity and racial divides uh what you're saying is like
00:21:01.800that's just that's just mob justice consensus matters like that's that's the whole problem
00:21:07.180in our nation right now is that we're we're continuing to gravitate towards in our politics
00:21:12.540and in our um and in this cultural war all these guys we're uh we're gravitating towards
00:21:19.620a way of doing life a way of doing setting up society in such a way that that 51 percent
00:21:26.040can just strong arm and absolutely demand anything from the 49 percent it's it's not a
00:21:33.140democratic republic uh anymore and so there's just so much at stake uh at stake and so yeah
00:21:40.240it's it's crazy um i i liked it uh what who was it chomsky is that who you said yeah he's a he's
00:21:46.940a linguist from the mid-century uh 1950s on i don't remember exactly when gotcha he's a he's
00:21:59.580a very influential for the whole linguistics piece of it yeah cool um going back to you know
00:22:06.440the church that you guys ended up leaving and then you, you know,
00:22:09.080you kind of found refuge with us for a season and then went ahead and landed
00:22:13.100at the church you're at now. What's the name of the, it's Pilgrim.
00:31:09.720The Democratic Party is the party of empathy, right?
00:31:12.740And whereas we've made empathy like the greatest of all virtues, but empathy, it's not like
00:31:19.640nowhere in the Bible is empathy ever described as a virtue.
00:31:22.600And I would argue that empathy actually hamstrings, especially someone in the position of leadership, their ability to actually love and nurture and lead the people that God has assigned to them.
00:31:34.500This idea of I'm just going to drown with you rather than I'm going to put one foot in the quicksand and reach out one hand, but I'm also going to hold tight with standing on solid ground with my other foot and holding on to a branch and a tree or something that's solid.
00:32:16.000But you also, I know for me, when I'm hurt, I don't just need someone to listen.
00:32:21.840I need someone to ask me thoughtful questions. I need someone to push back. I need someone to
00:32:27.480cross-examine, right? Like the problem is one is thought right until the other comes
00:32:31.740in cross-exam. I need people to cross-examine my frustration, cross-examine my venting,
00:32:38.360cross-examine my self-pity, cross-examine my, you know what I mean? Like, because I'm not infallible.
00:32:44.820And so I don't mourn infallibly. I don't get angry infallibly. I mean, it is my anger, my sadness, my frustration, all these things, they're drenched. They're absolutely drenched with my flesh and with the world that's constantly shaping or seeking to shape and inform my views.
00:33:05.060And so the flesh, the world, the devil, the three great enemies of the Christian pilgrim, they're all influencing me.
00:33:12.260I cannot ultimately remove myself from those things.
00:33:40.340And one of the ways we do that is we cross-examine and we ask for evidence.
00:33:46.280We ask for facts, not just how do you feel.
00:33:49.420You feel this way, but what are the facts?
00:33:52.740What actually happened in this most recent shooting that made you so upset?
00:33:56.920What actually, you know, and that's at a political national level, but in individual churches, you know, and so my concern is that through racial reconciliation, through critical race theory, intersectionality, what really seeped into the church is as we started just gospel everything, right?
00:34:14.500Gospel centered, gospel centered, gospel centered, and I'm all for gospel centrality, but we made it gospel myopticism.
00:34:51.320We have all these different human fleshly standards coming in the place.
00:34:57.880And we have no way to cross-examine them because there's no ultimate truth anymore.
00:35:02.800There's no universal reality, absolute reality that we're able to say doesn't line up with this.
00:35:12.480And so, yeah, man, I've experienced that as a pastor in our local church level.
00:35:17.400And I think that's a lot of what you and Natalie were experiencing in the church that you were coming from was just this gravitational pull away from the law of God.
00:35:30.140And it starts, I think it starts with, it sounds so good.
00:35:34.480It starts with like this obsession with grace.
00:35:38.360It's all about grace, you know, and it's new covenant theology.
00:35:46.460How is he leading? It's like following Jesus is great, but how do we follow Jesus? How does Jesus communicate his will to me? Through the law. It's not just this subjective little, you know, Jiminy cricket on my shoulder, you know, like, and so as churches move away from the law, they move into gospel myopticism, gospel everything.
00:44:33.140So now we start asking questions to try and resolve to the synthesis where it's pitting
00:44:38.340those two things against each other, destroying everything and emerging with something new.
00:44:42.720And it's always what I call deforming, but that's that synthesis where those two things
00:44:48.040are pitted together we don't believe it's true and we're searching for what's valuable so uh i'll
00:44:53.920apply this real quick is recently there was a someone was asking the question of where are the
00:44:58.720women's voices in scripture earlier that's their question is we're looking for something very
00:45:07.240specific that's not the author it's not as intent so we got to remove that intent and now we can
00:45:14.640start picking apart everything through, again, Derrida's deconstructionism. So it's this vicious
00:45:19.560cycle of just all these different systems and how we view scripture coming together and just
00:45:25.700destroying scripture in the long world. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think,
00:45:31.340I can't remember who said it, but I think for you and I, you know, the idea of just completely
00:45:38.460demolishing and deconstructing everything you know our our sentiment is that um that that's
00:45:45.220that's going to lend towards chaos that's going to lend to it like that's it's it's going to be
00:45:50.300a disimprovement it's not going to make things better it's going to make things worse and so
00:45:53.980sometimes i just sit back and i wonder like why why are people so dead set on just uh seeing the
00:46:00.500world burnt you know like the joker you know on uh batman returns you know some people just you
00:46:06.140know, Alfred said, some people just want to watch the world burn. And it's just like, that's,
00:46:09.760that's a hard person for me to understand, you know, because I feel like there's always an
00:46:13.380incentive. You know, you want power, you want money, you want, you know, something. And, and I
00:46:19.660think there is an incentive. I think there, you know, I think there's a deep desire for power.
00:46:24.680But then the question is like, well, how are you going to get power if you just burn everything
00:46:28.800down? How, how is that, how is that connected? Because you and I, we see it as just like,
00:46:34.560everybody's left with nothing um but but then people think that like if they burn everything
00:46:39.540down if they deconstruct everything that there'll be a positive result and like where does that
00:46:44.260where does that principle where does that like concept even come from and then you know like
00:46:50.020you start to think you're like oh i know where that comes from it comes from our public schools
00:46:54.420it comes from evolution it comes from the big bank like if if you at an early at your earliest
00:47:00.720ages have been taught and have subscribed to the idea that that order comes out of chaos right
00:47:07.040that's what evolution that's why as christians we you know theistic evolution is is a false doctrine
00:47:13.060like we reject that god did not create the world by using evolution as his tool for for one like
00:47:21.220we believe that death entered the world through sin whereas if if god right so just replace the
00:47:27.120Big Bang with God, but still keep everything else that evolution theorizes, and you have
00:47:32.960theistic evolution. But even if that were the case, even if we replace the Big Bang with God,
00:47:37.640we have theistic evolution, God using evolution over millions of years in order to eventually
00:47:42.980build up to Adam and Eve. Well, then what we have ultimately, when we say God using evolution as
00:47:48.120his tool to create, what we're really saying is that God's using death as his tool to create,
00:47:53.520Because that's what evolution is all about. Evolution is that you have this highly intelligent, well-crafted life form, but it's sitting on top of a mountain of skeletons.
00:48:09.500it only came to be through not just millions of years right we always think of that when we think
00:48:16.540of evolution but really it came to be over millions and trillions even of deaths deaths like
00:48:23.780this this little organism came and lived for you know three and a half minutes but it didn't you
00:48:29.760know it only had half of a lung you know and it wasn't fully and it died you know but a better
00:48:34.520organism and it died and it died and it died and we're not just talking about you know single cell
00:48:38.860organisms we're not just talking about a a mitigated entropy and we're talking about
00:48:43.080we're talking about animals we're you know we're talking about highly uh complex um uh physical
00:48:50.060beings all the way up to like things like homo erectus and then you know like you're talking
00:48:54.840about like man-like creatures all the way and and you're not just talking about a few of them died
00:48:59.400you're talking like millions of them had to live for for you know for at least a couple hundred
00:49:05.840thousand years, and speaking of Homo erectus, a type of man, and died, and died, and died, and died,
00:49:12.200and died, and died, and died, all these organisms, all the way up to finally you have a fully
00:49:17.800functioning, developed male Homo sapien, and female Homo sapien, and then God breathes His breath
00:49:26.780into them. They have a soul, and finally God did it. God created man, but on a mountain of death,
00:49:35.100And the reason we would reject that is for a number of reasons. But one of the simplest reasons that I always give to Christians who, you know, subscribe to evolution and think that evolution is somehow, you know, can be cohesive with biblical teaching, which is completely at odds.
00:49:49.980in the same way that Marxism, in the same way that socialism, in the same way that critical
00:49:54.160theory and evolution also, it is a demonic ideology. It is at odds. It can't be used as
00:50:03.940an analytical tool. It can't be separated from its ultimate worldview. It's attached to a worldview.
00:50:09.880It says something about God. And if nothing else, what evolution says about God, if it were true,
00:50:15.300If evolution were the way that God created all the things that we see today, what it
00:50:20.000would say about God is that God created life by using death, which would say that God is
00:50:25.360a liar in Genesis chapter 3 when his word tells us that death entered the world through
00:53:11.460then then why wouldn't they burn things down to get what they want
00:53:16.180makes logical sense i mean it doesn't make logical sense but in their minds
00:53:21.680because they because logic has long been cast aside and they wouldn't know logic if it slapped
00:53:27.160them in the face so because they've gotten rid of the logic right the logos the word christ because
00:53:32.820they've they've gotten rid of god's law they've gotten rid of god's logic they've gotten rid of
00:53:36.280god's word um then then in their minds like so all that back to what i was originally saying is
00:53:42.360just like for you and i we see deconstructionism as just this completely fallacious illogical
00:53:49.160silly and and and ultimately it's dangerous but this silly notion that that by destroying something
00:53:56.340i could improve it we're like like we we still have that mindset of like if something's broken
00:54:02.100you don't just throw it away but but you you look for the the problem and and like if my car is not
00:54:08.820running it doesn't mean the whole car is systematically broken it doesn't mean my whole
00:54:13.920car is systematically racist right it just means it could just be that one piston isn't firing the
00:54:18.760way that it's supposed to it could just mean that you know what i mean it could and so what we do
00:54:23.180is is we we begin to investigate and if we find one thing wrong we don't say that that one thing
00:54:29.060substantiates our theory that the whole thing is broke. No, we just, we just say all that proves
00:54:34.100if I find one bug, that doesn't mean it's the feature. It just means I found one bug. Now there
00:54:39.460could be some more, but finding one problem does not substantiate a theory that the whole thing
00:54:45.360from, from, from floor to ceiling is completely broke. And so we're still of a mindset, you and I
00:54:51.760and, and, and biblical Christians that if something's broke, um, you, you ultimately, you,
00:54:57.480don't just throw it on the ash heap and burn it and think that magically some utopian, you know,
00:55:06.120problem-solving worldview will arise from the ashes. No, like if something's broke, we have to
00:55:12.380do the hard work of fixing it. That's the whole thing. I love what you said, like the
00:55:17.500semper deformanda versus, you know, semper reformanda. Like, no, we reform. We don't,
00:55:24.820So we take what God's given us and we say, man, this is wonderful.
00:55:30.420The Constitution of the United States of America is wonderful.
00:55:34.280And the fact that our nation had race-based slavery for as long as it did, we see that as a bug, not a feature, right?
00:55:43.060And so we don't say we need to get rid of the Constitution or we need to get rid of, you know, the whole system of two or three witnesses.
00:55:48.880And we need to get rid of, you know, like, no, we say we need to reform.
00:55:53.500we need to reform things there are there are isolated pieces of systems we find it in in
00:55:59.680we find it in our government we find it in our culture we find it in the church
00:56:03.120and wherever we find something that's not in line with the truth of god's word we want to reform it
00:56:07.900we want to change that we want to fix it what we don't want to do is take the baby with the bath
00:56:13.380water and throw the whole thing out and and then just sit back on our haunches and and assume that
00:56:19.060magically something will come yeah so anyways i'm saying all that to say i completely i completely
00:56:27.180agree with you it's it's it's reforming rather than deforming it's um it's it's it's reformation
00:56:34.640not revolution um it's it's not it's not just taking the whole thing and saying it's all bad
00:56:41.260let's throw it all away um and and then just and then just imagine that if we burn it all down
00:56:47.500like the joker right some men just want to watch the world burn like the joker wanted to watch the
00:56:52.200world burn because he liked chaos because he's clinically insane i think people today they're
00:56:57.200not clinically insane they want to watch the world burn because not because they just they're insane
00:57:01.620and they enjoy chaos they want to watch the world burn because they've been taught from grade school
00:57:06.660that chaos produces order they've been taught a lot and they actually think that deforming
00:57:13.180will ultimately improve something and they've just been played we just live in a generation that's
00:57:19.000been played there's a i i copied down this verse real quick that i i found incredibly helpful
00:57:27.000with this because it's always this idea of maybe we'll arrive at the truth at some point like we
00:57:32.000have god's word it's right here in front of us um and first timothy three five through seven says
00:57:38.700holding to a form of godliness although they have denied its power avoid such men as these for among
00:57:44.560them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins
00:57:49.180led on by various impulses and this is the key verse 7 always learning and never able to come
00:57:56.320to knowledge of the truth that's right just as janice and jambres opposed moses so these men
00:58:02.400also approve or i'm sorry oppose the truth men of depraved mind rejected in regard to the faith
00:58:09.840and the the whole thing is just disintegrating any form of another thing they bring up is
00:58:17.360propositional logic and it's like well no we appeal to a standard and we reason from that
00:58:24.180standard and that's biblical you look at uh exodus 20 right the the fourth commandment
00:58:30.520verses 8 through 11. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all
00:58:37.160your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it, you shall not do any
00:58:44.060of your work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle
00:58:49.320or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth,
00:58:56.860the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day therefore the lord blessed the
00:59:01.720sabbath day and made it holy he appeals to creation to a six-day creation right and then
00:59:09.440on top of that he's using propositional logic according to the standards of scripture
00:59:15.300yeah god created male and female he he went through everything that we need to know in
00:59:23.840genesis and so we're going to work out from that and here it is in scripture laid out right in
00:59:29.840front of us we'll still deny it right yep you're right yeah we we just keep getting cute with the
00:59:36.220text and yeah it was just like how do we know that's what it really means how to who are you
00:59:40.340to say what god means by his word um it's like yeah and but we just we lose everything we lose
00:59:47.660every premise we lose every foundation um yeah and the world the world will not improve through
00:59:54.360those kinds of means well um we try to keep our episodes typically around i don't know anywhere
00:59:59.780for some of them are shorter 35 minutes some of them are longer so we've gone about an hour so
01:00:03.880uh let's let's do this um i want you to give give you a chance just to tell our listeners how they
01:00:10.280can uh follow your podcast and follow you and some of the things you are doing and uh also we um for
01:00:16.020our club members. If you haven't already become a responder, we encourage you guys listening to
01:00:20.600this podcast to become a responder. That's what we call our club members. That's the only way this
01:00:25.380ministry can continue is through your generous prayers and support. And our responders, one of
01:00:32.080the kind of incentives that we give to you as our thank you for your support is we have our bonus
01:00:39.000reel. So each of our guests that we're hosting on this podcast, Theology Applied, we have them stay
01:00:44.680on a little bit a little bit after we end the episode for our kind of behind the scenes
01:00:50.440conversation our bonus hour and so our bonus question for Dave is you Dave I know because
01:00:58.680you're a friend of mine we've talked about it you personally subscribe not merely to
01:01:02.520complementarianism but what you would describe as biblical patriarchy and so I was wondering
01:01:09.000if you would stay on for our bonus edition conversation with me and you for just a few
01:01:13.460more minutes and explain this view biblical patriarchy and why you choose to hold to it so
01:01:20.240me and dave are going to come back we'll do a bonus thing but as we end the podcast uh dave
01:01:25.100would you just tell our listeners a little bit about what you're doing how they can keep up with
01:01:28.460you yeah and thanks again for having me on and uh giving an opportunity just to work through some
01:01:34.940of the word of god and looking at what it's doing in the world in the real world that's
01:01:39.900right around us. You can check out our website at reformedoperator.com. We have a podcast
01:01:46.800available basically anywhere you can find a podcast. We're there. It's Reformed Operator.
01:01:52.840You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram. We update that pretty regularly. And we use the
01:01:58.560McShane reading plan. So you can follow us on Twitter. And we have also a Westminster
01:02:03.360standards reading plan as well that's included on there that we try to update every day on Twitter.
01:02:09.900So, yeah, that's how you can get a hold of us. And again, thanks a lot for having me on.
01:02:15.060Absolutely. Thanks for for coming on the show. Appreciate it. All right. That concludes our show.
01:02:19.720Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. And if you haven't become a responder, go ahead and do that.
01:02:24.840And I'm going to stay on a little bit longer and talk to Dave about biblical patriarchy, which I have no doubt will prove to be interesting and probably a bit controversial.