The NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - Tim Keller’s Problem Isn’t His Embrace Of Abraham Kuyper, It’s His Embrace Of Karl Marx ｜ with David McLeod & Chris Hwang

00:00:00.000 All right, listen, guys, I get it.

00:00:02.040 Many of you are unable to financially support this ministry because you're spending your

00:00:05.820 cash and your lives on raising young children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

00:00:10.640 Praise God for you and that endeavor.

00:00:13.760 However, algorithms are a thing.

00:00:16.300 Shadow banning, sadly, is a thing.

00:00:18.900 And one major way that you can help to expand the reach and effectiveness of this ministry

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00:00:31.800 perhaps even more effective than that, you can share our podcast with a friend. We hope you'll

00:00:37.000 take the time to do so. Thank you so much. God bless. The problem with Timothy Keller is not

00:00:43.420 that he's embraced Abraham Kuyper, but that sadly, at least at some level, he seems to have embraced

00:00:51.160 Karl Marx. Kuyperianism is not the problem. The problem is Marxism. This is something that I hope

00:00:59.320 especially some of my Baptist friends may listen to and might at least consider that Abraham Kuyper

00:01:06.540 is not the primary problem. The sentiment of engaging all of life with all of Christ

00:01:15.080 is not the issue. The issue is, are we actually engaging all of life, every realm of life with

00:01:22.700 all of Christ or some of Christ and some of a progressive neo-Marxist, godless pagan idea?

00:01:33.100 That's what we're going to address in this episode with two special guests, David McLeod

00:01:39.440 and Chris Wong. Tune in now. Applying God's word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.

00:01:53.060 All right. Welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied. I am your host, Pastor Joel

00:01:57.460 Webin with Right Response Ministries. And in this episode, I'm privileged to welcome not one, but

00:02:02.880 two special guests to the show. We have Chris Wong and David McLeod. Would you guys go ahead and

00:02:09.280 just share a little bit about yourselves and then we'll get into some Tim Keller stuff as promised

00:02:13.960 as the title showcases. We're going to talk about how all three of us in different ways were shaped

00:02:19.140 by Tim Keller, how we came to eventually realize the problems with Keller, how we overcompensated,

00:02:24.940 but then came back and saw some things that are actually good that the church, even the

00:02:30.040 conservative evangelical realm has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. And it's actually

00:02:35.640 creating some serious problems that we want to address. So before we hop into all that,

00:02:41.060 first, let's just welcome our guest. Could you guys, Chris and David, tell our listeners a little

00:02:45.920 bit about yourselves? Hey guys, I'm Chris Wong, and I'm really thrilled to be a part of this

00:02:52.280 community, Joel. I worked in New York City for, gosh, 12, 13, 14 years of my life. Worked on

00:03:01.600 Wall Street for a few years. And then from there, joined a startup where I helped build that

00:03:07.660 business for over a decade. We sold that business, had a brief stint at a public technology company.

00:03:15.540 And then as of now, I'm the co-founder of Every Good Work with my business partner and artist,

00:03:22.960 David, and I'm also advising startups as well. Great. There's a lot to

00:03:31.580 talk about go ahead david go ahead well um i'm i'm an artist um i've been an artist essentially my

00:03:37.500 entire life um i grew up in birmingham i grew up in the pca um kind of at the epicenter of the of

00:03:46.780 the founding of the pca in the in the 70s i'm a child of the early 80s grew up uh with great

00:03:55.100 Christian family, um, went to school, studied art and have been a portrait painter and paint

00:04:02.140 painting for, um, galleries and personal collectors for about two decades now.

00:04:10.840 Awesome. That's so interesting. Yeah. So I'm excited about this episode and our listeners,

00:04:15.600 you should be excited about this episode because part of what we're going to be talking about

00:04:18.560 is this all of Christ for all of life, this Kuyperian mantra, Abraham Kuyper. He's the guy

00:04:24.620 who was famous for saying, there's not one square inch of all the world that Christ doesn't cry out

00:04:29.240 mine. You guys have heard me use this analogy or illustration several times, but we don't want to

00:04:34.120 do the Mufasa and Simba Lion King routine where they go up to the Pride Rock and Simba's looking

00:04:41.600 at this kingdom that he's going to inherit. And Mufasa, his father says, everything that the light

00:04:46.860 touches is going to be your kingdom. And Simba responds by saying, but what about that dark,

00:04:51.680 shadowy place. We don't want to do that as Christians and say, well, that dark shadowy

00:04:56.840 place, that's politics or that dark shadowy place, that's art. That dark shadowy place,

00:05:01.560 that's culture, that's medicine, that's science. That's no, no, no. It all belongs to Jesus.

00:05:07.060 And so basically the team that we have on the show today is we've got Chris and David,

00:05:10.920 we've got the business guru and we've got the artist. And so we're going to be looking at

00:05:16.000 markets. We're going to be looking at economics. We're going to be looking at art and culture

00:05:19.740 and painting and talking about why, um, business is corrupt and art sucks. And it's because of a

00:05:26.740 rejection of Christ and how to fix those things. But the first thing that we want to look at is

00:05:31.840 part of the problem has to do with Tim Keller and not saying that it's exclusively his fault

00:05:38.120 or that he's the first guy to make this mistake. But he, the reason why we're going to address it

00:05:43.060 from Keller is because all three of us have been shaped by Keller particularly. And so I want us

00:05:47.600 to talk about that, but then also because Keller is not the original failure in this arena that

00:05:53.920 we're about to discuss. But he's probably one of the most notable guys today. And so what we want

00:06:00.980 to talk about is this all of Christ mantra, redeeming that. But the problem, just to stop

00:06:08.380 beating around the bush, the problem is that Keller actually did that and does that really well.

00:06:13.600 Keller is a Kuyperian. And I think there's a lot of guys who have watched Keller's

00:06:19.340 deconstruction, his theological evolution, becoming more and more politically and culturally

00:06:27.260 progressive and compromising on more and more conservative, biblical, theological issues.

00:06:34.340 And I know, at least in the Baptist world, I have a lot of Baptist friends, pastors, podcasters,

00:06:40.480 you name it authors they think that the problem with keller and and and the the achilles heel

00:06:48.260 that led to his progressive theological progressive downfall is his embrace of abraham kuyper and it's

00:06:55.620 not the problem with keller is not kuyper the problem with keller is that he's a marxist that's

00:07:02.140 the problem and so all that being said let me throw it to you chris and then you throw it to

00:07:06.260 David, but talk a little bit about the ways that you were shaped by Tim Keller, the good,

00:07:10.480 the bad, the ugly. Yeah. I mean, I remember, um, being on my campus and, uh, that was when he

00:07:18.920 wrote, um, I believe his apologetics on, um, what was it? Um, the reason for God, the reason for

00:07:26.060 God. Yeah. I remember that he was on a book tour. I had lunch with him with a group of, um, college

00:07:31.360 students um and and he really he radically changed my understanding of of the gospel um he spoke in

00:07:39.200 a language that i would say really was attractive um you know he had a different type of way of

00:07:46.480 communicating i think he's very gifted in that i think obviously adding his um his intellectualism

00:07:53.200 you know um was was um also very um very attractive and so really i just kind of

00:07:59.520 Yep, fell in love with the whole Tim Keller, you know, mission and what he was up to.

00:08:05.200 And I would say that the impact that he made was he really was able to communicate the gospel.

00:08:12.500 I think that was something good, and we should praise God for that.

00:08:15.160 There's a lot of good stuff about that.

00:08:17.700 I think the really bad stuff that I ended up embracing as a disciple of Tim Keller was I ended up nuancing everything.

00:08:25.480 um i think c.s lewis i believe it's c.s lewis where he said something where you know if you

00:08:31.220 if you start seeing through everything at some point you see nothing at all and and in many ways

00:08:38.640 i kind of became that as a christian and i think when when you when you live that out where you

00:08:44.860 start nuancing everything um you you start losing spine right you start losing witness you start

00:08:53.820 losing the very power of why the holy spirit indwells inside of the believers it's boldness

00:09:01.980 so so i think i i became a i almost i wasn't i wasn't i would say i wasn't a person who

00:09:09.020 mastered apologetics i ended up becoming a person over time who apologized a lot

00:09:15.100 does that make sense yeah so there's a lot of practicing sodom sodomites that we were friends

00:09:20.220 with um and we love right but i found myself in terms of the most effective witnessing that i

00:09:28.000 could do was number one practicing hospitality but whenever we're talking about the gospel it's

00:09:32.740 always always something about me trying to um point a finger with contempt at those self-righteous

00:09:41.520 christians right and little did i realize that those self-righteous christians were actually

00:09:47.100 christians who were being faithful to the text right they actually were being faithful to the

00:09:52.160 lord and they were willing to take nasty stuff from even people like myself um right and and

00:09:59.800 they were willing to be faithful and so i i think for me over time i became that winsome intellectual

00:10:05.860 guy who spoke poetically but then when you double clicked on does this guy have any substance

00:10:12.760 does he have any rock is there anything that he's standing on i would say people would not really

00:10:18.480 know so i would say in short that's a little bit of how tim keller has impacted me positively but

00:10:24.580 also a lot of negative too right and you chris were correct me if i'm wrong but you were a part

00:10:29.840 um a core member of an axe 29 church in manhattan because you lived there yep and that church the

00:10:37.020 pastor there was intimately involved he was a part of what how would you describe it yeah he's

00:10:42.480 part of a cohort, had personal discipleship with Tim Keller. And yeah, I would say Tim Keller was

00:10:48.200 very much like the mayor of New York City when it came to church planting, right? You kind of get

00:10:52.360 the blessings of being a part of that ministry, being a part of some sort of, you know, leadership

00:10:58.960 training, pastoral training. And yeah, so was definitely involved. And yeah, Tim Keller was

00:11:05.440 always just a subway ride away. So my friends, roommates were all part of it. So yeah, definitely

00:11:12.060 had a lot of involvement with Tim. So you were part of the 829 church, but your pastor in many

00:11:16.780 ways was discipled with other pastors in a cohort with Tim Keller, but you had friends who were part

00:11:21.460 of Tim Keller's church. You would attend it sometimes. And it's funny because you were

00:11:25.320 part of an Acts 29 church and you know, I was an Acts 29 pastor and a lot of people don't understand

00:11:30.000 like, um, like I remember going to Acts 29 conferences and, uh, they would literally call

00:11:35.140 like it wasn't, they would say it out loud. They would say, um, uh, here's, you know, every single

00:11:40.340 lecture, you know, um, plenary speaker, you know, would, would give their, their speech and, uh,

00:11:46.220 and the quotations would be, you know, 50% of the quotations would all be Keller quotes and they

00:11:51.280 would, and they would call him Yoda. So even, so even though like Keller wasn't ever in Acts 29,

00:11:57.620 people underestimate, uh, the extent of his influence by Acts 29. I would say Acts 29 has

00:12:05.800 been impacted more by keller than it has by channel yeah i would say like how many times

00:12:10.520 and you probably even preach this message where it's like everything needs to end with like a

00:12:15.140 gospel right the gospel uh hook yeah you're not you're not allowed you're not allowed you're too

00:12:21.080 broken you're too sinful you don't even realize it and how many times have we not been allowed

00:12:27.340 by maybe this is a counseling session between us Joel but but no I'm I can talk about all that

00:12:36.560 stuff but yeah I'm being very serious like how many times do we just feel immobilized as a body

00:12:42.260 like we're not allowed to have dominion we're not allowed to conquer those are actually

00:12:48.740 sensitive words that you should be careful Chris using even though they're very biblical words

00:12:53.960 right like right because it's the the keller gospel twist is what we would sometimes call

00:12:59.040 the keller gospel twist is that uh essentially what it is is that the whole sermon leading up

00:13:04.540 to that gospel twist is a use of the law of god but exclusively only ever in the first use of the

00:13:10.960 law the first use of the law is that it functions as a mirror it reveals to us the holiness of god

00:13:16.340 and by way of consequence our sinfulness and all the ways that we fall short and that we will never

00:13:21.100 ever be able to measure up to God's standard of holiness, which is true, right? All of sin and

00:13:26.240 fallen short of the glory of God, no man will be saved by works as done unto the law. All that's

00:13:31.700 true. But the reformed tradition is not just one use of the law. The third use of the law is that

00:13:37.800 for the Christian, the law, it doesn't just reveal our need for a savior, but having by grace through

00:13:43.040 faith alone in Christ received a savior, the law in its third use is now a lamp unto our feet,

00:13:49.700 a light unto our path. It's a guide. It's a compass. It shows us where to go in the process

00:13:55.300 of sanctification, being formed more into the image of Christ, but also growing in godly dominion.

00:14:02.500 And guys, you don't like the word dominion. Okay. Then in place, you should like it because it's a

00:14:06.160 biblical word, but just in place the word stewardship, stewarding God's world, that is

00:14:11.680 dominion. So all that being said, Keller was good with using the law in its first use. That is a

00:14:16.580 legitimate use of the law of God. People, you know, Spurgeon said, a man cannot appreciate

00:14:21.140 the beauty of Christ unless he first come to see the need for Christ. And the law reveals to us

00:14:26.760 our need for Christ. But the law having received Christ reveals to us where to go, how to grow in

00:14:33.160 holiness, but how to grow in holiness for the purpose of glorifying God by exercising Christian

00:14:39.640 stewardship and dominion in the tangible physical world and not just in the 17th dimension. And

00:14:46.240 that's where keller we'll get there david we'll go to david but we'll get we'll get there so no

00:14:53.960 chris joel awesome insight um i'm probably not going to be quite as eloquent or uh long-winded

00:15:04.280 as either of you guys that's fine nobody's as long until we get to art it's a great compliment

00:15:09.040 in which case i can just i can just go on forever great um yeah i um my experience with keller was

00:15:17.120 very positive for a very long time um and i and i say that even looking back that i i still see it as

00:15:25.120 as positive during that that era of my life as chris said um you know some similar story

00:15:33.040 heavily impacted on my understanding of justification, need for a savior, the beauty

00:15:39.080 of the gospel, my interaction. I didn't read a whole lot of Keller books, so maybe that's why

00:15:46.620 it's still also so positive to me, my history. I remember something about a forgetfulness

00:15:58.840 book is a tiny little a tiny little book um blessed forgetfulness the humility thing don't

00:16:06.200 think less of yourself but think of yourself less yeah yes um he spoke at a church in nashville

00:16:12.620 when i was uh either newly married or a college student so somewhere around 23 24 25

00:16:19.260 um and he just like chris said he had just a great way of delivering making um uh very apparent

00:16:29.780 biblical truths to my modern ears so um talking to mothers in the audience about how

00:16:38.700 um if they if they don't like doing the dishes you know or changing your motivation to to a

00:16:48.560 christ-like motivation um and and again looking back i can see how there was a little bit of

00:16:55.760 jiu-jitsu going on in order to always make everything kind of like the third way yes

00:17:04.840 there's like there's this way which is this the bad ditch and there's this way which is also a

00:17:09.680 bad ditch but this is the right way um and it's and it's like walking a tightrope you eventually

00:17:16.980 you eventually look silly because you're just trying to balance and you can't possibly say

00:17:24.500 one thing to offend these people or what another thing to offend these people um and

00:17:30.800 in application in my own life i mean being an artist in a very broken world in a broken world

00:17:40.380 in a broken country, in a broken field, the arts, being able to proclaim the gospel in a way that is

00:17:51.120 in your face or winsome or anything is nearly impossible. And I found myself just being silenced

00:17:59.600 whenever the topic would come up. There were times when I would be more bold, but

00:18:07.500 But it certainly wasn't because I had a great Tim Keller quote in the back of my mind to pull out to really convince my pagan friends in New York that they should start going to Redeemer.

00:18:23.400 It was more boots on the ground, very basic stuff about how sad they clearly were and how fulfilling my life in Christ is.

00:18:37.500 um so yeah i that that's really good and i like that you brought up the third way ism because

00:18:43.440 that's just a classic you know so you got the classic you know tim color gospel twist uh you

00:18:47.800 know first use of the law exclusively never the third and then you know and then at the end hey

00:18:52.060 but thank god for jesus so it's you know you're lawless you've broken the law you'll never be

00:18:57.300 able to keep the law don't even bother trying but jesus kept the law in your place praise god let's

00:19:01.320 go home um so that's a classic you know but the third way thing is a classic too right you know

00:19:05.660 so there's Republicans and there's Democrats and then there's Jesus. And what's implied in that,

00:19:11.760 the problem with that is because the Republican Party and the Republican platform is certainly

00:19:17.500 not synonymous with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Or for that matter, not that it even should be,

00:19:22.380 but what it should be in line with as a ministry of justice with the civil master, it should be

00:19:26.740 in line not with the gospel, but with the law of God. And it's not in line with that either.

00:19:30.000 So the Republican party is not synonymous with biblical law and justice, but what you

00:19:36.340 do, here's what you do is this subtle crafty jujitsu, like you said, David, is that it's

00:19:42.500 not even what you're saying out loud, but by way of implication, what you're implying

00:19:46.020 by your silence, and I think an intentional and careful crafty silence is you're saying,

00:19:52.300 well republicanism isn't uh christian and uh and democrats aren't christian um and and then what

00:20:00.360 you're implying is that they're both they're both wrong but that they're both equally wrong

00:20:05.020 which is not true right when you have one party that recently had 49 out of 50 representatives

00:20:11.560 vote to codify row into law in all 50 states for abortion the murder of the unborn child to be

00:20:18.940 legal all the way through nine months of pregnancy without uh with for any reason at any point in any

00:20:26.220 state and and you have one party that has 49 out of 50 people voting for that to be law and then

00:20:32.000 another party that's voting against it um these things are not equal right they're just they're

00:20:37.520 just not and so that third way ism is is really i think just um it's it's really it's a euphemism

00:20:43.800 for the biblical word, which is compromise, because what you have is, you know, another

00:20:50.480 classic Keller thing was contextualize the gospel, contextualizing.

00:20:54.200 And he would point to Paul, you know, in like in Athens, you know, or Mars Hill, you know,

00:20:59.200 I see you are a very religious people, you know, you have all these idols built to all

00:21:03.000 these gods, but I noticed one over here built to the unknown God.

00:21:06.100 I've come to make him known, to reveal, you know, who this God is.

00:21:09.100 And Keller would, you know, really emphasize that text, which is a biblical text, and there's

00:21:14.580 lots of truth to be preached from it, but he would emphasize it over and against other

00:21:18.480 texts, overemphasize it.

00:21:20.860 And this whole contextualizing of the gospel, what I realized, and it took me a long time

00:21:24.920 to realize this, but what I finally came to see was when Tim Keller contextualizes the

00:21:30.040 gospel, what he means is he means being very acutely aware of the culture that you're

00:21:37.900 preaching the gospel in, and then taking the gospel, namely taking Christ, and instead

00:21:43.700 of all of Christ for those people in their lives, you take the portions of Christ, now

00:21:50.660 being an expert in this particular culture, you take the particular portions of Christ

00:21:55.740 that you think will be most palatable to this particular people.

00:21:59.680 And so it's actually some of Christ, part of Christ, a portion of Christ against the

00:22:05.400 whole Christ, all of Christ for these particular people. And I can't remember who it was, but

00:22:09.680 someone at some point correcting Keller on this, it was a podcast I was listening to a few years

00:22:15.520 back, but it was so helpful. He said, yeah, Paul contextualized the gospel, but contextualization

00:22:20.460 of the gospel in the mind of Paul and in the New Testament apostolic writings, what that always

00:22:26.140 meant was finding, being aware of the culture that you're in, their customs, their culture,

00:22:31.260 those kinds of things um for the sake of making the gospel more clear not less so to contextualize

00:22:38.320 the gospel means to clarify the gospel not to make it more ambiguous right it's to clarify

00:22:44.360 the offense of the gospel right exactly it's to make it it's it's to make it what it is which is

00:22:51.420 a sword and not what it isn't which is syncretism yeah i think that's a good point because for me

00:22:57.600 what I was going to say was, um, it was really weird for me.

00:23:01.200 It was almost like the power of the gospel had to submit to secularism.

00:23:08.580 You know what I'm saying? That's right.

00:23:10.100 It's almost like the gospel was not powerful enough to chop off the head of an

00:23:16.200 impotent God of secularism, which is so impotent.

00:23:21.000 And yet for some reason we needed to be shrewd and intellectual,

00:23:27.600 and and find the compatible pieces of secularism and mix it yeah and you said david would yeah go

00:23:34.840 ahead no go ahead joel well i was i was just saying finding those compat instead of instead

00:23:39.420 of actually right like i think phil johnson said it like this like i want to engage culture

00:23:43.500 he said but i um i want to engage culture the way david engaged goliath yeah he killed him

00:23:50.140 right so it's like we want to engage secularism um but we want to engage secularism um with the

00:23:56.040 mentality that it's a fight to the death that's right um and and the reason why the left has been

00:24:01.220 winning is because they play for keeps they know it's a fight to the death right exactly so when

00:24:06.280 you just think you're sparring you're wrestling or you're just sitting down and having a charitable

00:24:10.020 conversation and seeing how we can learn from each other you know and establishing this

00:24:14.560 synchronization between secularism and finding well it can't all be bad find the compatible

00:24:19.060 pieces that might fit with christianity and this principled pluralism right a lot of this comes

00:24:23.700 back to classical liberalism. It comes back to, uh, misinterpretations and, and, and some of the,

00:24:28.340 the negative things with John Locke and all, all these kinds of things. Um, when that's your

00:24:32.380 mentality, um, that's a lose, that's a recipe for losing. That's a loser mentality. Uh, the left

00:24:37.720 keeps winning because, uh, not because they had all the institutions, they have them now. Um, but,

00:24:42.180 but, but they got them. They were at a massive deficit 40 years ago. And yet now they're winning

00:24:48.000 how, um, because they were scrappy, right? Like when, when there's two guys fighting and one of

00:24:52.920 him's a little scrawny dude he knows he doesn't have the physical advantage they were playing so

00:24:57.800 he's biting scratching punching go david go for playing to win yes and playing to win and and guys

00:25:05.560 like we could name a whole laundry list of sort of wannabe conservatives um evangelicals who just

00:25:15.100 want a seat at the table right i think of these men as um they see where the culture is going

00:25:23.580 and they don't have the boldness to proclaim the actual truth to the enemy and as a result they

00:25:31.320 want to be they want to have a seat at the table for now and then when things get really bad they

00:25:37.340 want to be the last against the wall exactly yeah and i think and it's all for the sake of love

00:25:43.060 right and and i think that's the i think i'm curious to hear your thoughts joel like as a

00:25:49.260 pastor but since when can we not still be so burdened by love for our enemies why why can't

00:25:57.000 we still be bold and actually believe that the gospel can destroy the enemy but that it destroys

00:26:06.860 the enemy and we welcome that enemy into the family of god right like why why does it have

00:26:12.600 i think that's the biggest critique that i think is just a straw man um david loves the lost you

00:26:20.020 love the lost i love the lost but we're not going to compromise before the word of god and we're

00:26:26.480 not going to compromise the glory of god what's that compromise that makes that makes it ineffective

00:26:33.060 if we if we are not bold and proclaiming the truth then they're not going to be caught up

00:26:40.560 in the stories we have to tell

00:26:41.980 because they think that their story

00:26:43.820 is better than ours.

00:26:44.880 Their story goes along

00:26:46.800 with the world that they see around them

00:26:49.020 way better than ours does

00:26:50.640 in most cases.

00:26:52.400 We have to call out

00:26:53.900 these giants that are in the land

00:26:56.000 for what they are.

00:26:57.760 And I think that's the most loving thing

00:26:59.880 that we can do.

00:27:00.860 And if a world could see

00:27:02.340 men with spine

00:27:05.880 who believe more than ever

00:27:07.940 that god is god is their lord jesus christ is lord yep but also but also but also see that

00:27:17.460 we're willing to lay down our lives right because we love too like there's something glorious the

00:27:24.940 lion and the lamb but i think for me what was kind of the tipping point was twitter

00:27:29.640 seeing how much um i still believe you know i'm i'm earnestly hoping you know keller i love keller

00:27:39.360 i love him as as as someone who's who's learned so much but on twitter when you're convincing

00:27:45.640 um an entire generation that it's okay to vote it's it's just so nuanced and so complex that

00:27:54.620 it's okay to vote for people who love to murder babies that to me is insane there's something

00:28:01.860 insane about that right and and i think you know lord have mercy on us and thank god for me you

00:28:09.520 know praise god i'm still repenting i was just like that so i completely understand it um but

00:28:16.320 but the the tipping point for me was they would they would point the fingers at the sheep

00:28:22.380 keller would be more focused on blasting his members the lord's the lord's sheep the lord's

00:28:31.560 this is this is the blood was spilt for for his sheep and and here for their self-righteousness

00:28:37.740 or for their as if he knows there are all their hearts that's right and you know we can do our

00:28:42.680 own name calling joel i know you've got an awesome video on who to who we have to be aware of but

00:28:48.500 i mean russell moore right there's all these people where you just look at what they're doing

00:28:52.080 on twitter is they're they care more about bashing they punch right they tickle left they coddle the

00:28:58.480 left cow kowtow left and what that means that's political you know cultural terms what it means

00:29:03.340 in christian terms is that they beat up christians and a particular kind of christian they beat up

00:29:08.480 blue collar salt of the earth average ordinary christians the christian who believes that god

00:29:14.360 actually made the world in six literal days yep the christian who believes that marriage is between

00:29:19.320 a man and a woman and that gay marriage is a mirage and that it shouldn't be legal that's right

00:29:24.460 the christian who who um the christian who's uh such a um primitive neanderthal that he actually

00:29:32.700 is ignorant enough to think uh that christian nationalism might be biblical because christ is

00:29:38.360 king you know that the dumb christian the killer laughs and mocks that person russell moore is

00:29:46.980 laughing and mocking that person. Beth Moore is laughing at and mocking that person. And when I

00:29:54.240 realized that, Matt Chandler has laughed and mocked that person. And when I realized that, that's when

00:29:58.700 I left Acts 29. I was like, I'm not going to give you my blood, my sweat, my tears, our money,

00:30:04.380 our support. No, because that person that you're mocking is the member in my church.

00:30:11.040 Amen. That's right.

00:30:12.220 And it's me.

00:30:13.220 That's right.

00:30:13.720 And it's my wife and Lord willing, if he would be so gracious, it's the kids that I'm raising.

00:30:18.620 I hope that my kids are your Neanderthal primitive Christians that believe that God created the

00:30:24.560 world in six literal days and that Christ is King.

00:30:26.860 And that Jesus is Lord is the most political statement ever made in all the universe.

00:30:32.900 That's, you know, so no, I'm not going to help build and support your clout and your

00:30:38.200 ministry, um, that, that, that exists for mocking my future children. Um, I, no, I'm not going to

00:30:45.660 participate in that. And so all that being said, my point to segue here for us, um, my point is

00:30:51.720 that like, I had that experience. You guys have that experience. Um, but then the next experience

00:30:57.340 in the leg of my theological development as the Lord was in his sovereignty, sanctifying me,

00:31:01.920 um, producing repentance for things that was wrong. Well, part of the problem is that I,

00:31:06.320 when I started seeing that, right, we left in 2018. I took my church out of Acts 29,

00:31:12.800 the church I was pastoring in California, because that was right after Eric Mason had wrote Woke

00:31:18.780 Church, you know, and so Acts 29 was getting, you know, Chandler had just made his, you know,

00:31:24.280 his notorious statement of, you know, I'll take a African-American six on a scale of one to 10

00:31:32.300 instead of an Anglo seven, you know, and those, those kinds of things were happening. And that

00:31:37.020 was Keller influence. And so when that happened, I moved out. So this is 2018. And, and when I took

00:31:42.580 our church out of Acts 29, Acts 29 was very Kuyperian. Again, not everything about Abraham

00:31:49.580 Kuyper is great. In fact, Abraham Kuyper has a couple of quotes about art that all three of us

00:31:55.560 would strongly disagree with. But when we're talking about, when we say Kuyperianism, what

00:32:00.320 what the three of us mean and what Keller means and what and we would agree with what he means

00:32:04.680 about Kuyper and what, you know, the quintessential way that Kuyperianism, the term is used in

00:32:11.100 theological realms today is simply meaning all of Christ for all of life. That's what we mean by

00:32:17.560 Kuyperianism. We don't mean prescribing to, just like Calvinism doesn't necessarily mean that you

00:32:22.080 prescribe with everything in John Calvin's institutes, but it means primarily his take on

00:32:27.100 soteriology, right? That the five points of Calvinism, as it refers to salvation, the sovereignty

00:32:32.500 of God in election and salvation, that's Calvinism. Well, Kuyperianism, what we mean is all of Christ

00:32:38.100 for all of life. The recognition that yes, the church is unique. Christ is uniquely head of the

00:32:43.960 church in the sense that the church is the only, it's the only institution for which Christ died.

00:32:50.480 The only entity for which Christ died. It's the only entity that is Christ eternal bride.

00:32:55.860 but Christ is head. So he is uniquely head of the church, but he is not exclusively or merely head

00:33:04.080 of the church, uniquely head of the church, but he is head of everything. Caesar submits to God.

00:33:09.160 He's God's deacon. So Christ is head of Caesar. Christ is head of markets. He's head of arts.

00:33:14.440 He's head of culture. He's head of science. He's every square inch. That's the Kuyper sentiment

00:33:19.040 when we say Kuyperianism. And my point is in 2018, pulling out of Acts 29, seeing the negative

00:33:25.620 impact of Keller with compromise, becoming more and more culturally and theologically

00:33:30.240 and politically progressive, those kinds of things, you guys, me, we started pulling away

00:33:35.720 from this and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but for myself, one of the things

00:33:40.240 that I did as I threw out my Keller books, I also threw out Kuyper and I looking and

00:33:48.000 it took me a couple of years.

00:33:49.320 It wasn't until probably about 2020 when all the stuff started going down with the

00:33:55.120 branch covidians and you know and the summer of love you know where the country was on fire

00:33:59.340 you know like those kind of things is what really started to wake me up where i realized okay wait

00:34:04.480 a sec wait a second because i had thrown out keller and i threw out kuyper with him and and

00:34:09.680 my point is um because i thought the all of christ for all of life every square inch mentality

00:34:14.580 that's what would cause you to cozy up to culture want a seat at the table like you said david and

00:34:20.780 start to make concessions and compromises. But then I realized as I looked under the lid a little

00:34:27.100 bit, it took a closer look, I realized, no, no, no. It's not that Keller is Kuyperian. It's that

00:34:33.300 Keller is Marxist. And I went back and started listening to Acts 29, you know, conference

00:34:37.880 sessions that I had sat in, you know, that I decided, man, I'm going to pull the church out.

00:34:41.940 And I realized, you know, like there were talks about how we should be more socialist in our

00:34:46.840 economic, you know, framework as a country, because that's caring for the poor. And I realized,

00:34:51.200 wait a second, that's not Kuiper. That's Christ has a stake in economics. The problem is they're

00:34:57.440 not applying Christ to economics. They're applying Marx to economics. And so then I went, you know,

00:35:03.440 from Keller to like Kuiper sucks. Let's go radical to kingdom. I started looking at Van

00:35:08.360 Druden and I was right there, you know, next to Escondido, Westminster. And I started looking at

00:35:12.680 like this, um, no, it's just the church. Let's just do the holy huddle. It's it, let's, let's

00:35:16.940 build the bunker and just practice the ordinary means of grace and Christ will, you know, he's

00:35:21.620 going to return in 50, you know, 15, 20 minutes anyways. So let's just do this and, um, and just

00:35:26.800 worry about that. Um, and, and this whole, you know, we lose down here as, as brother MacArthur

00:35:31.480 would say, we lose down here. And, and that's, you know, and so I embraced that. And then I

00:35:35.480 started to realize, you know, it was guys like Doug Wilson, God bless him forever. You know,

00:35:39.300 it was that I started realizing, Oh, there's actually a, the problem was not Kuiper. The

00:35:44.480 problem was, um, using a Kuiperian lens, but marks, um, and progressive things as the source

00:35:51.020 instead of Kuiperian lens with Christ as a source. Um, it, it, so it's not the all of life piece

00:35:56.480 applying to all of life. That's the problem. It's the, are you applying all of Christ piece?

00:36:02.700 Is it the biblical Christ, um, a biblical view of government, biblical view of economics,

00:36:07.300 biblical view. And that saved my ministry. It revitalized everything. It brought me into

00:36:14.500 post-millennialism, theonomy, all these different things. And it brought you guys, it caused me

00:36:22.100 practically in terms of practical implications to move across the country. And it did similar

00:36:26.760 things. This testimony that I'm sharing, it did similar things with you guys and it caused you to

00:36:31.960 move. It caused you to start a company. And that's what I want to talk about now, because what you

00:36:37.120 guys are doing is it's, it's so it's exactly the same as what I'm doing and entirely different at

00:36:42.380 the same time. I'm doing like podcasting and right response ministries and preaching, but,

00:36:47.120 but what we're doing, it's entirely different. You're in the business realm, but it's 100%

00:36:51.800 the same. And the sense of that Kuyperian, all of Christ for all of life. When I got that,

00:36:57.740 I moved from California to Texas. Chris, you, you moved from, from New York to Tennessee,

00:37:03.040 New York. No, I wanted more of an adventure. New York to Seattle to Tennessee.

00:37:09.200 Oh, okay. You moved to all the blue collar, primitive Neanderthal Christians who have the

00:37:17.360 gall to believe the Bible, right? Instead of being the sophisticated, snobbish kind of,

00:37:22.440 you were like, I'm not, no, man, I've been arrogant. What am I, right? I was raised in

00:37:28.180 Texas and I thought like, no, I'm going to be sophisticated. I'm going to, you know,

00:37:32.360 And I've had to repent and be like, no, these people, some of them, sure, there's religious, you know, religiosity and self-righteousness.

00:37:41.920 Some of that, everybody's a sinner.

00:37:43.560 But a lot of it was like, no, these are the salt of the earth.

00:37:46.300 These are some really sweet people that I took for granted because I thought I was too cool for school.

00:37:52.680 David, how is this coming back to, Kuyper's good, Marx is bad.

00:37:58.520 Let's apply all of Jesus to all of life.

00:38:00.580 How has that affected you and your personal life?

00:38:03.640 And then let's talk about you guys combined with your business endeavor.

00:38:08.220 Probably less of a drastic journey for me.

00:38:12.360 Although my moment of sort of upheaval, I guess it did happen.

00:38:19.760 It just wasn't necessarily along the same lines.

00:38:22.840 It wasn't post-COVID.

00:38:23.960 It was pre-COVID. And it wasn't necessarily because of Kuiper or not Kuiper. In 2016, my wife and I moved our family from downtown Nashville, a mile from the Titans football stadium, to a 50 acre farm an hour south.

00:38:44.900 And it was the time right when she was quitting work with our church, which is a PCA church, mostly because she was having a baby.

00:38:59.340 Our third, it was time for her to quit work and her oldest was five and to be home with the kids.

00:39:05.480 And I don't know. I mean, I don't have, like I said, I don't have quite as drastic of a journey with Keller and Kuyper. Kuyper and Calvin. Kuyper's interpretation of Calvin has kind of always been on my radar.

00:39:26.760 um and i don't think i don't think it's any um fluke that we're all sort of similar ages

00:39:34.600 i think that like coming into like some i have a long way to go but coming into some bit of

00:39:41.340 maturity having a my oldest is nearly a teenager now and you know just the responsibilities my

00:39:49.620 wife and I will be married for, um, 16 years and a couple of weeks, you know, life, life has just

00:39:57.700 gotten, I've just, I'm not a boy anymore. Um, I feel like a boy in many days. Um, but I don't know,

00:40:06.740 I, is that helpful at all? Yeah. It sounds like from, from my interpretation of what you just

00:40:14.160 said is that, um, Chris and I, uh, drank the Kool-Aid maybe a little bit more than you did.

00:40:19.620 in terms of the, you know, Joel and I have more commiserating. We went through more

00:40:24.380 strengths. That's what it was. He's going to New York. I'm going to California. We're going to be

00:40:28.420 sophisticated and influential and sit at the table and, and be nuanced and winsome and

00:40:34.000 contextualize the gospel, AKA make the gospel less clear. And David was awesome. That's what

00:40:41.420 No, I did have that.

00:40:44.360 And it's every good work, man.

00:40:45.560 Exactly.

00:40:47.060 No, I did have that.

00:40:48.280 I showed my work in Manhattan in 2017.

00:40:51.560 Right, right.

00:40:52.200 Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

00:40:53.280 I went there multiple times.

00:40:55.780 I had shows there.

00:40:57.100 I went and visited my art buddies there.

00:41:00.180 And, you know, so yeah, I thought, okay, I've got the keys to the kingdom.

00:41:05.240 I'm showing in the epicenter of the art world, or at least in America.

00:41:09.280 um but i can i can work my way and and like sort of avoid this um this the world that i was in

00:41:19.700 was so pagan and the way that i was going about it was just sort of pushing aside

00:41:24.520 my personal convictions and um this work that we're doing now so i've always done portraits

00:41:32.380 um even during that time because those gallery sales didn't pay the bills like i needed them

00:41:38.240 I've always done portraits, which is beautiful because I get to depict the image of God in a human face. But this work that we're doing together is something that I did not see coming. Chris might have, but we got to chatting one afternoon at his house, and I told him about an idea to paint people doing regular things, and I want to kind of redeem the art world.

00:42:03.140 and chris was like well how do you feel about making a marketplace and like really democratizing

00:42:08.680 this thing like if you want to make it accessible if you want to paint regular people why don't we

00:42:12.460 actually be able to sell the paintings to regular people and 30 minutes later we were like already

00:42:18.820 sort of drawing up there were no napkins but the proverbial the proverbial pin to napkin moment

00:42:26.480 had happened right um in terms of the business model and what we want so with that let's do so

00:42:33.980 this is different for my listeners if you know you'll probably recognize if you've been following

00:42:37.560 right response for a while i don't typically do this but i think that this will be really special

00:42:41.400 and unique so what i actually want to do at this point is i want to actually start showing some of

00:42:46.080 the paintings that david's done from their website every good work as we continue this conversation

00:42:51.120 so we're going to pull this up and you're going to be able to see some of these paintings you're

00:42:54.960 and be able to see the quality of the craftsmanship with the paintings, but also just the website

00:42:59.180 itself, this Christian excellence in everything.

00:43:02.820 And as we do this, real quick, what I'd like to do is I'd like to have Chris and David

00:43:06.800 now actually reintroduce themselves.

00:43:09.000 So we kind of started as just normal guys in the church world, followers of Jesus, how

00:43:13.940 we've been shaped by Keller negatively, positively, how we relearn from the scripture along the

00:43:19.460 way and set some things right.

00:43:21.640 Personal testimony was kind of the first half of this episode, but now I want you to hear

00:43:26.300 the professional side of things.

00:43:28.960 I want you to actually hear Chris and David introduced in regards to this company that

00:43:34.640 they've started that's significant, that it's impacted Right Response Ministries personally,

00:43:39.420 even with our new studio and our set.

00:43:41.500 David's the guy who painted the painting that's right behind me on the wall.

00:43:44.900 So we're going to do all of that, new introductions, as you're being able to look at the website,

00:43:50.820 uh, looking at the paintings. Um, and I want you to hear because, because I want you to hear their

00:43:56.240 testimony. I want you to hear what they're doing, but I want you to be inspired. Chris and David

00:44:00.500 are inspiring. Um, I want you to hear the inspiration because, um, they've got a good

00:44:05.920 work that they're doing, but the Lord has prepared in advance a good work for you to do. And it's

00:44:11.560 not just the good works of putting sin to death. Yes. And amen. And sanctification, but good works

00:44:16.620 in business, good works in arts, good works in the home, good works in every realm of life. So

00:44:22.360 Chris and David, would you guys just take a moment and, and, and read for our listeners, your bios?

00:44:27.820 Okay. So yeah, I'm, uh, as Joel has said, I'm David McLeod. I'm an artist. I grew up drawing

00:44:33.860 and painting. It wasn't until I studied with a portrait painter for a kind of an old world

00:44:40.900 classical style apprenticeship for four years while I was also a college student that I got

00:44:46.740 the passion and realized this is something that I wanted to do so I've just been an artist ever

00:44:52.060 since mostly painting portraits but doing other things as well and like I said I'm Chris and

00:45:00.720 with David we founded every good work which we're excited to reveal this painting here shortly

00:45:05.880 um i think that the the biggest difference is on post mill uh covenantal um really focused on

00:45:15.000 building the kingdom from the bottom up outside of the walls of the church outside of the walls

00:45:19.520 of the family of course those are priorities but i think i think we can talk about sort of how

00:45:24.320 every good workly synergizes with with that change um and then yeah like i said before

00:45:30.900 worked on wall street for a few years that's where i cut my teeth in the media and entertainment

00:45:35.280 in space back in 2007 which was an interesting time for all of us and then from there decided

00:45:42.880 to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to build businesses from scratch and so joined a small

00:45:48.800 startup we raised you know a pretty significant round of venture capital we scaled the business

00:45:56.640 and we sold it for you know a little over a couple hundred million dollars to a publicly

00:46:00.720 traded competitor. From there, joined a public technology company and was very much introduced to

00:46:08.080 how public company woke culture works. I'm a master at that now. And then the Lord did his

00:46:18.820 work around that same period of time. And it's been three years of repenting, three years of

00:46:23.160 reforming, three years of God's goodness over David's life, over my life and bringing us

00:46:28.360 together i believe the spirit's doing a wonderful work in a specific area in tennessee um which you

00:46:34.640 know that's a whole different topic uh but ultimately you know we're here to build we're

00:46:39.540 here to make a difference we believe that jesus christ is lord and he's lord over art yes he's

00:46:46.060 lord over business he's lord over art amen so we just revamped our whole studio which is kind of

00:46:54.760 cool because i met you guys really around the same time that i was thinking about you know making

00:47:00.880 these changes revamping the studio um which a lot of that here's here's one of the things that i

00:47:06.280 think christians get wrong and one of the hesitancies for other christians because so

00:47:11.480 many christians do get it wrong um there's a hesitancy to pursue christian excellence in

00:47:17.260 every realm of life because people will say it's vain they'll say it's frivolous they'll say what

00:47:22.500 why not you know it should just be the gospel it's just the content or it's just the you know

00:47:26.720 it's just the message it's just the truth it's just just give me the doctrine and and give it

00:47:31.440 to me from a webcam on your computer um don't spend a dime don't don't do anything for it to

00:47:38.100 be you know aesthetically excellent and i don't do anything and and i just reject that because a lot

00:47:45.000 of the message that i'm trying to convey to my listeners is not that everyone should um should

00:47:51.560 should quit their job and become Christian podcasters and not that everyone should,

00:47:56.540 should quit their job and, and go to seminary and become pastors.

00:48:01.120 That one of the big theological messages that I'm trying to convey with right response

00:48:07.320 ministries, theology applied, right?

00:48:09.660 The show that we're doing right now, that's our flagship show.

00:48:12.360 Theology applied to what, right?

00:48:14.640 Applied to every realm of life.

00:48:16.340 So a lot of what I'm trying to accomplish is I'm not trying to get a bunch of people

00:48:20.800 to decide to be pastors or to decide to be christian podcasters but to be christians in

00:48:26.520 every realm of life and because that's that that all of life all of christ for all of life

00:48:32.120 kyperian post-millennial theonomic restoring chrysidom that's the big banner would be chrysidom

00:48:37.680 chrysidom 2.0 and because that's really the mission of right response ministries and that's

00:48:42.840 the message i'm conveying i realized that it was almost hypocritical and in at least at minimum

00:48:47.840 maybe not hypocritical, maybe not malice of intent in my heart, but at least at minimum

00:48:53.360 inconsistent and contradictory and confusing to the listener and in the ministry and the message

00:49:00.420 that I was trying to convey to say Christian excellence in all of life and to do it with a

00:49:05.580 blank white wall behind me and a webcam. And so we were like, man, we want to do a studio and I

00:49:13.160 want it to look like professor xavier meets the apostle paul slash you know whatever i want it to

00:49:19.620 be like ligonier except i'm not as as smart as sprawl and that you know and everybody knows that

00:49:24.400 that's fair um but but you know but presuppositional so better apologetic but i want it to be like you

00:49:30.100 know that's but that's the style now with that leading to you guys i thought um i can't have

00:49:37.160 a piece of wood hanging that says there's no place like home or you know you know what i mean

00:49:43.740 like i can't go to um i can't go to uh to hobby lobby right uh no offense to deck this this studio

00:49:52.500 out to achieve what i'm trying to convey to everyone else and and so then it's like well

00:49:59.660 i don't i don't even know anything about art and i don't i don't know a painter yeah and then god's

00:50:06.640 happy you know favorable providence you know god sent you guys and you found me and i was like yeah

00:50:12.960 i'll partner with you guys because this is exactly what i'm trying and so all that being said like

00:50:18.220 as we're pursuing excellence in all of life and applying all of christ to all of life

00:50:22.600 um part of that has to do with with art and um and part of that has to do with good art

00:50:30.760 talk about that guys yeah so totally agree um if christians aren't going to be making good things

00:50:40.900 and buying good things then there aren't going to be people making good things that christians like

00:50:48.280 like if we want to if we want for there to be better things that glorify and honor god

00:50:56.220 then we need to be spending our money on good things yeah period we need to be hiring crafts

00:51:03.460 people and looking up i mean it's fine to look up where your clothes came from and where the

00:51:08.200 furniture came from and trying to orient all of our purchases around something that is god honoring

00:51:13.640 absolutely and if we just hold our pennies and save them um the world is just going to care

00:51:21.080 keep keep going it's just going to keep building it's just going to keep uh building up its own

00:51:27.460 idols christians especially now i think we've sort of come out of the haze of the last 50 years

00:51:35.780 really since post post enlightenment this has kind of been coming and that if we don't have

00:51:40.880 an alternative a better story to tell we're just going to keep finding bad stories all over the

00:51:47.760 place it's not okay just to you know turn off your netflix or cancel disney plus what are you

00:51:56.060 going to read what are you going to watch what are you going to consume this is where what are

00:52:00.860 you going to create what are you going to create and the creation is it's everywhere because we

00:52:04.700 are made in god's image we are sub creators we're going to be making things no matter what and we're

00:52:10.100 going to be consuming things no matter what which we we have a small slice of that sub creator

00:52:16.480 world and our company every good work intends to make art that is accessible to everyday people

00:52:24.860 not just paintings and drawings but also in other fields as well as the business continues to grow

00:52:31.260 yeah chris would you yeah yeah i was just gonna say i mean that's what very well put um i think

00:52:37.900 for us like we forget god is the best storyteller right david already pointed out stories i think

00:52:43.360 that was really captivating to us like god is god is an artist god is god creates god god is a

00:52:50.820 storyteller and going back to kuiper and kind of recovering the wells of abraham or you know

00:52:56.540 calvinism i think for us we've been awakened to this idea of the sovereignty of god like the

00:53:02.220 sovereignty of god and the very holy spirit that resurrected a dead body like we live in a story

00:53:07.180 in which there's the tomb has is empty like how does that not completely undo every every

00:53:15.400 conventional line of thinking every sense you know how does that not undo or or cause you to

00:53:21.520 repent from laziness or cause you to somehow think life is boring um god god has done something

00:53:29.940 magical you could almost say and so we believe that our task as christians is to tell the best

00:53:37.160 stories and praise God that, um, you know, I'm out of the, out of sort of the world of

00:53:44.500 the best story that only I can tell is the upper level story, right?

00:53:49.720 As Joe put Joe boot on your, on your show, um, praise God that I don't have to be a community

00:53:56.060 group leader in order for me to tell a better story, praise God.

00:54:00.760 I don't have to be a part of the elder pastoral training program and the next discipleship

00:54:07.160 the next 90-day discipleship plan from the pastor.

00:54:10.620 Praise God.

00:54:11.200 I don't have to do that to tell the best story.

00:54:13.200 Praise God that really we can build businesses

00:54:15.900 and we can tell better stories through better art.

00:54:19.600 And so every good work, go ahead, Joel.

00:54:22.360 Were you going to say something?

00:54:23.120 No, I was just agreeing.

00:54:24.380 But if you give me a chance to talk, I'll never turn you down.

00:54:28.980 But as I was listening to both of you guys,

00:54:32.900 David, I love what you were saying.

00:54:34.500 You can't just cancel your Netflix.

00:54:35.620 it's not enough to just cancel your Disney Plus

00:54:37.600 it's not enough to just say I'm not going to give my pennies

00:54:40.060 to people who hate me

00:54:41.500 and who hate Christ

00:54:42.680 you're going to

00:54:44.720 well this is a rush duty sentiment

00:54:46.900 it's not whether but which

00:54:48.560 you're going to spend your money

00:54:50.120 you're going to

00:54:51.260 even if you save it in your coffer

00:54:53.700 until the day you die

00:54:54.960 even then you're going to get the death tax

00:54:57.780 depending on what state you live in

00:54:59.120 then your pennies

00:55:01.800 they don't go to Disney

00:55:02.640 they go to the government

00:55:05.060 that's right so my my point is what what i hear you saying is it's not enough to boycott and i

00:55:09.740 kept thinking this is the way to phrase it as you were talking um christians can't only boycott

00:55:14.300 christians have to build it's not just boycott but boycott and build um and and really if you

00:55:21.540 i've talked about this in the past but it's kind of like you know five b's um and and christians

00:55:26.480 and conservatives sadly have only done four of them and always left left out the fifth one which

00:55:31.940 is built um the first b is is vitally important and christians are experts i mean just phenomenally

00:55:38.080 successful at um and that first b is getting beat um so christians are great at that get beat right

00:55:43.620 following christ's example right he's the suffering servant like a lamb led to the slaughter right so

00:55:48.620 first it's vitally important you can't miss the first step you must get beat john mccarthur has

00:55:53.460 great notes on that we don't win down here um so get beat all right uh number two is uh once you

00:55:59.780 get beat, bemoan, right? And that's the Christian version of the B word. There's another B word

00:56:04.880 that you could put in there, but get beat, bemoan, right? So whine, complain, complain about getting

00:56:12.180 beat. And then the third one is get beat, bemoan, and then boycott. And that's what you were talking

00:56:18.300 about, David. And that is actually something we should do. So these first two, we actually

00:56:21.880 shouldn't do. We shouldn't get beat and we shouldn't bemoan, but we should boycott wickedness.

00:56:26.980 Uh, we, we should not give our dollars, our time, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our

00:56:31.840 children, uh, to, to, uh, wickedness.

00:56:35.120 Um, so boycott.

00:56:36.300 Then the fourth one is, you know, and this is again, what Christians have done wrong,

00:56:40.200 get beat, bemoan, boycott, and then beg.

00:56:44.160 Um, which typically means a nonprofit and not, there's nothing inherently wrong with

00:56:48.980 this right response ministries.

00:56:50.660 It's a religious organization.

00:56:52.820 It's raises awareness, teaches theology.

00:56:55.400 It is a nonprofit.

00:56:56.380 So there's, I'm not saying that this is inherently wrong, but what I'm saying is, is that I think

00:57:00.640 that if anybody has any ambition at all, and they're a Christian, 90% of Christians with

00:57:06.480 ambition go the nonprofit route.

00:57:08.380 Um, and, and, and so that fourth B is beg.

00:57:11.320 So get beat, bemoan, uh, boycott, and then beg for donations, um, instead of build and,

00:57:19.560 and and and know that people even if they hate you will buy um because because you can hate

00:57:27.620 chick-fil-a because you're a sodomite um but by golly it's a good chicken sandwich that's right

00:57:33.600 and you and your gay partner are going to be eating chick-fil-a not on sunday right not on

00:57:39.380 sunday sabbatarian you know but you are gonna you're gonna eat chick-fil-a whether you like

00:57:43.880 it or not um and consider we do the same thing right so i'm gonna cancel netflix but i've got

00:57:48.300 amazon you know like i mean so anyways that's all i was thinking the whole time you guys were

00:57:52.820 talking is not enough to boycott david nailed it we've got to build we've got to build and it is

00:57:58.520 okay it's not only okay i would say it is imperative that christians build for profit

00:58:05.320 enterprises in the realm of business in the realm of art that is not a sinful endeavor that is a

00:58:12.460 righteous good endeavor what makes it sinful is when you produce a product that's lousy

00:58:17.860 And it rips people off.

00:58:19.420 Making good things to be sold for ethical prices, it pleases the heart of God.

00:58:26.120 And I think, how can we not, like, dead men become new creations, and all of a sudden, by the sovereign spirit of God, we're created to actually worship God again.

00:58:38.220 And we worship God with our total self, our total humanity.

00:58:43.580 And a third of our life is committed towards work.

00:58:47.200 how how could we not as an act of adoration act of worship to this glorious father son and holy

00:58:55.720 spirit where christ is lord overall how can we not see um coding as an act of worship right

00:59:04.520 imagine just imagine if the church would just awaken or you know we kind of we use this term

00:59:10.940 where the church it's almost like every good work exists to break spells the church is under a spell

00:59:18.340 and it's it's living a half-life because of radical two kingdom and forfeiting better stories

00:59:26.700 that god has actually given our generation an opportunity to make make our mark for the king

00:59:33.840 yeah right and and so in many ways we don't jokingly say we mean it seriously that a painting

00:59:40.040 might actually if it could just wake up one person to a better story the story of what it

00:59:46.480 means to be truly christian all the way then we've served our purpose yeah and and so yeah with fine

00:59:54.580 art we want to reclaim art but we want to make it available for everyday people again yeah because

01:00:00.200 art is such a strategic channel um it's such a strategic place because where art goes david can

01:00:08.840 attest to it obviously there goes the culture they're just 10 years ahead right when you're

01:00:14.320 in new york city and williamsburg right you just see what's going on there you'll see that

01:00:20.620 normalize a decade later yep and so for us if we were radical to kingdom about it we would

01:00:28.020 abdicate our role right as an artist or as a business person and and unfortunately we would

01:00:36.040 be so undereducated i would be and i and i'm still learning because of help from the likes of david

01:00:42.140 um we would almost be discipled into actually thinking that um a banana with duct tape tied to

01:00:50.760 it is actually worth me paying 99 bucks to watch to look at and right like like not only is it

01:00:58.160 discipling us um but it's discipling us to be anti-christ yeah right we're actually choosing

01:01:05.540 to accept a story that's based off of evil wickedness and godliness and we're choosing to

01:01:12.820 like you said you'll syncretize with the false god yeah right because art of course is driven

01:01:18.080 by worldview and so if christian artists like david has been consistently doing for his his

01:01:23.540 career if it's an act of worship to god we can't help but want wanted to make it excellent

01:01:31.260 but at the same time it's going to show something about who christ is and we know that the perfection

01:01:39.500 of beauty is in christ and so if we can just awaken a renaissance almost a create a renaissance

01:01:45.760 an emerging class of artists who are willing to be unashamedly christian through and through in

01:01:51.600 their art and be inspired by christ in what they do and create works of beauty works of art then

01:01:58.640 our hope is that we become a platform

01:02:00.920 in which

01:02:02.680 we can create a parallel path

01:02:04.960 and we can create an avenue in which better

01:02:07.020 stories are being told.

01:02:08.840 Every Good Work, in a nutshell, we're an e-commerce

01:02:10.960 marketplace for buyers and sellers

01:02:13.000 of fine art originals

01:02:15.120 and exclusive

01:02:16.960 limited prints on canvas.

01:02:19.420 Can I speak to that?

01:02:20.720 Please, go ahead.

01:02:22.120 The print technology is phenomenal.

01:02:25.400 We have access to a

01:02:27.020 scanner that takes works of art that I think they can do um five and a half feet by eight feet or

01:02:34.140 something like that uh hopefully we can do a painting that size and then um it scans it with

01:02:41.160 the same machine that is used by the Smithsonian to scan any image you see online um in print

01:02:49.520 material that the Smithsonian uses the same exact scanner it's a seven figure scanner

01:02:55.500 so we have access to that machine and then it's printed using a printing technology called

01:03:04.380 a gicle which is it's not it's different from a print on canvas that you just order

01:03:10.300 online a family photo on canvas the archival quality is the biggest difference and the

01:03:17.580 quality of the printing so it's using pigment based inks instead of dye based inks these prints

01:03:24.620 that look identical to the original so we have the original behind us here and joel has a print

01:03:32.140 behind right there right behind very hard to tell apart until you get really close

01:03:37.020 and they're also guaranteed for 100 years so we wanted to make something that is significantly

01:03:44.220 less of a price from the original but also is still an heirloom something that we could pass on

01:03:52.860 you could pass on to your grandkids, your great grandkids, potentially five, six, seven,

01:03:59.300 eight generations from now could own these same works of art.

01:04:03.340 And what is the name of this one, David?

01:04:06.080 What did you name this painting?

01:04:07.640 Well, I'm terrible at naming my paintings.

01:04:11.200 I occasionally, I occasionally strike gold, but for this one, I believe it was Chris who

01:04:17.380 actually gave the name, The Conquering King.

01:04:20.920 The Conquering King.

01:04:22.100 Yeah.

01:04:22.340 so it's it's an allegorical painting and go ahead and then i'll keep going no no go ahead

01:04:29.020 it's an allegorical painting go yeah it's an allegorical painting there's two figures um

01:04:34.840 they're the heroes it's fun because while i was painting this my two and a half year old son

01:04:40.220 would come into the studio and would continually point and say good guys

01:04:46.660 good guys um so joel wanted a painting that depicted light and dark he wanted a painting

01:04:56.420 that depicted war victory struggle we collaborated with joel that's kind of one of the cool parts of

01:05:04.520 this actually that see that's what i was going to say yeah because i want you to talk about the

01:05:08.800 painting you're the artist and you're on the show i want but what was so cool to me about this model

01:05:15.020 is like okay first like because of having access to a seven figure and david just said that just

01:05:20.640 for anybody who you know just to spell that out what that means is this is a piece of machinery

01:05:24.420 that is in the millions that's so this is not just like um a cheap knockoff print this is something

01:05:30.620 when david says it's really hard to tell the difference he means that um i i personally could

01:05:34.940 be a foot and a half away from both of them and probably wouldn't be able to see the difference

01:05:38.200 someone trained uh very highly trained in the realm of painting and arts and texture would have

01:05:44.180 to be very close for them to even be able to tell the difference. So one, what's really cool about

01:05:48.480 the model is being able to take high quality works of art that should cost thousands of dollars,

01:05:54.460 10 grand, you know, maybe more, maybe less, give or take, you know, given the size, the time,

01:05:59.200 you know, all those things, but be able to put them in the hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds

01:06:03.760 of dollars to where your average blue collar family could say, okay, we may not be able to

01:06:10.240 have a painting on every wall of our house but we could have one or two we you know instead of

01:06:15.000 instead of the hobby lobby you know instead of like a bunny you know that that's uh chewing on

01:06:19.440 a piece of grass you know and made out of twisted iron you know whatever like that you get at the

01:06:23.720 um the the big what's the name of that store big that sounds like the big it's uh perfect big

01:06:29.380 something i can't remember the name of the store but you know whatever instead of those kinds of

01:06:32.900 things like we're gonna have so it's it's um incredibly high quality art at a reasonable price

01:06:39.540 But then what was so cool is that that's one piece of the puzzle.

01:06:42.560 The other piece of the puzzle with your model that I love is that Chris and David are actually

01:06:47.400 seeking out like-minded pastors and theologians.

01:06:52.660 And so they're actually, instead of just, we're going to do this.

01:06:55.600 And this is actually humble too.

01:06:57.500 And this is one of the, you know, this kind of proof that David is a Christian artist.

01:07:02.560 Because I don't imagine most secular pagan artists would be willing to do this.

01:07:07.060 um, but David is saying, okay, I'm the artist. He knows, he knows that he's the artist and I'm not,

01:07:11.520 I don't have this kind of skill, but he's saying, I'm going to collaborate with Joel

01:07:15.080 and I'm going to hear his ideas. And I, and I, and he's not going to know what he's talking about

01:07:19.080 at certain points along, along the journey. But what was cool was that me and David got to work

01:07:23.840 together and it wasn't, it wasn't a lot, but a few text messages or a 15 minute phone call here or

01:07:29.280 there about once a week for about a month throughout the whole painting process to where,

01:07:35.480 um, I can't paint, but, but David can. And I was able to say, this is my vision of what I see

01:07:42.260 theologically as, as, um, as the, as the cultural moment that the church is living in right now.

01:07:50.240 And I want to capture it, not just in a podcast and not just in a sermon that has to happen,

01:07:55.520 but I want to capture it on a canvas where you can not just hear it, but you could see it

01:08:00.900 and be moved and and david was able to help me do that and not just do it for me personally

01:08:06.620 but he was able to collaborate with me so you've got the i'm providing the theological vision right

01:08:12.340 and david's providing the artistic vision um and then and then this model that chris has brought

01:08:19.140 in with the business piece means that um not just uh a guy who you know has a podcast that thousands

01:08:24.880 of people listen to and you know it's a little bit not a lot but a little bit of clout a little

01:08:28.660 bit of credibility and a little bit of a budget you know he can afford a painting on his wall and

01:08:32.920 his fancy you know professor xavier studio no but like chris comes in with the business piece

01:08:37.620 and you get to take joel's theology david's artistic gift and chris's business mind and now

01:08:45.480 you can have the conquering king in your house and when people come over you can say yeah this

01:08:51.540 this means something and this will last not not for 10 months but lord willing 100 years and i'm

01:08:56.920 going to give it to my kids they're going to give it to their kids um that's that's beautiful and

01:09:02.180 without that then again it's just the the it's just the the independent fundamentalism bunker

01:09:08.180 that we're just you know we're just on the sinking ship and let's just you know do another

01:09:13.980 do another podcast on lauren daigle and why she's a heretic you know and well um but but the world

01:09:19.620 gets to keep everything that you can see that's right they they get they get that i think that

01:09:23.900 Christians have gotten very comfortable with books and podcasts and filling our mind with things

01:09:29.980 that we don't know what to do with our walls. We don't know what to do with our clothes. We don't

01:09:35.160 know what to do with our movies. We don't know. We don't know what to do with a lot of our activity.

01:09:40.600 What should our Sundays look like? What should our shopping look like? What should our food look

01:09:44.940 like? We're exploring all of these things. And it really is amazing to, you said it so well,

01:09:52.140 Joel, that the three of us could kind of use our different gifts and collaborate on something

01:09:56.840 that provides, hopefully other people will like this and will respond positively to it.

01:10:03.480 And then we can keep, we can do it again. You know, one of the things that keeps sticking

01:10:09.320 out to me is we're three guys sitting around talking about art and theology. Now it's pretty

01:10:15.880 common for guys to sit around talking about theology nowadays, at least in the circles

01:10:19.380 that i'm familiar with but forgot for us to talk about how that applies to art is very it's unique

01:10:25.960 and and early on in our conversations one of the things that chris harped on before we even

01:10:32.540 chatted with you first joel was i want to make art for i want to make it masculine again

01:10:37.600 i want i want art that men want to buy um because a lot of the decisions in art and in the home

01:10:46.520 are made by women that it makes sense that it would but we want to we want to tap into that

01:10:52.720 part of a man that um is looking for the battle that really is there and not to be told just to

01:11:01.020 go sit back down on this on the bleachers but actually to engage the culture wherever he is

01:11:07.460 yeah we forget that men we're called to fight but as men were called to look to know how to feast

01:11:14.280 right because that because our lord does that perfectly and so we we really want that's what's

01:11:20.600 amazing about being word driven i think right having you joel is sort of the foundation by which

01:11:26.300 david could kind of have a biblical grid and a biblical imagination you know that's something

01:11:32.280 that we would love i think that's how reformation works right artists and farmers they just go to

01:11:38.880 the script and all of a sudden it changes the way in which they do their work and so having that was

01:11:45.260 a really really powerful thing for me to see like seeing it come alive yeah um but yeah ultimately

01:11:51.740 for us like we we believe that men should know what beauty tastes like men should know what

01:11:58.640 beauty looks like right that's that's what it means to be a masculine man and so and so for us

01:12:05.020 this conquering king really really really was a special thing for us um but then ultimately

01:12:11.620 you know what we care about like what David was pointing out is because we're post-mill

01:12:17.140 and because we're covenantal fine art makes so much sense to us yeah you know what I'm saying

01:12:24.980 like like the world is inundating us with inglorious unrighteous images and

01:12:34.520 they're saying look at this on the computer screen look at this on the

01:12:38.000 television screen look at this in the next art gallery and have to have to

01:12:43.220 deal with the fact that this piece of art is supposed to be worth 20 million

01:12:48.920 dollars right right even even and then the average person just going that

01:12:53.960 doesn't make any sense that's right so what happens is our appetite for understanding for art

01:13:01.000 goes very to kingdom we just go into this little hole where everything art is bad because everything

01:13:09.080 that art in the world right now kind of is bad they've taken over this amazing institution that

01:13:15.800 was largely created by christians who seek to honor god and if the best thing that we've got

01:13:21.160 and there's nothing to say i mean from what i know the the ceo of hobby lobby is a brother in

01:13:26.360 the lord and seems to be a man who who's on fire for for him and praise god for that but to your

01:13:32.520 point joel like if the best that christians have is a bible verse that's on a quilt in a very

01:13:40.520 sentimentally way then something is wrong the church is under under a spell could have been

01:13:47.400 made by in a sweatshop for i mean hopefully not right we have no idea how these things were made

01:13:53.160 but and and so how can you be post mill if the best you've got is blessed in cursive

01:14:02.440 how can you how can you deal with how can you deal with all the screens all the unrighteous images

01:14:08.660 that are on your children right that they see on social media that they see on whatever and

01:14:15.680 that's considered glorious that's considered beautiful that's considered righteous

01:14:19.760 well this is for us a faith experiment you know it's a mustard seed it's a startup but ultimately

01:14:28.180 what we want to do is we want to inundate every wall for christ yeah right our mission is that

01:14:34.000 the real mission behind this is we want to reclaim every wall because just like you said christ

01:14:40.620 everywhere everything is mine and so your wall is his so is your television screen whatever your

01:14:47.040 magazine cover shows it's either going to be christ or it's not going to be it's either going

01:14:51.580 to be beautiful or it's going to be ugly and what a what a white space opportunity we've got i think

01:14:57.180 david and i were shocked yeah we're like how how where where are where's the competition you know

01:15:03.340 i'm kind of nervous joel that you have a decent followership you know but but i think you know

01:15:09.520 We really believe that this is our post-mill response.

01:15:14.400 This is our faith in action, and we pray that God will bless it.

01:15:17.980 Yeah, and going back to the start of the episode, I think you made a good point to begin with.

01:15:27.780 Tim Keller, with his Every Good Endeavor, the Kuyperian sentiment, the Kuyperian mindset is there and is good.

01:15:37.920 that was good yeah yeah he was on to something you know we didn't actually name the company

01:15:44.100 every good work after that but coincidentally it's the same idea right and and not only art

01:15:51.640 but like you go through the scriptures and you look at the word work and where god uses work

01:15:56.240 and workmanship we are we are his artwork that's right our whole lives sort of become a work of

01:16:02.580 art Schaefer talks about that um in one of his books so yeah I I love Chris what you said it's

01:16:10.500 it's per it's a perfect time I think for this because people are starting to look other places

01:16:16.060 and right um do you guys remember this is a little bit random but do you remember David

01:16:22.700 and and Chris the little three minute video and this was years ago but I remember seeing it

01:16:28.640 And I thought, whoa, and this is when I was still in Acts 29, but it was from Keller and it was about how they were going to take over New York and saying right now, statistically, it's like 3% Christian, but we believe if we could get to 10%, it would be a tipping point.

01:16:43.400 But the whole thing was this Kuyperian, all of Christ for all of life thing.

01:16:47.440 He said art would become 10%, that much salt concentrated in one area.

01:16:52.820 It would affect everything.

01:16:54.580 It wouldn't just mean more churches.

01:16:56.640 It wouldn't just mean more churches.

01:16:57.780 um art would become more hopeful i remember that line that that phrase right there art would become

01:17:03.480 more hopeful this would become like um business would become more ethical um medicine would become

01:17:09.000 more compassionate um you know all these and and i remember watching more just yeah amen exactly so

01:17:16.700 i remember watching that and and and sadly you know it's so ironic i'm remembering that video

01:17:23.140 and now with the latest and greatest you know 2.0 update from keller is the keller institute

01:17:30.100 and i don't know if you guys have noticed but it's it's tragic because it really is kind of um

01:17:34.680 it's it's a it's basically a concession that like um that didn't work we we we failed because now

01:17:41.420 the keller institute is an acknowledgement um that we're in a negative world now we're in a

01:17:46.200 hostile world. Christendom is on decline. We're not going to win, at least not anytime soon.

01:17:54.420 And so we just need to learn how to live in a world that's owned by the enemy,

01:18:00.420 where we're the minority. And we've been preached to give away.

01:18:06.780 Exactly. Exactly. And we need to learn how to live in this hostile world where we're the minority,

01:18:12.760 where we lost, uh, basically how to live in Babylon when, when, when Israel gets taken

01:18:17.740 captive.

01:18:18.480 Um, and, and what that means is with the Keller Institute is we're going to focus on apologetics

01:18:24.080 because we want to make it, you know, we don't, we don't want to just surrender.

01:18:26.520 We want to go down with a fight, but we are the ones who are conquered.

01:18:31.460 They are the conquerors.

01:18:32.660 They are stronger.

01:18:33.420 And so we're going to be doing careful apologetics.

01:18:37.180 And so we're at the Keller Institute is going to train you how to be apologists in a negative

01:18:41.320 world which we both all three of us know what that means is how to be even more you thought

01:18:45.920 we were winsome before you've seen nothing yet we're going to be even more winsome even more

01:18:50.960 contextualizing even more ambiguous even more stephen colbert you know um as an example of

01:18:57.280 great christian witness um and and it was just so sad because it was like the keller institute

01:19:02.000 is is kind of like the the uh the answer to that little three minute video and and that

01:19:08.240 you know endeavor from you know 10 years ago whenever it was and that not working out and i

01:19:13.920 and i see that and i just again i you know you guys are more in the presbyterian world and i have

01:19:18.620 at this point probably more presbyterian friends than baptists but i am still 1689 and i have some

01:19:23.540 baptist you know relationships and and networking and my baptist friends especially don't get

01:19:30.760 kuiper they don't get abraham kuiper and and they look at like keller tried to do this thing they

01:19:35.440 remember that video that i'm referencing um and they look at that and they say and now look at

01:19:40.040 keller and the keller institute the keller institute is the fruit of that and whereas i

01:19:44.080 want to say no the keller institute um is is the um it's the response to that failing um it's not

01:19:51.760 the fruit of that it's the failure of that not working and the reason why that didn't work

01:19:56.620 in my assessment a couple reasons why but one is because uh the all of life piece was not the

01:20:02.320 problem but it was the lack of all of christ it was compromising christ and number two um it was

01:20:07.980 also missing um the art of war um of of just warfare just war theory but also successful

01:20:18.200 war strategy um the decisive point finding a place that's both significant but also

01:20:25.080 winnable um keller went to a place that was significant um but he is right in the sense that

01:20:31.260 Manhattan's not going

01:20:34.160 we're post-mill Manhattan is going to bow to

01:20:36.380 Christ but probably

01:20:38.400 not in the next couple

01:20:40.280 years. And what did you say Joel

01:20:42.240 like and this

01:20:44.240 does line in with what you're saying

01:20:46.340 and I think every good work

01:20:47.660 I think what Keller was up to

01:20:50.420 yeah being Kuyperian being Marxist

01:20:52.280 I mean fail that's number

01:20:54.380 one but also it seemed like

01:20:56.340 it was all about the

01:20:58.300 world. It was always

01:21:00.380 about for the world as opposed to for the glory of god yeah you know the good of all about the

01:21:08.300 good of people more than it's all about evangelizing the lost it was always about being winsome for

01:21:15.100 anything anyone but right but i would say it's almost like um christ was not lord jesus was not

01:21:25.440 lord to your point about just war because jesus is lord we say just war right because it's all

01:21:32.460 about the glory of god we're able to say these controversial things that might you know raise a

01:21:38.640 hair and brother don't be too where's your winsomeness certificate you know that you earned

01:21:44.060 it through the keller institute i i really do believe that if it wasn't about worship

01:21:49.320 yeah it was about it was about you know i'm saying it was it wasn't about that

01:21:54.020 christianity instead of objective christianity yeah it was it wasn't like um westminster

01:21:57.820 catechism question number one what's the whole point exactly the chief end exactly like everything

01:22:02.420 god does he does for his glory and for the good of those who love him are called to according to

01:22:06.260 his purpose yes but it's both of those and and i think yeah you can you can emphasize one or the

01:22:11.960 other you can say everything god does is for his glory and the world's going to go to hell in a

01:22:15.980 handbasket you know and anybody who's post mill is just shining brass on the sinking ship right

01:22:20.040 So that's like glory of God, but not good of, of his image bearing people, or you can

01:22:24.360 go image bearing people.

01:22:25.800 They're good, but not glory of God.

01:22:27.240 And it's got it.

01:22:28.160 The two have to stay together.

01:22:29.580 Yeah.

01:22:29.880 Yeah.

01:22:30.520 Yeah.

01:22:30.780 And also taking a longer look at it.

01:22:35.600 We as Americans, especially just want to look at every decade is just every generation

01:22:41.420 that Jesus is coming.

01:22:42.680 Now we're also every, we're special.

01:22:44.860 We're the special ones.

01:22:45.720 and to not look at the future of Christendom to be potentially thousands of years before Jesus

01:22:53.200 returns. I mean, it could be that our grandkids are running every good work and it's finally

01:23:01.060 making an impact. I don't know. It's got to do something in order to maintain a functioning

01:23:08.240 business model between now and then. But I don't want to be arrogant to say that God's going to do

01:23:14.620 something amazing but i also don't want to be falsely humble and pretend like god doesn't want

01:23:20.600 to bless work that is honoring to his name yeah i think i think for us like even with the whole

01:23:25.760 worship to the glory of god like our thesis is if if by faith we do this to the glory of god

01:23:33.060 and then then one of the byproducts is it becomes a blessing to the world whether or not the world

01:23:40.300 wants it or not. And I think what's missing is when you're focused so much on the world,

01:23:46.340 and that's what it's all about. And it's about sharing the gospel to the lost so that you

01:23:51.840 actually compromise your entire Lord's Day service, right? Where a pastor, a megachurch

01:23:59.360 pastor, like an Andy Stanley, can tell you, look you in the eye, look the sheep in the eyes and say,

01:24:05.820 church isn't for you church isn't for believers right church if you're if you're thinking about

01:24:12.460 that then you have the wrong idea of why you're here yeah right there's just this obsession with

01:24:18.820 wanting to win the loss that's not the end goal the goal is the glory of god to delight in him

01:24:24.980 and as we worship him yeah everything falls into place yeah we're gonna what good is a man

01:24:31.440 to gain the world that's right we're gonna love yeah so this is this is an

01:24:36.120 act of love just as much as it is an active act of worship and and our hope

01:24:40.980 is that this what this displays actually will be a blessing you know that that

01:24:47.760 there will be pagans who say I don't I don't like Christ I don't I don't

01:24:52.920 understand the Bible verse but but that story really resonates with me and I and

01:24:59.760 i don't know what to say other than it's gonna fit on my wall and then or christians put it on

01:25:06.400 their wall and maybe mom or dad explain it to their kids a couple times and it just goes in

01:25:12.120 one ear out the other they come home in 20 years and they realize in a moment of sanity that this

01:25:20.480 this painting or one like it has been has been catechizing them day after day after day after

01:25:28.720 day into the very things that the first i remember joel very distinctly you wanted

01:25:36.680 first corinthians 15 25 for he shall reign until he makes an enemy his all of his enemies are under

01:25:45.660 his feet right and romans 12 2 that we would be able to test we would discern what is before us

01:25:56.880 You wanted to see a clear light and dark that a man can see what is good, that a man can see what is bad, and that we would also understand that Jesus is reigning and ruling.

01:26:11.220 He is in dominion right now, and he is going to put all of his enemies under his feet, and he's called us to be a part of that story.

01:26:19.680 there's going to be kids that see that and have no idea what that story means because they're

01:26:24.320 children but they're good their imaginations potentially are stirred up by the imagery of the

01:26:29.900 of the demons in the background and their imaginations are stirred up by my like my two

01:26:33.940 and a half year old who just wants to turn the corner and see the good guy standing there who

01:26:38.580 just looks so powerful so serene but yet so ready to fight that image those images that feeling

01:26:47.800 that does something especially on a daily basis for the course of years that we're hoping

01:26:53.620 that we're going to bring we're going to bring up people and and call other christians into

01:26:58.640 similar works where we're just surrounded by good things we can't look around and not see

01:27:06.420 christians doing good things it's happening all over the podcast world it's happening all over

01:27:11.940 the publishing world we want to see it happen in the art world yeah amen could i real quick

01:27:18.740 no go ahead go ahead well i was going to take a minute to describe the elements in the painting

01:27:24.440 but i want to yeah that's what that's exactly what i was going to do but go ahead you don't

01:27:28.340 know i want i want to hear you i want to hear your take on it because i can give the theological

01:27:32.460 side yeah go for it and then maybe yeah so like like david said you know uh looking at first

01:27:38.180 corinthians 15 for he must reign until he has made all his enemies a footstool for his feet

01:27:45.020 and and so that's actually in the painting there's um there's like a monument like a

01:27:50.840 pillow like an ebenezer being raised and you see that in kind of the bottom right hand corner

01:27:55.680 and etched in you know stone you find engraved those words and so the the verse is actually

01:28:01.800 spelled out with a reference first Corinthians 15, 20, it's 25. Is that right? And so you've

01:28:08.320 got that in the bottom corner. But then the two heroes, the figures, what I wanted David to do

01:28:13.560 is like, I wanted to see a Christ figure reigning. So not Christ himself. So it's not, it's not a

01:28:19.080 second commandment violation. It's not, you know, this isn't Jesus, but a Christ figure just like

01:28:22.960 Aslan is a Christ figure in Narnia. I wanted a Christ figure, but then I also wanted the church

01:28:29.140 and the church, you know, um, on earth militant and, and, and, and, you know, dressed for

01:28:34.140 battle.

01:28:34.840 Um, and, and the biggest thing that I told David and David came up with a lot of that

01:28:39.520 stuff.

01:28:39.900 Um, but the biggest thing I said is I want to see Christ reigning this great post-millennial

01:28:43.760 hope, um, a Cochrane King, like, um, but I want, um, but I want to also see darkness.

01:28:49.720 I want to see the enemy.

01:28:50.760 And that's where the cross reference of, of first Corinthians 15 kind of works in with,

01:28:54.640 uh, Romans chapter 12, where, um, good, you know, some of the best stories, at least in my

01:29:00.800 assessment, in my opinion, things like the Lord of the Rings, um, you, you, you know who the bad

01:29:06.300 guys are. Um, because they're literally right. There's this triple braided cord in, in, in

01:29:13.460 theological terms and in just reality, the world that God made. And that's truth, goodness, and

01:29:19.040 beauty these three things are inseparable um as as as creatures right everything god alone is the

01:29:27.580 creator as any creature begins to deny um its purpose the purpose for which god intended it

01:29:34.780 that's glory right a glorious tree is a is a very treely tree a tree that is truly truthful you know

01:29:42.660 it's, it's, um, it's, it's the treiest tree you could ever find. It's, it's being a tree and all

01:29:48.640 the greatness of a tree and all the right ways in the right direction and the, and the purpose for

01:29:52.740 which God intends it. And so too with man, um, you know, the man is the glory of God, right?

01:29:58.820 That man is the glory of Christ, a woman, the glory of man and the woman's hair is the glory

01:30:03.100 of woman. Um, this, this cascading flow of reflecting glory, but part of reflecting glory

01:30:09.460 is being in step with the purpose of the creature for which the creator made it.

01:30:15.800 And so when man is doing what God, being who God created man to be, there's a glory there.

01:30:23.660 And so my point is that the truth is there.

01:30:26.040 You're doing what you've truly been made to do.

01:30:28.920 But along with that truth comes automatically goodness and beauty.

01:30:35.820 And so one of the things that I love about Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings is that you see not just this is a good man, but that good man also happens to be a beautiful man and not a beautiful in an effeminate man, effeminate way.

01:30:52.660 But there are elves and there are orcs.

01:30:56.780 You don't have to ask, you know, 20 questions to figure out who the bad guys are.

01:31:01.840 And that's not to say that the elves are perfect.

01:31:04.420 there are some nefarious elf characters um but but what happens is that the orcs and especially

01:31:10.760 a certain species a certain type of orc is actually even used to be an elf but is now a

01:31:17.200 hybrid because of dark magic there was a compromise in the truth and the immediate result um was a

01:31:24.180 disfiguring of beauty that that as truth went so so beauty went with it and you can see that in art

01:31:32.300 right the unveiling of the martin luther king statue it's it's a it's a pair of hands holding

01:31:37.480 a penis that's what it looks like it's disgusting it is objectively ugly because as culture denies

01:31:45.480 truth they can't make beauty truth and beauty are intertwined you can only make that which is

01:31:52.140 objectively beautiful um for for a very short period if you look at human history as a whole

01:31:59.160 for a very short period after a culture has turned its back on the truth. So all that being said,

01:32:04.600 I wanted the Christ figure and then this lesser good guy, still a good guy, but the shorter guy

01:32:11.080 that you see who's dressed for battle next to the Christ, I wanted them to be good, true, and also

01:32:16.880 beautiful in the light. You see, the light is focused on them. It's beautiful. There's this

01:32:22.180 cascading, you know, above it, you know, with the red garment. But then I wanted bad guys and I

01:32:27.700 wanted bad guys to look like bad guys i want them to look like orcs like let's let's make bad guys

01:32:32.720 bad again you know what i mean that's that's my that's that's my mantra let's make bad guys bad

01:32:36.560 again i want that one of them to be ugly um and and and to depicted uh physically visibly as as

01:32:44.640 such um to to look as ugly as as as they are evil and so so what you see is you've got you know

01:32:52.580 you've got this dragon and, and the theology behind it, as that pulls into the post mill thing

01:32:57.880 is that, um, basically the Christ figure is holding a bow and it's, and it's, you can tell

01:33:02.660 that he's already fired off his shot. Um, and so it's, it's, it's being held down and what,

01:33:07.580 what he shot and killed is this giant dragon over and it's dark. So it's hard to see, but Nathan

01:33:13.660 will pull it up in post. And so you, if you're watching right now, you should be able to see a

01:33:17.740 close-up of of the painting but you see this dragon um and and and the dragon is more than

01:33:24.500 just a singular atomistic bad guy um it's it's like it's like the mothership carrying all these

01:33:31.840 other lesser bad guys and and its belly is like like a hole of of a ship and out of its belly is

01:33:38.380 coming um other monsters and you can see them depicted that david drew in there so you got the

01:33:43.100 the chief monster and that's the monster that the christ figure has already taken out but now the

01:33:48.720 the dragon this mothership bad guy is crashing to earth and and its hole its its belly is being

01:33:57.260 opened up and all these lesser monsters are coming out and polluting the earth so the christ figure

01:34:01.900 said i've already given the death blow to satan is what's being communicated um you know i bound

01:34:07.900 the strong man. But now you church militant, the church on earth. So, so that lesser good guy is

01:34:15.580 not supposed to be an individual person like the Christ figure, but it's supposed to represent the

01:34:20.460 church corporately, the church as a whole and the church militant on earth. I gave the death blow

01:34:26.600 to Satan. Now you go finish the job and round up all his minions. And your eschaton is there in

01:34:33.300 the background before you always before you a glimpse of the celestial city um and and you can

01:34:39.040 see in the background the celestial city and that so that's the theology piece and and david can

01:34:45.520 you talk about like some of the textures and the colors and things like that yeah um i think joel

01:34:52.000 just complete yeah that was it joel thank you no i mean the only the only things that i would

01:34:59.120 really add are the painting is it depicts a very the the high contrast of what is what is apparent

01:35:09.040 to believers and that is victory is sure yes but also we live in turmoil a lot of the time we don't

01:35:22.360 know our own personal lives can be confusing the world at large can be confusing family life church

01:35:29.100 life, business, finances? Why is this all not working out if Christ is victorious and Christ

01:35:38.340 is ruling? And so the painting actually from a visual standpoint depicts that contrast. You have

01:35:46.940 the stable um sort of calming very uh simple graphic effect of the vertical central figure

01:36:02.300 that everything is around the whole painting is divided in thirds vertically so there's a bottom

01:36:09.580 third that goes from the bottom to the golden hero's feet and then to the top of his helm

01:36:16.140 and then to the top of the painting and then he stands in the exact center of the painting

01:36:22.400 from his feet the ground goes out in a in a like a pyramid shape that just gives structure to that

01:36:33.380 dark object and then around him so he's also unaffected by the swirl the swirling

01:36:43.920 storms of evil the swirling storms of evil have have swept across the foreground and have pulled

01:36:51.900 the cape of the silver hero the church militant along with it he is even affected by it you can

01:37:00.900 see how it sweeps across his figure in some places and then there's this so then you see also like

01:37:09.000 the light side of the painting with the celestial city in the background and the foreground of

01:37:15.380 pasture land is very beautiful and there's a there's a river and a stream that comes through

01:37:20.880 and then on the other side you have chaos demons the leviathan the beasts the the fire

01:37:29.380 and the smoke plumes that come up from the crashing of the beast to the ground

01:37:34.840 um and then the but the final say the final word is god's word the banner of the banner that that

01:37:46.400 matches the same color of the cloak of the golden hero um is god's is god's final word and gives

01:37:54.500 and gives the painting uh it gives it sort of a surreal feeling but also gives it kind of the

01:38:02.480 final say this is this is the way things are going to be the final eschaton is that god is going to

01:38:11.320 bring his people to himself through jesus is jesus is going to present us to him um and the last enemy

01:38:20.100 to be defeated is death awesome yeah so so with that i want to turn to you chris now because

01:38:28.040 I've got some guys in my church that I'm thinking of that I think probably want to get, you know,

01:38:32.840 we've actually, we've already had a couple of people email us, you know, because they've seen

01:38:36.720 the painting and I've talked a little bit about it in some of my other videos as we just unveiled,

01:38:40.620 you know, our new studio. And so we've had a couple of people reach out and say, you know,

01:38:44.000 how do I get one? So Chris, talk about that now. So we, you know, there's theological meaning,

01:38:49.060 there's beauty, there's all the reasons, everything we've talked about thus far,

01:38:52.520 why we need to recapture art, why, you know, it needs to be, you know, all of Christ for all of

01:38:56.440 life. Every good work, art's one of those good works. And what this particular piece of art

01:39:00.660 means, how an artist and a business guy and a pastor collaborated together to make something

01:39:06.000 that's beautiful, but it's beautiful because it's, what I want to say is it's not beautiful and true.

01:39:10.980 It's beautiful because it's true. It's beautiful because it's true. It means something. And so

01:39:17.960 how do people get it, Chris? This is the best part. I got the easy job. So go to

01:39:23.780 everygoodwork.art that's our domain and you'll see either in the top banner and we'll see if we can

01:39:31.420 do this in post but in the top banner we have right response ministries we call out the conquering

01:39:36.540 king and you can click on that and it'll take you to the actual page where you can either get a

01:39:42.680 recap of some of the technical technical things that david had applied to the painting itself

01:39:50.180 some of the theological narratives that inspire joel but ultimately you can kind of get a sense

01:39:55.680 of it i know it's hard to see and i know nathan's going to try his best to get some close-ups

01:40:00.560 but we also do our part we've also done our part to create some good product photography

01:40:05.560 where it'll allow you to kind of get a deeper glimpse of it in a multi-dimensional way um

01:40:11.660 and and ultimately look we're brothers and so we're this is not a a company of 2 000 people

01:40:17.560 it's david and myself and so we'll be personally handling any any questions or or emails or

01:40:24.040 anything like that and then prices are very affordable so this is right this is something

01:40:29.480 that's over ten thousand dollars as an original but we've been able to figure out a way to make

01:40:34.600 this affordable through high quality prints on canvas and so prices start as low as 240 based on

01:40:40.840 a certain type of dimension and then it can range all the way as high as you know six hundred dollars

01:40:45.880 plus to get this real life you know very magnificent looking um print um depending on

01:40:53.320 obviously the wall that you want to put it on and so ultimately our goal was how do we make this

01:40:58.600 a really unique special experience for the right response ministries we wanted to honor you

01:41:04.280 pastor joel and honor um the community that supports you too and so this is made available

01:41:11.080 really on a limited print i think that's the other thing that we wanted to bring up is that

01:41:15.240 you know a lot of people don't realize that declays actually do increase in value over time

01:41:21.480 just because it's a very high quality product but at the same time we wanted to also accentuate

01:41:28.200 the value of this by making it limited as well and so we have a limited print release but we want to

01:41:34.440 expose this amazing work of art in collaboration from pastor joel and david and we wanted to give

01:41:40.760 it to y'all the to the right response community and um it's a one-time discount of 40 off so

01:41:48.640 that's as that's as as as affordable as we would want to make it to be yeah that's that's super

01:41:54.820 generous guys thank you um the community kind of rallies around this and we've done everything we

01:42:03.420 can to hopefully explain to you why this is meaningful um but we also ultimately want to

01:42:10.120 make sure that you see it just as meaningfully and so yeah go to everygoodwork.art there's a

01:42:16.480 top banner or you can scroll down and you'll see the conquering king image click on that and then

01:42:21.460 just like any other simple e-commerce website add to cart we'll take credit cards and all that

01:42:26.800 normal standard right is that going to be 40 off on whatever whatever dimension whatever size they

01:42:32.040 pick or just on a specific size so they can get that like the original which is i have the you

01:42:38.120 know i don't have the original but i have the same size of that 30 you know 30 by 40 inches it's

01:42:43.360 massive you know like it's about they could get that for for 40 off that's right so something

01:42:49.740 so if my math is right go ahead go ahead so something that's 499 you can or sorry something

01:42:55.040 that's 399 you can get it at 240 right and so we're really trying to do everything we can to

01:43:00.700 make it affordable but also we really want to bless um your community joel because you are the

01:43:06.820 first there's a short list of pastors and we wanted to also honor you because you you actually

01:43:13.660 took a risk on us and so this is not something this is not a sustainable business model you're

01:43:19.360 talking to the business guy here but but it's also something where man we really want to make this

01:43:25.620 a special thing that we'll remember for a long time yeah and we also know that this painting

01:43:30.500 hopefully will be present at the upcoming it will conference it will that's the last piece of the

01:43:36.640 puzzle. Yeah. So we've got five. Well, no, no, no, we'll say it. But like 550 people are registered

01:43:42.160 and, you know, and I know that I've had so many people emailing me. And so listeners, I, I,

01:43:47.120 I apologize that we were not able, I've told you, but we were not able to get a larger venue

01:43:50.900 this year. Now that said, we have decided to host this conference again in 2024 and Lord willing,

01:43:57.400 we will secure a larger venue that can seat, you know, around a thousand to 1200 people, but

01:44:01.560 in god's providence we want to be content with what he's provided this year so for 2023 may 5th

01:44:06.760 6th and 7th the theonomy and post-millennialism conference our venue holds 500 we've got you know

01:44:12.980 550 that we've let in so we've already gone over our capacity and we've got another like 150 people

01:44:19.200 on a waiting list so we just we can't take anyone else but if you are one of those 550 people who

01:44:25.000 was able to get through you were able to register you're going to be there at this conference this

01:44:29.980 is a painting that you can get right now. And I would not encourage you to wait, get it now for

01:44:34.500 40% off. But if for whatever reason, just financially, you can't swing it right now.

01:44:39.060 We're living in Joe Biden's recession. I get it. May 5th, 6th and 7th at the Theonomy and

01:44:44.980 Postmillennialism Conference. I'm pretty sure that even if we've sold out, we're going to limit it.

01:44:51.200 But even if we sold out, I think that I might be able to twist David and Chris's arm just enough

01:44:56.100 to say this is this is the post-millennial conference this is the post-millennial painting

01:45:00.780 it's a match made in heaven let's bust it out of the vault one more time so yeah you would this

01:45:05.420 painting will have an appearance at that conference as well the original will be there

01:45:09.780 and we'll have oh awesome yeah and we'll have prints to view and purchase and we've talked

01:45:17.420 about maybe um you know if you've if you've placed an order a week or two before the conference maybe

01:45:24.020 we could deliver it we could bring the print for you um we can figure out some of those details in

01:45:30.340 the time in the time being but for now think about it as limited print run we know that this 100 or

01:45:38.020 200 prints is going to be special um it's our first set so i will be hand signing that's right the

01:45:45.460 front of these i won't be doing that for every i will not be doing that for everything and every

01:45:51.060 good work that is painted by me but i will be doing it for these so this painting um

01:45:59.620 the original is not signed yet i had it scanned without being signed so that joel when they

01:46:05.860 printed yours the signature wasn't done yet i signed it and then i finished it with a clear

01:46:10.660 coat that's that's uv that protects the ultraviolet light and then i'm also going to

01:46:16.180 number them on the back. So if you're in the first of this limited print run, you're going to have

01:46:24.880 those two things. And I'm not sure how often we will be doing that sort of next step. And I know

01:46:31.500 from looking into it that the way as you clay increases in value is the limited print and being

01:46:39.620 signed by the artist. So those two things for sure are going to give you something that hopefully

01:46:46.120 you like just because it's a good painting and that's a good story but also it's going to last

01:46:51.520 and also it's going to go into the valley um that's great that's awesome yeah cool guys well

01:46:58.700 that's it i i think that this episode is great i think it'll be helpful i think people will get an

01:47:02.420 idea of you know all right here's some of the problems with keller but here's the baby that

01:47:06.300 we don't need to throw out with the bath water all of christ for all of life let's reject marks

01:47:11.480 Let's keep Kuiper.

01:47:12.960 Okay.

01:47:13.280 With the Kuiperian mindset, how can we apply all of Christ to every single realm?

01:47:18.780 Art's one of them.

01:47:20.000 What does that look like?

01:47:21.100 How do truth and beauty relate to one another?

01:47:23.480 And how can I actually put my money where my mouth is?

01:47:26.940 What good endeavor does God have for me?

01:47:28.960 And what good endeavors and good works can I support like what Chris and David are doing?

01:47:34.440 So thanks for coming on the show.

01:47:36.180 Thanks for our listeners tuning in.

01:47:38.200 And I encourage you guys, if you like art, if you like this painting, it means something.

01:47:44.340 It means something beautiful and true about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is

01:47:49.540 also king, reigning and ruling right now.

01:47:53.280 So if you can afford it, don't break the bank.

01:47:55.780 But if you can afford it, don't spend 240 bucks on crap.

01:48:00.940 Spend 240 bucks in a Christian way.

01:48:03.440 Get a nice piece of art.

01:48:04.640 So thanks for tuning in.

01:48:05.800 Can I be frank with you for just a second?

01:48:07.640 right here at the end. Look, some of you guys, you're financially supporting this ministry,

01:48:12.620 and from the bottom of my heart, I say thank you. I cannot thank you enough. However, some of you,

01:48:19.440 you just can't afford it. In fact, some of you, you shouldn't afford it. Let's be honest. I mean,

01:48:26.700 we're living in Joe Biden's ridiculous economy. Our nation and our totalitarian political elites

01:48:34.760 lost their minds over the last three years due to COVID. We have written checks that we simply

01:48:42.260 cannot cash. It doesn't matter if people change the definition of a recession. We are living in

01:48:48.840 a recession right now regardless. Some of you are struggling to afford a carton of eggs at the

01:48:55.720 grocery store. You cannot support financially this ministry at this time nor should you but you could

01:49:03.260 still help us tremendously. I am asking you, please, if you're willing to do so, take one

01:49:10.080 minute of your time. Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, iTunes, Spotify,

01:49:17.380 whatever that might be. This is the way the system works. We want to be innocent as doves,

01:49:22.820 but shrewd as vipers. We need to be strategic. You leave us a five-star review and our podcast

01:49:30.040 shows up for more people. And the Word of God and courageous theology applied in practical ways to

01:49:37.820 every realm of life gets out there. Help us get it out there. Thanks for tuning in.

The NXR Podcast - February 28, 2023

THEOLOGY APPLIED - Tim Keller’s Problem Isn’t His Embrace Of Abraham Kuyper, It’s His Embrace Of Karl Marx ｜ with David McLeod & Chris Hwang

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