The following interview was done by Bud Alheim, who has a podcast called The Bud Zone. Bud resides in the city of Jacksonville, Florida. I am joined today by Tom Sullivan. Welcome, Tom, to The Bud Zone. Thank you for taking time to talk with me. It's a pleasure, especially to get to talk about the subjects that I narrate about. And so I look forward to it, brother. I am really honored to have you here. You've been a blessing to me, and I don't know how long we've been connected on social media, but it's been a while. Part of that, I think, is because of our love for the Reformed theology, the Puritans, and we've shared some things both online and kind of behind the scenes online with things that you're reading and narrating and things that I'm reading and not narrating, but we kind of have that in common. Give us just a brief introduction to yourself. Uh, yeah, thanks a lot of all things. I'm a retired mailman. So I was a letter carrier for 26 years and some of the toughest climate to be a carrier in just as an example, in the year 2014, um, grand Rapids, which is 30 minutes from Lake Michigan, got Lake effect, snow and abundance. And we had 116 inches. And so during all that time, this was. my hobby, and now this month I start my 37th year, so narrating has followed me for a long, long time. You're no longer in Grand Rapids, right? You're now in Kentucky? Yeah, Owensboro is where Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary is at Grace Reform Baptist Church, and I certainly wasn't looking to come here when I retired, but I had looked at a number of places. The door kept closing, and I mean closing. I was looking to go to Bluefield, West Virginia, and it just imploded. which on hindsight is really good. So next we looked to Louisville, made three exploratory trips, and it just became apparent on the third one when the Airbnb host canceled our reservations. I was sitting up in the middle of the night, and one week before this brother who was from Grand Rapids who is down here now, his wife is from Ecuador and my wife is Dominican. They were very, very close friends in Grand Rapids and she was putting pressure on him to ask me to consider Owensboro, which I didn't have a real interest at the time, but sitting up in the middle of the night, I asked myself, honestly, these other things aren't working out. Why shouldn't I look into Owensboro, Kentucky? So I started looking at the cost of living. You get seven inches of snowfall annually here compared to over 70 in Grand Rapids. And so I said, well, I'll make an explorer tour trip. But really meant a lot to me was when I reached out to Sam Waldron, who, by the way, married Betty and I in 1996. But when I reached out to him, he said, well, we like it, Tom, but you have a hospitality waiting for you here. Why don't you just come down and check it out? And I appreciated how the people just reached out to me. The moment that they know you're coming, they send you a text message and tell you, here's a place where you can stay. Though I've been a professing Christian for about 40 years last year when I started this journey, I've really only had assurance since about 1986, and I've been under good ministries almost the whole time. Well, very few people have probably had an invitation to come move to, you know, a location like that from Sam Waldron. That's wonderful. But that leads into my question, very broad, but give me the answer to it. Why are you a Christian? You know, a lot of us start on a false trip of thinking that we're Christians for a long time when we are not. So the earliest I can remember even being exposed to this, because I was raised up in Catholicism, didn't know the difference between Protestant and Catholic. And going all the way back to being a junior in high school, somebody shared the four spiritual laws. you know, you pray the sinner's prayer and they say, uh, congratulations, you're born again, which I just have to segue for a second and say, that's what's wrong with modern evangelicalism is that they've made the terms justification, which has to do with our bad record and the clearing of that in a court of law where God is a judge and regeneration, which is the change of the heart or what theologians call the governing change in the governing disposition of the soul. So, the very fact that somebody says you prayed the sinner's prayer and then you were born again is a mixing of terms and besides that, it's putting the effect for the cause. But so, I had a false conversion for a while, but a lot of things just forced me back into a community of believers, so I knew so little in 1981. God was so good to me in how he directed my path to very good instructors very early on. For example, my chaplain in the Air Force was a five-point Calvinist. He was actually from the Evangelical Free denomination, which if you may be familiar with the name Chuck Swindoll, so was he, but this man was a solid five-point Calvinist. And I remember walking into his office one time, and I was very new to this. I was awakened, and I wanted to do a study of the Book of Romans, and I said, what would you recommend I read? And I remember writing the answer into a book called Henry Thiessen's Systematic Theology which isn't a solid theology, but the chaplain wanted to get us started somewhere, and there was such an aversion to the word systematic theology that people became scared of it. But I was intrigued, so I bought the book, and he told me, read John Murray, I wrote that down on Romans, and David Martin Lloyd-Jones. So I followed up on Lloyd-Jones right away, which was good, because Murray's a lot harder to read, and I went down to a bookstore. I was stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho, and I went down to a bookstore, which was in Boise, which was 50 miles away, which had a good Christian bookstore, and a very The very first book I bought was Studies on the Sermon on the Mount by Lloyd-Jones, and there I was with a number of professing Christian airmen on Mountain Home Air Force Base, and we were doing a study of the verses that Armenians typically use that indicate you can lose your salvation, and God was using this to awaken me to the fact that I may not have been converted. So, I was studying Lloyd-Jones on Matthew 5 verses, you know, especially 21. or 721, chapter 7, verse 21, not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, and his chapters were called false peace. To begin with, and I started reading that and I became alarmed. And also, I was in a Plymouth Brethren church visiting because one of these airmen was Plymouth Brethren. and I visited his church in Boise, Idaho, and I would typically, by that time, I was reading all the wrong stuff, Kenneth Hagen, Watchman Nee, and others. I had no discernment yet, but I was going through the book stand, as I always did, because I said, if I want to find out about good books, I got to ask questions about the authors. And the Plymouth Brethren are very, very dispensational. You know, the the seven stages, each of the churches in Revelation represents a stage of the church, and so on. And so they happen to have on their bookshelf A.W. Pink's commentary on Genesis. I've taught on Pink a number of times, so I know that that was the first commentary that he wrote on. It was actually published by Arnold C. Gaebelein, a real dispensationalist in the But I said, well, how's this guy, A.W. Pink? And they said, well, he's supposed to be good. And I made a mental note of that. And that week, I went down to the local bookstore in Mountain Home and said, I want to buy a book by A.W. Pink. And they'd bring these works up on a microfiche in the day. And anything they didn't have, they could order. And since we were doing a study of all of the verses that typically are used to establish from those that don't believe in eternal security that a Christian can lose his salvation, and those would be the five passages in Hebrews. And since A.W. Pink had a commentary on Hebrews, I had them order it for me. And I can tell you God used that earthquake of reading him on the warning passages, again, to really awaken me. If you read A.W. Pink on Hebrews 6, 4-6, there's a chapter after that called The Two-Fold Working of the Holy Spirit, how the Holy Spirit works in common way upon those who are non-elect and enlightening them and awakening them and convicting them and so on that fall short of regeneration. And then read A.W. Pink on Hebrews 10.26, and he starts off, the warning in the past, there has been thousands of professing Christians who had a profession like you may have, but are now in hell. Their confession was a false one built upon what he said, the bare litter of Scripture rather than one supernaturally wrought in the heart by God. And the Lord was really using these to awaken me to a real conviction. But it wasn't until a couple of years later in 1983 that I really started to be awakened because like many people that I counsel in our day, I have a counseling group on Facebook called Thoughts on Christian Experience and Assurance. I came to the delusion that I'd committed the unpardonable sin, so my awakening really started in earnest there. It took me about eight months to get that settled. Those of your listeners who are familiar with Pilgrim's Progress will be aware that It took Christian a while, who was then called Graceless, just Pilgrim, and he set out on his journey. From when evangelists pointed him to the light off in a distance, or do you see yonder wicked gate, before he entered in, and the Puritans would talk about those things that happened antecedently to the new birth. which really are convictions of sin. People hear that and they say, well, that's preparationism. But the fact of the matter, it isn't, because the Puritans didn't teach that that person was now prepared to come to Christ, but that God, in fact, was preparing Christian prior to entering into the Wicca Gate. Because by nature, we don't know our own innate self-righteousness, and it pleases God. And not all cases are alike, but you used to hear about this a lot more, to allow a person to try in his own strength to come to Christ, and then he learns the truth of what the Westminster Confession of Faith says in chapter 9, verse 3, and our own London Confession says in the same spot, neither are they able to prepare themselves thereunto, and that's under the doctrine of free will. But by nature, we don't know that, and it pleased God that he was going to bring me to that dark valley for a long time. It was about three and a half years, up until September of 1986, when I started by reading the Trinity Hymnal, and I turned to the section on the forgiveness of sin. And reading that hymn by Samuel Stone, weary of earth and laden with my sin, I look to heaven and long to enter in, but there no evil being may find a home, and yet I hear a voice that bids me come. And that was really when God was opening the Scriptures and what His Son had done in a way that I spiritually understood this. And I was reading that night for about six and a half hours, and it really was helpful to me. And so my journey, as far as I know, spiritually speaking, and in fact, was September 18th, 1986. So I had quite an awakening. before I knew that there was really a change in me manifested, and it had to be manifested in my mind, I was so afraid of a false hope, and having a spirit of adoption to where I would be crying to God again. I was under such terrible awakenings that I gave up any hope of praying because I was just made to realize that by nature I hated God, I did not love Him, and I left off praying altogether because I was in such despair that it would do any good, but that's the night that God changed me and really brought home my helplessness to me and that my hope can only be found in Jesus Christ as my substitute. But interestingly, what I'd already been narrating for almost a year before that day, Well, I was going to ask, you've mentioned narrating, and I want people to know that you are on Sermon Audio under, if folks look for the Narrated Puritan, and I've got it actually pulled up right now as we're speaking, and just some of the, here are some of the top Sermons that you're narrating that have come from a variety of Puritans. You've got it looks like the number one is Go figure Jonathan Edwards centers in the hands of an angry God thousands of listens on that Spurgeon's the defense of Calvinism. You've got a couple by Whitfield Don't be discouraged by the scoffing of wicked man. That is tremendous more Spurgeon more Whitfield But how did you end up getting into this ministry? You've got the voice for it. You've got that commanding sort of granite voice. But how did you connect your ability to do that, your desire to do that, with the Puritans? How did this whole ministry get started with you? The way that God was fitting me for it in the beginning was that Even before 1985, going back to about 1983 and 1984, I never had a typing lesson. Word processors, if they were out there, were very, very ancient and not very good. So my right arm would get tired writing letters to my sister, writing letters to other people. So in the day, you used to have these boom box cassette players with a built-in microphone And so I would buy blank tapes, and I would stick them in the cassette deck, and I would read my letters. I would talk, and sometimes I'd read different things. And when I was in New York City attending Trinity Baptist Church, I actually had a make-believe Christian radio station, and so I would be reading there as well. Well, when I was stationed in New York City, I was attending church at Montville, New Jersey, Trinity Baptist Church. Some of your listeners may have heard of the name Albert Martin. through some things that were happening under my awakening, I was directed to that church. And they had this wonderful, wonderful bookstore down in the basement. They were at phase two of that church, and it was really coming along well. And without fail, I would go into that bookstore. They'd open it after the evening service on Sunday, And to give you an idea of how good the price of books were back then, you have the six volumes of Thomas Brooks, $49.95. John Flavel, six volumes, $49.95. The 16 volumes of John Owen for $99.95. I know Newton's were $59.95. You could get hardback books for $10, like I have dead new systematic theology, systematic and polemical theology, $9.95. And then they would bundle books together, paperbacks, that were the Baker Summit series, they called them, which was really a combination of the ministry they were doing at Gospel Missions in Choteau, Montana, and Baker would publish those. They would sell three of John Flabel's works for $7. And so the books were there and it was a couple of weeks before I left New Jersey and I was going back to Montana. And I looked at a volume of John Owen Sermons and I said to myself, and this was October, I said, somebody really needs to create audiobooks of these. And I never thought of myself doing it. I just said it needed to be done. I'd never even heard of Chapel Library in those days. So, I got back to Montana, but I maintained fellowship and correspondence with a brother who's still at Trinity Baptist Church, who sent me for the first time the materials from the Chapel Library. Many of your listeners may have heard of Chapel Library, but you may not know the background. It was started in 1963 by Lawrence and Amy Nelson, who by the time that I started working with them were already in their late 80s and looking for somebody to pass the ministry off to. And they had actually published some of the early works of A.W. Pink, the smaller books. I had talked to Amy Nelson on the phone, and they had at one time even corresponded with Pink, which is amazing because Pink died in the year 1952. So, these were Christian soldiers that went back quite a ways. In fact, they told me that they owned A. W. Pink's personal copy of John Owen on Hebrews. They were very interesting to get to know, but as I looked through these materials, I noticed that there was a section in which somebody was narrating these books at a request of a blind patron of the chapel library who said, we just cannot get these things in Braille. Do you think you could get people to volunteer to narrate them? And so I thought, ah, this is really interesting. Let's see how this is. So I, because it was a library, I was able to borrow the tapes that were narrated of John Flabel's Fountain of Life, and I was listening to this narration by this lady, and I said, um, something's wrong here. When you're reading Puritan literature, if you do not stop at the comma, colon, and semicolon for the proper amount of time, you'll throw off the paragraph. And I thought to myself, well, these are just volunteers, why don't I get a cassette, and I have a cassette deck with a built-in microphone, send them a sample and volunteer to narrate for them, which is probably, I sent it off in November of 85. I had four various samplings on there. I remember I had narrated part of Archibald Alexander's work called Prackled Crews. The first book I ever narrated was The Anxious Inquirer by John Angel James. And then I narrated the genealogical record in Matthew 1 just to show that I could handle the biblical names and so on. And within a few weeks, a package arrived in the mail, and it had 15 blank 90-minute Memorex cassettes and a recorded letter. I had to listen to it. They recorded it for me, and they said, we like what we hear in your recordings. It sounds like it has a little bit more authority to it. And I was really, really happy. I was under awakening, but I was glad to be able to be used because by 1985, I was already very well read in Puritan literature and the works of Edwards and so on. And so, in December of 85, I started. It was the first time I ever narrated Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I have probably done that sermon 15 to 20 times. There's a lot of that material. I've even memorized paragraphs and so on. I've done them so many times. But the influence that made me the narrator that I was were two, and that is that I used to listen to the Bible on cassette a lot. And there was Stephen Stevens' voice, which was a more, it's almost artificial, you know, but it's the great radio voice. But the other that gave me the seriousness was Alexander Scorby, and when he got to Revelation 8 verse 8, it was the way that he said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, to the inhabitants of the earth by reason of the other three trumpets which are yet to sound. And that just stuck with me. And when I began to narrate Jonathan Edwards and so on, that whoa, whoa, whoa, I knew had to be. And a sermon that you really, really believe that was of the power and extent of Edwards' graphic details in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, you know, Errol being drunk with the blood of his enemy and so on. Most of that imagery is taken out of Deuteronomy 32. So the two things came together in the very early beginning to make me have the beginning elements of a narrator, but a couple of other things came along that really assisted me, and that was what I was telling you about the real necessity of when you're reading extended sentences to pause at the semicolon, colon, and period for the listener. And it may surprise you the source that God used to emphasize that to me. It was Brother Jeff, who is the webmaster of gracegyms.org. I was doing narrations for them, and him and his wife were listening to them, and I really began to realize it's so important for your listeners to not read too fast, but to read with conviction and proper pauses and so on. So, my narrations that were originally done in 1985 through, say, 87 and so on, it's embarrassing for me to listen to those. And by the way, but I had thought for a long time I would never be able to get a copy of those. But what happened when sermon audio started in the year 2000, there was very little material that was out there that was put into MP3 format. The MP3 player was really pretty new in 2000. In fact, I myself started recording in real media, real audio. A ministry that was very early on on sermon audio was Stillwater Revival Books up in Canada. They're the ones that do that over-promotion of the Puritan hard drive. But he had discovered my narrations from the chapel library in Pensacola, Florida, and he asked for a copy of everything that they had. And so I'm looking around Sermon Audio one day, and I see that Archibald Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience. Somebody actually narrated that? I didn't know there was somebody that was as interested in it as I am. So I started listening to this narration on Sermon Audio, and it was me. And I said, where did this guy get these cassettes? Well, that was really good. It enabled me to be able to have copies of some of the earliest narrations that I did. They were great books, but you can imagine a boom, a cassette deck and built-in mic and so on. They're not really good recordings, but I had discovered William Perkins' book, Cases of Conscience. And it wasn't even in print. And my mom was a librarian in a small town in Montana. And I said, Mom, did you say that you could borrow books on an interlibrary loan from other libraries in the nation? She says, I can do that. And I said, could you look up to see if you could get Cases of Conscience by William Perkins? And she found it in the St. Paul, Minnesota library. They send you out the book. You only got one week that you can use it, and then you have to ship it back. And I said, so I got one week to get as much of this done as I can. And I became alerted to William Perkins Very early on, because of Lloyd-Jones's commentary on Romans 7, the law and its functions, which by the way, I disagree with his analysis of that. He doesn't treat that that's a believer, but an awakened person. appendix, he mentioned what Dr. Beeke calls the morphology of conversion in William Perkins' case as a conscience. And that's the first that I started studying the Puritans and this concept of awakening and the law work and so on. And I studied it so much, I'd actually written a 60-page paper on that for Sam Waldron about 25 years ago, which, by the way, is on my site. Alright, we'll put links to all of this because people need to have access to it. Let me ask you this. When you started with Chapel, were they giving you guidance saying, we want you to record this sermon, we want you to record this chapter of a book? Were they telling you what to do or were you kind of at will choosing and recording what you wanted? Well, it was interesting. They allowed me full reign to choose topics knowing that I'd probably choose good things. However, they did listen to titles that they weren't aware of to see if they were sound. And I remember one of them very early on was by William Sprague, one of the first graduates at Princeton Theological Seminary when they formed in 1812. And Sprague had written this book called Lectures to Young People. Very, very good books. But they did listen to that and make sure that it was sound. But by then, and this is 85, 86, I wasn't going to give them anything that I didn't believe was safe for the hearers. But my problem was back then, but I say this embarrassingly, is that I narrated things that were copyrighted, not knowing that you're not supposed to do that. So, none of the copyrighted works remain. I actually did all 657 pages, I believe it is, of studies on the Sermon on the Mount by Lloyd-Jones. It took just over 20 cassettes. On the 21st cassette, I finished it and then gave part of a biography and I sent that off to them. It was very, very edifying for myself, but they couldn't use it because of the copyright. But there was only one time did I narrate anything that I probably wouldn't do now. But still, it's a powerful sermon, The Almost Christian by John Wesley, but there's so much material that's so solid that people are not aware of. I did not have the ability to publish books. And I know that some of these books really need to be reprinted, and they probably never will be. And I thought the only way I can introduce them to maybe a few people is by narrating them. So, it's providentially has turned out that anybody that I have worked with who was publishing my materials to YouTube, in a case of Christian Music and Sermons that has about 200,000 subscribers, he has put my material on YouTube, and another guy on Sermon Audio, that whenever I work with somebody else, it never tends to work out, and I prefer it that way because even When I'm narrating something that is requested of me, the only way I can do a good delivery is if I'm really impressed with what I'm reading, first of all, for myself. So if it's not making an impression on me, I won't narrate it. In fact, there's mornings I'll sit down here in my studio to begin a narration. And I might start, you know, 10, 15 minutes in to three or four narrations, and they're just not gripping me. And I just, I just erase it. I said, this is not what I want to do. But there are certain authors that never failed to grip me. And that's Jonathan Edwards, really early on, Thomas Boston, Human Nature and His Fourfold State. And John Owen is my go-to Puritan that always has an effect on me when I narrate him, especially his commentary on Hebrews, people are intimidated because it's seven volumes, so they don't actually start reading it. But it's his observations, for example, in his commentary of 3, verse 7 to 19, today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts, exhort one another daily, lest you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. John Owen's observations alone, for those verses, or 125 pages, of some of the most gripping exhortations to persevere in the faith I know in the English language. And I'm never reading this, not even necessarily for my listeners. If they benefit, I'm glad. But the reason that I narrate is because I need it for my In 40 years, bud, what really hurts me inside is the amount of people that I have such hopes in who have defected from the faith. If you consider that the man that preached at our wedding, we got married wedding in Montana. After Waldron married us legally, we went out and had a ceremonial wedding. There were reasons for that. But the guy who preached at our wedding at one time was the most promising student at Trinity Ministerial Academy under the teaching of Greg Nichols. He's a total apostate. And we started this conference in 1983 called the Midwest Reformed Baptist Family Conference, and Al Martin came out and preached for the most powerful sermons I've ever heard recorded on cassette called God's Word to Our Nation. And the man that put that conference together, his wife just died a couple of weeks ago. And of course, she was honored. She had been a part of the church for 51 years, church secretary for 25 years. But her husband, the pastor of that church, and I had visited there in 89, is a complete apostate within the last little over maybe one or two years. And these are the type of things that frighten me and make me narrate. You know, somebody can listen to my narrations and say, you seem to a little bit tend to the more melancholy introspective materials. But keep in mind, first of all, I'm doing that for myself. And I do narrate other things that are very, very comforting, such as William Bridges lifting up for the downcast. But I read a lot of Owen in, because I need it for myself. You know, the ham prone to wander, Lord, I feel it prone to leave the God I love. Which, by the way, was written by a 22-year-old man who, for years after he wrote that, went back into a state of declension. And some lady happened to read this hymn to a man that she didn't know who it was, and it turned out that he was the author of it, and he came under conviction listening to the words of his own hymn that was being written, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. So, it's that prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, that keeps me narrating the type of things that I do because I, but I've told people I have way too much light to apostatize. I will have one of the lowest places in hell if I throw this off and go back to the world and prove that I wasn't finally a Christian after all. I don't know about you, one of the things, I mean I love reading the Puritans, you know, I've got all the Banner of Truth little Puritan paperbacks and I've worked through those methodically, and Owen particularly, but one of the things that you sort of glean from that if not explicit, certainly implicit, is one of the doctrines that is really lacking in the church today, and that is the fear of God. We need to maintain a fear of God, and that's not a horrible fear, that's a reverential fear, and you really need to understand it from a rich, biblical, theological perspective. And of course, the Reformed Puritan understanding helps promote that. It's not necessarily, I understand melancholy and it sounds, you know, pulpit pounding wrath of God kind of thing all the time, but actually what that is doing is drawing those who hear the shepherd's voice, drawing them to him in that reverential fear of God, so that's a wonderful thing. I'm looking at your narrated Puritan page on Sermon Audio, 945 sermons on there. But you've done a whole lot more than that. What kind of traffic do you get? Do you ever look at the analytics on sermon audio? Yeah, let me give you a little update on that. But first, I want to go back to the subject of the fear of God. And of course, for the Christian, that's not a tyrannical, cringing, cowering fear of God. But what's missing, and I don't know if you know this, I've told you I teach church history, I also teach the history of revivals in America. The Second Great Awakening, we are really, really ignorant of. There was a magazine that was started in June of 1800. to chronicle all of the reports of these revivals that were coming in, and to put them into one magazine and publish that. So you had men like Edward Door Griffin, there was a revival in Yale under Timothy Dwight, and so on. And I was teaching at a place called the J.H. Spencer Society for the Promotion of Baptist History in Kentucky, and I said I wanted to teach on the Kentucky Revival of 1800, and I said to and this is really what people have to understand who are students of revival. And I have been studying this stuff for a long time going back to 1986 when I first got John Gilley's historical collections and accounts of revival. The way that you can tell a counterfeit revival is really summed up in the fact that when the manifest presence of God comes upon an assembly and you are not converted, you will, mark it, you will be afraid. When the Holy Spirit comes and convicts and shows you that you are out of Christ, the things that I have read, for example, in historical collections of a revival now in progress in the United Kingdom, 1859, William Reed, and I even remember the page number 22. The pastor was talking about when revival came to his congregation, and he used a sentence, these things really grip me, but he said, if an angel went through this town and took out the firstborn of every family, the people could not have been more solemn than I saw that they were in my assembly. He said he prevailed upon them to go home after the prayer meeting at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night, and they could not be prevailed upon to leave it with 3.30 the next morning. And I have read so many hours, and they're on Sermon Audio. You know, I have other narrations on Sermon Audio that aren't under my site. For example, if you did a search on T. Sullivan, I did numerous ones for the Reformed Baptist Church. It was all in Michigan. And Stillwater Revival Books published a number of my stuff, not just from the Chapel Library, but stuff I volunteered to do for him that is a history of revivals. But to every revival that seems genuine that I've ever read, If you are unconverted and you face the convicting spirit of God, you will be in dread. And that's an element that is so lost upon. People pray for revival. I'm thankful they do. They don't study it as much as I would like, but they're ignorant of the fact that a lot of your pastors who come out of a seminary, even solid seminaries in our day, It seems like they wouldn't be properly prepared to take aside somebody like those awakened under the ministry of Asahel Nettleton or Jonathan Edwards when he preached sinners in the hands of an angry God in Enfield, Connecticut. They would be shocked because they would say, well, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and these people would be in such fear, and the pastors would be shocked that they can't. They become aware that, I know that this is the truth, but I don't have any desire to come to Christ. I'm being convicted about how much I hate him and that I am unwilling to come. And I'm under so much fear right now, my only desire for Christ is to escape hell. And so the pastor has to take people aside and give them more particular directions. That was the purpose of the inquiry room in the revivals under A.C.L. Nelton. They had a separate building. In fact, if a lady cried out in the congregation during a sermon, They separated her and took her back to the inquiry room because of what is called sympathy. We see somebody under a great consternation and agony, and it affects what we call our sympathetic feelings. And a lot of people are affected in a revival by sympathy and not conviction of sin, and Nettleton had learned that from Some of the mistakes maybe that were made under Edwards and Whitfield very early on, that not all crying out in a congregation is conviction of sin. Some of it may be because of what they're feeling as they see other people that are truly convicted of sin, and so Nettleton would separate them. In our day, a lot of young pastors, and you know, people may disagree with me on this, but I think they're too superficial, to be able to understand what would go on if you had to counsel somebody like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress that was under the fear that he was under. But anyway, can you remind me of your next question? No, I'd like to continue with that. That is so rich and so vivid and so applicable. Well, we'll move to the next question. So let's say, I mean, you've narrated all of these largely Puritan, not Puritan only, but you are the narrated Puritan. Let's say that you've got someone who is new to the Puritans. What narrations would you send them to, to give them kind of an introduction to, this is really what Puritan reform theology is about? Have you got two or three that you would really recommend that they go and listen to as kind of an introductory point? My list may differ from others, but for sure John Flavel. If you want to read Puritan sermons, Thomas Manton, I wouldn't necessarily tell somebody to go start with a treatise on the mortification of sin by John Owen. But, you know, later on you'll want to read that for sure. If there is a treatise of Owen that is neglected in Volume 6 of his work, it's the work of temptation. But some of the Puritans, I noticed, like, William Bates, they don't have such run-on sentences that Owen has. And so, Bates, I found him easier to read. Charnock, for example, some of his sermons in Volume 5 of his collected works. William Bridge is really good. And then some of the Scottish Puritans like Guthrie's Trial of a Saving Interest was the original Those are a little easier to read. And of course, John Bunyan, because Bunyan was quite illiterate very early on and learned most of his English reading just from the King James Bible, you know. When he got married, his wife, his original wife, and we don't even know her name, we're assuming it's Mary because they named their blind daughter Mary. She brought two books as a dowry to the marriage, and that was Arthur Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven. And I'm trying to remember the second name. It's kind of embarrassing. Spontaneously, I'll chide myself later for not remembering. But she basically started teaching him English, how to read and so on. But he was such a prolific reader of the King James Bible. So, once you are able to read the King James easily. Bunyan's very easy to read, but now when I narrate the Puritans, I narrate them in a more modern English. I never say thee and thou and a concubines and some of the words that like adversation is aversion now. So I tried to make the run-on sentences easier to listen to. I've been narrating Owen over 30 years, so I can do this stuff on the fly. I don't have to write it down. I just read it and automatically just start reading it in a more modern English. When you were talking earlier about Owen and the importance, not particularly with Owen, but generally of the colons and the semicolons and the periods, I remember when I first started trying to read Owen a long time ago, it would be like you'd pick up a volume and you'd start chapter one and you're reading through and it's like you'll go four or five pages before you ever arrive at a period. It's like this long thought that he has and it is so deep and so rich. So I had to put him down for a while and then come back to him. Well, just as an example, his commentary on Hebrews, it's a thousand pages of introduction before he ever gets to the first verse. Yeah. It's definitely a student for the, I mean, a book for the scholarly students and so on, but 4,000 pages. I mean, when you start talking about Puritan records of some of the things, I just recently discovered a book that was 907 pages on Song of Solomon chapter one. Chapter one. Yeah, yeah, and William Gouge taught Hebrews on Friday nights at Blackfriars in London for 30 years. Joseph Carrill, Carroll, in his commentary on Job, those were sermons that were 20, spanned 24 years. You look at Thomas Adams' commentary on 1 Peter, three chapters, or 2 Peter, whatever, over 900 pages. There were such prolific writers, but I would never recommend, say, Thomas Adams as the first Puritan you should read. They called him the Shakespeare of the Puritans. There's just so much wit within wit and so on. You want to read something where they're just kind of flowing through. sermons, writings that were taken directly from their sermons and shorthand are going to be easier to read. Okay. Let me ask you this, which I haven't thought about, but years ago a brother told me that because I had not, I had never read a Pilgrim's Progress Bunion, that there was no way I could get into heaven. Do you agree with that assessment? Is that a fundamental requirement for a Well, first of all, there's a great deal of difference between Pilgrim's Progress Part 1 and Part 2. The conversion experience of Christian is a lot different than Christiana. Notice that Christiana did not have a burden on her back. John Bunyan was representing a separate kind of conviction of sin that was more like what he went through that was shown by the great burden pressing down upon him. And where we run into trouble in our day, we have a tendency not to talk about a conversion experience that was like Christian. But there are ministries out there, one of them is in Ames, Iowa, that if you did not have a Christian-type awakening prior to conversion, your conversion is suspect. I think that marked the early Netherlands Reformed Church in Grand Rapids before Dr. Joel Beeky got there and brought balance to it, that out of a hundred people who were members, only ten would have courage to come forward to the Lord's table, because they over-applied examine yourselves before you take the table. And there are people that are so much on the other extreme. They're the exception, but they're out there. And to have a website like Thoughts on Christian Experience and Assurance, I have to deal with both kinds, because you really have to stay biblical. Yeah, I was going to say, you've got to be cautious not to let that pendulum swing too far to the legalistic or too far to the libertine kind of grace side. You've got to keep a balance. Yeah, well, as an example. I found it amazing going to a Christian church that had been there in Grand Rapids since 1971. So many of the children were raised in that church, and they couldn't tell you the day of their conversion. And I certainly believe that's possible, but where I got concerned was when these professing Christian teenagers, now young adults, would say, well, I really don't understand Paul's language in Romans 7, 14 to 25, that which I would, I do not, and the evil that I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I would not, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells in me, O wretched man that I am. And they would say, well, because I was raised in a Christian home, I didn't go into the links of sin, so I can't understand that language. And I listened to that kind of profession. And I say, I think you're deceived because it don't matter if you were brought up in a Christian home or not, if you don't know something of that groaning with inside of you. That even Paul talks about in Romans 8, 26, we groan, be in burden, and we don't know how to pray for as we ought, and we need the assistance of the Holy Spirit. If you don't know the language of, oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? They possibly may be Christians, but I'm gonna be honest, I have trouble fellowshiping with them. As I said, you speak in a different tongue than me, my brother. I am pounding upon my chest continually, even as a Christian, crying out, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Darrell Bock Amen. Alright, let me go back. Let me posit it this way. You're going to have an intimate dinner at your house. You get to invite five Puritans. Who's going to be there? It's kind of tough because I don't even feel worthy to be in the presence of almost any of them. But Bunyan, and because you invite Bunyan, I would say invite Owen. You know, people don't know the relationship. there was between those two. If it wasn't for John Owen, we wouldn't have Pilgrim's Progress. John Bunyan was in jail. He couldn't afford it. Owen got a copy of it, and he thought it was worthy of publication. And if you look at the first edition down at the bottom, it says published by, you know, his publisher. So Owen and Bunyan I would like to have John Flavel there because I'd like to talk to him about his experience when he was, that he communicates that he was riding on a horse at this inn and God drew so near to him that he didn't know if he was alive or in heaven already. I'd love to talk to Flavel. I would probably leave out Thomas Shepard, you know. Probably wouldn't want the most introspective of the Puritans to be there. You know, people would fault me for this, but one of the Puritans that has most affected me because of his pay sauce and his writings is Richard Baxter. There are certain quarters where you'll catch some abuse for that. Certainly. But because of the effect, it would make me feel like I'm really living half of a Christian life. If he started talking to me the way that he does to pastors and the reform pastor, That's really, really gripping. But also William Gurnall, I'd love to talk to him. And Gurnall received some flack as well. There was a Puritan sermon that came out, really. I thought it was libelous, but because William Gurnall did not leave the Church of England during the act of uniformity. He took some black for that, but you know, maybe he knew he could do better if he stayed there and so on. But Gernal is the original Puritan that I read the most because I got Christian a complete armor all the way back in 1984 and I've just read and reread the thing. There's just so much wit and also he sure knew how to say things that are very, very convicting at the beginning where he says, soul, take thy Isaac, thy beloved sin that is promised you the most pleasure, and take the knife of mortification and run it through the heart of it. And that, not with a countenance cast down, that's so interesting, people miss that. But the Puritans believe that if your countenance was cast down when you're offering a sacrifice to God, you're offering it against your will. You have to give God a joyful heart. They missed that, but the Puritan, and you can see this in Owen as well, that God is only satisfied with diligent faith and joyful obedience, and continually they will show you that God was displeased with the worship in the Old Testament because they did it with hands hanging down and they gave them the worst of their flock And the Puritans would say, God wants you to worship Him with your heart. And the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace, and so on. Yeah. All right, so you've got four. You've got Bunyan. You've got Owen. You've got Flavel. You've got Grinnell, who's number five at your dinner. Thomas Goodwin. Goodwin? Okay. Yeah, well, you know, Goodwin's really one of the harder Puritans for me to read. But if you read a book like The Child of Light Walking in Darkness, what he knew of the spiritual warfare, that book was published when he was 36. And it was a textbook that was used for years and years to come. But how he understood the wiles of the devil, And the Puritans were well versed in how the devil studied our human physiology. The devil could tell by your eye movements or different things about how you may be acting to a thing and he can fit his temptations because he can't read the mind, but he can listen to your speech, he can read your eye movements and bodily emotions and so on and then fit temptations to them because he probably could tell if you're excited by something that you shouldn't be excited by. And you see Goodwin or Richard Gilpin or these other not-so-well-known John Downham, very good book on Christian warfare of the wiles of the devil and being able to study human physiology. I'm waiting for the narration. Is it there? Yeah, it is. Well, anything that I promote with any enthusiasm, I'm not going to promote something that hasn't affected me enough that I felt like I needed to read it out loud and record it. And because I mentioned that, there is a book that for about 20 years I've been trying to get into Kindle format, PDF format, anything called Cases of Conscience by Samuel Pike and Samuel Hayward. which was published in the year 1755. Between 1755 and 1859, that book was never out of print. And these two Presbyterian pastors in England asked their congregants to write them letters asking spiritual questions, but it's not superficial questions, it's really good questions. And they answered them on Saturday night and published it in a book called Cases of Conscience. And that book went out of print in 1859. I discovered it on a brother's bookshelf because in 1969, a Presbyterian publishing company did a paperback volume of just the first volume. But I said, a book like this just needs to be reprinted. Well, by God's grace, I got the brother who does some of the modern works for monergism.com. His name is Bill Gross, William Gross. And if you go to onthewing.org, he just published the first volume in November and the second in September. But it's questions like, how do we know if a promise or threatening that comes to our mind is coming from God or the devil? The very first question in there is, how do I know if I have really moved affections and emotions during the worship, what part of it is spiritual and what is merely natural? Because they even knew things like how certain kind of, and there wasn't even contemporary Christian music in those days, but how the, they called them the animal spirits in the day, but how the natural person could get so moved by just a beat of the music, where we're supposed to be moved by the words of the music. You know, people need to realize that Christian music is really singing God's Word back to Him. And I'm not exclusive psalmody, but I can understand what they're aiming at. That's why I'm drawn to hymn writers like Thomas Kelly's stricken, smitten, and afflicted, see him dying on the tree, and Joseph Hart, and Isaac Watts, and John Berridge, and so on. is because there's such a spirituality to them. It's the words that should move us in our spiritual worship, not just the sound of the music that can merely leave an impression on the animal emotions. And by the way, I deal with this a lot when I deal with such things as Christian sympathy. There's an excellent article that's in Volume 3 of Robert Dabney's works called spurious religious excitements. And Dabney became a philosopher at the University of Texas after he was almost booted out from Union in Virginia. And he had such a knowledge of the affections, the emotions, the mind, the will, and he wrote this spurious religious excitements because of some of the artificial things that he saw going on in the later revivals under people like Charles Finney. It's just a masterpiece of showing how we can be moved in Christian worship merely by sympathy rather than spirit. and it's been one of the most interesting things I have read. So let me let me segue from that into a question that I was going to kind of ask as we as we would wrap it up. When you look at the visible church today, you know, what is it that most concerns you? We kind of discussed this before we started recording, and you said, you know what, the John Owen sermon would indicate a concern that you would have about the church now. Well, I want to tell your listeners, I owe a debt to Bud for a couple of reasons. But to begin with, my present sermon audio site started from a church plant. And we had to fold the guy who was preaching for us. It turned out he was diagnosed with Lyme's disease. And so we never really got it going. But we had enough funds that I asked, could I have enough of the remaining funds to keep our church website going for five months. And we're getting close to the end of the five months and I made a subtle pitch on the Facebook page that I would like to keep this going and I'm so thankful for you, bud. You were the first person to step up and you sent me enough money to keep it going for six months and then a brother out of Canada took it over from there. He said, I want you to put my credit card in and so on. So, you know, it's people like you that have kept me going because I said, if this is really useful and I pray about it, maybe God will. But the second way that you really affected me, and I don't think you were aiming to affect me, but I was just one of your friends on Facebook, and I had narrated part of this sermon before, but as I looked at the words again, I was so affected that I narrated the whole thing, and the two sermons took just under four hours, and it was his sermon on the goodness and severity of God and judging sinful churches and nations. But my concern is that even though I narrated this again last week, in fact, I did it twice to make sure that I did a very, very good recording because the message is so great that Section 6 talks about what is the nature of that repentance and reformation which at this time God requires of us all, and he's talking about England, Puritan England, that we may not perish in a sore displeasures. the repentance, which in any case God requires absolutely, and then he gives a description of these things and so on. But the fact of the matter is, in the United States and the church in the United States, we don't really, in our heart of hearts, many of us, believe that those judgments are in any way imminent. And we are are not even close to applying the type of things that Owen is laying out here. And he says it's not just to professing Christians in the church, though of course it must start with us, but he's saying these things are required of our magistrates as he was under a monarchy in early, late 1640s. We're not even close to taking him seriously at this point, and most people won't even listen. And therefore, I get afraid. The fact of the matter is, and we see it already under the present leadership in this country, God is already judging us and he can certainly turn up the heat. with orphan children and so on, and they're calming these children down at night because bombs are falling all around them and shaking their building and so on. We really, in our heart of hearts, I wonder, do we really believe that that could happen to us? Are we deceived and thinking that the United States can't be touched by the finger of God in judgment because the temple of the Lord or we? And I'm afraid it's going to take a revival that's going to undeceive a lot of people, even in the Christian church, if they really understand God's anger with our country for our national sins. So that sermon affected me so much, and I'm so thankful that you pointed that out to me. But the fact is, I narrate it, and I'm afraid most people will say, I don't want to listen to this. Well, it is, again, called, What Must Be the Nature of Our National Repentance to Avoid Imminent Judgment? And I think you're right. Certainly, one of the things that many Christians that I've talked to don't seem to understand, if they're just the typical church member and maybe it's a nominal kind of faith that they even seem to exude, they don't seem to understand that the Romans' one kind of judgment, which we can vividly see going on, is not just unique to this time. The Lord has been doing this throughout history. That's been a common thing. You know, there's nothing new under the sun. He's always judging sin. There are always people in that John 3, 18 kind of situation where, you know, they're condemned already because they don't believe. Well, when you mix in what Peter teaches us, that judgment begins at the house of the Lord, you have to start thinking about what's going to affect what's going on out there. Well, it's going to be the pulpits, and it's going to be the pews, and it's going to be them in repentance, returning to the Word, reforming to the Word, you know, semper reformanda, always reforming, because the Lord is doing three things always that we know. He is always glorifying His name, He is always exalting His Son, and He is always blessing His saints. Now, sometimes that blessing comes in the form of chastisement, and my view is that that's where we're kind of at right now. What you see in the world at large is evidence that there's judgment. Why is there judgment? Well, the Church has largely been unfaithful. We've wandered from the Word, we've wandered from sound doctrine, we've diminished doctrine, disregarded doctrine, and certainly we've compromised the Gospel. as a whole, not every church. They're faithful, you know, there's a remnant out there. But those are the kind of things that concern me that don't seem to be preached with any kind of vigor. And you're saying that you don't think that we understand imminent judgment. I think you're right. Well, exactly. And, you know, we have our prayer meetings, and I'm thankful for that. But the judgment is too far away from some of us for us to be down on our knees, smiting upon our breasts and saying, God, have mercy to this nation. And to have the demeanor of the prophets in Daniel 9, Nehemiah 9, and Ezra 9, which all three of those chapters were them crying out for the sins of the land, they were saying these are our sins. though I haven't personally done them, the nation may be judged. And what's good about Owen's sermon is he talks about even if judgment comes upon the house of God, if we are repentant individually, the sharp end of the sword will escape. But we will feel it. It is going to get very, very close to home. And I honestly don't know that Christians in our day really believe this is true." Well, that grew of them. And Owen so masterfully goes through all of these deceitful refuges that people look to, and he knows that that's why they're not going to apply the sermon in a way that, well, if that was true in, what, 1649 or whenever he preached it, where does that leave us in 2022? Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, this is a little different context, but the spiritual doctrine, the truth, totally applicable. There's a principle there that we've missed. Well, and as somebody that teaches church history and came from Grand Rapids, I've often told people that no part of the United States has thrown off as much light is Boston, Massachusetts, under the Congregational Puritans in Grand Rapids, Michigan, under all the light that we've had there. That is a mecca of Reformed theology. Erdman's publishing, Baker publishing, Kriegel publishing, they're all there. And now Heritage publishing and so on. We have a massive amount of light in Grand Rapids, and more and more they're being given over to the gay agenda and so on. There is just not any part of this country, you could say, well, I'll go there and there's revival here and I'm going to be safe. It just seems to be widespread in the land. I used to have a bumper sticker on my car going to tech school that says, our only hope is revival. And I believe that's stronger now than ever. If God does not mercifully interpose and bring his manifest presence upon us and a number of people are convicted and then converted, then judgment's coming. Amen. Well, we need to be in prayer. Faithful Christians certainly need to understand this. They need to listen to this. This is so profound. If you work through it diligently and prayerfully, listening to it or taking the volume and reading it, it is powerful. I've certainly put it into as simple of English as I can and narrated it deliberately, slowly as I can. So even if a person says I have trouble reading Owen, I try to make it. Sometimes you can listen to it and you say, well, now I can hear it better than when I was reading, and that was my goal. But I do it foremost, first of all, for me, because I'm the one that needs it. I'd have such good fellowship with Paul Washer because that's my kind of person, that self-effacing. And, you know, you don't want people to praise you. You don't want people to talk to you about your ministry. You just want to be in prayer. That'd do me some good, you know, especially because I'd be rebuked, but that's what I need, you know. Well, we point to Christ, and we're means, and you are a tremendous means. And yeah, I thought about that earlier when you were talking about the narrating. You know, it's a win-win. You're benefiting from the exposure to this rich, biblical, doctrinal theology, but in narrating it, You're putting it out there, too, and the Lord can use that. I mean, it's drawn from His Word. Let me answer that really quickly because you asked me about the kind of stats so I can see them. I wish I'd hear more from the listeners and I would know how it's affecting them. But in August, my narrations were viewed by 29,300 people in 110 countries. Wow. Typically every month I'm right around 15,000 persons viewing the narrations from 100 countries. That's right about where I am right now. But I really want to hear from the people that listen to it because I can't know, you know, we could have, and you see this all the time, this wonderful library. full of Puritan books, and everybody might think, wow, you're spiritually minded, and they never actually eat the feast, you know, they have the books for display. And people can look at my narrations and look at the titles and the subtitles and so on and not listen and profit from anything. So we really don't know how our ministry is affecting people, and I know you would understand that unless people reach out to us and say, that really helped me, brother. Sure. And there are a few out there, and I'll even talk to them on the phone. But there are those that are out there that are really hungry for these things, and I see them all the time coming into the church here, because we're drawing a lot of people. You know, you have somebody like Dr. White that comes to your seminary and teaches a module, and people know Dr. White, and so they find out about the seminary here, and we've had people join this church just because they knew Dr. White was here, Dr. Sam Waldron has a national name within Reformed Baptist circles. Well, I'm just a mailman that's retired, and my job here is to get with the new ones one-on-one and just try to disciple them. And a lot of times I don't tell the pastors what I'm doing. We don't want to sound a trumpet so that people know the ministry that we were doing. We just, we love these people. We want, Paul says, I travel in birth that Christ be formed in you. We want them to receive the bread of life that they're so hungering for. And you and I have been in the way a little while, and God puts these people in our paths. And some of the best counsel we can give is just don't do the foolish things that I've taught as a young Christian. Wisdom is knowing what not to do and counseling. Well, you're doing something much more important than delivering mail as much of a career as that was. I mean you are delivering through this ministry the Word of God. Your soul is benefiting from it and like you said, you don't know how the Lord is using it. What's on the plate next? What have you got on the agenda for the recording? What are you planning on? Well, because every day I'm down here and wonder what might I narrate next. It can be spontaneous, but it's going to be a lot of Owen and a lot of his commentary on Hebrews. I just narrated chapter 5, verse 7. Jesus was heard, and the days of his flesh and that of his supplication and strong crying and tears, and he was heard and that he feared. And the way Owen opened that up, I just said, this is simply, simply marvelous. People look at this Hebrew's commentary and may be intimidated by the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, so much of the scholarliness of opening it up. But when he gets down into the doctrine, and Owen was, he loved our Lord in sincerity. You know, his last works that he wrote was on communion with Christ, the doctrine of Christ, and Volume 1. So Volume 1 is his latest writings on his deathbed. Somebody said that this work has just went to press, and he says, I rejoice, but now I'm about to see our Savior in another light and way. And it was the day that he passed away. I mean, he wasn't just, they weren't just theoretical and not even just doctrinal. I mean, the doctrine just really became a part of their lives, and I know Owen walked very, very close to our Lord. I see it in his writings. You can't write a book like The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded and a treatise on Indwelling Sin without really being in touch with the experimental side of Christianity. Anything you'd like to close with? Any words of wisdom? Darrell Bock If I could, you know, you asked me to read one paragraph. It's the next paragraph after the title, What is the Nature of that Repentance and Reformation, which at this time God requires of us all that we may not perish in a sword as pleasure. It's this illustration. After a devastation made of the treasure of the Roman Empire by a number of tyrants successively, Vespasian, Titus Vespasian, the Roman, soldier, coming to the government, acquainted the Senate that there was need of so many millions of money that the empire might stand. Not that it might flourish and grow vigorous, wherein too much more was required, but that it might be preserved from dissolution and ruin. And I shall propose not what is requisite to render the Church of God in this nation orderly, beautiful, and vigorous, but only what is necessary that it may stand and live by a deliverance from desolating judgments." I said, man, that's so gripping, because Owen never guaranteed that even if we carried these things out, and so much more, in country, that even if we carry these things out, God may still judge. Matt, you look at the Old Testament at the repentance, and yet God said, coming in the next generation, I'm still going to judge this nation even though the king was repentant. it because of the bloodguiltiness of the nation. And there was an amazing sermon, it's in the Puritan fast day sermons of Stephen Marshall called Reformation and Desolation, and the prophet was saying that even though There's this kind of repentance in the day of this king. Was it Manassas? I'm trying to remember. But still, judgment was going to come upon the country because of the sins that went before him. I'm going to spare this king and this present generation for a few years, but judgment still came upon Israel. for their apostasy. And I picked up that sermon because when we first started feeling the effects of this coronavirus and the present administration and so on, and I had just retired, so I said, what could I read that would really affect me? And I knew it would be the Puritan fast day sermons that were on the Puritan hard drive. And this is on Sermon Audio. It's called Reformation Desolation by Stephen Marshall. And I said, boy, this guy gets it. And it's another sermon that we're not about to really take to heart, you know. It reminds me, today, actually this morning, because you know I post these quotes, just things, as a result of kind of what I'm reading at the moment. I'll pull a book down and, you know, record the quotes. But this morning it was from R.B. Kuyper, Glorious Body of Christ, and he said, quote, the Word of God takes sin incomparably more seriously than does the modern pulpit. But underneath that fact lies another. The reason why Scripture takes sin much more seriously than does the present-day preaching is that it takes God so much more seriously. That's what you're speaking to. This is where we're at now. So, yeah, we need to pray for God to grant His church, His elect, repentance, and that that truth of repentance and return to the Word spreads throughout the society, to the culture, and we need to be speaking truth to power. But none of us are safe if we don't stay humble before the Lord, you know? Yeah. Lord make us faithful. Well brother, thank you so much for your time. You were an encouragement. Your ministry is being noticed, you know that, and we will be praying that the Lord continue to use it and broaden the exposure of what you're doing so that he can be glorified, sinners can be saved, and Christ can be exalted. Well, thank you so much. And that concludes this episode of The Bud Zone. The Bud Zone Podcast is a member of the Christian Podcast Community, where you can find scores of biblically sound podcasts for your edification and encouragement. Go to christianpodcastcommunity.org to discover more. You are now leaving the Bud Zone. Thank you for listening. God bless you. And just a reminder, no doctrines have been harmed during the recording of this show.