And welcome Facebook, and if you're watching this later, welcome YouTube. It says live, I don't see the counter anymore, but I assume it's up there live. We're gonna have a message about a half hour or so in length, followed by a discussion maybe a half hour or so in length, so we should be done around seven o'clock or so, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later, kinda depends on how things go. And if you, I don't know if you saw our sneak in, but we had a late arrival sneak in. If you catch this in progress and you wanna watch it and it's already later and you can't find it very easily on my Facebook page, it's also gonna be housed on YouTube. We have a YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and search for The Household of Faith in Christ, and you'll see our blue and purple logo there, and that's us. And now Tyler's making a cameo. What are you looking for, honey? I found it. And I think Grandma might be watching. Say hi, Grandma. She's up there. She's not there, but she can hear you. Yeah, okay Anyway, we're gonna have a passage from Jeremiah 23 read later So if you want to get your Bibles out and ready for that so you can find it quickly when we get there Jeremiah chapter 23 and We're gonna have The middle part of a message that started last week, and it's gonna end, the message is next week, but we'll get into all that in a little bit. So without further ado, I'm gonna ask Angela if she wouldn't mind opening some prayer, and then we'll have the message. Heavenly Father, we thank you for a day filled with blessing, Father. We thank you for bringing us together here in safety, Father, and we invite the presence of your Holy Spirit to be amongst us, Father, The teaching that comes forth, Lord, would be of you. The message would be what you would want to have said. The message would be a message of instruction, a message of edification, a message of guidance. And we just want to glorify you, Father, so we invite your presence here for this purpose. May the name of Jesus be glorified in this message, and may many be blessed by it. In Jesus' name we pray, amen, amen. Amen. I'm gonna go transition over there. As I mentioned, this is part two of a three-part message that was originally intended to be like a 60-minute lecture, if you will. But we're breaking it up into three pieces for our purposes here. And if you haven't read The Shack or seen the movie, that puts you at a bit of a disadvantage, but not a huge one. And if that is you, really quickly. The shack is a story about a little girl named Missy. She's killed in the woods in a shack and her father Mac is then the main character through the rest of the story and him dealing with that trauma. And in him dealing with it, he's visited by who the author would have you understand to be God, represented by three characters in the story, Papa, who's supposed to be the father character of God, Jesus, the son character of God, and Saraiu, the Holy Spirit character of God. So that's kind of a quick overview. That should be enough for what we're doing here. This is actually, this is the middle of three messages on this particular account that I'm giving, but it's actually the, one, two, three, fourth out of five total messages on the Shack that we will be doing. And so if you missed those and you're interested in all of the different things about the Shack that can be unpacked, you can go back in the archives and you can view those later. But to help us kind of get started here as a bit of an introduction, I'm gonna share a newsletter thing that I wrote as a promotion for this message that might help to set the scene a little bit. When writing the blurb for last month's newsletter, I hadn't yet written the Sunday sermon, or the Saturday sermon as it turns out. So I didn't quite know what I would say, but this time it's different. I have written the message, and so I know what I will say. This week we head down the homestretch of wrapping up our extended look at the epistles of John. For the second to last time, we're going to use the shack as a case study. What do many people in and around the church believe about the nature of God? How well does this match up with biblical teaching? What are the implications of these beliefs, both good and bad? The book continues to be popular. The movie's out on DVD. It could very likely be a big gift item for years to come during the holidays. Do you know what the shack teaches? Are you equipped to talk with others who might ask you questions about the issues it raises? Do you even know what you believe? what you should believe about these things. The Apostle John would hope for you to know what you believe and why. John would want us to understand the truth and be witnesses to the truth. This is the endeavor we continue to undertake. I am eager to worship with you once again. So truth, one of the two huge themes in the epistles of John, first, second, and third John, the thumbnail understanding of those messages, truth and love. Love and truth. It's not truth opposed to love, love opposed to truth. They go together. Can't have one without the other. And what happens with something like the shack is it puts so much emphasis on love as we want to understand what love means, not necessarily what the Bible teaches about love. that we're willing to sacrifice the truth to try to achieve it. That really would be the crux of the issue for the shack. So in a very simple sense, that is the problem with the shack. But it's so much more complex and complicated, and there's so many issues that are raised in the shack, so many different kinds of heresies, so many different variations on those heresies, that it really is kind of a primer, if you will, for us understanding the world around us, which is why we're spending the time that we are on this, so that when you hear these kinds of things in a different context, we're like, I kind of know what that is. I might not remember the name for it, I might not even know why I remember what this is, but I kind of know what it is, and I know it's not biblical. So that's kind of the goal with all of this. So we're gonna jump right in, this is probably the most awkward of all the messages because this is the middle part of a three-part message. So it's kind of absent a natural introduction, it's absent a natural conclusion. So we're gonna just jump right into the pool here. But before I do that, let me have a word of prayer real quick. Father, we ask that we would have increased discernment and wisdom as your people through instruction like this. that we would recognize our need to be dependent upon you, your truth, what's been preserved for us in your word, the scriptures, the Old and New Testament, and recognize that you can't have love without truth. And of course, if it's truly the truth, then it's rooted in love. These things are both from you. They're both who you are. You are love. You are truth. help our minds to be eliminated and our hearts be softened through this message, and help you better equipped to share the gospel truth and advance the kingdom with the neighbors around us. It's in Christ's name we pray, amen. So on page 126 of the shack, Papa, who is, again, supposed to be the God, the Father character, says, and this is talking to Mac, who in a sense is the everyman. Mac is supposed to be you and me. Mac is humanity in a sense. Papa says to Mac, our relationship, it's not about performance or you having to please me. I'm not some self-centered, demanding little deity insisting on my own way. Now, it starts out not so bad, right? Our relation with God isn't about us performing for God per se, but is God being righteous the same as him being a petulant bully, as he's represented here in that quote? And so this sort of thing makes Mac confused. He's thoroughly confused. And he says that Papa is not anything like the God I've known. That's what Mac says on page 164. And I would say, me neither. And Mac adds on page 179, I find the way that you are, talking to God, to be so different from all the well-intentioned religious stuff I'm familiar with. I guess like what, from the Bible? And from the church fathers? This is a problem. On page 187 of the shack, Papa tells Mac, who says of himself, Mac does, that he hides inside lies. And Papa says to Mac, there's no shame in that. There's no shame from hiding inside lies. And Papa also says, it's not about feeling guilty. Guilt will never help you find freedom in me. Well, why do we have a conscience? How are we ever going to be pricked to conversion if we never feel the guilt? In the shack, God is kind of like a cosmic salesperson. When his people refuse to listen to him, he's not frustrated, he's not disappointed. He just looks down the corridors of time and he sees that with just 46 more attempts, he will be successful. It's as I was taught in the sales field. Every no brings you that much closer to a yes. And in the shack, it seems that there is a yes awaiting each individual. I mean, does this mean that there's universal salvation? Well, perhaps, according to Paul Young, the author of The Shack, on page 149, he has Jesus say, if you want to do things, if you want to do your thing, have at it. Time is on our side. In the end, I guess, love wins, to borrow a title from Rob Bell's controversial book. No one faces eternal condemnation, apparently. Now the shack, I mentioned this last week, antinomianism, anti-law. The shack places this antinomianism at the foot of the cross, so at least it does that. On page 203, it says, Jesus laid the demand of the law to rest, and goes on to say, it no longer has any power to accuse or command. Is that right? Does the law have no power to command? Were all people's, each and every specific individual person, were all people's condemnation nailed to the cross? I would point you to John's Gospel, chapter 16, verse 8, and 2 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 10, and a variety of other places you could turn for an answer to a question like that. On page 223, Papa, again, the father character says, I don't do humiliation or guilt or condemnation. But is that right? Is there no judgment? Is it fair to say that Jesus humiliated the Pharisees as they were trying to trick him? Don't all people stand guilty before the throne of God saved only by the blood of Christ? Is there or is there not? a judgment day coming according to the Bible. Papa also says on page 206, you never disappoint me. Now maybe I'm mincing words here, but was God disappointed in Moses resulting in Moses not being allowed to enter into the promised land? Was God disappointed with all the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness? Was God disappointed in the whole world at the flood? Is God disappointed in any of the seven churches that have letters written to them in the book of Revelation? Also look at Mark 3.5, Ephesians 4.30, 1 John 2.28. And Saraiu, the Holy Spirit character, digs the hole a bit deeper, saying on page 206, The trouble with living by priorities is that it sees everything as a hierarchy. So have no priorities. Be anti-authority. Are humans on an equal footing with God? The Jesus character tries to clarify on the next page, saying that he doesn't want to be at the top of the pyramid, He wants to be at the center of everything. That is a straw man argument that is built upon word play. And it leaves no one in charge, no authority, no law, no rules. And with no rules, there can be no sin. And so Missy's killer, again, she's a little six year old girl who was killed early in the story. Her killer, her murderer, he's not said in the shack to be a sinner. but he is rather said to be a victim of pain. Look at page 225, that's where you find this. Papa says that the killer is a, quote, broken child that has been twisted by his pain. And the same is true for Mac, I guess. I mean, that's true for all of us. We're all twisted and broken by our sin and our pain and that sort of thing, but what causes our pain but our sin? It's not a get out of jail free card because we're in pain, The victim mentality that's seen here in the shack is something that is pervasive in the broader culture right now. And Mack buys right into this. Mack calls himself, on page 186, a mess, a screw up. Doesn't call himself a sinner. Papa does this too, just two pages later, saying, when you mess up again, ask for forgiveness again. And Saraiu, the Holy Spirit character, says on page 196 that sins are mistakes. But the trouble with this sort of language is that not all mess-ups are sins. And to say that they are is to diminish what sin really is. I mean, if I bump into a milk carton and I splatter the milk all over the counter, spills it on the floor, I make a big mess. I have messed up. I haven't sinned. That is, by the way, why we don't cry over spilt milk. Seriously. So if God isn't an authority figure, what is God? Well, in the shack, Papa says, quote, I am the always present observer. It says that on page 95, the always present observer. Now this is interesting because if you see an interview with the author, William Paul Young, or hear him speak in a different context, he will actually, on occasion, speak against deism. And yet, right here, the pages of the shack, this is deism. A distant God. He's not active and involved and personal and imminent. He is removed. He is a observer. an observer who describes sin as, quote, your soul's sickness, who sees Max's soul as a complex garden. This is beginning to be unfolded in the shack on page 138. But where is the sin in this complex garden? The god of the shack asks postmodern questions like, what is freedom really? Asked that on page 95, and then answers that freedom is an incremental process. Freedom is a verb. It's mere movement, motion. It's never actually attained, never gained. You can never actually have freedom. Words have meaning. We need to be mindful of their definitions. Take, for example, the meaning of Papa's name in the shack. You know, something that could easily get lost when you're reading the shack is the importance of Papa's real name. Papa is the familiar name that's used over and over in the pages of the shack for the father character. But the official name for Papa in the shack, you find it on page 86, is Eleusia. And theologians might find this name rather interesting. Eleusia means God of all being. And later in the book, Papa is said to be the ground of all being. That's on page 111. Why do I point this out? Because it appears that this is language borrowed from a 20th century existentialist philosopher and theologian named Paul Tillich. And Tillich taught that God isn't a being per se himself. Rather, God is the ground for all being. He is the foundation for all being. He's an abstract idea or notion. He is a figment. He's not an actual being. So as I was reading deeper into the shack, I began asking myself, so is William Paul Young here trying to build a system of thought that is based upon Platonist philosophy mixed with systematic theology and a dash of existentialism and perhaps even some panentheism thrown in? You even know what panentheism is? The shack tells you on page 112 when the Jesus character says, God, who is the ground of all being, dwells in, around, and through all things ultimately emerging as the real. So God is in and around and through all things, but God isn't actually a being himself. You're on a nature walk, you see a big boulder over there. Oh, that big boulder, God's in that boulder. God's around that boulder, God's through that boulder. And this little pebble, I'm gonna skip across the water, that's God. And the water is God, and the breeze I feel, my hair is God. All these various ideas are God. God isn't any one. He's not even anything, he's in everything, but he's not actually anything, or more importantly, anyone. But as is often the case in the shack, the book is a bit inconsistent on this point. On page 135, Saraiu, again supposedly the Holy Spirit, says, original sin, quote, tore the universe apart, divorcing the spiritual from the physical. That's not exactly the biblical view, but it's also not exactly the shacklical view either. I mean, how can God be in and around and through everything when the spiritual and the physical have been divorced? They have been torn apart. It's an attempt to have it both ways. It is a logical inconsistency, and it's pervasive. These sorts of things are pervasive throughout the story of the shack. And if you're a little confused at this point, you know, it's okay. So is William Paul Young. Now I've taken a moment here to talk about Papa's name, Eleusia. Let's allow a few minutes here, and we're gonna talk about the three main God characters. We're gonna tackle the Papa character this week, and we're gonna get into the Jesus and Sarai, the Holy Spirit character, next week. So there's these three main God characters in the shack. Now Papa, again, is intended to be God the Father, but represented throughout a mature 95% of the book as a woman. Papa says repeatedly that she is, quote, especially fond of people. It's one of her favorite phrases. And so Mac, he finally asks her if there's anyone with whom she is not especially fond. Is there anyone you're not especially fond of, God? Anyone at all? And Papa's answer comes on page 119 after running through the catalog of all beings who ever existed, right? all the false prophets who deceive God's people, all of the anti-Christ bedeviling Christ's church, all the demons, the devil himself. Papa answers, nope, I haven't been able to find any. Guess that's just the way I is. To this, Mac actually asks, What about your wrath, God? What about your wrath? And Papa's answer, I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment. It's not my purpose to punish it. That's on page 120. This is totally unbiblical, of course. I mean, Isaiah 59. Verse 2, Romans chapter 6, verse 23, Deuteronomy 28, verse 63, Proverbs 16, 4, Psalm 11, 5, Romans 2, 5, Revelation 6, 16, Revelation chapter 17. I mean, the list is unending. It goes on and on and on. If God doesn't punish for sin with death, then why did Jesus Isn't this what Christians believe? Don't Christians believe that Jesus had to die for our sin? Well, in the shack, Papa says, I'm not asking you to believe in anything. I'm not asking you to believe anything. It's page 119. Well, why not? Well, because on page 192, Papa says, I am now fully reconciled to the world, no matter what they believe. Mac asks, the whole world? Papa replies, The whole world. This is Max of Universal Salvation, huh? And when Max says he doesn't understand, Papa says, men, such idiots sometimes. So if you disagree with William Paul Young on this point, you are an idiot, especially if you're a man. And I suppose I'd have to be. I mean, if Papa, God the Father, is the one calling me an idiot in the shack, I must be an idiot. Now, almost as bad as being called an idiot by a fictional God, being called an idiot by a fictional wuss God. As I alluded to last week, the God of the shack, kind of a wuss. We see this weakness on display, for example, page 224, Papa says, Mac, for you to forgive this man is for you to release him to me and allow me to redeem him. Allow? God needs Mac's permission? Later, page 225, Papa says, when you forgive someone, you certainly release them from judgment. Whose judgment? God's? Apparently, look at page 227 of the shack if you have a copy. So it doesn't matter what God declares in the shack. It matters what humans declare. And this helps to explain why Papa says just say it out loud There is power in what my children declare. Now, do we have here a word of faith theology burgeoning and bubbling up? I'm not sure. Papa tells Mac, he says, Mac, give him over to me so that my love will burn from his life every vestige of corruption. Again, here hinting at universal atonement, but only if Mac, representing us humans, says it's okay. We're gonna pause here in a second so that we can enter into our discussion, but I've obviously quoted an awful lot of William Paul Young's words, the words he's placed into the characters of his story, characters that in some cases are supposed to be God. Let's end with God's actual words. Jeremiah 23, I mentioned it at the start tonight, so hopefully you've already bookmarked it, stuck a thumb in there or a pencil or something so you can find it quickly. If you haven't done that, I'll give you a second to find it. Jeremiah 23, it's in the Old Testament, latter part of the Old Testament. If you find Isaiah, you're close, go a little bit further in. And if you find yourself in Lamentations, Ezekiel, right around there, and you've gone a little too far, back up and you'll find Jeremiah. We're looking at 23, beginning in verse 16. Gonna read seven verses together. Basically seven verses that warn against what's happening here with Paul, Yond, and the shack. 16 through 22 in Jeremiah 23 say, Thus says the Lord of hosts, do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, it shall be well with you. And to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, no disaster shall come upon you. For who among them has stood in the counsel of the Lord to see and hear his word? Or who has paid attention to his word and listened? Behold the storm of the Lord. Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest. It will burst upon the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days, you will understand it clearly. I did not send the prophets, yet they ran. I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds. This is the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God, perfect rule and guide for faith and life practice. Those with an ear to hear, let them hear. Let us pray. Father, you are a magnificent God. We ask that you would forgive us for our tendency to minimize who you are to deny your character, to invent with our own imagination a God of our own making, who can fit inside our own box, imagining, pretending that you need our permission to do anything. Lord, we ask you to bless our time of discussion, that we grow from this time, that we grow in our understanding of you, your word, obligation to serving the world around us, to being ambassadors for your church and advancing the cause of the kingdom. We beg your forgiveness for our inadequacies, but we trust that your Holy Spirit will be alive and active and apparently in a clear way involved with us in this discussion that we're having. Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to have this time, to live in a place where we can freely gather in this way. We appreciate you and the freedoms you grant us in Christ so much. It's in his name, Christ's name that we pray. Amen. All right. So I've got some, Questions kind of lined up but anything that originally struck you that I might not ask a question about The idea that God is in everything and And That would suggest that he's not a person with a personality, and yet he's standing there talking to someone with a personality. I mean, he's just contradiction after contradiction. I mean, he's talking to a God who's saying, I'm in everything, and I'm just a force. And I don't really have a mind, I'm just a force. Yet I have a mind enough to talk to have this conversation with you. And that can be one of the indicators when somebody's talking about spiritual things, talking about the Bible supposedly. When there's an inconsistency, that can be an indication that, okay, there's something wrong, at least with their argument, if not with their theology. So how is it that we have this basically impersonal God who's being very personal in the shack? One of the things people love about the story of the shack is you have this personal God, but at the same time, there's an argument being made by this personal God that I'm not really personal. Because really what you have is an imagination of, Mack, the main character, you have an imagination of his own mind, really, because I don't know if we've mentioned this yet, or if it's coming up next week, I can't remember, but there's this point in the story where Mack is wondering if he's, is he hallucinating, is he dreaming, is he imagining these things, is he having a vision, like he's not sure, and that's putting the story on purpose, because I think we as the reader are supposed to be like, oh, maybe he's just projecting in his mind this story, which would make sense if we have a panentheist god. And there's a difference between pantheism and panentheism, by the way. So if you might have heard me throw in the extra N in there, that wasn't me misspeaking. Pantheism is God is everything. Panentheism is God is in everything. So they're very similar and close, but they're slightly different. And I don't think the shack is advocating a pantheistic view quite so much as a panentheistic view, more likely. So anyway, there's your word of the week. So Sarayu, we talked about Sarayu, I think the meaning of the word, right? The Hindu God, the name of a Hindu God. It's interesting that that's the name for the Holy Spirit that was chosen. Sarayu says on page 203 that humans, like the law, okay, inconsistent, right? Paul Young in the shack is basically saying, we don't like the law, we don't need the law, we don't want the law, but it's very interesting. Humans like the law because, quote, it grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. That's not what the law does. That's not what it does, and I think it's interesting. That's similar to the kinds of things we're hearing now, right? With the hegemony, right? The power structures that are, the systemic issues that are oppressing people, the laws that have been created are there so that you can be a judge of others and feel superior to them, and you can oppress them. There's a connection, that's why I said this kind of thinking that was so popular for like a decade, when the shack first came out, it's popularity's begun to wane. But for like a decade, it was hugely popular, and on the heels of all that, we have all this woke theology. It feels like it came out of nowhere. It didn't come out of nowhere. It has its seedbed in a variety of things, including the kinds of theology that are taught in the shack. And because we are slow as a people, pick up on the mistakes, the theological mistakes in the shack, not only to pick up on them, but to, we've talked about this in the past, to use the shack as a Bible study in a non-critical fashion, to see all the positive things we can learn about God by studying the shack instead of studying the Bible. We were so weak 10 years ago on that question that it doesn't, it shouldn't be surprising that we're caught, you know, running through the streets naked right now, theologically speaking, you know, so. So we have this, you know, judge not lest ye be judged kind of a mentality here, right? Masseria goes on to speak against, quote, responsibility and expectation. Is responsibility and expectation bad? Is it bad, expectations bad to have responsibility? Can you think of a reason why someone like Paul Young would suggest that it is bad? There's no accountability. There's no sin if there's not responsibility. And so it just kind of speaks to his whole mentality of, you know, Papa forgave it all. It's all done. You don't have to worry about anything anymore. It's already forgiven. Whether you want to receive it or not, doesn't matter. It's all done. And again, it kind of fits with what's going on now, even though the shack predates what's happening now by a little over a decade now, right? Decade and a half, really, since the book was written, I think, or pretty close to it. This anything goes, your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth, who's to say what is truth? So you can't hold me responsible, only who's to say I really should have done that anyway. You can't put that on me, who are you to put that on me? Like this very laissez-faire, squishy kind of way of thinking about the world plays out here. This one jumped off the page of me when I read, a lot of them did, but this is one that did. Sarah, you again, speaking here, says, I have great fondness for uncertainty. This is God speaking. Would the Apostle John agree that God is a big fan of uncertainty? I mean, you know, that's just flat out ridiculous. God, one of his attributes is that he's omniscient. Right, and not genius. So he doesn't even know what it is to be uncertain. That's a human limitation, and even when Jesus was human, he didn't know things in his humanity because he purposely condescended himself to be human, but he wasn't uncertain about anything. He knew who he was and he knew his mission and he knew he called himself the way, the truth and the life. He was saying, if anything you need to know, I'm your guy. I'm gonna tell you, come to me and you'll get it. So that's just, yeah, it's just ridiculous. Like so many things that this man says in this book, it's just, It's absurd and God is not a fan of uncertainty. God is the answer to uncertainty. He's the antithesis of it. You might remember a theme, I don't know how many weeks ago it was now, we were in the epistles of John and the whole theme of the particular message was John is driving home the point that he wants us as believers in the true God, followers of Jesus Christ. He is written so that we can know that we may know that we have eternal life. There's no uncertainty. It's a message of assurance. You who are in Christ, you know. that you're in Christ. You know that he is who he says he is. You know God is who he says he is. You know you are who God says you are. There's no uncertainty. If you have uncertainty, John wants to remind you, he's like, no! No uncertainty here, be certain. So John would disagree with Saraiu completely, and yet John's writing under the inspiration of Saraiu. No he's not. Using Shaq's language, right? Right, right. Writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he's in disagreement with the Holy Spirit? Obviously that's not true, so the shack is in disagreement with the Holy Spirit is the point there. Papa says on pages 207 and 220 that nothing is ritual. So it says it once and doubles down 13 pages later. But can you think of any biblical rituals? Well yeah, communion. Yeah, Lord's Supper, there's one. How about the command to not be conformed to the world but transform yourself by the renewing of your mind? How about dying daily? I mean, that's something that, you know, if you don't do it every day, then how is it... That's the only way it cannot be a ritual is if you don't do it. If you don't die daily, then it can't be a ritual. But you're told to die daily. And one of the first things that comes to mind is the Lord's Supper, and of course, Paul Young knows this, and so Paul Young actually has the shack say, the God character, one of the God characters says, without any ritual, I think it's Papa, without any ritual, without any ceremony, they savored the warm bread and shared the wine. Actually, this wasn't a quote, this is a description. They actually have a communion meal in the shack, not remembering the context. And they didn't treat it as a ritual. They did it with no ceremony, no nothing. They just happened to have bread and wine as like it was a regular meal, I guess. Not a Lord's Supper meal. But it was meant to be a picture of the Lord's Supper. So ritual and ceremony, apparently these are bad things in William Paul Young's view. The thing he doesn't do is he doesn't, He doesn't distinguish between something being ritual in a mindless way and something being ritual in a spiritual way. Because Jesus said, The father is looking for worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth. So the father doesn't want mindless ritual. Just for the sake of doing it. Just for the sake of doing it. In fact, he rebuked Israel and one of the major prophets, I forget which one, I think Isaiah, for that very thing. He said, just get away with me with your, I'm paraphrasing, with your mindless rituals. So it's the attitude. that you bring to it that God is concerned about. But certainly there are things that for our own spiritual growth and enrichment, we need to do them routinely. It's the attitude and it's also the practices themselves. If we do those things, those rituals, those religious practices, if we do them imperfectly or even sinfully on occasion, those things are paid for at the cross in Christ as believers. But it doesn't mean that the demands aren't still there. Think about all the layers upon layers of ritual in the Old Testament with the temple's sacrifice system and the way they were to handle the Ark of the Covenant. I mean, what was his name, the guy who touches it? Uzzah. Uzzah. Uzzah reaches out to the Ark. They're not following the ritual. They weren't supposed to be loading it up onto an ox cart. They were supposed to carry it on the poles, but they neglected that ritual, decided to put it on an ox cart. The ox cart starts to topple over, so Uzzah reaches out his hand to stop the ark from hitting the ground, and God strikes him dead. Oh, but he doesn't punish God. Yeah, God doesn't punish. Oh, how about that other tiny ritual in the New Testament, spoken of in the book of Hebrews, in which the writer of Hebrews says, forsake not the assembly of yourselves together. Right, so I mean going to church is a ritual. Yeah, but the shack speaks against that and you can see but in today's context how many fellow professing believers do you know that would say we don't really have to go to church? Exactly, we can just go outside and we can just you know lay in the grass and take in nature. I have nothing against that, but it's not a substitute for what the Lord has commanded that we do for our own spiritual good and well-being. And you have a lot of professing believers who refuse for whatever reason, I don't understand it, but they refuse to be baptized. And they're like, oh, we need to, or another example, I'm gonna go back to baptism in just a second, but people who live together forever, they call themselves married, but they never actually do anything to recognize that we are officially married. There's no ritual, no covenant ceremony, no nothing. Now, I'm not saying the Bible requires that, but they're, They're animus towards that. It really belies something going on in their heart. But the Bible does say that believers should be baptized. But you were saying, I think, because I don't want anybody to misunderstand you, when you said marriage, you weren't saying that the Bible doesn't say that we're required to be married to cohabit. That's not... No, no, you should be married to cohabit. What I'm saying is there's no biblical requirement for spending $40,000 to have a ceremony for it, right? But yeah, you need to be married to go have it. Yeah, so yeah, thanks for clarifying. But on baptism, if you call yourself a Christian, because I know you guys are baptized, so if you call yourself a Christian and you have not been baptized, get baptized. And if you're saying, no, I don't really think I need to be baptized, you are in sin. You are in sin. Stop it. Get baptized. Well, and I think, just to put the cherry on the top of what you said, The one person who did not need to be baptized was Jesus. And he did it. He said to fulfill our righteousness. I think what that means is, he said, I'm doing this as an example to you. I don't have to do it for myself. I'm doing it as an example for you to follow, because that's basically what he was saying to his cousin, John the Baptist, who was saying, but why would I need to be baptized by you? No, just allow it this time, because this will help to fulfill our righteousness. So yeah, if the Lord did it when he didn't need to, we most definitely need to do it. Now here's a point that's actually one of the stronger points made in the chat, but even it has some issues potentially. Page 213, Sarayu says, each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you. And the more you know another, the richer the colors of the relationship. What do you think about that? I can break it down, it's a long quote. Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. I don't know if I like the word absolutely there necessarily, but each relationship is unique. But to say it's absolutely unique would almost indicate that there's like no commonality with any other sort of relationship. So I don't like the word absolutely there, but okay. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you. Again, that's interesting. Well, love isn't a feeling, love is a verb, so the action part may vary from person to person. Yeah, I mean, when you think about the seven love languages, and so what makes one person feel the most love is different than the next person. If you put it in those terms, and I think even parents with children can say that much, that this one child feels really appreciated by whatever. There's a sense of which we love everyone the same meaning right we sacrificial Servant heart, you know respecting them as image bearers of God all those sorts of things That's gonna be the same. But yeah, you're gonna it's gonna play out differently So I'm not trying I mean actually this is one of the best passages in the shack for what it's worth So I'm not trying to tear it apart And the more, you know another person, you know, the richer the colors of the relationship Yeah, the more you get to know someone the richer so there's a lot of truth here But the way it's phrased, because there's a little ambiguity, throws in a couple of, you know, absolutely this, or you know, whatever, like the way it's phrased, in some sense it feels biblical to me, and in another sense it feels a little bit like Dr. Phil to me, you know? So, for what it's worth. I think if this exact phrase showed up in a different book, I would have been fine with it, but because it's surrounded by so many other problems, I'm suspicious even of this. I hear what you're saying, it's like, yeah, oh my gosh, what can I take from this that's not sully? Yeah. So Mac, again, the main character in the book, who kind of represents all of us, is kind of the idea, I think, of Mac. I think, more specifically, he's supposed to represent the author, William Paul Young, but as a stand-in for us. Mac has anger at his earthly father who abused him as a child, right, in the story. Now, the father in the story of the shack is supposedly a Christian. That's interesting. But was he really? What do you think? This abusive father, and the abuse in the story is pretty dramatic kinds of abuse. If I remember correctly, it's been a while now, but if I remember correctly, he used to strap him to, tie him to a tree and then whoop him with a belt. He'd get into a drunken stupor and be completely out of control with rage and just beat the snot out of his son. Does that, I don't know, does that evidence, enough fruit of the spirit to feel like it's a Christian? It's one thing if you're struggling against sin, it's another thing if you're just embracing it and having a whoop butt session. If the father went through a season like that and then repents, you can say, oh, there's been a change. But it would appear that the father goes to his grave having been that kind of a father. actually done on purpose by the author to paint a Christian as something that they're not, like as a hypocrite. You know, this is what Christians do. They beat their children, but they go to church on Sunday because it's all about the ritual. So he's kind of doing another layer of... It comes across to me like he's had this trauma in his life and And so he's kind of, he has created in his mind, I don't know what has caused him to do this, but he has created in his mind what God is like. Maybe his earthly father really did call himself a Christian and abused him. So that warped him. Now he's going to explain what a Christian really is. And you know, from one extreme to the other, You know, this guy probably really wasn't a Christian, at least not at first, abused him. So now I'm gonna go all the way over to the other side and I'm gonna create a God that has basically no standards. And that's really who God is. And I just think, I just get the sense that that's what William Paul Young has done. You know. William Paul Young, you know, the Papa, not the Papa, the Mac character, has to, in order to be able to live with himself, has to accept what Papa said, which is, you know, it's all done. You know, it's all done. The sins, you know, I took care of it all. Because in his mind, he's like, oh, okay, so that's how I can relate to my father. He just didn't know any better. know what he was doing, just like I didn't know what I was doing, neither did the killer know what they were doing. It's all forgotten because that's how I can, because how else could I possibly accept that my own father would do that to me. So I almost think like that's in his mind how he can digest it. And it does appear that there must have been a post-death conversion for Mac's father in the story because Mac and his father meet in the afterlife and they have a reconciliation where they They come together in a peaceful, loving kind of a context. So here's somebody who was professing to be a Christian, but wasn't acting like one at all, dies, and then all of a sudden becomes this loving, almost perfect picture of what a loving father would look like in the afterlife. Again, this idea of a universal salvation, even if you go to your grave not a Christian, not a believer in Christ, that somehow after you die, you will have more chances to accept the truth. But this would go completely against what scripture says. It's appointed to each to die once and then to judgment. I'm familiar enough to know that there's a variety of people that might see this video and we've all seen stories in the news and all of us probably have stories in our own histories. people who were Christians who did bad things to us, people who were leaders in the church, you know, pastors or Roman Catholic priests, you know, they were pretty high profile in the news over the last number of decades with these kinds of stories. And that becomes a pretty big issue for people, a stumbling block for people to say, oh, Christianity, yeah, a bunch of hypocrites. Christianity is not about me. It's not about these wonderful ladies, it's not about any other pastor priest anywhere, or kingdom priest, we're all priests. It's not about any of us, though. It's about our eternal, perfect, high priest, Jesus Christ. The church rests on him, who he is, what he's done. And Christ is not a hypocrite. And we all call ourselves Christians and we throw ourselves upon the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ because we recognize we're not him. and we are a working process. And that is not an excuse, but that is an explanation as to why you see a difference. Why don't Christians act like Christ? Because we're not Christ. When we're fully, perfectly glorified at the end, when Christ returns and heaven comes to earth and there's a renewed creation and all those who are in Christ, When we come to believe in Jesus Christ, we are declared righteous. That's called being justified. We have a declared justification. It's not because we are innocent, it's that God accounts us as though we're innocent. And how can he do that? Because he's assigned our guilt to Jesus Christ, who pays the penalty on our behalf. So it's like the judge saying, all right, the fine's 100 bucks. I don't have a hundred bucks. Well then you're going to stay in jail forever. And then Jesus shows up and says, I got it. Here's a hundred bucks. It's on me. That's kind of what justification is. And then out of gratitude for that transaction that takes place, that legal transaction, we now want to make him happy. We want him to be satisfied with our life. We want to be a good example. And as we progress, and some of us do this faster and slower than others. It's kind of like the stock market. a little bit up and down, but kind of like the stock market, it should be a general upward trajectory over time. That improvement in our life is what's called sanctification. We get increasingly holy in our living. And then the final step is glorification, where we won't be able to sin anymore. But until that day, we're still, sadly, horrifyingly able to sin. So if you're one of those, Christianity, man, they're all a bunch of hypocrites. Yeah, we are. But when we're glorified, we won't be anymore because we'll be like the one who saved us. We'll see him as he is because we'll be like he is. But we're not there yet. So judge the faith and the truth of what the Bible teaches based on the standard of Jesus Christ, not upon any faulty standard that I might try to put forward or anybody would try to put forward in our lives. Let's see, so here's a quote from 224 in the shack. This ought to be a fun one. Son, you need to speak it to name it. I wonder, in a sense we might be okay with this, but is this a name it, claim it theology at play? Who even knows what name it, claim it theology is? Who wants to take a stab at that? Well, I think in the worst sense of that phrase, it means that you can live any kind of life you want to live, and despite your rather rebellious and even depraved life, you can just speak whatever you want. It'll sort of materialize just because you spoke it. Here's a way to put it. Even though you're sowing poison ivy, you can just speak daisies into your life and you'll get daisies. It doesn't matter that you're sowing poison ivy, you're going to get daisies just because you speak it. That's a false version of it. But I think that if you're living obediently before the Lord, and not perfectly, but in spirit and in truth, you are living the kind of life where you're repenting and you're going forward with the Lord with integrity, then I think you have some power there, some authority there To cast demons out. Exactly. To speak certain things because we are made in the image of God who spoke things. He said, call those things that are not as though they are. You can call for your children certain things. You have authority over them. You can call those things. you know, they're going astray, you can say, no, you're going to be a servant of, you're going to, God's gonna get ahold, you can start decreeing and proclaiming over their lives that which is in alignment with the will of God. Yeah. And that's a huge key, because in a sense, again, if we wanna, it's kinda like Bill Clinton, it depends on the meaning, what the meaning of is, is. It's kind of, now, what, it's gonna be, what the meaning of it and so when it says you need to speak it, to name it, what is it? And what we're to speak is God's word. Because there's power in God's word, there's power in what God declares, and then we, he shares that power with his people because we're co-heirs with Christ, but we need to be speaking his word. And what is it we're to name? Well, his word and his promise. So we're naming his promises. And so oftentimes this gets misused where somebody decides that they want to have a, How much does the new electric Hummer? $120,000, something like that? And somebody says, I want a new electric Hummer. And somebody says, all right, well, you just need to speak it, name it, and God's gonna give you an electric Hummer for $120,000. I would say, okay, good, show me a scripture. Where has God said anything about that kind of a promise? Where does God's word indicate that that's what we should expect? But it gets misused, and so we have a lot of people in a lot of contexts, a lot of churches, who, they want the hummer, and they don't get the hummer, and then they get castigated for it. Well, you don't have enough faith. If you had enough faith, you'd be able to speak it into existence. You should be able to say, boom, I want a hummer, and tomorrow you have one. But that's not God's word, right? That's not according to His will. So you need to figure out what His will is. We know what His will is from His word. We need to name, we need to speak His word into situations and into our life. And we need to name the promises. What has He promised us? And He loves that because it brings Him glory. And you lay claim to that. And God will not deny that because He has promised it, because He has declared it. And you're walking in His word rather than an imagination of your own word. which is, at the crux of it, the issue for William Paul Young. He made himself a god. He has declared his own word. He's naming his own thing that has nothing to do with what God has revealed in Special Revelation, what we call the Bible. But it makes sense, because earlier in the book, he talks about how God is in everything. So you should just be able to name something, right? I mean, to use his own... And his own logic, maybe? And his own logic, right? I mean, that's just kind of playing into his own Yeah, it could be. I'm gonna do one more just so I can finish what's on this page. It'll make it easier for me next week. So on page 226, Papa says, forgiveness does not excuse anything. Well, I mean, there's truth to that. There's consequences to our sin. There's consequences, but yeah, forgiveness doesn't excuse the sin that we commit. No, I would agree. If I go to the Lord for forgiveness, he's not saying it doesn't matter that you did that. So yeah, I think that's true, but I feel that there's a but coming. But what else? That's the quote. Oh, that's it? Forgiveness does not excuse anything. Well, yeah. Forgiveness does not... It does not excuse. It doesn't give the person who committed the offense an out, as though they had an excuse for doing it. So yeah, in that sense. But in another sense, when God forgives us, we are free to go. We are, in that sense, excused. There's a lot of churches, which kind of bothers me when they do this, but a lot of churches will end their worship service with, you are excused. You ever been to a church like that? And I've never liked that, the way that's phrased, you're excused. It's like we're, we've been held, yeah exactly, we've been held captives, and now you're excused. It's always bugged me just a little bit, but that might just be me. But yeah, the idea of we're excused, meaning we're free to go in that sense, but we use the word excuse, you know, excuse and excuse aren't exactly the same word. So forgiveness doesn't mean we have an excuse for having committed a sin, but when we are forgiven, we are free to go, so we are excused. We shouldn't hold it against anybody any longer, right? It should be dealt with. Right, yeah. Forgiveness is releasing a person At the same time, it's still being wise in how you deal with them. Right, right. Yeah, you have to put yourself in that same situation. What you're doing is you're releasing your anger. Right. And allow for God's wrath. But God, in terms of consequences, I don't think we're ever excused. No, we're not because that's the cross. When I say consequences, I don't mean eternal consequences. I believe that when God forgives us, Because the eternal consequence really is hell. That is excused. Earthly consequences really aren't excused. You get the repercussions of your behavior. There's mercy, there's grace. You have to really approach it carefully. That's one of the reasons I highlighted this quote is because If you want to look at it from a particular point of view, you can say, yeah, I kind of could go with that, but this other way, I can't go with that, but that's not how it's presented in the shack. It's a flat, black and white statement, forgiveness does not excuse anything, period, end of thought. That's a little bit problematic. Somebody could take that the wrong way, and given the context of the shack, Again, in a different context, surrounded by a lot of really good theology might not bother me so much. Although, surrounded by a lot of really good theology, it probably wouldn't have been quite so cavalier in making a bold statement like that and not explaining it. Anyway, we've been going just a little over an hour, so I guess we'll wrap it up. I wanted to mention this, I'm mentioning it at the end, because if you're still watching at this point, then you are obviously supportive of what we're doing here, you're involved with what we're doing, you didn't just check in early, oh this isn't for me, and check out, you're still here now. So you're the ones that want to hear this. We are beta testing a website for the Household of Faith in Christ, and so it's free for you to go look, and I would love to hear feedback. It's not done. but that doesn't mean you shouldn't point some things out if you notice them. I will tell you there's a page on the website called resources that is going to be totally redone. So you can kind of ignore the resources page, but the rest of the website is mostly done and right. So if you see some things on there, typos, things that make you scratch your head, you know, whatever, private message me or email me or call me or text me or whatever and hopefully within the next handful of weeks we'll have what we feel really good about and say this is the website. It'll always be evolving and changing obviously but this is the website and we can put it out there with some pride and confidence that it's not going to embarrass us. So householdoffaithinchrist.com I know it's a lot of words, a lot of letters, but it's the name of the church, so hopefully it's easy to remember. Householdoffaithinchrist.com, that's the website. So if you would check that out and give me feedback, I'd appreciate it. I'll close this in prayer. Lord, thank you so much for this time together. We thank you that you are truth, you are unchanging, and you're not everywhere. I mean, you are everywhere, but you're not the way that Paul Young says it. So we thank you that you've given us the Holy Spirit that dwells in us so that we can have the ability to discern truth and discern that you are truth so we can identify anything that's pretending to be, that's truly an imposter. We ask that you would bless the remainder of our weekend and bless the week coming up that we would have opportunity to discern truth and give us success in that, to grow us in that, to train us up in that. We ask that you would lead us not into temptation, Lord, and that you would deliver us from all evil, in Jesus' name. Amen. So, God willing, next week we will wrap up our look at the shack, and that will put the final period at the end of our look at the series of the epistles of John. And then the week after that, the first Saturday, I think it's the first Saturday in, in May, if I'm not mistaken, whatever the next Saturday is after next week. Two weeks from now, we're gonna look at Revelation, the book of Revelation, and that'll probably take us many months to work our way through. So anyway, until next week, God bless.