I'm going to kind of not only give you a welcome, but also kind of lay out the framework of the conference. And then we'll have our first speaker. We'll have a song and then I'll introduce the first speaker. Let's ask the Lord's blessing upon this event. God, if you didn't exist, what would we be doing here? We would just struggle along in society and just wait to die, I suppose, dear God. But you've given us great hope, the fact that you've entered into this ugly world full of iniquity and sin, and you sent your son out of love and concern for us. Thank you for giving us a precious gospel to not only to believe in, but also a gospel to defend and fight for. Help us to love you enough, dear Lord, to love the truth, to not only believe it and treasure it, hold it deep into our hearts, but dear God, that we would, as your children, as followers of God, that you would give us the fortitude and the commitment and the boldness that we need to fight for truth, to defend it. Lord, help us to not make subtle, slight compromise because we fear man or we wanna be liked. But Lord, give us the strength to face the battle that sets before us with confidence. We pray to God that your hand will be upon this event and all the fellowship that will take place between the sessions. We pray your hand will be upon the speakers, that you give them the words that they need and give us the ears that we need to profit greatly. Lord, we kind of look at this event as being trained for battle. And we know the battle is raging around us. It's raging on the news. It's raging on social media. It's raging sometimes even within our own families. And Lord, we need to be equipped to fight, equipped to engage false truth and philosophies that are starting to be brought into the very church that into the church around us. So Lord, we pray your hand to be upon the conference. This we ask in your son's name. Amen. I look at social justice as the greatest battle of our generation. I don't look at it as here's something we need to be aware of, this is something we need to know a little bit about. It's gonna be a passing thing. There's all kinds of things that we had to deal with. You go about 20 years ago and the church had to fight the inspiration battle. The church has to battle the idea of evolution, There's been multiple battles the church has to face and defend and teach against. Some of these battles keep continuing. This is one of them. This is not going anywhere. This thing called wokeness or social justice. It's so integrated into our culture, into our politics, into our sports, into media, into businesses. Well, now that businesses are beginning to have training based upon this ideology. It's surrounding us everywhere we look. Things are being canceled, political correctness. These things are affecting us. And I know for myself, 20 years ago when I entered into the ministry, one of my commitments was to keep politics out of the pulpit. I made that commitment. We're here to teach the kingdom of God. But it's not a commitment that I can no longer keep because of this. This social justice has not only integrated into politics, this social justice is a false religion. It's a philosophy that is not just different than Christianity. It's a philosophy that seeks to undermine Christianity. It's a philosophy and a worldview that is in opposition to the very things that we count dear. In fact, the very gospel itself will be undermined if we flirt with this. if we slowly integrate some of these ideas into our vocabulary, into our thinking and thinking, hey, we don't want to be racist. We don't want to be unjust. We love equality. We love unity. We love our brethren. We sure don't want to be characterized as someone that is oppressive or racist or a bigot. And so we're prone, we're tempted, we're tempted to buy into some of this political correctness. And part of it is we're afraid of what people will think about us, honestly. And so we're bought into the peer pressure of this new morality. And that impacts us because we don't want to offend everyone or anyone, but also because it's alluring. But I am convinced, and I'll pray that this conference exposes this and reveals this more fully. I'm convinced that social justice is based upon a foundational worldview that is in opposition to the Christian worldview. And the Christian worldview is based on God. God is at the bottom. of everything we believe. And if you take that foundation, God, out of the equation, then you're building a worldview on air. You have no foundation. You're building your worldview on relativism. And that's where this philosophy has come from. It began many years ago when atheists began to think of another way for morality. If you take God out of the equation, then you're going to get relativism. And this is what happened with Karl Marx. He was an avid atheist. And if you don't have God as the foundation of your morality, then you have to look for a new morality, a new code. And he based his code of morality essentially upon science, where science is the foundation of what is right and wrong. And this led him to redefine the biblical method or the biblical foundation of morality of God, who gives us absolute commands to love God with all of our heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves and to treat each other fairly and justly. That's been the moral code that's been written in our very conscience, in our very DNA. That's the moral code that even unbelievers have written in their heart, in their minds. But that very morality is based upon the fact that there's a God who gave us that morality, who gave us that law. And so with God out of the equation, then man becomes the standard of what is right and wrong. Man becomes the one who defines what is just and unjust. And Karl Marx redefined justice. He redefined right and wrong. And he redefined it by not treat people fairly, but by fair outcomes. The best way to envision this is thinking about a basketball game. If the referee is fair, if the referees are fair, they treat the tall players and the short players equally. They treat the skilled players and the unskilled players equally. A foul for one is a foul for the other. The same rules and let the best team win. Don't be biased. Just call it fair. That's the biblical method of morality. But under this new view of morality with no God to set the standard, it's everybody gets the same amount of points, the same amount of playing times, there's no winner, there's no loser. That is what's fair. Because for Karl Marx and those who followed him, viewed God as oppressive. because God puts an absolute. God doesn't care how you feel about it. It's not based upon your relative feelings or what you want to be or what you want to be true. God says, this is right, this is wrong. And for Karl Marx, this was oppressive because it was authority that stood over him. And if you don't have a God who defines morality, then you get to define morality for yourself. And that's exactly what Sigmund Freud did. Sigmund Freud bought into the basic lie of the devil, that you should do what you want to do. And does God really say? Sigmund Freud said that the, that, Within the soul, there's three elements and the bottom of the element is the true you. It's your real identity. He called it the id, but it's really, I would call it selfishness. I would call it depravity. I would call it the sinful nature that we all have. And that inner self, That inner being is what needs to be unleashed to be free. And what happens if there's a God, you have parents that teaches you, you can't think that way, you shouldn't behave this way. If you're a boy, you need to act like a boy. If you're a girl, you need to act like a girl. And it's putting all these, what he would say, social constructs on top of you, putting authority on how you should think, how you should behave. And that is oppressive and it builds guilt into the soul. and it represses the inner desires, then that brings in the internal conflict of wanting something but yet feeling guilty about it and suppressing it yourself. And for Sigmund Freud, the goal of liberation is to free the id, to free the self. Well, that's the basic message of Satan. Because wherever there's authority, there's oppression. And I'm convinced that social justice is the application of this philosophy that wherever you see authority, if it be a father over a wife, parents over children, then you have oppression. And where you have oppression, you have injustice. And so what they call unjust is really simply authority. And what they're looking for, and this is the end goal, this is what it leads to. We gotta not only see where it comes from, we gotta see where it leads to. And where it leads to is unshackled selfishness where everyone gets to do what's right in their own eyes. And they built a philosophy to justify it. They built a world religion to encourage it. And don't think that Christianity is not gonna be on the chopping block. because we stand in opposition to that worldview. There is a God. There is a right and wrong. We don't get to determine our sex. We don't get to determine who's in charge. We don't get to determine the roles of masculinity and femininity. We don't get to control that. That is God who set these things up. We don't even get to control everything about ourselves. That God hasn't made everyone with the same gifts. There are some who are rich, there are some who are poor, but it's God who determines that, not you and I. Some have natural intellectual abilities, others struggle intellectually. But see, that's not what unity is based upon, on unity of outcome. God's unity is based upon love in diversity. And so we need to equip ourselves not only to know what social justice is, we need to know where it is leading. And in my mind, this is how I envision this or how I think through this. It's helped me to think through the difference between social justice and biblical justice and critical theory and the biblical worldview. I look at it like an X. You think of an X, you see that there's two lines that seem to cross one another, and in this, we have Christianity and you have social justice, and they seem to cross over on certain points that we have an apparent, we appear to have them in common, such as social justice seems to be against racism. Christianity is against racism. Social justice is for equality. Christianity is, in some sense, for equality. Oh, they both love justice, right? So we're using these same terms and we Christians sometimes begin to think, oh, look, we agree and we can support this. We can get on this bandwagon, if you would, and support our brothers and become social justice advocates because of all things, Christians want to do what's right. And so there's X seems to cross and that's where we're tempted to come into this worldview and embrace it. But you need to look at this X, not as every overlap ever overlapping or touching. See an X, though, it seems to cross or this X that seems to cross. They have totally different foundations. Christianity is founded on God and God's authority. Social justice is founded on atheism and no ultimate authority. So they have total different foundations. And so they may say some things that we may appear to agree with. We got to trace back, where's that thought coming from? And can I take the apple from a tree that is rotten and not expect the apple not to be rotten itself? Can I cherry pick what I want from a worldview and not worry about the foundation of that worldview? No, we need to examine where that worldview comes from. What's the foundation of that? And it's in opposition to our worldview. But not only does this X have two different starting points, they have two different conclusions. Christianity leads to true unity in Jesus Christ. In fact, it has the only solution for unity. It has the only solution for anti-racism. It has the only solution for justice. In fact, Christianity is based upon true justice, where Christ died for sin to make things right. It doesn't sweep justice under the cover. It exonerates justice, the law. Christianity accomplishes this utopia. That's what heaven is. will peace will be on earth as it is in heaven. Perfect peace. That's beautiful. We celebrate these objectives that the gospel brings. But you know what social justice, it doesn't accomplish that. It only divides. It only causes more racism. In fact, we're seeing that. That not only are whites constantly racist and they can't do anything about it. Now blacks can't be racist. They can't be prejudiced. And so you can encourage a kind of a reverse racism and call it good. And it just brings more division. It doesn't bring more unity. And we're seeing that division. In fact, sin, let's not fool ourselves. God cannot be mocked. He will not be mocked. If you throw away God, you throw away morality. And if you throw away morality, you don't get peace. You don't get unity. You're going to have more and more division, more and more rioting, more and more hostilities, more and more oppositions. In fact, what you'll see, you'll see even the left turn on themselves. But here in God's church, we have a different worldview. We have not just a different system of belief, we have the person of Jesus Christ that makes us unique and different. And I pray that two things happen during this conference. One, I pray that we have a greater awareness of this great opposition that we're facing as Christians. It's in our politics, it's in some churches, it's in our sports, it's everywhere, that we have a greater awareness of that. But not just that, that God has given us a greater commitment to the truth. That's the only way to battle a delusion, a lie, a false philosophy. The only way to really tackle that is to be even more familiar with the word of God. My job that I had for almost 15 years working with people with mental illnesses, I've come to the conclusion working with people who have delusions, who think they are somebody that they're not, or they're paranoid, I've come to the conclusion the only way to counsel someone who's thinking poorly is just continue to tell them the truth. Don't allow them, and this is what happens. I had a guy that told me, hey, I'm Gabriel. I'm Gabriel, every day. And his friends begin to call him Gabriel because it was just easier. It was just easier to kind of just give into it. Because, you know, the friends knew he wasn't, but it was just like, okay, I'll play along. I'm tired of confronting you. I'm tired of, challenging you on this. I'm tired because you're not hearing me. And I'm just, it's just easier to give in to your delusion and play along with it. And I've come to conclusion that that's the worst thing you can do. And finally, this guy, this one guy that thought he was Gabriel, finally, after years, he was convinced that he wasn't. And part of it was because every day I told him, you're not Gabriel because you do this and Gabriel doesn't do that. Look, think about this, and if I only could, I guess I'm not Gabriel. You can't battle social justice if you don't know the word of God. So I'll pray that this conference will do that for all of us, that it'll enrich us and equip us for the battle that's set before us. I wanna thank, again, Beryl Baptist Church for opening up their facilities for us. I'm gonna ask, Wade, if you'll come and open us up with prayer. It is a joy. It is our honor and privilege to have you all attend this conference, this much needed conference. Let's pray together. Our gracious and kind Heavenly Father, Lord, We thank you, Lord, for this conference. We thank you, Lord, for Pastor Jeffrey and Grace Bible Church. And already the work that they have put in, that I have seen, has been such a blessing. Father, I pray that as this conference continues and as we are able to hear your men preach, Father, I pray that you would hide them behind your cross. I pray, Lord, that the Holy Spirit would give each individual here understanding. Lord, that you would better equip us to fight. Lord, these are difficult times that we're living in, but Lord, they're also joyous times that we are able to stand We are able to count the cost. We're able to stand upon truth. And Lord, help us to be better equipped to do just that. Our Father, we ask you to bless this singing that we do. Help us to sing from our hearts of praise and honor to you. We ask all these things in Christ's name, amen. I want you to stand with us. We're going to sing, Be Thou My Vision. This song reminds us that we want God to be our vision. God is our source of truth. Sing, Be Thou My Vision. Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, safe that Thou art, Thou my best thought, by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light. Be Thou my wisdom, be Thou my true word, I ever with Thee, and Thou with me. Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one. Be Thou my shield and my sword for the fight. Yet Thou, my high tower, Praised Thou me heavenward, O power of my power. Hitches I heed not, nor man's empty place, Thou mine inheritance now and always. My King of Heaven, my treasure Thou art. I, King of heaven, on victory is won, May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's sun. It is my pleasure and joy to introduce to you one of my quickly growing close friends, a man that has proven to be humble, a man that has proven not only to be quite the scholar, but a man who, that I think I love this the most about this man, he's not afraid to be bold. And that's what we need more than ever in this age. When we're living in an age where we're going to be tempted to compromise, we're going to be tempted to make subtle, slight concessions. And above all things, we want to be humble, and we want to be meek, and we don't want to be argumentative, and we want to be gentle. We want to have the fruits of the spirit when we talk with people that we differ with. So we need that sense of wisdom to be harmless as dove. But sometimes we become so harmless as dove that we don't become wise as serpents. And we cease to realize that we have to defend God's glory and God's name above making sure that we don't offend a brother and sister in Christ. And what I like about Dr. Olin Strand is the fact that under quite a bit of opposition, he's standing on this important topic. Dr. Olin Strand is a professor of systematics at Midwestern Theological Seminary in Kansas City. And we're honored to have you come speak to us. He also has a book coming out on wokeness. It's not here yet, so you can't buy it here, but you can get on Amazon. And I really commend you to get that book. Thank you so much. Please do not get online right now and order it. That would offend me greatly. I'm just kidding. Thank you so much for your kind introduction, Jeff. It's an honor to stand with you and several men of God on this topic. And thank you all for coming. And thank you to this church for hosting this event. It's a great delight to be here coming down yesterday from Kansas City through the ever more green wilds of Arkansas, beautiful state. 2 Corinthians 10, verse 3. For though we walk in the flesh, We are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments in every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. Thank you that in an age in which so much is shifting and uncertain, we stand on absolute solid rock. We stand on rock that no earthly earthquake can undo. It cannot destroy it. It cannot dynamite the foundation. There is nothing man can do to the word of God, to your word, to change it, overturn it, overrule it. It is firmly fixed in the heavens. We pray now that we would stand upon this rock and that you would strengthen us in these evil days to know the times as the men of Issachar and to go to war appropriately for the glory of your son. In his name we pray. Amen. Here the Apostle Paul directs us to one of our major tasks as Christians. We see this in verses 3 and 4. We're walking in the flesh like Paul is, but he says right off the bat, though he's engaging the super apostles who are waging war against him in ancient Corinth and do want him defeated in that city, he himself is not waging war according to the flesh. What does this mean? It means that he's not engaging in trading insults. He's not trying to vaunt his intellect or his gifting, his rabbinic training over that of others. He's not going to insult them through clever put-downs. He is not waging war according to the flesh. But, please note this, verse 4, he is in fact waging war. He says as much, the weapons of our warfare are not katasarchos, not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy okiramaton in the Greek, strongholds. So Paul here tells us at the outset that he does in fact engage in war. This is not a peacetime enterprise for Paul. He is, in the first century context in ancient Corinth, defending his apostleship against those who would unseat him, who would kick him out of Corinth, who would silence his ministry. And instead of saying, these guys are waging war against me, but I'm not waging war against them. What does he say? He says, I am in fact waging war. Make no mistake about it. But I am not using fleshly weapons. And we can conclude by extension, he is not trying to win a fleshly battle. In other words, as we've all experienced, he's not in a debate or a disagreement, and he's just trying to get the upper hand and make his opponent look bad. No, he is waging spiritual war against his opponents. He'll say elsewhere in the New Testament that he's not fighting against flesh and blood. That's a different way of saying exactly what he is saying here. He's fighting against principalities and powers that use flesh and blood to try to defeat the Christian ministry, the word of God, and the power of divine grace. So Paul is not fundamentally attacking image bearers as if he can just shout them down, he's won the debate. He is, in fact, he takes this up on a much higher plane. He is fighting warfare of a much higher order. And by extension, he is drafting all the Corinthians, who are true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, into this war. And by extension, he is drafting you into this war. He is teaching us, nearly 2,000 years ago, that we are in fact engaged in a great conflict between God and the devil. Every Christian is. It is not an opt-in for you or an opt-out. It is not something that especially theologically-minded Christians enter into and others don't. It is not something you do if you're mean and nasty and if you're nice and gentle and loving and spirit-filled. You don't do this. This is where every Christian is. You may have been told It may have been communicated to you in various forms that we're in peacetime. We are not in peacetime. We are in a war against the devil who wants to destroy us as the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ and who wants to damn Every single image-bearer he can to hell everlastingly. Those are the stakes. God does not want fallen image-bearers to taste his wrath. Satan wants every human person to taste the infinite wrath of the Father. So, these are the stakes. This is where we are. If it feels to you increasingly in 2021 in America like we are in a sort of spiritual battle that is hard to define and hard to pin down, but everywhere feels like we are in it, this is because we are. But this isn't something new, just so you know. This is a 2,000-year-old document that I am reading. There are not a lot of gatherings of 400, 500 people in Arkansas or my state of Missouri right now where people are paying great attention to a nearly 2,000-year-old document. But we are, because it is the very word of God. And this document, nearly 2,000 years old, tells us exactly where we are, that we are in this great battle, a spiritual battle. But here's the good news. Even as Paul is in a battle in Corinth, all Christians are in a battle by extension, and we are in one in 2021 in this country as Christians. We are not playing from a position of weakness. We are not engaging in warfare from the bad position. Verse 4, his weapons, Paul's, have divine power. to destroy strongholds. Specifically, verse 5, to destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. So Christian, believer, feeling right now at a conference like this, like we are hard-pressed, like we are losing in the public square, as we may well be, know this. Your spiritual weapons have divine power in them. They may feel weak, they may look weak, they may be characterized as weak by the world around us, but they have the very power of God embedded in them. And it's not because of you, it's not because of your intellect, it's not because of the degree of your faith, it's not because you've had an unbroken string of 27 straight quiet times in the morning. It is fundamentally because these are God's weapons. These are not your weapons. You and I didn't develop these in a super cool theological laboratory somewhere in a basement. There's no lab where you can develop these. No human mind can invent this. No human person can fashion this. This is the gift of God. Just as saving faith comes from the heavens, so the weapons with which we wage war come from Almighty God himself and are granted to us. and given to us, even as we feel tremendously weak in worldly terms. And so we are. So we are. We are, in fact, weak in worldly terms. We are not those who are high and lofty. We are not those who find strength in ourselves. We are those who find all our power in God. Paul's confidence is that these divinely empowered weapons will, in fact, accomplish their aim. Paul is engaging in spiritual and theological terms in the ministry of destruction. When's the last time you saw that on a website title of pastor? Honey, says the seminary student, I'm interviewing for the job of minister of destruction. Some of you may want to revisit that after this talk. Talk with your senior pastor, your elders, see if this can be done. In all seriousness, this is what Paul says he's about. Is this how evangelicals talk today? Is this how Baptists think? Is this how Christians engage the world? As if we're in war, as if we have divine weapons for that war. And as if our target is not to be nice and not to be reasonable as the end goal. We're seeking to bear the fruits of the Spirit in all our lives. But the end goal is not niceness. The end goal is not to make Christianity palatable and pleasing to the natural man, to unbelievers. The end goal for the Apostle Paul is destruction. People, you see, are trapped. People are trapped because of arguments, verse 5. Arguments and every lofty opinion. People effectively, Paul is saying, he's giving us a really cool word picture actually. People effectively build little sand castles around themselves and think that they will keep God out. Think that they will wall themselves off from conviction of sin and from the grace of God in Jesus Christ. That's effectively what the unbeliever does. Every unbeliever does this. We did this when we were trapped in unbelief. We built little systems. of self-righteousness, arguments, lofty opinions that we raised against the knowledge of God. And we thought, I'm good. I'm in my little fortress. We were not good. We were in a desperate condition. And we had not built a titanium fortress around ourselves. As I said, we built a sand castle around ourselves. That's what it is to try to keep out God and the knowledge of God. God, all he needs to do is send a little bit of wind, and that stronghold that seems so powerful in fleshly terms crumbles. All this means then, friends, that we need to understand arguments and lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God in order to do ministry. in order to see sinners saved from their desperate condition, from eternity in hell. as their just outcome. We need to understand at least something of the arguments and lofty opinions of our time and past times in order that we can engage them and see people won to the Christian faith. This is what the Apostle Paul tells us he is doing. So let me put this in simpler terms for us. You and I, in engaging in Christian witness with unbelievers all around us, we are trying to do two things. We are trying, according to this text, we are trying to destroy unbelief, really at the intellectual and theological level, destroy unbelief, and we are then trying, last part of verse five, to teach the Christian faith, to take every thought captive to obey Christ. So we engage in the ministry of intellectual deconstruction, destroying systems, ungodly systems. And then secondly, we engage in the task of gospel reconstruction. We effectively rebuild the worldview from the ground up, as Jeff was saying a few minutes ago. We don't take bits and pieces of worldview, oh, here's this, and here's this from that one, and here's this from that one, and cobble together a worldview for people with a prayer in Jesus' name at the foundation of it, at the start, and call it, boom, Christian. We destroy unbelief and then we reconstruct an entire system of Christian truth grounded in the word of God. And we give people the blessing and the gift of a mind dedicated to God. Biblical truth unveiled, systematized according to scripture in all its glory and beauty and power. Those are our two tasks. And I pray, and beginning this conference, mine is the first talk, in case you didn't notice, that my talk will equip you first to understand what wokeness is, what social justice is after, what critical race theory is teaching us at a basic level. That's my first goal. And then I pray in successive sessions, not so much this one, that we will be able to think more about how we rebuild in the ashes, okay? So what we're going to do now, I have two tasks ahead of us having begun in 2 Corinthians 10. First, we're going to look at the seven cornerstones of woke thought, okay? Having called you to destroy strongholds, per the Apostle Paul, I now want to look at a particular stronghold, that of what I call wokeness. And then secondly, we're going to look in this session at how wokeness affects you spiritually. So this is not going to be a session where I give you a lot of the antidote, where I give you a lot of the answer, where I give you a lot of the gospel hope. This is more laying out what is facing us, the challenge we are up against, what we are seeing on TV, what is on Pinterest when we're going looking for a recipe or a dress, what we encounter when we turn on ESPN to watch a baseball game or a basketball game, what when we go to the to the grocery store is shouted at us from the covers of magazines, these sorts of things. This ideology is everywhere. And so I want us first to understand the system, to understand the stronghold. And then in successive sessions of the conference, including mine, later on tonight, I want to apply the gospel to it. I'm eager to do that. That's really the good stuff. But I can't do that yet. So part one, how do we destroy the stronghold? What does it teach us? I recently saw online news about a Coca-Cola training session on whiteness in February, 2021. In this session, Coca-Cola employees were encouraged to, quote, try to be less white, try to be less white. A fascinating concept this already. According to the session, to be less white means the following, direct quote, to be less oppressive, to be less arrogant, to be less certain, to be less defensive, to be less ignorant, to be more humble, to listen, to believe, to break with apathy, and to break with white solidarity. End quote. What on earth was taking place in a Coca-Cola HR session like this? Simply this, the movement I call wokeness was advancing. But what is wokeness? Wokeness is built off of the ideology called critical race theory, CRT, and it is in large part synonymous with what is called intersectionality. And wokeness uses theological language and even the very system of Christian theology. And it argues first and foremost that you and I need to become awakened to the racial injustices all around us. So what wokeness seeks to do is wake you up. You and I are effectively sleeping, okay? We're sleeping. And what that means, practically, is that we're asleep to the true nature of racial injustice in the world. So what needs to happen, as I say, is that you and I need to wake up. Our eyes need to be opened. When our eyes are opened, then according to wokeness, if we follow critical race theory, we will see that what looks like not a perfect world, of course, but a generally normal, generally racially better world than it was five, six decades ago, actually is not. Instead, the whole social order has fallen under the spell of racial injustice. And when you embrace wokeness, you see this. So you'll re-see ordinary interactions. You'll start to question if people who you work with, people in your family, people you're church members with, if they're a different skin color than you, you'll start to question, wait a minute, is this person actually foisting racial injustice upon me? I need to wake up. I need to see that what looks like normal human interactions are actually allowing for this transaction of racism all the time. White culture, whiteness being in many cases the majority culture of America, is not an equitable culture at all. It's not a fair culture. We haven't made real racial gains in a lot of ways. Instead, whiteness is dominating society and it is creating a wicked social dynamic. To better understand this, let's walk through seven affirmations that build into, that construct this system. That is, as I said a few minutes ago, taking many people captive. This is really the reigning ideology of our day. This is what is advancing at all turns in all corners of our society. First, seven ideas to capture this. First, wokeness argues that racism is ordinary, not aberrational. It's ordinary, not aberrational. What does this mean? It means this. Yes, there are racist words and racist acts, and those are wrong when one person of a given race is cruel to another person of a given race, a different race. That's racism, basically. Well, wokeness says, yes, there is racism of that kind when someone says a word they should not say to another person, for example, in a fight. But actually, racism, according to wokeness, is much bigger than this. Racism is personal, but it's also structural. A very important term for you to understand as we try to map this system in order to destroy it. The specific term that captures this truth is structural racism or systemic racism. It's not only that individuals could say or do racist things, it's that the entire civilizational order is infected with racism. If you were to be able to pull up the floorboards of America and look at the actual foundation of this country, you would see that it is shot through with racism. The whole thing, it's crawling like with termites. It's crawling with little racist termites. That's not in my notes. It's a strange image, but that's effectively That's effectively the argument. That's how bad things are. You look at the house. It's a new build. It's a new construction. It looks beautiful. But actually, if you pull up the boards, you see that the whole thing is falling apart and evil. and corrupted. Now we need to say very quickly, we need to say that racism can take systemic form, evil can take systemic form in many different ways. We as Americans have a past that includes slavery and Jim Crow law and segregation and when we encounter such things in our study of the past, we grieve them. It's terrible to recognize that that is a part of our history. Of course, no society, no country has a perfect history. I don't believe that we should despise only our society or our country. There's lots of good in the American past as well. Nonetheless, we need to make clear that we do have a category for understanding that sin of various kinds. can become the very law of the land. And that can affect people in horrible ways, in all sorts of ways. And so we have a category for that. We know that has been a feature of America in days past. But what wokeness does is it argues that the same form of evil of days past is still present today. In other words, we haven't really made progress from the 19th century, when slavery was the law of the land. We're in the same racist environment, basically, with a few twists, a few tweaks, that we were then. Racism, then, first point, is ordinary. It's the normal human experience. Second, racism in America has a name. White supremacy. White supremacy. Robin DiAngelo is one of the best known woke voices who has said just this, and I quote, white supremacy describes the culture we live in, a culture that positions white people and all that is associated with them, whiteness. as ideal," end quote. So white supremacy, according to D'Angelo, is not what happens when there is a Klan cross burning horribly in someone's front yard. What an evil thing that is. That's bona fide white supremacy, and that's a real problem in America, according to yours very truly. But woke voices and critical race theorists go way beyond that. and argue that the very culture we live in is white supremacist. This majority culture that is predominantly white is a white supremacist order. So you can already tell that this is a system that does not play to a draw. This is a system that indicts fundamentally white people, not just as doing some non-ideal things, but as inherently white supremacist. That's the claim, for example, from D'Angelo. That's from D'Angelo's book, White Fragility. White Fragility is a bestseller many times over. It's been recommended by numerous evangelical leaders as a sound resource by which to understand America and the American church. And so a whole ton, not just of ordinary American citizens, but Christians, born-again believers, have heard basically that this culture is a white supremacist culture. And so by extension, wherever you have a lot of white people, so-called, wherever you have a church, let's say, that is 70% white, as many churches in America are, you have a white supremacist church. This is strong water. This tells you just how aggressive this system is. This system is training us, for example, by extension, that our children, are children who have white skin, are little white supremacists in training. This tells us then that this system divides the world up into those who benefit from whiteness, including many white people, and those who are oppressed by them. And as was said just a few moments ago, this means that wokeness is built upon a Marxist foundation. Wokeness is built absolutely upon a Marxist foundation. Wokeness is just Marxism with an updated veneer. Marxism argues that the world is broken up into two categories, oppressors and the oppressed. Marx and Engels first applied that view to economic situations and fomented real and terrible revolutions in numerous countries in which tens of millions of people, including many just ordinary people, lost their lives because of it. What Marxism does is it fosters hatred. It is a system that is built to destroy. Not a system that is built to destroy by Christian means, to destroy evil systems. This is an evil system that is built to destroy Christianity and anything in its path. And it does so by convincing people that they are oppressed. That is fundamentally how it advances. It teaches people that the world is split up into those pairings and that ordinary people are oppressed people. And what they should do is they should rebel. They should foment revolution. They should destroy the existing order. They should take to the streets. They should riot. They should destroy property. Anywhere they see authority, anywhere they see policemen, for example, they should oppose them in different forms, even attack them. That is squarely a Marxist framing. What is happening in this country is exactly what Marxism sets out to accomplish, to turn people against one another. It is a system of division. There are real disparities in society to handle. There are real problems to cover. There are injustices in this country. In point of fact, there will be injustices in every country until Jesus returns. There is real historical baggage for us to work through. We all have the seeds of sin of various kinds in us. We are those who acknowledge that we're so sinful, we couldn't save ourselves. We needed God to rescue us. So we definitely have a place for understanding how there can be sin, not only in an individual, but collectively when sinful individuals get together and have a thing called a country or a nation. So we understand this. We understand that racism didn't vanish in 1965 with the passing of civil rights legislation. We understand that people are racist or ethnocentrist or partial in sinful ways. Today, we understand that people treat one another differently, unjustly. That's called partiality in the scripture. We know this. This is in the book. This is in the book of James in the New Testament. It's an idea that's over just about 2,000 years old. So we know why people sin against one another. And we know that sins of various kinds are occurring in our society and will occur in our society. Our eyes are not blind to that. Let me extend this just for a minute. Some of you may have experienced this. Some of you may have had someone call you something vile. Some of you may have been treated, not just in a moment, in an instant, but over and over again, sinfully, because of your background, because of your skin color, because of other reasons. We understand this. My case and the speaker's case here this weekend, if I can say this by extension, is not that racism has magically vanished. But the question is whether, while there is sin in our society and sin in every society, is this country fundamentally divided up into oppressor and oppressed? That is the question. Let me illustrate. I am short. Thank you for laughing. I am short. By virtue of being short over the years, I have had people make fun of me. I have had people show partiality to me or against me, more accurately. I have faced consequences of various kinds for being short. I have. I'm not saying this in a silly way. I'm not equating that with other people's experience necessarily. But I am here to tell you that, especially as a boy, When kids are really cruel, over appearance, and you're like, look, you're making fun of me. I don't want to be this. I would much rather be six foot tall. In fact, that was one of my original prayer requests on this earth, was that I would be taller. I tried. Didn't work out. However, I would be careful myself about saying that because I experience partiality and sin of that form, that America is structured along the lines of tall supremacy, height supremacy. It could be our society could have that embedded in it, that our laws and our policies are hostile to short people intentionally. That's a possibility. We know that laws were of that nature in various ways in days past against people in partial forms. But I'm going to be careful about concluding that just because I have experienced sin, the society itself is a society that oppresses me. Because if I'm going to conclude that, I have to have proof that this is a tall supremacist society. I have to prove that through recourse to laws, policy, data, functions of society. All this to say, friends, all this to say that wokeness is making a major claim. It's telling us that oppression is everywhere. But if you're going to claim oppression, like I was just illustrating over height, you have to prove that. And the claim that America is systemically racist, not just has racism in it in different forms as it does, but is systemically racist and therefore needs to be rebuilt from the ground up is a major claim. Third, all white people are racists. You'll expect this from what I've already been saying. In a video that went viral from 2017, a teacher named Ashley Shackelford said just this. Standing before a room of women, including numerous white women on the video, several of whom began sipping their water furiously as this teaching advanced, Shackelford bluntly told her audience, you can find it online, she told her audience that, quote, all white people are racists. Then she extended the point. You're always going to be a racist, even when you're on a path to be a better human being. She said, you're going to be a racist. She continued the point still more. I believe, direct quote, I believe all white people are born into not being human and grow up to be demons. So what was happening in this strange training session? What was happening is that wokeness was talking and it was teaching the idea that white people are not just participants in a privileged order, but are actually all racists. Not everyone who teaches CRT or intersectionality would say this directly, to be sure, but some voices do, and it is a natural conclusion of the system. Fourth, this means that our biggest problem is not actual racists of the actual white supremacist kind. In my view, this is me talking, that's a real problem. But according to woke voices, our biggest problem are not those folks, it's ordinary people. Ordinary, normal Americans. You say, Strand, that's a strong claim. You must be generalizing. You must be putting words together and then putting them into their mouths. No, this is Ibram X. Kendi, professor at Boston University, probably the leading woke voice in the world today. Here's what he said. The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate, but the regular American's drive for a race-neutral one. End quote. What is Ibram Kendi arguing there? He's saying that our biggest problem with regard to racism isn't whatever vestiges of the Klan are left over, or whatever parts of the shadowy movement called the alt-right that want a genuine white supremacist order, as some of them do, horribly, but those aren't our problems with racism. Our biggest problem with regard to racism is you. It's me. It's the regular American. It is the person who fails to challenge this entire civilizational order that is shot through with racism. We are the problem. We, by virtue of saying things like, I don't see race, I'm not a racist, I just want everybody to be able to live freely, I agree with Martin Luther King Jr., whether I agree with his theology or not, what he said in common grace terms when he said he wanted his children to be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I agree with that. That's what I want for America too. I think that's a good vision. When you and I say that, what we are actually doing is reinforcing white supremacy. Do you understand why? Because we're not pulling up the floorboards, we're not pulling up the boards, we're not getting at the termites, we're not getting at the order that is infected and swarming with disease, specifically racism. Here we see the shocking truth about this system, about this ideology. It saves its strongest firepower, not for actual racists, but for ordinary people. who, whether they're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ or not, many of them, not all, many of them actually do want a more equal society. Many of them don't want to be racist. Many of them do believe that some version of what MLK was after is a good thing for people not to be judged by the color of their skin. But Kendi and his peers target these people, reading them as the problem. Fifth, the solution to this condition is not regeneration. It's not theology. It's not Bible. It's anti-racist social justice. Those are key terms, anti-racist social justice. According to Kendi, this is what it means to be anti-racist. Quote, we can knowingly strive to be an anti-racist. Like fighting an addiction, being an anti-racist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination. End quote. What is Kendi saying? He's saying you're never cured of racism. You can't ever leave racism behind. All you can do is resolve to fight your problem. Sort of like being an alcoholic, per the terms of Alcoholics Anonymous, therapeutic framing. You never leave that behind. You're always an alcoholic for the rest of your life. Well, woke voices argue much the same idea with regard to white supremacy. You never leave it behind. You never overcome it. You're never free of it. You're always trapped by it. It's who you are. So what you do is you commit yourself to action, to fighting it. This fits perfectly with how Marxists load people up with guilt and then send them into the world burdened, believing that if they just tear down the social order enough, they will atone for their sins. But there's never true atonement in this system. There is no grace and wokeness. There is no justifying faith in critical race theory. There is only, as I will be saying tonight at much greater length, condemnation. This is a system of condemnation. And so in order to enact anti-racism, you pursue a program called social justice. I won't go into this at great length, but social justice is basically leftist justice. In other words, it is not retributive justice like biblical justice, where if you do something wrong, you pay the consequences for it. That's the foundation of biblical justice. Social justice is different. It sounds good. Lots of people around us, lots of people on social media, lots of millennials, lots of younger folks are tweeting these kind of ideas and putting hashtags up and pictures up. And they think they're pursuing justice by using that language. But our culture's understanding of justice is entirely different from biblical justice, as it's so commonly used. So justice, social justice, is distributive. It's to make everything equal. It's to give everybody the same conditions of life. Social justice then looks at differences between groups and it reads them as inequities and then it brands them injustices. So some of you have read in woke literature, CRT literature, a few of you are gonna have had a class in this at a secular college or university, you will know that one of the major places this conversation goes is over societal disparities. and there will be different stats and studies that are cited by woke voices, and when there are, let's say, different literacy rates or nutrition rates or life expectancies, these sorts of things, and where, let's say, black people are lower than white people, that is proof of an unjust social order. That is a possible conclusion, intellectually, but it is far from a necessary conclusion. And if you want to read more on this, get Thomas Sowell's book, Discrimination and Disparities. I think I got that title right. Discrimination and Disparities. Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L. He has done great work on that count. It's a matter, frankly, that needs to be thought out more. It's very technical and complicated. There's often lots of reasons for why different groups are in different places on different metrics. And we should be very careful. about the conclusion that one factor, race or racism, accounts for these societal disparities. Votie Bauckham's new book, Fault Lines, is very good on this count. So definitely get Votie Bauckham's book, Fault Lines. I was not paid to say this. This is of my own volition. It just shot to the number seven spot on the USA Today bestseller list. It's a book that in many senses was resisted and unwanted in even evangelical circles. And it is absolutely taking the publishing world by storm. And it is a beautiful thing to see. So get Fault Lines. Sixth, wokeness leads to a greater vision of oppression and justice called intersectionality. Intersectionality is the idea that there are lots of different groups that are oppressed, and their interests intersect. That's why you get the term. Jeff alluded to this in his welcome comments, but basically, wherever you have authority and power, you have an oppressor, and thus you have an oppressed group. What are examples, according to intersectional voices of this evil? Men oppress women. So our culture is shot through with toxic masculinity. And where you see men being strong, you're probably seeing an example of toxic masculinity. When men use a loud voice or, I don't know, do things like hunt or fish or something aggressive, or when boys go outside at the playground after sitting indoors for two straight hours and then start, for no good reason, tackling each other, you're seeing toxic masculinity. Real argument today. That testosterone that is in boys, that is given them by God, on average 1,000% more testosterone in boys than in girls, not by cultural conditioning, not by pills, just God-given, And that is what explains that instinct to go out and, for no good reason, I repeat myself, hit something. But that is said to be an example that masculine aggression is said to be toxic masculinity that oppresses women. We know that men sin against women. We know that men do, on average, have considerably greater strength than women, again, on average. And so we know where there are real causes of sin. We do. But we must be exceedingly careful about saying that authority or ability or aggression is inherently wrong. God, as I believe Anthony Matheny is going to be talking about very soon, God created manhood. God created womanhood. God wants boys to be boys. God wants girls to be girls. Okay, the police is probably just outside the door having said that, but I say it nonetheless. The rich oppress the poor in an intersectional worldview because the rich have authority and power by virtue of money that people do not have. Here again, we know that rich people can oppress the poor, and yet we don't automatically assume as believers. that rich people are worse than poor people. That's not a biblical conclusion, but that is an intersectional conclusion. That is a woke conclusion. Physically able people oppress physically disabled people. This is called ableism. I'm not making this up. So our society is set up for the good, for the normalization of ableness, ableism, And so people who are disabled are unfairly oppressed and disadvantaged. Now it could be the case that a society is not helping people as they should, yes? But it's not fundamentally the case that to be abled-bodied means that you are an oppressor. But this is what this worldview says, because this is a worldview that wants to pit people against one another. It wants to rev them up, fill their mind full of poison, and get them to fight. Because Marxism seeks the destruction of creation order. It seeks the destruction of God-given institutions, as Jeff's book shows. We could go on, but seventh, all this means that for the church, this is now us, this is our context, we should indict people for their white supremacy. White people should repent. I want you to hear this very quickly before I go on on this point. There's no such thing as whiteness. There's no such thing as blackness. There is differing skin pigmentation, absolutely. But in terms of this strong understanding of race as an idea, there are not different human races. You understand from scripture? Acts 17.26 tells us that all humanity is of one blood. And if you go to the first page of the Bible, Genesis 1, 26 to 28, were all made in God's image. So there aren't lots of different races. There's one human race. There are different ethnicities, I believe, according to scripture. You look at the Greek, you'll see laos and ethne and other terms that signify that there are different peoples who have different culture, different practices, different heritage, different language. So we understand a category for being Italian, or being Irish, or being a New Zealander, or being Japanese, or these sorts of things. We understand this. Nigerian. And yet, we're not, in affirming that, splitting people up into effectively different species of humanity. We see different skin pigmentation not as a negative thing, furthermore, we see it as a beautiful part of our diversity-loving God. making the world. So much more to say on this count, but suffice it to say that all this presentation that splits us up into white and black, whiteness, blackness, or other variations therein, is really building on a lie. It's building on a lie. And it's telling us that we are fundamentally different, effectively, species of humanity when we're one human race that has all fallen in Adam and has one problem, our sin. And the solution to that problem is just one in number, and it is the blood of Jesus Christ. It is the gospel of divine grace. Nonetheless, in the church today, we hear that white people are guilty. We hear that white people should repent of their complicity in white supremacy. Pastors are actually hijacking their pulpits. to call white people to repentance, not who have done a wicked act, but simply who have white skin, or people who have not sufficiently challenged the white supremacist order, who may be a person of color, but who have not challenged this wicked order, who do exist in a church body alongside other believers and find unity in Christ. Those kind of people are not doing enough. They are guilty too. because they're leaving the wicked system unchallenged. Friends, this is quite an ideology. This is, as I say, built to divide, built to destroy Christian unity. Do you know what I think the ultimate target of wokeness is, and of critical race theory, and of intersectionality, and of Marxism? I think it truly has in its sights the unity of the local church. Satan hates the local church even more than he hates good government. Satan hates the local church at least as much as if not more than he hates the natural family. Satan hates the local church because it's an aggregate form of believers even more than he hates you individually. He despises a body. that has nothing in common but Jesus Christ. He wants to wipe the earth of it. He hates it to his core. He will do anything he can to destroy your local church. He will do anything he can to get you to leave your local church because you're different by background or skin color than someone else. He will do anything he can to start getting believers at each other's throats and get them to stop practicing humility and love and being slow to speak and slow to answer. He will do anything he can to foster disunity. He ultimately has his sights set on the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And if he could destroy it, he would. But friends, the good news is this, he can't. He can't destroy the church, and he can't destroy your church. If you will cling to the power of God, the power of God that is found in his word and his gospel, and you will work through real issues perhaps, and you will confess sins as they pop up, yes, as you spot them in your past. But as you cling to that unity in Christ, you will overcome the devil who seeks to destroy the church. This is the power of God sufficient for these things. What happens then, very quickly, what happens before we conclude when you embrace wokeness? When you embrace these ideas, what will you see? What will take place in a person? This is from my book, Christianity and Wokeness. So I spelled this out at greater length there. It comes out in July. But I'll give you quick words now. And we're going to move rapidly heading towards the conclusion. First, wokeness divides us from others. It divides us. It takes people who formerly were friends and working together and liking one another, or even just seeing one another as normal people. You know, we don't need to sentimentalize this. We're not best friends with everyone. But it causes us to divide from one another and to start looking at one another with real distance. Wait a minute. Are you oppressing me? Second, wokeness causes us to despise others. when we identify people who have what we don't have. We will despise them. Wokeness is really built on jealousy. If you were to fuel it up at the gas station, the gas would need to be composed of jealousy to refill the tank, because it really is a system that says it's fighting partiality and injustice, but actually creates it. Third, wokeness then leads us to condemn others. Then we start condemning people. Has this happened on your Facebook thread? Has this happened on Twitter? Has this happened in a classroom that you've been in? Somebody that you were formerly friends with? I've heard of this happening in marriages, interracial marriages. One person starts buying into this system, this ungodly ideology, they don't destroy the stronghold, and then they end up condemning others. You oppress me. You hate me. I know of children who heard woke preaching, children of a different skin color than their adoptive father and mother, and then went home and asked their father and mother if they hated them because they had different skin color. because there was woke preaching that had said from the pulpit that white people fundamentally oppress black people. That can happen, but this couple had gone to great lengths to adopt children that didn't look like them. because of the gospel of divine grace. And yet this pulpit is being taken over by devilish ideology and training precious kids, just little children, to think in a profoundly ungodly way. Fourth, wokeness robs us of peace. Are you seeing this in your peer groups, in your circles, with a coworker, with a friend, with a classmate, somebody who used to just live Whether a Christian or a non-Christian, of course, you need Christ to know true peace. But even in common grace terms, when wokeness takes you over, Man, it leaves you spun up like a top, and you're always going to war with people, and you're always tweeting about it, and you're always attacking someone, and you're always going after it, and every conversation ends up turning to this, and it robs you of peace. Fifth, wokeness directs you away from the gospel. You don't see people in light of the gospel. You see them in light of their skin color. I can think of numerous peers in the evangelical movement who I worked alongside and did events with and these sorts of things, and now they want to separate. Not because of actual racist acts or words, but because of this ideology convincing them that I do not love them because of my skin color, when my actions, though imperfect, do not show that. So wokeness leads us away from the gospel, which is exactly what Satan wants. Sixth, wokeness makes us bitter. It just makes us bitter and angry. It leaves you fundamentally angry at people 24-7. Seventh, wokeness makes moving on from wrongs very hard. We're fundamentally always dwelling in the past. For example, with the teaching of American history, there's real things to sort out there, as you've heard me say, but all we can focus on is the evils of America or the West, when in reality, it was a so-called white man, William Wilberforce, who tirelessly campaigned for the end of the slave trade and slavery. That doesn't mean we have just solved all the problems in our past, but it means that the past is complicated, and we should not only despise it, and we don't want to teach our children, don't teach your children to hate America, That is a terrible idea. Teach them that it has real failing in it, yes, but don't teach them to hate everyone in the past. That's a terrible outcome. Eighth, wokeness veils God's providence. It loses sight of the fact that even as there is real sin and evil in our past, God still stewards all things toward his appointed ends. God, listen friends, let's just square with it. God uses evil in the accomplishment of his plan. God appointed the most unjust thing in history, the death of his son, in order to accomplish the greatest thing in history, the rescue of sinners. Don't talk to me about a God who doesn't appoint and even use evil in his plans. That doesn't excuse evil, not one bit, but it does help us make peace. with real wrongs and not live in the past and recognize that even as, let's say, this country and the American church in its past has failed, and that failure is real failure, and we square with that, yet God has used evil for good and is overcoming it even now through his spirit. Ninth and finally, wokeness makes man big and God small. It makes ideology big. It makes hatred big. It makes oppression big. It makes God small. It makes God a small and passing thing. Brothers and sisters, our challenge and our charge is not to fight against flesh and blood. It certainly is not to divide up according to skin color and go to war with one another. What a terrible outcome that would be. And yet, we must recognize that as the Apostle Paul told the Corinthian church he was doing, We are not merely dealing with less than ideal situations in our society, in our church today. We must recognize that underneath the actions of mankind, there is malevolent energy, and the devil is seeking to destroy image bearers. But even more than that, as I have said, the devil is seeking to destroy the church. This is a wonderful time for you and me. to take stock of ungodly systems and lofty opinions, and this is time, brothers and sisters, it is time. Come to the wall. Come to the ramparts. Stop assuming that somebody else will speak up. Stop acting as if this will go away on its own terms. This is not going away. This is coming for you. This is coming for your children and grandchildren. This is coming for your church. It is time to take a stand because we must not be taken captive. Let's pray. Father in heaven, help us to do this. We're not sufficient for this. We don't have the strength in ourselves, the intellect, the cunning, the know-how to do this, to pull this off. We're a weak and needy people. Fundamentally, we need you. We pray that the power of Christ in us would overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil, as it surely will. In Jesus' name, amen. I invite you all to stand with us. This next hymn is The Church's One Foundation. It was written at a time in 1866, Samuel Stone wrote this, at a time when the church was undergoing persecution and heresy was entering the church. And he defends it by writing this song and proclaiming that the church has one foundation. That foundation is Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ has taught and said is true and right. The church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. She is His new creation. by water and the Word. From heaven He came and sought her to be His holy bride. With his own blood he bought her and for her life he died. He left from every nation, yet one or all he One Lord, one faith, one birth. One holy name she passes, partakes one holy food. with every grace endure. With toil and tribulation and to ♪ Till with the vision gone ♪ eyes are blessed, and the great church victorious shall be the church at rest. Yet she on earth hath union with God the three and mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is mine. O happy ones and holy, Lord give us grace that we Like them, the meek and lowly, on high they dwell with thee. Though with the scornful Men see her sore oppressed, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distressed. Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cries go up how long? And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song. May be seated. You know, there's many things I would rather do than have to learn about social justice. I have to study it to figure out what it is, what is it teaching, to be at a conference in some sense like this. There are more pleasurable things that we could have had a conference on. We could have had a conference on the nature of God or on the church. These are needful things. But here we are, we're having a conference on social justice. And there's a tendency like, well, I'm not interested in that. But the truth is, We did not pick this battle. This is not something that we can go, well, I'm just going to focus over here. I'm going to focus my attentions there. I'll let other people battle this. Not when it's intruding into our families, into our churches, into our relatives, and when it's being saturated around us. This is a battle that's chose us, and so may we be ready to fight. I am thankful for men who fight. I am so thankful for men who will stand. And the next speaker that we have is a man that has proven that he'll stand and stand strong, even when it will cost him. There's very few people, it seems like, that'll do that these days. And the pastor of First Baptist Church of Lindale, Texas, it has to be bad when you'll partner with a Texan. But we're desperate. And we'll take whoever can fight with us. We'll take Texans. No, actually, if anybody's oppressed, it's Arkansans from Texans. We're actually thankful for Tom Buck. He's become a friend. I only met him just a few years ago at the G3 conference, but I've been following him and have been thankful for his ministry and his stand. So, Tom Buck, will you come and minister to us? I'm actually from Tennessee originally. That doesn't make it much better, does it? But we're volunteers, we volunteer to any fight. That's the reason there is a Texas, is because of Tennesseans. We showed up to the Alamo, didn't turn out real great, but there we were. So, I was beginning to feel a little bit bad over there at how I oppress you with my tallness. But then I realized how you oppress me with your metabolic privilege. And so anyway. When Dr. Johnson asked me to speak at this conference, I was honestly humbled. I mean that. I was encouraged to be invited. I was coming to just attend and listen to these other brothers that will be speaking this weekend. So I told my wife, and this is true, I told her I found it a little daunting to be speaking at the conference where Vodie Bauckham would have spoken, if not for his health crisis, with other men that I so greatly respect that were speaking. And we were driving in the car on Tuesday, and in an attempt, I think, to encourage me, she said, I'm sure they know you'll do a good job. And they probably asked you because everybody else was already busy. So, well, there you go. It was then that I was fully and finally humbled. So when I'm finished after this talk, you can either tell your friends, Tom did a good job, or apparently everybody else was already busy. But take your Bibles, if you would, and look with me in 2 Timothy chapter 2. 2 Timothy chapter 2. I want to begin reading in verse 14, a text I'm sure you're familiar with. Paul writes to this young pastor, remind them of these things and solemnly charge them in the presence of God, not to wrangle about words which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. Be diligent. to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the Word of Truth. But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Pray with me if you would. Father, we love Your Word. We pray that we would just not say those words, but we would evidence it by how we handle Your Word, our submission to Your Word. That we allow it to be the final, complete say of how we view this world, how we view ourselves. Lord, we want to be men. We want to be women who are unashamed of how we handle your word. Give us wisdom this afternoon. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. I'm going to address something that you might not immediately think is directly related to the influence of social justice in churches. But when I read that one of the driving questions of this conference is, and I quote, how do we protect our local church from this ideology of social justice. The importance of expositional preaching immediately came to my mind. Because I believe a lack of sound expositional preaching is central to what has made so many in the church susceptible to this godless ideology. One reason social justice is thriving in the church is people don't truly know their Bibles. and they don't recognize when God's Word is being twisted rather than rightly exposited. They've sat under anemic preaching and it has left them vulnerable to being infected with this ideological virus. And rather than sound preaching, they've sat under preachers who use the Bible like Plato. They bend and twist the scriptures to support the latest idea that has popped into their mind or the recent trend in the culture. And social justice is just the latest cultural trend. However, I see this Trojan horse that's infiltrated the church as the greatest threat to the gospel in my lifetime. I can't think of a greater description of what is taking place in churches with the current social justice movement than the words that we just read that Paul wrote to Timothy. It's wrangling about words which is leading to the ruin of hearers. It's worldly and empty chatter that's leading to further ungodliness. It is leading to talk that is spreading like gangrene, and sadly, it's being propagated in pulpits. Now here's the truth. Whatever is coming out of the pulpit of our churches is going to shape our people more than anything. Unsound preaching will produce unsound Christians. And that is why I continue to say that the main role of any pastor is to accurately handle the word of truth. It was the command that Paul gave to Timothy to respond to the false teaching that he was facing in his ministry. And I want to posit that the only kind of preaching that fulfills this command is biblical exposition. Now before we proceed, I think we need a working definition of expositional preaching. Some think what's meant by expositional preaching is preaching through books of the Bible or simply just preaching from the Bible. And while I would argue that preaching through books is the best way to practice consistent exposition, that's not what defines biblical exposition. And simply reading a biblical text before you preach isn't exposition. So let me give you a very rudimentary definition of expositional preaching. The preacher diligently labors to discover the point of a biblical text and makes that point the central point of his sermon. Again, the preacher diligently labors to discover the point of a biblical text and makes that point the central point of his sermon. So I would say that the main role of any pastor is to preach sermons that derive their point from the original point of the text. The preacher preaches the text, not other ideas, his own or otherwise. Expositional preaching, I would say, is not just one option among others for handling the Scripture. It is the means of rightly handling the Word that gives you confidence, I'm going to try to articulate this this afternoon, that gives you confidence that you aren't merely preaching your own ideas or cultural norms, but you're preaching God's truth. Paul's command to accurately handle the Word of Truth could literally be translated here, cut it straight. It's the same word that's used for orthopedics, anything that talks about something being straight. In order to cut it straight, we've got to first understand that the meaning of the text, get this, the meaning of the text doesn't originate in the mind of the modern reader. It originates in the mind of the original author. Obviously, ultimately in the mind of the Spirit, because the Holy Spirit inspires that author. But understanding from a literary context, in the mind of the original author. And the author's original point was delivered to and understood by a people in a particular historical context. So it's the author's meaning to the original audience that we've got to come to understand. And once that original meaning has been discovered, it is applied to the preacher's modern audience in their context. Even then, get this, even then it's not with limitless applications. Because an application of any text is only valid if it is warranted by the original meaning of the text. And so there are those today who want to argue that what they're doing with social justice is just applying it. Scripture has one meaning, but many applications. That's true in one sense, but not limitless applications. Even our applications must be tethered to the original point and the meaning of the text. Now all of this, by the way, is a strong assertion that I've just made when you consider so much preaching today is not expositional. Sadly, too many modern sermons are preaching from the Bible, but aren't actually preaching what the Bible actually says. There are sermons that are preached out of context. For example, I heard a preacher base his whole Christmas sermon on Matthew 2.8 that reads, and I quote, Go and search diligently for the child, and when you've found him, bring me word that I too may worship him. The point of his sermon was to find Jesus and worship him this Christmas. But those words were King Herod's words to find Jesus so he could kill him. Out of context. There are sermons that moralize the text without any connection to the original meaning. Sermons, you've heard them, they're famous, on David and Goliath, that teach people how to defeat the giants in their lives. Or Philippians 3.13, where Paul says, this one thing I do, being used to teach the importance of having goals in your life. There are sermons preached through various lenses. psychological lenses, therapeutic, doctrinal, social, political lenses. How many Fourth of July sermons have there been where 2 Chronicles 7.14 was applied as if it were written directly to America? And this is the kind of preaching, by the way, the lenses type preaching, that is often occurring with social justice topics. Preachers go to the text with a framework of social justice already in their minds, with social justice lenses, if you will, that they will read the biblical text with. This is happening in some of the most conservative places. A professor at Southeastern Biblical Theological Seminary positively stated about how to see social justice in the Scriptures. And he said, and I'm quoting, when you put on the lenses, you begin to see it everywhere. Or the viral sermon by author of Woke Church, Eric Mason, where he equated the plagues in Egypt to political protests that were taking place. Again, at Southeastern Seminary, Latino hermeneutics lecture was given, where you should read the story of Abram and Sarai, and I quote, through the lens of an Hispanic immigrant. He proceeds to explain that when Abram and Sarai come to the Egyptian border, quote, Abram had no choice but to lie about Sarai being his sister. Because like Hispanic immigrants, again I quote, if you have to lie or put people in danger to get across the border, then that is what must be done. Consider Esau McCauley, in his book entitled, Reading While Black, he takes Romans 13, where Paul says these words, do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good. And then he suddenly twists it to relate it to modern American policing. He says that what this text means today is that blacks should not have to, quote unquote, live in fear of being pulled over by police at a traffic stop. And I quote, he says, here Paul speaks about the absence of fear, a central concern for black folks, unquote. But Paul's point, if you read Romans 13, is not that the government should make sure that no one ever fears the police or, in that situation, the soldiers of Rome. Rather, it says, if you don't want to fear, then do good. I mean, it's the plain reading of the text. You could never get Macaulay's interpretation without putting on his social justice lenses. This hermeneutical sleight of hand is destructive. And it is leading many Christians astray, causing them to think that they have been given biblical marching orders to carry out social justice. None of these sermons exemplify accurately handling the Word of Truth. They are not unashamed workmen who are diligently studying the Word in order to draw out the original meaning of the text that's already embedded in the text, but they are shamefully forcing upon the text a framework that fits their modern social justice ideology. And rather than protecting the church from secular culture, it is taking it right over the cliff headlong into it. What must we do in the face of this mishandling of God's Word is this. We need to have an unwavering commitment to rightly divide the Word of Truth. Now perhaps at this point you may think I'm overstating this case to argue that sound biblical exposition is needed to protect the local church from the dangerous ideology of social justice. After all, there are those opposed to the social justice agenda who are in churches that do not practice sound biblical exposition. There are those who are not Christians who oppose the ideas of social justice that is infiltrating our nation. And in addition, there are those who have historically been advocates for biblical exposition, but now seem to be taken captive by this ideology. Well, first I would respond to that first group, that we want our churches to oppose worldly social justice for the right reasons. Not political reasons, not personal reasons, not reasons of feeling uncomfortable or whatever it may be, but biblical reasons. As pastors and as Christians, we should not be satisfied that those we shepherd as pastors are simply for the right things and against the wrong things. We want the worldview of our congregants to be built upon the right foundation. Namely, we want it to be built on God's Word. They need a biblical worldview. They need to be able to rightly handle the Word themselves, and they need to be able to recognize when Scripture is being abused. Lest they eventually be taken captive by other things that are contrary to sound doctrine. So we want people to be equipped for every good work. Therefore, it matters why someone lands on the right side of these social justice issues, not simply that they land on the right side. I believe sound exposition is necessary for that critical task. But on the other hand, it is possible for men who were once committed to sound biblical exposition to falter or become inconsistent in their commitment. A large part of what makes this so dangerous for the church is the fact that men who have championed expositional preaching are now employing or allowing for the bending and twisting of scripture to advance worldly social justice. Nothing has broken my heart more than to see men who used to stand on one side of the fault line now standing on the other. And I believe that confronting their error and calling them back to sound exposition is also necessary for this critical task. So there needs to be both a clarion call for an unwavering commitment to sound biblical exposition, and for those who have departed from that commitment, we should gently correct them And as Paul says in 2 Timothy 2.25 just right after this, if perhaps God may grant them repentance. Because I believe that every person that is pushing this within evangelicalism needs to repent and return. When Paul challenged Timothy to stand against the false teaching infiltrating his church, what did he do? He took this young pastor back to the basics. Preach the Word. This is not something new that Paul pulls out of his hat before he passes on from this world because what he told him earlier didn't work. In Paul's first letter to Timothy, what did he tell him to do? He said, and I quote, "...give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching. Be absorbed in these things so that your progress will be evident to all." And the mission hasn't changed. Even when faced with threats to the gospel, preach the Word. And you can't preach the Word properly without first handling the Word rightly. Stop allowing the world to control the language of the church. Stop wrangling over the world's jargon. Like social justice, the way they use racism, reparations, whiteness, blackness, diversity, oppression, supremacy. Allow God's voice to be the one that speaks through His Word. Now Paul isn't saying here that you shouldn't fight about words, period. The contrast is between wrangling over words from a worldly perspective and cutting straight the word of truth. There are important words in Scripture that it greatly matters what you say those words mean. Words like justification, words like propitiation, like heaven and hell, like justice, partiality and repentance and forgiveness and grace and unity. What Paul calls for us to avoid is the kind of debate and word battle that pits divine truth against human words and ideologies that ultimately make the Bible answerable to man. that make the Bible, in some ways, even on the defense. The kind of word battle that attacks the straightforward and simple truth of Scripture with human philosophy. If we allow worldly words with philosophies to creep into the vocabulary of our church and begin to define what we believe and what we think and pull us away from the Word or put that framework upon the Word, it will bring about ruin. Literally, that word that Paul uses there is the word we get, catastrophe. Total devastation. It will not build up, but tear down. It will not strengthen, but weaken. We've got to have an unwavering commitment to rightly divide the Word of Truth without a hint of compromise. And anytime we allow anything to overshadow our commitment to sound biblical exposition, we are in danger and our listeners as preachers are in danger of being taken captive by worldly ideologies that will infect and will spread like gangrene. For Paul, the sound preaching of the Word is what keeps the church on the right track. It protects the church from the false ideologies that are always seeking to find a hearing in the church. It is what gives the preacher, the pastor, the ability to lead in the midst of a cacophony of voices that are constantly attacking the church and coming against the truth of God's Word. It allows us to stand firm. And that's the illustration that he uses later when he uses Korah's rebellion as the example in this passage. He says, stand firm on the firm foundation. There is a fault line. And it matters where you're standing. So in our remaining time, I want to give you three theological convictions that will give you an unwavering commitment to sound biblical exposition. So look back to chapter 2 again. I should say to 2 Timothy again, chapter 3, and a couple of more verses you're very familiar with. Look at verse 16 and 17 in chapter 3 of 2 Timothy. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work." Now hear this just for a moment, particularly pastors that are here. How you preach God's Word reveals what you really believe about God's Word. And we literally, as pastors, we literally teach people how to use their Bible and how to interpret the Bible by the way we preach it. Our people can understand, if they're listening to us preach, whether we're getting that out of the text or they leave going, I don't know how I saw that. That was incredible. I still don't see it, but it was incredible. And it's very easy as pastors for us to want people to leave in awe of us instead of in awe of Christ and His Word. So let me give you three theological things I'm drawing from this text. First, the Bible, this is a commitment, a theological commitment, that I believe if you have, will cause you to be committed, unwaveringly so, to biblical exposition. First, the Bible is totally inspired and inerrant. It's clearly this text, often used for this very thing, theologically to say, this is where we go to one of the passages we go to, to prove or communicate the inspiration of Scripture, inspired in an area. In other words, we believe, now get this, we believe that the Bible is the living Word of God speaking. 2 Timothy 3.16 declares that all Scripture is breathed out by God. What do we do when we speak words? We exhale. We breathe out. It is God speaking. Simply put, you must believe that the Bible is literally God speaking. And that we, I love this, that we have in our Bibles a fully trustworthy record of what He has said. We must believe that God has something to say and has chosen to faithfully communicate that to us in Scripture. It's been this way from the beginning. When God created, He spoke everything into existence by the power of His Word. He spoke and it was. And after God created man and placed him in the garden, in Genesis 2.16, what did God immediately do? He immediately spoke to him. God did not leave it to man's imagination to know how to relate to his world or to God. He did not leave man to rely on his gut instinct as to how to live in this world. God didn't download knowledge into man's mind to know how to live. God gave man His Word. Now, brothers and sisters, that was before the fall. If man needed God's Word to live in this world before the fall, how much more do we need God's Word now? In addition, when Satan entered the garden to tempt man to rebel against God, the first thing he did was attack, undermine, and twist God's Word in chapter 3 and verse 1. He says, did God actually say And Satan altered God's word. And what happened immediately after Adam and Eve sinned? Immediately after Adam and Eve sinned, God shows up and what's He bring correction with? He brings correction with His word. He gave the word of promise of the coming seed of the woman who would crush Satan in Genesis 3.15. And as you go through the Bible, both Old Testament and the New Testament, this continues to be the pattern. Just search through the Old Testament and see how many times this phrase, the word of the Lord came, see how many times that appears. It's in excess of 3,000 times. The path continues into the New Testament. How did he begin his ministry? Public official. In Luke 4, preaching from the book of Isaiah. When Jesus faced the challenge of Satan, or any other opponent, he turned to the scripture as The Word of God. He declared, I didn't come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. There will not be a dot, there will not be a jot or a tittle that will disappear. It will all be fulfilled. And Christ, as we see in the rest of the New Testament, did exactly what He said He came to do. At the founding of the New Testament church, Peter didn't unhitch himself from the Old Testament. and preach his personal experience to confirm the resurrection. He didn't ignore that. He said, of this we are all witnesses. But he didn't leave it at the foot of their experience. He stood at Pentecost and preached from the prophet Joel. And it was through the preaching of God's Word that the people were cut to the heart and cried out, brothers, what shall we do? believe and be baptized. The means by which God makes Himself known to us is through His Word. Furthermore, still on this first point of the inerrancy and the infallibility of God's Word, if God has spoken If God has spoken, we must rightly hear what He said. We can't be left to mere speculation about what He might have said. We must believe that if God knows we need His Word to live, that He would give a reliable means by which we can know exactly what He said. What good does it do us if God speaks but we can't be really sure of what He said? What good does that do us? But we possess, brothers and sisters, we possess the Word of God and He has given it to us in a reliable means by which we can know what our Creator has said to us. And that conviction, that conviction should fuel our desire to let our people hear the voice of God and not the voice of the preacher. And the only way we can truly be sure people are hearing God's voice and not ours, is to handle God's Word with the kind of care that gives us confidence that we are now saying what He has already said. This means we've got to get our lenses off because we all come to the Word of God with lenses. We all come with frameworks to the text. No one's saying that we don't come to the text with frameworks. We're actually saying don't come to the text with frameworks. You've got to set your framework aside. You've got to allow the Word of God to shape your framework. It's not my framework and experiences reading into the Word of God. It is the Word of God that speaks to me and my experience in my life and gives me a new biblical world view framework. And this demands biblical exposition because God's point must be our point. I mean, after all, you want people, do you not, to be careful with your words? I mean, I've never seen people get more bent out of shape, myself included. than when someone takes my words out of context. There's no better place for that than Twitter, but anyway, that's another story. Have you ever written something to someone, they misunderstood it, and you had to explain, that's not what I meant. Or someone told someone else what you said or what you wrote, and they totally misconstrued it, and you were infuriated at the most, maybe at least discouraged at the least, that someone would take your words and put meaning into it that you never intended. The practice of careful exposition helps you discover what God has said so that you don't alter His word. Because I guarantee you that God takes it more seriously when you take His word out of context than when others take yours. God has spoken. And we need to be diligent to discover what He has said by understanding it in the original context. God didn't write the Word directly to us. He wrote His eternal truth. He chose to do this directly to a particular people at different times and different places with different authors. with different cultural backgrounds and understanding what he was saying in the original context is fundamental to knowing what he means to us today. It can never mean now what it didn't mean then. I heard a woman Bible teacher who was talking about how she was nervous flying on a plane. She didn't like to fly normally and in this particular situation she was up in the air and the turbulence was rather bad and she said that at that moment she was trying to help comfort other people. How God can use his word in your life in troubling circumstances. So she said as she's up in the plane, she opened her Bible to get a word from the Lord. It's always the beginning of a bad story. But anyway, here we go. This is true. She said this. She said that she opened her Bible and it immediately fell to Obadiah 4. She said it read, though you soar like the eagle and make your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down. Some of you know your Bibles. She didn't. She said that the Lord told her in that moment that though she is up in the sky, soaring like an eagle in an airplane, that the Lord would bring her safely down. Now, as some of you seem to know, if you looked at the context of Obadiah 4, you would see that God was speaking there to Edom. He was addressing their pride. They lived in a high place that was rocky, and they believed it gave them security that just couldn't be penetrated by their enemies. They were mistreating God's people, but they believed they couldn't be touched. So that verse wasn't about bringing down someone safely. It was about bringing someone down in judgment. What she found in that moment to be relevant was a complete mishandling of the Word of God and the voice in her head wasn't the voice of God. Dare I say that maybe some of us, myself included, have practiced such poor handling of God's Word. But there's more needed for a commitment to biblical exposition. We must not only really believe the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God, second, back to 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, we must also believe, second thing, that it is completely sufficient and fully authoritative. You see that in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17? It's fully authoritative. Because it's profitable for everything you need. For teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. It's fully authoritative. And, look here at the sufficiency. So that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. The great battle that evangelicals fought in the 80's was for the inerrancy of the Bible. But now the great battle is for the complete sufficiency of Scripture. And that's one of the things that we're dealing with in this assault of social justice upon the church. We are inundated today with sermons that originate with the felt needs of people when the reality is that often people's deepest needs are not their perceived needs. Do we really believe, brothers and sisters, That God's Word is sufficient to meet our needs and the needs of our people in our church. Do we really believe God's Word is sufficient to address the problems that plague society? Or do we need other useful tools? If not, if we don't think the Word is sufficient, why not? Just consider one of the most wonderful stories, or most astounding stories, if you will, in the Old Testament of Moses. At the end of Deuteronomy 31, you can go read that maybe later today, but in Deuteronomy 31, 24, we're told that Moses, when he finished writing the Torah in a book, and he commanded that it be placed by the Ark of the Covenant. Now, just picture that for a moment. You've got the Ark of the Covenant, the presence of God symbolized there. And here He is, the Lord's presence is there in this Ark. And the Word of God side by side. The person and the voice. And Moses knew how desperately the people needed the Word of God. And with the copy of the Torah lined by the ark, here's what he said, and I quote in Deuteronomy 34, 27. Be careful, be careful to do all the words of this law, for it is no empty word for you. Indeed, it is your very life. Consider Jesus. Not just Moses, consider Jesus. who lived his life in full submission to Scripture that he knew so well. He often responded to his detractors with the words, have you not read? When he was tempted by Satan, he battled with three deft quotes. Deft quotes from Deuteronomy. His summary response to Satan was that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Now take those two imageries, Moses and Jesus. Scripture is your life and Scripture is your food. It is the very sustenance, the very basic sustenance like bread is. How much more powerfully could it be said for the sufficiency of Scripture than that? But is that the weight that you place on the Scriptures? As life and sustenance? for both yourself and your church. I contend, what ideology could ever be a useful tool that Scripture would ever need to help it? Nothing is needed but God's Word. It is sufficient. It's fully authoritative. The convictions for biblical exposition come from this. We're often so convinced that the Bible needs a little bit of an oomph to make it relative, relevant. I understand this as a pastor. I'll be preaching, and I begin to hear the rustling of candy wrappers, and the turning of wrists I see, and then I say, you know, something happened to me the other day, and there's a hush over the crowd. Tom's been on Twitter again. So we're going to listen. And I'll tell you what will really get them listening is if I tell a story about my dog. I talked once when my dog died. I just mentioned it. I got the most letters of appreciation for my sermon that I've ever got. I'm serious, over my dog. There is something, there is something a little feeling of power in it when you feel people hanging on your words. And so we're tempted to tell these kind of stories, these interpersonal types, and not that they're bad when they serve the text rather than you. The convictions for biblical exhibition come from a belief that the Word of God is completely inspired and inerrant, that's number one, totally sufficient and authoritative. But look back at verses 16 and 17 of chapter 3 again of 2 Timothy, the third, immensely powerful. Now I'm getting that word here is that the Scriptures, how do you become, for every good work, what equips you? It's the Scriptures. You are equipped for every good work. That's the power. We could even go to Hebrews 4.12 that tells us the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. I want to repeat that. Hear this. I know you've heard it before, but listen. The Word of God is living and active. sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Honestly, tell me this. Do any of our words have that power? No, they don't. Have we ever said anything that possesses that ability? No, we have not. Martin Lloyd-Jones warned to preachers that they can become excited about the structure and the outline of their sermons and their clever sayings, but not excited about the power and the meaning of the text. The power of our preaching is not in our power to persuade, but in the power of God to transform lives. Therefore, we've got to handle God's Word carefully. If, and that's the case I've been making, if the Word of God is what does the work of God in this world, any tampering we do with it is dangerous and potentially destructive. We dare not tamper with it. If you really believe these things, You will never preach another sermon, pastor. You will never study the Bible again, fellow Christian, where you don't handle the Scriptures in an expositional way. I'm convinced of that. And you will be faithful to the end to let the Word of God do the work of God with the pastor's heart who holds out the Word as our only source of life and sustenance. that we have the kind of confidence in God's Word and love for God's people that Charles Simeon had. One of my heroes of the faith. Charles Simeon was the man who almost single-handedly brought the evangelical resurgence to the Church of England. In fact, John Stott said that his evangelical roots came from Charles Simeon's ministry in 1836 as they came through the Cambridge Seven. He became pastor at Holy Trinity Church, and he preached there for 50 years. The first 10 years of his ministry. Now get this, the first 10 years of Charles Simeon's ministry at Holy Trinity Church, the people in the church were so unhappy that they chained their pews closed so that all the listeners had to sit on the aisle on the stone floors. For 10 years, he had to preach with people sitting on the floors and people sat and listened. But he persevered. He continued to commit himself to the consistent expositional preaching of God's Word. His 21 volumes of expository sermon outlines set the standard for preaching in the following generation. He stayed at Holy Trinity Church his whole life faithfully preaching the Word of God and loving his people to the very end. You can imagine all the conflicts, all the attacks upon the church, all the false teaching that arose in 50 years of ministry, and he kept doing week in and week out what God called him to do, what Paul called Timothy to do, preach the word. By the way, he continued preaching to those who continued to resist his preaching because he knew the faithful preaching of the word of God was their only source of life and sustenance. Nothing else would help. When he died, Charles Simeon, when he died, one of his obituaries shared a remembrance of Simeon calling his members to faith near the end of his ministry. And let me directly read you that obituary. Having urged all of his hearers to accept the offered mercy, he reminded them that there were those present to whom he had preached Christ. to more than 30 years, but they had continued indifferent to the Savior's love. And pursuing this train of exhortation for some time, he at length became quite overpowered by his feelings and sank down into the pulpit and burst into a flood of tears. May God grant us. such hearts. Father, we are thankful to You that You have given us Your inerrant, Your sufficient, Your powerful Word. We have everything we need to fight every battle that comes our way to take every thought captive and make it submissive to Christ as Owen preached. We have everything we need to equip us for this good work. May we stop wrangling over words and may we have an unwavering commitment to the word of truth. In the precious name of Christ we pray, amen. Well, I don't know about you, but I think we're off to a good start. I hope you think the same as I do, that we're also in need of a break. So let's take a break. We'll meet back here and get started at 4 sharp. We'll begin to start at 4 sharp. If you haven't been to the exhibit hall yet, go out the doors and go to the right. There you'll find the exhibit hall. There's restrooms outside these doors as well as in the hallway to the exhibit hall.