Episode 7: The Law, Sin, & Judgment

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Brenton
This is further a weekly show for the people of Harmony Bible Church, where we seek to revisit and expand on Sunday sermons with the goal of growing deeper in biblical truth that transforms our lives. Welcome back to Further. I'm Brenton Graham and I'm here with Chris Carr on Sunday. Chris preached from Romans 212 through 16 about the law, and it's significance to both Jews and Gentiles.

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Brenton
And again, if you missed it, you can find it on any podcast platform or our website. One one note this shows certainly isn't meant to be and truly can't be a replacement for the preaching of God's Word. And so please listen to Sunday messages first and then come explore the text with us further. Chris, thank you for the message and thanks for being here.

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Brenton
Any thoughts coming off this weekend?

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Chris
Well, one thought I have is that it was interesting to have it pointed out to me that I was wearing an orange sweater on Sunday, given the fact that I referred to an orange shirt, a bunny, and I had really no realization of that until it was pointed out to me by a number of people. But I guess I was the bad bunny on Sunday, and I believe Bad Bunny is a rapper that I don't want to be associated with, so I'll probably never wear that sweater again.

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Brenton
Fair enough. We have observant people here.

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Chris
Yes, we certainly do.

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Brenton
All right. Let's start in verse 14. You had mentioned it a little bit, but says they are a law unto themselves and this is referring to the Gentiles. How complete is the law that's written on everybody's heart?

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Chris
Well, it's I would say it's certainly a partial law. I may not have been clear about this, but I think it's a a law that is pointing to the law. So, again, I don't know if this was helpful or not, but a lowercase a law. Right. And that's something that says it's written on all of our hearts and it's meant to point to the the bigger law, God's law that really stands in heaven and that he made or he he put in writing specifically for the people of Israel.

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Chris
And so I think it's it's a it's a partial testament to that. It's enough to tell people that there is a big o law and enough to give them the sense that, yes, there are certain things that are right and certain things that are wrong. But I think because of sin that our comprehension of that and certainly our application of that is limited.

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Chris
And, you know, there's this question about whether we become who we are by nature or nurture. And of course, the answer to that is, is both. And so some of us that law, I think, is more apparent to us because we've had, you know, families, parents in particular, but other people in our lives who've helped to reinforce it.

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Chris
And for other people, it's not being reinforced. And so they have less of a kind of a perception of that law. But in any way, it's it's limited, but it's there for everyone and probably becomes more apparent, depending upon the nurture that you have in your life.

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Brenton
Yeah, so kind of nurture. Regardless, everybody is going to have some sense of moral behavior and their conscience bears that out. Yeah.

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Chris
Yeah. And I think that the to go back to the research at the Yale baby law, I think that research shows that we we are born with a natural understanding that some things are good and some things are not good and some things deserve punishment. And that's a testament to it. And I think every culture, at least that's ever been released study at any time would show that, well, sometimes those different norms, moral norms can can vary.

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Chris
There are moral norms. Yeah, there are there in every culture, there are things that are acceptable and there are things that are unacceptable. I've had the opportunity to travel to a lot of different countries around the world, and so to observe a lot of different cultures and there are norms that are that are different in different places, and yet there are norms and things that are accepted as right and accepted as wrong no matter where you go.

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Brenton
Yeah, and I think one other I guess one way that we see this in our in our own lives, in our own culture, is through our demand for justice. And I think we'll get into this a little later. But we we inherently understand that things should be just and we when we see something unjust happen in a court or in our country, that's that's something that we we get upset about really fast.

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Brenton
And so I think we can we can see that stuff inherent in us. Is this different than than what he's talking about with the general revelation in Romans one? Is he referring to something else or is this the same thing?

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Chris
I think it's related, but I do think it is different. I would say what he's talking about in Romans one is an external revelation, and this is an internal revelation. So and Romans one, he's talking about, I think, creation. We can look up at the sky and we can see the stars, the moon, the sun. We can look at the trees, we can look at the beauty of the mountains.

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Chris
And we can see that, you know, we should be able to see that it didn't just get there by itself. It didn't just happen. There's an all the illustration, and I don't remember who originally came up with it, but it goes along these lines if you were to. I have never seen a watch before, so don't don't think of the digital watches that we have today.

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Chris
But the old ones that you would wind up and there you know, some some people are still in there today. But if you were just if you'd never seen a watch before and you were traveling down the road and you happened to come upon a watch and you open it up and you looked at all the inner workings there, you would you would come and walk away with like, there's a watchmaker.

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Chris
Yeah. There's somebody who has designed this and didn't just like these parts that just randomly come together and start working. And so if you look at it, a creation and I before I was a pastor, I was a biologist and I love to study the human body. And if you look at the human body and just study it even a little bit, you can see it's incredibly intricate and there must be a maker, there must be a designer.

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Chris
So that's that's Romans one. And then I think in enrollments, too, we're talking about the internal witness that we have in our just in our nature. And then I love, you know, in our hearts, like in the in imprinted on our hearts, is this knowledge right or wrong? And then in our conscience, you know, and he says, you know, there are conflicting thoughts or accusing them and excusing them.

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Chris
And I think everybody has that. Am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong? And those are just internal testament. Now, maybe you were going to get into this later, but I'll just jump into here. That's not enough. Like the Romans one, the revelation of creation is not enough to save us, but it's enough to condemn us.

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Chris
And the same thing is with this internal witness. It's just it's not enough to to bring salvation to us, but it is enough to show us that we need to be saved.

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Brenton
Right. Right. And I guess that kind of gets into the next question. So verse 13 says, But the doers of the law are who will be justified? And and I think just a quick reading of that section would kind of go against everything that we've we've been talking about. But is I guess what another way to say this be that the only way to be justified by the law is to keep it fully?

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Brenton
Is that what he's saying.

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Chris
That is what he is saying, yes. Okay. I believe that that's what he's saying.

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Brenton
Yeah, sure. So so yeah, it's but he's not he's certainly not talking about this is this is how we're going to be justified because nobody's going to keep the law fully.

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Chris
And I think it's right to look at this as this is theoretical. Yeah. And if someone did perfectly keep the law, they would be justified.

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Brenton
Right.

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Chris
But his whole argument in the last part of Romans one, all two and leading to chapter three is that no one keeps the law. And he hammers at home over and over and over again. We're not even you know, we've still got two more weeks of this. He's trying to bring that home.

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Brenton
But the I guess the Jewish Jewish audience that would be reading this maybe thought that they were keeping the law on their side. Right.

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Chris
I think that they had deceived themselves into thinking that they had kept it enough justified. And we're going to talk this week about circumcision. And because they had received this sign of the people of God, that meant that they were justified in part from the fact that they felt no need to show obedience and in a number of different areas.

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Brenton
Right.

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Chris
Because he's going to accuse them in the passage. We're going to look at the beginning verse 17, and then the next few verses is like he says, You don't you don't keep the law and makes it really very clear, gives specific examples of how they don't.

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Brenton
Okay, good. I guess feel free to run with this if you want, but Judgment day, He mentions this at the end of our passage. But what what do you see this looking like for a believer? I don't know how much more specific I need to be for that question.

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Chris
It's pretty broad. It is. I I'd say that we see two different type of judge types of judgment in the New Testament there. It would be the great white throne judgment, and then there would be the judgment seat of Christ. And, you know, the Bible doesn't give us great detail about this. And sometimes the judgment passages are filled with language that we have to wrestle with.

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Chris
Is this literal or is this you know, is this really pointing to something else? And so but I think if you think about the great white throne judgment, that really is the judgment that unbelievers stand before the Lord and really was the judgment day that I was talking about on Sunday. And believers don't actually stand in the way.

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Chris
Right. Right through in judgment, because our judgment day is is in the past. So I'm going to see if I can kind of explain this. But but what Paul is really doing in our passage from last week is he's taking our future justification and bringing it back into the present. And so what he's saying is that we're going to be found to be justified at the in the end, and that that justification has become real in the here and now.

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Chris
Like like I am justified. And so I'm going to be shown to be justified on on judgment day. But the great white throne judgment would be the one in which the unbeliever is going to be judged and face God's final judgment and then sentenced to eternity, separated from God and hell, the judgment seat of Christ. Paul talks about this in Second Corinthians chapter five.

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Chris
It's interesting. I had the opportunity to travel to Corinth a number of years ago, and there's actually it's called the Bema seat, and there's actually a stone engraved with that says Bema seat there in the ancient city of Corinth. So it's Paul's radiant readiness. He's he's he's thinking of that literal place, probably. And the the Bema. See, this judgment seat of grace will be this judgment where our our works as believers will be judged.

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Chris
So he talks about if you you know, if you build on a foundation that is kind of wood, hair, stubble, that that's going to going to burn up and it's not going to amount to anything. But if you build on really the foundation of Christ and serving him and living for him, that's going to lead to rewards. And so the my understanding of the judgment of Christ would be that that's actually a judgment where we our works as believers are judged and we will be given rewards that we'll get to experience for all eternity, for faithful service and following of Jesus.

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Chris
And then what we would lose out potentially there is that if as believers, we we really fail to give our lives and service for Jesus, and if we spend our time really giving ourselves to the things of the world, and then we're going to lose out on some reward that we could experience.

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Brenton
Yeah, yeah. Just a give you what he's talking about here in second Corinthians chapter five, verse nine. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive what is due for what He has done in the body, whether good or evil.

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Chris
Yeah, so that's again, exactly how well that works. We kind of open a can of worms here a little bit. I don't think we were necessarily planning on doing that, but I just want to do you want to be really, really clear for believers like our judgment day in the past in terms of like what is our future destiny?

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Chris
Jesus took our judgment on the cross and so now our home in heaven is, is, is guaranteed. We've been posses sealed by the Holy Spirit in Ephesians chapter one, which means that our our inheritance is guaranteed and adherence is eternity with the Lord in heaven. But there is a judgment seat that we're going to stand for our Lord and our our life as a believer is going to be examined.

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Chris
And so Paul uses this in security in chapter five. And I think the that Jesus does in the Gospels, in the New Testament, a number of different times, New Testament letters, Paul and Peter, to encourage us and to challenge us that the way that we live as believers does matter and that this idea is like a we place our faith in Jesus.

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Chris
We're going to heaven, and then we can kind of go on living the way that we want to live. And it doesn't does it really matter is just completely foreign to anything that we see in the New Testament right?

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Brenton
Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned apologetics on Sunday. Another broad question for you, I guess, what would be your method for for talking to someone that that doesn't believe in an objective law? I mean, that's that's more common than you might think.

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Chris
It's definitely common these days, more and more, especially as our educational institutions are really inculcating our children with this idea that there is, you know, no absolute truth. And what's so interesting about this is that they're teaching that there's no absolute truth, which they are actually stating as an absolute truth or and so I am I am not a very good evangelist.

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Chris
We have people at Harmony on staff and in our body who are much better evangelists than I am, something I'm seeking to grow in. But I would really just try to in any way I can try to convince people that they actually do believe in objective right and wrongs and they they follow them all the time. And even as a simple thing, I just use an example there.

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Chris
Do you believe in absolute truth? No. Well, okay, then. It's just it's an absolute truth. And so that doesn't necessarily that's not necessarily going to be all that effective. Right. But again, people do believe that there are certain things that are that are right and and and wrong. And so just trying to get them to consider that and to wrestle with that.

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Chris
And what does that ultimately mean to trace that back?

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Brenton
Yeah, kind of pointing out inconsistencies in their worldview, right?

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Chris
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good word. Brennan You probably could answer this question better than I could. So I'm going to actually I'm going to turn the tables on you today. How would how would you go about it?

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Brenton
Yeah, I think that's a good answer. I mean, you I think to adopt the atheist worldview, I guess I'm assuming that someone doesn't admit an objective low would be an atheist, but to adopt that, I think you lose a lot of of what we what we evidently see in this world. So you can't I don't think you can have universal laws of logic.

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Brenton
I don't think that reasoning works well or at all in an atheistic worldview. And so for us, I guess I kind of have a soapbox about some forms of apologetics, but I won't get into that now. Yeah, essentially we want to put the atheist on trial and not God, so we want to poke holes and look for inconsistencies in their worldview.

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Chris
Correction. Yeah, and I think talking to them about if the fact that if there is no objective morality, right or wrong, that ultimately everything descends into chaos and there is order in the universe so we can go down that route, there's order in the universe. Why is there order in the universe? Is it just because it randomly happened?

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Chris
But but no, there needs to be order in the universe or we wouldn't exist if and if there's not order and society, things go break down into chaos. And of course, we're seen that. We saw that in particular during the pandemic and the variety of different things that that happened in different places across our country and across our world.

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Chris
And we're seeing it more and more all the time. And that that is directly related to this idea that there is no objective moral standard.

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Brenton
Yeah. And like I said earlier about the our need for justice is you adopt that worldview and you are essentially saying that we are we're stardust. We've come we've come from stars a long time ago then what? What in the world matters with justice if we're just stardust bumping into stardust? And so there's there's a lot of different avenues you can go down and there's a lot of resources on Unapologetic.

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Brenton
So maybe we'll put a few books in the description here but.

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Chris
Yeah you mentioned, you know, justice. Maybe I'll just play off of this here. I you are familiar with Bill Maher. I am so interesting guy and I've been watching some of his stuff. He's got a show on HBO, which I don't have HBO, but he's on YouTube and.

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Brenton
I keep up with him, too.

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Chris
Yeah. And he he actually has some good things. He has some good critique of our our cultural elites and even our media. But in fact, last last night, I was I was listening to him and he you know, he basically is an atheist, and yet he's he's arguing for social justice, for racial justice in particular, is when he was talking about and he was doing a rant, by the way, about the Oscars and all this kind of stuff, which is really interesting.

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Chris
But I'm just thinking they're like you. You're arguing like you want racial justice, which is which is good and we should. But what's what's your writing like? He's you know, he's going on in he actually is critiquing the Bible in his local little monologue and all this kind of stuff. And and yet what's the basis for how can you tell me that it's wrong for for me to be a racist when you don't believe in an objective moral standard?

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Chris
I believe it is wrong. Racism is wrong for sure. But the reason I believe it's wrong is because of what the Bible says about every human being being created in God's image. Yeah. And if you throw if you throw out what the Bible teaches about humanity being made in his image, then you have no basis for really any law whatsoever.

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Chris
Why is it wrong for me to to kill some to kill somebody? Yeah, well, it is wrong. Always the wrong. Well, you have no you know, as an atheist, you have no basis to tell anybody that anything is wrong.

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Brenton
If, yeah, we're essentially just a matter of time and matter right.

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Chris
Getting a little more passionate today. So. Yeah.

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Brenton
All right. Okay, so let's switch just switch this to someone that might believe in a moral standard, but yet they kind of just think they're they're probably good enough. How do you convince them that they're not.

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Chris
You know, Well, I think this is maybe even more more difficult. And I think that we have to talk about the holiness of God and that he is infinitely, perfectly holy, perhaps talks about without a shadow of turning, so to speak, and how no matter how good they they are, they fall way short of being perfectly holy again.

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Chris
Paul is going to get to this. Romans 323 Most of us, almost all of us, can quote it by heart for all of us. And it falls short of the glory of God and it's not just like a little falling short of his glory. His perfection is way short of his glory. And I would also say that in the the unoriginal or at heart, even our goodness is in rebellion to God.

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Chris
And that's something we don't catch all of the time, but we use our goodness as a means to God owes us or to justify ourselves or to to look down on other people. And and so if if you know, so so a lot of unoriginal people and honestly sometimes even regenerate people believing people we we we use our goodness as a means to try to earn God's favor and to try to put him in our debt.

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Chris
What I God owes me this. I deserve this because I did this. And that's actually a rebellion against God. But I would also say, in addition to that, I just think if we are actually honest with ourselves about the things that we think about the attitudes that we have and the desires of our heart, they are desperately wicked and I think that when we we fail to admit that or we minimize that, we're actually showing how self deceived we are, which is another part of our nature that is is corrupt.

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Chris
And that doesn't mean that we're what, you know, every part of us is corrupt. Does it mean that we don't do good things? Absolutely. We do. Both unbelievers and believers do good things for sure. And yet the reality is, is we we just have a lot of sinfulness in our hearts and our motivations and their desires. I go back to the invisible tape recorder a few weeks ago.

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Chris
I think it's so helpful. At least it's helpful to me. I always hope that anybody else, if you just think about all the things that I say about other people and how they ought to live and what they ought to do and what they aren't doing that they should be doing, and how I judge other people. If I use the same standard on myself, I it's just evident that I don't I don't macho.

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Brenton
Yeah yeah. And I don't want to paint with the broad brush but going back to the people that that think they're probably just good enough to get by I wonder sometimes if that's more apathy talking than anything of, you know, I don't really want to deal with the things that I have in my life, and so it's probably just fine.

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Brenton
And so, yeah, and maybe some of it is just a kind of a heart change that needs that. Oh, it's obviously a heart change that needs to happen, but there's probably something below the surface there as well.

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Chris
Yeah.

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Brenton
So you had mentioned a little bit before that the unbelief was can do good things. But in in Hebrews Chapter 11 says and without faith, it is impossible to please him for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek him. And so maybe there's a clarification to be made there.

00;27;50;18 - 00;27;55;19
Brenton
They can do good things, but those things aren't necessarily pleasing to God.

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Chris
Correct. Isaiah 64. All our righteous deeds are like polluted like a polluted garment in who what he means there is that they don't again earn us a favor before God. So we saying on sun solid rock and dressed in the righteousness of Christ alone. So if we're dressed in our righteous deeds or our good deeds, they're. They're polluted, which means they just don't earn favor for the Lord.

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Chris
They don't places faultless before his throne only by having the righteousness of Christ. Well, we'll do that.

00;28;40;17 - 00;29;05;19
Brenton
Good. You mentioned very briefly on Sunday Social justice. And I think that your point was that a lot of times the people that get involved with these movements, even though they they want right things, they they want justice for our for the people of our country. They've rejected the foundation to argue for it. Is that that right.

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Chris
Correct. Social justice, of course, is one of those terms that generally brings a lot of emotional response to it, either positive or negative or sometimes somewhere in between. But I think as believers, we should recognize that justice is something that we should support, that we should work for the Old Testament in particular talks about justice a lot. What I would in other times probably call social justice, but I kind of refrained from doing it today because it's easy for people to misunderstand what I'm actually talking about.

00;29;54;16 - 00;30;17;09
Chris
But just to give one example of a passage, Jeremiah 2216 and 17, it says this He judge the cause of the poor and needy. Then it was well for him, is not this to know me? Declares the Lord, but you have eyes and heart only for your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood and for practicing oppression and violence.

00;30;18;03 - 00;30;53;19
Chris
So in Jeremiah is just calling down, really, or warning the people of Judah about God's judgment on them and the coming captivity that he's going to send them in to for their sin, and in particular the sin that he goes back to over and over again is that the people were being unjust. They were taking advantage of, as this passage talks about the poor and the needy, shedding innocent blood, practicing oppression and violence and those kind of things.

00;30;53;19 - 00;31;28;05
Chris
And so it wasn't simply idolatry of bowing down to the bails and the astrocytes and those kind of pagan deities. It was also mistreating the poor, the widow, the orphan, the the alien, what's known as the quartet of the vulnerable. I think of an important term there. And so, you know, God says, you know, he judged the cause, the poor and the needy.

00;31;28;05 - 00;32;02;28
Chris
Then it was, well, is this not what it means to know me? And so we should work for justice, that people are given the rights that they deserve as image bearers of God. And so we we should work to see that racism is eradicated. We should work to see poverty eliminated. We should work to see that the most vulnerable amongst us are cared for.

00;32;04;02 - 00;32;34;02
Chris
And so we should work for justice. And at the same time, what many of the what we might call social justice warriors is another term are misguided in is that they don't understand the two things. One is the foundation of their desire for justice comes from the fact that there is an objective moral, moral standard, that there is a law.

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Brenton
Right.

00;32;35;28 - 00;33;15;02
Chris
That God has imprinted on their hearts, like the very fact that people want to see justice done reveals that there is a God who has placed that law on their hearts and that desire in the hearts. The other place that much of the social justice movement of our day airs is that it's gospel. Yes. Yeah. Which means it's graceless know, which means that there's no desire for true reconciliation, restoration for for healing.

00;33;15;02 - 00;34;14;18
Chris
And a lot of times once you, you know, step out of bounds or do something unjust, you're here's another term canceled and there's no there's no possibility of forgiveness. And so that's missing in in much of the conversations about social justice. And maybe I should also add, there's a there's a third thing that's important that we're actually you know, we're seen here in Romans one and two as well, is that there there needs to be personal responsibility that not only do, do, do sometimes systems lead to unjust behavior and lead to the problems that we have, but we also contribute to that is that we have we all have a sin nature.

00;34;14;18 - 00;34;36;28
Chris
And so, yes, some of the things that happen to us are at the hands of others. But it's also true that we make choices that can can lead to the problems and the struggles that we face. And that's that's also often missing an understanding of personal responsibility.

00;34;37;08 - 00;35;03;17
Brenton
Sure. Yeah, That's a good point. That that a lot of those groups are graceless because their gospel is so we don't see a lot of forgiveness or reconciliation coming out of those. It's more yeah, it's it's usually pretty aggressive and it's usually everybody else is wrong and that's the end of it, right? So yeah, more gospel.

00;35;03;28 - 00;35;49;05
Chris
Right? Well, and that is true. And I just want to caution us though, on the other side, there can be an error which says all we need, we just need to preach the gospel and we just need people to, you know, come to save faith in Jesus Christ. And while that is our primary concern, we have to understand that that as believers who have understood and come to receive God's grace and God's forgiveness, and we've been reconciled to God, now we're called to move out in into the world, and we're called out to move out in the world and to show God's heart for the disadvantaged, for the poor, for the needy.

00;35;49;28 - 00;36;29;19
Chris
And we just think about the passage in in Matthew chapter 25, The Sheep in the Goats. Here's the here's back to the judgment day. And and and you know, Jesus says know as you did to the least of these. So you did to me. And and so the way that we really relate to the the neediest, the downtrodden, again, the poor, the widow, the orphan actually reveals our relationship to the Lord.

00;36;29;19 - 00;36;48;01
Chris
No, it doesn't. Those things don't save it. So here's again, we we can get this idea and a lot of churches go wrong this is that the way that we minister to those people are actually what saves us. It doesn't save us, but it is a result of being saved as what Jesus is saying in that passage.

00;36;48;20 - 00;37;11;24
Brenton
Yeah, yeah. So one application of that could be almost to not throw the baby out with the bathwater When we, when we look at these groups, um, I think, I think it's easy to be turned off of the whole subject. And so we need to look at, look at what they're doing wrong, but look at what we need to do right in those in those situations as well.

00;37;11;24 - 00;37;54;20
Chris
This may be helpful for us to think about Whenever we see something in our in our culture. We need to look and we need to say, can we should we reject it and should we receive it or should we seek to redeem it? And so there are some things we just need to outright reject. There's some things that that we can just outright receive, and then there are things we need to say, okay, there's some good in that, but we need to come at it from a biblical perspective and we need to not go all the way with a culture the way they're going and just to simply receive it.

00;37;55;20 - 00;38;22;19
Chris
But we need to come alongside and take the good that is there and seek to to redeem it in a gospel way. And again, the gospel is central to that. So there will be some things that we just have to outright reject what our culture saying about things like sex and and gender. We just there's no there's no redeeming what our culture is saying about that, although we we can redeem sex, okay.

00;38;22;19 - 00;39;05;15
Chris
But not what our culture is saying. And then there are some things that are really, really good. And I do think if we're willing to with this whole social justice kind of movement, to look in, to say that there are some some good things, a passion to to to care more about things like racial injustice, to care about how women are viewed and treated, that that those are things that maybe we need to awaken to the fact that we need to be more involved in seeking to address those kind of kind of issues.

00;39;05;25 - 00;39;20;04
Chris
But we've got to make sure that we're coming at it through a gospel lens. So we take maybe what the what our culture is saying and say, no, that's not in line with scriptures, but we're not just going to outright say we're not have anything to do with it. We're going to come at it and we're going to bring the gospel into it.

00;39;20;04 - 00;39;43;03
Chris
So you go back to that grace issue. So, yes, we need to be concerned about racism, but we but we need to address that issue in a way where there's a possibility of grace and there's a possibility of forgiveness. And ultimately, what we're really looking for is we're looking for reconciliation. And I want to say this. There's a big push for racial reconciliation.

00;39;43;19 - 00;40;12;15
Chris
Racial racial reconciliation ultimately is impossible without the gospel. And so should we seek for racial reconciliation? Absolutely. Read Ephesians Chapter two. Paul talks about the Jews and the Gentiles. Dividing the wall of hostility comes down in Christ. But the way that it comes down and Paul's answer, How does it come down is it comes down through the gospel.

00;40;12;15 - 00;40;32;12
Chris
So do we work for it? Absolutely. But we don't, you know, Paul So talks about our weapons aren't the weapons in the world, But but we have, you know, the weapons to to really destroy stronghold and the way that we do that is through the Word of God and Holy Spirit to the gospel.

00;40;33;17 - 00;40;59;21
Brenton
Yeah, Yeah. That's that's a lot of good information. I think that we it's obvious that there's a lot of oppressed people around and and I think that's that's what we need to look to is the people that are in front of us, the people that we can help affect. I don't think that we need to stick to the categories that that other groups have have created.

00;40;59;21 - 00;41;10;04
Brenton
And so we we should be looking for oppressed people and we should be helping we should be fixing the justice, the injustices that we see in front of us.

00;41;10;18 - 00;41;36;27
Chris
Right. And I love what you just said. Let's not just wholesale take the categories our cultures lay now. Absolutely. Let's let's think about this carefully. I talked to my use the word nuance in the bonus episode we did last week, and we need to have some nuance all the time. All the time. And that's that is so often missing in these discussions.

00;41;36;27 - 00;42;02;29
Chris
It's I go back, it's either, you know, reject or receive. And the redeem is there, the nuance there. And it's there's not always, you know, a call for nuance. Sometimes we just very clearly reject it. Okay. But a lot of times there there is room for redeem. And we need to be people who think carefully, who are cautious about how we respond.

00;42;03;21 - 00;42;21;09
Chris
I love what James says. You know, be quick to listen, so to speak. So to become angry doesn't mean that we don't speak, doesn't mean that we don't become angry. But what we listen and we think and we pray and then we we seek to see if there's a way that we can redeem.

00;42;22;12 - 00;42;57;03
Brenton
It's good. Great. Well, we'll wrap it up there. Thank you, Chris. I hope you guys are enjoying this and. I hope it's edifying. We'll see you next week.