This is Apologetics Live.

To answer your questions, your host from.

Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rapaport.

We are live Apologex Live here to answer your most challenging questions that you have about God and the Bible.

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Just remember one thing.

When you do, I don't know is a perfectly good answer.

This is a ministry of striving fraternity.

What we do here is, well, we do apologetics, we teach apologetics, we defend the Christian faith.

That's actually what Apologetics is referring to.

And so we do lots of ways of doing that.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity.

And so today we're going to talk, well, something that is very necessary in the apologetics community.

We are going to talk about the issue of church.

And why do I say this is an important thing in the apologetics community?

Because, well, a lot of apologists don't go to church.

So Brother John saying, is this live?

Yes, John, you can see there's your comment.

We are live.

We have had some problems.

We got it fixed with the website.

So therefore some people may not realize, hey, we're actually live again so we're going to need some help.

I'll mention this throughout the show is if you could share this with folks and let folks know we are live.

That way they know we had four weeks and they may have gotten out of listing going something's wrong.

So we want to, we, we want to today talk about an article that was on the website for Missionary Gamer.

If you want to go and find the article and follow along, just go to missionary gamer.com virtual_church.

Okay, so Missionary Gamer, Virtual Underscore Church.

This is the article.

We are going to go through this article.

The really the, the purpose of, of this is I don't know if this would have been as big of an issue prior to Covid, but certainly after Covid we have a lot of people who feel that they could, they could do church at home.

They don't need to have, you know, a church to go to.

They can sit online and, and, and watch church and, and that is something we're going to argue you can't really do.

So let me bring in my guest.

If you're a regular here, you may have, he's been on before on Diff on Different topics.

But the, the main thing we had him on here before was for his ministry of being a missionary gamer and he.

The.

Let me bring in Peter Hammond.

Peter, welcome.

Good to be here.

So, folks, Peter Hammond is when I, when I.

How we say this whenever, whenever you're on my podcast.

But just so people realize there's people that play video games and try to make it sound spiritual by saying that they're evangelizing.

And then there's you.

I've watched you play your video games.

You're clearly not actually playing.

You're just roaming around trying to find things to help other people in these video games and share the gospel.

You're not actually trying to play a game.

You lose most of the time.

Actually.

I do.

I lose.

I lose horribly.

Yes, yes.

Like every time.

And so.

Yeah, but you.

You're there to share the gospel, which you do well.

So I do have the link for those who are watching.

There's missionarygamer.com virtual church.

That is where you can find the article that we're going to be going through.

Now, before we go through the article, you know, and, and I, I may have to bring this clip up again later, but, you know, there were.

I just have a message from the previous.

The, the almost Vice President of the United States.

And so I just wanted to respond to this.

And so as, as we listen this, I unfortunately have to give a warning.

You used to never have to do this when you had someone that was like president or vice President.

But yet there is some foul language in here.

And since I grabbed the clip quickly, I had, I didn't have a chance to bleep it out, but I will try to just bleep where I know he's going to say something.

So, so here we go.

This fight.

It.

It's.

Well, this, this I think I could kick most of, but I, I don't.

Know if we're going to fall into that place where we want to.

Okay.

We challenge you to a, to a.

You know, a WWE fight here type of thing.

Okay.

So he is ch.

He thinks he can kick the butts of Republicans.

Hey, Tim Waltz.

Any.

Anytime you want.

Come on, let's, let's do it.

I'll tell you what, Tim, if it, if it will make you feel more of a man, since you like to, you know, have.

Think that boys could pretend to be girls and things like that, if it'll make you feel better, here you go.

I, I'll even give you my black belt.

You can wear that for the, for the fight.

Anytime, buddy.

This was going to be our vice president.

Like it does bring up an interesting point though.

What if you, I identify as a black belt and then you get your butt whooped.

Yeah, that, that's, that's, yeah that would be right.

So yeah that's the reality is that.

Well you know, you can identify that way.

It doesn't make it reality.

That'd be a good question.

So if he, if he, if I give him, if I give him my, my black belt here and he just identifies as one.

Does does that count?

I mean should I be nervous?

Does that depends if you have your.

Depends if you have your cane or not.

That's true.

Well, yes.

And, and you're one of the few people that know that I, that I do carry a cane for certain occasions.

Whenever I am, whenever I'm dressed in a suit.

I, I do have a cane or I'm on a plane for other reasons but and it's, it's not to fake injury.

So I get on a plane.

I never board earlier just because I have the cane.

So there, there are the people I, you know, Justin Peters was flying.

He, I forget what he calls it.

He said that the, the, the stewardesses.

Stewards and stewardesses have a name for people that they, they, they pretend to be.

That they need extra time to board and then they get on the plane and they're perfectly fine.

But I, I like the cane is.

Well it's a nice weapon but you know it's also I think cool to, to people don't gentlemen used to walk with canes and that's what I like.

I'm old fashioned.

He's like.

Or do you just feel like a little twirlings?

Yeah, well he's, he has that down under type of humor.

You know.

I just don't see you as a singing in the rain kind of guy.

Yeah, no I don't me and singing don't go along.

I, I, you know there's one way to empty a church.

Have me sing.

There you go.

So let's take a look at the.

Well let me first let you introduce your yourself because probably more people have been.

Have been joining us since you were last on.

It's been a while and, and I again I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you those who are watching it please share this on the social medias that where you are so people know that you know we, we've lost a lot of viewers because things were down.

So if you wouldn't mind just sharing this out so folks know that we are live again.

So that would be a.

A big help.

So how long were you down for?

Probably about four weeks where the.

It was just cached.

And so every.

So basically what was happening was every time I set it up and I would go in and test, everything worked great for me.

But as long as I was logged into the website, everything looked great.

But it didn't actually go out to the web.

I was seeing a cached ver.

Yeah, I guess I, because I was logged in, had a cached version.

So yeah, so we.

It took us like the first week it happened.

I'm like, oh, something must have just been weird.

But then two weeks, I'm like, this is bad.

And then since our webmaster was traveling, he couldn't get to it right away.

And so after like three weeks, I'm like, we gotta deal with this.

So, yeah, so with that, if folks can share it, that would be wonderful.

I think.

We're also streaming on your channels, on your.

Your.

At least your twitch channel.

Y so missionary gamer.

So let folks know a little bit about your ministry, what you do, and why they should be checking you out.

So the.

The focus of my ministry is the gospel.

And my desire is to share the gospel anywhere I can by the means that God has given me.

And when I was in Montana, I was in a town of 256 people and I ran out of people to share the gospel with.

And so I wondered, hey, can I use video games to connect with people online and share the gospel with them?

And the short answer is yes.

So started that about five years ago.

And it's a.

It's a very productive ministry.

I get to go all over the world and I never have to leave my little room.

And it is a way to connect with people who are largely abandoned.

A lot of kids, which was kind of surprising to me, like kids that just, they live there and.

And then just a lot of adults as well that go there to escape.

And it's been a very profitable place to engage people for the gospel and also to disciple and to help answer questions and stuff like that.

So, yeah, I've been doing that for about five years.

But ultimately I'm an evangelist and so it doesn't really matter where I am.

I had to do a year of uber driving and so I became an uber missionary.

And it was.

It was a great thing hanging out gospel tracks.

And we actually got bottles of water with the gospel on them.

So we'd hand those people when they were drunk, hoping that when they sobered up in the morning, they would go, where did I get this bottle of water from?

And they would.

They would get a chance to read the gospel there as well.

Had a lot of opportunity to share the gospel with people on the way to the airport.

That was always a profitable time because I had, like, an hour and a half for giving them a ride.

But ultimately, as you know, Andrew, we went out to Coeur d'alene and got a chance to open air witness together there.

That was a.

That was a blessing for me.

It was really cool to be there with you.

That.

That was interesting.

Yeah, it was a good time.

Right?

We had.

We had that lady.

I'm not really that concerned with where I'm sharing the gospel or how I'm sharing the gospel.

As long as we're focused on the gospel.

Yeah, we had that lady.

I still remember that.

So.

So we're doing.

We're doing some open air.

We're handing out tracks, you know, getting some minor conversations.

Actually, you were getting some pretty good conversations going with.

With some folks.

But it was funny because we had this woman who just.

She walked over and I was doing open air, and she parked herself right there.

Yeah.

Yeah, she was.

She.

She was wanting to fight.

She was looking.

Yeah.

We were wrapping up, though, and I remember, too, because we were getting ready to go, and she thought she was going to shut us down.

And we were like, well, we've already been here for several hours.

We're getting ready to go.

But you engaged her, and she was.

Yeah, she wasn't too excited about it after she realized she wasn't who she was tangling with.

Yeah, it was so funny.

Like, she really.

I.

I guess in her mind, you know, she claims she used to be a Christian and do all these missions trips and things like that, and she.

She thought she had these great answers that were just gonna shut me down and I was gonna, like, cower in fear.

I think it was good.

You.

You and you announced right from the beginning.

We're.

We're just.

We're getting ready to go, but we'll spend a couple minutes with you so that she didn't think she chased us off.

Yeah.

And I thought that was very wise On.

On your part.

I.

I hadn't thought of that.

And I was like, that.

That was a smart thing to do.

But as she just started asking questions and trying to challenge, it wasn't anything I haven't heard before.

And I had answers, and she kept changing topics.

She didn't like the answer.

No, she did.

Not at all.

Because she would, she tried to change topic and I'm like, well, let's stick on this.

No, no, what about this?

And when all else failed, she relied on her experience.

To which I was like, yeah, I'm not impressed.

Like, yeah, we have the word of God, you know.

She's like, well, I used to be a Christian.

And I, I said, well, that's not what the Bible says.

So, so yeah, in, in the end, she, you know, she started calling me names and that's when it was like, yeah, okay, now it's, now it's time to go, right?

I guess.

But, but yeah.

Hey, we got someone who, who.

From your Twitch.

We've, I've never had shared on Twitch, but gaming for Jesus says Peter.

So thanks for watching on twitch.

Yeah.

So MissionaryGamer.com it is a Ministry that you're doing to share the gospel.

You know, I agree with you.

I had a pastor out in California that used to do the Uber driving and he didn't need the money.

He just, he, he's a very early riser and so he liked doing those early rides to the airport because he was where he was, he was between San Jose Airport and San Francisco.

So he'd get, he'd get both airports and he would just share the gospel.

And he figured if they fired him, he didn't care because he wasn't doing it for the money.

And so he even had, one time he had an Uber executive in the car.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And they're not supposed to say they're an executive, but because, because my friend was just sharing the gospel, right?

He starts talking to him and, and realize like the guy, you know, like this pastor is so friendly that the guy thought it was pretty cool that he actually said, I'm not supposed to let you know this, but I'm actually an executive at Uber.

But the, the company, you know, encourages them or requires them to use Uber when they're traveling.

And so, so it makes sense.

They don't tell you they're, you know, they're an executive.

That, that would make sense.

But I guess in this case he, he kind of broke protocol because he was enjoying the conversation, which is good.

So, so what, what got you.

And I know you had a little bit of help from folks in, in your church.

What got you to want to write this article that we're, we want to go over and discuss tonight.

So the focus on the virtual worlds is really, it's, it's a ever growing opportunity to engage with people.

And as we've seen with you know, you're talking Covid earlier, how that really pushed a lot of people into the virtual realms.

This is something that has been a big and growing focus for many people, for, you know, we're into decades now.

And it's, you know, gaming, it's VR, it's zoom, it's this type of meeting.

It's, it's a.

It's starting to get into now augmented reality.

And all of these places are where people are going and they're going with their worldviews, they're going with their presuppositions, and they're going to.

To connect, they're going to escape.

And the, the thing that I think got me strongly focused on it was initially with the idea that people go there thinking they're escaping God.

There.

There's this prominent idea, especially with gaming, but I think it's in other areas as well, especially the VR spaces, that this is a game, this is virtual, so it doesn't count.

I can go there and behave any way I want to behave.

And God's law doesn't apply.

And we actually have on our YouTube channel a two video course on God's law for gamers.

And I go through and make a very direct, biblically sound application of God's law to gaming.

And, and I try to help people understand that just because you're in a game, if you're lying to people, you're still lying.

If you're in a game and you're, you're coveting or you're blaspheming or you're behaving in a way that's abhorrent, God still sees it.

He is.

He is very much aware of what you're doing.

And that, that understanding that the virtual world, although it's virtual, still is under the purview of God in his omniscience is.

Is where this kind of started really gaining some traction for me and especially with our ministry because, you know, we use it so, so effectively for the gospel and for evangelism.

Well, then the, the question becomes, you know, well, is it.

Is it just as good as the real thing?

Is it.

Is it on par?

And when you brought up Covid, but it was actually before COVID but it definitely got into full gear with COVID that people really started to get into this idea of, you know, that church could be a virtual church, and that's.

That, that would be.

That would be just like anything else.

Now the trouble is you can do a lot of things virtually.

I mean, we're meeting virtually right now, and it's a perfectly good, meaning this is a perfectly good venue for this conversation.

And evangelism, you can do that virtually very effectively.

You can do teaching virtually as well.

But there is a line, and that line is kind of hard to put your finger on sometimes where these, this, this virtual, the virtual nature of it breaks down in trying to replace reality.

And it's very, it's very easy to put your finger on when you try to have a virtual hamburger or, or get a.

But at least there's no calories.

Well, there's no calories.

Yeah, but the, the, or get a virtual hug, you know, or, or, or something of that nature.

So it, there is a line that people see pretty clearly on those aspects.

But then the question is, okay, well, what other things does it break down as well?

And I started seeing, this is before COVID I saw some pretty out there stuff where one virtual church was doing a virtual baptism and they had, you know, a laptop there with the, you know, the, the young lady in her bathtub and she was live streaming her, getting virtually baptized.

And I was like, you gotta be kidding.

What is going on here?

And what was terrible is the next guy who, they were doing back to back virtual baptisms, the next guy, when he, he went under the water and came up, he actually split his head open on the faucet.

He started bleeding and every, oh, it was terrible.

And it was, it was just one of those things where I'm like, you know, they have a name for when you have a camera on a girl in a bathtub and baptism.

And so that's where it kind of got my mind thinking about, okay, well where is this going?

Where do people want this to go?

And then ultimately started getting into some really serious conversations.

And then Covid hit and that's what it really started getting out there saying, you know what?

There's a line and, and let's define that line and, and let's make it clear that there's.

There's a line around things like food, there's lining around things like, you know, embracing hugs.

There's a line around church, and there's a reality to where you cannot virtualize some things.

So this is, this is one of them.

So let me ask.

Right, so just because part of doing apologetics, right, is, is asking questions and getting a better understanding of what, when someone says something.

That's what we do right here.

We want to try teach apologetics.

Part of that is learning to listen and learning to ask questions.

So I want to, I want to challenge what you said to see how, how far it goes, right?

So you said, okay, if you, if you're lying in a video game, you're pretending to be someone you're not in a video game, so what?

And I'm assuming by that what you mean is if I'm you know, a 56 year old male and I'm pretending to be a 13 year old male because I'm in a, using a fake name online, is that what you're referring to?

I think that could be another application.

I'm referring directly to lying.

Somebody says, hey, did you take that?

And you said, and you look at him and say, or didn't look at him but you say through the mic.

No, I didn't take that.

And in fact you, you did steal that item from them.

So there's, there's a very direct, like you're lying.

It does tend to get a little bit more gray area when there's role play involved.

You're kind of Talking about the 13 year old, things like that.

There's people who use voice changers, there's all kinds of different things like that.

If the way I, the way I highlight it in, in God's Law for Gamers is I, I try to keep it pretty straightforward.

Like if the game has the expectation that you're going to be battling each other and there's only one person left, like a battle royale kind of game, is that murder?

Well, no, obviously not.

That's the point of the game.

You're all running around shooting each other and whoever is left standing, they win.

Nobody's been murdered.

However, Jesus said something very important.

He said if you call your brother a fool, you've committed murder in your heart.

So the issue that I bring it back to with God's Law for Gamers is about what's going on with your heart.

Because I've seen video and, and seeing people that are completely losing their mind because they, they lost in the game and they went back there and they're gonna, you know, and were they murdering physically?

No.

Were they murdering?

Oh yeah.

And did God count that as murder?

Oh yeah.

So there's end Lusting is another, another very straightforward one.

In fact, we're both familiar with recent events that affected somebody who was having a virtual lustful relationship with somebody.

And these are, these are things that are, are important to understand from God's purview.

They're this sin.

And, and they should not just think that because it's called virtual whatever or game whatever that, that, that somehow gives them A get out of jail free card.

And it doesn't count from God's perspective.

Sorry, it does, especially with the heart issues.

And I think that's where there's a great opportunity as well to use these gaming worlds, these virtual worlds to bring light to these hard issues in a way that doesn't necessarily have the same impact when you're out in the real world.

And I, I highlight this for, for parents with their children that these, these virtual environments can be very helpful for teaching especially how to interact with people and how to deal with disappointment, how to deal with loss, how to deal with their own covetous heart and things of that nature.

But you have to be proactive about it.

And I think that's where a lot of my focus in my ministry on is.

Okay, how can we proactively use these, these virtual worlds to bring glory to God, to edify, to have fun?

Nothing wrong with having fun.

But there, there is a line at which it, it like everything, you know, you start using it for the wrong reasons and then you end up with abhorrent situations like the virtual church.

And this article in the virtual church that we're, we're talking about today, this came out of the, the discussion with people saying, hey, I don't think this is right.

Like, are we supposed to be doing this?

And they would say something like, well, where in the Bible does it say you can't do virtual church?

Where does it say virtual church is wrong?

And that's where it's like, well, obviously the Bible doesn't directly address virtual churches being wrong, but it does very clearly state what church is.

Yes.

And by that, by that standpoint, we can clearly make the statement that virtual church is not and should not be put in the equivalent place as actual real church, nor should it even be considered as an alternative.

It is at best a way to engage in the sermon and keep up to speed if you're sick or if like we had for temporary times that you can actually get into a church environment.

But the, the key word there is temporary and it's, it's simply like watching a show online.

It is, there is some edification to it, but it should not be confused with actually attending a church.

So Kathy referred to it here.

She said virtual deception.

And so I think that's a good phrase for it.

Now just at a curiosity, how then would you think, how would the ethic that you're proposing for gaming be when it comes to say, movies?

Right?

In a movie, someone is, is obviously being, pretending to be someone they're not.

Right.

They're.

They're taking on a character.

They're pretending to be married.

They're pretending to.

You know, they're pretending to be married to someone they're not actually married to.

Would you have issue with that or.

Or would you see that as different?

So it's.

I didn't.

This wasn't about addressing entertainment.

I get it.

I'm just curious.

Yeah, no, there.

There's some.

There's some benefit of setting some.

Some guidelines to it where there's.

There's an entering into an agreement.

I think whenever you.

Whenever you watch entertainment, you know it's not real.

You know that these are people who are acting.

You've seen them in other movies before.

So you're.

There's an.

That this is for entertainment.

And I would say there's nothing wrong with entertainment.

It goes all the way back to where there were plays and things of that nature.

It is interesting that Jesus did use the hypocrites, which were how they would call actors in that day, as an example, when he would speak about people being false and fakes.

And so there is that aspect to it.

But I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with plays or movies or things of that nature.

I think the line crosses when you start thinking it's real.

And this is something that there's a big opportunity to talk about, too, with.

On a tangent, but with what's happening with AI and the ability to do generative.

And I sent you some of those, the new AI voices and how people are doing role play with these voices.

And I think we talked about how somebody, even recently a young man committed suicide by direction of one of these AI generated characters.

So this.

It's when it starts crossing that line and blurring of being reality.

I'm talking to someone.

They are telling me to do something in the real world.

Yeah.

I think that's where entertainment is.

There's a line there.

Well, I think.

I think the issue becomes.

I think it comes down to.

If you're going into.

Whether it's the virtual world in any.

Any way, whether social media, so you go on to Facebook and you create a fake account and pretend to be someone you're not.

The purpose of doing it is deception.

Right.

And I think that's what's going on with art.

Correct.

Let me bring one of our speakers, Dan Kraft, into the conversation.

Welcome, Dan.

Greetings, sir.

How are you?

You know, see, most people would just adjust their camera, but Dan is so tall that even his camera is just not Fitting.

Yeah.

This is how most people see me.

If you want to check out Dan Sevenfoot apologist.com is his, his website.

One of the speakers at Shrinetary.

But Dan, we're talking about basically probably your first time maybe meeting Peter Hammond.

He's with Missionary Gamer and he's got an article on that we, we wanted to talk about which is about, you know, the insufficiency of virtual church and upholding the biblical mandate for physical church.

And I know there's already some questions that are piling up with some, well, what about this, what about that?

And, and definitions of a church.

But I think that this is an important issue.

I think that I, I agree with you.

There were people before COVID that were avoiding church.

I think that generally it's, it was and maybe still is.

It's generally people that wanted to avoid accountability.

And so I mean if you're at church meeting with people that get to know you, sometimes they keep you accountable.

And some people don't like that.

So as a pastor, you know, and talking with other pastors, we, we just seems to be names.

You end up referring to people.

You know, you have the pew sitters, they're the people who come in, they, they come in usually late, sit in the back and they're out the door before you say Amen.

You know, and then, and there's those that, and it's funny because you can even, even deal with.

I was talking with a pastor at a conference recently.

We were talking about this individual person that was, you know, going after him and saying things and, and I go, you know, I'm, I'm willing to guess that this person doesn't attend church.

And so I decided to ask the question and sure enough, nope.

It's like, yeah.

He goes, gee, you could have guessed that, right?

Because you have some people, they, they find fault in every church and everyone, they're the only one that seems to be, have all the answers, right?

So when we talk about the virtual church, let me ask this question.

Is it actually church?

I mean, can we even do or call it church if we're sitting home and just watching it on TV or on a computer?

And I'm going to caveat this for you, Peter, because I kind of know what your answer is.

I read the article, but as you answer it, the follow up that people are going to ask and so I want you to answer the question, then answer this follow up question is what about the shut in?

Because that, you know, that's the question people are going to challenge you With.

So Matthew just said, can Andrew Rapaport be my online pastor and baptize me virtually?

Only if I can.

Proving the point.

Only if I could virtually hold you under long enough that, you know.

That'S awesome.

So I think it's very important to set up some understanding of what actual church is.

And we.

We can get that, you know, direct from God's word.

And that's what we've highlighted in the article online that, that God makes it very clear what.

What church is, and it is a very specific set of attributes that are applied to his church.

And.

And one of the key ones is gathering together and somebody.

Well, you can still.

You're.

We're gathering together virtually right now.

Well, there's a caveat to that, though.

It's not just gathering together.

It's gathering together for corporate worship.

Again, together.

You're saying, well, you can sort of sing together on.

No, no, you can't.

You're not singing together online.

But now we start adding the other caveats, and you're to perform the two, you know, sacraments.

Thank you, ordinances.

Thank you, ordinances.

I was like, my mind's sitting there somewhere.

Come from a Roman Catholic background.

Yeah.

Don't.

Don't make me tell your pastor you believe in sacraments.

Thank you.

Yeah, we have baptism and we have the Lord's Supper, and those are.

Those are two physical things to gather together and.

And perform and to partake of together.

And then for me, the biggest issue of them all is there has to be church authority applied and.

And a level of accountability applied.

By the very nature of virtual environments, there is no accountability.

And, and anybody who says there is, they don't understand the fundamental nature of.

Of virtual worlds.

And so when we have all of these attributes applied to the church, it is so clear why the concept of virtual church just falls down.

You cannot have it singularly on any of these points.

And then once you start putting them all together, it becomes very clear that virtual church, as our pastor Jeff Miller said, is for virtual Christians.

So if you're a real Christian, you need to be in a real church.

And if you're a virtual Christian, you could be at a virtual church.

There you go.

There you go.

So, I mean, that's.

That is.

Sorry about the sacraments, guys.

Somebody's hit me up about the sacraments.

I had to jump out because somebody was at my door.

Did you.

Did you.

By any.

You mentioned.

What were you talking about right before I left?

You said something about virtual church.

Yeah, accountability.

Church discipline ties into that that's where.

I was going to go with that.

Yeah.

Of course, that isn't done in most churches anyway, so.

Well, that's.

That's a whole different topic, but.

And that just breaks my heart.

We actually just had a church discipline issue at our church as well.

And the reality of.

Did you.

Did you repent?

Huh?

Did you repent?

Yeah.

Were you restored from saying.

I had to repent from saying sacraments?

The.

The reality of church discipline is a necessity to have a healthy church, and I've seen it play out multiple times in our church as well.

And it breaks your heart.

Yeah, it's absolutely terrible.

But when.

When church discipline is not happening, your church gets sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker.

So we have multiple attributes being applied to this very specific body, as it's called, which is the church Christ's body.

That.

That doesn't apply to.

You can't apply it to anything else.

It's not a corporation.

It's not a business.

It's.

It's not a.

It's not virtualizable.

There.

There's no way to qualify it other than what it is, which is a real gathering of saints to worship God, to be held accountable to, to mentor to.

To worship together, to encourage each other to come alongside and disciple and ultimately to glorify God in that.

In that whole process.

And it does not.

It is not replicatable in any other form but that which God has given us in the.

In the church.

Dan, anything you want to add to that?

No, I was just making.

I just.

I was just here to represent for church discipline, man, because that's.

That's the one thing, you know, people talk about.

Well, you can, you know, you can gather, you can have, you know, fellowship, you can socialize online, but you.

You're not doing.

You're not.

You're not baptizing remotely.

You're not taking communion remotely.

You know, it's.

There's just an element of, you know, you're not there.

Right.

It's.

If you're part of the body of Christ, you don't have remote control, but you don't have remote control body parts.

Yeah, right.

And.

And there's.

There's some.

There's also the matter of service, right?

Like, how do you serve the body of Christ?

How do you exercise your spiritual gifts via zoom?

You don't.

Unless you think your spiritual gift is speaking incomprehensible sentences in a language that nobody knows, not even you.

Right?

So you can't do it.

Can't exercise your Spiritual gifts for the edification of the body.

Well, and that's, that's where you bring up the point.

The edification of the body.

It's, it's, it's a, it's a body and you cannot sever that body apart and still call it a body.

And, and when we look at our, our interactions in the church, there is a reality to it that is profound.

And for me, there's a lot of practical aspects that I can bring it back to as well.

Because when my daughter passed and, and I was, you know, in a state of absolute, you know, tragic moment, where did I go?

I went to my pastor's house.

I, I was embraced by my pastor and wept on his shoulder.

You know, my, my wife was with the pastor's wife and we were weeping and praying and, and my, my, my experience, I was physically there.

Could you virtualize that?

No way.

Now is that a, is that something you could stand on to say that, you know, the virtual church is not, not Bible?

No, but I'm just bringing up as a practical example the one anothers we are to be in, in fellowship with each other.

And it's a physical thing of actually walking alongside somebody in a capacity that you can't, you know, you can't do through a set of VR goggles that just doesn't work.

And when somebody's on their deathbed and, and you go in and you're there and, and with the family and praying and holding hands and when somebody's celebrating a marriage, you know, and you're there and you're witnessing the marriage and you're participating.

All of these one anothers have to be physically participated in otherwise, you know, they lose any of the actual meaning to them.

Now can you, can you, you know, witness it, you know, as from a, from a camera?

Well, yeah, you know, it's, it's better than nothing at all.

But it should not be conflated with the actual reality of, of participating in church.

Amen.

Yeah.

When, when I wrote the book, what do we believe?

What I did in the chapter on the church is go through the actual word.

Now this obviously was many years before COVID because the book's been out for I, I don't know how many years.

20?

Somewhere between 2015, 2018 is when it came out.

But what I wanted to do because I actually was, was looking at something different.

An area that, you know, Peter, you and I know well is the open air community.

And I was frustrated because a lot of guys that would not attend church, but they would Go out and to the street corner, preach the gospel and say, well, that's church.

And I started seeing people that were saying, using arguments that about, you know, they're, they're preaching or there's two or three are gathered or they're singing hymns and they're praying and that makes it church.

And it's like, well, what actually is church?

And so when I was writing the chapter for the book, I, I really look through the, the definition of church by looking at it, how it is morphed over the ages.

Because the word that we have for church in Greek, ecclesia is a word that initially was used the first time we, we see it in Greek literature being used is in Ephesus.

And it was referred to a gathering for the purpose of voting.

Now in Ephesus, voting was mandatory for every male.

It, it was a democracy, unlike what we have in America.

Hello?

Hello?

Someone didn't silence their phone.

My son.

Man, give me, give me some slack.

Make sure I put mine on mute.

See, I just have mine set to a timer to turn off to, to shut off between these hours.

The.

But the thing is that what we end up seeing is the, the we're in a representative democracy in case people don't realize, right.

We vote people to represent us in our democracy, but they were a democracy where it was, it was required for everybody to vote.

And so with that, what ends up happening is they had this word ecclesia.

It was a gathering for, for a specific purpose.

Now the church started using that.

And as the church started to use it, it became more specific.

It was the gathering for the purpose of a worship of God.

Now that, so that's the first century thinking by, you know, when the Catholic Church came in, you ended up having the, you know, the Middle Ages.

There then became this distinction between what we call the visible and invisible church, or sometimes referred to as the universal and local church.

In other words, the, the people that meet on Sunday in a building, we call that church.

But that's, that's the local or visible church.

There's, there's unbelievers there as well as believers.

And so they made that separate from what the Bible would sometimes refer to church.

And it's talking about this universal or invisible church, which is all believers everywhere.

And so they realized there was the need for that distinction.

Puritans come along and the Puritans say, well, you know, really, if you want to define church, there's three elements that define church.

Because they, at a time where most people were going to church but they weren't believers.

Most people were leading churches, but they weren't believers where especially like in England where you had, you know, the king or queen was the head of the church and then in the rest of Europe you had a pope who was the head of the church.

And so the, what you ended up seeing is they became more specific and the Puritans said okay, there's three elements.

You have to have the preaching of the word of God.

You had to have the practice of the ordinances, not sacraments.

But actually some puritans would have called them sacraments.

So.

Okay, there is that.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, those were the liberals actually.

Those are the more reformed covenantal guys.

But and the third element that they said was, and it's interesting, the third element they said is required to define church was church discipline to keep the church pure.

I completely agree.

And so you, you see that the word for church over time has become more and more specific.

Now in the book, the only part where I throw in my kind of theological distinction and I, I admit maybe it tweaks some folks.

I, I do say that, you know, if we're reformed and keep reforming.

Well, the, the word church has become more specific in, in our, in our, you know, century because now we make the separation between the nation of Israel and the church and all my covenant friends are going, no, I can't believe, believe you just said that.

Right.

Well, well, I think along that lines of the church discipline, I think that's one of the, the easiest and most direct places to, to point to and go there.

There is just, it's impossible to have church discipline virtually and there's also other impossibles as well, which is administrating the ordinances.

And there's, but the, the church discipline is just so easy to point at and go just by the nature of the, the ability for people to just instantly disappear and instantly come back in.

You don't know if it's the same person or not.

There's, there's no way to do, to do the church discipline, but there's, there's just no way to do a lot of the one anothers that there is.

Now we do have some interesting points brought up in the chat and they're, they're the go tos that people always come to.

What if, what if you A, don't have a church by where you're at?

Well yeah, before we get to that one.

Yeah, go ahead, skip B.

And then, and then B.

B was what if you're physically, you're unable to attend a church.

You know, physical justification.

And that's the one that I wanted you to answer.

And then the, the third one is, what if.

What if the church itself is.

Is shut down?

And so the, those, those three were, I think, you know, made pretty clear during.

During COVID and.

And.

And some of the other things that have happened since that all three of them do not negate the reality of what church is.

So we're not, we're not pragmatic.

We don't sit there and look at a situation or an experience and say, oh, all of a sudden we have to change the meaning of God's word because of an experience or, you know, some sort of pragmatic reason.

The definition of the church stands regardless of what our experiences are.

Correct.

So the reality of somebody who's disabled, they're one of the people who are so important to be in church because the church needs to come and help them.

That's part of the church's design, is to help the saints in need.

I've gone to somebody's house who needed physical assistance because they were injured or otherwise.

It needed to help them.

I know faithful saints who actually go drive and have a special van with a special motorized scooter to bring somebody who's completely paralyzed to church.

So there's, there's an opportunity to serve in a church, the other members of the church by helping them attend the church.

Now, temporary issues.

Can you, can you watch church if you're sick and you don't want to get other people sick?

Of course.

But you're not confused that in watching church, you're actually in church.

And that's the dilemma is if it's a temporary thing, if it's for a certain season because something's going on, then you can watch church, but you're not in church.

And that's the distinction.

Go ahead, Dan.

Hi.

So I had a thought as I was.

I was.

I was staring at Fatima's.

Her question here and, you know, is a physical disability a justification for virtual church?

And I was just kind of thinking back, like, to the church that I.

That I used to attend for 20 some odd years.

We had two people.

We had one guy had Lou Gehrig's disease, couldn't, you know, couldn't move a muscle.

And he was in church every Sunday.

He would go on men's retreats.

He was there.

We had a couple of couples who had severe physical disabilities.

I mean, they're on the, the chairs.

They could, you know, kind of all, you know, I don't know what it was that they had, but there's some kind of like cerebral palsy or something.

They were there every single week.

And I kind of wonder if, if the question isn't kind of like a sign of our times where we don't, either we don't really understand the importance of church or maybe we've kind of watered it down.

And I, I, I just think about, you know, during times of persecution, especially like in the first century, you know, people would risk their lives to go to church, but we're like, oh, I have a sprained ankle, so I'm not going to church.

Like, are you kidding me?

Like, there are people around the world today who, who gladly risk their lives.

Yeah.

To go to be a part of the body of Christ, you know, in person.

Right.

So it's just, it's, you know, I, Fatima, I, I'm not throwing shade at you, you know, I don't mean to, you know, throw stones at you or anything, but I just wonder if it's, it's just one of these things where we've kind of lost the real, the import or the impact that church is supposed to have in our lives.

And Fatima is from the Philippines where, I mean, there's, when it was the very humbling thing when I preached both times in the Philippines was the fact of, it became a thing where I just asked people like how they got to the conference and the, the number of modes of transportation.

They, well, I took a boat to a train, took a bike ride, you know, like the, the bus.

I mean, there's so many different modes.

And I, and I'd ask like, so that, that sounds like a lot of work.

Why'd you do it?

And they were like, because the word was being preached, you know, they really will go out of their way, you know, for that.

And so I think, I think what she, she was though asking is the question.

I, you know, I first, I mean, we have, you know, a lot of churches have the shut ins.

And that's usually, and that's why I asked you with that, Peter, because that is the first argument against people that say you need to be in church.

They'll say, but you have the shut ins.

And, and what about them?

Right.

My question would be, wait a minute, what about you?

Are you a shut in?

Stop making excuses.

You know, that's usually what all that is.

It's just a red herring.

It's just a smokescreen.

Well, but you do, let's get off the issue.

Let's talk about the accepted, let's talk about those exceptional cases and we'll try to overturn the rules to help me feel good about not going to church or doing whatever.

But I mean, but what if you are speaking?

So what if someone is watching this?

They are a shut in.

Right?

We want to, you know, there may be a case where people don't have the, a van or the means of being able to physically help someone get to church.

Right.

So, and I see.

So we, we, I want us to be careful with it.

Right?

This is apologize live.

We do, we do apologize.

We have to be careful when we do apologize.

Right.

We can't just beat people over a club just because.

Well, that's what scripture says.

There, there are, there may be times.

And that's why I'm, I want to probe this out with us is to say, you know, are there times and, and you know, that putting, you know, putting the church service on a live stream might be acceptable.

I mean, I'll say this, you mentioned, one of the three examples there, Peter is you mentioned the, you know, people who are just streaming at home with.

Because the church is closed.

Right.

Well, one thing I would say is go find another church that's open.

We had a lot of people coming in our doors because of that reason.

You know, that's, that's where we have.

To look at it.

And I think you were bringing that up earlier is what's the purpose of us going to church?

It is not for us to consume people.

And you'll hear people say, ah, churches didn't do it for me.

Well, guess what?

It's not about the church doing it for you.

You are to go there to serve others.

Correct.

You are to go there to use the gifts that God has given you to help others in the church.

And so yeah, if you have a, if you have the incorrect understanding of church is somehow all about you, then yeah, you're going to look at a virtual church and streaming and go, hey, that's just as good.

Because, because guess what, you're not in church anyways.

And that's where we have to have a very clear distinction of what church is and make sure you're not conflating it to think that, oh, just because I'm watching a live stream, I'm attending church.

No, you're not.

You're.

You're watching a live stream.

Somebody just asked that question about it and it's, it's important just as long as you make sure.

Well, I was gonna say I want to bring that, I want to bring that question up because I was gonna, I started so we could.

It's a long one, but basically, you know, it says is having your church tech team not live streaming Sunday after Sunday if your church won't.

Well, okay, the summarization of this, it's a long one, but gaming for Jesus.

Sorry, I'm just going to summarize it.

But like, basically, is it wrong for the church to live stream?

And, and I would, I would say, and I saw that you, you said it's a stream, not church.

I think it's okay to live stream because there's times, as already mentioned, you have people who are sick.

Well, just because they're sick, you don't want to say, okay, we're going to stream only to you, or you want to allow people that if there's a reason they can't be there, to be able to have some way of being able to attend the church virtually as.

But it's not a regular, it's not every week we're doing this.

If it starts to be every week, then you have a different problem.

Right.

And I think it's important to understand too, it's augmenting the church.

I would put streaming in the same camp as having speakers, you know, as having lights.

You're, you're augmenting the church.

You're not replacing it, you're augmenting it.

So a lot of times you, you come home and for me, I live stream multiple times in our church.

I'm not really paying attention to the service.

I'm at church, I'm serving others.

But then sometimes I go through and I, oh, what was the sermon about?

And I go back and I watch the live stream.

So there's, there's value as it augments church.

It helps enhance, you could say church, but it doesn't replace church.

And that's, that's the fundamental distinction.

And I think one of the things as people are here to, to sort of give some clear indication on if you are a true believer in Christ and you think that you are attending church virtually and that's okay.

It's important to understand you're in sin.

And, and that's a, that's a hot take there for a minute.

Wait a minute.

What now?

Yeah, you're, you're in sin and you need to repent of that and actually go and attend physical church.

You need to put yourself under the authority of the leaders of that church, the elders of that church, and you need to actually participate and serve in church.

And it's, it's a Sin, like any other sin, you have to repent of it.

And, and there's very clear definition on how to do that.

And I want to encourage you.

It is, it is definitely a forgivable sin and something that you will find very quickly how clear it is that it is a sin once you start serving in an actual church.

Yeah, Kathy is saying here I would not be able to get to church if my church family didn't help me get there.

And that gets to what you're saying, like we should be doing this together.

I brought one of our other speakers here, Mr.

Aaron Brewster, am Brewster from Evermind Ministries, people.

Wasabi baby.

And you know, for those who are, for those who are watching in the chat, you know, we're missing my co host but you see my co host is back here.

He's been commenting like crazy here, having all kinds of comments, but he's not here helping co host.

But I do, I do want to say before we move on with the conversation, just remind folks, because we had website issues, folks do not realize that we are back to they thought we, we're not doing things live.

And so even the two guys down on the bottom there, Dan and Aaron, were like, are we live this week?

It's like, yeah, it's just screwed up.

Here's the, here's the direct link.

So if you guys don't mind sharing it on whatever platforms you happen to be on, let folks know we are live.

Let them know if you're enjoying this conversation, let them know why you're enjoying it, why they should maybe tune in.

And we're going to get to some of the questions that we have in the chat as, as we move forward.

The article again that we're, we're dealing, we want to, that we're trying to address is this idea.

It's from MissionaryGamer.com just MissionaryGamer.com VirtualChurch the title of it is the Insufficiency of Virtual Church Upholding the Biblical Mandate for Physical Church.

And so, you know, basically the article is.

Here's basically the contents of the article.

It goes through and gives a lot of scriptural proof for each of the points, but it looks at what is the biblical nature of the church, the divine purpose of the church, ordained structure of the church, the essential activities of the church, and the biblical inadequacy of a virtual church.

With that in mind, we've already named a couple things you can't do in a virtual church that you could do in a physical church.

You, you can't use your Gifts.

Now, Dan, you brought this up, but some gifts can be done virtually.

I mean, I could teach virtually.

I, I do that.

We do that here every week.

So teaching's a gift we could do.

True.

We can, we can accept that evangelism.

Evangelism works perfectly well virtually.

If that was a gift.

I don't think it is.

I don't think it's a spiritual gift.

I just think it's a command we're all supposed to do anyway.

Oh, now you're cutting me deep.

Ouch.

Only because I, I look, I actually think people refer to the gift of evangelism because they go, oh, I don't have that gift.

Here's a funny thing.

If you look at the gifts, let's, let's take, put aside the gifts that ceased.

Oops, did I give away my position.

Those miraculous gifts that were used for the vindication of the word of God.

I don't think.

Continued.

But, and I know my, you know, if our Canadian friend, if our Canadian brother, Brother John is still watching, he's going to pipe up now.

But I think he's at the gym.

He said he's, he had to go to the gym.

But the, the thing is that we are commanded to do all the gifts.

It's just that some will come easier.

We're all commanded to teach.

We're all commanded to have mercy.

We're all commanded to exhort.

We're all commanded to, to, to give, to, you know, to serve.

I mean, all of the gifts are commanded.

It's just that some will come easier.

And so, and Aaron is saying in the chat, apostle wasn't a spiritual gift.

It was a unique role.

Yeah.

And so because some people think that apostles were a gift.

And so what we end up seeing is there are certain gifts that you really can't do properly and more so all the one anothers.

And if you look at the, I think 30 some one anothers in the Bible, you can't really do them effectively if you are just doing, you're, you're over video because the reality is when everything you do, in my opinion, when everything that you do is virtual.

And, and Peter, you know, this being that you do the video games, when people are playing video games, they're, they're submersing themselves in a virtual world with a virtual reality of themselves.

And, and people, whether social media, gaming, whatever, you see this, where people put on this, this front and what they portray on social media is not always, you know, what they, who they really are.

So Matthew on Twitch is saying, that, you know, missionary, gamer, you, you have the gift.

Don't listen to Andrew.

Hey, if it, if it's a gift, I just, I don't.

I'm not saying it.

It.

Let me put it this way.

I'm not saying this.

There can't be a gift of evangelism.

I'm just saying literally.

Hold on, let me finish.

I'm saying that the Bible doesn't say there is one.

So maybe it's 411.

I literally quoted it.

See, in Jesus, 4:11.

Like, I made the observation that pastor isn't even a gift either.

Pastor is a role.

A pastor can have the gift of teaching.

Pastor can have a gift.

In fact, pastors are supposed to be apt to teach.

So we would hope that our pastors do are gifted to teach.

Right?

But a pastor in and of itself is not.

It's not a gifting.

It's a role.

Just like the evangelist.

A specific role that the Lord gave to the church.

A specific role.

Like, like a, like a high priest.

Like, you know, you're right.

It's a role.

It's the role of evangelist.

Okay, no.

So now first we got sacraments, now we got this to deal with.

Okay?

So may I.

So hold on, hold on.

Before we move on, I want.

I.

Right, because I, I do like to do this with apologetics Live is when, when there's a teaching moment to stop and for the audience and, and show something.

I want everyone to look at what just happened there.

Don't, don't pass over what you just saw.

You saw someone that posted a passage of scripture that he felt made an argument, right?

Someone else comes along and says, no, no, this is what that is.

And what did you see Peter do?

Did you see Peter fight back and go, no, no, no, I got to double down and show him.

Right?

No, what you, what you saw?

A little bit.

A little bit.

But what you actually quoted the bear.

That was before Aaron explained it, right?

So it, it was.

He needed Aaron explaining it, not me.

And so the.

It comes.

It's more.

It sounds better when it comes from Aaron.

But, but what did you see Peter do?

He turned, looked at the scripture and went, oh, you're right, ladies and gentlemen, that is when we do a apologetics, right, Defending of the faith, that can be the result.

When we approach scripture humbly, that should be the result, right?

Instead of trying to prove how right we are saying, oh, yeah, you know, that's what scripture says.

So.

Okay, Aaron, continue.

So I, I always come in, you know, a little late and, and Then oftentimes I'm not 100.

Why is it you come late?

It's, there's going to be a purpose for this.

There's.

We're gonna work.

I work on Thursdays and what do you think?

What type of work do you do on evenings?

We're gonna talk about that some other time.

No, no, but, no, this is, this is.

There's an important reason for this.

There's an important reason.

I know you missed it because you came in late.

I'm curious.

What is it you think that I do?

Well, I, I, at least what you've told me is that you're, you're teaching martial arts on Thursday nights.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

You, no, yeah, you, you can play it.

I actually teach martial arts.

I have taught martial arts in the past on Monday nights.

That's not what I do on Thursday night.

Okay, because, because we had this earlier and, and I'll just, I'll just bring this up and I'll again, I have to unfortunately give the.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, because Aaron is here so far, for Aaron's sake.

This, this was the link.

It's not even, this was our, almost.

Our, this was going to be our, our, our vice president, believe it or not.

And, and so unfortunately I have to get.

There's a, some foul language I'll bleep over.

But, you know, so, so this was, was Tim Walls on, on Gavin Newsom's show.

How do you fight it?

Well, this, this, I could kick most of their ass.

I cannot run them.

But I don't know if we're going to fall into that place where we want to.

Okay.

We challenge you to do a, you.

Know, a WWE fight here type of thing.

So, so, you know, Aaron, I was, claims like that.

Yeah, I, I, I, I, I basically said, hey, you know, anytime Tim Walls wants, I'll even give him my black belt.

And he can, you know, he, he could virtually identify as a, he can identify as a black belt if he doesn't have one.

You, you have three black belts.

And so.

My word.

Wow.

Anyway, so I, I say this to say that it's possible that I might repeat some things.

So I'll just, I'll just shorten some ideas.

If we go back and we ask ourselves, why did churches start putting their pastors teaching in audio?

Because that's where it started.

Like I remember getting cassettes from, from Certain speed.

Do you want to explain what a cassette is for the younger audience?

No, don't bother.

I can look it up.

Just try to figure out what a cassette and a pencil had to do with each other.

And then.

Yeah, then, then it was.

Then it was CDs, right.

Then it was DVDs, then it was actual videos.

Okay.

And why were we doing that?

We were doing that because it was being used in a couple different ways.

It was being used as a tool for the church to be able to go back and reference.

It was being used as an opportunity because we live in a very different time.

You know, there are potentially a lot of different house churches and things like that in the first century.

Okay.

But for the most part, we're spoiled to a degree.

We get to kind of even see the pastor's message before we even go visit the church to decide whether or not that's going to be a good spot for us.

Okay.

But also it was oftentimes used as a.

As a soul winning tool or just a teaching tool.

Right.

So it started for very good reasons.

Okay.

We have to establish that because I think part of the problem is we do hear people.

And honestly, I have to admit.

Your name, sir?

Oh, sorry.

This is Peter Hammond.

Peter.

Okay, sorry.

Peter Aaron.

And you're the gentleman who wrote the article, correct?

No, actually it was written by our board for a missionary gamer, predominantly our pastor, Dave Rich, and one of the very prominent missionaries in our church.

His name's Gordy Hunt.

He's also on report as well.

And they got together and the actual.

The actual full write up, I think is somewhere close to eight pages.

So that's.

I bring that up to say that I did not read the article.

Regardless of who wrote it.

I didn't read it because I didn't know that was gonna be the topic.

Like, I was right here and I saw it.

So I don't know what your position is.

I don't even know if you hold to this position, but I've heard some people say that we should stop streaming church.

Like, if we're streaming church, that's bad because we're giving people an opportunity to do this thing that they shouldn't be doing.

Right.

And.

But I think that extreme swing, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it forgot why we were doing it in the first place.

Yeah.

I literally run the live stream for our church.

So I certainly.

Perfect.

So he definitely thinks it's a sin.

Can I please stop?

So I think that there is value.

There is the same value that there was before.

I can watch a John MacArthur sermon and I can be built up and edified by, am I doing church?

No.

By definition, I'm not doing church.

Church is what we see in Ephesians 4, where that the.

The pastor is equipping us for the work of the ministry, and we are doing the work of the ministry by speaking truth and love to each other, building each other up into the head who is Christ.

So that.

That is what that is for.

And you're right, you can't do that virtually, but.

Well, I'll take that.

I'm gonna step back, pull that one back a little bit.

I'll get to that in a minute.

But that doesn't mean that it's not.

It's not valuable.

Now, what I just pulled back, I said, you can't do that virtually.

I'm a biblical counselor, and I believe that the best biblical counseling and discipleship happens within the context of life, on life, okay?

So I don't care if you're over a virtual screen or you're sitting across the desk from somebody to be in their lives is going to produce the best discipleship out there.

However, I do find myself with individuals who, for whatever reason, have somebody who can.

Who can facilitate that role in their lives.

And normally they're bad reasons, but I can, and I'm there and I'm doing it.

I am discipling people over the Internet, virtually.

Okay?

Now, that's not what's happening when we're talking about virtual church.

We're talking about people just sitting there, consuming, listening.

You know, maybe they're singing along, right?

But they're not interacting with anybody else.

But I do want to just be fair.

I want to be fair.

The fact that what we're doing right here is hopefully iron sharpening iron.

This is challenging.

This is learning.

We are growing.

So that can happen virtually.

I would argue that if we were in China or Russia, and, and.

And this is how we did church, right?

So we came together virtually.

There was a message given by a singular individual.

Then we were able to break out into smaller little, you know, the small little things, and communicate with each other in small groups.

And then we were able to talk to each other one.

That's strange.

That's not normally how we look at using Zoom and Streamyard and whatever else.

But if we did that, yes, we would be communicating with each other, individuals to individuals, in the exact same way that we do in a church service.

I think, though, hypothetically, in the example that I gave, if we were doing this in China, we'd actually be doing it better because I've moved 22 times.

I've been a member of Tons of different churches.

I visited tons of different churches and I found that multiple.

Most people, most churches talk about the same things, the same things that unbelievers talk about.

They talk about weather, they talk about sports, they talk about.

They have limited amount of information that they can discuss before they're uncomfortable.

And very few people are actually doing the one another's far too often than the average church.

But those of us who are doing this virtually in China, behind blocked doors and shuttered windows and are risking ourselves, we're having real conversations.

We're actually confessing sin one to another.

We're actually sharpening each other and rebuking each other.

And we're using that in the best way.

So I want to be fair that that can happen virtually, even though obviously when we're talking about virtual church, unfortunately what I just described isn't being done so well.

I've repeated everything you guys just said, but throw that up.

We did cover it at the beginning.

There's a lot of things we can virtualize, but there's a line, and that's what we're establishing here is there's, there's lines in, in the virtual realm that, that you, it's impossible to cross.

You cannot eat and be sustained by a virtual hamburger.

It's just, it's not going to happen.

It's impossible.

You cannot have a virtual hug.

You cannot get in.

Yeah, right.

My personal, my virtual space you just crossed.

I'm being triggered.

You cannot do virtual church.

And that's the point is there's a line at which you can do a lot.

You can teach and exhort and conversate and all these things.

Evangelize.

I'd even say there's a certain element of discipleship you can do as well.

But there becomes a line where you're saying, oh yeah, we can replace church because it's just as good virtually.

And the answer is, not only is it not almost as good, it's not church.

And that's an important thing that you just said, right?

Is, so let's use the example you, that was mentioned earlier, right?

You can, you can listen to someone on the radio.

You can, you can sit on a Saturday evening and, and watch a pastor's sermon, you know, a live, a recorded live stream, you know, at a church.

But when you're doing it on Sunday for the purpose of avoiding.

And I think that's really the thing, when you're, when you are not looking to attend church, when you're, you're purposely looking to avoid that, that is Forsaking the fellowship together.

And I think I have the comments starred somewhere, but someone had mentioned that, right.

Scripture is clear.

We should not forsake the assembling together.

That was an issue in Paul's day.

And they didn't have a way to do virtual church because in Hebrews it says right not to forsake the assembling together.

They must have been forsaking the assembling together for different reasons.

Maybe they were probably afraid of persecution.

But it says that they had a problem back then with it.

We have a problem with it still today.

And, and Fatma just brought up.

It's a hard issue.

And I agree with that.

And there's also those practical elements we talked about.

There were three reasons somebody's not going to church.

And I think it's important to understand that you got to do some drastic moves if you're a follower of Jesus Christ to obey him.

There is a reason why, as followers of Jesus Christ, we have commands, and those commands are to be obeyed.

And sometimes you have to do some things that are difficult to obey them.

For example, you might need to move.

And that is, that is a very real situation for people where they're in an area where there's no actually biblical sound church.

So guess what, guys, you need to move.

If you say, no, no, my job in our house and our friends and our life and this, that and the other, sorry, those do not supersede the authority of Christ in your life.

And if they do, you might need to check who you're actually following.

Yeah.

Because there's, there's a reality to being a follower of Jesus Christ.

You don't look back and, and what he says, you obey.

And even if that obedience is difficult, even the other part we were just talking about with China and other places like that, even if that obedience means persecution, means jail, means death.

And we had some examples of that with the recent covet incident with the faithful pastors in Canada who actually went to jail for having church and physically performing their role as a pastor in church.

And they went to jail for it.

And I guarantee you there will not be a single person in the age to come looking back going, I really wish I hadn't been persecuted for following Christ.

I really wish I hadn't been obedient and gone and been jailed or whatever the terrible things were.

They're going to be the people that we are going to look at and go, wow, what a great opportunity they had to glorify our God in being obedient to him.

And so that's the point here, is to be obedient to our king, to bring him glory no matter the cost.

Be it moving, be it some sort of physical difficulty that you have to overcome, be it getting out of your comfort zone because you don't like other people.

Hey, guess what?

Those are all very real things, but they do not trump God's word.

They do not trump his commands.

You obey him no matter the cost.

And that's, that's a hard pill to swallow for some people.

Yeah.

So we got a bunch of questions coming up before we get to some of the questions that, that are back in the backstage.

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Let's get to some of the questions that we have and folks.

Andrew.

Yep.

Thank you.

Thank you for pronouncing that word correctly.

Well, that's the advantage of knowing Greek, right?

No, I'm curious, Dan, what are some of your favorite mispronunciations?

There's actually a school in.

I thought it was Legos.

It's not like Moscow, Idaho that's called.

They call it Logos.

Yes, I've heard logos many times.

Yeah, I think the people, I think it's people at Logos Bible Software actually pronounce at Logos.

Yeah.

Because I was, I actually interviewed.

I was interviewed and I, I was offered a job there.

Anyways, we were walking through one of the hallways.

I'm like, why do you guys pronounce it Logos?

You know, it's logos.

Like.

Yeah, well our marketing team, you know.

Yeah, there's a, there's a.

So some comments that we have here.

So the comments we have Here is the Lion 238 from Twitch says Lagos user here highly recommend it for those who study the Bible.

Another Twitch, Emmy.

Timmy says I love logos.

Oh, sorry, Lagos.

So, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna save it for a minute.

It's epitome.

Epitome.

So yeah, it's a clever spin there.

He's actually a pastor in Canada as a matter of fact.

Okay.

And a faithful brother who live streams and also uses gaming for evangelism and discipleship.

But known him for many years.

And that's, that's where you can have friendships, you can have, you know, a lot of things through these mediums that, that augment it.

But again, there's a line and I think that's the important part to remember.

And I again come back to that quote from Pastor Miller is virtual church is for virtual Christians.

There you go.

Aaron, you were going to say something.

Well, you're on mute right now.

So sorry, you know.

Yeah, I, I say Logos, Logos when I'm referring to a certain ministry that, that's how they, that's what they call themselves.

And I, it's like one time I had somebody pronounce my name like in a way that My name is not pronounced and I was kind of like, well, that's not my name.

So out of respect for the people who call their stuff logos, I call it that.

But I think Dad's right.

Why are we doing that?

All right, so let's get to some of the, the questions that we got.

Not in any particular order, but this one came up, it's a longer one.

Wanted to make sure that we answered it.

This is from Twitch and Peter is the one streaming on Twitch because I've never been on there.

But so question for you, Peter.

It says this from I guess Bluey.

Maybe is how it's actually Liam and I've known him for years as well and I had a chance to share the gospel with him and he very straightforward rejects it and.

But he's always been extremely respectful and I am hopeful that through interactions like this and hopefully the word of God that he will see the good news and, and understand and, and repent and put his faith and trust in Christ because I love him and it breaks my heart, but I am grateful for him and he keeps coming back and so hopefully, good Lord willing, he'll come to understand the truth.

But he's very smart.

He has excellent questions like this.

Okay, so here's what about that?

Here's his question.

He says wasn't able to submit my question, so I will put it here.

Pete, as you're aware I am not a believer or a non nun believer, but I do find the comments about church not accepting.

Then why is it okay during COVID that you all stayed indoors and didn't attend church?

Didn't you, didn't you all sin by not going then to reflect backwards.

Now seeing that Covid could have been a control slash scare tactic as now anyone in with COVID can go to work so destroys the confidence that it was a life threatening disease.

So.

So I think that's a really good question.

Yeah, it is.

And it brings up a good point that a lot of people didn't understand is many Christians kept going to church and our church kept running as did many churches, even under the threat as some churches felt very heavy, the threat of direct persecution for attending.

And so there is a reality to the cost of church that we got a little taste of during the COVID time frame.

Those who did not continue to operate and shut down because the state came to them and said you have to.

I think there's an argument to be made that they were in sin.

And it was, it was a real good sort of snapshot of, of what the church has faced for since its inception of, of the reality of the persecution and the overreach of the government and of the.

The world at large against the church.

And this is how we stand.

We stand in church and we, we worship in church.

And if they're gonna send us to jail, we go to jail peacefully.

Because ultimately we're not accountable to the state for our worship of God.

We're accountable to God.

But then their line becomes, well, what are we accountable to stay for?

Everything that they say that doesn't hinder upon the word of God.

And that's, That's.

We are, we are incredibly obedient up until the point they tell us to do something against God's commands.

And that's the point where we say, no, there's a line.

And there's some of us who.

There are some of us who actually, we.

My family, we.

And several people from our church actually left our church.

And I had been.

We had been members there for.

For over 20 years as the only church my kids ever knew.

And when they, when they started bowing to the edicts of, of Lord J.

Inslee, who said that you're not allowed to sing in church and that you needed to limit the numbers, and our church was requiring you to.

To make reservations to attend, and they would only allow, you know, what, 50, 60 people in the sanctuary.

We said, no, that's not what church looks like.

So we left that church and we went to another one and several of our friends actually left with us.

So, yeah, not, not everybody, you know, just knuckled under and said, yes, sir, we'll do whatever you say.

No, we.

We.

We obey God rather than man.

When the two are in conflict.

Yeah.

And that's the question.

When the two are in conflict.

And so this is where we are at odds with some of our church members because there was the whole mask mandate, and there we could not find scripture that says we could, you know, just disregard that.

So we were one of the few people who actually went to church but still wore the mask because we were mandated by law to do so.

And that caused a lot of people some contention with us.

But the reality is I did it because I was obeying God's word.

God's word says that we are to be obedient to the state up until that point, that it crosses God's word.

And when it does, that's where we say, hey, you know, sorry, I'm following God, not, not the state.

But up until that point, we have to be obedient and I got the, well, what they told you you have to wear yellow pants on Tuesday.

I'm like, I guess I'm wearing yellow pants on Tuesday because it brings glory to God to be obedient to what he says.

Now that's a, that's a whole different topic to go down the road of.

And I don't think that this is the right venue for that.

But it's important to understand my focus is always on obedience to God and hence the point of the, the church conversation we're having today.

So Liam had a follow up to his question.

Probably throw it up there.

He says, thank you all for respecting my current stance and taking the time to respond to my question.

Let me find the question, put it up there.

There we go.

And I want to, I want to, because this actually goes to what I wanted to say.

I think my main point on it was for those that could be end of life positive care may not have the means to attend.

So my, what I was going to bring up, and I just wanted to put this out there because it ties into this larger conversation is okay, let's say that there actually were a zombie plague, right?

Something that's transmittable via.

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Waltz, man, he just punch them all.

But, you know, it's something that's transmittable, something that's actually truly deadly.

And we do have legitimate deadly diseases in this world.

Okay, we acknowledge the fact that those exist.

Do we shut down church because we're afraid that A, this is somehow outside of God's control?

That when he gave us the command, when he gave us the church, that he's like, oh, you know what, I hadn't thought about that one.

Or B, to a certain degree we have to trust each other.

The hidden churches, they trust their members not to turn them into the secret police.

You have to, if you're going to facilitate that way, you have to trust God first.

But then by extension, because you trust him, you've got to trust the other people.

And I'm not saying you don't inspect, you don't, you know, verify.

Right?

I'm not saying you don't do that.

But I'm saying to a certain degree we have to let go of that and say God, you're in control.

And in other way too, it's like, well, listen, if somebody is sick, like I refuse to take my children when they were very little, I wasn't going to put them in the nursery when they just had snot running down their noses.

Like, to a certain degree we need to respect each other enough that if I'm sick and I could pass that on to you, I'm not going to go to church.

But all of us who aren't sick, all of us who are well, should be going.

So, Liam, to your point.

Yeah.

I think somebody who, if we're honestly talking about legitimate concern, I know people, I have family who have autoimmune disorders and things like that, then, yeah, you need to steward your bodies, and you have to do that.

Well, and that goes into the category that we talked about earlier, the individuals who are, you know, bedridden and so on and so forth.

But that doesn't mean we shut the church down.

That doesn't mean that we Christians go, oh, no, there's a virus.

Oh, no, there's inclement weather.

Great.

If there's inclement weather, everyone who can go to church can get there.

Can get there.

And if only five people show up, that's not a problem.

Like, we didn't have to cancel church because there are some.

I live in the mountains of North Carolina.

Yeah.

The place that managed to get flooded with a hurricane.

You know, when we get ice, some of these roads are very impassable.

Not all of them.

So when we do the easy thing and we say, oh, you know, there was snow at higher elevations, we'll cancel church.

But you've got 20 people, 30, 40 people going, well, our roads are clear.

Why did we cancel it?

So I hope, Liam, that answers your question.

Yes, we don't cancel church just because there are a few people who shouldn't go.

Those people need to steward their bodies.

But we definitely have to trust God that we're going to obey him and he's going to provide, and then we trust each other to a certain degree to love each other and not do stupid things that are going to get everyone else hurt.

And I think it's important to clarify, too, because I did say earlier, and I'm sure it's a hot take, that, that people are in sin.

Regarding this issue, I want to clarify.

The sin specifically is if you are attending virtual church and you are thinking you're being obedient to God's commands to attend actual church, that's where you're in sin.

Yeah.

When.

When you're, when you're avoiding the real church purposely and you're calling something that's not church church.

Exactly.

So the people who attend because they're, you know, sick or whatever, or can't attend because they're sick or whatever, and they watch church online, they're not thinking they're attending church, they're thinking they're watching church.

It's when people sit there and say, I am attending church, I'm a member of a church, I even got virtually baptized, I take virtual communion and I am in obedience to God.

They're in sin and that is where they need to repent.

They need to recognize that practice is sin.

They need to seek out a faithful local church and they need to commit to regular, active participation in the physical gathering of that body.

They need to submit themselves to that authority and that is how they resolve that sin.

So hopefully, Liam, that helps make that clear.

What I was specifically talking about concerning.

He just said sin of using virtual church as an excuse for not going.

I think I understand your stance on this sin.

His previous comment, the one before this one on the screen right now, he does say too, in the scenario if someone is end of life and their way of going to churches virtually, then is it justified?

They wouldn't be classed as sin.

And I would say if there's somebody who's end of life life, right, what needs to be happening is that God's people really need to be going with them.

Amen.

My wife, my wife has a sweet ministry that she has done in a couple different occasions where people were end of life and by God's grace, she had the opportunity in the schedule to be there with them and she's there with them reading verses, she's there singing to them.

Sometimes they couldn't participate if somebody's end of life and they're watching, you know, some virtual message in order to be encouraged and taught, praise God for that.

But where are God's people?

They need to be in that room, they need to be going there loving on them and doing the one another's in person.

Maybe not on Sunday when the message is being watched, but at some point during the week that really should be happening.

And I would say, yes, Liam, you're right, that individual, we would not sit and say that person is sinning.

By no means.

Now the church who aren't going to that person, person that's probably sinning because we're not, we're not churching those people, we're stranding them.

Yeah.

And I think that's an important clarification.

Not just for Liam, for other people though too.

Is church isn't Sunday correct?

It is, it is every single day.

And there's often cases where people are end of life.

The pastor and the church goes to that person and they have communion together, they sing psalms together.

They are with that person in church, in the body of Christ together, even to the point of where they, they are actually going home to be with the Lord.

We just had that happen recently with somebody at our church.

And so there's a reality of church is beyond just Sunday.

And as an unbeliever, that doesn't make sense.

That's, that's very difficult to get your head around.

But it's an important clarification.

And, and part of the thing is, is that people have, they've just kind of by, by not having good definitions, right?

It has allowed for people to, you know, confuse, you know, the, the terminology, the, you know, what, what is church?

And it's, we have to have this distinction.

We, we have to be very clear on what churches, what it is not.

So that when we discuss these things, we're going to say it's a sin, right?

It's a sin if it's, if it's something that is violating God's law, right?

God's nature.

So what makes it a sin?

Well, what makes it a sin is the fact that, you know, you're purposely avoiding the fellowship.

You're purposely avoiding the gathering together.

That's the issue.

And so if, if someone is doing that, it is sin.

So let, let's try, let me try to get some of these other questions that we had.

Let's see, we, we talked about moving as an option because some, there are, some people said what, you know, you know, this person had asked what happens when you live in a place without access to a church.

There's a couple options you can do.

We mentioned move.

The other is start a church, right?

If there's no, obviously if you're a woman, you don't start the church.

But.

Because women can't be pastors.

But you, you might have to do as Paul would do in certain areas is starting, start a church.

And so there are, you know, I think, I think a lot of times what we see is that people put barriers in front of them saying, oh, well, we can't do this for whatever reason.

And it's like, no, that is something you're creating.

That's not a real barrier.

And so we have to ask ourselves, is this a real issue or am I making this up right now?

I did like this comment from, from Matthew referring to, I guess Epitome had the comment and I missed his comment, but it's, but he said this is a great idea.

The question is, would any of the online pastors be willing to discuss this?

Well, I'll Say this, if there's any online pastors, please share this with them and welcome them on.

They can come on here on a Thursday night.

We'd be happy to discuss this with them if they disagree with us.

Yeah, he's speaking prominently about the Twitch community.

There's a whole group of people who are pretenders and they're pretending to be pastors, they're pretending to be evangelists, they're pretending to do all this stuff.

And I found out very, through trying for probably a good year to help them understand the realities.

They're not interested in that.

Fundamentally they know.

And so that, and it's not our job to try to try to clarify that to them.

They're, they're charlatans and they're, they're in the virtual sense of it.

They're, they need to come to that reality.

And I've, I learned the hard way they're not open to trying to help them with that.

They're, they're already in a very bad place to start with.

And the fact that you can't sit with them face to face and have that conversation, they use that very quickly to, to defend themselves from that.

So, yeah, there are no online pastors.

There's a lot of online fakes.

So, yeah.

And, and if you want, you know, there's.

I did a debate, if you go back on this channel, did a debate with Ari Fuentes, oh, many several years ago on the topic of Calvinism.

But one of the things that came up, I mean, I argued after we, after the debate was over, I argued he really shouldn't be debating because he actually was a Calvinist and just doesn't understand the topic.

But the, the one thing that I did bring up to him is the fact that he left a church and just became an online pastor and he's got, his church supposedly is online where there's no accountability.

Well, he, he, he left, you know, in a church in a bad state and now he's, you know, just calling himself a pastor, a self proclaimed pastor to a church that doesn't exist.

And, and that is what many are doing is no different than I said with people on the street where they just go, well, this is my, my flock.

This is, I'm, I'm the pastor because I preach.

No.

A comment that came in from Andrew.

Andrew, Andrew's from down under there in Australia.

He says, I work with someone who can't get past the labeling of those who attend church as hypocrites.

Now, apologetics, right.

We want to defend the faith how do we answer this as Christians?

Very easily.

Basically, what is a Christian?

A Christian is someone who recognizes that they've broken God's law, they are sinners, they are not good people when compared to God.

I mean, Peter may be a far more moral and better person than I am, but that has no bearing.

If, if I'm the standard, Peter looks good.

If God is the standard, we both look bad.

Right?

So it's a matter of like saying, well, hey, Peter and I are going to swim from here to the uk or better yet, we're going to go a little further.

We're going to swim from here to Israel.

Okay?

Now Peter goes, I go for a mile and drowned.

Peter goes two miles and drowned.

Now when you look at the map of, in where we're supposed to go, that one mile difference doesn't even look, it doesn't even look like we left land.

Right?

Because it's such a big gap that we had that we, we failed.

So it doesn't matter who's closer.

It's the reality of the comparison.

When we're, when the comparison is against the absolute Im, the absolute infinite God who cannot sin and is infinitely holy.

You and I don't compare at all.

So the entrance to Christianity is recognizing you're a wicked sinner deserving eternity in a lake of fire because God is infinitely holy and we are sinful.

That's the starting point.

So to say that a Christian is a hypocrite when they act like a sinner kind of doesn't make sense because it kind of is saying, yeah, we already admitted we're a sinner.

You know where the hypocrites are?

Hypocrites are at your job site, at the mall, at the library, the shopping centers, everywhere else where you have people that say they're a good person, that, especially if they say they're good enough to go to heaven, but the reality is they're not, but they think they're.

That's the hypocrite, the self righteous person who thinks he can work his way to heaven or be a good enough person that he should deserve heaven.

That's the hypocrite.

They're not in the church.

I mean there are some in the church, but the, the universal church, the true church is made up of people who admit I'm a sinner.

Go ahead.

Kind of like complaining that hospitals are full of sick people.

Yeah, why do you expect that's where sick people go?

But you know the whole thing about hypocrisy, right?

I mean we don't just get to say, and I know you're not saying this, but, but lest you be misunderstood, we don't just get to say, oh, I've been forgiven, you know, I've been, you know, covered by the blood of Jesus, therefore I can go live any way I want to.

That's, you know, cheap grace, easy believism.

That is not genuine Christianity.

So in that sense, are there some, are there some self professing Christians who are like that?

Yeah, there are.

There are tares among the wheat, right?

Not all who profess the name of Jesus are Christ followers.

That's just a fact.

Right?

The parable of the soils is another good example of that.

Right?

They spring up for a time, they appear to bear fruit, but when, you know, when the trouble comes, boom, they wither.

They were never truly of us, right?

Jesus himself In Matthew chapter 7 says, not everyone who says to me, on that day, Lord, Lord, wander into the kingdom of heaven.

People are going to be saying, hey Lord, didn't we.

We did.

We did miracles in your name.

We preached in your name.

I mean, that's pretty big stuff.

And Jesus is going to look at them and say, you know, be gone.

I never knew you, you workers of iniquity, right?

So don't confuse, you know, just because somebody says they're a Christian and then their actions, you know, their actions betray them and show them, you know, the whole, the book of James, right?

Actions speak louder than works is basically the summer, the one, you know, two second synopsis of the book of James.

So we shouldn't be, you know, get too excited when we see people who claim the name of Christ fall down.

Now where the difference is, when you fall down, when you sin and you're confronted with it, do you repent?

That's the key.

That's the key difference.

And that's, and I, and I demonstrated.

Earlier, I will never say sacraments again.

Sacraments is completely wrong.

I get it.

Please forgive me.

Well, yeah, Bluey is saying, he's saying, I've.

I speaking of you, Peter, he said, I've seen him on Ark.

He won't be swimming 10ft.

Huh?

That's because there's fish in the water that eat you.

So, so Fatima makes this observation and I, and I, I wanted to throw something in there too about the hypocrites.

She says, in a way, Christians are hypocrites because we know we can't be fully who we need to be until we are united in Christ's glory.

And Fatima, I love you to death, dear sister.

But I'm gonna have to strongly disagree with that.

And here's why.

I.

In my counseling, I have a lot of parents basically say, you know, I've got this struggle in my life, like, you know, just to say I have a foul mouth.

And I'm trying to teach myself not to.

I'm trying to stop doing that, but I don't.

So I don't want to tell my teenage son that he's not allowed to cuss because I'm doing it, too, right?

And I said, okay, well.

And they say, I don't want to be a hypocrite.

I'm like, well, that's not technically a hypocrite.

A hypocrite is somebody who says, you need to stop doing that, but they don't put the same responsibility on themselves.

You should stop doing that.

And it might be one of those, you know, do as I say, not as I do, and that type of thing.

We make lots of excuses.

Sometimes we verbalize it, sometimes we don't.

A hypocrite is that person, a person who says, listen, I'm a failure.

I shouldn't be doing this either.

You shouldn't be doing it, and I shouldn't be doing it.

By the grace of God, let's help each other to grow in this.

You keep me accountable, I'll keep you accountable.

That is not hypocrisy.

I cannot be fully who I should be in Christ until I'm united with him in glory.

That doesn't make me a hypocrite.

When I say we need to be holy as he is holy, we need to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, we need to do that as well.

To say that is not hypocritical.

Now, if I say, well, you need to do that, and then make a bunch of excuses for why I don't.

Now we're being hypocrites.

And that's a key thing to remember, too.

So.

So, no, they're.

Generally speaking, there are.

Very.

Well, I say there.

There are far fewer hypocrites in the church than we like to think there are.

That people like to think there are, because the.

The legalists and people like that who are making those claims are the hypocrites.

Most of us acknowledge fully that we are sinners saved by grace, and we're just doing this together.

Yeah.

So one last question that came up early.

Brother John from Canada had a question about Second Corinthians 14.

Sorry, 11.

14.

11 for Second Corinthians 11, 4.

What do you believe is another spirit?

Now, so before I read verse four, a good practice always to do is to back up a few verses.

So let's start in verse one.

So this is Second Corinthians, chapter 11, verse one.

And why don't I just put that on screen, actually?

Because that way those of you who don't have Logos, you can now see what we could do with Logos.

I will make it a bit bigger, actually.

That's.

That seems good enough.

All right.

So he says, I wish that you would bear with me a.

In a little foolishness, but indeed you are bearing with me, for I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy, jealousy, for I betray, betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a.

A poor, pure virgin.

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity, Purity of devotion to Christ.

Now this is verse four.

For if one comes and preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or you receive a different spirit from which you do not receive, or a different Gospel from which you did not receive, you bear this beautifully.

Now, verse five, read a little bit further.

Just good to have context.

For I consider myself not.

Not in the least inferior to most eminent apostles.

But even if I am unskilled in speech, yet I am not so in knowledge, in fact, in every way, we have made this evident to you in all things.

So his question was, what.

What do I believe is the different spirit that is mentioned over here that we can see?

Okay.

And so what we have there is the, the different spirit.

If we look at the context, the whole book.

So the context of book, Paul is being challenged with the fact that, well, you know, they're.

They're basically these people running around saying that, you know, they're.

They're, you know, Paul's not the real one.

You should be listening to.

You should listen to them.

Paul's not really an apostle, things like that.

So throughout the book, he is having to defend his ministry by people who are.

Who are providing falsehoods.

And so that's why he starts off in verse one.

And basically, let's be foolish a little bit.

Let's bear with what this is saying.

But then he ends up talking about the fact that the Gospel is very simple.

There's a simplicity and a purity of the devotion of Christ.

Verse 3.

So what he's doing is he's referring to this deception.

He refers to it from the serpent who in Verse three deceived Eve with a craftiness.

So there's this idea of the simple gospel that they accepted and this craftiness that is coming along.

And so what he does here is he's pitting a true gospel to a false gospel.

And we could see this in the fact that in verse four, he's saying that what you received, in other words, if you are saved, what did you receive?

And, and that becomes the thing that he's, he's arguing for here is what did we receive?

And what we received is the true gospel.

But so he's comparing it to a different gospel.

Right?

So this different spirit, okay, is going to be something no different, I think, than what Paul would say.

Similarly in Galatians, if an angel, even if an angel came and gave you a different gospel, it's accursed.

So what he, what he's doing here is saying it.

The source doesn't matter.

Even if it's a something, some being that is appearing as an angel of light.

Well, Satan appears as an angel of light.

So the fact that it's an angel doesn't mean it's a holy angel.

It could be an unholy angel.

So he says, if one comes and preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or you receive a different spirit, well, what's the spirit that you receive with the true gospel, the Holy Spirit.

What would then be a different spirit that you're receiving?

Well, it wouldn't be the Holy Spirit.

It would, if you're receiving a spirit, it would be a demonic spirit.

If you're receiving it in the same way we receive the Holy Spirit, or it is receiving the message of a, of a, of an unholy angel, as referred to by the serpent in the previous verse.

I think he had to hearken back to First Corinthians when he was dealing with the whole issue of ecstatic utterances and all that, and says, nobody speaking by the Holy Spirit can say Jesus is accursed.

Correct.

So people were doing that and they were saying Jesus is accursed.

And oh, I'm doing this because it's my spiritual gift and I'm speaking in tongues.

Right.

Well, this is exactly what Paul's talking about.

The Spirit you have is not the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is not going to curse Jesus.

Us.

Correct.

And this is very closely tied to some.

What he says in, in Galatians 1.

I'll flip there in a moment.

But what he, what he says is which.

So if you, or you received a, a different spirit which you have not received.

Now that becomes important.

How do you receive a spirit which you have not received?

Right.

In other words, this is saying that the, the.

And remember at this time you have people that the beginning of Gnostics where they, they would claim they have a spirit, a super knowledge, and so they hadn't this greater knowledge.

Well, what ends up happening is that they believe they would receive a spirit.

And it's not the.

They didn't actually receive a spirit.

They received nothing.

It's just a spiritual pride they had.

And so I think that there's some of that in play because he says you didn't actually receive anything because he goes on to say though or a different gospel which you did not accept.

So this is very similar to the language that we have in Galatians 1, verses 9 and 10.

And if I could type properly, it says as we have said to you said before.

So we say again, if a man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, he is to be accursed.

For now I am seek, for now my seeking the favor of men or of God.

Or am I striving to please men?

If, if it were.

If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond servant of Christ.

I should have started in verse eight.

Sorry.

Verse eight says, but even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that, that we preach to you, he is to be accursed.

As I, as we said before.

So I say again, if a man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, he is to be accursed.

It's very similar language between the two.

And so I think the, the different spirit John that is being referred to there is the idea of, you know, if, if you're hearing a gospel, a supposed gospel message that's not a biblical gospel message.

The, the message that saved a person, the message that saved these people.

If anyone comes along with a different message, he's basically saying you don't receive that.

And it doesn't matter if the source has it sounding really good or what.

It, it's.

The Bible is the source.

And so you know, for, for I think it was Lehman Layman, I forget his name but Louis.

Liam.

Liam.

Thank you for, for.

Liam.

Let me end the by saying this before we tune out for the show.

This is the gospel message we see in the Bible.

It really is this simple.

Liam might be a far more moral person than me, a far better person than me compared to as humans go.

But that doesn't matter.

Because when we stand before God, no one is going to be looking and judging themselves.

To me, to Peter, to Dan, to Aaron, the comparison that is going to be made is absolute perfection of God.

We have to be as pure as God.

And there's not a human alive that ever can say that they've done that.

And that's the issue.

What we see is that we have to be absolutely perfect.

We fail that one lie is all it takes to make us a criminal in God's sight.

Because God is infinitely holy.

When we break his law, it has an eternal consequence.

And that is why, if we tell one lie, that we rightly deserve eternity in a lake of fire, which is called the second death.

Because we've broken the law of an infinitely holy, infinitely just God.

And that has a consequence that is eternal.

It is forever.

And so, Liam, you and I both rightly deserve hell.

We don't like that.

And I get it.

We all do.

We all do.

Every.

Every human alive deserves eternity in a lake of fire.

But what God did was he came to earth as a man.

And why is this important?

It's important because what you see is that in.

In every.

In every religion, every man made religion, and there's only two religions, there's divine and man made religions.

Okay?

And so in every man made religion, what you have is people that are going to earn their way to heaven by good works.

They take what Jesus did on the cross, but they add work to it.

And so what we end up having is every man made religion adds human effort in some way.

Christianity is the only religion that says God did it all.

There's nothing that we can add to it.

Christianity is also unique in a different area.

Liam.

It is the only religion that can have a God that is both just and merciful.

Every religion will say that God is just and they'll say he's merciful.

In Islam, they will refer to God most merciful.

And if you ask them, is God just?

They'll say yes.

But see, justice and mercy are mutually exclusive.

Justice says that when we break God's law, the full punishment of sin must be paid.

Mercy says, though we've broken God's law, he lets it go.

How could these two be the same?

They can't.

They're mutually exclusive.

But because of the nature of Jesus Christ being fully God, truly God, truly man, when he came to earth as a man, being a human being, Liam, he could be a substitute for you and I because he never broke the law.

So being someone that never broke the law, he could be a substitute.

However, more importantly, the fact that he's God, that means he's eternal.

So he can do something like die on the cross once in time and it counts for all of eternity.

The reason for that, Liam, is because of the fact that in his absolute nature, being eternal, he ends up paying a fine that counts for more than just a temporal event.

It counts for all of eternity.

And this is an essential thing.

And so because the fact that he's God, he can pay this fine.

When he pays it, the full justice is paid.

The full weight of sin was put upon Jesus Christ.

All of the sin that I committed, that punishment was paid at the cross by Jesus Christ.

And now he can offer mercy.

Because now what he did on that cross, the payment was made.

Now we can receive mercy.

So I'm going to quote a friend of mine, Keith Foskey.

He said, this Christ is able to satisfy in a moment what it would take me an eternity.

And that really sums it up well is what Christ did on that cross was a moment in time for us.

But it would have taken an eternity for you and I to pay that with one sin.

And we commit and we pay and we commit thousands of sin every day, 364.25 days a year, times however old you are, Lamb, you know, that's what we have to face.

And so what Christ did, he paid it all.

He paid what we could not pay.

And so what we end up seeing is that because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, we can have eternal life.

And so I beg you, Liam, you've heard it from Peter, you heard it from me.

Maybe someone else is listening.

I beg of you to consider what the message of the gospel is.

The true gospel.

It's not, hey, go to church.

Going to church won't make you a Christian.

What makes you a Christian is repentance, a change of mind, to stop thinking.

It's a change of basically our pride that thinks we could be a good person or we have a good nature or we could do good work.

Works.

Or maybe as you might think of the way I grew up thinking, well, I'm Jewish, I was going to heaven because of my genealogy.

That's not going to get us to heaven.

What gets us to heaven is when we turn from trusting ourself and what we think is our good nature and we turn to Jesus Christ and that becomes the reality.

It is only by what Jesus did we can have forgiveness of sin, what he did at the cross.

So we have to turn from self to Christ.

That's, that's what it takes to be a Christian.

And so I wanted to make sure that for, for Liam's sake and anyone else's that you, you clearly heard the gospel message because what Paul is arguing there in Second Corinthians 11 is the fact that there are people who preach a different gospel.

And the man made gospel has three things different than the the true gospel of the Bible.

The biblical gospel is from a God who's both just and merciful.

And I explained that it doesn't have human effort, it's divine effort.

God does all the work.

So it's not based on works.

And last thing, it's based on a person and not a system of morality.

It's based on who Jesus is.

He being truly God and truly man.

That's the difference.

It's, that is different than every man made religion which can't reconcile a God that's just and merciful which has human effort involved in how you get right with God.

And because of that they have nothing but a system of morality.

There's nothing special about Muhammad to make for Islam any human being.

There's nothing unique about Muhammad.

There's nothing special about Joseph Smith that makes it unique in that case, there's nothing special about Mary Baker, Eddie or Buddha or any of the other false religions.

But there is something unique about Jesus Christ.

Amen.

He was eternal God came as a man, went to the cross, died on that cross and proved that he was God by what he said he would do raising himself from the dead.

No man can raise themselves from the dead.

What dead people do is rot.

But he rose himself from the dead so that we might have eternal life.

So that is the gospel message.

Peter, I want to thank you for coming on folks.

Check out MissionaryGamer.com to see what he is doing there.

Check out the article he's got missionarygamer.com virtual_church to read the article.

Now just a programming note.

We will not have an apologetics live next week.

I will be, I will be out of town for a family event and so we will not have a, a show next week.

We will have one on the third and so that one I we don't have a topic.

I think what we may end up doing is and I wanted to, I want to doing this regularly and we may do this starting on the third is that the plan will be to start teaching, you know, in the beginning of the hour some something about apologetics going through apologetics in one way or another to teach Something to give you guys a handle of apologetics and understanding it more.

And so I will.

I do want to let you know that April 1st I will be.

There's a.

A show called now that's debatable.

It's put on by a professing atheist.

Notice I didn't say an atheist because there is no such thing as atheists.

Everyone knows God exists.

They suppress that truth in unrighteousness.

But the what we end up seeing is that they profess to be atheists.

He's a professing atheist.

He wants me to be on his show, talk about Christianity on.

Oh, you're gonna love this.

What day am I going to be on his show?

April 1st.

Yes, I will be on a professing atheist show on National Atheist Day because the Bible says the fool says in his heart there is no God.

We will see very quickly if this person has a good sense of humor or not because I will thank him for having me on on National National Atheist Day because the Bible says the fool says in his heart there is no God.

We will see quickly whether he's got a sense of humor or not.

This could go really badly really quickly, but it should be a lot of fun either way.

So that will be something I don't.

I, I will post on X and, and Facebook when I know where to share that.

He hasn't given me the links yet.

So, so with that, let me, let me close out.

We haven't done this in a while, but let me close out with a little message that someone put together for us.

So we will see you next week and remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

There we go.

All other religious systems are based on a system of morality, of good works.

What makes Christianity unique?

It is.

It is not a system of morality.

It is about of Jesus Christ.

Buddha is dead.

Muhammad is dead.

Joseph Smith is dead.

Mary Baker Eddie is dead.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

If Jesus Christ was not both fully man and fully God, there would be no payment of sin.

This was a debate in the first century.

Jesus Christ was fully man.

It's important to note that he did not have a human father.

Therefore he did not inherit a sin nature.

Jesus Christ Christ not only had to be fully man, but he also had to be without sin, never breaking any part of God's law.

If Jesus was not a man, then people would have no payment of sins.

But Jesus Christ is also fully God.

Jesus had to be God in order to pay an eternal fine.

Only an eternal being.

Can pay an eternal fine.