Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello and good morning. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. And I, man, we predicted that we would be back in office on Thursday. Well, it's Thursday as we're recording this. You are a false prophet. False profit. Half of us are back in office. I drove in, but false profit. Yeah, it's guilty. Guilty. You? Well, okay. If you're gonna acknowledge the guilt, then you know the sentence we have to issue. Stoners and sisters, this is Pastor PJ's last episode, and we are so disheartened by this, but we wanna be thoroughly biblical. So if you wanna be part of this, you can show up tomorrow. Church parking lot founded Classical Academy. Prosper. This is not it. I tell you what, we're gonna look the other way this time because we do want to encourage your spiritual growth. Hey, I appreciate that. I appreciate that, man. Yeah. You shared that long form Mike Winger video with us on the Shepherds chat on his exposure of this guy Todd White, and I don't know how many people other than the fact that he's local, and so maybe it is worth addressing. He's from the DFW area here, at least that's where he's doing ministry currently. And yeah, Mike Winger. Who is a, I believe a pastor, but also a discernment guy. He is out there engaging with a lot of false teachers and just helping us think biblically about them. But speaking of false prophets and false teachers. He has a four hour video. I'm about three hours through it. But exposing this guy Todd White and really it sounds like just a failure of character. He is what a lot of this video is about. More than it is even his false teaching, though it is addressing also. The errors that he's promoting there as well. But yeah, if you are looking for something to buy the time during this, snowpocalypse 2026 and you've got a commute or anything else, it might be interesting for you to jump on and listen to. He certainly is not. Part of our ilk, and he doesn't run in our circles. I mean, he's got guys from Bethel that are involved in his life and other people like that. But I think what Winger's doing is helpful here to shed light on this. And hopefully, the greatest result, and Winger even says this multiple times in the video, would be to see this guy Todd White come to repentance, but he is local white is in the DFW metroplex and he is a guy that's a wolf in sheep's clothing that. Should be guarded against. And so maybe you'll hear some people in our area talking about him or maybe some of your neighbors even attend his church. He's somebody to look out for sure. Yeah, I watched, I don't know, maybe half of his expose on Sean Bowles and then, I don't know, maybe about half or so of this one that he did on Todd White and. Mike Winger. I respect the pieces out of him. He's such a careful Bible. Nerd. In fact, his podcast and his YouTube channel is called Bible Thinker and I think he does a commendable job of that. I really appreciate his content. I think he's a great guy, but you should know that he is a charismatic, he or, I dunno if he'd call himself that he's a continuation. I think he'd probably say that. So he definitely believes in the expression of the gifts. He's for that. But he also believes that the people who are at the forefront of this movements, particularly those in the Bethel and Bethel adjacent. Camps need to be diligent to clean house. And so he's had a lot of people come to him and say, can you please help us expose Sean and Todd? And so he's willingly done this, so he's not looking, he's not a discernment blogger. He's not the kind of guy to start firing shots at people, but his reporting on this is excellent. He has receipts, he's showing the evidence, and he's done a lot of good work. He's putting his money where his mouth is. He's willing to front. Up to a hundred thousand dollars to. Fund an investigation on Todd White's ministry, and it seems like, he's a man of his work. He does everything above reproach and he welcomes scrutiny into large scale ministries and particularly men and in this case, women who have large. Platforms where they're leading the sheep. And so his concern is that the sheep and the church be protected, not just the elite, not just those who have the money and the ministries, but those who follow those people. And so I really appreciate his heart. I appreciate his stance and if he were in our camp it is reformed and sensationalist. I think someone like him would be a welcomed edition. We have a lot of people like that in our realm where we have discernment bloggers and discernment podcasters and things of the like. But Mike just comes off as so authentic, genuine and willing to be scrutinized himself. He seems humble enough to let let people call him out on things as well. So all that to say I commend him. He's a great thinker. He's a great Bible teacher. I think he does really good work. But again be wise, we're different. There's differences between us, and those differences are not insubstantial. They're fairly significant, but he's still a wonderful guy. I hope to meet him someday. Seems like a great dude. He's back in our neck of the woods in California, although probably further north. I think he's in the LA area, but still a great guy. Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I took away from this expose that he's been doing on Todd White is White's lack of accountability. And he even talks about the fact that, white's got multiple boards and accountability boards, but you don't really know who's on those boards. And those boards really don't have any power over him. And that got me thinking about just our own situation. I know often we will tell our people, Hey it's us as a plurality of elders here, but we also have an external board. Our external board is, we don't want them to be this nameless, faceless group of people that we're just throwing out there as this, safety blanket so that you can trust that we've got accountability. If you wanna know who those people are, we can certainly share that with you and I know them well enough to know that. They'd even be willing if you had concerns, and hopefully you won't have concerns to that level, but if you did, they're not inaccessible. And they are truly an accountability board. They're really there for the good of our church. They care about our church and that's what they're there to help with. So, man, the lack of accountability in anybody's life is a dangerous position to get in. And I'm thankful that even just at our local level, autonomously here, as we operate as a church, we have a plurality of elders. And the fact that you and Pastor, mark, and myself all hold one another accountable to the work that we should be doing, and there's not a hierarchy of authority in that regard there, but that we are really co-laboring together for the good of the flock and making sure we're both, we're all doing a. The right job that we need to be doing on that. It's funny because I think people expect that of their leaders and should, accountability is. A necessary element of anyone's leadership structure to date, especially considering how suspicious people are of leadership and leaders in general. So absolutely give accountability to leaders, but it's the thing that we really all need. All of us need someone to say, here's my life, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm thinking. Here's how I'm leading, here's what I'm reading, here's what I'm washing. Often we don't welcome that into our lives. And for that reason, most of us just don't have it. At least not to the degree that we should until, and unless we invite one another into our lives to say, this is what my life looks like. We're not gonna have it and probably not gonna have it to the degree that we need it. It's not just that it's good to have, it's probably in my estimation, based on how I read the New Testament. The one another's of our community are not optional. They're an obligation in part because we need each other. It's the body mentality. If I am really good at being a hand, I'm still not a foot, I'm still not an ear, I'm still not eyes. I need every part of the body to make me complete as a Christian, and that really doesn't grate against. That really doesn't work well with a lot of individual Western mindset people. We are built because of our culture into thinking that individualism is my highest virtue. Living for me, myself and I, even if I do have a personal relationship with God, is something that is, is sacred almost. And yet for Western Christians. Us, I'm talking about us here. It is so important that we press and move ourselves into discomfort by saying, I welcome community into my life. This is the only way that we'll ever experience the kind of wholeness and maturity that Christ welcomes us into by being part of his body. Yeah, that man, that's so true. And I'm hitting on that again this weekend. I talked about it during our series on the church about community. It's coming back up again this Sunday because in one Peter three, eight we're talking about what really body life in the church should look like. That the key attributes that should be part of our church if we're gonna be a strong church. And when you read these attributes in one Peter three, eight. You can't escape the fact that we need to be involved in each other's lives. We have to have that level of commitment and community with each other. Even just the last one that we're gonna talk about, which is having a humble mind. So often what keeps us from accountability is a lack of humility. We don't want to be vulnerable because we have a concealed pride and we can hide that behind. I don't wanna burden somebody, I don't want to, be cause somebody to have to care about me and go out their way from me. And it's this false humility that we can have when really what's humble is to say I need you. I need you in my kitchen. I need you in my life. I need you asking me about what's going on in my marriage and things like that because that's what God has designed and left to ourselves. We're in trouble. We need the voices of other believers in our lives. So we're gonna be talking about that on on Sunday as we gather in person, Lord willing back at our church for for church this Sunday. Amen to that man. We need that. And let me just encourage you, if you're hearing that and you're saying yes, you have to invite people to do it. Yes. People will not do it apart from you saying, please do this and then say it over and over again. One time is not enough because people don't know if you mean it. Furthermore, when you do give it, you need to thank them for that. If in fact they do offer some form of accountability, we need this. It's a good thing. I can't wait to hear that sermon. Yep. Well, hey, let's jump into our text for today. We're in Exodus 22 through 24, and then we're gonna be in the last part of Matthew chapter 20. Man, the moral of the story I think of in Exodus 22 is God cares about how we treat one another. We were just talking about this. This is more kind of. The laws of what not to do. And some of these are gonna be things that you are gonna sit there and say, okay, well, I'm not gonna steal something from somebody. I'm not gonna destroy somebody's property here. I'm not going to borrow something from somebody and fail to care for it. And yet the principle behind this is why when Jesus is asked the question. Hey teacher, what's the greatest commandment? And he says, well, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, and mind. And the second is like, it. Love your neighbor as yourself. And then he says on these two things, hangs the entirety of the law. Well, as Moses is continuing to develop the law here in these chapters, we're really getting the love for. Neighbors. We're really getting the fact that if we love God, we're going to love one another. And you can't say I love God and yet not carry out the things that we're, you're being called to do here in the law as it pertains to your neighbor. So even though you may look at this and say, well, my neighbor doesn't have a field that they're plowing, so I'm not gonna be tempted to destroy their field. What's the principle behind that? We talked about this recently. I think you were pressing on. When we come to the Bible, we have to read it in such a way as to not just. Look at the letter of the law, but look at the spirit of these things. Okay, what's the heart behind this? What does this look like for us today? Which to your point, does require a little bit more legwork on our front to, to make sure that we're not just passing over it and saying, okay, what's next? But saying, okay, how do I take this and apply it to my life? Amen to that. Chapter 22 really helps underline something that we take for granted because again, we live in a, we live in a Western culture that already assumes these things. These are the things that go, without being said, but in chapter 22, 1 of the things that I see that I appreciate is that God has a sense of. Ownership that he honors. It's so much here and so much I think it's obvious that he's saying, look, if something happens to one of your possessions and it's in the possession of somebody else, they're gonna have to pay for that because they're taking something unlawfully. We take ownership and property rights for granted. Again, our laws facilitate that. They support that and encourage that, but here we have to see that. If that was an unbiblical mindset, well we should do away with it. In fact, in Acts chapter two, we're not gonna be there for a little bit. But Acts chapter two, you have this community mentality where the church is selling goods. Barnabas is known for being a son of encouragement because he sells his things. He is like, Hey, I wanna use this to serve the church. Well, it wouldn't make any sense if they didn't own those things. If they already had a community ownership, then it wouldn't make sense to sell them. There would be nothing to come in. It would be like, well, we sold these things to fund this other thing. But yet what we see in scripture is that God at least provides a foundation for ownership and property rights. Something again, we take for granted. But I think we see it here and the reason that we can say we see it is because God says when something is taken from somebody, it's unlawful and it needs to be. It needs to be given some kind of reparation. There is a lawful repayment and a lawful making good on what was previously taken from him. I think that's really valuable and helpful for us to see. Yeah, so if you borrow anything from Pastor Rob, make sure you take care of it. 'cause otherwise he's gonna come for it. You're gonna have to make a time for that. I will hire a lawyer. Actually, that's a violation of one Corinthians chapter six. That's true. So we don't do that, but we do honor each other's stuff. That's true. That's true. Chapter 23 continues the care for other people, at least in the initial part of it here, especially the vulnerable there. And how we care for the sojourners and even the not bearing false witness. These things are important for us to see that God cares about how we. Treat the needy and the vulnerable among us. He's gonna revisit that with the widows and the orphans, which he's already hit on in chapter 22 as well. But this is a common theme throughout the laws, how we care for those that are needy. But after this, he gets to the Sabbath and some of the feasts that he's gonna institute here. And the Sabbath is something you said. I don't remember if it was even as we started this podcast off or right before we were talking, but kind of this forced Sabbath, so to speak, that we've had from him over the last week of just being able to be home and be with our families and spend time not in the busyness and the routine of everything else going on. And that's such a good perspective. I think that was just us chatting offline, but if you wanna pull that out a little bit more and how it relates to why God wants his people to Sabbath, why God wants his people to rest, I think that'd be helpful. I didn't make that specific connection, but I did say I really have appreciated this. We, this forced week off outside of COVID, which was a manmade, it was forced externally onto us. This is a God forced time off. And one of the things that I've appreciated about this is that we knew it was coming so we could prepare. We had water, we had food, and so there wasn't this. This sense of apocalypse where everyone's freaking out, losing all sense. But we knew what was gonna happen and so we opened our windows, we watched the snowfall, we spent a lot of time together. We had almost every meal together as a family. I can't think of the last time that's even happened. I. We had several meals in a row where we're all together. We opened up the Bible for at least one of them, and we spent time and we enjoyed it, and I prayed all, every time I had a meal with him, I prayed and I said, God, help us to appreciate this. This is such a unique season, and I think in part what God designed. Us to experience when he gave us the Sabbath is to say, look, everyone, stop what you're doing and go worship. The Sabbath is not just for rest. It is for that, but it's also for worship. It's a way for us to reset, recalibrate, and prepare ourselves for work. My old pastor used to say. We rest so we can work and we worship, so we can work as well. That's one of those things that they both work together. So this week has been a really great reset for me. I feel more energized than I felt in months, maybe years. 'cause I've gotten good sleep the last several days. I, I've been able to work out still. I've been using the Peloton, thankfully I still have that. We still pay the subscription, so we've been using that. I'm ready to go, man. I could run a marathon. At some point, but not right now. But at some point I could do that. 'cause I'm ready. Awesome. Well, he gets into the feasts here and we're gonna see more feast added to Israel's calendar. And not all of 'em are here because some of them are going to be installed later. For example, the Feast of Purim is gonna be around the time of Esther, so we're not. We're not all the way there yet, but these are some of them. And God is going to institute these feast as reminders. And this is why this is lumped together with the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a reminder of a rhythm or a pattern of God's provision of the need for us to acknowledge God's presence in our lives in different areas. And so you get the feast of unleavened bread that happens around Passover. You get the Feast of the harvest. And then you get the feast of the end gathering there, the feast of the first fruits. And these are to be feasts where the Jewish males later on are gonna have to show up in Jerusalem, and they're gonna have to gather there. They're gonna have to be present there for these feasts. And that is gonna hold through throughout the rest of the history of Israel here. But they're being installed here early on in the giving of the long. From here. He goes on to talk about the. Entrance into the promised land and what his plan is for the conquest. And we get that in the rest of chapter 23. Here, he talks about an angel that's gonna go before them, and this is the angel that's gonna go in and drive out the Amorites and the Hittites and all the different its here. And he's gonna say, you, you can't bow down to the gods in this land. That's gonna be a common thing in fact, if you jump back, he even says that we shouldn't even mention the name of other gods. And in verse 13 of Exodus 23, he says, don't even mention the names of these foreign gods. And then later on it says, when you get into the foreign lands, you need to drive the people out less. They cause you to end up going after their gods. And if you know the history of Israel, you know that unfortunately that is gonna be what happens because they're not gonna fulfill all this, but they're gonna make no, no provision, give no quarter to the inhabitants. We see that at the end of chapter 23, verse 32. You should make no covenant with them or their gods. That's gonna be significant because Joshua's gonna not necessarily succeed in that as they take the promised land. But that's the rest of chapter 23. There. Yeah. One thing that stood out to me in chapter 23 before we jump into 24 is a small phrase in verse 29, where he says, I will not drive them out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beast multiply against you. And so here again, we see that God's timeframe for them dealing with their enemies, God's adversaries, is little by little, he says in verse 30, and this is a really good principle for the way that God tends to work. Us not only in the conquest with Israel, but also in the way that he helps us grow in our sanctification. I lament the fact that my sanctification is not leaps and bounds. I think when I was saved, there was immediate sanctification that I started loving things that I never loved. I started spending more time praying, and I started reading my Bible at least more significantly than I had before. There are some really clear markers, but since then, I can only think of a few times in my life where my sanctification exploded. But by and large, what I've noticed over the course of my Christian life is that it has been little by little step by step, day by day, hour by hour in some cases. And so notice here the way that God works with us. He knows our weaknesses. He knows even the enemy's strategies and strengths, and so he does what he sees fit according to his timeframe. We need to trust that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's good. That's a good connection to sanctification. I like that. On chapter 24, this brings a conclusion to this section that has been about the Mosaic covenant. So 19 through 24 of Exodus really is the Mosaic Covenant. Swath, if you will. And so in 24, the covenant is more or less ratified. If you look at verse seven, it says, he took the book of the covenant, that is the law. And he read it in the hearing of the people. And the people said, all the Lord has spoken. We will do and we will be obedient. And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people. And behold the blood of the covenant of the Lord has made with you in accordance of all these words. So there's a solemnity here of the people entering into this relationship with God and this relationship with God, the Mosaic Covenant. Is unlike the Abrahamic covenant, going to be conditional, and we're gonna get into that later in the giving of the law. Deuteronomy the second law, so to speak. We're gonna read about blessings for obedience and cursings for disobedience. And and this is a, this is God saying, if you do these things, I will be with you as you are God and I will fulfill the things that I'm promising to do for you. Whereas the Abrahamic covenant is this broad, sweeping promise that God is gonna bless all the nations of the earth through the offspring of Abraham, and give the land and give the seed. That is a covenant that's unconditional. That covenant is still in effect even though Israel failed in the mosaic covenant. God is the unilateral giver of the mo of the Abrahamic covenant, and that's still in operation, the Mosaic Covenant, 19 through 24. This is the law, and this is God saying, if you do these things, it will go well for you. If you don't do these things there will be punishment for this and it's ratified. There's a feast. This is fascinating. It says in verse nine, Moses, Aaron, NAAB and Abba, who in 70, the elders went up and they saw the God of Israel. We know from the, what we're gonna read later on in Exodus chapter 34, that no one can see the face of God and live. So this is a, they're in his, the presence of His glory. They beheld him and they ate and they drank. So they had this feast in the presence of the glory of God. What a fascinating thing that would've been to experience that, to behold that this is when Moses has given the two. Tablets of stone, at least the first round, and he is sent back down to the people and he goes back down after 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain. All right, let's jump over to our New Testament reading then in Matthew chapter 20. We are in the back half of Matthew chapter 20, verses 17 through 34. So in Matthew chapter 20 verse 17, Jesus is going to be again with the 12. He's predicting his crucifixion again here with them and right on the heels of this. Comes the request of the sons of Zebedee, the mother of the sons of Zebedee who come up to Jesus and they say, Hey, we we have a request for you. We want our, the mother says I want my sons to sit on your right hand and the left. And this is where Jesus says, you don't know what you're asking. But he does not say that has not been, that's not possible. He just says it's not his to grant that. And I think Pastor Rod, you've made the point multiple times. And in fact, even recently, Jesus doesn't say, don't try. He doesn't say it's wrong to aspire to these things. He just says, this is not mine to give. And so that does imply that there are going to be positions of honor that are there that will be given, and God is gonna be the one to bestow those. And as you've said, pastor Rob, we wanna live in such a way that, that we would do that. Paul puts it in later on, the New Testament I wanna run so as to win the prize. And that's my goal, that's my aim. And I think there's something to be taken away as, even as we look at the request of the mom of James and John here, and we say, oh, that, that doesn't seem. Right. And yet it's not so much the ambition, it's the audacity to ask that, especially right on the heels of his predicting his crucifixion. Yeah. And maybe if you are gonna go for heavenly rewards, don't have your mom do it for you. Just saying fair, fair. Throwing it out there just to encourage people to do it themselves, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fascinating too because the path forward to this is not to try to run to the head of the line, and that's where Jesus goes next. He says, if you wanna be great. You should be a servant. If you wanna be first, you should be the servant, the slave, even as the son of man then came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So even in that ambition, we need to make sure we're pursuing that with that humility that's appropriate to you. Amen to that. Yeah. The way that we achieve greatness in the kingdom and by the way, this is after salvation. This is not for salvation. This is not getting right with God by doing these things. This is after becoming a Christian. After being sanctified by the spirit. Now that you're in this, in the family, so to speak, here's how to grow in your greatness, in the truest sense of the word. And we do it by following Jesus' footprints, which is essentially to serve. And I love this because he, this is the phrase that we memorized. Typically, Jesus himself came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. He gave the most. He served the most, so he's exalted the most. In a similar sense, if you want to be exalted. In the best sense of the word, in a way that is honorable and God glorifying. You do that by serving and by finding ways to serve the most just like Jesus. Well, the chapter goes on and concludes with an account with these two blind men who are there outside of Jericho, and they're calling out to Jesus as he's passing by. Son of David, have mercy on us. This is a Messianic title, and so it's interesting that I think it's probably not lost on Matthew to put this in here and on us. We should see it too, that. It's these blind men that are recognizing who he is and they're seeing who he is. And Jesus calls them over him and they say what? He says, what do you want me to do for you? And they say, Lord, let our eyes be opened. And Jesus in pity touches their eyes and immediately. They recover their sight. And then I think this is the important part, and it is the last two words of this, they followed him that that's the key here. You've got other situations where Jesus will heal people. And that's not the fallout. Like you think of the 10 lepers that he heals the lepers and only one comes back. Here Jesus heals these two blind men and then they follow him. And we don't know the rest of the story with these two blind men. We don't know. If this is genuine faith, we can assume and believe the best, I think. But at the same time who knows, but at least initially they do what's right. They receive their sight and they stick with him. They're gonna say, we're gonna be with you, Jesus, for what you've done for us. And that's the appropriate response. This is a microcosm of salvation for us. If we think about the spiritual blindness that all of us had God removes that when we come to him and we recognize he's the only one that can do that. And we say we, we want to see spiritually speaking, that's faith and repentance in, in Jesus Christ. And he removes the blinders so that we can see and believe. And then our response needs to be, we wanna follow Jesus. Not that the rest of our life is like, well, great, we can see now. We'll see you later. We're gonna go live the life we wanted to live. But no, we're gonna live the life in full devotion to Christ. So I think we see it from the faith and repentance to lordship salvation. I think it's all contained here in the story of the two blind men coming to faith or coming to, to be able to see here from Jesus's work. One of my favorite old school songs is Open The Eyes of My Heart. Remember that one? I do that one. I do, I do. To see You High and lifted up. It's a good song. Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. Paul Belo. He's got so many zingers, but I think this is appropriate, even though God gives a sight to see him and to see him as savior and to see him as worthy of our lives. There's still a real sense in which we continue to grow in our ability to see him throughout the rest of our lives. And there's times when you see him better and see him worse, not because he's any less glorious, but because our sin often clouds our vision. And so it is a whole host of other things, our selfishness, our our inability to be spiritually alert and alive and vigilant all the time. So I think. That song's a great song to, to consider even singing today. Open the eyes of my heart, help me see things more clearly. Instead of just saying, now I can see now I once was lost. Now I'm found and once was blind. Now I see it's true. But there is a progressive seeing in the Christian life that requires constant ongoing improvement. Amen to that. Yeah. That's. Again, why we need each other, which is what we're gonna be talking about again this weekend as we gather as a church. So, hey, let me pray for us and we'll be done with this episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Wanna make us a church that not only. Acknowledges that we need each other, but lives it out. Lord, we desire true community. We desire our community groups to grow and to thrive and more and more people to join in those. And we would, that we would live in such ways to, to sharpen each other, to love each other, to care for each other Lord, to serve one another even as Jesus calls us to, to say we wanna follow his example. He came not to be served, but to serve. What may that be our heart's desire as, yes, we do live with that ambition to say we want to. We want those seats at the right hand or the left hand of Jesus. We want to sit there so that we would be those that have lived a life of faithfulness before you. And so honor that ambition, Lord but help us to live in humility at the same time. And so thank you so much for giving us spiritual sight. If you have to those that are listening to this, we pray that we live our lives in full devotion to you as you continue to develop that sight until our faith is turned to full sight. When we see you, we pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen. I keep reading those Bibles, y'all, and we will catch you again tomorrow with another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See you tomorrow. Bye.

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