Doug: Christianity at its core is this is what it means to be a human being.
I want to describe who you are to yourself, so that you will,
can understand why you do what you do and where you're at.
And then I'm going to tell you about who I am.
Jesus says, this is who I am, and this is why I came in order to fix that.
That causes all of you.
Individual problems and tainted,;/ your soul.
Jesse: Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Salty Pastor Podcast, a
podcast dedicated to helping you learn and grow in your spiritual walk
and your critical thinking skills.
We are here to be your guides.
Ultimately you have to take that journey on your own, but we are here
to be sages sounding boards and,
sometimes comedians, to help you along your journey in life.
My name Jesse Maher I will be your host and we can not do the Salty Pastor
Podcast without the Salty Pastor himself.
Dr.
Douglas Peake.
Doug: Well, welcome everybody.
It's so good to be here again.
With you today, right before Christmas season.
And one of the things that I've really enjoyed doing over the last year and
a half, I believe this is our hundred and 50th episode, 150 episodes.
That's 75 hours of talking.
That is so much talking.
That's a lot of talking.
But one of the things that, uh, is the hallmark of the Salty Pastor, the Hallmark
of my ministry and the entire team here at Foothills, is that our goal is to help
you grow in your face so that you know what you believe, why you believe it,
because if you want strength, if you want courage, if you, if you want to have.
Uh, character that allows you to not only survive, but thrive in the
world in which we live the ultimate reality, then you're going to need
to have more faith, not less faith.
You need more convictions, not less convictions.
You need to have more truth, not less truth.
You need more moral clarity, not less moral clarity.
It's the people who have these things who are the strongest, the most
confident, the most courageous people.
They know why they're here.
They know the purpose of their life.
They know the point of their life.
They understand the ultimate reality in which live.
They understand, oh, this is what a human being really is.
Not under the silly stuff that the world keeps trying to convince us,
but I know what a real human being is.
And then as I'm created in the image of God, but I've been tainted by sin.
And until I deal with that taint, like a cancer and get rid of it.
Get myself in remission, which is righteousness.
Then I'm never going to discover who I'm truly meant to be, how to truly live life.
I'll never experience real love.
I'll never experience authentic joy.
And I'll never have the peace that surpasses all understanding and
experience relationships, at a level of security that I never imagined.
And so my trust goes up, my belif it goes up.
And so the world is trying to convince us to have less of this, less of that
be more malleable, being more, uh, have fewer convictions go with the
flow, have fewer truths, have no trues.
And then your life will be better.
Is a bunch of absolute hogwash, toilet, water, urinal mint, thinking
that we need to get rid of it.
World right now.
And so we're studying Christmas in order to show us how to have joy!
Jesse: Urinal mint and Christmas in the same sentence, pastor.
I think you're the only one that can pull that off.
Doug: Urinal mint and Christmas in the same sentence.
I love it!
Jesse: Well, we are in our series title Jesus's Christmas.
Um, basically the main point of this whole series is if you remove Jesus.
Can we still have Christmas?
That is the question we are debating this season and can
humidity, humanity, not humidity.
That's freezing today.
Actually there no humidity.
Can humanity become more joyful, discover more meaning and purpose.
And on Tuesday we focused on the wise men, or the magi as they're called, who come
from the east to worship the baby Jesus.
And it was interesting to note that the Jewish leaders who spend all their time
studying the scriptures, studying the prophecy about the Messiah, miss it.
And these guys that don't really know anything about the prophecy are like,
hey, we think something big is happening.
You guys should really pay attention.
Doug: Should pay
attention.
Jesse: So let's dive into that.
What does that mean?
Doug: Well, it's easy.
I think that what this illustrated for us, what we kind of learned on
Tuesday is that it's really easy for people to be driven more by a frame of
reference or an ideology than what is
actually truthful.
In other words, we can have all these facts, but we don't
interpret facts anymore.
Just in light of the facts.
Our ideology drives the interpretation of the facts and this is happening
more and more, even in the science.
Even in the scientist today in Western cultures.
And the reason why is because of postmodernism and postmodernism
denies any all objective truth.
Now, the interesting outflow of this is that once you remove any
potential for objective truth.
Then it's just your ideology that drives you.
And that ultimately ends up removing all the joy out of your life.
Because what you've done basically is you've removed the capacity for
joy to occur a case, uh, kind of a way to illustrate this is, uh,
back in 2016 and went on sabbatical for about three or four months.
And I have a cousin who has a house.
In the mountains of Italy, right there, close to the, kind of the
west coast, just north of PISA.
We're up there in this house and I'm trying to figure out how to cook,
you know, cause you got to cook food and you can't eat out every meal.
It's just outrageously expensive for five people.
So we go and I go, you know, I'd like to bake some bread because I'm not
really a fan of the Italian breads.
They tend to be hard and crusty breads.
They don't salt, their breads.
I used some good old American bread.
Jesse: So white wonder bread is what you're looking for I believe.
Doug: Soft and fluffy with some salt in it.
I just think it, yeah, bread has meant to have butter on it and not use to
lock up that Italian gravy stupid stuff.
So anyway, I went there and I bought, I bought some, uh, Some flower, you know,
Zac and I went to the store, we bought some flour and then we bring it home.
And so I put it in there and I do all this stuff.
And then I'm, you know, I put yeast in it and stuff and I'm waiting for
it to rise and it will never rise.
It never, I, and then I bake it.
It was hard and thick.
And I was like, man, this is crazy.
So I, that was one of the big frustrations of my life in Italy
is that I couldn't bake bread.
So I get.
And something popped up and I looked on, uh, this thing about baking bread or
buying flour in Italy or something like that, uh, is right after we got back.
And there was an article in there, says no, when you go to the store
and buy flour, you know, the thing you have to realize is, uh, Italians
make multiple kinds of flowers.
And one very important flower to them is pizza, crust, flour.
Okay.
And pizza crust flour is designed to not rise.
Even if you put yeast in it and guess what flour we bought, pizza,
crust, pizza, crust, flour, bread.
Jesse: Pizza bread.
Doug: I had a pizza
of bread, you know, I said, that's all I had.
I go, that's it is, I got the wrong flower.
So it never rose.
If you don't have objective truth, you'll never have joy.
It will never rise up in your life because you're using flour that cannot rise.
It's designed not to rise.
When you get rid of objective truth, people who do this have one goal in
mind, and that is to create chaos.
They say the opposite, but when you read what they write, you end
up realizing it's about nihilism.
It's all about meaninglessness and that's what they want.
That's their goal.
That's their frame of reference.
So what does the Wiseman tell us is that even in religious communities,
people can be driven more by ideology, then they can be driven by truth.
And the objective truth is this Christmas story is about God, leaving heaven to
come to people in order to redeem them.
To help save them from the taint.
Right.
So that they can become who they were meant to be like Jesus was
the most fully human being, right.
That has ever walked the face of the earth.
When you look at Jesus you go, ooo, that guy, man, he was a full human being.
We all aspire to that.
It's the highest ideals of what it means to be a human being.
And in doing that, that basic truth right there, the objective truth of the
Christmas story elevates the individual.
It absolutely elevates the value of the individual.
And elevates the value of Jesse, of Doug, of, uh, the people who
work on your staff, you know, Finn or Jeremy or whoever it elevates,
every single it elevates the value of the homeless person, dealing
with a mental illness and drug addiction that sleeps under a bridge.
It raises the value of the person who's a president of the United States.
And everything, every person in between.
And so it is that principle of the gospel that we celebrate on
Christmas at its core and its purity.
So, and what that does is that weaves its way out into the hearts and minds of
people until you see massive movements, where do you think the principle of
individual sovereignty comes from?
You know, it doesn't come from.
It doesn't come from a world.
That is, uh, uh, post-modern what happens is, is that the principle of
individual sovereignty comes from this elevation of individuals as valuable
in the eyes of God, you matter to God.
Right.
You matter to God.
And that's what individual sovereignty is based on that each human being has a soul.
Okay.
So, so let's just say, for instance, you know, just recently in our society,
people are saying, well, uh, these lives matter, you know, uh, gay lives matter
or transgender guys matter, men or black lives mattered or Asian lives mattered.
And, you know, and then there became a debate that, well, if
you say all lives matter, then that gets rid of something else.
And we talked about this early on in the podcasting, back in those early
episodes when we started podcasting a year and a half ago, and that was.
Simply this is that in the eyes of God, it doesn't matter what you think about
yourself or how you identify yourself.
So maybe you think yourself, well, I'm a gay person and
that's how I want to identify.
You may think of yourself.
Well, this is my ethnicity, you know, I'm an Asian, um, you know, I'm an American
Indian, um, I'm, uh, maybe, uh, an Asian person, maybe I'm a, person from Africa.
So I'm, African-American maybe I'm black, so I'm black.
I mean, maybe I'm Hispanic or Latino and you, if, if you, however you
identify, you have to start from the premise that you matter to God.
So everybody matters to God.
So as a Christian, we can't, you know, say one group matters to
God more than the other, then we've departed from the gospel.
So we've departed.
So when we talked about this early on, you can go back and listen to
those episodes early on if you'd like.
And so that's really critical to understand, but there is a
movement in Western culture today that is seeking to eradicate the
sovereignty of the individual.
They call it progressivism, but it's not progressive at all.
It's actually re- aggressive.
It's going back to ideologies from 500 years ago, a thousand
years ago, 2000 years ago that broke people down into groups.
You know, hierarchies of groups, your only value is dependent upon
what group they associate you with.
And so they're doing this over and over again.
And in order to do this, what they have to do is they have to eradicate
this notion of individual sovereignty.
Okay.
And they have to go back to it.
Now it may not be as difficult as you think because the whole notion of personal
sovereignty protected in a constitution or a government document is very unique.
It didn't exist until 250 years ago.
So you look at seven to 8,000 years of recorded human history.
And you don't have that ever until now we were the great experiment.
We were the great experiment.
And so what's interesting though, is that even Western civilization cultures
now are trying to eradicate this notion of individual sought us sovereignty,
particularly as it comes up in the notion of celebrating Christmas.
You know, let's let's secularize and sterilize Christmas so that we
can maintain all of the good stuff.
Right.
And that we think is good and get rid of all the stuff that we
don't like or think is offensive.
But the problem is if you get rid of what you think is offensive,
you actually get rid of all the good stuff they go hand in hand.
You can't have one without the other.
I was just reading an article about a,
uh, there was the European union and they commissioned the European commission
and the European union rolled out a 32 page document in October titled
Guidelines On Inclusive Communication.
And it featured a kind of inclusion that aims to exclude an entirely
erase the Christmas holiday and Christianity in general.
They quote from the document, "not everyone celebrates the Christian holidays
and not all Christians celebrate them on the same dates", said the document, which
encouraged people to replace the word Christmas with holiday and Christmas time
with holiday time, it councils speakers to avoid divisive phrases, such as ladies
and gentlemen, which furthers the general ba, uh, the gender binary problem.
The EU leadership said that the speech or stick restrictions will help create.
A union of equality.
So you see, this is the reasoning and that is, is that well,
we're going to be more at peace.
We're going to be more equal.
We're going to be more on the same page.
If we get rid of these objective truths from which all of these
principles have come from, and the guidelines were published by
an Italian paper called Aljilani,
and it was on the first Monday of advent.
So on the first Monday of the advent season, which is a celebration of
Christmas, there was this massive backlash all across Europe.
As a matter of fact, it was such a big deal that the Pope came out and the
Pope said this stuff is like the attempt to erase Christianity and Christian
holidays to the Nazis and communists totalitarian regimes of the recent past.
Boy Pope Francis was not,
Jesse: He got salty!
Doug: He got Salty.
Jesse: Must been listening to the podcast.
Doug: He, this is what he says in history.
Many, many, many dictatorships have high have tried to do this very thing.
He said, think of Napoleon.
And from there, think of the Nazi dictatorship, think of
the communist dictatorship.
And so I think it's really important to understand is that our celebration of
Christmas is that we're celebrating Jesus.
Not all the fun stuff.
What we're celebrating is where it all comes from.
And let's never forget that because Jesus Christmas, why don't you get
rid of Jesus, all that other stuff you've got dough that will never
rise.
Jesse: So let's talk a little bit more about this idea that this
quote, unquote progressivism, uh, furthering, or trying to remove
Jesus from, uh, Christmas altogether.
Why do they seek to secularize the society as a whole?
Like why what's the, what's the reasoning behind it besides this idea of being more
inclusive?
Doug: Well, I think, you know, the secularism, the
syllogism, the logic goes like.
This things that are not overly specific, they're not ideologically
driven have broader appeal.
Case in point.
Ben Crosby's, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas is more
popular than Buddy Greens.
Mary Did, You Know.
You know, Mary, Did You Know where he sings about her,
you know, Mary, did you know that your baby would save the world?
Right?
So everybody knows White Christmas.
Jewish people and secularists and atheist will sing White Christmas.
And so on the surface, you look at that, right?
And you think to yourself, wow.
That brought EV, it brings people from different ideologies
and religions together.
They have something in common.
Well, that is true at taht level.
But that's also like saying, well, we all eat food, right?
So that's just have food that brings us.
Let's just all have together.
Yeah.
So the Grinch who stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer are more popular
movies than the movie, the Nativity Story.
Which is a story of Joseph,
taking Mary as his wife and then mo, taking her to Bethlehem to give birth.
And how difficult, even though the gospels just basically kind of skim over that real
quick, how difficult that was going to be for a young pregnant woman and a guy.
Who had no means in how far they had to travel on foot.
It's a long way.
Right?
And so the movie is about that, but very few people have seen that movie.
It's an excellent movie.
It's well done.
It's well produced, but p, more people know about Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer.
Then they know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
It seems like.
Right.
So secularism kind of has that as a, is in a kind of an ideological framework.
And so they make assumption.
And this assumption is very dangerous, but it happens.
And that is well, if a nondescript non-ideological, non-truth claiming,
you know, nothing specific song like White Christmas is more popular
than Mary, Did You Know, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas is more
popular than focusing on Jesus.
Then let's get rid of all the absolutes let's get rid of all objective truth
claims we'll have, it'll give us a broader appeal and this will create
peace and unity, but it is a lie.
It is a lie because it doesn't take into account.
Number one is all these different people who like Bing Crosby's dreaming
of white Christmas already have truth claims that they've adopted.
And the reason why they adopt that one is because, because it's nondescript,
it doesn't violate their truth claim.
But they're never going to let go of their truth claim.
This is why I'm a big critic of the coexist bumper sticker.
You know, people like that, they go, oh, it's so nice.
It's such a great thing.
And you should really, why, why would you want to criticize that?
And I said, because at its core, you don't understand the arrogance of your position.
Okay.
What you're doing is you are demanding.
You're making an absolute truth claim.
That in order for us to get along, all of these people have
to drop their truth claims.
So you don't understand when you put that bumper sticker on your car, what
you're demanding of everybody else.
Jesse: Well, and on the other side, you're also saying it doesn't
matter if they're all the same.
Right.
It's like, that's, you're, you're either saying you got to fall in
line or you're saying none of it matters anyways, so yeah, get over it.
Doug: Which is a massive truth claim and it's offensive.
Right?
You see it's offensive.
It's offensive to me, it's offensive to Muslims.
It's offensive to Jewish people.
And so you think that you're all high and mighty that you love peace.
But I would say to you, if you put that bumper sticker on your car, there's
three things that you don't understand.
Number one, you don't understand history, you never, never remember
reading the history book because you have no idea where peace comes from.
Number two is I'd say that you're making assumptions, that you've never
even thought through in your own life, and you can't even live your own life
according to your own assumptions.
You can't even do that.
And number three is that you're probably one of the most self-centered
narcissistic arrogant people that, that anybody else could meet.
Because you believe
that you're right above every body else, without ever even investigating
the veracity of the claims of these different belief systems.
So be careful about slapping something on your car.
So you can't get rid of absolutes.
You, you can't get rid of objective truth claims for a broader appeal,
because this will never create peace and unity, because secularists and people
who do this, they don't want freedom,
of the individual, right?
They want control of the individual.
Why do you think they got rid?
Or why do you think up until the constitution of the United States
put it in a political document.
The individual sovereignty was never acknowledged by the government.
Why do you think governments in all history?
Why is that?
Why did the Romans enslave, you know, half of their population?
Why, why is it that, uh, king Henry the eighth instituted
the divine right of Kings?
What is it that, you know, a certain person, you know, their
bloodline made them rulership quality and somebody else not.
This isn't biblical, this isn't gospel oriented at all.
What happened?
Has that by regressing back to this, by getting rid of the individual sovereignty,
it allows you in the name of whatever you want to get rid of true justice.
It allows you to do whatever you want in order to create unjust systems, just like
this article or this commissioned report from the European union, you can dictate
what people can say and cannot say.
Now this ideology that they're propagating is a denigration of the individual.
It's dehumanizing of the individual.
This is where socialism comes from.
Communism comes from, this is where critical race theory comes from.
This is where cancel culture comes from.
This is where all of the divisive, violent problems that we have in our own society
and across the world today come from is when people are denigrating the value
of human beings instead of enhancing it.
Jesse: So with this thought process of, uh, wanting to
secularize and take control.
A vibrant Bible believing Jesus center church would probably be, be a thorn
in their side to this plan, right?
Doug: Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you always got to do is read history.
You Lennon had to deemphasize the church and sideline.
It what's interesting at the time the Russian Orthodox church, which
is a subset of Eastern orthodoxy, made it really, really easy,
for them.
You know, how they made it easy for Lennon to deemphasize the church is
because they became very politically, political in their orientation.
They align themselves with the ruling power at the time.
So they, so they lost their credibility.
Uh, this is why Adolf Hitler basically took over the Lutheran church.
You know, um, there's early on these, a lot of these have
been scrubbed through history.
They're very difficult to find, but there was a thing where they took
the Naxzi Swastika, and they super imposed over the Lutheran cross.
Now, if you've ever seen a Lutheran cross, uh, the Lutheran church has
crossed is basically it has a cross with a wreath in the center of it.
Like a circle.
And then if you look at that, you can super impose the swastika right over
the center of it without any problem.
And that's what Adolf Hitler did.
And they hate out Hitler met with the church and he's basically
said, I'll let you exist.
As long as you don't oppose us kind of in a nutshell.
And they all agreed.
There was only one famous guy that was a Lutheran pastor.
Who's opposed nazi-ism right and left.
And his name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
And he was executed.
Uh, in some of his literature that he wrote while he was in prison before he was
executed, he was hung two weeks before his camp was set free by the allied forces.
By the way, this is why Mao outlawed the church.
Mao Mao outlawed the church in the first thing that a Mao Zedong did in the
cultural revolution is he basically went and got rid of all the educated people.
You know, you don't want people who have truth claims.
You don't want people who have intelligence.
You don't want people thinking for yourself.
As a matter of fact today, there's a massive resurgence
under Xi Jinping in China today.
It's a massive crackdown on Christianity in China right now.
Uh, just recently I was over at my brother-in-law's house and he's adopted,
he and his wife had adopted two boys from China who are deaf because they, they were
going to be in orphanages the whole life.
Nobody would really want them.
And so, uh, there was a gal who went over there and she
kind of started an orphanage.
She would take these kids that nobody would want.
Because they were deaf or they're handicapped in some way.
And so what happened is just recently, she had to flee because they arrested her.
They interrogated her over and over again for 18 hours, 20 hours over
and over and over again and saying that, uh, she's not an American
citizen, she's a German citizen.
And they said to her over and over, if you were an American citizen, we
throw you in prison because you're talking about Jesus in our country.
And that's illegal.
Hmm.
You know, it didn't matter that she saving all these kids.
It doesn't matter all, all of the things.
And so she fled, and this is what she said.
I have lived in China for, you know, 20 years, 25 years.
And I never realized how evil the CCP was until this happened to me.
And there's a massive crackdown right now because Xi Jinping cannot
bring about his communist utopia unless he gets rid of the church.
He has to destroy it.
But as the Russians found out, The communist found out one communist
leader once said, they said, well, we found out about the churches.
It's like a nail, the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes, you know?
So the number one people group persecuted in the world today as
Christians, no one else comes even close.
The murder, the imprisonment, all of these things, no money, no other
people grew up in the world comes close to the persecution that the
world propagates on Christianity.
Why is that?
Is that a coincidence?
Or is it because there is an evil in this world, propagated by Satan that
seeks to de-humanize and destroy people.
And the thing that stands in the way of his agenda and modifying the hearts
and minds of governments and social movements across the globe is Jesus.
Get rid of Jesus and we can win.
Jesse: So we all have
two minutes left.
Um, what, I mean, we are blessed in America to have protection.
As a church, um, under the constitution, what does the
church need to be aware of though?
Doug: Well, I think, you know, I, I want to make this point over and over
again, and it's really important to understand, but it's a nuanced point,
but it's critical and it's like math.
If you don't do the first step properly, then the next step won't make any sense.
And that is, this Christianity is not a political system.
Christianity is not democracy.
Christianity is not monarchy.
It's not a parliamentary.
It's not totalitarian.
It's not a governmental political system.
Number one, it's not an economics system.
All right.
It's not a free market system.
It's not a command and control system.
It's not a feudal system.
It's none of those things.
Christianity is not a social system or a hierarchy set up.
What it is at its core is a truth claim about Jesus and human being.
Christianity at its core is this is what it means to be a human being.
I want to describe who you are to yourself, so that you will,
can understand why you do what you do and where you're at.
And then I'm going to tell you about who I am.
Jesus says, this is who I am, and this is why I came in order to fix that,
that causes all of your individual problems, and taints your soul.
That's the gospel message at its core.
That is the objective truth.
Jesus Christ came to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.
The apostle Paul wrote, the reality is this objective truth then leads
to all sorts of political theory.
It leads to all sorts of social theory, at least all sorts of economic theory.
In other words, this basic truth that you, as an individual matter
to God, it blows the whole notion that you can enslave another person
against their will out of the water.
You have an objective truth that says, yeah, you can't do that okay.
We're going to fight against that.
Well, human beings trying to do it.
Yep.
They always try.
They always try the fact that slavery exists.
Isn't the issue.
The issue is who stopped it and why, you know, who stopped it?
Number two, it has political theory in that is, well, where did the
notion of democracy come from?
That people should have, because up until 250 years ago, the whole
notion that people should be able to govern themselves was a joke.
The people who ruled, believed well, they are genetically inferior.
They don't have the intelligence.
To be able to govern themselves well, where did all those ideas come from?
A lot of people are not worried about this.
Here's a little brief history lesson, but.
When we went back to Boston, I toured a replica of the Mayflower.
So I was kind of digging into the derivation or where did the pilgrims,
you know, I knew there were Puritans and I know what Puritans believe, but really
they were kind of a subset appeared tense.
And this is what I found out is that what people were not aware of is that
king Henry the or eight who right after the Protestant reformation started in
Germany, he wanted to divorce his wife.
But he was in a political fight with the Pope and the Pope
said, no, so he broke off.
So he used the reformation as an opportunity to break off.
And he created the Anglican church or the church of England where he was the
head and he could do whatever he wanted.
Right, right.
And so what happened is then he died and his daughter, Mary took over and Mary was
a committed Catholic and she became known as bloody Mary because what she did is she
went through and she started executing.
All of the church of England leadership and people, she cause she wanted England
to go back to being Roman Catholic.
Okay.
Well then she died, heard it rain wasn't very long.
And then her sister took over, uh, her, her half sister international
says, sister said, I'm going to take king Henry's, um, position and keep
the Anglican church as the church of England is where England should go.
Well, during bloody.
The church went underground.
Right.
And because the leadership was being killed, they started a
congregational form of leadership.
And that is that they would get in these little groups and then they would vote
on whether or not a person could become a part of the church because you don't want
to bring a treasonous person or someone's going to betray you right into the group.
And so they started, they would vote on everything.
So they had this congregational kind of modality.
And what happened is then when.
Mary died.
And her sister took over and went back.
She wanted to bring the church of England back.
So a lot of these underground churches came out, but she wanted
to control them politically.
She wanted to use them to political ends.
And so some of those peak groups said, yeah, we don't want to do that.
And there was a guy by the name of brown and they were called brown
separatists and they said, yeah, we're not going to be a part of the king.
Uh, the church of England, we're going to continue to be
congregationally led churches.
Right.
They were persecuted for that.
So they fled to the Netherlands and then that's, those were,
the pilgrims were Puritans, but they were brown, separate tests.
You see?
And so then they came over and now when you go back to, to new England
and you go back up there to where the Mayflower is a Massachusetts
Cape Cod and you drive through New Hampshire and Vermont, every corner,
there's a congregationalist church.
And what's really interesting though, is that it started out as a congregational
church is basically a pure democracy.
We vote on everything, you know, and what ended up happening is is that.
Because it was driven that way.
It lost its focus.
So it just became whatever the wind of the age is.
And so that's why so many of those congregational churches are dying because
they, whatever the wind of the ages, that's what they want to propagate.
They removed the objective truth of the gospel.
So, so in essence, what this teaches us is if you remove Christianity,
The that Jesus is what Christmas is.
You remove the basis or the foundation on which all of these other things are built.
Political theory, economic theory, social theory, and it makes it
possible to do anything you want.
And so that's why the church has such a threat, but not.
You see, not a congregational church, that's not a threat.
What is a threat is a Bible believing Jesus centered, vibrant faith community.
Those are the most dangerous in the direction of where progressivism
wants to take our society.
Those are the ones that are most at threat.
Those are the ones that are being, I think, attack the most.
And so what we need to do as a church is we need to always avoid the temptation.
To reflect all the values of the culture, where you must always be
committed to the values of the gospel.
And we should never change that.
And that's why this series is called Jesus Christmas, because
if you get rid of Jesus, you ain't gonna have no Christmas.
Jesse: Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us, Pastor.
Um, I know you're gonna be talking a little bit more about it on Sunday, uh,
during your sermon, but we just appreciate you guys joining us, learning more about
who you are and why you believe what you do, and getting a little bit of a history
lesson, how it's affecting us today.
I'm all here on the Salty Pastor Podcast.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We'll see you on Sunday here at
Foothills
Christian Church.
Doug: Merry Christmas.